King Suckerman

  Karras stopped at Real Right Records above R, stepped into the store. They had a Graham Central Station tune, an epic instrumental workout called “The Jam,” cranking through the house KLMs. Cheek was in the corner of the shop, talking to a P-Funk-loving regular, a kid named Mills with a major-league Afro, who had his own personal copy of Standing on the Verge of Getting It On cradled under his arm. Mills claimed to have Parliament’s Osmium on the Invictus label in his private collection. Cheek had never actually seen it, though, and had repeatedly asked Mills to bring the proof into the store. Cheek and Mills had gotten past that now and were arguing about the meaning of a certain cut off Maggot Brain.

  Rasheed stood behind the counter, gave Karras an eye sweep. Karras nodded, and Rasheed nodded back. He head-motioned Karras to the back room.

  Marcus Clay sat doing the books at an old desk amongst general clutter and cartons of stock, squinting in the dim light. He looked up as Karras entered.

  “Mitri.”

  “Marcus.”

  “What’s goin’ on?”

  “Marvin Gaye.”

  “What you doin’ today, man? Anything? Or you just wanderin’ around?”

  “Got a little business to take care of.”

  “Business, huh?”

  “Yeah. After that, maybe go out and see my mom.”

  “Tell her I said hey.”

  “I will.”

  Clay rubbed his face, looked through the open door frame leading to the floor. “Damn, those boys are playin’ that Larry Graham loud.”

  “Ain’t No Bout-a-Doubt It.”

  “You agree!”

  “I’m sayin’ that’s the name of the LP.”

  “Whatever the name, it’s still too goddamn loud.”

  “You got a record store here, Marcus.”

  “Now you’re gonna tell me how to run my shop?”

  “Just pointing it out.” Karras had a seat on the edge of Clay’s desk. “What’s up, man? What’s botherin’ you?”

  “The money and shit.” Clay dropped his pencil on his desk. “Still haven’t figured out what to do about that. Damn fool thing I did.”

  “You haven’t heard from anyone yet, have you?”

  “Not a damn thing yet.”

  “Then relax. We’re all right.”

  Clay looked up. “Where’s your girl?”

  “Out.”

  “You—?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  Clay grinned. “Showin’ some restraint. Not like you, man.”

  Karras started to tell Clay about Donna DiConstanza and the Benbow’s men’s room the night before: how he’d gone out and just fucked someone, anyone, to keep himself from hitting on the teenage girl back at his crib.

  “You know me, Marcus,” said Karras. “Just trying to do right.”

  Clay, agitated and tight, stood up. “Goddamn, man, those boys just gotta turn that shit down!”

  Karras followed Clay out to the floor. Clay went behind the counter as Rasheed stepped aside. Cheek and the Mills kid had kept up their intense discussion without missing a beat. Clay lowered the volume in the store.

  “All right?” said Clay.

  “Solid, boss,” said Rasheed.

  “Hey, Marcus,” said Karras, who had stopped at the H bin of the store’s Rock section. “When you gonna get around to moving Jimi into Soul?”

  “What?” said Clay.

  “What, haven’t you ever listened to Band of Gypsys?” said Karras. Rasheed laughed as Karras walked toward the door.

  “Dimitri,” said Clay. “We still got a game this evening?”

  “Chevy Chase library,” said Karras.

  “I was thinkin’, after that we could hook up at your place for a little thing. Listen to a few records, dance some.” Clay’s eyes smiled. “Me and Elaine, you and your… friend. You know?”

  “Sounds good,” said Karras. “Later, Marcus. Later, Rasheed. Y’all take it light.”

  Clay said, “You too.”

  Rasheed stood on the throw rug covering the cash box in the floor. “You hear what your boy said about Hendrix?”

  “Yeah,” said Clay, moving out from behind the counter. “Told you he was down.”

  “He knows his music is all. But down? I wouldn’t go so far as all that.”

  Clay grinned a little as he walked away.

