Hell To Pay

chapter 3

STRANGE turned down 9th, between Kansas and Upshur, one short hop east of Georgia. He saw a spot outside Marshall’s funeral home, steered the car into the spot, and locked the Chevy down. He walked past a combination lunch counter and butcher shop, the place just said “Meat” in the window, and nodded to a cutter named Rodel, who was leaning in the doorway of Hawk’s Barbers, dragging hard on a Newport.

“What’s goin on, big man?”

“It’s all good,” said Strange. “How about you?”

“Same old soup, just reheated.”

“Bennett workin’ today?”

“I don’t know about workin’. But he’s in there.”

“Tell him I’ll be by in forty-five or so. Need a touch-up.”

“I’ll let him know.”

Strange looked up at the yellow sign mounted above the door to his agency. The sign read “Strange Investigations,” half the letters bigger than the rest on account of the picture of the magnifying glass laid over the words. Strange really liked that logo; he’d made it up himself. He made a mental note that there were smudges on the light box of the sign.

Strange stood outside the windowed door of his offices and rapped on the glass. Janine buzzed him in, a bell over the door chiming as he entered. George “Trip Three” Hastings, his hands resting in his lap, sat in a waiting area to the right of the door.

“George.”

“Derek.”

“I’ll be with you in a minute, soon as I get settled.”

Hastings nodded. Strange turned to Ron Lattimer, seated behind his desk. Lattimer wore an off-the-rack designer suit with a hand-painted tie draped over the shirt, had one of those Peter Pan-looking collars, the kind Pat Riley favored. A little too pretty for Strange’s taste, though he had to admit the young man kept himself cleaner than the White House lawn. And he made the office his home as well; Lattimer sat in an orthopedically correct chair and had one of those Bose compact units, always playing some kind of jazz-inflected hip-hop, set back behind his desk.

“What’re you workin’ on, Ron?”

“Faxing a subpoena right now,” said Lattimer.

“You still on that Thirty-five Hundred Crew thing?”

“Many billable hours, boss.”

“Shame, clean as you look, can’t nobody see you in here. I mean, you go to all that trouble to be so perfect, how’s anybody gonna know?”

“I know.”

“Let me ask you somethin’. You ever walk by a mirror you forgot to look into?”

“SUVs are pretty good, too,” said Lattimer, his eyes on the screen of his Mac. “The windows they got in those things, they’re just the right height.”

Strange passed a desk topped with loose papers and gum wrappers and stood in front of Janine Baker. He picked up the three or four pink message slips she had pushed to her desk’s edge and looked them over.

“How was lunch?” said Janine.

“Nice women,” said Strange. “C’mon in the back for a second, okay?”

She followed him back to his office. Lamar Williams, a gangly neighborhood boy of seventeen, was emptying Strange’s wastebasket into a large garbage bag. Lamar took classes at Roosevelt High in the mornings and worked for Strange most afternoons.

“Lamar,” said Strange, “need some privacy for a few. Why don’t you get yourself the ladder and Windex the sign out front, okay?”

“Aiight.”

“You comin’ to practice tonight?”

“Can’t tonight.”

“You got somethin’ more important?”

“Watchin’ my baby sister for my moms.”

“All right, then. Close the door behind you on your way out.”

The door closed, leaving Strange and Janine alone. She came into his arms and he kissed her on the lips.

“Good day?”

“Now it is,” said Strange.

“How about dinner tonight?”

“If we can eat right after practice. I got a job from those women and I’m gonna try and knock it out late.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Strange kissed her again and went behind his desk. He had a seat and noticed the PayDay bar set beside his phone.

“That’s you,” said Janine, her liquid eyes looking him over. “Thought you’d like to cleanse your palate after that lunch.”

“Thank you, baby. Go on and send George in.”

He watched her walk to the door in her brightly colored outfit. She was the best office manager he’d ever had. Hell, she ran the damn place, he wasn’t afraid to admit it. And, praise God, the woman had an ass on her, too. It moved like a wave beneath the fabric of her skirt. All these years, and it still stirred Strange to look at her. The way she was put together, some people who knew something about it might say it was poetry. He’d never been into poems himself. The best way he could describe it, looking at Janine, it reminded him of peace.

GEORGE Hastings and Strange had known each other since the early sixties, when both had played football for Roosevelt in the Interhigh. In those days he ran with George and Virgil Aaron, now deceased, and Lydell Blue, also a football player, a back who was the most talented of the four. Strange and Blue had gone into law enforcement, and Hastings had taken a government job with the Bureau of Engraving.

“Thanks for seeing me, Derek,” said Hastings.

“Ain’t no thing, George. You know that.”

Strange still called Hastings George, though most around town now called him Trip or Trip Three. Back in the early seventies, Hastings had played the unlikely combination of 3-3-3 and hit it for thirty-five grand. It was a fortune for that time, and it was especially significant from where they’d come from, but, with the exception of the new Deuce and a Quarter he’d purchased, Hastings had been smart and invested the money wisely. He’d bought stock in AT &T and IBM, and he had let it ride. By neighborhood standards, Strange knew, Hastings had become a wealthy man.

He also knew that Hastings liked to hear Strange call him by his given name. George was a name out of fashion with the younger generation of blacks. It had been a generic name used by plantation owners to refer to their male slaves, for one. And in the modern world it had become a slang name to refer to a boyfriend, as in, “Hey, baby, you got yourself a George?” So young black people didn’t care much for the name and they rarely considered it as a name for their own babies. But George Hastings’s mother, a good old girl whom Strange had regarded with nearly as much affection as his own, had thought it was just fine, and that made it all good for Hastings and for Strange.

