The November Criminals (6 page)

So Digger told me the joke she’d dug up. “What’s brown and hides in the attic?”

“I don’t know! What
is
brown and hides in the attic?” This is the correct ritual response. She paused to collect herself. I held my breath.

“The diarrhea of Anne Frank.” The way she delivered it, in this coy, quiet voice, a
conciliatory
voice, just
destroyed
me, that and the fact that we were also pretty stoned, and after I stopped laughing I told her, “Excellent job.” Thus disaster was averted. She’s going to achieve greatness, and this is the proof. Do you know how easy it is to give in to resentment under these circumstances?
Everybody
does it. Not her, though. She even agreed to come back to my house then, even with the brick of weed stowed under the passenger seat. I was still darting paranoid head turns as I drove. But we made it home unarrested, and I did an invisible celebratory dance on my way inside. Then it was time to deal with the pot. I know I promised to spare you the details of my routine, ladies and gentlemen. But many of you have never witnessed this procedure. So I thought I would give you a glimpse.

The weed was dense, almost springy to the touch, fragrant. Furred with faint red hairs. Noel has a very reliable and high-quality connection. Fibers from the glans-shaped (think of the head of your dick;
glans
is the Latin word for “acorn,” I shit you not) nuggets clung under my nails. Now, I had a customer base to maintain. And in this, as in any small business, you have to have something that distinguishes you from your competitors. The weed Noel sold me was always good, and sometimes even better than good. Good enough to justify my 50 percent markup on it.
Unjust
, you gasp. But that’s what the market will bear. And the pussies who buy from me! They have no other real sources, falling as they do in that unclear zone between middle-classness and true wealth.
Actual
rich kids can afford to be decadent, can buy in bulk. Poor or desperate kids buy retail. Good stuff, or shwag whose lack of quality is compensated for by additives: low-grade coke, PCP. Et cetera. Sometimes H
₂
C(OH)
₂
, or formalin, embalming fluid. Sometimes a well-known and popular insect spray, which causes nausea, vomiting, and eventual blindness. I never had to use these, which helped ensure my good reputation. But clean weed is not sufficient. You have to be
creative
. You have to have an
identity
. This can reside in your personality or person: Noel Bradley. Or in your quiet, confident scariness: David Cash. But I have no personality to speak of, and my physical weakness is pretty apparent. So I had to resort to
cosmetic measures
.

What were they? Orange peels. These, according to the lore of my schoolmates, help to keep the weed moist, which helps to keep it potent. This has always seemed like pure voodoo to me. Don’t they have to dry tobacco leaves before you smoke them? And isn’t dried sage or whatever, doesn’t it have more flavor than its fresh counterpart? At least, you’re supposed to use less of it. In cooking, I mean. My father is very insistent on this fact about dried sage, although to my knowledge he’s never deployed it in any circumstances. But whatever. Every bag I sold came with a little twist of orange peel. I also made sure to use the type of Biggie bags where the little strip of plastic across the lips of the bag turns green when they’re closed. On those weak props was my success founded.

I’d developed this whole little
routine
to deal with packages from Noel. I broke it down into eighths, quarters, half ounces, and ounces. I knew from experience that Biggie-brand baggies weigh between .029 and .032 of an ounce, and so I measured, making adjustments as I went. My method was simple: weigh out; add the famous Addison-identifying scrap of orange peel from the bowl of such scraps I keep in my minifridge; thumb the zip-seal 90 percent closed, leaving a vent; roll up the bag, the air escaping through said vent; complete the seal to its full piss-greenness; secure with a tag of invisible tape. And you’re done. The floppy cylinders go back into the safe, to be drawn out, modularly, as needed. I could, at the height of my industriousness, bag and seal a pound in under an hour. You develop horrible neck cramps; your hands ache. The one unpleasant drudgery I faced in my occupation. I raced myself, to keep it interesting. That day I shaved seven seconds off my previous best.

Digger had stalked upstairs when I started my process. She doesn’t like to be around while I do that kind of work. I heard her wander around, opening and slamming cabinets, looking for food. Her steps have a recognizable, martial time signature: 2/2. I shit you not. She clipped downstairs as I finished—she knew how long it took me to deal with a package; she’d been through this with me before—already talking. “I had to go to this thing for my mother, like a surgery-appreciation thing. Did I tell you?”

“No, did she like win the Joseph Mengele Lifetime Achievement Award or something?” I’m a
funny
guy! Digger ignored this, as she pretended to ignore the handfuls of bags I was shoving into my safe. I keep it in my closet, hidden in plain sight. It’s not like my father ever inspects my room, anyway. She whipped out her blood-colored pipe, which I packed with some loose weed, making foppish hand gestures. And then we got high. A rhomboid of the day’s last sunlight tracked its way across my counterpane.

