Soul Circus

by George P. Pelecanos

  Down near Naylor Road, Strange slowed down, moved into the middle lane, and came to a stop at a red light. Cars were parked along the curb to his right. The Benz stopped behind him and the Nissan pulled up to his left. He moved his car up into the crosswalk, as there were no cars there to block his exit. If he needed to make a move he could do so now. The Nissan did the same and pulled up even with his driver’s-side door.

  Could be this was a trap. If that was the case, the rider on the Nissan’s passenger side would be the shooter. But Strange wasn’t ready to look over at them yet.

  In the rearview, Strange could read the front tag on the Benz and he committed it to memory. He said it aloud so that he would get used to the sound of the sequence, and he said it aloud again. He saw a fat young man in the driver’s seat, a ring across the fingers that were gripping the wheel. Another young man, with no expression on his face at all, sat beside him.

  He heard a whistle and looked to his left. Two young men with similar features, thick noses and bulgy eyes, were looking straight at him. A bunch of little tree deodorizers hung from their mirror, and music played loudly in their car. The bass of it rattled their windows. The one in the passenger seat grinned at him, raised his empty hand, and made a quick slashing gesture across his own throat.

  Strange was startled by the loud beep of a car horn. He looked in his rearview and saw the fat man in the Benz making the gun sign with one hand. He pointed the flesh gun in the direction of Strange. And then Strange realized that the fat man was pointing his finger over the roof of Strange’s car, at the traffic light in the intersection. Strange looked ahead at a green light; the fat man was telling him that the light had changed and it was time to move on through.

  Strange gave the Caprice gas. He heard the fading laughter of the two on his left under the throb of their music as he went down the road. The Benz and the Nissan pulled out of the intersection as well but turned right on Naylor Road and vanished from his sight.

  It might have been paranoia, a middle-aged man thinking negative things about a group of young black Anacostians who had the look of being in the life. Strange was angry at himself, and a little ashamed, for the assumptions he had made. But he had also been living in this very real world for a long time. He wrote down the plate number that he had memorized in the spiral notebook he kept by his side.

  STRANGE had first met Robert Gray, not yet a teenager, at Granville Oliver’s opulent house in Prince George’s County the previous fall. Oliver had pulled Gray out of a bad situation in the Stanton Terrace dwellings and had been grooming him for a role in the business he was still running at the time. When Oliver had been arrested and incarcerated, Strange had promised Granville, and had made a promise to himself, that he would look after the boy and try to put him on the right path.

  But it hadn’t been an easy task. There was the geography problem, in that Strange lived in Northwest and Gray’s people were down in Southeast, so he couldn’t see the boy all that much. And Strange wasn’t about to take him under his own roof, especially now that he was dealing with having a new family of his own; Janine and his stepson, Lionel, were his first priority, and he was determined to do everything he could to make that work. So Strange had seen that Gray was put up with his aunt, the sister to his mother, who was doing a stretch for grand theft and assault, her third fall. Through Granville Oliver’s lawyer, Raymond Ives, Strange had arranged for a monthly payment to be made to the aunt, Tosha Smith, as one would pay foster parents for their services. The money was Granville Oliver’s.

  Tosha Smith lived in a unit of squat redbrick apartment buildings on Stanton Road. Strange parked on the street and walked up a short hill, across a yard of weed and dirt, past a swing set where young children and their mothers had congregated. One girl, wearing a shirt displaying the Tweety Bird cartoon character and holding a baby against her hip, looked no older than fifteen. Strange navigated around two young men sitting on the concrete steps of Smith’s unit and ascended more stairs to her apartment door.

  Tosha Smith, fright-time thin with a blue bandanna covering her hair, opened at his knock. Her initial expression was adversarial, but in a practiced, unemotional way, as if this were her usual greeting for every unexpected visitor who came to her door.

  “Tosha,” said Strange.

  “Mister Strange.” Her face softened, but not by much. Strange had visited her many times, but the look of relaxation that came with familiarity did not seem to be in her repertoire.

