Soul Circus

by George P. Pelecanos

  The stairwell’s interior walls were the usual dull cinder block. The words “Mews Crew” were spray painted on the wall, artlessly, along with several nicknames. “Black,” that most popular of D.C. street names, was among them. Strange had become acquainted with most of the gang names down here in the course of his long investigation related to Granville Oliver, but he had not heard this one mentioned. He figured that the wall tag was just the work of hopeful kids.

  Strange knocked on the apartment door where Olivia Elliot had lived. No one answered, but there was music behind the door, and Strange knocked again. A girl opened the door to its chain length and peered out. He could smell marijuana through the opening, and the girl’s eyes told him she was high. Strange caught a glimpse of an older boy, shirtless above the waist, backing into the hallway of the apartment.

  “I’m looking for Olivia Elliot,” said Strange.

  “I ain’t know her,” said the girl.

  “Is your mother at home?”

  “At work.”

  “How long have you been living here?”

  “We only been stayin’ up in here, like, a month.”

  “What -”

  “Bye.”

  She closed the door. Strange was accustomed to having doors closed in his face, and he wasn’t about to knock again just to get the same response. Anyway, he had the feeling that this was a dead lead. The management company was the way to go. But he figured he’d upturn all the stones he could while he was here.

  Strange knocked on another door, then tried a third. He walked back down the stairs to the open air. A man in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette beside a Dumpster, stared him down. Strange looked him over and walked on. With his cell holstered to his belt and his pen and pad, Strange was obviously some sort of official, cop, or inspector. He didn’t feel the need to explain himself or acknowledge the smoker in any way. Besides, Strange had sized up the man and decided that if it came down to it, he could kick his ass. Didn’t matter how old you got, there was always some kind of satisfaction for a man in knowing that.

  He walked around the unit to the back, where the apartment’s balconies faced a small playground holding rusted and broken equipment. Strange studied the balconies. He noticed a boy’s bicycle in the 20-to-23-inch range chained to a rail on the third floor. That size bike would belong to a child who was somewhere between seven and twelve years old. He counted the apartments and where they were in relation to the stairwell, and he returned to the front of the building and took the steps to the door he thought he was looking for. He knocked on the door and soon it opened.

  A dark-skinned, unkempt woman whose facial features had begun to collapse stood in the frame. Hung on a chain around her mottled neck was a large wooden crucifix that lay on a threadbare housedress. The furniture in the room behind her followed the lead of the dress. A piece of rug art, a brown-and-white pony standing in a field of black, was tacked to the wall over a shredded sofa.

  “Yes?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Strange softened his eyes. “I’m trying to get up with Mark Elliot, little boy lives here, down on the floor below you. Trouble I’m having, the phone number I had on his mother, when I dial it I get a recording, says it’s been disconnected.”

  “Well, that’s because they moved out.”

  “I was afraid it might be that.”

  The woman looked him over and crossed her arms beneath her sagging breasts. “And you are?”

  “Excuse me. My name is Will, uh, William Sonnett. I’ve got a football team I coach every fall over in Turkey Thicket, run it through the, uh, church group. We do this camp in the summertime, kind of ease the kids into their conditioning, if you know what I mean. I was hoping to recruit Mark into the Pee Wee division. I heard from some of the neighborhood boys that he could play.”

  The woman’s features untightened and she let her arms fall at her sides. “Mark would have liked to have played, if he still lived here. He’s a good little athlete. He played with my grandson all the time when he was living here.”

  “That so.”

  “Yes, they rode their bikes together day and night.”

  Damn, thought Strange, I am good. His blood ticked the way it always did when he was getting close. He’d like to see Terry’s face when he told him that, just as he had predicted, he had found the woman in one afternoon.

  “You don’t know how I can get in touch with Mark or his mother, do you?”

  “No, I’m sorry. They left without a word.”

  “And she hasn’t called you or nothin’ like that.”

  “No. She hasn’t.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, Mark has called. He calls my grandson ’bout once a week or so. I think he must be lonely, wherever they’re stayin’ at.”

