What It Was (27 page)

“Only the Lord is without sin.”

“I know, but…”

“Pretend you just got born, this minute.”

“You mean make a new start.”

“Today, Derek. Do something right.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Strange.

His mother always did know what to say.

STRANGE HAD
gone to his office to check for messages off that new machine he had, but there were none. While he was there, Vaughn phoned him and asked if he wanted to meet for a beer. They had worked together, and Strange had visited him in the hospital, but they had never socialized.
Vaughn caught the hesitance in Strange’s voice as surely as if he had read it on his face.

“Trust me,” said Vaughn. “It’ll be worth your time.”

“Okay,” said Strange. “But let’s do it on
my
turf.”

Which is how they came to spend the afternoon at the Experience, Grady Page’s place, with the steel-top bar and the posters and funk-rock music, and the mix of police and security guards who were out of uniform, and neighborhood types, and folks burning reefer in the back alley.

“This your spot?” said Vaughn, wearing his suit, hat, and eye patch, seated at the bar beside Strange. Vaughn wasn’t the only white person in the place, but he was visibly in the minority.

“You’re not uncomfortable, are you?” said Strange.

“I like all the people,” said Vaughn, and he held up an empty bottle of Bud so Grady Page, up-picking his massive Afro behind the stick, could see. “One for me and one for my younger brother here, professor.”

“You got it,” said Page, and Strange was oddly touched.

“What about me?” said Harold Cheek, the off-duty patrolman out of 4-D, seated on the other side of Strange.

“And one for my fellow officer, too,” said Vaughn.

Page served the beers. The three men touched brown bottles and drank. Page was playing the
Superfly
soundtrack front to back through the house system, and “Little Child Runnin’ Wild” had kicked it off. Strange thought it was one of the most dynamic songs he’d ever heard. To Vaughn it was jungle-jump. But the music didn’t bother him. He was with friends and, given his odds at the house in Burrville, happy to be alive.

Even with the music going, they could hear a celebration back by the restrooms, where the security guard Strange and Cheek knew, Frank, was being congratulated by a group of well-wishers that included a couple of comely young women. Frank wore big bells, a wide brown belt, and the horizontal-striped shirts he favored.

“What’s goin on back there?” said Vaughn.

“Read this,” said Cheek, and he passed the A section of the house
Washington Post
across the bar to Vaughn. “Story about the burglary.”

Vaughn looked at the front page. The headline read, “5 Held in Plot to Bug Democrats’ Office Here,” with the byline of Alfred E. Lewis printed underneath the head. Vaughn scanned the first few paragraphs: five men, most of them Cubans, had been caught trying to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee on the sixth floor of the Watergate complex on Virginia Avenue. An alert twenty-four-year-old security guard had noticed tape on the lock of a door leading to the garage stairwell, taken it off, seen it reaffixed to the door later on, and notified Metropolitan Police.

“So?” said Vaughn passing the paper back to Cheek. Vaughn had no intention of reading the entire story. There was drinking to do.

“That’s Frank Wills,” said Cheek, jerking his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the celebrating young man and his friends. “He’s the one who stopped the burglary. Dude’s a hero.”

“Kinda like you,” said Strange, and Vaughn shrugged.

“I didn’t exactly succeed,” said Vaughn. “My man’s in the wind.”

“You hear anything?”

“Someone matching Red’s description murdered a man in a bar the other night, in a place called Big Stone Gap over in West Virginia. Shot him to death with a forty-five. A witness said the shooter left with a lady tall as he was and got into a taxicab that was waiting out front. It would make sense that Red and Coco would hide that Fury. Also that they would be in that state. Red was born there.”

“And?”

“Federal marshals are on it now. I’m done.”

“You did your part.”

“So did you,” said Vaughn, and he saw Strange dip his head. “You all right with it?”

Strange lowered his voice. “I’m getting there.”

Vaughn lit a cigarette and pushed the lighter in front of Strange so that he could see the Okinawa inlay on the Zippo’s face. “First time I killed a man was on that island. I had him in the sights of my M-One for fifteen minutes before I squeezed the trigger. But I did it. He would have shot me or one of my buddies if he’d had the chance. After that it got easier.”

“This isn’t war,” said Strange.

“Yes, it is,” said Vaughn. He reached into his suit pocket, produced something rolled up in a napkin, and handed it to Strange. “Here you go. This’ll cheer you up.”

Vaughn watched as Strange peeled back the napkin. Inside was a ring: eight small diamonds clustered around a larger diamond, with a gold body holding a Grecian key design.

“How’d you get it?” said Strange.

“I’ll tell you in a minute,” said Vaughn. “Took a little
arm-twisting, but not much. The girl who had it thought it was a fake.”

“I’m not much of a detective, am I?”

“You’ll get there, young man.” Vaughn looked him over. “What’re you gonna do with it?”

Strange stared at the ring in the palm of his hand. “Something right.”

“Give Me Your Love” came up on the system, and a couple of young women began to dance. Soon they were joined by two eager young men. Strange and Vaughn drank away the afternoon as the music played on and the folks around them, regal and fly in their natural hairstyles and up-to-the minute fashions, laughed and had big fun. Living the moment in a thrilling, glorious time.

June 18, 1972.

