“What’d you hear?”
“That it happened.”
White dragged on his Viceroy and let the smoke out slow.
“I’m lookin’ for a red Ford,” said Vaughn. “Galaxie Five Hundred, sixty-three, sixty-four. Damage to the grille, headlights, front quarters, like that.”
“Ain’t had nothin’ like it come through.”
“Here you go.” Vaughn handed White a card on which he’d scribbled his home number next to the printed station number. “Anything at all, you get up with me, hear?”
White nodded.
“Everything okay?” said Vaughn.
“God is good,” said White.
Leonard White finished his smoke and watched Frank Vaughn cross the street, heading for a pay phone near the bus stop. Vaughn amused him. He was like one of those dinosaurs, didn’t know the other dinosaurs had all laid down and died. Also, like many men who’d done time, White had a strange fondness for the one who’d sent him up. In a very direct way, Frank Vaughn had done what his mother, father, girlfriends, and minister had been unable to do: He’d turned his life around.
At the pay phone, Vaughn flicked away his cigarette. He pulled his wallet and ratfucked through its folds until he found a phone number jotted down on a piece of matchbook cover. He dropped a dime into the phone and dialed the number of a homicide cop over in PG County, a guy named Marin Scordato he’d befriended on the shooting range over in Upper Marlboro many years ago. Scordato kept a notebook detailing the current whereabouts of the men he’d arrested who’d done time and been sent back out into the world. He often squeezed these men for information. Almost all of them were parole violators in one way or another, and they readily responded to his threats. It was harassment, and very effective.
“Marin, it’s Frank.”
“Hound Dog, how’s it hangin’?”
“My meat’s okay,” said Vaughn. “But I got a problem with a case.”
MIKE GEORGELAKOS HAD torn the register tape off at three o’clock and was entering the day’s take in his green book. He sat on a stool near the register, glasses low on his nose, penciling figures into the book. Any sales made after three would go into his pocket and remain unreported to the IRS, a common practice among small businessmen in D.C.
Down behind the counter of the Three-Star Diner, Darius Strange used a brick to clean the grill while Halftime, Mike’s utility man, washed dishes on the other side of the plastic screen, humming the chorus of “I Was Made to Love Her” over and over as he worked. Ella Lockheart filled the Heinz bottles with A&P-brand ketchup as gospel music came from the house radio. They went about their tasks in an unhurried way. Lunch rush was over, and the end of the workday was near.
Derek Strange and Troy Peters sat at the counter eating cheeseburger platters and drinking Cokes, getting fueled up for the start of their four-to-midnight shift. They were in uniform, and their service revolvers hung holstered at their sides. Peters was thinking of his wife, Patty, and how she’d looked in sleep, her blond hair fanned out on the pillow, after they’d made it the night before. Strange had been dizzy with the thought of Carmen Hill all day, the curve of her backside in that dress, the cut of her thighs, the warmth of her privates against his as they danced. Those deep brown eyes. In addition, Strange and Peters were concentrating on the food that was before them, loving it the way they loved women, as young men tended to do.
“How’s that burger, son?” said Darius Strange.
“It’s good, Pop.”
“You do somethin’ long enough, I guess you get it right.” He looked over his shoulder at his son, and as he shifted his weight he felt a sharp pain down by his tailbone.
Derek watched his father wince, then return to his task. He had that big old chef’s hat, which he called a toque, on his head. Recently, Billy Georgelakos had taken a photograph of his own father, Mike, standing alongside Darius, with Darius wearing the hat and holding a spatula up in his hand. The photograph had been framed and hung by the front door.
Mike had upped Darius’s pay through the years. Currently, he was making a hundred and ten dollars a week. Alethea was getting seventeen dollars now to clean houses and had cut her workweek down from six to five days. On their combined take, they managed to pay their bills. So they were doing all right. But Derek was worried about his father. Lately, his flesh looked loose on his face, his cheeks drawn. For a man in his fifties, he seemed to be aging fast.
