Right as Rain

'Thank you,' said Strange.

He patted her shoulder impotently again and walked away.

'Will I see you in church this Sunday, Mr Strange?'

'I hope to be there,' said Strange, keeping his pace.

He couldn't get through the door fast enough. Out on the sidewalk, he stood for a moment and breathed fresh air.

Renee Austin lived in a garden apartment complex set behind a shopping center in the Maryland suburbs, out Route 29 and off Cherry Hill Road. Strange waited in the parking lot, listening to an old Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, as Renee had not yet returned from picking up her daughter. Strange was singing along to 'Pretty Flower,' closing his eyes and trying to mimic Teddy's growl, when Renee's red Civic pulled into the lot.

They sat at her kitchen table, drinking instant coffee. Renee's daughter, a darling little three year old named Kia, sat on the linoleum floor. Kia had a dark-skinned doll in one hand and a freckly faced, cartoonish-looking white baby in the other, and she was pressing their faces together, loudly going, 'Mmm, mmm, mmm.'

'Honey,' said Renee, 'hush, please. We are trying to talk, and it's hard to hear ourselves with those sounds you're makin'.'

'Rugrat kissing Groovy Girl, Momma!' said Kia.

'Yes, baby,' said Renee. 'I know.'

Renee was a good-looking, dark-skinned young woman with long painted nails and a sculpted, lean face. Her hair had been chemically relaxed, and she wore it in a shoulder-length, fashionable cut. She worked as an administrative assistant for an accounting firm on Connecticut and L, and she stayed there, she said, not for pay or opportunities but for the firm's flexible schedule, which allowed her more time with Kia.

She was a tired-looking twenty-one. Renee told Strange that she had planned to register for community college courses but that Kia's arrival and the father's subsequent departure had dimmed those plans. Strange noticed all the toys, televisions, and stereo equipment spread about the apartment, and Renee's Honda had looked brand-new. He wondered how far she was overextended, if she had dug a credit hole so deep that she couldn't even see the light from where she stood.

'Maybe when she gets into a full day of school,' said Strange, 'you can go after that college degree.'

'Maybe,' said Renee, her voice trailing off, both of them knowing that it would never happen that way.

Renee talked about Chris Wilson, how they had met, what kind of man he was. How he had been 'a better father' to Kia than Kia's own blood had been.

'How about when he drank?' said Strange. 'Was he good to her then?'

'Chris hardly drank more than one, maybe two beers at a time. When I first met him, he barely drank at all.'

'What about the night he was killed?'

Renee nodded, looking into her coffee mug. 'He had been drinking pretty heavy, here at the apartment, earlier that night. He had gone through, I don't know, maybe a six-pack over the course of the night.'

'Unusual for him, right?'

'Yes. But the last few weeks before he died, he was drinking more and more.'

'Any idea why?'

'He was upset.'

'And he was upset the night he was killed, wasn't he?'

'Yes.'

'Over what?'

'I don't know.'

Renee bent forward from her seat and handed Kia a Barbie doll she had dropped. Then Renee sat up straight and sipped at her coffee.

'Renee?'

'Huh.'

'What was Chris upset over? You told the newspeople you didn't know. But you do know, don't you?'

'What difference would it have made to talk about it? It didn't have nothin', anything to do with his death. It was family business, Mr Strange.'

'And here I am, only tryin' to help the family. Chris's mother hired me. Chris's mother sent me over here, Renee.'

Renee looked away. She looked up at the clock on the wall and down at her daughter and around the room.

'Was it about his sister, Sondra?' said Strange.

She nodded hesitantly.

'Had he been in contact with her?'

'I don't know.' Renee met his eyes. 'I'm not lyin'; I do not know.'

'Go on.'

'After Sondra lost her job and her place, Chris got more and more distant. He was trying to find her, and do his job as a policeman, and make time for his mother, and me and Kia… it got to be too much for him, I guess. And I learned not to ask too many questions about Sondra. It only upset him more when I did.'

'Where was Sondra working when things started to fall apart on her?'

'Place called Sea D.C., at Fourteenth and K. She had been a hostess there for a short while.'

'Her mother said she was basically a good girl, got in with the wrong crowd.'

'Wasn't like she was wearing a halo or nothin' like that. Sondra always did like to party, from what Chris told me. And I had some friends who worked in restaurants and clubs downtown, and I'd hung with these people a few times after the chairs got put up on the tables. So I knew what time it was. In those places, at closing time? Someone's always holding something. In that environment, it's easy to fall into that lifestyle, if you allow yourself to fall into it, Mr Strange.'

'Call me Derek.'

'Sondra got into that heroin thing. Chris said she was always afraid of needles, so he figured she started by snorting it. Probably thought it was okay, doin' it like that, like she couldn't get a jones behind it in that way. Another mistake future junkies make. I know because I had an uncle who was deep into it. It's a slower way to go down is all it is. How you end up, it's all the same.'

'The night Chris was killed. Describe what happened here before he went out.'

Renee moved her coffee mug around the table. Her voice was even and unemotional. 'He got a phone call on his cell. He took the call back in my bedroom. I didn't hear what was said and I didn't ask. But he was agitated when he came out of the bedroom, for real. He said he had to go out. He said he was going to a bar or something to grab a beer, that he needed to get out of the apartment and think. I didn't think it was a good idea, what with him already having been drinkin' and all, and I told him so. He told me not to worry. He kissed me and he kissed Kia on the top of the head, and then he left. Two hours later, I got a call from Chris's mother telling me he was dead.'

Strange sat back in his chair. 'Chris had some brutality complaints in his file. He ever talk about that?'

'Yes,' said Renee. 'He told me he had to get rough with suspects sometimes, but he said he never went off on someone didn't deserve it. And yes, he had been drinking heavily the night he was killed, just like they said. The newspapers and the TV and his own department, they can paint their pictures any way they want. None of that explains why he was murdered. Bottom line is, if that white cop hadn't come up on the scene, Chris would be alive today.'

'That white cop didn't know Chris was a policeman,' said Strange. 'He saw a man with a gun-'

'He saw a black man with a gun,' said Renee. 'And you and I both know that's why Chris is dead.'

Strange didn't reply. He wasn't certain that on some basic level she was wrong.

Strange leaned forward and touched Kia's cheek. 'That your baby, pretty little girl?'

'My baby,' said Kia.

'I hope I helped you,' said Renee.

'You did,' said Strange. 'Thank you for your time.'

Strange sat at the downstairs bar of the Purple Cactus, sipping a ginger ale, watching the crowd. It was mostly young white money in here, new money and livin'-off-the-interest kind of money as well. The waitresses and bar staff were pretty young women and pretty boys, working with a kind of rising intensity, serving the early, preshow dinner patrons who were just now beginning to flow through the doors. The dining room chairs were hard, and triangles and other geometric designs hung on the walls. Dim spot lamps brought an onstage focus to each table, so the patrons could be 'seen' while eating the overpriced cuisine.