Key Witness (2 page)

“You got your pistol out from somewhere in the house, where you kept it for emergencies, and you brought it into the room with you,” the policeman said, putting it together. “Which you assumed would give you some protection, but it didn’t because he took it away from you. I see the picture now,” he concluded.

“He was walking at me,” she said. The color was rapidly draining from her face, her voice coming out in airy, wheeling gasps, like she’d had a tracheotomy. She shook her head. “I couldn’t pull the trigger. He took it right out of my hand.”

“And then shot you with it,” the policeman confirmed.

“I tried to take it back away from him once he’d taken it. That’s when it went off.”

You’re lucky it didn’t go off in your chest, Wyatt thought. Two inches to the left and we wouldn’t be standing here talking like this.

“At least they didn’t get anything,” Enid added defiantly, almost gloating. “As soon as that gun went off they ran like scared rabbits.”

A woman suddenly materialized, running up the driveway. “What happened?” Moira, Wyatt’s wife, asked. “Oh!” she gasped, seeing the blood seeping through the bandage on Enid Sprague’s rib cage.

“Burglars,” Wyatt explained. “Enid tried to stop them and they took the gun away from her, and it went off in the struggle.”

“Oh, my God! You poor thing! What can we do?” Moira was wearing a black cocktail dress, but she had no shoes on and no makeup.

“I need to go to the hospital,” Enid said.

“Of course.” Moira was chagrined.

The paramedics lifted Enid into the ambulance.

“Before you go, sir,” the officer asked Ted Sprague, “can you give me a description of them? Did you get a decent look at them? Either of them, or both?” He had his notepad out.

“Well, it was dark, like I said,” Ted began. “Pitch-black, except for their flashlights. All we could really see were silhouettes.”

“They had stocking caps pulled down low over their faces,” Enid interrupted from the back of the ambulance. “And they were wearing gloves.” She pointed at the paramedic’s hands. “Like hers.” She lay down inside, on the gurney.

“They were black,” Ted told the cops. “They were black men, both of them.”

The lead cop, who was white, cocked his head quizzically. “If it was pitch-black, how could you tell?” he asked.

Ted Sprague turned from helping his wife into the ambulance to face the cop. “I didn’t fall out of the tree this morning, son. It could’ve been black as the inside of hell in there, but I can tell a black man when I hear his voice. I heard them both talk, and they were both black men. Of that I am certain.”

“All right, then.” The officer made some notes. “Did they seem young or old, or in between?”

“Young.” Ted was as firm as concrete. “From gangs, I’d bet my life on it.”

“We’re going to check the house over,” the officer told Ted, “and we’ll leave someone here until you get back. These people won’t be back,” he said, looking at Wyatt and Moira as well as the Spragues. “They’re likely a dozen miles away from here by now, but you might want to let your security service know what happened. They’ll send someone out to keep an eye on things.”

The ambulance took off down the driveway, disappearing into the street. The cops went into the house to assess the damage further.

It was quiet again, only the sounds of night in the country, but Wyatt felt like he was standing in a war zone. He put an arm around Moira’s waist. She was shaking.

“Let’s go home,” he said comfortingly. “It’s over here.”

She looked up at him. “I never thought something like that could happen here. Nothing’s safe anymore,” she stated, her voice flat.

“That’s not true,” he countered.

“Of course it is. You just saw it.”

He shook his head. “This was a professional, planned burglary. The men who did this knew the Spragues were out of town. It was dumb bad luck for everyone that they came back early.”

“You don’t know that,” Moira said. “And they shot Enid.”

“They didn’t have guns.” He wanted her to understand the truth of the situation so she could put it in its proper perspective. “It was
her
gun. It went off by accident. People get robbed, honey. It doesn’t mean gangbangers are coming out here and threatening us.”

She thought about that for a moment. “It’s the world. Nothing is safe anymore,” she proclaimed a second time with a shudder.

“C
AMELS.”

Normal, everyday purchase, nothing suspicious.

The owner, a squat statue behind the counter, barely looked at him, singsong: “Regular or filters? Kings or lights?” One sideways glance then away, the black narrow eyes opaque marbles. Like he was a dog turd stinking up the pavement.

