“What it is, Red?”
“What it will be.”
They gave each other skin.
“Got some blondes behind your seat,” said Jefferson. “Opener’s in the glove box.”
Jones retrieved a couple Miller High Lifes, golden in clear glass bottles, and popped their caps. He handed one to Jefferson. Jefferson took a long swig, fitted the bottle between his legs, and pulled off the curb.
ROLAND WILLIAMS lived on T Street, between 13th and 14th, in a house he rented, paying cash, always on time, no references required, no questions asked. The owner of the house was one of several slumlords who had bought run-down properties, pre-and post-riot, and methodically flipped them at an enormous profit to the U.S. government for their “urban renewal” projects. In the late ’60s, the practice had been exposed in a series of Washington Post articles that had made a splash in the newspaper industry and on Capitol Hill. Reporters won prizes and promotions, but their work had little impact down here; five years later and the area continued to be in the grip of poverty and opportunists.
Williams’s row house, on the outside, was as blighted as any other on the block, but inside it was well furnished and nicely appointed. Williams had money. He was the neighborhood heroin dealer, known to most as such, and went untouched and unmolested by the law. Williams paid protection money to Mike Hancock, a Popeye who worked the Third District.
Williams was of the older school of heroin dealer who worked peacefully out of his house. He copped ounces, called “jumbos,” at 116th and 8th, up in Harlem. He bought from minor leaguers, black dudes who had scored from Italian button men who were low on the food chain themselves and connected to the Family. The run to Little Baltimore was Williams’s pleasure; he liked to go “up top” to the big city, do his thing, eat in one of those nice checkerboard-tablecloth restaurants they had, take his time, drive home slow.
Williams used mannite and quinine to cut his heroin, which generally was 4 to 12 percent pure when it hit the end user. Four was garbage, 12 a smoker. The temptation was to keep stepping on the dope to maximize profit, but if it was diluted too much a dealer would soon be out of business with a rep for selling trash product. Williams was not greedy, and he was known for delivering an honest kick.
He was a heroin user, but he had that under control. Like many in his line of work, he was functional. He laughed when he saw the TV shows with bad actors in dark-eye-circle makeup, playing strung-out junkies who had fucked up their lives. In Williams’s circle, it was macho to be an addict and know how to carry it.
It spoke to a general point of attitude. In his time, criminals were not amateurs. The burglars, car thieves, dope cutters, pickpockets, and flimflam artists he knew were all driven by the skills of their profession and pride in their work. There were few kids in the game. No one realized how soon all this would change.
This last batch of dope he’d copped had not yet been paid for. Williams was short on money at the time of purchase, as he’d recently put a deposit down on a sweet ’69 Mark IV that he didn’t need but wanted. His contact up top, man named Jimmy Compton, had let him slide because he was a longtime customer in good standing. Williams had brought the product home, cut it down, and packaged it in bundles of twenty-five glassine dime bags. Runners, paid with a shot, would deliver the dimes to residences and places of business. Clients were listed in a book he kept well hidden. Williams had the bundles in paper bags in two locations: the suit carrier in his closet and in a wall cutout behind a hutch in his living room. His intent was to sell the shit, give his New York connect his payment, and add a little bonus to it, to acknowledge the man’s trust.
Williams put on some nice threads, as he always did this time of night, and prepared to leave his place for a little something at Soul House, his favorite bar, on 14th. It was a cave, really, just a simple dark room with low music coming from the juke. A spot where he felt comfortable. There he played the role of up-and-coming businessman, sitting at the stick, having himself a quiet drink. Mid-shelf scotch in hand, sometimes with a young lady seated beside him. Thinking, I’ve made it.
THEY PARKED on the 1300 block of T, drank off a couple more High Lifes, smoked cigarettes, and waited for near dark to come. They were watching a white brick row house with blue shutters, had a little old-time porch on the front. Jefferson had been watching the house for several nights.
“There he goes now,” said Jones.
