The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

From The Cocaine Chronicles

1.

“You said I could have water. I want some water,” Fat Tommy asked again.

“You can have water, Moises, after you tell us how it went down. Understand? That’s our deal,” Vargas reminded him.

Fat Tommy’s big shoulders slumped. He was having a really bad day. His business was gone. His money was gone. His high was gone. And the cops weren’t buying his story. He laid his arms tenderly across his knees. He tried to sleep, but the cops kept butting in. He narrowed his eyes in the harsh light and squinted down at his arms. Still, he had to admit... he certainly was well dressed.

“Don’t give those white folks no excuses, Tommy,” his wife, Bea, had advised. “We ain’t gonna get kilt over this asshole.”

Bea had borrowed her mother’s credit card and bought him two brand-new white, long-sleeve business shirts from Sears for his interrogations and, regrettably, for the trial. That was such a sweet thing for Bea to do. Buy him new shirts that the cops would like. He loved his Queen Bea — she had been his sweetheart since grade school, way back when he was skinny and pretty. Bea was sexy, street-smart and loyal to him. After he’d knocked her up, twice, he had started to hang with her, help her with his sons, and had grown to love her.

Gradually, she had helped him develop his posh sartorial style: his dazzling jheri curl (forty bucks a pop at Hellacious Cuts on Crenshaw); his multiple ropes of gold, bedecked with dangling golden razors, crucifixes, naked chicks, powerfists and coke spoons; his rainbow collection of jogging suits and fourteen pairs of top-of-the-line Air Jordan sneakers (and a pair of vintage Connies for layin’ around their new pad). He had restricted himself to only five or six affairs after they got married. The affairs were mostly “strawberries” — amateur whores who turned tricks for dope.

Getting your johnson swabbed by a ’hood rat for a couple of crumbs of low-grade rock — not even a nickel’s worth — wasn’t like being unfaithful, he figured. It was medicinal; therapeutic; a salutary necessity — more like a business expense. Like buying aspirins or getting a massage on a high-stress job. But that was all past — the whores, the dealing, the violence, the stress. He had resolutely turned his back on “thug life” six months ago, when he realized that a brother, even an old-time G like him, was vulnerable to jail time or a hit — after he had experienced the deadly grotesqueries in which Pemberton was capable of entangling him.

So, hours after that goddamn murder, months before he knew the cops were onto him, he’d flushed the bulk of his street stash down the toilet — 1,800 bindles — and threw away most of his thug-life paraphernalia, even his jack-off books, Players and Hustlers mostly, and, his cherished Big Black Titty magazines and, faithfully (except when the Lakers were on TV, or Fear Factor, or The Sopranos), got down on his knees and read the Bible with Bea and promised to her on his daddy’s life, and on his granddaddy’s soul even, he wasn’t going to disappoint her anymore. No more drug-gin’, no more whores, no more hangin’ out. No more street. Swear to Jesus...

“White folks like white stuff,” Bea had explained in the wee morning hours before he surrendered himself. They were in the bedroom of their new Woodland Hills bungalow, and Bea was standing behind him on her tiptoes and pressing her breasts against his back as they faced the dresser mirror. “They like white houses, white picket fences, white bread, and white shirts,” she added grimly, peeking over his shoulder to admire her husband and herself in the mirror.

They both looked so sad; so pitiful and wronged, Bea thought. And all because of that shit-for-brains Pemberton. Fat Tommy thought so, too. Recalling those poignant scenes on that morning, he remembered that they’d both cried a little bit, standing there perusing their innocent, sad, sexy selves in the mirror. Little Bea had slipped from view a moment as she helped Tommy struggle out of his nightshirt and unfastened for the final time the nine golden ropes of braid that festooned his massive neck, and then his diamond ear stud. Bea tearfully placed them in a shopping bag of things they would have to hock. She slid the voluminous dress-shirt sleeves over his backswept arms. Then her beautiful, manicured hands appeared, fluttering along his shoulders, smoothing out the wrinkles in his new shirt.