  “So your grandson, he must call him back.”

  “I don’t allow Daniel to call out on our phone.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I think Mark called here a couple of days ago. Maybe I still have the number on the caller ID.”

  Strange smiled. “I sure would appreciate it if you’d check.”

  In the small kitchen the woman handed Strange a cordless phone. He pressed the directory button and thumb-wheeled through the record of calls printed out, one by one, on a lit yellow screen. There were thirty old calls listed in the directory.

  “I never think to erase them,” said the woman.

  “Neither do I,” said Strange.

  Strange found a number with the name Olivia B. Elliot printed above it. He copied the number onto his pad.

  “Thank you,” said Strange.

  The woman, ugly by anyone’s standards but with a peculiar bright-eyed energy to her, looked up at Strange with admiration. “You’re doing the Lord’s work helping these kids like you do, Mr. Sonnett. Praise God!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Strange, unable to meet her eyes. “I better be on my way.”

  IN the car Strange phoned Janine.

  “Derek, I didn’t have any luck with the management company. Apparently she moved out without giving them any notice and she left no forwarding address.”

  “That’s okay. I got a phone number on her. You ready?”

  Strange gave her the number. Over the years, Janine had cultivated contacts all over town. But her contact at the phone company was the most valuable. Strange sent Christmas cards out to all the people he did business with. A few of these cards contained gift certificates. At Christmastime, Strange sent Janine’s contact at the phone company a Tower Records certificate along with a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill.

  “I’m going to meet Devra Stokes,” said Strange. “Call me on my cell when you get an address.”

  Strange’s cell rang as he parked in the lot of the strip center on Good Hope Road. Janine was on the line with Olivia Elliot’s address. Strange wrote it down, thanked her, and cut the connection. Then he phoned Quinn.

  “Terry, can you get out for a while?”

  “I think Lewis can handle the shop.”

  “Yeah, what else is a cat like Lewis gonna be doin’ with his time? All right, write this down. Just need you to verify that she’s at the address.”

  Quinn took down the information. “That’s up around Lincoln Heights. Northeast, right?”

  “Yeah, it’s on the north side of East Capitol.”

  “Took you, what, two hours to find her?”

  “Some of it was lunch. And most of the rest was drive time.”

  “You are one macho motherfucker.”

  “And I drink the bad dude’s brew.”

  “Gonna make beaver boy happy.”

  “He’s gonna get some change back, too.”

  “Why can’t you take care of this yourself?”

  “I got some more work down here in Anacostia. The character wit I called on today, on the Oliver thing.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” said Quinn.

  Strange hit “end” on his cell.

  He looked through the wi
ndow of the hair salon. Devra Stokes’s little boy was holding on to her pants leg as she gathered up her things. Even his timing was on today. Sometimes, Strange thought, everything just goes right.

  Chapter 7

  DEWAYNE Durham checked himself in a full-length mirror hung crookedly on a nail pushed into a bullet hole in a plaster wall. He wore a new pair of jeans his mother had pressed for him and a Nautica shirt with a black-and-beige Hawaiian print. He wore a pair of black Jordans, the Penny style, on his feet, which picked up the black of the shirt real nice. He looked good and he looked strong. A little on the thin side, but that was his fun-house reflection in the cheap mirror, which one of his boys musta bought from Target or someplace like that. He’d have to talk to that boy. Wasn’t no such thing as a bargain; you had to spend money to get nice things.

  Trick mirror or no, he’d have to watch his weight, make sure he didn’t go in the direction of one of those sad-sack motherfuckers, had no ass and got no respect. Like his half brother, Mario, had to be the saddest, most okeydoke-lookin’ motherfucker in Ward 8. Mario’d be dead by now, picked off just for sport, if it wasn’t known that he was kin to Dewayne.

  “Your brother’s out by your car,” said Bernard Walker, a.k.a. Zulu, Dewayne’s next in command.