The Daily News man came into the diner and dropped his stack atop the cigarette machine, removing the unsold copies from the previous day. Derek got off his stool, picked one from the top of the stack, and walked it back to the counter, where he spread it out to the left of his plate. The News was D.C.’s tabloid paper, convenient to read because of its size. The easy layout style and the dramatic edge put on the stories also made reading the News fun. Even had puzzles near the funny pages, Jumble and such, which Derek still liked to do. He opened the paper to the movie section and checked out the scheduled openings for the first-run houses downtown.
“Anything good coming up?” said Peters, wiping mustard from the side of his mouth.
“The Scalphunters,” said Derek. “I been waitin’ on that one.”
“Burt’s all man,” said Peters.
“Don’t forget about Ossie Davis. Got that bald-headed dude, too, played Maggott in The Dirty Dozen.”
“Savales!” said Mike Georgelakos, suddenly animated, from the other end of the counter, and Derek heard his father chuckle under his breath.
“You gonna take your little hairdresser?” said Peters.
“I don’t think so,” said Derek, thinking, Darla doesn’t even like westerns anyway.
Darius turned and stepped up to the counter, placing his palms on it and facing his son. “You finished?”
“Thanks, Pop,” said Derek.
“You tryin’ to do my job now?” said Ella Lockheart, stepping quick over the mats, reaching across Darius to clear Derek Strange’s empty plate. “I’ll just take that up.”
In doing so, she brushed her hand across Darius’s forearm. Her touch seemed natural and did not appear to discomfort him at all. Ella placed the plate on a bus tray beneath the counter and went back to her ketchup bottles. Darius looked at her for a moment, then back at his son.
“Dennis and I had a talk last night,” said Darius.
“He told me he was gonna speak with you.”
Darius’s eyes went to Troy Peters, then back to Derek.
“It’s okay, Pop,” said Derek. “My partner and me, we already discussed it.”
Peters nearly smiled. It was the first time he could recall Derek calling him partner.
“You think it’s for real this time?” said Darius.
“He thinks it is,” said Derek. “Whether Dennis follows through or not, I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.”
“Maybe the three of us could check out that movie you were talking about. You, me, and Dennis, I mean. We could go downtown and see it this weekend. It’s playin’ at the Keith’s, right? We haven’t seen a picture together at one of those old palaces in a long time.”
“I’d be into it,” said Derek.
“I’ll talk to your brother,” said Darius. “See if he’s into it, too.”
Darius went back to his work. Derek looked down the counter at Ella, smiling to herself, singing along softly with the gospel tune coming from the radio.
Derek remembered a time when he was a kid, when he’d walked uptown after school one day while the magnolias were in bloom, hoping to surprise his old man. Derek was coming up the alley, headed for the rear door of the diner the way he and Billy liked to do, when he saw his father and Ella Lockheart talking real close on the back stoop. In his father’s eyes and smile Derek saw something familiar. It was the way he looked and smiled at his wife, Derek’s mother, on certain nights when they were happy and getting along. Later, on those same nights, Derek would hear them laughing and making noise in their bedroom
. Seeing his father look at Ella that same way unsettled him. He backed himself out of the alley and walked home, never mentioning to his father that he had come to visit him that spring day.
He guessed he had known even then. But for a boy it was all too confusing to deal with directly, so he had put the incident, mostly, to the back of his mind. He loved his mother and father equally. He was sorry for her and disappointed in him. Disappointed, too, that the bond between his parents, which he had held to be simple and sacred, was as complex and fragile as everything else. But he couldn’t bring himself to hate his father. Judge not lest you be judged, that’s what their minister always said in church. It seemed to apply to both Darius and the adult Derek Strange.
You are your father’s son. That’s what Lydell had said to him the night before.
He reckoned that he was. He sure had gotten his work ethic from his old man. His interest in local sports heroes, in music, even in western movies, it had all come from Darius Strange. And his reluctance to commit to one woman, truly commit, even when someone as good as Carmen was looking at him square in the face, well, he supposed that had come from his father, too. Course, knowing where all his baggage came from didn’t make the load any lighter. You just put one foot in front of the other every day and did the best you could.
