Soul Circus (27 page)

Strange touched Devra’s forearm. “I’m sorry you had to go through that. I admire you, the way you stood strong.”

“I’m ashamed for what I did when I was younger. Who I hung with, too. But that will never be me again. Just to do nothing, try to put it behind me, it’s not enough. I figure, sometimes you got to
do
something. Isn’t that right?”

“You’re a brave young woman.”

“Not really. Maybe I’m just foolish, like I always been.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Anyway, what should I do now? Just go back to work?”

“Yes, for right now. How long you on for?”

“Till closing time. She stays open till ten o’clock.”

“You don’t want anyone to think anything’s wrong. I’ll call you later at your place and tell you about the next step and the arrangements we’ve made.”

“Mom,” said Juwan, “this ite cream’s good.”

“I know it, baby,” said Devra, looking over the seat and smiling at her son.

“You’re keeping him with you?” said Strange.

“Yes.”

“What did you tell Inez today when you left?”

“That I was taking a break.”

“She wouldn’t follow you?”

“She was the only one in the shop. She wouldn’t leave it for nothin’; that shop is everything to her.”

“That’s a bad little woman right there. My wife works for me, and she did some checking on Inez Brown. Assault priors, check kiting, everything.”

“I’m not surprised.” Devra’s eyes took all of him in. It was an unexpectedly uncomfortable moment, and Strange shifted in his seat. “So you’re gonna look after me yourself?”

“Me and my partner. A guy named Terry Quinn.”

“Where’s he at?”

“Here in Southeast. We’re workin’ on a couple of things today.”

“You ever lose a witness?” said Devra.

“I’ve made mistakes,” said Strange, thinking of Olivia Elliot. “But I’m not gonna lose you.”

FROM her car on the street, a forest green Hyundai, Inez Brown watched the parking lot of McDonald’s. She had put the Hyundai along the curb just right, so she could see the white Caprice, its tail facing her. She could see Strange and the girl, and the top of the boy’s head in the backseat. But she figured, the way she was behind him, way back on the street, he’d be awfully lucky to notice her car, if Strange even knew what kind of car she drove.

Devra had said she was goin’ out for lunch and some ice cream for the boy. That’s where she’d fucked up. ’Cause Inez knew the little kid, ran that mouth of his all day long, liked that Golden Arches ice cream best.

Inez sat on a couple of cushions so she could see over the wheel. She had good eyes. She could see the two of them, the fake cop and the girl, lippin’ in the front seat of his car. That’s all the fat man had asked her to do: find out if these two were still talking, even after she’d been warned. Stupid little bitch, with her young ass, too.

Inez checked her watch. She’d done her job and now she needed to get back. She didn’t like to be away from her business, not even for a few minutes. No telling the customers she’d lost, doing this thing right here. She’d head back to the salon now. Phone Horace when she got there, tell him what he wanted to know.

QUINN put time in out front of Mart Liquors, talking to some of the men and women who were entering and leaving the shop. He spoke to the regulars who hung outside the place as well. Quinn asked them about Mario Durham and a guy named Donut. He showed them the flyer of the missing teenager, Linda Welles. Some answered politely and some were bordering on hostile, and a few didn’t bother to respond to his questions at all. He got nothing from any of them. They had made him straight off as some kind of cop.

He tried the Metro station. He tried the phone banks at the gas stations and accompanying convenience marts. He received the same nonresponse.

Quinn drove the neighborhoods next. He had no plan. He cruised Stanton Road, passing liquor stores and squat redbrick structures surrounded by black iron fences. He went down Southern Avenue, then got on Naylor Road. On Naylor were more liquor stores, Laundromats, and other service-oriented businesses. Around 30th Street, on a long hill, were the Naylor Gardens apartments, a complex as well tended and green as a college campus. Farther along, up past Naylor Plaza, the apartments abruptly went from clean and pampered to ghetto grim. And farther still were a couple of stand-alone units like those Quinn had visited several times before.

He slowed his Chevelle and idled it on the street. This was the complex that Linda Welles’s brothers had recognized in the sex video. The party had been held in one of these units. It was where she had last been seen.

