What It Was

FIVE

Strange had traded in his Impala and bought a low-mileage, triple-black, ’70 Monte Carlo from the Curtis Chevrolet at Georgia and Missouri. He’d be paying on it for three years, but he had no buyer’s remorse. He was a GM man who was working his way up to a Cadillac, but for now he was more than satisfied. The lines were extra clean, with rally rims, Goodyear radials, and a small-block 350 under the hood. The interior had sweet buckets, a horseshoe shifter on the console, factory eight-track sound, and a wood-grain dash. It was a pretty car.

Strange drove it downtown, Curtis’s Roots in the deck, “Get Down” playing loud.

He found a parking spot and commenced to knocking on doors in the apartment building at 13th and R, where Bobby Odum had lived. He began on the top floor and got very little in the way of leads. He was a young black man, casually but not loudly dressed, nice looking and well built, with a polite manner. Most important, he was not the law. Ft sizme somSo the residents of the building, for the most part, talked to him freely. But the information he received held little value in terms of his quest. He was looking for a ring, not Bobby Odum’s killer. Homicide was police business and always had been. Private detectives only solved murders in movies and dime novels.

On the bottom floor, he found a young woman named Janette Newman, a compact, nicely put-together gal who had the Marcus Garvey thing going on in her apartment. She let him in, offered him a seat on the sofa, and served him a soda. He learned that she was a schoolteacher at Harriet Tubman and that she was single.

“You live here alone?”

“Most nights,” she said.

“I imagine you saw the comings and goings of Bobby Odum. He had visitors, right?”

“There was this one light-skinned girl.”

“Speak to her?”

“She wasn’t the approachable type.”

“Ever rap with Odum?”

“Sometimes. He had a job, and in the morning we’d leave here around the same time.”

“So you know where he worked at.”

“He washed dishes at that fish place up on Georgia,” she said. “Cobb’s?”

“I know the spot.”

“Walked over to Seventh and took the uptown bus, every day.”

“I assume you told all this to the homicide detective who came to see you. Vaughn, right?”

“Big white dude. Don’t recall his name. I wasn’t about to tell that man too much. They never do anything for us, anyway. You know how that is.”

Strange nodded. He had identified himself as a self-employed investigator. He had not told her that he was former MPD.

“I hope I’m being of help.” She parted her lips and smiled.

It was a fetching smile, but there was little warmth to it, and no kindness in her eyes. He imagined she could run to mean sometimes, too.

Strange liked all kinds of women. They didn’t have to be beautiful to catch his attention, but they did have to be nice. His girlfriend, Carmen, was both.

He had not always been faithful to her, but he knew what he had.

“Anything else I can do for you?” said Janette.

“Not today,” said Strange.

Outside the building, Strange saw a man sitting on a retaining wall and doing nothing. Looked like a guy who lived on the streets. If this was his spot, he was the type of person who would notice things, that is if he Khat. Loowas not too high. Strange took steps toward him. The man watched him dolefully, then got off the wall and walked away. Strange went to his car.

The Carryout on the west side of Georgia, in Park View, specialized in fish sandwiches. Case no one knew, the sign out front, featuring a big old bass leaping out of the water with a hook and line in its mouth, announced it. Strange asked the owner, Ordell Cobb, for a minute of his time. Cobb was in his fifties and wore an apron smudged with ketchup and blood. His manner was gruff. They were at the rear of the kitchen, near a door leading to an alley, workers hustling around them. The stainless steel sink that Odum had most likely stood over, its power nozzle hanging above, sat right beside them. WOL was playing on the house radio. Strange knew, ’cause Bobby “the Mighty Burner” Bennett was introducing a song.

“I already told the white detective,” said Cobb. “I don’t know nothin about Odum’s murder. He washed dishes for me, is all. I don’t get into the personal lives of my employees.”

“You owe him any back pay?”

“Why?”

“Tryin to see if any relatives or friends of his dropped by.”

“He owed me money, on a advance I gave him.”

“One more thing: you notice if he was ever wearing a ring, had a big cluster of stones on it?”

Cobb shook his head in exasperation. “I didn’t study on him all that much. Look, young man, I gotta get back to work.”

“Okay, then. Let me get a couple of fish sandwiches for takeaway before I get out of here.”

“The flounder or the trout?”

“Make it the trout,” said Strange. “Extra hot sauce.”

Kinda counterproductive, thought Strange, as Cobb moved toward the deep-fry basket. Me and Vaughn covering the same ground.

Strange took the sandwiches over to his mother’s row house at 760 Princeton Place, his childhood home. His father, Darius, had passed a couple of years earlier from cancer, and his older brother, Dennis, had been murdered by a low criminal just before the riots. The losses had set his mother back emotionally, but the deaths of her loved ones had not broken her. Alethea Strange was a woman of faith, and she still had her younger son.

