I heard a click on the line. He had hung up. In the kitchen, the bird was yapping madly. I depressed one of the buttons on the receiver rest, got a dial tone, and immediately phoned Henry Garavelli. He picked up on the third ring.
“Garavelli Television,” he said.
“Henry, this is Ben. Are you free this afternoon?”
“What’s up?” he said.
“I’m looking for a lady named Natalie Fletcher,” I said. “Thirty-three years old, five feet six inches tall, slender, long black hair, may be dressed as Cleopatra.”
“Cleopatra?”
“That’s right, Henry. I’m expecting her to show at 12 East Ninety-sixth, near Fairleigh. She’s supposed to visit a woman named Susan Howell at two o’clock, Apartment 12C. If she shows, she may be driving a 1971 blue Buick station wagon. Stick with her, and get back to me.”
“Got you,” he said, and hung up.
I went out to the kitchen, and told the bird to shut up. He did not shut up. He yammered all the while I prepared myself some bacon, eggs, toast, and coffee, and continued squawking while I ate. I put the dishes into the sink, glared at the bird before I left the kitchen, and then showered, shaved, and dressed for the trip uptown to Hammerlock. I was just leaving the apartment when Lisette let herself in with her key. It was twenty minutes to three, and she usually came to work at eleven in the morning. Lisette had a hangover. She explained that Rene Pierre, her professor friend, had brought home a case of very good Bordeaux last night, and they had consumed three bottles of it before midnight.
I told her to go swallow a raw egg.
Twenty-One
There are almost eight million people living in this city, and nine percent of them—more than 700,000—are black. Of these, close to half a million live in the rank ghetto known as Hammerlock. Knowing the bitter humor with which slum dwellers baptize the rat-infested areas in which they’re forced to live (as, for example, La Perla in San Juan, a pearl indeed), you might automatically conclude that the name of a wrestler’s hold had been applied to Hammerlock only after it became a slum—the grip of poverty metaphorically pulling the slum dweller’s dignity up behind his back and yanking on it till it broke.
Wrong.
Once upon a time, and long before my own Dutch grandfather came to these shores, the section now known as Hammerlock was interlaced with canals built by his ancestors. The harbor and river, then as now, were busy with seagoing traffic; the network of canals eased the clutter, diverting barges loaded with merchandise onto the inland waterways. Hammerlock in those days was an area of farms and forests, its dirt roadways permitting the passage of a single horse and wagon, or a coach perhaps, but certainly not two of them approaching from opposite directions. The canals were speedier and safer; then, as now, there were highway robbers everywhere, and they probably thought twice before sticking up a barge, which was a crime close to piracy on the high seas and punishable by hanging. In any case, as with all canal systems, there were locks. These locks were named after the keepers who ran out of the Canalside shacks to open the gates whenever a barge approached. Buersken’s Sluis, Goed-koop’s Sluis, Favejee’s Sluis, Weidinger’s Sluis were all part of the system. As was Hemmer’s Sluis. Well, when the roads were improved, the canals were filled in (some of them, in fact, were filled in to make roadbeds), and the names of the locks vanished together with the locks themselves and the Canalside shacks that had dotted the landscape. But the keeper Hemmer had constructed for himself a house of huge stones cleared from the field beyond his lock, and this remained on the site long after the canal running past it had been filled in. The house itself became known as Hemmer’s Sluis, which was changed to Hammer’s Lock when the English took over the city, and later, long after the house itself had been burned down by the Hessians fighting Washington’s troops, this was shortened to Hammerlock. As a matter of interest, the northernmost corner of the slum named Hammerlock—the part that jutted into the river and pointed a jagged finger of land toward the next states—was called Landslook, a bastardization of Lange’s Lock from days of yore.
I got uptown at about ten minutes to three, found a garage on Liberty and 104th, and parked Maria’s Pinto there. The last known address for Charles S. Carruthers— according to his parole officer’s report—was 8212 McKenzie, four blocks west of Liberty, near the corner of 106th. The day was sunny and mild, and the residents of Hammerlock were out in force to enjoy the good weather, anticipating the winter perhaps, when they would be imprisoned indoors in badly heated apartments. It was no accident that Hammerlock had the highest fire-incidence rate in the entire city, or that most of those fires took place in the wintertime, when cheap and faulty kerosene burners were used to supplement the heat that was supposed to be coming up in the radiators; go fight City Hall.
The citizens regarded me with suspicion, partially because I was a white man in an exclusively black neighborhood, but more specifically because they knew I was fuzz. To them, it didn’t matter that I was retired fuzz. Fuzz is fuzz, and there’s a fuzz look and a fuzz smell. They knew exactly what I was, and they could guess at why I was there—to get one of their people in trouble. They were wrong. I was there looking for a white woman who maybe knew why a white man had stolen a corpse from a mortuary after killing a white employee of the place. But they were right, too. Fuzz is fuzz.
I know too many cops, especially detectives, who are very quick to assume a man is guilty of something or other simply because he looks “bad.” Nine times out of ten, this means he looks “black,” a condition over which he has very little actual control. I know a two-hundred-pound white detective, for example, who beat up a hundred-and-ten-pound black postal clerk coming home from work at two in the morning—because he looked “bad.” He later charged the man with loitering and resisting arrest. I know another white detective—a pair of them, in fact, working as partners—who were investigating a narcotics case and busted into an apartment where a teenage black kid was puffing on a joint. That’s all the kid had on him, that single joint, and it was almost down to a roach when they broke in. Otherwise he was clean. But their stoolie had told them there was a dope factory up in Apartment 6A, and this was Apartment 6A, and there was only a skinny black kid sitting on the bed in his undershirt, half stoned out of his mind on grass, and not knowing what they were talking about. They figured he looked “bad.” They dropped three nickel bags of heroin on the floor, and they called in the cop on the beat to witness the arrest, and when the three cops testified against the kid in court, they made him sound like the dope king of the Western world. He’s now doing time at Brandenheim, upstate. He probably will still look “bad” when he gets out. Some black detectives aren’t much better where it concerns their brothers. Or sisters, as the case may be. I know a black Vice Squad detective who arrested a black woman for violation of Section 887 of the Code of Criminal Procedure—the section defining prostitution. In court, he claimed she came up to him on the street, asked if he wanted to have a good time, set a price, took him up to a hot-bed apartment, and “exposed her privates” to him, which in this city is the moment of truth before which no vice arrest can be made. The charge stuck. The woman was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment at the state reformatory for women in Ashley Hills. No pimp came forward to put up bail for her while she was awaiting trial, no shyster lawyer got her off with a pat on the behind and a fifty-dollar fine. That’s because she wasn’t a prostitute, you see. She was a manicurist at a beauty parlor. The detective who arrested her had been stopping by the place for months, trying to make time with her. He’d finally got the courage to ask her for a date, and when she refused—she was a married woman—he busted her the next day.