Soul Circus

by George P. Pelecanos

  “That’s how it was,” repeated Jones.

  “We could make it happen right now,” said Long, “you want us to.”

  “I ain’t lookin’ for no full-scale war in broad daylight,” said Durham. “This here is between you two and the cousins. You representin’ Six Hundred, don’t get me wrong. But it’s up to y’all to make it right.”

  Dewayne Durham stared across the table at the two young men. He knew them better, maybe, than they knew themselves. Allante Jones was loyal to his bosses and his friend, fearless, and on the dumb side. Jerome Long was handsome, a player, and, considering his lack of education, smart. What he was missing was courage. He had always avoided going with his hands and he had never killed. This here was a test and an opportunity, to see if these boys were ready to go to the next level, and to reduce the numbers of the Yuma Mob by two, thereby weakening them and Horace McKinley. So it would also be good for business.

  “You tell us what to do, D,” said Long, “and it’s done.”

  “You need to roll up on those cousins out on the street,” said Durham.

  “We gonna need a gun,” said Long. “I gave the Glock back up to Zulu.”

  “Are you gonna use it?” said Durham.

  “I’m ready to put work in,” said Long. He was assuring Durham that he was willing to make his first kill.

  Durham phoned Ulysses Foreman from his cell. He got Foreman’s woman, the big white girl, on the line. He told her what he needed and what he wanted to pay for it, and they all sat around and talked some more about the business and cars and girls. A short while later, Ashley Swann phoned him back with instructions. He thanked her and cut the call.

  “Give him about an hour and a half,” said Durham, “then tip on over to his house.”

  “I won’t let you down,” said Long.

  “It’s all over to y’all,” said Durham. “I’m gonna be out today, so I’m countin’ on you two to get it done.”

  “Where you gonna be at?”

  “I’m taking my son to King’s Dominion.”

  “Thought we was goin’ to Six Flags,” said Walker.

  “Whateva,” said Durham, who saw his son, Laron, a beef baby he had fathered four years ago, once or twice a year. “Point is, I might not be back in town till late.”

  “We’re gonna take care of it,” said Long, Jones nodding his head in agreement.

  “Go on about your business,” said Durham, officially ordering the hit. He flipped some cash off his bankroll for the gun purchase and handed it to Long. He and Walker watched them walk from the room and listened for the door to shut at the front of the house.

  “Think he can do it?” said Walker.

  “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  “Boy’s a studio gangster, you want my opinion.”

  “One way or the other,” said Durham, “we gonna find out now.”

  TERRY Quinn was seated behind the glass case of the used-book-and-record store where he worked, reading a Loren Estleman western called Billy Gashade, when Strange phoned him from his cell. He was headed down into Southeast and was looking for company, wondering if Quinn would like to ride along. Strange said that they could hook up at his house. Quinn said he would ask Lewis if he could cover for him, and Strange said, “Ask him how to get the dirt stains out of my drawers while you’re at it. I bet he’s an expert at that.” Quinn told Strange he’d meet him at his row house on Buchanan and hung up the phone.

  Lewis was back in the sci-fi room, rearranging stock. His thick glasses were down low on his nose, and surgical tape held them together at the bridge. His hair was unwashed and his skin was pale. He wore a white shirt with yellow rings under the arms. Strange called it his trademark, the Lewis Signature, the look that made all the “womenfolk” fall into Lewis’s arms.

  “That record came in you were looking for,” said Lewis.

  It was Round 2, by the Stylistics. Quinn had ordered it from his contact at Roadhouse Oldies, the revered vinyl house specializing in seventies funk and soul, over on Thayer Avenue.

  “Don’t sell it,” said Quinn. “I got it for Derek but he doesn’t know about it. He’s got a birthday coming up.”

  Lewis nodded. “I’ll put it in the back.”

  “I’m going out for the day,” said Quinn. “All right?”

