Right as Rain

by George Pelecanos

  They sat at her kitchen table, drinking instant coffee. Renee’s daughter, a darling little three—year—old named Kia, sat on the linoleum floor. Kia had a dark—skinned doll in one hand and a freckly faced, cartoonish—looking white baby in the other, and she was pressing their faces together, loudly going, “Mmm, mmm, mmm.”

  “Honey,” said Renee, “hush, please. We are trying to talk, and it’s hard to hear ourselves with those sounds you’re makin’.”

  “Rugrat kissing Groovy Girl, Momma!” said Kia.

  “Yes, baby,” said Renee. “I know.”

  Renee was a good—looking, dark—skinned young woman with long painted nails and a sculpted, lean face. Her hair had been chemically relaxed and she wore it in a shoulder—length, fashionable cut. She worked as an administrative assistant for an accounting firm on Connecticut and L, and she stayed there, she said, not for pay or opportunities but for the firm’s flexible schedule, which allowed her more time with Kia.

  She was a tired—looking twenty—one. Renee told Strange that she had planned to register for community college courses but that Kia’s arrival and the father’s subsequent departure had dimmed those plans. Strange noticed all the toys, televisions, and stereo equipment spread about the apartment, and Renee’s Honda had looked brand—new. He wondered how far she was overextended, if she had dug a credit hole so deep that she couldn’t even see the light from where she stood.

  “Maybe when she gets into a full day of school,” said Strange, “you can go after that college degree.”

  “Maybe,” said Renee, her voice trailing off, both of them knowing that it would never happen that way.

  Renee talked about Chris Wilson, how they had met, what kind of man he was. How he had been “a better father” to Kia than Kia’s own blood had been.

  “How about when he drank?” said Strange. “Was he good to her then?”

  “Chris hardly drank more than one, maybe two beers at a time. When I first met him, he barely drank at all.”

  “What about the night he was killed?”

  Renee nodded, looking into her coffee mug. “He had been drinking pretty heavy, here at the apartment, earlier that night. He had gone through, I don’t know, maybe a six—pack over the course of the night.”

  “Unusual for him, right?”

  “Yes. But the last few weeks before he died, he was drinking more and more.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “He was upset.”

  “And he was upset the night he was killed, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Over what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Renee bent forward from her seat and handed Kia a Barbie doll she had dropped. Then Renee sat up straight and sipped at her coffee.

  “Renee?”

  “Huh.”

  “What was Chris upset over? You told the newspeople you didn’t know. But you do know, don’t you?”

  “What difference would it have made to talk about it? It didn’t have nothin’, anything to do with his death. It was family business, Mr. Strange.”

  “And here I am, only tryin’ to help the family. Chris’s mother hired me. Chris’s mother sent me over here, Renee.”

  Renee looked away. She looked up at the clock on the wall and down at her daughter and around the room.

  “Was it about his sister, Sondra?” said Strange.

  She nodded hesitantly.

  “Had he been in contact with her?”

  “I don’t know.” Renee met his eyes. “I’m not lyin’; I do not know.”

  “Go on.”

  “After Sondra lost her job and her place, Chris got more and more distant. He was trying to find her, and do his job as a policeman, and make time for his mother, and me and Kia. … It got to be too much for him, I guess. And I learned not to ask too many questions about Sondra. It only upset him more when I did.”

  “Where was Sondra working when things started to fall apart on her?”

  “Place called Sea D.C., at Fourteenth and K. She had been a hostess there for a short while.”

  “Her mother said she was basically a good girl, got in with the wrong crowd.”

  “Wasn’t like she was wearing a halo or nothin’ like that. Sondra always did like to party, from what Chris told me. And I had some friends who worked in restaurants and clubs downtown, and I’d hung with these people a few times after the chairs got put up on the tables. So I knew what time it was. In those places, at closing time? Someone’s always holding something. In that environment, it’s easy to fall into that lifestyle, if you allow yourself to fall into it, Mr. Strange.”

