Soul Circus (8 page)

“What I thought, too. Now look, he didn’t want me to tell you. Didn’t want to worry you or y’all’s moms. But I just thought it might be better if you knew.”

“Okay, then.”

“We all right, dawg?”

Durham nodded. “Yeah, we’re good.”

“We better be gone,” said Walker, placing his empty pilsner on the table.

“Gotta see the troops get out for the night,” said Durham.

“I’ll get you a bag for your guns,” said Foreman.

Durham pulled a roll of cash from out of his jeans. “Fourteen, right?”

“Fifteen,” said Foreman, standing from his chair.

“Why you want to do me like that?” said Durham, but Foreman was ignoring him, already walking toward a side room where he kept his supplies.

FOREMAN stood on the stoop of his house, watching the Benz go down the drive. He was under a pink awning that Ashley loved but he hated. It was a little thing, though, one of them concessions you make to a woman, so he told her that he liked the awning, too.

He had played it right, telling Dewayne about Mario and the gun. Now there wouldn’t be no misunderstanding later on. If Dewayne didn’t like it, well, next time he’d give him some of that good smoke he kept in the family. Everything was negotiation in this business, nothing but a game.

“It go okay?” said Ashley, coming up behind him with a fresh glass of wine in her hand.

“Went good.” Foreman put his arm around her waist, looked her over, then kissed her neck. “Those boys were noticing you.”

“You jealous?”

“I don’t think you’re goin’ anywhere.”

“You got that right, boyfriend.”

“I better keep an eye on you, though. Fine as you look, someone might try to steal you out from under me.”

“That’s where they’d have to steal me from, too.”

Foreman kissed Ashley on the mouth. She bit his lower lip, and they both laughed as he pulled away.

YOU ever been back in there?” said Strange, looking through the windshield to the brick wall bordering St. Elizabeth’s.

“Once,” said Devra Stokes. “This girl and me jumped the wall when we was like, twelve.”

“I interviewed a witness there, a couple of years back.”

“Hinckley?”

“Naw, not Hinckley.”

“I was just playin’ with you.”

“I know it.”

They sat in the Caprice, across from the institution, eating soft ice cream from cups that they had purchased at the drive-through of McDonald’s. Juwan, Devra’s son, sat in the backseat, licking the drippings off a cone.

“It was this dude, though,” said Strange, “had pleaded insanity on a manslaughter charge, we thought he might have some information on another case. He seemed plenty sane to me. Anyway, we sat on a bench they have on the grounds, faces west, gives you a nice look at the whole city. This is the high ground up here. Those people they got in there, they got the best view of D.C.”

“I wouldn’t mind getting taken care of like they take care of those folks in there. You ever think like that?”

“It’s crossed my mind, in the same way that it would be easy to be old. Walk around wearing the same raggedy sweater every day, don’t even have to shave or mind your hair. But I don’t want to be an old man. And I wouldn’t want to be locked up anywhere, would you?”

“Sometimes I think, you know, not to have all this pressure all the time . . . not to have to think about how I’m gonna make it for me and Juwan, just for a while, I mean. That would be nice.”

“I know it’s got to be rough, raising him as a single parent,” said Strange.

“I got bills,” said Devra.

“Phil Wood’s not taking care of you and your little boy?”

“Juwan’s not his. Juwan’s father —”

“Mama!”

Devra turned her head. The boy’s ice cream had dripped and some of it had found its way onto the vinyl seat. Devra used the napkin in her hand to clean the boy’s face, then wipe the seat.

“Mama,” said Juwan, “I spilt the ice cream.”

“Yes, baby,” said Devra, “I know.”

“Don’t worry about that,” said Strange. “You see that red cushion back there? My dog sleeps on that, and he has his run of the car. So I ain’t gonna worry about no ice cream. This here is my work vehicle, anyway.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Ain’t no thing,” said Strange. “Look here, what about Juwan’s father, then?”

Devra shrugged. “He’s in Ohio now. They had him incarcerated out at Lorton, but they moved him a few months ago. Once a week, me and Juwan used to take the Metrobus, the one they ran special from the city, out there to see him. But now, with him so far and all, I don’t think Juwan’s even going to remember who his father is.”

