trinkets on the dresser. A large dollar sign had been cut out and tacked to the wall. On an opposite wall, a poster of the group PM Dawn. No pictures of fat-bottomed women, no basketball stars, no hard rappers, no gun-culture or drug-culture symbolism, nothing representative of the mindless, raging testosterone of a seventeen-year-old city boy trying to push his manhood in the 1990s. Nothing like my own bedroom at seventeen, for that matter, or the bedrooms of any of my friends.
“Mind if I look in the closet?” I said.
“Go ahead,” Shareen said.
I went to it, opened it. I scanned a neat row of clothing, shirts of various designs and several pairs of slacks, the slacks pressed and hung upside down from wooden clamps. I put my hand on the shelf above the closet rod, ran it along the dustless surface. I found a back issue of D.C. This Week and took it down. I looked at it with deliberate disinterest, folded it, and put it under my arm.
“Anything?” LaDuke said, nodding at the newspaper.
“No,” I said, and forced a smile at Shareen. “You don’t mind if I take this, do you?” t size='3'›“I don’t mind,” she said, looking very small, hugging herself with her arms as if she was chilled.
“Thanks. By the way, did you clean this room recently?”
“I haven’t touched a thing. Roland always kept it this way.”
“Have you noticed anything missing? Did he take any clothes with him, pack anything before… the last time you saw him?”
“I don’t think so,” she said, a catch in her voice.
“You keep a nice house,” I said, trying to keep things light.
“Thank you. It’s not easy with these kids, believe me.”
“I can imagine,” I said, but it was too much.
“You can?”
“Well, no. Actually, not really.”
“Then don’t patronize me.” The resentment crept back in her tone. “Let me tell you how it is. When I inherited this house from my mother, I also inherited the balance of the mortgage. That, and everything else it takes to be a single working mother-car, clothing, new stuff for the kids all the time. You come into this part of town, see what it is over here, and maybe you make a judgment about where I prioritize my family in the scheme of my life. What you don’t know is, I’d like to get my children out of this neighborhood, too, understand? But the way it is out here, in this economy, me and everyone I know, we’re all one paycheck away from the street. So, no, it’s not easy. But I’ve done pretty good for them, I think. Anyway, I’ve tried.”
I didn’t ask for all that, but I allowed it. LaDuke cleared his throat and pushed off from the wall.
“I’ll take that photograph of Roland now,” I said, “if you don’t mind. Then we’ll be on our way.”
She left the room. I walked out with LaDuke and told him to meet me at the front door. After some hesitation, he followed Shareen downstairs. I went to the daughter’s room, knocked on her open door. She pulled one earphone away from her head and looked up.
“Yeah.”
“I’m Nick Stefanos.”
“So?”
“What’s your name?”
“Danitra.”
“So how’s it going?”
“It’s goin’ all right.”
“Listen, Danitra, I’m here because your mom hired me and my friend to find your brother, Roland.”
“So?”
“Just wanted to introduce myself, that’s all. What are you listening to?”
“Little bit of this and that. Nothin’ you’d know.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right. But I recognized that Trouble Funk you and your friends had on the other day when I called.”
“That was you?”
“Yep.”
For a second, she looked like she might apologize for her attitude that day, but she didn’t. Instead, she shrugged and began to replace the earphone over her ear.
“Hold on a second,” I said.
“What?”
“You got any idea where your brother went off to?”
“Uh-uh.”
“You think he’s okay?”
“That fool’s all right,” she said.
“Why are you so sure?”
“ ’Cause if he wasn’t, he would’ve called. Listen, most likely he’s off on one of his money things. That boy just wants to be large, know what I’m sayin’? Always wantin’ to be like some movie star, ride around in a limousine. When he finds out it ain’t like that, he’s gonna come home.”
“You think so, huh?”
I stood there and waited for a reply. But she turned away from me then and went back into herself. I left her alone and headed back down the stairs.
“Mrs. Lewis really digs you, man,” LaDuke said with a laugh as he negotiated the Ford around RFK, then got it on to East Capitol. “Every time you open your mouth, she’d like to bite your head off.”
“Yeah, thanks for all your support back there.”
“Kinda liked watchin’ you bury yourself.”
I fired a smoke off the dash lighter. “Well, the funny thing is, in some ways I agree with what she’s saying. She’s out there working for a big firm, and she probably knows just about as much law now as the people she’s working for. You know how that goes, Xeroxing and taking messages for people who really have no more intelligence than you. I mean, lawyers, they’ve got the degree, and they worked for it, but that doesn’t necessarily make them geniuses, right? But I’m sure that doesn’t stop them from condescending to her all day long. Then she’s trying to raise those kids in a bad environment, with no way to get out… I don’t know… I guess I can see why she’s so angry. ’Course, that doesn’t explain why she’s so angry at me.”
“Maybe you remind her of the type of guy that left her with those kids,” he said.
“Yeah, maybe.” The thought of my failed marriage crossed my mind. The thought must have transferred to my face.
“Hey look, Nick, I didn’t mean anything.” ‹ Kg. he’s s/p›
“Forget it.”
LaDuke punched the gas and passed a Chevy that was crawling up ahead. He drove for a couple of miles, then said, “You get anything from the sister?”
“Uh-uh. Typical teenager with no time for me, and nothing good to say about her brother. She thinks he’s just out there being an entrepreneur, trying to make some kind of score.”
“You saw the dollar sign plastered on his bedroom wall. Maybe that is all he’s into. Maybe he’s running some kind of game.”
“What else you see in that room?”
“I saw what you saw,” he said.
“No, I mean the details.”
LaDuke rubbed the top of his head, something I had seen him do over the last couple of days when he was trying to think. “Well, it’s kind of a funny room for a seventeen-year-old boy. It looked like it could have been his sister’s room.”
“Right. How about that PM Dawn poster?”
“PM Dawn? What the hell is that?”
“It’s a rap group-but soft, man, all the way soft. Not what anyone down here would call ‘street authentic.’ Like what U2 is to rock and roll.”
“U2?”
