Soul Circus (3 page)

They shook hands. Durham ended the ritual with a weak finger snap.

“Let me get on back to Mer-land where I belong,” said Foreman.

“I got an appointment I got to get to my own self.”

“You need me to drop you somewheres close?” Foreman had no intention of driving Mario Durham anywhere, but he felt it made good sense to be polite, go through the usual motions and ask. Foreman’s business relationship with Dewayne Durham was on the rise.

“Nah, I’m just down there around the corner.”

“Awright, then,” said Foreman.

“Aiight.”

Durham dropped the pistol into the large pocket of his oversize jeans and stepped out of the car. He walked down the hill and cut left. Foreman watched him, wearin’ a boy’s-size Redskins jersey, a slip of nothing in his Hilfigers, hanging like some sad shit on his narrow ass. “I’m just down there around the corner” — that was some bullshit right there. Twigs didn’t own no car, or if he did it wasn’t nothin’ but a bomb. Most likely he was headed for the Metro station to catch a train to that appointment he had. Must be a real important date, too. Foreman had to admit, though, Mario Durham always did have some good chronic to smoke. Dewayne, a dealer over in Congress Heights, advanced him however much he wanted.

Durham walked toward the Metro station in Barry Farms, passing hard-eyed boys on the sidewalk, thinking how different it felt when you had a gun in your pocket. Different on the physical tip, like he’d grown taller and put on fifty pounds of muscle. Lookin’ in those young boys’ narrowed eyes, thinking, Yeah, go ahead, fuck with me; I got somethin’ right here gonna make your eyes go wide. Having that .38 just touching his leg through the fabric of his Tommys, it made him feel like he had four more inches of dick on him, too.

He’d catch a Green Line train and take it over the river to the Petworth stop. The man’s office, he’d seen the sign out front with the magnifying glass on it all those times he’d been to that titty bar they had across the street from it, on Georgia. His office, it wasn’t far from the station stop.

Durham wondered, could the man in that office find Olivia? Because his kid brother wasn’t gonna wait much longer without taking some kind of action his own self. Sign out front claimed they did investigations.

Strange Investigations.

That’s what it said.

“THERE it is right there,” said Quinn, pointing to the in-dash cassette deck in Strange’s Chevy.

“He said ‘hug her.’ ” Strange sang the words: “ ‘Makes you want to love her, you just got to hug her, yeah.’ ”

“ ‘You just got to
fuck
her,’ ” said Quinn. “That’s what the man’s sayin’. Rewind it and listen to it again.”

They were on eastbound H Street in Northeast, where the sidewalks were live with pedestrian traffic, folks hanging out, and deliverymen moving goods from their curbed trucks to the shops. They passed a Murray’s Steaks, several nail salons and hair galleries, and a place called Father and Son Beer and Wine. Strange turned right on 8th and drove toward Southeast. He rewound the tape and the two of them listened again to the line in question.

“There it is, man,” said Strange. “He said ‘hug her.’ ”

“He said ‘fuck her,’ Dad.”

“See, you’re focusing on the wrong thing, Terry. What you ought to be doing, on a beautiful day like this, is groovin’ to the song. This here is the Spinners’ debut on Atlantic. Some people call this the most beautiful Philly soul album ever recorded.”

“Yeah, I know. Produced by Taco Bell.”

“
Thom
Bell.”

“What about those guys Procter and Gamble you’re always goin’ on about?”

“Gamble and Huff. Point is, this is pretty nice, isn’t it? Shoot, Terry, you had to have —”

“Been there; I know.”

“That’s right. You take all those slow-jam groups from that period, the Chi-Lites, the Sylistics, Harold Melvin, the ballad stuff that EWF was doin’, and what you got is the most beautiful period of pop music in history. It’s like America got their own . . . they finally got their own opera, man.”

Quinn turned up the volume on the deck. He chuckled, listening to the words. “Derek, is that what you mean by opera, right there?”

“What?”

“ ‘Makes a lame man walk . . . makes blind men talk about seein’ again.’ ”

“Look, the song’s called ‘One of a Kind (Love Affair).’ Ain’t you never had the kind of love that could rock your world like that?”

“When I was bustin’ a nut, maybe.”