“Told you,” said Jefferson. “He leaves out the same time, early in the evening. Goes to that bar, Soul House, on Fourteenth. You can set your watch to it. How they do in London, England, with that big clock they got.”
“Roland Williams,” said Jones.
“That’s Ro-Ro, went to Cardozo?”
Jones shook his head. “Long Nose Roland, outta Roosevelt.”
“I can see it,” said Jefferson.
Roland Williams, with the nose of an aardvark, late twenties, wearing big-bell jeans and a print shirt. He locked the door of the house behind him and walked down the sidewalk.
“Let’s go,” said Jones.
They got out of the Buick and crossed the street. They came up quick behind Williams, who had turned his head and quickened his step but too late. Jefferson produced an old police-issue .38 with cracked wood grips held fast by electrical tape, and put the barrel of it to the small of Williams’s back.
“Keep walkin, slick,” said Jefferson. “Straight to the alley.”
Williams complied. He moved surely and did not appear to be too shook. They turned into an alley that ran behind Williams’s block, uneven stones in concrete, hard beneath their feet.
“Stop and turn around,” said Jones. “My man’s got his thing on you, so don’t be funny.”
Williams turned to face them. Somewhere near, a big-breed dog, housed behind a chain-link fence, barked lazily. There was no light back here, save the faint bleed of a streetlamp situated at the end of the alley. It was hard to read Williams’s face, but his voice was steady.
“Y’all want my money,” said Williams, “go on and take it.”
“Give it here,” said Jones.
Williams removed folding money from his front pocket and held it out. Jones took it and without examination stuffed it in the patch pocket of his bells.
“Now the key to your crib,” said Jones.
“For what?” said Williams.
“ ’Bout to help myself to your heroin. I know you’re holdin.”
“Who…”
“Never mind who. He kissin dirt.” Jones nodded with his chin. “Give it up. I don’t want no loose dimes, neither. The bundles.”
“You don’t understand what you gettin into, brother. I got that shit on consignment.”
“Say what?”
“I don’t own it.”
“You got that right. It’s mine now.”
Williams sighed. They heard his breath expel and saw his shoulders sag.
Jefferson grew impatient and touched his pistol to the man’s cheekbone. “Tell him where the dope at.”
“What I got is in my bedroom closet,” said Williams. “In a suit bag.”
“That’s it?” said Jones.
“All of it,” said Williams. “Swear for God.” Williams was a poker player, and they could not read the lie in his eyes.
“Gimme your key.”
Jones left the alley with the key to Williams’s house and the key to the Buick. Jefferson kept the gun loosely trained on Williams, who calmly lit a cigarette. Neither of them spoke.
Fifteen minutes later, Jones returned. Williams ground the butt under his foot.
“You get it?” said Jefferson.
“Yeah, we’re good.”
Williams studied them. The tall, light-skinned dude had a distinctive look and a rep to go with it. Had to be Red Jones, who some called Red Fury on account of his woman’s car. He knew nothing about the little one with the gold teeth.
“Can I get my house key back?” said Williams.
J
ones tossed it in his general direction. Williams did not catch the key, and it fell to the ground with a small pathetic clinking sound. Jones and Jefferson chuckled low.
Williams felt unwise anger rise up inside him. “Y’all motherfuckers ain’t gonna last.”
“We gonna last longer than you,” said Jones, and he drew his .45 from the dip of his bells.
Williams took a staggering step back. Jones moved forward, pressed the gun’s muzzle high on Williams’s chest, and squeezed its trigger. The night lit up, and in the flash they saw the look of shock on Williams’s face as he left his feet and dropped to the alley floor. Blood pooled out from Williams’s back. His chest heaved up as he fought for breath. Then his eyes closed and he moved no more.
“Next time,” said Jefferson, “gimme some kind of warning. My ears are ringin, Red.”
“Boy talked too much shit.”
They left him for dead. It was a mistake.
