The Cocaine Chronicles Read online

  Such a wave of woe swept over Fat Tommy as he contemplated all this that, softly, he began to weep. His whole bright life was passing before his sad eyes: there were pinwheels of light; a series of birthdays; his stint as a fabulous dancer; his wife, Bea, again; his kids—Little Tommy and infant Kobe—cuties! He didn’t deserve this. And there was his old job as assistant manager at the Swing Shop—twelve years ago now—all those great records: Tupac, NWA, Biggie, KRS-ONE, Salt-N-Pepa, shit, even Marvin Gaye. He knew them like the lines in these hands that now stared up at him, glazed and dotted with sweat. All the bright scenes of his life seemed to be fading, all of them diminishing like faces in a fog. Even the fabulous good shit that was coming, close on the horizon—that seemed to be diminishing, too. If only he could get a glass of water, or maybe some lemonade.

  5.

  “I’m dryin’ out inside,” Fat Tommy pleaded, lifting his head slightly. He couldn’t see Vargas, but could hear his footfalls pacing back and forth somewhere behind him. He closed his eyes a moment and tried to catch a wink.

  “Steady, sweetheart. Steady. Just a few more questions and you’re home free,” Vargas said.

  Tommy waited for the next question with the same despairing apprehension with which he had endured all the last. An hour earlier Vargas had turned the lights on so bright that when Fat Tommy looked up the next moment, he beheld not a pea-green interrogation room with a trio of sad-sack cops trying to sweat him for a cop murder he didn’t commit—the whole room seemed to him as a single white spotlight, a moon’s eyeball inspecting him on a disc of light. At many points during the long, arduous interrogation, the men drew in so close on the hulking gangster that the tips of all four men’s shoes seemed to be touching. Now when Fat Tommy squinted into the light, it didn’t even seem like light anymore but a kind of shiny darkness. And he felt as though he were falling through the brightness like a brother pitched off a hundred-story building.

  Vargas switched the lights back to a single hot light again. The trembling darkness in the distance beyond the spotlight seemed like measureless liquid midnight.

  “I need some lemonade!” Fat Tommy screamed. The voice startled him. It did not seem like his own, but rather like the voice of a child or woman screaming from the bottom of a well.

  Vargas turned off the tape recorder. Dockery and Braddock pushed their chairs back from the cone of white light that made Fat Tommy look like a Vegas lounge fly sobbing under a microscope. The scraping of their chairs was like an utterance of disgust, and they meant it to be that. It sent shivers up their own backs, and shot a great hot thunderbolt of fear down the spine of Fat Tommy O’Rourke. Vargas cut a rebuking glance at Dockery and Braddock.

  “It’s late,” Vargas said, looking around for a clock. They had started this session just before two p.m.

  Braddock pulled out his watch bob. To view the dial, he swept his hand through the cone of light that seemed to enclose Fat Tommy in a brilliant Tinker Bell glow, and the watch flashed like a little arc of buttery neon framed in white.

  “Almost six a.m. Sixteen goddamn hours and not a peep from this shithead,” Braddock said. He smacked the back of Fat Tommy’s chair. Tommy shivered briefly and settled deeper into his sob.

  Dockery felt around in his pant leg for his pack of butts and stood up. “Just a little longer, sport, and you can get back to beatin’ off in yer cell.”

  “Yeah, beatin’ off in yer cell …” Braddock repeated.

  “I need a piss break,” Fat Tommy said as politely as he could, then added with a smile, “and a big glass of lemonade.”

  “Good idea, asshole. Think I’ll go drain the lizard,” Dockery said, and looked at Vargas. Vargas nodded and Braddock and Dockery went out.

  Fat Tommy sobbed on. He was still crying when Braddock and Dockery came back in laughing. They both held huge cups of lemonade and they were eating fresh Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Braddock tossed a half-eaten doughnut in the trash.

  “I’m starvin’, officer. I’m sleepy. I don’t know about no murder,” Fat Tommy tried again. He shut his eyes tight.

  “Pale-ass pussy,” Braddock muttered. “Yer gonna fry for this. Why don’t ya quit yer lying?”

