Monroe said, “Got a good ass to fuck, too.”
Marcus Clay stood watching the street scene unfold. He saw the familiar, aging residents who came from their two-story 11th Street row houses to see the action. He saw the beat cops who worked his district, one of whom he recognized as a brother who had come out of Cardoza a few years after him. He saw the kid who always stood on the corner at the liquor store, the winos out front. He saw the drug boys leaning against their pretty sports car, just two of the many who were driving middle-class residents out of the city, keeping them away from U, keeping them and their children from patronizing his shop. Maybe Elaine had been right: He must have been off to think that a new record store could go down here in Shaw.
Clay noticed the white beat cop, a no-neck musclehead, walk over to the drug boys and half shake his head. Clay saw his partner talking to the boy in the Raiders jacket. Clay thought about what he had seen just after the Buick had burst into flames.
Dimitri Karras returned. He had been checking on his lady friend, who stood back on the sidewalk huffing a cigarette.
“Guess the show’s about over,” said Karras.
“Yeah,” said Clay, cocking his head. “Funny thing, though.”
“What’s that?”
“Your girlfriend, what’s her name, Madonna?”
“Donna Morgan.”
“Her. She came with that boy drivin’ the K car, right?”
“He split. She was just wondering if he was comin’ back.”
“I don’t think he is comin’ back. Thing is, I saw him pull somethin’ out of that drug car while it was burnin’ up. Saw him put it in his car—a pillowcase or somethin’—and take off.”
“Why do you say that’s a drug car?”
“That there’s a brand new Grand National, Dimitri. Top of the line. I got close enough to see the hands wrapped around that wheel. Looked like a kid’s hands. How you gonna figure a young black kid, sixteen, seventeen years old, gonna afford one of those?”
“Sounds like you’re makin’ a big leap, just ’cause he’s young and black.”
“All I see around here every day, it ain’t no leap. And don’t be throwin’ that ‘just ’cause he’s black’ shit up in my face. Remember who you’re talkin’ to, man.”
“Okay, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I have no idea.”
“I do. Trust me.”
“What’re you sayin’, Marcus?”
“Just…” Clay looked into Karras’s eyes. “Shit.”
“What?”
“I don’t even know why I’m talkin’ to you now. You higher than a mothafucker, man.”
“I am not.”
“Hard eyes, can’t stand in one place. Grindin’ your teeth and shit. Now you’re gonna look at me and tell me, ‘I am not.’ ”
“Marcus—”
“Look, man, I know your girl came down here to cop some blow. I know you were back in the head feeding each other’s noses. Her boyfriend took somethin’ out of a drug car, could’ve been drugs, could’ve been money, could’ve been that dead boy’s dirty laundry for all I know, and he booked. What I’m tellin’ you is, I don’t wanna know. I don’t want to know about that kind of trouble, and I damn sure don’t want you bringin’ that kind of trouble around, hear?”
“I don’t know her boyfriend. I don’t know anything about him or that car.”
“Look—”
“Okay, I hear you, Marcus.”
“I got a business to run.”
“I hear you.”
“You got the rest of the day off, man. Get her out of here and go.”
“I’m sorry, man. I’ll see you back at the apartment.”
“Good.”
Karras rubbed his chin. “Marcus?”
Clay sighed. “Ain’t no thing, man. Just go ahead.”
They shook hands. Clay watched Karras go back and talk to his cokehead girl. He wished Karras hadn’t mentioned the apartment. It was bad enough, what with his business troubles, trying to keep his head up, that Elaine had thrown him out of their own house. That he was separated from her and Marcus Jr., their three-year-old son. Now he and Dimitri, a couple of grown men coming up on forty years old, were sharing an apartment.
He didn’t need to be reminded of all that. Especially not today.
