The Twelfth Card (12 page)

“An’ now you a free man. That phat.”

Jax thought this was funny—here’s sad-ass Ralph nervous and all when Jax comes along with a cigarette and a s’up, man. But then starts relaxing when he finds out that he did hard time for armed robbery, illegal weapons possession and attempted murder, spraying blood like paint.

Harlem. Didn’t you just fucking love it?

Inside, just before he’d been released, he’d tapped DeLisle Marshall for some help and the brother had
told him to hook up with Ralph. Lisle had explained why the little skel was a good man to know. “That man hang out
ever
’where. Like he be ownin’ the streets. Know ever’thing. Or can find it out.”

Now, the blood-painting Graffiti King sucked hard on the cigarette and got right down to it. “Need you to set me up, man,” Jax said in a soft voice.

“Yeah? Whatchu need?”

Which meant both whatchu need and what’m I going to make from it?

Fair enough.

A glance around. They were alone except for pigeons and two short, fine-looking Dominican girls striding past. Despite the cold they wore skimpy tops and tight shorts on their round, knock-me-down bodies. “Ay, papi,” one called to Jax with a smile and kept going. The girls crossed the street and turned east into their turf. Fifth Avenue had been the dividing line between black and Spanish Harlem—
el barrio
—for years. Once you were east of Fifth, that was the Other Side. Could still be down, could still be phat, but it wasn’t the same Harlem.

Jax watched them disappear. “Damn.” He’d been in prison a long time.

“Word,” Ralph said. He adjusted how he was leaning and crossed his arms like some Egyptian prince.

Jax waited a minute and bent down, whispered into the pharaoh’s ear, “I need a piece.”

“You fresh, man,” Ralph said after a moment. “Yo’ ass get caught with a piece, they violate you back in a minute. And you
still
gotta do a annual in Rikers fo’ the gun. Why you wanta take a chance like that?”

Jax asked patiently, “Can you do it or not?”

The scrawny dude adjusted the angle of his lean and looked up at Jax. “I think we phat, man. But I ain’t sure I know where to find anything fo’ you. A piece, I’m saying.”

“Then I ain’t sure I know who to give this to.” He pulled out a roll of benjamins, peeled off some twenties, held them out to Ralph. Being real careful, of course. One black man slipping another some money on the streets of Harlem could raise a cop’s eyebrow, even if the guy was just tithing to a minister from the nearby Baptist Ascension Pentecostal Church.

But the only eyebrow going up was Ralph’s as he pocketed the bills and looked at the rest of the roll. “You got yourself some tall paper there.”

“Word. And you’ve got yourself some of it now. And a chance for more. Happy day.” He put the wad away.

Ralph grunted. “What kinda piece?”

“Small. Something I can hide easy, you know what I’m saying?”

“Cost you five.”

“Cost me two, I could do it.”

“Cold?” Ralph asked.

As if Jax would want a gun with a registration number still stamped on the frame. “Whatta you think?”

“Then fuck two,” said the little Egyptian. He was ballsier now; you don’t kill people who can get you something you need.

“Three,” Jax offered.

“I could do three and hemi.”

Jax debated. He made a fist and tapped Ralph’s with it. Another look around. “Now, I need something else. You got connections at the schools?”

“Some. What schools you talkin’ ’bout? I ain’t
know nothin’ ’bout Queens or BK or the Bronx. Only here in the hood.”

Jax scoffed to himself, thinking, “hood,” shit. He’d grown up in Harlem and never lived anywhere else on earth except for army barracks and prisons. You could call the place a “neighborhood,” if you had to, but it wasn’t “the hood.” In L.A., in Newark, they had hoods. In parts of BK too. But Harlem was a different universe, and Jax was pissed at Ralph for using the word, though he supposed the man wasn’t disrespecting the place; he probably just watched a lot of bad TV.

Jax said, “Just here.”

“I can ask round.” He was sounding a little uneasy—not surprising, considering that an ex-con with a 25-25 arrest was interested in both a gun and a high school. Jax slipped him another forty. That seemed to ease the little man’s conscience considerably.

“Okay, tell me what I supposed to be lookin’ fo’?”

Jax pulled a sheet of paper out of his combat jacket packet. It was a story he’d downloaded from the online edition of the New York
Daily News
. He handed the article, labeled
Breaking News Update
, to Ralph.

