Reversible Error Read online

  “He saw the whore get it?”

  “Shit, no! He saw Clarry get it. The fuck I care about some whore—he saw the guy did Clarry, and if you right about this, the guy that did all the dealers. And the whore.”

  “This Laxton witness the actual killing?”

  “No, what he saw was Clarry’s car pull up under the highway, and the guy get out, go in the back of the car for a minute, and get out again and walk away. Laxton was nodding off in a pile of trash. He jumped when he saw the guy, made some noise, and the guy spooked and got small real fast. That’s probably why he left the piece on the seat of the car.”

  “So did he see the guy close enough to put him on the mug books?”

  Dugman smiled. “No need. He made the guy right there. He knew him from way back.”

  “Who was it?” asked Fulton, taking a sip of his drink.

  “Name’s Tecumseh Booth.”

  Fulton let loose a great snorting laugh, spraying soda from his mouth over the table. When he had stopped coughing, he wiped his face with a cocktail napkin and said, “God damn! You got to be shittin’ me, man. Tecumseh? I know Tecumseh Booth. I sent him up for armed robbery a couple of years back. He’s a lot of things, but he ain’t no hit man.”

  “Maybe he changed professions,” Dugman said carefully.

  “Uh-uh. Not likely. Tecumseh will hold your horse while you ace somebody. He might drive you away from the scene. But he never shot nobody in his life. Never even carried heat, that I know of.”

  “He was there,” said Dugman.

  “Yeah, could of been. Go ahead and pick him up if you want, but he won’t tell you shit.”

  “He won’t?”

  “He didn’t tell me shit when I picked him up, back when. Three guys shot up a liquor store, and Booth was the wheel on the job. The other mutts got loose and Booth took the fall—eight years, I recall it was. Never said shit. Boy can hold his mud, I’ll say that for him.”

  Dugman pushed back from the table. “We’ll see about that.”

  Fulton frowned. “Art, no roughing. I know it’s Harlem, but times has changed, you dig?”

  “Yeah,” said Dugman, standing up. “They sure has. Teddy Wilson used to play this room. Catch you later, Loo.”

  Outside, Dugman cursed himself for a short-tempered fool. He knew Fulton was good—a smart and competent detective. Yet Dugman could not help harboring resentment for the other man’s success, for his rocketing rise through the ranks. Fulton was the first college-educated black detective lieutenant in the history of the NYPD. If the paddies downtown ever let a brother in as chief of detectives, it would be Fulton.

  No, it was not precisely resentment; it was anger at what his own life had been, a grinding rise through the ranks, nearly ten years in a blue bag before they gave him his gold tin. Now he was taking orders from a man ten years his junior.

  At some level, he wanted Fulton to acknowledge that, to honor him for it, at least to credit him with some smarts. He didn’t deserve a laugh in the face and a nagging about questioning suspects.

  He got in his car and drove fast across town. He realized that he had not conveyed to Fulton the three points he had wanted to bring out about the rash of dope-dealer killings. What had puzzled him from the outset was the lack of resistance on the part of the victims. Not one of these people had been shot down in a hail of lead. At least one of them had opened his door to his assailant. The killings had been done almost at the leisure of the murderers, and against a group of men who were typically suspicious to the point of paranoia, well-guarded and well-armed.

  The second point was what Slo Mo had said when Mack braced him against the wall in that alley. The pimp knew Mack was a cop. Why had he been so frightened, and why did he so urgently want to make it clear that he didn’t sell dope?

  The third point was the clincher to Dugman. They had dropped Slo Mo in the alley at a quarter to twelve. They had called in the pickup request on the prostitute Haze about twenty minutes later. Within the next hour somebody had picked her off her stroll, taken her down to the docks, and put a bullet in her head.

  It was indeed a bad thought, almost too heavy to hold by himself, and Dugman briefly considered turning his car around, driving back to Pepper’s, and laying the burden on his superior. But something made him stop. Would Fulton laugh at him again? He didn’t need that! No, the better move was to nail it down, to pick up Tecumseh Booth and make him talk, to make him reveal that the cool and casual murderer they were hunting was a cop.