  Fat Tommy closed his eyes and took a breath and asked once again, “Please, officer, can I have some water or some lemonade?”

  “It’s detective,” Dockery said.

  “Listen here, detective,” Tommy assented, his big voice gravely and frail, “I don’t deserve this beef. I don’t know nothin’. I didn’t see nothin’. I got a wife and family. I ain’t no liar. Cut was the one who fount Simpson … He told us he was a snitch. Not no cop. It was all his idea. We wouldn’t be mixed up in none of this if Cut hadn’t—”

  The room went dead quiet.

  Fat Tommy eased his eyes open and strained to hear the shuffling of the cops’ shoes behind him, but could only hear his own heart beating, thu-thump, thu-thump.

  Then Dockery said, “Cut? You never mentioned any Cut.”

  Fat Tommy could feel the life draining from his chest. He began to hyperventilate and for the first time he could feel the jheri curl gel-deluxe begin to drip against his collar. “You said I could have water. I need some water,” he pleaded.

  “You can have water, Moises, after you tell us how it went down,” Braddock growled from somewhere behind him.

  “Tell us about this Cut,” Vargas continued, piling on. “He got a last name?”

  Fat Tommy felt his mouth moving. He couldn’t make it stop. “Cut … um … Cut Pemberton … I think.”

  “And?”

  He tried to think of innocent words. He tried to stall and think of what Bea would want him to say. “I didn’t know him that good,” he finally said.

  “Go on,” Vargas prodded. “What’s he look like?”

  Tommy tried to think of other faces, but all he could see before him was that goddamn Cut. “Gots a cut cross his ear, go straight cross his lip, like he’s wearing a veil on one side of his face.”

  “Yes … ?”

  “Said he got it in a fight with a cracker when he was in the Marines. But I heard he got it in prison—” He held his breath and tried to stop his voice from speaking again. He couldn’t believe what it was saying, betraying him, snitching on him.

  “Okay … go on.”

  Tommy’s mouth burst open again: “He can talk Spanish.”

  “Go on,” Dockery said. “Cut …”

  Tommy’s whole body seemed to slump. Special Agent Braddock smacked his chair hard and Tommy sat bolt upright. “Well, Cut was the onliest one that did it.”

  “Go on.”

  “Cut was one of them red, freckly niggahs from Georgia.”

  “Yes.”

  No one spoke for a moment, then Fat Tommy’s voice said, “Spotted like a African cat. I didn’t even know him good …”

  “Um-hum.”

  “Wore plaits standing all over his head.”

  “Plaits? Really?”

  Tears were streaming down his cheeks, but Fat Tommy grinned. “My Bea used to call him BuckBeet, ’cause he looked like a red pickaninny. That used to piss him off, ’cause of Buckwheat, you know?”

  “Yes … Cut …”

  “Yeah, Cut. First I knew of him … two years ago … when I was staying on Glen Oaks off Paxton … Him and Karesha—my wife’s sister—and my Uncle Bunny banged on my duplex at ’bout two in the morning looking for some crack.”

  “You mean Bunny Hobart—the second-story man?” Dockery broke in again. The detectives had two tape recorders going now, but Dockery never trusted electronic equipment and was transcribing everything Fat Tommy said on a yellow legal pad.

  “Yeah, that be him,” Fat Tommy said. He slumped back in the hard metal chair, trembling as he recalled the scene. “He knew Cut from the joint. Cut had just got out and was chillin’ with Karesha. He was already dressin’ like a Crip, all blue, talkin’ shit. I could tell he was trouble. He used to strong-arm young Gs and take their stuff.”

&
nbsp; “And Bunny told him you were the big-time coke man,” Braddock said. It was not a question.

  “I was gettin’ out of the business. I was gettin’ out,” Fat Tommy explained. “It was Cut that fucked up all my plans. He wanted to impress the big-time talent … I was only stayin’ in till he could get on his feets.”

  “What big-time talent?”

  “Colombians, La Caja Crips … It was them goddamn Colombians that tolt Cut about Simpson,” Tommy confessed. “Cut came up with the idea of settin’ the guy up. He tolt us he was a snitch—not no cop! I tried to talk him out of it; I tried to reason with him …”

  “A regular Dr. Phil,” Braddock said.