  “Aiight, then,” said Dewayne, patting his hair, shaved nearly down to the scalp, one last time in the mirror before walking from the room. There was a mattress in the room, the mirror, and nothing else. Walker followed him down a narrow hall.

  The house, a duplex on Atlantic Avenue in Washington Highlands, near 6th, was unfurnished except for some folding chairs and a couple of card tables where Dewayne’s boys bagged up and bottled up their shit. Plywood filled the window frames. The house had radiators but no gas, and the electricity and water had been shut off long ago. The 600 Crew, Dewayne’s outfit, used the house during the day to conduct their business, and also used it as a place to cut up, roll dice, play cards, and hang.

  They passed an open door to the bathroom, where excrement, urine, and paper clogged the toilet and filled half the tub. Dewayne’s crew peed in the bathtub and sometimes they shit in it, and on occasion they hid their airtight, weighted bundles of marijuana and cocaine underneath the mess. Dewayne had figured that no police would stick his hand down in there, and he was right; the last time they’d been raided, the uniform had stood there for only a couple of seconds, hardly looking into the bathtub, gagging while he was shaking his head, and then walked out. Later, Dewayne would let some young boy with ambition fish out the product. The stench in the house didn’t bother him or any of the fellas. Got so now they didn’t even notice it.

  Four boys were bagging up some chronic at a table in what used to be the dining room as Dewayne and Walker came down the stairs. Dewayne’s New York connect had made a delivery the night before.

  Walker had to bow his head at the foot of the stairway, since the ceiling there was kind of low. He had gotten the name Zulu partly because of his skin color, which was close to black, but mainly because of his height and build. He was six and a half feet tall and could throw a scare into Charles Oakley on a dark street. Walker was a feared enforcer down here in Anacostia. He was an unhesitant triggerman, but it was known that he could also go with his hands. It was said by Dewayne’s rivals that Zulu Walker was the long hair on Samson’s head. You cut it, and Dewayne Durham wouldn’t be shit.

  “Y’all gonna have it ready to go for the shift tonight?” said Dewayne.

  “We good,” said a medium-skinned, handsome boy named Jerome Long, a.k.a. Nutjob, seated at the table. He made eye contact with his boy Allante Jones, a.k.a Lil’ J, who was beside him. The two, equally tall, had come up together in Stanton Terrace. Both were fatherless. With one mother on a slow junk-ride down and another in and out of jail, they had been raised by Long’s grandmother until she could no longer handle them. To this day they were rarely seen apart.

  An electronic scale sat on the table along with boxes of zip-lock bags of various sizes purchased at Price Club. Pounds of marijuana rested at the feet of the boys in grocery store paper bags. A beat box, running on batteries and playing an old Northeast Groovers go-go PA tape, sat beside the table on the floor. Another boy stood by the window frame at the front of the dining room, looking through a quarter-size hole punched out of the plywood, checking the street for police.

  “My troops,” said Dewayne, giving them the verbal pat on the back he felt they needed but meaning it in his heart, too. Dewayne was only twenty-three and hadn’t gone past the tenth grade, but he felt he knew more about business instinctively than those who went to those kind of schools had ivy growing up the walls. One thing he did know: A man, however big he believed himself to be, wasn’t nothin’ without his employees.

  “We’ll roll on back in a little while,” said Dewayne.

  Jerome Long watched them go down a hall and through the kitchen. When he heard the back door open and shut he head-motioned to Allante Jones and the two of them got up from the table. They went back to the kitchen and looked out the window over the kitchen sink, the only window in the house that had not been boarded up.

  “Check them out,” said Long, looking past Dewayne and Walker, on the concrete walk now, to the Yuma Mob members sitting on the back steps of a house on the other side of the alley.

  “All bold and shit,” said Jones.

  “I’m tired of sittin’ at that table.”

  “So am I.”

  “You ready to make some noise, Lil’ J?”

  “Drama City.” Jones elaborately shook Long’s hand. “ ’Bout time someone in this town remembered our names, too.”

