Restoration Heights Page 9

  He went back into the living room, stared helplessly at the television, the couch. He only knew one way to pass the time—he put on his coat, grabbed his ball and left. He went to a small park near his apartment—on weekday mornings the Y’s courts were claimed by the adjacent Bedford Academy. Reddick played in the park occasionally when the weather was nice—the crowd was mostly teenagers, nearly all of them black. The games at the Y brought out his best play; the rumble of skill beneath the ball-busting jokes, the threat of loss, of being vanquished, revived his dormant focus. Out here was different. He went to the courts in the park to reaffirm his history, to ground himself. Playing outside recalled the idyllic repetition of his adolescent summers, baking in the swamp heat of North Carolina, toting his two indispensable items: a ball and a sketchbook. Sitting courtside between games, sharing Gatorade he and his friends bought with their combined scraped change, filling the pages with his heroes, Magic, Jordan, Wolverine, drops of sweat smudging the graphite, taking suggestions, advice. His work admired for its verve, its accuracy. Then getting up for another game—driving, the thrill of movement and the cessation of loneliness that exists only in shared effort. He was too young to believe there was anything more to it than that, that his passion brushed the live wire of the country’s sundering division. Too young to realize that he was an exception. Racial awareness had come in fits and starts, in isolated episodes. Being called a cracker in the third grade—accosted by a crowd of older black girls, teasing him without menace, and he had no idea what it meant, what aspect of him was the subject of the joke, until his mother bit her lip and explained. On the cusp of high school, in a four-week summer program at the School of the Arts, he walked into an all-white class for the first time and had never felt such crushing loneliness, such displacement. In a room of kids who looked like him, scions of a middle class he couldn’t comprehend, that seemed descended from another planet. Jokes he didn’t know the references for, foods he had never tried, clothes his mother couldn’t afford. TV he had never watched. The bully who saw it all as clearly as he did, who whispered poor boy, poor boy when the teacher’s back was turned until the girl who sat between them snapped and came to his defense, more because she was sick of the litany, the strange onomatopoeia of it, than from compassion. He knew because she never spoke to him again. You talk like a nigger, they said. The first time he had heard a white person say it, a transgression that seemed almost biblical, profane. He could draw better than any of them and it didn’t matter. He pined for the meritocracy of the courts. He made one friend, who gave him a mixtape of discordant rock that he hated for two years before he learned to adore it, that he still had in some shoebox. He learned that there was more to art than comic books and athletes. And he learned that he was white.

  He walked onto the courts in the park, netless hoops and blasted asphalt. They had been shoveled once then ignored, were buried under a layer of filthy ice. A furrow ran diagonally through them, connecting two gates. He could just make out the foul line and he stood over it, took his shot and watched the ball thud off the ice. He picked it up and did it again, aware of how ridiculous it was to be out there but with nowhere else he could think to go. The ball was heavy and tight in his gloved hands, dense as lead. He missed as many as he made. After an hour the blanket of white clouds let go and falling snow blurred the hoop.

  He had forced himself to absorb the lessons of his tormenters. He worked on his speech, practiced by-the-book conjugation on his teachers. He looked up movies he had heard them reference, made his mother rent them. He watched their sitcoms until he got the jokes. His friends accused him of changing—he laughed it off, because he was afraid to voice what he had learned, what they already knew, that his white skin was inescapable, his blond hair, and that once he got out there again, away from these hermetic blocks, there would be expectations thrust upon him, a way to act, to be, that frightened him. If he wasn’t ready he was doomed to see those four alienated weeks of the summer program stretched into a lifetime.

  Of course it didn’t work. Dean, Beth, the friends he made in art school—on some level he believed they suspected him for a fraud. He was never quite at ease, never natural. The performance drained him; it damaged his ambition. He didn’t blame it for his failed art career but he couldn’t absolve it either. The minimum requirement for art world success—before talent, before connections, before unbelievable luck, just the starting point, the price of admission—was a fanatical desire to be there. It was an impossible thing to fake; he tried, but found himself searching for opportunities to escape the effort. Basketball was his refuge, waiting for him when he needed it.

