What It Was

by George Pelecanos

  “Janet Newman?”

  “Janette.”

  “I’m Detective Vaughn,” he said, flipping open his badge case and replacing it quickly in the flap pocket of his jacket. “Thanks for seeing me.”

  “I don’t have much time.”

  “I won’t take much. May I come in?”

  She stepped aside and allowed him to pass through. The place was neat and clean, with brown carpeting and what Vaughn thought of as African decor on the walls. Masks, wood carvings, shit like that. Least there weren’t any spears. The Mother Country stuff was the rage with these young ones.

  A stick of incense burned in a ceramic holder formed as a miniature elephant, set on a living-room table near a sofa-and-chair arrangement. The room’s sole window had its curtain drawn.

  Janette Newman did not close the door. She stood beside it and folded her arms across her chest. Vaughn guessed that he would not be offered a beverage, nor would he be asked to have a seat. It was hard to think straight or have a conversation, what with the music bleeding into the hall. He knew where it was coming from. He had interviewed the unit’s occupants, a mother with a job and her son, a doper who had no plan to get one. Kid listened to music all day long. What Ricky would call soul-funk. It was all Zulu-jump to Vaughn.

  “You’re a hard woman to pin down,” said Vaughn.

  “I work,” said Janette.

  “You teach over at Tubman, right?”

  “Correct. There was a flood, so they closed the school today.”

  “Kind of young to have a teaching position, aren’t you?” He thought his words complimentary until he saw her eyes harden.

  “I have a degree from Howard. Would you like to see my diploma?”

  “No disrespect intended,” said Vaughn. “I meant, you know, you’re doing well for such a young woman.”

  Janette looked him over. “You had some questions?”

  “You stated over the phone that you weren’t here at the time of Robert Odum’s murder.”

  “I was in my classroom when it happened.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Not to speak to, past a nod or a ‘good morning.’ ”

  “He had people visit him from time to time, didn’t he?”

  “Most folks do.”

  “Was there one by the name of Maybelline Walker? Light-skinned woman, young, attractive…”

  “If I saw visitors I don’t remember them.”

  “Not a one.”

  “I said no.”

  “Do you recall if Odum had a job?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  Vaughn already had Odum’s work address, as he’d found a pay stub in his apartment. He was testing her. She was withholding information, and probably lying, but not because she had anything to do with Odum’s death. Some folks just didn’t care for white people or police.

  “You sure about that?” said Vaughn.

  He gazed at her for a long moment until she became uncomfortable and looked away. He liked her backbone, and he didn’t even mind her attitude, but she wasn’t in his physical wheelhouse. If he was going to go black, he’d go for a specific look: cream in the coffee, white features. A Lena Horne type.

  “You’re staring at me,” she said.

  “I was thinking.”

  “Of what?”

  “My case.”

  “Don’t you have any leads?”

  “I can’t speak on that at this time.”

  “Be nice if the police told us something so we could rest easy in this building. I’m not tryin to get myself killed around here.”

  Vaughn reached into his inside pocket. “Here’s my card. Anything comes to mind, give me a call.”

  Vaughn walked out of her apartment without another word and heard the door close behind him. Janette was not a person of interest. Just another name he could cross off the list.

  He went through the hall, the bass still coming from the adjoining unit, the glass door of the building buzzing from it as he pushed on its surface, exiting to breathe fresh air.

  Outside, a man, an addict or alcoholic from the used-up look of his eyes, sat on a nearby retaining wall, smoking a cigarette. Vaughn approached and showed him his badge. The man did not seem impressed. Vaughn offered him ten dollars, and the offer was waved away. Then he offered to buy him a bottle in exchange for his time. The man declined. Vaughn asked him a couple of questions, got nothing but shrugs.

  Two strikes, thought Vaughn. And: I am hungry.

  HE HAD lunch at the counter of the Hot Shoppes on Georgia Avenue, in Brightwood Park, up around Hamilton. In its parking lot had been the famous fight between three badass white greasers and a dozen or so motivated coloreds, back in the ’60s. The fight had carried over to the other side of the street. Those white boys could mix it up. That kind of balls-out, bare-knuckled hate conflict was done now, too, thought Vaughn with nostalgia. The blacks had taken over the city, and race rumbles had gone the way of drop-down Chevys, Link Wray club dates, and Ban-Lon shirts.

