John Deoudes’s wife, whose name was Evthokia but who the customers called Mama, was behind the counter. Their youngest son, Logan, back from the navy in ’65, was working the grill. On the stools and in the booths were neighborhood old-timers and other locals who were just getting off work. Martini saw one of the butchers from Katz’s, the kosher market across the street, take two steaks from inside his jacket and slip them to Mama. She put one in the refrigerator for her family and gave the other to Logan to cook for the butcher. Martini realized he knew everyone in here by name or sight. This place hadn’t changed since he was a kid.
He had his food, a cup of coffee, and another smoke. Logan Deoudes, compact and muscular, came by and said hello.
“Whaddaya know, Dom?”
“Nothin’ much. You still got that dog?”
“Greco? He’s breathin’.”
“Nice dog.”
Deoudes looked him over. “You all right?”
Martini paid up, put some change on the counter, and left John’s. He went south on Georgia Avenue. He loved his Nova but usually walked from his mother’s house to the station and back again. He was never in a hurry to get home.
Across the street, a small crowd was gathered around the box office of the Sheridan. When they were teenagers, Martini and his brother, Angelo, used to climb up a fire ladder that led to the roof and sneak in a window that opened to a hall near the projection booth. If the manager, a guy named Renaldi, didn’t nail them right away, they’d hide in the men’s room until the show began, then take their seats in the dark. The theater was the hot spot of the neighborhood, an A house that was also a good place to try and pick up girls. Now they ran second-bill westerns, Universal Bs, and Greek movies on Wednesday nights.
Tonight was a George Peppard picture, Rough Night in Jericho, had Dean Martin in it, too. All Italian Americans knew that Martin’s real name was Martini. Angie used to ask him, “Hey, Dom, you think we’re related, like?” and Martini would smack him on the back of the head and say, “Yeah, and Nancy Sinatra’s our sister, too.”
Dominic Martini would have given his life, right now, to take back all the times he’d smacked his brother or called him stupid or a fag. He was only trying to toughen him up, but still. If he could see him again, just once more, he’d hold him tight.
He went down to Lou’s, a pool hall next to the firehouse, and got a game. Someone put “The Ballad of the Green Berets” on the jukebox, and a couple of drunks started singing along. Martini called his pocket, sunk the eight, and handed his stick to a guy he didn’t know. One of the drunks stepped out of his way as he walked across the poolroom. Martini was known around the neighborhood as the marine who’d seen action in Vietnam. He supposed he was feared. What the drunk didn’t know, what none of them knew, was that his fighting days were done. He lit a cigarette as he left the place and headed west.
He walked onto the grounds of Fort Stevens, going along the cannons, hearing the pop of the flag and the lanyard clanging against the pole. His history was in this park. He’d had his first smoke here, got shitfaced on hard liquor here, hid beer and things he’d stolen in the ammo bunker built into the hill. As a kid, he’d run across this field from Officer Pappas, laughing and yelling “Jacques” over his shoulder as he hotfooted it in the direction of his house. He’d busted his cherry here one night, when he and a couple of his buddies pulled a train on a girl named Laurie, who they all called Whorie, after she’d dared them to. He thought it was all good fun and he never thought the things he was doing would have any bearing on what he would be as a man. But now it seemed that all of it had brought him to where he was today.
He’d read the newspaper on his break, back at the station. Buzz had said not to worry, that a hit-and-run on a colored guy wouldn’t even make the news. He was wrong. It was only a few paragraphs in the City section, but it was there. Vernon Wilson was seventeen, nearing graduation at Roosevelt High School, working, at the time of his death, as a delivery boy for Posin’s deli. He had been accepted to Grambling College and was planning to start there in the fall. He was survived by a mother and a brother. Police were said to be working on the case but had no concrete leads at this time.
Martini cursed himself as he left the park and walked down Piney Branch Road.