Quinn looked up a rise of dirt and weeds to a three-story bunker of brick. On the stoop sat several young men wearing wife-beaters and low-hung jeans revealing the elastic bands of their boxers, skullies and napkin bandannas. They were passing around a bottle in a brown bag. They looked down at the street, where Quinn’s engine rumbled. One of them, a heavyset young man with blown-out hair, looked directly at Quinn and smiled.

Quinn pulled off from the curb. He had tried to interview that group earlier, remembered the smiler and his hair. He had had the sense then that they knew something about the fate of Linda Welles, but he hadn’t pushed it. He hadn’t done his job. He remembered feeling weak and punked as he’d driven away from them the last time. And he felt that way now.

Quinn drove over to the area of Valley Green. He pulled the Chevelle up along some street-side kids on their bikes. He asked about Mario Durham and “a dude named Donut.” He got some shrugs and smart remarks, and watched impotently as the kids rode away, doing wheelies, laughing, cutting on one another and the white man in the old car.

He parked at a small market and went inside. He questioned the woman behind the counter and got a shrug. He bought a pack of sugarless gum and thanked her for her time. Then he walked next door, into a Chinese carryout, where a thin man with fat freckles across the bridge of his wide nose stood in a small lobby in front of a Plexiglas wall with a lazy Susan in it. A Chinese woman stood behind the Plexiglas; her smile was welcoming, but her eyes were not. She looked friendly and frightened, both at once. Quinn got the woman’s attention and talked into a slotted opening above the lazy Susan.

“I’m looking for a guy named Mario Durham,” said Quinn.

“I don’t know.”

“How about a man they call Donut?”

“You want food?”

Quinn looked down at the linoleum floor and shook his head.

“
I
know Donut,” said the man with the freckles. “Boy owes me ten dollas.”

Quinn turned. “You know where he lives?”

“The building he lives in ain’t but two blocks from here. I don’t know the apartment number where he stays at, though.”

“The building’s good enough. He owes you ten?”

“Boy took me for a Hamilton, like, a year ago. He thinks I forgot. But I’m gonna get it someday.”

“You’ll get that ten sooner than someday,” said Quinn, “you give me the address.”

“Make it twenty,” said the man, “and I’ll give it to you now.”

HOMICIDE Detective Nathan Grady got a break soon after meeting with Strange and Quinn. A young man named Richard Swales, picked up on an intent-to-distribute beef, had offered his help, in exchange for some “consideration,” in locating Mario Durham. He told the arresting officer that he knew from talk on the street that Durham was wanted in a murder. From the substation, where they were keeping Swales in a holding cell, Grady was called and told of the lead. Grady said he’d be right in.

In the interview room, Swales admitted that he did not know Mario Durham personally or his whereabouts. But there was a guy folks called Donut, Durham’s “main boy,” who most likely could point the police in the right direction. Grady learned that Donut’s real name was Terrence Dodson. He asked Swales where he could find Dodson. Swales said that he didn’t know, but he knew the “general area he stayed at.”

“Can I get some love?” said Swales.

Grady said that if the information he’d given him was correct, and if it led to an arrest, yes, it could help Swales’s case.

That’s all Grady had been looking for. Someone less afraid of Dewayne Durham than he was of prison. A two-time loser about to strike out. It was how most cases were solved.

It took a hot minute to find Terrence Dodson’s address in Valley Green and get a record of his priors. Grady took his unmarked and, accompanied by a cruiser and a couple of uniformed officers, went to the address. One of the uniforms stayed out on the street with the cars. The other uniform went with Grady into the building, where they found Dodson’s apartment door. Grady knocked, the uniform behind him, and the door soon opened. As it did, Grady flashed his badge.

“Terrence Dodson?” said Grady, looking down on the small, ugly man who stood in the door frame, one eye twitching, trying to manage a smile.

“That’s my given name. Ain’t nobody ever call me that, though.”

Grady slipped his badge case back into his jacket. “Donut, then, right?”

“That’s right.”

“You know a Mario Durham?”

“Why?” said Donut, chuckling weakly. “He done somethin’? What, that fool spit on the sidewalk, sumshit like that?”

“Mind if I come in?”

“You got a warrant?” Donut barked out a laugh. “I’m just playing with you, officer,
I
got nothin’ to hide.”

Donut stepped aside to let the white man pass. Big motherfucker, too. Looked like that man played in the sequels to that movie with Felton Perry, about the redneck sheriff with the bat. The ones that weren’t no good.

