Nine Deadly Lives Read online

  “Mudah?” Nadine’s surprise made her accent slip out. When I’d met her ten years ago at the Royal Peacock in Atlanta, I’d wondered where she was from. It wasn’t Trinidad, Barbados, or Jamaica. I couldn’t place her accent, which frustrated me because that was one of my talents—I could locate people by voice. You could tell me you were born and raised in Brooklyn, and I’d tell you the exact neighborhood. So, after five dances and a couple of rum punches, I finally broke down and asked. Maybe it was the rum punch, the fact that dancing so tightly together had made us both a little woozy, but when she answered, “Nevis, an island so small you can walk it in a day,” I not only believed her, I felt like I’d lived there my entire life.

  “Her grandfather was Rube Walker, a player for the Cubans, New York’s Negro League team,” I explained. “This guy, Terry Bunch, played against him on the Cleveland Buckeyes before getting traded to the Cubans. When Bunch joined the team, Martin Dihigo, the Cubans’ best player, was considering retirement, and Bunch and Walker, being young and ambitious, competed for the fans’ attention. They ended up with a sort of old-school Jeter and A-Rod competition going on. Natalie—that’s the client—thinks Bunch killed her grandfather.”

  “Rivalry to last more than fifty years? Nuh, don’t believe it.”

  “Happens. Just last week I read about two old men, how anthropologists wanted them to have a conversation. Now, these two the only folks left on earth still speaking this ancient language, but they hate each other so much they won’t talk to each other. Same with Bunch and Walker. They hated each other all their lives. They both played for the Cubans, and briefly, for the Giants. They never got paid much, but their reputations opened up financial opportunities. So, Bunch and Walker competed to have the best stats and the most fans.”

  “What you say make sense. But after they leave baseball, what good it do to keep competition going?”

  “That’s the problem. More animosity developed when their careers ended, because, literally, they no longer played for the same team. After they retired, they used name recognition to start almost identical businesses. Bunch sold hamburgers on one thirty-sixth. A couple of blocks over, Walker opened a BBQ joint. They even had kids around the same time. Their kids kept things going by having children—granddaughters—born the same year.”

  I paused because Nadine had wrapped her face in my shirt, her body erupting in a sound that could have been a laugh or a cry. I patted her back, considered for the hundredth time whether her small size had something to do with the way I could never read her. Because a smaller person’s body is more physically visible to others, they find new ways of hiding themselves. With Nadine, she’s developed this way of looking as though she could, at any moment, take off and fly. Like you could be having a conversation with her, blink, and suddenly she wouldn’t be there.

  “You alright?”

  Nadine didn’t answer but leaped from my lap.

  “You making plans to solve this?” She spoke with her back to me, and then I knew for sure she’d been crying. And though I knew she’d been asking about the Walker case, it was like she discussed us, the one thing that kept our five-year marriage from being perfect.

  “Headed there first thing tomorrow,” I answered. “Got to find out what Bunch has to say.”

  “Not a lot of new clients coming in, so Jina say she give me some time off,” Nadine said softly. “Tomorrow, you finish up early and we meet for lunch? A picnic?”

  “I want to, baby, but I got forty-eight hours. There’s not enough time.”

  “You’re right. There’s not,” Nadine said. “There never is.”

  She walked inside the bathroom, shut the door behind her.

  o0o

  My business has to be run a certain way. If you’re the neighborhood detective, not everyone can know who you are. In fact, the fewer people who know what you do, the better you do your job. That’s why I operate on referrals and why the 48-hour turnaround policy is for my clients as much as it is myself. Clients like it because they get useful information quickly. I like it because the longer a case drags out, the more questions get asked. In my line of work, you don’t want too many people asking questions.

