“Absolutely.”
“Yeah,” said Strange, “absolutely. And it’s bullshit, too. But you can almost understand it, the images we get fed all the time from the papers and the television news. Listen, I had this friend, name of James, who lived down here. Still does, far as I know. He was a cameraman, worked for one of the network affiliates. So this network was doing a story down here, one of those segments on ‘the ghetto,’ and they found out that my buddy James lived in this part of the city. So the producer in charge got hold of him and said, ‘Take your video camera and go get some tape of black people down in Anacostia.’ ”
“He said it like that?”
“Exactly like that. This was about fifteen, twenty years back, when you could still say those kinds of stupid-ass things and not worry about gettin’ sued. So James does his thing and takes the footage back to the studio. They run it for the producer and it’s not exactly what he had in mind. It’s images of people leaving their houses to go to work, cutting their grass, dropping their kids off at school, like that. And the producer gets all pissed off and says to James, ‘I thought I told you to get some footage of black people in Anacostia.’ And James says, ‘That’s what I got.’ And the man says, ‘What I meant was, I wanted shots of people standing outside of liquor stores, dealing drugs, stuff like that.’ And James said, ‘Oh, you wanted a specific kind of black person. You should have said so, man.’ ”
“What happened to your friend?”
“I don’t think he got any work out of that producer again. But he’s doin’ all right. And he says it was worth it, just to make that point.”
Strange pulled into the parking lot of the strip shopping center on Good Hope Road. He fit the Caprice in a space near the hair and nail salon and had a look around the lot. Strange didn’t see Devra Stokes’s car, though the woman he had talked to on the phone had said she would be working today.
Quinn picked up his folder off the seat beside him. “I brought some flyers for Linda Welles, that girl went missing.”
“That’s all your doin’ on that is passing out flyers?”
Quinn hesitated for a moment before answering Strange. He had spent some time on a rough stretch of Naylor Road, knocking on doors, talking to people on the street. And he had tried to speak to a group of hard young men who seemed to gather daily on the steps of a dilapidated apartment structure that had been visible in the Welles video. But the young men had given him blank kill-you stares and implicit threats, and he hadn’t hung with them long, despite the fact that he felt they had to know something about the girl. In the end, he had walked away from them with nothing but shame.
“I’ve interviewed her family,” said Quinn. “I’ve talked to her friends and I went down to the neighborhood that shows up on the video. I got nothin’, Derek, so I’m down to doing this.”
“Sue’s gonna keep you hard on the case, huh?”
“It’s not just Sue. I’m trying to do something positive for a change. That Mario Durham thing left a bad taste in my mouth, you want the truth.”
“Mine, too, I can’t lie about it. But I’m running a business, and I got employees like you to support, not to mention a new family. It was quick money and I took it.”
“It stunk, just the same.”
“We can talk about that over a beer later on, you feel like it.”
“All right. In the meantime, maybe I’ll go over to that grocery store and pass some of these out while you talk to Stokes.”
Strange reached for the handle on the door. “I’ll meet you back at the car.”
Chapter 16
“THAT was Inez, over at the shop,” said Horace McKinley, flipping his cell closed. “That police, or whoever he is, came by to see Devra.”
“Same one we tailed yesterday?”
“He’s drivin’ the same car. He showed Inez some kind of badge, told her he was an investigator for D.C., some bullshit like that.”
“He leave his name?”
“Said it was Strange.” McKinley, in fact, had known Strange’s name for some time now.
“The girl ain’t there, though, right?” said Michael Montgomery.
“Nah, Inez sent her home for a couple of hours when that man called, said he was rollin’ on down.”
“Guess he shouldn’t have called ahead.”
“Yeah, we one step ahead of the motherfucker, for now. He gets her to testify against Phil Wood, we got us a serious problem we got to fix. I’m talkin’ about the girl.”
Montgomery nodded without conviction. He wasn’t into the way McKinley roughed up the women. Gettin’ violent on women didn’t sit well with him; he’d seen a whole lot of men – if you could call them men – beat on his mother through the years when he was a kid. One of them finally beat his mother half to death. Years later, that man had got his brains blown out across an alley by a gun in Montgomery’s hand. Montgomery’s mother and his younger brother were staying with some relatives now in a suburb of Richmond. He hadn’t seen his mom or the little man for some time.
They stood in the house on Yuma, McKinley’s great girth filling out the fabric of his warm-up suit. “Monkey Mike” Montgomery’s arms hung loosely at his sides, his hands reaching his knees.
“What you want to do, for now?” said Montgomery.
“Grab the Coates cousins off the back stoop,” said McKinley. “Tell them to get over to the apartment where Devra Stokes stays at. Strange told Inez he knew where she stayed, so that’s where he’s off to next. Tell ’em to make sure this Strange knows they’re around.”
“They took a few shots at the Six Hundred boys last night. You knew about it, right?”
McKinley nodded. He had heard them bragging on it out back, and he was down with what they had done. Once in a while you had to let the rivals know you were out here and still alive. Except for Dewayne and Zulu Walker, the 600 Crew was light. The one they had shot at, called himself Nutjob, like the name would mean somethin’ just by saying it, he wasn’t nothin’ but a punk.
“I musta knew somethin’ when I took those cousins on.” McKinley smiled, showing the three silver “fronts” on his upper teeth. “Those boys are ready.”
“You want them to talk to Stokes, too?”
“Nah,” said McKinley. “Those two are like a couple of horses, man. I don’t want to be ridin’ them too hard. You and me, we’ll visit the bitch when she gets back to work. In the meantime, let’s roll over to that barbecue place on Benning Road and get us some lunch.”
Montgomery left the house to give the Coateses their orders for the day. McKinley walked toward the front door, where he’d be far enough away from the others. He dialed a number, got a receptionist, gave her a name that was a code, and was transferred to the man he had asked to speak to.