C H A P T E R • 29
I gave Bobby a minute and then I stood up and ran the few steps to the corner where I could see him walking down Powell and rolling the small suitcase and with the bag of tapes in the other hand. He heaved them into his Caddy and drove away.
I heard the deep comfort of a bass voice. “Probably going to the Kat if I know Bop.”
I whirled around to find two men I didn’t recognize at first in the dark. One pushed a handkerchief into my hand. They were Daddy’s friends Riley and Joseph. I put the handkerchief up to my nose.
“Better have your eye looked at. And you’ll need to pack your nose,” Riley said.
“Listen to Riley,” Joseph said. “He knows about working in the corner on broken noses.”
“Soon as you call the police. Somebody killed Heavy and the phone is dead in there too.”
“Clarence is dead in there?”
“He’s dead in there.”
“Damn.”
“How long have you been out here?” I asked them.
“We stopped for a minute before we went to Ruthies to watch the Brooklyn Nets play some basketball. We saw Clarence go in. He had a bag.”
“And when we came back and saw the gate open, we decided to wait and see what was going on and that’s when we saw you and Bobby running out.”
“Did that son of a bitch do that?” Riley asked.
“Yes. Bobby Bop punched me in the face.”
Riley went to find a phone, and Joseph and I walked over to Al’s.
While Joseph went down the hall to verify Heavy was dead, I wrote down what I remembered from the reels and videocassettes that were gone and a description of both Bobby Bop and what I remembered of Heavy and how he was lying—just to have them.
“Heavy changed his clothes,” Joseph said, when he came back from the bedroom. “He must have a whole wardrobe of those suits. Maybe they were in the bag he brought in.”
“Or, it might have been a bag of money. Bobby found a suitcase of money hidden in the back in the compost box.”
“Maybe. But he always wears a sweat suit with a hood. But red. The sweats he was wearing was red.”
“Don’t tell the police the thing I said about the money. Okay?”
We told the police everything else. They kept us in the living room in one area near the door and took samples from our hands and clothes. I heard Heavy’s injury described as traumatic head injury and the drug inventory to include marijuana, crack, Valium and fentanyl.
While detectives were making field tests and taking pictures, Riley ministered to my face.
When I was sitting across from the detective, he picked up a plastic bag with the throwing star in it and turned it over several times and touched his thumb against one of the 8 points. “Is this blood?”
“No comment.”
“You know I could get you for criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree for this. It’s a class A misdemeanor to carry that thing around.”
“It’s not mine.”
He asked me again to describe the crime scene, now very much changed, compromised, he called it. He seemed surprised when I described it the same way as last time.
“How do you know what’s missing? You said this was the first time you were here.”
“I didn’t say I know everything that’s missing. I just know Bobby took some of the cans and videotapes with him.”
I didn’t tell him about the money—not the loose bills Adrianne picked up off the floor or the suitcase of money in the compost box.
“Miss Washington, you should buy a lottery ticket,” he told me. “You’re lucky he let you get away.”
“I don’t know. Seems to me I’ve used up a lot of my luck. But not tonight. He didn’t let me anything.”
When we walked outside, we got our pictures taken by the downtown news people.
At Harlem Hospital, they described the gauze packing Riley had inserted as a professional job and my nose as not broken.
At home, I slept iced and propped up with pillows.