Hastings leaned over and flicked the spring-mounted head of the plaster Redskins figure that sat on Strange’s desk. The head swayed from side to side.

“The old uniform. That goes back, what, thirty-some-odd years?”

“Forty,” said Strange.

“Who painted his face brown like that? I know they weren’t sellin’ ’em like that back then.”

“Janine’s son, Lionel.”

“How’s he doin’?”

“Finishing up at Coolidge. Just applied to Maryland. He’s a good boy. A knucklehead sometimes, like all boys tend to be. But he’s doing all right.”

“You see Westbrook the other night?”

“Boy made some catches.”

“Uh-huh. Still makin’ that first-down sign when they move the sticks. That drives the defenders crazy. He is cocky.”

“He’s got a right to be,” said Strange. “Some call it cocky; I call it confidence. Westbrook’s ready to have the season of his career, George. Gonna bust loose like Chuck Brown and all the Soul Searchers put together.”

“He ain’t no Bobby Mitchell,” said Hastings. “And he sure ain’t no Charley Taylor.”

Strange smiled a little. “No one is to you, George.”

“Anyway,” said Hastings. He reached inside his lightweight sport jacket. Strange figured from the material that the jacket went for five, six hundred. Quiet, with a subtle pattern in there. Good quality, and understated, like all George’s possessions. Like the high-line, two-year-old Volvo he drove, and his Tudor-style house up in Shepherd Park.

Hastings dropped a folded sheet of paper on Strange’s desk. Strange picked it up, unfolded it, and looked it over.

“I got what you asked for,” said Hastings.

Strange read the full name of the subject: Calhoun Tucker. Hastings had provided the tag number for the Audi S4 that Tucker owned or leased. Mimeographed onto the sheet of paper was a credit card receipt from a nightspot that Strange recognized. It was located on U Street, east of 14th. Hastings had scribbled a paragraph of other incidental character details: where Tucker said he’d lived last, where he’d last worked, like that.

“How’d you get the credit card receipt?” said Strange.

“Looked through my little girl’s purse. They went to dinner, he must have said, Hold on to this for me, will you? Didn’t like going through her personal belongings, but I did. Alisha’s getting ready to step off a cliff. I mean, young people, they decide to get married, they never do know what it means, for real.”

“I heard that.”

“My Linda, God love her, she’d be doing the same thing, she was still with us. She was harder on Alisha’s boyfriends than I ever was, matter of fact. And here this boy just rolls into town six months ago – he’s not even a Washington boy, Derek – and I’m supposed to just sit on my hands while everybody’s world gets rocked? I mean, I don’t even know one thing about his family.”

Strange dropped the paper on the desk. “George, you don’t have to justify this to me. I do this kind of background check all the time. It’s no reflection on your daughter, and as of yet it’s no reflection on this young man. And it damn sure is no reflection on you. You’re her father, man, you’re supposed to be concerned.”

“I’d do this even if I thought the boy was right.”

“But you don’t think he’s right.”

Hastings ran a finger down his cheek. “Somethin’ off about this Tucker boy.”

“You sure the off thing’s not just that some young man’s getting ready to take away your little girl?”

“Sure, that’s a part of it; I can’t lie to you, man. But it’s somethin’ else, too. Don’t ask me what exactly. You live long enough, you get so you know.”

“Forget about exactly, then.”

“Well, he’s drivin’ a luxury German automobile, for one. Always dressed clean, too, real sharp, with the gadgets that go with it: cells, pagers, all that. And I can’t figure out what he does to get it.”

“That might have meant somethin’ once. Used to be, you had to be rich or a drug dealer to have those things. But look, any fool who can sign his name to a lease can be drivin’ a Benz these days. Twelve-year-old kid can get his own credit card.”

“Okay, but ain’t no twelve-year-old kid gonna march my baby girl down to the altar. This here is a twenty-nine-year-old man, and he’s got no visible means of support. Says he’s some kind of talent agent, a manager. Puts on shows at the clubs around town. He’s got this business card, says ‘Calhoun Enterprises.’ Anytime I see ‘Enterprises’ on a business card, way I look at it, might as well print the word ‘Unfocused’ next to it, or ‘Doesn’t Want No Real Job,’ or just plain ‘Bullshit,’ you know what I’m sayin’?”

Strange chuckled. “Okay, George. Anything else?”

“I just don’t like him, Derek. I plain do not like the man. That’s somethin’, isn’t it?”

Strange nodded. “Let me ask you a question. You think he’s into somethin’ on the criminal side?”

“Can’t say that. All I know is-”

“You don’t like him. Okay, George. Let me handle it from here.”

Hastings shifted in his seat. “You still gettin’ thirty an hour?”

“Thirty-five,” said Strange.

“You went up.”

“Gas did, too. Been to a bar lately? Bottle of beer cost you five dollars.”

“That include the two dollars you be stuffin’ in their G-strings?”

“Funny.”

“How long you think this is gonna take?”

“Don’t worry, this won’t take more than a few hours of my time. Most of it we do from right here, on computers. I’ll have you happy and stroking checks for that wedding in a couple of days.”

“That’s another thing. This reception is gonna cost me a fortune.”

“If you can’t spend it on Alisha, what you gonna do with it? You got yourself a beautiful girl there, George. Lovely on the outside, and in her heart, too. So let’s you and me make sure she’s making the right decision.”

Hastings exhaled slowly as he sat back in his chair. “Thank you, Derek.”

“Strictly routine,” said Strange.