  “Yes, sir,” Fat Tommy replied quietly. His heart was sputtering like an old Volkswagen.

  “Catch your breath, son,” Vargas said. “Get our boy King Moises some lemonade, will ya, Dockery?”

  Dockery went out and Fat Tommy flopped his big grease-spangled head down into his hands. From the top of his jheri curl to the soles of his size-16 Air Jordans, everything about him was huge, extroverted, and showy. Now, he sat hulking in the metal chair, trying in vain to make himself smaller, hoping that the willful diminishment of his great size would in turn reduce in the minds of the cops the appalling grandeur of his recent crimes. He sat there in his bright white tent of a shirt with his Martin Luther King, Jr. tie strung tight around his bulging neck like a painted garrote.

  His mind went blank, then black, then pale gray. Far above the dull cacophony of the cops grinding away at his statement, Fat Tommy O’Rourke—a.k.a. Moises Rockafella, La Caja’s King of Rock Cocaine—could hear a plaintive, high-pitched wail, a shrill, sad voice, strangely resembling his own. He prayed to Christ it was someone else.

  EMORY HOLMES II is a Los Angeles–based writer and journalist. He has reported on crime, schools, and the arts for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the L.A. Sentinel, the L.A. Daily News, the Amsterdam News, Los Angeles Magazine, Essence, CODE, the R&B Report, Written By magazine, American Legacy, The Root, the New York Times wire service, and other publications. His crime fiction has appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 and Los Angeles Noir. Holmes is presently completing The Good Cop, a novel of race and murder in L.A. County.

  camaro blue

  by bill moody

  Hello? Yes, I want to report a stolen car. Robert Ware. Oh, for Christ’s sake. Okay, okay. I don’t know when. Last night sometime, I guess.”

  Bobby Ware tried to calm down. He gave his address and license number and continued to answer questions. “It’s a blue 1989 Chevy Camaro Sport.” He listened to the other questions and lit a cigarette.

  “It was in front of my house. Oh yeah, there was a horn too. What? No, not the car horn. A tenor saxophone in a gig bag. What? Oh, a soft leather case. Yeah, that’s right. Okay, thanks.”

  Bobby hung up the phone and sat for a minute, smoking, thinking. “Fuck,” he said out loud. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Finally got his dream car and some asshole stole it. Man, I gotta move, he thought. Too much shit in this neighborhood.

  He got up, paced around. Barefoot, cut-off jeans, sandals, and a Charlie Parker T-shirt, his daytime uniform, trying to think who he could borrow a horn from for the gig tonight.

  He was working in a quartet at a club on Ventura, backing a singer who was trying to convince everybody she was the next Billie Holiday, but she wasn’t fooling anyone. But hey, a gig was a gig. Three nights a week for three months now, so he couldn’t really complain.

  He replayed last night in his mind. He’d come home, tired and anxious to get in the house, and totally spaced, leaving his tenor in the car. That wasn’t like him or any horn player, but too late now. He sat down and turned on the TV, hoping he wasn’t going to see his Camaro in one of those car chases the city had become famous for.

  When Lisa got home, he was still sitting in front of the TV, watching the news, but there were no stolen car reports and no news from the police.

  “Hi, baby,” Lisa said. She was carrying a bag from the Lotus Blossom Chinese takeout. “You hungry?” She set the bag down on the kitchen table and walked over to Bobby.

  She was in her Century City law-office outfit—skirt, blouse, half heels, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She sat on the arm of Bobby’s chair and kissed him lightly on the lips, then let herself slip over the arm onto his lap.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Somebody stole my car.”

  “Oh, baby, and you just had it serviced and waxed.”

  “Tell me. But it gets worse.”

  “What?”

  “My horn was in the car.”

  “Oh no, did you report it?”

  Bobby pushed her off him. “Of course I fucking reported it.”

  Lisa held up her hands. “Okay, okay.”

