Downtown Browns: Ren’S Playhouse

By Khalil Baaqi

This is the most terrifying urban tale since the original motion picture, Candyman.
Kenny Robbins, Author of Nobodys Hostage

The Lomax Brown projects in D-Town are experiencing a preponderance of brutal murders. Human carcasses and the dismembered remains of men of all ages are being found throughout the twin cities largest urban housing development, and in various locations on the citys eastside. Discovered in dumpsters, in alleyways, and within the units of the horde of massive buildings that comprise the infamous projects are the remnants of fathers, sons, grandsons, and husbands, deprived of their heads, genitals, and entrails by a mysterious and unseen evil that would come to be known as the eastside ripper. The killings began a month after the death of Lorenzo Ren Hickem, a long-term and well known resident of the Browns who was savagely murdered while soliciting the services of an A-Town prostitute on A-Towns notorious Nile Ave. After the killings had begun, rumors immediately began to circulate throughout the community about the late Rens vengeful revenant being the culprit, considering that very few if any believed that a normal person could be responsible for these deeds because of the brutal and heinous nature of the killings. And as the body count continues to pile up, the residents of the Browns and inhabitants of the entire eastside community find themselves on the perils of familial and communal collapse because of the mass hysteria that inevitably ensued. Unsurprisingly, the initial questions of who or what could it be? burgeoned into the portentous and foreboding who will be next?

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781532014635

Khalil Baaqi

Khalil Baaqi earned a bachelor’s degree in political ccience and a master’s degree in criminal justice from the University of Colorado-Denver, and a master’s degree in social work from New York University. He currently works for the Denver Public School system. This is his second book.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 Khalil Baaqi.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-5320-1464-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-1463-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016921509

iUniverse rev. date: 04/03/2017

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Eating Bugs

Chapter 2 Keep ’Ya Head Up

Chapter 3 Serendipity On Devil’s Night

Chapter 4 Lunatic

Chapter 5 Urban Legends

Chapter 6 The Disappearance Of Ruchia

Chapter 7 Lunch Meat

Chapter 8 The Rose Hill Burial Ground

Chapter 9 Reggie! And The Noble Warriors

Chapter 10 The Eastside Ripper

Chapter 11 Cruel Summer

Chapter 12 Should’ve Packed A Vest On The Night Of The Fresh Fest

Chapter 13 All Hell Done Broke Loose

Chapter 14 Aggrieved

Chapter 15 Good Girl Gone Bad

Chapter 16 Devil’s Last Run

Chapter 17 Most Evil

Chapter 18 Sunshine On A Snowy Day

Epilogue

About The Author

INTRODUCTION

Ren’s reputation was nothing short of legendary around the ‘hood. At 5'9 with a medium build, he was a smooth-talking wannabe pimp, hustler, and playa’ who on the surface exuded all the perceived virtues that either goes along with ‘hood life, or should be incorporated into one’s daily métier as a means of out-thinking, out-cunning, outlasting, and out-strategizing the opposition; in other words, getting over. After all, isn’t this what ghetto life is all about? And surely the rules of engagement and the art of war, as they pertain to not only survival but out-doing everyone else, is no different in the Lomax Brown housing projects, in the heart of downtown D-town. Yes, a setting where it is much more advantageous to be cool and vigilant as opposed to being smart, especially book smart. Yeah, those damn books. A place where the hustle is both respected and coveted to the fullest, and the game is widely perceived as practically inviolable, particularly for those who have yet to raise the proverbial white flag that life so often dictates and, instead, have chosen to win.

This is what Ren meant to the ‘hood, and all of these things are what his persona and visage were widely perceived as capable of holding down, lock, stock, and barrel. Yet when he was savagely murdered by a prostitute in A-town, the town that makes up one-half of the twin cities of A and D, and by a being that Ren had always been praised for having nothing short of absolute and unimpeded power and control, this is where the game in D-town had changed, and the remnants of Ren’s life, as well as the lives of those around him in the Lomax Browns, would take a much darker turn. Similar to perhaps every housing project in every state, city, and town, the Lomax Brown projects are full of underprivileged underachievers; school drop outs; dope pushers; crack and test-tube babies; homes with absentee fathers; overworked and overwhelmed mothers or the TNAF mothers who didn’t work at all; pregnant preteen and teenaged girls; juvenile delinquent boys and young adult males, dawdling statically up and down the corners because of their sagging pants; and old heads and rapscallions, hands permanently clutched to the necks of the rot-gut liquor bottles, bantering and rambling on incoherently about how things were back in their so-called respective heydays. Not to mention the other interlopers, whores, and reprobates who are abound and run amok in the downtown district, which is all but a short ten-minute walk from the Lomax Browns. Yes, this is how life is. Poverty, despondence, indignation, and rampant disparity, overshadowing the glimmer of hope that remains, and underscoring the ebb to the binary ebb and flow that life incessantly throws at its unassuming inhabitants. Yet no one in the Lomax Brown housing projects, amid all of life’s other tragedies, would ever have perceived that an exceptionally brutal serial murderer would be in their midst.

