Tropical Depression (2 page)

I played along. “What kid, Roscoe?”

He still didn’t answer. I turned and looked at him. He gave me a goofy half-smile and a half-shake of the head. “Just a kid,” he said. “Sixteen years old. Still dumb enough to think people are basically good. Dumb enough to think he could make a difference, you know? A lot like you, Billy.”

“Suck my butt, Roscoe.”

“I mean it, Billy. Your biggest problem as a cop was, you still felt for people. Tried to really help ’em instead of just doing your job as a cop.” He gave another of his asthmatic half-chuckles. “Seven years on the force and you still a rookie in your heart.”

“Guess I learned better, Roscoe.”

I could hear him sigh. “Guess you did. But you didn’t learn enough, Billy. Not if you think you can run away from it like this.”

Down at the head boat the leathery old gal put her filets into a couple of those thin plastic bags they hand out and then just marched away. The smarmy mate watched her go and said something close to the ear of a stocky blonde girl standing by the ramp. She smiled politely. A dark-haired guy came off the boat and put an arm around the blonde and they walked off together. The mate watched, then went back on the boat. There was nothing left to look at down the dock, not even that damned geeky mate. I turned to Roscoe.

“Is that what this is about, Roscoe? That why you came all this way? To tell me about myself?”

I could see real rage in those soft brown eyes and just for a second I thought he might let all the years of smooth control drop away and hit me, call me motherfucker—just for a second. Then he gave me a little smile. “No, Billy. That ain’t what this is about. My nickel running out?”

“Yeah,” I said, “it’s running out. I got a three-pound mutton snapper I have to take home and eat before it turns to bait from sitting in the sun. I’ve been in the sun and salt water all day myself and I need a shower. I have two ice-cold bottles of St. Pauli waiting in the fridge and a ballgame coming on in two hours. I got a life, Roscoe. It might not be much, but it’s got nothing to do with you, or L.A., or cops anywhere. I don’t care about any of that shit. I don’t care if the Dodgers never win the pennant again, and I don’t care about you, except I got to get rid of you. So if I have to hear your story to do that, give me the story. Then just get out of here.”

He cocked his head at me, eyes gleaming, for all the world like a very dangerous robin. Then, head still tilted to the side, he shook his head slowly in wonder. “You never used to be mean like this, Billy. You letting two bottles of beer waiting turn you mean?”

“No,” I said, “it’s the shower. If I don’t get my shower soon I’m going to burst into tears.”

“Well, then,” he said, with that strange half-smile he’d picked up since the last time I saw him, “can’t keep a man from his shower.” Roscoe took a deep breath and looked away, over to the parking lot. He blew out his breath and shook his head again.

“There was this kid,” he said finally. “And he thought he could make a difference.” He stopped talking again, but not for as long this time. “You got to understand how this went down, Billy. First off, we knew something might be coming and we were as ready as we could get. But we weren’t ready for this. We weren’t allowed to be ready. Deep in their honky Presbyterian hearts, the commissioner and the chief and all senior staff were thinking it couldn’t happen like this ever again. Because all that terrible shit with the Nee-grows is twenty-five years ago. Why, they even got some very promising Nee-grows moving up on their own staff.”

“I heard,” I said. “Congratulations.”

He let it slide. “’Sides, the black community hasn’t been able to get all together on something in almost as long. So what we were ready for and what we got were not even in the same ballpark.”

He sighed heavily. “It was just so fast. They announced the King verdict and suddenly the town was on fire. There was no sense to it. Far as I know, there were no Koreans on the jury, but suddenly it was the Korean shopkeepers were getting it the hardest.

“So the Koreans are on their roofs with all these automatic weapons ready to pop the first black face they see, even if it has a badge.”

He spent some time breathing again, looking down and trying to figure out if there was something he could do with his hands. There wasn’t; he shook his head and went on.

“What I can’t understand is how we handled it so bad. You know the department, Billy. Good cops, most of ’em. Damned good.”

“Tell that to Rodney King,” I told him, and took a long pull on my mineral water. It was a cheap shot, and Roscoe’s smile said as much.

“You never work midnights, Billy? You never hear about the kind of pumped-up halfwits get dumped on that shift? All the losers and discipline problems the PBA and the ACLU won’t let us fire?”