  Long forced a smile. He felt he had to talk this way sometimes, so his friend and the others would believe that he was hard. But he wasn’t hard for real. He didn’t want to kill no one, and he didn’t want to die.

  GOING out the back door, Dewayne and Walker went down a concrete walk split with weeds cutting a small yard of dirt. Past the alley, where Mario stood leaning against Dewayne’s Benz, Dewayne could see the fenced backyards of the street that ran parallel to Atlantic. About three houses down, on the back steps of another duplex, a group of boys sat drinking out of bags in the late-afternoon sun, listening to their own box, passing around a fat one and getting high. These were members of the Yuma Mob, headed up by Horace McKinley, who had risen under Granville Oliver, Phillip Wood, and them. Crazy boys, ’cause they were trying to make a rep, the worst kind. Especially those two cousins, the Coateses, who had come up from the South. Dewayne briefly locked eyes with one of them, because this was what he was expected to do, then kept walking toward his car.

  Dewayne didn’t sweat behind the competition. He expected them to be there. Shoot, you didn’t go openin’ no MacDonald’s, then get surprised when a Burger King moved in across the street. There was business enough for everyone down here, just so everyone knew their place and kept to it. That is, if you stayed on your strip. Once in a while, at night, if anyone was still down here, his boys would fire off a shot in the Yuma Mob’s direction to let them know they were still around, and they’d fire one back. Turf etiquette: We’re down and there’s peace if we stay behind our imaginary lines. Even the square motherfuckers lived on these blocks, had payroll jobs and kids and shit, got used to the sound of occasional gunfire. Long as those boys didn’t come into your house and start shittin’ on your bed, then everything would be cool.

  “Little brother,” said Mario, stepping off the car.

  Dewayne shook Mario’s hand, hanging off a wrist you could circle with your thumb and pinkie, then pulled his older brother in for the standard half-hug. To say Mario was thin was to say that Kobe had a little bit of game. Mario was famine-in-Africa kind of thin. You saw a photo of him, you’d start sending money to that company on TV, claimed they could feed kids for eighty-nine cents a day.

  “Zulu,” said Mario, “how you been?”

  Walker allowed him a nod. “Twigs.”

  It hurt Mario to hear Wa
lker call him that name, but he managed to hold a friendly smile.

  “What’s up, son?” said Dewayne.

  “Wanted to get up with you, D. Let you know I’m gettin’ close to finding the girl.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Uh-huh. Hired me one of those private investigators to do it.”

  “Okay. And what you gonna do then?”

  “I’m gonna make it right.”

  “You find her, you let me know where she at, I’ll make it right.”

  “Nah, man, this here is me.”

  “ ’Cause you can’t be lettin’ no bitch do you like she did, and I don’t care how good that pussy was. She took me off, too, and I can’t have none of that.”

  “Said I’m gonna square it.”

  “Don’t tell me. Show me that you will.”

  “We’re kin,” said Mario. “I won’t let you down.”

  Kin. Who would know it? thought Dewayne. Boy looked like a water rat ain’t had nothin’ to eat for, like, forever. They shared the same mother; that was true. Mario’s father, a nothing by all accounts, had died in a street beef when Mario wasn’t nothin’ but a kid. He must have been one ugly man. Dewayne had never known his father. His mother, Arnice Durham, had claimed that he was handsome. He was doing a stretch, last Dewayne had heard, in some joint in Pennsylvania. Didn’t mean shit to Dewayne anymore, if it did mean something to him to begin with. Whateva. Anyway, he had promised his mother he’d look after Mario, and there wasn’t anything Dewayne wouldn’t do for his moms.

  Dewayne looked down at Mario. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills. He handed a couple of twenties to Mario.

  “Here you go,” said Dewayne. “Go out and buy you some new stuff, don’t look like last year. Shit’s hangin’ off you, boy. And Deion ain’t even with the squad no more.”

  Mario held up the bills. “I’m gonna get this back to you, too, soon as I get myself situated with a job.”