Soul Patch

CHAPTER TWO

I counted sleepless nights instead of sheep, staring up at the ceiling I knew was there but couldn’t see. Katy was next to me, but a million miles away. We had hit the inevitable impasse, that stage in marriage when each day is like a long drive through Nebraska. In the absence of passion, I wondered, what distinguished love from habit? The answer escaped me there in the dark.

Once, many years back, when I was working the case that ultimately led to Larry Mac’s first big promotion, I thought Katy meant to leave me. Only time in my life I felt faint. Had to prop myself up against the furniture. God, I can feel the power of that moment surging through me even now. A few months before, Katy had miscarried. The convulsion of grief and guilt that followed in its wake had overwhelmed us. After the initial tears and blame, Katy fell into a kind of stupor. I thought she was coming out of it, but she was so unpredictable in those long weeks.

The miscarriage and the months that followed caused the first subtle cracks in our marriage. They were hairline fractures, small, barely detectable. I suppose they’ve added up with time. But that day, the day I thought I would faint, my panic wasn’t about the miscarriage. No, the panic belonged to me. I owned it. I thought Katy had stumbled upon the secret, the one her father and I kept wedged between us like a bottle of liquid nitroglycerin.

Back in December of 1977, Patrick Maloney, Katy’s younger brother, had gone into Manhattan and vanished. I had just been retired from the job due to a freak knee injury. Hobbling around on a cane and looking for a way to raise some money for our first wine shop, I was hired by the Maloneys to help find their missing boy. According

I had, in fact, found Patrick, a college sophomore who had collected a trunkful of his own dark secrets. By that time I’d already begun to fall in love with Katy. But when I found her brother, he begged me for a few more days. He wanted to come back to his family on his own terms. I agreed. Biggest mistake in my life. I should have dragged him out of his hiding spot by the ears and plopped him on his parents’ sofa.

Of course, Patrick was full of shit. He hit the road running and never looked back. Can’t say that I blamed him. My problem was that my father-in-law knew I’d found his son. We both had our reasons for not telling Katy. Now our reasons were moot. The time for confession had come and gone. Compounded with each passing day, this was a sin Katy would never forgive.

For years I had been able to keep the panic and guilt at bay. My sleepless nights were few. Only time it used to get to me was when I’d work the odd case, or see Francis and he’d ask me that fucking question about ghosts. Then I’d relive it all over again, the past churning inside me. These days, sleeplessness was the norm and I’m not sure if guilt or panic has a thing to do with it. I suppose I still loved Katy and that she loved me, but the love just wasn’t the glue it had once been. Sarah, our little girl, she was the glue now. These nights, when I stare up at a ceiling I cannot see, I wonder if I would still feel faint if Katy threatened to leave or if I would simply feel relief.

Tired of the frustration, I got up and fished Larry McDonald’s cassette out of my jacket pocket. Still smelled his smoke on my suit. Went downstairs. Poured myself a few fingers of Dewars. Sitting on the floor, hunched against the wing of the sofa closest to the stereo, I sipped scotch and rolled the cassette in my hand. It was a prayer of sorts, a prayer without words-a prayer that the cassette meant trouble, that the trouble meant Larry Mac needed my help. It was a cruel prayer. It’s cruel to pray for troubles, but I was lost. Worse, I was bored.

Some cops are action junkies. They crave stimulation. If it doesn’t come to them, they go looking for it. If they can’t find it, they create it. That wasn’t me, not who I used to be-not while I was on the job, anyway. Now I wasn’t so sure. The wine business had never been my dream. That was Aaron’s gig, not mine. I’d just hitched my ass to it

I slipped my big old Koss headphones over my ears, clicked off the SPEAKER A button, and pressed PLAY on the tape deck. There were three voices, two men and a woman. All sounded far away, but I could make out what was being said clearly enough. The recording had the sound of a tape that was made surreptitiously, because no one was speaking into the mic. It became immediately apparent I was listening to an interrogation or, as cops euphemistically like to call it, an interview. The suspect’s name was Melvin. Melvin didn’t like being called Melvin. Even my moms don’t call me Melvin no more. It’s Malik!

