What It Was (2 page)

“Pour it,” said Jones.

Odum went to a rolling cart displaying liquor and setups, and free-poured scotch into a clouded tumbler from a Chivas bottle. The bottle had been filled and refilled over the years with off-brands, its label faded to gray. It now held Scots Lion, the low-shelf brand from the Continental liquor shop on Vermont Avenue.

Odum handed Jones his drink, and Jones hit it. It tasted like scotch. He pointed to the sofa and said, “Sit down.”

Odum had a seat on the sofa and Jones settled into an overstuffed chair. Between them, a coffee table was littered with burned bottle caps, cotton balls pink with blood, a two-dollar necktie, and a large metal ashtray.

Jones reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a pack of Kools that was unopened on top. He shook a smoke from the hole he had torn out of the bottom of the pack, flipped the cigarette, and put the filtered end in his mouth. He picked a book of fire up off the table, read its face, and struck a match, touching flame to tobacco and taking in a deep lungful of menthol. He let the smoke out slow.

“So you been past Ed Murphy’s,” said Jones, his eyes going to the matchbook before he helped himself and slipped it into his pocket.

“I caught that boy Hathaway at the Supper Club. He was playin there last week. Donny’s a Howard man.”

“My woman’s into him. And that female he be singin with, too.”

“They gonna be together at the Carter Barron,” said Odum. “I got tickets for the show.” His face soured as he realized his mistake.

“Where the tickets at?” said Jones.

“They in my leather,” muttered Odum, angry at himself. Something else came to him, and his tone betrayed him as he pointedly added, “The
in
side pocket.”

Jones dragged on his Kool, double-dragged, leaned forward, and tapped ash into the tray. He stared at Odum and said nothing.

“Red?”

“Uh-huh?”

“
Shit,
Red, I been lookin to get up with you.”

“You have?”

“You ain’t give me no number, though.”

“I called
you
and got nary an answer.”

“That’s funny, ’cause I been here.”

“Maybe your phone line’s fucked up. We could check it right now and find out.”

“Nah. You must got the number wrong, somethin.”

“Decatur two, four seven nine five?”

“That’s it.”

“Then I ain’t get nothin wrong.
Did
I?”

“Okay.”

“Where my money at?” said Jones.

Odum spread his hands. “Wasn’t but eighty dollars, Red.”

“One or eighty, it’s all the same to me. You played and you lost. Trying to be funny with a ten and no royalty. Now you need to make it right.”

What Jones said was true. There was a card game and Odum had stayed in on a ten-high, looking to outlast Jones and the others on a bluff. Jones, who did not fold, had been holding a pair of faces. But a weak hand and eighty dollars was not why Jones had come.

“You can have my watch,” said Odum.

“I don’t want that off-brand shit.”

“I got heroin.”

“How much?”

Odum tapped the toe of his right Jarman on the wood floor. “One dime is all.”

“What am I supposed to do with that?”

“I don’t know. Look, I’m just a tester, man—”

“Where you get your medicine at?”

“Ah, shit, Red.”

“Where?”

Odum lowered his eyes. “Dude named Roland Williams. He got bundles.”

“Roland Williams, went to Cardozo?”

“Nah, not
Ro-Ro
Williams. I’m talking about Long Nose Roland, came out of Roosevelt. He been going up top. You know, coppin at that spot in Harlem they call Little Baltimore.”

“Where Long Nose stay at?”

“Thirteen hundred block of T,” said Odum.

“Where exactly?”

Odum did not know the address. He described the row house by the color of its shutters and the little porch out front. Jones saw it in his head.

“Okay,” said Jones. He drank from the tumbler, emptied it, and placed it roughly on the coffee table. He dropped his cigarette into the glass and rose from the couch as if sprung.

“We done?” said Odum.

“Put some music on the box,” said Jones. “It’s too quiet in this hole.”

Odum got up. His feet were unsteady beneath him as he crossed the room. He went to the home entertainment center he had purchased, on time, for one hundred and forty-eight dollars at the Sun Radio uptown. He had not paid on it for many months. It was an eighty-watt Webcor system with a record changer and dust cover housed atop an AM/FM stereo receiver and eight-track player. Two air-suspension speakers bookended the unit, seated on a slotted metal stand holding Odum’s vinyl.

Odum chose an album and slipped it out of its dust jacket. He placed the record on the turntable, side two up, and carefully dropped the tone arm on the first song. Psychedelic funk came forward.

Odum did not turn around. As the groove hit him, he began to move with a small, off-the-rhythm dip and a shake of his hips. He was not much of a dancer. He forced himself to smile.

“
Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow,
” said Odum.

Jones, now standing behind the couch, said nothing.

“ ‘I wanna know if it’s good to you,’ ” sang Odum, as the chorus kicked in. His mouth had gone dry and he licked his
lips. “Wait till you hear Eddie Hazel’s
gui
tar on the way out the jam. Eddie can do it.”

“Turn it up,” said Jones. Odum hiked up the volume. “More,” said Jones. Odum’s trembling hand clockwised the dial. “Now sit your narrow ass back down.” The music was loud in the room. It had been mixed to travel from speaker to speaker, and its freaks-in-the-funhouse effect made Jones cold. Odum sat on the couch, his birdlike hands folded in his lap.

“Red,” said Odum.

“Hush,” said Jones.

“Red, please, man… I’ll get you your eighty.”

“This ain’t about no eighty. It’s about you runnin your gums.”

