Deacon King Kong(69)
“What’s that got to do with Sportcoat?”
“How many times do I have to say it? Your guy kicked off something big. I don’t know that he meant to. In fact, I’m sure he didn’t. But he’s got the wrong end of things. There’s a drug war brewing. You don’t want your guy or your church in the middle of it. These drug lords are a different breed. They don’t play by the rules like the old crooks did. There’s no handshake or silent agreements, no looking the other way. Nobody’s safe. Nothing’s sacred. There’s too much money involved.”
“What’s that got to do with us?”
“I told you before. Turn your guy in and back out of it. Stay out of the way. We can protect him.”
Sister Gee felt hot. She looked up into the sky, squinting, then raised a long, lovely brown arm to shade her eyes as she peered at him. “I’m burning up out here. Can we get in the shade?”
It was as if she’d asked him to go to the beach, or swimming, or to lounge in a cool air-conditioned library someplace, to sit and read Irish poems, the kind he liked, the simple ones, “Symbols of Erie” and “The Diaries of Humphrey,” the ones his grandmother loved and taught him.
She walked past him, wading through the weeds to the back of the church building, out of view of the side door where Dominic, Bum-Bum, and Miss Izi were loading chairs. He followed behind, noting the shapely figure beneath the dress. When she reached the shade of the old building, a cinder-block structure built on a foundation of solid red bricks, she placed her back to the wall just underneath the faded painting of Jesus with his arms spread and leaned against it, propping her foot on the wall, showing a golden-brown knee. He faced her, standing just inside the shade, his hands clasped in front of him, rubbing his thumbs, trying not to stare. Everything she did, Potts realized, every move—the gentle arcs of her neck and mouth, the way she held herself erect along the wall and stretched a long arm out to wipe her forehead with gentle silklike smoothness—made something inside him want to kneel down.
“Sportcoat ain’t hard to find,” she said. “He’s around. You wanna go get him, go ahead. It’s not gonna change nothing. Deems is still out there slinging poison like clockwork every day at the flagpole at noon. He hasn’t moved a peep toward bothering old Sportcoat, far as I know. Fact is, he’s more polite now than before. They say he’s changed a little. He don’t sell to grandmothers or little kids now. Of course that don’t matter, since they ain’t got to do but walk five blocks to the Watch Houses and get what they want. Some folks send their children to buy drugs for ’em. Imagine that? Sending a little child nine, ten years old out to buy drugs. This projects was never that way. What are we doing wrong?”
She seemed so sad as she said it, it was all Potts could do to stop himself from placing an arm around her right there, right behind the church in the shade under Jesus’s sad painted gaze, and saying, “It’s all right. I got you.”
Instead he said, “I’m speaking as a friend, miss. You—all of you—need to step back and let us do our job here.”
“Arrest Deems then. That’ll make it easier.”
“We arrest him today, ten guys will be in his place tomorrow. You arrest ten guys, ten more guys will come. You know why? They’re being bailed out. By the same man who sent that kid Earl to your little party. It’s a whole organization we’re talking about. This guy looking for your Sportcoat is part of a syndicate. You know what that means? Organized crime. That’s why they call it organized. Guys like him have legitimate businesses mixed with illegitimate ones. He’s not just one guy. He’s an operator. He’s got employees working for him. He runs a factory. The drugs they sell at your flagpole, they don’t come packaged. They come to this country raw. They need to be prepared, prepped, and packaged, just like you’d package aspirin or soda pop to sell in a store. This guy’s operation runs all the way from Queens to Georgia. It’s something you can’t get in the way of.”
“Are you interested in doing that?”
“The police? Us? Yes.”
“Well, you got us wrong,” she said tersely. “All’s we want is our Christmas Club money.”
He laughed. “What are you talking about? You step in the middle of a major Brooklyn drug operation and send the drug king’s muscle man home by subway with a lump on his head the size of Philadelphia. You threaten the same muscle man by saying you know his dead minister father. All for your church club money?”
“He came here courting trouble,” she said angrily. “And them’s hard dollars in our church club money. Nobody knows how much is in there.”
“Whatever it is, it’s not enough to risk your skin. You have no idea what you’re dealing with!” Potts said.
“You don’t live here,” she said bitterly. “I know Deems’s whole family. His grandfather, Mr. Louis, was a hard man. But it’s a hard life out here. He came to New York from Kentucky with ten cents in his pocket. He swept and mopped an office for forty years till he died. And then his wife passed. His daughter prayed in this church every Sunday for years. Between you and me, she drinks like a fish and ain’t worth a nickel. It was her son, Mr. Louis’s grandson Deems, he was the gem of that family. He was the one with all the promise. That boy could throw a ball better’n anybody around here. He had the chance to get out on account of just that one thing. Now he’s gonna die or go to jail, which amounts to the same thing. Once Deems comes outta prison, if he lives long enough to go in, he’ll be worse than he was when first he gone in. Back and forth he’ll go. None of that fits in your little reports and warrants does it? When the newspaper writes their little stories about coloreds and Spanish swinging around Brooklyn like a bunch of monkeys in trees, none of that gets in there, now does it?”