Soul Circus

by George Pelecanos

  Foreman slipped back into the house and went down the stairs off the kitchen. He hoped Ashley had got herself dressed by now. She could show Durham in, and his personal giant, too.

  FOREMAN had spread out several pistols on the felt of his pool table down in the recreation room of the rambler. He had bought a ring once for Ashley, and this was the way the jeweler had presented it to him, on a square of red felt. When Foreman had chosen his pool table at that wholesale store he went to, he had gone for the red, remembering how he had been sold on the ring. This was the way he presented all his goods.

  Five guns were set in a row, turned at a forty-five-degree angle to the line of the table. Above them were boxes of ammunition, “bricks,” the contents of which fit the guns. A Heckler & Koch 9mm automatic was at the head of the row. A Sig Sauer .45 was next, followed by a stainless steel Colt of the same caliber, then a Glock 17. The Glock was the MPD sidearm and, Foreman knew, was always a sure sale. The young ones wanted what the police carried, nothing less. At the end of the row was a Calico M-110 auto pistol, a multiround, 22-caliber chatter gun. It was generally ineffective and hard to conceal but had recently gained popularity on the street due to its round capacity and exotic look.

  “That’s pretty right there,” said Dewayne Durham. He was pointing to the Colt .45 set between the Sig and the drab plastic Glock. Foreman had placed the gun there strategically, knowing it would stand out.

  “You like it, huh?”

  “What kinda grips you got on there?”

  “That’s rosewood,” said Foreman. “The checkered style. Ordered them from Altamont and put ’em on my own self. Looks good against the stainless, right?”

  Durham picked up the gun, felt its weight in his hand. He racked the slide and dry-fired at the wall. He placed the gun back on the table.

  “Pretty,” repeated Durham, Foreman knowing right then that he had made a sale. “That’s like that gun you got, right?”

  “Same gun,” said Foreman. “Only I got the ivory grips on mine.”

  “You had it long?”

  “Just came in. Got bought at a store down in Virginia and changed hands once since. Never even been fired.”

  “How you know?”

  “Smell it.”

  “Okay, then. I’m gonna take that Glock, too, if it’s clean.”

  “You could eat off it, dawg.”

  “Aiight, then.”

  “What about that?” said Bernard Walker. Foreman had been watching the tall man’s eyes and knew he was talking about the Calico.

  “Brand-new,” said Foreman.

  “Where the bullets come from?”

  “Right up top there, why it’s long like it is. They call it a helical feed.”

  “What you need that for, Zulu?” said Durham. “Shit ain’t even, like, practical.”

  “I guess I don’t need it,” said Walker. “I was just askin’ after it, is all.”

  Durham said to Walker, “I’m buyin’ you the Glock.” To Foreman he said, “How much for the two?”

  Foreman closed his eyes like he was counting it up. He had already decided on a price.

  “Sixteen for the both of them is what I’d normally charge. With those grips and all, price got up.”

  “Sixteen hundred for two guns?” Durham made a face like he had bitten into a lemon. “Damn, boy, you gonna make me pay list price, too. What, you see me pull up in my new whip and the price went up? Or I got the word sucker stamped on my forehead and nobody done told me.”

  “I said it’s what I’d normally charge. I’m gonna make it fifteen for you. And I’ll throw in the bricks.”

  Durham looked down at his Pennys. He had made up his mind, but he was going to let Foreman wait. They both knew it was part of the process.

  Durham looked up. “You got anything to drink up in this piece?”

  Foreman smiled. “I’ll throw that in, too.”

  Foreman got them a couple of beers from the short refrigerator he kept running behind his bar and opened one for himself. He brought them frosted pilsner glasses he stored in the fridge for his guests. They sat in leather chairs grouped around a leather couch studded with nail heads, a glass-topped table in the center of the arrangement. Italian leather on the couch, Durham guessed, soft as it was. Foreman did have nice things. Why wouldn’t he, with the prices he charged?