When Bea was satisfied with her effort, she slipped around in front of him and unloosed his lucky nose ring, letting him view her voluptuous little self in the lace teddy he’d bought her for Mother’s Day, but which she had seldom worn. Then, while he was distracted ogling her melons, she had seized his right pinkie finger, whose stylish claw he had allowed to flourish there as a scoop for sampling virgin powder on the fly and which he had rakishly polished jet black, and before he could stop her, she deftly clipped it off. Fat Tommy shrieked like a waif.

“It’s better this way, Tommy,” Bea assured him. She carefully placed the shorn talon in a plastic baggie. It resembled a shiny black roach; but for Fat Tommy, it was like witnessing the burial of a child.

“I’m keeping this for good luck, Tommy,” she told him, and stowed it in the change purse of her Gucci bag.

She patted his lumpy belly, which protruded out of the break in the shirt like a fifty-pound sack of muffins. She buttoned up the shirt and put on the new hand-painted Martin Luther King Jr. tie she had especially made for him by a Cuban chick she had met in rehab. She cupped his big pumpkin head in her hands. She had paid her little sister, Karesha, fifteen bucks to touch up his jheri curl, and the handsome, thick, mane of oily black locks cascaded sensuously, if greasily, down his forehead and neck.

“Try to stay where it’s cool, so the jheri curl juice don’t drip on your brand-new shirt, baby,” Bea said in a sweetly admonishing tone.

“This new ProSoft Sport Curl Gel don’t drip like that cheap shit, baby,” Fat Tommy explained. “It’s deluxe. I gave your sister two more dollars so she would use the top-drawer shit. I want to make a good impression.”

“I know you do, baby. But you’re gonna have a hard time keeping it up in the joint... I don’t think you—”

Her husband had stopped listening and Bea stared once more into Fat Tommy’s eyes. He was such a big baby. Standing there he had reminded her of a holy card she had cherished the two years she went to Catholic school before she met him. St. Sebastian, sad and pitiful, mortally wounded, innocent and wronged, pierced with arrows. She kissed him lightly on his shirt front and pushed him backward onto the edge of the bed.

“Pull yourself together, Tommy. I’ve got to go drop off the kids,” she said.

Fat Tommy was still crying, sitting dejectedly on the side of the bed, long after she had dressed and gone out to drop their boys at her sister’s new hideout in Topanga Canyon.

2.

It was still dark when Bea went out. The sun soon poked up. She hardly even noticed. She sped along the freeways, and the awakening valley skies unfurled before her in desolate pink banners of light. She raced over the back roads, hurtling through space along the crests of the canyons. Again and again she skidded in a cloud of dust against the shoulders of the abyss. Again and again she slowed down a moment then, thinking better of it, sped back up. She couldn’t stop looking at her boys, couldn’t stop cursing Pemberton under her breath and sadly reflecting on how that asshole had put them all up to their eyeballs in shit. The boys woke up during the forty-minute drive over to Karesha’s, with Bea the whole time vainly scanning the radio for news of Pemberton’s arrest.

Bea’s mother was standing at the window when she drove up. Her mother would drive the boys up to Santa Barbara and they would take a cross-country bus to Texas that night. The three women and the two infant boys cried until Bea’s mother drove off in Karesha’s pink Lexus, fleeing in plain sight, with Little Tommy and baby Kobe waving bye-bye from their car seats.

After their mother and the boys were safely away, Karesha, a cold, deadly customer in most circumstances, confided to Bea that she was a little nervous about the possibility of her own capture or of the jailing — and inevitable execution — of her notorious former squeeze, Cut Pemberton, and what it could all mean for her Hollywood plans, and for her high-toned, social-climbing crew.

“You heard from him?” Bea had asked, as she backed out of the dirt driveway in Karesha’s rented, brush-covered hideaway.

“I hear the Columbian’s got him,” Karesha said quietly. “The cops don’t know much about him yet. I’m sure he wants to keep it that way. Anyway, I trashed the cell phone.” They were quiet for a moment, then Karesha said, “But if that sick motherfucker come ‘round here I’m gonna send him to Jesus.” She lifted her T-shirt and showed Bea the pearl-handled .22 Pemberton had bought her as an engagement gift. It was stuffed in the waistband of her jeans.

When Bea arrived back home, the neighbors were out, watering their lawns, pretending they didn’t know Fat Tommy was a prime suspect in a vicious murder.

