Right as Rain (3 page)

“That the grandmother’s house we’re looking at?”

“Uh—huh. I been staking it out all this week. Leon finally showed up today. That’s his hooptie over there, that yellow Pontiac Astra with the rust marks, parked in front of the house. Ugly—ass car, too.”

“Sister to the Chevy Vega.”

“People paid extra for that thing ’cause it had the Pontiac name on it?”

“Some did. Nice work.”

“Thanks, boss. How you want to handle it?”

Strange gave it some thought. “I think we need to brace him in front of his grandmother.”

“I was thinking the same way.”

“Come on.”

They got out of the Acura, Lattimer retrieving his overcoat first and shaking himself into it as they walked alongside Langdon Park toward Mills Avenue. A couple of young boys, school age, were sitting on a bench wearing oversize parkas, looking hard at Strange and Lattimer, not looking away as Strange glanced in their direction.

“Hold on for a second, Derek,” said Lattimer, putting a little skip in his walk and side—glancing Strange. “I got to find me a tree… .”

“Funny,” said Strange.

They were past the park and onto Mills. Lattimer said. “You want me to take the alley?”

“Yeah, take it. I don’t feel like running today if I don’t have to. My knees and this cold aren’t the best of friends.”

“I don’t feel like running, either. You know how I perspire quick, soon as I start to buck, even in this weather.”

“I don’t suspect he’ll be going anywhere, but you never know. Speaking of which …”

Lattimer saw Strange pull the Leatherman tool from his pocket and flick open its knife as they neared Leon’s yellow Astra. Still walking, Strange drew change from his pocket and dropped it on the street beside the door of the car. He got down on one knee to pick it up, and while he was down there, punctured the driver’s—side tire with the knife. He retrieved his change, closing the tool and replacing it in his pocket as he rose.

“See you in a few,” said Strange.

He took the steps up to the porch of the row house as Lattimer cut into the alley. He waited half a minute for Lattimer to get behind the house, and then he knocked on the door.

Strange saw a miniature face peer around a lace curtain and heard a couple of locks being turned. The door opened, and a very small woman with prunish skin and a cotton—top of gray hair stood in the frame. The woman gave Strange a thorough examination with her eyes.

She looked back over her shoulder toward a nicely appointed living room that spread out off the foyer. Then she raised her voice: “Leon! There’s a police officer here to see you.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Strange. “And tell him not to run, will you? My partner’s out back in the alley, and he’ll be awful mad if he gets to perspiring. The sweat, it stains his pretty clothes.”

S
TRANGE
took Leon Jeffries out the kitchen door to a small screened—in porch. The porch gave to a view of a gnarled patch of backyard and the alley. After Strange got Leon out to the porch, he waved Lattimer in from there. Leon confessed to bilking the old woman from Petworth with a pyramid investment scheme shortly thereafter.

“What y’all gonna do to me now?” asked Leon. He was a small, feral, middle—aged man with pale yellow eyeballs. He wore a pinstriped suit jacket with unmatching black slacks and a lavender, open—collar shirt.

“You need to give our client back her money, Leon,” said Strange. “Then everything’ll be chilly.”

“I
planned
on gettin’ her money back to her, with interest. Takes a little time, though. See, the way I worked it, I used the next person’s investment to pay the, uh, previous person’s investment, in installments. Sort of how some folks stay ahead of the game with multiple credit cards.”

“That’s a
legal
kind of scam, Leon. What we’re talking about here is, you were taking off old ladies that trusted you. How you think that’s gonna look to a jury?”

“A jury trial for a small—claims thing?”

“You got a sheet, Leon?” asked Lattimer.

“I ain’t never been incarcerated.”

“So you got a sheet,” said Lattimer. “And this goes before a judge, forget about a jury, you get a judge on a bad day he ate the wrong brand of half—smokes for breakfast, some shit like that, they gonna put your thin ass
away.
”

“We need the money for our client now,” said Strange. “That’s all she wants. She’s a good woman, which you probably saw as a weakness, but we’re gonna forget about that, too, if you come up with the two thousand you took from her straightaway.”

