Soul Circus (22 page)

Stepping into the foyer, he found Greco lying on his belly, rubbing his eyes with his front paws. His tail was twitching at the sound and smell of Strange’s entrance, but he was crying.

“All right, boy,” said Strange softly, “let me get a look at you.”

Strange lifted the paws away from Greco’s face. His eyes were pink and nearly red at the rims. The intruders had used something, pepper spray most likely, to immobilize him.

Strange went to his second-floor bathroom and got some Murine eyedrops out of the medicine cabinet. As he passed the doorway to his office, he noticed that the room had been completely tossed. It was the only room he had seen so far that had been misarranged. He did not stop but went directly down the stairs to Greco.

Strange put drops in Greco’s eyes and then got spring water from the refrigerator and flushed his eyes further, splashing the water from a juice glass. Greco stood after a while and shook himself, then touched his nose to Strange’s calf. Strange patted the top of his head.

“You’re like that one-eyed fat man, boy,” said Strange. “You got what they call true grit.”

Strange was angry that anyone would do this to a good animal. But he was thankful that the dog was alive.

Strange went up to his office. The Granville Oliver files, including paper and audio tapes, were gone. Other files were missing as well. Some of the cases on his western CDs were broken into pieces. Everything atop his desk, except for his telephone and message machine, had been swept onto the floor.

He had duplicate files and tapes in his daytime offices. He guessed that the storefront on Buchanan had been inspected and found to be wired for security. It wasn’t as if they couldn’t beat his simple alarm system if that was what they wanted to do. But the home break-in was deliberate in that it carried a deeper meaning.

The message light blinked 2 on his machine. Strange hit the receive bar.

Devra Stokes had called. She said she wanted to talk.

The next message was from a white man: “You interviewed a Kevin Willis in Leavenworth. In your conversation, Mr. Willis talked about a pending capital case. Obstruction of justice in a capital case is the highest form of obstruction and carries the most severe penalty. Eight to ten years, medium security. The loss of your license forever. How much are you willing to lose?”

The message ended there. Strange listened to the message again and transcribed it exactly. He saved the message and checked the directory on the readout of the phone. The call following Devra’s said “No Data.” Strange phoned Raymond Ives at home and got the attorney on the line. He read the message to Ives.

“You save it?”

“Yeah.”

“You’ll never be able to trace that call.”

“I know it.”

“Call the police, report the burglary, and have them come to the house. Get a record of the event.”

“What else?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Strange listened to Ives breathe. He was telling him that he would talk no further about the subject, not on this line. So Ives suspected that Strange’s phone was bugged.

“I’ll speak with you later,” said Strange.

“Right,” said Ives.

Strange phoned the police. He was told that some officers would be dispatched to his place in the next half hour.

He phoned Janine on his cell. If the home phones were tapped, then surely his cell calls were being monitored as well. He didn’t care. If the government was after him, FBI or whoever, there wasn’t all that much he could do. He wasn’t going to spend his time making pay-phone calls and worrying about conversations indoors. He was getting angrier by the moment. All that talk about loss of license and eight-to-ten. He didn’t take to threats. This was bullshit, was what it was. They had misjudged him, thinking he would cave to their office-toss and phone messages. And they shouldn’t have fucked with his dog.

He got Janine and gave her the facts without conjecture. She asked him if he was sitting down.

“I just watched the news, Derek. Someone found the body of Olivia Elliot in Oxon Run late this afternoon.”

“Lord,” said Strange.

“You better call Lydell,” said Janine.

“I will,” said Strange, rubbing at his face. His anxiety shifted from thoughts of himself and the government to his role in this girl’s death. And then there was Quinn and Mark Elliot, Olivia’s son. The hardest part would be telling Quinn.

“Derek, you there?”

“Yes. I’ll be home in a couple of hours. I’m waitin’ on the police.”

“I’ll save you dinner.”

“You got anything special for Greco? Some bones, maybe?”

“I’ll find something.”

“I love you, baby.”

“See you soon.”

