George Pelecanos: Drama City

At Warder, the wide north-south street that paralleled Georgia Avenue, Lorenzo cut left, then hung another left on the east side of the school and went down Princeton Place, where his grandmother still lived in the house in which he’d been raised.

A little girl he recognized, a six-year-old name of Lakeisha, came toward him on the sidewalk, swinging a clear book bag by its strap. Right behind her was her mom, a pretty young hairdresser named Rayne. Rayne was a single mother who undoubtedly led a stressful life but seemed devoted to Lakeisha and always kept herself looking good. She and her daughter lived beside his grandmother, in the next row house to the south.

Lorenzo stopped to let Lakeisha bend down and pet his dog. She had a pretty smile, like her mother’s but near toothless, and cornrows with tiny seashells fitted on the ends of her braids.

“Jazz Man’s her name?” said Lakeisha.

“Jasmine,” said Lorenzo, looking at her fondly, barely knowing her but loving her, as she reminded him of his baby girl.

“Is she good?”

“Most of the time.”

Lakeisha touched a finger to her chest. “Does she love people in her heart?”

“Yeah, she loves people. ’Specially little princesses like you.”

“Bye, Jazz Man,” said Lakeisha, abruptly standing and going up the hill toward her school.

“Thank you, Lorenzo,” said Rayne, smiling shyly.

“For what?”

“For being so nice to my baby.”

“Ain’t no thing,” said Lorenzo, smiling back, puffing his chest up a little and laughing at himself for doing so. Wondering how she knew his name, remembering that he had made it a point to find out hers from his grandmother. Maybe she had done the same.

“I better catch up to her,” said Rayne.

“See you around,” said Lorenzo.

Down the street a bit, Lorenzo entered a pedestrian passageway between the school playground and a neighborhood park surrounded by a fence but accessible through an always-open gate, and walked onto a field covered in high grass. This was the usual morning route for Lorenzo and his dog. Jasmine stopped in the middle of the field, put herself back on her hindquarters, and defecated in the grass.

Lorenzo looked around, slightly embarrassed, as he always would be, at what he was about to do. He retrieved the plastic bag from his pocket, slipped his hand inside it, formed a glove, then reached down and picked up Jasmine’s feces. He turned the bag inside out and tied it off. He and Jasmine left the park, exiting by the south-side steps, and went back down Otis the way they’d come.

Passing 6th again, he could see Nigel, now standing outside his car, talking to the ones on his payroll. Nigel had on a nice powder blue Sean John warm-up suit, with a simple gold chain hung outside the jacket. One of the young men, wearing an Oakland Raiders cap sectioned like a pizza pie in alternating black and white, turned and looked at Lorenzo, made a comment to the tall boy next to him, and laughed. Lorenzo could only imagine what had been said as they looked at him, a square in a uniform, working for rent money and nothing more, holding a bag of shit in one hand and the leash of a dog, and not even a fighting dog at that, in the other. Time was, Lorenzo Brown would have laughed at the sight of his self too.

Nigel Johnson said something to the young man who had made the comment, and the young man’s smile vanished. Nigel nodded at Lorenzo with an uptick of his chin. Even from this distance, Lorenzo could still see the boy in Nigel’s eyes. He nodded back and went on his way.

Lorenzo left food and water for Jasmine, turned the stand-up fan so that it blew directly on her carpet bed, and exited the house. He got into his Pontiac and went down to Georgia, where he drove north, toward the office. There he would clock in, check his messages, and take one of the white trucks out for his calls.

Up around 9th and Upshur, in Petworth, he stopped to pay Rodel, the man who cut his hair in the shop set in that commercial strip that ran along the avenue. He’d been light at the time of his last shape-up, and Rodel had let him slide. Coming out of the barbershop, he saw a big man with a dog, a muscular tan boxer, out on the sidewalk. The man, broad of shoulder and back, his hair lightly salted with gray, was turning the key to his business, had that sign with the magnifying glass over its front window. That sign was always lit up at night. Man had been in business there Lorenzo’s whole life. You’d be driving down Georgia at night, from a party or a club, or from laying up with a girl, and you’d see that sign? You knew you were close to home. Lorenzo had heard the man coached kids’ football too, held practices on the field of Roosevelt High. Joe Carver’s boy was in the program. Joe had told him this man was all right.

“Pretty animal,” said Lorenzo to the man’s back as he passed.

“First time anyone called Greco pretty,” said the man, turning his head, checking out Lorenzo in his uniform. The man pushed on the door of his business. “Well, let me get on in here and do some work.”

“I heard that,” said Lorenzo. “I got to be off to work my own self.”

“Have a good one,” said the man, the boxer following him inside.

Off to work, thought Lorenzo as he got behind the wheel of his car. Feeling a kind of pride as he turned the key.

By eleven-thirty, Rachel Lopez had already put in a fairly productive day. She’d gone into PG County for her first calls, one in Barnaby Heights and one off Addison Road, a couple of young offenders freshly out on drug-related incarcerations, the most typical cases in her files. Next she’d driven toward a men’s shelter down off Central Avenue to check on one of her older offenders, a man named Dennis Coles, but on the way she’d been held up by crime scene vehicles that had converged on a strip shopping center up ahead. The traffic reporter on 1500 AM told her that a robbery-murder had occurred in the area and that a roadblock had been set up by police. She turned her Honda around and drove north to Cheverly. She parked in the lot of a garden apartment complex, where she found the unit of a young man named Rudolph Monroe.

Monroe’s mother, Deanna, answered the door. She was around thirty, heavy and unkempt. She wore a family reunion T-shirt over jeans. Big gold hoops hung from her ears.

Rachel could hear the sound of a cartoon show blaring from a TV set somewhere back in the apartment. That would be Jermaine, Deanna’s youngest, age four. Rachel made a point of learning, and remembering, the names of an offender’s kin. Jermaine would be sitting in front of the set, Rachel guessed, drinking sugar-heavy soda, his hand in a bag of Doritos or potato chips.

“Hey, Miss Lopez,” said Deanna. Her eyes were welcoming, but she did not ask Rachel in.

“Hi, Deanna.”

“Rudy ain’t here.”

“We had an appointment,” said Rachel. Not sounding annoyed, but stating a fact.

“I told him you was comin’,” said the mother.

“Do you know where he is?”

“He went to talk to this manager.”

“What manager?”

“Up at the Popeyes.”

“On Landover Road?” said Rachel, hoping that was the one. She had spoken to the manager there before; he had two brothers who had been incarcerated and was not averse to hiring offenders.

“Yeah. I seen they had a position open there, had one of those signs up in the window. Rudy knew y’all had a meeting, but I told him, you need to jump on that opening quick. You understand?”

Rachel said that she did understand and that she was glad Rudolph was motivated in that way.

She wasn’t angry at all when this kind of thing happened, because the time an offender spent actively pursuing employment was quality time, much more important than any meeting with her could be. That is, if Rudy really was out looking for a job.