Some of the other dualities that exist in life and that subsequently determine the trajectory of the human condition are good and evil, pros and cons, right and wrong, and, of course, black and white. So for every ship that brings bad cargo along with it, the upside to such binaries is the hidden flowers that subsequently blossom on the days when sunshine shrouds or engulfs the overcast of gloom and despair. In the ‘hood, such transmutations are symbolized as roses that grow from concrete, as every urban enclave are considerably referred to as concrete jungles. It is no different at the Lomax Browns. For every Ren—past or present—there is a simulacrum of what the Ren’s of the projects could have become or could possibly become. Such is the case of sixteen-year-old Malcolm Walker, for instance, a budding basketball prodigy who lives on the projects eastside with his mother Margaret, five siblings, and Grandmother Sue B, known to most of the other tenants as Mama Butler. Malcolm and his family stay in building J, just two complexes over from where the late Ren, who called unit 237 in building K his dominative domicile. Malcolm is more than aware of the late ghetto star’s presence, impact, and influence on the young soldiers and baby gangsters, or BGs, who would subsequently pick up where the ephemeral Ren’s of the projects typically leave off. After more than ten years of living within proximity of Ren, Malcolm could easily recollect the days when as a little tike being totted on the handlebars of Ren’s beach cruiser, with the old-school shocks and hydraulics that gave the pimped-out two-wheeler a low-rider look and feel. Could easily recollect the early a.m. wars in the courtyard of the adjoining buildings, with the cacophonic Ren practically always serving as either direct combatant or ringmaster of the melees. And, of course, could easily recall the foot traffic of the countless number of young girls and women moseying to and from Ren’s place; from pros to the fancy-sporting ladies of the ‘hood, to the burgeoning wannabe-video and celebrity vixens, who saw their bodies, sex appeal, and carefully-crafted dookie-braided styled hair as the only feasible means to escape a lifetime of ghetto subjugation.

On the Northwest side of the Lomax Browns, fourteen-year-old Tessa Ford could hardly fathom being one of these types of hood-chic. Pretty, lithe, and precociously ambitious, Tessa is the product of a nearly twenty-year marriage that produced four other siblings, of which Tessa is the middle child. Tessa’s mother, Clarice Ford, is a widow who lost her husband two years earlier at a nearby botched liquor store robbery, in which Maurice Ford, a landscaper, was an unfortunate casualty. Bequeathing her good looks to her daughter, Clarice is a kindergarten teacher who over the years has had to grapple with her family falling on hard times financially about a year or so preceding the death of her husband, whose work as a landscaper had been becoming more and more unstable. Consequently, they would have to abort their three-bedroom duplex in a working class community in A-town and move into the Browns to cut expenses. Despite the family loss and palpable setback, Tessa’s drive for learning, spiritual growth, and feminine development never waned. Like her mother, she is an avid reader. And like her father, whose work ethic made up for his lack of formal education, she is a fledgling perfectionist who unceasingly commits to tasks that she failed to immediately pick up on.

Unlike Malcolm, and because of Clarice’s indefatigable practice of keeping her children shielded from all of the elements of the projects and the players comprised of those elements to the best of her ability, Tessa knows practically nothing about the late and notorious Ren. Unfortunately, however, it is difficult to be a young teenager in the ‘hood and not know by word of mouth, via peers and friends of the nasty murder of one of the Brown’s most infamous residents that had taken place five months earlier. Nonetheless, and similar to Malcolm, Tessa as a young teenager is subjected to the prospect of having to endure the incessant woes that accompanies ghetto life and project living, despite how talented and ambitious, as both unquestionably are. This is the ubiquitous plight of being both black and poor in America, and is without question the reality that completely overwhelms the young and old whom are devastatingly ensnared in this ever-present yet evanescent reality, considering that irrespective of socioeconomic status we all have only so long to live. A reality that predetermines whether girls who are intrinsically good will inevitably go bad, as the mantra presupposes. Whether girls whose natural talents and learned ambitions will eventually be dumbed down to a culture that solicits the physical development of the black female’s body as opposed to the cognitive development of her brain. Or whether young boys in the ‘hood do find that being cool and tough rather than being smart and self-composed is more socially and culturally appealing, as well as essential to overall survival.