“How do, Miss O’Rourke?” Pearl Stenis, the boldest of her nosy neighbors greeted her.

“I’m blessed, Mrs. Stenis,” Bea said flatly.

She pulled into the garage and closed the door. She gathered herself a moment before she got out. She turned on all the lights in the garage and found a flashlight, and took a good twenty minutes making sure the Mercedes was clean of diapers and weapons and works and blow and any incriminating evidence. When she was done, she poked her head into the house and called out, “We’re late, Tommy. We’re supposed to be there at eight o’clock sharp — it’s already eight forty. I’ll be in the car. Come on, baby. We got to be on time this time.” She waited in the car and honked the horn a half-dozen times but had to come back inside and get Fat Tommy. She found him back in bed, fully dressed, sobbing, with the covers pulled over his head.

“Where the hell you been, baby?” Fat Tommy said. “I thought Cut got you.”

“That niggah better be layin’ low,” Bea said. “These Hollywood cops would love to catch a fuck-up like that and Rodney King his ass to death for the savage shit he done.”

“It just ain’t fair,” Fat Tommy complained.

“Listen here, Tommy,” Bea said sternly. “You don’t deserve this beef. You don’t know nothin’. You didn’t see nothin’. You got a wife and family to protect. It was that goddamn Cut that fount Simpson. You didn’t even know he was a cop. It was all Cut’s idea. We wouldn’t be mixed up in none of this if Cut hadn’t...”

Fat Tommy began sobbing again. After a few minutes, he confessed that he had raided the emergency stash in the bathroom and had done a couple of lines to calm his nerves. He suggested that they do what was left. There was only a half-bindle left anyway. He never did crack; the high felt like a suicide jump. Crack was for kids; toxic, cheap-ass shit meant to sell, not do. Fat Tommy was old school — White Girl all the way. Powder, he believed, was classier, mellower than rock cocaine.

Bea retrieved the emergency bindle out of the bottom of a box of sanitary napkins where she and Fat Tommy stored it. There was only a portion of an eight ball — an eighth of an ounce — left from the half-pound Fat Tommy liked to keep around the pad for Laker games and birthdays and other special occasions. Bea used her mother’s Sears card to line out six hefty tracks of the white powder on the dresser top. Rolling their last hundred-dollar bill into a straw, the couple snorted quickly, sucking the lines of blow into their flared nostrils like shotgun blasts fired straight to the back of their brains.

Quickly, the drug began to take effect: it eased its frigid tendrils down the back lanes of their breathing passages, deadening the superior nasal concha, the frontal and sphenoid sinuses, creeping along their soft palates like a snotty glacier before it slid down the interiors of their throats, chilling the lingual nerves and flowing over the rough, bitter fields of papilla at the back of their tongues and ascending, like a stream of arctic ghosts up through their pituitary glands, their spinal walls and veins, and into the uppermost regions of their brains. The pupils of their dark brown eyes became dilated and sparkling.

“Damn, that’s good shit,” Fat Tommy said, feeling the cold drip of the snow, liquefied and suffused with snot, glazing the commodious interiors of his head and throat.

Fat Tommy shut his eyes tight. The darkness inside his mind began to fill with amorphous, floating colors. His big body seemed to be shapeless and floating, too. He looked down at the drifts of sugary dust remaining on the dresser. Almost four hundred bucks’ worth of Girl — gone in six vigorous snorts. As Fat Tommy admired the smeared patterns of residue on the dresser top, Bea leaned down and broadly licked the last thin traces of powder.

Then she swept her lovely, manicured, forefinger across the dresser top, along the trail of spittle her tongue had left, sopping up the final mists of blow. She dabbed this viscous salve along her teeth and gums. Normally Fat Tommy prided himself in always managing to lick up the leftovers before Bea got to them. But he was immobilized with grief; and too, he was froze from his nose to his toes. Now Bea was froze numb, too. The coke was ninety percent pure. It’d only been stepped on once. Chilean. Cream of the Andes. Bea blinked hard and looked up at her husband.

