The Wolves of Fairmount Park (24 page)

“People buy dope, Derrick. We supposed to close our eyes to that?”

“You see what you want to see. Who put you onto me?”

“You know I can't say that.”

“Yeah, I'll tell you who. Asa Carmody.”

Danny shifted in his seat, tried to give nothing away.

“He brought you somebody. Like he was just helping you out. All innocent.” Derrick Leon was almost laughing, his eyes suddenly much clearer than when he'd first shambled in. “Yeah, I see it in your poker face. He brought you, I'm going to guess it was DeAngelo Barnes.”

Danny gave a little headshake, but he felt something like a cramp in his neck and along his jaw. Leon leaned closer, his hands on the table between them.

“Yeah, don't even lie, it just make you look stupid. Now, Asa Carmody hand you DeAngelo Barnes and you say thank you, Asa, you're a good citizen, and you catch me asleep, huh? And what happened next? You don't even know.” Leon smiled, rocking a little, the chains swaying. “How you ever make detective, anyway? I go up on death row, and DeAngelo Barnes is gone, and all my corners still open, all day, every day, and everybody still working, still slinging dope on Fifteenth Street, only now the money goes east instead of west. Never even missed a beat. I made them corners. I built them. There should be a plaque with a picture of Derrick Leon. A movie about me, like with Denzel.”

The guards stood up behind Leon and he turned to look at them, then back at Danny. There were fast changes in his face, flickers of humor, of fear. Danny tried to imagine what it was like, how he'd be, sitting year after year on death row.

“Yeah, I'm going to burn. They can't wait, not a minute. Nobody ever cared this much about me before.” He stood up and held his cuffed hands out to Danny. “But I learned my lesson. See, if I had fed my enemies to you, instead of taking care of things straight up, I'd be walking around free like Asa Carmody, huh?”

By the time it got dark Orlando was home, walking the narrow rooms and licking his lips. He'd been four places he knew to score and found himself shut out everywhere, stuck at a distance, pacing with the baggers and glueheads working their thin, scabby arms and haranguing customers and bystanders for spare change until they got run off by the jugglers.

At Fifty-second Street, he got too close to a big runner called Evil Eye, a twitchy, angry, low-level dealer with a giant gold Ra pendant, who kicked his legs out from under him and booted him in the ass down the sidewalk while everyone on the corner laughed. He pulled himself up on skinned palms and kept moving, his cheeks burning, and they shouted insults at him until he was out of range down Market Street.

He'd heard of guys turned off at some corners, usually base-heads who tried to run games and beat the dealers out of money, or people suspected of snitching, who seemed untrustworthy or wrong, or who were just a pain in the ass to everybody. Pestering
the paying customers for handouts, or just too crazy to have around.

Orlando, though, had been to places he thought were run by different crews, so he knew whatever word was out against him was general, and there was nothing he could do, no one to appeal to. It was a nervous business that ran on rumor and vendetta and lying so intricate it became a kind of mythology. Back at Zoe's, he paced and wondered when she was going to get home, moving between the front windows and the stairs like a dog on patrol. By the time she came in, walking slowly, head down, the way she always was after work, he was tapping his raw hands against his thighs in a jerky bebop and his nose was running.

She stopped on the top step of the stairs to see him there, leaning toward her, his eyes wild. “What's going on?”

“You're late. We got things to do.”

“That asshole Julian, the manager?”

He held up a hand. “We got to go, Zoe. We got things to do. I'm stuck here, going nuts while you screw around.”

“Will you listen to me a minute?”

“What?”

“Jesus, what's up with you? What happened to your hands?” She retreated a step, and he clamped his arms to his sides in a manic simulation of stillness, his eyes moving in his head like a metronome.

“I got shut down. Nobody will call me back. The word's out on me or something.”

“Where? We'll call somebody.”

“Everywhere. Are you fucking listening to me? Who are you going to call? We got to get somebody to front for us. These
fuckers are telling each other something about me. Do you have money?” He pointed to her purse, which she pulled against her chest protectively.