  Karras went back to his place, scaled out some ounces, bagged them, rolled a joint for himself. He made a couple of phone calls, put some ball clothes together with the herb into a gym bag, and left his apartment. He put the top down on his Karmann Ghia, slapped his eight-track of Johnny Winter And into the deck, and pulled out of his spot. Down on Corcoran Street he hooked up with a guy named Robert Berk, passed him three ounces of weed, took back a hundred and fifty in cash.

  Karras took a few hits of Columbian while driving north through Rock Creek Park. He went slowly by a group of city kids riding ten-speeds showing orange flags; the kids blew whistles at him as he passed, Karras watching them in the rearview. The reefer had taken, Winter singing the Winwood-Capaldi song “No Time to Live,” Johnny’s junk-ravaged vocals going out against his own lovely blues guitar.

  Riding high in the park in his sporty ragtop, the wind blowing back his long hair, Dimitri Karras smiled.

  TWELVE

  Wilton Cooper stepped out of the shower, wrapped a towel around his waist. Coming out into the room, he cracked a cold Near Beer straight off. He had a long pull, had another, put the can down on the nightstand.

  “Go ahead and have yours,” he said to Bobby Roy Clagget, who stood naked before him. “I like it cold in the summertime, so there’s plenty of hot water for you, if that’s your pleasure.”

  “Thanks, Wilton.”

  “Go on, boy.”

  Cooper watched Clagget walk to the bathroom. From the backside the boy wasn’t too bad. Scarier than a motherfucker, though, in the face. Cooper had noticed, on top of the pimples and his general ugliness, that now the boy had a line of white pus along his gums where his teeth had been. Infection, most likely, which meant a fever’d be setting in anytime soon. But like the brothers in lockup used to say, you ain’t gonna fuck no face anyhow, and in the heinie-parts department the Clagget kid looked as fine as any young boy he’d seen. Yeah, Cooper, he figured he’d wait on getting dressed himself, just sit around in the coolness of the AC and sip his funny beer, let the boy come out from the shower and put him where he was born to be, facedown on the bed.

  The kid, he had done all right out there at that farm, too, played it real good and cool. Cooper had known Clagget would be down when the time came. He’d seen it that first night, with his shotgun fitted in his pant leg, strutting across that field.

  Cooper lit a Salem long.

  He looked at the briefcase filled with money, the grocery bag filled with cocaine, the briefcase and the bag side by side in the corner of the room. Funny how neither one meant a damn thing to him. The money couldn’t buy him anything better than he had right now, than he had felt that afternoon: the rush of just taking something you decided was yours, the head-up feeling in your stride afterward when you were walking away. The ride… It was all about the ride.

  As far as the blow went, Cooper had already decided he wasn’t going to bother driving Carlos’s shit all the way down to South Florida. For what? To be some brown motherfucker’s butt-boy again? Uh-uh, man, that shit was way done. Cooper was going to take this ride as far as it would go, ’cause it felt good. Course, he knew the way it was going to end, the same way it always ended for guys like him who had never had no chance and didn’t give a good fuck if one came along. The point of it all was to walk like a motherfuckin’ man; if you had to, go down like one, too.

  Anyway, the whole thing was in motion, Cooper knew. They had been too careless, made too many mistakes. Even with the fire, which had covered some of their tracks, at least, the Baltimore cops or whoever would find and run the remaining Marriottsville evidence—shells, shot patterns, prints, tire impressions,
all that—with the Feds, who’d match at least one item up with the Carolina shotgun kill. Somebody’d seen the Challenger leaving the drive-in that night, somebody’d seen Bobby Roy gettin’ in the car. And Cooper’s prints—Ronald Thomas’s prints, for that matter—they were on the national network. Cooper figured it would be best if he and Bobby Roy moved over to the Thomas cousin’s crib in Northeast, switched cars, maybe, though Cooper hated to give up his ride. Move around a little, buy some time.

  The Clagget kid and the Thomas brothers, they didn’t have to know none of that. He’d just go on ahead and keep it to himself.

  B. R. Clagget came from the bathroom wearing only his briefs.

  “Wilton?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What we doin’?”

  “Gonna go see Eddie Spaghetti.”

