Soul Patch

You ever heard a D Rex Mayweather?

There was an uncomfortable silence. I could hear the hum of the ventilation system, shoes brushing along the linoleum floor of the interrogation room, bodies shifting in their chairs. I thought I might have heard whispering, but it was hard to know if I was just imagining it. The silence broke, and the older detective did the honors.

Why should we give a shit about some dead, drug-dealing nigger, Malik?

Man, y’all gimme that buddy-buddy Malik shit and then you gotta get all up in my face like that. S’not right, man. Y’all get my moufpiece and a D.A. We let them decide if they should give a shit about what this nigger got to say.

That was it. End of tape. But not, I figured, the end of the story. It was too late to call Larry. It was too late to go back to bed. Maybe it was too late for a lot of things.

Excerpted from the Daily News, June 5, 1972:

BOARDWALK BODY IDENTIFIED

Terry O’Loughlin, Staff Writer

The partially decomposed body discovered last week in a shallow grave beneath the Coney Island boardwalk has been positively identified as that of reputed drug kingpin Dexter Mayweather. Mayweather, better known by his street name, D Rex, was alleged to have run the largest drug trafficking network in the five boroughs.

Mayweather had been arrested on a host of charges over the last ten years, ranging from simple possession to assault and attempted murder. Yet at the time of his death, he had never been convicted of any crime. Detectives at the nearby 60th Precinct refused comment on either Mayweather’s homicide or on his previous run-ins with the NYPD.

However, an unnamed source in the federal prosecutor’s office was more forthcoming. He spoke of Mayweather with a grudging respect. “D Rex was the real goods. He was shrewd, slippery as an eel, and ruthless,” the source said. “He was anything but run-of-the-mill and he had been the undisputed ruler of Coney Island. But no lion stays king forever.”

Although the Medical Examiner’s office has listed the death as a homicide, it has refused to release the actual cause of death. Beyond stating that Mayweather’s body had been in the sandy grave for about two weeks and that it had been positively identified through the use of dental records, the M.E. has declined further comment.

Dexter Mayweather, the youngest of seven children, began life in a coastal South Carolina town. When his father abandoned the family shortly after his son’s birth, his mother relocated to the Coney Island section of Brooklyn.

(See Body Identified on page 28)

CHAPTER THREE

I would have caught the winning touchdown pass or floated down some lazy country stream or tasted a woman for the first time. When I woke, the world would take me to its breast and I’d be able to hear myself think for the first time in my life. Not only would that voice inside my head know the right questions, but it would supply the answers for my way ahead. Unfortunately, it had been my experience that focusing on ifs and woulds and should haves was a shortcut to hell.

“Jesus Christ, Moe!”

I woke up, the touchdown pass glancing off my fingertips.

“Is this how you want Sarah to find you?”

I took inventory:

Shirtless and in my boxers.

Headphone cord twisted through my arms.

Tumbler between my legs.

Bottle of Dewars dripping scotch onto the living room carpet.

Drool on my shoulder.

A stiff neck.

A sore back.

The stereo on.

“I guess not,” I said.

“Come on, clean yourself up. Sarah’s gonna be up in a little while and want her Sunday morning pancakes.”

“Okay, just let me wipe this-”

“Forget that mess. I’ll take care of it. What were you doing out here anyway?”

“Time traveling.”

“Can’t you give me a straight answer anymore?”

I let it go. Katy and me, we were a million miles apart out of bed as well. Never mind that I wasn’t certain what I had been doing last night. Maybe Larry’s tape had been a way for me to escape from the bedroom, a ready excuse to deaden my senses with a few too many fingers of scotch.

As to what was actually on the tape. . Sure, I knew who Dexter Mayweather was. Every cop who worked the Six-O in the late ’60s and early ’70s knew about D Rex, King of the Soul Patch. Shit, they found his body under the boardwalk where I used to walk my beat. But D Rex had been murdered in the spring of 1972, and what possible connection this could have with Larry was escaping me at the moment. Besides, I had other reasons for remembering that spring.

On Easter Sunday of 1972 a little girl went missing. Seven-year-old Marina Conseco was the youngest of five brothers and a sister. Her dad, a divorced city fireman, had left Marina in the charge of her older siblings while he went to get some hot dogs and fries at Nathan’s. When he returned, he noticed Marina was missing. Three days later, she was still missing. Coney Island was never hell on earth, not even in the bad old days when I worked it, but it wasn’t a good place for little girls lost.

By the fourth day, we’d made the unspoken transition from searching for her to searching for her remains. No one had to say a word. You could see it on the faces and in the slumped shoulders of the off-duty cops and firemen who had volunteered to look for her. We were running out of places to search. They’d even had the divers in to plumb the muddy waters of Coney Island Creek. They found a capsized submarine, but not Marina’s body. My hand to God, there’s a submarine in Coney Island Creek. You can look it up, as my sister Miriam likes to say.

Never underestimate exhaustion. As the years pass, I become more and more convinced that my exhaustion saved Marina’s life. Between regular shifts, overtime, and my off-duty volunteering, I had barely slept in ninety-six hours. In spite of my lack of sleep, I was out searching with a couple of firemen. We were driving toward Sea Gate along Mermaid Avenue. I could feel myself drifting off, so I blasted the air conditioner, turned the radio up full bore, began shaking my head violently. The guys in the car with me must have been just as tired, because they didn’t say a word. I began forcing my eyes open, wide

What I noticed were the old wooden water tanks on the rooftops of abandoned buildings. I slammed on the brakes and all three of us jumped out of the car. When I pointed up, they understood. We found Marina Conseco at the bottom of the fifth tank, in half a foot of filthy water, alive! She was in shock and suffering from hypothermia. She had a fractured skull and some broken bones. She’d been molested for two days before being thrown in the tank and left to die.

That was my moment, my one moment on the job. It earned me a few medals, a nice letter in my file. Papers wrote about the rescue. Even rated some face time on local TV. What rescuing Marina Conseco didn’t get me was a gold shield. Why not?

The city was nearly bankrupt.

Twenty-three-year-olds didn’t get gold shields back then.

Jews, blacks, and Hispanics needed to walk on water to get one.