Right as Rain

16

'After I went through all that trouble,' said Strange, 'now you're gonna tell me you can't go?'

'I apologize,' said Lattimer. 'I know you went and got the tickets and all that, but Cheri said she doesn't want to go to some dark auditorium and watch two men beat the fuck out of each other all night.'

'That girl of yours must be special, you gonna pass up tickets to a title bout. This is a Don King production, too, ain't no thing someone's puttin' on in their basement. You should have told me she was gonna act like that before I bought the tickets, man.'

'I didn't know.'

Strange watched Quinn cross the street, a record under his arm. 'There he is.'

'What's with white boys and flannel shirts?' said Lattimer. 'A chain saw come with that outfit when he bought it?'

'Everybody's got their own thing.'

'He don't look all that violent to me. And he doesn't look like a cop.'

'He is on the short side,' said Strange. 'But, trust me, he can rise up.'

Quinn opened the passenger-side door and got into the backseat.

'Terry. Meet Ron Lattimer, an investigator on my staff.'

'Ron, how you doin'?'

'I'm makin' out.'

Quinn reached his hand over the front bench, and Lattimer shook it.

'What you got there, Terry?' said Strange.

'It's for you.'

Quinn passed the Blackbyrds' Flying Start up to Strange. Strange smiled as he examined the cover. He opened it and studied the inner sleeve, a photo of the group in an airplane hanger.

'Damn, boy. On the Fantasy label, too. I never thought I'd see one of these again.'

'It just came in today.'

Strange scanned the liner notes. 'Just like I remember it. These boys were students at Howard when they cut this record. They were studying under Donald Byrd, see-'

'Derek,' said Lattimer, 'I got things to do this afternoon.'

'Yeah, okay, right.' Strange put the record on the seat beside him.

'Y'all hungry?'

'There's a Vietnamese around the corner,' said Quinn. 'The soup there rocks.'

'I'm into that,' said Strange.

Strange engaged the trans and pulled off the curb. He went up to Georgia, turned left at Quinn's direction, and drove south. At the stoplight he opened the record again, chuckled to himself as he checked out the period threads and oversized lids on the members of the group.

'That was real nice of you, Terry.'

'I know you're not looking for any friends,' said Quinn, catching Strange's eyes in the rearview. 'I just thought you'd like it, that's all.'

Strange, Lattimer, and Quinn got a window table at My-Le, a former beer garden, now a pho house on Selim. Their view gave to the traffic on Georgia Avenue and the railroad tracks beyond.

'They're doing something over there,' said Quinn, nodding to the station by the tracks. A blue tarp covered the roof, and plywood boards had replaced the windows.

'Looks like they're restoring it,' said Lattimer.

'Either that or tearing it down. They're always tearing down things here now.'

'Get rid of all these pawnshops-'

'Yeah, and the nail and braid parlors, and the barbershops, and the cobbler and the key maker, the speed shops and auto parts stores… the kinds of places working people use every day. So the yuppie homeowners can brag that they've got the music-and-book superstore, and the boutique grocery store, and the Starbucks, just like their counterparts across town.'

'I take it,' said Strange, 'you're not all the way into the revitalization of Silver Spring.'

'They're erasing all of my memories,' said Quinn. 'And to tell you the truth, I kind of like the decay.'

The lone waiter, a genial guy named Daniel who painted houses on the side, served them their soup and fresh lemonade.

Lattimer stared into his bowl and frowned. 'There's none of that bible tripe or tendon or nothin' like that in there, is it?'

'Number fifteen,' said Quinn. 'Nothing but eye round.'

The soup was a rich mixture of rice noodles, meat, and broth, with bean sprouts, hot green pepper, lime, and fresh mint served on the side. Strange and Quinn prepared theirs and added hot garlic sauce from a squeeze bottle. Lattimer slung his tie back over his shoulder, watched them, and followed suit.

'Were you a cop, too?' asked Quinn, the fragrant steam from the soup warming his face.

'Me?' said Lattimer. 'Nah.'

'He didn't like the way the uniforms were cut,' said Strange.

'Go ahead, Derek. I always wanted to do the kind of investigative work I'm doing right now. Never wanted to do anything else. Besides, you don't mind my sayin' so, all the problems they got on the force, I feel lucky I didn't join up.'

'There's a helluva lot more good cops on the force than there are mediocre ones,' said Quinn. 'And there's not many who are plain bad. The ones who weren't ready to be out on the street, that wasn't their fault. The situation you had back then, the fish stank from the head down.'

'That explain all those shootings?' said Strange.

'Firing on unarmed suspects, firing at moving vehicles…' said Lattimer, picking up the ball from Strange.

'Who's gonna decide whether they're armed or unarmed in the heat of the moment, when some guy's reaching into his jacket, huh?' said Quinn. 'In this climate we got now, out there on the street? With all the criminals having access to guns, the attitudes, the cold-blooded murder of cops… it's not much of a leap to make the assumption that, if you're wearing a uniform, you're in harm's way. Look, man, what I'm trying to tell you is, a lot of us out there, we were scared. Can you understand that?'

