Robert Tanenbaum - Reversible Error

"Girl, it's about the only way there is."

"OK, give me the boxes. I'll start right away."

"You can do it? Just like that?"

"No," said Caputo, her face tightening. "I'll have to steal and lie and forge my boss's signature and do nothing else for the next week or so, but there's nothing much else I feel like doing anyway. I'll get back to you in a couple of days."

Pepper Soames's club, on the old part of 125th where it curves down to the river, was one of the last of the old-time Harlem jazz clubs. It was a relic of the days, thirty years past, when the audience for real jazz was small, hip, and almost entirely black, before stereo, heroin, integration, or rock and roll.

Art Dugman walked into Pepper's around midnight, took a table in the nearly empty room, ordered a J amp;B on the rocks, and watched his boss, Detective Lieutenant Clay Fulton, finish his set. Fulton was playing keyboard in a trio: a hotshot kid alto player and an elderly man on bass. Dugman thought they were pretty good, but he didn't know anything about jazz.

After they finished playing, Fulton came over to Dugman's table and sat down. He was holding a glass of what Dugman knew was club soda. Fulton didn't drink anymore.

Fulton said, "Why ain't you home, Dugman? Streets are dangerous this time of night."

"You said report to you. I'm reporting."

"So cop a squat, Jack. What's happening on the dealer murders?"

"Let me spin it out for you, just like we got it. See if you come up with the same bad thoughts I did."

"Bad thoughts?" said Fulton.

"Just listen up, Loo," said Dugman, and quickly recited what he and his team had learned since the night of Larue Clarry's murder: the details of the killing itself, the evidence from Clarry's apartment, their interrogation of Slo Mo, and the murder of what ought to have been their best witness, the prostitute Haze.

"Whores get killed all the time," said Fulton after a thoughtful pause.

"Yeah, but look here, we know who did it," said Dugman. Some of the girls on Haze's stroll saw Haze getting into a car with a black man about one-thirty this morning. The M.E. says she was killed between two and three the same morning. Nobody ever saw her alive again."

"You got a good make on the guy from that?"

"No, we had to shake the place up a little."

Fulton grunted. "Am I gonna have trouble on this?" Fulton understood what happened when the King Cole Trio shook the place up a little. People came flying headfirst out of shooting galleries. People found themselves hanging by their ankles from rooftop parapets. TV sets fell from windows. Normal trade shut down at the public drug markets and the places where stolen goods changed hands. The underworld got sick, heaved its belly, and spewed forth a sacrifice.

"No trouble," said Dugman, "we just hustled the mutts. Anyhow, a junkie name of Laxton shook out. Says he saw the whole thing."

"He saw the whore get it?"

"Shit, no! He saw Clarry get it. The fuck I care about some whore-he saw the guy did Clarry, and if you right about this, the guy that did all the dealers. And the whore."

"This Laxton witness the actual killing?"

"No, what he saw was Clarry's car pull up under the highway, and the guy get out, go in the back of the car for a minute, and get out again and walk away. Laxton was nodding off in a pile of trash. He jumped when he saw the guy, made some noise, and the guy spooked and got small real fast. That's probably why he left the piece on the seat of the car."

"So did he see the guy close enough to put him on the mug books?"

Dugman smiled. "No need. He made the guy right there. He knew him from way back."

"Who was it?" asked Fulton, taking a sip of his drink.

"Name's Tecumseh Booth."

Fulton let loose a great snorting laugh, spraying soda from his mouth over the table. When he had stopped coughing, he wiped his face with a cocktail napkin and said, "God damn! You got to be shittin' me, man. Tecumseh? I know Tecumseh Booth. I sent him up for armed robbery a couple of years back. He's a lot of things, but he ain't no hit man."

"Maybe he changed professions," Dugman said carefully.

"Uh-uh. Not likely. Tecumseh will hold your horse while you ace somebody. He might drive you away from the scene. But he never shot nobody in his life. Never even carried heat, that I know of."

"He was there," said Dugman.

"Yeah, could of been. Go ahead and pick him up if you want, but he won't tell you shit."

"He won't?"

"He didn't tell me shit when I picked him up, back when. Three guys shot up a liquor store, and Booth was the wheel on the job. The other mutts got loose and Booth took the fall-eight years, I recall it was. Never said shit. Boy can hold his mud, I'll say that for him."

Dugman pushed back from the table. "We'll see about that."

Fulton frowned. "Art, no roughing. I know it's Harlem, but times has changed, you dig?"

"Yeah," said Dugman, standing up. "They sure has. Teddy Wilson used to play this room. Catch you later, Loo."

Outside, Dugman cursed himself for a short-tempered fool. He knew Fulton was good-a smart and competent detective. Yet Dugman could not help harboring resentment for the other man's success, for his rocketing rise through the ranks. Fulton was the first college-educated black detective lieutenant in the history of the NYPD. If the paddies downtown ever let a brother in as chief of detectives, it would be Fulton.

No, it was not precisely resentment; it was anger at what his own life had been, a grinding rise through the ranks, nearly ten years in a blue bag before they gave him his gold tin. Now he was taking orders from a man ten years his junior.

At some level, he wanted Fulton to acknowledge that, to honor him for it, at least to credit him with some smarts. He didn't deserve a laugh in the face and a nagging about questioning suspects.

He got in his car and drove fast across town. He realized that he had not conveyed to Fulton the three points he had wanted to bring out about the rash of dope-dealer killings. What had puzzled him from the outset was the lack of resistance on the part of the victims. Not one of these people had been shot down in a hail of lead. At least one of them had opened his door to his assailant. The killings had been done almost at the leisure of the murderers, and against a group of men who were typically suspicious to the point of paranoia, well-guarded and well-armed.

The second point was what Slo Mo had said when Mack braced him against the wall in that alley. The pimp knew Mack was a cop. Why had he been so frightened, and why did he so urgently want to make it clear that he didn't sell dope?

The third point was the clincher to Dugman. They had dropped Slo Mo in the alley at a quarter to twelve. They had called in the pickup request on the prostitute Haze about twenty minutes later. Within the next hour somebody had picked her off her stroll, taken her down to the docks, and put a bullet in her head.

It was indeed a bad thought, almost too heavy to hold by himself, and Dugman briefly considered turning his car around, driving back to Pepper's, and laying the burden on his superior. But something made him stop. Would Fulton laugh at him again? He didn't need that! No, the better move was to nail it down, to pick up Tecumseh Booth and make him talk, to make him reveal that the cool and casual murderer they were hunting was a cop.

Sugar Hill had fallen some from what it had been thirty years earlier, but it was still a pretty nice neighborhood, for Harlem. The apartment occupied by Tecumseh Booth was located in a still-handsome tan brick building on 149th off St. Nicholas Avenue. The class of the area was demonstrated by the brass mailboxes in the lobby, which had retained their doors, locks, and polish. Detective Jeffers read the name of Tecumseh Booth's girlfriend from one of them, and headed up to the third-floor apartment with Maus.