The gun hung heavy in the right-hand pocket of his jacket. A compact automatic, like the hit men use. He didn’t know any hit men, he’d heard that from his homie, who swore he’d stolen it from some Italian guy’s house.

He could kill this motherfucker and sleep like a baby afterward. Take the gun out and shoot this prick right in his face.

“Change that—make it Marlboros,” he managed to respond as the short man, almost as wide as he was tall, was reaching up on his tiptoes for the pack of smokes high on the shelf behind the counter. You asshole, you’re so dumb you don’t keep the cigarettes someplace where you can reach them easy, you deserve having to stretch your short fat arm up there—the owner’s shirt coming out from where he’d neatly tucked it into his pants, which were belted halfway up his chest.

Then he noticed that there were packs closer down, easier to reach. Son of a bitch was trying to foist a stale pack off on him. Save the fresh ones for his regular customers.

You’re on my list, he thought to himself, eyes burning at the owner’s back.

He hated when people pulled shit like that. Like he was some fool back in school, didn’t know the answer, teacher trying to ridicule him. Fumbling, tongue-tied. “Yeah, Marlboros,” he said again. “Hard box.” It threw him, being asked a dumb-ass question like that. And trying to sell him stale goods, that really burned his ass.

Not that it actually mattered. He didn’t smoke tobacco. One brand was the same as the other, far as he was concerned. Camels had been the first brand that had popped into his mind, because of that Joe Camel character you saw everywhere, on the billboards and in the subways, a takeoff of an ultracool dude, shooting pool and scoring the bitches.

Tobacco was a plot: evil, enslaving, you saw that message plastered on the signs in the buses, the billboards all through the south side—sometimes plastered right over that Joe Camel’s jive-ass face: a picture of a skeleton handing a lit cigarette to an innocent little black kid. Little girl in pigtails, face all clean and shiny. Big shit-eating grin on the death-head’s skull-face.

Pass on tobacco. Smoke weed, or he would mix up some crack with Valium that was part of the contents of some old bitch’s purse he’d grabbed off the seat of her car where she had left it while she was putting coins in a parking meter. Deserve the bitch right, leave her purse on the seat with the window wide open.

Doing drugs on a regular basis was expensive, too much for him, especially where he was at these days. The only good thing about not having money he could think of.

He wasn’t going to have a habit—ever. Habits were for losers. Like they say on the street, if you have a regular habit that’s all you have. You
deal
shit, you don’t use it, unless you’re dealing it and taking a taste for yourself. Preferably you sell it to white people, ’cause they paid top dollar. They want to score and get the fuck out of his neighborhood, scared shitless, you could smell the fear on them.

Score dope and cheap pussy, blow jobs in their expensive cars, that’s all they came down to his neighborhood for.

Mostly, though, it was his own people who copped. Where you live is where you do business. But you got to be careful, you’re gonna do a lot of prison time if you get caught dealing if you’re black. Black dealer goes to prison, white dealer goes on parole. Check it out, Dexter had told him once.

It was true. Still, as the saying goes, selling drugs is a living. Mighty fine one.

Getting into dealing was going to be his next move. He was already desperate thinking about it, about the life he was missing out on. Cars, jewelry, clothes. Bitches.

His best friend, Dexter—like a brother: blood, almost, born four days apart. Their mamas sitting out on the stoops, side by side, legs spread against the August humidity, drinking Cokes out of the bottle, baby boys bouncing on their knees. That’s how far back. Dexter Lewis and Marvin White, from the cradle. Dexter four days older, he’d pulled rank all their lives. And still did.

Dexter was a dealer, a legitimate high roller, not some street hustler selling dime bags. Just turned eighteen and he’s a lieutenant in the city’s drug syndicate, run from the state prison by bloods: a multimillion-dollar business.