  Lewis had recently bought half the shop from the original owner, Syreeta Janes, and he was more than happy to cut Quinn’s hours whenever possible.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  Out on Bonifant Street, Quinn went up toward the Ethiopian coffee shop beside one of his neighborhood bars, the Quarry House, to grab a go-cup for his drive down Georgia. He walked by a group of young men who were headed into the gun store, a popular spot for sportsmen and home-protection enthusiasts. It was also a hot destination for those D.C. residents who wanted to touch the guns they had seen in magazines and heard about in conversation. Though it was illegal for them to purchase guns in this shop, they could buy or trade for these same models later on the black market or rent them very easily on the street. The store was conveniently located just a half mile over the District line in downtown Silver Spring.

  SITTING at his desk in his house, listening to a new CD, Strange stared at the tremendous amount of paper spread before him. He had been on the Oliver case for some time, and it had been easy to forget, busy as he’d been, just how much work he had done.

  He had started with the original indictment and set up dossiers on all the codefendants and the government witnesses who were scheduled to testify against Oliver. He had studied the discovery, which was everything the government had seized on the case: autopsy files, bullet trajectories, and coroner’s reports among the data. He’d read the 302, the form the FBI used to describe the debriefing of its cooperating witnesses. The names of those witnesses had been blacked out; it was Strange’s job to identify them through careful reconstruction. He’d used the PACER database to turn up previous charges on the witnesses. By law, these charges did not have to be mentioned in the reports provided by the government prosecutors.

  All of this was office work, the first phase of the process. The second phase was done out on the street.

  Here Strange took his research and went out to the civilian population, looking for character witnesses and witnesses for the defense: those who had direct knowledge of the actual “events” referred to in the indictment. In court jackets he looked for assault cases, complainants in domestic disputes, and codefendants who might have a beef against his client. He was looking for any kind of background that could be used during cross-examination. Most of the people he spoke to would never make it to the stand.

  Strange looked at it all as a stage play with a large cast of characters. In the beginning, he had written Oliver’s name on a large sheet of paper and connected lines, like tentacles, from it to the names of those who had known him or had been affected by his alleged deeds. These included the current drug dealers who had stepped into Oliver’s abandoned territory. All of this was an awful lot of work, but by doing it, he found that the various relationships and their possible ramifications sometimes became more graphic, and evident, to him.

  Many of the leads he’d gotten were false leads, and though he suspected them to be from the get-go, he still went after anything he could. He had even traveled down to Leavenworth, on the nickel of Ives, to interview a former member of Oliver’s gang, Kevin Willis, who had later gone to work for the Corey Graves Mob in another part of Far Southeast. Willis had talked on tape about everything he knew: who was “hot” on the street and who would or would not most likely flip. He had talked freely about charges still pending against him. Strange had the tapes in his office off Georgia and duplicates here in his house. But, as with many of the interviews he’d done, the tapes had given him nothing.

  But Strange had a feeling about Devra Stokes. He sensed that Stokes, one of Phillip Wood’s former girlfriends, had more to tell him. He had phoned the hair and nail salon and been told s
he was working today. He had gotten Janine to start the process to obtain a Federal Order of Subpoena, in the event that he would need her to testify.

  Greco’s sharp bark came from the foyer down on the first floor. When Strange went out to the landing and saw Greco’s nose at the bottom of the door, his tail twitching, he knew that this was Quinn.

  Quinn, a folder under his arm, came up to the office and waited as Strange gathered up the papers he needed for the day.

  “What the hell is this?” said Quinn, chuckling, holding up a CD he had picked up off the desk. “My Rifle, My Pony and Me?”

  Strange looked down at his shoes. “Meant to put that away before you came by. Knew you’d give me some shit about it if you saw it.”

  “It’s a song from Rio Bravo, right?”

  Strange nodded. “Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson sing it in that scene in the jail.”

  “What scene in the jail? Christ, half the movie’s set in the jail.”

  “I know it. But look, they got another twenty-five tracks just like that one on there, too. Title tunes with vocals from old westerns.”

