“You wasn’t afraid of Razor,” he said. “How come?”
I shrugged.
“Hard to be afraid of someone who needs a stepstool to look you in the eyes.”
He started to smile a little, then caught himself.
“He coulda had a gun.”
“He didn’t,” I said. “No one out there did.”
“How you know that?”
“It’s one of the first things they teach you at private dick school.”
This time the smile got a little wider before he caught it.
“My mom said you wanted to talk to me. ‘Bout what?”
I sat back and crossed my left ankle over my right knee.
“The last time we spoke, you said I didn’t know, uh, beans about the gangs, so I did a little research, mostly by talking to a few people. This morning, I spent some time with Asaan Witherspoon.”
“Mr. Spoon,” said Anthony. “Yeah, he be pretty cool.”
“Well,” I said, “when I broached the subject of your leaving the gang, Mr. Spoon said he thought that, given the current conditions, you might be better off staying put.”
Anthony didn’t speak for a minute. Then he looked over at me and said, “Whatch you think about that?”
“I think that’s a decision you have to make on your own, Anthony. Whichever way you go, I’ll be glad to try to help, but right now would be a good time to let me know how you feel about all this.”
He frowned and said, “Those guys out on the porch? They all live around here, and they’re all my friends right now. But if I was to try to leave the Links without permission, they be my enemies tomorrow.”
“Who gives permission?” I asked.
“T-Man, of course. He the leader.”
I thought of something.
“Is everybody in the neighborhood a member of the Links?”
“Nah. Billy Phillips, down the street, he ain’t with us, on accounta he’s funny in the head, you know? He has to take some kinda pills every day, but he still acts funny most of the time. You be talkin’ to him, but it’s like he’s not really there.”
“What about other kids, kids who aren’t funny like Billy? Any of them not in the gang?”
“Sure. Lionel Yates. His little brother, Kevin, he’s in the gang, but not Lionel.”
“How come?”
“Lionel the quarterback on Franklin’s football team. He gonna go to college, then the pros. Lionel’s gonna be rich, gonna come back and help the community. T-Man say he don’t hafta be in the gang.”
During my teaching career, the number of kids who’d told me they were going to become professional athletes probably numbered well into the hundreds. The number who actually got anywhere near the pros was, as far as I knew, zero. But who could tell. Maybe Lionel Yates would prove to be the exception to the rule. Either way, this didn’t seem like the time or place to debate that particular issue.
“T-Man don’t take kindly to brothers leavin’ the Links,” said Anthony. “What you think you can say might make him let me out the gang? I mean, I ain’t no star athlete or nothin’.”
As he spoke, Anthony tried to appear casual and disinterested, but I noticed he leaned forward a little as he finished, waiting to hear my response.
“Anthony, the truth is I don’t know exactly what I’d say to T-Man. It would depend on what my take on him was, what kind of person I judged him to be, what kind of rapport I could develop with him, stuff like that. But mostly, it would depend on what I was trying to accomplish, which brings me back to what I asked you in the hospital last week and then again a few minutes ago.”
I stopped and looked right at him.
“Do you want out of the gang?”
For a minute, he just sat there. Then, suddenly, the words just exploded out of him.
“Yes! Okay? Yes!”
He stayed on the edge of the sofa for a moment longer, then slumped back down and stared straight ahead. In a much softer voice, he said, “’Course I want outta the gang. You gotta be nuts to wanna be with most of those guys. I mean, Razor? He like cuttin’ people up, hurtin’ them. Dude be crazy.”
We sat for a minute or two without speaking.
“Can you set up a meeting between T-Man and me?” I asked.
He looked over at me.
“Yeah,” he said, “but all that gonna do is get him pissed off at me. Like I said, he don’t like it when somebody starts talkin’ about leaving the Links.”
“Let me worry about that,” I told him. “I’ll make sure he thinks this wasn’t your idea, and that you had no choice in the matter. You just put me in touch with him, okay?”
He hesitated briefly, then nodded.
* * *
A little while later, as I drove home, I thought about two things. The first was that Anthony never had offered me anything to drink. I decided not to tell on him.
The second thing I thought about was that maybe this could be the start of a whole new career for me. I could see my business card already.
Jeremy Barnes, Ambassador-at-Large.
Gang Relations a Specialty.
Chapter 25
“And you knew they weren’t armed?”
I was at Laura’s apartment. We’d arranged to have dinner together that night, so after leaving Anthony’s house, I’d driven to Monroeville and picked up a couple cheeseburger subs from Rudy’s, which, like almost everything else in Monroeville, is just five minutes away from the Tennis Club Apartments. The weather was still warm, so we took our sandwiches out to Laura’s balcony. She has a small table and two chairs out there, along with a large plant in one corner.
“I knew nobody had a gun,” I told her.
“But how? Couldn’t one of them have had a very small gun, like a derringer or something, hidden in his pocket? You couldn’t possibly have noticed that.”
“You’re right,” I said, “but
