Maybe Mr. Carter is simply a very prosperous businessman, I told myself. But even the unspoken words in my head made me say out loud, “Bullshit.”
I sat for fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, marking details: the tall white metallic fence that appeared to completely surround the property, the surveillance cameras mounted in obvious positions at the gate and on the garage doors, the basketball hoop with a Plexiglas backboard on the wide parking area, a nice touch. I wondered what the inside of the place might be like.
I was actually playing with the idea of simply walking up and requesting an interview when the front doors opened, and Carlyle and a boy of about nine or ten stepped out. Both of them were looking directly at me.
I fidgeted, felt myself unconsciously shift in my seat, and watched them walk to the gate as it rolled open. Carlyle was dressed as he had been when he’d entered, in an open-collared silk shirt and dress slacks. The boy was in knee-length shorts and a simple blue polo shirt, almost like a relaxed school uniform.
As they walked directly toward me, the former drug dealer’s face was placid and expressionless. I watched his hands, which were empty and out front. There were no lumps that would indicate weapons, though I could not see the small of his back. When they were thirty feet away, their destination obvious, Carlyle seemed to read my mind, and raised his arms above his head and did a little pirouette, playfully, but purposely causing his shirt to rise above his waistline to show he was unarmed. The boy, whose complexion and shape was a miniature of the man, sported a smile and an excited look.
I opened the driver-side door and stepped out as they approached.
“Wow,” said the kid, not looking at me, focused on the car. “Nice car, man.” The boy’s face could not hide his honest thrill as he stepped up to the front of the Gran Fury and looked at his reflection in the polished surface of the black hood.
The Brown Man had his hand out, extending it to me as if we were old friends or acquaintances meeting on a pleasant sunny afternoon.
“Good day, sir,” he said, with a lilt in his voice I knew had not been there when I first encountered him working the streets.
I stepped forward and took his hand, giving a single pump, and then withdrawing it.
“Hello, Carlyle,” I said.
The man’s eyes narrowed as he put an extra effort into looking at my face. “No one uses that name for me,” he said. His tone was moderated, not with surprise, or disapproval, or threat. “Do I know you, sir?”
“We’ve met in the past. Over a mutual, uh, concern,” I said. “My name is Max Freeman.”
He continued to search my face. “My apologies, sir. Perhaps you were in uniform before? I’ve met many people in uniform.”
I watched the Brown Man’s eyes cutting behind me. I half-turned to see the boy now peering in the window of the Gran Fury, with that same “ooh, ahh” look on his face. He ran his hand over the chrome egg of the side-mounted spotlight, and then quickly used the tail of his shirt to polish off his fingerprints.
“No,” I said, turning back. “Our mutual acquaintance was a homeless junk man with some very bad habits.”
As the Brown Man raised his brow, a light of recognition slipped into his eyes.
“Ah, the PI,” he said, and then shook his head as if remembering. “A nasty business, yes?”
“Eddie the Junk Man,” I said.
“A beast of a man.”
“A dead beast,” I said, holding eye contact with the drug dealer a bit longer than I meant to.
The Brown Man looked beyond me.
“My son has a fascination with classic cars,” he said. “Right, Andrew?”
The boy was still enthralled.
“It’s a Plymouth, right?” he said to me.
“Yes,” I said, talking to him over the shimmer of the polished roof. “A 1975 Gran Fury. They were mostly used as police cars back in the day.”
The boy moved to the passenger-side window and cupped his face with his hands to reduce the glare as he peered inside.
“Go ahead. Open the door,” I said. “Take a look inside.”
The boy’s eyes lit up at the suggestion, but he looked to his father first to get the man’s approval. Carlyle nodded, and the boy opened the door and climbed in.
“Information out on the streets is that you’ve gone into a new line of business, Carlyle,” I said, figuring, what the helclass="underline" Sometimes you have to ask the hard questions first and sort through the bullshit. He did not turn his eyes from the windshield of my car, where he could watch his son through the glass.
“As an entrepreneur, Mr. Free-Man,” he said, putting an emphasis on both syllables of my last name. “I have business dealings in lots of areas, mostly as an investor.”
He smiled, showing brilliant white teeth. Whether he was smiling at his son’s fascination or at my insouciance was up to interpretation.
“This particular arena of business would be Medicare fraud, Mr. Brown Man,” I said.
My use of his old street name caused a twitch in his stoic and professional demeanor. He gave me no response.
“The family member of another player in this, ah, investment opportunity of yours has become a target. She’s a bystander, an innocent. She was shot at while I was with her. Which means I was shot at- which I don’t like.”
Carlyle Carter put his hands behind his back. His eyes still did not meet mine.
“You know my past, Mr. Free-Man. You know what I did, and I ain’t gonna deny it,” he said, losing some of his white-collar business speak.
“But times have changed. The product has changed. The people done changed and the demand changed. But addiction don’t change. Another generation comes in, their taste is different-but that urge won’t dry up, Free-Man.”
I clasped my hands in front of me, the opposite profile of Carlyle, but I turned to gaze through the windshield just as he had as he watched his son.
“I do recall that a substantial supply of steroids and amphetamines and other prescription drugs were found in the trunk of a recently wrecked gangbanger’s car,” I said, tossing more out there.
“See? There you go,” Carlyle said.
“And that kind of product would be your area of expertise.”
I felt the man shrug more than saw it.
“A mature man don’t sell the streets no more like some beggar,” he said, a tick of frustration now in his voice. “Them young boys? They’re tryin’ to get the thrills because they’ve heard stories of the old days. They’ll do almost anything, so you’re best not to mess with them. Nowadays, a smart man deals only with people he knows, people he trusts-people of a certain position, who can cover your ass, Mr. Free-Man-you know?”
I could feel Carlyle Carter’s eyes on the side of my face when he said the words, making it personal instead of rhetorical. I looked at him as he signaled his son with a crooked finger. Before the boy got out, Carlyle made one last statement.
“I got nothin’ to do with no shootin’ Mr. Free-Man. Ya’ll do guns. The young bloods do guns. I got responsibilities now, man,” he said, nodding at his son. “I don’t do guns. I’ve got nothin’ to do with it.”
Carlyle turned and started back to his gated house. The boy caught up, but turned to me and waved.
“Thanks, mister. That’s a cool ride.”
– 14 -
Sittin’ here restin my bones
Where the hell did that old Otis Redding tune come from? Man, that’s like one of those ancient ones Dad would have been playing in the garage while he was working on one of those old junkers of his. The old man always had his head under the hood of some falling apart Oldsmobile 98, or a salvaged Caddy with a sprung rear bumper and peeling landau roof. Smell of gasoline in your nose since you were old enough to toddle out to the garage and search him out. Big door open to the big world, sun streaming in through the dust particles while your father teaches you the sizes of socket wrenches and spark plug gaps. Good old days.