“Who’s the primary? Do you know?”
“A Bill Dolittle.”
“Okay. You tell him I’m at his disposal, hear? And the same goes for you and your parents. Anything you need. Anything, understand?”
“Thank you, Detective,” said Strange, and hung up the phone.
Billy Do-nothing. That was a bad break. Unless the perp walked right into the station with pen in hand, or there was a forthcoming wit, or there was a plea-out involved, the case would go cold.
Vaughn rubbed at his face. The young man, Derek, had seemed unemotional, considering. Well, he was police. Some of them just felt they had to put up a hard front all the time. Secretly, Vaughn was relieved that the son, and not the mother or father, had picked up the phone. But he hoped Derek would pass on the message that he had called.
Vaughn sat there smoking his cigarette. What he knew of Dennis Strange came from Alethea, and Alethea gave up little of her private life. He remembered vaguely that the older son had been in the service, but that was long ago. There was little else to recall. When Alethea spoke of her sons at all, it was usually about Derek, the cop. He wondered if Dennis, the murder victim, had shamed her in some way or if it was just that Derek gave her such pride.
Vaughn crushed his L amp;M out in the ashtray before him, found an unmarked out in the lot, and went to work.
He visited several garages on the D.C. border. He went back down to 14th and recanvassed a few of the neighbors who lived close to the accident scene, and turned up jack.
Shortly thereafter, he sat at the lunch counter in the Peoples on Georgia and Bonifant, eating a burger-and-fries platter and washing it down with a chocolate shake, his basic early lunch. The steel cup used to make the shake sat next to his glass. The soda jerks here didn’t pour the extra out and waste it like they did at other five-and-dimes, and that was why Vaughn always came back.
He pushed away his plate and lit a smoke. When he was done with it, he took his notebook and pen out of his inside jacket pocket, went to a wooden phone booth in the drugstore, dropped a dime in the slot, and got Scordato, his PG County cop friend, on the line.
“Marin, it’s Vaughn.”
“Hound Dog, how’s it hangin’?”
“Straight down the middle,” said Vaughn. “Gimme somethin’, will you?”
“Get a pen.”
Vaughn drove into PG County. He visited a garage off Riggs Road, in Chillum. He got shrugs and the usual passive hostility. His next stop was a place near Agar Road, in West Hyattsville, near the Queens Chapel Drive-in, an unmarked garage on a gravel road set behind a strip of speed and tire shops.
Vaughn parked behind a Dodge Dart, a plum-colored GT with mag wheels. A Hi Jackers decal and another reading “WOOK: K Comes Before L,” were affixed to the rear window. He studied the car as he passed it and headed for the garage.
Vaughn walked through the open bay door. A white guy and a colored guy, both good sized, had their heads under the hood of an all-stock, pearl-finish Chevelle SS. “Windy” came from a radio set high on a shelf.
The white guy, light and freckled, wearing coveralls cut off at the shoulders, a cigarette dangling from his lips, stood free as Vaughn cleared his throat. The colored guy’s eyes came up, but only for a moment, returning his attention to the Chevy’s water pump, illuminated by a droplight. He worked a flathead to a clamp, tightening it around a hose. Vaughn saw homemade tattoos, probably done with a heated wire, on both of his forearms.
“How’s it goin’ today?” said Vaughn.
“We help you?” said the white guy, real chipper voice, smiling, looking Vaughn over, making him as a cop.
“I hope so,” said Vaughn, badging the white guy, replacing the badge case inside his jacket. “Frank Vaughn, MPD. I’m lookin’ for a Patrick Millikin.”
“You found him.”
“Can I get a minute?”
Millikin pointed his chin in the direction of the Chevy. “Just about.”
Vaughn stepped forward, closing the space between himself and Millikin, intending to crowd him. Millikin did not react.
“A homicide occurred a few nights ago involving a red Galaxie or Fairlane, sixty-three, sixty-four. Might be damage to the grille or the hood. Headlights, quarter panels…” Vaughn looked at the colored guy, whose eyes had flashed up again, then back at Millikin. “I was wondering if a car like that might have come through.”
“No, sir.”
Millikin picked a shop rag up off the cement floor and rubbed at his hands. The ember flared on his cigarette as he drew on it, Millikin squinting against the smoke coming off its tip. He dropped the rag, ashed the cigarette into his palm, and rubbed the ashes into the thigh of his coveralls.
“You
“Haven’t seen a car fitting that description.”
“You talk to the other garage owners around here, don’t you?”
“Sometimes.”
“Any of them mention a car like that?”
“No.”
“Nothin’, huh?”
“Not a thing.”
“You got a brother in the joint on a manslaughter beef, right?”
“He don’t know about no red Ford, either.”
Millikin dragged on his smoke, double-dragged, pitched the butt out the open bay door. His pale freckled face had gone pink.
“You’re a funny guy,” said Vaughn.
“I was just sayin’ he don’t know.”
“Well, I mention prison ’cause… hell, Mr. Millikin, I know all about the code. How people like your brother and some of the people you might, uh,
“That’s nice. But I still ain’t seen the car. Now look, I gotta get to work. I promised the man who owns this Chevy here that I’d have it for him this afternoon.”
“Here’s the deal,” said Vaughn, taking another step forward. “The driver of the car I’m describing, he ran this colored boy down in the street for no reason at all. Broke his neck, severed his spinal cord… left his brain fluid all over the street. Boy had a steady job, was off to college in the fall, the whole nine. Looked to me like this driver, he was havin’ fun doing it. Boy wasn’t hurting no one.”
Millikin’s eyes had lost some of their light. “That’s rough.”
“Someone spray-painted ‘Dead nigger’ on the asphalt, too, with an arrow pointing to where the body dropped. Can you imagine?”
“Damn shame,” said Millikin, looking away from Vaughn.
“Yeah,” said Vaughn. “It’s just wrong.” He reached into his pocket, retrieved his badge case, and withdrew a card, doctored to include his home phone. “You hear anything about a red Ford, sixty-three, sixty-four, damage to the front, you give me a call.”
“I surely will.”
Vaughn looked to make eye contact with the colored guy before he left, but the man’s face was buried in his work. He walked from the garage, the lousy music trailing him like a bad joke.
Outside, he stopped by the plum-colored Dart. He withdrew another business card from his badge case, reached into the open window, and dropped it onto the driver’s bucket. He knew that the call-letter decal on the back window was for one of those local radio stations played soul, R amp;B, race music, whatever
