Deviant Behavior

by Mike Sager

  The sun was in evidence; bright but not warm. The engine purred; a song by Whitney Houston played on the radio. Jamal sat in the shotgun seat, wearing a do-rag and wraparound shades. He tapped out a Newport cigarette. As was the custom among some DC natives, he’d opened the soft pack from the bottom so that it appeared unopened—local etiquette proscribed bumming from a fresh pack. “I don’t see why we need him,” Jamal grumbled.

  “Ever read the side of a squad car?” Freeman asked. “It says, ‘To Protect and Serve.’”

  Jamal lit the cigarette, took a deep drag. “Doesn’t say that inside the car nowhere.”

  “I hear what you’re sayin,” Freeman assured him, drawing from his extensive experience with couple’s therapy—the need to acknowledge the validity of the opinions held by the person with whom you are attempting to dialogue. “I used to teach high school in Newport News. You ever been there? Some of it’s as bad as DC—worse. One thing I always noticed: We’d be on a field trip, you know, driving somewhere—the parents and I would drive because we had no budget for transportation. We’d be stopped at a light and a cop would pull up next to us, and all of the boys—I’m talking about high school boys, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old—all of them would go absolutely insane. They’d act all crazy and furtive and weirded out, like they were guilty of something.

  “I know those kids weren’t perfect. Some of them probably were guilty of something—that’s the world they lived in. This one’s brother was dealing crack. This one’s daddy was in jail. This one’s mother was violating ADC by letting her man shack up. I used to tell them, ‘Acting like that draws attention to yourself. Cops are gonna think you’re guilty of something because you’re acting guilty.’ When I see a cop, it doesn’t phase me. I don’t even think about the cop. I don’t even notice him. Only time I think about a cop is when I need something, like if my house gets broken into, or if I get mugged, something like that.”

  “Obviously you ain’t black.”

  “No, but I’m gay. And my ex-husband is black and gay. One thing gay people have learned: You have to assume your own innocence, despite what everybody may think. You have to stand up and demand your rights. That’s the way of the world. Nobody’s giving out nothin for free. And you’re never gonna get nothin,” his head swiveling on his neck like Rosie Perez, “if you don’t ask. Not even things you think you deserve: no acres, no mules, no respect, no recognition, no thank you. With cops, you sometimes have to remind them what they’re here for. Their intentions are good—they start out good anyway. They just get caught up … in the politics, in the quotas, in the battlefront conditions, in the trauma of it all. I used to date a cop. Believe me: it changes a person. You think those guys aren’t fuckin scared? They hide behind their wall of authority. Sometimes they forget what they’re really here for. Deep down, you have to believe, cops are just people who want to help. Otherwise they’d have never become cops.”

  Jamal grunted—Yeah, right. He exhaled a thick plume of smoke out the window. Freeman turned up the radio. “I Will Always Love You” was number one for the third straight week. He sang along, half under his breath, a pitchy falsetto.

  A primer-gray van pulled to the curb in front of the Jag. It rolled forward a bit, taking up one space plus half of another, leaving about six feet of clearance between itself and the Jaguar’s shiny hood ornament. Freeman and Jamal watched as an older white man, a chaw of tobacco bulging his cheek, stepped down from the driver’s side of the van and walked around to the back. He threw open the double doors to reveal a dirty curtain, center-split, as in a theater.

  After an interval, the curtain parted and a man emerged, carrying a crutch, a shopping bag, and a large, empty plastic cup. A woman followed, baby in arms. They shuffled off in a southerly direction, toward the business district.

  Freeman bummed a cigarette from Jamal and poked in the lighter, which was recessed stylishly into the high-gloss, burlwood console. The song changed, an up-tempo hit from the previous summer, “Baby Got Back.” Jamal’s head bobbed in rhythm to the backbeat; Freeman tapped his thigh on the one.

  The white guy reached inside the curtain again, rummaged around, pulled out a length of board—two by twelve, five feet long, sturdy and well worn. He angled the board to the ground, a makeshift ramp.