FIVE
Marcus Clay hit the gas, ascending the big hill of 13th Street that was the drop-off edge of the Piedmont Plateau. His Peugeot fought the hill, knocking all the way. The engine made a sound Clay hated, like the rattle in an empty spray-paint can. He never did like this car. All the buppies in D.C. were buying Peugeots now, from the old money up on North Portal Drive to the suburbanites to the Huxtable-looking trust-fund kids on the campus of Howard U. Elaine had encouraged him to buy his, telling him he’d look like a real businessman behind the wheel of the import. It was what she wanted to be seen in when they pulled up to the houses of her attorney friends. It had hurt him to give up his ’72 Riviera with the boat-tail rear. There wasn’t anything wrong with it that a tune-up and some new rubber couldn’t have cured. Goddamn if that Riviera wasn’t one righteous, beautiful car.
Clarence Tate sat in the passenger seat. His daughter sat in the back. Clay was giving them a lift home, as Tate’s Cutless Supreme was just coming out of the shop. Denice Tate stared out the window, saying nothing. The burned-up boy in the Buick had been her first close-up look at death.
Clay looked left at the Clifton Terrace apartments. Run-down to the point of irreversible disrepair, roach and rat infested, play areas strewn with garbage and needles and broken glass… a nightmare for the women and children who lived inside its walls. The second of the mayor’s three wives, Mary Treadwell, had skimmed hundreds of thousands of dollars out of Pride Incorporated, the agency responsible for much of the city’s subsidized housing. The money she had taken had included Clifton Terrace rent payments. Treadwell had stolen from the poor while living high in the Watergate apartments and cruising the city in her shiny Jag. Treadwell had been sentenced to three years. She was serving it after losing her last appeal in 1985.
Tate looked through his window at Cardoza High on the right. Denice would be entering it next fall. More money was available to D.C. schools than to practically any school district in the country. Despite this, Tate knew of no public school system in worse shape. Leaking roofs, broken windows, lack of running water and working toilets in bathrooms, a severe shortage of supplies, in many cases no supplies. Tate knew that most of the money had gone to midlevel administrators. And Tate had read in the Post how the mayor had awarded many of the major school contracts to minority firms, how those firms had driven up the cost of supplies, materials, and repairs to outrageous levels. Since the well was only so deep, the artificially high cost meant less of everything for the children. Tate was all for brothers giving brothers preferential treatment in business—hell, it worked for the Koreans and Greeks and Italians who had come before them. But the mayor’s administration had made a handful of black men wealthy while tens of thousands of black children went without across the city. Tate couldn’t abide by that. He loved D.C. But he’d be damned if he’d see his little girl have to put up with that kind of day-to-day substandard bullshit much longer. He’d leave the city if he had to, even if it was the last thing he ever wanted to do.
“Daddy?”
“What, baby?”
“I was gonna go over to Ashley’s tonight, watch some video.”
“Ashley’s momma gonna be there?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
It ain’t exactly a lie, thought Denice. Ashley’s mom is gonna be there, but me and Ash are not. Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers are playing at the Masonic Temple tonight. We’re gonna be there. And it is gonna be the bomb.
“All right, honeygirl,” said Tate. “You can go if you’d like.”
Donna Morgan looked across at Dimitri Karras. Karras wore his cat eye–lens Vuarnets, his gray hair moussed and spiked. He sat low in the driver’s seat of the 325, his righ
t hand working the stick.
Karras in a Beamer. Spiked hair and Vuarnets. If the yuppies had a coat of arms, it would be those sunglasses, that haircut, this car. She wasn’t surprised that Karras had adopted the uniform. Karras had always worn masks.
She had met him at College Park, when she was a student and he taught American lit. That was the seventies, when he still wore the Shaggy Professor mask—longish hair, droopy Wyatt Earp mustache, corduroy sport jacket over Hawaiian shirt and jeans. Clydes on his feet. He had that casual thing down cold with his students—I’m older than you but, hey, I’m one of you—and also a rep with the girls. Men who were sexually aggressive didn’t scare Donna. They never had. And besides, Karras was cute. The first day of class, when his eyes flashed on hers from the front to the back of the room, she knew he was going to be inside her. It was just a question of when.
