Drumsticks (20 page)

I sat down on one of the vinyl seats and opened the cardboard box. It was very light. At least I knew I wasn't going to find a cache of Uzis, or even black market maple syrup, inside.

I reached in and felt paper. I pulled a few sheets of it onto my lap. And looked down at a ghost.

It was Black Hat. No, I shouldn't call him that. I should say instead that I was looking at Kevin, because the sweetly untroubled face of the boy whose photo I was gazing at held nothing of his future as a badass rap star, nor a son who reviled his parents, nor a rotting corpse sleeping uneasily, and forever, in the family plot.

Kevin was also represented as a curly haired infant, probably only days old. As the adorable toddler he must have been, happy in some unnamed playground in his little short pants. The class picture from fifth grade. Birthday party, with ice cream on his upper lip. Kevin and Dad trying out the new bicycle.

Beautiful memories. It made me ill.

I found some packets of fungusy tea at the bottom of the carton. Each portion was wrapped in a thin piece of cloth with a pattern I recognized immediately. My Mama Lou doll's dress was made out of that fabric, and so was the tiny bag carried by Dilsey, the second doll.

I hesitated a few minutes before attacking the canvas valise. Oh I knew full well I had to open it. And I knew full well I wasn't going to be happy at what I found. But I needed a couple of minutes before I could do the deed.

At last I pulled the zipper straight across in one violent movement. Primordial funk seemed to fly all over the van, nearly choking me.

I found a man's stained suit jacket and filthy sox, along with a pair of worn-down slippers. There was an unspeakable Fruit of the Loom undershirt and three different battered old hats.

As I clawed through the tangle of items, I pulled out a set of false eyebrows and mustache, and several jars and compacts containing makeup, light and dark.

There was more. I could have gone on rooting through the bag of tricks, but there seemed little point in it. I had gotten the message loud and clear.

I had to hand it to Miller. That old son of a bitch had balls of iron. And a damn good sense of humor, by the way.

To think that I had almost shown him his own photograph that day in Union Square Park! What a joke.

The last time I'd encountered the old black panhandler—my “boyfriend,” who used to sleep at the ATM near Ida's table—the one who flirted with me and hit me up for change a couple of times—the one who was trying to raise enough to buy a Big Mac—I had thought fleetingly of asking him if he could identify Ida's friend Miller from the snapshot I was carrying.

What a joke indeed.

Where was Miller now? Who was he now—Ivana Trump?

The vehicle's walls were spic-and-span clean. It took a few minutes to bring them into focus enough to realize they were covered with acoustic tiles. What was that for? Did Miller, Ida, and Lenore Benson sit back here listening to earsplitting music, like the idiot kids who ride around in those high-suspension cars listening to—

Listening to—rap music.

I looked up quickly at the van's ceiling. There was a saucer-size object up there. It was a speaker.

Sure, they could very well have been listening to ear-shattering music in here. Some care had been taken to soundproof the space. To keep the music in and the street noise out.

I hadn't dotted every one of the i's and crossed every one of the t's yet. Not just yet. But I had the feeling that my old friend synchronicity—or was it my nemesis—was going to provide a full explanation very soon.

My final discovery was the kicker. Before I left the van, I crawled up to the front. No revelations to be had up there. Driver's seat. Steering wheel. Passenger seat. Windshield. All standard.

But before I closed things out, I pushed the button on the glove compartment.

What came tumbling out was much more threatening than the sight of Howard's fist rushing toward my face.

This was Ida's handiwork, too. But it was not another Mama Lou clone. Not a duplicate of any of the dolls I'd seen anywhere, in fact.

This one was a boy doll. Wearing the cutest little baggy denims and a Chicago Bulls cap. It was the spitting image of Kevin Benson.

No, I'll amend that. This time it was altogether appropriate to call him Black Hat.

CHAPTER 18

Blue Room

Hair pulled back and shining. No jewelry at all. Lenore Benson might have been on the way to one of the endless fund-raisers that women of her class seemed always to be organizing. She was in dark blue cashmere this time. Carolina Herrera, I believe. And the sleeves covered those ugly slashes on her wrists very nicely.

