Hell To Pay

by George Pelecanos

  White tossed the Adidas bag in the backseat, got into the front, and turned the ignition. He put the stick into first and heard the tires squealing as he pushed on the gas and let off the clutch. First time this old shit box had ever caught rubber. White didn’t look in the rearview. As he neared Georgia Avenue he began to laugh.

  WHITE stopped at a market on Georgia, one of those fake 7-Elevens, places those Ethiopians named Seven-One or Seven-Twelve, for a big cup of coffee to go. A 4-D cop was parked in the lot, but that meant nothing in this neighborhood, ’less you were out here committing some obvious mayhem. Shoot, someone was smoking cheeva in a nearby car, you could smell it in the lot, and the cop was just sitting there behind the wheel, smellin’ it too, most likely, sipping from a large cup. Why would that cop care to stress his self, make an arrest, when the courts would just kick that smoker right back out on the street?

  White went into the store. He bought his coffee and a couple of Slim Jims, some potato chips, and a U.S. road map, folded up wrong like someone had been using it without paying, which was in a slot next to the gun magazines they sold in that joint. White went back out to the lot, the map in one hand, the other stuff in a brown paper bag.

  There was this boy standing near his Toyota, and when White came out the boy kind of backed away. He was wearing a white T-shirt and khakis, and White had the real feeling he knew this boy or he’d seen him before.

  White wasn’t a fighter and he wasn’t brave, but when it looked like someone was fuckin’ with your whip out here, ordinarily you had to say something. You couldn’t let it pass, because then you were weak. Just a comment like, “You got some business lurkin’ around my shit?” or somethin’ like that. But White didn’t need no drama tonight, what with the police right there, and he let it pass.

  As he pulled out of the lot and back onto Georgia, he noticed that boy, standing on the corner, staring at him and his car. But White wasn’t gonna worry about it now. He was gone.

  WHITE got over to 14th Street and headed south. He took the 14th Street Bridge over the Potomac River and into Virginia, where he followed 395 to 95 South. Soon he was out of anything that looked like the city and seeing signs for places like Lorton, which of course he had heard of, and Dale City, which he had not. Down around Fredericksburg, just an hour into his journey, he saw a Confederate flag sticker on the back window of a pickup truck and knew he was already very far away, maybe a whole world away, from D.C.

  The coffee had done its job. He was wired and bright with thoughts of the future. He was sorry that the little boy had been killed, but he was convinced that he couldn’t have stopped it, and he knew for certain that he couldn’t change what had happened now.

  This was his plan: He had a cousin in Louisiana, a nephew of his mother’s who had come up and stayed with his grandmother a couple of summers back. That summer, White and this boy, Damien Rollins, had got kind of tight. Damien worked in a big diner down there on the interstate, outside New Orleans, and told White that he would hook Charles up if he ever came down south. He said that the man who owned the diner paid cash, under the table. Charles had the idea that this would allow him to work there without incident, under an assumed name, in case anyone was still lookin’ for him up in D.C.

  White had an address on his cousin, and he had held on to it. About halfway down, he’d give him a call and tell him he was on his way. He had money in his pocket, so he’d also tell cuz that he’d be stayin’ with him and help out with half the rent. He’d get that job at the diner and he’d hold it. He wouldn’t get into any kind of bad shit down there and he’d stay away from those who looked wrong.

  Maybe he’d make manager someday at that job.

  chapter 26

  WALTER Lee worked for a big-box electronics retailer up by Westfield Shopping Center, the fancy new name for the mall that everyone in the area still called Wheaton Plaza, a few miles north of the Silver Spring business district. Lee wrote up answering machines, mini-tape recorders, cordless phones, and portable stereos at a computer station after the customers had basically picked the units out themselves. The human resources department gave him the title of sales counselor, but there were few professional salesmen left in the business, and Walter Lee was a clerk.

  Strange and Quinn entered the store late in the morning. There was a sea of maroon shirts in the place and few customers at this hour. Most of the employees looked like African Americans, African immigrants, and Indians of some variety, with some Hispanics thrown into the mix to cater to the Spanish-speaking clientele. Strange found himself wondering if the manager of the store was white.

