Down the River unto the Sea

29

It was maybe eight blocks from the unique shooting gallery to Cafecino Caprice on Lafayette. The coffee shop was open twenty-three hours a day, at least that’s what the sign said. It was late enough that the place wasn’t completely crowded. We settled at a round corner table with our two paper cups of black coffee, which cost $2.95 each, plus tax.

Burns was breathing easily, only sipping at the coffee now and then.

“Kierin’s shit sets down hard and keeps it goin’ for a good long time,” Burns said. “If I had two hits I’d be well till lunchtime tomorrow.”

“Ms. Goya says that you can help me exonerate Mr. Man.”

“I thought you wanted to get him off death row?”

“Not execute,” I explained. “Exonerate. Prove he’s innocent.”

“Oh.” Burns snickered. “I know a lotta words, but sometimes they get a little mixed up ’cause I ain’t never been to school. Not really. I was in elementary school for eight years, but then, when I just couldn’t graduate an’ I was fourteen they sent me on my way. My moms was already dead an’ I only went ’cause she wanted me to, but then she died and they let me go... My moms was a nurse one time and she loved roses...”

I wondered if he was playing me.

“I need you to concentrate on what happened to Man,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I could exorate him for ya. I mean... I know what happened and what they planned.”

“Who?”

“Valence and Pratt.”

“You knew them pretty well?”

“Pretty well? I had to suck Pratt’s scrawny dick at least once a week. And he would tell me every time that if I told Valence that he’d kill me. He’d hold the gun to my head while I was suckin’ him. I was always afraid he’d bust a nut and pull the trigger at the same time.”

“I thought Miranda said that Man took you out from them.”

“He did. He did. Three times. But you know I had that junk in my veins, and everything that the brothers had for me needed you to be straight. I tried. I really did. But you know bein’ high’s the only way things make sense in my head. Valence and Pratt knew that. They knew how to keep me right.”

“I don’t think the courts would take something like that as evidence,” I said.

“No, they wouldn’t. No one takes a junkie seriously. Even if I told ’em I was the one set up Manny for gettin’ killed they wouldn’t believe it.”

“You set up A Free Man for Valence and Pratt?”

When Burns looked up at me there was a smile on his face and tears streaming from his eyes.

“Them cops come to me and say that Manny was gettin’ in their business too bad and that they needed to talk to him. That was a code. They knew I didn’t wanna hurt nobody and so they’d say talk when they meant kill.”

I was sitting right in front of him, but he was looking to the right, at a blank wall.

“You did this for them more than once?” I asked.

“They said they wanted to talk to Manny,” Burns continued, ignoring the question. “They said they’d gimme a hundred dollars and I’d be free’a them if I’d tell Manny I had dirt on them and to meet me at the Seagate Pier down on the West Village side.

“I made ’em gimme the hunnert up front and then I called Manny and said exactly what they wanted me to.”

“Did you go there too?”

“Naw. I was at Auntie Hester’s sleepin’ in that same shed where I met you.”

“So you’re the one who set up Mr. Man for the ambush in the West Village?”

“Yeah. Out near the crypt.”

“There’s no crypt around over there,” I said, realizing that I was beginning to talk like the junkie.

“Not no tourist trap fake plaque sayin’ that this was where they buried George Washington or nuthin’ like that, but you better believe that there’s a sure-enough graveyard just a couple’a blocks from where Yollo an’ Anton had me lead Manny.”

“And you just told him to meet you even though you knew they planned to kill him.”

Burns turned his head to face me. His eyes were still crying while the smile had subsided into a wry grin.

“Yeah.”

“And you say you did this more than once?”

“A few times they had me steer people their way, and once I had to help them carry Maurice Chapman down there.”

“Show me.”

It was a long walk for the junkie, but he made it in his own fashion. At times he’d stagger, and now and then he came to a complete halt. He didn’t talk much. I got the feeling that this mission was more serious than just the one hit of aitch could handle.

There was an abandoned church a block north of Christopher on the West Side Highway. This made me think of Mel and the evil where only good was supposed to exist.

There was a metal door behind a stand of holly at the north wall of the defunct house of prayer.

“See that brick with the black spot over the door?” Burns asked.

“Yeah.”

“Reach up an’ pull that suckah out.”

The iron door was tall and wide. I could barely reach but finally managed to tease out the loose stone. On the inside plane of the brick there was taped a sophisticated key that fit the lock set in the corroded but still strong metal door.

I pulled the door open and was about to step through when Burns said, “Hold up, ex-cop.”

He reached inside the doorway and flipped a switch to turn on a spotlight that illuminated a brick courtyard. The inner square was teeming with rats of all shades and sizes. There were hundreds of the rodents disturbed by the sudden flash of intense light.

