The phone jerked Bitterman back from his reverie.
“Mr. Bitterman, this is Sharnella Watkins. Don’t hang up on me. I can help you. My boy’s gone, ’cause they want to kill him.”
“Who’s they, Sharnella?”
“The 6th and O Crew.”
“Sharnella, you said your son had never been in trouble. The 6th and O Crew is nothing but. Why am I listening to this?”
“He didn’t do nothing. He was coming home from school with a trophy he got at a art show, and Lufer tried to take it from him, but my baby wouldn’t give it to him and when Lufer tried again he hit him with it and knocked him down and my baby ran off. He said Lufer went to get his gun and was yellin’ that he’d kill him for sure. And he would, that boy’s purely mean. He kill you for no reason.”
“Sharnella, this still doesn’t help me. Get to the help-me part or I’m hangin’ up.”
Sharnella had never given a policeman a straight answer in her life. But her baby was in danger. Sharnella never stopped to think why she felt so differently about this child, her fourth, than any of the others, only that she did and that his death, after all the others, would kill her too.
“This boy, Lufer Timmons. He’s killed a bunch of people. That’s what everybody says. Everybody afraid of him. They say he’s the Crew’s main shooter. But he does it when it ain’t business, just ’cause he likes it. And he said he’ll kill my boy. Doesn’t that help you, Mr. Bitterman?”
The Crew favored death as a solution to all its problems. Giving the delivery man a name was a help. “Tell you what, Sharnella. You go over to the station house like I said and give ’em all the information about your son. Bring a picture, a list of all of his friends and where they live, and where he’s been known to hang out. Tell them to fax me a copy of all that. I’ll look into it.”
Her story was probably 90 percent bullshit and 10 percent horseshit for flavor, but Bitterman knew he’d check it out. You turned over every rock and picked up every squiggling thing. That was his motto: No Corner Too Deep, No Corner Too Dark.
Bitterman tried to remember Sharnella from her second son’s trial. She’d started dropping babies at fourteen and was done before twenty. That’d make her around thirty-five now. She looked fifty. Flatbacking and mainlining aged women with interest. Beginning as a second-generation whore, Sharnella’s childhood had been null and void; her prime had passed unnoticed, one sweaty afternoon in a New York Avenue motel.
Bitterman was more aware of time than ever before. He’d lifted and run and dragged his ugly white man’s game to basketball courts all over the city. Elbow and ass, he rebounded with the best even though he couldn’t jump over a dime. No one ever forgot a pick he set or an outlet pass that went end to end, but he remembered not to shoot too often or try to dribble and run at the same time. His twenties and thirties didn’t seem all that different, but now at forty-five he knew he wasn’t the same man. Bald by choice, rather than balding. Thicker but not yet fat, slower both in reflexes and foot speed. Maybe mellowing was nothing more than realizing that he couldn’t tear the doors off the world anymore. The long afternoon of invincibility had passed.
Sharnella’s second son, Jabari, had killed a rival drug dealer in a rip-off attempt that also killed a nursing student driving by. Her only daughter, Female, with a short “a” and a long “e,” so named by the hospital and then taken by Sharnella, who liked the sound of it, had died of an overdose of extremely good cocaine at the age of sixteen. Everything she delivered died or killed someone else.
Bitterman called down to Identification and Records.
“Get me the file on Lufer Timmons. If there’s a picture make a copy for me and send it up with the file. And see if there’s a file on Dantreya Watkins.”
Bitterman sat at his desk awaiting the files, massaging his eyes.
Bitterman had tried to catch a case of racism for years, a really virulent one, but to no avail. He had mumps when he needed anthrax. It would have made his job so much easier. No sadness for the wasted lives, no respect for the courage of the many, no grief for the victims, no compassion for the survivors.
He’d been a homicide cop in a black city for almost his entire adult life. He’d seen every form of violence one person could do to another. He’d seen black women who’d drowned their own babies, and ones who’d ripped their own flesh at the chalk outlines of a fallen son. Men who’d shot and stabbed an entire family, then eaten the dinner off their plates and men who’d worked three jobs for a lifetime, so their children wouldn’t have to. Bitterman just didn’t get it, how anyone could conclude that they were all of a kind, that they were different and less. He wished he could, it saved on the wear and tear.
When he opened his eyes again, he saw the Lufer Timmons file on the desk and a note saying no file on that Watkins. Maybe he was his mother’s pride and joy.
Lufer Timmons had been raised by strangers, starting with his parents and moving on to a series of foster homes, residential treatment centers, detention centers and jails. Now at seventeen, he was well on his way to evening the score with a number of crimes to his credit starting with the attempted rape of his therapist at the age of eleven.
Bitterman studied the picture of Timmons. Six-one and a hundred sixty-eight pounds. He had a long face with deep crevices in his cheeks, thin lips, a thin nose, prominent cheekbones, and bulging froggy eyes. Bitterman pocketed one photo, Xeroxed the page of known associates and family and put the file in his desk drawer. A call to operations yielded the very pleasant news that one of his known associates was currently in custody at the downtown detention center.
Bitterman drove slowly along “The Stroll” looking for Sunshine, as in “put a little Sunshine in your day,” her marketing pitch to the curbside crawlers. Sunshine was a six-foot redhead, natural, with alabaster skin, emerald green eyes and surgically perfected tits. Bitterman had decided that Sunshine was going to be his Christmas present to himself. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to have sex with her. He just wanted to look at her, all of her, without having to hurry, like when she was on display, so he could memorize her beauty. Lately he’d been thinking about what he had to show for forty-five years, and all the fucks of a lifetime hadn’t stayed with him as sharply as his memory of her on a warm summer’s eve, leaning against a lamppost, trying to stay one lick ahead of a fast-melting vanilla cone. Her tongue moving rapidly up the sides of the cone until anticipating defeat, she engulfed the whole mound and sucked it out of the cone. Beauty baffled Bitterman. It seemed fundamental and indivisible. He could not break down his response into pieces or explain it away by recourse to another force or power. Sunshine was perfect and her beauty touched him in a way he couldn’t avoid. He hoped that she wouldn’t be easy to find. He knew that she would turn out to have bad teeth and bray like a donkey.
Lafonzo Nellis was waiting for Bitterman in interrogation room six. Bitterman sat down and the guard left.
“So, Lafonzo. Tell me about Lufer Timmons.”
“Fuck you.”
“Glad we got that cleared up. Let me give you some context, here, Lafonzo, before you get into more trouble than you can get out of. Because it’s Christmas, God gave me three wishes. The first is a known acquaintance of Lufer Timmons in custody, that’s you. The second is to have you locked up but not papered. The third is up to you. See, if you don’t talk to me, that’s okay. I hear that Lufer is a reasonable man, fair with his friends, not likely to do anything rash. I’m gonna leave here, head over to 6th and O and start asking about Lufer, and talking loud about how much help you were to me. The street bull who brought you in hasn’t papered you yet. He can let you go and he doesn’t have to explain a thing. You’re just DWOP: Dropped Without Prosecution. Now, I hear that a lot of your buddies saw you get busted and righteously, too. How you gonna explain being out of here right after we talk? Huh?”