  The curtain parted. Another man appeared. He swung his torso up and onto the ramp, a motion like a gymnast—it became immediately apparent that both of his legs had been amputated above the knees. He slid down the ramp with practiced agility, moved toward the 7-Eleven in a peculiar but powerful style: setting his gloved palms on the ground, swinging his torso forward, arm muscles rippling, and then setting his torso down again, and so on, meanwhile passing Salem, who had just emerged through the glass doors of the convenience store wearing her jeans and her comfortable sweatshirt, her usually spiky hair sans mousse, making her look very much like an ordinary girl, a college student or one of the yuppie interns who lived in group houses in the area. Her long pale fingers were wrapped possessively around the forearm of Officer Perdue Hatfield.

  Salem opened the back door and slid across. Hatfield hesitated. “You didn’t tell me he was coming,” he said of Jamal.

  “We don’t need you no way,” Jamal said, looking out the windshield, refusing to make eye contact.

  For one brief second Hatfield thought about eye contact: how black men never like to make it. He’d noticed it as far back as high school, with his friends on the football team and in the morning prayer club. You could see it when you watched pro basketball too—the players were all the time hugging and patting butts, but rarely did you catch them looking one another in the eye. He wondered if it had anything to do with evolution—like the way, in the animal kingdom, that looking into the eyes can be seen as a direct challenge, an invitation to fight. On the street they called it “mad doggin.” It could get you killed. You lookin at me? Or maybe it had to do with slavery, how the black man was trained not to look into the face of his master, how conditioned behaviors over time can become stereotypical traits, which, as everyone knows, is part of the common thinking when it comes to the existence of a permanent black underclass in America. Or maybe it’s just a boundaries thing. Like people always say, the eyes are the windows of the soul. Some people like to keep their shades drawn.

  Freeman leaned across Jamal and offered his hand to the cop. “Officer Hatfield? I’m James Freeman, from the Advisory Neighborhood Commission? We have a little situation in progress here, sir.”

  Jamal directed Freeman’s arm gently but firmly out of his personal space. “Look man,” the pimp said to Hatfield, still avoiding eye contact, “if you too damn busy buyin doughnuts—”

  “Listen you guys,” Freeman said, the high-fag sibilant at the end of the word floating through the air like a football penalty flag. “Whatever beef you have, we need to put it aside. We’ve got two people missing.”

  Salem reached for the cop’s hand. “Pretty please?”

  45

  Still sweating from his midmorning aerobics, Bert Metcalfe entered the crystal chamber wearing a shiny red tracksuit and tiny white Reebok high-tops. He was followed by his manservant, Thornton Desmond, who was carrying what appeared to be an antique doctor’s valise.

  This time the retractable ceiling was closed, giving the place a dim, cavelike feel. Thornton hefted the valise onto the central pedestal, then took a step backward, allowing Metcalfe his elbow room.

  Standing on his tiptoes, Metcalfe opened the clasp of the valise. The Master Skull was nestled snugly into a bed of Italian silk. “The lining was done in Savile Row,” he said.

  “The craftsmanship is obvious,” Thornton said. “I take it the valise was among his effects?”

  “In the next to last box I opened.”

  “Rather ironic, don’t you think, sir?”

  “What’s that, Thornton?”

  “That he lost the skull but managed to save the valise.”

  “The skull was stolen from h
im in 1924, in Amsterdam. He was there to speak before the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences.”

  Despite himself, Thornton had found himself drawn in by the tale. “How did it happen?”

  “Apparently, my grandfather hadn’t been totally forthcoming with his hosts at the royal academy. They thought they were getting a lecture on pre-Mayan antiquities. According to his diary, from the moment he mentioned the lost continent of Atlantis and extraterrestrials, the company started booing. In his account he mentions ‘a fusillade of overripe legumes.’ Fleeing into the wings of the auditorium, he escaped into an alley, apparently, and made his way eastward toward the central station, looking to get out of town. Along the route, he stopped at a bar on Zeedijk Street, not far from the red-light district. Zeedijk and Stormsteeg. It’s still there. According to my woman in Amsterdam, they’re still using the original beer tap, dating to 1731.”

  “I’m to take it he felt the need of a pint?”