  Bobby sighed. “I’m sorry, babe, but you know what the chances are of getting back a stolen car in L.A.?” Especially that car. Bobby had read somewhere that Camaros, even older ones, were popular among car thieves. By now it was probably stripped clean at a chop shop, and somebody was trying to figure out how to put the saxophone together.

  For as long as he could remember—at least since high school—Bobby had wanted a Camaro. He could never afford a new one, and good used ones were hard to come by. Then one afternoon, driving back from the store, he’d found this one parked on a side street with a “For Sale” sign in the window. A blue Camaro Sport. One owner, all the service records, and the car looked like it had hardly been driven more than to the store. Now it was gone.

  He took Lisa’s Toyota to the gig, after dredging up a tenor from a former student who wasn’t sure he wanted to pursue jazz anymore. Bobby had helped him pick out the horn so it was a good one, but it wasn’t Bobby’s old Zoot Sims model he’d bought from a guy on the street in New York.

  After the second set, he was standing in the parking lot behind Gino’s with the bass player, a tall thin guy who played good and didn’t care anything about singers. They watched a tan Ford Taurus pull in, and two guys in rumpled suits got out and came over.

  The bass player cupped the joint in his hand and started walking toward the club. “Cops, man.”

  “Are you Robert Ware?” the older of the two asked Bobby. The younger one watched the bass player walk away.

  “Yeah. Is this about my car?” Bobby was wary. They didn’t usually send detectives out for stolen cars.

  “I’m afraid so,” the older cop said, casually showing Bobby his ID. He looked at Bobby for what seemed like a long time. “We found traces of cocaine in your car, Mr. Ware.”

  “No, that’s not mine,” Bobby said. “I’m not into coke.”

  The younger cop nodded, smiling knowingly at Bobby.

  “No, seriously, man. Coke is not my thing.” He held up his cigarette. “This is it for me.”

  The older cop took out a small notebook and flipped through some pages. “Do you know a Raymond Morales? Hispanic male, twenty-nine years old.”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t let him borrow your car?”

  “Borrow my car … What are you talking about? I don’t loan my car to anyone. Ask my girlfriend.”

  “We did. She told us where to find you.”

  They all turned and looked as the side door opened and the bass player peeked out. “Hey, man, we’re on.”

  “Listen,” Bobby said, “can you guys wait a bit? We have the last set to do and then we can talk.”

  The two cops looked at each other and shrugged. The older one said, pointing across the street, “We’ll be at Denny’s.”

  “Cool,” Bobby said. “You did find the car, right?”

  The younger cop looked at him and smiled again. “Oh yeah.”

  Bobby found them in a back booth drinking coffee and eating pie. He sat his horn on the floor, slid in next to the younger cop, and ordered coffee.

  “So? What’s the deal on my car? When can I get it back? Was there much damage?”

>   The two cops glanced at each other. “There was some damage,” the younger one said.

  “Oh fuck,” Bobby said, loudly enough that a couple in the next booth turned and looked. “I knew it. Totaled, stripped, or what?”

  “Bullet holes,” the younger cop said.

  “What?”

  “Mr. Ware,” the older cop began, “your car was involved in a high-speed chase early this morning. Raymond Morales was driving. He apparently ran out of gas. He emerged from your car with a weapon and fired on the pursuing officers. They returned fire and Mr. Morales was shot at the scene.”

  “Jesus,” Bobby said. He sat stunned, not knowing what to say.

  “The driver’s side door has holes, the window was shattered, and there were several bullets lodged in the seat.”

  “Is he … ?”

  Both cops nodded.

  “I’m sorry,” Bobby said, wondering about Raymond Morales.

  “It happens,” the younger cop said.

  “Your girlfriend said you reported there was a saxophone in the car?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “We didn’t find it.”

  Bobby looked at both of them. “What do you mean, you didn’t find it?”

  “Wasn’t in the car,” the younger one said.

  They talked some more without giving up much information about the incident or when he could get his car back. The older cop gave Bobby his card and said they’d be in touch. They left Bobby to finish his coffee and think about Raymond Morales.

  Two days later Bobby got a call from the older cop. Lloyd Foster, Bobby remembered from the business card. “We’re done,” Foster said. “You can pick up your car tomorrow morning.”