“That’s what I can’t understand about you young folks, Generation XYZ, or whatever you’re calling yourselves this week. Y’all ain’t got no romance in you, man.”

“I had plenty in me last night.”

“Oh, yeah?” Strange looked across the bench. “How’s Sue doin’, anyway?”

“She’s fine.”

“Yeah, and she’s
fine
, too.”

On M Street, Strange cut east. They took the 11th Street Bridge over the river and into Anacostia, bringing them straight onto Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue.

The welcoming strip in this historic part of town was clean and carefully tended. Merchants swept the sidewalks outside their businesses, and the cars along the curb were late model and waxed. Commercial thinned out to residential as the Chevy began to climb the hill in the direction of St. E’s. Strange and Quinn drove by the Big Chair without remark. Farther up, on the left, Strange mentally noted the nice lines on a pretty red El Dorado parked along the curb. He loved the beauty of big American cars.

“ ‘I Could Never Repay Your Love,’ ” said Strange, upping the volume on the deck.

“Thank you, Derek,” said Quinn.

Strange ignored him, settling low on the bench. He smiled as the vocals kicked in. “Just listen to this, man. Philippe Wynne really testifies on this one here.”

STRANGE found Devra Stokes on their third stop. He had first gone to the Paramount Beauty Salon on Good Hope Road, where no one claimed to remember the girl. Strange checked his files, located in the trunk of his car: Janine had located Devra’s mother, Mattie Stokes, using the People Finder program on her computer. Strange found her, a tired-looking woman in her late thirties, at her place in the Ashford Manor apartments, down by the Walter E. Washington Estates off Southern Avenue. She informed Strange that her daughter was working in another beauty parlor on Good Hope Road, a block east of the Paramount.

Quinn stayed in the car while Strange entered the salon. He went directly to an oldish woman, small as a child, whom he figured to be the owner or the manager. He told the hard-faced woman that he was looking for Devra Stokes and was pointed to a young lady braiding another woman’s hair. A little boy, no older than four, sat at the foot of the chair, playing with action figures and making flying noises as he moved the figures through the air. When the older woman told Devra that a man was here to see her, she glanced at him with nothing telling in her eyes and returned to her task at hand. Strange had a seat by the shop-front window and flipped through a copy of
Essence
magazine. The miniature woman he had spoken to was looking him over as if he had just come calling on her granddaughter with flowers, chocolates, and a packet of Trojan Magnums. He tried to ignore her and studied the photos of the models in the magazine.

Ten minutes later Devra Stokes walked over to Strange and sat down beside him. Time and her environment had not yet bested her. She had almond-shaped, dark brown eyes and a wide, sensuous mouth.

“You lookin’ to talk to me?”

“Derek Strange.” He flashed her his license. “Investigator, D.C.”

“This about Phillip and them?”

“Yes.”

“Knew y’all would be along.”

“Will you speak with me?”

“I can’t today. I got appointments.”

“But you will?” Devra looked away. Strange gently touched her arm to bring her back. “You filed a brutality complaint against Wood.”

“That was a while back.”

“When the time came to take the stand, you changed your mind.”

Devra shrugged and looked in the direction of the little boy, still playing beside the chair. Strange was certain that Phillip Wood had paid her to stay away from court. It was possible, also, that Wood had fathered her child. Wood would be put away forever, and with him any money he could provide to Stokes and her son. Strange was counting on her awareness that she’d been permanently dogged out. He hoped it burned her deep.

“I just need some background information,” said Strange. “Chances are you won’t have to testify.”

“Like I say, I can’t talk now.”

“Can I get up with you here?”

“Where else I’m gonna be?” said Devra, looking down at her shoes.

“What time you get off today?”

“About five, unless my clients run over.”

“Your little boy likes ice cream, right?”

“He likes it.”

“How about I see you around five? We’ll find him some, and we’ll talk.”

Devra’s eyes caught light and her mouth turned up at the sides. She was downright pretty when she smiled. “I like ice cream, too.”

Course you do, thought Strange. You’re not much more than a kid yourself.