  Vaughn had a Mighty Mo burger, onion rings, and an orange freeze, then followed it up with a hunk of hot fudge cake and a cup of coffee. The perfect local lunch. Pulling the coffee cup and an ashtray in front of him, he used his customized Zippo lighter, a map of Okinawa inlaid on its face, to light an L&M.

  Bobby Odum. A pathetic character, one hundred and twenty-three pounds of junkie, a former second-story man now scraping by as a dishwasher and heroin tester. He was one of many confidential informants that Vaughn kept and cultivated around the city. Testers and cut buddies made the best, most vulnerable CIs because they were addicts. They always had need of money.

  The ballistics report had determined that the slugs retrieved from Odum’s apartment came from a .22, a weapon favored by assassins who worked close in. A Colt Woodsman, if Vaughn was to make a wager.

  Odum had recently given Vaughn information related to a homicide, a tip on a man involved in a Northeast burn. The resulting warrant had led to a home search, the discovery of the murder weapon, and the arrest of one James Carpenter, now in the D.C. Jail awaiting trial.

  The last time Vaughn and Odum had met was at a diner called Frank’s Carry Out, on the 1700 block of 14th Street. The owner, Pete Frank, had allowed Vaughn to talk to Odum privately, in the storage room at the rear of the building. That day, Odum had been worried running to paranoid. He claimed it had gotten around that he and Vaughn, well-known by the District’s underworld, had been seen together in Shaw, and that it had then been assumed that he, Odum, had fingered Carpenter. He told Vaughn that his apartment phone had been ringing “off the hook,” and that it was, he suspected, some “wrong dude” who was looking to find him. Vaughn asked him if he knew the caller’s name, but Odum claimed he had no clue.

  “How you know it’s not a woman calling you,” said Vaughn, “or a friend?”

  “I know,” said Odum, touching a finger to his chest. “I feel that shit, right in here. The reaper ’bout to come at me, Frank.”

  Vaughn slipped him twenty dollars. “Go get well,” he said.

  The next time Vaughn saw Odum, he was lying on a slab in the city morgue, the top of his head sawed off, one eye blown out of his gray face.

  Vaughn tapped ash and wondered if it was him that got Odum killed. Not that they were friends, but he felt a sense of responsibility, if not accountability, to see to it that Odum’s killer was found. Bobby was just a little guy he paid for information. But it didn’t matter to Vaughn who Odum was, or what color he was, or if they were asshole buddies or not. Vaughn worked all of his cases the same way.

  He dragged on his cigarette and signaled the counter girl for his check.

  VAUGHN DROVE down to 14th and U, once the epicenter of black Washington, now a weak reminder of its former vibrant life since its burning in ’68.

  He was in search of Martina Lewis. Whores were out on the street at night, witnessed all kinds of illicit events, gossiped out of boredom, and, because they were young, had good rete
ntion. Also, they were easily shook down. But Vaughn had never put his foot to Martina’s neck. He’d not had to.

  As it was afternoon, the prostitutes had woken up, were eating breakfast and getting prepared for work, but they were not yet visible on the stroll. In a popular diner on U, Vaughn got up with a stocky streetwalker, went by Gina Marie, who claimed she’d heard nothing about the Odum murder. Though she had given him no information, he put a five in her callused hand.

  Vaughn paid for a ticket at the nearby Lincoln Theatre box office. After allowing his eyes to adjust to the darkness, he found Martina Lewis seated in one of the middle rows of the near-empty auditorium. Martina was napping, head back, wig askew, lipsticked mouth slightly open, with an Adam’s apple as big as a fist. It was said that Martina was hung like a donkey, too. Some men were fooled, and some claimed to be, but most knew what he was and wanted it. Martina had been in the life, and successful at it, for some time.

