“I’d better not eat any then,” he said. “I’m allergic to sulfites.” Lucille swept the offending salad bowl off the table and marched from the room.
Rankin sat now, looking dejectedly at his hands. “I came up here hoping to get away from gangs, you know. My wife doesn’t want me having to work around them. She’d have a fit if she knew I was waiting here in a dive, meeting a bunch of them for dinner, without even any kind of bodyguard.”
“I won’t tell if you don’t,” I assured him.
We sat quietly for a few minutes. It seemed to take forever for the minute hand on my watch to move from one slash mark to the next. Eventually, Lucille reappeared laden with two platters of food. She set the chili burger in front of me and slung the other one onto the table, where it came to rest in front of Chief Rankin. He stared down at it, dismay written on his face.
“This doesn’t look like salmon,” he said.
“It’s ham,” Lucille told him firmly. “We’re out of salmon.”
With that she flounced from the room before a stunned Chief Rankin had a chance to reply. It was all I could do to keep from laughing aloud. Rankin had violated one of the prime unwritten rules of Doghouse behavior-offending a waitress-and Lucille had seen to it that he was suitably punished.
I think he would have gone after her, but just then the door opened again, and our guests sauntered into the room.
I’ve been told all my life that America is a melting pot. The Hispanics may have given rise to the general theme of cool macho dudeness, but urban blacks have elevated it to an art form, and these six dudes were the coolest of the cool.
They came wearing the uniforms and colors-blues, reds, and blacks-of their three diverging armies. They wore leather and gold chains and three-inch Afros with shaved spots over some ears. They stalked into the room, but there was no elbowing, no jabbing or jibing or trading of insults. They filed in silently with all the solemnity of young men attending a funeral. Behind veiled eyelids, they sized each other up, but no one said a word.
Our guests were a disturbing-looking bunch, and the dead silence made it even worse. It got scarier still when the last to arrive peered into the room and then went away, returning with a large leather briefcase, a Hartmann. He set the case on the floor near the door with a resounding thump. The case was big enough to hold a whole arsenal of handguns and other death-dealing weapons. My tie suddenly felt a full inch and a half too tight.
Lucille followed the case into the room, order pad in hand, no-nonsense mask on her face. “Who all’s eating?” she demanded.
One of the six seated himself directly across the table from Rankin. Staring at the chief with undisguised, malevolent hatred, he assumed the role of spokesman. “Depends on who’s payin‘,” he said.
Despite his premeeting case of nerves, Chief Rankin seemed to have recovered his equanimity. He met the young man’s gaze. “I am,” he said. “Have whatever you want.”
Lucille turned to the person closest to her. He may or may not have been twenty-one. Unlike Rankin, he had obviously been a guest of the Doghouse on numerous previous occasions. Without needing to consult the menu, he ordered a Bob’s Burger and a beer, but the spokesman squelched the latter.
“No drinkin‘,” he rasped, aiming his smoldering gaze on the offending henchman. “No beer. We’re here to take care of business.”
No one spoke while Lucille continued taking orders. At last she left the room. “It might be nice if we started with introductions,” Chief Rankin began. “I’m Chief of Police-”
“No introductions,” the leader interrupted. “We don’t need no introductions. We don’t need no nicey-nice. We’re here to talk business.”
“What kind of business?” Rankin asked.
“Look, I got me a business. I go to work every day. It’s a capitalist business. Sometimes I got merchandise to sell. Sometimes I buy. It’s a free country, and my business is s’posed to make me a profit, but I’m in this squeeze play, man. I’m gettin‘ it in the shorts from both ends. I don’t mind payin’ protection. Like I said, it’s a free country. Cops got to make a profit too. What I do mind is gettin‘ squeezed even after I pay my protection. That’s not cool, brother. That is not the American way.”
Rankin looked at him in amazement. “You’ve been paying protection money to officers in my department?”
The leader leered back at him. “I sure as hell ain’t been payin‘ it to the United Way!”
“Who are they? I want their names!”
“Whoa now, I tell you that, I’m breakin‘ my word, and all that money I spent on protection goes down the drain.”
“If you’re not going to name names, why are we here then? What’s the point?”
“The point is, I want to stay in business. Most black folks leave us alone and most white folks do the same. Some of ‘em get in our way, and we kill ’em, but most of ‘em leave us alone, and that’s cool, man. That’s good for business. Except now, everybody’s thinkin’ we did this murder thing, that we killed Ben Weston and all those little kids.”
He paused and snapped his finger. “Ben Weston? I coulda smoked that mother in a minute, but I didn’t-not him, not his woman, and not those kids, neither.”
For the first time, he looked away from Rankin and stared hard at me. “I give orders. I say shoot to kill. They kill. I say scare the shit out of ‘em. The bullet hits the mirror. Understand?”
I understood all right. It was as blatant a confession as I’ve ever been given, yet I knew there wasn’t a damn thing I’d ever be able to do about it. Still, it wasn’t a time to back off.
“Who were you trying to scare?” I asked. “Ben Weston or me?”
“Ben Weston busts my homeys. I been paying One-Time for protection so me and my boys don’t go down, but he’s doin‘ it anyways, hidin’ ‘em, makin’ ‘em forget what they’s s’posed to do. So I’m gonna scare Ben Weston, scare him real good, excepten he’s dead already and my homey’s too damn dumb to figure it out.”
Lucille came into the room and delivered the food, studiously ignoring Chief Rankin. By mutual unspoken agreement, all discussion ceased until she went out, once more closing the door behind her. When she left, Rankin resolutely picked up his knife and began attacking the cold ham steak solidifying on his plate. When no one else spoke, I finally put in my own two cents’ worth.
“You said you were going to help us,” I said quietly. “Do you know who killed Ben Weston?”
My counterpart lifted his hand and the young man nearest the briefcase hefted it onto the table. My heart skipped a beat as I wondered if now was when the guns would come out and the shooting would start, but no one made a move to open it.
“You know a homey named Knuckles Russell?” the speaker asked.
I nodded. “I know him.”
“You see this case here? It’s his, but somebody stole it. Been gone two maybe three months, and Knuckles is all pissed off ‘cause it’s from his mother. Then yesterday morning it shows back up at the place where Knuckles use’ to live. Like magic, now you see it now you don’t.”
“He must have brought it back.”
My opponent shook his head. “That motherfucker walks on my turf, I’d smoke him, and he knows it. But it’s his all right. His bag and his shit.” He shoved the case down the tabletop, stopping it when it was directly in front of me.
“Open it, One-Time,” he said to me. “Open it and see for yourself.”
I flipped the latches on the case and lifted the lid. The only thing visible inside was a pair of sweats, red sweats, that had been crammed into it. But there was something else in there as well. It came out and wafted heavily through the room. Homicide cops smell that smell all the time-the sickeningly overpowering odor of rotting dried blood.
In a roomful of menacing Bloods, Crips, and BGD, there are some words you don’t say if you want to leave the room alive. “Blood” is one of those words. Keeping my mouth shut, I closed the lid on the briefcase and looked back at the spokesman, who was regarding me levelly across the table. When I didn’t look away, he picked up his Bob’s Burger and took a huge bite.