“It’s not what I do. I do background checks. I uncover insurance fraud. I confirm or disprove infidelity. I interview witnesses in civil cases for attorneys, and I get paid to be a witness in court. I locate debtors, and I have a younger operative who occasionally skip—traces. Once in a while I’ll locate a missing child, or find the biological parent of an adopted child. What I don’t do is solve murder cases or disprove cases that have already been made by the police. I’m not in that business. Except for the police, nobody’s in that business, you want to know the plain truth.”
“The white policeman who killed my son. Did anyone think to bring up his record the way they brought up my son’s record?”
“Well, if I recall… I mean, if you remember, there was quite a bit written about that police officer. How he hadn’t qualified on the shooting range for over two years, despite the fact that they require those cops to qualify every six months. How he was brought onto the force during that hiring binge in the late eighties, with all those other unqualified applicants. How he had a brutality—complaint sheet of his own. No disrespect intended, but I think they left few stones unturned with regard to that young man’s past.”
“In the end they blamed it on his gun.”
“They did talk about the negatives of that particular weapon, yes — the Glock has a light trigger pull and no external safety.”
“I want you to go deeper. Find out more about the policeman who shot my son. I’m convinced that he is the key.”
“Mrs. Wilson —”
“Christopher was proud to be a police officer; he would have died without question … he did die, without question, in the line of duty. But the papers made it out to seem as if he was somehow at fault. That he was holding his gun on an innocent man, that he failed to identify himself as a police officer when that white policeman came up on him. They mentioned the alcohol in his blood… . Christopher was not a drunk, Mr. Strange.”
Nor an angel, thought Strange. He’d never known any cop, any man in fact, to be as pure as she was making him out to be.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Strange.
He watched Leona Wilson’s hand shake with the first stages of Parkinson’s as she raised her teacup to her lips. He thought of his mother in the home, and he rose from the couch.
Strange walked to the fireplace, where a slowly strobing light shone behind plastic logs, the phony fire cracking rhythmically. An electric cord ran from beneath the logs to an outlet in the wall.
He looked at the photographs framed on the mantel. He saw Leona as a young woman and the boy Christopher standing under her touch, and another photograph of Leona and her husband, whom Strange knew to be deceased. There were a few more photographs of Christopher, in a cap and gown, and in uniform, and kneeling on a football field with his teammates, the Gonzaga scoreboard in the background, Christopher’s gaze hard, his eyes unsmiling and staring directly into the camera’s lens. A high school boy already wearing the face of a cop.
There was one photo of a girl in her early teens, its color paled out from age. Strange knew that Chris Wilson had had a sister. He had seen her on the TV news, a pretty, bone—skinny, light—skinned girl with an unhealthy, splotched complexion. He remembered thinking it odd that she had made a show of wiping tears from dry eyes. Maybe, after days of grieving, it had become her habit to take her sleeve to her eyes. Maybe she had wanted to keep crying but by then was all cried out.
Strange thought it over, his back to Leona. It would be an easy job, reinterviewing the players, retracing steps. He had a business to maintain. He wasn’t in any position to be turning down jobs.
“My rates,” said Strange.
“Sir?”
He turned to face her. “You haven’t asked me about my rates.”
“I’m sure they’re reasonable.”
“I get thirty dollars an hour, plus expenses. Something like this will take time —”
“I have money. There was a settlement, as you know. And Christopher’s insurance, his death benefits, I mean, and his pension. I’m certain he would have liked me to use the money for this.”
Strange went back to the couch. Leona Wilson stood and rubbed the palm of one hand over the bent fingers of the other. She was eye to eye with him, nearly his height.
“I’ll need access to some of his things,” said Strange.
“You can have a look in his room.”
“He lived here?”
“Yes.”
“What about your daughter?”
“My daughter doesn’t live here anymore.”
“How can I reach her?”
“I haven’t seen Sondra or talked with her since the day I buried my son.”