  The room was paneled in knotty pine. Foreman had always wanted a room like this, a room that he imagined a secure man would own, and now he had it. To him, the wood had the smell of success. There was the pool table and a deep-pile carpet, wall-to-wall, and a wide-screen Sony with a flat picture tube, the best model they made, with a DVD player racked beneath the set. His stereo, with the biggest speakers they had in the store, was first-class. He had a gas-burning fireplace in here, too, and the bar with the imitation marble top. He was all hooked up. He’d rather sit down here and catch a game than go out to the new football stadium or the MCI Center, matter of fact. He’d rather sit down here and chill than do just about anything else.

  Durham took a taste of beer. He had a look around the room. Looked like some old man, wore his pants up high, owned it. Foreman was playing some old-school stuff on the stereo, Luther Vandross from when Luther could sing, had some weight behind his voice. Music from the eighties, that fit this place, too.

  “Saw your woman,” said Durham, after enjoying a long sip of beer. “She looked good.”

  “Thank you, man,” said Foreman.

  It made Durham kinda sick just to think about her. Why it was, he wondered, that black men who went for white women always went for the most fugly ones. When a white boy had a black woman she always seemed to be fine. You could bet money on that shit damn near every time.

  Foreman’s woman, she had come to the door in some JCPenney’s-lookin’ outfit, no makeup on her face and wine breath coming out her big mouth. Looked like she just dragged her elephant ass out of bed; must have remembered that it was feeding time, sumshit like that. Talkin’ about, “How you two be doin’?” A big-ass, ugly-ass white girl trying to talk black, her idea of it, anyway, from ten years ago.

  “Yeah,” said Durham, “she looked good.”

  “She’s gettin’ her rest,” said Foreman.

  Foreman took a Cuban out of a wooden box on the glass table before him, clipped it with a silver tool set beside the box, and lit the cigar. He got a nice draw going and sat back.

  “Saw your brother, Mario, today,” said Foreman casually, as if it had just come into his mind.

  “So did I,” said Durham. “Just a little while ago.”

  “This was in the morning,” said Foreman. “I had a little transaction with him.”

  “Yeah?”

  “No big thing. Rented him a gun. Traded him five days’ worth for a little bit of hydro he was holding.”

  Walker glanced over at Durham. No one said anything for a while, as Foreman had expected. But he wanted his business with Twigs to be up front, on the outside chance that some kind of problem came up later on.

  Durham’s eyes went a little dark. “Now why you want to do that? I’d get you some smoke, you needed it.”

  “Well, for some reason, Mario’s always got the best chronic.” Foreman chuckled. “The older I get, seems I need the potent shit to get me high.”

  “What, mine don’t get you up?”

  “The truth? It hasn’t lately. When Mario lays some on me, I trip behind it.”

  ’Cause what I give to Mario, I give to him out of my private stash, thought Durham. And you know this.

  Durham exhaled slowly, trying to ignore the ache in his stomach. “What he needs a gun for, anyway?”

  “Said he was lookin’ to make an impression on someone. I didn’t get the feeling he was gonna use it.”

  “He ain’t say nothin’ to me.”

  “Boy’s harmless, though, right?”

  Durham cut his eyes away from Foreman. “He ain’t gonna do nothin’, most likely.” He did believe this in his heart.r />
  “What I thought, too. Now look, he didn’t want me to tell you. Didn’t want to worry you or y’all’s moms. But I just thought it might be better if you knew.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “We all right, dawg?”

  Durham nodded. “Yeah, we’re good.”

  “We better be gone,” said Walker, placing his empty pilsner on the table.

  “Gotta see the troops get out for the night,” said Durham.

  “I’ll get you a bag for your guns,” said Foreman.

  Durham pulled a roll of cash from out of his jeans. “Fourteen, right?”

  “Fifteen,” said Foreman, standing from his chair.

  “Why you want to do me like that?” said Durham, but Foreman was ignoring him, already walking toward a side room where he kept his supplies.