  He left the court when he couldn’t see the backboard anymore—he knew whether his shot went in only by the direction and pace of the ball when it thumped into the powder.

  When he got home Dean was gone. He ran hot water over his hands, burned sensation back into his fingers. The remaining hours crawled. He was dressed and back on the sidewalk at a quarter to noon.

  The snowfall had improbably gotten worse; the swirling air was white and thick as cream. He pulled the front of his hood down and buried his chin in his collar. He couldn’t look up without squinting. He walked west, to the corner of the block where Trisha’s store was. Halfway down were two figures, a woman in an ankle-length parka and a tall man in a hooded puffer; the woman’s back was to him but he recognized her blazing hair. The man was black. They stood beside the chalkboard sign advertising the store’s specials.

  Reddick crossed to the opposite side of the street and walked slowly—trying to act natural, to watch them with his eyes and not his head. He adjusted his hood to clear his periphery. Trisha hadn’t noticed him. He was unremarkable, one of a dozen hooded shadows in a fog of snow. The couple hugged and as they separated the man leaned in for her cheek while she raised her lips—they smiled playfully at the awkward exchange, the misalignment of intentions. It didn’t have to be Tyler. She never admitted that they had hooked up—she could be dating someone else. Except that she was at that party alone. Except that she had seemed so protective.

  It occurred to him that she might have changed her mind and not have asked Tyler at all. There were good reasons she might want to protect him. But if Reddick was patient he could bypass her skepticism now and reach him directly. He stopped walking, knelt to untie and retie his boot. Trisha was angled slightly toward the entrance to the store, her back to Reddick. Tyler hadn’t noticed him. The couple hugged once more and she went inside. Tyler dug his hands into his coat pockets, turned and walked south. Reddick stood up and followed.

  Tyler walked quickly. He seemed anxious to get indoors. Reddick drifted back, pushed the limits of visibility but took care not to lose him. A block later Tyler hooked right and they walked to Clinton Hill. Reddick hoped he was going somewhere public, a coffee shop or restaurant. They were stopped by multiple lights, Reddick always finding some excuse to hang back from the intersection, stopping to adjust his gloves or hat, to check his phone.

  He thought of Harold’s warning. Were Tyler or Ju’waun involved with Hannah’s disappearance? What if he wasn’t following a witness, but a suspect—and Franky had nothing to do with it, his malicious history with women just a coincidence? Or maybe Franky did kill her, and Tyler was somehow complicit. In either case Reddick had to be ready for him to play it hard.

  Tyler went inside a dentist’s office, the entrance tucked beneath the stoop of a brownstone. Reddick stopped outside. It might be a perfect spot to confront him—catch him sitting down, waiting for an appointment. He would need a couple of minutes to check in. Reddick counted to sixty three times and followed him inside.

  The lobby was small, maybe a dozen chairs. Two patients waited on opposite walls, both of them staring at their phones. There was an open sliding partition to the left, with no one at the counter behind it. Tyler waited in front of it—Reddick hadn’t given him enough time. They made brief eye contact. He was dark-skinned and h
andsome, Reddick’s height and build, his hair twisted into finger coils that danced above heavy eyelashes. Reddick realized that they were wearing identical coats—Tyler didn’t look at him long enough to notice. Reddick got in line behind him.

  An assistant appeared at the counter, a middle-aged woman holding a manila envelope. She smiled at Reddick and then addressed Tyler.

  “Here you go, sweetheart.”

  He took the envelope, slipped it into his inside pocket and left.

  She turned to Reddick. “Can I help you?” He fumbled over a response and stepped forward.

  “I just... I just remembered I have to go.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I have to go.”

