Deacon King Kong(94)

Sportcoat shook his head. The sound of hammers banging in his brain had returned. He wished it would stop. With a sigh, he stared at the jug of King Kong in his lap. Booze, he thought. I chose booze over my Moonflower.

He reached over the armrest and picked up the bottle cap. He gently put it on the bottle, screwed it closed slowly, then lifted the bottle off his lap and placed it carefully on the floor.

“Where’d you say Sister Paul was?” he asked.

“Out in Bensonhurst. Near the hospital where Sausage and Deems is.”

Rufus eyed the bottle of King Kong. “If you ain’t sipping, I’ll do the dipping,” he said. He reached down and picked up the bottle, took a deep sip, then turned to hand the bottle to Sportcoat.

But the old man was already out the door and gone.





21





NEW DIRT



Potts drove past the Elephant’s boxcar three times, checking the empty alleys and the nearby streets. He did it both as a precaution and to telegraph his arrival. It was early evening, and at this hour pedestrians at the edge of the Cause Houses were sparse. There was little need to worry about lookouts. In the old days, even kids playing stickball on the docks would interrupt their game to send one of their number dashing off, and the news of a cop’s arrival traveled to the mobsters running card games and loan sharks faster than any telephone.

Today there were no kids playing near the beaten, deserted docks, he noticed, and from the look of things there hadn’t been for a while. Still, it was never a good idea to surprise the Elephant, so he did the exercise anyway, circling the block three times before turning onto the dock where the boxcar lived. He let the cruiser drift slowly onto the dock, then stopped at the door of the boxcar and let the car idle. He sat behind the wheel several minutes, waiting.

He had come alone. He had to. His suspicions about his young partner, Mitch, the lieutenant at the Seven-Six, and the captain above him were just too great. He didn’t blame them for being on the take. If they wanted to climb up the greasy payoff pole, nipping a bit here and there from the family, looking the other way while the crooked bums ran their rackets, that was their business. But three months short of retirement, Potts saw no reason to risk his own pension. He was glad he’d stayed clean in his career, especially now, because a shooting like the one at Vitali Pier three days ago could touch off a drug war or a department political fight. Both were traps that no cop near retirement wanted to be in the vicinity of. You stick your foot in it and before you know it you’re on your own, in the wilderness all by your lonesome, broke self, wondering where your pension went, all boiled up on Benzedrine and coffee, waiting for the political hacks at PBA to come cut you loose, which was like waiting for a herd of crocodiles.

Dirt, he thought bitterly, staring through the windshield. Like the beautiful cleaning woman, Sister Gee, from the church said. “You and I got the same job. We clean dirt.” And dirt it was, he thought. And not just any dirt. New dirt surfacing. He could smell it, feel it coming, and it was big, whatever it was. The Cause was changing, he could see the transformation everywhere. It was 1969; the New York Mets, once the laughingstock of Major League Baseball, would win the World Series in a week. America had landed a man on the moon in July, and the Cause was falling apart. 1969. I’m gonna call it, he thought bitterly. This is the year the Cause falls to bits. He could see the disintegration: old black tenants who had come to New York from the South decades ago were retiring or moving out to Queens; the lovable old drunks, bums, shoplifters, prostitutes, low-level harmless habitual criminals who had once brought him laughs and even solace in his long days as a patrolman and detective, were going, going, and soon to be gone, moving away, dying, disappearing, locked up. Young girls who had once waved at him had matured into unwed drug-addict mothers. A few had fallen into prostitution. Kids who used to joke with him on the way home from school as he patrolled in his car, pulling out trombones from instrument cases and blasting horrible music at his cruiser as it rolled past while he laughed, had vanished—the city was cutting music from the schools, someone said. Kids who had once bragged about their baseball games had become sullen and silent, the baseball fields empty. Just about every young kid who had once waved now walked the other way when his cruiser appeared. Even his old friend Dub Washington, the hobo he had peeled off curbs around the neighborhood on countless cold nights, was worn by the change. He’d seen Dub two days ago and the old wino bore awful news. He’d picked up Dub the day after the Vitali Pier shooting, just routine, his usual once-a-month task of hauling him to nearby Sisters of Mercy on Willoughby Avenue, where the kind Catholic nuns fed him and let him shower and sent him on his way. Dub was harmless and always fun, a wonderful aficionado of city news: he claimed to be the only one in the Cause Houses who read the New York Times every day. But that day Potts found the old man grim and shaken.

“I seen something bad,” Dub said.

“Where?” Potts asked.

“Down at Vitali Pier. Two old fellers walked into a hot mess.”

Dub explained what he’d seen. Young kids. A girl shooter. Two old men. Two young men. Two of them dropped. A third, maybe a fourth, fell into the harbor.

“Who were they?” Potts asked.

“Sportcoat was one,” Dub said. “Hot Sausage the other.”

That did it, Potts thought. That would wrap it up. He’d spent two weeks seeking information about the old man. Nobody knew anything, of course. They all deflected. Leave it to good old Dub to come up with some answers. It was old-time police work: an old source, developed over the years, paying off. There were puzzles here, of course, but as it worked out, Sportcoat apparently got the back end of what he’d delivered on the front. Of course he did. Don’t these stories always end up that way? He’d tried to warn Sister Gee.