“What up, Mr. Money,” Digger asked. She makes this remark every time I resupply. I
never
have a retort. Digger’s voice, if you heard it without seeing her … I mean, she’s
feminine
. I mean in her character. And also she has gigantic tits, for someone as short and small-framed as she is. But her voice is ambiguous. It can carry real overtones of hurt and anger, just because it’s so throat-heavy.

Today, at last, I had something for her. I mean Noel’s story about Mike Lorriner. I wouldn’t have told her if she hadn’t made that
Mr. Money
remark, which is unfair. She knows I haven’t spent any of it on myself, or on anything else, other than resupplying. I now had some kind of countercharge to offer, to demonstrate my potency.

“Come on. Noel said that? And you like believe it? Noel said it. Noel,” she crowed. I told her I did. Believe it, I mean. Just to tweak her. And suddenly I did believe. At least halfway. She—to my shock—stopped scoffing and started challenging me. Why didn’t I just tell the cops? What was I going to do about it? I tried to calm her down. But here was this opportunity to satisfy this urge that I’d made a whole speech about, and I was paralyzed! (Her sentiment, not mine.)

“But it’s just
Noel
, man,” I said.

“Yeah, but it’s either true or it’s not true, even if Noel says it. And you just said you believed it.” Her sudden partisanship of his theory bewildered me. Which shows how little I understand women. And the triteness of the story was suspicious. It made too much sense. Some bulky, black-hating cracker, on the town for the weekend and desperate to prove his credentials, a booze-powered party, shoving, shouts, slurs aplenty, Kevin being heroic and stolid in the face of persecution. Et cetera. But Digger persisted: “At least
check it
out,” she said, “at least check it out.”

My subsequent decision, if it can be called a decision and not an act of drug-induced lassitude, not a proof of my inability to resist her, could be marked as our fulcrum moment. Yes, something
that
blank-faced and ordinary. Calling Information! Oh, you can convince yourself to do anything. It doesn’t even require any real effort. Just a moment of weakness or distraction. According to the 411 lady, there were nine Lorriners living in Maryland with listed numbers. Five of them lived in Baltimore, which Noel’s statement that Lorriner was a redneck ruled out. Two lived in Bowie, and though I remembered Noel saying Severn, I took down their info anyway. One was named Jason and one was named Brandon. So no good. One lived in Groton Woods. Her name was Kaneia. But one of the listings, in a town called Brander’s Hollow, seemed meaningful. No full name, just an initial: M. Lorriner, 9780 Fork Lute Road: 301-927-1124. “Thanks, just thank you,” I gushed. And the operator’s fuzzy “You’re welcome” sounded charged with delight.

“Well?” Digger asked. “It makes sense,” I said. “He’s listed in Brander’s Hollow. Or M. Lorriner is.
You
know. Brander’s Hollow. They have that like Little League world series there? And there was that cross-burning lawsuit?” These statements might have been true. They might have referred to some other, similar town. To this day I don’t know. I keep forgetting to look them up. I jabbed the numbers in. The line rang three times. Then someone, a man, answered. With a quack.

Rural flatness is not just a geographical feature. It comes out in the voice, too, and it came out in his. Made him sound young. That much I remember.
No criminal would talk like such a hick
, I reasoned. Right? No aesthetic coherence
there
. Digger was lip-asking something of me, with exaggerated round precision:
Is it
him,
is it him?
Her mouth looked enormous. I swatted my hand in dismissal, and she punched me in the biceps. Not her strongest blow—and she
can
throw a punch—but enough to distract me, so that I almost lost Lorriner. But I managed to retake control of the situation. I’d give Lorriner a fillip and let him go. No danger there. I’d never felt more secure, my after-weed cigarette bleeding smoke, Digger lying next to me, a victim on the phone. Why
not
exercise power if you have it? And so I spoke.

“Uh, yes, uh, is, uh, is this Mike Lorriner?”

“Who is this?” the man breathed. My lungs tightened.

“I know what you did to Kevin,” I mumbled, suppressing a giggle.

“Ix
cyuse
may?” he twanged.

“No, I like
know
, man,” I asserted. “And I’m like going to tell the cops. You like can’t get away with
that
shit, man.” (What?) And then I hung up. Slammed down the receiver. Digger and I laughed ourselves into exhaustion. It took two full minutes, which is an eternity of laughter.

