Hell To Pay

by George Pelecanos

  “You say he still stays with his grandmother?”

  “Far as I know.”

  Strange shook Hawkins’s hand. “Thanks for your time.”

  Crossing the lot to the Caprice, Quinn said, “Just goes to show you, you can’t judge a man by his appearance.”

  “You tellin’ me that?”

  “Oh, so now you’re gonna tell me you didn’t look at that guy and think, Shoe-shine Boy.”

  “Didn’t see the word ‘boy’ flashin’ through my head at any time, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You know what I’m sayin’. Man shines shoes for a living and he’s got a Porsche in his garage.”

  “It’s not a Carrera, though.”

  “He’s workin’ on that,” said Quinn.

  Strange removed his keys from his pocket and tossed them to Quinn. “You drive. I need to make some calls.”

  “Right.”

  Quinn hit the Beltway and headed back toward the city. Strange phoned Lamar, got no answer, and left another message. He found the number for Ed Diggs on his list and phoned the house. Quinn heard him talking to a woman on the other end of the line; he could tell it was an older woman from the patient tone of Strange’s voice.

  “Any luck?” said Quinn, as Strange hit “end.”

  “His grandmother says he’s on his way out the door. I figure he’s still home, still wearin’ his pajamas, and now she’s gonna tell him to get his shit together and get himself out the house.” Strange looked at the needle on the speedometer. “You can get there quicker, we might still catch him in.”

  “I’m already doin’ seventy-five. Wouldn’t want us to get pulled over. You might go showing that toy badge of yours to a real police officer, get us into a world of hurt.”

  “Funny. C’mon, Terry, speed it up. Car’s got a three-fifty square block under the hood, and you’re drivin’ it like a Geo and shit.”

  “You want me to drive it like a race car, I will.”

  “Pin it,” said Strange.

  LUCILLE Carter lived on a number street off North Dakota Avenue in Manor Park, in a detached bungalow fronted by a series of small roller-coaster hills that stopped at a stone retaining wall before they reached the sidewalk. There were plenty of cars parked along the curb on this workday. This, along with the condition of the raked lawns and the updated paint on the modest houses, indicated to Strange that the residents were mainly retirees holding on to their properties and sheltering their extended families.

  Strange and Quinn went up the concrete steps to the porch of Lucille Carter’s house. Strange knocked on the front door, and it soon opened. Carter, short, bespectacled, narrow in the hips, and not yet completely gray, stood in the frame. She knew who they were. Her eyes were unsmiling and her body language told them that she wasn’t about to let them in. As agreed, Quinn stepped back and let Strange take the lead.

  “Derek Strange. This is my partner Terry Quinn.” Strange opened his badge case and closed it just as quickly. “Like I explained to you on the phone, we’re investigating the Lorenze Wilder homicide. We need to speak with your grandson Edward.”

  “He already talked to the police.”

  “I told you we needed to speak with him again.”

  “And I told you, Mr. Strange, that he was on his way out. As I am about to be, shortly.”

  “Any idea where we can catch up with him?”

  “He went out to his job-”

  “He doesn’t have a job, Miss Carter.”

  “He went out to his job search. If you had let me finish-”

  “All due respect, I don’t have the time or the inclination to let you finish. You told Edward that we were on our way over here, and now he’s gone. So let me make this easy for you and tell you how it’s gonna be. Me and my partner here are gonna be back in an hour with a subpoena. Edward’s not in, we’ll come back the hour after that. Same thing the hour after that. We have to, we’ll be here on the hour around the clock. Now, what do you suppose your good neighbors gonna think of that?”

  “This is harassment.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Would you like me to call your supervisors?”

  “I can’t stop you.” Strange looked at his watch. “We’ll see you in about sixty minutes, then. Thank you for your time.”

  They heard the door close behind them as they were walking down the steps.

  “That was nice,” said Quinn. “The Gray Panthers are gonna give you their humanitarian award for that one.”

  “You want to find a man in this city, shake down his grandmother,” said Strange. “Black man like Diggs always gonna respect the matriarch who treated him right. Plus, she’s stronger than he is, and the last thing he’s gonna want is to incur her wrath.”

