Page 37 of Hanging and Burning

I cleaned the bathroom and the shears with bleach, checked my clothes and body for any obvious evidence, and then I slept the sleep of the dead.

In the dream I was sitting at a small round table in the far corner of Manzo Watanabe’s bakeshop, across the way from my office on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights. Opposite me sat Leaf Alyssandra Morton, her lovely but hard intelligent face and wild thick braided hair standing straight up and out, like spikes or maybe handmade spears, marking her as someone special, someone strong.

“So, do you want me to come home?” she asked. There was no softness in her voice, no empathy in the words.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

For a moment I was lost in the question. I didn’t know the answer and felt that anything I said would be a lie, a goddamned lie. But while looking at her, I considered her self-reliance and just the fact that she was sitting there, asking the hard questions. I clenched my fists and gnashed my back molars. I closed my eyes, and there in the darkness, the only answer possible arose from deep down.

“I don’t know yet,” I said softly.

“You don’t know what?”

“Whatever there is for us is in the future. It’s not gettin’ sumpin’ back but buildin’ or maybe tryin’ and hopefully not failin’ to make a life.”

I was worried, in the dream, that Leaf would just float off, blown by the hot wind of my maybe too-well-thought-out answer.

Her gaze was a frown—a Black woman’s frown. In that countenance was a whole history of desire and betrayal, hope and disappointment, of bright beginnings, all of which were destined for ignominious ends. She knew, and I did too, that the odds were against success, happiness, or any kind of future that wouldn’t stop short at a dead end.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll come.”

The phone alarm went off some time after the dream. It was seven thirty in the early evening, and time to try to get the upper hand.

I dressed in my dark green suit over a papaya-colored long-sleeved shirt. My shoes were of an even darker green and the pistol was in the jacket pocket on the right side.

There was a twenty-four-hour so-called pharmacy across the street from the Carnelian Oyster. I say so-called because the vast store also sold liquor, all kinds of groceries and snacks, lots and lots of doodads, children’s toys, and even lawn furniture along with items of clothing. It offered as many products as the once-essential general stores in the Old West.

On the acres-wide parking lot, I pulled into a space that had a perfect view of the nightclub entrance. There I intended to wait until something did, or did not, occur.

The parking lots of twenty-four-hour stores are pretty safe hideouts. No one worried about you unless you left your car and acted suspiciously. I spent the time sitting behind the wheel and searching the Internet via phone, finally coming up with a few photographs that would help me. After that I donned my earbuds and continued my reread of Dead Souls, written by the Russian Nikolai Gogol. I say reread because the first time I had read the 183-year-old masterpiece was on paper. I decided that maybe listening to it I’d hear something that my eyes had missed.

I learned to love reading during a time when I had no access to books, bunged away in solitary confinement on Rikers Island… for my own good, I was told. Technically still a cop during this period of incarceration, I was surrounded by hardened convicts who would have killed me if they could have, who had tried to kill me more than once.

I had a scar on the right side of my face from a knife wound that no plastic surgery could hide. That was my gift from Rikers, a gash that had burst open like an overripe fig.

I was alone in the dark with gutter cockroaches and sewer flies for company. There were two things I wanted at that time: to kill anyone I got near and to read. I didn’t miss music or television, sex or sweet smells. After a while I lost my desire for food beyond that which I needed to survive. But the idea of being able to deliver my mind from the torment of imprisonment by imagining anything felt like the only true escape.

Like all good books, Gogol’s seemingly modernist view of the world was in the form of a crime novel. It was through reading that I came to understand, or at least to believe, that modern society is based on ever-changing sets of rules. Through the prism of that basic truth, I could see how people try and fail and try and succeed in breaking those often contradictory, never exactly the same systems of regulation.

While listening to the old master’s words, I watched drivers pull up to the restaurant, negotiate with the valets, and then go into the Oyster. For everyone who arrived I used my specially designed night-vision monocular to see and photograph their faces.

He showed up at 11:37, shook hands with the valet, then walked into the club. The smile on my lips had no humor to it. I reexperienced the memories of mice and roaches, the smells of shit and sweat and dried piss, of men shouting out in pain and anger, of a cell that felt smaller every day and, mostly, of a rage that was so powerful it could never be sated.

9.

I DROVE OUT of the parking lot and pulled up to the curb across the street from the Carnelian Oyster. Secreting the pistol under the passenger seat, I prepared myself for any possible encounter with the police. If they stopped me on suspicion, I had a story ready. My cousin, Caledonia Reese, was meeting her girlfriend in the club to see if they could still live together. Caledonia didn’t have a car so I agreed to wait for her, in case they couldn’t work out their differences. It wasn’t a very good story, but my mind was set more on revenge than survival.

Luckily for me there aren’t many police cruisers on the LA streets. That, and the fact that my quarry, accompanied by a young woman in a minimal dress, left the club at 11:52, put me in the safe zone for vengeance.

He was driving a new cherry-red Lincoln Continental. I had to do a U-turn to follow him, but that wasn’t so hard to do in my VW Bug.

Tailing the bright red car, I had to stay pretty far back because of the poor choice of yellow for the rented car. When I came out to visit my grandmother, I wasn’t expecting to follow anyone in the crystal-clear desert darkness of Southern California.

He drove north and then east, coming at last to a tall, wide double gate in the middle of a high hedge that took up a third of the block. The gates opened automatically, and the candy-apple-red-colored car drove through.

I parked a few blocks from the hedge-hidden house and made my way back at a pace designed to look like someone who was trying to get somewhere and yet moving with a metered enough stride that it wouldn’t look like I was trying to get away.