playing low, Russell Thompkins Jr.’s angelic vocals an apt, melodic narration to the life they were seeing, tableau- form, through the windshield. On 13th, a tired woman shuffled down the sidewalk, carrying a bag of groceries. A group of young girls double-Dutched on the corner, and on a nearby stoop a man was pleading with a woman, gesturing elaborately with his hands to make his case.
“City ain’t all that different since I been back,” said Wallace. “Little burned around the edges, maybe. But still the same rough old ghetto.”
“You missed the trouble.”
“I had my own troubles to worry on.”
“Where were you?”
“Bao Loc, mostly. Northeast of Saigon. I was with Charlie Company, the One Seventy-Third.”
Strange had heard tell of the company. Lydell had occasionally invoked its name with reverence.
“You?” said Wallace.
“My knee kept me out. Football injury.”
“You oughta thank the one who put the hurtin on you.”
“I reckon I should,” said Strange. “You see much action?”
Wallace did not reply. As it was for many veterans, his combat experience was sacred to him and the men he had fought with. He had no intention of discussing it with this young man.
“What’s this about?” said Wallace.
“I wanted to talk to you about the Odum murder.”
“Figured as much. But we gonna have to settle on something first.”
“I don’t have any money to speak of.”
“It’s not about coin. I’ll talk to you but no one else. And if you put the police on me, I’ll deny I told you anything.”
“The law can protect you.”
“I’m not afraid. But my mother lost a leg to diabetes, and now she’s confined to a chair. She needs me, man. Understand?”
“You have my word,” said Strange. “Did the police question you?”
“A white detective tried to give me money and liquor in exchange for conversation. Like I was some kind of bum.”
“You knew Odum?”
“Not really. Seen him on the street now and then.”
“Were you over there on that wall at the time of the killing?”
“There every day.”
“And?”
“The music got my attention, comin from this apartment on the second floor. It was soft at first, then real loud. And then, under it, a little pop. Small-caliber gun. Few minutes later, a tall light-skinned dude with a fucked-up natural come out the building, walkin like nothing happened. He went to a car.”
“What kind of car?”
“Late-model Fury, red over white. Had the fold-in headlamps. A woman with big hair or a wig was behind the wheel. The tall man got in the passenger side.”
“He see you?”
“If he did, he didn’t much care.”
“I’m looking for a ring was in Odum’s possession the time of his death. Wonderin maybe if the tall man had it in hand when he walked to the Plymouth.”
“Shit.” Wallace chuckled. “Now you expectin me to know too much.”
“I took a swing at it.”
“You on a treasure hunt, huh.”
“Somethin like that.”
“Plenty of police went in and out of Odum’s crib. Might could be one of them took that ring.”
“I thought of that.”
“Or you just gonna have to ask the tall dude yourself.”
“Hoping to avoid that if I can,” said Strange. “What else about the car? You didn’t get the plate number, did you?”
“Wasn’t no numbers,” said Wallace. “Plate was the kind had words on it.”
“You remember what it said?”
“Coco,” said Wallace. “C-O, C-O.”
“D.C. tags?”
“Right.”
Strange experienced a small familiar rush. All the bullshit jobs he’d taken for money lately, it had been a while since he had been involved in something real.
“You got strong observation skills,” said Strange. “What do you do for work?”
“I don’t do a thing.”
“You can’t find a job?”
“Can’t keep one. Man at the VA says I got problems. Emotional stress brought on by my ‘intense experience overseas.’ Says time gonna heal me.”
“Maybe he’s right.”
“Truth, is, I don’t know
“He was good.”
Dennis had been found in the alley behind their boyhood home, his throat cut open with a knife. He’d been butchered like an animal.
But I took care of the one who did it, thought Strange.
“Thanks for this.” Strange put out his hand.
SEVEN
Lou Fanella and Gino Gregorio had come down from Newark on the Turnpike, taking the BW Parkway south into D.C. They entered the city via New York Avenue in a black ’69 Continental sedan with suicide doors and a 460 V-8.
“What a shithole,” said Fanella, big and beefy, with dark hair and Groucho eyebrows. His thick wrist rested on the wheel as he drove, a cigarette burning between his fingers.
He was looking at the run-down gateway to Washington that was the first impression for many visitors to the nation’s capital, a mix of warehouses, liquor stores, unadorned bars, and rank motels housing criminals, prostitutes, last-stop drunks, and welfare families.
“This is where Zoot said to rent a room?” said Fanella.
“That’s what he said.” Gregorio was on the young side, with a wiry build, thinning blond hair, the cool blue eyes of an Italian horse opera villain, and a face cratered with scars grimly memorializing the nightmarish acne of his adolescence.
“It’s all smokes ’round here,” said Fanella.
“There were some places looked all right, back where we were.”
“Then let’s go back to where we were.”
They turned around and got a room in a motel off Kenilworth Avenue, in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Their room smelled strongly of bleach and faintly of puke. The area itself was no better than the one they had rejected, but most of the people here were white. Now they were comfortable.
They went out and bought liquor and mixers and brought the goods back to the room. Fanella drank Ten High bourbon and Gregorio went with Seagram’s 7.