AT the Metro station Strange idled the Caprice while Quinn passed out flyers to Anacostians rushing to catch their Green Line trains. The flyers were headed with the words “Missing and Endangered” and showed a picture of a fourteen-year-old girl that Sue Tracy, Quinn’s girlfriend, had been hired to find. Tracy and her partner, Karen Bagley, had a Maryland-based business that primarily took runaway and missing-teen cases. Bagley and Tracy Investigative Services also received grant money for helping prostitutes endangered by their pimps and violent johns. Quinn had first met Tracy when he agreed to take on a case of hers that had moved into D.C.

Strange watched a cocky and squared-up Quinn through the windshield, the only white face in a sea of black ones. Quinn was drawing fish eyes from some of the young men and a few double takes from the older members of the crowd. Strange knew that Quinn was unfazed by the attention. In fact, he liked the challenge of it, up to a point. He was, after all, a former patrol cop. As long as he was given the space he gave others, everything would be cool.

But it often didn’t happen that way. And when Quinn was shown disrespect, the kind that went down with a subtle eye sweep from a black to a white, it got under his skin, and baffled him a little bit, too.

Something was said by a couple of young males to Quinn as he began to walk back to the car. Quinn stopped and got up in the taller of the two’s face. Strange watched Quinn’s jaw tense, the set of his eyes, the vein wormed on his forehead, the way he seemed to grow taller as the blood crept into his face. Strange didn’t even think to get out of his car. It was over without incident, as he knew it would be. Soon Quinn was dropping onto the bench beside him.

“You all right?”

“Guy
told
me to give him a dollar after he called me a white boy. Like that was gonna convince me to pull out my wallet. God, I love this town.”

“It was the
boy
part got your back up, huh?”

“That was most of it, I guess.”

“Think how it felt for grown men to be called
boy
every day for, I don’t know, a couple hundred years before you were born.”

“Yeah, okay. So now it’s my turn to get fucked with. We all gotta have ourselves a turn. For some shit that happened, like you say, before I was even born.”

“You don’t even want to go there, Terry. Trust me.”

“Right.” Quinn breathed out slowly. “Look, thanks for stopping here. I told Sue I’d pass some of those out.”

“Who’s she looking for, anyway?”

“Girl named Linda Welles. Fourteen years old, ninety-nine pounds. She ran off from her home in Burrville last year, over near Woodson High, in Far Northeast? Couple of months later, her older brother recognizes her when he’s with his boys, watching one of those videos they pass around.”

“She was the star, huh?”

“Yeah. It was supposed to be a house party, freak-dancing and all that, but then a couple of guys start going at it with her back in one of the bedrooms, right on the tape. Not that she wasn’t complicit, from the looks of it.”

“Fourteen years old, complicit got nothin’ to do with it.”

“Exactly. The brother recognized the exterior shot of the street where they had the party. It was on Naylor Road, up around the late twenties, here in Anacostia. That was a while back. The girl’s just vanished, man — nothing since.”

“So, what, you gonna go deep undercover down here to find her?”

“Just passing out flyers.”

“ ’Cause you’re gonna have a little trouble blending in.”

“But I feel the love,” said Quinn. “That counts for something, doesn’t it?”

They drove back to W Street, passing the Fredrick Douglass Home, then cut up 16th toward Minnesota Avenue, where they could catch Benning Road to the other side of the river and back into the center of town. They passed solid old homes and rambling bungalows sitting among tall trees on straight, clean streets, sharing space with apartments and housing complexes, some maintained but many deteriorating, all surrounded by black wrought-iron fences. Many of the apartment buildings, three-story brick affairs with the aesthetic appeal of bunkers, showed plywood in their windows. Hard young men, the malignant result of years of festering, unchecked poverty and fatherless homes, sat on their front steps. Strange had always admired the deep green of Anacostia and the views of the city from its hilly landscapes. It was the most beautiful section of town and also the ugliest, often at the same time.

“You can’t find one white face down here anymore,” said Quinn, looking at a man driving a FedEx truck as it passed.

“There’s one,” said Strange, pointing to the sidewalk fronting one of the many liquor stores serving the neighborhood. A cockeyed woman with a head of uncombed blond hair and stretch pants pulled up to her sagging bustline stood there drinking from a brown paper bag. “Looks like they forgot to do their head count this morning up at St. E’s.”

Strange was hoping to bring some humor to the subject. But he knew Terry would not give it up now that he’d been stepped to.