What It Was

“I already told the white detective,” said Cobb. “I don’t know nothin about Odum’s murder. He washed dishes for me, is all. I don’t get into the personal lives of my employees.”

“You owe him any back pay?”

“Why?”

“Tryin to see if any relatives or friends of his dropped by.”

“He owed me money, on a advance I gave him.”

“One more thing: you notice if he was ever wearing a ring, had a big cluster of stones on it?”

Cobb shook his head in exasperation. “I didn’t study on him all that much. Look, young man, I gotta get back to work.”

“Okay, then. Let me get a couple of fish sandwiches for takeaway before I get out of here.”

“The flounder or the trout?”

“Make it the trout,” said Strange. “Extra hot sauce.”

Kinda counterproductive, thought Strange, as Cobb moved toward the deep-fry basket. Me and Vaughn covering the same ground.

Strange took the sandwiches over to his mother’s row house at 760 Princeton Place, his childhood home. His father, Darius, had passed a couple of years earlier from cancer, and his older brother, Dennis, had been murdered by a low criminal just before the riots. The losses had set his mother back emotionally, but the deaths of her loved ones had not broken her. Alethea Strange was a woman of faith, and she still had her younger son.

It was a Saturday, so Strange knew she would be home. Monday through Friday she worked as a receptionist for a downtown ophthalmologist who serviced the shirt-and-tie class. The eye doctor was a former client whose home she had cleaned for many years. He offered her a job in his office in April 1968, after she told him that she would no longer be doing domestic work of any kind. The man thought of himself as a liberal in matters of race, whatever that meant, and he had probably hired her out of guilt, because she had no experience for the position. But his internal motives made no difference to her. She took to the work quickly and did her job well.

Alethea greeted Strange at the door with a delighted smile. He tried to phone her once a day, but, like many sons who meant well, he did not get over to her place as much as he intended to.

“I brought some Cobb’s, Mama,” said Strange, holding up a brown paper bag darkened with grease.

They ate in the living room, where Strange used to roughhouse with Dennis, sometimes just wrestling, sometimes full-out boxing, his father amused, sitting in his chair, reading the Washington edition of the Afro-American, listening to his Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson records on the console, or watching Westerns on his Zenith TV, or talking about that awful man who owned the Redskins and local-products- gone-pro like Elgin Baylor and Maury Wills. Strange had his father’s albums in his own collection now, but the console stereo was still here, being used mostly as a stand for his mother’s potted violets.

The place looked the same, a small living area, two bedrooms, a galley kitchen, even the wall decorations were the same, but it was too quiet, the only noise coming from the longtime tenants on the first floor. Made Strange sad to visit, thinking how still it must be when it was just his mother here.

“This is good,” said Alethea, closing her eyes as she swallowed.

“I went for the trout,” said Strange.

After, they moved to the kitchen, where she finished up the dishes she’d been washing when he had arrived. The window over the sink had cardboard taped to its bottom pane. Alethea did this so as not to disturb the babies in the nest built by robins on the outdoor sill every spring.

He watched her as she worked in her housedress. She still had a younger woman’s figure, but she listed a bit, favoring the hip that did not ache. Seated behind an office desk, answering phones and dealing with patients, was not physically demanding, but the time his mother had spent as a maid had taken its toll on her knees and back. She had aged ten years in the past four; in the final months of Darius’s painful illness, her hair had gone completely gray as she tended to her husband in their home.

“How’s Carmen?” she said, looking slightly over her shoulder.

“Good. We’re going to a movie tonight.”

“Don’t be takin her to one of your Westerns.”

“What you want me to do, go to some weepy?”

“Make her happy, Derek.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Strange leaned against the Formica counter, his arms crossed, watching her work, listening to her hum. When she was done, she dried her hands and hung the towel on a rod.

“Thank you for stopping by, son.”

“My pleasure,” said Strange.

He was done working for the day, and he had Ky, t='0 some time to kill, so he drove farther north on Georgia and stopped at a place called the Experience for a beer. It was a small joint, just a room with a steel-top bar front to back, a few tables, and a jukebox. The juke stayed mostly unplugged, on account of the owner, young dude named Grady Page, liked to play funk-rock music, the hybrid thing he loved, through the house system. The Experience was a neighborhood spot, had posters thumbtacked to its walls. It catered to a mix of local drinkers, heads, off-duty police officers, utility workers, security guards, and women who liked men who wore uniforms.

Strange had a seat at the bar next to a snaggletoothed MPD patrolman, Harold Cheek, out of 4-D, who was in streetclothes today. Funkadelic’s “You Hit the Nail on the Head” was on the system, the lead track off their latest, George Clinton playing his Hammond wild and free, a speed freak’s idea of a circus tent song. Grady Page liked to spin the new.

“Gimme a Bud, Grady,” said Strange. Page, tall and lean, was going for the unofficial Biggest Afro in D.C. award. He reached into the cooler.

“You see Grady?” said Cheek with amusement. “Tryin to look like Darnell Hillman and shit.”

“Artis Gilmore got a big ’Fro, too,” said Strange.

“Not as big as Darnell’s.”

Strange was served. With one deep swig he drank the shoulders off the Bud.

“Heard your man Lydell got his stripes,” said Cheek.

“Yeah, Lydell’s doin all right.”

Lydell Blue, Strange’s main boy from their Park View youth, had entered the MPD academy at the same time as Strange and had recently been promoted to sergeant. An army regular with time served in Vietnam, he had recently married a girl he’d met at his church. Strange felt Lydell had pulled the trigger too young, but realized that it was he, and not his friend, who was not ready.

“Y’all played football together at Roosevelt, right?” said Cheek.

“I went both ways,” said Strange. “Tight end and safety. Lydell was a fullback. Mostly, I tried to open the field up for him.”

“He had the Interhigh record for yardage gained, didn’t he?”

“His senior year. Lydell could play.”

Cheek looked him over. “You miss it?”

“Football?”

“The force.”

“I don’t miss it at all,’ said Strange. “They sure don’t need me. Not with heroes like you out there.”

“Go ahead, Derek.”

“You know Vaughn, don’t you? Homicide police?”

“I know of him.”

0em' width='27'›“Where’s he out of now?”

“Last I heard, Three-D.”

An off-duty security guard named Frank came over and greeted them with soul shakes. “What it look like, brothers?”

“Frank,” said Cheek.

Frank was good natured and had a pleasant face. He was wearing big bells with a wide brown belt and a knit shirt holding horizontal stripes. Real police sometimes called security guards “scarecrows” or “counterfeit cops,”