“Oh, my God it was just some like
baseball
hick. You could just like
hear
it. Noel was like wrong. I admit it. You could just hear it. Oh, my gawd,” I gasped. I sounded, now that I think about it in retrospect, like Alex Faustner.

“You idiot, man, you idiot, you idiot,” Digger kept groaning. And we lay there in the afterhaze of hilarity—provoked by the pointless murder of one of our classmates. That’s real empathy, right? The human race is disgusting. You can guess what we did next. At least some of you have been through similar things. It’s amazing how mind-clearing a simple physical event like clumsy and enthusiastic sex can be. Does this go away with age? Literature says yes. That’s a depressing prospect. What am I going to
do
with myself when I get old? You think eighteen is too young to suffer over your own mortality?
Fuck
you, ladies and gentlemen.

And in the service of ignoring mortality, Digger and I could have gone on for the whole afternoon. We did that sometimes, on weekends, engaged in
marathon
sessions. But the phone started ringing again, just when we’d barely gotten going, and I spasmed my way to the receiver. Digger burrowed her fingertips into the spare flesh of my forearm and muttered, “It’s
nothing
, Addison, don’t get all absurd.” Her voice came from low in her throat. I picked up. I’m not
that
big a coward. It was the same guy, of course: Lorriner. He sounded less breathy, sure of himself.

“Schacht, right?”

My lips went numb with fear. “How do you know my name?” Thoughts of some globe-spanning, anti-Addison conspiracy choked and thrilled me.

“Yew motherfucker. Yew can’t tell me sheeeit. You forgit about caller ideee?” His vowel dragged and he continued. “Mayn, I am going to like
fuck
yew up. Put yew in the daymn hospital. Put yew in the daymn
grave
yard.” Then the dial tone uncoiled, gray-green, infinite. Digger—provoked by my hanging lower jaw—asked me what the fuck was wrong, as she covered her marmoreal tits. “He has caller ID,” I muttered. “He knows my name. My last name.” Stoned as I was, I had completely failed to reckon with this possibility. “Oh, fuck.” She groaned. The rhomboid of sunlight wandered off my bed and fell onto the cold stone floor.

VI
.

“I
F YOU CAN WAIT
just literally one second, Mr. Schacht.” Officer Pontecorvo said this, the phone pressed against her honey-colored neck. I never learned her first name. She’s the evening desk officer at the Second Precinct, which is where the cops who look after my sleepy neighborhood have their base of operations. Officer Pontecorvo was, on the day I went there, just one member of a color-specked crowd of people in the precinct’s entrance area. They wore suits, they wore coveralls, they wore glaring print dresses. They filled the pews lining the walls or stood near the armpit-high desk behind which Officer Pontecorvo perched like a scribe. She was young, olive-skinned. Kind of hot. Her dark cap covered massive tresses of darker hair. I stood at her high desk with a dry mouth, and she flicked her eyes, one swift up-and-down, as I explained my (stupid) problem. She did that a lot, you could tell: sum up and dismiss men with a single glance. She was
nice
about it, though.

The Second Precinct house is, in a word, kind of awesome. I had walked there from the Tip-Top, where I left Digger and my car. I use my car for business, so I figure the less the police know about it, the better. It’s distinctive, and you can never tell what’s going to stick in some cop’s mind. I think they teach you to notice stuff like that in the academy. Don’t get me wrong, though. Unlike most people my age, and despite my occupation, I have no real problem with cops. They seem to lead a pretty good life. With all the excitement of private technical terms and paraphernalia. And they do provide a vital service, for all of their visible fuckups. There were actual cop cars here. And actual cops. Paunchy cops, thin cops, men and women, strutting around with that hip-shot pride particular to gunwearers. I envied them, to be honest. They conducted themselves without any hesitance. This calmed me. The precinct itself looked like the synagogue (Temple Emunah; wispy-voiced Reform) my father and I attended once every three or four years: blond brick, low and spread out. A lot of windows. I didn’t expect that. A milk-pale man with two Bozo-the-Clownish protuberances of gray hair sprawled and slept on a pew, right inside the front door, his blue nylon pants exposing the last eighteen white inches of his shins. That much I remember.

Going to the cops at all had been Digger’s idea. She hadn’t believed me at first when I told her, still sprawled in the cooling bed, that Lorriner had threatened to kill me. We were both pretty high, and naked. My
hard-on
hadn’t even wilted. I had difficulty believing the fact of the call myself. I mean, he was just some hick idiot, right? That’s how it looked to me: he was overresponding to my accusation out of fear. I mean, if some stranger called
you
up and accused
you
of murder, what would
you
do? But she insisted and insisted. She got so
angry
when I tried to shrug it off. I think, also, she was kind of pissed about the sex being interrupted. Although she would never admit anything like that.