  No one approached them or asked if they needed help. In fact, several of the sales counselors had scattered when the two of them had walked through the doors. Strange went up to a tall young African and asked him if he could point out Walter Lee. Strange already knew that Lee was on the schedule; he’d phoned the store on the ride out to Wheaton.

  Walter Lee stood by the rack of boom boxes, fiddling with a radio dial, as Strange and Quinn approached. Lee looked up and saw a strong middle-aged man in a black leather jacket, a beeper and a Buck knife and a cell on his belt line, with a younger white dude, also in a leather, had a cocky walk, coming toward him. Lee saw two cops.

  “How you doin’ today?” said Strange.

  “Good. What can I get for you gentlemen?”

  Quinn got too close to Lee, crowding him, like he used to do when he wore the uniform. Strange did the same to Lee on his opposite side and flipped open the leather case he drew from his jacket. He let Lee look at the badge and license and closed the case before he had looked at them too long.

  “Investigators, D.C.,” said Strange. “This here’s my partner, Terry Quinn.”

  “What y’all want?”

  “’Bout a minute of your time,” said Strange. “A few questions about Lorenze Wilder.”

  “I already talked to the police.” Lee looked around the sales floor. He was in his early thirties and carried too much weight for his age. He wore a fade haircut that looked fine on Patrick Ewing but on Lee just looked tired. “This ain’t too cool, you know.”

  “We won’t be long,” said Strange. “You were at the wake for Lorenze, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Y’all were tight?”

  “I already told the police-”

  “Tell us,” said Strange.

  “Tell us again,” said Quinn, his tone softer than his partner’s.

  Lee looked over Strange’s shoulder, then breathed out slow. “We hadn’t been tight for, like, ten, fifteen. We ran together in high school, that was about it.”

  “Coolidge?”

  “Yeah. I came out in eighty-six. Lorenze, I don’t think he finished up.”

  “Lorenze have many enemies when you two were hangin’ together back then?”

  “Back then? I guess he did. He had this way about him, right? But if you’re askin’ me, Did he have enemies lately, or, Do I know who killed him? The answer is, I don’t know.”

  “Y’all didn’t swing in the same circles,” said Strange.

  “Like I said: not for a long time.”

  “You use drugs, Walter?”

  Lee’s eyes, directly on Strange, narrowed, and he lowered his voice. “This ain’t right. You know this ain’t right. Comin’ up in here to a black man’s workplace and tryin’ to sweat him.”

  “If you do drugs,” said Strange, plowing ahead, “and if you cop from the same people, then maybe you know who Lorenze owed. ’Cause it could’ve been a drug debt got him doomed.”

  “Look. I haven’t been usin’ any kind of drugs for a long time. Back in the eighties, yeah, I had a little problem with powder. Lotta people did. But I found my way out of it, see-”

  “Let’s get back to Lorenze.”

  “No, you’re gonna let me finish. I found my way out of it. This isn’t the only job I have. I got a night job, too. I been holdin’ two jobs down now for the last ten years, and all the time doin’ i
t straight. Takin’ care of my little girl, raising her right.”

  “All right,” said Strange. “You’re so far away from all that, why’d you go to Lorenze’s wake, then?”

  “Because I’m a Christian. I went to say a prayer for my old friend. To pay my respects. Even you can understand that, right?”

  “Did Lorenze still hang with some of the old crowd that you know?”

  Lee relaxed his shoulders. It seemed he’d given up on reaching Strange’s human side and now he just wanted this done. “Most of them grew up and moved on. A couple of them passed.”

  “Sequan Hawkins? Ed Diggs?”

  “I haven’t seen Sequan, so I don’t know. Digger Dog? He’s still around.”

  “That’s Diggs’s street name?”

  Lee nodded. “I saw him at the funeral home. He’s still livin’ over there with his grandmother. He looks older, but the same, you know? He always was Lorenze’s main boy.”