  “More likely scotch—his drink of choice. He woke up in an alley at dawn with a ringing headache and a big lump on the back of his head. The valise—this very valise, which he’d had custom made in 1919—was lying open on the ground beside him.”

  “And the skull was gone.”

  “For the next sixty-some years. Until that marijuana clown bought it in a pawnshop for seventy guilders.”

  “And now here it is,” Thornton marveled.

  “Here it is,” Metcalfe repeated. Using both hands, he removed the skull from its bed and placed it at the center of the pedestal. The recessed light set it aglow. He pulled a chamois cloth from the zipper pocket of his tracksuit and commenced polishing.

  Thornton removed the valise to the floor. “If I may ask, sir … ?”

  Buffing intently: “Yes?”

  “Have you sussed out anything further about the reasons your father never talked about your grandfather, why the facts of your background were kept secret from you for all those years?”

  “My father was called Bertram Hedgewick Metcalfe II—he was not a junior. He was raised by a man named Franklin Smith, who married my grandmother when my father was two. Smith was the only father he ever knew. His birth certificate lists his father as unknown.”

  “Obviously there was some embarrassment.”

  “Metcalfe wrote nothing about it in his journals, nothing I can find, though his descriptions of my grandmother’s beauty do seem a bit over the top—even for a proud adoptive papa, if you know what I mean. From what I can gather, he was still in Tumbaatum at the time of the birth. And he never met the child who bore his name—up through the time of his death at the age of seventy-eight, two years before I was born. I found this one letter, from an old friend of my grandfather’s, which alludes to Stuke’s ‘villainous behavior.’”

  “And of course there was the duel in Belize.”

  “Which took place the year of my father’s birth.”

  Thornton’s eyes bugged. “Are you saying that Metcalfe might not be your actual grandfather?”

  “Men fought duels for many reasons in those days,” said Bertram Hedgewick Metcalfe III. “And people cut off communications for many reasons, as was the case with Metcalfe and my grandmother—we called her Gram Roberta. To my knowledge, after she left Belize, they never spoke nor saw each other again. The fact is, without Metcalfe’s DNA, we’ll never know for certain. His body was never found. They believe his boat was struck by lightning somewhere in the Caribbean Sea—he was still searching for Atlantis.”

  “And what of Stuke?”

  “Another riddle. I’ve got people on it, but so far nothing; we have no idea how or when or where he died. It’s as if he just disappeared off the face of the Earth.”

  “A pity, sir.”

  “It is as it is, Thornton. Truthfully, it doesn’t matter to me. I have Metcalfe’s name. I have his money. And I have his thirst for discovery, for seeking, for the unknown. I am his heir in every way, DNA or not.” He stepped back to admire the skull. It sparkled and gleamed, a bright thing full of promise.

  “So now what?” Thornton asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve got the Master Skull. You’ve got the four others. You’ve got this whole chambre.” He pronounced the word with an exaggerated French accent, making a sweeping gesture with his hand. “Quel prochain? What next?”

  Metcalfe looked up at his butler. “To be honest,” he said, “I’m not sure. To my knowledge, no one has ever gathered five skulls together in one place—at least no one we know about.”

  “So at this point—”

  A light on the wall behind the two men began to flash, indicating the presence of visitors at the service door of the carriage house at the front of the property.

  “Go see who that is, will you please?” Metcalfe requested. “And send up the detective and the girl—she was here overnight, was she not?”

  “Since about midnight, sir. He brought her when he brought the skull. She stayed in the Princess Suite.”

  “Maybe she knows how to make this thing work.”

  46

  Salem, Jamal, Jim Freeman, and Perdue Hatfield—who was absent from his post without permission, a potential firing offense—stood before the door of Metcalfe’s carriage house in upper Georgetown.

  “Ring again,” Jamal ordered, annoyed.

  “The main house is back there beyond the gardens,” Salem explained, attempting to mollify him. “It takes a while for them to answer.”

  Hatfield couldn’t help but notice that she’d once again dropped her black-girl accent in favor of a slight southern twang. “People of this echelon usually have a guard on duty.” He un-snapped the safety strap that held his Glock in its holster. “Something here doesn’t feel right.”

