“Funny.”
“I’m guessing Maybelline Walker didn’t like losing the ring.”
“No,” said Strange. “But fuck what she didn’t like.”
“And Carmen? You two patch things up?”
Strange nodded. “We got back together. And then I did the same thing I did to her before. I was just like that, Nick. Fact is, I was in my fifties before I got right with one woman.”
“You learned.”
Strange thought of that Western his father and he used to watch over and over again, where the gunmen save a south-of-the-border village from bandits. “Took me a long time to learn my elbow from a hot rock.”
“So where’s Carmen now?”
“Carmen’s gone. Vaughn, my mother… they’re all gone.” Strange picked up his glass, examined it, and drank off some Johnnie Walker Black. He put the glass quietly back down on the mahogany.
“What about Red Jones?”
“The marshals caught up with Red and Coco at a Holiday Inn someplace in West Virginia. Desk clerk was one of those police scanner freaks, and he recognized the big man from the description that had gone out over the airwaves. Red and Coco were naked on top the sheets when the law came in with pistols and machine guns.”
“They kill ’em?”
“No. I don’t recall what happened to Coco. I reckon she did time.”
“And Red?”
“Red ended up in the federal joint, in Marion, Illinois. Became the leader of D.C. Blacks, a prison gang got put together to go up against the Aryan Brotherhood and their kind. The D.C. Blacks claimed they were descended from the Moors.”
“Yeah?”
“That’s their claim. So Red was in Marion. This would be nineteen eighty-two. He got put on the same control unit as his enemies, and some say that was deliberate. That the white guards were in with the Aryans. Right away, Red tried to stab the main AB, and then Red tried to shoot him with a zip gun. This AB, dude had a Jewish name if you can believe it, him and another one of his shamrock buddies, they cut themselves out of an exercise cage with a hacksaw blade and found Red in the showers. To this day you hear people say that Red fought off a dozen men. Truth was, it was only two. But it was a determined two. When they were done with him, they dragged his body up and down the tier so that everyone could see.”
“They made a statement,” said Stefanos.
“He’d been stabbed sixty-seven times. Robert Lee Jones was hard to kill.”
“And still talked about to this day.”
“It’s his kind whose names ring out. The others get forgotten. You know what happened to Frank Wills, that young security guard who foiled the Watergate burglary?”
“No.”
“He died penniless, in a house with no electricity or running water. By then he’d done a year’s time for shoplifting an ink pen. And all those reporters who got famous, all those politicians who made their names on the scandal, all those motherfuckers who were doin the dirt, with their million-dollar book deals and radio shows…”
“Relax, Derek.”
“ ‘Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell and Dean. It follows a pattern if you dig what I mean.’ ” Strange chuckled, thinking of that old Gil Scott-Heron record he owned long ago. Curtis Mayfield, Donny Hathaway, Isaac Hayes… Gil was gone now, too.
“You better slow down with that scotch,” said Stefanos.
“Now I’m gonna take drinkin advice from you.”
They finished their alcohol quietly and listened with reverence to the music coming from the juke.
“Something bothering me,” said Stefanos. “This story you told, those scenes with Red and Coco alone in her place, Vaughn doing his street work, the girls in the diner on U Street…”
“Yeah?”
“You weren’t a witness to that. So how do you know what was said and done?”
“I don’t know, exactly. Some of that shit? I filled in the gaps and made it up. I mean, it’s true if I say it is. Print the legend, right?”
“You know that stock boy with the long hair in the Nutty Nathan’s stereo store? That was me.”
“For real?”
“There was only one stock boy who worked that place in the summer of seventy-two.”
“Smartass,” said Strange. “Lord, you were silly, even then.”
Stefanos smiled. “Let’s have another drink, Dad.”
“Uh-uh,” said Strange. “We gotta earn some money.”
They’d been hired by longtime public defender Elaine Clay to gather evidence on a homicide that had occurred in the Washington Highlands area of Southeast. They’d been waiting for the workday to end so that they could interview the mother of the alleged shooter, who by now would be back in her apartment. They were hoping that she could provide a verifiable alibi for her son, one that Clay could take into court. The young man was going to trial in a few weeks.
They left twenty on forty-four. The bald tender scooped the cash up off the bar.
“Leo,” said Stefanos.
“Yasou, patrioti.”
Strange and Stefanos walked out onto Georgia Avenue. Strange buttoned his leather blazer and nodded toward his black Cadillac, parked on the street.
“Let’s go, Greek. The clock ticks.”
“What’s your hurry?” said Stefanos.
Strange squinted against the dying light. “We’ve got a case.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Pelecanos is an independent-film producer, an essayist, the recipient of numerous international writing awards, a producer and an Emmy-nominated writer on the HBO hit series The Wire, and the author of a bestselling series of novels set in and around Washington, D.C. He currently writes for the acclaimed HBO series Treme.
Also by George Pelecanos
The Cut
The Way Home
The Turnaround
The Night Gardener
Drama City
Hard Revolution
Soul Circus
Hell to Pay
Right as Rain
Shame the Devil
The Sweet Forever
King Suckerman
The Big Blowdown
Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go
Shoedog
Nick’s Trip
A Firing Offense
Contents
Front Cover Image
Welcome
Dedication
Author’s Note
Intro
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Outro
About the Author
Also by George Pelecanos
Copyright
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2012 by George P. Pelecanos
Cover design by Keith Hayes
Cover image courtesy of the Advertising Archives
Illustrations by Philip E. Pascuzzo
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at
[email protected] gusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Reagan Arthur Books
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
www.hachettebookgroup.com
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First e-Book edition: January 2012
Reagan Arthur Books is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Reagan Arthur Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
ISBN 978-0-316-20955-7
George Pelecanos, What It Was
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