Strange’s beeper, clipped to his belt, sounded. He unfastened the device and checked the readout. “Do you mind if I use your phone?”
“It’s right over there.”
Strange made the call and replaced the receiver. He placed his business card beside the phone. “I’ve got to run.”
Leona Wilson straightened her posture and brushed a strand of gray hair behind her ear. “Will you be in church this Sunday?”
“I’m gonna try real hard.”
“I’ll say a prayer for you, Mr. Strange.”
“Thank you.” He picked his leather up off the back of a chair. “I’d surely appreciate it if you would.”
STRANGE drove down South Dakota to Rhode Island Avenue and hooked a left. His up mood was gone, and he popped out the Blackbyrds tape and punched the tuner in to 1450 on the AM dial. Joe “the Black Eagle” Madison was on all—talk WOL, taking calls. Strange’s relationship with OL went back to the mid—sixties, when the station’s format had first gone over to what the newspapers called “rhythm and blues.” Back when they’d had those DJs Bobby “the Mighty Burner” Bennett and “Sunny Jim” Kelsey called themselves the Soul Brothers. He’d been a WOL listener for, damn, what was it, thirty—five years now. He wondered, as he often did when thinking back, where those years had gone.
He made a left turn down 20th Street, Northeast.
Leona Wilson’s posture had changed when he’d told her he’d take the job. It wasn’t his imagination, either — the years had seemed to drop off her before his eyes. Like the idea of hope had given her a quick shot of youth.
“You all right, Derek,” he said, as if saying it aloud would make it so.
He’d been straight up with Leona Wilson back at her house, as much as anyone could be with a woman that determined. Her temporary hope was a fair trade—off for the permanent crash of disappointment that would surely follow later on. He told himself that this was true.
Anyway, he needed the money. The Chris Wilson case was a potential thousand—, two—thousand—dollar job.
Down along Langdon Park, Strange saw Ron Lattimer’s Acura curbed and running, white exhaust coming from its pipes. Strange parked the Caprice behind it, grabbed his binoculars and his Leatherman, climbed out of his car, and got into the passenger side of the red coupe.
Lattimer was at the finish line of his twenties, tall and lean with an athlete’s build. He wore a designer suit, a tailored shirt, and a hand—painted tie. He held a lidded cup of Starbucks in one hand, and his other hand tapped out a beat on the steering wheel. The heater fan was blowing full on, and jazzy hip—hop came from the custom stereo system in the dash.
“You warm enough, Ron?”
“I’m comfortable, yeah.”
“You doin’ a surveillance in the winter, how many times I told you, you got to leave the motor shut down ’cause the exhaust smoke, it shows. Bad enough you’re driving a red car, says, Look at me, everybody. Notice me.”
“Too cold to leave the heat off,” said Lattimer.
“Put that overcoat on you got there in the backseat, you wouldn’t be so cold.”
“That’s a cashmere, Derek; I’m not gonna wear it in my car. Get it all wrinkled up and shit, start looking like I picked it up at the Burlington Coat Factory, some bullshit like that.”
Strange took a breath and let it out slow. “And what I tell you about drinking coffee? What you need to be doing, you keep a bottle of water in the car and you sip it, a little at a time, when you get good and thirsty. Coffee runs right through you, man, you know that. What’s gonna happen when you got to pee so bad you can’t stand it, you get out the car lookin’ for some privacy, tryin’ to find a tree to get behind, while the subject of your tail is sneaking out the back door of his house? Huh? What you gonna do then?”
“The day I lose a tail, Derek, because I been drinkin’ an Americano —”
“Oh, it’s an Americano, now. And here I was, old and out of touch like I am, thinking you were just having a cup of coffee.”
Lattimer had to chuckle. “Always tryin’ to school me.”
“That’s right. You got the potential to be something in this profession. I get you away from focusing on your lifestyle and get you focused on the business at hand, you’re gonna make it.” Strange nodded toward the faceplate of the stereo. “Turn that shit off, man, I can’t think.”