  “Thanks for your time,” said Quinn.

  “That it?” said Lee, his eyes still locked on Strange.

  “That’ll do it,” said Strange. “We need you, I expect we can find you here.”

  Strange and Quinn walked toward the entrance to the store. They passed a white guy in a maroon shirt, small, with a belly and patches of hair framing a bald top, trying to calm an angry customer. The manager, thought Strange.

  Out in the lot, Quinn glanced over at Strange on the way to the car. “You were kinda rough on him, weren’t you?”

  Strange stared straight ahead. “We got no time to be nice.”

  They drove out toward Potomac in Strange’s white Caprice. Strange made a cell call to see if Sequan Hawkins was at his job. Then he phoned the office and got Janine. Quinn sipped coffee from a go-cup and listened to their short, businesslike conversation. Strange made another call, left a message on the machine at Lamar Williams’s apartment, and left Lamar the number to his cell.

  “What’s going on?” said Quinn.

  “Lamar’s been trying to get up with me. Janine said he told her it was important.”

  “Well?”

  “He’s got his classes right now. I’ll get him later.”

  “Any idea what he wants?”

  “These boys rolled up on him a while back in Park Morton, lookin’ for Joe’s mother? Pretty sure it’s the same hard cases I saw up at Roosevelt one night at practice. They were huntin’ Lorenze, I’m certain of it now. Bet you they ain’t nothin’ but neighborhood boys, too. Maybe Lamar found out something more.”

  “If they’re stupid enough to stay in the neighborhood, it won’t be long until someone turns them in.”

  “You’re right. If it doesn’t happen today, it’ll happen tomorrow, if you know what I mean. The police are gonna get those boys soon enough.”

  “What if we find them first?”

  “I haven’t figured that out yet, Terry. To tell you the truth, right now I’m just goin’ on blind rage.”

  Strange kept the needle above eighty on the Beltway. Quinn didn’t comment on the speed. He blew the steam off his coffee and took a long pull from the cup.

  “You and Janine got some problems, huh?” said Quinn.

  “Guess you heard that in my tone.”

  “You two gonna make it?”

  “Haven’t figured that one out yet, either,” said Strange. “Anyway, it’s not up to me.”

  Strange parked the Caprice in the lot of Montgomery Mall, near an upscale retailer that anchored the shopping center. In contrast to Westfield, the parking lot here was clean, and the multiethnic people walking from their luxury cars and SUVs to the mall might as well have had dollar signs stamped right on their foreheads.

  Strange and Quinn went up to the second floor of the department store. The sound of piano met them as they reached the top of the stairs. A man in a tuxedo played the keys of a Steinway set near the escalators adjacent to a menswear section and a large layout of men’s shoes. Middle-aged white men wearing pressed jeans and sweaters strolled the aisles. Strange wondered what they were doing here on a Monday, why they weren’t at work. Living off the interest, he reckoned.

  They walked along the display tables of shoes. Several well-dressed salesmen eyed them as they passed.

  “You need any kicks?” said Strange.

  “I got a wide foot,” said Quinn, “and it’s hard to fit. There’s this salesman, though, at Mean Feets, down in Georgetown? Says he can fit me. Dude named Antoine.”

  “Skinny cat, right? Always standin’ outside in the doorway there, hittin’ a cigarette.”

  “That’s him.”

  “I know him. They call him Spiderman.”

  “You know everyone in town?”

  “Not yet,” said Strange. “But it’s a long life.”

  To the side of the shoe department was a shoe-shine stand, where a kneeling man in suspenders was buffing the cap-toes of a suited white man sitting in a chair above him, up on a kind of elevated platform.

  Strange and Quinn waited in an alcove-type area beside the stand. They could hear the white man talking to the shoe-shine man about the Redskins/Ravens game, praising only the black players. They could hear the white man ending his sentences with “man” and they could hear him dropping his g’s, talking in a way that he thought would endear him to the black man kneeling at his feet. Talking in a way he would never talk at work and in a way he would forbid his children from talking at the dinner table at home. Strange looked over at Quinn, and Quinn looked away.