  FIVE

  Sugar Hill had fallen some from what it had been thirty years earlier, but it was still a pretty nice neighborhood, for Harlem. The apartment occupied by Tecumseh Booth was located in a still-handsome tan brick building on 149th off St. Nicholas Avenue. The class of the area was demonstrated by the brass mailboxes in the lobby, which had retained their doors, locks, and polish. Detective Jeffers read the name of Tecumseh Booth’s girlfriend from one of them, and headed up to the third-floor apartment with Maus.

  The two detectives drew their pistols and clipped their police identification to their breast pockets. Jeffers was about to knock on the door, but Maus stopped him and placed his ear against the door. It was the kind of hollow metal fire door that was good at transmitting certain sounds.

  “Hear anything?” asked Jeffers.

  “Yeah,” answered the other. “Music. Earth, Wind, and Fire, I think. And a banging sound. And a kind of squealing. Maybe he’s beating a dog to death with a stereo.”

  Jeffers placed his massive head against the door and listened. He smiled. “I think what you hearing there is Tecumseh on the job.”

  Maus raised his brows and pressed his ear more tightly to the door. “You think so? Making a lot of noise, ain’t he?”

  “You think that ’cause you unfamiliar with the sexual habits of my people. Being naturally more attune to the physical propensities of life, we get more juice out of the berry, so to speak, in the way of hump. Therefore the noises of ecstasy which we hearin now.”

  “Yeah, you keep telling me that, but I got to take your word for it, since I notice you haven’t fixed me up with any of your sisters yet.”

  Jeffers laughed softly. “You not ready for that, boy. I got to bring you along slow, got to pace you.”

  Maus said, “1 appreciate that, Mack, I do, and meanwhile I’m working hard to overcome my objection to miscegenation. Meanwhile, what the fuck are we doing here? I’m getting horny listening to this shit.”

  “My plan, little man, is to wait until Tecumseh have pop his rocks and then we gonna swoop him up while he lie in the sweet afterglow. Besides, he ain’t gonna be getting none of that for a long time where he goin. It’s my act of Christian charity for the month.”

  They waited in the hall until the sounds stopped. Then Jeffers pounded mightily on the door and shouted, “Open up! Police!” He pressed his ear to the door again.

  “Are they coming?” asked Maus.

  “So to speak? No, I hear escapin noise. I think he’s goin out the window.”

  “You going to take the door down?”

  “Don’t be funny, son. This a steel door. I go through a door like this, they better have my momma’s ass on fire on the other side. No, we just gonna go downstairs again. Tecumseh ain’t goin nowhere.”

  And indeed, when they arrived back on the street, they found Tecumseh Booth facedown on the ground, dressed only in a pair of slacks, with his hands cuffed behind him. Art Dugman had picked him up easily as he dropped from the fire escape.

  Jeffers stooped and jerked Booth to his feet with a single yank on the handcuff chain. Booth yelped sharply and said, “Hey, what the fuck you want with me? I ain done nothin!”

  Jeffers popped the rear door of the Plymouth open and threw the prisoner in. He got in himself and Dugman went around to the other side. Maus drove the car south toward the Twenty-eighth Precinct.

  Booth sat between them calmly with his hands cuffed behind his back, waiting. He had learned, from
a lifetime of arrests, the wisdom of the sages, that silence was the ideal state of being. He had also learned that cops made mistakes, and that in some mysterious way these mistakes had the power to cancel guilt, so that you could walk away from a crime that the cops and kids on the street and old ladies knew you had done, and they couldn’t do shit to you. This had happened to him a number of times. The main thing was to shut up.

  Booth became aware that the two cops on either side of him were staring at him. He looked straight ahead. After a while the older one said, “Turn off here.”

  The driver swung left, heading toward the blackness of Colonial Park. He stopped the car in the dark of a big tree.

  The older cop said, “Look at his head. It’s the perfect shape.”

  “Don’t start that again!” the big cop said nervously.

  “I’m telling you, it’ll work this time,” said the older detective. Booth felt the older cop’s body shift, and looked to see why. He had drawn out his pistol.