  I’ve got to be especially careful because of how I look. People never believe there’s a reason for a six-two, two hundred pound black man to just hang out in their neighborhood—and that includes other six-two, two hundred pound black men. So, if I know I’m going to hang out somewhere for a while, I wear a disguise. When I say disguise, I don’t mean funny mustaches and glasses. I’m talking about the ability to adapt a persona, make people think you are whoever they want you to be. I’ve lived in this neighborhood for years, but with the right prop, I won’t get recognized. Ever read Ellison’s Invisible Man? If so, you understand what I’m saying, and realize Ellison got at least one thing right: every once in a while, being invisible has its advantages.

  The morning I started the Walker case, I threw on a Yankees hat that made it hard to get a feel for the exact shape of my face. Then, I put on glasses, because glasses make it hard for people to see the person wearing them. The final touch? A camera, a small but useful item, in my car trunk. These days, when people see cameras and think there’s even a possibility of their picture being taken, the person holding the camera gains instant invisibility. All people can think about is their own image being projected. Cameras are the closest thing in the world to an invisible cloak.

  But useful as cameras can be, I needed a ruse for carrying one in this neighborhood; Manhattan doesn’t get many tourists past 96th street. Bunch lived just a few blocks away from me, and the neighborhood’s faded glamour—all kinds of notables (W.E.B. DuBois, Ella Fitzgerald, Malcolm X ) had lived on the same street—loaned itself to the film industry. So, I posted flyers around the street corner about a film shoot. “Scouting locations for a new film by Spike Perry,” the flyer read. “Will pay small fee if your home is chosen.” The flyer listed a number that redirected messages to my voice mail. And as people, some in suits and others in uniforms, trickled out of their apartments, they stared at those flyers and smiled. People, no matter who they are, see their lives as big and inherently cinematic. No one thought it strange that Spike Perry, whose films were all based in Atlanta, had decided to shoot in Harlem.

  Also, I hadn’t lied to Nadine when I told her I was going over to Terry Bunch’s first thing in the morning. I parked across from his apartment at 5:00 a.m., two hours before morning rush began. People up that early are the industrious—morning runners whose feet pound pavement while the rest of the city snores, commuters who fight sleep as they force themselves to be on time for jobs that will hopefully lead to a better life. If you want to hide, the best time is early in the morning, when people are too concerned with their own lives to ask a lot of questions.

  A couple of individuals came and left, but nothing interesting happened until a woman walked out of Bunch’s building at half-past six. She was different from the others who’d walked out of the squat, grayish-blue building. Like the other residents, she moved not briskly, but determinedly, carrying her bags as though they’d already grown heavy but she knew there was no way of lightening her load. What made her different was she had a sharpness—a meanness—they hadn’t possessed. Sleepiness had wiped all anger from the early morning commuters’ faces and replaced it with just one emotion: exhaustion. But that wasn’t true for this woman; you could look at her, at her thin hair pulled into a tight, greasy ponytail, and tell she’d started the day with a chip on her shoulder.

  I wondered if I had seen this woman earlier, when I’d first noticed a fluttering in the window of the sixth floor of Bunch’s building. The curtain had opened and closed quickly, but the feeling someone was watching me hadn’t left. The woman—who stomped, rather than walked, down the street—had a thin, almost athletic body. I mentally replaced her white nursing uniform with a baseball one and wondered if she could be Bunch’s granddaughter. Natalie had told me her name was Taneika.
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br />   If Taneika had been watching me, I had to get out of there pronto. And even if this woman wasn’t related to Bunch, I’d been stagnant for too long. Now was a good time to get coffee somewhere nearby.

  I stopped at a place a block from Bunch’s building. “Jake’s Coffee” had a sign hanging in the window that read “Special: egg and cheese on a roll 1.50” but Jake’s interior smelled of bacon more than coffee. Only one person ate; the other customers clutched their coffees as though the best bagel in the world couldn’t get them to let go.

  There were a couple of tables, but most folks sat at the counter, copies of the Amsterdam News or the Post unfolded in front of them. I picked a stool and ordered coffee and the special. When the waitress set my egg-and-cheese down, I asked the guy next to me for ketchup.