  Soon the white man left, and they went out to the stand, where the shoe shiner was straightening the tools of his trade.

  “Sequan Hawkins?” said Strange, getting a short nod in return. “I’m Derek Strange, and this is Terry Quinn, my partner. We phoned you a little while ago.”

  Hawkins rubbed his hands clean with a rag that smelled of nail polish remover. He was a handsome, well-built man with a light sheen to his close-cropped hair and a careful hint of a mustache.

  “Come on around here,” said Hawkins, indicating with his chin the alcove where they had stood.

  They went back to the alcove and Strange said, “This is about Lorenze Wilder, like I explained.”

  “Let me see some identification, you don’t mind,” said Hawkins.

  Strange flipped open his leather case and produced his badge and license. Hawkins’s mouth turned up on the right, a lopsided grin.

  “You two are, like, cops.”

  “Investigators, D.C.,” said Strange. “We knew the young man who was murdered alongside Lorenze.”

  “My sympathies,” said Hawkins, the grin disappearing at the mention of the boy. “I got two of my own.”

  “You went to the funeral home for Lorenze’s wake,” said Quinn.

  “That’s right.”

  “You were friends with him?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “What made y’all stop being friends?” said Strange.

  “Geography,” said Hawkins. “Ambition.”

  “Geography?”

  “I haven’t lived anywhere near the old neighborhood for the past ten years.”

  “Don’t get back there much, huh?”

  “Oh, I do. I drive over to the house I grew up in, like, once a month. Park outside of it at night sometimes and look through the windows. They got a new family in there now.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “To look at the ghosts.”

  Strange didn’t feel the need to comment. He often went by his mother’s house at night, parked on the street, and did the same thing. He didn’t consider Hawkins’s actions to be odd at all.

  “You ever run into Lorenze Wilder on those trips?” said Quinn.

  “Sure, I saw him now and again. He was still living in his mother’s house; I guess it was paid for with life insurance after her death. He never did get a steady job I knew of. He was one of those… I don’t like to speak ill of the dead. But it was plain Lorenze was never gonna make it.”

  �
�How about Ed Diggs?” said Strange.

  “I saw him around the way, too. He was living with his grandmother last time I ran into him. Ed was the same way.”

  “Any other reason why you might have gone back?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re looking for someone who might have wanted to hunt down Lorenze,” said Strange. “Maybe for a drug debt or somethin’ like that.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “So, you’d go back to the neighborhood once a month for what, exactly?” said Quinn. “Couldn’t be to just park outside your house.”

  “I went back to remember, Mr…”

  “Quinn.”

  “I’d see some of those guys still in the neighborhood, the ones who were already at that dead end, who weren’t even lookin’ to get through it anymore, and it just served to remind me.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of why I’m down on my knees here every day. See, I don’t just work here. I own this concession. I got four of these around the Beltway and a couple downtown.”

  “You must be doin’ all right,” said Strange.

  “Got a house on a couple acres out in Damascus, a wife I love, and a couple of beautiful kids. There’s a Harley in my garage and a Porsche Boxster, too. It’s not the Carrera, but I’m workin’ on that. So yeah, I’ve done all right.”

  “You read about the murders,” said Strange, “and you knew Lorenze. Any ideas?”

  “I think you’re talkin’ to the wrong man. You want to know if Lorenze died because of a street beef, you need to be talking to Ed. They were still as tight as any two men could be, way I understand it. But Ed’s not the type to talk to the police, or even to someone got a toy badge, tryin’ to look like they’re police.”

  “Okay,” said Strange.

  “Couldn’t resist,” said Hawkins. “You need to be flashing that license quick, so no one can look at it too close.”

  “Normally I do. Get back to Diggs.”

  “All I’m saying is, if there’s any information to be got, Ed’s the one to talk to. But you’re gonna have to be creative.” Hawkins looked them both over. “Y’all got a couple of pairs of shoulders on you. Use ’em.”