  “Now?”

  “Little later on. In the meantime, come on over here and drop them drawers.” Cooper stabbed out his cigarette. “Gonna give you something good, little brother, on account of how proud you made me today.”

  Dimitri Karras bought some yellow daisies at Boukas Florists on upper Connecticut, then drove west into AU Park. He stopped the Karmann Ghia in the shade of a large elm on 45th and Davenport. He had parked all his cars, from his first Bug to his ’66 Nova to the Ghia, in the same oil-stained rectangle of street beneath that tree.

  Karras was familiar with most of the old trees on the block. He knew the best climbing trees and those that bore fruit, and could tell you, even in the winter, which dogwoods would blossom pink and which would blossom white, and in whose yard grew the most interesting birch or the magnolia with the loveliest blooms. Beneath a weeping willow in old Mr. Montemorano’s backyard, he had shown little Katie O’Donnell his thing and she had shown him hers; ten years later, at the age of fourteen, he had dry-humped his first girl behind the curtain of that very willow’s branches. At eight he fell out of an oak in front of Ricky Young’s house and broke his arm; at seventeen, sick from drink and unable to make it the half block to his mother’s house, he had vomited spaghetti against the same tree. There was a history to the trees in the neighborhood where a guy grew up.

  Eleni Karras stood behind the storm door, watched her son walk toward the Cape Cod where he had been raised. He needed a haircut, not that she’d bother bringing the subject up. And he always wore those same bluejeans, turned up once at the cuff. A twenty-seven-year-old man, wearing blue jeans all the time. If he had a good job, maybe he’d have to get some nicer clothes, start spending money, get into a little healthy debt, make him have to work harder…. Who was she kidding? She didn’t even know what he did to pay the bills. “Little bit of this and that, Ma,” he’d always say, then give her the millionaire’s smile. Well, he always did have a nice smile. Admittedly, Dimitri had no visible means of support and little in the way of prospects, but with his kind of looks it still surprised her that no girl—a Greek girl would have been very nice—had scooped him up yet. Eleni knew a few koritsakis from good families he could talk to at Saint Sophia. That is, if he ever stepped foot in church.

  Look at him, thought Eleni: He still walks with that happy bounce, like he did when he was a kid.

  “Hey, Ma,” said Dimitri, opening the door and giving his mother a kiss. He handed her the daisies, wrapped in sheer green paper.

  “Dimi, mou,” said Eleni. “Pos eise, pethi mou?”

  “I’m okay. How’s my girl?”

  “Etsi ke etsi.” Eleni made a flip of her hand. “I’m doin’ all right.”

  Karras followed his mother to the kitchen. Walking behind her, he saw that she had put on a few more pounds. She had always had thick ankles, and over the years the rest of her had come up to speed.

  They passed a photograph of his father, Peter Karras, and a frame filled with war medals hung in the hall. As a little boy, Karras used to study the photograph of the man he never knew, his father in his Marine Corps dress uniform, square-jawed and handsome, nearly blond, with a prominent mole beside his mouth. Sometimes, when his mother was off at work, Dimitri would take the photograph down from the wall, go to the bathroom mirror, hold the picture up next to his own face, try to find the resemblance between him and his old man. But there was no resemblance there. Dimitri Karras always favored his mother’s side, and as time passed he got to where he liked the way he looked, and found that women liked it, too.

  In the kitchen, Eleni put the flowers in a vase and set the vase in the center of the gray Formica-topped table. Karras took his usual seat.

  “Thanks for the daisies, honey.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Thelis ligo rice pudding?”

  “What, you made a pot?”

  “This morning. You said you were coming by!”

  “Sure.”

  Eleni served it to him in a glass dessert bowl. The pudding was still warm from the stove and thick with raisins. His mother had sprinkled some cinnamon on top as well.

  “Mmm.”

  “Entaxi, eine?”

  “It’s better than entaxi, Ma. It’s great!”

