Right as Rain

'I said I heard you.'

'It's just another stereotype, man. Positive as it might look on the surface, it's just another thing we've got to live with and live down.'

'Damn, Derek,' said Lattimer, tossing the paper on his desk. 'You just get all upset behind this shit, don't you? All the article's saying is we like to look good. Ain't nothin' more sinister behind it than that.'

'Derek?' said Janine.

'What is it, Janine?'

'Where are you off to now?'

'Workin' on this Chris Wilson thing. I'll be wearing my beeper, you need me.' Strange turned to Lattimer. 'You busy?'

'I'm working a couple of contempt skips. Child-support beefs, that kind of thing.'

'Right now?'

'I was planning on easing into my day, Derek.'

'Want to ride with me this morning?'

'That Chris Wilson case isn't going to pay our bills. I do a couple pick ups, it helps us all.'

'Like to get your thoughts on this, you have the time.'

'Okay. But I got to do some real work this afternoon.'

'Give Terry Quinn a call,' said Strange to Janine. 'The name of the shop he works in is Silver Spring Books, on Bonifant Street. Tell him I'll be by in an hour, he wants to make arrangements to take some time off.'

'You're gonna let the guy you're investigating ride with you?' said Lattimer.

'I'm getting to know him like that,' said Strange. 'Anyway, I told him I'd keep him in the loop.'

Lattimer stood, shook himself into his cashmere, and placed a fedora, dented just right, atop his head.

'Don't feed Greco again,' said Strange to Janine. 'I gave him a full can this morning.'

'Can I give him one of those rawhide bones I keep in my desk?'

'If you'd like.'

On the way out of the office, Strange looked into Janine's eyes and smiled with his. That was just another thing he liked about Janine: she was kind to his dog.

Out on Upshur, Strange nodded at the fedora on Lattimer's head.

'Nice hat,' he said.

'Thank you.'

'That function as a sword or a shield?'

'Keeps my head warm,' said Lattimer, 'you want the plain truth.'

15

Strange drove the Caprice into Southeast. He popped 3 + 3, in his opinion the finest record in the Isley Brothers catalog, into the deck. Ronald Isley was singing that pretty ballad 'Highway of My Life,' and Strange had the urge to sing along. But he knew Lattimer would make some kind of comment on it if he did.

'This is beautiful right here,' said Strange. 'Don't tell me otherwise, 'cause it's something you can't deny.'

'It is pretty nice. But I like somethin's got a little more flow.'

'Song has some positive lyrics to it, too. None of that boasting about beatin' up women, and none of that phony death romance.'

'You know I don't listen to that bullshit, Derek. The music I roll to is hip-hop but on the jazz tip. The Roots, Black Star, like that. That other stuff you're talkin' about, it doesn't speak to me. You ask me, it ain't nothin' but the white music industry exploiting our people all over again. I can see those white record executives now, encouraging those young rappers to put more violence into their music, more disrespect for our women, all because that's what's selling records. And you know I can't get with that.'

'The soul music of the sixties and seventies,' said Strange. 'Won't be anything to come along and replace it, you ask me.'

'Can't get with that, either, Derek. I wasn't even born till nineteen seventy.'

'You missed, young man. You missed.'

Strange turned down 8th Street and took it to M.

'Where we headed?' said Lattimer.

'Titty bar,' said Strange.

'Thank you, boss. This one of those perks you talked about when you hired me?'

'You're staying in the car. This is the place I picked up Sherman Coles for you while you were admiring yourself in a three-way mirror. I just got to ask the doorman a question or two.'

'About Quinn?'

'Uh-huh.'

'I heard Janine say that the man Wilson pulled that gun on, he was clean.'

'Maybe he was. One thing's certain, he made out. According to the papers, the department paid him eighty thousand dollars to make him happy. For the emotional trauma he went through and the back injury he sustained when Wilson threw him up against the car.'

'What did Wilson's mother get?'

'A hundred grand, from what I can tell.'

'Cost the police department a lot to make everyone go away on that one.'

'The money was never going to be enough to satisfy his mother, though.'

'You can dig it, right?'

Strange thought of his brother, now thirty years gone, and a woman he'd loved deep and for real back in the early seventies.

'When you lose a loved one to violence,' said Strange, 'ain't no amount of money in the world gonna set things right.'

'How about revenge? Does that do it, you think?'

'No,' said Strange, his mind still on his brother and that girl he'd loved. 'You can never trade a bad life for a good.'

Strange parked on the street, alongside one of the fenced-in lots fronting the strip-bar and bathhouse district. He said to Lattimer, 'Wait here.'

The doorman who'd been at Toot Sweet when Strange had picked up Coles was there again today. He'd gotten his hair cut in a kind of fade, and he wore a baggy sweatsuit, which didn't do a whole lot to hide his bulk. Boy looked like some cross of African and Asian, but Strange figured the majority of it was African, as he'd never seen any kind of Chinaman that big.

'How you doin',' said Strange.

'It's still seven dollars to get in. We ain't gone and changed the cover since the other day.'

'You remember me, huh?'

'You and your friend. White boy did some damage back in the bathroom.'

Strange palmed a folded ten-dollar bill into the doorman's hand. 'I'm not coming in today, so that's not for the cover. That's for you.'

The doorman casually looked over his shoulder, then slipped the ten in the pocket of his sweatpants. 'What you want to know?'

'I was wonderin' about what happened back there in the bathroom.'

'What happened? Your partner fucked that big boy up. Went into the kitchen and got a tenderizing mallet, then went into the bathroom and broke big boy's nose real quick. Kicked him a couple of times while he was down, too. I had to clean up the blood myself. There was plenty of it, too.'

'What you do with the big guy?'

'One of my coworkers drove him to D.C. General and dropped him off. They got a doctor over there, this Dr Sanders, we've seen him put together guys got torn apart in this place real nice. So we figure we put him in good hands.'

'Why didn't you phone the cops?'

'The big guy didn't want us to. Right away I'm thinkin' he's got warrants out on him, right? And the management, they don't want to see any cops within a mile of this place. Not to mention, you and your buddy, I know you're not cops, but whatever the fuck your game is, you probably know enough real policemen to make it rough on the owner to keep doing business here, know what I'm sayin'? I mean, we're not stupid.'

'I didn't think you were.'

'Next time you bring white boy around here, though-'

'I know. Put him on a leash.'

The doorman smiled and patted his pocket. 'You want another receipt?'

'It's tempting,' said Strange. 'But I'll pass.'

On the way back to the car, Strange thought, Maybe I'm giving this Terry Quinn too much credit. Sure, it could have gone down the way he said it did with Wilson. But maybe it was just that some switch got thrown, like all of a sudden the 'tilt' sign flashed on inside his head. A young man with that kind of violence in him, you couldn't tell.