Colleen McCullough - Naked Cruelty

At noon on Tuesday, November 26, Buzz, Nick Jefferson and four uniforms entered the house to find two black men watching a Lakers replay on television; neither man was armed, and a rigorous search of every cranny on all three floors revealed no firearms. 17 Parkinson was a three-family house that had been gutted and completely lined with mattresses, every window boarded up. Milo Washington and Durston Parrish clearly lived in it, but Buzz’s snitch, vouched for by Nick, swore that Milo and Durston were the heads of the new splinter group. So where were the caches of weapons?

Posters had been pinned to the mattresses extolling bloodshed, black supremacy, the slaughter of whites, and, many times over, three capital letters: BPP. It was a new acronym to Buzz.

He stared at Milo Washington, a more commanding figure than Durston Parrish. Well over six feet, a good physique, a handsome face, milk coffee skin and hip threads; the eyes, large and an interesting shade of green, regarded him with contempt. He must, Buzz reflected, be feeling an utter fool-watching a Lakers replay!

“What does BPP stand for, Milo?” Buzz asked.

“Black People’s Power,” Milo said proudly, defiantly.

“So that’s it! Who’re you, man?” Nick asked.

“I am the founder and leader.”

“And articulate when you need to be. Where are the guns?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know, Uncle Tom pig?”

A frisson of fear shot down Buzz’s spine; they hadn’t been quiet about raiding 17 Parkinson, thus giving those in the houses nearby time to evacuate before the bullets started humming.

“Something’s wrong,” Buzz said to Nick when the search proved fruitless. “Milo didn’t deny the guns-he’s stupidly articulate, needs time inside having talks with Wesley le Clerc.”

“We’ve got nothing on them,” Nick said. “Watching the Lakers win isn’t a crime, and there were no stashes of any kind.”

“Don’t hold your breath, Milo,” Buzz said to him on the porch, a corner of his mind wondering why the uniforms, clustered around one squad car, looked so upset.

They had all been inside the house when the fracas at Taft High occurred. Two students, two teachers and a riot cop were dead, and another thirty-three were wounded, all but two slightly. Someone on Parkinson had run to the school to alert the kid who led Black People’s Power there; spoiling for action, he gathered his troops, broke out automatics and spare clips from the BPP cache, and set off to bust Milo and Durston free. If the pigs thought they were taking Milo in, they better think again! But one of the BPP kids was a spy, there to tip off the Black Brigade kids when the BPP arsenal surfaced. The BB kids tapped their own cache, and a gun battle developed within the school. Only the intervention of riot police had stopped the hostilities.

Why hadn’t Corey Marshall believed his report? It all hinged on that, thought Buzz, wandering desolately across the courtyard blaming himself-and Corey. He’d known the guns were at the school! Trouble was, he didn’t have enough evidence to lay before Captain Vasquez, who might otherwise have hit the school at the same moment as Buzz hit the BPP house on Parkinson. No, no, it was all wrong! Corey Marshall was the necessary link and-

Someone was pacing the courtyard: Carmine Delmonico. His face was grim, nor did Buzz need to ask why he was out here, pacing. Sometimes a man needed to have space and open air.

Carmine saw him and strode over.

“Do you believe this?” he demanded. “Two rival black power factions, two thousand hapless kids of every color God makes a human skin-shit, shit, shit ! How did one faction think it could bust Milo Washington loose, and why did the other faction decide to stop them inside the school? My wife is right, it’s guns! And drugs! Why can’t they use a classroom as a place to learn instead of as a place to come down off of smack?”

The two men turned and began to walk together.

“I knew I was right,” Buzz said at last, clenching his fists. “I kept telling Corey there was a splinter group, but he wouldn’t believe me. I didn’t have any facts, just my cop instincts. I was conned too, Carmine, by Corey’s Black Brigade snitches. They talked me into thinking that the Black Brigade wasn’t worried by the formation of Black People’s Power. Whereas the truth is that Milo was making significant inroads into Mohammed’s army, and war was in the wind. The trouble is Mohammed’s ordinary soldiers are not in the picture-I should have seen it, but I didn’t. Jesus!”

Another silence fell, again broken by Buzz Genovese.

“I put in four hours writing that report, busted my ass, but I didn’t have facts to back up my cop instincts. Just little signs-stray remarks, sidelong looks, interrupted whispers-not facts, facts, facts! The Valley bank holdup went down to finance BPP weapons purchases, but tell me why-just tell me why they had to hide the weapons in a school? A school! ” He stopped, recollecting himself. “Well, too late now. Five lives! I am haunted, Carmine.”

“What report, Buzz?”

“The supplementary one I submitted about the Taft High arms cache. Corey closed the case for lack of evidence a month ago-well, I guess you know that. But I knew it wasn’t over. So I watched and listened for another nearly two weeks, then I wrote this second report.” He looked embarrassed. “Sorry, Captain, I didn’t mean to snitch, and Corey was right. There wasn’t a shred of evidence.”

“What do we do about it?” Carmine asked, holding up the second report. He was staring at Commissioner Silvestri and Captain Vasquez, whose faces were carefully neutral.

“If so much as a whisper of this gets out, the media will have a field day. The death of kids in a school is world news,” Carmine went on. “Holloman is full of journalists. The Black Brigade and its splinter, Black People’s Power, are local black power groups with no national impact. To the journalists in this year of riots and terrible violence, the BB and the BPP are peanuts. Martin Luther King Junior dead, then Robert Kennedy-it’s an awful year! But what if it leaks that the Holloman PD had warning of a second weapons cache at Taft High, and didn’t so much as look for it? It’s known now that both groups had a cache at the school, but nothing indicates that the Holloman PD didn’t do its job. Except this.” He put the seven sheets down on Silvestri’s coffee table.

All three men had read Buzz’s report, pulled from the back of the Taft High file by a terrified Corey Marshall. What Carmine didn’t know was whether Corey had intended to bring him the report, or burn it. His cop instincts said Corey intended to burn it, but just as he pulled the sheets, Carmine had walked in.

“You said one of my cases would come back and bite me,” said Corey, handing him the report.

“I’m sorry that it’s so terrible, Lieutenant.”

“What’s going to happen to me?” He sounded petrified.

“I don’t know. But if you have any brain at all, don’t so much as mention it to Maureen. That’s your only hope.”

“I told Corey not to confide in Maureen,” Carmine said now. “He might even obey that order, because I don’t think he could face the tongue-lashing she’d give him.”

“You’re very smart, Carmine,” Fernando Vasquez said.

“If I were, this wouldn’t have happened. I knew that Corey Marshall was weak, but so was I for not acting.”

“That’s aftersight speaking.” Fernando’s beautiful hand indicated the report. “You kept this unduplicated, and you guys in Detectives haven’t caught up enough with modern policing to keep copies of everything. For instance, did Sergeant Genovese keep a copy for himself?”