“I’m straight now,” Bea said, noting a half moon of white powder showing around the alar grooves of Fat Tommy’s right nostril. “Your slip is showin’, baby,” she said, and pointed to his reflection in the mirror. Fat Tommy pinched his nostrils closed, shut his eyes, and took a sharp snort. The lumps of powder were swept from the grooves in his face, shooting brilliantly past his nasal vestibules and septum in white-hot pellets of snot. His heart began to race. Neither one of them said a word for a few minutes. They closed their eyes and surrendered to the high. When Fat Tommy finally opened his eyes, Bea was staring at him with a beatific look on her face.

“You look nice,” Bea said. “Innocent... Don’t let ‘em punk you, Tommy. Just wear the shit outta this shirt and tie. Dr. King’ll bring you through. All business. You know how to talk to white folks. Don’t go in there like no G... talking all bad and shit, like you was that goddamn Cut. That’s what they want. Give them your A game, and you’ll be all right. Remember. You wasn’t there. You didn’t see nothing. You don’t know nobody. We ain’t gonna get kilt over some asshole.”

Fat Tommy got in the car, gripping his Bible, sobbing and praying and assuring Bea and the Lord he loved them. He promised — between his sobs — he would savor her instructions and repeat them like a mantra: Don’t say nothing that’s gonna get us kilt over some asshole. She reminded him that his stupid-ass Uncle Bunny had done a nickel at Folsom on a break-in after Bunny talked too much. So — don’t talk too much. Don’t do nothing that will make you look guilty. They got nothing, Bea reminded Fat Tommy. That was the bottom line. They agreed if he was cool and smooth he had a chance to ease his way out of the beef with short time.

3.

The cops were nice to him at first; they said he was a stand-up guy for turning himself in and helping out with the investigation. They interviewed him all day. Fat Tommy told them he didn’t “need no lawyer.” He wasn’t guilty. The cops didn’t seem to be concerned about his coke business so much as they wanted to find out what he knew about the recent murder of the undercover cop — Simpson — right in the middle of the projects on Fat Tommy’s home turf, La Caja. Fat Tommy assured him he didn’t “have no ‘turf,’ not anymore, not in La Caja, not nowhere.” Moreover, he didn’t know anything about a cop killing.

“We know you ain’t no killer, Moises,” Vargas told him a few minutes into the interrogation. “But you grew up in La Caja, where this murder went down. We figure you might know something. Point us to the bad guys. We know you’re in bed with the Columbians. They’re all over La Caja these days. One of them called you by name... called you Moises. We got him on tape. He’s quite fond of you. Says you’re a big shot. You’re looking at some serious time if you don’t play ball, Moises... Play along and help us catch this killer... you’ll be all right...”

Vargas offered him a jumbo cup of lemonade and four jelly doughnuts. Vargas said that the pretty cop who had processed him that morning had asked to make the lemonade especially for him.

Fat Tommy said, “That was sure nice of her.”

“Yeah. Officer Ospina is a sweetie. Drink up. That’s the last of it... we need to get started,” Vargas said, and smiled at him.

Braddock took the empty cup, crushing it, and banked it into the wastebasket in the back of the interrogation room.

“Great shot,” Fat Tommy said. “Three-pointer.”

Braddock and Vargas said nothing. Braddock walked to a chair somewhere behind him and Vargas turned on a tape recorder and intoned: “This is Detective Manny Vargas of the Homicide Detail, Criminal Investigation Division of the Van Nuys Police Department. I am joined with Detective Will Dockery and DEA special agent Roland Braddock. This is a tape-recorded interview of Thomas Martin O’Rourke, a.k.a., ‘Fat Tommy’ O’Rourke, a.k.a., Tommy Martin, a.k.a., Pretty Tommy Banes, a.k.a., SloJerry-T, a.k.a., Bigjerryjay, a.k.a., T-Moose, a.k.a., Moises Rockafella...”

“Uh, my name ain’t Moises,” Fat Tommy protested, interrupting as politely as he could. “Some bad people started calling me that. But I don’t let nobody call me that no more.” He tried his sexiest grin.

Vargas looked at him blankly and continued: “This a homicide investigation under Police Report number A-55503. Today’s date is March 28, 2005, and the time is now 1349 hours.” Then Vargas looked at Fat Tommy and said, “Could you state your name once more for the record?”