Jax tapped the paper with a thick finger. “I need to find the girl. That they’re talking about.”

Ralph read the article under the headline,
MUSEUM OFFICIAL SHOT TO DEATH IN MIDTOWN
. He looked up. “It don’t say nothin’ ’bout her, where she live, ’bout her school, nothin’. Don’t even say what the fuck her name be.”

“Her name’s Geneva Settle. As for everything else”—Jax nodded at the little man’s pocket where the money had disappeared—“that’s what I’m paying
you
the benjamins for.”

“Why you want to find her?” asked Ralph, staring at the article.

Jax paused for a minute then leaned close to the man’s dusty ear. “Sometimes people ask questions, look around, and they find out more shit than they really ought to be knowing.”

Ralph started to ask something else but then must’ve figured that, even though Jax
might’ve
been talking about something the
girl
had done, the Graffiti King of blood could also mean that Ralph himself was being too fucking nosy. “Gimme a hour or two.” He gave Jax his phone number. The little pharaoh pushed off from the chain link, retrieved his bottle of malt liquor from the grass and started down the street.

*   *   *

Roland Bell eased his unmarked Crown Vic through central Harlem, a mix of residential and commercial buldings. The chains—Pathmark, Duane Reade, Popeyes, McDonald’s—existed side by side with the mom-and-pop outfits where you could cash checks, pay your bills and buy human-hair wigs and extensions or African arts or liquor or furniture. Many of the older buildings were run down and more than a few were boarded up or sealed with metal shutters covered with graffiti. Off the busier streets, ruined appliances awaited scavengers, trash was banked against buildings and gutters, and both weeds and impromptu gardens filled vacant lots. Graffitied billboards advertised acts at the Apollo and some other big uptown venues, while hundreds of handbills covered walls and plywood, hawking the acts of little-known MCs, DJs and comedians. Young men hung tight in clusters and some watched the
squad car behind Bell’s with a mix of caution and disdain and, occasionally, raw contempt.

But as Bell, Geneva and Pulaski continued west, the ambiance changed. The deserted buildings were being torn down or renovated; posters in front of the job sites showed what sort of idyllic town houses would soon replace the old ones. Geneva’s block, not far from steep, rocky Morningside Park and Columbia University, was beautiful and tree-lined, with clean sidewalks. The rows of old buildings were in good repair. The cars may have sported Clubs on the steering wheels but the vehicles the steel bars protected included Lexuses and Beemers.

Geneva pointed out a spotless four-story brownstone, decorated with carved facades, the ironwork glistening black in the late-morning sun. “That’s my place.”

Bell pulled his car two doors past it, double-parked.

“Uhm, Detective,” Ron Pulaski said, “I think she meant the one back there.”

“I know,” he said. “One thing I’m partial to is not advertising where the people we’re looking after live.”

The rookie nodded, as if memorizing this fact. So young, Bell thought. So much to learn.

“We’ll be inside for a few minutes. Keep an eye out.”

“Yes, sir. What for exactly?”

The detective hardly had time to educate the man in the finer points of bodyguard detail; his presence alone would be enough of a deterrent for this brief errand. “Bad guys,” he said.

The squad car that had accompanied them here pulled to a stop where Bell pointed, in front of the Crown Vic. The officer inside would speed back to
Rhyme’s with the letters he wanted. Another car arrived a moment later, an unmarked Chevy. It contained two officers from Bell’s SWAT witness protection team, who would remain in and around the town house. After learning that the unsub would target bystanders simply as a diversion, Bell had ordered some reinforcements. The team officers he’d picked for this assignment were Luis Martinez, a quiet, solid detective, and Barbe Lynch, a sharp, young plainclothes officer, who was new to protection detail but gifted with an intuitive radar for sensing threats.

The Carolinian now lifted his lean frame out of the car and looked around, buttoning his sports coat to hide the two pistols he wore on his hips. Bell had been a good small-town cop and he was a good big-city investigator but was truly in his element when it came to protecting witnesses. It was a talent, like the way he could sniff out game in the fields where he’d hunted growing up. Instinct. What he sensed was more than the obvious—like spotting flashes off telescopic sights or hearing the click of pistol receivers or noticing somebody checking out your witness in the reflection of a storefront window. He could tell when a man was walking with a purpose when by all logic he had none. Or when an apparently innocent bad parking job had placed a car in the perfect position to let a killer escape without having to saw the wheel back and forth. He’d see a configuration of building and street and window and think: Now, that’s where a man would hide to do some harm.

