Rhozier Brown - DC Noir 2 - The Classics

“I just wanna know what happened to John.”

Schmidt smiled. All those white teeth. I could see him with his mouth open, his lips stretched, those teeth showing. The way an animal looks after you kill it. Him lying on his back on a slab.

“I heard he drowned,” said Schmidt.

“You think so, eh?”

“Yeah. I guess he couldn’t swim.”

“Pretty hard to swim, you got a bullet in your head.”

Schmidt’s smile turned down. “Can you swim, Bill?”

I brought the knife across real fast and buried it into his armpit. I sunk the blade all the way to the handle. He lost his breath and made a short scream. I twisted the knife. His blood came out like someone was pouring it from a jug. It was warm and it splashed onto my hands. I pulled the knife out and while he was kicking at the floorboards I stabbed him a coupla more times in the chest. I musta hit his heart or something because all of a sudden there was plenty of blood all over the car. I’m telling you, the seats were slippery with it. He stopped moving. His eyes were open and they were dead.

I didn’t get tangled up about it or nothing like that. I wasn’t scared. I opened up his suit jacket and saw a steel revolver with wood grips holstered there. It was small caliber. I didn’t touch the gun. I took his wallet out of his trousers, pulled the bills out of it, wiped it off with my shirttail, and threw the empty wallet on the ground. I put the money in my shoe. I fit the blade back into the handle of my switch knife and slipped the knife into my pocket. I put all the empty beer bottles together with the full ones in the paper bag and took it with me as I got out of the car. I closed the door soft and wiped off the handle and walked down the street.

I didn’t see no one for a coupla blocks. I came to a sewer and I put the bag down the hole. The next block I came to another sewer and I took off my bloody shirt and threw it down the hole of that one. I was wearing an undershirt, didn’t have no sleeves. My pants were black so you couldn’t see the blood. I kept walking toward Northwest.

Someone laughed from deep in an alley and I kept on.

Another block or so I came up on a group of mavri standing around the steps of a house. They were smoking cigarettes and drinking from bottles of beer. I wasn’t gonna run or nothing. I had to go by them to get home. They stopped talking and gave me hard eyes as I got near them. That’s when I saw that one of them was the cook, Raymond, from the kitchen. Our eyes kind of came together but neither one of us said a word or smiled or even made a nod.

One of the coloreds started to come toward me and Raymond stopped him with the flat of his palm. I walked on.

I walked for a coupla hours, I guess. Somewhere in Northwest I dropped my switch knife down another sewer. When I heard it hit the sewer bottom I started to cry. I wasn’t crying cause I had killed Schmidt. I didn’t give a damn nothing about him. I was crying cause my father had given me that knife, and now it was gone. I guess I knew I was gonna be in America forever, and I wasn’t never going back to Greece. I’d never see my home or my parents again.

When I got back to my place I washed my hands real good. I opened up a bottle of Abner-Drury and put fire to a Fatima and had myself a seat at the table.

This is where I am right now.

Maybe I’m gonna get caught and maybe I’m not. They’re gonna find Schmidt in that neighborhood and they’re gonna figure a colored guy killed him for his money. The cops, they’re gonna turn Bloodfield upside down. If Raymond tells them he saw me I’m gonna get the chair. If he doesn’t, I’m gonna be free. Either way, what the hell, I can’t do nothing about it now.

I’ll work at the hotel, get some experience and some money, then open my own place, like Nick Stefanos. Maybe if I can find two nickels to rub together, I’m gonna go to church and talk to that girl, Irene, see if she wants to be my wife. I’m not gonna wait too long. She’s clean as a whistle, that one.

I’ve had my eye on her for some time.

(Originally published in 2003)

Claridge Towers

Horace and Loneese Perkins — one child, one grandchild — lived most unhappily together for more than twelve years in Apartment 230 at Claridge Towers, a building for senior citizens at 1221 M Street, N.W. They moved there in 1977, the year they celebrated forty years of marriage, the year they made love for the last time — Loneese kept a diary of sorts, and that fact was noted on one day of a week when she noted nothing else. “He touched me,” she wrote, which had always been her diary euphemism for sex. That was also the year they retired, she as a pool secretary at the Commerce Department, where she had known one lover, and he as a civilian employee at the Pentagon, as the head of veteran records.

He had been an army sergeant for ten years before becoming head of records; the secretary of defense gave him a plaque as big as his chest on the day he retired, and he and the secretary of defense and Loneese had their picture taken, a picture that hung for all those twelve years in the living room of Apartment 230, on the wall just to the right of the heating-and-air-conditioning unit.

A month before they moved in, they drove in their burgundy-and-gold Cadillac from their small house on Chesapeake Street in Southeast to a Union Station restaurant and promised each other that Claridge Towers would be a new beginning for them. Over blackened catfish and a peach cobbler that they both agreed could have been better, they vowed to devote themselves to each other and become even better grandparents. Horace had long known about the Commerce Department lover. Loneese had told him about the man two months after she had ended the relationship, in 1969. “He worked in the mail room,” she told her husband over a spaghetti supper she had cooked in the Chesapeake Street home. “He touched me in the motel room,” she wrote in her diary, “and after it was over he begged me to go away to Florida with him. All I could think about was that Florida was for old people.”

At that spaghetti supper, Horace did not mention the dozens of lovers he had had in his time as her husband. She knew there had been many, knew it because they were written on his face in the early years of their marriage, and because he had never bothered to hide what he was doing in the later years. “I be back in a while. I got some business to do,” he would say. He did not even mention the lover he had slept with just the day before the spaghetti supper, the one he bid good-bye to with a “Be good and be sweet” after telling her he planned to become a new man and respect his marriage vows. The woman, a thin school-bus driver with clanking bracelets up to her elbows on both arms, snorted a laugh, which made Horace want to slap her, because he was used to people taking him seriously. “Forget you, then,” Horace said on the way out the door. “I was just tryin to let you down easy.”

Over another spaghetti supper two weeks before moving, they reiterated what had been said at the blackened-catfish supper and did the dishes together and went to bed as man and wife, and over the next days sold almost all the Chesapeake Street furniture. What they kept belonged primarily to Horace, starting with a collection of six hundred and thirty-nine record albums, many of them his “sweet babies,” the 78s. If a band worth anything had recorded between 1915 and 1950, he bragged, he had the record; after 1950, he said, the bands got sloppy and he had to back away. Horace also kept the Cadillac he had painted to honor a football team, paid to park the car in the underground garage. Claridge Towers had once been intended as a luxury place, but the builders, two friends of the city commissioners, ran out of money in the middle and the commissioners had the city government people buy it off them. The city government people completed Claridge, with its tiny rooms, and then, after one commissioner gave a speech in Southwest about looking out for old people, some city government people in Northeast came up with the idea that old people might like to live in Claridge, in Northwest.