What It Was

grounds. A faint gray light had settled in the room.

“Who robbed you?” said Fanella, looking down at Williams. “Don’t take too long thinking about it, either. I don’t have the patience or the time.”

“He goes by the name of Red,” said Williams without hesitation. “Red Jones. Don’t know what the minister called him when he got baptized.”

“How’d you know it was him?”

“I knew him by rep. Tall, light-skinned dude with a fucked-up head of hair, kinda rusty like.”

“Who hipped him to your supply?”

“Tester of mine name Bobby Odum. Jones deaded Odum, then he and this little dude with gold teeth came after me.”

“And they ripped you off for your product.”

“At the point of a gun,” said Williams.

“Funny he didn’t do you all the way.”

“Wasn’t for lack of tryin.”

“It was me, I would have put one in your head.”

“The man shot me,” said Williams, seeing where Fanella was going and not liking it. “Close range, with a forty-five. You think I’d let him do me like that for what? To pretend I got robbed?”

Fanella looked down on Williams and stared him in the eyes. “It makes me wonder, is all.”

“I’m a businessman. You can ask Jimmy, up at One Sixteenth. I’m straight.” He was speaking on Jimmy Compton, Fanella and Gregorio’s man in Harlem.

“Me and Gino already spoke to Jimmy,” said Fanella. “Now we’re speaking to you.”

“Okay,” said Williams. “All right.” Bullets of sweat had risen on his forehead.

“Tell us where we can find the heroin,” said Fanella. “Or the money. Makes no difference to me.”

“Po-lice got half of the dope,” said Williams. “I only told Red where some of it was. Tried to keep it from him, see? But the law found the rest of it, in the spot where I keep it.”

“Where’s that?”

“At my crib.”

“So half of it’s klf Atgone for good.”

Williams thought to say something, but his mouth was dry. He felt his lip tremble. He tried to make it stop, but he could not.

Fanella smiled. “You all right?”

“Yes,” said Williams. He was ashamed and he looked away.

“Let me see what Red did to you.”

“Why?”

“I’m curious.” Fanella looked over his shoulder and said, “Gino.”

Gregorio moved to the door and put his back against it.

“Don’t,” said Williams.

“Don’t?”

“Sayin, I wish you wouldn’t do that. Doctor said to leave it be.”

“C’mon,” said Fanella, his thick eyebrows meeting comically as he mustered up a false face of concern. “Lemme see.”

Fanella pulled his switchblade from the pocket of his sport jacket and opened it with the touch of a button. The blade locked into a place with a soft click. Williams recoiled and made a small humming sound. Fanella chuckled as he cut the sling from Williams’s shoulder. Then he used the knife to slice away the bandages that covered his wound. Williams winced at the wet sucking sound of gauze pulling away from dressing and skin.

“Wow,” said Fanella. “You should look at this, Gino.”

Gregorio did not move.

“Please, man,” said Williams.

“That’s a big hole,” said Fanella. The entrance wound was the size of a quarter, black around the edges, pinkish in the center where the skin had begun to come back, slick and shiny from the dressing. “Don’t even look like it’s infected.”

“Please.”

“What’d you tell the police?”

“What I told you. I gave up Red’s name. That’s all.”

“They found heroin in your apartment and they’re not even going to charge you?”

“It was an exchange, ’cause I gave up good information. Plus, they searched my spot without a warrant.”

“You said you knew Red’s rep. So you must know more.”

“I told the law enough to leave me alone.”

“I’m not the law,” said Fanella. “What’d you leave out?”

“I can’t say no more, for real. I’m not tryin to get doomed.”

Fanella put one knee up on the mattress to ke mwidth='27' steady himself. He loosely placed his hand on Williams’s shoulder above the wound and kept his thumb free.

“What didn’t you tell them?” Fanella grinned. “What else?”

“Red got this woman,” said Williams, a tremor in his voice. “Goes by Coco. Runs whores in a house on Fourteenth. What I heard, anyway.”

“Heard where?”

“The street.” Williams gave him the location and described the building.

“That’s it?”

“Swear for God.”

Fanella gripped Williams shoulder. “Does this hurt?”

“No.”

“How about this?” Fanella pushed his thumb into the gunshot wound. It felt like jelly as he broke through the skin. Williams began to thrash and scream.

“Lou,” said Gregorio, and turned his head away.

Fanella put his right hand over the man’s mouth. Williams urinated on the sheets before he passed out.

“Niggers aggravate me,” said Fanella.

They left the room and walked down the hall. They did not move quickly, because Lou Fanella felt that a man should leave a scene unhurried, with his shoulders square and chin up. They went by a nurse who did not notice them, and an aged orderly pushing a wheelchair, and a tall, uniformed security guard with chiseled features who was standing against a wall, giving them a long stare.

“Fuck you lookin at?” said Fanella to the young man.

“Nothin, sir.”

“I didn’t think so.”

Clarence Bowman studied them as they passed.

Frank Vaughn sat in an unmarked Dodge beside Detective Henry A. Passman, a gentle family man who, because of his initials, was called “Hap” by nearly everyone on the force. Like many career police officers who aspired to rise above uniform status, he had been shuttled around various divisions and had finally found a home in what had once been Prostitutions and Perversions but was now known by the more succinct description of Vice.

Night had come to the city. The calendar said close to summer, and there were folks dressed lightly and out on the street. On 14th at R, a spring-gold ’7 °Camaro, up on HiJackers, was curbside, idling. A white girl in white hot pants and a red gingham midriff shirt was leaning into its open driver’s-side window, negotiating with the muscle car’s occupants. Music was coming loudly from the eight-track system, but to Vaughn it was just screams and guitars. His focus was on the girl, a minor from the looks of her, and the heads of the five long-haired young men squeezed into the car.

“It’s somebody’s birthday,” sai kthdp›