What It Was

by George Pelecanos

  “A ring? No. There was some women’s jewelry we found in his bedroom dresser. A bracelet and a necklace, too, if I remember right.”

  “Real shit?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Bobby used to do Burglary Ones, years ago. Said he lost his ambition after he fell in love with smack. Maybe the trinkets in the bedroom were some old pieces he was holding on to.”

  “What happened to that jewelry?”

  “Property’s got it,” said Vaughn. “You think Odum’s killer took the ring?”

  “Or one of the uniforms on the scene slipped it in his pocket.”

  “It happens. But I’d put money on the one who chilled Odum.”

  “You got a suspect?”

  Vaughn showed Strange his choppers. “You’re cute. You know it?”

  “We might be able to help each other out.”

  “That’s what you said on the phone. But I haven’t heard a goddamn thing yet.”

  “Show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” said Strange.

  Vaughn chuckled. “For a nickel I will.”

  It was an old vulgar joke about a colored girl. Vaughn was indelicate. Vaughn’s kind were about to be extinct. He was the type of man Strange’s mother would charitably call “a product of his time.” Strange knew that Vaughn was that way. He was also good police.

  “What I got for you is real,” said Strange. “That’s a promise.”

  “Now you’re gonna bargain.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “You always were smart. It’s a damn shame you left the force.”

  “I had to,” said Strange.

  Vaughn tapped ash off his cigarette. “I like a guy named Robert Lee Jones for this one. Goes by Red.”

  “Red Jones.”

  “You heard of him?”

  “Sure.”

  “Got a nice long rap sheet. Relatively small stuff up till now. Agg assaults and shit like that.”

  “You have a description?”

  “Tall, light-skinned black. Reddish hair.”

  Strange took this in. “That would explain his street name.”

  “You’d think. Wears an Afro like you, but his is all fucked up. I’ve seen his latest mug shot. Looks like Stymie gone wrong.”

  “What’s the motive?”

  “Contract hit. Odum was one of my informants; he tipped me on a homicide I’d been working. The guy we arrested and charged probably arranged the murder-for-hire from inside the jail.”

  “I know Odum washed dishes up at Cobb’s. What’s that pay, dollar sixty-two an hour? You say he was your CI, but even with that, how did he afford that apartment and his heroin habit?”

  “He was a tester, so the jolts were free. Could be he was living off his old B-Ones. Bobby always found a way to make it. Career criminal, but no violence.” Vaughn dragged on his L&M and let the smoke out slow. “He was a good egg.”

  “How’d you come to all this knowledge?”

  “Red Jones robbed and shot a small-time heroin dealer by the name of Roland Williams. Williams lived to finger Jones and describe an unidentified accomplice: a little man with gold teeth. Odum was a tester for Williams. Odum must have put Jones onto Williams before he got done. I think it connects.”

  “You think.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So pick up Jones.”

  “We would if we could find him. His photo’s been passed out at roll call in every district. He’s on parole, but his PO says he hasn’t reported to her in months. The Absconding Unit’s been looking for him, but so far they’ve come up with bupkes. His last known address is bullshit. My informants don’t know anything, either, or they’re too afraid to talk. If he’s driving a car it’s not registered.”

  “That’s where I might be able to help you.”

  “Hold up a second.” Vaughn stubbed out his cigarette and signaled the owner of the diner. “Hey, Nick, gimme a Hershey bar, will you? I need somethin sweet to go with this coffee.”

  “Male or female?” said Nick.

  “With nuts,” said Vaughn. As Nick went down to the register, where the candy was racked in a display, Vaughn returned his attention to Strange. “Go ahead.”

  “A source of mine saw a man, matches your description of Red Jones, on Thirteenth at the time of the murder. My source heard a small-caliber gunshot right before the man exited the Odum building.”

  “Will your source testify?”

  “Hell, no,” said Strange. “He won’t talk to the law, on or off the record. And I’m not about to give him up.”

