The Fury

28

I kissed Amanda goodbye, made sure I was presentable and headed uptown to meet Clarence Willingham.

I rode the 2 train to 116th and Lenox Avenue. It was a hot day outside, the breeze that had felt so cool on our balcony gone.

Morningside Park was actually part of a cliff that sep arated Manhattan from Morningside Heights. It was also the location of a massive protest in 1968, when students of Columbia University staged a sit-in in and around the proposed construction of a gymnasium on the park grounds. With separate east and west entrances, many assumed this was to segregate the gym between black and white. University spokesmen denied the claims, but abandoned the plans after students barri caded themselves inside numerous university buildings.

After a group of students opposed to the protests blockaded the occupied buildings, police came in to end the struggle. Over one hundred and fifty students were injured during the forced removal, and over seven hundred were arrested. Because of the terrible public re lations, specifically stemming from the student-on student violence, Columbia scrapped its plans and built an underground gym instead. Ironically the blueprints for the gym were then sold to Princeton University, which appropriated them for their own use.

The address Clarence gave me was for a five-story brownstone within walking distance of the park. A pretty nice neighborhood. The Columbia campus stood directly on the opposite side of Morningside Park, and though Clarence did live far from student housing, the university owned such huge swaths of real estate in upper Manhattan that the neighboring streets were clean and graffiti free, devoid of clutter and garbage. It must have looked great in a brochure.

Before turning onto Clarence's block, I called

Amanda's cell phone. She picked up, answering with a hard-to-distinguish, "Heh-wo?"

"Amanda?" I said. "Everything okay?"

"Eating," she said, removing whatever had been in her mouth. "Chocolate-covered strawberry. I swear, we need to move in here."

"Where did you buy that?"

"I didn't buy it. They were in a small tin by the tele vision. I think they're complimentary."

"Amanda," I said, shaking my head, "nothing in hotels is complimentary. Check the box."

"Hold on." I heard her ruffling with something, then whisper oh hell under her breath.

"What happened?"

"Um…you know that bonus I got for Christmas?"

"Yeah?"

"Well, it's going to have to go toward paying off these strawberries."

"It's okay," I said. "Just enjoy them. Watch some thing crappy on television, I'll be back later."

"Okay, fine, I'll finish them. Be careful, babe. See you soon. Love you."

"I love you, too."

When I arrived at Clarence's building I rang the buzzer. I expected him to simply unlock the door, but within a minute I saw a man coming down the stairs toward me. He was wearing a bathrobe, loosely tied, with white briefs and blue slippers. A paunchy stomach hung over the elastic band of the briefs. It was a comical look, and it was safe to say he was coming to greet me rather than go for a stroll.

He opened the door, and I extended my hand.

"Henry Parker, nice to meet you, Clar…"

Clarence was ignoring me. My hand sat there unshook, a lonely hitchhiker. Clarence wasn't even looking at me, he was too busy looking down the street, both sides, behind me, as though expecting a boogey man or a ninja to jump out and kill him. His eyes flick ered back and forth, widening and then closing. He squeezed them shut hard, then opened them again.

Perhaps this allowed him to see better, or give him some extrasensory perception.

When he seemed content that nobody was waiting to jump out at him, he said, "You come alone?"

"Of course I did."

"You sure about that?"

"Um…yeah. Pretty sure."

"You a cop?"

I snorted out a laugh. "Are you serious? I said I was a reporter."

"Cops lie. I don't believe that BS about cops having to declare themselves. If someone's recording this, I'm calling entrapment on your ass."

I turned out all my pockets. Showed him I was carrying nothing.

His brow furrowed. "That's not an answer."

"No. I'm not a cop, I'm a reporter." I showed him my business card.

"What'choo got in there?" he said, pointing to my bag.

"Tape recorder, notepad."

"You can't bring that to my place."

"What do you mean?"

"Nobody records or writes down what I say. You can't deal with that, you can leave."

I didn't have much choice, so I said, "What do you want me to do with my stuff then?"

