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To Charles C. Mish and Estelle Petrulakis
The Confidential Informant
I was in the waiting area of the VA hospital emergency room off North Capitol Street, seeing to my father, when Detective Tony Barnes hit me back on my cell. My father had his head down on the crossbar of his walker, and it was going to be a while before someone came and called his name. I walked the phone outside and lit myself a smoke.
“What’s goin on, Verdon?” said Barnes.
“Need to talk to you about Rico Jennings.”
“Go ahead.”
“Not on the phone.” I wasn’t about to give Barnes no information without feeling some of his cash money in my hand.
“When can I see you?”
“My pops took ill. I’m still dealin with that, so…make it nine. You know where.”
Barnes cut the line. I smoked my cigarette down to the filter and went back inside.
My father was moaning when I took a seat beside him. Goddamn this and goddamn that, saying it under his breath. We’d been out here for a few hours. A girl with a high ass moving inside purple drawstring pants took our information when we came in, and later a Korean nurse got my father’s vitals in what she called the triage room, asking questions about his history and was there blood in his stools and stuff like that. But we had not seen a doctor yet.
Most of the men in the waiting room were in their fifties and above. A couple had walkers and many had canes; one dude had an oxygen tank beside him with a clear hose running up under his nose. Every single one of them was wearing some kinda lid. It was cold out, but it was a style thing, too.
Everyone looked uncomfortable, and no one working in the hospital seemed to be in a hurry to do something about it. The security guards gave you a good eye-fuck when you came through the doors, which kinda told you straight off what the experience was going to be like inside. I tried to go down to the cafeteria to get something to eat, but nothing they had was appealing, and some of it looked damn near dirty. I been in white people’s hospitals, like Sibley, on the high side of town, and I know they don’t treat those people the way they was treating these veterans. I’m saying, this shit here was a damn disgrace.
But they did take my father eventually.
A white nurse named Matthew, redheaded dude with Popeye forearms, hooked him up to one of those heart machines, then found a vein in my father’s arm and took three vials of blood. Pops had complained about being “woozy” that morning. He gets fearful since his stroke, which paralyzed him on one side. His mind is okay, but he can’t go nowhere without his walker, not even to the bathroom.
I looked at him lying there in the bed, his wide shoulders and the hardness of his hands. Even at sixty, even after his stroke, he is stronger than me. I know I will never feel like his equal. What with him being a Vietnam veteran, and a dude who had a reputation for taking no man’s shit in the street. And me…well, me being me.
“The doctor’s going to have a look at your blood, Leon,” said Matthew. I guess he didn’t know that in our neighborhood my father would be called “Mr. Leon” or “Mr. Coates” by someone younger than him. As Matthew walked away, he began to sing a church hymn.
My father rolled his eyes.
“Bet you’d rather have that Korean girl taking care of you, Pops,” I said, with a conspiring smile.
“That gal’s from the Philippines,” said my father, sourly. Always correcting me and shit.
“Whateva.”
My father complained about everything for the next hour. I listened to him, and the junkie veteran in the next stall over who was begging for something to take away his pain, and the gags of another dude who was getting a stomach tube forced down his throat. Then an Indian doctor, name of Singh, pulled the curtain back and walked into our stall. He told my father that there was nothing in his blood or on the EKG to indicate that there was cause for alarm.
“So all this bullshit was for nothin?” said my father, like he was disappointed he wasn’t sick.
“Go home and get some rest,” said Dr. Singh, in a cheerful way. He smelled like one them restaurants they got, but he was all right.
Matthew returned, got my father back into his street clothes, and filled out the discharge forms.
“The Lord loves you, Leon,” said Matthew, before he went off to attend to someone else.
“Get me out this motherfucker,” said my father. I fetched a wheelchair from where they had them by the front desk.
I drove my father’s Buick to his house, on the 700 block of Quebec Street, not too far from the hospital, in Park View. It took a while to get him up the steps of his row house. By the time he stepped onto the brick-and-concrete porch, he was gasping for breath. He didn’t go out much anymore, and this was why.
Inside, my mother, Martina Coates, got him situated in his own wheelchair, positioned in front of his television set, where he sits most of his waking hours. She waits on him all day and sleeps lightly at night in case he falls out of his bed. She gives him showers and even washes his ass. My mother is a church woman who believes that her reward will come in heaven. It’s ’cause of her that I’m still allowed to live in my father’s house.
The television was real loud, the way he likes to play it since his stroke. He watches them old games on that replay channel on ESPN.
“Franco Harris!” I shouted, pointing at the screen. “Boy was beast.”
My father didn’t even turn his head. I would have watched some of that old Steelers game with him if he had asked me to, but he didn’t, so I went upstairs to my room.