  “I’m still listening,” said Vaughn. He unwrapped the Hershey bar Nick had dropped before him, broke off a piece, and popped it into his mouth.

  “Jones, if it was Jones, got into a red late-model Plymouth, white interior.”

  “A Plymouth what?”

  “Fury, had fold-in headlamps.”

  “That would make it a seventy-one.” Vaughn nodded, thinking of Martina Lewis, seated beside him in the auditorium of the Lincoln Theatre. I heard him called Red Fury, too. I don’t know why. “Sonofabitch.”

  “What?”

  “I think my dick’s gettin hard.”

  “Wait’ll you hear the rest.”

  “Tell me.”

  “There was a woman driving the Fury. Tall, from what my source could make out. Had dark skin and big hair.”

  “Your source didn’t happen to get the numbers on the plates?”

  “No.”

  “Shit.”

  “ ’Cause there weren’t any numbers,” said Strange with a small smile. “They were vanity plates.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Plates read ‘Coco.’ C-O, C-O.”

  Vaughn slid off his stool and stood. “D.C. tags, right?”

  “Correct.”

  Vaughn put another cigarette in his mouth, lit it, and went to the house pay phone, where he made a call. Strange got up, walked down to the end of the counter, and got the attention of the grill woman, who said her name was Ida. Strange complimented her on her cooking, thanked her for her kindness in making his eggs southern, and slipped her a couple of dollar bills. He met Vaughn at the register, where he was hurriedly settling up with Nick.

  “I got this,” said Vaughn.

  “Did you see me reach?” said Strange.

  “Thanks, Marine,” said Nick, closing the register drawer.

  Vaughn and Strange walked toward their cars, parked together on Vermont.

  “Your mom doing all right?” said Vaughn.

  “She’s fine,” said Strange. “Working for an eye doctor downtown.”

  “I’ve been by the Three-Star. Heard your dad passed. My sympathies.”

  “Thank you.”

  Vaughn stopped walking, hit his cigarette, hot-boxed it with one last drag, and flicked the butt out to the street.

  “If you happen to come up on that ring…” said Strange.

  “Right,” said Vaughn. “Watch yourself out there.”

  “I plan to.”

  They shook hands.

  LOU FANELLA stood beside the bed of Roland Williams in D.C. General Hospital. Gino Gregorio leaned against a wall.

  There had been a nurse taking Williams’s vitals when they’d arrived, and Fanella had asked her to give them some privacy. He’d smiled at her in a way that implied no kindness and said, “Don’t go telling anyone we’re in here, sweetheart. I might take that to mean we’re not friends.” She left them with her eyes downcast and closed the door behind her. Outside the hospital, dusk had come, throwing long shadows on the stadium-armory complex grounds. A faint gray light had settled in the room.

  “Who robbed you?” said Fanella, looking down at Williams. “Don’t take too long thinking about it, either. I don’t have the patience or the time.”

  “He goes by the name of Red,” said Williams without hesitation. “Red Jones. Don’t know what the minister called him when he got baptized.”

  “How’d you know it was him?”

  “I knew
him by rep. Tall, light-skinned dude with a fucked-up head of hair, kinda rusty like.”

  “Who hipped him to your supply?”

  “Tester of mine name Bobby Odum. Jones deaded Odum, then he and this little dude with gold teeth came after me.”

  “And they ripped you off for your product.”

  “At the point of a gun,” said Williams.

  “Funny he didn’t do you all the way.”

  “Wasn’t for lack of tryin.”

  “It was me, I would have put one in your head.”

  “The man shot me,” said Williams, seeing where Fanella was going and not liking it. “Close range, with a forty-five. You think I’d let him do me like that for what? To pretend I got robbed?”

  Fanella looked down on Williams and stared him in the eyes. “It makes me wonder, is all.”

  “I’m a businessman. You can ask Jimmy, up at One Sixteenth. I’m straight.” He was speaking on Jimmy Compton, Fanella and Gregorio’s man in Harlem.