It was a Saturday, so Strange knew she would be home. Monday through Friday she worked as a receptionist for a downtown ophthalmologist who serviced the shirt-and-tie class. The eye doctor was a former client whose home she had cleaned for many years. He offered her a job in his office in April 1968, after she told him that she would no longer be doing domestic work of any kind. The man thought of himself as a liberal in matters of race, whatever that meant, and he had probably hired her out of guilt, because she had no experience for the position. But his internal motives made no difference to her. She took to the work quickly and did her job well.

Alethea greeted Strange at the door with a delighted smile. He tried to phone her once a day, but, like many sons who meant well, he did not get over to her place as much as he intended to.

“I brought some Cobb’s, Mama,” said Strange, holding up a brown paper bag darkened with grease.

They ate in the living room, where Strange used to roughhouse with Dennis, sometimes just wrestling, sometimes full-out boxing, his father amused, sitting in his chair, reading the Washington edition of the Afro-American, listening to his Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson records on the console, or watching Westerns on his Zenith TV, or talking about that awful man who owned the Redskins and local-products-gone-pro like Elgin Baylor and Maury Wills. Strange had his father’s albums in his own collection now, but the console stereo was still here, being used mostly as a stand for his mother’s potted violets.

The place looked the same, a small living area, two bedrooms, a galley kitchen, even the wall decorations were the same, but it was too quiet, the only noise coming from the longtime tenants on the first floor. Made Strange sad to visit, thinking how still it must be when it was just his mother here.

“This is good,” said Alethea, closing her eyes as she swallowed.

“I went for the trout,” said Strange.

After, they moved to the kitchen, where she finished up the dishes she’d been washing when he had arrived. The window over the sink had cardboard taped to its bottom pane. Alethea did this so as not to disturb the babies in the nest built by robins on the outdoor sill every spring.

He watched her as she worked in her housedress. She still had a younger woman’s figure, but she listed a bit, favoring the hip that did not ache. Seated behind an office desk, answering phones and dealing with patients, was not physically demanding, but the time his mother had spent as a maid had taken its toll on her knees and back. She had aged ten years in the past four; in the final months of Darius’s painful illness, her hair had gone completely gray as she tended to her husband in their home.

“How’s Carmen?” she said, looking slightly over her shoulder.

“Good. We’re going to a movie tonight.”

“Don’t be takin her to one of your Westerns.”

“What you want me to do, go to some weepy?”

“Make her happy, Derek.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Strange leaned against the Formica counter, his arms crossed, watching her work, listening to her hum. When she was done, she dried her hands and hung the towel on a rod.

“Thank you for stopping by, son.”

“My pleasure,” said Strange.

He was done working for the day, and he had Ky, t="0 some time to kill, so he drove farther north on Georgia and stopped at a place called the Experience for a beer. It was a small joint, just a room with a steel-top bar front to back, a few tables, and a jukebox. The juke stayed mostly unplugged, on account of the owner, young dude named Grady Page, liked to play funk-rock music, the hybrid thing he loved, through the house system. The Experience was a neighborhood spot, had posters thumbtacked to its walls. It catered to a mix of local drinkers, heads, off-duty police officers, utility workers, security guards, and women who liked men who wore uniforms.

Strange had a seat at the bar next to a snaggletoothed MPD patrolman, Harold Cheek, out of 4-D, who was in streetclothes today. Funkadelic’s “You Hit the Nail on the Head” was on the system, the lead track off their latest, George Clinton playing his Hammond wild and free, a speed freak’s idea of a circus tent song. Grady Page liked to spin the new.

“Gimme a Bud, Grady,” said Strange. Page, tall and lean, was going for the unofficial Biggest Afro in D.C. award. He reached into the cooler.

“You see Grady?” said Cheek with amusement. “Tryin to look like Darnell Hillman and shit.”

“Artis Gilmore got a big ’Fro, too,” said Strange.

“Not as big as Darnell’s.”

Strange was served. With one deep swig he drank the shoulders off the Bud.

“Heard your man Lydell got his stripes,” said Cheek.

“Yeah, Lydell’s doin all right.”

Lydell Blue, Strange’s main boy from their Park View youth, had entered the MPD academy at the same time as Strange and had recently been promoted to sergeant. An army regular with time served in Vietnam, he had recently married a girl he’d met at his church. Strange felt Lydell had pulled the trigger too young, but realized that it was he, and not his friend, who was not ready.

“Y’all played football together at Roosevelt, right?” said Cheek.

“I went both ways,” said Strange. “Tight end and safety. Lydell was a fullback. Mostly, I tried to open the field up for him.”

“He had the Interhigh record for yardage gained, didn’t he?”

“His senior year. Lydell could play.”

Cheek looked him over. “You miss it?”

“Football?”

“The force.”

“I don’t miss it at all,’ said Strange. “They sure don’t need me. Not with heroes like you out there.”

“Go ahead, Derek.”

“You know Vaughn, don’t you? Homicide police?”

“I know of him.”

0em" width="27"›“Where’s he out of now?”

“Last I heard, Three-D.”

An off-duty security guard named Frank came over and greeted them with soul shakes. “What it look like, brothers?”

