they were calling it this week. It was all jungle-jump to Vaughn. What the sticker meant was, this here had to be the vehicle of the colored mechanic, had the prison tattoos. Maybe the lie Vaughn had told, about the spray paint in the street, would get the guy going. Maybe not. Anyway, it was all scatter shot. Once in a while you got a hit.
Vaughn got into his car and headed back into D.C. He had promised Linda Allen he’d drop by.
Back in the garage, Pat Millikin and Lawrence Houston waited for the sound of the cop’s engine to fade.
“Stupid sonofabitch,” said Millikin, lighting another smoke. “He backed my brother on the inside, so it was on me to back him, too. But after this, I’m done.”
“You finished with his car?”
“I got it over in Berwyn Heights, workin’ on it nights. Gonna be a few days before I’m done.”
“That big boy he was with, you say he wanted a rental, too?”
“Buzz Stewart. Well, he ain’t gettin’ one now. I’m gonna call him at that gas station he works at right now and give him the news. Make it simple: I got no cars to rent.”
“You gonna tell him about our visitor?”
“Not my lookout. We didn’t say nothin’ to that cop, so Stewart’s got no reason to know. I want as little contact with those two as possible.” Millikin looked at Houston. “Listen, Lawrence… brother or no brother, if I had known what those guys did, I never would have took in that car.”
Houston shrugged. “Ain’t no thing to me.”
He tugged at the pump hose, testing the strength of the clamp. He reached to close the Chevy’s hood and saw the tremble in his hands.
His hands shook when his blood was up.
TWENTY-THREE
FIVE MINUTES INTO meeting Billy Dolittle, Strange marked him as lazy, incompetent, and “that way.” The man wearing his seersucker suit, red-and-blue rep tie, and cheap brown shoes, writing things down in a notebook, one of those schoolkid tablets, black with white spots. Talking down to him, speaking slowly and repeating himself as if Strange were a child. Dolittle chewing on wintergreen Life Savers during the interview, Strange wondering if he had been drinking this early, ’cause he sure did look the type. Also wondering how much to tell him: what to give up and what to hold back.
It was Dolittle who suggested that Strange officially ID his brother, that, as a cop, he could “handle it” and in the process spare his parents the pain of seeing their son “like that.” By then his father had arrived at the house and, as Strange knew he would, insisted on coming along. So together they went to the alley and stood over Dennis and saw him “like that,” and neither of them got sick or turned his face away. Instead, Darius put his hand on his younger son’s shoulder and said a low prayer, and Derek Strange closed his eyes, not thinking of God or his brother’s spirit but instead thinking, I will kill the motherfucker who did this to my brother, and, That man is going to die.
Back in the kitchen of his father’s house, both of his parents seated at the table in the living room, his father holding his mother’s hand, Strange talked to Dolittle and told him some of what he knew about his brother’s life. He told him about Dennis’s stint in the navy, his disability, and how he had no current job, and he mentioned his running boys, Alvin Jones and Kenneth Willis, and suggested that Dolittle definitely speak to them, because both of them were wrong. He did not tell Dolittle that Dennis moved small amounts of marijuana for the neighborhood dealer, James Hayes, because he had no desire to taint his brother further or to get Hayes, a nonviolent man who had hurt no one, in trouble with the law. Also, he wanted to talk to Hayes himself.
“Where can I find Jones and Willis?”
“Jones stays with this woman name of Lula Bacon, down in LeDroit Park. Far as I know, he has no job. Willis is a janitor in some elementary school up off Kansas; I don’t know which one. He’s got an apartment over on H, in Northeast, above a liquor store. Eighth, Ninth, around there. My mother might have Kenneth’s number.”
Dolittle scribbled in his notebook, his lips moving as he worked. “Anything else you can think of?”
Strange shook his head. “Not now.”
Dolittle handed him a card. “You can get ahold of me here.”
Strange saw that there was only the precinct house number on the card. When Dolittle was off the clock, he was off.
“I’m gonna call you this afternoon,” said Strange, “see if there’s been any progress.”
“We haven’t even finished canvassing the neighbors yet. These investigations take time.”
“They take too much time, they get cold.”
“I can understand you being anxious,” said Dolittle, scratching at a thick nose spiderwebbed with red veins. “But you need to let me do my job. I been at this a long time.”
Too long, thought Strange.
“Don’t worry,” said Dolittle, touching Strange’s arm gingerly. “We’ll get this guy.”
You’ll get him if you get lucky, thought Strange.
“That it?” said Strange.
“I’ll see myself out.”
Strange listened to Dolittle talking to his parents out in the living room. He heard the phone ring and he heard his father tell his mother not to pick it up. As word had spread in the neighborhood, the calls had begun to increase. Soon folks would be dropping by with food and drink, and the apartment would be crowded with visitors. He hoped his mother could handle it. She was doing all right so far.
Strange went to the window over the sink, where his mother’s square of cardboard had come free in two corners and was arcing back. Strange reaffixed the corners to the glass.
He heard the front door open and shut. He heard his mother sobbing. He heard his father say, “Come here, Alethea,” and the rustle of their clothing as they embraced.
Strange wanted to be with them and hold on to them, too. But this was their moment, and he was no longer a boy. He sat down on the kitchen floor beside the sink, where he’d sat at his mother’s feet many times as a child, leaned his head back against the cabinet, and, very quietly, allowed himself to let go.
BUZZ STEWART FLICKED ash off his Marlboro. “There it is, right there.”
“It doesn’t look like much,” said Dominic Martini.
“That’s right. It ain’t no big deal.”
They were parked in Stewart’s Belvedere, the nose of the Plymouth pointed south, on the west side of Georgia Avenue, not too far over the District line in Shepherd Park. “Once Upon a Time” came from the radio, Buzz Stewart nodding his head to the busy Motown arrangement as he kept his eyes fixed on the strip of businesses clustered on the east side of the street.
Nearby was Morris Miller’s liquor store, a landmark whose rear parking lot was a meeting spot for D.C. and Montgomery County teenagers, a starting place to buy beer and make plans on Friday and Saturday nights. Years earlier, owner Morris Miller could not live in the neighborhood where he owned his business, as Shepherd Park had covenants restricting the sale of its houses to Jewish buyers. Since then, the neighborhood had become progressive. In ’58, white and black homeowners, angered by the practices of blockbuster real estate agents, had formed Neighbors Inc. to support integrated streets. Now the area was heavy with Jewish residents, as well as blacks, with pioneering interracial couples in the mix. Its high school, Coolidge,