But at the moment he noted no threat and ushered Geneva Settle out of the car and inside the town house, motioning Martinez and Lynch to follow. He introduced Geneva to them, then the two officers
returned outside to check the surrounding area. The girl unlocked the inside security door and they went in and climbed to the second floor, accompanied by the uniformed officer.

“Uncle Bill,” she called, rapping on the door. “It’s me.”

A heavyset man in his fifties with a dusting of birthmarks on his cheek opened the door. He smiled and nodded at Bell. “Nice to meet you. Name’s William.”

The detective identified himself and they shook hands.

“Honey, you all right? Terrible what happen to you.”

“I’m fine. Only the police are going to hang around for a while. They’re thinking that guy who attacked me might try again.”

The man’s round face wrinkled with concern. “Damn.” Then he gestured toward the TV. “You made the news, girl.”

“They mention her by name?” Bell asked, frowning, troubled at this news.

“No. ’Causa her age. And no pictures neither.”

“Well, that’s something . . . ” Freedom of the press was all very well and good but there were times when Roland Bell wouldn’t mind a certain amount of censorship—when it came to revealing witnesses’ identities and addresses. “Now, y’all wait in the hall. I want to check out the inside.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bell stepped into the apartment and looked it over. The front door was secured by two deadbolts and a steel police lock rod. The front windows looked out on the town houses across the street. He pulled the shades down. The side windows opened onto an alley and the building across the way. The
facing wall, though, was solid brick and there were no windows that presented a vantage point for a sniper. Still, he closed the windows and locked them, then pulled the blinds shut.

The place was large—there were two doors to the hallway, one in the front, at the living room, and a second in the back, off a laundry room. He made sure the locks were secured and returned to the hallway. “Okay,” he called. Geneva and her uncle returned. “It’s looking pretty good. Just keep the doors and windows locked and the blinds drawn.”

“Yes, sir,” the man said. “I be sure to do that.”

“I’ll get the letters,” Geneva said. She disappeared toward the bedrooms.

Now that Bell had examined the place for security, he looked at the room as a living space. It struck him as cold. Spotless white furniture, leather and linen, all covered with plastic protectors. Tons of books, African and Caribbean sculptures and paintings, a china cabinet filled with what seemed like expensive dishes and wineglasses. African masks. Very little that was sentimental, personal. Hardly any pictures of family.

Bell’s own house was chockablock with snaps of kin—especially his two boys, as well as all their cousins back in North Carolina. Also a few pictures of his late wife, but out of deference to his new belle—Lucy Kerr, who was a sheriff down in the Tarheel State—there were none of his wife and Bell together, only of mother and sons. (Lucy, who was herself well represented on his walls, had seen the pictures of the late Mrs. Bell and her children and announced she respected him for keeping those up. And one thing about Lucy: She meant what she said.)

Bell asked Geneva’s uncle if he’d seen anybody he hadn’t recognized around the town house lately.

“No, sir. Not a soul.”

“When will her parents be back?”

“I couldn’t say, sir. Was Geneva talked to ’em.”

Five minutes later the girl returned. She handed Bell an envelope containing two yellow, crisp pieces of paper. “Here they are.” She hesitated. “Be careful with them. I don’t have copies.”

“Oh, you don’t know Mr. Rhyme, miss. He treats evidence like it was the holy grail.”

“I’ll be back after school,” Geneva said to her uncle. Then to Bell, “I’m ready to go.”

“Listen up, girl,” the man said. “I want you t’be polite, the way I told you. You say ‘sir’ when you talking to the police.”

She looked at her uncle and said evenly, “Don’t you remember what my father said? That people have to earn the right to be called ‘sir’? That’s what I believe.”

The uncle laughed. “That’s my niece fo’ you. Got a mind of her own. Why we love her. Give yo’ uncle a hug, girl.”

Embarrassed, like Bell’s sons when he’d put his arm around them in public, the girl stiffly tolerated the embrace.