corner and said, “I used to hang out there when I was a real little kid.”
“How little?” Haynes said.
“Six or seven. The world’s two fastest soda jerks worked there. One had a bad leg; the other had terribly crossed eyes and both must’ve been well over forty. Pop sometimes took me there for what he said were the best ice cream sodas in town. We’d sit at the fountain and watch the two guys work. God, they were fast. I remember Pop kept telling them they were an endangered species. Think they’re still there?”
“We could find out,” Haynes said.
“You’re serious?”
“Sure.”
As the light changed to green, Erika McCorkle spotted an empty metered parking space just south of Larimer’s market, raced a BMW for it and won. She stopped parallel with the car in front of the empty space, shifted into reverse, spun the steering wheel to the right, backed up, spun the steering wheel again, this time to the left, and shot the Cutlass into the empty space, its two right wheels coming to a stop no more than three inches from the curb.
Haynes dug into a pants pocket for some quarters to feed the meter. “Very smooth,” he said.
“More slick than smooth.”
They crossed Connecticut on the green light only to find themselves marooned on the center traffic island. “When you were hanging out with the sandwich and soda artists,” Haynes said, “did you live around here?”
“My folks’ve always lived within a mile of Dupont Circle. It’s because Pop likes to walk to work although lately he’s been taking a lot of cabs.”
“Nothing wrong with him, is there?”
“Yes,” she said, stepping off the curb as the light changed. “He’s lazy.” She glanced at Haynes. “Known him long?”
“We talked once in nineteen seventy-four. It was my eighteenth birthday and Steady took me to dinner at Mac’s Place. Your father stopped by the table and later sent over two cognacs that made me feel all grown-up.”
“That makes you thirty-three then, doesn’t it?” she said.
“Not until August.”
There were no longer any soda jerks or a fountain for them to work behind in the Schwartz drugstore. The young Nigerian pharmacist in the rear told Haynes the fountain had been gone for at least ten years, maybe even twelve. The drugstore now seemed to concentrate on selling toiletries, discount vitamins, over-the-counter cure- alls, junk food and the occasional prescription.
They were in the drugstore just long enough for Haynes to question the young pharmacist. After they left, Erika McCorkle stood on the corner, looking around and glowering, as if trying to will the neighborhood back into what it had been when she was six or seven.
“I’m not old enough to hate change,” she said more to herself than to Haynes.
“You hate it most when you’re five or six.”
“Nothing changed when I was five or six.”
“Then you obviously had a happy childhood.”
“What I had were two older but remarkably well suited and reasonably well adjusted parents.”
“Then you were also lucky,” Haynes said. “Want some coffee?”
“The Junkanoo,” she said. “The bastards tore down the Junkanoo.”
“A nightclub, wasn’t it?”
“Right over there,” she said, pointing to a missing-tooth gap on the east side of Connecticut Avenue in the 1600 block. “I knew it closed. But now it’s gone. It just—aw, fuck it. Let’s get that coffee.”
They found a small Greek restaurant up the street called the Odeon that seemed willing, if not anxious, to serve them. He drank his coffee with cream and sugar; she drank hers black. As he stirred the coffee, Haynes said, “You see much of Steady?”
“Not till I was seventeen. It was just after he and Letty split, and Steady was using Pop’s place as a kind of headquarters. That was the summer before I went off to school and I was helping out, doing scut work mostly. Steady was there night and day, looking for somebody to talk to. When I wasn’t busy, I listened. Sometimes he even talked about you, which must be what you’re really interested in.”
“Am I,” Haynes said, somehow not making it a question.
“He could never understand why you became a cop.”
“He never asked.”
“I’ll ask.”
“Because I needed a job and they were willing to hire me.”
“That’s what I guessed, but Steady claimed it was a lot more complicated than that.”
“Well, if you’re a lapsed Quaker turned anarchist who hires out to prop up rotten governments you despise, everything might seem complicated. Even getting out of bed.”
“Did he know you despised him so much?”
“I never knew him well enough to despise him.”