Strange nodded at the familiar story. A young man fathered a child, then went off to do his jail time, his “rite of passage.” Lorton, the local prison in northern Virginia, was slowly being closed down, its inhabitants moved to institutions much farther away. Lorton’s proximity to the District had allowed prisoners and their families to remain in constant contact, but that last tie between many fathers and their children was ending now, too. Juwan’s future, like the futures of many of the children who had been born into these circumstances, did not look promising.

“Can’t Phil help you out with some money?”

“Phil’s got no reason to give me money. He had a whole rack of girls. I was just one.”

“But he paid you to stay away from court on that brutality rap.”

“That was a one-time thing.”

“I’m gonna need you to talk about it with me, you don’t mind.”

“Talk about what?”

“Well, the fact that he was beatin’ up on you, for one. Plus, the time you filed the original charges was about the same time some of the murders went down that they got Granville up on. Including the murder of his own uncle. So I need to know, did Phil ever discuss any of those murders with you? Or did you hear anything else about those murders from anyone close to Phil or Granville around that time?”

“I got no reason to hurt Phil.”

“It’s not about hurtin’ Phil. The prosecution’s gonna put him up on the stand to testify against Granville. What the defense does, they want to give a complete picture of the prosecution’s witness to the jury. If Wood was the kind of man who would take his hand to a woman, that’s something the jury ought to know. Throws a shadow, maybe, over the stuff he’s saying about Granville.”

“How’s that gonna change anything? Ain’t nobody denying that they were in the life.”

“True. But that’s how it works. Their side claims something and our side tries to refute it. Or make it more complicated than it really is.”

“Sounds like bullshit to me.”

“It is. But I’m still gonna need your help.”

“I don’t know.” Devra looked out her open window, away from Strange. “I don’t want to get back into all that. I moved away from it, hear? I got my little boy. . . .”

Strange turned his body so that he faced her. “Look here. They’re gonna try and put Granville to death. Some folks feel that only God gets to decide that. And a lot of folks in this city, they don’t see how killing another young black man is gonna solve any of the problems we got out here.”

“Granville did his share of killin’, I expect.”

“Maybe so, Devra. But this is about something more than just him.” Strange touched her hand. “It’s important. I need you to talk to me, young lady, tell me what you know.”

“I gotta think on it,” she said.

“Give me your phone number and the address where you’re stayin’ at, you don’t mind.”

Stokes did this, and Strange wrote the information down. He withdrew his wallet and opened it.

“Let me give you my business card,” said Strange. “Got a bunch of different numbers on it; you can reach me anytime.”

Strange turned the ignition and drove the Caprice off the McDonald’s property. An E-series Benz and a beige 240SX followed him out of the parking lot and down the hill of Martin Luther King.

STRANGE dropped Devra Stokes by her old Taurus in the lot of the salon on Good Hope Road. He waited for her to strap Juwan into a car seat and get herself situated and drive away. He noticed the older woman who owned the shop staring at him through the plate glass window. And he noticed the two cars that had been following him since back at the McDonald’s idling behind him, about a hundred yards and several rows of spaces back.

Strange drove out onto Good Hope. In his rearview he studied the vehicles, a black late-model Benz, tricked out with aftermarket wheels, and a beige Nissan bomb, the model of which he could not remember but which he recognized as the poor man’s Z.

Strange went down Good Hope and cut left onto 22nd Place without hitting his turn signal. The Benz fell in behind the Nissan and they stayed on his tail. He took another left on T Place and did not signal; the other cars did the same. T Place became T Street after a bit, and he took that to Minnesota Avenue. They were still there, about five car lengths back. Okay, so now he knew they were following him. But why?

Down near Naylor Road, Strange slowed down, moved into the middle lane, and came to a stop at a red light. Cars were parked along the curb to his right. The Benz stopped behind him and the Nissan pulled up to his left. He moved his car up into the crosswalk, as there were no cars there to block his exit. If he needed to make a move he could do so now. The Nissan did the same and pulled up even with his driver’s-side door.