“We gotta get moving,” said Peters, looking at his watch.
“Right,” said Derek.
They paid up, half the amount that was printed on the menu, and left change on the counter. They waved good-bye to Mike, whose lips were moving as he counted out a stack of ones.
“Have a blessed day, young man,” said Ella Lockheart, now filling the salt and pepper shakers, her final task of the day, as Derek Strange and Troy Peters headed for the door.
“You, too, Miss Ella. See you, Pop.”
“Son.”
Outside the diner they moved toward their squad car. Across the street at the Kennedy, folks were gathering for the first showing of Von Ryan’s Express. Girls were doing double Dutch in front of a church, and a woman pushed a baby carriage down the sidewalk, passing a man applying wax to his curbside Lincoln.
“Nice out,” said Peters, looking up at the cloudless sky.
Strange smelled rain.
TWENTY-ONE
ALVIN JONES PARKED his Special on the corner of 2nd and Thomas, and walked north into the heart of LeDroit Park. As he moved along, he hard-eyed young men and let his gaze travel soft over the women. He had left his gun in the apartment but hadn’t come out naked. He carried a straight razor in the pocket of his slacks.
Soon he came to the intersection across the street from the market. It might have been that the owner of the shop or someone who worked there had gotten suspicious, seen them sitting in Kenneth’s Monterey on Sunday night. Maybe it was them who called the police on Kenneth after taking down the number on his plates. Didn’t seem like the MPD would arrest someone on just a hunch, but still. Jones wanted to make sure.
The door was tied open with a string. He stared at the market pointlessly, knowing he wasn’t going to get any closer or go inside. Then he saw a couple of boys a half-block down, riding bicycles over a piece of plywood they had leaned up on some bricks in the middle of the street. Jones went over to where the boys were playing and observed their game. They were getting some speed on the approach, riding their bikes up the shaky ramp, trying to get the bikes into the air. The kid who got up highest would win a bet of money that, Jones figured, neither of them had. But the bikes were old and heavy, and it wasn’t working out the way they’d planned.
Least they had bikes. Jones had asked his father for a bicycle once, back in the early fifties, and his father had laughed. Jones asked him again, and his father slapped him so hard he saw stars, just like in the cartoons. Wasn’t his real father anyway. Just some man his mother had ordered Jones to mind. When he wasn’t laughing at him, the man used to beat him with a belt or closed hands. If Jones could see him now, he’d kill him. But the man had been dead for ten, twelve years. Got his heart stabbed in a fight over a woman, lived one floor down from where they all stayed.
Jones whistled to the boys. They rolled on over to him on their bikes, apprehension and curiosity on their faces. He introduced himself and told them what he wanted, holding two folded ones in his hand as he spoke. Telling them how he’d grown up around here, asking them, What was the name of that man owns the market down here, and the other man, works there, too? Claiming how he wanted to go in there and say hello but was ashamed because he wanted to call them by their names and couldn’t recall. And, Oh yeah, had they seen this other cat hanging around the market or somethin’ yesterday? Jones describing Dennis Strange and the kids not knowing any damn thing, but wide of eye and licking their lips over those dollar bills.
“Don’t we get the money, mister?” said one of the boys, watching as Jones slipped the bills back into his pocket.
“Ask for the money up front next time,” said Jones.
Y’all should have paid me for the lesson I just gave you, thought Jones, walking away. He always went to kids first for information, ’cause they were trusting and the first to give it up. But these kids here, they weren’t worth a damn.
Jones went back down the street. He passed the market and at the next intersection cut right and walked into an alley that ran between two residential blocks. At the end of the alley, Jones could see the back door of the market, an overturned milk crate by its stoop. Cats of all kinds scattered as he moved along the cracked concrete. Up ahead, a boy in a striped shirt threw a tennis ball against a brick wall.
