“I just need to verify his current address. I have him at Fourteen-twelve P Street, in Northwest. Is that correct?”
“Hold on and I’ll check,” she said. I listened to the tapping of a computer keyboard while I won Kd w'27dered if there was any such address at Fourteenth and P. The woman got back on the line.
“I have him at Thirteen-forty-three Hamlin Street in Northeast.”
“Over in Brookland area, right?”
“That I don’t know.”
“Can you tell me, Miss-?”
“Sheridan.”
“Miss Sheridan, can you tell me the circumstances of Mr. Thomas’s severance with the company?”
“No,” Miss Sheridan said, “I can’t.”
“I understand,” I said. “One more thing. I recently met one of your employees, a big fellow by the name of Rudolph.”
“Yes?”
“I just wanted to tell you-he’s doing one hell of a job.”
“T hank you,” she said.
“Thank you, ” I said, and hung up the phone.
I ripped a ticket off the Dart’s windshield and threw it in the glovebox with all the others. Then I swung a U on Florida and headed across town to the Brookland section of Northeast.
EIGHT
James Thomas lived in a pale green two-story house with pine green shutters, on a gently graded piece of Hamlin Street between Thirteenth and Fourteenth in Northeast. The lots were large in this part of town, with wide yards whose once-grand homes were set far back from the curb.
My grandfather had still owned some Brookland property in the midsixties, when we would drive across town in his black Buick Wildcat once a month on Sunday to collect the rent. Papou’s property was a brick warehouse on Ninth Street that faced railroad tracks that later were to parallel those of the Metro. The dark-skinned man we met each month was elderly and bald, except for two neatly trimmed patches of gray above each ear, and he paid my grandfather with a roll of twenties that he had ready as we pulled up to the lot. His name was Jonas Brown, and he ran a clean little auto body shop out of the space, and he called my grandfather “Mister Nick” and me “Young Nick.”
After the riots, Papou sold the warehouse to Jonas Brown, and I had since rarely returned to Brookland. I remembered it as being as peaceful as any section of D.C., with its stately Victorians surrounded by huge clusters of azaleas in the spring. In my gauzy childhood visions, middle-class black families walked slowly down city streets, the men wearing striped suits and brown felt hats, the women in brightly colored dresses cinched with white ribbons, and Brookland was always Sunday morning.
So the drive that day down Twelfth Street, the neighborhood’s main avenue, saddened me. A painfully thin, coatless wo N›Soman stood at the corner of Twelfth and Monroe in what looked to be a chiffon Easter dress, her head bowed as she fought to remain upright against the strong, cold wind. At Michigan Liquors a young man in a thick red down coat stood talking into a pay phone, gesturing broadly with his free hand, his beeper clipped to the waistband of his sweatpants, the door open to his window-tinted Chevy Blazer that sat idling near his side. I noticed several other drug cars, Jags and Mercedes with gold wheels and spoilers and gold-framed licence plates, parked in the lot of the Pentecostal Church of Christ. The movie theater was gone, replaced by a chain drugstore. There were hair salons and dry cleaners and delis; outside their doors teenage boys heavily paced the sidewalks. At Lucky’s Cocktail Lounge a warping sign depicted a logo of a forked-tongue Satan. Under the Satan a slogan was printed with red bravado: WHERE THE DEVILS PLAY, AND THE LADIES MAY.
I had parked my Dart two doors up from the Thomas residence, in front of a leaning Victorian that was fronted with stone steps leading up to a rotting porch. Two young men sat on those steps and watched me as I walked by. Ice T’s “Drama” was coming out of their box. One of the boys smiled malignantly in my direction as the words “Fuck the damn police” rapped out of the speakers. All of the house windows were barred on this street, and the deep barks of large-breed dogs were alternately close and distant in the air. I walked on.
On the porch of the Thomas residence I knocked on a heavy oak door. After my second knock there were muted footsteps and the darkening of the peephole centered in the door. Then the release of deadbolts and the metallic slide of a chain. The door opened, and a tiny dark woman in a print housedress stood before me, looking up with quizzical, kindly brown eyes. Her hair was thin and white; her deeply lined features nearly aboriginal.
“Yes?” she said in a manner that wedded curiosity to trepidation.
“Is James Thomas in, ma’am?” I gave her my card along with my least threatening smile. She handed back the card after a brief inspection.
“That would depend on your business with him, Mr…?”
“Stefanos.”
“What is your business with him, Mr. Stefanos?” she repeated, with the greatest degree of forced unpleasantness that a woman of her frailty could muster.
“It concerns a case I’m working on,” I said, adding, “I’m not with the police, ma’am.”
She considered that as the December chill continued to intrude upon her house through the open doorway, along with the rap from the boom box on the porch of the house to her right. Her shoulders finally slumped in visible submission as she motioned me in. I thanked her and followed as she led me into a den furnished with throw rugs and faded overstuffed furniture.
Mrs. Thomas had a seat on the couch; I took mine in a cushiony chair. She folded a slim pair of hands in her lap after pulling the hem of her housedress down to her knees, then looked into my eyes. I don’t know what she was looking for, or if the look was meant to intimidate me. It did. There were seventy years of hard life in those eyes, seventy years of churchgoing faith and hope in answer to deterioration and disappoi S anentntment and death. The wooden clock on the fireplace mantelpiece ticked loudly in the otherwise silent room.
“I’d like to see your son,” I said. “If he has a few minutes.”
“Does this concern the young man’s death at the Piedmont?”
“Yes, it does.”
Mrs. Thomas sighed slightly but retained her posture. “The District police have gone over the case with us very thoroughly, Mr. Stefanos. I believe they were satisfied that my son had nothing to do with that boy’s death.”
“I’m not working with the police,” I said. “So I’m not privy to what was said between them and your son. But I do have an interest in seeing that the murderer is found. William Henry was my friend, Mrs. Thomas.”
Her hands moved together in a washing motion in her lap, as if it were her hands that were doing the deliberating. She looked away briefly and up the stairs, where I assumed James Thomas was residing. Then she looked back at me, her features softened but unresigned.
“When one person dies, his suffering is over, Mr. Stefanos. Those left behind often bear the weight of the hardship. I didn’t know that Henry boy. The papers and the police said he was an innocent young man. Anyway, he’s in the hands of the Lord now-neither you nor I can help him. But my son has been hurt enough. He’s lost his job and he’s lost all his self-respect. He sits in that room upstairs all day, and he doesn’t come out, except for dinner and to walk down to the liquor store.” Mrs. Thomas looked down at her lap. “I couldn’t help that young man. It wasn’t my job to help that young man. But it is my job to protect my son. And I don’t want him hurting anymore.”
“I didn’t come here to hurt your son. I came here for a few simple answers. You believe in justice in heaven. I respect that belief, if a person can be satisfied with it. I can’t. So I have to believe in justice on earth.” I rose slowly, walked in her direction, and stood over her. “Let me have a couple of minutes with your son, and I’ll be on my way.”
“I’ll ask if he’d like to see you,” she said.
I stepped aside to let her pass and watched her ascend the stairs. She held the wooden banister as she did