“I’m Thomas Martin O’Rourke.”

“Address?”

Tommy gave them his parent’s address. That’s where he got his mail now.

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-four, officer,” Fat Tommy said.

“Employed?”

“I was assistant manager at the Swing Shop...”

“Was...?”

“I got laid off.”

“When was that?”

“1992.”

Dockery and Braddock rolled their eyes, then Vargas said, “What were you doing after you got... laid off?”

Fat Tommy fingered his Martin Luther King Jr. tie. “Odd jobs, here and there...”

“What kind of odd jobs?”

“Church stuff.”

“Church stuff?”

Fat Tommy sat up straight in his chair. “I’m a Christian, sir. And I try to help in the Lord’s work whenever—”

“You get that fancy Mercedes doing this church work?”

“Naw.” Fat Tommy laughed out loud.

“The street tells us you’re a big-time coke man — that true, Moises? You a big time coke dealer, Moises?”

“Oh no, sir. Not no more. All that shit is dead... I mean, all that stuff is dead... I don’t do no drugs no more. I don’t sling coke no more. I got a wife and family..

“You high now?”

“What was that?”

“You under the influence of drugs or alcohol at this time?”

“No. Oh Jesus, no.”

Fat Tommy wished to Christ he was.

4.

At many points during the long, arduous interrogation, the men drew in so close on the hulking gangster that the tips of all four men’s shoes seemed to be touching. He couldn’t make the cops believe him. They wouldn’t give him any more lemonade, even though the girl cop made it ‘specially for him. They wouldn’t give him any more doughnuts — they said they were all out. Cops out of doughnuts! Now, they wouldn’t even give him water — and he was dry as shit. That Chilean coke had sucked all of the good spit out of his mouth. If only he could get a glass of water, or maybe some lemonade.

“I’m drying out inside,” Fat Tommy pleaded.

Bea’s admonitions echoed in his head and gradually, and without realizing it, Fat Tommy allowed a luxuriant smile to creep across the corners of his mouth. Still smiling, he opened his eyes into a narrow slit and gazed down at his handsome shirt sleeves, admiring the shiny contours, like little snow-covered mountains really, that the polyester fabric traced along his massive arms as they lay across his knees.

Christ, he loved this shirt!

“Somethin’ I said funny, Fatboy? Somethin’ funny?” Braddock yelled, momentarily breaking through his reverie.

He blinked and looked down again at his arms and knees. They were such good arms; good, kind arms; and great knees — great great knees. After a while, he decided, with a hot white tear leaking out of a crack in his right eye, finally, that he loved his knees as much as he loved his dick or his ass — better, probably, now that he had found the Lord again. His regard for his ass and dick now seemed so misguided, so... heathen. And these knees were so much more representative of him, innocent, God-fearing, above reproach.

They had taken him all over — all over L.A., the Valley, even to Oak Town once on a church picnic. There was plenty of water there, beer and red pop and lemonade and swine barbeque, too. He was thin then, and pretty. Just a baby boy — so innocent, such a good young brother. The picnic was on the Oakland Bay, and they’d all rode the bus up there, singing gospel songs all the way. There must have been a hundred buses, the whole California Youth Baptist Convention, someone said. And it was his knees that helped him get through it, basketball, softball, the three-legged race with pretty Althea Jackson. They were nine years old! Those were some of the best times in his life. And he was such a good guy, a regular brother, everyone said so, and now this lunatic murder, and this fucked-up Pemberton, that devil, poking his bloody self like a shitty nightmare in the midst of all his plans.

Fat Tommy ached at beholding all these tender scenes — Bea, the picnic, the tears — all the images like flashing detritus in a river streaming across his upturned hands. It was just too much. He closed his eyes, but the river of images burst inside them, flooding the darkness in his head even more vividly than before: his first day at Teddy Roosevelt Junior High; the time he and Bea won third place at the La Caja Boys and Girls Club Teen Dance-Off; and his best pal... not that goddamn Pemberton... but Trey-Boy, Trey-Boy Middleton (rest his soul). That was his best friend. It was cool Trey-Boy who befriended him even after he got fat and everyone started treating him like a jerk, and it was Trey-Boy who’d taken pity on him and helped him pimp up his style.