"Bernita down the hall will watch it."

"Bernita?"

"You can trust her. She got a plasma TV. Anytime you have something you need stored safely, Bernita's your woman."

I wasn't quite sure how that was supposed to convince me to leave my equipment with her. I guess I didn't have much of a choice but to trust Clarence's sterling recommendation of Bernita's safe-deposit skills.

"Okay, whatever you say."

"All right. Come on."

Clarence led me into the hallway, past a row of rusty mailboxes and up the first flight of stairs. The building smelled of mold, and the paint was chipping on the staircase railing. Clarence took a left and knocked on the first door. A scraggly woman wearing a pink bathrobe and smoking an unfiltered cigarette opened it.

I wondered if this was actually some sort of spa.

"Bernita," he said. "This is Henry. He's gonna be leaving his bag with you for a while."

Bernita's apartment beyond her looked rather massive, with a hallway splintering off to several dif ferent rooms. The floors were scrubbed clean, and a single dining table sat in the middle, uncluttered with the exception of a pair of crystal candlesticks. It seemed like quite a lot of space. Bernita wasn't wearing a wedding ring. The fact that she had at least three or four rooms for what looked like herself made me all the more conscious of my own dwelling.

"How long?" she said.

Clarence looked at me. "How long you need?"

"Hour. Two, tops."

Clarence said, "Forty-five minutes."

"Whatever," she replied. Then she looked at me, her upper lip curled back. "Henry. Ain't never met a young boy named Henry."

Bernita closed the door before I could reply.

With my belongings safely-hopefully-squared away, Clarence led me to the fourth floor. He lived in apartment 4J. When we got to the door, Clarence stuck his hand into his bathrobe pocket, pulling out a key ring with at least thirty keys on it. I marveled at the man's security methods. Then he went to work unlock ing the half a dozen dead bolts on his front door.

Once Fort Knox was fully unlocked, he opened the door and beckoned me inside.

For the life of me I couldn't figure out why he went to such ridiculous lengths, because Clarence's apart ment was an absolute pigsty.

Garbage littered the floor like he was trying to save room in the city landfills. Empty Chinese food and pizza boxes were stacked in one corner. Beer cans were strewn about, creating an aluminum carpet. I could identify at least a half-dozen different brands, as well as a few bottles of various liquors: Jose Cuervo, Cour voiser, Hennessy. Clearly, Clarence Willingham was not picky when it came to his booze.

"Take a seat," he said, gesturing to a beanbag chair crisscrossed by duct tape like a low-budget surgical patient. I sat down, immediately feeling the beans shifting under me. The last beanbag chair I'd sat in was during college, and I'm pretty sure a box of wine was involved. "Can I get you a drink? Beer? Soda?

Absinthe?"

I was tempted to ask for the absinthe out of curiosity, but decided I wasn't that thirsty. "Thanks, I had lunch before I came."

"Suit yourself, man." Clarence reached under a desk and pulled out a small wooden box. He opened it, and took out what appeared to be a piece of rolling paper and a bag of pot. He looked as me, pleased. "This is some pure hydro. Fifty bucks a gram. You can snag an ounce in Washington Square Park for about six hundred.

Sometimes you go up by the George Washington

Bridge, around 179th Street, you find some real fiends who'll sell it for cheaper, but it won't be as good. And you'd be surprised at how many of the kids from

Columbia deal right in Morningside Park."

"Thanks for the info," I said, "but I gave up smoking in college. I eat enough Cheetos these days as it is."

"Suit yourself, reporter man."

Clarence sprinkled some of the weed onto the paper.

Then he spent a minute picking through it, removing any clumps or twigs. Once the mixture was in a slight cone shape-wide to narrow-he began to roll. Clarence stared at the joint with an almost trancelike intensity. He began in the middle, using his thumbs to roll it evenly, gradu ally moving his fingers to the ends of the paper. Once it was a cylinder, he licked the top edge of the paper and folded it over. When that was completed, he took a small piece of thicker paper and rolled it tightly into a spiral.