Buzz had been wrong about plenty. The newspaper people and the police did “give a shit.” They were going to look for the killers, even though the boy was “just a coon.”
Buzz had told him to stop crying about something he couldn’t change. Buzz had told him to keep his mouth shut. He would do that, because he always did what Buzz said. But there was a part of Martini that hoped the truth would come to light. He felt it was important for people to understand that what happened to Vernon Wilson was unprovoked and in no way his fault. Wilson’s mother deserved to know this. His brother did, too.
Martini entered his house on Longfellow. The smell of garlic and basil was heavy as he went through the door. The air inside was warm and still. His mother, Angela, sat in his father’s old chair, wearing black, watching a Hazel rerun on their old RCA Victor. She turned her head and looked at him. Her face was waxy in the light.
“Ma.”
“There’s Sunday gravy and pasta in the kitchen.”
“I already ate.”
His mother turned back to the television. Martini went up to his room and lay down on the bed.
THEY HAD PUT Kenneth Willis in one of those rooms at the Ninth Precinct house, had a table and a chair and nothing else. The table was bolted to the floor, and beneath it ran an iron bar. They had cuffed one of his hands to the bar. His face was fucked from when he’d fallen to the sidewalk, and also from the beat-down they’d given him in this room. He’d said something smart to one of the arresting officers, and that had set them off. They must have known about his priors, too; the statutory rape charges on his sheet always got their blood up. Willis was used to getting hit by the police, he expected it, even, so it wasn’t any shock. He could have used a little whiskey, though, something, to rub on his gums. White boy had knocked loose one of his teeth.
The one who’d hit him, Officer James Mahaffie, and another one, Officer William Durkin, both in plainclothes, were in the room with him now. Standing over him and getting real close, how they liked to do.
Willis knew how to play these two. Give them back the lip they gave you. That’s how you got respect from their kind.
“What were you gonna do with this, then?” said Durkin, holding the single stocking they’d recovered from Willis’s slacks.
“This girl I been datin’,” said Willis, “she left it over my crib. I was gonna return it to her.”
“What, this girl only has one leg?”
“She has one pussy. That’s all I need to know.”
“You’re a real stud. I’m just curious: You ever had a woman over the age of fourteen?”
“Your mother was,” said Willis.
Mahaffie, big and blond, slapped him viciously across the face. Willis put his tongue to the loose tooth, moved it, and tasted blood. He felt dizzy and hot.
“A gun and a stocking,” said Durkin. “You were on your way to knock over something when we nailed you outside your place. Isn’t that right?”
“Huh?”
“Tell us about your accomplice. Where were you headed when we picked you up?”
“I was just goin’ out for a walk.”
“Liar.”
“What’d you say?”
“You’re a lyin’ piece of black shit.”
“Fuck you, whitey.”
Mahaffie threw a deep punch into Willis’s jaw and knocked him off his chair. His arm twisted in the fall, and he felt an arrow of pain in the wrist still cuffed to the bar. Something had torn in his shoulder, too. Mahaffie righted the chair, and Willis struggled to his knees. He retched as he managed to get back in the seat. He spit blood and his tooth on the table. He looked them in the eye in turn.
“Hey, Jim,” said Durkin, smiling jag
ged teeth. “You see this?” He let the stocking dangle from his hand.
“Yeah, I see it.”
“Stupid sonofabitch was gonna pull a robbery with a fishnet stocking. Oh, shit.”
Durkin and Mahaffie laughed.
“What’s the charge?” said Willis.
“That thirty-two you were carryin’,” said Durkin. “Big surprise, someone filed the serial number off it. Guy like you gets popped with a weapon altered like that, you’re lookin’ at a felony.”
“So? How come I ain’t been brought before no judge?”
“We’re gonna let you think about it.”
“I don’t need to think on nothin’,” said Willis. “I’ll take the charge.”
“You’re lookin’ at time,” said Durkin.
“I wanna speak to an attorney.”