  A grown man, on the thin side, with bald patches in his hair, sat on the couch playing a video game, staring at the television screen against the wall as a cigarette burned in an ashtray before him. He did not look away from his game or acknowledge Strange in any way.

  Even in the doorway, Strange could take in the unpleasant odor of the apartment, not unclean, exactly, but closed up, airless, with the smell that always reminded him of an unminded refrigerator. And every time he had come by it was dark here, the curtains drawn over shuttered blinds. So it was today.

  “You wanna come in?” said Tosha.

  “Robert in there with you?”

  “He’s out playin’ with his friends.” Tosha noticed something cross Strange’s face and she grinned lopsidedly, showing him grayish teeth. “Don’t worry, I always know where he’s at. We don’t allow him to go more than a block or two away from here.”

  “We?”

  Tosha jerked her head over her shoulder. “I got Randolph stayin’ here with me now. Boy needs a man around, don’t you think?”

  “If it’s right.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that. Randolph keeps him in line, tells Robert to mind his mouth when he gets the way young boys get. Randolph’ll go ahead and smack the black out him, his tongue gets too bright.”

  Strange could hear a baby crying from back in the apartment. He shifted his feet. “You say Robert’s in the vicinity?”

  “You’ll find him out there somewheres close, ridin’ his bike. Tell him to get in here before dark comes, hear?”

  Why don’t you drag your junkie ass on out here and tell him yourself? thought Strange. But he only nodded and went back down the stairs.

  “I’ll be lookin’ for my money this month,” said Tosha to his back.

  Strange kept going, finding relief in the crisp spring air as he made his way outside. The sun had begun to drop behind the neighboring buildings, and shadows had spread upon the apartment grounds.

  Strange circled the block in his car, then widened his search to the adjacent streets. He spotted Robert Gray standing around with a group of boys, most of them older, on the corner of another apartment complex. The boys, some wearing wife-beaters with the band of their boxer shorts showing high above the belt line of their jeans, studied Strange as he got out of his curbed Chevy. Gray said something to one of the boys, got on his bike, and rode it over to Strange, now leaning against the front quarter panel of his car out in the street.

  “How you doin’, Robert?”

  Gray’s eyes went past Strange to somewhere down the street. “I’m all right.”

  “Look at me when I talk to you, son.”

  Gray fixed his gaze on Strange. He had intelligent eyes, and he was polite enough. But Strange could not recall ever seeing him smile.

  “How’s school going?”

  Gray shrugged. “We nearly out. Ain’t all that much left to do.”

  “Your aunt and them treating you okay?”

  “I get along with ’em.”

  “The boyfriend, too? He’s not eatin’ up your share of the food, is he?”

  “Him and my aunt don’t eat all that much, you want the truth.” Gray cocked an eyebrow. He was a handsome boy, one of those who already had the features of a man. “You see Granville?”

  “Saw him today. He was asking after you.”

  “They gonna kill him?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever happens, it doesn’t look like he’s ever gonna come out of jail. It’s important you kno
w this. All that bling-bling you and your friends always talking about and lookin’ up to, the whips and the platinum and the Cristal, you get in the life, it always goes away. Forever, you understand?”

  Gray half nodded and quickly looked off to the group of boys standing on the corner. Strange felt impotent then. To Gray he wasn’t much more than a fool, and an old man in the bargain. This much he knew.

  “Look here,” said Strange. “You still up for my football camp?”

  “Yeah, I’ll play.”

  “I hear you can play.”

  “You know I can.”

  “We’re gonna start the camp in August. Now, all the boys who play for me, they need to show me their last report card from the school year. So I want you to finish up strong.”

  “I’ll do all right. But how I’m gonna get over there to where y’all practice?”

  “I’ll work that out,” said Strange, realizing that he hadn’t figured it out yet. But he would. “All right then, why don’t you get on home before it gets dark.”

  “I will, in a little while.”