“I’d have to get me a job,” said Leon. “’Cause currently, see, I don’t have those kind of resources.”

“You gonna wear that outfit to the job interview?” said Lattimer.

Leon, wounded, looked up at Lattimer and touched the lapel of his lavender shirt. “This right here is a designer shirt. An Yves Saint Laur
ent.
”

“From the Singapore factory, maybe. Man your age ought to be wearin’ some cotton by now, too, instead of that sixty—forty blend you got on right there.”

Strange said, “How we going to work this out with the money, Leon?”

“I ain’t got no got—damn money, man; I told you!”

Some spittle flew from Leon’s mouth and a bit of it landed on the chest area of Lattimer’s overcoat. Lattimer grabbed Leon by the lapels of his jacket and pulled Leon toward him.

“You spit on my cashmere, man!”

“All right, Ron,” said Strange. Lattimer released Leon.

“Everything all right over there?” said an elderly man from the backyard of the house to the left. An evergreen tree grew beside the porch, blocking their view of the man behind the voice.

“Everything’s fine,” said Strange, speaking loudly in the direction of the man. “We’re officers of the law.”

“No,
they ain’t!” yelled Leon.

“Go on inside now,” said Strange. “We got this under control.”

Strange squared his body so that he was standing close to Leon. Leon backed up a step and scratched at the bridge of his dented nose.

“Well,” said Leon haughtily.

“Well
water,
” said Lattimer.

“Look here,” said Strange. “What me and my partner are going to do now, we’re going to go back inside and talk to your grandmother. Explain to her about this misunderstanding you got yourself into. I think your grandmother will see that she has to give us what we need. I’m sure this house is paid for, and from the looks of things around here, it won’t be too great a burden for her to write the check. I know she doesn’t want to see you go to jail. Shame she has to settle up the debt for your mistakes, but there it is.”

“Won’t be the first time, I bet,” said Lattimer.

“What ya’ll are doin’, it’s a shakedown. It’s not even legal!” Leon looked from Strange to Lattimer and drew his small frame straight. “Not only that. First you go and insult my vines. And now you’re fixin’ to shame me to my granmoms!”

“Sooner or later,” said Strange, “everybody’s got to pay.”

S
TRANGE
split up with Lattimer, drove down to the MLK Jr. library on 9th Street, and went up to the Washingtoniana Room on the third floor. He retrieved a couple of microfiche spools from a steel drawer where the newspaper morgue material was chronologically arranged. He threaded the film and scanned newspaper articles on a lighted screen, occasionally dropping change into a slot to make photostatic copies when he found what he thought he might need. After an hour and a half he turned off the machine, as his eyes had begun to burn, and when he left the library the city had turned to night.

Outside MLK, Strange phoned Janine’s voice mail and left a message: He needed a current address on a man. He gave her the subject’s name.

“Hey, what’s goin’ on, Strange?” said a guy who was walking by the bank of phones.

“Hey, how you
doin?
”

“Ain’t seen you around much lately.”

“I been here,” said Strange.

Strange headed uptown and stopped at the Raven, a neighborhood bar on Mount Pleasant Street, for a beer. Afterward he walked up to Sportsman’s Liquors on the same street and bought a six—pack, then drove to his Buchanan Street row house off Georgia.

He drank another beer and got his second wind. He phoned a woman he knew, but she wasn’t home.

Strange went up to his office, a converted bedroom next to his own bedroom on the second floor, and read the newspaper material, a series in the
Washington Post
and a
Washington City Paper
story, that he had copied from the library. As he looked them over, his dog, a tan boxer named Greco, slept with his snout resting on the toe of Strange’s boot.

When he was done, he logged on to his computer and checked his stock portfolio to see how he had done for the day. The case for
Ennio Morricone: A Fistful of Film Music
was sitting on his desk. He removed disc one from the case and loaded it into the CPU of his computer. The first few strains of
“Per Qualche Dollaro in Piu”
drifted through the room. He turned the volume up just a hair on his Yamaha speakers, sat back in his reclining chair with his hands folded across his middle, closed his eyes, and smiled.

Strange loved westerns. He’d loved them since he was a kid.