“Tribe Called Quest represents.”
“Turn it off anyway, and tell me what we got.”
Lattimer switched off the music. “Leon’s over there in that house, second from the last on the right, on Mills?”
Strange looked through the glasses. “Okay. How’d you find him?”
“The address he gave the old lady, the one he took off? He hadn’t lived there for a year or so. One of the neighbors I interviewed knew his family, though — both of them had come up in the same area. This neighbor told me that Leon’s mother and father had both passed, years ago. Got the death certificate of his mother down at that records office on H, in Chinatown. From the date on that certificate, I found her obituary in the newspaper morgue, and the obit listed the heirs. Of the family, only the grandmother was still alive. Leon didn’t have any brothers or sisters, which makes him the only heir to g—mom. I figured Leon, hustler that he is, is counting on the grandmother to leave him everything she’s got, so Leon’s got to be paying regular visits to stay in her grace.”
“That the grandmother’s house we’re looking at?”
“Uh—huh. I been staking it out all this week. Leon finally showed up today. That’s his hooptie over there, that yellow Pontiac Astra with the rust marks, parked in front of the house. Ugly—ass car, too.”
“Sister to the Chevy Vega.”
“People paid extra for that thing ’cause it had the Pontiac name on it?”
“Some did. Nice work.”
“Thanks, boss. How you want to handle it?”
Strange gave it some thought. “I think we need to brace him in front of his grandmother.”
“I was thinking the same way.”
“Come on.”
They got out of the Acura, Lattimer retrieving his overcoat first and shaking himself into it as they walked alongside Langdon Park toward Mills Avenue. A couple of young boys, school age, were sitting on a bench wearing oversize parkas, looking hard at Strange and Lattimer, not looking away as Strange glanced in their direction.
“Hold on for a second, Derek,” said Lattimer, putting a little skip in his walk and side—glancing Strange. “I got to find me a tree… .”
“Funny,” said Strange.
They were past the park and onto Mills. Lattimer said. “You want me to take the alley?”
“Yeah, take it. I don’t feel like running today if I don’t have to. My knees and this cold aren’t the best of friends.”
“I don’t feel like running, either. You know how I perspire quick, soon as I start to buck, even in this weather.”
“I don’t suspect he’ll be going anywhere, but you never know. Speaking of which …”
Lattimer saw Strange pull the Leatherman tool from his pocket and flick open its knife as they neared Leon’s yellow Astra. Still walking, Strange drew change from his pocket and dropped it on the street beside the door of the car. He got down on one knee to pick it up, and while he was down there, punctured the driver’s—side tire with the knife. He retrieved his change, closing the tool and replacing it in his pocket as he rose.
“See you in a few,” said Strange.
He took the steps up to the porch of the row house as Lattimer cut into the alley. He waited half a minute for Lattimer to get behind the house, and then he knocked on the door.
Strange saw a miniature face peer around a lace curtain and heard a couple of locks being turned. The door opened, and a very small woman with prunish skin and a cotton—top of gray hair stood in the frame. The woman gave Strange a thorough examination with her eyes.
She looked back over her shoulder toward a nicely appointed living room that spread out off the foyer. Then she raised her voice: “Leon! There’s a police officer here to see you.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” said Strange. “And tell him not to run, will you? My partner’s out back in the alley, and he’ll be awful mad if he gets to perspiring. The sweat, it stains his pretty clothes.”
STRANGE took Leon Jeffries out the kitchen door to a small screened—in porch. The porch gave to a view of a gnarled patch of backyard and the alley. After Strange got Leon out to the porch, he waved Lattimer in from there. Leon confessed to bilking the old woman from Petworth with a pyramid investment scheme shortly thereafter.
“What y’all gonna do to me now?” asked Leon. He was a small, feral, middle—aged man with pale yellow eyeballs. He wore a pinstriped suit jacket with unmatching black slacks and a lavender, open—collar shirt.