T
HE AFTERNOON
had passed. Leo
, the owner and operator of the spot that carried his name, had turned on more lights for the evening trade and kept them dim. Outside, the rain had stopped, and northbound rush hour traffic had commenced on Georgia Avenue. Derek Strange and Nick Stefanos had been here for hours, drinking and talking, and they were relaxed and a little bit drunk. Empty green bottles of Heineken and half-filled shot glasses sat before them on the bar.

The jukebox played “Give Me Your Love,” Curtis’s trademark guitar and falsetto filling the room. Strange had chosen the song.

“Quite a tale,” said Stefanos.

“Just a story,” said Strange.

“I’ve heard some of it over the years, here and there. A few of the details differ from yours.”

“It changes, depending on who’s tellin it.”

“That guy, the heroin dealer with the long nose…”

“Roland Williams.”

“I’d heard he was shot in the carryout, House of Soul.”

“Maybe he was,” said Strange. “I get it confused with Soul House, the bar. My memory could be failing. Then again, damn near forty years have passed.”

Stefanos sipped his bourbon. “What’d you do with the ring?”

“I took it back to its rightful owner.”

“That make you feel better?”

“The
re
ward did,” said Strange. “Dayna Rosen gave me a nice chunk of money. It bought me that sign outside my office.”

“The one with the magnifying glass over the letters? How’d you ever come up with such an original design?”

“Funny.”

“I’m guessing Maybelline Walker didn’t like losing the ring.”

“No,” said Strange. “But fuck what she didn’t like.”

“And Carmen? You two patch things up?”

Strange nodded. “We got back together. And then I did the same thing I did to her before. I was just
like
that, Nick. Fact is, I was in my fifties before I got right with one woman.”

“You learned.”

Strange thought of that Western his father and he used to watch over and over again, where the gunmen save a south-of-the-border village from bandits. “Took me a long time to learn my elbow from a hot rock.”

“So where’s Carmen now?”

“Carmen’s gone. Vaughn, my mother… they’re all gone.”
Strange picked up his glass, examined it, and drank off some Johnnie Walker Black. He put the glass quietly back down on the mahogany.

“What about Red Jones?”

“The marshals caught up with Red and Coco at a Holiday Inn someplace in West Virginia. Desk clerk was one of those police scanner freaks, and he recognized the big man from the description that had gone out over the airwaves. Red and Coco were naked on top the sheets when the law came in with pistols and machine guns.”

“They kill ’em?”

“No. I don’t recall what happened to Coco. I reckon she did time.”

“And Red?”

“Red ended up in the federal joint, in Marion, Illinois. Became the leader of D.C. Blacks, a prison gang got put together to go up against the Aryan Brotherhood and their kind. The D.C. Blacks claimed they were descended from the Moors.”

“Yeah?”

“That’s their claim. So Red was in Marion. This would be nineteen eighty-two. He got put on the same control unit as his enemies, and some say that was deliberate. That the white guards were in with the Aryans. Right away, Red tried to stab the main AB, and then Red tried to shoot him with a zip gun. This AB, dude had a Jewish name if you can believe it, him and another one of his shamrock buddies, they cut themselves out of an exercise cage with a hacksaw blade and found Red in the showers. To this day you hear people say that Red fought off a dozen men. Truth was, it was only two.
But it was a determined two. When they were done with him, they dragged his body up and down the tier so that everyone could see.”

“They made a statement,” said Stefanos.

“He’d been stabbed sixty-seven times. Robert Lee Jones was hard to kill.”

“And still talked about to this day.”

“It’s his kind whose names ring out. The others get forgotten. You know what happened to Frank Wills, that young security guard who foiled the Watergate burglary?”

“No.”

“He died penniless, in a house with no electricity or running water. By then he’d done a year’s time for shoplifting an ink pen. And all those reporters who got famous, all those politicians who made their names on the scandal, all those mother
fuckers
who were doin the dirt, with their million-dollar book deals and radio shows…”

“Relax, Derek.”

“ ‘Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell and Dean. It follows a pattern if you dig what I mean.’ ” Strange chuckled, thinking of that old Gil Scott-Heron record he owned long ago. Curtis Mayfield, Donny Hathaway, Isaac Hayes… Gil was gone now, too.

“You better slow down with that scotch,” said Stefanos.

“Now I’m gonna take drinkin advice from
you
.”

They finished their alcohol quietly and listened with reverence to the music coming from the juke.

“Something bothering me,” said Stefanos. “This story you told, those
scenes
with Red and Coco alone in her place,
Vaughn doing his street work, the girls in the diner on U Street…”

“Yeah?”

“You weren’t a witness to that. So how do you know what was said and done?”

“I
don’t
know, exactly. Some of that shit? I filled in the gaps and made it up. I mean, it’s true if I say it is. Print the legend, right?”

“You know that stock boy with the long hair in the Nutty Nathan’s stereo store? That was me.”

“For real?”

“There was only one stock boy who worked that place in the summer of seventy-two.”

“Smartass,” said Strange. “Lord, you were silly, even then.”

Stefanos smiled. “Let’s have another drink, Dad.”

“Uh-uh,” said Strange. “We gotta earn some money.”

They’d been hired by longtime public defender Elaine Clay to gather evidence on a homicide that had occurred in the Washington Highlands area of Southeast. They’d been waiting for the workday to end so that they could interview the mother of the alleged shooter, who by now would be back in her apartment. They were hoping that she could provide a verifiable alibi for her son, one that Clay could take into court. The young man was going to trial in a few weeks.