  “Call me Derek.”

  “Sondra got into that heroin thing. Chris said she was always afraid of needles, so he figured she started by snorting it. Probably thought it was okay, doin’ it like that, like she couldn’t get a jones behind it in that way. Another mistake future junkies make. I know because I had an uncle who was deep into it. It’s a slower way to go down is all it is. How you end up, it’s all the same.”

  “The night Chris was killed. Describe what happened here before he went out.”

  Renee moved her coffee mug around the table. Her voice was even and unemotional. “He got a phone call on his cell. He took the call back in my bedroom. I didn’t hear what was said and I didn’t ask. But he was agitated when he came out of the bedroom, for real. He said he had to go out. He said he was going to a bar or something to grab a beer, that he needed to get out of the apartment and think. I didn’t think it was a good idea, what with him already having been drinkin’ and all, and I told him so. He told me not to worry. He kissed me and he kissed Kia on the top of the head, and then he left. Two hours later, I got a call from Chris’s mother telling me he was dead.”

  Strange sat back in his chair. “Chris had some brutality complaints in his file. He ever talk about that?”

  “Yes,” said Renee. “He told me he had to get rough with suspects sometimes, but he said he never went off on someone didn’t deserve it. And yes, he had been drinking heavily the night he was killed, just like they said. The newspapers and the TV and his own department, they can paint their pictures any way they want. None of that explains why he was murdered. Bottom line is, if that white cop hadn’t come up on the scene, Chris would be alive today.”

  “That white cop didn’t know Chris was a policeman,” said Strange. “He saw a man with a gun —”

  “He saw a black man with a gun,” said Renee. “And you and I both know that’s why Chris is dead.”

  Strange didn’t reply. He wasn’t certain that on some basic level she was wrong.

  Strange leaned forward and touched Kia’s cheek. “That your baby, pretty little girl?”

  “My baby,” said Kia.

  “I hope I helped you,” said Renee.

  “You did,” said Strange. “Thank you for your time.”

  STRANGE sat at the downstairs bar of the Purple Cactus, sipping a ginger ale, watching the crowd. It was mostly young white money in here, new money and livin’—off—the—interest kind of money as well. The waitresses and bar staff were pretty young women and pretty boys, working with a kind of rising intensity, serving the early, preshow dinner patrons who were just now beginning to flow through the doors. The dining room chairs were hard, and triangles and other geometric designs hung on the walls. Dim spot lamps brought an onstage focus to each table, so the patrons could be “seen” while eating the overpriced cuisine.

  Upon its opening, the Cactus had been touted in the Post ’s dining guide and in Washingtonian, and had become “the place” for that particular year. Strange had come here once when he was trying to impress a woman on a first date, always a mistake. He had dropped a hundred and twenty—five on three appetizers, portioned to leave a small dog hungry, and a couple of drinks. Then the waiter, another bright—eyed boy with bleached—blond hair, had the nerve to come out with a dessert tray and try to get them to sample a “decadent,” twelve—dollars—a—slice
chocolate cake that was, he said with a practiced smile, “architecturally brilliant.” It had ruined Strange’s night to feel that used. And to make things worse, the woman he was with, she hadn’t even given him any play.

  A waiter wearing a thin line of beard came up to the service end of the bar and said to the bartender, “Absolut and tonic with a lemon twist,” then added, “Did you see that tourist with the hair at my four—top? Oh my God, what is she, on chemo or something?” The waitress standing next to him, also waiting on a drink and arranging her checks, said, “Charlie, keep your voice down, the customers will hear you.”

  “Oh, fuck the customers,” said Charlie, dressing his vodka tonic with a swizzle stick as it arrived.

  Strange wondered how a place like this could stay in business. But he knew: People came here because they were told to come here, knowing full well that it was a rip—off, too. Same reason they read the books their friends read, and went to movies about convicts hijacking airplanes and asteroids headed for earth. Didn’t matter that none of it was any good. No one wanted to be left out of the conversation at the next cocktail party. Everyone was desperate to be a part of what was new, to not be left behind.

