No Lesser Plea (35 page)

“What’s the matter, Pres? Cat got your tongue? Say hello to your old friend.”

“What you want, Man?”

“What I want? Well, couple a things. You got a pencil and some paper?”

“Paper? What for?”

“ ’Cause you got to write down your orders, just like in a restaurant. You the waiter. Get ’em!”

Elvis scrounged up a paper bag and the stub of a pencil.

“What the fuck this about, Man?”

“Now Pres, baby, be cool. The first thing is, you gonna be glad to hear I got you a job. Now you gonna be able to keep that fine lady you got there and your baby in style. Gonna make your parole officer sit up and smile too.”

“What the fuck you talkin’ about, a job? What doin’?”

“You gonna be a paper boy, Pres. Now write this down.”

Sonny Dunbar dropped by Karp’s office that Friday to talk about the progress he had made in the search for Louis’s accomplice. Or rather the progress he hadn’t made.

“Butch, look. I’m just one guy, right?” Dunbar was explaining. “If this was a real case, we’d have people watching Louis’s apartment twenty-four hours a day, hitting the people who knew him. We’d have ten, twenty guys out. But this is just me. I got Slocum covering stuff I should be doing, but he can’t do that forever. The loot is on my ass already. He thinks I’m cooping, can you believe it?”

“What are you saying, Sonny, you want to give up?”

“No, shit, I’ll keep plugging. But this guy, Louis—it’s weird. Nobody knows him. I mean the usual snitches. He’s got no rep on the street, no contacts. I checked out that bar in Queens, Torry’s, where Donnie met him. They ID’d Louis, all right, they knew him as Stack, but I drew a blank on ‘Willie Lee.’ ”

“How about the girl friend?”

“Yeah, DeVonne. She knows shit. She saw the guy once, doesn’t know nothing. One thing, she heard Louis call him ‘Pres,’ or ‘Press.’ ”

“That’s good! That’s a name at least. You check it out?”

“Check what out? Is it a first name, a last name, a street name, a private joke? You know how many bloods are called Pres? You ever hear of Lester Young?”

“No, is he in the case?”

“Not that I know of. He was a jazz musician, kicked off about twenty years ago. They called him Pres because he was the president of all the sax players—the best, follow? OK, now if I had the manpower, I could go through every yellow sheet in headquarters and see whether we had somebody who was, one, black, two, about twenty, about six-two, two-hundred pounds, three, had a little scar on one side of his nose, and four, had some name or alias that fit with ‘Pres.’ Now, you want to go downtown with the shit we got and ask for ten guys to do that, and ten guys to work the street?”

“OK, Sonny, you made your point. But I got the feeling we’re not being smart. Let’s say the Louis connection is a dead end. We got to know something more about this other guy.”

They thought for a while in silence. Dunbar glanced at his watch. He was due to meet Fred Slocum in twenty minutes on another case and spend four or five hours walking up and down stairs, knocking on doors, and talking to suspicious people who didn’t see anything ever. Karp thought about punks and hoods, how they revolved like the dumb horses on a carousel, in and out of prison, on and off parole. He studied the clumsy Identikit sketch he had taped to his desk lamp, as if it would somehow yield up a name, an address. He drew idly on a yellow legal pad: a stick figure with no face, then bars across the figure, then he wrote “1970” above the bars and drew a big circle around the whole thing.

“Butch, I got to go,” said Dunbar, getting out of his chair.

“Wait a minute, Sonny. Maybe I got something. You remember Donny said Louis said this guy was just out of the slams?”

“Yeah, so?”

“OK, so he’s about twenty, right? It’s probably his first adult offense. And it’s got to be something like armed robbery, or ag assault.”

“Why? Why not drugs, or rape?”

“Just a hunch. Louis is an armed robber. He’s already got a junkie for a patsy. He needs a strong-arm—somebody like him—don’t ask me why, but I figure it that way. OK, now the field is a little narrower. We’re looking for an armed robbery, first offense—he probably got a bullet—released from prison in late Nineteen-sixty-nine or early Nineteen-seventy, that matches the other stuff we got on him.”

“Butch, what if he’s from Detroit or Jersey? Donnie didn’t say what prison. I mean other states got prisons.”