  She poured him a cup of coffee and a cup for herself. Karras could stand a cup of coffee on a July afternoon on account of his mother kept the house so damned cold. What it was, she was addicted to the AC from working reception in a doctor’s office for twenty-odd years. Old Doc Steinberg, he wanted it like ice in the place. Eleni got to like it after a while, though her coworker, Ida Mae Clay, could never take it and ended up wearing sweaters in to work year round. Karras almost smiled, thinking of Marcus’s mother, standing there behind the sliding glass window, her fists balled on her hips—that was the way she stood when she was all fired up—bitching about the cold in the office for half her working life.

  “How’s Marcus doin’?” said Eleni.

  “He’s okay.”

  “His business good?”

  “He’s makin’ it.”

  “You should go into some kind of business yourself.”

  “I’ll get right on it, Ma.”

  “Sure, sure.”

  “Anyway… what else is on your mind?”

  “Eh?”

  “When you called you said someone from church wanted to talk with me about something.”

  “Oh, yeah. You remember Nick Stefanos?”

  “The guy Pop worked for after the war, right? He had a grill down on Fourteenth Street—”

  “He still has it. Fourteenth and R.”

  “So?”

  “I’m not sure what he wants, exactly. Said something about a problem with his grandson. You know, Nick raised the boy himself.”

  “That’s nice. But what’s it got to do with me?”

  “I don’t know. I told Nick you’d go down to the grill and see him today—”

  “Ma!”

  “What, you too busy?”

  “Me and Marcus have a game over at the library later on.”

  “Game, huh? Twenty-seven years old, you’re playin’ games.” Eleni shook a thick finger at Karras. “Look, you don’t have any idea what Nick Stefanos did for your father and me after the war. We were living in this little apartment in Chinatown—the three of us, you were just a baby still—and we were gettin’ close to being evicted. Your dad had gotten this… he had gotten this limp, see. Back then they didn’t have these programs they got now, and nobody wanted to hire a cripple—”

  “All right, Ma, all right. You told me this story like fifty times.”

  “Nick Stefanos hired him. Nick took him in.”

  “I said all right.”

  “You go down and see Nick today. Okay?”

  Right after I go and off an ounce of weed to a bunch of high school boys. Yeah, then I’ll give some old guy advice on how to raise a kid.

  “Okay,” said Karras. “I’ll go see Nick.”

  Eleni Karras leaned her back against the sink. Past her round shoulders Dimitri Karras watched a wren glide and light on the corner of the outside windowsill, where it was building a nest. His mother had always st
ood there in front of the sink, her arms crossed, talking to him about his day while he ate the food she had prepared; and birds had been building nests in that spot for twenty years. Karras smiled.

  “What’s so funny, Dimitraki? Eh?

  “Nothin’. Just good to see you, that’s all.”

  “Wanna little bit more pudding?”

  “Sure, Ma. One more bowl.”

  Wilton Cooper sat on the edge of Eddie Marchetti’s desk, rapped a rolled-up District of Columbia detail map against his thigh. B. R. Clagget stood behind him, hip cocked, smoking a long white cigarette.

  “So the deal went all right,” said Marchetti, nervously moving his swivel chair back and forth behind the desk.

  “Deal went real smooth,” said Cooper.

  “See, Clarenze? I told you, no problemo.”

  Clarence Tate, standing next to the office window, nodded shortly. He was watching the skinny white dude, thinking how pale and weak he looked. Tate had noticed the pus on the kid’s gums, figured he was heading into a fever infection now. Cooper should’ve made sure the kid was treated right, if he had given a fuck. But Cooper, you could see it in his eyes, he didn’t care if he ever saw the sun come up on another day. Why would he care if the kid he was riding with lived or died?

  “You meet Larry’s lady?” said Marchetti.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Cooper. “That was one wild freak.”

  “She makes quite an impression, right?”

  “Talk about it,” said Cooper. “She damn near blew me away!”

  Cooper and Marchetti laughed. Tate watched Clagget’s pig eyes move knowingly toward Cooper.

  “So anyway,” said Cooper, “been a pleasure doin’ business with all a y’all, so far. Now I mean to clean things up, get that money back from Trouble Man.”