  “You okay here?” asked the bartender, a clear—eyed blonde with nice skin.

  “Fine,” said Strange. “I do have a question, though. You remember a guy used to work here, name of Ricky Kane? Trying to locate him for a friend.”

  “I’m new,” said the bartender.

  “I remember Ricky,” said Charlie the waiter, still standing by the service bar. Would be like old Charlie, thought Strange, to listen in on someone’s conversation and make a comment about it when he wasn’t being spoken to.

  “He’s not working here any longer, is he?” said Strange, forcing a friendly smile.

  “He doesn’t need to anymore,” said Charlie. “Not after all that money he got from the settlement.” Charlie side—glanced the brunette waitress beside him. “Course, he never did need to work here, did he?”

  ’Cause old Ricky had his income set up from dealin’ drugs, it suddenly occurred to Strange.

  “Charlie,” admonished the waitress.

  Charlie chuckled and hurried off with his drink tray. The bartender served the brunette waitress her drinks and said, “Here you go, Lenna.”

  After Lenna thanked her, the bartender came back to stand in front of Strange. “Another ginger ale?”

  “Just the check,” said Strange, “and a receipt.”

  STRANGE walked around the corner and four blocks up Vermont Avenue, then took the steps down to Stan’s, a basement bar he frequented now and again. It was smoky and crowded with locals, a racial mix of middle—class D.C. residents, most of them in their middle age. Going past some loud tables, he heard a man call his name.

  “Derek, how you doin’!”

  “Ernest,” said Strange. It was Ernest James from the neighborhood, wearing a suit and seated with a woman.

  “Heard your business was doin’ good, man.”

  “I’m doin’ all right.”

  “You see anything of Donald Lindsay?” asked James.

  “Heard Donald passed.”

  “Uh—uh, man, he’s still out there.”

  “Well, I ain’t seen him.” Strange nodded and smiled at Johnson’s lady. “Excuse me, y’all, let me get up on over to this bar and have myself a drink.”

  “All right, then, Derek.”

  “All right.”

  Strange ordered a Johnnie Walker Red and soda at the bar. At Stan’s, they served the liquor to the lip of the glass, with the miniature mixer on the side, the way they used to at the old Royal Warrant and the Round Table on the other side of town. When Strange felt like having one real drink, and being around regular people, he came here.

  Sipping his scotch, he felt himself notch down. He talked to a man beside him about the new Redskins quarterback, who had come over from the Vikings, and what the ’Skins needed to do to win. The man was near Strange’s age, and he recalled seeing Bobby Mitchell play, and the talk drifted to other players and the old Jurgenson—led squad.

  “Fight for old D.C.,” said the man, with a wink.

  “Fight for old Dixie, you mean.”

  “You remember that?” said the man.

  “That and a lot of other things. Shame some of these young folks out here, talkin’ about nigga this and nigga that, don’t remember those things, too.”

  “Some of our people get all upset ’cause the word’s in Webster’s dictionary, but they hear it from the mouths of their own sons and daughters and grandkids, and they let it pass.”

  “Uh—huh. How are white people gonna know not to use that word when our own young people don’t know it their own got—damn selves?”

  “I heard that.”

  Strange’s beeper sounded. He read the numbers, excused himself, went to the pay phones back by the bathrooms, and made a call. It was Quinn on the other end of the line.

  “Lookin’ forward to it,” said Strange, when Quinn was done talking.

  “Us too,” said Quinn. “Where should we meet?”

  Strange told him, racked the phone, and checked his wrist—watch. He paid his tab, bought the man at the bar another round, and left Stan’s.

  AT his row house, Strange dumped all the matchbooks and the photograph of Sondra Wilson onto his office desk, went through his mail, and changed into sweats. He went down to his basement, where a heavy bag hung from the steel beams of the ceiling, and listened to the sound track of Guns for San Sebastian on his boom box while he worked the bag. He fed Greco, then stripped off his damp clothing and went to take a shower. If he hurried, he’d have time to visit his mother at the home before picking up Janine for the fights.