She was composure itself, sitting there in front of the window on that straight-back chair. A few magazines lay at her feet.

I wanted to cry. Not just out of sympathy for all her losses. I could have cried with exhaustion and frustration.

Ida had been murdered. My friend Justin had been beaten to a pulp and his lover had narrowly escaped the same treatment. Dan Hinton's life was in ruins. I had brandished my gun and almost gelded Mr. No Questions Asked—Howard. I'd taken a mean sock in the face. I'd crawled around a deserted pier in no-man's-land, where anything might have happened to me and nobody would know until the neighborhood children found my twisted body a week later.

And what did I have to show for it all? A stick-figure likeness of Kevin Benson that Ida must have fashioned for Lenore Benson.

Maybe Ida had been killed before she got the chance to give it to her. Maybe Mrs. Benson had left it in the van by mistake. I didn't know.

The kindly smile on Lenore's lips was a permanent fixture, attached to nothing in reality, I realized, when she looked right through me and said, “I've finished with my tray. You may take it now. Thank you.”

I took the chair next to hers. “How are you today, Mrs. Benson?”

“I'm not tired at all, thank you.”

“I'm happy to hear that,” I said.

I was stuck there, trying to think of a way to communicate with her, to make her hear me, understand me, trust me—hideously frightened I'd say the wrong thing. What if she began to cry? What if she screamed?

Lenore Benson's good manners were her only device for holding the rest of the world at bay. If the Black Hat doll pressed the wrong button, it might just drive her deeper into madness.

I looked over and smiled weakly at the night nurse, who looked coldly back at me.

“I have a little present here, Mrs. Benson. May I give it to you?”

“More oranges, dear? No, thank you. I couldn't eat another bite.”

“No, not oranges. I brought you this.”

I allowed her to get a good look at the doll, and then handed it to her gently, my movements slow and deliberate. “I thought it might keep you company here, until you can go back home to all your other dolls.”

I saw the recognition break onto her face. So far, so good. Far from tears or hysterics, she was happy. I had made the right decision.

“Oh, thank you, Ida,” she said, beaming. “He's looking very well indeed.” But then I noticed the puzzlement on her face. “But he won't sing here, will he? You said he'll only sing when we're in the car.”

In the
van
, you mean. That's what I wanted to say. It was an effort, but I held my tongue.

She took in a deep gulp of air. And then Lenore Benson, at the top of her lungs, unloosed the vilest stream of cuss words I had ever heard in my life. I didn't even use language like that when my steam iron exploded in my hand. That is saying something.

The oddest thing of all was the expression on her face: pure delight.

She raised her hands up out of her lap and I leaned away from her, thinking she was about to strike me. But that wasn't it. Still cursing incoherently, she began tapping out an artless beat on the back of my chair. Not a strong beat, but a straight-ahead and soulful one.

My God, she was accompanying herself. She was improvising—rapping!

Said Ernestine:
Close your mouth, girl, before you start catching flies
.

Queen Lenore rapped about my mama. She rapped about
her
mama. Before she was done, she had touched on the come and the crank and the crack and the other kind of crack.

It was a hypnotic performance. After it was over, she returned to her ultra-placid state, the doll cradled in her lap.

I could not take my eyes off of her, but it was definitely time to go. And so I left there walking backwards.

Leman. Leman. I had to talk to Leman. But I couldn't find the public phones at the clinic.

There was a place on 69th Street. An awful bar where I gigged a couple of times last year with a sixties nostalgia band whose regular tenor was in rehab.

It was the only place I could think of in the nabe. So I ran out of the clinic and across York Avenue to that dark, stanky joint, where I'd once seen three mice frolicking on top of the jukebox.

You opened the front door of the place and the smell of stale beer and ancient hamburger grease went up into your sinuses like a swarm of diseased insects. The dark corridor leading to the bar held the unspeakable bathrooms and the phones so old they still had rotary dials. I suppose the occasional drug deal took place there, too.

I dug into the pockets of my jacket. No loose change. I rattled the small shoulder bag that held my gun. None in there either. I continued on into the bar and asked for a fistful of quarters. And, as long as I was right there, I ordered a bourbon.