  FOREMAN stood on the stoop of his house, watching the Benz go down the drive. He was under a pink awning that Ashley loved but he hated. It was a little thing, though, one of them concessions you make to a woman, so he told her that he liked the awning, too.

  He had played it right, telling Dewayne about Mario and the gun. Now there wouldn’t be no misunderstanding later on. If Dewayne didn’t like it, well, next time he’d give him some of that good smoke he kept in the family. Everything was negotiation in this business, nothing but a game.

  “It go okay?” said Ashley, coming up behind him with a fresh glass of wine in her hand.

  “Went good.” Foreman put his arm around her waist, looked her over, then kissed her neck. “Those boys were noticing you.”

  “You jealous?”

  “I don’t think you’re goin’ anywhere.”

  “You got that right, boyfriend.”

  “I better keep an eye on you, though. Fine as you look, someone might try to steal you out from under me.”

  “That’s where they’d have to steal me from, too.”

  Foreman kissed Ashley on the mouth. She bit his lower lip, and they both laughed as he pulled away.

  chapter 9

  YOU ever been back in there?” said Strange, looking through the windshield to the brick wall bordering St. Elizabeth’s.

  “Once,” said Devra Stokes. “This girl and me jumped the wall when we was like, twelve.”

  “I interviewed a witness there, a couple of years back.”

  “Hinckley?”

  “Naw, not Hinckley.”

  “I was just playin’ with you.”

  “I know it.”

  They sat in the Caprice, across from the institution, eating soft ice cream from cups that they had purchased at the drive-through of McDonald’s. Juwan, Devra’s son, sat in the backseat, licking the drippings off a cone.

  “It was this dude, though,” said Strange, “had pleaded insanity on a manslaughter charge, we thought he might have some information on another case. He seemed plenty sane to me. Anyway, we sat on a bench they have on the grounds, faces west, gives you a nice look at the whole city. This is the high ground up here. Those people they got in there, they got the best view of D.C.”

  “I wouldn’t mind getting taken care of like they take care of those folks in there. You ever think like that?”

  “It’s crossed my mind, in the same way that it would be easy to be old. Walk around wearing the same raggedy sweater every day, don’t even have to shave or mind your hair. But I don’t want to be an old man. And I wouldn’t want to be locked up anywhere, would you?”

  “Sometimes I think, you know, not to have all this pressure all the time… not to have to think about how I’m gonna make it for me and Juwan, just for a while, I mean. That would be nice.”

  “I know it’s got to be rough, raising him as a single parent,” said Strange.

  “I got bills,” said Devra.

  “Phil Wood’s not taking care of you and your little boy?”

  “Juwan’s not his. Juwan’s father—”

  “Mama!”

  Devra turned her head. The boy’s ice cream had dripped and some of it had found its way onto the vinyl seat. Devra used the napkin in her hand to clean the boy’s face, then wipe the seat.

  “Mama,” said Juwan, “I spilt the ice cream.”

  “Yes, baby,” said Devra, “I know.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” said Strange. “You see that red cushion back there? My dog sleeps on that, and he has his run of the car. So I ain’t gonna worry about no ice cream. This here is my work vehicle, anyway.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Ain’t no thing,” said Strange. “Look here, what about Juwan’s father, then?”

  Devra shrugged. “He’s in Ohio now. They had him incarcerated out at Lorton, but they moved him a few months ago. Once a week, me and Juwan used to take the Metrobus, the one they ran special from the city, out there to see him. But now, with him so far and all, I don’t think Juwan’s even going to remember who his father is.”

  Strange nodded at the familiar story. A young man fathered a child, then went off to do his jail time, his “rite of passage.” Lorton, the local prison in northern Virginia, was slowly being closed down, its inhabitants moved to institutions much farther away. Lorton’s proximity to the District had allowed prisoners and their families to remain in constant contact, but that last tie between many fathers and their children was ending now, too. Juwan’s future, like the futures of many of the children who had been born into these circumstances, did not look promising.

  “Can’t Phil help you out with some money?”

  “Phil’s got no reason to give me money. He had a whole rack of girls. I was just one.”

