“Guilty.”
Now she leans back and stretches her legs across his. The kimono slides up to reveal her thighs. There’s a spot just below her pussy that Malone thinks is the softest place on earth.
“Tonight,” she says, “we had an abandoned crack baby. Left right on the front steps.”
“Wrapped in swaddling clothes?”
“I get the irony, Malone,” she says. “How was your day?”
“Yeah, good.”
Malone likes that she doesn’t press him, that she’s satisfied with what he tells her. A lot of women aren’t, they want him to “share,” they want details he’d rather forget than recount. Claudette gets it—she has her own horrors.
He strokes that soft spot. “You’re tired. You probably want to sleep.”
“No, baby, I want to fuck.”
They finish their drinks and go into her bedroom.
Claudette undresses him, kissing skin as she bares it. She goes to her knees and takes him into her mouth and even in the dark bedroom, with light coming in only from the street, he loves the look of her full red lips on his cock.
She’s not high tonight, it’s just the weed, although it’s very good weed, and he loves that, too. He reaches down and feels her hair, then slides his hand down into the kimono and feels her breast, teases it and feels her moan.
Malone puts his hands on her shoulders to stop her. “I want to be in you.”
She gets up, goes to the bed and lies down. Draws her knees up like an invitation and then issues one. “Come here, then, baby.”
She’s wet and warm.
He slides back and forth across her body, across the full breasts and the dark brown skin and reaches down with a finger to feel that soft spot as outside sirens blare and people shout and he doesn’t care, doesn’t have to care right now, only has to slide in and out of her and hear her say, “I love that, baby, I love that.”
When he feels himself about to come, he grabs her ass—Claudette says she has no ass for a black girl—but he grabs her small tight ass and pulls her close and pushes himself as deep in her as he can go until he feels that little pocket in her and she grabs his shoulder and she bucks up and comes just before he does.
He comes like he always does with her, from the tips of his toes through the top of his head, and maybe that’s the dope but he thinks it’s her, with that low soft voice and warm brown skin, slick and sweaty now, mixing with his, and maybe it’s a minute or maybe it’s an hour when he hears her say, “Oh, baby, I’m tired.”
“Yeah, me too.”
He rolls off her.
She sleepily squeezes his hand and then she’s out.
He lies on his back. Across the street the liquor store owner must have forgotten to turn off his lights, and their reflection blinks red on Claudette’s ceiling.
It’s Christmas in the jungle and for this short time, at least, Malone is at peace.
Chapter 5
Malone sleeps for just an hour, because he wants to be out in Staten Island before the kids get up and start ripping open the presents under the tree.
He doesn’t wake Claudette when he gets up.
He gets dressed, goes into the little galley kitchen, makes himself an instant coffee and then goes to his jacket and takes out the present he got her.
Diamond earrings from Tiffany’s.
Because she’s crazy about that Audrey Hepburn movie.
Malone leaves the box on the coffee table and goes out. He knows she’ll sleep until noon and then make it to her sister’s for Christmas dinner.
“Then I’ll probably hit a meeting at St. Mary’s,” she said.
“They have them on Christmas?” Malone asked.
“Especially on Christmas.”
She’s doing well, she’s been clean for almost six months now. Hard for an addict working in a hospital around all those drugs.
Now he drives down to his pad, on 104th between Broadway and West End.
When he separated from Sheila, a little over a year ago now, Malone decided to be one of those few cops who lives on his beat. He didn’t go all the way up to Harlem, but settled for the outskirts on the Upper West Side. He can take the train to work or even walk if he wants, and he likes the neighborhood around Columbia.
The college kids are annoying in their youthful arrogance and certitude, but there’s something about that he likes, too. Likes going into the coffeehouses, the bars, hearing the conversations. Likes to walk uptown, let the dealers and the addicts know he’s around.
His place is a third-floor walk-up—a small living room, a smaller kitchen, an even smaller bedroom with a bathroom attached. A heavy bag hangs from a chain in the living room. It’s all he needs; he’s not there much anyway. It’s a place to crash, shower, make a cup of coffee in the morning.
Now he goes up, showers and changes clothes. It wouldn’t do to go back to the house in the same clothes because Sheila would sniff it out in a second and ask him if he’s been with “huh.”
Malone doesn’t know why it bugs her so much, or at all—they separated almost three months before he even met Claudette—but it was a serious mistake to have answered Sheila’s question “Are you seeing anyone?” honestly.
“You’re a cop, you should know better,” Russo said when Malone told him about Sheila freaking out. “Never give an honest answer.”
Or an answer at all. Other than “I want a lawyer, I want my delegate.”
But Sheila had freaked. “‘Claudette’? What is she, French?”
“As a matter of fact, she’s black. African American.”
Sheila laughed in his face. It just cracked her up. “Shit, Denny, when you said at Thanksgiving you liked the dark meat, I thought you meant the drumstick.”
“Nice.”
“Don’t get all PC with me,” Sheila said. “With you it’s always ‘moolie’ this and ‘ditzune’ that. Tell me something, do you call her a nigger?”
“No.”
Sheila couldn’t stop laughing. “You tell the sistuh how many brothuhs you tuned up with your nightstick back in the day?”
“I might have left that out.”
She laughed again, but he knew it was coming. She’d had a couple of pops so it was only a matter of time before the hilarity turned to rage and self-pity. And it came. “Tell me, Denny, she fuck you better than I did?”
“Come on, Sheila.”
“No, I want to know. Does she fuck better than me? You know what they say, once you try black, you never go back.”
“Let’s not do this.”
Sheila said, “Because usually you cheat on me with white whores.”
Well, that’s true, Malone thought. “I’m not cheating on you. We’re separated.”
But Sheila was in no mood for legalisms. “It never bothered you when we were married, though, did it, Denny? You and your brother cops tapping everything with a pussy. Hey, do they know? Russo and Big Monty, they know you’re stirring tar?”
He didn’t want to lose his temper but he did. “Shut the fuck up, Sheila.”
“What, are you going to hit me?”
“I’ve never laid a goddamn hand on you,” Malone said. He’s done a lot of bad things in his life, but hitting a woman is not one of them.
“No, that’s right,” she said. “You stopped touching me altogether.”