“You guys be safe,” said Lucas.
They left the Jeep and walked back toward Clifton and their SS. Lucas watched them in the side-view mirror, cracking on each other, laughing. He liked them both. He also felt they were in way over their heads.
Lucas checked his notebook, got out of his Cherokee, crossed the street to the east side of 12th, and walked toward the house where the old woman still stood near her garden. The owner of record was Leonard Woods. The home had been purchased for well under a hundred grand and was assessed at six times that today.
Lucas stood at the foot of the concrete steps looking up at the woman, shapeless in her dress. Her hair was white, thin, and uncombed. Even from this distance he could see that her face was dotted with raised moles.
“Afternoon,” Lucas called out.
“Just about,” said the woman. Her tone did not invite further conversation, but it did not deter him.
“Nice garden,” he said. “Is the ground cover there, the purple flowers, is that phlox?”
“Creeping phlox, yeah,” she said sourly. “You selling somethin? Cause if you are, I don’t talk to solicitors. I got a sign right up there on the door says the same.”
“No, ma’am,” said Lucas.
“Well?”
“I’m an investigator. I’m looking into the disappearance of a package from the porch of a home on this street.”
“Investigator for who?”
“I represent a client.”
“Who is it?”
“Unfortunately, that’s confidential.”
“Well then, we got nothing to talk about.”
“I’m attempting to retrieve my client’s lost property.”
“An in surance thing,” she said with something close to disgust.
“Is it Miss Woods?”
“Young man, you don’t know me. Don’t even be so bold as to call me by my name.”
“I apologize,” said Lucas, knowing that the conversation was completely blown. “Maybe we’ll talk again when it’s a better time.”
“Ain’t gonna be a better time,” said the woman. “Go on, now.” She made a shoo-away motion with the hand that held the trowel. “Before I call my son at his job. You do not want that.”
“Sorry to trouble you,” said Lucas, bowing his head slightly and walking back to his car. When he got in it, he looked at her house. She had gone inside. He didn’t blame her for being ornery. She was somebody’s mother, probably a nice person when she wasn’t being bothered by a stranger. He was sorry he had spoiled her peaceful day.
Shadows shrank and disappeared. They grew elsewhere as the sun moved across the sky.
A late-middle-aged man with a large belly came out of a row house. He was wearing old khakis, a long polo shirt, and a Redskins hat. He walked down the sidewalk in the direction of Lucas’s Jeep. He was softly singing a song, a slo-jam that Lucas was familiar with but could not identify.
“ ‘Make me say it again, girl,’ ” sang the man.
In his notebook, Lucas checked the diagram of the street.
The man neared, and Lucas, his arm resting on the lip of the open window, said, “Mr. Houghton?”
“Huh?” The man stopped walking. He seemed momentarily dazed. Then he looked back over his shoulder at the house he’d come from.
“Mr. Houghton, is it?” said Lucas.
“Nah, that’s not me,” said the man genially. “Mr. Houghton’s deceased. His daughter stays there now. I was just visiting.”
“Oh,” said Lucas. “Look, I don’t mean to bother you, but I’m looking into a theft on this block.”
“You police?”
“I’m an investigator,” said Lucas. It didn’t answer the question exactly, and it wasn’t a lie. “A package went missing from the porch of a home across from your friend’s house. About a week and a half ago.” Lucas told him the exact day.
“I ain’t been to this street but twice in the last year. And my lady friend wasn’t around then. She just got back from a three-week cruise, no lie.”
“Got it.” Lucas pointed his chin up at the man’s hat. “ ’Skins gonna do it this year?”
“Not this year.”
“I like Donovan.”
“The fans in Philly treated him like dirt.”
“Yeah, I know. I hope when we play the Eagles we shove it up their asses.”
“We’ll play up. But we ain’t got that full squad yet that can compete at the next level. Wasn’t anything wrong with Jason Campbell. They never did give him an O line. He had heart.”
“No doubt.”
“I like McNabb, too. But this move wasn’t about upgrading the position. It was about sellin jerseys and merchandise. I won’t even go out to that stadium and put money in that owner’s pocket. I’m a fan for life, but until we get a new owner I’ll just watch the games on TV.”
“I heard that,” said Lucas. In fact, he heard a similar version of that sentiment in D.C. damn near every day.
“Good lookin out, young fella.”
“You, too.”
The man walked away. Lucas heard him singing the same song as he neared the Clifton Street cross.
Lucas ate his sub, a BMT, and washed it down with water. Time passed and he felt the need to pee. He reached into the back of the Jeep and retrieved an empty half-gallon plastic jug he kept there when he was doing surveillance. He urinated into the jug, capped it, and placed it on the floor of the backseat.
Minutes later, an MPD squad car turned onto 12th and cruised slowly by Lucas. Lucas did not stiffen, nor did he eye the officer behind the wheel of the car beyond taking mental note of the driver’s race (black), general age (on the young side), and gender (male). Lucas was not breaking any law, but he was not looking for any unnecessary confrontation. The car, affixed with 4D stickers, kept on going, and at the end of 12th the driver turned right on Euclid. Something flickered faintly in Lucas’s mind as the car disappeared from view.
The street settled back to quiet. The sun moved west.
Teenage kids began to appear later in the afternoon. Those who had been visited by a guest speaker that day wore street clothes, as they were allowed to do, but most wore white or purple polo shirts with khakis, the school’s uniform. Though there were many white residents in this neighborhood now, the kids coming from the schools were African American, African immigrant, and Hispanic, with a few Vietnamese and Chinese in the mix. The air was filled with their conversations: loud, boisterous, and laced with profanity. Even as they moved in groups of two or three, they occasionally stared at the phones in their hands and texted as they walked.
A young man walked alone down 12th. Lucas studied him in the side-view: sixteen, seventeen, on the tall side, very thin, dark skin, and braids that touched his shoulders. He was wearing purple over khaki. His lips were moving. He was talking to himself.
Lucas watched him turn up the steps of a house on the odd-numbered, west side of the street, the row house that was left-connected to the house of Lisa Weitzman, where the package had disappeared. Lucas checked his notebook quickly and stepped out of his Jeep. He jogged across the street as the young man neared his porch.
“Hey, Lindsay,” said Lucas, using the last name of the home’s owner, a woman named Karen Lindsay.
The young man stopped and turned. “Yeah?”
“You got a minute?”
The boy studied Lucas-his age, his build, his utilitarian clothing-and then he looked down the block toward his high school. Lucas’s eyes naturally followed. Back on Clifton there remained many students, hanging out in groups, walking slowly; uniformed police officers standing on the sidewalk, verbally moving the students along; an occupied squad car parked nose-east on the street.
“I just have a quick question for you,” said Lucas, turning his attention back to the Lindsay boy.
“No,” said Lindsay, moving quickly again, going up the steps.