A strategic mistake, telling the detectives that. The woman detective-young, with the lilt of someone raised speaking English in school and Spanish at home-jumped all over him. She started and ended each question with Melvin, picking fiercely at his scabs. She was the bad cop and was either a great actress or born to the part. The male detective-older, white, Bronx Irish-was the sympathetic voice. Listen, Malik, I’m with you, man, but it’s her case.

You could tell he was the more experienced detective, not because of his age, but because he spoke less. A good interviewer knows that silence can be your best weapon. The Latina’s youth was showing. She was a little too eager, too much of a shark, that one. She smelled blood in the water, Melvin’s blood. She’d learn.

Funny thing is, I was a cop for ten years, but I wasn’t allowed in the box except for maybe once or twice, and then only to try and intimidate the suspect. Detectives guarded their turf jealously: uniforms need not apply. For detectives, the interview room was like the ark that held the Torah scrolls; only the rabbis got a free pass. The rest of us had to be invited to stand before the ark or stare from the pews in awe and wonder. It took me a minute to divine that Melvin, a.k.a. Malik, had been snagged with half a key of coke taped to the underside of the dash of his 1979 Buick Electra 225. Things quickly settled into a boring point-counterpoint:

I’m keepin’ my mouf shut till y’all get me my lawyer.

You do that, Melvin. You keep quiet while I extol the virtues of the Rockefeller Drug Laws to you. Okay, Melvin?

The partner bitched about her using words like extol.

What’s the problem? You afraid Melvin won’t understand?

Fuck Melvin. I’m worried I won’t understand!

I didn’t get what this chatty interrogation about a drug bust had to do with Larry, nor why it would worry him so, but it was great for insomnia. I found myself drifting off into that netherworld between consciousness and numb sleep. I was almost fully out when the female detective began a rant about just how much of his worthless life Melvin would be spending in Attica thanks to the former governor of the Empire State.

Shit! Get me my moufpiece and you best bring a D.A. too.

Why’s that, Melvin?

’Cause I got something to deal.

Something like what, Malik?

You ever heard a D Rex Mayweather?

There was an uncomfortable silence. I could hear the hum of the ventilation system, shoes brushing along the linoleum floor of the interrogation room, bodies shifting in their chairs. I thought I might have heard whispering, but it was hard to know if I was just imagining it. The silence broke, and the older detective did the honors.

Why should we give a shit about some dead, drug-dealing nigger, Malik?

Man, y’all gimme that buddy-buddy Malik shit and then you gotta get all up in my face like that. S’not right, man. Y’all get my moufpiece and a D.A. We let them decide if they should give a shit about what this nigger got to say.

That was it. End of tape. But not, I figured, the end of the story. It was too late to call Larry. It was too late to go back to bed. Maybe it was too late for a lot of things.

Excerpted from the Daily News, June 5, 1972:

BOARDWALK BODY IDENTIFIED

Terry O’Loughlin, Staff Writer

The partially decomposed body discovered last week in a shallow grave beneath the Coney Island boardwalk has been positively identified as that of reputed drug kingpin Dexter Mayweather. Mayweather, better known by his street name, D Rex, was alleged to have run the largest drug trafficking network in the five boroughs.

Mayweather had been arrested on a host of charges over the last ten years, ranging from simple possession to assault and attempted murder. Yet at the time of his death, he had never been convicted of any crime. Detectives at the nearby 60th Precinct refused comment on either Mayweather’s homicide or on his previous run-ins with the NYPD.

However, an unnamed source in the federal prosecutor’s office was more forthcoming. He spoke of Mayweather with a grudging respect. “D Rex was the real goods. He was shrewd, slippery as an eel, and ruthless,” the source said. “He was anything but run-of-the-mill and he had been the undisputed ruler of Coney Island. But no lion stays king forever.”

Although the Medical Examiner’s office has listed the death as a homicide, it has refused to release the actual cause of death. Beyond stating that Mayweather’s body had been in the sandy grave for about two weeks and that it had been positively identified through the use of dental records, the M.E. has declined further comment.

Dexter Mayweather, the youngest of seven children, began life in a coastal South Carolina town. When his father abandoned the family shortly after his son’s birth, his mother relocated to the Coney Island section of Brooklyn.

(See Body Identified on page 28)