It was Trey-Boy. Not a murderer. A hip brother. True-blue. Trey-Boy showed him how to affect a gangster’s scowl, and helped him adopt a slow, hulking walk that could frighten just about anyone he encountered on the street. He’d showed him how to smoke a cigarette, load a gat, roll a blunt, and cop pussy, weed, and blow. He had even showed him how to shoot up once.

And Trey-Boy never got mad, even when that faggot Stick Jenkins bumped him on purpose and made him spill a good portion of the spoon of heroin Trey-Boy had carefully prepared. Trey-Boy had pimp-slapped the faggot — he called him “my sissy” and Stick had just smiled like a bitch and turned red as a yella niggah could get — and everyone laughed.

He remembered how Trey-Boy had cooked up what was left of the little amber drops of Boy they could scrape from the toilet seat and floor and showed him how to tie off and find the vein and shoot the junk even if he only got a little whacked — it was whacked enough to know he wouldn’t do that anymore. It wasn’t fun at all. He couldn’t stop puking. It felt like now — in this hot room with no water, under this white light. But he wasn’t no goddamn junkie. None of that puking and noddin’ and drooling shit was for him. He was strictly weed and blow, strictly weed and blow. He wasn’t no goddamn junkie. Let them try to pin that on him. They’d come up zero. Just like this murder. He wasn’t there; he didn’t do it. He didn’t see nobody; he didn’t know nobody.

Trey-Boy had given him his favorite street moniker — Fat Tommy. When Trey-Boy said it, it didn’t feel like a put-down. It was a term of war and affection. Fat Tommy was a lumpy 370 pounds but he didn’t feel fat when Trey-Boy called him Fat Tommy — he felt big, as in big man, big trouble, big fun — there’s a difference, really, when you think about it. A street handle like Fat Tommy made him feel like one of the hoods in The Sopranos — his favorite story. He’d made a small fortune with that name — not like he made with Cut Pemberton, when the margins and risks got scary and huge, and the fuckin’ Columbians got involved, and people feared him and only knew him by the name Pemberton hung on him, Moises — Moises Rockafella, the King of Rock Cocaine. He didn’t make big cake like that with Trey-Boy — but at least he didn’t have to worry about a murder beef, and the living was decent.

5.

At one point, Vargas cut on the lights in the interrogation room so brightly that when Fat Tommy looked up he beheld, not a pea-green interrogation room with a trio of sad sack cops trying to sweat him for a cop murder he didn’t commit — the whole room seemed to him as a single white spotlight, a moon’s eyeball inspecting him on a disc of light. He was so damn dry and tired. He could not see Vargas, but could hear his footfalls pacing back and forth somewhere behind him. He closed his eyes a moment and tried to catch a wink.

“Steady, sweetheart. Just a few more questions and you’re home free,” Vargas said.

Tommy waited for the next question with the same despairing apprehension with which he had endured all the last. Why these other questions? Why this Moises shit? He wasn’t goddamn Moises anymore. That shit was dead; done. Why didn’t these pigs believe him? Tommy felt so sorry for himself. None of it was his fault. It was the Columbians and that goddamn Pemberton. He was the bad guy. If they want their devil, there he is. But don’t expect Fat Tommy to commit suicide and snitch. That shit was dead.

“I need some lemonade!” he screamed.

Braddock began to mock him. Fat Tommy burrowed himself deeper into his thoughts. The cops kept hammering away at his story. He shut his eyes. He was only pretending to listen, nodding yes, yes, goddamn it, yes, or gazing up at them with a mournful, wounded look in his eyes.

Vargas turned off the tape. Dockery and Braddock pushed their chairs back from the cone of white light that made Fat Tommy look like a Vegas lounge fly sobbing under a microscope. The scraping of their chairs was like an utterance of disgust, and they meant it to be that. It sent shivers up their own backs, and sent a chilling thunderbolt of fear down the back of Fat Tommy O’Rourke. Vargas cut a rebuking glance at Dockery and Braddock.

“It’s late,” Vargas said, looking around for a clock. They had started this session just before two P.M.