Dexter was a prime example of how good you could do if you were willing to take chances, hang tough, be a hard-nosed businessman. Dexter had started dealing barely a year ago, and already he’s driving a Jeep Grand Cherokee, the Orvis model, top of the line—leather on leather, two car phones, CD player, he’s buying his suits three, four at a time at the most expensive men’s stores in the city. Ralph Lauren, Dexter’s very buttoned-down, nothing flashy. Rolex on his wrist, a real one, not one of those jive knockoffs. The Navigator model, understated chrome, good down to fifty fathoms. The watch cost Dexter $3,500, Dexter pays for it in cash, hundred-dollar bills, crisp like he’d printed them up himself. Whipping out his roll, peeling them off, laying them down on the jewelry-store counter. The salesman, pasty-faced middle-aged white asshole, his eyeballs bulging, checking it out, shit-eating grin on his face; “Very good, sir, is there anything else I can show you today, sir?” Salesman thinking, eighteen-year-old nigger drug dealer, pimp, I hope you choke on that watch, you socially worthless piece of shit, smiling, “an excellent selection, sir, you have excellent taste.” You could read that motherfucker’s mind like he had a window in his forehead.

Standing there next to Dexter, watching. With less than five dollars in his own damn pocket. About as useful as a second asshole.

This being-poor shit was going to end, and soon. Get out of the projects, get his mother off her knees.

Six months. A year, tops. He’d be peeling off the hundreds, just like Dexter.

Look around the Korean’s store. Take your time. Check it out. Play it cool, play it slow. Don’t rush it, it ain’t going nowhere.

This store was a little gold mine. He’d been checking it out for months, from when he’d been a delivery boy. The block the store was located on had been part of his route, he had walked by it every day, five days a week. Once or twice he’d gone inside and bought a soda, and that was when he’d seen how much money was coming in.

The store owner slapped a pack of Marlboros—hard box, like he’d asked for—down on the counter.

Lay his money down, nice and polite, pocket his change, cigarettes, walk out. Casual, no big thing. Owner not even looking at him, he could’ve been a spaceman from Mars.

V
IOLET WALESKA’S FEET WERE
killing her. Her ankles, her calves, her knees. Some days it felt like she’d been beaten with a baseball bat from the waist down. She had been standing on the rock-hard concrete floor, slippery from being constantly hosed down, for her entire shift, ten miserable hours, only breaking for lunch and the bathroom—but she was going out tonight and aching legs weren’t going to stop her.

She peeled off her white pants and smock that the company furnished daily, freshly laundered and deodorized, continued stripping down to her underwear, off came her Dr. Scholl’s support hose, it all went into the big canvas laundry basket. Everything was soaking wet with her sweat and stinking to high hell; they could wash these uniforms in boiling water forever and the smell would still stick—the smell of dead, burning pigs.

She was naked but she could care less about modesty. They were all women, over two dozen of them, old, young, short, tall, skinny, fat, black, white, and they knew each other intimately. Killing, cutting, gutting, rendering, ten hours a day, year in and year out—it formed a bond among them.

The stench of burnt hair and rendered pigskin hung in the air like a mushroom cloud. Five acres under one roof, thousands of pigs butchered daily. They moved up the conveyor belt, four hundred pounds of sheer squealing terror, each hog’s ten pounds of watery shit running on the floor like blood, the hose washing everything away. But not the smell of death, the awful decay.

It never went away, despite the air conditioners and industrial fans that blew twenty-four hours a day, and the quantities of lemon oil and deodorant, also provided by the company. The women lathered the stuff on at the end of every shift, after scrubbing themselves raw in the scalding showers. But it never went away.

She stood under the shower of near-boiling needles, the steam rising up and filling the room. Standing there until the muscles in her neck and back began to stop aching, the tension flowing away like the water flowing down the drain. She had a strong, full figure—a womanly woman, nothing weak. Washing her hair, she eased herself to the floor, the water flowing under her butt, under her legs, lying on the floor of the shower on her back and elevating her legs, feeling the circulation coming back.

She dried off with her own towels she’d brought from home, nice thick terries. When you worked this hard you had to pamper yourself. That’s why, despite the ache in her calves and ankles and feet that would outlast a two-hour professional massage, she was going to dress up in a sexy outfit and go out dancing. She was meeting a couple of girlfriends, Peggy and Paula, they’d dance with each other like teenagers, drink some margaritas, act up. And maybe she’d meet a cute guy, dance with him—some slow ones. Not that anything would ever come of it—it never did, not someone you met dancing in a bar—but a girl has to dream.

She still had time, but not an infinite amount anymore, not very much at all. She had turned forty on her last birthday, a month ago. The dreaded
four-o.