  “That cop knowledge?”

  Strange shook his head. “My mother always said it. ‘Kick the bush and the quail comes flyin’ out.’”

  “So Diggs flies out of the bush. Then what? I mean, the cops have already talked to this guy.”

  “They didn’t know how close he was to Lorenze. And they didn’t talk to him the way I’m gonna talk to him.”

  “Okay, what now?”

  “Let’s get my car out of view so we can regroup.”

  Strange pulled the Caprice around the corner and parked it a block south of the Carter residence and out of its sight lines. He phoned Lamar’s apartment and this time he got him on the line. Strange made a writing sign in the air and snapped his fingers. Quinn handed him a pen. Strange wrote down a series of numbers, asked Lamar some questions, nodded as he listened to the answers, and said, “Good work, son,” before ending the call.

  “What?” said Quinn.

  “Lamar saw one of those boys last night, one of the three who rolled up on him at Park Morton.” Strange was punching numbers into the grid of his cell as he talked. “Said this boy was wearing the same bright shirt he had on when he saw him the first time.”

  “Lotta bright shirts out here.”

  “His face was hard to forget, had a nose like an anteater.”

  “And?”

  “Boy had a duffel bag in his backseat and a road map in his hand when Lamar saw him coming out the market, over there near the Black Hole. Looked to Lamar like he was runnin’.”

  “What else?”

  “Lamar got the license number off this boy’s Toyota, too.” Strange gave him the hold-up sign with his hand as his call connected. “Janine. Derek here. I need you to run a plate for me quick. You get an address on the owner of the car, I’m gonna need a phone number from the reverse directory, too.” Strange gave her the information and nodded as if Janine were in the room. “I’ll be waiting. Right.”

  Strange hit “end.” “Janine will get it quick. She sends a Christmas card every year to this guy she’s been knowin’, over at the DMV? One of those little things she does, small gestures of kindness. Gets results.”

  “She is good.”

  “The best.” Strange pointed his chin up the block. “You want the alley or the front of the house?”

  “The alley.”

  “Where’s your gun at, case I need it?”

  “Right here, under the seat.”

  “Is it loaded?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You got your cell?”

  “In my pocket.”

  “Keep it live.” Strange kept the pen Quinn had given him and slipped a notepad into his jacket. “The old lady will be going out, I expect. Either he’s in there or she’s gonna find him and tell him to get back to the house and take his medicine. But I don’t trust him to do what she says. If you get sight of him, you call me.”

  “What if you see him first?”

  “I’ll do the same.”

  STRANGE positioned himself a half block east of the Carter home, his 10×50 binos around his neck.

  Quinn walked down the alley, found the Carter bungalow, and quickly opened the link gate at the end of the weedy concrete path to the back porch of the house. Then he w
alked back and stood three houses away on the stones of the alley. A pit bull in a cage barked at him from a neighboring yard. No one came out to see what the barking was about, and no curtains moved from the back windows of the houses.

  Quinn paced the alley for an hour. Then his phone chirped. He flipped it open.

  “Yeah.”

  “The old lady just left. She’s drivin’ off in her Ford right now.”

  “Okay,” said Quinn.

  Another thirty minutes passed. Then a sad sack of a man in oversize jeans and a T-shirt came out from the back of the Carter house. He stepped down off the peeling wood porch and reached into his jeans for a pack of cigarettes. He shook one out from a hole cut in the bottom of the pack and lit it with a match he tore from a book.

  Quinn stepped back behind a tall lilac bush that still had leaves. He phoned Strange and kept his voice low.

  “Derek, he’s out in the yard. How do you want to play it?”

  “Hard,” said Strange. “Strong-arm him into the house and keep that back door unlocked. How much time you figure before he goes back inside?”

  “However long it takes to smoke a cigarette.”

  “Right,” said Strange.

  Strange ran to the Caprice. He dropped his binoculars to the floor. He found Quinn’s automatic, a black Colt.45 with a checkered grip and a five-inch barrel, underneath the seat. He released the magazine and checked the load: a full seven shots. It had been a long time since Strange had had the weight of a gun in his hand. He felt that he needed one today.