STRANGE HAD traded in his Impala and bought a low-mileage, triple-black, ’70 Monte Carlo from the Curtis Chevrolet at Georgia and Missouri. He’d be paying on it for three years, but he had no buyer’s remorse. He was a GM man who was working his way up to a Cadillac, but for now he was more than satisfied. The lines were extra clean, with rally rims, Goodyear radials, and a small-block 350 under the hood. The interior had sweet buckets, a horseshoe shifter on the console, factory eight-track sound, and a wood-grain dash. It was a pretty car.
Strange drove it downtown, Curtis’s Roots in the deck, “Get Down” playing loud.
He found a parking spot and commenced to knocking on doors in the apartment building at 13th and R, where Bobby Odum had lived. He began on the top floor and got very little in the way of leads. He was a young black man, casually but not loudly dressed, nice looking and well built, with a polite manner. Most important, he was not the law. So the residents of the building, for the most part, talked to him freely. But the information he received held little value in terms of his quest. He was looking for a ring, not Bobby Odum’s killer. Homicide was police business and always had been. Private detectives only solved murders in movies and dime novels.
On the bottom floor, he found a young woman named Janette Newman, a compact, nicely put-together gal who had the Marcus Garvey thing going on in her apartment. She let him in, offered him a seat on the sofa, and served him a soda. He learned that she was a schoolteacher at Harriet Tubman and that she was single.
“You live here alone?”
“Most nights,” she said.
“I imagine you saw the comings and goings of Bobby Odum. He had visitors, right?”
“There was this one light-skinned girl.”
“Speak to her?”
“She wasn’t the approachable type.”
“Ever rap with Odum?”
“Sometimes. He had a job, and in the morning we’d leave here around the same time.”
“So you know where he worked at.”
“He washed dishes at that fish place up on Georgia,” she said. “Cobb’s?”
“I know the spot.”
“Walked over to Seventh and took the uptown bus, every day.”
“I assume you told all this to the homicide detective who came to see you. Vaughn, right?”
“Big white dude. Don’t recall his name. I wasn’t about to tell that man too much. They never do anything for us, anyway. You know how that is.”
Strange nodded. He had identified himself as a self-employed investigator. He had not told her that he was former MPD.
“I hope I’m being of help.” She parted her lips and smiled.
It was a fetching smile, but there was little warmth to it, and no kindness in her eyes. He imagined she could run to mean sometimes, too.
Strange liked all kinds of women. They didn’t have to be beautiful to catch his attention, but they did have to be nice. His girlfriend, Carmen, was both.
He had not always been faithful to her, but he knew what he had.
“Anything else I can do for you?” said Janette.
“Not today,” said Strange.
Outside the building, Strange saw a man sitting on a retaining wall and doing nothing. Looked like a guy who lived on the streets. If this was his spot, he was the type of person who would notice things, that is if he was not too high. Strange took steps toward him. The man watched him dolefully, then got off the wall and walked away. Strange went to his car.
THE CARRYOUT on the west side of Georgia, in Park View, specialized in fish sandwiches. Case no one knew, the sign out front, featuring a big old bass leaping out of the water with a hook and line in its mouth, announced it. Strange asked the owner, Ordell Cobb, for a minute of his time. Cobb was in his fifties and wore an apron smudged with ketchup and blood. His manner was gruff. They were at the rear of the kitchen, near a door leading to an alley, workers hustling around them. The stainless steel sink that Odum had most likely stood over, its power nozzle hanging above, sat right beside them. WOL was playing on the house radio. Strange knew, ’cause Bobby “the Mighty Burner” Bennett was introducing a song.
“I already told the white detective,” said Cobb. “I don’t know nothin about Odum’s murder. He washed dishes for me, is all. I don’t get into the personal lives of my employees.”
“You owe him any back pay?”
“Why?”
“Tryin to see if any relatives or friends of his dropped by.”
“He owed me money, on a advance I gave him.”
“One more thing: you notice if he was ever wearing a ring, had a big cluster of stones on it?”
Cobb shook his head in exasperation. “I didn’t study on him all that much. Look, young man, I gotta get back to work.”