“Yeah, okay.”
Mahaffie put his finger in the mess on the table and flicked the tooth against Willis’s chest. “Here you go. Put it under your pillow tonight. For the fairy.”
“I get a phone call, don’t I?” said Willis, over Mahaffie and Durkin’s laughter. He watched them walk from the room.
Later, Willis stood out in the hall, a desk sergeant nearby, and made his call on a pay phone. He spoke softly so the sergeant couldn’t hear.
“I’m in trouble, cuz.”
“You need to stand tall,” said Alvin Jones.
“You know I will.”
“They gonna try and make you talk.”
“They already did,” said Willis, sick from the coppery taste in his mouth.
“You got a lawyer?”
“They gonna give me one, I expect.”
“You can beat a little old gun rap.”
“Yeah, but they ain’t even charged me yet. They just gonna let me sit here for a while, I guess.”
“That ain’t legal.”
“Black motherfucker like me, legal ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.” Willis shifted his eyes to the sergeant, then back to the wall in front of him. “Thing of it is, they knew about our plan.”
“Say what?”
“The market,” said Willis. “They knew. Now, why you think that is?”
Alvin Jones let that lie in his brain.
“Kenneth.”
“Yeah.”
“You call here again, I might not be in, you understand?”
“You goin’ back with Mary?”
“Nah, man. That baby’s got the cryin’ disease, and I cannot take it. I’ll be at cousin Ronnie’s crib, over there off 7th. But that’s for you only. Don’t you tell no one where I went.”
“I won’t say nothin’.”
“I know it. You a soldier, Ken.”
Jones told his cousin to be strong, then hung up the phone. His eyes went narrow and he began to mumble. Sitting there in the living-room chair of Lula Bacon’s apartment, rattling ice cubes in a highball glass where bourbon had been.
They knew. His cousin’s words burned through his head.
“What’s wrong with you?” said Lula, standing over him, her hand on her hip.
“Nothin’,” said Jones.
“You talkin’ to yourself and your eyes are funny.”
“Go on, bitch,” said Jones, holding out his glass. “Get me another drink.”
Jones watched her head into the kitchen. He lit a Kool and dragged on it deep.
Okay. They knew. But how’d they know? Who the fuck would have the nerve to talk to the police about their plans, and why? Lula? Nah, he never told her anything. Only one he could think of . . . that smart-mouthed boy Dennis, one had the police brother. Yeah, he was the one. Had to be. Tryin’ to be all Dudley Do-Right and shit.
Jones remembered Dennis, right in this very spot, advising him on how to draw the number out the box score. Telling him that Frank Howard was seven ’cause he played left.
Jones grabbed the phone off the stand, dialed, and got his bookie on the line.
“Alvin,” said the bookie. “How’s it goin’, brother?”
“What the number was?” said Jones.
The bookie told him he hadn’t hit. The numbers that had come out weren’t even close to the ones he’d played.
Jones hung up the phone. He pictured Dennis Strange in his head. Acting superior, talkin’ all that clever shit, looking to play him. Defying him, sitting in the backseat of the Mercury the night before, holding one of his dumb-ass books, like he was better than him and Kenneth, his so-called friend. The friend that he’d betrayed. Boy gave out bad advice, too.
Alvin Jones watched his hand shake as he ashed his cigarette. He felt his blood go tick tick tick.
NINETEEN
DEREK STRANGE WAS listening to a Dial single, Joe Tex doing “A Sweet Woman Like You,” when Lydell Blue buzzed him from the lobby. Strange turned off the music, checked himself in the full-length mirror he had hung by the front door, and went down to meet Lydell. Night had fallen on the streets.
Strange dropped into the bucket of Lydell’s gold Riviera. Blue’s big arms and chest stretched the fabric of his shirt as he put the car in gear.
“Where we headed, Ly?”
“Barry Place.”
“Shoot, we coulda walked.”