  EDWARD Diggs took a last drag of his Kool, then a real last drag that burned his throat, and crushed the butt under his shoe. He picked up the butt and tossed it over the fence, into the yard of a neighbor who was also a smoker. Diggs’s grandmother wouldn’t let him smoke in the house, and she didn’t like to see any evidence of it in her backyard. Mad as she had been this morning, he wasn’t gonna do anything to get her back up more than it already was.

  But fuck that shit if she thought he was gonna talk any more to the police. Let them deliver that subpoena. He had told them he didn’t know shit about what had happened to Lorenze and that kid, and he didn’t have to go on repeating it if he didn’t want to. Far as telling them the truth, he had decided from the get-go to keep his mouth shut. Lorenze was his main boy, he loved him like a brother and all that, but all the talking in the world wasn’t gonna bring Lorenze back. Diggs felt that the police wouldn’t waste their time protecting a guy like him. All he wanted now was to live.

  He turned and went back up the walkway, cracked and overgrown with clover and weeds. He thought he heard something behind him, but it couldn’t be, it was just his own footsteps and that cur, wouldn’t stop barking across the way.

  His right hand was grabbed from behind and then bent at the wrist. A bolt of electric pain shot up to his neck, and the shock of it nearly dropped him to his knees. But the man behind him held him up.

  “Let’s go, Ed.” A white man’s voice, the one saying the words pushing him along the walkway to the back porch. “Inside.”

  “Fuck is this shit? You’re hurtin’ me!”

  “Investigator, D.C. Move it.”

  “I’m ’onna get your badge number, man.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “This is assault right here!”

  “Not yet,” said Quinn. “Open that door, let’s go.”

  Diggs did it and Quinn released him as they stepped inside. They were in a clean kitchen that held a small table and chairs. On the table was a coffee cup and the sports page of the Washington Post. A set of knives sat on the Formica counter, sheathed in a rubber stand. Diggs stood by the table, trying to give Quinn a hard glare. Quinn looked Diggs over carefully, thinking of the knives, deciding that Diggs would never make a play.

  “Sit down,” said Quinn, pointing to one of the chairs. Diggs pulled one away from the table and sat in it. He mumbled to himself as he stared at the linoleum floor.

  Quinn moved to the rear window and looked through it. Strange was coming through the open gate and moving quickly up the walkway. His shirttails were out over his jeans. Then Strange was opening the door and he was in the kitchen and closing the door behind him. He walked toward Ed Diggs. Diggs stood from his chair.

  “Meet Ed Diggs,” said Quinn.

  “Ed,” said Strange, and as Strange reached him he threw a deep right into Diggs’s mouth and knocked him back over the chair. Diggs slid on the linoleum and stopped sliding when the back of his head hit the kitchen cabinet beneath the sink. Strange yanked him up by his T-shirt, kept his left hand bunched on the T, and hit him with a short, sharp right to the same spot. Diggs’s neck snapped back and his eyes fluttered. His eyes came back, and he stared up at Strange as blood flowed over his lower lip and dripped onto his shirt. Strange released him and Diggs dropped to the floor. Diggs staggered back up to his feet.

  “We tell you to stand?” Quinn righted the chair. “Sit your ass down.”

  Strange pulled a chair over so it faced the one Diggs had been sitting on. He and Quinn listened to Diggs mumble and moan, and they waited for him to slouch across the room. Strange had split Diggs’s lip wide, and blood came freely now from the cut.

  Diggs sat down dead eyed, his shoulders slouched. Strange reached under his shirt and pulled the.45.

  “Nah,” said Diggs in the voice of a boy. “Uh-uh, man, nah, uh-uh.”

  “Who killed Lorenze?” said Strange.

  “I don’t know who did that.” His diction was sloppy and wet.

  “Somebody was huntin’ him. Was it a drug debt?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Strange racked the receiver on the Colt.

  “Why you want to do that, brother? I told you I don’t know.”