“Frank,” said Cheek.

Frank was good natured and had a pleasant face. He was wearing big bells with a wide brown belt and a knit shirt holding horizontal stripes. Real police sometimes called security guards “scarecrows” or “counterfeit cops,” especially the ones who weren’t much more than migrant workers, passing through town on their way to someplace else. But no one cracked on Frank, a local with a work ethic. Two oh five an hour, and he did his job straight.

“Where he guarding at now?” said Strange, after Frank had drifted.

“He’s down at that big hotel complex in Foggy Bottom. One on Virginia Avenue?”

“Frank’s cool,” said Strange.

A couple of ladies visited. One of them, a nice little deep-dark girl who was put together right, offered to get Strange high, and they went out back to the alley, where she produced a number and fired it up. Grady Page joined them for a minute. He and Strange shotgunned each other, then Strange did the same for the girl, whose name was LaVonya. Page went back inside to do his thing. LaVonya said to Strange, “You’re a big one,” and he said, “You should see me when I stand up,” and though he was already standing and the comment made no sense, it sounded funny, and the two of them laughed. She wrote down her phone number and Strange took it, because he was a man, and as soon as they went back into the bar he lost track of her.

Page was playing the title cut off The World Is a Ghetto, the long version from the brand-new War, and Strange was higher than a Denver hippie as he drank another beer, the instrumental middle of the song building emotionally, almost violently, taking him up, Strange knowing that he was young and in the midst of something, a music, dress, and cultural revolution that was happening with his people, in his time. Where it was going he had no clue, but he was glad to be a part of it.

“Man, you are trippin,” said Cheek with a chuckle. He had returned to his spot beside Strange, who had not noticed he was gone. “Where LaVonya at?”

“Who?”

“You better have another beer to straighten your shit out.”

“Okay, then,” said Strange. “And one for you. On me.”

Grady Page, smiling absently, up-picking his hair with his rake, had a power fist as a handle, was leaning against the beer cooler. Strange held up two fingers and signaled for one more round.

When Strange woke up, in the bedroom of his apartment on the northeast corner of 13th and Clifton, dusk had come. A nap was what he had needed, and it had cleared his head. He showered and changed into clean clothes, and soon Carmen knocked on his door.

She was in pale slacks, cork-wedge shoes, and a pretty lilac-colored shirt that played off nice against her dark skin. She wore her hair in a natural, and when she smiled her deep dimples showed. He’d been knowing her since they were kids, and reckoned that he’d loved her just as long.

They kissed.

“What’s goin on, baby?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been calling you to firm up our plans.”

“I fell asleep. Guess I didn’t hear the phone.”

“Thought you were working today.”

“I was,” said Strange, frowning as if accused. “Workin all the time. Even when I sleep, I work.”

“Go on, Derek.” Carmen smiled. “What are we gonna see tonight?”

“Culpepper Cattle Company?”

“Please.”

“I’m playing with you.” But he really did want to see it.

“What about Georgia, Georgia? It’s playing at the Langston.”

“All the way in Northeast?”

“Benning Road’s not far.”

“What’s it about?”

“Diana Sands plays this singer, falls in love with an army deserter in Sweden.”

“Might as well give me a sleeping pill instead.”

“So? You tryin to take me to a cow movie.”

“Cowboy.”

“Same thing, to me.”

“How about this? I got some of that wine you like in the fridge. Let’s have a glass or two, then go out and catch a little dinner.”

She walked toward him. “I guess we could.”

Strange put Al Green Gets Next to You on his stereo and poured some Blue Nun as “Are You Lonely for Me Baby” set the mood. It was Al’s deep-soul record, full of grit and fire. They drank the too-sweet white by the open French doors on the south wall, Carmen sitting close to him, his arm around her shoulders as they talked about their day, looking down on the city lights below. His place was on the edge of the Piedmont Plateau, a low-rent district, but no rich man had a better view of D.C.

“You hungry?” said Strange.

“Not really.”

“Come here, girl.”

Strange woke naked in his bed. Carmen, nude atop the sheets, was sleeping beside him. Though they had made love twice that evening, the sight of her body made his mouth go dry. She’d been working toward medical school, but financial issues had steered her to nursing. Now an RN at the Columbia Hospital for Women, she had the beginnings of a solid, meaningful career. He was proud of Carmen and, despite his failings, wanted to do her right. He covered her, put on his drawers, and left the bedroom.

He went to the living room, where soul records were scattered around his stereo, his expensive Marantz tube amplifier the center of the space. On the wall was an original one-sheet poster of the Man With No Name, tall in his poncho, a prize possession that Strange had gotten from a friend who’d worked at the Town theater on 13th and New York Avenue. Also, a Jim Brown lobby still from The Dirty Dozen, copped from the same dude. Wasn’t any mistaking it: a man lived here.

Strange picked up the phone, dialed the number for the Third District station, and got the desk man on the line. He gave the sergeant his home and office numbers, and left a message for Frank Vaughn.