Could be this was a trap. If that was the case, the rider on the Nissan’s passenger side would be the shooter. But Strange wasn’t ready to look over at them yet.

In the rearview, Strange could read the front tag on the Benz and he committed it to memory. He said it aloud so that he would get used to the sound of the sequence, and he said it aloud again. He saw a fat young man in the driver’s seat, a ring across the fingers that were gripping the wheel. Another young man, with no expression on his face at all, sat beside him.

He heard a whistle and looked to his left. Two young men with similar features, thick noses and bulgy eyes, were looking straight at him. A bunch of little tree deodorizers hung from their mirror, and music played loudly in their car. The bass of it rattled their windows. The one in the passenger seat grinned at him, raised his empty hand, and made a quick slashing gesture across his own throat.

Strange was startled by the loud beep of a car horn. He looked in his rearview and saw the fat man in the Benz making the gun sign with one hand. He pointed the flesh gun in the direction of Strange. And then Strange realized that the fat man was pointing his finger over the roof of Strange’s car, at the traffic light in the intersection. Strange looked ahead at a green light; the fat man was telling him that the light had changed and it was time to move on through.

Strange gave the Caprice gas. He heard the fading laughter of the two on his left under the throb of their music as he went down the road. The Benz and the Nissan pulled out of the intersection as well but turned right on Naylor Road and vanished from his sight.

It might have been paranoia, a middle-aged man thinking negative things about a group of young black Anacostians who had the look of being in the life. Strange was angry at himself, and a little ashamed, for the assumptions he had made. But he had also been living in this very real world for a long time. He wrote down the plate number that he had memorized in the spiral notebook he kept by his side.

STRANGE had first met Robert Gray, not yet a teenager, at Granville Oliver’s opulent house in Prince George’s County the previous fall. Oliver had pulled Gray out of a bad situation in the Stanton Terrace dwellings and had been grooming him for a role in the business he was still running at the time. When Oliver had been arrested and incarcerated, Strange had promised Granville, and had made a promise to himself, that he would look after the boy and try to put him on the right path.

But it hadn’t been an easy task. There was the geography problem, in that Strange lived in Northwest and Gray’s people were down in Southeast, so he couldn’t see the boy all that much. And Strange wasn’t about to take him under his own roof, especially now that he was dealing with having a new family of his own; Janine and his stepson, Lionel, were his first priority, and he was determined to do everything he could to make that work. So Strange had seen that Gray was put up with his aunt, the sister to his mother, who was doing a stretch for grand theft and assault, her third fall. Through Granville Oliver’s lawyer, Raymond Ives, Strange had arranged for a monthly payment to be made to the aunt, Tosha Smith, as one would pay foster parents for their services. The money was Granville Oliver’s.

Tosha Smith lived in a unit of squat redbrick apartment buildings on Stanton Road. Strange parked on the street and walked up a short hill, across a yard of weed and dirt, past a swing set where young children and their mothers had congregated. One girl, wearing a shirt displaying the Tweety Bird cartoon character and holding a baby against her hip, looked no older than fifteen. Strange navigated around two young men sitting on the concrete steps of Smith’s unit and ascended more stairs to her apartment door.

Tosha Smith, fright-time thin with a blue bandanna covering her hair, opened at his knock. Her initial expression was adversarial, but in a practiced, unemotional way, as if this were her usual greeting for every unexpected visitor who came to her door.

“Tosha,” said Strange.

“Mister Strange.” Her face softened, but not by much. Strange had visited her many times, but the look of relaxation that came with familiarity did not seem to be in her repertoire.

A grown man, on the thin side, with bald patches in his hair, sat on the couch playing a video game, staring at the television screen against the wall as a cigarette burned in an ashtray before him. He did not look away from his game or acknowledge Strange in any way.

Even in the doorway, Strange could take in the unpleasant odor of the apartment, not unclean, exactly, but closed up, airless, with the smell that always reminded him of an unminded refrigerator. And every time he had come by it was dark here, the curtains drawn over shuttered blinds. So it was today.