  “Me and Gino already spoke to Jimmy,” said Fanella. “Now we’re speaking to you.”

  “Okay,” said Williams. “All right.” Bullets of sweat had risen on his forehead.

  “Tell us where we can find the heroin,” said Fanella. “Or the money. Makes no difference to me.”

  “Po-lice got half of the dope,” said Williams. “I only told Red where some of it was. Tried to keep it from him, see? But the law found the rest of it, in the spot where I keep it.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “At my crib.”

  “So half of it’s gone for good.”

  Williams thought to say something, but his mouth was dry. He felt his lip tremble. He tried to make it stop, but he could not.

  Fanella smiled. “You all right?”

  “Yes,” said Williams. He was ashamed and he looked away.

  “Let me see what Red did to you.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m curious.” Fanella looked over his shoulder and said, “Gino.”

  Gregorio moved to the door and put his back against it.

  “Don’t,” said Williams.

  “Don’t?”

  “Sayin, I wish you wouldn’t do that. Doctor said to leave it be.”

  “C’mon,” said Fanella, his thick eyebrows meeting comically as he mustered up a false face of concern. “Lemme see.”

  Fanella pulled his switchblade from the pocket of his sport jacket and opened it with the touch of a button. The blade locked into a place with a soft click. Williams recoiled and made a small humming sound. Fanella chuckled as he cut the sling from Williams’s shoulder. Then he used the knife to slice away the bandages that covered his wound. Williams winced at the wet sucking sound of gauze pulling away from dressing and skin.

  “Wow,” said Fanella. “You should look at this, Gino.”

  Gregorio did not move.

  “Please, man,” said Williams.

  “That’s a big hole,” said Fanella. The entrance wound was the size of a quarter, black around the edges, pinkish in the center where the skin had begun to come back, slick and shiny from the dressing. “Don’t even look like it’s infected.”

  “Please.”

  “What’d you tell the police?”

  “What I told you. I gave up Red’s name. That’s all.”

  “They found heroin in your apartment and they’re not even going to charge you?”

  “It was an exchange, ’cause I gave up good information. Plus, they searched my spot without a warrant.”

  “You said you knew Red’s rep. So you must know more.”

  “I told the law enough to leave me alone.”

  “I’m not the law,” said Fanella. “What’d you leave out?”

  “I can’t say no more, for real. I’m not tryin to get doomed.”

  Fanella put one knee up on the mattress to steady himself. He loosely placed his hand on Williams’s shoulder above the wound and kept his thumb free.

  “What didn’t you tell them?” Fanella grinned. “What else?”

  “Red got this woman,” said Williams, a tremor in his voice. “Goes by Coco. Runs whores in a house on Fourteenth. What I heard, anyway.”

  “Heard where?”

  “The street.” Williams gave him the location and described the building.

  “That’s it?”

  “Swear for God.”

  Fanella gripped Williams shoulder. “Does this hurt?”

  “No.”

  “How about this?” Fanella pushed his thumb into the gunshot wound. It felt like jelly as he broke through the skin. Williams began to thrash and scream.

  “Lou,” said Gregorio, and turned his head away.

  Fanella put his right hand over the man’s mouth. Williams urinated on the sheets before he passed out.

  “Niggers aggravate me,” said Fanella.

  They left the room and walked down the hall. They did not move quickly, because Lou Fanella felt that a man should leave a scene unhurried, with his shoulders square and chin up. They went by a nurse who did not notice them, and an aged orderly pushing a wheelchair, and a tall, uniformed security guard with chiseled features who was standing against a wall, giving them a long stare.

  “Fuck you lookin at?” said Fanella to the young man.

  “Nothin, sir.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  Clarence Bowman studied them as they passed.

  FRANK VAUGHN sat in an unmarked Dodge beside Detective Henry A. Passman, a gentle family man who, because of his initials, was called “Hap” by nearly everyone on the force. Like many career police officers who aspired to rise above uniform status, he had been shuttled around various divisions and had finally found a home in what had once been Prostitutions and Perversions but was now known by the more succinct description of Vice.

