Vaughn dropped down into a seat beside Martina and removed his hat. He glanced up at the screen out of habit. The Legend of Nigger Charley had moved over from the Booker T, and he couldn’t have cared less.
Martina and Vaughn put their heads close so they would not disturb the others in the audience.
“How’s it goin, doll?”
“Frank.” Martina’s voice was husky. Though he was in drag, he didn’t feel the need to female-front to the detective. He looked Vaughn over as the film cut to a daytime Western landscape scene and the light from the screen hit the auditorium. “Nice suit.”
“It’s new.” He had thrown his old gray suit in the trash, as his dry-cleaning man, Billy Caludis at the Arrow on Georgia, had been unable to remove the blood.
“Glad you came by. I was worried about you, honey. Is your eye…”
“It’s fine,” said Vaughn.
The shotgun blast had stripped a sliver of metal off the Frigidaire and sent it deep into his right cornea. The surgeons had removed the invasive projectile and saved his eye, but the retinal damage had been extensive. In the coming years he would be prescribed glasses, and later a special contact lens, but he would deny the severity of his condition and decline to wear them. For the remainder of his life, Vaughn’s right eye could only register shapes and light. liny
“I called you that day,” said Martina.
“I got the message later on.”
“Wanted you to know that there was some hitters in town who were lookin for Red. I was afraid y’all would cross paths.”
“That’s exactly what happened,” said Vaughn. “How’d you get the word?”
“White girl name of April had partied with the one named Lou the night before. Lou was asking after Red.”
“His name was Lou Fanella.”
“Matter of fact, she boosted a ring off him. I saw it myself.”
“What did the ring look like?” said Vaughn.
Martina described it. He added, “Costume shit.”
“Tell me about April.”
“She’s trash.”
“Know where I can find her?” said Vaughn.
Martina told him that most days April could be seen in the diner next door to the Lincoln, having coffee and smokes before she got out on the stroll. Vaughn thanked him, reached into his jacket, and produced an envelope that was thick with cash. Martina took the envelope, looked inside it, and ran his fingers through the green.
“What’s this for?”
“There’s a little less than nine hundred dollars in there. It’s damn near all I’ve got in my savings account. It’ll get you started, at least. I want you to leave town.”
“Why?”
“Clarence Bowman knows you snitched him out. He’s in lockup, but that doesn’t mean he can’t get to you. Red Jones killed Bobby Odum because Bobby talked to me. He’d do the same to you if he got the chance. I don’t want that on my conscience, too.”
“Isn’t your wife gonna be mad when she finds out you cleaned out the bank?”
“She’ll be proud of me,” said Vaughn.
’Cause I helped out a needy Afro American. Or whatever you call yourselves these days.
Right, Olga?
Martina slowly batted his eyes, his long fake eyelashes fluttering like wings in the light. “I’m gonna miss you, Frank.”
“Don’t worry, baby. We’ll meet down the road.”
A little while later, Vaughn walked out of the auditorium. He never saw Martina Lewis again.
As Vaughn entered the diner on U in search of April, Strange stepped up to Carmen’s house.
He knocked on the door of her unit and there was no response. He thought he might use her outside spigot to wet the flowers and leave the bouquet on her front stoop. If she was on a long shift at the hospital, though, the flowers would be wilted by the time she came home, what with the heat. Better to try calling her again in the evening and give the flowers to someone who would appreciate them.
Strange picked up a couple of fish sandwiches and drove his Monte Carlo over to the house in which he had grown up, on the 700 block of Princeton Place. His mother, Alethea, answered the door in an old housedress and smiled brightly at the sight of her son.
“I brought Cobb’s,” said Strange, holding up a brown paper bag stained with grease.
They ate in the living room, near his father’s old recliner and his console stereo. Strange was silent for most of the meal.
“Everything all right, son?” said Alethea.
“I’m fine.”
“Don’t lie to me. You never could. Not too well, anyway.”
Strange swallowed his last bite and pushed his plate aside. “I been wrong, Mama. I’ve done some real bad things. Broke every important commandment and some that ain’t been wrote yet.”
“Only the Lord is without sin.”
“I know, but…”
“Pretend you just got born, this minute.”
“You mean make a new start.”
“Today, Derek. Do something right.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Strange.
His mother always did know what to say.
Strange had gone to his office to check for messages off that new machine he had, but there were none. While he was there, Vaughn phoned him and asked if he wanted to meet for a beer. They had worked together, and Strange had visited him in the hospital, but they had never socialized. Vaughn caught the hesitance in Strange’s voice as surely as if he had read it on his face.
“Trust me,” said Vaughn. “It’ll be worth your time.”
“Okay,” said Strange. “But let’s do it on my turf.”
Which is how they came to spend the afternoon at the Experience, Grady Page’s place, with the steel-top bar and the posters and funk-rock music, and the mix of police and security guards who were out of uniform, and neighborhood types, and folks burning reefer in the beefto spend tack alley.
“This your spot?” said Vaughn, wearing his suit, hat, and eye patch, seated at the bar beside Strange. Vaughn wasn’t the only white person in the place, but he was visibly in the minority.
“You’re not uncomfortable, are you?” said Strange.
“I like all the people,” said Vaughn, and he held up an empty bottle of Bud so Grady Page, up-picking his massive Afro behind the stick, could see. “One for me and one for my younger brother here, professor.”
“You got it,” said Page, and Strange was oddly touched.
“What about me?” said Harold Cheek, the off-duty patrolman out of 4-D, seated on the other side of Strange.
“And one for my fellow officer, too,” said Vaughn.
Page served the beers. The three men touched brown bottles and drank. Page was playing the Superfly soundtrack front to back through the house system, and “Little Child Runnin’ Wild” had kicked it off. Strange thought it was one of the most dynamic songs he’d ever heard. To Vaughn it was jungle-jump. But the music didn’t bother him. He was with friends and, given his odds at the house in Burrville, happy to be alive.
Even with the music going, they could hear a celebration back by the restrooms, where the security guard Strange and Cheek knew, Frank, was being congratulated by a group of well-wishers that included a couple of comely young women. Frank wore big bells, a wide brown belt, and the horizontal-striped shirts he favored.
“What’s goin on back there?” said Vaughn.
“Read this,” said Cheek, and he passed the A section of the house Washington Post across the bar to Vaughn. “Story about the burglary.”
Vaughn looked at the front page. The headline read, “5 Held in Plot to Bug Democrats’ Office Here,” with the byline of Alfred E. Lewis printed underneath the head. Vaughn scanned the first few paragraphs: five men, most of them Cubans, had been caught trying to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee on the sixth floor of the Watergate complex on Virginia Avenue. An alert twenty-four-year-old security guard had noticed tape on the lock of a door leading to the garage stairwell, taken it off, seen it reaffixed to the door later on, and notified Metropolitan Police.