Karras wasn’t much of a teacher. He claimed to love books, but seemed wary of overanalyzing them. The syllabus required that the students read six assigned novels over the course of the semester and show up for class twice a week. There would be a final because there had to be a final, but Karras assured them it would be lightly weighted against their overall participation in the weekly discussion, which tended to concern the book at hand only marginally. To no one’s surprise—he always looked a little stoned—Karras admitted his love of marijuana one day to everyone in the room. At undergrad Maryland U, this was akin to pulling one’s finger out of the dike. After his confession, a majority of his students began to meet out on the mall, where kids played Frisbee and caught sun and walked bandanna-clad dogs, and get smoked up together before his class. The discussions thereafter were sometimes heated, momentarily interesting, frequently incoherent, and instantly forgotten. At the time, the word on campus was that Dimitri Karras’s class was “really deep.”
Donna Morgan nailed Karras behind his desk after class one afternoon about three weeks into the semester. There was little verbal foreplay before she brazenly cupped a handful of his jeans. She straddled him on his chair and gave him the goods, really pushed it out. He had this smile on his face, this I-Don’t-Give-a-Fuck-About-Nothin’ smile, that should have hipped her to his character. He never even said, “Maybe we shouldn’t,” or even the more cowardly “Do you think we should?” There was no ethical question raised because neither of them thought to bring it up. Teaching was just something Karras was doing on the way to something else, and Donna attended classes with naked disinterest and a blind eye to the future. Indeed, Karras ankled his position at the end of the semester. Donna dropped out of school at the same time and never returned.
They had stayed boyfriend and girlfriend for a few months into the new year. He began to move dope in quantity, and she took a salesclerk job out at the Hecht’s in Wheaton Plaza. They broke up, for reasons Donna could not now remember, sometime in the spring. Donna heard later from a friend that Dimitri had gotten into some unspecified bad shit in the summer of ’76, and that he had given up wholesale for retail—records, that is.
Over the next ten years, she ran into him maybe twice. Once down on 19th Street in 1980, when they were both standing in line to see Raging Bull at the Dupont. On that night, Dimitri wore a new mask: an Elvis Costello pompadour and a deep-weave overcoat with heavily oilskin shoes, straight off the cover of Get Happy, his retro Teddy Boy look. She saw him a couple of years later at the Wax Museum, Graham Parker’s Real Macaw tour. Karras wore a black sport jacket, pointed Italian shoes, and a skinny black tie, like the Special Beat Service boys coming off the plane. Karras had begun to go gray.
On those occasions when cocaine brought them back together, she called him Mr. Karras. It was an unsubtle jab at their age difference, but also a reminder of their teacher/student history. Karras didn’t seem to get it. If he did, he didn’t care.
Mask or no, Donna had to admit that Dimitri Karras looked good behind the wheel of his BMW. Rumpled, waved out, or yuppified, the man always had style.
“Nice car,” said Donna.
“You think?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“I didn’t want to be one of them. But I saw this on the lot and fell in love. The navy over burgundy combo, it’s bad, isn’t it?”
Donna ran her hand over the leather seat. “It’s really nice.”
“I been workin’ hard these last few years. I had the money. No kids to support, nothin’ like that, so…”
“You don’t have to apologize. Everybody’s making money these days. You gotta spend it on something, right?” Donna looked out the window. They were coming into Georgetown via M. “Where we going?”
“I’ve got to stop by the store, check in.”
Marcus had told him to go home. But Karras would call Marcus from the Georgetown store, score a few points, let him know he was still on the case.
Karras said, “Where were you and Eddie off to tonight?”
“Echo and the Bunnymen at Lisner. I left the tickets in his visor.”
“Funny, him taking off like that.”
“I know. I wonder why he booked.”
Karras looked over at Donna in her seat, the cut of her black-stockinged thigh. Karras hadn’t mentioned his conversation with Marcus to Donna. He was glad Eddie Golden had taken off. He didn’t care about Eddie heisting a pillowcase out of some drug car. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want Donna to know, not tonight. He wanted Donna alone.
“Well,” said Donna, “I guess that takes care of the concert.”
“Look, we’ll call Eddie in a little while, find out what happened. With that crash so close to him, he probably got spooked is all. Maybe you guys can still make the show. Anyway, if you ask me, he did you a favor, taking off with those tickets.”
“Aw, come on, the Bunnymen rock.”
“The Bunnymen suck.”
“Okay. What were you going to do tonight?”