  “Okay. You haven’t actually seen all these, have you?”

  “Most of ’em, you want the truth. But I got a twenty-year jump on you.”

  “Seen The Hanging Tree lately?” said Quinn, reading off the CD.

  “No, but I saw a damn good one the other night on TNT. I forgot the name of it already, but I been meaning to tell you about it. Italian, by that same guy did A Bullet for the General.”

  “I liked that one.”

  “Anyhow, in this movie, they’re gettin’ ready for the big gunfight at the end. The hero gets off his horse and faces a whole bunch of gunmen standing in this big circle of stones, like an arena they got set up.”

  “That’s been done before.”

  “Well, they do that Roman Coliseum thing for the climax of these spaghetti westerns all the time. They’re Italians, remember?”

  “I’m hip.”

  “So they’re all starin’ at each other for a while, like they do. Squintin’ their eyes and shiftin’ them around. Then this hero says to these four bad-asses, before he draws his gun, ‘What are the rules to this game? I like to know the rules before I play.’ And the main bad-ass, got a scar on his face, he smiles real slow and says, ‘It’s simple. Last man standing wins.’ ”

  Quinn grinned. “I guess that put a battery up your ass, didn’t it?”

  “I did like that line, man.”

  “You need to get out more, Derek.”

  “I’m out plenty.” Strange stood, slipping the papers he needed into a manila folder. He undid his belt, looped it though the sheath of his Buck knife, moved the sheath so that it rested firmly beside his cell holster on his hip, and refastened the belt buckle. “You ready?”

  Quinn nodded at the knife. “You are.”

  “Comes in handy sometimes.”

  “You had a gun, you wouldn’t need to carry a knife.”

  “I’m through with guns,” said Strange. “Let’s go.”

  Down the stairs, Strange put a bowl of water out by the door and dropped a rawhide bone to the floor at Greco’s feet.

  “He gonna be all right here all day?” said Quinn.

  “Too hot to have him in the car,” said Strange. “He’ll be fine.”

  DRIVING down Georgia in the Caprice Classic, Strange had the Stylistics’ debut playing in the cassette deck; “Betcha By Golly, Wow” was up, symphonic and filling the car. Strange was softly singing along, closing his eyes occasionally as he tried to hit the high notes on the vocals.

  “Careful, man,” said Quinn. “You keep shutting your eyes when you’re gettin’ all soulful like that, you’re gonna get us killed.”

  “I don’t need my eyes. I’m driving by memory.”

  “And you’re gonna bust a stitch in your jeans, the way you’re trying to reach those notes.”

  “Tell me this isn’t beautiful, though.”

  “It’s dramatic, I’ll say that much for it. Kinda like, I don’t know, an opera or something.”

  “Exactly. What I was trying to tell you yesterday.”

  “The singer’s really got a nice voice, too.” Quinn’s eyes smiled from behind his aviators. “What’s her name?”

  “Quit playin’. That’s a dude, Terry! Russell Thompkins Jr.”

  “Produced by Albert Belle, right?”

  “Funny,” said Strange.

  “You got all of this group’s albums?”

  “I’m missin’ Round Two. You asked me the same question last week.”

  “I did?” said Quinn.

  They got down into Anacostia. They drove the green hills as the sun came bright and flashed off the leaves on the trees. Generations of locals were out on their porches, talking on the sidewalk, and working in their yards.

  “Just another neighborhood,” said Strange.

  “On a day like this one, it does look pretty nice.”

  “I was just thinking, looking at these people who live here… The world we run in, all we tend to see is the bad. But that’s just a real small part of what’s going on down here.”

  “Maybe it is a small part of it. But a mamba snake is small, and so is a black widow spider. Doesn’t make those things any less deadly.”

  “Terry, when you say Far Southeast, or Anacostia, it’s like a code or something to the rest of Washington. Might as well just add the words ‘Turn your car around,’ or just ‘Stay away.’ ”

  “Okay, it’s a lot nicer here than people think it is. It’s an honest-to-God neighborhood. But the reality is, you’re more likely to get yourself capped down here than you are in Ward Three.”