  Freeman pointed to a large ceramic gargoyle perched beneath the eaves. “That’s a camera up there, isn’t it?”

  “I thought that was his tongue,” giggled Salem.

  “Girl, you mind always in the gutter,” Jamal said.

  “I thought that too at first,” Hatfield said, coming to her defense. “It’s a clever concealment—first-rate.”

  Salem looked up at the big cop; their eyes met. Finally it came to her—who Hatfield reminded her of. It had been bugging her since the first time she saw him, walking along Fourteenth Street, twirling his baton: Why does that guy look so familiar? When she was in ninth grade, there was this boy who lived with his father a couple of spaces down from her and her mom at the Launchpad Mobile Home Park. He was two years older, played lineman on the football team. Without fail, he’d show up every morning to walk her to school. Obviously he liked her, but he was always too shy to make a move. There was something so sweet about him, so innocent and courtly. Just like Hatfield.

  “There’s probably a full monitoring station inside the home,” Freeman opined. “It’s standard these days in high-end properties.”

  As if on cue, Thornton’s voice emanated from an unseen speaker. “Good afternoon. How may I help you?”

  Salem stepped forward like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. “We’d like to see the little guy,” she said.

  Long pause. “Miss Clark? Is that you? I don’t believe your next appointment is scheduled until Monday afternoon.”

  “Appointment?” Jamal turned angrily toward Salem, but she ignored him. She addressed the camera: “Would it be possible for me to please talk to him? Just for a minute? Tell him I remembered somethin about my father.”

  “I’m afraid that would be impossible, miss,” Thornton intoned.

  Now Hatfield stepped forward and removed his cap. He aimed his honest moon face toward the camera. “Officer Perdue Hatfield, sir, Metropolitan Police. I’m here to investigate a possible missing person. Please open the door at once.”

  “Do you have a warrant, officer?”

  “Not at this time, sir.”

  “All police contacts must be made through our attorney,” the butler said. “It’s house policy. I’m frightfully sorry.”

>   Hatfield pulled out a pad and pen. “Can you tell me who that is?”

  “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to divulge that information.”

  “Then how the fuck we supposed to contact him?” Salem asked, lapsing into ghetto for emphasis.

  Freeman stepped forward from behind the others—a tall group, they’d kept him thus far concealed. He projected his most gracious self. “Good afternoon. I’m James Freeman, from the Advisory Neighborhood Commission? We’re the group that—”

  “Jim Freeman?”

  “Thornton? Thornton Desmond?”

  The butler hooted with laughter. “I can not believe this!”

  “I knew that sonorous Irish tenor sounded too familiar!” Freeman enthused. “The envy in piano bars all over town.”

  “Aie, but ye flatter me, sir,” Thornton said, laying on the brogue.

  Freeman let loose a rip-roaring specimen of his trademark laugh, a booming baritone giggle that echoed off the centuries-old brick into the clean, cold air of upper Georgetown. He looked to his fellows—this unlikely confederacy—seeking his props. “It’s been what … since the gala at the clinic?”

  “I still have our photo with Liz.”

  “Are you kidding? I keep it on my nightstand.”

  “So what’s up?” Thornton asked.

  “We have a little problem,” Freeman said. “You think you could let us in?”

  Now it was Thornton’s turn to laugh—a dry, wry, single malt cackle, reminiscent of the doorkeeper of the Emerald City. “Why didn’t you just say so in the first place?”

  47

  Kwan and three of his homeboys moved along the sidewalk like a squad of marines on urban recon, the merch tags on their identical Timberland boots flapping in muffled concert. A fourth homeboy was parked around the corner in Kwan’s Jeep Cherokee, engine idling. Though they were only eight blocks, as the pigeon flies, from the border of their own neighborhood, they might as well have been in Bosnia—almost every day someone in town was shot (or at least shot at) for no worse offense than being on the wrong block. There was a war going on in the streets of the nation’s capital—a war on drugs, a war on values, a war between the haves and have nots, between different groups of have nots. Kwan and his boyz had been born and raised in this context; they thought of themselves as soldiers, they lived by their wits. Such was the fact of their lives. Deep behind enemy lines, the strain of their mission showed on their young faces.