Finally the story had come together. I had just about everything put together now. Just about everything but the bodies. Enough drama and violence and star-crossed parallels for a Black History Month miniseries. Can't you just see the image of Mama Lou under the closing credits?

The only trouble was, it was all real.

I downed my drink, ordered a second one, and headed with it to the phone.

Sweet picked up immediately.

“My brother,” I said in greeting.

“Who the fuck is this? Is that you, Cueball?”

“It's me. I've got things to tell you, buddy. But first I want to hear you say I'm your sister.”

I heard his crazed cackle at the other end of the line. “Yeah, that'll be the day.”

“Hey,” I said harshly, “I'm not one of them, Leman. And I'm glad I'm not.”

“One-a who?”

“You know, like the Bensons. And I'm not like you either. You're pigheaded and mean. But you're still my bro. And I'm sorry I sicced Aubrey on you like that. I used to write poems, did you know that? I just heard some rapping that beats anything I ever set to paper—by the way, do you really like that shit?”

“You oughta be taken off the streets, girl. This stuff is getting to you.”

“Tell me something I don't know. Listen, Leman Sweet 'n' Sour. It's busting open. The whole thing.”

“I know. I just tried you at Aubrey's,” he reported. “I been calling all over town for you.”

“What's happening?”

“I'll start small and then work my way up to the big stuff.”

“Start, man, start.”

“First, Loveless's people finally tracked down somebody who could tell them what Ida and Miller used to do when they worked in nightclubs.”

I piped up: “They made things appear out of nowhere. And sometimes they made things disappear. Illusionists, they're called. Smoke and mirrors and telling the future. Parlor tricks with hypnosis. Psychic scam artists.”

There was a long pause. “How did you know that?”

I laughed bitterly. “Felice Sanders told me—when she
wasn't
there. Black Hat told me, too.”

“Felice Sanders couldn't tell you—Are you drunk, Cueball?”

I thought about it. “Yeah. A little. A drink helps to loosen the grooves, doesn't it? Listen, what about going over the plot of this soap opera I been following, Leman? You like a good story, the way I do?”

“You really are high, ain't you?”

“Just listen for a minute, okay?”

“Okay,” he agreed, reluctantly.

“Dr. Benson and his family had a good life, right? Things were cooking for them for a long time. He and his wife must've had some pretty high hopes for their boy Kevin. Just ask me; I know something about mamas' and daddies' high hopes. But then the kid grew up, and the shit hit the fan. Not only did he pick a poor little white girl to marry, he decided he wanted to be a rap niggah called Black Hat. No way were they having that. But then something happened to settle that family feud once and for all. The poor kid got killed—caught a stray bullet probably aimed at somebody else. Everybody was fucked up behind that. Everybody. And the wife takes it so bad that she winds up in a posh laughing academy in her Nino Cerruti knits.

“A while later, Ida Williams, a nice old lady who sells dolls on the street, gets popped by a stray bullet. Strange coincidence, isn't it, Sweet?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it was. Because it turned out that Ida had a connection to Black Hat's family—those crazy dolls that your friend turned you on to.”

“Right. Now, what else happened? Several people overheard Kevin's fiancé, Felice, threaten to take some action that was going to knock the Bensons for a loop. Nobody knew it at the time, but she was going to try to get Black Hat's music out, make his name even after he was dead. Too bad for her, the one she turned to for help was this greedy loser, Lyle Corwin.”

“Biggest mistake that little chick ever made,” Leman said.

“I have to agree with you there. Before you know it, Felice goes missing. We don't know what happened to her, but we know it can't be good. Matter of fact, when Little Nan gets access to the place where Felice has been staying, half living with an older black man, it looks like the writing's on the wall. Unfortunately the writing's in blood.

“So here's another weird parallel: my … my source, let's call him … the one who helped me get into Ida's place, the one who helped me finger Lyle. He turns up missing, too. He's also bloody, but alive. And before they wheel him into surgery, he's able to tell me that Lyle Corwin is somehow hooked up with this man Miller—Ida's cohort, and Felice's cohort, most likely. I mean, there were three older black men weaving in and out this plot—Jacob Benson, Miller—”