It is my older brother’s room as well. James’s bed is on the opposite wall, and his basketball and football trophies, from when he was a kid all the way through high school, are still on his dresser. He made good after Howard Law, real good, matter of fact. He lives over there in Crestwood, west of 16th, with his pretty redbone wife and their two light-skinned kids. He doesn’t come around this neighborhood all that much, though it ain’t but fifteen minutes away. He wouldn’t have drove my father over to the VA hospital, either, or waited around in that place all day. He would have said he was too busy, that he couldn’t get out “the firm” that day. Still, my father brags on James to all his friends. He got no cause to brag on me.
I changed into some warm shit, and put my smokes and matches into my coat. I left my cell in my bedroom, as it needed to be charged. When I got downstairs, my mother asked me where I was going.
“I got a little side thing I’m workin on,” I said, loud enough for my father to hear.
My father kinda snorted and chuckled under his breath. He might as well had gone ahead and said, “Bullshit,” but he didn’t need to. I wanted to tell him more, but that would be wrong. If my thing was to be uncovered, I wouldn’t want nobody coming back on my parents.
I zipped my coat and left out the house.
It had begun to snow some. Flurries swirled in the cones of light coming down from the streetlamps. I walked down to Giant Liquors on Georgia and bought a pint of Popov, and hit the vodka as I walked back up Quebec. I crossed Warder Street, and kept on toward Park Place. The houses got a little nicer here as the view improved. Across Park were the grounds o
f the Soldiers’ Home, bordered by a black iron, spear-topped fence. It was dark out, and the clouds were blocking any kind of moonlight, but I knew what was over there by heart. I had cane-pole fished that lake many times as kid, and chased them geese they had in there, too. Now they had three rows of barbed wire strung out over them spear-tops, to keep out the kids, and the young men who liked to lay their girlfriends out straight on that soft grass.
Me and Sondra used to hop that fence some evenings, the summer before I dropped out of Roosevelt High. I’d bring some weed, a bottle of screw-top wine, and my Sony Walkman cassette player, and we’d go down to the other side of that lake and chill. I’d let her listen to the headphones while I hit my smoke. I had made mix-tapes off my records, stuff she was into, like Bobby Brown and Tone Lōc. I’d tell her about the cars I was gonna be driving, and the custom suits I’d be wearing, soon as I got a good job. How I didn’t need no high school diploma to get those things or to prove how smart I was. She looked at me like she believed it. Sondra had some pretty brown eyes.
She married a personal injury lawyer with a storefront office up in Shepherd Park. They live in a house in PG County, in one of those communities got gates. I seen her once, when she came back to the neighborhood to visit her moms, who still stays down on Luray. She was bum-rushing her kids into the house, like they might get sick if they breathed this Park View air. She saw me walking down the street and turned her head away, trying to act like she didn’t recognize me. It didn’t cut me. She can rewrite history in her mind if she wants to, but her fancy husband ain’t never gonna have what I did, ’cause I had that pussy when it was new.
I stepped into the alley that runs north-south between Princeton and Quebec. My watch, a looks-like-a-Rolex I bought on the street for ten dollars, read 9:05. Detective Barnes was late. I unscrewed the top of the Popov and had a pull. It burned nice. I tapped it again and lit myself a smoke.
“Psst. Hey, yo.”
I looked up over my shoulder, where the sound was. A boy leaned on the lip of one of those second-floor, wood-back porches that ran out to the alley. Behind him was a door with curtains on the window. A bicycle tire was showing beside the boy. Kids be putting their bikes up on porches around here so they don’t get stole.
“What you want?” I said.
“Nothin you got,” said the boy. He looked to be about twelve, tall and skinny, with braided hair under a black skully.
“Then get your narrow ass back inside your house.”
“You the one loiterin.”
“I’m mindin my own, is what I’m doing. Ain’t you got no homework or nothin?”
“I did it at study hall.”
“Where you go, MacFarland Middle?”
“Yeah.”
“I went there, too.”
“So?”
I almost smiled. He had a smart mouth on him, but he had heart.
“What you doin out here?” said the kid.
“Waitin on someone,” I said.
Just then Detective Barnes’s unmarked drove by slow. He saw me but kept on rolling. I knew he’d stop, up aways on the street.
“Awright, little man,” I said, pitching my cigarette aside and slipping my pint into my jacket pocket. I could feel the kid’s eyes on me as I walked out the alley.
I slid into the backseat of Barnes’s unmarked, a midnight-blue Crown Vic. I kinda laid down on the bench, my head against the door, below the window line so no one on the outside could see me. It’s how I do when I’m rolling with Barnes.
He turned right on Park Place and headed south. I didn’t need to look out the window to know where he was going. He drives down to Michigan Avenue, heads east past the Children’s Hospital, then continues on past North Capitol and then Catholic U, into Brookland and beyond. Eventually he turns around and comes back the same way.
“Stayin warm, Verdon?”
“Tryin to.”
Barnes, a broad-shouldered dude with a handsome face, had a deep voice. He favored Hugo Boss suits and cashmere overcoats. Like many police, he wore a thick mustache.
“So,” I said. “Rico Jennings.”
“Nothin on my end,” said Barnes, with a shrug. “You?”
I didn’t answer him. It was a dance we did. His eyes went to the rearview and met mine. He held out a twenty over the seat, and I took it.