  “Take care of yourself, young man.”

  Gray wheeled off on his bike and joined his friends. Strange got back in his car.

  Strange phoned Quinn from his cell as he drove across Anacostia. Quinn told him that he was outside the address given on Olivia Elliot, and he was getting ready to confirm. He asked Strange for the son’s name. Strange gave it to him and told Quinn that if he needed him he could reach him at Janine’s house, which he had not yet gotten used to calling home.

  Strange was looking forward to holding his woman and talking to his stepson, sitting at the dinner table, just being with the ones he loved. Seeing the things he saw out here every day, he figured he deserved a couple of hours of that kind of peace.

  He turned the radio on and moved the dial to PGC. The Super Funk Regulator was on the air, talking to a woman who had called in from her car.

  “Where you at right now?” asked the DJ.

  “I’m on Benning Road, headed home from work.”

  “Who you goin’ to see?”

  “My son Darius,” said the woman giggling, obviously hyped to be on the radio and live. “He’s ten years old.”

  “You have a good one,” said the DJ. “Thanks for rollin’ with a brother.”

  “Thanks for lettin’ a sister roll.”

  Strange smiled. He did love D.C.

  Chapter 10

  IT was Terry Quinn’s habit to keep a paperback western on the car seat beside him when he was on a job, since there were often long stretches during surveillance when he found himself with little to do. Today he had brought along They Came to Cordura, an out-of-print novel by Glendon Swarthout, from the used-book store where he worked in downtown Silver Spring. Sitting in his vintage hopped-up Chevelle, looking at the group of boys playing outside the building where Olivia Elliot had apparently settled, he didn’t think he’d have that extra reading time to kill.

  He was on a street numbered in the high fifties, in the neighborhood of Lincoln Heights, a residential mix of single-family homes and apartments at the forty-five-degree angle of border close to the Maryland line. This portion of the city, on the east side of the Anacostia River, was called Far Northeast, just as Anacostia was known as Far Southeast by many who lived in that part of town.

  Nearby was the W. Bruce Evans Middle School. Administrators there had recently sent a group of “problem students” to the D.C. Jail to be strip-searched in front of prisoners, one of whom had masturbated in plain sight as he watched the kids disrobe. Some District school official had apparently decided to reenact an unauthorized version of Scared Straight. Quinn wondered how that “strategy” would have settled with the parents of problem kids out in well-off Montgomery County or in D.C.’s mostly white, mostly rich Ward 3. But this controversy would fade, as this was a part of the city rarely seen by commuters and generally ignored by the press, out of sight and easily forgotten.

  Lincoln Heights was not all that far from Anacostia, a couple of bus rides away. If Olivia Elliot was trying to put some distance between herself and Mario Durham, she had made only a half-hearted effort. But Quinn wasn’t surprised. Washingtonians were parochial like that; even those who were running from something didn’t like to run too far.

  He grabbed a blank envelope from the glove box and neatly wrote “Olivia Elliot” across its face. He folded a sheet of blank notebook paper, slipped it inside the envelope, and sealed it. Then he got out of his car, locked it down, and crossed the street.

  There were plenty of kids, girls as well as boys, out of doors, though the sun had dropped and dusk had arrived. School was nearly done for the year, and if there was any parental supervision to begin with, it was even more lax this time of year. As Quinn went down the sidewalk toward the kids he saw rows of buzzers in the foyers of the attached homes, indicating that these houses had been subdivided into apartments. An alley split the block halfway, leading to a larger alley that ran behind the row of houses. Not unusual, as nearly every residential street in town had an alley running behind it, another layout quirk unique to D.C.

  Quinn stopped close to the address Strange had given him, where four boys had built a ramp from a piece of wood propped up on some bricks in the street. A kid on a silver Huffy with pegs coming out of the rear axle circled the group.

  “Hey,” said Quinn. “Any of you guys know where I can find Mark Elliot?”