  He felt her eyes on his back as he hurried from the office. It didn’t matter; she didn’t matter. He looked both ways on the sidewalk. The snow was finally slowing; he scanned the shuffling pedestrians, looked for someone his own height, wearing his jacket—and realized that it was the jacket that may have started this. Bent over, his face hidden, Hannah had seen the puffer and mistaken him for Tyler that night—it was why she ran up to him so quickly, she was being playful, drunk, trying to startle him. Just a random error, being mistaken for someone else, had drawn him into whatever this was. He wondered how life could turn on something so small.

  It also meant Tyler was lying when he told Trisha he didn’t know Hannah.

  There, across the street, going south. Reddick hurried to catch up, then fell in behind him again.

  What had Tyler picked up? Did he work at the dentist’s office—was it some kind of paperwork, a paycheck? The assistant called him sweetheart, didn’t address him like a colleague. A patient, then—but what would a patient receive in an envelope? Test results, X-rays? It had happened too quickly for that—there was no discussion, no follow-up or checkout.

  Tyler crossed the street and went into a bodega. Reddick intentionally missed the light, hovered at the curb where he could see inside. A silver-haired, wiry Latino working the counter passed Tyler an envelope just like the one he got from the dentist’s office. He put it in his pocket with the other one and left. The light changed and Reddick followed.

  At Fulton there was a large apartment building with a string of commercial spaces at its base—a coffee shop, a yoga studio and a high-end liquor store. When Tyler went into the coffee shop Reddick didn’t follow; he walked past him to the corner and waited. After five minutes Tyler came out with a cup, steam tumbling from the lid. He slipped into the yoga studio, reemerged almost immediately and then went inside the liquor store.

  Five minutes turned to ten turned to twenty—too long to be shopping. Reddick examined the storefront—Cask, Specialty Liquors and Wines. The midday haze rendered the glass front wall nearly opaque. The cold was sinking into his body, his feet ached and his nose leaked. He eyed the warm interior of the café, the customers on their laptops or phones, their dripping winter layers piled beside them on empty chairs. There were open seats near the window—he should be able to see Tyler leave from there. He was cold enough to risk it. He went in, kept an eye outside while he bought his coffee and found a stool where he could watch the sidewalk.

  There was money in that envelope, there had to be—and in the one he got from the bodega, and another, probably, from the yoga studio, maybe even one from this coffee shop. It was the only thing that made sense. Tyler was a bagman running pickups—but for what? This was Clinton Hill. Maybe a few places still ran numbers but the neighborhood had flipped thirty years ago. Yet what else could it be? And more importantly, whom was he picking it up for?

  Harold’s warning—you are sticking your head in shit where it does not belong.

  Thirty minutes later Tyler hadn’t come out of the liquor store and Reddick began to wonder if he had missed him while he was in line. The coffee had plunged straight to his bladder but he couldn’t risk a trip to the restroom. After another twenty minutes Tyler finally emerged, with a friend, smiling. The other guy was the same age, taller but with the same agile build, his face shrouded by the furred hood of his parka. Reddick turned away when they passed the window, then got up and followed.

  The pair retraced Tyler’s route, headed back toward Bed-Stuy. The pressure in Reddick’s bladder had become so urgent that it stung; if they hadn’t been moving closer to his own apartment he would have given up. On the fringes between the two neighborhoods they went into a dry cleaners called Clean City. Reddick waited on the corner and pressed his thighs together. He couldn’t wait much longer, began to look desperately for a private corner. He felt betrayed by his body—he might never find Tyler again. He could give them fifteen minutes. No, ten. He lasted almost eight, realized that if he didn’t leave now he wouldn’t make it, swore and started home.

