Deacon King Kong(35)

Sister Gee could not completely keep a smirk from climbing across her face. “If this is the move they’re making, it’s sideways,” she said. “Sportcoat’s seventy-one. He ain’t no drug dealer.”

Potts continued, “We’d like to talk to him.”

“You won’t have no trouble finding him. He’s a deacon in this here church. Some call him Deacon Cuffy. But most call him Sportcoat on account of him liking to wear them things. You can get his name easily enough from that. That’s the most I can offer you. I got to live here.”

“You know him well?”

“Twenty years. Since I was twenty-eight.”

Potts quickly did the math in his head. She was ten years younger than me, he thought. He found himself straightening his jacket to cover his slight paunch. “What’s his job?” he asked.

“Odd jobs mostly. Does a bit of everything. Works over at Itkin’s Liquors some days. Cleans our basement other days. Takes out the trash. Gardens for a few white folks around these parts. He’s got a real green thumb. Can do just about anything with plants. He’s known for that. And for drinking. And baseball.”

Potts thought a moment. “Is this the umpire from the baseball games between you and the Watch Houses? The one that yells and runs around all the bases?”

“One and the same.”

Potts laughed. “Funny fella. I saw those games when I was on patrol sometimes. There was a hell of a ballplayer down there. Some kid . . . he was about fourteen or so. He could pitch like the dickens.”

“That’s Deems. The one he shot.”

“You’re kidding.”

She sighed and was silent a moment. “Deems sat right where you is every Sunday till he was twelve or thirteen. Sportcoat—Deacon Cuffy—he was Deems’s Sunday school teacher. And his coach. And everything else to him. Till Hettie died. That’s his wife.”

This is why, Potts thought bitterly, I got to get out of the business. “What happened to her?”

“She fell in the harbor and drowned. Two years ago. Nobody ever did figure that out.”

“You think your man had anything to do with that?”

“Sportcoat ain’t my man. I been low in my life, but not that low. I’m married. To the minister here.”

Potts felt his heart fall. “I see,” he said.

“He ain’t had nothing to do with Hettie dying—Sportcoat, I’m talking about. It’s just how things work around here. Fact is, he was one of the few around here who really loved his wife.”

She sat very still as she spoke, but her lovely olive eyes bore a softness and a hurt so deep that when he looked in them he saw the swirls of pools beneath; he felt as if he were looking at a piece of ice cream left on a picnic table in the hot sun too long. Regret poured out of her eyes like water. She seemed to be breaking apart in front of him.

He felt himself reddening and looked away. He was about to blurt an apology when he heard her say, “You looks a lot better in street clothes than you do wearing that fancy uniform. I guess that’s why I remember you.”

Later, much later, it occurred to him that maybe she remembered him because she had been watching him, sitting outside the bar with his friends listening to the bitter soldiers of the IRA swear at the British and complain about the neighborhood going down because the Negro and the Spanish had arrived with their civil rights nonsense, taking the subway jobs, the janitor jobs, the doorman jobs, fighting for the scraps and chicken bones the Rockefellers and all the rest tossed to them all. He found himself stammering, “So I needn’t look into her death?”

“Look all you want. Hettie was a hard woman. She was a hard woman because she lived a hard life out here. But she was good through and through. She wore the pants in that house. Sportcoat did everything she told him. Except,” she chuckled, “when it came to that cheese.”

“Cheese?”

“They give out free cheese in one of the buildings every first Saturday of the month. Hettie hated that. The two of them fought about it all the time. But other than that, they were good together.”

“What do you think happened to her?”

“She walked into the harbor and drowned herself. Things ain’t been right around this church since.”

“Why’d she do it?”

“She was tired, I reckon.”

Potts sighed. “Should I write that in my report?”

“Write whatever you want. The truth is, I hope Sportcoat’s run off. Deems ain’t worth going to jail for. Not no more.”

“I understand. But your guy’s armed. Maybe unstable. That creates instability in a community.”

Sister Gee snorted. “Things got unstable ’round here four years ago when that new drug come in. This new stuff—I don’t know what they call it—you smoke it, you put it in your veins with needles . . . however you do it, once you do it a few times you is stuck with it. Never seen nothing like it around here before, and I seen a lot. This projects was safe till this new drug come in. Now the old folks is getting clubbed coming home from work every night, getting robbed outta their little payday money so these junkies can buy more of Deems’s poison. He ought to be ashamed of hisself. His grandfather would kill him if he was living.”

“I understand. But your man can’t take the law into his own hands. That’s what this is for,” he said, holding up the warrant.