  “You like ketchup on your eggs?” The man looked as amused as a person could be before seven a.m. He wore a threadbare, ill-fitting gray suit. With his lined face and close-cropped hair two shades lighter than the suit, he looked retirement age, too old to be heading in for work. I wondered why he was up so early.

  “Must be from the south. That’s how people do down that ways.” The man on my left wasn’t any younger, but was also a working man. He wore a light blue uniform, the logo of a company I had never heard of—“Bretson”—on the chest.

  “Just moved up from Atlanta, College Park area,” I lied.

  “That near the airport?” The man in the Bretson uniform sized me up, looked like he tried to see past my baseball cap and thick glasses. For a moment, I wondered if he recognized me. In any case, I continued with my lie, pretended it hadn’t been ten years since I’d left the south.

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “I’m staying with family now, but I want my own place. Maybe even in this neighborhood. They say rent’s cheap at the Chavet. Heard of it?”

  The Chavet was the name of Bunch’s building. It’d been on the street for years, and even though these two men were twenty years or so younger than Walker or Bunch, if they’d lived in the neighborhood for any amount of time, they knew something about it.

  “Nice building, good super but—” the Bretson man stopped talking and looked like he didn’t want to continue. I sipped and nodded, creating enough pause in the conversation that someone had to fill in. The man on my right did the job.

  “Otis here don’t want to say,” the man spoke slowly. “And don’t neither of us know how bad your family’s been working your nerves, but dealing with them’s better than heading to the Chavet. A man died there a couple months back.”

  “So what? People die. Life happens,” I said.

  “Not like this,” the man in the gray suit continued. “Twenty years ago, when the city was at its worst, violence happened on the street, never inside somebody’s home. Not how it happened this time around. They saying this guy Walker—he the one lived over in the Chavet—died of a bad fall. But I don’t believe it.”

  “Me, neither.” Otis nodded so vigorously his coffee cup shook with the movement.

  “What do you think happened?” As soon as I asked the question, three other men came in. They were young, my age, the age a person should be working, but it was as obvious that they weren’t as it was that the two men I talked to were. But if they weren’t going in to work, why get up so early? Where were they headed? From the corner of my eye, I watched them bellow their orders to the waitress and sit down at one of Jake’s few tables.

  “Back in the day, Walker owned this neighborhood.” As the man in the gray suit spoke, he also watched the men, much more obviously than I had. The moment they walked in, his whole demeanor had changed, from mild amusement at seeing me pour ketchup on my eggs to something that could almost be described as fear.

  “Now, Frank, get the story straight,” Otis interrupted.

  “Well, alright.” Frank made an effort to focus back on the conversation with Otis and me. “It was him and another fellow named Bunch. They played ball together. They’d been neighborhood heroes ever since the New York Cubans won the Negro Leagues Championship in ’48.”

  “’47,” Otis corrected. “But go on.”

  Frank ignored him; his eyes were focused on the table in front of us. The waitress had brought back the orders, and as the men ate, they were getting rowdier and more relaxed.

  “I said, go on, Frank.”

  “I’m not your boy. I don’t got to take orders from nobody, ’specially you.” Frank’s words to Otis were more irritated than angry, and it was clear his heart wasn’t in anything he said to us. He was a computer, relaying information; he’d directed his real attention to the table in front of us.

  “Couple of years ago,” he continued, “the baseball commissioner decided to honor some of the old Negro players like Bunch and Walker. For a while, there was all kinds of fuss. People got interested in these men again and what they had to say.”

  “Saw them all over the local TV,” Otis nodded.

  “That, and they got big plaques in their honor. Some big-time writer wanted to write a book about their lives. And people in the neighborhood got to talking about all the investments they’d made over the years,” Frank paused, and for a few seconds, diverted his attention from the table and back towards me. He gave me a long, searching look. “Wouldn’t surprise me if some young-gun decided to break in and steal Walker’s stuff, hurt him when he tried to fight back.”

  “Even at his age, he the type wouldn’t go down without a fight,” Otis agreed.