Lattimer didn't answer, but he held Quinn's gaze.

Strange broke apart his chopsticks and used them to find some eye round in the bottom of his bowl. 'Like I said, that doesn't explain everything.'

'It's complicated,' said Quinn. 'You know that. You were out there, Derek. You know.'

'All right, then,' said Strange. 'You had a couple of brutality complaints in your file, right?' He swallowed meat and noodles and wiped a napkin across his mouth.

'That's right,' said Quinn. 'So did Chris Wilson. So do a lot of cops. Legitimate or no, once a complaint gets made, it stays in your file.'

'What were yours about?'

'Mine were about bullshit,' said Quinn. 'Guy hits his head on the lip of the cruiser's back door when you're putting him in, guy claims you slapped the cuffs on him too tight… like that. It never goes into the report what was said to you, how many times you're disrespected in the course of a night.'

Strange nodded. He remembered all of that very well. He remembered, too, how cops got hardened after a while, until what they saw in certain parts of town were not the citizens they had sworn to protect but potential criminals, men and women and children alike. A white cop looking at a black face, that was something further still.

'Listen,' said Quinn. 'You guys remember a few years back, this black cop pulled over a drunken white woman, coming out of Georgetown or somewhere like it, late one night?'

'That's the girl that cop handcuffed to a stop sign,' said Lattimer, 'made her sit her ass down in the cold street. Some photographer happened to be there, caught a picture of the whole thing.'

'Right,' said Quinn. 'Now, Derek, tell me what you thought about that incident, the first time you read it.'

'I know what you're gettin' at,' said Strange. 'That the police officer, he didn't just do that to that girl for no reason. That she must have said something to him-'

'Like what?'

'I don't know. How about, "Get your hands off me, you black bastard," somethin' like that.'

'Or maybe she even called him a nigger,' said Quinn.

Lattimer looked up from his bowl. He didn't like to hear that word coming from a white man's mouth, no matter the context.

'Maybe she did,' said Strange.

'The point is, whether it happened that way or not, those kinds of conversations go on in the street every night between cops and perps and straight civilians. And what's said, it never sees the light of day.'

'You goin' somewhere with this?' said Strange.

'Yeah,' said Lattimer, 'I was kind of wondering the same thing.'

'All right,' said Quinn, leaning forward, his forearms resting on the four-top. 'You want to know what happened that night? As far as my role in it, it's in the transcripts and the news reports. There's nothing been left out, no secret. A man pointed a gun at me, and as a police officer, I reacted in the manner I was trained to do. In retrospect, I made the wrong decision, and it cost an innocent man his life. But only in retrospect. I didn't know that Chris Wilson was a cop.'

'Go on,' said Strange.

'Why was Chris Wilson holding a gun on Ricky Kane? Why did Wilson have that look of naked anger that I saw that night on his face?'

'The official line was, it was a routine stop,' said Strange. 'Must have just degenerated into something else.'

'An off-duty cop takes the time to pull over and hassle a guy for pissin' in the street?'

'Doesn't make much sense,' said Strange. 'I'll give you that. But let's suppose Wilson did just pull over and decide to do his job, whether he was wearin' his uniform or not.'

'We don't know what happened between Wilson and Kane,' said Quinn. 'We don't know what was said.'

'We'll never know. Wilson's dead, and all we've got is Kane's version of the event. Kane's got a clean sheet. Kane didn't shoot Wilson, so there wasn't any reason for the inquiry to be directed toward him.'

'I'm not tellin' you guys how to do your jobs,' said Quinn. 'But if it was me got hired to make Wilson's memorial look better, I'd start by talking to Kane.'

'I plan to,' said Strange.

'But Kane's got no incentive to talk to anyone,' said Quinn.

'It's gonna be difficult, I know.'

'And he sure as hell's not gonna talk with me around,' said Quinn.

'That's not why I picked you up today.'

'Yeah? Who we goin' to see?'

'Eugene Franklin,' said Strange. 'Your old partner. We're meetin' him in a bar in an hour or so.'

Quinn nodded, then placed his napkin on the table and went to the small bathroom next to the restaurant's karaoke machine.

Lattimer drank off the remaining broth from his bowl and sat back in his chair. 'You gonna drop me off at the office on the way to that bar?'

'Sure,' said Strange. 'What do you think?'

'The man is troubled,' said Lattimer. 'But what he's saying, it makes sense.'

They split the check and went to the car. Driving down Georgia Avenue, they passed the Fourth District Police Station, renamed the Brian T. Gibson Building in honor of the officer who was slain in his cruiser outside the Ibex nightclub, shot three times by a sociopath with a gun. Officer Gibson left a wife and baby daughter behind.