CHAPTER TWELVE
The man who called himself Robert Love lived in a house that was little more than a tenement building. It was a small apartment building wedged in between six similar-looking buildings deep in the maze of streets that ran along the northern rim of Harlem. When they approached the front door, a stream of six children—the earliest certainly no older than four—went running by them, in the middle of a game of some kind. Other than that, the streets were quiet; hardly anyone in this area owned an auto and most of the residents were either at work or desperately searching for a job.
There was an ominous feel to the neighborhood, which Ava assumed was why Frank made sure to step in front of her. He wanted to be the one to knock on the door and engage with whoever was waiting on the other side. When he knocked, the sound echoed inside, suggesting just how hollow the door was and how empty the apartment might be.
The door was answered almost right away by a tall, thin black woman. She was carrying a child of about a year or so on her hip. The woman was very pretty, though it was clear she was tired and maybe in need of a meal. She sized them up quickly and her face went rigid, like steel.
“You the cops?” she asked.
“We are,” Frank said, showing his badge. “Detectives Wimbly and Gold.”
“A woman dick?” the woman asked with a chuckle. “You pulling one on me?”
Ava wasn’t sure why, but it actually did her a bit of good to hear the comment. It was nice to know that her little burst of fame had not yet reached every nook and cranny of the city.
“We aren’t pulling anything,” Frank said.
With her face still hardened, the woman shrugged as if she really didn’t care at all. “Can I help you?” she asked. The baby on her hip looked out curiously.
“We’re looking for a man named Robert Love,” Frank said. “Does he live here?”
She nodded and didn’t look all that surprised to have the cops asking about him. “Yeah, that’s my husband. He’s not here, though.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“He’s got a job over at the tire factory. Got it a few weeks back.”
“Do you know which one?”
“No. All I know is that it’s next to a butcher’s shop. He brought home some fatback last week. Said the butcher gave him a good deal on it.” She adjusted the baby a bit and sighed. “He done something I should know about?”
Ava waited as Frank took a few seconds to come up with a proper response. “Nothing bad,” he finally said. “We just need to ask him a few questions about something we believe he was a witness to.”
The woman rolled her eyes a bit. She wasn’t buying it but apparently didn’t care enough to ask questions. “Anything else?”
“No ma’am,” Frank said. “I believe I know the factory you’re talking about. Thank you.”
She gave a curt nod and closed the door. Heading back to the car, Frank said, “Doesn’t seem like the best marriage, you think?”
“That or the people that live her just get really tense when the police come knocking on their door.” For Ava, it was a bit odd to know that Frank was not inherently racist. She could see him doing his best to remain open-minded on a variety of issues that most other detectives and cops on the force had long ago taken a direct stance on—racism being among those issues. She’d seen it in Clarence from time to time, too, and he’d not shown any racist or hateful traits at all. But every now and then he’d make a comment that would make her think otherwise. Because of that, and because of how she saw Frank sometimes wrestle with it, she wondered if it was harder for a man to work for the police force in this rapidly growing city and not get ensnared in some of the negativity and stereotypes.
Ava had no idea where the tire factory in question was, but it turned out not to be all that far away. Still, in the nine blocks they covered just to get out of the maze of dirty streets and into the more well-maintained avenues, she pictured a man walking to work down this route every day and couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. In their automobile, it took fifteen minutes to get from the residence of Robert Love to the tire factory. Even with shortcuts and little alleyways to cut off some time, she imagined it would take a man anywhere between thirty and forty minutes to get there.
The tire factory was a small building that emitted a plume of blue-tinged smoke from its roof. When they got out of the car, Ava could smell the pungent odor of rubber before they even went inside. Frank held the door open for her and they found themselves standing in a thin alcove. An overweight man stood behind a cluttered counter. He was smoking a pipe and furiously looking through a stack of papers. Behind him, out of sight behind a large brick wall, it sounded like the world was ending as machines did their business and several shouting voices communicated with one another over the din.
The large man behind the counter looked up and gazed at them from behind a little cloud of pipe smoke. “Yeah?” he asked, having to raise his voice to be heard over the commotion behind him. “Can I help you?”
Jack flashed his badge and stepped closer to the counter. “Detectives Wimbly and Gold, NYPD. We need to speak to a man we were told works here—fellow by the name of Robert Love.”
“What’s he done?” the pipe-smoking man asked.
“Probably nothing,” Frank said, and Ava appreciated him not vocalizing any assumptions he might have. “We just need to ask him some questions about a case we’re working on.”
The man considered this for a moment, almost as if he had been hoping for something more. “Come on, then. I’ll take you to his station.”
He waved them over to join him on the other side of the counter. They met him on the right side of the counter, where he pushed open a small saloon-style half-door that allowed them to come around to his side. From there, without a word or even much of a glance, he led them behind the large brick wall and out onto the floor.
Ava had been in factories where hard manual labor was conducted before, but there seemed to be a tense sort of urgency on the floor of the tire factory. It was a large concrete slab of a floor with large, noisy machines taking up much of the area. Everything smelled of sweat and rubber, and there were dozens of men hard at work, separated into separate stations. Strips of rubber lay on pallets and carts, and the finished tires were stacked in neat rows on the far end of the floor. To Ava, it all seemed like organized chaos.