He inserted that into one end of the joint. Clarence twisted the end without the roach so nothing would fall out.

Taking the joint between his thumb and index finger,

Clarence held it to his lips, sparked a lighter and took a deep drag. He drew it deep into his lungs, his eyes closing as the end of the joint glowed. Finally he removed it from his lips and puffed out a dark cloud that hung over his room for a minute before disappearing.

When all that was done, he opened his eyes, looked at me, held out the joint. "Best weed you'll smoke in this city."

"No, thanks," I said. "I'm working."

"Whatever. So you said you wanted to talk about my pops. What about him?"

"Your dad was Butch Willingham."

"S'right." Clarence took another drag. I noticed a small corner of his upper lip was turned up. Either he wasn't entirely fond of speaking about his father, or hadn't in a long time.

"Was he a good father?"

Clarence held out the joint. I don't think he meant it that way, but I saw that as somewhat of an answer.

"No better or worse, s'pose."

"How do you mean that?"

"I know a lot of kids my age who had more'n I did.

Know a lot that had less. My dad, he didn't have much of an education. No college, no high school. Dropped out at fourteen, spent the rest of his life slinging rock.

That's all the man knew. As far as I knew he was good at it."

"How so?"

"Kept me well fed. My moms died when I was a kid and I never had no brothers or sisters, so it was all up to him. He made sure I went to school, beat my ass if I didn't get good grades. I know a lot of dads who bought the rock my dad sold and just sunk into a hellhole because of it.

My dad never smoked, never drank. To him this was his livelihood, like someone who goes to a plant, punches a clock. He didn't take his work home with him."

"I find that a little hard to believe. I mean…" I motioned to the joint. Clarence laughed.

"Yeah, I used to do harder stuff. Crack. A little heroin here and there. The weed's a cooling-down drug. I'll get off it at some point." He took another long, deep, drawnout puff, then smiled lazily. "Just not yet."

"The sins of the father," I said under my breath.

"What's that?"

"Nothing. So do you remember when your father was killed?"

"Remember?" Clarence said, coughing into his fist.

"I was the one that found him."

"You're kidding," I said.

"Nope. Thursday nights I had me a pickup game of basketball in the park with some other kids. I was about six-two by high school, and could handle it like a dream.

I thought if I kept growing I could be another Magic

Johnson, the kind of big guy who had the skills of a point guard. Then one Thursday I came home. Picked up one of those ice-cream cones in a wrapper, you know with chocolate around the cone and nuts in the vanilla?

Carried it home with me, went upstairs, first thing I see is blood on the carpet. I couldn't see my dad, that's how big the puddle was. He was lying in the living room, the puddle had spread into the hallway. I go in there, and he's facedown, arms above his head like he was trying to fly and fell from the sky."

"You saw the words?" I said.

"Yeah. Just barely, but they were in the carpet. Lucky for us we had an off-white carpet, otherwise I might have missed it. The Fury. That's what my dad wrote while he was dying on our floor."

"I can't even imagine," I said.

"No," Clarence said, putting the joint into an ashtray.

"You can't. The cops told me they used a silencer. It took a few years until I knew what that meant."

"My brother was killed the same way," I said.

Nobody spoke for a moment. Then I said, "So once you came out and saw him, you called the cops?"

"No. First I tried to wake him up," Clarence said. He spoke slowly, the words rusty like they hadn't been spoken in a long time. His voice was soft yet gritty, and it chilled me to the bone. "I turned him over. The back of his head was almost gone. I remember seeing bone Jason Pinter and brain on the floor, but I was a kid. I figured there was always a way to put someone back together. I turned him over, saw that glassy look in his eyes, the same look you see on the mannequins in department stores. And I held my father's head in my hands and tried to get my daddy to wake up. Finally a neighbor heard me crying and called the cops. She actually reported it as a domestic disturbance, thinking my dad was beating me. Then when they came in and saw him…man, that's a picture that'll never go away."