“I think y’all are headed down the wrong road,” I said.
“How so?”
“Heard you been roustin corner boys on Morton and canvassing down there in the Eights.”
“I’d say that’s a pretty good start, given Rico’s history.”
“Wasn’t no drug thing, though.”
“Kid was in it. He had juvenile priors for possession and distribution.”
“Why they call ’em priors? That was before the boy got on the straight. Look, I went to grade school with his mother. I been knowin Rico since he was a kid.”
“What do you know?”
“Rico was playin hard for a while, but he grew out of it. He got into some big brother thing at my mother’s church, and he turned his back on his past. I mean, that boy was in the AP program up at Roosevelt. Advanced placement, you know, where they got adults, teachers and shit, walkin with you every step of the way. He was on the way to college.”
“So why’d someone put three in his chest?”
“What I heard was, it was over a girl.”
I was giving him a little bit of the truth. When the whole truth came out, later on, he wouldn’t suspect that I had known more.
Barnes swung a U-turn, which rocked me some. We were on the way back to Park View.
“Keep going,” said Barnes.
“Tryin to tell you, Rico had a weakness for the ladies.”
“Who doesn’t.”
“It was worse than that. Girl’s privates made Rico stumble. Word is, he’d been steady-tossin this young thing, turned out to be the property of some other boy. Rico knew it, but he couldn’t stay away. That’s why he got dropped.”
“By who?”
“Huh?”
“You got a name on the hitter?”
“Nah.” Blood came to my ears and made them hot. It happened when I got stressed.
“How about the name of the girlfriend.”
I shook my head. “I’d talk to Rico’s mother, I was you. You’d think she’d know somethin ’bout the girls her son was running with, right?”
“You’d think,” said Barnes.
“All I’m sayin is, I’d start with her.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
“I’m just sayin.”
Barnes sighed. “Look, I’ve already talked to the mother. I’ve talked to Rico’s neighbors and friends. We’ve been through his bedroom as well. We didn’t find any love notes or even so much as a picture of a girl.”
I had the photo of his girlfriend. Me and Rico’s aunt, Leticia, had gone up into the boy’s bedroom at that wake they had, while his mother was downstairs crying and stuff with her church friends in the living room. I found a picture of the girl, name of Flora Lewis, in the dresser drawer, under his socks and underwear. It was one of them mall photos the girls like to get done, then give to their boyfriends. Flora was sitting on a cube, with columns around her and shit, against a background, looked like laser beams shooting across a blue sky. Flora had tight jeans on and a shirt with thin straps, and she had let one of the straps kinda fall down off her shoulder to let the tops of her little titties show. The girls all trying to look like sluts now, you ask me. On the back of the photo was a note in her handwriting, said, “How U like me like this? xxoo, Flora.” Leticia recognized Flora from around the way, even without the name printed on the back.
“Casings at the scene were from a nine,” said Barnes, bringing me out of my thoughts. “We ran the markings through IBIS and there’s no match.”
“What about a witness?”
“You kiddin? There wasn’t one, even if there was one.”
“Always someone knows som
ethin,” I said, as I felt the car slow and come to a stop.
“Yeah, well.” Barnes pushed the trans arm up into Park. “I caught a double in Columbia Heights this morning. So I sure would like to clean this Jennings thing up.”
“You know I be out there askin around,” I said. “But it gets expensive, tryin to make conversation in bars, buyin beers and stuff to loosen them lips…”
Barnes passed another twenty over the seat without a word. I took it. The bill was damp for some reason, and limp like a dead thing. I put it in the pocket of my coat.
“I’m gonna be askin around,” I said, like he hadn’t heard me the first time.
“I know you will, Verdon. You’re a good CI. The best I ever had.”
I didn’t know if he meant it or not, but it made me feel kinda guilty, backdooring him the way I was planning to do. But I had to look out for my own self for a change. The killer would be got, that was the important thing. And I would be flush.
“How your sons, Detective?”
“They’re good. Looking forward to playing Pop Warner again.”
“Hmph,” I said.
He was divorced, like most homicide police. Still, I knew he loved his kids.
That was all. It felt like it was time to go.
“I’ll get up with you later, hear?”
Barnes said, “Right.”
I rose up off the bench, kinda looked around some, and got out the Crown Vic. I took a pull out the Popov bottle as I headed for my father’s house. I walked down the block, my head hung low.
Up in my room, I found my film canister under the T-shirts in my dresser. I shook some weed out into a wide paper, rolled a joint tight as a cigarette, and slipped it into my pack of Newports. The vodka had lifted me some, and I was ready to get up further.
I glanced in the mirror over my dresser. One of my front teeth was missing from when some dude down by the Black Hole—said he didn’t like the way I looked—had knocked it out. There was gray in my patch and in my hair. My eyes looked bleached. Even under my bulky coat, it was plain I had lost weight. I looked like one of them defectives you pity or ridicule on the street. But shit, there wasn’t a thing I could do about it tonight.