Hell To Pay

phone.

“That’s you,” said Janine, her liquid eyes looking him over. “Thought you’d like to cleanse your palate after that lunch.”

“Thank you, baby. Go on and send George in.”

He watched her walk to the door in her brightly colored outfit. She was the best office manager he’d ever had. Hell, she ran the damn place, he wasn’t afraid to admit it. And, praise God, the woman had an ass on her, too. It moved like a wave beneath the fabric of her skirt. All these years, and it still stirred Strange to look at her. The way she was put together, some people who knew something about it might say it was poetry. He’d never been into poems himself. The best way he could describe it, looking at Janine, it reminded him of peace.

GEORGE Hastings and Strange had known each other since the early sixties, when both had played football for Roosevelt in the Interhigh. In those days he ran with George and Virgil Aaron, now deceased, and Lydell Blue, also a football player, a back who was the most talented of the four. Strange and Blue had gone into law enforcement, and Hastings had taken a government job with the Bureau of Engraving.

“Thanks for seeing me, Derek,” said Hastings.

“Ain’t no thing, George. You know that.”

Strange still called Hastings George, though most around town now called him Trip or Trip Three. Back in the early seventies, Hastings had played the unlikely combination of 3-3-3 and hit it for thirty-five grand. It was a fortune for that time, and it was especially significant from where they’d come from, but, with the exception of the new Deuce and a Quarter he’d purchased, Hastings had been smart and invested the money wisely. He’d bought stock in AT&T and IBM, and he had let it ride. By neighborhood standards, Strange knew, Hastings had become a wealthy man.

He also knew that Hastings liked to hear Strange call him by his given name. George was a name out of fashion with the younger generation of blacks. It had been a generic name used by plantation owners to refer to their male slaves, for one. And in the modern world it had become a slang name to refer to a boyfriend, as in, “Hey, baby, you got yourself a George?” So young black people didn’t care much for the name and they rarely considered it as a name for their own babies. But George Hastings’s mother, a good old girl whom Strange had regarded with nearly as much affection as his own, had thought it was just fine, and that made it all good for Hastings and for Strange.

Hastings leaned over and flicked the spring-mounted head of the plaster Redskins figure that sat on Strange’s desk. The head swayed from side to side.

“The old uniform. That goes back, what, thirty-some-odd years?”

“Forty,” said Strange.

“Who painted his face brown like that? I know they weren’t sellin’ ’em like that back then.”

“Janine’s son, Lionel.”

“How’s he doin’?”

“Finishing up at Coolidge. Just applied to Maryland. He’s a good boy. A knucklehead sometimes, like all boys tend to be. But he’s doing all right.”

“You see Westbrook the other night?”

“Boy made some catches.”

“Uh-huh. Still makin’ that first-down sign when they move the sticks. That drives the defenders crazy. He is cocky.”

“He’s got a right to be,” said Strange. “Some call it cocky; I call it confidence. Westbrook’s ready to have the season of his career, George. Gonna bust loose like Chuck Brown and all the Soul Searchers put together.”

“He ain’t no Bobby Mitchell,” said Hastings. “And he sure ain’t no Charley Taylor.”

Strange smiled a little. “No one is to you, George.”

“Anyway,” said Hastings. He reached inside his lightweight sport jacket. Strange figured from the material that the jacket went for five, six hundred. Quiet, with a subtle pattern in there. Good quality, and understated, like all George’s possessions. Like the high-line, two-year-old Volvo he drove, and his Tudor-style house up in Shepherd Park.

Hastings dropped a folded sheet of paper on Strange’s desk. Strange picked it up, unfolded it, and looked it over.

“I got what you asked for,” said Hastings.

Strange read the full name of the subject: Calhoun Tucker. Hastings had provided the tag number for the Audi S4 that Tucker owned or leased. Mimeographed onto the sheet of paper was a credit card receipt from a nightspot that Strange recognized. It was located on U Street, east of 14th. Hastings had scribbled a paragraph of other incidental character details: where Tucker said he’d lived last, where he’d last worked, like that.

“How’d you get the credit card receipt?” said Strange.

“Looked through my little girl’s purse. They went to dinner, he must have said, Hold on to this for me, will you? Didn’t like going through her personal belongings, but I did. Alisha’s getting ready to step off a cliff. I mean, young people, they decide to get married, they never do know what it means, for real.”

“I heard that.”

“My Linda, God love her, she’d be doing the same thing, she was still with us. She was harder on Alisha’s boyfriends than I ever was, matter of fact. And here this boy just rolls into town six months ago — he’s not even a Washington boy, Derek — and I’m supposed to just sit on my hands while everybody’s world gets rocked? I mean, I don’t even know one thing about his family.”

Strange dropped the paper on the desk. “George, you don’t have to justify this to me. I do this kind of background check all the time. It’s no reflection on your daughter, and as of yet it’s no reflection on this young man. And it damn sure is no reflection on you. You’re her father, man, you’re supposed to be concerned.”