Jones came up on the boy and stood beside him. The boy didn’t move away. He had an old face for his years, with eyes that had lost their innocence too soon. All of this, to Jones’s mind, was good.
“What’s goin’ on, young man?”
The boy said nothing.
“You got an arm on you like Bob Gibson, boy.”
The boy whipped the ball against the wall.
“All right,” said Jones. “You just listen.”
Jones fed the boy the same stories and questions he had given the kids on the bikes. The boy continued to throw the ball, catching it bare-handed off one hop, as Jones spoke. When Jones was done, he waited for the boy to say something. But the boy did not react at all.
Jones had lost half his patience. He put fire to a Kool and looked the boy up and down. “Somethin’ wrong with your tongue?”
The boy shook his head. “My uncle told me not to talk to no police.”
“He told you right.”
The boy held the ball and stood straight. He looked Jones in the eye for the first time. “You got money?”
“I might.”
“I might know somethin’, then.”
“Tell me what you know.”
“Where the money at?”
Jones chuckled low. He reached into his pocket and handed the boy two one-dollar bills. “Say it.”
“White man who owns the market, everyone calls him Mr. Ludvig. Man who works for him, we all call him John.”
“John’s a black man. . . .”
“Dark-skinned, got gray in his hair.”
“What about the rest?”
“Rest of what?”
“What I asked. Did you see a young brother come and talk to those men yesterday? I’m sayin’, someone who wasn’t from the neighborhood. Like a stranger. Most likely, this cat would’ve talked to John.”
The boy frowned as he thought. His frown broke as the image came to his mind. “There was this one man, came around early. Right back here.”
“In the alley?”
“Man walked by me. Talked to John behind the store. Tall, young dude, had an Afro that was all messed up.”
“He ain’t say his name, did he?”
“Nah.”
“Anything else about this man?”
“Nothin’, I guess. Except —”
“What?”
“Man was carrying a book.”
 
; Jones smiled. “He say anything to you?”
“Nothin’ important. Knowledge is power, somethin’ like that.”
“That’s bullshit right there,” said Jones.
“I know it,” said the boy.
“Street’s the only teacher you ever gonna need. And books are for faggots, too.”
“I aint’ no punk.”
“I can see that,” said Jones. “Listen, you and me didn’t talk today, hear?”
“For two more dollars, we ain’t never talked any day.”
“Boy,” said Jones, reaching for his wallet, “you about to drive me to the poorhouse and drop me off out front, all those brains you got.”
THE TROUBLE STARTED after dark, at the Peoples Drug Store at 14th and U, where trouble was not uncommon. Fourteenth and U’s four corners marked the busiest and most notorious of all intersections in black Washington, a major bus transfer spot in the middle of D.C.’s Harlem, a hub for heroin addicts, pimps, prostitutes, and all manner of hustlers, as well as law-abiding citizens and neighborhood residents just trying to move through their world.
The Peoples Drug sat beside the Washington, D.C., office of Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, housed in a former bank. The SNCC and NAACP offices were nearby as well.
Hostility between juveniles and the store’s black security guards had become a regular occurrence at this particular Peoples in the past few weeks. On this evening, the guard on duty, employed by an outside service, confronted a group of young men who were swinging a dead fish outside the store and bothering passersby with lewd gestures and remarks. The security guard told them to move on, but the boys did not comply. They called him “punk” and “motherfucker,” and when he retreated, a couple of them followed him into the store. The manager phoned the police. A physical altercation ensued between one of the boys and the guard, and the boys were expelled. The manager locked the front door. By now a crowd had begun to form outside the Peoples. As was common in the inner city, word had spread quickly via the “ghetto telegraph,” and the story had mutated to suggest another beat-down of a black boy at the hands of the authorities. Confusion and curiosity turned to anger as the crowd grew. The crowd pushed against the plate glass of the front show window. The glass imploded just as MPD patrol wagons and squad cars began to arrive.