Quinn stayed in the car while Strange entered the salon. He went directly to an oldish woman, small as a child, whom he figured to be the owner or the manager. He told the hard-faced woman that he was looking for Devra Stokes and was pointed to a young lady braiding another woman’s hair. A little boy, no older than four, sat at the foot of the chair, playing with action figures and making flying noises as he moved the figures through the air. When the older woman told Devra that a man was here to see her, she glanced at him with nothing telling in her eyes and returned to her task at hand. Strange had a seat by the shop-front window and flipped through a copy of Essence magazine. The miniature woman he had spoken to was looking him over as if he had just come calling on her granddaughter with flowers, chocolates, and a packet of Trojan Magnums. He tried to ignore her and studied the photos of the models in the magazine.
Ten minutes later Devra Stokes walked over to Strange and sat down beside him. Time and her environment had not yet bested her. She had almond-shaped, dark brown eyes and a wide, sensuous mouth.
“You lookin’ to talk to me?”
“Derek Strange.” He flashed her his license. “Investigator, D.C.”
“This about Phillip and them?”
“Yes.”
“Knew y’all would be along.”
“Will you speak with me?”
“I can’t today. I got appointments.”
“But you will?” Devra looked away. Strange gently touched her arm to bring her back. “You filed a brutality complaint against Wood.”
“That was a while back.”
“When the time came to take the stand, you changed your mind.”
Devra shrugged and looked in the direction of the little boy, still playing beside the chair. Strange was certain that Phillip Wood had paid her to stay away from court. It was possible, also, that Wood had fathered her child. Wood would be put away forever, and with him any money he could provide to Stokes and her son. Strange was counting on her awareness that she’d been permanently dogged out. He hoped it burned her deep.
“I just need some background information,” said Strange. “Chances are you won’t have to testify.”
“Like I say, I can’t talk now.”
“Can I get up with you here?”
“Where else I’m gonna be?” said Devra, looking down at her shoes.
“What time you get off today?”
“About five, unless my clients run over.”
“Your little boy likes ice cream, right?”
“He likes it.”
“How about I see you around five? We’ll find him some, and we’ll talk.”
Devra’s eyes caught light and her mouth turned up at the sides. She was downright pretty when she smiled. “I like ice cream, too.”
Course you do, thought Strange. You’re not much more than a kid yourself.
AT the Metro station Strange idled the Caprice while Quinn passed out flyers to Anacostians rushing to catch their Green Line trains. The flyers were headed with the words “Missing and Endangered” and showed a picture of a fourteen-year-old girl that Sue Tracy, Quinn’s girlfriend, had been hired to find. Tracy and her partner, Karen Bagley, had a Maryland-based business that primarily took runaway and missing-teen cases. Bagley and Tracy Investigative Services also received grant money for helping prostitutes endangered by their pimps and violent johns. Quinn had first met Tracy when he agreed to take on a case of hers that had moved into D.C.
Strange watched a cocky and squared-up Quinn through the windshield, the only white face in a sea of black ones. Quinn was drawing fish eyes from some of the young men and a few double takes from the older members of the crowd. Strange knew that Quinn was unfazed by the attention. In fact, he liked the challenge of it, up to a point. He was, after all, a former patrol cop. As long as he was given the space he gave others, everything would be cool.
But it often didn’t happen that way. And when Quinn was shown disrespect, the kind that went down with a subtle eye sweep from a black to a white, it got under his skin, and baffled him a little bit, too.
Something was said by a couple of young males to Quinn as he began to walk back to the car. Quinn stopped and got up in the taller of the two’s face. Strange watched Quinn’s jaw tense, the set of his eyes, the vein wormed on his forehead, the way he seemed to grow taller as the blood crept into his face. Strange didn’t even think to get out of his car. It was over without incident, as he knew it would be. Soon Quinn was dropping onto the bench beside him.
“You all right?”
“Guy told me to give him a dollar after he called me a white boy. Like that was gonna convince me to pull out my wallet. God, I love this town.”
“It was the boy part got your back up, huh?”
“That was most of it, I guess.”
“Think how it felt for grown men to be called boy every day for, I don’t know, a couple hundred years before you were born.”
“Yeah, okay. So now it’s my turn to get fucked with. We all gotta have ourselves a turn. For some shit that happened, like you say, before I was even born.”
“You don’t even want to go there, Terry. Trust me.”
“Right.” Quinn breathed out slowly. “Look, thanks for stopping here. I told Sue I’d pass some of those out.”
“Who’s she looking for, anyway?”
“Girl named Linda Welles. Fourteen years old, ninety-nine pounds. She ran off from her home in Burrville last year, over near Woodson High, in Far Northeast? Couple of months later, her older brother recognizes her when he’s with his boys, watching one of those videos they pass around.”
“She was the star, huh?”
“Yeah. It was supposed to be a house party, freak-dancing and all that, but then a couple of guys start going at it with her back in one of the bedrooms, right on the tape. Not that she wasn’t complicit, from the looks of it.”
“Fourteen years old, complicit got nothin’ to do with it.”
“Exactly. The brother recognized the exterior shot of the street where they had the party. It was on Naylor Road, up around the late twenties, here in Anacostia. That was a while back. The girl’s just vanished, man – nothing since.”
“So, what, you gonna go deep undercover down here to find her?”