So I agreed to go, “as soon as we come down.” A not-terrible idea. I mean, we hadn’t done anything
wrong
. But I had an amendment of my own. I didn’t want to go in without some cover story. So I proposed telling them that I wanted to do an oral history project about Kevin, the same lie I had offered our teachers. I’d tell them this at first, and then, once I’d gained their confidence, cleverly let slip what I knew about Lorriner. Digger accepted that compromise. We even stopped off at the Tip-Top on the way. I managed to eat one limp slice of toast, and Digger rammed down a Tip-Top Deluxe in under a minute. The grill man, this Stalin-mustached guy, abandoned his suspicious apathy to shoot her an admiring glare. We parted with a singlepump handshake, in token of greater sobrieties and successes to come.
“Should
be back in like an hour,” I muttered professionally. Stalin Mustache returned to scraping carbonized fat off the iron horizon of his griddle.

“No, hang on.” Officer Pontecorvo was now laughing at the person on the other line, her index finger in the air instructing me to be patient. “Yeah, I got this guy with an unusual request. Addison Schacht, he says his name is. Uh-huh.” To me, now, her brow darkening: “You said oral history, right?”

“Yes, that’s basically it. I read Lieutenant Huang’s name in the paper?”

“I mean, I’m sure he’d like to help you. But I don’t know how much he can say.” Sweet and assuaging. Her nails, painted white, had little enamel palm trees on them, and I knew she was going to hang up and kick me out. So I started to beg. Subtly. Using this wounded, sort of childish voice. It goes with the face Digger was talking about.

“No, I understand that. I understand that. But if you’ll just … ma’am, it’s like I just
need
—” And here she interrupted.

“Please don’t say that. Ma’am. I’m too young.”

I licked my lips. She laughed again, at my obvious discomfort, and started explaining over the phone to the lieutenant.

“Yeah, I know it’s unusual. Yeah, I know. I
know
about the dinner. Yeah, I’m sorry. He
seems
normal,” she told her interlocutor. “Yeah, yeah, in back. I’ll send him back. No, I won’t. He says it’s for school. Right? No, I told him that. No, I told him that already. Okay. Okay. Yes. I owe you a bucket of chicken. All right? And a six-pack. It’s agreed.” And she hung up. And winked and grinned at me in self-amusement. Her teeth were flawless.

“Go wait in there, down the hall,” she said, hooking a thumb. “Where all the desks are. He’ll
see
you. Don’t worry.”
This isn’t
actually
happening
, I muttered in my head. That’s how foreign even small-scale fake success is to me.

In there
was a big bullpen filled with partition-fenced desks. Some bank office, or wherever telemarketers work: that’s how it looked. Green baize, photos of children, their tacked-up artwork. Except that it was empty of people. Phones went off and agitated murmurs from the receiving dock filtered back to me. There was a small square filth-specked mirror near the entranceway, and by making dainty leaps and spine contortions, walking toward it and away, I was able to get an image of my whole
gestalt
. I’d put on my holiday suit, lawyer-black, for the occasion, and a tie I’d swiped from my father’s closet. Also, for some reason, I was carrying a briefcase with nothing in it, this old narrow-gauge black leather attaché my father discarded when I was eleven, and which seemed to me the height of aesthetic magnificence then. Scars of use dented all its edges, and its vertices had been blunted by handling. I know now that I looked like a gawky, underfed idiot, someone über-insignificant. But I managed to convince myself then I looked pretty
goddamn
impressive. I accomplished this legerdemain in a few seconds and was sitting at one of the desks furiously scratching my balls
sub rosa
when Lieutenant Huang arrived.

I should, by rights, still carry a real animus toward Huang. He bears no small responsibility for the dramatic subsequent course of my life. Which presented many new and unpleasant complications. Those of you who live in a less absurd city than D.C. will have a hard time granting any credence to what follows. I don’t blame you. First of all—and let’s be honest—I
sound
like an asshole. I
know
that. I mean, I haven’t ever had a
real
job or fathered a child, or even gone to college. I’ve only fucked one girl. I still believe—though I haven’t done much achieving in this department—that you should fuck as many women as possible. Admitting this will negatively influence your decision about me. But I can’t help believing it. I also know all these qualities mark me out as someone free of experience. And that my writing leaves a lot to be desired, because it
pretends to be experienced
. How
else
am I supposed to write, though? Despite these vitiating factors, you have to believe me. About my interaction with the cops, I mean. I mention this now because, in retrospect, a little more professionalism on my part that day would have spared everyone involved in this retarded story a number of painful and lasting memories. Though they say life is meaningless without painful memories. Dubious.