“Then we’re fucked. For that matter, he could have split town. But, I figure Louis for somebody who’s got to control everything. Look at how successful he’s been. You think he’s going to pick a sidekick who’s going to split, who has any real options. No, we’re looking for a local mutt, Sonny. Just a regular anonymous local mutt. Look, let’s check the parole records. He’s a first offender, he had to make parole, right. One of these guys ever did straight time it’d make headlines.”

Dunbar looked skeptical. “This is another long shot, Butch.”

“Shit, Sonny, a long shot is the only shot we got. And I was right once, wasn’t I?”

Dunbar sighed. “I’ll check it out,” he said.

Number 563 Boynton Street was one of three apartment houses on the block still occupied by human beings. The name of the building, graven in a marble lintel, was Lancaster. In its better days it had sheltered a generation of Irish, then a generation of Jews. The other buildings had been torched by vandals, or by their owners for insurance. Some of these had their windows blocked with glittering tin sheets. Others had been demolished and turned into fields of gray and red lumps, from which sprang jungles of hardy weeds. The streets sparkled with crushed glass.

So many buildings had been cleared that Dunbar, climbing out of his dusty white Chevy, once again had the odd impression he often got in this part of the Bronx, of not being in the city anymore, but out west, among the classic landscapes of the horse opera. In the vacant plains of flattened rubble, the buildings stood like weathered buttes. It was one of the few parts of New York where you could see almost the whole dome of the sky from street level. It always gave Dunbar the shivers.

Karp had been right. There was an armed robber who had been released from Attica at just the right time. And who looked right. And who had the right name. Dunbar patted his gun, unconsciously, and entered the fetid hallway of 563, heading for Apartment 505, the last known address of Preston Elvis.

Dunbar was about to ask the girl who opened the door if her momma or daddy was home, until he saw her swelling belly and the little boy who clung to her pink housecoat. This thin child was the lady of the house. He flashed his shield.

“Police. Are you Mrs. Elvis?”

“What you want? I ain’t done nothin’.”

“Could I come in?”

Silently, she backed away from the doorway. Mother and child stared at him with liquid, sad brown eyes. The living room was the same as all the others he had been in. A lumpy couch—this one was green plastic—and a big color TV. A game show was blaring: a capering man was giving things away to white people.

“That’s a nice new TV, there,” said Dunbar. “Preston got that for you, did he?”

“Who?”

“Preston Elvis. This guy,” said Dunbar, showing the mug shot. “He lives here, right?”

“No, nobody live here, jus us.”

“But, he comes here a lot, doesn’t he? I mean I could find out lots of ways, but it’s easier if you tell me. And, shit, honey, I ain’t from welfare. I don’t give a rat’s ass who lives here or when. I just need to talk to him.”

“He ain’t been ’round for a long while,” she said, sullenly.

Dunbar looked through the apartment. There was a pair of men’s shoes near the couch. The bedroom and bathroom were empty, but there were male clothes scattered around and in the closet, and there were recently used shaving things in the bathroom.

He went back to the woman. The boy had returned to watching TV.

“What’s your name, girl?”

“Vera. Higgs.”

“OK, Vera. I’ll tell you the truth, now. I don’t want to take you downtown. I don’t want to take your little boy away. And I definitely don’t want to tell the welfare that a man’s been living here. OK? But all that is gonna come down, if I don’t get to talk with Preston real soon? So tell me, where’s he at?”

“He workin’. He ain’t done nothin’.”

“Right, and where does he work?”

“I don know. He never tell me shit about what he be up to. Someplace, down in the city. No lie, Mister, I don know.” Her voice became shrill and tears started.

Dunbar believed her. He thought, OK, Sherlock, time to play detective. What he didn’t want was to have to stake out this shithole, maybe for hours or days even, if Elvis decided not to come home for a while. He looked more closely at the miserable dwelling, opening drawers, peering into cabinets, willing something to pop out at him. There was a pile of newspapers on the kitchen table. Idly, Dunbar picked one up and glanced at the headline, something about black leaders selling out their third-world brothers in the struggle against imperialism. Late-breaking news. Then something clicked.

He showed the paper to the woman. “Who reads this paper, you?”

She shrugged. “He bring them here.”

“He ever talk about a dude name of Mandeville Louis? Or Stack?” Shrug. Dunbar said, “I’ll be back.” He left the apartment and rushed down the stairs. It could be a coincidence that Preston Elvis had lying around his apartment twenty or thirty copies of the Claremont Press, the same newspaper that Mandeville Louis had worked for. But somehow Dunbar doubted it.

