The Cocaine Chronicles Read online

  “Pull yourself together, Tommy. I’ve got to go drop off the kids,” she said.

  Fat Tommy was still crying, sitting dejectedly on the side of the bed, long after she had dressed and gone out to drop their boys at her sister’s new hideout in Topanga Canyon.

  2.

  It was still dark when Bea went out. The sun soon poked up. She hardly even noticed. She sped along the freeways and the awakening Valley skies unfurled before her in desolate, pink banners of light. She raced over the back roads, hurtling through space along the crests of the canyons. Again and again she skidded in a cloud of dust against the shoulders of the abyss. Again and again she slowed down a moment, then, thinking better of it, sped back up. She couldn’t stop looking at her boys, couldn’t stop cursing Pemberton under her breath and sadly reflecting on how that asshole had put them all up to their eyeballs in shit. The boys woke up during the forty-minute drive over to Karesha’s, with Bea vainly scanning the radio the whole time for news of Pemberton’s arrest.

  Bea’s mother was looking out the window of her sister’s place when she drove up. Her mother would drive the boys up to Santa Barbara and they would take a cross-country bus to Texas that night. The three women and the two infant boys cried until Bea’s mother drove off in Karesha’s pink Lexus, fleeing in plain sight, with Little Tommy and baby Kobe waving bye-bye from their car seats.

  After their mother and the boys were safely away, Bea’s little sister Karesha, a cold, deadly customer in most circumstances, confided to her that she was a little nervous about the possibility of her own capture or the jailing and execution of her notorious former squeeze, Cut Pemberton, and what it all could mean for her Hollywood plans, and for her high-toned, social-climbing crew.

  “You heard from him?” Bea asked, as she backed out the dirt driveway of Karesha’s rented, brush-covered hideaway.

  “I hear the Colombians got him. The cops don’t know much about him yet. I’m sure he wants to keep it that way. Anyway, I trashed the cell phone,” Karesha said quietly. “But if that sick motherfucker come ’round here I’m gonna send him to Jesus.” She lifted her T-shirt and showed Bea the pearl-handled .22 Pemberton had bought her as an engagement gift. It was stuffed in the waistband of her jeans.

  When Bea arrived back home, the neighbors were out, watering their lawns, pretending they didn’t know Fat Tommy was a prime suspect in a vicious murder.

  “How do, Miss O’Rourke?” Pearl Stenis, the boldest of her nosy neighbors, greeted her.

  “I’m blessed, Mrs. Stenis,” Bea said flatly.

  She pulled into the garage and closed the door. She gathered herself a moment before she got out. She turned on all the lights in the garage and found a flashlight, and took a good twenty minutes making sure the Mercedes was clean of diapers and weapons and works and blow and any incriminating evidence.

  When she was done, she poked her head into the house and called, “We’re late, Tommy. I’ll be in the car. Come on, baby. We got to be on time.” She waited in the car and honked the horn a half-dozen times but had to come back inside. She found Fat Tommy back in bed, fully dressed, sobbing, with the covers pulled over his head.

  “Where the hell was you at, baby?” Fat Tommy complained. “I thought Cut got you.”

  “That niggah better be layin’ low,” Bea said. “These Hollywood cops would love to catch a fuck-up like that and Rodney-King his ass to death for the savage shit he done.”

  “I was there, too, baby. Remember, I was there, too,” Fat Tommy murmured.

  “Don’t say that, Tommy! Don’t say that no more,” Bea demanded. “Put that craziness out your mind. You wasn’t there. You don’t know nothin’. You don’t know nobody.”

  “It just ain’t fair.”

  “Listen here, Tommy,” Bea said sternly. “You don’t deserve this beef. You don’t know nothin’. You didn’t see nothin’. You got a wife and family to protect. It was that goddamn Cut that fount Simpson. You didn’t even know he was a cop. It was all Cut’s idea. We wouldn’t be mixed up in none of this if Cut hadn’t …”

  Fat Tommy began sobbing again. After a few minutes, he confessed that he had raided the emergency stash in the bathroom and had done a couple of lines to calm his nerves. He suggested that they do what was left. There was only a half-bindle anyway. He never did crack, the high felt like a suicide jump. Crack was for kids; toxic, cheap-ass shit meant to sell, not do. Fat Tommy was old school—White Girl all the way. Powder, he believed, was classier, mellower than rock cocaine.

