Martini paid up, put some change on the counter, and left John’s. He went south on Georgia Avenue. He loved his Nova but usually walked from his mother’s house to the station and back again. He was never in a hurry to get home.
Across the street, a small crowd was gathered around the box office of the Sheridan. When they were teenagers, Martini and his brother, Angelo, used to climb up a fire ladder that led to the roof and sneak in a window that opened to a hall near the projection booth. If the manager, a guy named Renaldi, didn’t nail them right away, they’d hide in the men’s room until the show began, then take their seats in the dark. The theater was the hot spot of the neighborhood, an A house that was also a good place to try and pick up girls. Now they ran second-bill westerns, Universal Bs, and Greek movies on Wednesday nights.
Tonight was a George Peppard picture, Rough Night in Jericho, had Dean Martin in it, too. All Italian Americans knew that Martin’s real name was Martini. Angie used to ask him, “Hey, Dom, you think we’re related, like?” and Martini would smack him on the back of the head and say, “Yeah, and Nancy Sinatra’s our sister, too.”
Dominic Martini would have given his life, right now, to take back all the times he’d smacked his brother or called him stupid or a fag. He was only trying to toughen him up, but still. If he could see him again, just once more, he’d hold him tight.
He went down to Lou’s, a pool hall next to the firehouse, and got a game. Someone put “The Ballad of the Green Berets” on the jukebox, and a couple of drunks started singing along. Martini called his pocket, sunk the eight, and handed his stick to a guy he didn’t know. One of the drunks stepped out of his way as he walked across the poolroom. Martini was known around the neighborhood as the marine who’d seen action in Vietnam. He supposed he was feared. What the drunk didn’t know, what none of them knew, was that his fighting days were done. He lit a cigarette as he left the place and headed west.
He walked onto the grounds of Fort Stevens, going along the cannons, hearing the pop of the flag and the lanyard clanging against the pole. His history was in this park. He’d had his first smoke here, got shitfaced on hard liquor here, hid beer and things he’d stolen in the ammo bunker built into the hill. As a kid, he’d run across this field from Officer Pappas, laughing and yelling “Jacques” over his shoulder as he hotfooted it in the direction of his house. He’d busted his cherry here one night, when he and a couple of his buddies pulled a train on a girl named Laurie, who they all called Whorie, after she’d dared them to. He thought it was all good fun and he never thought the things he was doing would have any bearing on what he would be as a man. But now it seemed that all of it had brought him to where he was today.
He’d read the newspaper on his break, back at the station. Buzz had said not to worry, that a hit-and-run on a colored guy wouldn’t even make the news. He was wrong. It was only a few paragraphs in the City section, but it was there. Vernon Wilson was seventeen, nearing graduation at Roosevelt High School, working, at the time of his death, as a delivery boy for Posin’s deli. He had been accepted to Grambling College and was planning to start there in the fall. He was survived by a mother and a brother. Police were said to be working on the case but had no concrete leads at this time.
Martini cursed himself as he left the park and walked down Piney Branch Road.
Buzz had been wrong about plenty. The newspaper people and the police did “give a shit.” They were going to look for the killers, even though the boy was “just a coon.”
Buzz had told him to stop crying about something he couldn’t change. Buzz had told him to keep his mouth shut. He would do that, because he always did what Buzz said. But there was a part of Martini that hoped the truth would come to light. He felt it was important for people to understand that what happened to Vernon Wilson was unprovoked and in no way his fault. Wilson’s mother deserved to know this. His brother did, too.
Martini entered his house on Longfellow. The smell of garlic and basil was heavy as he went through the door. The air inside was warm and still. His mother, Angela, sat in his father’s old chair, wearing black, watching a Hazel rerun on their old RCA Victor. She turned her head and looked at him. Her face was waxy in the light.
“Ma.”
“There’s Sunday gravy and pasta in the kitchen.”
“I already ate.”
His mother turned back to the television. Martini went up to his room and lay down on the bed.
THEY HAD PUT Kenneth Willis in one of those rooms at the Ninth Precinct house, had a table and a chair and nothing else. The table was bolted to the floor, and beneath it ran an iron bar. They had cuffed one of his hands to the bar. His face was fucked from when he’d fallen to the sidewalk, and also from the beat-down they’d given him in this room. He’d said something smart to one of the arresting officers, and that had set them off. They must have known about his priors, too; the statutory rape charges on his sheet always got their blood up. Willis was used to getting hit by the police, he expected it, even, so it wasn’t any shock. He could have used a little whiskey, though, something, to rub on his gums. White boy had knocked loose one of his teeth.
The one who’d hit him, Officer James Mahaffie, and another one, Officer William Durkin, both in plainclothes, were in the room with him now. Standing over him and getting real close, how they liked to do.
Willis knew how to play these two. Give them back the lip they gave you. That’s how you got respect from their kind.
“What were you gonna do with this, then?” said Durkin, holding the single stocking they’d recovered from Willis’s slacks.
“This girl I been datin’,” said Willis, “she left it over my crib. I was gonna return it to her.”
“What, this girl only has one leg?”
“She has one pussy. That’s all I need to know.”
“You’re a real stud. I’m just curious: You ever had a woman over the age of fourteen?”
“Your mother was,” said Willis.
Mahaffie, big and blond, slapped him viciously across the face. Willis put his tongue to the loose tooth, moved it, and tasted blood. He felt dizzy and hot.
“A gun and a stocking,” said Durkin. “You were on your way to knock over something when we nailed you outside your place. Isn’t that right?”
“Huh?”
“Tell us about your accomplice. Where were you headed when we picked you up?”
“I was just goin’ out for a walk.”
“Liar.”
“What’d you say?”
“You’re a lyin’ piece of black shit.”
“Fuck you, whitey.”
Mahaffie threw a deep punch into Willis’s jaw and knocked him off his chair. His arm twisted in the fall, and he felt an arrow of pain in the wrist still cuffed to the bar. Something had torn in his shoulder, too. Mahaffie righted the chair, and Willis struggled to his knees. He retched as he managed to get back in the seat. He spit blood and his tooth on the table. He looked them in the eye in turn.