This is a story about the travails and pressures of the Tessa’s and Malcom’s of the world to overcome such odds, as well as the pressures and challenges of those around them, such as parents, caregivers, and mentors of the young who inhabit the concrete jungle that is the Lomax Brown projects. An urban setting that, again, like so many others is comprised of the scourges of drugs, poverty, crime, and death. No, the downtown Browns is no different than any other urban housing institution. Drugs, needless to say, are nothing new. Poverty, without question, has always been a fact of life here. The whores, johns, drunkards, and reprobates are characteristically by-products of urban decay. And death, yes, even death, has always been synonymous with project living. So when five mutilated bodies over the last four months, just one month after the demise of the notorious Ren, started to appear in various locations around the massive developments, the general questions of who, what, and why, were ostensibly overshadowed by really, oh well, and what else is new! Yet despite the apathetic outlook, regardless of how blasé’ or horrific, few, if any, would have a clue to the abject extreme of the slaughter that the Browns would ultimately play host.

CHAPTER 1

Eating Bugs

17 October 2014

With well over three-thousand units the Lomax Brown is the single largest housing development in the twin cities, particularly with the curtailing and remodeling of the old East Villages, defunct now for over a decade. Taking up nearly a three-block radius, which is just shy of a third of a mile, the complexes that comprise the Lomax Brown—commonly referred to as the Browns—have always been cluttered with foot traffic, particularly because they are located within a stone’s throw of the heart of downtown. Whether it is the residents or the family, friends, and acquaintances of residents, or interlopers, vagrants, street hustlers, or those who merely circumambulate in and around the area, the coalescing of thousands to and from the Browns as well as the day-to-day basis that such activities take place make it hard to pin-point those who are responsible for all of the shady-goings on—hustling, embezzling, extorting, and brutal murder. Lieutenant Detective Aaron Sanchez knows this fact all too well. In fact, the discovery of a mutilated corpse, prompting another strong black coffee with no cream and lots of sugar early a.m. wake up call, will be the fifth gruesome crime scene unveiled and investigated at the Browns in just a little over a four-month time period.

In the early a.m. hours of a surprisingly warm Sunday morning, the puncture-riddled and bloodied body of a forty-four-year-old male was found in the laundry facility on the north-end of the complexes. The body was positioned face down with the head turned at a forty-five-degree angle, mouth gaped open. The victim, Fredrick Clay, known around the ‘hood as Shawn because of his middle name, and who although reserved and pleasant, had a history of substance abuse, with stints of incarceration for petty theft and drug possession. His half-naked body was found near the broom closet of the laundry facility, castrated and with over twenty stab wounds in both his lower and upper body. After knocking on doors at the nearby complexes searching for potential witnesses, Sanchez and his triumvirate of uniformed officers were only able to gather information from three preadolescent youths who discovered the body. Amid the commotion that had ensued because of the discovery of another mutilated corpse, as well as having to approach the witnesses with extreme patience and caution because of their young ages, not to mention bewildered and frantic parents, the detective and the officers were not able to gather much, other than the youngest of the discoverer’s description of bugs coming out of the victim’s mouth.

Eeeewww! That man died because he was eating bugs; that’s how he died, right? ten-year-old Tavian Leblanc asked.

We are not sure how the man died, Sanchez replied. But we don’t want you and your friends to worry, okay. We’re going to find out who did this, I promise you.

After watching the youngsters saunter off back to their building, Sanchez felt a sharp pain in the pit of his stomach. A pain more reminiscent of guilt than the after effects of the whopper with cheese combo that he had voraciously consumed at Burger King’s twenty-four-hour drive thru shortly before receiving the ominous yet usual call. Truth is, Sanchez knew that this was not the first time he had offered such an assured verbal respite, but with few results and even fewer leads to work with. And after five brutal homicides he knew that it would probably not be the last of such empty platitudes. Another truth is that also, deep down, Sanchez could relate to the fears and anxieties of some of the residents at the Browns, and not simply because of his status a cop.

