George Pelecanos - What It Was

“ What man?”

“A prosecutor. Cotch-somethin.”

“Cochnar?”

“That’s what it was.”

Vaughn wrapped a hand around Martina’s forearm, hard as wood. “What’s Bowman look like?”

“Tall, dark, and cut. Like that actor, used to be an athlete.”

Vaughn looked at the screen, saw Fred Williamson, and said, “Him?”

“Nah, one of them Olympic dudes.”

“I gotta get out of here.”

“Wait a minute, Frank.”

“We’ll settle up later.”

“It’s not about that,” said Martina, looking at him straight on. “I’m scared.”

“Keep it together,” said Vaughn. “I’ll work it out. You’ll be fine.”

Vaughn rose abruptly and rushed up the auditorium aisle. Martina’s head jerked birdlike around the house. He was trying to see if anyone had been watching or listening to their conversation. Half-believing that they had not been observed, Martina slouched in his seat and got low.

Derek Strange sat in a big cushiony armchair in the living room of Maybelline Walker’s apartment, the last of the day’s sun coming in through her west-wall windows. Maybelline sat on a matching sofa, so close to him that her bare knee almost touched his. She was in her strapless dress and she had removed her shoes. Her big natural was lifted by the wind of a floor fan set near the furniture. It was warm running to hot in her pad. Both of them were drinking Miller High Lifes out of bottles. Beads of sweat had formed on Maybelline’s forehead and across her chest, where the tops of her breasts were exposed. Strange could smell her perspiration and that sweet strawberry scent he remembered from the time she had visited his office.

Maybelline had put the Staple Singers’ Be Altitude: Respect Yourself, their new one on the Stax label, on her compact system, and Mavis was belting out “This Old Town (People in This Town),” the last track on side one.

Strange and Maybelline were deep into their conversation. It had become a confession for her. She claimed it felt good to get it out. Now that the horse had been let out the barn, Maybelline had begun to drop her finishing-school manner of speech, and her G’ s.

“Hallie Young phoned me just after you gave her a call,” said Maybelline, giving Strange a wicked eye, “askin for references.”

“That was kind of lame of me,” said Strange. “And then I really messed up when I met that Rosen gal. Told her I was looking for a tutoingidth="27r for my ten-year-old daughter.”

“Your look doesn’t say ‘devoted father.’ Or husband.”

“I’m too young,” said Strange. “Ain’t nobody gonna tie me down to a marriage. Not yet.”

They both sipped at their beers.

“How’d you find the ring?” said Strange.

Maybelline wiped a bit of foam from her full mouth. “Dayna Rosen used to leave me with her son alone in that house for, like, two hours at a time.”

“She barely knew you.”

“Derek, she didn’t know me at all. But white folks like her, they just overdo that ‘I feel for your people’ thing. Tryin so hard to be right. Like, Look at me, I got an actual black person in my home, and I’m gonna trust her enough to leave her there with my child while I run errands around town. If I had a kid, I wouldn’t leave it with a stranger, would you?”

“We already established I don’t have one, so I can’t answer that.”

“Dayna used to call me girl, sister, all that jive. Shoot, she was no kin to me.”

Strange, trying to redirect her, said, “Back to the ring.”

“Dayna had showed it to me, and then I saw it again in a jewelry box in their master bedroom one day while she had gone out and Zachary had disappeared. I was always having to go and look for him. Boy couldn’t sit still and work on math to save his life.”

“Six years old, he’s not supposed to sit still.”

“I didn’t steal that ring,” said Maybelline.

“I know,” said Strange. “Bobby Odum did.”

Maybelline’s eyes went to the beer bottle in her hand. “I had got to know Bobby. Used to go into Cobb’s for my fish sandwich, and he’d come out from the kitchen every time he saw me walk through the door. We went out for a drink, and he mentioned his history…”

“Odum was a second-story man, among other things. You put him up to the burglary, right?”

“Yes,” she said, turning her face away suddenly, like an actress in a silent film. “He volunteered to steal it, once I told him about the ring.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I didn’t have to get with him, if that’s what you mean.”

“Cobb said he saw you two lockin lips out back his shop.”

“Kissin ain’t fuckin.”

“It can have the same effect.”

“I’m not above letting a man give me a kiss to get where I need to bee Illine.

“So you didn’t sleep with him.”

“Please,” said Maybelline. “Do I look like the kind of woman that Bobby Odum could satisfy?”

“I don’t blame him for trying. After all, he was a man.”

“He wasn’t much of one.”

Strange studied her. “The Rosens did you a solid by hiring you. Didn’t you feel any, you know, remorse?”

“Not really. Dayna didn’t pay a dime for that ring. That day when she had it on her hand, she said herself that it came down from her grandmother, like an inheritance.”

“When Dayna and her husband realized it had been stolen, they did what?”

“They called the police,” said Maybelline with a shrug. “The night Bobby stole it, the Rosens were all out to dinner somewhere, and the house was locked up. If they suspected me as an accomplice, they kept it to themselves. I guess they didn’t want to jam up another young black woman with the law. I swear, sometimes I felt like I could have slapped that woman in the face and she would have apologized to me .”

Strange recalled his conversation with Dayna Rosen. She’d said that she had told Maybelline they would no longer require her services, using the excuse that progress had been made with Zach and the job was complete. She had never accused Maybelline of anything and had even defended her, in a way, to Strange. Strange felt that the Rosens were decent people, if hugely naive. Maybelline saw their kindness as stupidity.

“What about the police?” said Strange.

“Police never even questioned me. You know the MPD don’t do shit for follow-up on those burglaries.”

The music had come to an end. Maybelline put her bottle down on a glass coffee table and went to her stereo. She took the album off the platter, replaced it in its sleeve, found a 45, and fitted a plastic adaptor into its center space. She dropped the record onto the spindle of the turntable and flipped the play lever located on the side of the platter. Luther Ingram’s new smash, “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right,” came forward. Ordinarily, Strange would have thought, Koko 2111. He would have if he had not been studying Maybelline’s lush figure filling out every inch of her dress.

“You still buying singles?” said Strange.

“That’s all they had at the record store,” said Maybelline, and she went back to the sofa and sat on one end of it. She patted the empty portion of the cushion. “Why you sittin so far away?”

“Am I?”

“You could have phoned me,” she said. “I know you didn’t come over here to give me a personal update.”

“How you know why I came over? You got ESP?”

“Derek, I believe you’re scared.”

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Fightin words, thought Strange. And: Figures that a mathematics teacher would have it all worked out. Everything this woman does is calculation.