“Please.”

“You a churchgoin man?”

“I try to be.”

“All that bullshit the preacher been tellin you? About that better world you gonna find on the other side?”

“Red.”

“You about to see if it’s true.”

Jones drew a .22 Colt from beneath the tails of his rayon, put the barrel behind Odum’s ear, and squeezed the trigger. Odum said, “Huh,” and as he lurched forward, blood flowed from his mouth and splashed onto the coffee table, and Jones put another round into the back of his head. Odum voided his bowels, and the smell of his evacuation and the one-cent smell of blood were fast in the room.

Jones reholstered the .22 in the dip of his bells. He found the concert tickets in Odum’s leather and slipped them into
one of his patch pockets. Then he recalled Bobby Odum directing him, almost desperately, to a particular place in the jacket, and his suspicious nature told him to search the jacket further.

He put his hand into the left side pocket of the leather and retrieved a woman’s ring the color of gold. Its mount carried a large center stone, clear and bright, surrounded by eight smaller stones orbiting around it. To the untrained eye it could have been a cluster of diamonds, but Jones was certain that he was looking at rhinestones or plain old glass. Long as Jones had known him, Odum had been ass broke.

It was a fake piece, for sure. But it was pretty, and Coco would like the way it looked on her hand. Jones slipped the ring into his patch pocket, too.

He took the glass he had been drinking from and carried it with him, wiping the doorknob off with his sleeve as he exited, listening to the guitarist going off from the stereo. The little man had been right. That cat Hazel could play.

Out on 13th, Jones crossed the street. A man named Milton Wallace sat on the concrete edging of a row house lawn, smoking down a cigarette he had resurrected from a nearby gutter. Wallace watched Jones pass.

Jones got into the Fury’s passenger bucket. He handed the tickets to Coco and said, “These for you, baby.”

Coco’s eyes came alive as she studied one of the tickets. “Donny and Roberta at the Carter Barron?
Thank
you, Red.”

“Ain’t no thing.”

“Bobby give these to you?”

“He can’t use ’em no more.” Jones placed the scotch glass on the mat between his feet. “I got somethin else for you, too.”

“Show me, baby.”

“When we get to your crib. We need to leave outta here now.” Jones pointed to the keys hanging in the ignition. “Cook it, Coco.”

She turned the key, engaged the transmission, and pulled away from the curb.

Milton Wallace eyed the Fury as it traveled south on 13th. Wallace recorded the image of the car, and the license plate, in his head.

S
HE WAS
stepping out of
a Warwick-blue Firebird convertible, sitting on redline tires, when Strange first saw her. She had parked the Pontiac on 9th, near the Upshur Street cross. She was young, had prominent cheekbones and clean beige skin, wore her hair in a big natural, and was unrestrained in a print halter dress. The girl was fine. Purse in hand, her hips moving with a feline sway.

Looked to Strange that she was headed toward his spot. He could see her clearly through the wide plate glass window fronting his business. One of the reasons he liked this place: the open view.

He got up out of the swivel chair behind his metal desk. A hard desk-style chair, like the kind he’d had in high school, sat before it. He looked around with an eye to straightening up, but there wasn’t much to put in place. He had one of those new machines, recorded the phone calls when they came in, but he had not yet figured out how to use it. He’d been here for just four months or so, and he had only acquired
the bare bones that a person needed to replicate the look of an office. Everything seemed temporary. Even the sign out front was a bullshit sign, done by a dude around the corner who called himself an artist but claimed he was a lot of things when he was high.

A radial GE clock radio sat on his desk, plugged into a floor socket. Its AM dial was set on WOL. The sound was all treble, no bass. Amid the static, “Family Affair” was playing low, Sly and his drugged-out drawl.

A little bell mounted over the door chimed as the woman entered the shop. Strange, tall and broad shouldered, wearing low-rise bells, a wide black belt, brass-eye stacks, a rayon shirt stretched out across his chest, and a thick Roundtree mustache, stepped up to greet her.

“Are you Mr. Strange?”

“I am. But call me Derek, or Strange. Either way’s fine with me. No need to call me mister.”

“My name is Maybelline Walker.”

“Pleasure.”

“Can I take some of your time? I’ll be brief.”

Strange shook her hand and took in her smell, the faint sweetness of strawberries. “Let’s sit.”

They crossed the cool linoleum floor. Strange allowed her to go ahead so he could check out her behind, as a man will tend to do. He made a maître d’s hand motion, pointing her to the client chair. She fitted herself into it, glanced at its attached desktop with puzzlement, and rested her forearm atop its face as she crossed one bare leg over the other. Strange noticed the ripple of muscle in her thigh as he took a seat behind his desk.

“What can I do for you today?”

“I’ve been seeing your sign out front for months now.”

“I’m fixin to get a new one.”

“Strange Investigations. Do you have many?”

“A few.”

Background checks, mainly, thought Strange. Case-builds for divorce lawyers. Infidelity tails. Nothing of any weight.

“Are you busy with one now?”

“I’m in a slow period.”

“Hmm.”

Strange looked her over. Straight backed and poised. Had some nice titties on her, too. High and tight, big old erasers about to bust through the fabric of her dress. A redbone with light-brown eyes. One of those brown-paper-bag gals, the kind he’d rarely gone after, as dark-skinned women were more to his liking. Not that he wouldn’t straighten out Miss Maybelline Walker if she’d give him a go-sign. God, he would hit the hell out of it if he had the chance.