“You need to give our client back her money, Leon,” said Strange. “Then everything’ll be chilly.”
“I planned on gettin’ her money back to her, with interest. Takes a little time, though. See, the way I worked it, I used the next person’s investment to pay the, uh, previous person’s investment, in installments. Sort of how some folks stay ahead of the game with multiple credit cards.”
“That’s a legal kind of scam, Leon. What we’re talking about here is, you were taking off old ladies that trusted you. How you think that’s gonna look to a jury?”
“A jury trial for a small—claims thing?”
“You got a sheet, Leon?” asked Lattimer.
“I ain’t never been incarcerated.”
“So you got a sheet,” said Lattimer. “And this goes before a judge, forget about a jury, you get a judge on a bad day he ate the wrong brand of half—smokes for breakfast, some shit like that, they gonna put your thin ass away.”
“We need the money for our client now,” said Strange. “That’s all she wants. She’s a good woman, which you probably saw as a weakness, but we’re gonna forget about that, too, if you come up with the two thousand you took from her straightaway.”
“I’d have to get me a job,” said Leon. “’Cause currently, see, I don’t have those kind of resources.”
“You gonna wear that outfit to the job interview?” said Lattimer.
Leon, wounded, looked up at Lattimer and touched the lapel of his lavender shirt. “This right here is a designer shirt. An Yves Saint Laurent.”
“From the Singapore factory, maybe. Man your age ought to be wearin’ some cotton by now, too, instead of that sixty—forty blend you got on right there.”
Strange said, “How we going to work this out with the money, Leon?”
“I ain’t got no got—damn money, man; I told you!”
Some spittle flew from Leon’s mouth and a bit of it landed on the chest area of Lattimer’s overcoat. Lattimer grabbed Leon by the lapels of his jacket and pulled Leon toward him.
“You spit on my cashmere, man!”
“All right, Ron,” said Strange. Lattimer released Leon.
“Everything all right over there?” said an elderly man from the backyard of the house to the left. An evergreen tree grew beside the porch, blocking their view of the man behind the voice.
“Everything’s fine,” said Strange, speaking loudly in the direction of the man. “We
’re officers of the law.”
“No, they ain’t!” yelled Leon.
“Go on inside now,” said Strange. “We got this under control.”
Strange squared his body so that he was standing close to Leon. Leon backed up a step and scratched at the bridge of his dented nose.
“Well,” said Leon haughtily.
“Well water,” said Lattimer.
“Look here,” said Strange. “What me and my partner are going to do now, we’re going to go back inside and talk to your grandmother. Explain to her about this misunderstanding you got yourself into. I think your grandmother will see that she has to give us what we need. I’m sure this house is paid for, and from the looks of things around here, it won’t be too great a burden for her to write the check. I know she doesn’t want to see you go to jail. Shame she has to settle up the debt for your mistakes, but there it is.”
“Won’t be the first time, I bet,” said Lattimer.
“What ya’ll are doin’, it’s a shakedown. It’s not even legal!” Leon looked from Strange to Lattimer and drew his small frame straight. “Not only that. First you go and insult my vines. And now you’re fixin’ to shame me to my granmoms!”
“Sooner or later,” said Strange, “everybody’s got to pay.”
STRANGE split up with Lattimer, drove down to the MLK Jr. library on 9th Street, and went up to the Washingtoniana Room on the third floor. He retrieved a couple of microfiche spools from a steel drawer where the newspaper morgue material was chronologically arranged. He threaded the film and scanned newspaper articles on a lighted screen, occasionally dropping change into a slot to make photostatic copies when he found what he thought he might need. After an hour and a half he turned off the machine, as his eyes had begun to burn, and when he left the library the city had turned to night.
Outside MLK, Strange phoned Janine’s voice mail and left a message: He needed a current address on a man. He gave her the subject’s name.
“Hey, what’s goin’ on, Strange?” said a guy who was walking by the bank of phones.
“Hey, how you doin?”
“Ain’t seen you around much lately.”