  Bea retrieved the emergency bindle out of the bottom of a box of sanitary napkins. There was only a portion of an eight ball left from the half-pound Fat Tommy liked to keep around the pad for Lakers games and birthdays and other special occasions. Bea used her mother’s Sears card to line out six hefty tracks of the white powder on the dresser top. Rolling their last hundred-dollar bill into a straw, the couple snorted quickly, sucking the lines of blow into their flared nostrils like shotgun blasts fired straight to the back of their brains.

  Quickly, the drug began to take effect: it eased its frigid tendrils down the back lanes of their breathing passages, deadening the superior nasal concha, the frontal and sphenoid sinuses, creeping along their soft palates like a snotty glacier before it slid down the interiors of their throats, chilling the lingual nerves and flowing over the rough, bitter fields of papilla at the back of their tongues and ascending, like a stream of artic ghosts, up through their pituitary glands, their spinal walls and veins, and into the uppermost regions of their brains. The pupils of their dark brown eyes became dilated and sparkling.

  “Damn, that’s good shit,” Fat Tommy said, feeling the cold drip of the snow, liquefied and suffused with snot, glazing the commodious interiors of his head and throat.

  Fat Tommy shut his eyes tight. The darkness inside his mind began to fill with amorphous, floating colors. His big body seemed to be shapeless and floating, too. He looked down at the drifts of sugary dust remaining on the dresser. Almost 400 bucks worth of Girl—gone in six vigorous snorts. As Fat Tommy admired the smeared patterns of residue on the dresser top, Bea leaned down and broadly licked the last thin traces of powder. Then she swept her lovely manicured forefinger across the dresser top, along the trail of spittle her tongue had left, sopping up the final mists of blow. She lightly dabbed this viscous salve on her teeth and gums. Normally Tommy prided himself on licking up the leftovers before Bea got to them, but he was immobilized with grief. And, too, the coke was Chilean, cream of the Andes, 90 percent pure.

  “You right, baby?” Bea asked, staring at him with her pretty eyes.

  “Baby, I’m froze from my nose to my toes,” Fat Tommy told his boo.

  Bea blinked hard and looked up at her husband. “Your slip is showin’, baby,” she said, noting a half moon of white powder around the deep alar grooves of Fat Tommy’s right nostril. She pointed to his reflection in the mirror. Tommy pinched his nostrils closed, shut his eyes, and took a sharp snort. The lumps of powder were swept from the grooves in his face, shooting brilliantly past his nasal vestibules and septum in white-hot pellets of snot. His heart began to race. Neither of them said a word for a few minutes. They closed their eyes and surrendered to the high. When Fat Tommy finally opened his eyes, Bea was staring at him with a beatific look on her face.

  “You look nice,” Bea said. “Innocent … Don’t let ’em punk you, Tommy. Just wear the shit outta this shirt and tie. Dr. King’ll bring you through. All business. You know how to talk to white folks. Don’t go in there like no G … talking all bad and shit, like you’re that goddamn Cut. That’s what they want. Give them your A game and you’ll be all right. Remember: You wasn’t there. You didn’t see nothing. You don’t know nobody. We ain’t gonna get kilt over some asshole.”

  Fat Tommy got in the car, gripping his Bible, sobbing and praying and assuring Bea and the Lord he loved them. Between his sobs he promised her he would savor her instructions and repeat them like a mantra: Don’t say nothing
that’s gonna get us kilt over some asshole. She reminded him that his stupid-ass Uncle Bunny had done a nickel at Folsom on a break-in after Bunny talked too much. So—don’t talk too much. Don’t do nothing that will make you look guilty. They got nothing. That was the bottom line, Bea reminded Fat Tommy. They agreed if he was cool and smooth he had a chance to ease his way out of the beef with short time.

  3.

  The cops were nice to him at first; they said he was a stand-up guy for turning himself in and helping out with the investigation. They had interviewed him all day. Fat Tommy said he didn’t “need no lawyer.” He wasn’t guilty. The cops didn’t seem to be concerned about his coke business so much as they wanted to know what he knew about the recent murder of the undercover cop—Simpson—right in the middle of the projects on Fat Tommy’s home turf, La Caja. Fat Tommy assured him he didn’t “have no ‘turf’ no more, not in La Caja, not nowhere.” Moreover, he certainly didn’t know anything about a cop killing.

