“What can I do for you?”
“You said you’d help.”
“Talk to me.”
“I’m out here, seein’ what I can piece together.”
“About your brother’s murder.”
“I decided to go around Dolittle,” said Strange.
“I don’t blame you.”
“There’s two men I need to talk to. Alvin Jones and Kenneth Willis. They -”
“Slow up. I’m writing this down.”
“Alvin Jones… Kenneth Willis.”
“Okay.”
“Willis and Jones were planning to rob a corner market down in LeDroit Park. My brother tipped off the man at the market about the robbery. This man called the police. The police picked up Willis on a gun charge before they had a chance to pull it off.”
“What police?” said Vaughn.
“Ninth Precinct,” said Strange.
“Who knows what your brother did?”
“The man he told,” said Strange, fish-eyeing Hayes. “Other than him, you and me.”
“Willis is in custody now?”
“Last I heard.”
“I know some people in the Ninth. What about the other one?”
“Jones is in the wind. I’m having a little trouble locating him.”
“You gonna be there a minute?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll call you back.”
Strange hung up the phone. He stayed where he was and looked at James Hayes.
“You hear all that?”
“Maybe I did and maybe I didn’t,” said Hayes. “You tell me.”
“Those names sound familiar to you?”
“No.”
“You said that Dennis had sold a little somethin’ for you on Sunday night. Did he sell it to Jones and Willis?”
“He could have,” said Hayes. “But neither of those names is on the check.”
“Say what?”
“Look in that basket right there in front of you,” said Hayes. “Should be a check lyin’ in there. I been too sick to cash it. Takes enough out of me just to walk to Meyer’s for my newspaper and cigarettes.”
Strange read the name off the top of the check and scanned the address. “Dennis gave you this?”
Hayes nodded. “That’s how he paid for the gage.”
The phone rang. Strange picked it up.
“Strange here.”
“I spoke to Jim Mahaffie down in the Ninth. Bad news on Willis.”
“What is it?”
“He got bounced. They arraigned him on the gun charge, but they couldn’t hold him; Willis had soft priors. The attorney they assigned him got him off on a bond.”
“When?”
“This morning.”
“Damn.”
“Look at it like this: You can talk to him alone now, you want to, in your own way.”
“Right.”
“You know where he stays?”
“Somewhere on H.”
“I got his permanent right here,” said Vaughn. He gave Strange the address.
“Thanks, Detective.”
“Anything,” said Vaughn. “You gonna be in today?”
“Four o’clock.”
“I’ll see you then.”
“You’re workin’ a double?”
“I’m on somethin’,” said Vaughn.
Strange cradled the receiver, folded the check, and placed it in his breast pocket. “I’m gonna need this.”
“Take it,” said Hayes. “Listen, young man…”
“You don’t have to say it. We’re all feeling the same way. There ain’t but one man responsible for Dennis’s death.”
“Good luck,” said Hayes.
Strange checked his wristwatch and went out the door.
AFTER VAUGHN HUNG up with Strange, he phoned the Stewart residence and got a woman on the line. She sounded tired and old. Vaughn didn’t identify himself or use any kind of ruse. He simply asked her if Buzz was in, and when she said no, he asked if she knew where he was.
“He met some friends.”
“What friends? Shorty?”
Vaughn heard the woman draw on a cigarette and exhale. “I suppose.”
“Was he leaving town?”
“Did you see him putting a suitcase or anything like it into his car? Did he act like he wasn’t going to be seeing you for a while?”
“Who am I speaking to?”
Vaughn killed the line. He stepped out of the phone booth and went to his car.
TWENTY-SIX
THE WOMAN LIVED on Fairmont Street, west of 13th, just two blocks from Strange’s apartment building. Strange stared at the check in his hand, reading the address at the top of it, and then he looked up at the tall row house at the end of a concrete walk. It was one of those old houses capped with a turret, a common architectural touch unique to D.C. The house had probably been fine once, maybe even grand, but it was in disrepair and in need of paint now.
Strange went up the walk and into the ground-floor foyer. He matched the woman’s name to the name on one of the mailbox slots and took the stairs up to the second floor. He knocked on her door.
She opened the door without asking who was there. She was young, on the tall side, not yet twenty, her face a mess of large, wide features, her eyes almond shaped, her skin light. Her figure had been lush, most likely, in her early teens, but it had gone to fat. She held a baby wrapped in a blanket, and the baby was fussing, its eyes closed tight, its tiny fingers reaching out. It was trying to get to one of her breasts, which it had been suckling moments before. The woman’s shirt, unbuttoned halfway down, was wet with her own milk. She wore bright orange plastic earrings showing a silhouette of an Afroed woman with the words “Black Is
