George Pelecanos - Drama City

“Tell him I came by,” said Rachel.

“I will.”

“Nice earrings,” said Rachel before she said good-bye.

“Thank you,” said Deanna with a smile.

Out in her car, Rachel checked her NA schedule, which she had printed off the Internet, then glanced at her watch. There was a meeting on East Capitol about to convene. If there wasn’t much city-bound traffic, she could still catch the tail end of it, sit for a while, and relax. While she was resting, say a prayer.

The dog was a black rottweiler with tan socks and tan teardrop markings beneath its eyes. It stayed under a rusted rust-colored Cordoba, up on cinder blocks, parked in the paved backyard of a row house in the two hundred block of Randolph Street, west of North Capitol.

Lorenzo Brown had seen the dog before. He had left an Official Notification form on its owner’s door back in July. The shelter violation had been reported by a neighbor. Next to chaining, it was the most common call.

Lorenzo sat in his work van, a Chevy Astra, idling in the alley behind the row house, looking through the lens of a digital camera. The dog had come out from under the Cordoba and listlessly barked one time. Now it was staring at Lorenzo curiously and without aggression, its tongue dangling out the side of its mouth. Lorenzo snapped off a shot and took note of the home address, which had been stenciled on a No Trespassing sign hung on a chain-link fence. Then he drove out of the alley and went around the block, parking the van on Randolph near the front of the house.

As was his habit this time of year, Lorenzo left the motor and air-conditioning running to keep the van cool. Once outside the Astra, he locked the door with a spare key. He surveyed the block, a typical D.C. strip of brick row houses topped with turrets. Here, near Florida and North Capitol, the rep of drug dealing and gang activity was strong. But there was no evidence of criminal enterprise today. Construction vans and pickups dotted the curb. Spanish music, thin vocals and surging horns coming trebly from the low-end boom box of a housepainter, blared from the open windows of a house. A white girl in a pantsuit, a real estate agent, Lorenzo supposed, stood on the sidewalk, talking on a cell while she nervously smoked a cigarette.

Several longtime residents sat on the porches and stoops of their homes, watching the white girl, their eyes showing amusement. Behind the amusement was discomfort. They realized that in the near future their corner of the world as they knew it would cease to exist.

“Uh-oh,” said a man sitting on a rocker bench on his porch as Lorenzo crossed the sidewalk and went up the steps of a residence. “What J. J. do now, cause the police to make a house call?”

“You see a gun hanging on his side?” said a neighbor sitting in a similar type of chair on the porch of his own dwelling.

“I can’t even see your wide behind without my glasses.”

“That’s the dog man, fool.”

Lorenzo heard such commentary often when he entered a neighborhood. To the street-challenged eye he did look like some kind of police. If not police, an official, or something more than a meter man. He wore a sky blue shirt with a Humane Society badge pinned to his chest. He wore dark blue cargo pants and heavy black boots with lug soles, useful for climbing fences. He carried no form of protection, either clipped to his belt or concealed.

Black folks weren’t shy about discussing his presence, in his presence, in the same way that they would tell a stranger, straight up, if they did or did not like his outfit or new car. On the flip side, when he entered the white, wealthy neighborhoods of Ward 3 on business, there were no Greek choruses and few questions.

“Look here, J. J. ain’t home.” It was the one who had identified Lorenzo as the dog man, shouting from his porch.

Lorenzo ignored the man, continuing on until he reached the house, one of a few fronted by a portico rather than a porch. There he saw detailed stonework arching the entrance and colorful tile inlaid on the floor.

Lorenzo knocked on the door, despite having been told that “J. J.” was not home, suspecting that even if he were home, he would not answer the door. Lorenzo began to fill out an ON form, set on the clipboard he carried, as he waited. Soon he heard footsteps behind him and the voice of the middle-aged man who had called out to him from the neighboring porch.

“Told you he wasn’t home.”

“Thought I’d try him anyway,” said Lorenzo, keeping his eyes on the form as he filled it out, feeling the man beside him, smelling the hard liquor on his breath and the perspiration coming through his pores.

“You ain’t gonna find him at this residence.”

“What, he doesn’t live here no more?”

“I’m sayin’, he ain’t never gonna be in at this hour. J. J.’s got a day job.”

Lorenzo had met this fella before, the last time he’d come through, and he’d smelled this same way. Man in his fifties, still young enough to work, not working, drinking liquor while the sun was straight up overhead. Bags under the eyes, teeth missing, “retired” with fifteen good years still in him. He was wearing one of those tired-ass Kangol caps too.

“Jefferson’s my name. I’m a friend to J. J.-John Jr.”

“John Jr. got a last name?”

“Aaron.”

Lorenzo Brown wrote the full name of the resident on the form. It was easy enough to get from the criss-cross directory back at the office. But office time was not Lorenzo’s thing.

“I’m a Humane Law Enforcement officer, with the Humane Society. My name’s Brown.”

“I know who you are,” said Jefferson, in neither a friendly nor an unfriendly way. He did not offer Lorenzo his hand. “You came through here earlier this summer.”

“Don’t look like much has changed. What I can see, the situation with his dog is still the same.”

“He been meanin’ to get around to it, though.”

“You say you’re a friend to him?”

“I am,” said Jefferson with weak pride.

“I’d like to show you what J. J. needs to do to keep his dog. I’d hate to have to take it.”

“You mean you’d snatch that girl?”

“I wouldn’t take pleasure from it. But I’d do my job.”

“Damn.”

“How ’bout you meet me in the alley?”

Jefferson looked around the street as if to consider it, as if he had anything else to do.

“Okay?” said Lorenzo.

“Gimme five minutes,” said Jefferson. “I need to urinate.”

You mean you need to have you another drink, thought Lorenzo. He nodded at Jefferson before going back to the van.

Lorenzo drove around to the alley and waited. Five minutes stretched to fifteen. He whistled softly at the rottie, and when the dog came to the fence, Lorenzo put his knuckles through the diamond space of the links. A dry muzzle touched his hand.

“All right, girl,” said Lorenzo. “You all right with me.”

The dog’s eyelids had curled inward and appeared to be growing into its eyes. Besides this bit of sickness, it seemed to be well fed and in decent shape. Its owner had left a stainless steel bowl of water beside the car, though the water, most likely, had now been rendered hot by the moving sun. Health issues aside, there was no real shelter for the dog, except under that shaky car. Maybe the owner felt he had done enough. Lorenzo surmised that this was not a crime of deliberate abuse, but rather ignorance.

The alley smelled of excrement, garbage, and something that had once been alive and was now in decay. The August heat and the lack of breeze made the smell strong and sickening.

Two boys wearing long white T-shirts over blue jeans walked down the alley, going by Lorenzo Brown. They chuckled at the dog, which moved back a step as they passed. The T-shirt-and-jean combination was the uniform of choice for young men in the lower ranks of the drug game, but Brown had noticed both white and black kids in the suburbs, straight kids, honor students, whatever, wearing the same hookup. The suburban kids got their fashion sense out of The Source, off CD covers, and from the hip-hop videos run on 106 and Park. For all Lorenzo knew, these two could have been playing studio gangster as well. They gave him cursory eye contact but made no remark as they passed. If it had been his partner, Mark, white and therefore fair game, back here, these boys would have said something, made him the butt of some quick joke. They’d have to, because it was in the contract. But Mark wouldn’t have cared.