“I walked a beat all day. Besides, we meet some girls tonight, you think they’re gonna want us to walk them home?”
“You got a point.”
“I ain’t makin’ payments on this Riv for nothin’.”
They went down the hill alongside Cardozo, then east on Florida. Blue punched the gas, and the car seemed to lift off.
“What you got in this thing, the Apollo rocket?”
“Four-oh-one Nailhead,” said Blue, stroking his thick black mustache.
Strange had a look at the interior of the car. Blue kept it spotless, in and out; you could groom yourself looking into the mirror finish on the body. It was the ’63, the first year Buick had offered the model. Auto turbine, power windows, power seats, even had an antenna went up and down when you pushed a button. He’d bought it used, off that little old lady from Pasadena that every car lover was looking for. Still, even though it was five years old, it hadn’t come cheap. Blue still lived with his mother and father over there in Petworth because he couldn’t afford both an apartment and the nut on this car.
“It is nice,” said Strange.
“What is?”
“Your ride. But the question is, you do meet a girl tonight, where you gonna take her later on?”
“Your place,” said Blue, like he was telling a stupid man his own name. He used Strange’s apartment regularly for just that purpose.
“Fine with me, long as it ain’t like it was with that last girl you had.”
“What was wrong with it?”
“Y’all kept me up half the night.”
“One of those churchgoing types,” said Blue with a wink of his eye. “Girl sings gospel.”
“Sounds like she screams it, too.”
“Go on, Derek.”
Strange smiled. As kids, he and Blue had stood up for each other in the schoolyard and on the streets. At Roosevelt High, both had played football, with Strange going both ways at tight end and safety, and Blue a star halfback. Strange was more a blocker than he was a receiver and had opened many holes for Lydell, who had set that year’s Interhigh record for ground yardage gained in his senior season. It was in one of those final games that Strange had torn the ligaments in his knee, an injury that would keep him out of the draft. After graduation, Blue went into the army while Strange worked a succession of futureless jobs and recovered from the operation that fixed his knee. Then, when Blue returned from the service, both applied to the MPD and entered the academy. You made new friends all your life, but none were as special as the ones you’d made early on.
“Wanna hear somethin’?” said Blue.
“Pick it,” said Strange.
Blue reached over and turned on the AM. DJ Bob Terry was introducing Marvin Gaye’s brand-new one, “You,” on WOL. Blue kept his ha
nd on the dial and with a smirk on his face looked at Strange.
“That’s good right there,” said Strange.
“Thought you didn’t like Motown.”
“I make an exception for Marvin.”
“It’s got nothin’ to do with him bein’ local, does it?”
“A little.”
“You are your father’s son,” said Blue.
In more ways than you know, thought Strange.
They parked on Barry Place. Ahead, halfway up the street toward Georgia, they saw young people outside a row house, on the concrete porch and in the small yard, talking, dancing a little, getting their heads up on things they were drinking out of bottles and paper cups. Soul music was coming softly down the block.
Strange and Blue walked toward the house side by side. Both were dressed clean; both moved with their shoulders squared and their heads held up. To be young, handsome, and employed, to walk into a party looking strong, standing with your main boy from childhood, trusting him to watch your back, there wasn’t a feeling much better than that.
“Feels good,” said Blue.
“What does?”
“To be out of uniform for a change. Not that I don’t like my job, because I do. It’s just, you know, nice to have brothers and sisters lookin’ at me like I’m one of them.”
“You are.”
“I mean like I’m on their side.”
“You don’t have to explain it,” said Strange. “I know exactly what you mean.”
“It’s just hard. On top of it, I got a genuine sonofabitch for a partner. Old brother is always schoolin’ me. To him, if I open my mouth, I better be just breathin’, ’cause if I speak, I’m wrong.”
The comment made Strange think of Troy Peters. He tried too hard sometimes, but his heart was right. All in all, he was about as good a partner as a man could have.