“Why’d you do it, Renaldo?” said Vaughn.
“Does it matter?”
“That’s up to your attorney to decide. But I just like to know. Off the record.”
Renaldo shrugged. “Man was fuckin’ my woman. I don’t even like the bitch, understand? But there’s some things you don’t do. I heard about it at a card game; all these boys I run with . . . everyone knew but me. Didn’t even bother me he was jammin’ this girl. He just shouldn’t have talked so free, is all it was. It shamed me. When a man don’t have his pride . . .”
He ain’t got nothin’ at all, thought Vaughn, tuning out Renaldo’s voice and finishing it off in his head. He’d only heard this story, in variation, about a hundred and fifty times. He had thought this might be the interesting exception here, something different to make his buddies down at the FOP bar laugh, but it was always the same. Now Renaldo, a triple offender, just like the solid citizen who’d ratted him out, was going to do twenty-to-life for defending the honor of a bitch he didn’t even like.
“Take it easy, Renaldo,” said Vaughn before leaving him in the box. At least you got your pride.
Now Vaughn was free to work the hit and run. He had pulled an eight-to-four and his plan was to pursue it all day.
At around nine, Vaughn was still in the station, drinking coffee and having a smoke, sitting at his desk, scanning the night sheets, when he read about the fresh victim down in Park View. Alethea’s oldest was named Dennis. Had to be the same man.
He picked up the phone, talked to Olga, gave her the news, listened to Olga’s theatrics, and got Alethea’s phone number. He phoned the Strange residence, and a man came on the line. He recognized the voice.
“Strange residence.”
“Frank Vaughn here.”
“Detective.”
“I just heard. It is your brother, right?”
“Yes.”
“My sympathies to you and your family. Please tell your mother that I was . . . that she’s in my thoughts.”
“I will.”
“Young man?”
“Yes.”
“Who’s the primary? Do you know?”
“A Bill Dolittle.”
“Okay. You tell him I’m at his disposal, hear? And the same goes for you and your parents. Anything you need. Anything, understand?”
“Thank you, Detective,” said Strange, and hung up the phone.
Billy Do-nothing. That was a bad break. Unless the perp walked right into the station with pen in hand, or there was a forthcoming wit, or there was a plea-out involved, the case would go cold.
Vaughn rubbed at his face. The young man, Derek, had seemed unemotional, considering. Well, he was police. Some of them just felt they had to put up a hard front all the time. Secretly, Vaughn was relieved that the son, and not the mother or father, had picked up the phone. But he hoped Derek would pass on the message that he had called.
Vaughn sat there smoking his cigarette. What he knew of Dennis Strange came from Alethea, and Alethea gave up little of her private life. He remembered vaguely that the older son had been in the service, but that was long ago. There was little else to recall. When Alethea spoke of her sons at all, it was usually about Derek, the cop. He wondered if Dennis, the murder victim, had shamed her in some way or if it was just that Derek gave her such pride.
Vaughn crushed his L&M out in the ashtray before him, found an unmarked out in the lot, and went to work.
He visited several garages on the D.C. border. He went back down to 14th and recanvassed a few of the neighbors who lived close to the accident scene, and turned up jack.
Shortly thereafter, he sat at the lunch counter in the Peoples on Georgia and Bonifant, eating a burger-and-fries platter and washing it down with a chocolate shake, his basic early lunch. The steel cup used to make the shake sat next to his glass. The soda jerks here didn’t pour the extra out and waste it like they did at other five-and-dimes, and that was why Vaughn always came back.
He pushed away his plate and lit a smoke. When he was done with it, he took his notebook and pen out of his inside jacket pocket, went to a wooden phone booth in the drugstore, dropped a dime in the slot, and got Scordato, his PG County cop friend, on the line.
“Marin, it’s Vaughn.”
“Hound Dog, how’s it hangin’?”
“Straight down the middle,” said Vaughn. “Gimme somethin’, will you?”
“Get a pen.”
Vaughn drove into PG County. He visited a garage off Riggs Road, in Chillum. He got shrugs and the usual passive hostility. His next stop was a place near Agar Road, in West Hyattsville, near the Queens Chapel Drive-in, an unmarked garage on a gravel road set behind a strip of speed and tire shops.
