around the three walls. Above and below the counter, bookshelves. Bibles crowded the counter and the shelves: Leviathan family Bibles, small vest-pocket testaments. Bibles in Braille. Spanish, French, German Bibles. Bibles in Kiswahili, Bihari, Shona. A cigar box minus its lid sat on the counter next to a portable CD player. Several tens, fives, and singles lay in the box, and “Lead On, O King Eternal” came from the CD player. Taped above the box and the CD player a paper banner-“Message of the Day.”
“ ‘With the ancient is wisdom, and in length of days, understanding,’ ” Frank read aloud.
“Job Twelve, twelve.”
Frank turned to Jose. “For sure?”
“Coffee and a roll?”
“Sure.”
Frank knew he’d lose. Never do Bible bets with a preacher’s kid.
Bean There used to be a soda fountain named Cherry’s. Cherry had had the business for forty years before he retired and moved to Arizona. Two employees had bought him out, and latte, cappuccino, and a dozen variants of espresso had replaced banana splits, hot fudge sundaes, and of course, the signature cherry sodas. Bean There had, however, kept the round marble-top tables and the drugstore chairs with their curling wrought-iron backs and legs.
Frank watched Jose fix his coffee. Two spoons sugar, half-and-half to muddy brown. “How much coffee you think we’ve drunk?” he asked.
Jose didn’t hesitate. “Least two thousand gallons.”
Frank stared.
“Minimum.” Jose made a show of his first sip, taking it slow.
Frank dismissed it with a laugh. “That’s bullshit, Hoser-two thousand gallons?”
“Minimum,” Jose repeated. He sat quietly a moment for effect, then: “Okay. Cup of coffee is about eight ounces?”
“Minimum.”
“Okay, if we drink four cups a day that’s thirty-two ounces. Every four days… a gallon?”
Frank ran over the math in his head. “Yeah?”
“Well, that’s ninety gallons a year. Times twenty-six years…”
Frank tried to picture two thousand gallons of coffee.
“That’s if we just drink an average of four cups a day,” Jose added, “an’ you know, there been days-”
“Josephus and Franklin, our wall by day and night.” The voice came grating and rumbling, like a granite landslide.
A massively muscled man drove his motorized wheelchair up to the table.
“You were by my stall. I knew you’d stop here.”
Southeast Washington’s eyes and ears belonged to Gideon Weaver. A stray bullet during the ’68 riots had ended his career as a car thief, but a hospital conversion by Titus Phelps had put Weaver in a new set of wheels and on the path toward becoming an inner-city missionary.
“Coffee and a roll?” Frank asked.
“Man does not live by bread alone, Franklin, but Deuteronomy doesn’t say anything about cappuccino and a bear claw.”
Frank put the coffee and roll on the table in front of Weaver.
“Thank you,” he said. He bowed his head in brief prayer, then looked up at Frank and Jose.
“James Hodges,” he said.
“You hear who?” Jose asked.
Weaver shook his head. “People don’t know. They did, they’d talk, and I’d hear.”
He got a reckoning look, a man making an inventory, or weighing the value of a soul. “A tragic figure,” he offered slowly.
“You knew him?” Jose asked.
“He lived here in Southeast.” Weaver’s voice lifted at the end. As if to say, “I know everybody in Southeast.”
Frank asked, “Personally?”
“Franklin.” Weaver arched his eyebrows. “I said: ‘He lived here in Southeast.’ ”
Frank raised both hands, palms toward Weaver.
With a smile, Weaver accepted Frank’s surrender. “There was a lot written about James. His association with Juan Brooks.”
“We know,” Frank said, “but how’d you see him?”
Weaver worked at the bear claw with the side of a fork. He separated a piece, dipped it in his coffee, took a bite, and smiled in satisfaction. The smile went away and he put the fork down.
“James was a man who wanted to be king.”
Frank and Jose looked at each other. They both eyed Weaver.
“King,” Jose repeated.
Weaver took a moment to answer. “Yes.” He paused and nodded as if in agreement with himself. “I never thought of him that way. Until now-until you asked. ‘King’ just… just came out.”
“And what made it come out?” Jose asked.
Weaver considered this. “Do you know Belial?”
“No,” Frank replied.
“A fallen angel,” Jose answered.
Weaver rewarded him with a glance of approval. “James could have done much good. But he took the talents God gave him and turned them to evil uses. Still, it always seemed to me that he was searching for redemption. Trying to buy his way back into grace.”
“He had a head for business,” Frank put in.
“Numbers and people,” Weaver said.
“People?” Jose asked. “How ‘people’?”
“People underestimated him. Dropout. Child of the projects. A boy who didn’t know his father. The hustlers thought that they had a good recruit. Their mistake. They’d give James a little slack, a little headway-he’d hustle them.”
“You said ‘king,’ ” Frank reminded Weaver.
“Folks bowing to him-James hungered for respectability.” Weaver wagged a warning finger. “Not just respect. Difference between respect and respectability… You can get re-spect because you got a gun in your hand. Or a hundred-dollar bill. What James wanted was respec-ta-bil- ity-something people give you without you asking. Without the gun or the Benjamin.”
FIVE
Capital Mortgage.” Jose pointed to the next door down the hallway.
The Majestic theater had opened in the 1920s, and generations of kids had grown up in Southeast spending Saturdays at double-feature westerns and horror movies. The theater folded in the 1970s. For years, it stood empty, a shelter for the homeless and an incubator for rats. Then developers reinforced the art deco facade, ripped out the rows of gum-bottomed seats, gutted the interior, and rebuilt the Majestic as an odorless, fully carpeted, color- coordinated office building. A Rite Aid drugstore, the inevitable Starbucks, and a branch of the Riggs Bank took up the ground floor. Capital Mortgage shared the second floor with an assortment of lawyers, dentists, and trade association lobbyists.
Capital’s reception area conveyed an impression of rectitude: sturdy, unpretentious furniture, navy wool carpet, pale-blue walls hung with large black-and-white photos of old Washington, and a conservatively dressed receptionist with a Jamaican accent who offered a choice of V8, orange juice, or bottled water.
Frank and Jose waved away the receptionist’s offer. They settled into armchairs, Jose picking up a New York Times, Frank a Newsweek.