  Something about Otis’s words brought Frank out of whatever trance he’d been in. He got up abruptly, shoving his plate and a couple of dollars at the waitress.

  “I got to head on in. Nice talking with you,” he told me. “And, you, I’ll catch on up with you later on” he nodded at Otis and gave one last parting glance at the table, which had gotten so loud, it had made the half-empty restaurant sound crowded.

  “Don’t mind him,” Otis told me after his friend had left. “He had a bad scare a couple of years back. A couple of these youngsters held him up, jumped him. A hold-up can make any man feel powerless, but it’s worse when you get to be our age, and you start to losing your strength, your desire for women, all those things that make you feel like a man.”

  I thought of the woman I’d seen earlier this morning and decided to broach the subject. “Did Bunch have any children or grandchildren? What kind of people were they?”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this, but since you walked in, you struck me as an alright fellow. So here it is—Bunch’s granddaughter ran with a rough crowd. She’s got a temper, and that boyfriend of hers can’t be trusted. Seems the police need to pay more attention to the possibility of theft.”

  What Otis said wasn’t surprising—when I’d researched the case the night before, I’d found some recent press coverage. If Natalie was right about her grandfather not dying from natural causes, then one possibility was that someone had recognized the value of Walker’s rare baseball memorabilia, broken in the apartment, and injured Walker along the way. The only problem with this theory was there’d been no reports of a break-in and Walker’s injury supposedly happened between five and seven p.m. Who’d steal from a place in the early evening, in a small building where most residents knew each other and would be coming in from their jobs?

  “I better get headed to work,” I said. I started to stand, but sat back down as though considering a new possibility. “But thanks for the information. Don’t know if I want to move to a place with a lot of break-ins. Don’t need the stress...In any case, you sure about the break-in? Anyone tell you about Walker being robbed?”

  “No one said a durn thing. But something’s missing—that baseball plaque they gave him. Could be worth a few thousands.”

  The table behind us got quiet and looked up at the word “thousands.” When they looked up, I saw how young they were. They weren’t my age, as I’d first thought, but a good eight or ten years younger, and only seemed older in the harsh early morning light. As they looked at us, I realiz
ed it was the first time they seemed to be aware that someone else existed in the restaurant other than themselves, and the waitress who they saw as someone whose purpose in life was to serve them. That was the problem with this generation—with most people, really. It wasn’t that they were necessarily bad, but they were self-involved. Nothing mattered except for their own needs.

  “You sure about that?” I spoke softly, but now that the table was quiet, the place was so quiet that if a pin had dropped, it would have had an explosion-worthy echo.

  “Listen, years after Walker retired from baseball, that plaque was all he talked about. Last I saw him, he said he wanted to be buried with it, but that wasn’t the case when he was put to rest. I know, because I was there. And the only way he would have been buried without that plaque is if somebody stole it.”

  o0o

  I went back to my car and took out the camera, before walking into to Bunch’s building. I managed to slip inside the building as a well-dressed woman was leaving. My camera made her turn around.

  “You—you with la caméra,” the woman said. Her “you” sounded like “ooh,” and her pronunciation vaguely French. “I am Lela Cécile Michèle Thérésa Monet. I see flyer. You look to shoot le film, no?”

  “I’m in the process of looking—” I began, but Ms. Monet grabbed my wrist. She dragged me into to the elevator and began talking nonstop.

  “You visit mon appartement, oui? You like. Of course you like. I danced with Mademoiselle Josephine Baker. Also Dunham! Appartement es magnifique!”

  Ms. Monet’s apartment was magnifique. Plush rugs thick as fingers and everything in it—couch, walls, chairs, tables—a glaring white. In the brightness of Ms. Monet’s apartment, I got a good look at her. She appeared to be in her late sixties with sand-colored skin and a wig that was too “poofy” for her head. Her satin dress, tied tightly at the waist, was the same glistening white as her apartment. But, with one movement, she loosened the belt, and the dress collapsed to the floor. Ms. Monet stood in front of me in a white slip.