Even working for a relative of Curtis’s. I’d been surprised when he’d called me. The ring of the telephone had burst into a practice session where a Beethoven sonata I’d thought I had in my fingers was falling apart, where rhythm, color, texture, everything was off. I usually don’t like being interrupted at the piano, but this time I jumped at it.
Until I heard who it was, and what he wanted.
“A nephew of yours?” I said into the phone. “I didn’t know scum like you had relatives, Curtis.”
“Now, you got no call to be insulting,” Curtis’s smooth voice gave back. “Though it ain’t surprising. I told the boy I could get him a investigator do a good job for him, but he gonna have to put up with a lot of attitude.”
“What’s he done?” I asked shortly.
“Ain’t done nothing. A friend of his got hisself killed. Raymond think someone should be paying attention.”
“When people get killed the cops usually pay attention.”
“Unless you some black kid drug dealer in Yonkers, and you the suicide half of a murder-suicide.”
He had a point. “Tell me about it.”
He told me. An eighteen-year-old high school senior named Charles Lomax had been found in a park where the kids go at night. His pregnant girlfriend, beside him, had a bullet in her heart. Lomax had a bullet through his head and the gun in his hand.
The bodies had been discovered by the basketball coach, who said he’d gone out looking after Lomax hadn’t shown up for practice. He hadn’t shown up for class, either, but apparently that wasn’t unusual enough for his classroom teachers to be bothered about. Lomax had been a point guard with a С average. He’d been expected to graduate, which distinguished him from about half the kids at Yonkers West. He’d been in trouble with the police all his life, which distinguished him from nobody. There was nothing else interesting about him, except that he’d been a friend of Raymond Coe, and Raymond wasn’t happy with the official verdict: murder-suicide, case closed.
“What’s Raymond’s theory?” I asked Curtis, shouldering the phone so I could close the piano and stack my music.
“Let me put it to you this way.” Curtis oozed. “I ain’t suggested the boy hire hisself a honky detective because I admire the way you people dance.”
I pulled slowly around the corner, coasted past the cracked asphalt playground I’d been told to find. The late-day air was mean with the wind’s cold edge, but six black kids in sweats and high-tech sneakers crowded the concrete half-court. Their game was fast, loud, and physical, elbows thrown and no fouls called. One kid, tall and meaty, had a game on a level the others couldn’t match: Faster and smarter both, he muscled his man when he couldn’t finesse him. But it didn’t stop the rest. No one hung back, no one gave in. Slam dunks and three-pointers flew through the netless rim. They didn’t seem to be keeping score.
A kid fell, rolled, jumped up shaking his hand against the sting of a scrape. Without missing a beat he was back in the game. I parked across the street and watched. One of those kids was Raymond; I didn’t know which. Right now I knew nothing about any of them, except for what I could see: strength, focus, a wild joy in pushing themselves. I finished a cigarette. In a minute I’d become part of their world. This moment of possibility would end. Knowledge can’t be shaken off. And knowledge is always limiting.
The game faltered and then stopped as I walked to the break in the chain-link fence. They all watched me approach, silent. A chunky kid in a hooded sweatshirt shifted the ball from one hand to the other. To the one who’d fallen he said. “Yo, Ray. This your man?”
“Don’t know.” Raising his voice as though he suspected I spoke a different language, the kid said, “You Smith?”
I nodded. “Raymond Coe?”
“Yeah.” He jerked his head at the others. “These my homeboys.”
I glanced at the tight, silent group. “They in on this?”
“You got a problem with that?”
“Should I?”
“Maybe you don’t like working for a bunch of niggers.”
I stared into his dark eyes. It seemed to me they were softer than he might have wanted them to be. “Maybe I don’t like having to pass an exam to get a case.” I shrugged, turned to go.
“Yo,” Raymond said, behind me.
I turned back.
“Curtis say you good.”
“I don’t like Curtis,” I told him. “He doesn’t like me. But we’re useful to each other from time to time.”
Surprisingly, he grinned. His face seemed, for a moment, to fit with what I’d seen in his eyes. “Curtis tell me you was gonna say that.”
“What else did he tell you?”
“That you the man could find out about my man C.”
“What’s in it for you?”
A couple of the other kids scowled at that, and one started to speak, but Raymond silenced him with a look. “Nothing in it for me,” he said.
“I cost money.” I pressed. “Forty an hour, plus expenses. Two days up front. Why’s it worth it to you?”
The chunky kid slammed the ball to the pavement, snatched it back. “Come on, Ray. You don’t need this bull.”
Raymond ignored him, looked steadily at me. “C was my main man, my homie. No way he done what they say he done. Somebody burned him. I ain’t gonna let that pass.”
“Why me?” I asked. “Curtis knows every piece of black slime that ever walked the earth, but he sent you a white detective. Why?”
“’Cause the slime we looking for,” Raymond said steadily, “I don’t believe they black.”
Raymond, his homies, and I made our way to the end of the block, to the pizza place. The day had gone and a tired gray evening was coming in, studded with yellow streetlights and blinking neon. The homies gave me their names: Ash, Caesar, Skin. Tyrell, the one who could really play. The chunky one, Halftime. None of them offered to shake my hand.
Inside, where the air swirled with garlic and oregano, we crowded around a booth, hauling chairs to the end of the table. Halftime went to order a pizza. He came back distributing Cokes and Sprites, and he brought me coffee. Across the room, from the jukebox, a rap song began, complicated rhythm under complex rhyme, music with no melody. I drank some coffee. “Well?”
Everyone glanced at everyone else, but they all came back to Raymond. Raymond looked only at me. “My man C,” he started. “Someone done him, make it look like suicide.”
“People kill themselves,” I said.
Some heads shook: Tyrell muttered, “Damn.”
“You don’t know him,” Raymond said. “C don’t never give up on nothing. And he had no reason. He was gonna graduate, he was gonna have a kid. The season was just starting.”
“The season?” I left the rest for later.
“Hoops,” Raymond told me, though it was clear I was straining the patience of the others. “My man a guard. Tyrell, Ash, and me, we on the squad too.” Tyrell and Ash, a round-faced quiet kid, nodded in acknowledgment. “The rest of them,” Raymond’s sudden, unexpected grin flashed again, “they keep us on our game.”
“So you’re telling me if Lomax was going to kill himself he would have waited until after the season?” I lit a cigarette, shook the match into the tin ashtray.
“Man, I am telling you no way he did that.” Raymond’s voice was emphatic. “C don’t have no reason to want out. Plus, Ayisha. Ain’t no way he gonna do her like that, the mother of his baby.”