“Uh-uh. I’ll pick you up.”
“What’s the big secret? You don’t want me to know where you live?”
“I’ll swing by in an hour, Stevonus.”
“It’s Ste fa nos, you asshole.”
“One hour,” LaDuke said, and hung up the phone.
Paul Ritchie had set me up with one of the hustlers who worked the corner outside the Fire House, a guy who called himself Eddie Colorado. The name was a phony, but it sung, a canny cross of urban hood and westerner. Over the years, I had seen some of the men who stood around and worked that part of the street, and out of all the butch gimmicks that had passed through town-soldier of fortune, construction worker, lumberjack, and others-the cowboy thing seemed to have more staying power than the rest.
“What have you got goin’ on this weekend?” LaDuke said. We were sitting in my Dodge, alongside a small park near the P Street Bridge.
“Dinner with Lyla’s folks tomorrow, at their house. What about you?”
“I’ve got a date with Anna Wang tonight.” LaDuke grinned, proud of himself. “I called her up.”
“Congratulations,” I said, then pointed through the windshield to the bridge. “Here comes our boy.”
Eddie waited for the green at 23rd, crossed the street, and headed for my car. Ritchie had told me to look for an unnatural blond, a “skinny rockabilly type with bad skin,” and Eddie fit the bill. His orangish moussed hair contrasted starkly with his red T-shirt, the sleeves of which had been turned up, the veins popping on his thin biceps. His jeans were pressed and tight, and he walked with an exaggerated swagger, a cigarette lodged above his ear, a cocky smile spread across his face.
“Look at this guy,” LaDuke said with naked disgust.
“Relax,” I said, “and get in the backseat. Okay?”
LaDuke got out of the shotgun bucket, left the door open for Eddie, and climbed into the back. Eddie stepped up to the door, took a look around like he owned a piece of the park, pulled a wad of gum from his mouth, and chucked it onto the grass. He leaned a forearm on the frame and cocked his hip.
“You Stefanos?” he said.
“Yeah. Get in.”
“Sure thing,” Eddie said with a slow accent that had just crawled down off the Smokies. He dropped into the bucket and pulled the door closed.
I looked across the console at Eddie. “Paul Ritchie said twenty-five would buy some of your time.”
“A little of it.”
“Here.” I passed him a folded twenty along with a five. Eddie Colorado pushed his pelvis out and jammed the bills into the pocket of his jeans. He hit my dash lighter, slid the cigarette off the top of his ear, and put the filtered end in his mouth.
“No,” LaDuke said from the backseat, “we don’t mind if you smoke.”
Eddie turned his head, gave LaDuke a quick appraisal, smiled, followed the smile with a tight giggle. “Who’s your friend?”
“His name’s Jack.”
Eddie smiled again, raised his eyebrows, touched the hot end of the lighter to his smoke. He held the cigarette out the window, settled down in his seat, the sun coming directly in on his face. The acne on his cheek looked red as fire in the light.
Eddie stared straight ahead. “Paul told me you wanted me to look at some pictures.”
I opened the chrome cover on the center console, took out the photographs of Calvin and Roland, gave them to Eddie. He dragged on his cigarette and blew smoke down at the images in his hand.
“You know them?” I said.
Eddie’s mouth twitched a little. He nodded and said, “Yes.”
“Were they workin’ this area?”
“For a little while, yeah.”
“And you and your buddies kicked them out.”
“Right.”
“What’d they do to make you do that?” I said.
Eddie grinned. “You’re getting into somethin’ here that might come back to me. It’s gonna cost you another twenty-five.”
“Bullshit,” LaDuke said. “This guy didn’t kick anybody out of anywhere, Nick. Look at him.”
“Your friend thinks I’m weak,” Eddie said. “But I’ve been dealing with rednecks all my life, calling me this and that, beatin’ me up on the way to and from school. Let me tell you somethin’, it ain’t no different here in Washington D.C. than in the country. First day I got into town, I went into this burger joint off New York Avenue. This guy says to me, ‘Hey, you fuckin’ queer.’ You wanna know what I did about it? I broke his fuckin’ jaw.”
I watched a man with matted hair carry a backpack past my car. “So, what, you kicked these two off your turf because they called you a name?” cou d a
Eddie shook his head and said, “The twenty-five.”
I said, “Give it to him, Jack.”
LaDuke pulled his wallet, withdrew the money. He crumpled the bills and dropped them over Eddie’s shoulder, into his lap. Eddie smoothed the bills out carefully, folded them, and slipped them into his pocket.
“You say you knew these two,” I said. “What were their names?”
“I don’t know. Ain’t nobody uses his real name down here, anyhow.”
“They were doing prostitution down in those woods?”
“ ‘Doing prostitution’?” Eddie laughed. “If you want to call it that. They were workin’, Stefanos, that’s what they was doin’.”
“Down in those woods?”
“On the edge of the beach,” Eddie said. “At first, it didn’t bother anybody, ’cause, you got to realize, there’s a certain kind of man only goes for boys got dark meat.”
“Jesus Christ,” LaDuke muttered.
“So,” Eddie said, “it wasn’t no competition for the rest of us. But then this one here-Eddie put one dirty finger on the face of Roland Lewis-“he took some man’s money. I mean all his money. Took more than they agreed to. Just took it.”
I said, “You sure he wasn’t provoked? Maybe one of these johns threatened him or something, tried to hurt him.”
Brown lines of tobacco stain ran between the gaps of Eddie’s toothy grin. “The johns, man, they don’t hurt us. Most of the time, if there’s anything like that to be done, they want us to do it to them. Just last week, I had this old man down in the woods, this lawyer works for some fancy firm, down around 19th? He had me slide this rod with little barbs on it right up into his dick. And right before he came, he had me rip it out. Man, you should have seen the blood in his jizz. With all his screamin’ and shit, it was hard to tell the pleasure from the pain.”
“Goddamn it,” LaDuke said, “stick to what we’re talking about here.”
“Stick to it, Eddie,” I said. “We don’t need all the extra details.”
“All right.” Eddie looked in the rearview at LaDuke, back at me. “So anyway, we find out from some of our regulars that this thing has been happening again and again. That these boys are rolling our businessmen on a regular basis, takin’ the short road to big money. But there is no short road, see? This is work, like anything else. You don’t treat your customers right, they’re gonna go somewheres else. So we went and had a meeting with your boys one night, down in the woods.”
“You told them to get lost?” LaDuke said.
“It wasn’t all that dramatic,” Eddie said. “The one who started all the shit said that they were off to something c todth='27' better, that they didn’t need this anymore.”
“Off to what?”
Eddie stabbed a finger at Roland’s picture once more. “He said they were going to get themselves into the movies. Said they met a man who was going to make them a whole lot of money. Big money, man, extralarge.”
LaDuke said, “Porno?”
“What do you think?” Eddie said.