Strange phoned his friend Lydell Blue, a lieutenant in the Fourth District, at home. He told Blue that he was calling about Olivia Elliot, the woman whose murder had made the TV news. He gave Blue Mario Durham’s name and cell phone number, and told him what Durham had paid him to do.

“That’s your man right there, I expect.”

“No address?”

“What I gave you is what I have.”

“You better come in tomorrow morning. I’ll find out who’s got the case in Homicide and have him meet us at the Gibson building. Say nine o’clock?”

“I’ll be there. I’ll bring Quinn, too.”

“All right then, Derek. Thanks for the call.”

Blue hung up on his end. Strange heard the police knocking on the door on the first floor and went down to let the two uniformed cops in. He spent some time with them, then left them to do their job. He went to the living room, sat on his mother’s old couch, and stared at the cell phone he still held in his hand. There wasn’t any way to put it off any longer. He phoned Quinn.

DEWAYNE Durham had gotten the cell message on the way back from Six Flags amusement park informing him of the deaths of Jerome Long and Allante Jones. One of his young men at the elementary school had made the call. Word of the quadruple homicide had spread quickly on the street.

Durham and Bernard Walker dropped off Durham’s son, Laron, at his mother’s place in Landover. Durham hugged Laron without feeling and sent him into his apartment holding balloons and candy. Durham watched him, thinking, That boy has grown some, not realizing or caring that it had been six months since he had seen him last.

There were still a couple of balloons in the backseat of the Benz as Durham and Walker drove back into the city. Walker tried to look around them in the rearview as he changed lanes.

“Boy who called me said Nutjob shot first,” said Durham.

“I guess Jerome did have that fire in him after all,” said Walker.

“He ain’t had enough to save his life.”

“We lost two to get two of theirs. Makes us even, right?”

“That’s not the way it works; you know that. Some young boy now in Yuma is gonna see this as a way to prove he can put work in. All’s this is gonna do is make the killin’ start.”

“We’ll be ready, then.”

“We gonna have to be.” Durham shifted in his seat. “Go on over to Mississippi Avenue. Let’s see what’s up, get the rest of the story from the troops.”

When they got to the elementary school in Congress Heights, there were few of their people around. Durham could see a kid up by the flagpole, standing back in the shadows, and another boy, a lookout no older than twelve, up there on a bike. The kid rode his bike down the rise to the Benz, which Walker had put beside the curb. He wheeled around to the passenger side of the car as Durham’s window glided down.

“Wha’sup, youngun?”

The boy’s face was streaked with sweat, and excitement lit his eyes. A cell phone in a holster lay against his hip. “It was me called you up.”

“I’ll remember it, too.”

“Five-O already came by twice, askin’ after you. Same car both times.”

They heard the whoop of a siren blast then, as if on cue, as an MPD cruiser came down Mississippi.

“Here they come again,” said Walker.

“Book, little man,” said Durham, and the kid took off on his bike. He went up the cross street, past the elementary school, and disappeared into an alley.

“What you want me to do?” said Walker.

“Kill the engine. You don’t got your gun with you, do you?”

“You told me not to bring it, ’cause of your son.”

“We all right, then.” Durham moved to the left so that he could see the Crown Vic cruiser in the rearview, idling behind them with its headlights on, radioing in for backup. He could read the car number, but he suspected that this was more than a routine stop.

The Maryland-inflected, deep female voice on the cruiser’s loudspeaker told them to put their hands outside the open windows of the car. They did this, then were approached by two officers. One of them had drawn his sidearm, a Glock 17, and was holding it out and pointed at the driver’s window with his elbow locked.

“Why they’re not waitin’ on more cars?” said Walker.

Durham said, “They want to talk to me first.”

The officers separated them outside the car. Walker was led to the side of the cruiser by a tall officer with a thick black mustache. Durham was frisked against the Benz by an eight-year veteran of the force, a wide-bottomed woman with short bottle-blond hair. Her name was Diane Beard.

Beard pushed on Durham’s head until it was bowed and got close to his ear. “We’re taking you in for questioning soon as the backup gets here.”

“For what?”

“The shooting tonight.”

“I don’t know nothin’,” said Durham, his standard response to any police question.

“Course you don’t,” said Beard.