“That's what I was trying to say. Listen, I got fired. That fucking Julian—”

“Today? Today you get fired? What the fuck?”

“Well, what the hell are you going to do about it? Give me shit? That's helpful. You can't even hold down a job, Orlando.”

“I'm working. I'm working for that Parkman guy. I'm working every day.” He stuck one hand in his pocket to cover the shaking and stabbed out with the other toward the street. “I'm making things happen. I'm drawing lines. You don't get it.”

“Oh, bullshit. That's a fucking dream and you know it. That guy's never giving you a dime.” She stamped up the final step and leaned in toward him, her face terrible. “No, but that's okay, I'll just go get another fucking shitty job doing some fucking useless thing so you can float around the city all day and pretend you're a philosopher, or a detective, or whatever the fuck it is you think you are.”

“I'm trying to make things right. Don't you get that? I thought you understood.”

“This? All this bullshit? This is about your brother. You're trying to get your brother to treat you like a human being instead of a fucking junkie cartoon. Which he'd fucking do anyway if he wasn't such an asshole.”

His hand jerked at the end of his sleeve and he slapped her. She dropped her purse and clapped her hand over her face. Everything fell out of the purse and rolled and clattered on the stairs, lipsticks and change, an eight-ball lighter. The razor opened,
flashed and spun on the landing. He stuck his fingers in his mouth and bit down until he tasted blood. She dropped her eyes, bowed down slowly and retrieved her purse, moved without straightening down the stairs sweeping everything back in, and then stood up on the landing, turning from him and walking back out through the door.

The cell reception on the turnpike was bad, fading in and out while Martinez left messages. He called the Captain and left messages, tried John a half-dozen times before reaching him, coming out of court. He talked about Derrick Leon, about Soap Williams, about DeAngelo Barnes. The call ended with a frantic chirp as the signal was lost, and then Danny called back, his voice high.

“It was the same shit, John. I didn't even put it together until I was in that room with Leon.”

“You don't know that, Danny. Have you looked at the file on Barnes? Do you even remember?”

“I remember Asa Carmody sitting across the fucking table from me. Just like with Soap Williams. Feeding me bullshit with a teaspoon.”

“It wasn't bullshit. Derrick Leon was a bad guy, and so is Darnell Burns. You need to calm down and think.”

“We have to take a look at all of this again. I don't think Darnell did this.”

“No one is going to want to hear that. Not the DA, not the Captain.”

“John.”

“Not the families of those kids that got shot.”

“You know I'm right.”

“I don't know shit. And neither do you.”

“I got played. You were the one asked
me
if I knew why Asa was feeding me information. Well, you were right.”

“Just because the guy's got an agenda doesn't mean the case is no good. You know that's what they'll say. Criminals flip on each other. And we help them do it. Christ, Danny, it's what we do every damn day. Derrick Leon was a cop killer.” Through the phone Danny could hear John moving, his voice getting low, like he was afraid someone else would overhear. “If you start opening up old shit? Get defense lawyers opening up old cases? Man, that's a place nobody wants to go.”

“Are you going to back me on this, John? I need to know where you are.”

“I think all that boy-wonder shit messed with your head. You don't have the years in yet, and you think it was all too easy for you, and maybe you're right. But these are good cases against bad guys. We sent Derrick Leon to death row and the fucker belongs there. I'll tell you something else, Danny. My name's on those cases, too.”

“I just, I don't know.” There was a long pause. “I want to talk to the Captain about this.”

“Are you sure you have enough to do that?”

“I just want to talk to the man.”

“Yeah? Then ask yourself this, kid. Does he want to talk to you?”

.   .   .

Orlando was standing at a pay phone in Chinatown, one of the last ones in the city, it seemed like. For a while he had tried to get a stolen pay card to work, but it was bullshit. He had finally taken a pipe to a Coke machine outside a muffler place and run away with a couple of bucks in quarters.