“I don’t know. Check out some music, I guess.”
“You know,” said Donna, “if Eddie doesn’t turn up, I got nothin’ to do.”
“Eddie doesn’t show,” said Karras, “it’s you and me.”
Donna stifled a smile. The situation couldn’t be better. She had a virgin gram in the pocket of her skirt, and she was riding in a new Beamer with a good-looking man behind the wheel.
Karras was a sprinter, and Eddie went long distance. She figured, whatever happened tonight, Eddie would be around in the morning. She hoped Eddie wouldn’t post tonight.
“Mr. Karras?”
“Huh?”
“If we goin’ out, I’m gonna need some cigarettes.”
Karras cut up 34th, hooked a left onto P Street, found a parking space up near Wisconsin. Karras and Donna had a couple of quick spoons, left the car. Donna stopped in Neam’s market for two packs of Marlboro Lights—she could go through two decks easy behind a night of cocaine—and then the two of them walked south on Wisconsin Avenue toward the store.
They passed a Mean Feets, the city’s premier shoe boutique. A salesman named Randolph stood outside, leaning against the display window, smoking a cigarette.
“Hey, man,” said Karras, “what’s goin’ on?”
“Ain’t nothin’ to it,” said Randolph. “Just tryin’ to make a livin’ out here. How those Zodiacs treatin’ you?”
Karras looked down at the black leather lace-ups on his feet, rubber soled, utilitarian. Randolph had sold them to Karras, and they were his favorite pair of kicks.
“Treatin’ me good.”
“Got some Zodiac boots, too, nice low heels, got your name on ’em.”
“I’ll be in soon.”
“You, too, girlfriend,” said Randolph to Donna. “Time for you to come on in and see the footdiatrist.”
Donna laughed. “Okay. Thanks.”
“I’m serious, baby. Not that those shorties you got on don’t look good on them legs of yours. Mm-mm-mm.”
“We’ll be back,” said Karras.
“I know you will. And when you do, don’t forget
to ask for Shoedog.”
They kept walking. They passed Commander Salamander, where rich kids from Potomac and McLean came downtown to get their hair dyed pink and buy their bondage “punk” look from the middle-aged proprietors. Well, thought Karras, at least the kids are having fun. Everyone these days is having big fun.
Karras could deal with Georgetown: the lack of parking, the panhandlers, the gimmick bars serving shitty draft beer to Northern Virginia kids on weekend nights, the suburbanites and the crowds, the Iranian and Iraqi merchants selling off-brand clothing and shoes, the “jewelers” pushing gold chains to the drug kids driving in from across town. Marcus Clay couldn’t deal with Georgetown, so this had become Karras’s turf by default. You needed a record store in this part of town if you wanted to be in the business in D.C.
The demand for music was big down here. Two years earlier, a monstrous crowd had pushed through the plate glass window of Kemp Mill Records during an in-store appearance of Frankie Goes to Hollywood. That same year, when a rumor surfaced that Prince had been seen window-shopping on M Street, scores of purple-clad kids had descended on Georgetown in hopes of spotting His Royal Badness. Yeah, Marcus hated G-town, but Karras never tired of reminding him that Wisconsin and O was his top-volume store.
Karras went into the store. Donna Morgan stayed out front, lit up a smoke.
The store was narrow and deep, generally unclean and dimly lit. The new Falco, “Rock Me Amadaeus,” boomed from the stereo and pumped the house. The manager, Scott, greeted Karras right away with a handshake and a smile.
“Hey, Dimitri. What’s the word?”
“Johannesburg.”
Scott was on the heavy side, his face acned from junk food. He wore his shoe polish–black hair short except for a thick lock that fell in front of his face. Marcus had complained about the look, and Karras had shrugged it off, saying it was “a Flock of Seagulls thing.” Marcus had said, “A flock of douche bags, maybe. Tell him to get his hair the fuck on out of his face.”
But Scott was a good manager, steady and into it, and Marcus soon forgot about the hair. Karras knew that protecting the good employees from Marcus’s sometimes grumpy moods was part of his job. Marcus was under a shitload of pressure these days, and Karras understood.