  A couple of the boys snickered and looked Quinn’s way, but none of them replied. The kid on the bike pulled a wheelie and breezed by.

  “He might be new in the neighborhood,” added Quinn.

  They continued to ignore him, so he walked on. He saw some girls on the next corner, one of them sitting atop a mailbox, and he decided to see if he would fare better with them.

  He heard, “Hey, you guys!” in a straight, white voice, and then, “He might be new in the neighborhood!” in the same kind of voice, and then he heard the boys’ laughter behind him. Quinn felt his blood rise immediately; it was hard for him to handle any kind of disrespect. He wondered, as he always did, if he would have been cracked on down here, like these kids were cracking on him now, if he were black.

  “Mister,” said a voice behind him, and he turned. It was the kid on the bike, who had followed him down the street.

  “Yeah.”

  “You lookin’ for Mark?”

  Quinn stopped walking. “Are you Mark?”

  The kid pulled up alongside him and stopped the bike. He was young, lean, with an inquisitive face. “Your face is all pink. You all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You mad, huh?”

  “No, I’m all right.”

  “Shoot, they’re only messin’ with you because you’re white.”

  “Y’all think there’s something wrong with that?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just, we don’t see too many white dudes around here, is all it is. And when we do see ’em, they act like they scared.”

  “I’m not scared,” said Quinn. “Do I look scared to you?”

  “Yeah, okay. But why you lookin’ to get up with me?”

  “You’re Mark Elliot, then.”

  “Yeah, I’m Mark.”

  “I was looking for your mother.” Quinn held up the envelope. “I gotta give her this.”

  “You a police?”

  “No.”

  “A bill collector, right? ’Cause, listen, she left out of here a while ago and I don’t know where she’s at.”

  “She’s gonna be back soon?”

  “I prob’ly won’t see her. I’m gonna be watchin’ the Lakers game tonight over at my uncle’s. He’s fixin’ to pick me up right about now.”

  “Listen, Mark. I’m not looking to hurt her; I’m trying to give her something. She entered a contest. A raffle, you know what that is?”

  “Like they do at church.”

  Quinn nodded. “She won a prize.”

  “What kind of prize?�
��

  “I’m not allowed to say what it is to anyone but her. And I need to put this in her hand.”

  “She’s out gettin’ a pack of cigarettes.”

  “Thought you didn’t know where she was.”

  “Just give it here,” said Mark, reaching out his hand. “I’ll make sure she gets it.”

  “I can’t. It’s against the rules. I’ll drop it by later.” Quinn eye-motioned toward a redbrick structure, two houses back. “I know where you live. You’re up on the third floor, right?”

  “We in two-B,” said Mark, and his features dropped then. He knew he had made a mistake. He kicked ineffectually at some gravel in the street. “Dag,” he said under his breath.

  “I’ll come back,” said Quinn. “Thanks, Mark.”

  Quinn began to walk quickly back toward his car. The kid followed on his bike.

  “What’s your name?” said Mark, cruising alongside Quinn.

  “Can’t tell you that,” said Quinn, who kept up his pace. “It’s against the rules.”

  “I told you mines.”

  Quinn didn’t answer. He went by the group of boys in the street, who appeared not to notice him at all this time, and he put his key to the driver’s lock of his car.

  “Is it fast?” said Mark, who had stopped his bike and was standing behind Quinn.

  “Yeah, it’s fast,” said Quinn, opening the door.

  “You live out in Maryland, huh?”

  Quinn figured the boy had made his plates. Quinn kept his mouth shut and started to get into his car.

  “You don’t want to talk to me no more, huh?”

  Quinn turned and faced the boy. “Look, you’re a good kid. I’d like to talk to you some more and all that, but I gotta go.”

  “If I’m good, then why’d you want to go and do me like you did?”

  “Like how?”

  “You tricked me, mister.”

  “Listen, I gotta get goin’.”

  Quinn settled in the driver’s seat and closed the door. He looked once more at the kid, who was staring at him with disappointment, something worse than anger or hate.