  Buck and the Preacher was onscreen, Poitier and Belafonte in Western drag. Vaughn watched it and was quickly bored. He felt that the movie was like the other ones, popular these days, where all the black guys were heroes and studs and the whites were racists, trashmen, or queers. Vaughn shook Martina’s shoulder until he awakened.

  Martina was startled at first but then settled into a brief and very quiet conversation with the detective he knew as Frank and who many on the street called Hound Dog. Frank had always showed Martina something close to respect. Frank had never threatened Martina or pressured him for sex. Most important, Frank paid the rate, including the extra for the room.

  When Vaughn had what he’d come for, he gave Martina thirty-five dollars and left the auditorium. Now he had something concrete.

  “The dude you’re looking for,” Martina had said, “goes by Red.”

  “That’s it?” said Vaughn. “Just Red?”

  “I heard him called Red Fury, too. I don’t know why.”

  “No Christian name. No last name, either.”

  “Red’s all I know,” said Martina, telling Vaughn a prudent lie. Wasn’t any kind of accident that Martina Lewis was a survivor.

  Out on U Street, Vaughn lit a cigarette. Red was a fairly common street name for light-skinned, light-haired black dudes, but thinking hard on it, no specific Reds came to mind. Still, it was a start.

  Vaughn would go to the station and search through the cards, where the rap sheet descriptions included known a.k.a.’s. But not just yet. He was energized.

  LINDA ALLEN lived in an apartment in the Woodnor, on 16th, near the bridge end-capped with the statues of lions. She was a secretary at the Arnold and Porter law firm on the 1200 block of 19th, and Vaughn had been calling on her here for almost fifteen years. Linda was his special friend.

  She greeted him at the door in a spring-blue dress that showed off her upper curves and a pair of Andrew Geller heels that did justice to her calves. A leggy brunette on the downward slope of her forties, she was tall and healthy, with pleasingly muscled thighs and the big firm rack of a straight-off-the-farm centerfold. Linda had never married or given birth, which no doubt explained her still-youthful figure. Twenty-year-old studs did double takes when she walked down the street.

  “How’s it goin, doll?” said Vaughn.

  “Better now,” said Linda, and she nudged the door closed with her foot and came into his arms. They kissed passionately and Vaughn felt his pants get tight.

  “Glad to see me?” His sharp white teeth gleamed in the lamplight of the living room.

  “I need a shower, handsome. Fix us some drinks.”

  “Keep your shoes on,” said Vaughn.

  Vaughn put a Chris Connor record on Linda’s console stereo, built a couple of Beam rocks from her bar cart, and took the cocktails into her bedroom. The water was running behind her bathroom door.

  He took off his jacket, tie, pants, socks, and shoes, and sat on the edge of the bed, feeling himself unwind with each sip of bourbon. A little while later, Linda came naked and scented into the room, the high-heeled Gellers refitted on her feet. She picked up her drink off the nightstand, took a long pull of it, and stood there proudly, in profile, letting him look at her because she knew he liked to. Soon he had her split atop the sheets, the missionary man, in control, giving it to her without the word lovemaking entering either of their minds, his thick, helmeted cock plunging in and out of her warm, wet box, a pure physical act, which was what both of them were there for. Afterward, smoking cigarettes and finishing their drinks with the sex smell lingering in the room, laughing easily, talking softly, never about anything serious or with the pretense of plans, because Vaughn loved his wife, and Linda understood that this was something else.

  Linda’s fingers traced the fading shoulder tattoo Vaughn had gotten one drunken night in the Pacific, twenty-seven years ago. “Olga,” written across a flowing banner, scripted on a deep-red heart.

  “What’re you working on these days, Frank?”

  Vaughn said, “A case.”

  COCO WATKINS’S place of business was located on 14th, Northwest, between R and S, on the second floor of an old row house. On the ground floor was a neighborhood market, once a DGS store owned and operated by a Jew, now run by an ambitious Puerto Rican. Fourteenth, from U Street north to Park Road, had gone up in flames the night of Dr. King’s assassination, and though the major fires had not burned this far south, the event had made the once-grand street a near commercial dead zone. But not every enterprise had been negatively affected. There was still a steady nightly stream of customers, married suburbanites and white teenage boys looking to lose their virginity, who kept one part of the local economy alive.

