“Well, you know, there were some things that I had to do.”
He smiled. “You ready to talk to me?”
“Nuthin’ t’say, officer. I don’t know a thing.”
“Nothing? What about heroin, Mr. Rawlins?”
“No thanks.”
“This is no joke, man,” Sanchez said. “We got a serious drug problem here. The Gasteau twins were selling drugs.”
“Really?”
“We found traces in a wax paper bag in the hole in the garden. He had everything there he needed to cut drugs and package them.”
“What difference does it make?” I asked. “Those men are dead. Unless you think they gonna be sending drugs up from hell then that case is closed.”
“This is serious,” he said again. Maybe he was going to say something else but I cut him off.
“Naw, man. What’s serious is you got four or five dozen kids in this neighborhood climbin’ up under the bushes in front’a the school ev’ry night disintegratin’ their brains on airplane glue.” I was mad. “Every mornin’ you walk right over the rags. You see the kids stalkin’ an’ staggerin’ around and what you do? You come in here an’ try’n scare me because of somethin’ that happened years ago. I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout no heroin. I do know about glue though. You wanna hear about that?”
“That’s just penny-ante,” Sanchez said. He was dead serious.
“So what you worried ’bout is how much the drugs cost, you don’t care about what they do.”
Sanchez probably cared about what was happening to the glue sniffers. Many of them were his own people as well as mine. But there was no budget to stop the flow of wine and glue in the ghetto streets.
“So you don’t know anything about the drugs?” he asked.
“Man, I never even met either one’a them men,” I proclaimed. “It’s you who think I’m in it. It’s you come on out to my house and trick me down to a lineup on some lies. I’m just doin’ my job, sergeant. I’m just livin’ my life.”
“I got you on more than that, Rawlins,” he said darkly.
I gritted down, intent on silence.
“We got a call down at the station, Ezekiel. About all those burglaries from your school and other ones too.”
“Yeah. Somebody blamed it on me, I know.”
“This time they told us where you hid the loot.”
I stood up. “Come on, man.”
“Sit down.” The steel in his voice told me that it was all true. “I think that you better come on over to the station with us.”
Right on cue two cops came in from the hallway.
“I’m under arrest?”
“It’s just questioning for the moment, but I will arrest you if you refuse.”
The Seventy-seventh street station hadn’t changed much. The same yellow wax covered the dark-green-and-white-tile floor. The furniture hadn’t aged well.
“Down the hall past the sergeant’s desk — to your left,” Sanchez said.
I knew the way.
I knew the room.
I still remembered the corroded plaster and the mildewed floorboards. I took a quick glance at the corner to see if the mouse, crushed fifteen years ago, was still there.
It wasn’t a clean room.
“Sit down,” Sanchez said.
There were two wooden chairs. I took the one facing the door.
As I sat a tall white man came in, closing the door behind him. He wore dark gray pants and a white shirt with sleeves rolled high above his elbows. He took his place behind the seated Sanchez, and practiced making fists with his left hand.
Sanchez’s smile told me that he’d been waiting for this moment. I tried to look brave but that only made him gloat harder.
“You see, Drake?” Sanchez seemed to be talking to me.
The white shirted man nodded, clenching his fist hard enough to pop a knuckle.
“Okay,” Sanchez said. I didn’t know who he was saying it to. “Now we’re going to have a serious talk with some serious answers.”
My mouth opened — I wanted to speak — but there were no words to say.
Sanchez did a meaty drumroll against thighs with open hands.
“Just to show you that I’m an okay guy,” he said, “I’ll answer your question.”
I hadn’t asked any questions but maybe Sanchez thought that he could read my mind.
“You asked me how I got my stripes.”
Actually I had asked him when he’d become a sergeant but I saw no reason to point that out.
“I had a lot of help,” he continued. “People like you helped me. Negro people and my own Mexicanos — living like dogs instead of standing up and taking advantage of what’s right in front of them.
“It was hard for me to get this job because the bosses downtown didn’t believe that a Mexican could speak good English or work hard. They think our people are lazy, Ezekiel. They think that we’re all no-good crooks. Because of people like you. And because of you I made myself perfect to get this job.
“And now I have it. And I’m not going to hold your hand and say how sorry and sad I am that you were poor or that you think it’s too hard to be as good as other people. That’s why you’re going to talk to me now — because I know what you are and I don’t give a shit about you.”
There was a lot I could have said but I didn’t. Sergeant Sanchez was a zealot and he couldn’t hear anything unless you told him that you believed in his vision. And seeing that his vision was that I was a lazy crook — silence was my best choice.
“You can start with the little shack down on Olympic,” he said. “How’d all those wind instruments from Locke High get down there?”
Half a minute passed; then thirty seconds more.
“I don’t have all the patience in the world, Mr. Rawlins,” Sanchez said.
I prayed silently and was rewarded with a knock on the door.
A uniformed officer came in.
“What?” Sanchez’s lip curled as if he might damage whoever it was that interrupted us.
The uniform, a beefy specimen with a red bristle brush for a mustache, crossed over to Sanchez and whispered something.
“What?” the sergeant barked again.
“That’s what he said.” The uniform hunched his shoulders.
Sanchez stood up so quickly that I flinched, thinking that he was on the attack.
“Come on, Drake,” he said.
“Come on where?”
“Just come on.”
Sanchez went out in long angry strides followed by the red-whiskered cop. But Drake lingered for a moment, cradling his fist.
“Drake,” Sanchez called from the open doorway.
Drake was pulled by his superior’s voice but I could see that he wanted to hit me at least once before going.
“Drake! Let’s go!”
Drake opened his fist and used his big hand to blow me a kiss.
Another good-bye kiss. He closed the door and I was back fifteen years. A long time had passed but the helplessness felt just the same. The fear was the same too.
I sat remembering that the last time I was in that room I hadn’t tested the door. Maybe it wasn’t locked. I wasn’t under arrest. If the door was open I could walk free.
I was going to test the door this time. But I just needed a moment to steel myself.
I skipped the moment and went for the door. The knob turned. When I pushed the door open my heart was pounding and I wondered if every time I breathed hard I would be reminded of Idabell and our moments of love. I didn’t think long though. I stepped into the hall and ran into a man who was approaching my door.
“Hello, Easy,” Lieutenant Arno T. Lewis said. He was almost smiling.
Long and lean, hard as ironwood, the bespectacled policeman angled his opaque lenses at me. “Looks like I just saved you from a good ass-kicking.”
“I’m gettin’ too old for this shit,” I said.