  “We know you ain’t no killer, Moises,” Vargas told him a few minutes into the interrogation. “But you grew up in La Caja, where this murder went down. We figure you might know something. Point us to the bad guys. We know you’re in bed with the Colombians. They’re all over La Caja these days. One of them called you by name, Moises. He’s quite fond of you. Says you’re a big shot. You’re looking at some serious time if you don’t play ball. Play along and help us catch this killer … you’ll be all right …”

  Vargas offered him a jumbo cup of lemonade and four jelly doughnuts. His high had long ago been blown and he couldn’t believe how hungry and thirsty he’d gotten. Vargas said that the pretty cop who had processed him that morning had asked to make the lemonade especially for him.

  Fat Tommy said, “That was sure nice of her.”

  “Yeah. Officer Ospina is a sweetie. Drink up. That’s the last of it … We need to get started,” Vargas said, and smiled at him.

  Braddock took the empty cup, crushed it, and banked it into the wastebasket in the back of the interrogation room.

  “Great shot,” Fat Tommy said. “Three-pointer.”

  Braddock and Vargas said nothing. Braddock walked to a chair somewhere behind him and Vargas turned on a tape recorder and intoned: “This is Detective Manny Vargas of the Homicide Detail, Criminal Investigation Division of the Van Nuys Police Department. I am joined with Detective Will Dockery and DEA Special Agent Roland Braddock. This is a tape-recorded interview of Thomas Martin O’Rourke, a.k.a. Fat Tommy O’Rourke, a.k.a. Tommy Martin, a.k.a. Pretty Tommy Banes, a.k.a. Sugar-T Banes, a.k.a. Slo Jerry-T, a.k.a. Big Jerry Jay, a.k.a. T-Moose, a.k.a. Moises Rockafella …”

  “Uh, my name ain’t Moises,” Fat Tommy protested, interrupting as politely as he could. “Some bad people started calling me that. But I don’t let nobody call me that no more.” He tried his sexiest grin.

  Vargas looked at him blankly and continued: “This is a homicide investigation under police report number A-55503. Today’s date is March 28, 2005, and the time is now 13:49 hours. Could you state your name once more for the record?”

  “I’m Thomas Martin O’Rourke.”

  “Address?”

  Tommy gave them his parents’ address. That’s where he got his mail now.

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-four, officer,” Fat Tommy said.

  “Employed?”

  “I was assistant manager at the Swing Shop …”

  “Was?”

  “I got laid off.”

  “When was that?”

  “1992.”

  Dockery and Braddock rolled their eyes, then Vargas said, “What were you doing after you got … laid off?”

  Fat Tommy fingered his Martin Luther King, Jr. tie. “Odd jobs, here and there …”

  “What kind of odd jobs?”

  “Church stuff.”

  “Church stuff?”

  Fat Tommy sat up straight in his chair. “I’m a Christian, sir. And I try to help in the Lord’s work whenever—”

  “You get that fancy Mercedes doing this church work?”

  “Naw.” Fat Tommy laughed out loud.

  “The street tells us you’re a big-time coke man—that true, Moises? You a big-time coke dealer, Moises?”

  “Oh no, sir. Not no more. All that shit is dead … I mean, all that stuff is dead … I don’t do no drugs no more. I don’t sling coke no more. I got a wife and family …”

  “You high now?”

  “What was that?”

  “You under the influence of drugs or alcohol at this time?”

  “No. Oh Jesus, no.” Fat Tommy wished to Christ he was.

  4.

  He couldn’t make the cops believe him. They wouldn’t give him any more lemonade, even though the girl cop said she made it specially for him. They wouldn’t give him any more doughnuts—they said they were all out. Cops out of doughnuts! Now they wouldn’t even give him water—and he was dry as shit. That Chilean coke had sucked all the good spit out of his mouth. The cops kept hammering away at his story. He shut his eyes. He was only pretending to listen, nodding yes, yes, goddamnit, yes, or gazing up at them with a mournful, wounded look in his eyes.

  Their sharp questions droned on unintelligibly like the buzzing of wasps attacking just above his head. Then … the cops seemed to go quiet for a moment. Bea’s admonitions echoed in his head and gradually, without realizing it, Fat Tommy allowed a luxuriant smile to creep across the corners of his mouth. Still smiling, he opened his eyes into a narrow slit and gazed down at his handsome shirtsleeves, admiring the shiny contours, like little snow-covered mountains really, that the polyester fabric traced along his thick, short arms as they lay across his knees.

  Christ, he loved this shirt!

