What It Was

“Y’all want my money,” said Williams, “go on and take it.”

“Give it here,” said Jones.

Williams removed folding money from his front pocket and held it out. Jones took it and without examination stuffed it in the patch pocket of his bells.

“Now the key to your crib,” said Jones.

“For what?” said Williams.

“ ’Bout to help myself to your heroin. I know you’re holdin.”

“Who…”

“Never mind who. He kissin dirt.” Jones nodded with his chin. “Give it up. I don’t want no loose dimes, neither. The bundles.”

“You don’t understand what you gettin into, brother. I got that shit on consignment.”

“Say what?”

“I don’t own it.”

“You got that right. It’s mine now.”

Williams sighed. They heard his breath expel and saw his shoulders sag.

Jefferson grew impatient and touched his pistol to the man’s cheekbone. “Tell him where the dope at.”

“What I got is in my bedroom closet,” said Williams. “In a suit bag.”

“That’s it?” said Jones.

“All of it,” said Williams. “Swear for God.” Williams was a poker player, and they could not read the lie in his eyes.

“Gimme your key.”

Jones left the alley with the key to Williams’s house and the key to the Buick. Jefferson kept the gun loosely trained on Williams, who calmly lit a cigarette. Neither of them spoke.

Fifteen minutes later, Jones returned. Williams ground the butt under his foot.

“You get it?” said Jefferson.

“Yeah, we’re good.”

Williams studied them. The tall, light-skinned dude had a distinctive look and a rep to go with it. Had to be Red Jones, who some called Red Fury on account of his woman’s car. He knew nothing about the little one with the gold teeth.

“Can I get my house key back?” said Williams.

Jones tossed it in his general direction. Williams did not catch the key, and it fell to the ground with a small pathetic clinking sound. Jones and Jefferson chuckled low.

Williams felt unwise anger rise up inside him. “Y’all motherfuckers ain’t gonna last.”

“We gonna last longer than you,” said Jones, and he drew his.45 from the dip of his bells.

Williams took a staggering step back. Jones moved forward, pressed the gun’s muzzle high on Williams’s chest, and squeezed its trigger. The night lit up, and in the flash they saw the look of shock on Williams’s face as he left his feet and dropped to the alley floor. Blood pooled out from Williams’s back. His chest heaved up as he fought for breath. Then his eyes closed and he moved no more.

“Next time,” said Jefferson, “gimme some kind of warning. My ears are ringin, Red.”

“Boy talked too much shit.”

They left him for dead. It was a mistake.

FIVE

Strange had traded in his Impala and bought a low-mileage, triple-black, ’70 Monte Carlo from the Curtis Chevrolet at Georgia and Missouri. He’d be paying on it for three years, but he had no buyer’s remorse. He was a GM man who was working his way up to a Cadillac, but for now he was more than satisfied. The lines were extra clean, with rally rims, Goodyear radials, and a small-block 350 under the hood. The interior had sweet buckets, a horseshoe shifter on the console, factory eight-track sound, and a wood-grain dash. It was a pretty car.

Strange drove it downtown, Curtis’s Roots in the deck, “Get Down” playing loud.

He found a parking spot and commenced to knocking on doors in the apartment building at 13th and R, where Bobby Odum had lived. He began on the top floor and got very little in the way of leads. He was a young black man, casually but not loudly dressed, nice looking and well built, with a polite manner. Most important, he was not the law. Ft sizme somSo the residents of the building, for the most part, talked to him freely. But the information he received held little value in terms of his quest. He was looking for a ring, not Bobby Odum’s killer. Homicide was police business and always had been. Private detectives only solved murders in movies and dime novels.

On the bottom floor, he found a young woman named Janette Newman, a compact, nicely put-together gal who had the Marcus Garvey thing going on in her apartment. She let him in, offered him a seat on the sofa, and served him a soda. He learned that she was a schoolteacher at Harriet Tubman and that she was single.

“You live here alone?”

“Most nights,” she said.

“I imagine you saw the comings and goings of Bobby Odum. He had visitors, right?”

“There was this one light-skinned girl.”

“Speak to her?”

“She wasn’t the approachable type.”

“Ever rap with Odum?”

“Sometimes. He had a job, and in the morning we’d leave here around the same time.”

“So you know where he worked at.”

“He washed dishes at that fish place up on Georgia,” she said. “Cobb’s?”

“I know the spot.”

“Walked over to Seventh and took the uptown bus, every day.”

“I assume you told all this to the homicide detective who came to see you. Vaughn, right?”

“Big white dude. Don’t recall his name. I wasn’t about to tell that man too much. They never do anything for us, anyway. You know how that is.”

Strange nodded. He had identified himself as a self-employed investigator. He had not told her that he was former MPD.

“I hope I’m being of help.” She parted her lips and smiled.

It was a fetching smile, but there was little warmth to it, and no kindness in her eyes. He imagined she could run to mean sometimes, too.

Strange liked all kinds of women. They didn’t have to be beautiful to catch his attention, but they did have to be nice. His girlfriend, Carmen, was both.

He had not always been faithful to her, but he knew what he had.

“Anything else I can do for you?” said Janette.

“Not today,” said Strange.

Outside the building, Strange saw a man sitting on a retaining wall and doing nothing. Looked like a guy who lived on the streets. If this was his spot, he was the type of person who would notice things, that is if he Khat. Loowas not too high. Strange took steps toward him. The man watched him dolefully, then got off the wall and walked away. Strange went to his car.

The Carryout on the west side of Georgia, in Park View, specialized in fish sandwiches. Case no one knew, the sign out front, featuring a big old bass leaping out of the water with a hook and line in its mouth, announced it. Strange asked the owner, Ordell Cobb, for a minute of his time. Cobb was in his fifties and wore an apron smudged with ketchup and blood. His manner was gruff. They were at the rear of the kitchen, near a door leading to an alley, workers hustling around them. The stainless steel sink that Odum had most likely stood over, its power nozzle hanging above, sat right beside them. WOL was playing on the house radio. Strange knew, ’cause Bobby “the Mighty Burner” Bennett was introducing a song.