Chapter
3

H
E
locked the front door of the shop and checked it, then walked up Bonifant Street toward Georgia Avenue, turning up the collar of his black leather to shield his neck from the chill. He passed the gun shop, where black kids from over the District line and suburban white kids who wanted to be street hung out on Saturday afternoons, feeling the weight of the automatics in their hands and checking the action on guns they could buy on the black market later that night. Integras and Accords tricked out with aftermarket spoilers and alloy wheels parked outside the gun shop during the day, but it was night now and the street had quieted and there were few cars of any kind parked along its curb. He passed an African and a Thai restaurant, and Vinyl Ink, the music store that still sold records, and a jewelry and watch—repair shop that catered to Spanish, and one each of many braid—and—nail and dry—cleaning storefronts that low—rised the downtown business district of Silver Spring.

He crossed the street before reaching the Quarry House, one of two or three neighborhood bars he frequented. About now he could taste his first beer, his mouth nearly salivating at the thought of it, and he wondered if this was what it felt like to have a problem with drink. He’d attended a seminar once when he had still worn the uniform, and there he’d learned that clock—watchers and drink counters were drunks or potential drunks, but he was comfortable with his own reasons for looking forward to that first one and he could not bring himself to become alarmed. He liked bars and the companionship to be found in them; it was no more complicated or sinister than that. And anyway, he’d never allow alcoholism to happen to him; he had far too many issues to contend with as it stood.

He cut through the bank parking lot, passing the new Irish bar on the second floor of the corner building at Thayer and Georgia, and he did not slow his pace. He neared a black man coming in the opposite direction, and though either one of them could have stepped aside, neither of them did, and they bumped each other’s shoulder and kept walking without an apology or a threatening word.

On the east side of Georgia he passed Rosita’s, where the young woman named Juana worked, and he was careful to hurry along and not look through the plate glass colored with Christmas lights and sexy neon signs advertising Tecate and other brands of beer, because he did not want to stop yet, he wanted to walk. Then he was passing a pawnshop and another Thai restaurant and
a pollo
house and the art supply store and the flower shop … then crossing Silver Spring Avenue, passing the firehouse and the World Building and the old Gifford’s ice—cream parlor, now a day—care center, and across Sligo Avenue up to Selim, where the car repair garages and aikido studios fronted the railroad tracks.

He dropped thirty—five cents into the slot of a pay phone mounted between the Vietnamese
pho
house and the NAPA auto parts store. He dialed Rosita’s, and his friend Raphael, who owned the restaurant, answered.

“Hey, amigo, it’s —”

“I know who it is. Not too many gringos call this time of night, and you have that voice of yours that people recognize very easily. And I know who you want.”

“Is she working?”

“Yes.”

“Is there a
c
next to her name on the schedule?”

“Yes, she is closing tonight. So you have time. Are you outside? I can hear the cars.”

“I am. I’m taking a walk.”

“Go for your walk and I’ll put one on ice for you, my friend.”

“I’ll see you in a little bit.”

He hung the receiver in its cradle and crossed the street to the pedestrian bridge that spanned Georgia Avenue. He went to the middle of the bridge and looked down at the cars emerging northbound from the tunnel and the southbound cars disappearing into the same tunnel. He focused on the broken yellow lines painted on the street and the cars moving in rows between the lines. He looked north on Georgia at the street lamps haloed in the cold and watched his breath blow out into the night. He had grown up in this city, it was his, and to him it was beautiful.

Sometime later he crossed the remainder of the bridge and went to the chain—link fence that had been erected in the past year. The fence prevented pedestrians from walking into the area of the train station via the bridge. He glanced around idly and climbed the fence, dropping down over its other side. Then he was in near the small commuter train station, a squat brick structure with boarded windows housing bench seats and a ticket office, and he went down a dark set of stairs beside the station. He entered a fluorescent—lit foot tunnel that ran beneath the Metro and B & O railroad tracks. The tunnel smelled of nicotine, urine, and beer puke, but there was no one in it now, and he went through to the other side, going up another set of concrete steps and finding himself on a walkway on the west side of the tracks.