I was almost afraid to ask, but I said, "What hap pened then?"

"The cops came and took me away. I stood outside and watched a whole mess of them go into our building, wearing gloves, carrying all sorts of equipment to bag and tag my dad. I'd seen bodies before. Even if my dad was straight, that's a dirty game, and some of his friends didn't play the same way. It's not the same when it's your kind. Whether you love 'em or not, when it's your own flesh and blood lying there, something just dries up inside of you. Drains the life out of you."

Inside, I knew how Clarence felt. Only to a much smaller degree.

"Then I got sent to foster care. Lived with a nice old family until I turned eighteen. Moved out, went to school and never seen them since."

"You graduate?" I asked.

"Cum laude," Clarence said. "I don't like to keep up appearances, but this is my crash pad. My real place of business is in Gramercy."

"What kind of work do you do?" I asked.

"Graphic design," he said.

"That's funny," I said. "Do you know a woman named Rose Keller?"

"Sounds familiar, why?"

"Friend of my brother's. Also works as a graphic designer."

"Hmm…" Clarence tapped a finger against his lower lip. "Think I might have smoked with her once or twice.

Or maybe more." He smiled.

"She's kicked her habits. I guess creative people do creative things to their mind."

"I never lose the sharpness. It doesn't affect my work."

Then Clarence rattled off the names of several mul tibillion-dollar companies. He took a business card from a pile on his desk and handed it to me. It had his name, address, e-mail and Web site URL. The tagline read

Your dream can be a reality. "I have a portfolio of all my clients. You check out their Web sites, that's all me.

Half a dozen Fortune 500 companies."

"Not bad at all."

The joint had burned out. Clarence didn't seem to notice.

"That all you need, Parker?" Clarence asked. "I ap preciate thinking about the good times and all, but my day is wasting."

"One more thing," I said. "The note your father wrote on the floor. The Fury. Do you remember your father ever talking about anyone who went by that name?"

"Nah," Clarence said, waving his hand. "My dad never brought his work home with him."

"He was killed because of his work," I said. "I'd say that's taking it home with you."

Clarence didn't take to that comment very kindly, and stood up. "He never mentioned anyone by that name.

But I know what you're getting at. I've read the books.

I know what some people think. But a hustle's a hustle.

There's no greater power. No Keyser Soze sitting up in a tower somewhere twisting the wills of men. It's a big racket, is all it is. People play to make money. The cards are shuffled every so often, and my dad was one of those cards. Sucks for him and for me, but that's the way it goes. So don't go spreading any rumors, 'cause they ain't true."

I wanted to tell Clarence that for untrue rumors, he was quite adamant about making sure I knew he thought nothing of them.

"Thanks for giving me some of your time," I said.

"And I'm sorry for your loss."

"About twenty years too late, but I appreciate the sentiment."

Clarence led me to the door. The joint was a sad, for gotten nub in the ashtray. I turned around to shake his hand, when something caught my eye.

There was a futon resting in the far corner. Red cushion. Lots of stains from cigarettes, liquor, or both.

Something underneath the sofa was twinkling, shining in the low light.

I stepped around Clarence to get a closer look.

"What're you doing?" he asked.

I felt a tightness in my chest as I walked to the futon.

Dropping down to one knee, I peered underneath to see. Something told me I already knew what it was.

I felt a strong hand, Clarence's hand, grip my shoulder and squeeze. Pain coursed through the joint as he found the bone and dug in.

"Listen, man, you've had your fun. Leave or I'm gonna call the cops."

Ignoring him, I reached under the futon and grabbed the item. Standing back up, his hand still like a vise, I opened it to see what lay in my palm.

I felt the grip loosen as we both stared. My heart was hammering. I couldn't believe it.

Turning to face Clarence Willingham, I held out a small diamond earring in my hand. The companion to the earring I found up at Blue Mountain Lake by BethAnn Downing's body.

"Where is Helen Gaines?" I asked.