  “Somethin’ I said funny, Fatboy? Somethin’ funny?” Braddock yelled, momentarily breaking through his reverie.

  Fat Tommy jumped a little, snapped his eyes tight a moment, then slowly opened the slits again and looked back down at his arms. Braddock continued mocking him. Fat Tommy burrowed himself deeper into his thoughts. He looked at his arms and knees. They were such good arms—good, kind arms; and great knees—great, great knees. He stared down at his hands and knees lovingly as the cops droned on. He decided, with a hot, white tear leaking out of a crack in his right eye, finally, that he loved his knees as much as he loved his dick or his ass—better, probably, now that he had found the Lord again. His regard for his ass and dick now seemed so misguided, so … heathen. And these knees were much more representative of him—innocent, God-fearing, above reproach.

  They had taken him all over—all over L.A., the Valley, even to Oak Town once on a church picnic. There was plenty of water there, beer and red pop and lemonade and swine barbeque, too. He was thin then, and pretty. Just a baby boy—so innocent, such a good young brother. The picnic was on the Oakland Bay, and they’d all rode the bus up there, singing gospel songs the whole way. There must have been a hundred buses, the entire California Youth Baptist Convention, someone said. And it was his knees that helped him get through it: basketball, softball, the three-legged race with pretty Althea Jackson. They were nine years old. Those were some of the best times in his life. And he was such a good guy, a regular brother, everyone said so, and now this lunatic murder and this fucked-up Pemberton, that devil, poking his bloody self like a shitty nightmare in the midst of all his plans.

  Fat Tommy ached at beholding all these tender scenes—Bea, the picnic, the tears—all the images like flashing detritus in a river streaming across his upturned hands, it was just too much. He closed his eyes, but the river of images burst inside them, flooding the darkness in his head even more vividly than before: his first day at Teddy Roosevelt Junior High; the time he and Bea won third place at the La Caja Boys & Girls Club Teen Dance-Off; and his best pal … not that goddamn Pemberton … but Trey-Boy, Trey-Boy Middleton (rest his soul). That was his best friend. It was cool Trey-Boy who befriended him when everyone treated him like a jerk, and it
was Trey-Boy who’d taken pity on him and helped him pimp up his lifestyle.

  It was Trey-Boy. Not a murderer. A hip brother. True blue. Trey-Boy showed him how to affect a gangster’s scowl, and helped him adopt a slow, hulking walk that could frighten just about anyone he encountered on the street. He’d showed him how to smoke a cigarette, load a gat, roll a blunt, cop pussy, weed, and blow. He had even showed him how to shoot up once. And Trey-Boy never got mad, even when that faggot Stick Jenkins bumped him on purpose and made him spill a good portion of the spoon of heroin he had carefully prepared. Trey-Boy had pimp-slapped the faggot—he called him “my sissy,” and Stick had just smiled like a bitch and turned red as a yella niggah could get—and everyone laughed.

  He remembered how Trey-Boy had cooked up what was left of the little amber drops they could scrape from the toilet seat and floor and showed him how to tie-off and find the vein and shoot the junk, even if he only got a little wacked—it was wacked enough to know he wouldn’t do that anymore. It wasn’t fun at all. He couldn’t stop puking. It felt like now—in this hot room with no water, under this white light. But he wasn’t no goddamn junkie. None of that puking and nodding and drooling shit was for him. He was strictly weed and blow, strictly weed and blow. He wasn’t no goddamn junkie. Let them try to pin that on him. They’d come up zero. Just like this murder. He wasn’t there; he didn’t do it. He didn’t see nobody; he didn’t know nobody.

  Trey-Boy had given him his favorite street moniker—Fat Tommy. When Trey-Boy said it, it didn’t feel like a put-down. It was a term of war and affection. He was a lumpy 370 pounds but he didn’t feel fat when Trey-Boy called him Fat Tommy—he felt big, as in big man, big trouble, big fun—there’s a difference, really, when you think about it. A street handle like Fat Tommy made him feel like one of the hoods in The Sopranos—his favorite show. He’d made a small fortune with that name—not like he made with Cut Pemberton, when the margins and risks got scary and huge, and the fuckin’ Colombians got involved, and people feared him and only knew him by the name Pemberton hung on him, Moises—Moises Rockafella, the King of Rock Cocaine. He didn’t make big cake like that with Trey-Boy—but at least he didn’t have to worry about a murder beef, and the living was decent.