Braddock pulled out his watch bob and flicked it open. To view the dial, he swept his hand through the cone of light that seemed to enclose Fat Tommy in a brilliant Tinker Bell glow and the watch flashed like a little arc of buttery neon framed in white.

“Almost six A.M. Sixteen goddamn hours and not a peep from this shithead,” Braddock said. He smacked the back of Fat Tommy’s chair.

Dockery felt around in his pant leg for his pack of butts and stood up. ‘Just a little longer, sport, and you’ll be home free, bearin’ off in yer cell,” Dockery said.

“Yeah, bearin’ off in yer cell...” Braddock repeated.

“I need a piss break,” Fat Tommy said as politely as he could, then added with a smile, “and a big glass of lemonade.”

“Good idea, asshole. Think I’ll go drain the lizard,” Dockery said and looked at Vargas. Vargas nodded and Braddock and Dockery went out.

Fat Tommy sobbed on. He was still crying when Braddock and Dockery came back in laughing. They both held huge cups of lemonade and they were eating fresh Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Braddock tossed a half-eaten doughnut in the trash.

“I’m starvin’, officer. I’m sleepy. I don’t know about no murder,” Fat Tommy tried again. He shut his eyes right.

“Pale-ass pussy,” Braddock muttered. “Yer gonna fry for this. Why don’t ya quit yer lying?”

“You said I could have water. I need some water,” Fat Tommy asked again.

“You know the game, Fatboy,” Detective Dockery broke in, from somewhere behind him. “Yer startin’ to piss me off.”

“You can have water, Moises, after you tell us how it went down. Understand?” Vargas said. “That’s our deal.” Vargas turned on the tape.

Fat Tommy didn’t understand. The sharp questions droned on like wasps attacking just above his head. He was sleepy. He wanted water. He closed his eyes and took a breath and asked again for the thousandth time, “Please, officer, can I have some water or some lemonade?”

“It’s detective,” Dockery said.

“Listen here, detective,” Tommy assented, his big voice gravelly and frail, “I don’t deserve this beef. I don’t know nothin’. I didn’t see nothin’. Got a wife an’ family to protect. Was goddamn Cut who fount Simpson. Didn’t even know he was a cop. Ya gotta believe me. I wouldn’t be mixed up in none of this if...”

The room went dead quiet.

Fat Tommy eased his eyes open and peered sharply down along the tear-dappled lids. He strained to see or hear the shuffling shoes of the cops pacing in front or behind him. He could see nothing and could only hear what seemed to be his own heart galloping away down in the pit of his stomach, thu-thump, thu-thump.

“Cut? You never mentioned any Cut,” Dockery said after a while.

Fat Tommy could feel the life draining from his chest. He slowly opened his eyes. He began to hyperventilate and for the first time he could feel the jheri curl gel deluxe begin to drip against his collar.

“Tell us about this Cut,” Vargas said. “He got a last name?”

Fat Tommy felt his mouth moving. He couldn’t make it stop. “Cut... um... Cut Pemberton... I think,” his voice said.

“And...?”

He tried to think of innocent words. He tried to stall and think of what Bea would want him to say. “I didn’t know him that good,” he said finally.

“Go on,” Vargas said. “What’s he look like?”

Tommy tried to think of other faces, but all he could see before him was that goddamn Cut. “Gots a cut ‘cross his ear, go straight ‘cross his lip, like he was wearing a veil on one side of his face.

“Yes...”

“Said he got it in a fight with a cracker when he was in the marines. But I heard he got it in prison.”

He held his breath and tried to stop his voice from speaking again. He couldn’t believe what it was saying, betraying him, snitching on him.

“OK... go on.”

His mouth burst open again.

“He can talk Spanish,” Fat Tommy’s voice said, gasping.

“Go on,” Dockery said. “Cut...”

Tommy’s whole body seemed to slump. Special Agent Braddock smacked his chair hard and Tommy sat bolt upright. “Well, Cut was the onliest one that did it,” he said.

“Go on,” Braddock prodded. “Cut was?”

“What?”

“He said: Cut was...?” Vargas said.

“Um... Cut was... one of them red, freckly niggahs from Georgia...”

