“You mean like Joe Peck? Or the Elephant?” Jet tried to keep the excitement out of his voice.
Potts frowned, then glanced over his shoulder at the precinct building to make sure nobody he knew was within earshot. “Those two got ears in this precinct. Leave ’em alone. Peck’s crazy. He’s probably gonna get burnt by his own people. The Elephant . . .” He shrugged. “He’s old-fashioned. Trucking, construction, storage—he’s a smuggler. He moves stuff out of the harbor. Cigarettes, tires, that kind of stuff. He doesn’t work in drugs. He’s a hell of a gardener.”
Jet squinted at Potts, who seemed distracted.
“He’s a weird bird, the Elephant. You’d think he’d favor Lionel trains or toy boats, or something. His yard looks like a flower show.”
“Maybe he’s growing flowers to hide marijuana plants,” Jet said. “That’s illegal, by the way.”
Potts sucked his teeth and shot an irritated glance at him. “I thought you liked to draw comic books.”
“I do, man. I draw them all the time.”
“Then get back in the blues and draw your comics at night. You wanna be the first at something? Be the first Negro cop smart enough to forget the Dick Tracy crap and retire with your head in one piece.”
“Who’s Dick Tracy?” Jet asked.
“Don’t you read the funny papers?”
Jet shrugged.
Potts snickered. “Get out. Don’t be an idiot.”
Jet tried to get out. He actually broached the subject with his lieutenant, who ignored him. The Seventy-Sixth Precinct, which Jet had only recently joined as a detective, was a demoralized mess. The captain spent most of his time at meetings in Manhattan. The white cops didn’t trust him. The few black cops, smelling his ambition and terrified about being transferred to East New York—considered hell on earth—avoided him. Most wanted to talk about nothing more than fishing upstate on weekends. The paperwork was overwhelming: twelve copies for a shoplifting arrest. The bomb squad sat around and played cards all day. Potts was the only one Jet trusted, and Potts, at fifty-nine, was biding his time to retirement with one foot out the door, having been demoted to sergeant for reasons he never discussed. Potts planned to retire in less than a year.
“I’ll get out,” Jet said, “after I’ve done it a year. Then I can say I’m a pioneer.”
“All right, Custer. If it goes bad, I’ll call your mom.”
“C’mon, Potts, I’m a man.”
“So was Custer.”
* * *
The day of the shooting, Jet, clad in the blue Housing Authority janitor’s uniform and leaning on his broom, was standing in the plaza daydreaming about taking a job in his cousin’s cleaners and being the first Negro to invent a new shirt steamer, when he saw Sportcoat in his ragged sports jacket and beaten slacks teetering out of the dim hallway of Building 9 and drifting toward the crowd of boys around Clemens, who sat at the plaza flagpole surrounded by his crew and customers, not ten feet from where Jet was standing.
Jet noticed Sportcoat smiling, which was not unusual. He’d seen the ancient coot around, grinning and talking to himself. He watched as Sportcoat stopped for a moment in the crowded plaza, did a batter’s pose, swung at an imaginary pitch, then straightened, stretched, and teetered forward. He chuckled and was about to turn away when he saw—or thought he saw—the old man pull out a large, rusted pistol from his left jacket pocket and place it in his right-hand pocket.
Jet looked around helplessly. This was what Potts called “a situation.” Most of his work up until this point had been smooth. Make a few buys. Take mental notes. ID this one. Figure out that one. Get the lay of the land. Figure out where the spiderweb goes, which was to a supplier in Bed-Stuy called “Bunch” and through a dreaded enforcer on Bunch’s crew named Earl, who came around to distribute and collect. That was as far as Jet had gotten. There was a killer, he heard, a hit man named Harold who was apparently so horrible that everyone seemed afraid to mention his name, including Deems himself. Jet hoped not to meet him. As it was, he wasn’t feeling skippy about matters. Every time he briefed his lieutenant on his progress, the man seemed nonchalant. “Doing good, doing good” was all he said. The lieutenant, Jet knew, was angling for a promotion and had one foot out the door, too, like most of the commanders at the Seven-Six. With the exception of Potts and a couple of kind older detectives, Jet was on his own, with no guidance and no direction, so he cooled it and did the job easy as Potts had instructed. No busts. No collars. No comments. Do nothing. Just watch. That’s what Potts said.
But this . . . this was something different. The old man was approaching with a gun. If Potts were in his shoes, what would he do?
Jet glanced around. There were people everywhere. It was nearly noon, and the assortment of neighborhood gossips who met at the flagpole bench every morning to sip coffee and salute the flag had not quite departed. An odd truce had developed, Jet noticed, between Deems and his drug-slinging crew and the old-timers who came here every morning to gossip and insult one another with jokes. For a short period, between eleven thirty and noon, the two groups actually shared the flagpole space. Deems worked a bench on one side of the flagpole, and the morning residents gathered on the other, mumbling about the declining state of the world, which included, Jet noticed, Deems himself.
“I’d put a baseball bat to that little wormhead if he was my son,” Jet had heard Sister Veronica Gee grumble once. Added Bum-Bum, “I’d send him hobbling, but why interrupt my prayers?” Threw in Hot Sausage, “I’m gonna warm his two little toasters one of these days—when I’m not under the influence.”
Deems, Jet noticed, ignored them, always keeping his foot traffic to a minimum until the old-timers departed, leaving the squabblings, the posturing, the cursing, the harsh arguments, even the fights, for later. Before noon the plaza was safe.
Until now, Jet thought.
Jet checked his watch. It was 11:55. Some of the old-timers were starting to rise up from the bench, with the old man and his gun still coming, now fifty feet away, his hand thrust into his gun pocket. Jet felt his mouth go dry watching the old drunk teeter forward five feet at a time, stopping to swing an imaginary baseball bat, then swaying forward once more, taking his time, talking, apparently having a two-way conversation with himself: “Ain’t got time for you, woman . . . Not today I don’t! You’re not yourself today anyway. And that’s an improvement!”
Jet watched, unbelieving, as Sportcoat closed to forty feet. Then thirty. Then twenty-five, still talking to himself as he moved toward Deems.
At twenty feet, the old man stopped muttering, but still he came on.
Jet couldn’t help himself. His training kicked in. He dropped to a crouch to grab the snub-nosed .38 strapped to his ankle, then stopped himself. A gun strapped to the ankle was a dead giveaway. It screamed cop. Instead, he stood up and drifted away as the old man circled the crowd surrounding Deems. As casually as he could, Jet walked to the wide, circular concrete flag base, placing his broom against the base, stretched his arms, and feigned a tired yawn. He glanced at the bench where the old-timers sat, and he saw with alarm that a few of them were still there.