I didn’t say anything. I knew it as well as he did. A lot of cops who shouldn’t be cops were stuck on the late shift where they were out of sight and, in theory, out of harm’s way. A lot of good cops were on that shift, too. I’d worn the uniform long enough to know you couldn’t tell by watching thirty seconds of videotape whether the Rodney King beating was done by the bad cops or by good ones gone temporarily nuts. Sometimes I had trouble telling the difference anyway.

“Get on with it,” I said.

He nodded like he’d won the point. Maybe he had.

“I know you wondering, whether you want to admit it or not. So I’ll tell you, I don’t have any idea how it got so bad so fast. Chain of command didn’t just break down—it was never in place. Almost like it was deliberately sabotaged.” He stopped and shook his head. He looked puzzled, a little hurt, like a man betrayed by something he cared about and was sure of.

“Was it?” I asked him. He just looked at me for a moment and for the first time he was a cop looking at an outsider. I’d never been on the receiving end of that look before. It made me nervous. “Come on,” I said. “If it makes you happy I’ll say you’re right, okay? I
am
curious. I read about it and I don’t see how it could have happened like that. What went wrong?”

“Billy,” he said, “I don’t know what happened. Far as I can tell, nobody knows what happened. But it makes no sense for somebody to try to fuck things up like that. Anyhow, they didn’t need to. Morale has been real bad, everybody keeping their heads real low. Maybe when we came up against something definite like that it should have snapped us out of it. You know, action instead of thinking. Maybe it should have brought us back onto our feet again. It didn’t. It knocked us on our asses. We folded, Billy. We just cut and run. The first few hours, when we might’ve turned it around, we were getting mixed signals or no signals. Nobody took charge. So we just kept pulling back and pulling back and all of a sudden we were back too far to get in again and do anything and we got four days of anything goes. This area about the size of Rhode Island, and it’s total anarchy.

“But then something started happening in there.” He paused here and looked away toward US 1. There was a steady stream of traffic going by. There always was. A Conch Train turned the corner and went past. I sipped my water and waited for Roscoe to go on. The people on the Conch Train seemed to think they were having fun. I didn’t correct them.

“I’m kinda proud of this part,” Roscoe said at last. Something about the way he said it jerked my head back around and I looked at him hard. But his face was still closed, except for that half-smile. “With no police presence in the area at all, and I mean
none,
you’d expect they’d all just go totally loco in there, burn everything, loot everything, shoot, rape, slash and shit on the kitchen table.”

“Isn’t that what happened?” I said, and now he swiveled to look hard at me.

“No, it’s not,” he said. “That ain’t what happened at all. That’s just what TV said happened. But nothing is TV-simple. They just gotta make it look like it is or they can’t explain it in thirty-second sound bites. What really happened was that the majority of people in the area started coming together. I mean, even in the worst areas of Watts, ninety-some percent of folks hate like hell what’s going on around them. You know that. But they never seem to realize they got the bad guys outnumbered. There’s always been something missing, some little spark or—you know, a little grain of sand for the pearl to grow on. They never had anything like that. Then this happened and there was this kid.

“This kid. This sixteen-year-old black kid. He organizes this group so when there’s attacks, looters, shooters, whatever, he shows up with a group and does a nonviolent confrontation thing until the outlaws back down. Black kids like him, some Korean kids, some Chicanos. And they’re all working together. They out-policing the police. Making a difference in a way that looks like it’s going to last. You know, a new community coalition.

“And then somebody shot him.”

Roscoe took a deep breath. It sounded a little bit ragged. I looked hard at him but could see nothing behind the deep hurt in his eyes.

“It was an assassination, Billy. With a high-powered rifle from a rooftop. Somebody went to big trouble to get a shot and they shot down this kid. And I can’t find out why.”

“Why not?”

Funny smile again. “Not much evidence for starters. And this isn’t exactly what I do, you know. But mostly the pressure’s coming down from upstairs not to stir things up, for political reasons. The city is getting back to normal, they say—like that was good. They say the kid was just another looter at worst, or at best somebody in the wrong place at the wrong time who got popped by a nervous Korean shopkeeper.”

