What It Was

by George Pelecanos

  “How’s it goin, Red?” said Vaughn.

  “Fuck you, Hound Dog.”

  Vaughn grinned, exposing a row of widely spaced teeth, now pink with blood. “Fuck you.”

  Vaughn heard a dull thud from outside the rear of the house. That would be Coco’s feet landing on earth. She was making her escape.

  “Where my boy at?” said Jones.

  Vaughn looked at the corpse of Jefferson, tangled in the ruin of a blown-up table. “He didn’t make it.”

  “You get the one who killed him?”

  “I did him like he did your friend.”

  The faint wail of sirens reached Vaughn’s ears.

  “We gonna have to do this some other time, big man,” said Jones.

  “Don’t try it,” said Vaughn.

  But he heard movement up on the second floor, and then the familiar but heavier sound of Jones landing in the yard at the back of the house.

  Vaughn walked unsteadily to the kitchen. Through the open door, he saw Red Jones, a gun in each of his hands, clear the chicken wire fence without touching it, cross the alley, and cleanly leap over a chain-link fence into another backyard. Coco Watkins, holding a red suitcase and a cosmetic case, was waiting for him there. The two of them began to run.

  Vaughn went outside, straightened his gun arm, led his target, and aimed. But something was wrong with his sight; the landscape before him was blurred. He put his hand up to his right eye and covered it. He thought this would correct his vision, but it didn’t. When he drew his hand back, he saw that it was covered with blood.

  Vaughn lowered his gun. “Next time,” he said.

  Later, an elderly resident of Burrville claimed to have seen a tall young couple running through the backyards of her neighborhood. She said they were moving very quickly and taking long strides. Galloping, almost, and laughing.

  VAUGHN WALKED around the house to its front yard. Strange was seated on the government strip, his back against a black Lincoln. He was rubbing his hands together, and his eyes were unfocused. On the ground, several yards away, a young blond man lay on his back, his swollen tongue protruding from his mouth. His face was scarred and gray.

  Strange looked up at Vaughn. “You’ve been shot.”

  “I’m doin better than those guys in the house.” Vaughn pointed his chin at the body. “What happened to him?”

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” said Strange. “I told him to stop struggling… I told him. I was tryin to choke him out, the way we got taught at the academy.”

  “You touch that gun of his?” said Vaughn, pointing to the .38 lying in the grass.

  “No.”

  The sound of the sirens grew near. Vaughn picked up the revolver, fitted it in the right hand of Gregorio’s corpse, and studied the marks on his neck.

  “I killed him,” said Strange in disbelief.

  “No, you didn’t,” said Vaughn, pointing his Colt at Gregorio’s throat. “I did.”

  A WEEK after the violence in Burrville, Vaughn walked east down U Street in the middle of June. He was on leave with pay until the matter could be resolved to the satisfaction of the brass, various city councilmen, and the press.

  This is what Vaughn told investigators: he had followed a lead to a Northeast residence where he believed he could obtain information as to the whereabouts of Red Jones and his partner, Alfonzo Jefferson. He did not know that Jones or Jefferson would be in the house. Had he known, he would have gone there with backup. Upon arrival, he found himself in the midst of an armed conflict between Jones and Jefferson and two out-of-town criminals, later identified as contract men employed by the Syndicate. In the violence that ensued, Jefferson was killed and Vaughn was compelled to use lethal force against the hitters from up north. Jones and his lady friend, a notorious madam named Coco Watkins, had escaped. Luckily, a passerby, a former D.C. patrol cop named Derek Strange, heard the gun battle and used a police radio in Vaughn’s car to call in an Officer Needs Assistance. Strange, who had taken a bus to Northeast to visit a girl, was walking through the neighborhood at the time and happened to see the two-way mounted under the dash of Vaughn’s open-windowed Dodge.

  Vaughn’s story had holes, and many felt it was bullshit, particularly the bit about the good Samaritan passerby. But Vaughn stuck to it, not wavering in the details, even while he was high on painkillers in the hospital, where he had been operated on for his wound. Vaughn was a former marine who had fought in the Pacific. He was a longtime uniformed officer and Homicide detective with an outstanding record in the MPD. Among the rank and file, he was considered to be somewhat of a folk hero. His injury and his advancing years lent him sympathy. There was little doubt that Vaughn would be absolved of any wrongdoing.

  An oppressive heat had descended upon Washington and would remain, with little relief, until the arrival of the first blessedly cool nights of September. Vaughn walked through the sauna, seemingly without care. He wore a new lightweight gray Robert Hall suit and a hat. If he was hot, his discomfort didn’t show on his face.

