"What are you saying?"
"You saying a name?"
"You saying Sonny?"
"I don't want to look at no pictures," Assanti said.
"Are you saying Sonny?"
"Was that his name? Sonny?"
"You know these guys?"
"Was one of them named Sonny?"
"Nobody's gonna hurt you, Dominick."
"Was his name Sonny?"
"Sonny what?"
"We won't let anybody hurt you, Dominick."
"Sonny what?"
He looked at them for a long time. He was clearly frightened, and they thought for sure they were going to lose him just the way they'd lost the guy coming out of the liquor store.
He did, in fact, shake his head as if to say he wasn't going to tell them anything else, but he was only shaking it in denial of something inside him that was telling him he'd be crazy to identify anyone who had killed a man.
"The one with the gun," he said softly.
"What about him, Dominick?"
"His name was Sonny."
"You know him?"
"No. I heard the other guy calling him Sonny. When they were running by. Come on, Sonny, move it. Something like that."
"Did you get a good look at them, Dominick?"
"I got a good look."
"Can we show you some pictures?"
He hesitated again. And again he shook his head, telling himself he was crazy to be doing this. But he sighed at last and said, "Yeah, okay."
"Thank you," Wade said.
The only white man he could trust with this was Carella. There were things you just knew.
"My goddamn skin," Brown said, as if Carella would understand immediately, which of course he didn't.
"All that crap I got to use," Brown said.
Carella turned to look at him, bewildered.
They were in the unmarked car, on their way downtown, Brown driving, Carella riding shotgun. So far, it had been an awful morning. First the disappointing promises-promises conversation with Lieutenant Nelson at the Four-Five and then Lieutenant Byrnes of their very own Eight-Seven asking them into his office and telling them he'd had a call from a lawyer named Louis Loeb, who'd wanted to know why a grieving widow named Margaret Schumacher had been harassed in her apartment yesterday morning by two detectives respectively named Carella and Brown.
"I realize you didn't harass her," Byrnes said at once. "The problem is this guy says he's personally going to the chief of detectives if he doesn't get written apologies from both of you."
"Boy," Carella said.
"You don't feel like writing apologies, I'll tell him to go to hell," Byrnes said.
"Yeah, do that," Brown said.
"Do it," Carella said, and nodded.
"How does the wife look, anyway?" Byrnes asked.
"Good as anybody else right now," Brown said.
But, of course, they hadn't yet talked to anyone else. They were on their way now to see Lois Stein, Schumacher's married daughter, Mrs Marc with-a-c Stein. And Brown was telling Carella what a pain in the ass it was to be black. Not because being black made you immediately suspect, especially if you were big and black, because no white man ever figured you for a big, black cop, you always got figured for a big black criminal, with tattoos all over your body and muscles you got lifting weights in the prison gym.
The way Brown figured it - and this had nothing to do with why being black was such a very real pain in the ass - drugs were calling the tune in this America of ours, and the prime targets for the dealers were black ghetto kids who, rightly or wrongly (and Brown figured they were right) had reason to believe they were being cheated out of the American dream and the only dream available to them was the sure one they could find in a crack pipe. But a drug habit was an expensive one even if you were a big account executive downtown, especially expensive uptown, where if you were black and uneducated, the best you could hope for was to serve hamburgers at McDonald's for four-and-a-quarter an hour, which wasn't even enough to support a heavy cigarette habit. To support a crack habit, you had to steal. And the people you stole from were mostly white people, because they were the ones had all the bread. So whenever you saw Arthur Brown coming down the street, you didn't think here comes a protector of the innocent sworn to uphold the laws of the city, state, and nation, what you thought was here comes a big black dope-addict criminal in this fine country of ours where the vicious circle was drugs-to-crime-to-racism-to-despair-to-drugs and once again around the mulberry bush. But none of this was why it was a supreme pain in the ass to be black.
"You know what happens when a black man's skin gets dry?" Brown asked.
"No, what?" Carella said.
He was still thinking about Brown's vicious circle.
"Aside from it being damn uncomfortable?"
"Uh-huh," Carella said.
"We turn gray is what happens."
"Uh-huh."
"Which is why we use a lot of oils and greases on our skin. Not only women, I'm talking about men, too."
"Uh-huh."
"To lubricate the skin, get rid of the scale. What was that address again?"
"314 South Dreyden."
"Cocoa butter, cold cream, Vaseline, all this crap. We have to use it to keep from turning gray like a ghost."
"You don't look gray to me," Carella said.