There was something that sounded almost like pain in his voice now, and he started talking faster, more deliberately, like a lawyer who thinks he’s already lost the case but has to pull out all the stops for the jury anyway.

“I say no way. No way in
hell,
Billy. They shot him too good, and with the wrong kind of weapon. Koreans mostly have assault rifles or shotguns—they don’t know what they’re doing with these weapons. They just want something that sprays lead. This boy was dropped with one clean shot from a hunting rifle. This was murder, Billy. Somebody didn’t like what this kid was doing, and they hunted him down and they killed him. Somebody murdered this kid and I want them.” He must have heard his own voice shaking and stopped for a moment, taking a breath and giving me an apologetic smile before he went on.

“But they won’t even let me go after it. Not even me…And they won’t put anybody good on it. They’re trying to sweep it under the rug, make it go away, make sure nobody remembers, that nobody sees clearly who that boy was and what he tried to do, and that’s—”

He stopped here, like asking me the real question was too hard. He’d come three thousand miles to ask me a favor and now he couldn’t do it. Pride kicks in at funny times.

So he was quiet for a long time. So was I. I figured there had to be more to it than that. But there was no more. Roscoe stayed quiet. When I looked at him again he just gave me that strange half-smile. It looked bitter now.

My bottle of mineral water wasn’t quite empty, but the half inch on the bottom was warmer than spit and suddenly less appealing. I put the bottle on top of the ice machine.

“Why, Roscoe?” I asked him, trying to look at him hard enough to get behind the mask his face had become. “Why did you come all this way? Why not just write this one off like every cop in the world writes off a couple every day? Why me?”

“The politics on this one are bad, man. Nobody in the department is allowed to touch it. They don’t want nothing stirred up. But it’s important, and it’ll take a good cop to hang it on somebody. You still a good cop under there, Billy. You don’t quit,” he said, and he said it so seriously, so completely straight, that for a minute I believed him, believed he was talking about some other Billy Knight who never quit and always got his man. That’s how good Roscoe was, even when he wasn’t working at it.

I shook my head. “There’s lots of good cops in L.A. Some of ’em are black, and they can go where I can’t on something like this. I’m not that good.”

“Yes, you are,” he said. “You were that good. You were about the best street cop I ever saw. ’Sides, I need somebody on the outside who knows what the inside looks like and can’t be waved off by the chairwarmers.”

“Roscoe, you are a chairwarmer.”

“Billy, I know you are the man to do this like I know my own name.”

He was using that smooth management technique on me again. It made me mad.

“Why didn’t you save yourself all this trouble and just call me, Roscoe?”

“Guess I was afraid you’d hang up on me.”

“I’m hanging up anyway,” I said. I half-turned away, but there was nothing to look at. After a minute I turned back and looked at Roscoe. He was just watching me with those sad brown eyes. He looked like a teacher whose favorite student had just let him down in a big way.

“You have changed, Billy. Gone inside and closed the door. I guess maybe you’re not the man I needed you to be.”

“You got that right. I’m not a cop anymore. I’m not. I’m not a private detective. I’m not a Wackenhut or a school crossing guard. I’m a fishing guide. You’re not interested in fishing, just leave me the hell alone. You want to go fishing, great, give me a call. I get four hundred fifty dollars a day. Bring your kid.”

I turned and started away. Before I got three steps away, two things stopped me dead. The first was a sudden sick feeling that I knew what Roscoe was about to say.

The second thing was when he said it.

“I can’t bring my boy, Billy,” he said. “That kid we were talking about—?”

“No,” I said. It was a stupid thing to say, but it was all I could think of.

“Yeah,” he said, in that terrible soft voice again. “My Hector was the boy. The one got shot. He’s dead, Billy,” said Roscoe, going on long past what was necessary. “My Hector is dead.”

I turned slowly and watched that sad little half-smile trying to work its way onto his face one last time. It didn’t make it. Roscoe turned away and walked off down the dock. I tried to think of something to say. I tried to make my feet move, either toward Roscoe or back to my boat. I failed at both things. Instead I just stood there in the terrible five o’clock heat and watched Roscoe walk to a metallic blue rental car, get in, and drive away.