“Why you here?” said Durham, lowering his voice.

“Jerome Long and Allante Jones are dead. The Coates cousins, too.”

“Tell me somethin’ I don’t know.”

“Your brother, Mario, is hot.”

“What?”

“A woman named Olivia Elliot was found murdered in Oxon Run this afternoon. Mario’s the number one suspect. It just came out over the radio.”

Durham said, “God
damn
.”

His first thought: Couldn’t be. He didn’t believe Mario had murder in him. But then, it fit together. Dewayne had told Mario to find the woman for some get-back. He had only meant be a man. He didn’t mean for the fool to kill the bitch.

Durham’s second thought: Mario would be hidin’ out with that boy Donut. And the police would be talking to their moms straightaway. But she wouldn’t give Mario up. No one would. They knew who his brother was, after all.

More squad cruisers converged on the scene. Officer Beard yanked up on Durham’s arms, which she held behind his back, and pulled him away from the hood of the Benz.

“Little rough, ain’t you?”

“Gotta make it look good,” said Beard, a small degree of pleasure in her voice.

“I ain’t payin’ you to make it look
that
good,” said Durham.

Beard pushed him along. Pocket-cops, thought Durham. They hate everyone. Most of all, they hate themselves.

“THE police gonna want to talk to us,” said Mike Montgomery.

“I ain’t hidin’,” said Horace McKinley.

And I ain’t worried, neither. The police can’t touch me.

“Too bad about the cousins, though.”

“Find that boy we see down by the liquor store. The one makes them T-shirts?”

“I know his sister.”

“Find him. Get some T-shirts made up for the cousins. ‘RIP, We Will Not Forget,’ sumshit like that. You know what to do.”

“They ain’t had no family or friends.”

“It ain’t for them. We need to show the street, the Yuma honors their own.”

“I’ll get it done.”

They sat in the abandoned house at a card table, beer and malt bottles strewn about the scarred hardwood floor and the stairs leading to the second floor. The lights were on in the house. McKinley smoked a cigar.

“Gonna be a war for a while,” said McKinley, admiring the Cuban in his hand. “We gonna need some guns.”

“We’ll go see Ulysses, then.”

“Six Hundred gonna want to have some go. You know this.”

“They ain’t but across the alley.”

“Then that alley’s gonna be one of those DMZs you hear about.”

“Right,” said Montgomery. He didn’t know what McKinley was talking about. He didn’t know if McKinley knew.

“Phil Wood’s takin’ the stand tomorrow,” said McKinley.

“You told me.”

Montgomery reached into his pocket. He had walked out of the hair salon with one of those little wrestling figures by mistake. He’d been using the figure to play one of those hide-and-go-seek games with that boy Juwan. It had been fun hangin’ out with him. Relaxing. He was tired of this life he was leading, and that boy had reminded him, in a pure kinda way, that not everyone out here was involved in this drama that always ended in death. That boy had been friendly, and not because he was afraid of Mike or knew who McKinley was or nothin’ like that. That boy was nice.

“Phil’s gonna be up there for a couple of days.” McKinley drew on his cigar and exhaled a cloud of smoke that further fogged the room. “So we need to watch the Stokes bitch for a little while longer.”

“Okay.”

“I think she got the message today, but you never know. Girl had some fire in her eyes, I’ll give her that. She don’t respond to the way I put it to her, next thing is, we gonna have to squeeze her little boy.”

Montgomery fingered the plastic wrestler in his pocket.

“Mike?” said McKinley.

“What.”

“You heard me, right?”

“I heard you,” said Montgomery.

But I ain’t gonna do nothin’ to hurt that kid.

STRANGE drove uptown in his Cadillac, Greco beside him on his red cushion, War’s “Lotus Blossom” coming from the box. War was one of those groups Strange always went back to when he wanted to think and breathe. They were known as a jam band, but it was their ballads that really cooled him out.

Kids were out on Georgia’s sidewalks, like they always were. There wasn’t any curfew anymore, like there had been for a while in D.C. The curfew hadn’t worked because the responsibility for the children had been put in the wrong hands. It never should have been up to the police to raise other people’s kids.