Double Deuce

CHAPTER 3

Twenty-two Hobart Street is a collection, actually, of six-story brick rectangles, grouped around an asphalt courtyard. Only one of the buildings fronted Hobart Street. The rest fronted the courtyard. Therefore the whole complex had come to be known as Twenty-two Hobart, or Fouble Deuce. A lot of the windowglass had been replaced by plywood. The urban planners who had built it to rescue the poor from the consequences of their indolence had fashioned it of materials calculated to endure the known propensity of the poor to ungraciously damage the abodes so generously provided them. Everything was brick and cement and cinderblock and asphalt and metal. Except the windows. The place had all the warmth of a cyanide factory. To the bewilderment of the urban planners, the poor didn’t like it there much, and after they’d broken most of the windows, everyone who could get out, got out.

Hawk parked his Jag at the curb under a streetlight and we got out.

“Walk in here,” Hawk said, “and you could be anywhere. Any city.”

“Except some are higher.”

“Except for that,” Hawk said.

There was absolutely no life in the courtyard. It was lit by the one security spotlight that no one had been able to break yet. It was littered with beer cans and Seven-up bottles and empty jugs of Mogen David wine. There were sandwich wrappers and the incorruptible plastic hamburger cartons that would be here long after the last ding dong of eternity.

The meeting was in what the urban planners had originally no doubt called the rec room, and, in fact, the vestige of a Ping-Pong table was tipped up against the cinderblock wall at the rear of the room. The walls were painted dark green to discourage graffiti, so the graffiti artists had simply opted for Day-Glo spray paints in contrasting colors. The Celotex ceiling had been pulled down, and most of the metal grid on which the ceiling tiles had rested was bent and twisted. In places long sections of it hung down hazardously. There were recessed light cans with no bulbs in amongst the jumble of broken gridwork. The room light came from a couple of clamp-on portable lights at the end of extension cords. In the middle of the room, in an incomplete circle, a dozen unmatched chairs, mostly straight-backed kitchen chairs, had been set up. All but two of the chairs were occupied. All the occupants were black. I was with Hawk. He was black. I was not. And rarely had I noticed it so forcefully.

A fat black man stood as Hawk and I came in. His head was shaved like Hawk’s and he had a full beard. He wore a dark three-piece suit and a pastel flowered tie. His white-on-white shirt had a widespread collar, and gold cuff links with diamond chips glinted at his wrists. When he spoke he sounded like Paul Robeson, which pleased him.

“Come,” he said. “Sit here.”

I already knew who he was. He was the Reverend Orestes Tillis. He knew who I was and didn’t seem to like it.

“You Spenser?”

“Yes.”

“This is our community action committee,” Tillis said to Hawk. He didn’t look at me again. An old man, third from the left, wearing a Celtics warm-up jacket that had ridden up over the bulge of his stomach, said, “What’s the face doing here?”

I looked at Hawk.

“That you,” he said and smiled his wide happy smile.

“When Hawk mentioned him,” Tillis said, “I assumed him to be a brother.”

“You the man?” the old guy said.

“No,” I said.

“Don’t see why we need some high-priced face down here telling us how to live.”

“He’s with me,” Hawk said.

“Too many goddamn fancy pants uptown faces come down here in their goddamn three-piece suits telling us how to live,” the old man said. I was wearing jeans and a leather jacket. The rest of the committee made a sort of neutralized supportive sound.

“Gee,” I said. “They don’t like me either.”

“I can’t take you anywhere,” Hawk said. He turned toward the old guy and said quietly, “He with me.”

The old guy said, “So what?”

Hawk gazed at him quietly for a moment and the old guy shifted in his seat and then, slowly, began nodding his head.

“Sure,” he said. “Sure enough.”

Hawk said, “I come over here to bail your asses out, and Spenser come with me, because I hired him to, and we probably the only two people in America can bail your asses out. So you tell us your situation, and who giving you grief, and then you sort of get back out the way, and we get to bailing.”

“I want to be on record, ‘fore we start,” Tillis said. “I got no truck with the white Satan. I don’t want no help from him, and I don’t trust no brother who get help from him. White men can’t help us solve our troubles. They the source of our troubles.”

“Price you paying,” Hawk said. “Can’t afford to be too choosy.”

“I don’t like the face,” Tillis said.

I was leaning on the wall with my arms folded. Hawk gazed pleasantly at Tillis for a moment. “Orestes,” he said. “Shut the fuck up.”

There was a soft intake of breath in the room. Hawk and Tillis locked eyes for a moment. Then Tillis turned away.

“I’m on the record,” he said, and went and sat on a chair in the front row.

“Now,” Hawk said, “anybody got an idea who killed this little girl and her baby?”

“Cops know?” I said.

A woman said, “You know, everybody know.” She had long graceful legs and a thick body, and her skin was the color of coffee ice cream.

“It’s the Hobarts, or the Silks, or some other bunch of gangbangers that keep changing the name of the gangs so fast I can’t keep track. And how we supposed to stand up to them? We a bunch of women and old men and little kids. How we supposed to make some kind of life here when the gangbangers fuck with us whenever they feel like?”

“They don’t fuck with me,” the old man said.

“Course they do,” the woman said. “You old and fat and you can’t do nothing about it. That’s why you here. They ain’t no men here, ‘cept a few old fat ones that couldn’t run off.”

The old man looked at the ground and didn’t say anything, but he shook his head stubbornly.

“They got guns,” another woman said. She was smallish and wore tight red pants that came to the middle of her calves and she had two small children in her lap. Both children wore only diapers. They sat quietly, squirming a little, but mostly just sitting staring with surprising dullness at nothing very much. “They got machine guns and rifles and I don’t know what kinds of guns they all are.”

“And they run the project,” Hawk said.

“They run everything,” the big woman said. “They own the corridors, the stairwells. They’d own the elevators, if the elevators worked, which a course they don’t.”

“They got parents?” I said.

Nobody looked at me. The woman with the thick body answered the question, but she answered it to Hawk.

“Ain’t no difference they got parents,” she repeated my word with scorn. “Some do. Some don’t. Parents can’t do nothing about it, if they do got ‘em. How come you brought him here? Reverend didn’t tell us we’d have to talk to no white people. White people don’t know nothing.”

“He knows enough,” Hawk said. “Name some names.”

The group was silent. One of the babies coughed and his mother patted him on the back. The bigbodied woman with the graceful legs shifted in her seat a little bit. The old guy glowered at the floor. Everyone else sat staring hard at nothing.

“That get a little dangerous, naming names?” Hawk said. He looked at the Reverend Tillis. Tillis was standing with his hands behind his back, gazing solemnly at the group. He shook his head sadly, as if he would have liked to speak up but grave responsibilities prevented him. “Sure,” Hawk said. “Anybody got an idea why the kid and her baby got shot?”

Nobody said anything.

Hawk looked at me. I shrugged.

“Me and Satan gonna be around here most of the time the next few weeks,” Hawk said. “Till we get things straightened out. You have any thoughts be sure to tell us. Either one of us. You talk to Spenser, be like talking to me.”

Nobody said anything. Everyone stared at us blankly, except Tillis, who looked at me and didn’t like what he saw.