  Coco was a madam, technically, but the title meant nothing more than manager for a multi-bed operation housing six small, cut-up rooms, each of which held a bare mattress, a particleboard dresser, a freestanding rack with wire hangers, and a low-watt lamp. The girls made their connections out on the street, leaning into the open windows of idling cars, and handed over the prepaid fee, thirty for the act, five for the room, to Coco before entering with their johns.

  There was no pimp involved in this particular operation. It was fairly unusual for a woman to have such unchallenged control over a stable, but it was known that Robert Lee Jones was Coco’s man, and Red’s hard rep was such that she stayed protected. Even when Jones was incarcerated, few had tried to mack on Coco’s women.

  Coco and Jones sat in her office, which fronted 14th. A nice big room with a bar, a king-size, brass-headboard bed, red velvet couch and chairs, desk, compact stereo, and a couple of windows giving to a view of the wide street below. Coco was lounging on the couch in a negligee, her hair high and elegant, a live Viceroy in hand, the cluster-stone ring on her finger. Jones was in a chair, using an oiled cloth to polish one of two .45s he owned, classic Colts with stainless slides and black checkered grips. He had broken the .22 on a guardrail near the Anacostia and thrown its pieces into the river.

  “Where you about to go with that heater?” said Coco.

  “Me and Fonzo got business.”

  “Contract?”

  “Freelance.”

  “Be mindful. The Odum thing’s still warm.”

  “They got nothin.”

  “What I been hearin, that Detective Vaughn caught the case.”

  “The one they call Hound Dog.”

  “Him. Girl I know name Gina Marie told me he been askin around.”

  “Least they put a man on it.”

  Coco dragged on her cigarette. “That dude got no quit.”

  “Do I look like I care?”

  After coming to the city from West Virginia at an early age, Jones had grown up in one of D.C.’s infamous alley dwellings, way below the poverty line. No father in his life, ever, with hustlers in and out the spot, taking the place of one. A mother who worked domestic when she could. Half brothers and sisters he barely knew or kept track of. Twenty-five dollars a month rent, and his mother could rarely come up with it. All of them hungry,
all the time. Being poor in that extreme way, Jones felt that nothing after could cut too deep. Take what you want, take no man’s shit. No police can intimidate you, no sentence will enslave you, no cell can contain your mind.

  Jones stood, holstered the .45 in the dip of his bells, dropped the tail of his shirt over the bulge. His chest looked flat under clothing, but he was just shy of concrete. Five hundred push-ups a day in lockup, the same regimen on the outside. Legend was, an ambitious young dude had tried to shank him in jail and the blade had broken off in Red’s chest. It wasn’t a legend. Homemade shiv, but still.

  “My Fury’s in the alley,” said Coco.

  “We taking Fonzo’s short,” said Jones. He bent down, kissed her full red mouth. His fingers grazed the inside of her bare thigh, and she got damp.

  “Will I see you tonight?”

  “Bet,” said Jones.

  He left the room and walked down the hall, where a young working woman, a big mark above her lip, stood outside a room in a sheer slip, huffing a smoke.

  “Red,” she said.

  “Girl.”

  Out on 14th, Alfonzo Jefferson pulled up in his ’68 Electra, a gold-over-black convertible with 360 horses, a Turbo-400 trans, wide whitewalls, and rear-wheel skirts. It was a big, pretty beast, one of the nicest deuce-and-a-quarters on the street. Jones slid into the passenger side and settled on the bench. Jones and Jefferson had first met in the D.C. Jail and, when they could, had worked together since. Jones liked Jefferson’s fierce nature, and his style.

  Jefferson, small and spidery, looked like a man-child under the wheel. He wore a button-down synthetic shirt, slacks with a wide stripe, and a neat brimmed cap pulled low over his bony face. He had two-tone stacks on his feet. His front teeth were capped in gold. His voice was husky, and he was quick. Johnnie Taylor’s “Jody’s Got Your Girl and Gone” was playing through an eight-track deck in the car.