Vaughn parked behind a Dodge Dart, a plum-colored GT with mag wheels. A Hi Jackers decal and another reading “WOOK: K Comes Before L,” were affixed to the rear window. He studied the car as he passed it and headed for the garage.
Vaughn walked through the open bay door. A white guy and a colored guy, both good sized, had their heads under the hood of an all-stock, pearl-finish Chevelle SS. “Windy” came from a radio set high on a shelf.
The white guy, light and freckled, wearing coveralls cut off at the shoulders, a cigarette dangling from his lips, stood free as Vaughn cleared his throat. The colored guy’s eyes came up, but only for a moment, returning his attention to the Chevy’s water pump, illuminated by a droplight. He worked a flathead to a clamp, tightening it around a hose. Vaughn saw homemade tattoos, probably done with a heated wire, on both of his forearms.
“How’s it goin’ today?” said Vaughn.
“We help you?” said the white guy, real chipper voice, smiling, looking Vaughn over, making him as a cop.
“I hope so,” said Vaughn, badging the white guy, replacing the badge case inside his jacket. “Frank Vaughn, MPD. I’m lookin’ for a Patrick Millikin.”
“You found him.”
“Can I get a minute?”
Millikin pointed his chin in the direction of the Chevy. “Just about.”
Vaughn stepped forward, closing the space between himself and Millikin, intending to crowd him. Millikin did not react.
“A homicide occurred a few nights ago involving a red Galaxie or Fairlane, sixty-three, sixty-four. Might be damage to the grille or the hood. Headlights, quarter panels . . .” Vaughn looked at the colored guy, whose eyes had flashed up again, then back at Millikin. “I was wondering if a car like that might have come through.”
“No, sir.”
Millikin picked a shop rag up off the cement floor and rubbed at his hands. The ember flared on his cigarette as he drew on it, Millikin squinting against the smoke coming off its tip. He dropped the rag, ashed the cigarette into his palm, and rubbed the ashes into the thigh of his coveralls.
“You sure, now,” said Vaughn.
“Haven’t seen a car fitting that description.”
“You talk to the other garage owners around here, don’t you?”
“Sometimes.”
“Any of them mention a car like that?”
“No.”
“Nothin’, huh?”
“Not a thing.”
“You got a brother in the joint on a manslaughter beef, right?”
“He don’t know about no red Ford, either.”
Millikin dragged on his smoke, double-dragged, pitched the butt out the open bay door. His pale freckled face had gone pink.
“You’re a funny guy,” said Vaughn.
“I was just sayin’ he don’t know.”
“Well, I mention prison ’cause . . . hell, Mr. Millikin, I know all about the code. How people like your brother and some of the people you might, uh, associate with now and again don’t like to talk with the police. But see, this isn’t one of those honor-among-thieves things.”
“That’s nice. But I still ain’t seen the car. Now look, I gotta get to work. I promised the man who owns this Chevy here that I’d have it for him this afternoon.”
>
“Here’s the deal,” said Vaughn, taking another step forward. “The driver of the car I’m describing, he ran this colored boy down in the street for no reason at all. Broke his neck, severed his spinal cord . . . left his brain fluid all over the street. Boy had a steady job, was off to college in the fall, the whole nine. Looked to me like this driver, he was havin’ fun doing it. Boy wasn’t hurting no one.”
Millikin’s eyes had lost some of their light. “That’s rough.”
“Someone spray-painted ‘Dead nigger’ on the asphalt, too, with an arrow pointing to where the body dropped. Can you imagine?”
“Damn shame,” said Millikin, looking away from Vaughn.
“Yeah,” said Vaughn. “It’s just wrong.” He reached into his pocket, retrieved his badge case, and withdrew a card, doctored to include his home phone. “You hear anything about a red Ford, sixty-three, sixty-four, damage to the front, you give me a call.”
“I surely will.”
Vaughn looked to make eye contact with the colored guy before he left, but the man’s face was buried in his work. He walked from the garage, the lousy music trailing him like a bad joke.