“Yes.”

No one spoke for a moment, then Fat Tommy’s voice said, “Spotted like a African cat. I didn’t even know him good...”

“Um-hum.”

“Wore plaits standing all over his head.”

“Plaits? Really?”

Fat Tommy grinned, he couldn’t help himself. “My Bea used to call him BuckBeet, ‘cause he looked like a red pickaninny. That used to piss him off, ‘cause of Buckwheat, you know?”

“Yes... Cut...”

“Yeah, Cut. First I knew of him... two years ago... when I was staying on Glen Oaks off Paxton... him and Karesha — my wife’s sister — and my Uncle Bunny banged on my duplex at ‘bout two in the morning looking for some crack.”

“You mean Bunny Hobart — the second-story man?” Dockery broke in again.

The detectives had two tape recorders going now, but Dockery never trusted electronic equipment and was transcribing everything Fat Tommy said on a yellow legal pad.

“Yeah, that be him,” Fat Tommy said with a deep sigh. He slumped back in the hard metal chair, trembling as he recalled the scene. “Uncle Bunny knew Cut from the joint. Cut had just got out and was chillin’ with Karesha... Cut was already dressin’ like a Crip, all blue, talking shit. I could tell he was trouble. He used to strong-arm young Gs and take their stuff.”

“And Bunny told him you were the big-time coke man,” Braddock said. It was not a question.

Such a wave of woe swept over Fat Tommy as he contemplated all of this that, softly, he began to weep. His whole bright life was passing before his sad eyes: there were pinwheels of light; a whole series of birthdays; his stint as a fabulous dancer; his wife, Bea, again, his kids — Little Tommy and infant Kobe — cuties! cuties! He didn’t deserve this. And too, there was his old job as assistant manager at the Swing Shop — twelve years ago now — all those great records: Tupac, NWA, Biggie, KRS-One, Salt ‘N’ Pepa, shit, even Marvin Gaye. He knew them like the lines in these hands that now stared up at him, glazed and dotted with sweat.

“I was getting out of the business. I was getting out,” Fat Tommy explained. “It was Cut that fucked up all my plans. He wanted to impress the big-time talent... I was only staying in ‘til he could get on his feets.”

“What big-time talent?”

“Columbians? La Caja Crips?” Vargas pressed him.

“It was them goddamn Columbians that tolt Cut about Simpson,” Tommy confessed. “Cut came up with the idea of setting the guy up. He told us he was a snitch — not no cop! I tried to talk him out of it; I tried to reason with him...”

“A regular Dr. Phil,” Braddock said.

“Yes, sir,” Fat Tommy said quietly.

Tommy closed his eyes. He felt himself crashing. He flopped his big grease-spangled head down into his hands. From the top of his jheri curl to the soles of his size 17 Air Jordans, everything about him was huge, extroverted, and showy. Now, he sat hulking and exhausted in the metal chair, hot sweat and gel streaming down his face and neck, trying in vain to make himself smaller, hoping that the willful diminishment of his great size would in turn minimize in the minds of the cops the appalling grandeur of his recent crimes. He sat there in his bright white tent of a shirt with his Martin Luther King Jr. tie strung round his bulging neck like a garrote.

“Catch your breath, son,” Vargas said. He turned off the tape.

“Get our boy King Moises some lemonade, will ya, Detective Dockery?”

Dockery went out and Tommy’s mind went blank, then black, then pale gray. Now when he squinted into the interrogation room light it didn’t even seem like light anymore but a kind of shiny darkness. He felt as though he was falling through the brightness like a brother pitched off a hundred-story building. All the bright scenes of his life seemed to be fading, all of them diminishing like faces in the fog. Even the fabulous good shit that was coming, close on the horizon, that seemed to be diminishing, too. Vargas switched the lights back to a single hot light again. To Fat Tommy the trembling ocean of darkness beyond the spotlight seemed like fathomless midnight. And from the utter depths of its darkness Fat Tommy O’Rourke — a.k.a., Moises Rockafella, the King of Rock Cocaine — could hear a plaintive, high-pitched wail, a shrill, sad voice, strangely resembling his own. He prayed to Christ it was someone else.