In the meanwhile Burns found a handful of Ping-Pong — ball size rocks that he threw in among the swarming carpet of fur.

The rats scattered then. Dozens flooded through the doorway, over my feet and between my ankles. They skittered and screeched loudly, decrying the invasion of their nest.

“Come on quick,” Burns said, hurrying through the doorway. “You know street people can smell it when a door’s open somewhere.”

We made our way into the spotlit courtyard. Burns pushed the iron door shut and threw the bolt to secure it. I noticed that the hinges were well oiled for such an ancient entrance.

“You still got that key?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“It’s that green door across the way.”

Maybe fifteen feet away was another metal door; this one was made of copper and had turned the green of scum atop a stagnant pond.

“Hurry up an’ get it open,” Burns said. “We don’t want no cops seein’ the light.”

Using the same key, I unlocked the door, pulled it open, and immediately Burns turned off the anti-rat spotlight. He moved around me, turned on another light in the vestibule we’d entered, and closed the door behind us.

It was only then that I noticed the acrid-sweet scent of death. It was mild considering what a human corpse might be.

We descended a long stone staircase and came into a room piled with the corpses of at least a dozen souls. It was like my solitary cell, or the cellar in Queens where assassins meant to bury me, or the underground apartment that Melquarth had gifted for my time on the run.

Most of the dead had been that way for quite some time. They were desiccated and shorn of almost all flesh by meat-eating rats.

But the topmost corpse, a smallish body, was still decomposing. There were two of the rodents in the hollow of the rib cage tearing at the rotted flesh. Without thinking I took out my revolver and shot them.

The reports were quite loud, but we were underground and in an abandoned building.

“Are you crazy?” Burns yelled. It was the only time he’d raised his voice.

Looking at the partially exposed skull I saw a golden upper front tooth gleaming there.

“Johanna Mudd,” I murmured.

“You knew her?” Burns asked.

“Who were they?”

“Kids that caused trouble,” Burns said. “Enemies, ODs that would be better not founded.”

“And you carried some of them in here?”

“You gonna shoot me like you did them rats?” he asked.

There was no fear in his voice. He was like an old-time condemned Soviet prisoner, sentenced to death but never told when the bullet to the back of the head might come.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

Up the stairs we went and out into the rats’ courtyard. We passed through the iron door and secured it. I kept the key.

We stood at the entrance a moment or two, maybe experiencing the silent exercise of unconscious prayer for the dead. On each side, in the sheltering holly, dozens of red eyes of rats watched us, willing us to leave.

“What you gonna do with that key?” Burns asked.

“Throw it away,” I said. “If they can’t get in, maybe somebody’ll bring out a body and get caught.”

At Christopher and Hudson I gave the remaining cellophane packet and two hundred-dollar bills to Burns.

“Thanks!” he said like a gleeful child. “I thought you might be lyin’ about another one.”

“I try not to lie to people who help me.”

Burns nodded, patting the pocket where he’d deposited the drug.

“Did Valence and Pratt work with anybody else?” I asked.

“Not usually. I mean, they had pimps and kids do some pretty bad things but they was always in charge if that’s what you mean.”

“Any other cops?”

“No. Never.”

“Nobody?”

The only thing that Burns wanted was to get somewhere where he could inject his escape. But he didn’t want to be rude to his benefactor so he stood there concentrating.

“One time they gave me a envelope and told me to meet this guy down by the United Nations.”

“What kinda guy?”

“Just a short prissy faggot.”

“White? Black?”

“White guy in a — in a pink suit smelled like roses. I remember because I usually can’t put a name to a perfume but his was definitely roses.”

“What was in the envelope?”

“I didn’t open it ’cause Anton give it to me an’ I was only gonna get paid when I got back.”

“That’s all?”

“Why you wanna know anyway? Anton an’ Yollo is dead and all the businesses they had is ovah.”

“That was a fresh body in the tomb,” I said. “It couldn’t have been there more than a few days or so. Somebody who knew the dead cops’ business used it to bury that woman.”

“Maybe I’ll remember more later,” Burns speculated. “You know, after I shoot up and then sleep, sometimes in my dreams I put things together that were far apart before.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. If you remember something Hester has my number.”

“Maybe we could make some kinda deal?”

“Maybe... if you remember something I need.”

We stood there a moment or two in silence.

“You gonna get Manny outta that prison?” Burns asked.

“One way or another.” I didn’t know what the words meant — not yet.

The junkie took it as his cue to leave.

I stood there on the corner. It was nearly 3:00 a.m. The impact of the mass-murder gravesite manifested as a shudder in my chest and forearms.