Outside, he stopped by the plum-colored Dart. He withdrew another business card from his badge case, reached into the open window, and dropped it onto the driver’s bucket. He knew that the call-letter decal on the back window was for one of those local radio stations played soul, R&B, race music, whatever they were calling it this week. It was all jungle-jump to Vaughn. What the sticker meant was, this here had to be the vehicle of the colored mechanic, had the prison tattoos. Maybe the lie Vaughn had told, about the spray paint in the street, would get the guy going. Maybe not. Anyway, it was all scatter shot. Once in a while you got a hit.
Vaughn got into his car and headed back into D.C. He had promised Linda Allen he’d drop by.
Back in the garage, Pat Millikin and Lawrence Houston waited for the sound of the cop’s engine to fade.
“Stupid sonofabitch,” said Millikin, lighting another smoke. “He backed my brother on the inside, so it was on me to back him, too. But after this, I’m done.”
“You finished with his car?”
“I got it over in Berwyn Heights, workin’ on it nights. Gonna be a few days before I’m done.”
“That big boy he was with, you say he wanted a rental, too?”
“Buzz Stewart. Well, he ain’t gettin’ one now. I’m gonna call him at that gas station he works at right now and give him the news. Make it simple: I got no cars to rent.”
“You gonna tell him about our visitor?”
“Not my lookout. We didn’t say nothin’ to that cop, so Stewart’s got no reason to know. I want as little contact with those two as possible.” Millikin looked at Houston. “Listen, Lawrence . . . brother or no brother, if I had known what those guys did, I never would have took in that car.”
Houston shrugged. “Ain’t no thing to me.”
He tugged at the pump hose, testing the strength of the clamp. He reached to close the Chevy’s hood and saw the tremble in his hands.
You hit a monkey, huh?
His hands shook when his blood was up.
TWENTY-THREE
FIVE MINUTES INTO meeting Billy Dolittle, Strange marked him as lazy, incompetent, and “that way.” The man wearing his seersucker suit, red-and-blue rep tie, and cheap brown shoes, writing things down in a notebook, one of those schoolkid tablets, black with white spots. Talking down to him, speaking slowly and repeating himself as if Strange were a child. Dolittle chewing on wintergreen Life Savers during the interview, Strange wondering if he had been drinking this early, ’cause he sure did look the type. Also wondering how much to tell him: what to give up and what to hold back.
It was Dolittle who suggested that Strange officially ID his brother, that, as a cop, he could “handle it” and in the process spare his parents the pain of seeing their son “like that.” By then his father had arrived at the house and, as Strange knew he would, insisted on coming along. So together they went to the alley and stood over Dennis and saw him “like that,” and neither of them got sick or turned his face away. Instead, Darius put his hand on his younger son’s shoulder and said a low prayer, and Derek Strange closed his eyes, not thinking of God or his brother’s spirit but instead thinking, I will kill the motherfucker who did this to my brother, and, That man is going to die.
Back in the kitchen of his father’s house, both of his parents seated at the table in the living room, his father holding his mother’s hand, Strange talked to Dolittle and told him some of what he knew about his brother’s life. He told him about Dennis’s stint in the navy, his disability, and how he had no current job, and he mentioned his running boys, Alvin Jones and Kenneth Willis, and suggested that Dolittle definitely speak to them, because both of them were wrong. He did not tell Dolittle that Dennis moved small amounts of marijuana for the neighborhood dealer, James Hayes, because he had no desire to taint his brother further or to get Hayes, a nonviolent man who had hurt no one, in trouble with the law. Also, he wanted to talk to Hayes himself.
“Where can I find Jones and Willis?”
“Jones stays with this woman name of Lula Bacon, down in LeDroit Park. Far as I know, he has no job. Willis is a janitor in some elementary school up off Kansas; I don’t know which one. He’s got an apartment over on H, in Northeast, above a liquor store. Eighth, Ninth, around there. My mother might have Kenneth’s number.”
Dolittle scribbled in his notebook, his lips moving as he worked. “Anything else you can think of?”
Strange shook his head. “Not now.”