I have no problem admitting that Huang makes quite an entrance. A tall man with bulky shoulders carried high and clenched, striding squeakily down the linoleum floor. His close-cut dark hair gleamed like a pelt, scattered with gray. He seemed to be looking over my left shoulder, and his mouth was already open for forceful speech. A golden incisor glinted.

“Are you Addison? I’m James Huang. We’re going right over
here.”
How could I refuse
that?
We left the telemarketer pen for a long, blazingly lit hall, passing room after room, one echoing with the fuzzed shouts of television, and came out in another large open space. A lecture room. Student desks filled it. You know: hard ceramic-and-aluminum setups, chairs with a swooping tiny desk attached to one side. They’re almost impossible to turn around in. There was a dust-patched blackboard, too, on the same wall as the door, which all the desks faced. “Right over here, Addison. Have a seat.” Huang remained standing.

“Thanks,” I chirped. Huang was already speaking again, though.

“Hey, Baltimore? Baltimore? You wanna sit in? You wanna sit in on this? Addison, this is Sergeant Baltimore. Addison comes to us from Kennedy. He wants to talk to us about the Broadus killing. You were classmates?” he asked me. Another cop hooked himself around the steel jamb of the entrance. He was younger than Huang, rectilinear of build, dark skinned.

“Yes, sir. Class of two thousand. I mean, he would have been class of two thousand. I’m doing a kind of a project?”

They stood there eyeing me from their separate positions, like a vaudeville team. I had no idea what to say. So I didn’t say anything. Huang waited before speaking, looking (it seemed) at each separate part of my face, noting each element. I admired his craft.

“Well, Addison, I’d
like
to help you. I know how disturbing it is, something like this. I have a daughter that age. Your age. So I know.” Baltimore was flicking through a stack of papers he’d brought with him, his fingers swift and certain. “And I’d
like
to help you with your project.” Huang was grinning, flashing me his incisor again. “I’d like to. The thing is, Addison, I assume you got my name from that article? I’ve gotten a lot of calls because of that. I don’t know Arch Sexton. Personally, I don’t know him. But I think he was unfair to us. I think he made us look like we weren’t doing our jobs.” He worked something out a dental crevice with his tongue. I could see its motions through the skin of his cheek.

“No, sir, I don’t think that at
all.”
I poured as much saccharine assurance into my voice as I could muster.

“Okay, fine, that’s fine. Whatever. I don’t want to seem unfriendly,” Huang continued. Baltimore stopped shuffling papers, his hands poised and pincered. “I know how upsetting events like this are. But we
are
working. The investigation is ongoing. And because it’s ongoing, there’s not much I can say to you about it. About Kevin. Do you understand? Legally I can’t say anything to you. Does that make sense?” asked Huang.

“I mean, do you guys have like a system for that? For privacy and things like that? Like with priests?” This slipped out, but I actually liked how stupid it sounded, hanging in the still air of the lecture room.

“Do we have like a system? I’m not sure what you’re asking. There are procedural
rules
that forbid me to
tell
you anything. It’s just a simple matter of protecting the people involved with the investigation. Of protecting their privacy. So I suppose we have a system, yes. But it’s not like priest-penitent. Do you know what I mean by that? It’s not codified.”

I nodded. My
I’m just a dumbass kid
act was working. Huang’s speech was couched in a tone of friendly concern, despite the stony clarity of his eyes. As though I were asking him for some confusing but reasonable favor. “You want some coffee?” Huang drummed one heel while he spoke, which made all the metal on his person jangle.

“No, I’m not like the biggest fan of coffee. Although I drink it a lot. That’s not like a position of
criticism
or anything.”

“Well, in that case,” murmured Huang, through his clinkings, “I think we’re pretty much clear here, yes?” Baltimore made an affirmative noise deep in his throat. “So
since
we’re clear—I mean about the fact that I can’t talk to you, Addison, and I don’t mean to sound unfriendly here; I would
not
want you to get that impression—but since we’re clear I think we should probably just stop this before it gets into legally murky areas. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Well, it’s like sort of like an
involved
situation,” I offered, my eyes narrowed in fake confidence. Then I added, “And I wanted to like make you
aware
of it. I wanted to do this project. It’s not about the crimes. It’s about Kevin. As a personal thing. Just about your opinions. An interview.” You know that
voice
you use when you’re instructing a bellhop? I had it now.