“Mister Barlow? Emerson Dunbar,” said Dunbar, showing his ID. “I’d like to ask you some questions.”

The editorial offices of the Claremont Press occupied a storefront on the avenue of the same name, and consisted of a small shop immediately off the street, where you could buy the Press and a selection of books and records, or place classified ads; and, behind a glass door, one large room, which held a jumble of battered desks, filing cabinets, and other necessaries of journalism. Dunbar was standing at one of these desks, talking to James Barlow, the managing editor of the Claremont Press.

Barlow, a chubby, tan man with an Afro and ferocious side whiskers was dressed in a bush jacket and a black T-shirt. He regarded the police ID with studied repugnance.

“Why don’t you pigs leave us alone? The fucking FBI was here last week. I’m being followed, you know that? Two little blondies in a gray car. You see this phone? Tapped. The entire power of the fascist racist state is ranged against us, but we shall continue to speak and print the truth. Now, beat it! Go fuck with the
Times
for a change.”

“Mister Barlow, I’m not trying to harass you. This is a routine investigation of a routine crime. All I want to know is, have you seen this man?” He held out the mug shot of Preston Elvis. Barlow barely glanced at it.

“No,” he snapped.

“You sure? Why don’t you take another look? We have reason to believe he worked here.”

“I don’t need to. One oppressed nigger is the same as another. And if you think I’m going to help an oreo pig track down a brother, you’re dumber than you look.”

“Take it easy, Barlow. I gave fifty bucks to the NAACP in 1969.”

“Get out of here!”

“Honest, Barlow, I could care less about this guy’s politics. And they promised me if I broke this case I’d make sergeant—don’t you want to see the brothers get ahead on the force?”

“Brother, my ass! When the oppressed peoples rise up it’ll be class traitors and running dogs like you who’re gonna go to the wall first.”

“I can hardly wait. Lookie here, Lumumba, I’d like to stay and bullshit with you about the class struggle and all, but there’s this guy who seems to have aced about a hundred guys, most of ’em blacker than you, and I’d like to put him away, and this dude Elvis is gonna help me do it. Now, I asked you nice to help me, and you told me to get fucked so what do you say, we go along downtown and I’ll ask you again?”

Barlow jumped to his feet. “Oh, now the pig shows his true colors. You want to take me to jail? Go right ahead. I been in jail before.” He held his hands out rigidly, wrists together. “Go head, muthafucka! Take me in! Hey, people! Uncle Tom is gonna arrest my black ass. If I get shot trying to escape, remember his face.”

There were about twenty people in the large room, and at Barlow’s outburst they stopped what they were doing and began to move ominously toward Barlow’s desk, making belligerent noises.

Dunbar said, “Oh, for cryin’ out loud, Barlow! Get real!” Dunbar knew he couldn’t afford to start trouble. The crowd was obviously not going to let him take Barlow in without a scuffle, and if he called for backup, somebody was going to ask what he was doing there in the first place, which meant he would either have to lie, or get chewed out for wasting time on a dead case.

He snorted in disgust and pushed his way past the growling revolutionary cadres and out of the main office. He heard the crowd cheering as he swung past the glass door.

The detective loitered despondently in the bookstore for a while. There was a good deal on the collected works of Kim II Sung in twenty-five volumes, but Dunbar was able to restrain himself. He had just about become resigned to sitting in his car on Boynton Street until Elvis should decide to show, when he happened to look back into the office.

Everyone had gone back to work after their revolutionary victory. Barlow was dialing a number, reading it out of a small, black book. He looked around furtively as he waited for a connection. He was on the phone for no more than a few seconds of conversation. Then he hung up, put the book in a desk drawer and locked it.

Dunbar thought that was funny. Old Jim Barlow did not seem like a terse man. Probably talk your ear off about the oppressed working classes while ordering a cup of coffee. On the other hand, if he were telling somebody that the cops were after him and he thought his phone was tapped, he might be brief for once.

Dunbar
really
didn’t want to sit on Boynton Street. Which is why he waited until the place cleared out that night, broke in, picked the desk lock, and copied down all the names, addresses, and phone numbers in Barlow’s little book. All of the thirty-two names were nicknames or first names and initials—Chili T., Joe Q., Chingo Ray, Che M., and like that. Very conspiratorial. As he looked over the list, something almost rang a bell in Dunbar’s head. He looked at the list for several minutes trying to make something happen, and failing. Then he locked everything up again and went home to Queens.