  “True. But there’s also the fact that Anacostia’s damn near all black. That might have a little somethin’ to do with the fear factor, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Yeah,” said Strange, “absolutely. And it’s bullshit, too. But you can almost understand it, the images we get fed all the time from the papers and the television news. Listen, I had this friend, name of James, who lived down here. Still does, far as I know. He was a cameraman, worked for one of the network affiliates. So this network was doing a story down here, one of those segments on ‘the ghetto,’ and they found out that my buddy James lived in this part of the city. So the producer in charge got hold of him and said, ‘Take your video camera and go get some tape of black people down in Anacostia.’ ”

  “He said it like that?”

  “Exactly like that. This was about fifteen, twenty years back, when you could still say those kinds of stupid-ass things and not worry about gettin’ sued. So James does his thing and takes the footage back to the studio. They run it for the producer and it’s not exactly what he had in mind. It’s images of people leaving their houses to go to work, cutting their grass, dropping their kids off at school, like that. And the producer gets all pissed off and says to James, ‘I thought I told you to get some footage of black people in Anacostia.’ And James says, ‘That’s what I got.’ And the man says, ‘What I meant was, I wanted shots of people standing outside of liquor stores, dealing drugs, stuff like that.’ And James said, ‘Oh, you wanted a specific kind of black person. You should have said so, man.’ ”

  “What happened to your friend?”

  “I don’t think he got any work out of that producer again. But he’s doin’ all right. And he says it was worth it, just to make that point.”

  Strange pulled into the parking lot of the strip shopping center on Good Hope Road. He fit the Caprice in a space near the hair and nail salon and had a look around the lot. Strange didn’t see Devra Stokes’s car, though the woman he had talked to on the phone had said she would be working today.

  Quinn picked up his folder off the seat beside him. “I brought some flyers for Linda Welles, that girl went missing.”

  “That’s all your doin’ on that is passing out flyers?”

  Quinn hesitated for a moment before answering Strange. He had spent
some time on a rough stretch of Naylor Road, knocking on doors, talking to people on the street. And he had tried to speak to a group of hard young men who seemed to gather daily on the steps of a dilapidated apartment structure that had been visible in the Welles video. But the young men had given him blank kill-you stares and implicit threats, and he hadn’t hung with them long, despite the fact that he felt they had to know something about the girl. In the end, he had walked away from them with nothing but shame.

  “I’ve interviewed her family,” said Quinn. “I’ve talked to her friends and I went down to the neighborhood that shows up on the video. I got nothin’, Derek, so I’m down to doing this.”

  “Sue’s gonna keep you hard on the case, huh?”

  “It’s not just Sue. I’m trying to do something positive for a change. That Mario Durham thing left a bad taste in my mouth, you want the truth.”

  “Mine, too, I can’t lie about it. But I’m running a business, and I got employees like you to support, not to mention a new family. It was quick money and I took it.”

  “It stunk, just the same.”

  “We can talk about that over a beer later on, you feel like it.”

  “All right. In the meantime, maybe I’ll go over to that grocery store and pass some of these out while you talk to Stokes.”

  Strange reached for the handle on the door. “I’ll meet you back at the car.”

  Chapter 16

  “THAT was Inez, over at the shop,” said Horace McKinley, flipping his cell closed. “That police, or whoever he is, came by to see Devra.”

  “Same one we tailed yesterday?”

  “He’s drivin’ the same car. He showed Inez some kind of badge, told her he was an investigator for D.C., some bullshit like that.”

  “He leave his name?”

  “Said it was Strange.” McKinley, in fact, had known Strange’s name for some time now.

  “The girl ain’t there, though, right?” said Michael Montgomery.

  “Nah, Inez sent her home for a couple of hours when that man called, said he was rollin’ on down.”