Deacon King Kong(7)

Sportcoat, all agreed, had finally run out of luck. He was, truly, a dead man.





3





JET



There were sixteen witnesses at the Cause Houses plaza when Sportcoat signed his death warrant. One of them was a Jehovah’s Witness stopping passersby, three were mothers with babies in carriages, one was Miss Izi of the Puerto Rican Statehood Society, one was an undercover cop, seven were dope customers, and three were Five Ends congregation members who were passing out flyers announcing the church’s upcoming annual Friends and Family Day service—which would feature Deacon Sportcoat himself preaching his first-ever sermon. Not one of them breathed a word to the cops about the shooting, not even the undercover cop, a twenty-two-year-old detective from the Seventy-Sixth Precinct named Jethro “Jet” Hardman, the first-ever black detective in the Cause Houses.

Jet had been working on Deems Clemens for seven months. It was his first undercover assignment, and what he found made him nervous. Clemens, he’d learned, was the low-hanging fruit on a drug network that led up the food chain to Joe Peck, a major Italian crime figure in Brooklyn whose violent syndicate gave every patrolman in Jet’s Seventy-Sixth Precinct who valued his life the straight-out jitters. Peck had connections—inside the precinct, down at Brooklyn’s city hall, and with the Gorvino crime family, guys who would stake out a claim on a cop’s guts for a quarter and get away with it. Jet had been warned about Peck from his old partner, an elderly Irish sergeant named Kevin “Potts” Mullen, an honest cop recently returned to the precinct after being banished to Queens for the dreadful habit of actually wanting to lock up bad guys. A former detective busted back to swing sergeant, Potts had dropped by the precinct one afternoon to check on his former charge after discovering Jet had volunteered to work undercover in the Cause Houses.

“Why risk your skin?” Potts asked him.

“I’m kicking doors down, Potts,” Jet said proudly. “I like being first. I was the first Negro to play trombone in my elementary school, PS 29. Then first Negro in Junior High School 219 to join the Math Club. Now I’m the first black detective in the Cause. It’s a new world, Potts. I’m a groundbreaker.”

“You’re an idiot,” Potts said. They were standing outside the Seven-Six as they talked. Potts, clad in his sergeant’s uniform, leaned on the bumper of his squad car and shook his head. “Get out,” he said. “You’re outta your league.”

“I just got in, Potts. I’m cool.”

“You’re in over your head.”

“It’s just small-time stuff, Potts. Grift. Jewelry. Burglary. A little narcotics.”

“A little? What’s your cover?”

“I’ll be a janitor with a drug habit. First black janitor in the projects under the age of twenty-three!”

Potts shook his head. “This is drugs,” he said.

“So what?”

“Think of a horse,” Potts said. “Now think of a fly on the horse’s back. That’s you.”

“It’s an opportunity, Potts. The force needs Negro undercovers.”

“Is that how the lieutenant sold it to you?”

“His exact words. Why you dogging me, man? You worked undercover yourself.”

“That was twenty years ago.” Potts sighed, feeling hungry. It was nearly lunchtime, and he was thinking of mutton stew and bacon stew with potatoes, the latter of which he loved. That’s how he got his nickname—Potts—from his grandmother, because as a toddler he couldn’t say “potato.”

“Undercover work was mostly memos back then,” he said. “Horse racing. Burglaries. Now it’s heroin. Cocaine. There’s a load of money in it. Thank God the Italians around here in my day didn’t like drugs.”

“You mean like Joe Peck? Or the Elephant?” Jet tried to keep the excitement out of his voice.

Potts frowned, then glanced over his shoulder at the precinct building to make sure nobody he knew was within earshot. “Those two got ears in this precinct. Leave ’em alone. Peck’s crazy. He’s probably gonna get burnt by his own people. The Elephant . . .” He shrugged. “He’s old-fashioned. Trucking, construction, storage—he’s a smuggler. He moves stuff out of the harbor. Cigarettes, tires, that kind of stuff. He doesn’t work in drugs. He’s a hell of a gardener.”

Jet squinted at Potts, who seemed distracted.

“He’s a weird bird, the Elephant. You’d think he’d favor Lionel trains or toy boats, or something. His yard looks like a flower show.”

“Maybe he’s growing flowers to hide marijuana plants,” Jet said. “That’s illegal, by the way.”

Potts sucked his teeth and shot an irritated glance at him. “I thought you liked to draw comic books.”

“I do, man. I draw them all the time.”

“Then get back in the blues and draw your comics at night. You wanna be the first at something? Be the first Negro cop smart enough to forget the Dick Tracy crap and retire with your head in one piece.”

“Who’s Dick Tracy?” Jet asked.

“Don’t you read the funny papers?”

Jet shrugged.

Potts snickered. “Get out. Don’t be an idiot.”