  Strange got up out of his chair and with his free hand flat-palmed Diggs’s chest. Diggs and the chair toppled back to the floor. Diggs grunted, and Strange crouched over him and forced the barrel of the.45 into his mouth.

  “You know,” said Strange. He withdrew the barrel, touched it gently to the corner of Diggs’s right eye, and then pressed it there with force.

  “They’ll kill me,” said Diggs.

  “Look at me, Ed. I’m gonna kill you right now, I swear to God.”

  “Derek,” said Quinn. It wasn’t part of the act. Strange’s eyes had long since veered from the script.

  “Look at me, Ed.”

  Diggs did look. His lip quivered and he closed his eyes. When he opened them again a tear sprung loose and ran fast down his cheek.

  “Lorenze,” said Diggs, “he owed money to this boy for some hydro he copped. I was there when Lorenze bought it. He was gonna pay this boy in his own time… Wasn’t nothin’ but a hunrid dollars. Boy stepped to me at a dogfight back by Ogelthorpe; I could tell he was serious. I mean, that boy had nothin’ in his eyes.”

  “What’d this boy look like?”

  “Tall and slim, light skinned, had this crazy smile.”

  “He had partners, right?”

  “The ones he came with to the fight. Boy with cornrows and show muscles. ’Nother kid, one with the dog, boy had this funny-lookin’ nose and shit.”

  “The main one, he say his name?”

  “Garfield Potter.”

  “You know where he stays at?”

  “He said he was up on Warder Street, near Roosevelt.”

  “What else you know?”

  “Nothin’ else.” Diggs blinked hard. “You just doomed me, man. Don’t you care nothin’ about that?”

  Strange slipped the Colt back under his shirt as he stood.

  “Don’t speak of this,” said Strange. “Tell your grandmother you got jumped out on the street. Tell her you fell down and bounced a few times or anything you want. But don’t tell her it was us came back. It’s over for you, hear? You’ll be fine.”

  They left him lying on the kitchen floor and walked out the back door of the house and to the alley.

  Strange handed Quinn his gun. Quinn slip
ped it into his waistband and side-glanced Strange.

  “You got some anger management issues you need to work on, Derek. You know it?”

  “My anger’s been working pretty good for me today so far.”

  “Thought you were gonna use the forty-five for a second back there.”

  “Couldn’t have used it if I wanted to. I emptied the magazine before I came to the house.”

  “That gun felt too good in your hand, didn’t it?”

  “Scared me how good it felt,” said Strange. “Your bullets are in the ashtray, back in the car.”

  ON the way to the Caprice, Strange answered his cell. He continued his conversation with Janine as he got under the wheel of the car. Quinn slipped the.45 back under the seat. As Strange listened to his call, writing in his notebook, Quinn’s cell chirped. He answered, got out of the Chevy, and leaned against the rear quarter panel as he took the call.

  Strange waited for Quinn to get back inside. He noticed that some of the color had drained from Quinn’s face.

  “Janine got me a name and address on that boy Lamar saw,” said Strange. “Charles White. And guess what? His credit record shows his last address is up on Warder Street. I bet you he was the only one of the three qualified to sign for the utilities. She got me the phone number there, too.”

  “Guess you got enough to call Lydell,” said Quinn, his eyes showing he was somewhere else. “Time to send in the troops.”

  “I’m not ready to do that yet,” said Strange, watching Quinn’s stare go out the window. “Terry, you all right?”

  “I just got a call from the MPD. They got a girl down in the ER at Washington Hospital Center, she’s all fucked up. Beaten close to death. It’s an informant of mine, helped me on that snatch I did. She gave my name as the first contact. Girl named Stella.”

  “You want to go there, then go. I can drop you at the hospital and pick this up my own self from here.”

  “All right,” said Quinn. “Let’s go.”

  Quinn phoned Sue Tracy as Strange turned off Georgia Avenue and headed east on Irving Street. Strange entered the complex of hospital buildings five minutes later and stopped the Caprice near the heliport adjacent to the ER entrance. Quinn opened his door and put one foot to the asphalt. He turned and shook Strange’s hand.