  The driver turned around in the front seat. “Damn it, not in the damn car! The last time it took me three hours to clean all the blood and crap off of the upholstery. You want to play games, do it outside!”

  Booth felt a cold touch at his right ear. His head jerked away by reflex, only to be stopped by a similar but harder pressure on the other ear. The big cop said, “Boss, I sure hope you know what you doin. You say this really works?”

  “I know it,” affirmed the older cop. “Now, just get it stuck in there solid, and don’t be twitchin like you done last time.”

  Booth now could not move his head. He understood why. He had the muzzle of a .38-caliber revolver stuck firmly in each ear.

  “Hey,” he said. “Hey, what … ?”

  The driver leaned over the front seat and addressed him conversationally. “See, what he says, is if you do this just right, the two bullets will meet in the middle and cancel out. The same slug, the same load, same gun, understand. It’s like physics. I happen to think it’s horseshit, myself, but try and tell him anything!”

  Booth’s face twisted in a ghastly smile. “You shittin me, man. They can’t do that. They’s cops, they can’t …”

  The smile faded and Booth’s jaw went slack, as if something more frightening than having a pistol in each ear had just occurred to him. A trickle of sweat fell into his eye. The older cop caught the change in expression.

  “Say what? What can’t cops do, brother?” Dugman asked.

  Booth opened a dry mouth as if to say something, then shut it.

  The cop in the front seat began to talk again, in the same tone of calm explanation. “Yeah, see, we know you killed Clarry, and we know there was cops involved. Now, ordinarily we would take you in, book you, and question you. We would figure, maybe we can make a deal—you give us the guy, we put in a good word with the D.A., and so on.

  “But the word is, you don’t deal. You’re a stand-up dude. Fine. The problem is, we really need this guy. So we figured, you’re no good to us on that, the best thing we could do is, maybe if we ace you out, your guy will—I dunno—get a hair up his ass. Do something dumb. Maybe he’ll think we’re in the same business, and he’ll come after us. Or whatever. I mean it’s pretty thin at this point, but I don’t see the percentage in doing anything else, if you catch my drift—”

  The older cop broke in, “That’s enough. God damn, man, you ain’t got to ask his fuckin permission!” He addressed the big cop on the other side of Booth. “OK, we gonna do it now.”

  “Just a second, lemme shift around here. Is this gonna fuck up my suit?”

  “Not if you do it right. You lined up good?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “OK, squeeze off on the count of three,” said the older cop.

  “Um, hold it … you mean, right on three, or just after? Like, one-two-bang? Or one-two-three-bang?”

  The older cop sounded exasperated. “Damn! I told you before; take up all the slack, then let go as soon as I say ‘three’!”

  Booth could hear surprisingly well, considering that his ears were full of gun. He understood the explanation given by the man in the front seat, and even sympathized with it, as much as he could, considering his position. He would have used the same reasoning himself. He heard the count, as from a great distance. Closer, more intimately, he heard the whisper of the revolver mechanisms as they brought the new bullets around to be fired. He seemed separated from his trembling body, floating above his own head. He heard the cop say “three” and, a pulse-beat later, the tiny snicks as the mechanisms released their hammers.

  The hammers took a long time to fall. By the time they did, Booth was already far away.

  “I don’t think he believed us,” said Maus, looking down at Booth’s flaccid body.

  “He ain’t dead, is he?” asked Mack. Booth’s head was resting on his knee.

  Dugman reached out and touched Booth’s neck. “Naw, he just fainted. God damn! He let go his business too!” Dugman flung open his door and stepped out onto the sidewalk. In another second, Mack cursed and did the same. They stood on either side of the car hooting and waving their hands past their faces.

  “Say, Maus,” said Dugman, “why don’t you drive on down to the precinct and book the prisoner. Me and Mack got to do some detective work here on the street.”

  “Yo,” said Mack. “We got to stay close to our people.”

  Maus rolled down his window. “Fuckin guys. I knew I was gonna have to clean the fuckin car again.”