  Chapter 19

  RAY and Earl Boone stopped at the red light on Michigan and North Capitol. Ray dragged on his cigarette and Earl sipped from a can of Busch beer. On the corner, a neon—colored poster was stapled to a telephone pole, announcing some kind of boxing event that was scheduled for that night.

  “Feel like goin’ to the fights tonight, Daddy?” said Ray, knowing full well that his father didn’t even like to step outside the car in D.C. “They got some good ones over at that convention center. Looks like Don King’s gonna be there, too.”

  “Don King?” said Earl. “I’d sooner have a dog lick peanut butter out the crack of my ass.”

  “That a no?”

  “You got a green light, Critter. And stop bein’ so silly, too.”

  Ray made a call to Cherokee Coleman’s office, told one of Coleman’s people that he and his father were coming in. They drove into the old warehouse district off Florida Avenue.

  Ray saw an MPD cruiser idling on the street near Coleman’s office. He recognized the small numbers on the bumper of the Crown Vic and the same numbers, printed larger, on its side. Coasting past the driver’s—side window, Ray caught a quick glimpse of the uniform behind the wheel, a big, ugly spade who was staring straight ahead. Coleman had once told him the name of their pocket cop, funny kind of name for a man, funnier still for such a big one, but Ray could not exactly remember what the name was. Sounded like Madonna, some bullshit like that.

  They dropped the kilo off at the garage. The usual types were waiting, with a couple of new, young faces in the bunch, s kullcap stockings worn over the tops of their heads, dead eyes, kill—you—while—I—laugh smiles. There was a north side-south side argument going on as Ray and Earl stepped out of the car, one kid playfully feinting and jabbing another as the rest moved their heads to some jungle—jump coming from a box. Ray could give a good fuck about any of them. And as he and his father smoked and watched them scale out the heroin, he could only think, Everything goes right, this’ll be the last time I ever set foot in this shit hole of a city again.

  TONIO Morris came out of the dark room on the first floor of the Junkyard, where he lived with the other last—stage junkies and the bugs and the rats, lying on a moldy mattress in his own filth. Whe
n he was not here he was out on the street, stealing or begging, or collecting cigarette butts gathered along the curbs, or rummaging through the garbage cans in the alleys behind the houses in Trinidad and LeDroit Park.

  Here in the Junkyard, he experienced mainly boredom, relieved by the threat of drama, the occasional quick act of physical violence, or the odd joke that struck him funny and made him laugh deep in his wheezy chest. He slept fitfully and ate little, except for the small bites of chocolate he cadged from the others. Mostly his life was blocks of time between getting high, and mostly he waited, sometimes knowing but not caring that he was only waiting for death.

  Tonio crossed the big room, his feet crunching pigeon droppings, puddles dampening his brown socks, water entering where the soles had split from the uppers of his shoes. He stood by the brick wall, in a place that had been hammered out, and watched the Ford Taurus pass, driving by the cop car that idled on the street. They were here, on schedule, and he turned and headed for the stairs.

  He passed one of Coleman’s and went up to the second floor, to the open—stalled bathroom area where those who were still strong and those who had something to trade had staked out their spots. The once—beautiful girl named Sondra was in the last stall, leaning against the steel wall, rubbing her arm with her hand as if she were trying to erase a stain.

  Tonio went into the stall and stood very close to her so that he could make out her face. He was beginning to go blind, the final laughing insult of the plague.

  “Hello, Tonio.”

  “Hello, baby. Your boys are here.”

  Sondra smiled and showed filmy teeth; zero nutrition had grayed them. Her lips were chapped and bleeding in spots, raw from the cold. She wore a heavy jacket over her usual outfit, the white shirt and black slacks. An old woman back near Gallaudet College had seen her on the street a week ago and handed the jacket to Sondra out the front door of her row house.