HORACE McKinley sat in a vinyl nail-studded chair meant to look like leather in what used to be the living room of the house on Yuma. He talked on his cell as Mike Montgomery paced the room.

McKinley flipped the StarTAC closed. His forehead was beaded with sweat. There was sweat under his arms and it ran down his sides.

It had been a busy morning. He had learned from his own boys that Mario Durham was wanted in a murder. He had spoken to Ulysses Foreman, who had taken a call from Dewayne Durham, angry that the gun used by Mario had also been Jerome Long’s murder gun in the Coates killings. Foreman had called McKinley to give his condolences on the cousins, and also to assure him that he hadn’t known, of course, that one of his guns would be used against the Yuma Mob. McKinley saw an opportunity for an alliance with Foreman, and maybe to gain a favor or something free. He told Foreman that this was simply the cost of doing business for both of them and that no offense had been taken. And now that little old girl, ran his salon, had phoned with some disturbing news.

“That was Inez,” said McKinley. “The Stokes girl’s been talking to that Strange again.”

“What’re we gonna do?”

McKinley breathed in deeply and heard a wheeze in his chest. He was carrying too much weight. Now would be a good time to give up on those Cubans, too.

“Ice her down for a while, I guess.”

“Kill her?”

“No, I don’t want to kill the bitch ’less I have to. I was thinkin’ we’d hide her until she comes around. I figure, we separate her from her little boy for a few hours, she’ll change her mind about talking anymore.”

“We could use some help.”

“The troops been depleted, Mike. I got everyone on the street and I told them I needed a big cash night. It’s just you and me.”

“You want me to stay with the kid?”

“You’d do better with him than I will. Me, I’m better with the girls.” McKinley smiled at Montgomery, who was frowning. His long hands were jammed deep in the pockets of his jeans. “You gonna hold that boy tight? I don’t want you gettin’ soft on me now. This is business here; that’s all it is. We got to protect our own and what we got.”

Montgomery nodded. McKinley was only a couple of years his senior, but he was the closest thing to a father he’d ever had.

“I’m behind you, Hoss. You know this.”

“No doubt. You my right hand, Mike.”

“We gonna do this now?”

“No. We can get over to the salon later, take care of the girl. She ain’t goin’ nowhere else today.”

“What we gonna do now, then?”

“Let’s roll over to Foreman’s first and buy us another gun. I spoke to him, and he’s still got this Sig I had my eye on for a while. He’s expecting another piece later on today, too, case we need it. He’s got a boy he uses, gonna make a run.”

Montgomery pulled the keys to the Benz from his pocket and twirled them on his finger. “I’m ready.”

“We gonna have us our little war, I guess.”

“Might not happen too soon. Durham’s got his head turned around, lookin’ after that fool brother of his.”

“That might be the time to hit him,” said McKinley, rising laboriously from the chair. “While he’s weak.”

ULYSSES Foreman stood on the back deck of his house, smoking a cigar. Ashley was back in their room, packing for her trip down to her daddy’s in southern Maryland. She had the stereo on in there, Chaka Khan singin’ about “I’m every woman,” Ashley singing along. She loved Chaka. So did Ulysses, back when she was with Rufus. That was a fine motherfucker right there.

Foreman held one arm out and flexed as he drew on his cigar. He needed to get over to the gym, looked like he was starting to atrophy. Man had to pay attention to his body, especially in times like these.

It had been a morning. A call from Dewayne Durham about that brother of his and that goddamn gun. That was his own fault, renting the Taurus to Twigs. Once a fuck-up, et cetera. Foreman should have known. Apparently Mario had claimed that he knew about the gun being hot, too. Foreman had told Dewayne that this wasn’t so, but he wasn’t sure it had registered all the way. Now he’d have to do something for Dewayne just to keep his fire down. A gift,
that
would work; he could lay a gun on him, nothing too expensive, but no cheap-ass Lorcin, either, nothin’ like that. The kid from Alexandria was making a run for him today; he’d have him pick something up.

Then he’d talked to Horace McKinley, who had acted all unconcerned that he had sold that gun to Durham’s boy Jerome Long, who’d gone and used it on the cousins. The fat man
acting
unconcerned, but always strategizing. Foreman wondered what he’d want in the end.