  He banged through his building’s entrance and up the stairs, tracked slush and salt into his apartment, was barely unzipped before his bladder released. When it was empty he peeled off his coat and went to the case map. He wrote in the liquor store and the dentist’s office, the dry cleaners. The office, the bodega, the yoga studio and possibly the coffee shop were all pickups, but Tyler was in Cask and the cleaners for a while; there was more to both. He underlined them. He needed to get inside, to check them out. He thought about the meeting Sarah had set up with Aliana and glanced at the clock. It was almost two. Sarah had texted to say that she would meet him on the Upper East Side at five, so he had a couple of hours until he had to leave Brooklyn—enough time to do both, if he was quick.

  He went to the cleaners first. It was the bottom floor of a two-story building on the corner, butted against a row of tall townhouses. The windows were papered with fliers—music, African dance, hair and nail salons, community meetings in opposition to Restoration Heights. Inside was a worn hardwood counter with racks of plastic-wrapped clothes behind it. More fliers covered the inside of the windows, many of them out of date. A single chair squatted haphazardly near the entrance, beside a toppled stack of magazines. There was no one behind the counter. The air was dense with some industrial cleaner, sweet as cloves and faintly metallic. He stepped forward and tapped the tarnished bell. After a moment a young man shuffled in from a door in the rear, behind the racks. He was black, and young—around the same age as Tyler and his friend. He was neatly dressed and seemed tired; he looked at Reddick like he was the last chore on a long list.

  “Can I help you?”

  Reddick realized he hadn’t thought of what he would say, and stumbled. “Yeah, I was—do you clean coats like this?” He held his arms out, to indicate his puffer.

  The guy looked at him blankly. “Yeah. Just fill out a ticket.”

  “No. I mean. I don’t want to leave it now. I just—At the end of the season. In the spring. You know, clean it before I put it away.”

  “You’re an optimistic guy, you know that?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Thinking about spring on a day like this.”

  “I was just passing by and—you know. I thought this place would be convenient.”

  “That coat don’t have a tag? That you could look at and see if you should dry-clean it, instead of coming all the way over here?”

  “Oh. Yeah. It probably does.” Reddick backed to the door and opened it. “I’ll be back when it warms up.”

  “Hey, it’s whatever, man.”

  He stopped in the threshold, leaned back in. “While I’m here, though. Do you know a guy named Tyler?”

  “Tyler who?”

  “I don’t know his last name. I met him at a party. We talked about playing ball together but I didn’t get his number. I remember he said his friend worked here.”

  “Nope.”

  “No, you don’t know him?”

  “Can’t help you, man.”

  He had already flubbed the encounter—might as well heave something from midcourt and pray. “Then how about a guy named Ju’waun?
”

  “He at this party, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you guys talked about playing ball?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Never heard of him. And you’re letting cold air in.”

  “Right.” He stepped out and let the door close behind him. The kid was Tyler’s age, if they were friends it would explain why he had lingered inside. But then why lie about knowing him? Just to put off a nosy stranger? He had hoped Ju’waun’s name would pry something loose—for all he knew that was him behind the counter—but the nonreaction didn’t have to mean anything. Reddick was a stranger poking into private lives; he had to expect cautious answers.

  He hurried south to Cask. Walking inside was like slipping into an empty whiskey barrel—coppery wooden shelves and an aura of sweet malts. The walls teemed with expensive liquor, the wine lined up in two aisles in the center of the store. All of it arranged in narrowing categories of specificity, whiskey-scotch-malt-isle—cataloging the bottles demanded knowledge Reddick wasn’t even sure how to acquire.

  “How’s it going?” The woman behind the counter was at her laptop and didn’t look up when she spoke; her thick blond hair hung across one side of her face in a lively cascade. She was in her thirties, still in her knockout prime—thin and busty, in a cable sweater that had slipped down her shoulders to rest on the long slope of her breasts. She had full lips, a hard jaw and soft eyes—she was a collage of American infatuations. But her voice was patient and composed, accustomed to the reaction her looks provoked, willing to tolerate the time it took you to pull it together. “Let me know if I can help you find anything.”