  “But he paid you to stay away from court on that brutality rap.”

  “That was a one-time thing.”

  “I’m gonna need you to talk about it with me, you don’t mind.”

  “Talk about what?”

  “Well, the fact that he was beatin’ up on you, for one. Plus, the time you filed the original charges was about the same time some of the murders went down that they got Granville up on. Including the murder of his own uncle. So I need to know, did Phil ever discuss any of those murders with you? Or did you hear anything else about those murders from anyone close to Phil or Granville around that time?”

  “I got no reason to hurt Phil.”

  “It’s not about hurtin’ Phil. The prosecution’s gonna put him up on the stand to testify against Granville. What the defense does, they want to give a complete picture of the prosecution’s witness to the jury. If Wood was the kind of man who would take his hand to a woman, that’s something the jury ought to know. Throws a shadow, maybe, over the stuff he’s saying about Granville.”

  “How’s that gonna change anything? Ain’t nobody denying that they were in the life.”

  “True. But that’s how it works. Their side claims something and our side tries to refute it. Or make it more complicated than it really is.”

  “Sounds like bullshit to me.”

  “It is. But I’m still gonna need your help.”

  “I don’t know.” Devra looked out her open window, away from Strange. “I don’t want to get back into all that. I moved away from it, hear? I got my little boy….”

  Strange turned his body so that he faced her. “Look here. They’re gonna try and put Granville to death. Some folks feel that only God gets to decide that. And a lot of folks in this city, they don’t see how killing another young black man is gonna solve any of the problems we got out here.”

  “Granville did his share of killin’, I expect.”

  “Maybe so, Devra. But this is about something more than just him.” Strange touched her hand. “It’s important. I need you to talk to me, young lady, tell me what you know.”

  “I gotta think on it,” she said.

  “Give me your phone number and the address where you’re stayin’ at, you don’t mind.”

  Stokes did this, and Strange wrote the information down. He withdrew his wallet and opened it.

  “Let me give you my business card,” said
Strange. “Got a bunch of different numbers on it; you can reach me anytime.”

  Strange turned the ignition and drove the Caprice off the McDonald’s property. An E-series Benz and a beige 240SX followed him out of the parking lot and down the hill of Martin Luther King.

  STRANGE dropped Devra Stokes by her old Taurus in the lot of the salon on Good Hope Road. He waited for her to strap Juwan into a car seat and get herself situated and drive away. He noticed the older woman who owned the shop staring at him through the plate glass window. And he noticed the two cars that had been following him since back at the McDonald’s idling behind him, about a hundred yards and several rows of spaces back.

  Strange drove out onto Good Hope. In his rearview he studied the vehicles, a black late-model Benz, tricked out with aftermarket wheels, and a beige Nissan bomb, the model of which he could not remember but which he recognized as the poor man’s Z.

  Strange went down Good Hope and cut left onto 22nd Place without hitting his turn signal. The Benz fell in behind the Nissan and they stayed on his tail. He took another left on T Place and did not signal; the other cars did the same. T Place became T Street after a bit, and he took that to Minnesota Avenue. They were still there, about five car lengths back. Okay, so now he knew they were following him. But why?

  Down near Naylor Road, Strange slowed down, moved into the middle lane, and came to a stop at a red light. Cars were parked along the curb to his right. The Benz stopped behind him and the Nissan pulled up to his left. He moved his car up into the crosswalk, as there were no cars there to block his exit. If he needed to make a move he could do so now. The Nissan did the same and pulled up even with his driver’s-side door.

  Could be this was a trap. If that was the case, the rider on the Nissan’s passenger side would be the shooter. But Strange wasn’t ready to look over at them yet.

  In the rearview, Strange could read the front tag on the Benz and he committed it to memory. He said it aloud so that he would get used to the sound of the sequence, and he said it aloud again. He saw a fat young man in the driver’s seat, a ring across the fingers that were gripping the wheel. Another young man, with no expression on his face at all, sat beside him.