  Night had come to the city. The calendar said close to summer, and there were folks dressed lightly and out on the street. On 14th at R, a spring-gold ’70 Camaro, up on HiJackers, was curbside, idling. A white girl in white hot pants and a red gingham midriff shirt was leaning into its open driver’s-side window, negotiating with the muscle car’s occupants. Music was coming loudly from the eight-track system, but to Vaughn it was just screams and guitars. His focus was on the girl, a minor from the looks of her, and the heads of the five long-haired young men squeezed into the car.

  “It’s somebody’s birthday,” said Vaughn.

  “One of the boys in the backseat just turned sixteen,” said Passman. “His pals are buying him a present.”

  “The Fourteenth Street cherry-bust. A rite of passage in this town.”

  “They don’t want a white girl, though. They can get that any day at their high school. This one’s gonna take the money and turn the boy over to one of the black girls in the stable.”

  “Then?”

  “The boy’s directed to a building and told to go up a flight of stairs. Imagine what that’s like. How his heart’s pounding. Boy’s never even been down here before and now he’s in a strange house in what he thinks of as the ghetto. So he meets his whore in a dark little room. She tells him straight away he has to use a rubber. Offers to put it on for him, and if he says no, she insists. She doesn’t want to get on her back, is what it is. More often than not, that boy’s gonna shoot while she’s fittin the safe on his pecker.”

  “Liftoff,” said Vaughn. “Bit of a letdown, isn’t it?”

  “He’ll be grateful. Matter of fact, he’ll go back to his friends with a spring in his step. Bragging about how he fucked a black chick.”

  “You got a daughter, Hap?”

  “Two. I keep ’em close.”

  “My son’s twenty-six and he still lives in my house, rent free. Olga stocks his bathroom with toilet paper, Hai Karate, and his favorite brand of minty toothpaste.”

  “Least you know where he is.”

  A signal came from the handheld radio on the seat by Passman’s side. It was a plainclothes officer who had been sent into the Coco Watkins h
ouse and was now up in a room with one of the girls. He was telling Passman that the transaction had been made and that his girl had been badged. Passman switched frequencies and radioed a couple of squad cars that were parked on nearby side streets, waiting for his call. They arrived, sirens and cherry-tops activated, shortly thereafter, accompanied by a wagon. The Camaro promptly sped off, and the white girl disappeared into an alley.

  “Life’s off-key symphony,” said Passman, a cut-rate philosopher toiling in a world of hookers, pimps, glory-hole enthusiasts, flagellants, women who spread their legs on the D.C. Transit, and guys who played with their dongs in public.

  “Let’s see what we got inside,” said Vaughn.

  The building had been a row house, once residential, now zoned commercial, with an urban market on the first floor. They followed the uniformed police into the door beside the market and went up a flight of stairs to the second floor. The uniforms had drawn their service revolvers, but Vaughn’s rig remained snapped. At the sound of the sirens, Red Jones would have gone out the fire escape that led to the alley, where another patrolman and his partner were stationed and ready. But those officers had radioed in that all was quiet. Vaughn had not expected to find Jones in the building. He was here for information.

  The undercover officer and the unlucky young whore were standing in the hall, his hand loosely gripping her upper arm. She was an unformed-looking girl in a purple negligee. A prominent mole marked her face. Two other girls were standing in the hall, similarly attired, observing, smoking cigarettes.

  “Entrapment,” said the girl, whose name was Shay. “Entrapment.” She had been told to repeat that word and nothing else.

  “Down at the end,” said the plainclothes man to Passman and Vaughn.

  They didn’t need to be told. Coco Watkins, in red lipstick, violet eye shadow, high heels, high hair, and a red dress, stood by an open door at the end of hot-pad row, leaning against the frame. Her arms were folded. Her breasts were like chocolate grapefruits heaving up out of her plunging V-neck.

  “All right, that’s enough,” said Vaughn, and the uniformed police holstered their guns.