“Bob, man, how's it going?”

There was a long pause. “Are you kidding?”

“No, man, don't—”

“I wish I knew who this was, on the phone, but I don't.”

“Bob, wait.”

“If I knew who this was, I'd tell him to get his head out of his ass and stop pestering people before he gets a tire iron wrapped around his nuts.”

“Jesus, don't say—”

“But who this is I have no fucking idea, so I got nothing to say.”

The phone went dead. He stood back with the receiver in his hand for a minute before smacking it down hard on the cradle. He turned and was rocking on his heels, trying not to freak out any of the nice Chinese ladies on their way to work, when he saw Parkman Sr. come out of a place down the block between a restaurant with an aquarium in the window and a place full of that Hello Kitty stuff that was like crack for preteen girls.

Orlando moved fast, catching him as he stood in the street with his keys, looking up at the coiled eels moving languidly at the bottom of a murky tank.

“Mr. Parkman.”

He looked up startled, as if caught at something. He took a
few steps farther down the block, then turned and grabbed Orlando's jacket.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Whoa. Hands off.” Orlando smacked at the hand and Parkman released him, but poked him hard in the chest.

“What the fuck did you take from my son's room?”

“Nothing. What are you talking about?”

“Come on, come on. I'm not a mark, junkie. Just give back the stuff you took and I won't call the cops.”

“Look, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Why the fuck would I take anything when you're going to pay me?”

“Yeah, I'm not paying you shit now, am I? That camera alone is worth almost four thousand bucks.”

“Camera?”

“Please, you can't even lie right.” He turned and started walking again, shaking his head. “I would think that would be the one thing you're good at.”

“Mr. Parkman, just wait, just wait, okay? I'm telling you this is important.”

Parkman stopped but didn't turn. Orlando caught up and talked to his side, just as happy not to be in the man's eyes. “I didn't take a camera, okay? If the camera is missing, it was taken before I got there. Or it's just somewhere else, at your son's school or something.”

“Without the case? Please.” He didn't turn but kept looking down the block. It was like a movie where two spies are talking, hoping not to be seen in conversation. “Look, this was a mistake. I just wanted to figure out what the truth was, but I don't think you know the difference.”

“Wait, when did you notice it was missing?”

“Just stay away from me and stay away from my home. And my son's friends.”

“His friends? Did someone say something?”

The older man kept walking, dropping his head and holding his hands up. Orlando turned and drifted back toward Race. He turned to see the restaurant where Parkman had been eating, but it wasn't a restaurant. The restaurant's entrance was a few steps from the street in a little alcove. The door he'd come out of was red and flush with the wall, and next to it was a small, cracked window with neon ideograms and a small sign in English that read
MASSAGE
.

The lights in the parking lot came on silently, glowing a faint green and then brightening, though Danny thought the light they gave off added a kind of yellow haze so that nothing in the lot was any clearer for the electricity expended. Across Lincoln Drive the woods were almost black in the oncoming night. It was late, and there were gaps in the traffic, and in the long silences he could hear things moving. Leaves rattling, a stick breaking with a pop that echoed off the closed face of the building. What could be out there in those woods? What animals were big enough to make that much noise so close to the city? He was sitting on the hood of his car staring hard into the pockets of black shadow in the trees when the Captain came out and stood, his keys in his hand and his briefcase under his arm. He took his hat off when he saw Danny sitting there, showing his thinning gray hair in tight curls, a rivulet of sweat disappearing into his collar from behind his right ear.

“Danny, what's up?”

“You didn't return my call, so I thought I'd sit out here awhile.”

“It's been a bitch of a day. Want to go get a drink?”

“I just want to make sure we're doing everything right.”

“So do I, Danny. We all do. But that's not always possible.”

“I don't know. I just don't think I feel good about—”

The Captain shook his head, putting his hat back on. “I know what you think. I talked to John Rogan.”