involved with the hit out on Staten Island.'
'Witnesses?' April asked.
'In Harlem? Oh, you know the scum up there. Ten thousand people on the street. Every single one of them blind. No one saw a thing,' Iriarte complained.
'Except one old lady who lives in the building next to the club. She said Jefferson was a regular there. Day, night, weekend, whenever,' Mike said.
'So?' ' Iriarte studied April. He knew she had something. He cupped his hand at himself and waved. Give
Sure thing. She pulled Liberty's E-mail out of her bag. Then she laid it out for them. Hagedorn could be the one to locate the phone Liberty was using to send his messages. But she and Mike were the primaries on the case. They had to be the ones to pick hm up for questioning.
Hagedorn took the paper and studied it, his face all gooey with happiness. 'We got him,' he said. 'Thank you, God, we got him.'
'Now, wait a minute,' April said quickly. 'I told you. I want to handle this with Liberty.'
'Sure, sure, April.'
April checked her watch. She had a lot to do. She wanted to get hold of the mink coat at Liberty's apartment and send it to the lab to see if there were traces of Merril's blood on it. And she had to be home in Astoria in time to drive Skinny to Chinatown no later than three-thirty, four. Had to see Kiang at seven. She and Mike headed out into the field.
At five in the afternoon ballistics confirmed that the
Glock that had been found on the sidewalk a block and a half from Jefferson's shooting had been the murder weapon. But there was a big surprise. Three partials and one thumbprint lifted from the barrel of the gun were identified as belonging to the right hand of Frederick Douglass Liberty. No one beeped Sergeants Sanchez and Woo to let them know.
42
Belle lay on the sofa in her sometime apartment, her eyes closed and a towel full of ice on her head. She had bruises and swelling on her forehead and every half hour Liberty woke her up, concerned that she might have a concussion. He'd had six or seven himself, and didn't want her falling into a deep sleep, not to wake up for a week or two. The man had kicked her hard. The yards of turban she'd been wearing hadn't protected her at all.
'Come on, baby, open those beautiful green eyes.'
'They're hazel. Men don't know nothin',' Belle grumbled in her sleep.
The times she didn't respond, he squeezed some water from the towel onto her face and sponged it off, stroking her forehead until the green eyes fluttered open.
'Don't you touch me,' she muttered, raising a hand to her hair that was a color hard to pin down. Red-gold, gold-rust. Brown-gold, harvest gold. No, definitely red something. It was good hair and there was a lot of it. Probably drew attention to her, and Belle clearly didn't like that kind of attention.
'Don't look at me,' she mumbled.
'I'm not looking at you. Just worried about your health. You have a lot of courage. You got yourself messed up.'
'Belle, you got a family, a husband or boyfriend, somebody I can call to come get you?'
No answer. She'd fallen asleep.
The night had an eerie quality to it. Rick had three shallow cuts on his chest that oozed into the only other towel in the place, and burned some. He got up and washed them with soap in the grimy bathroom a few times. He was sore, and like other times he'd been hurt and his body was trying to mend, he was hungry. He thought about his restaurant. The restaurant was a place backed by him and his white partners, run by blacks, where both blacks and whites felt comfortable. Anyplace where blacks and whites both felt comfortable was considered trendy. Rick used to be amused by the term. Now it made him sick, as if all along he'd only been part of a zoo exhibit.
When everything was going wrong in her life, Rick's mama always said, 'I am still. I am still so God can show me the way.' She told her boy that God lived in stillness and only in stillness would Rick himself be able to find his way through this life.
'If God so still, then why the peoples scream and yell so loud in church?' he'd demanded.
'Is, do. Don't you go leaving out those verbs, boy, and don't question. Don't go questioning the ways of God.'
But how could he find out what God's ways were if he wasn't allowed to question? Liberty couldn't question the ways of God now. He didn't believe God had a personal interest in him or anyone else. Merrill was gone for no reason at all. Water flooded his eyes, blurring his vision, but he couldn't be crying. 'I don't cry,' he said aloud. He swiped at his face with the sleeve of his sweatshirt, which was ripped and bloody on the front. He glanced at the girl on the sofa, who was so leery about men. He wondered what had happened to make her that way, and realized she was beautiful.
He thought about the man with the gold teeth and the gun. A dozen people must have seen the man fire. Maybe more. Why had he bothered to cross the street and run a block and a half after him and Belle? Had he known they would be there? How did it fit? The street had been teeming with people. There had been people all over the place. It was possible that even some of the police had seen the shooter with the ridge of gold and the scarf on his head. Rick worried about Belle and couldn't fall asleep.
About eight hours later, at eight-fifteen in the morning, she sat up and rubbed her eyes. 'I'm hungry,' she said.
Rick looked at his watch. 'So am I.'
She went into the bathroom and stayed there a long time while he made some coffee in an old pot. Maybe it was the aroma of brewing coffee that made his throat close up around his windpipe and finally acknowledge the truth. Merrill was not at home, waiting for him with her sexy voice and all her troubles and demons. She was not going to agonize anymore over not giving him golden babies in his image. There would be no more heated (and painfully naive) discussions of politics, no more arguments with them against the world about race or anything else. No more screaming fits about cocaine. Merrill was gone. Another one of his lives was over. Rick's eyes were wet, but he was not crying. He now had to make the choice Merrill hadn't been given. He could die and not be buried with her in that bleak New England cemetery that had probably never received a black body. Or he had to become someone new. Again. Neither prospect had much appeal.
The water had been running in the bathroom for a long time. He knocked on the door. 'You okay?' he asked.
'Don't come in.' The reply was a nervous mumble through the door.
Rick expelled the trapped air in his lungs. 'I'm just asking if you're okay,' he grumbled to himself. He didn't walk in on strange women in their bathrooms.
'Don't come in,' she said again.
Jesus, she was exhausting. He poured some coffee and sat at the table drinking it as the sky cleared and slowly lightened. Finally Belle came out of the bathroom. Rick was careful not to look at her as he handed her a cup of coffee with He hoped her screwy brains hadn't been knocked any looser.
'Thanks.' She sounded surprised.
'You're welcome.'
'What are you doing?' she asked.
'Drinking coffee. Then I'm going to take you home, Belle. Where do you live?'
She sat down at the table and held the mug in both hands. 'My head hurts.'
'So does mine, but I can't stay here any longer, and neither can you.'
'Why?'