Dolittle handed him a card. “You can get ahold of me here.”
Strange saw that there was only the precinct house number on the card. When Dolittle was off the clock, he was off.
“I’m gonna call you this afternoon,” said Strange, “see if there’s been any progress.”
“We haven’t even finished canvassing the neighbors yet. These investigations take time.”
“They take too much time, they get cold.”
“I can understand you being anxious,” said Dolittle, scratching at a thick nose spiderwebbed with red veins. “But you need to let me do my job. I been at this a long time.”
Too long, thought Strange.
“Don’t worry,” said Dolittle, touching Strange’s arm gingerly. “We’ll get this guy.”
You’ll get him if you get lucky, thought Strange.
“That it?” said Strange.
“I’ll see myself out.”
Strange listened to Dolittle talking to his parents out in the living room. He heard the phone ring and he heard his father tell his mother not to pick it up. As word had spread in the neighborhood, the calls had begun to increase. Soon folks would be dropping by with food and drink, and the apartment would be crowded with visitors. He hoped his mother could handle it. She was doing all right so far.
Strange went to the window over the sink, where his mother’s square of cardboard had come free in two corners and was arcing back. Strange reaffixed the corners to the glass.
He heard the front door open and shut. He heard his mother sobbing. He heard his father say, “Come here, Alethea,” and the rustle of their clothing as they embraced.
Strange wanted to be with them and hold on to them, too. But this was their moment, and he was no longer a boy. He sat down on the kitchen floor beside the sink, where he’d sat at his mother’s feet many times as a child, leaned his head back against the cabinet, and, very quietly, allowed himself to let go.
BUZZ STEWART FLICKED ash off his Marlboro. “There it is, right there.”
“It doesn’t look like much,” said Dominic Martini.
“That’s right. It ain’t no big deal.”
They were parked in Stewart’s Belvedere, the nose of the Plymouth pointed south, on the west side of Georgia Avenue, not too far over the District line in Shepherd Park. “Once Upon a Time” came from the radio, Buzz Stewart nodding his
head to the busy Motown arrangement as he kept his eyes fixed on the strip of businesses clustered on the east side of the street.
Nearby was Morris Miller’s liquor store, a landmark whose rear parking lot was a meeting spot for D.C. and Montgomery County teenagers, a starting place to buy beer and make plans on Friday and Saturday nights. Years earlier, owner Morris Miller could not live in the neighborhood where he owned his business, as Shepherd Park had covenants restricting the sale of its houses to Jewish buyers. Since then, the neighborhood had become progressive. In ’58, white and black homeowners, angered by the practices of blockbuster real estate agents, had formed Neighbors Inc. to support integrated streets. Now the area was heavy with Jewish residents, as well as blacks, with pioneering interracial couples in the mix. Its high school, Coolidge, was still called “Jewlidge” by Stewart and Hess, but its student body was now primarily black.
Across the street, an A&P grocery was the largest store of the bunch. Also on the strip sat a drugstore, a dry cleaner, and a speed shop, and, on the corner, a bank. Stewart and Martini were looking at the bank.
“What they call a savings and loan,” said Stewart.
“You been inside?”
“Once. Shorty’s been in there, too. We seen everything we needed to see. A single armed guard, guy’s older than dirt. We ain’t gonna fuck with no safe. Gotta be thousands behind that counter alone. It’s a cakewalk, Dom. I shit you not.”
Martini stared at the bank, openmouthed. “What now?”
“We’re meetin’ Shorty for lunch up at the Shepherd. We’ll talk about it then.”
Stewart put the Belvedere in gear, pulled off the curb, and swung a U in the middle of Georgia. He turned up the Mary and Marvin; he’d seen Wells and Gaye sing this one together onstage at the Howard, back in ’64, and the song made him smile, remembering how happy he’d felt that night. He goosed the gas. It wasn’t but a short hop to the Shepherd Park Restaurant, but Stewart liked to hear his Plymouth run. They parked in the side lot, next to Hess’s mother’s car, a three-on-the-tree pea green ’64 Rambler Ambassador, which Walter Hess had been driving the past two days.