  Marlene’s bed sat on a high sleeping platform at one end of her loft, and from this vantage, at six-thirty on a workday morning, she watched the naked Karp drink water from her sink. He chugged a glass down, then filled another. Karp drank a lot of water, like a horse. It was the only healthy aspect of his diet, which consisted otherwise of junk food from cancer wagons and takeout windows—soggy pizza, elderly gray hot dogs, orange-colored knishes heavy as cinderblock, souvlaki oozing toxic oils, lukewarm eggrolls packed with substances mysterious as the East. Karp ate these in combinations and in quantities that would gag a wolverine, and washed it down with colorful, bubbled sugar-water.

  Marlene had vaguely considered a campaign to change his diet into one that would enable him to survive into the coming decade. This was but one of the many such campaigns she had planned for after the Big Day. Karp, though a fountain of many virtues, could stand considerable improvement.

  Once they learned about the baby, and Karp began to spend most of his time with Marlene, she had attempted to get her kitchen act together. She was a reasonably proficient cook, but like Karp, was no slave to the four basic food groups. Marlene subsisted largely on chocolate bars and yogurt.

  Since she had started eating for two and began an effort to reform, Marlene had cooked a number of what she considered decent meals. Karp responded with enthusiasm, but he would have responded with equal enthusiasm to raw vulture, as long as there was enough of it.

  More recently, she had been too exhausted to spend time in the kitchen, and on most evenings it seemed easier to take-out from one of the many grease joints, Italian, Chinese, or Greek, that perfumed the streets of lower Manhattan.

  She watched Karp top off his tank and walk to the toilet. The diet hadn’t affected his body yet, she thought approvingly. As large as he was, he was graceful and precise in motion, grounded and radiating contained power when at rest. The morning light flooding out through the big east windows of the loft lit up the hanging dust around his body like an aura.

  The legs were long and smooth, the arms suspended from wide square shoulders down to those enormous hands, with their bony spatulate fingers. The scars—the Dr. Frankenstein mass of ladders from the knee operations and the smaller ragged ones in the shoulder where he had taken a couple of assassin’s bullets—added somehow to the appeal. Scars: a real man!

  What a nice butt he has, thought Marlene, scrooching around in the bed to get a better look. And how nice that he’s retained that jockish habit of walkin
g around naked all the time. How dull to be married to some lard-ass in a plaid robe. We like each other’s asses, she mused; is that a really solid basis for a life relationship? Because although she knew his body nearly as well as she knew her own, her knowledge of what went on within that high and narrow skull remained vague and confused.

  The light moved slowly across the floor of Marlene’s loft. The big skylight in the center of its patterned tin ceiling was beginning to glow as well, like milk glass. The loft was one huge room, a hundred feet long by thirty-three, divided by portable screens into a living area, a kitchen, a dining area, and then the Limbo, a dusty zone occupied by athletic equipment— Karp’s rowing machine, Marlene’s body and speed bags—assorted junk, and the huge motors that ran the building’s freight lift. Under the west windows, at the far end, Marlene had set up a little office, and about a hundred potted plants, ranging from African violets to giant ficus trees.

  The place was entirely Marlene’s creation, and waking up in it always gave her a little charge. The summer she had moved in she had taken on the herculean task of cleaning out the remnants of a defunct electroplater, heaving great tangles of wire and scrap down the freight shaft, scraping, sanding, painting, until it was as she wanted it, a great white, calm room, high above the street, flooded with light.

  That summer, eight years ago, barely twenty-five people had lived full-time in the old industrial area south of Houston Street. Now they called it SoHo, the hottest property in New York. Recently a thin creature with black clothes and white hair had offered Marlene thirty thousand dollars for the key.

  Marlene sighed and got out of bed, wrapped a frazzled pink blanket around her shoulders, and scooted down the ladder from the sleeping platform. She walked across the wide-planked white-painted floor, dropped the blanket, climbed four steps, and plunged into the hot water of the thousand-gallon hard rubber electroplating tank that served her as a bath.

  Seated on the floor of this tank, perfumed water to her chin, she could not see over its rim. She heard the toilet flush, a door open, the sound of heavy naked steps toward the far end of the loft.