And Sometimes I Wonder About You

26

“What you got in the bucket, Pops?” my son asked as we walked.

Twill is five-ten, slender, handsome, and dark as our West African ancestors before the slave ships came. There was a small scar just under his lower lip; a reminder of folk heroes like Achilles and Cain. Twill didn’t have an evil bone in his body but he knew no laws except for Family, Friends, and Free Will.

I held up the bucket for him to see my catch.

Looking at the fish as if they were a calculus equation on a college blackboard, he said, “You musta heard my other name on that phone call, huh?”

“What were all those kids doing climbing in and out of Tusk’s place?” I asked. Tusk had migrated back to Australia after he’d gotten into trouble and I got him out again, but I always thought of the illegal apartment as his domain.

“Jones don’t see everybody,” Twill said. “A lotta the kids get written orders that he has somebody older pass out. Today was my turn.”

“The kids read?”

“He has most of them go to school. That way they get smarter and hear stuff that might be some help.”

“Like burglary jobs?” I asked.

“Like that.”

“Let’s sit on that bench,” I said, pointing to a pedestrian stopping point near the Seventy-second Street subway station.

We perched and I put the fish under the concrete seat. And there we sat side by side, father and son with nary a gene in common. Both of us were under threat of mortal danger, but our demeanor was more like two women friends taking a break after an afternoon of window shopping.

“Regale me,” I said to my boy.

Twill shook his head slowly and did not smile.

“This dude Jones is the real thing,” he said. “He like the black plague and almost no one knows about it. He deals in underage prostitution, got a bigger burglary ring than I ever heard of, uses little kids and young women who pretend they’re the mothers for international smuggling, murders anyone who goes against him, and has underground public floggings for even if somebody steal somethin’ the wrong way. It’s like living in the Middle Ages here today in twenty-first-century New York.”

Somehow Mardi had gotten Twill to start reading. He used the knowledge he gained to further his understanding of the flaws of humankind.

“How many people work with him?” I asked.

“I only seen a dozen or so at one time but it’s got to be hundreds. He been doin’ it more than twenty-one, twenty-two years and the ones that grow up still do things his way. Fortune says that there’s at least two dozen dead in a graveyard below the tunnels.”

“What about the police?”

“Nobody seems worried about the law. Kids get grabbed sometime but Jones got a law firm called Bedford-Rule that gets them out. There’s a lotta talk among the kids, say that if somebody turns on Jones he’s not safe even on Rikers Island.”

“You believe that?”

“That man got a system, Pops. He got some serious people in his pocket.”

“And you couldn’t figure all that out before you got yourself this far in?”

“I just didn’t believe it, man,” Twill, my peer, railed. “I mean how you gonna have some crazy dude with a false beard only come out in the tunnels under the city and run a crime syndicate made mostly of children?

“When Liza come to me I figured that either Fortune was playin’ her or they were just believin’ some kinda hype. If he was scammin’ her I’d cut her loose and if he was for real I’d just move ’em out of harm’s way.

“Then, two days after Fortune brought me in, Jones sent us out on this one job where all we had to do was go to this warehouse in Long Island City. There was a young guy made night watchman two years ago. He’d been layin’ out plans to steal a truck that had more than a million dollars of electronics in it. We drove that suckah to an abandoned building over in Brooklyn where there was people waitin’ there to take it over and break it down.”

“What happened to the watchman?”

“Who knows? Vanished in the tunnels till Jones need him for another job.”

“Somebody broke into the office,” I said. “Used explosives on the front door and then broke down the wall to the back office. That sound like your man?”

“Naw,” Twill said through a sneer. “That’s too loud for him. Jones want everything to be quiet like.”

One shore achieved but there were still many rivers to cross.

“Why would they trust you on a job when you just got there?” I asked.

“The only weakness they have is that they don’t think they have no weakness,” my brilliant son opined. “Trouble is, they might be right.”

“Why didn’t you go to Carson?” I asked then.

“The way I see it, Jones got the uppity-ups by the nuts. You know your friend wouldn’t back down so I figured tellin’ him wouldn’t help my client and probably hurt him.”

“You think they might suspect that you’re a plant?” I asked.

“Why would they? I haven’t done nuthin’ except what they said. I did that one job okay. Today I gave out his letters. They don’t suspect me but Jones got these two lieutenants called Marcia and Deck, little younger’n me but serious as a land mine in a nursery school playground. I saw Jones gesture at Fortune with his eyes when Fortune was leavin’ a few days ago and Marcia walked out behind.”

“Fortune get you in?”

“Not really. He told me who to go to. It’s this newsstand near Grand Central. All you had to do was say you was lookin’ for a sales job and that was the way in.”

I stood up and Twill did too. He picked up the pink bucket and we were on our way north.

“Maybe you should get in touch with this Fortune kid and point him over to Hush.”

“A’ight,” Twill said with a nod. “You know I was thinkin’ that maybe we might need Hush on this one anyway.”

“Why?” It had only been recently that I’d read Twill in on my friend’s old profession.

“Jones don’t let anybody share the throne,” Twill said. “Cut off the head, you know.”

“We’re detectives, Twilliam, not contract killers.”

“A’ight.”

“So you think this Jones keeps his power by blackmail?”

“That’s the only thing makes sense, I mean if you got pictures of some council member or mayor’s aide havin’ sex with a twelve-year-old girl, that’s like gold.”

“You know where these records might be?”

“No idea whatsoever.”