A third-generation Mexican-American, Sanchez grew up in the Mariposa Projects, called the red dawns because of each building’s fire-truck red exterior, located on the southwest side of the city. And because, clearly, no stranger to poverty, crime, and drugs, Sanchez imbued all of the hard-work and elbow grease ethics that his mother had instilled at an age as young as the youngsters who had found the mutilated corpse, and that he felt he had lied to. After completing college with a criminal justice degree, he joined the police academy, working his way all the way up to the narcotics division as one of the department’s most promising and talented young detectives. And even though his talent and ambition would eventually land him the position of lieutenant, it was the vicious murder of his teenaged stepsister that prompted his foray from narcotics to homicide. As he had mentioned to a psychiatrist during a psych evaluation as part of his promotional process, he had a John Walsh epiphany after his stepsister was killed, especially since the killer was never brought to justice. Or, at least not the real killer. Instead, a local vagrant and former pedophile named John Morrison had been indicted, tried, and convicted of the crime, primarily because several witnesses had placed him in the area where the young girl was last seen making a four-block trip to the local Shell Station.

In retrospect for Sanchez, however, it was probably more of a crusade rather than an epiphany, particularly being that he had no hand in the arrest nor the conviction process, considering that the downtown district was his jurisdiction and not the west side where the murder had been committed. More telling, though, is that Sanchez had his doubts about Morrison’s guilt. After years of abusing alcohol Morrison suffered from a form of dementia so severe that he could barely tell anyone his full name, not to mention having a bum leg from a severe injury while serving time in prison twenty years earlier. Surely, Sanchez, with his police instincts and experience, believed that his athletic teen stepsister could have evaded such a fiend. Nonetheless, this is perhaps unquestionably why Sanchez was fully aware of the impact that a brutal slaying of a human being could have on other human beings, especially those within close quarters, and regardless of whether they knew the victim or not.

Murders were obviously nothing new in D-Town. However, the five murders that had taken place in and around the Browns, and in just over four-months, had quadrupled the number of murders that had taken place within downtown and all of the other contiguous neighborhoods and areas combined. There had actually been one unsolved murder in the lo-do area during that time, in which that incident was the killing of another vagrant who was believed to have been stomped to death by rogue skateboarding teens. On the way back to the station, it was clear to the other officers that Sanchez’s anxieties were starting to consume him.

Shit! Another dead head and all that we have to start with is a bunch of kids with stories of goddamn bugs, fumed Sanchez.

It could be worse lieu replied officer Mike Floyd, a five-year former beat cop who was at the beginning stages of transitioning to detective due to his articulateness, trenchant discerning of the rules of engagement on the streets, as well as a master’s degree from one of the state’s most prestigious universities.

Oh yeah, how so? asked Sanchez.

We’re fortunate to have gotten anything at all as far as witnesses, Floyd replied. You and I both know that these people are not at all inclined to talk to cops, regardless of whatever goes down. Besides, if anything, what we should’ve been asking the parents is what the hell are kids that age doing up and running around the projects at this time in the morning. Both lawmen then turned and stared at each other momentarily.

Yeah, I guess, Sanchez replied. Let’s just hope that we have more success with victim number five than the others, huh?

With that said, an empty silence rang, as Sanchez then drifted off into deep thought, considering that both he and officer Floyd implicitly knew that five unsolved murders within the same vicinity had a fetid air of ominousness, and that things could only get much worse from that point on as a result. Just months earlier, the first victim was discovered in an alleyway of the complexes between spruce and 28th street. Charles grand Bush, a sixty-four-year father of three and grandfather of eleven, had been butchered with over thirty stab wounds, all around his torso and facial area. Known as grand because of his flair for florid suits and Gator dress shoes to match, regardless of his low-income status, he was also known as a drunkard with an intemperate disposition, especially when the bottle was less than half-full. Victims number two and three would come in less than two months’ time following the death of grand, as Rico Cole, thirty-seven, and forty-one-year-old Leonard Loggins would also be found in isolated locations within the Browns. However, it would be the fourth victim that would turn the heat up several decibels, as well as pitch the proverbial curveball to officials working the cases. The fourth victim would be the first female victim, a five-foot Hispanic female named Francisca Trujillo. Trujillo, a twenty-five-year-old single mother of a three-year girl would be found strangled in her apartment in building H, just a few buildings down from where the late Ren resided.

For more than a day, tenants at nearby units had heard the incessant cries and murmurs of Francisca’s daughter, Khalilah, who had not been physically harmed. It was not until a close acquaintance who stayed at the far south end of the hall went to investigate and discovered Francisca’s body and a dirty and nearly dehydrated infant huddled in the corner of her play pen. Unlike the other victims, Francisca had not been butchered but rather strangled to death with her own nylon stocking. Also, she had been killed in her own apartment, as opposed to the isolated areas located throughout the dense Brown complexes where the bodies of the other