“Okay, then. Let me get a couple of fish sandwiches for takeaway before I get out of here.”
“The flounder or the trout?”
“Make it the trout,” said Strange. “Extra hot sauce.”
Kinda counterproductive, thought Strange, as Cobb moved toward the deep-fry basket. Me and Vaughn covering the same ground.
STRANGE TOOK the sandwiches over to his mother’s row house at 760 Princeton Place, his childhood home. His father, Darius, had passed a couple of years earlier from cancer, and his older brother, Dennis, had been murdered by a low criminal just before the riots. The losses had set his mother back emotionally, but the deaths of her loved ones had not broken her. Alethea Strange was a woman of faith, and she still had her younger son.
It was a Saturday, so Strange knew she would be home. Monday through Friday she worked as a receptionist for a downtown ophthalmologist who serviced the shirt-and-tie class. The eye doctor was a former client whose home she had cleaned for many years. He offered her a job in his office in April 1968, after she told him that she would no longer be doing domestic work of any kind. The man thought of himself as a liberal in matters of race, whatever that meant, and he had probably hired her out of guilt, because she had no experience for the position. But his internal motives made no difference to her. She took to the work quickly and did her job well.
Alethea greeted Strange at the door with a delighted smile. He tried to phone her once a day, but, like many sons who meant well, he did not get over to her place as much as he intended to.
“I brought some Cobb’s, Mama,” said Strange, holding up a brown paper bag darkened with grease.
They ate in the living room, where Strange used to roughhouse with Dennis, sometimes just wrestling, sometimes full-out boxing, his father amused, sitting in his chair, reading the Washington edition of the Afro-American, listening to his Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson records on the console, or watching Westerns on his Zenith TV, or talking about that awful man who owned the Redskins and local-products-gone-pro like Elgin Baylor and Maury Wills. Strange had his father’s albums in his own collection now, but the console stereo was still here, being used mostly as a stand for his mother’s potted violets.
The place looked the same, a small living area, two bedrooms, a galley kitchen,
even the wall decorations were the same, but it was too quiet, the only noise coming from the longtime tenants on the first floor. Made Strange sad to visit, thinking how still it must be when it was just his mother here.
“This is good,” said Alethea, closing her eyes as she swallowed.
“I went for the trout,” said Strange.
After, they moved to the kitchen, where she finished up the dishes she’d been washing when he had arrived. The window over the sink had cardboard taped to its bottom pane. Alethea did this so as not to disturb the babies in the nest built by robins on the outdoor sill every spring.
He watched her as she worked in her housedress. She still had a younger woman’s figure, but she listed a bit, favoring the hip that did not ache. Seated behind an office desk, answering phones and dealing with patients, was not physically demanding, but the time his mother had spent as a maid had taken its toll on her knees and back. She had aged ten years in the past four; in the final months of Darius’s painful illness, her hair had gone completely gray as she tended to her husband in their home.
“How’s Carmen?” she said, looking slightly over her shoulder.
“Good. We’re going to a movie tonight.”
“Don’t be takin her to one of your Westerns.”
“What you want me to do, go to some weepy?”
“Make her happy, Derek.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Strange leaned against the Formica counter, his arms crossed, watching her work, listening to her hum. When she was done, she dried her hands and hung the towel on a rod.
“Thank you for stopping by, son.”
“My pleasure,” said Strange.
HE WAS done working for the day, and he had some time to kill, so he drove farther north on Georgia and stopped at a place called the Experience for a beer. It was a small joint, just a room with a steel-top bar front to back, a few tables, and a jukebox. The juke stayed mostly unplugged, on account of the owner, young dude named Grady Page, liked to play funk-rock music, the hybrid thing he loved, through the house system. The Experience was a neighborhood spot, had posters thumbtacked to its walls. It catered to a mix of local drinkers, heads, off-duty police officers, utility workers, security guards, and women who liked men who wore uniforms.
What It Was Page 4