  At the Lincoln Theatre box office he bought a ticket. The lady behind the window did a quick double take when she handed him his change. Vaughn had a perforated patch the size of an athletic-supporter cup taped over his right eye.

  “Enjoy the show,” she said.

  “Ma’am,” said Vaughn.

  He found Martina Lewis in his usual spot, in one of the middle rows of the ice-cool auditorium.

  Vaughn dropped down into a seat beside Martina and removed his hat. He glanced up at the screen out of habit. The Legend of Nigger Charley had moved over from the Booker T, and he couldn’t have cared less.

  Martina and Vaughn put their heads close so they would not disturb the others in the audience.

  “How’s it goin, doll?”

  “Frank.” Martina’s voice was husky. Though he was in drag, he didn’t feel the need to female-front to the detective. He looked Vaughn over as the film cut to a daytime Western landscape scene and the light from the screen hit the auditorium. “Nice suit.”

  “It’s new.” He had thrown his old gray suit in the trash, as his dry-cleaning man, Billy Caludis at the Arrow on Georgia, had been unable to remove the blood.

  “Glad you came by. I was worried about you, honey. Is your eye…”

  “It’s fine,” said Vaughn.

  The shotgun blast had stripped a sliver of metal off the Frigidaire and sent it deep into his right cornea. The surgeons had removed the invasive projectile and saved his eye, but the retinal damage had been extensive. In the coming years he would be prescribed glasses, and later a special contact lens, but he would deny the severity of his condition and decline to wear them. For the remainder of his life, Vaughn’s right eye could only register shapes and light.

  “I called you that day,” said Martina.

  “I got the message later on.”

  “Wanted you to know that there was some hitters in town who were lookin for Red. I was afraid y’all would cross paths.”

  “That’s exactly what happened,” said Vaughn. “How’d you get the word?”

  “White girl name of April had partied with the one named Lou the night before. Lou was asking after Red.”

  “His name was Lou Fanella.”

  “Matter of fact, she boosted a ring off him. I saw it myself.”

  “What did the ring look like?” said Vaughn.

  Martina described it. He added, “Costume shit.”

  “Tell me about April.”

  “She’s trash.”

  “Know where I can find her?” said Vaughn.

  Martina told him that most days April could be seen in the diner next door to the Lincoln, having coffee and smokes before she got out on the stroll. Vaughn thanked him, reached into his jacket, and produced an envelope that was thick with cash. Martina took the envelope, looked inside it, and ran his fingers through the green.

  “What’s this for?”

  “There’s a little less than nine hundred dollars in there.
It’s damn near all I’ve got in my savings account. It’ll get you started, at least. I want you to leave town.”

  “Why?”

  “Clarence Bowman knows you snitched him out. He’s in lockup, but that doesn’t mean he can’t get to you. Red Jones killed Bobby Odum because Bobby talked to me. He’d do the same to you if he got the chance. I don’t want that on my conscience, too.”

  “Isn’t your wife gonna be mad when she finds out you cleaned out the bank?”

  “She’ll be proud of me,” said Vaughn.

  ’Cause I helped out a needy Afro American. Or whatever you call yourselves these days.

  Right, Olga?

  Martina slowly batted his eyes, his long fake eyelashes fluttering like wings in the light. “I’m gonna miss you, Frank.”

  “Don’t worry, baby. We’ll meet down the road.”

  A little while later, Vaughn walked out of the auditorium. He never saw Martina Lewis again.

  AS VAUGHN entered the diner on U in search of April, Strange stepped up to Carmen’s house off Barry Place with a bouquet of fresh-cut flowers in his hand. He had phoned her several times over the past week but had been unable to make contact. Strange wanted an opportunity to talk to her, to apologize again, this time from his heart, and to ask for another chance. His pledge would be to prove himself worthy of her love.

  He knocked on the door of her unit and there was no response. He thought he might use her outside spigot to wet the flowers and leave the bouquet on her front stoop. If she was on a long shift at the hospital, though, the flowers would be wilted by the time she came home, what with the heat. Better to try calling her again in the evening and give the flowers to someone who would appreciate them.

  Strange picked up a couple of fish sandwiches and drove his Monte Carlo over to the house in which he had grown up, on the 700 block of Princeton Place. His mother, Alethea, answered the door in an old housedress and smiled brightly at the sight of her son.

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

  They ate in the living room, near his father’s old recliner and his console stereo. Strange was silent for most of the meal.

  “Everything all right, son?” said Alethea.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Don’t lie to me. You never could. Not too well, anyway.”

  Strange swallowed his last bite and pushed his plate aside. “I been wrong, Mama. I’ve done some real bad things. Broke every important commandment and some that ain’t been wrote yet.”

  “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?”r />
  “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.

  THE 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 reward 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?”