George Pelecanos - Hell To Pay

A fight had broken out in a bar on Kennedy at closing time, and it had spilled onto the street. Several squad cars were already on the scene. Officers were holding back the brawlers and trying to quiet some of the neighbors and passersby who had been incited by the police presence. The patrolmen carried batons. A guy shouted “cracker motherfucker” and “white motherfucker” repeatedly at the white policeman who had cuffed him. The policeman’s partner, a black officer, was called a “house nigger” by the same man. Blue got out of the car and crossed the street. Strange stepped out and leaned against the Crown Vic.

Down the street was the Three-Star Diner, Billy Georgelakos’s place. Strange’s father had worked there as a grill man for most of his career. A riot gate covered the front of the diner. Nearby, concertina wire topped the fence surrounding the parking lot of a church.

Blue returned to the Crown Vic with sweat beading his forehead. Most of the bystanders on Kennedy had disappeared. Whatever this had been, it was over without major incident. It would go unreported to the majority of the city’s citizens, safely asleep at home in their beds.

Strange asked Blue to make a pass through Park Morton, where Joe Wilder had lived, and Blue agreed. In the complex, few people were out. A boy sat on a swing in the playground of the dark courtyard, smoking a cigarette. Dice players and dope smokers moved about the stairwells of the apartments.

“We put flyers with the artist’s renderings of the suspects in the mailboxes here,” said Blue. “Gonna post them around the neighborhood as well.”

“That’s good.”

“Most of the time we don’t get much cooperation up in here. Drug dealers get chased by the police, they find a lot of open doors, places to hide, in this complex.”

“What I hear.”

“They even got community guns buried around here somewhere. We know all about it, but it’s tough to fight.”

“You sayin’ you think no one will come forward?”

“I’m hoping this case here is gonna be different. We’re mistrusted here, maybe even hated. I got to believe, though, anyone with a heart is gonna want to help us find the people who would kill an innocent kid.”

On the drive out, Blue went by the brick pillars and wall that were the unofficial gateway to the housing complex. Two children, girls wearing cartoon-character jackets, sat atop the wall. The girls, no older than eleven or twelve, cold-eyed the occupants of the squad car as they passed.

“Where are the parents?” whispered Strange.

ON Saturday morning, the Petworth Panthers defeated a Lamond-Riggs team on the field of LaSalle Elementary by a score of twenty to seven. Joe Wilder had not been mentioned by name in the pregame talk, but Dennis Arrington had led a prayer for their “fallen brother.” The boys went to one knee and bowed their heads without the usual chatter and horseplay. From the first whistle, their play on the field was relentless. The parents and guardians in attendance stood unusually quiet on the sidelines during the game.

Afterward, as they were gathering up the equipment, Quinn put his hand on Strange’s shoulder.

“Hey.”

“Hey, Terry.”

“You feel like gettin’ a beer later this afternoon?”

“I gotta drop these kids off.”

“And I’ve got to work a few hours up at the store. Why don’t you meet me up at Renzo’s, say, four o’clock? You know where that is, right?”

“Used to be Tradesman’s Tavern, up on Sligo Avenue, right?”

“I’ll see you there.”

Lamar Williams, Prince, and Lionel Baker were waiting by Strange’s Cadillac, parked on Nicholson. Lydell Blue’s Park Avenue was curbed behind it. Strange told the boys to get in his Brougham as he saw Blue, holding a manila folder, approaching him from behind.

“Derek,” said Blue, holding out the folder. “Thought you might want this Migdets roster back for your master file.”

Strange took it and opened his trunk. He started to slip the folder into his file box as Blue began to walk away. Strange saw some notation written in pencil on the Pee Wees folder. He pulled it and studied his own writing, the description of a car and a series of letters and numbers, on the outside of the folder. He thought back to the evening he had written the information down.

“Lydell!” he said.

Blue walked back to Strange, still standing by his open trunk. Strange took the papers out of the Pee Wee folder and handed the folder to Blue, pointing at the notation.

“Probably nothin’,” said Strange, “but you ought to run this plate here through the system.”

Blue eyed the folder. “Why?”

“Not too far back, a week or so, I noticed some hard-looking boys up in the Roosevelt lot one night when we had practice. Thinking back on it, it was a night that Lorenze Wilder was down on the field, waitin’ on Joe. I wrote down the plate number and car description out of habit. The car was a Caprice. I guessed on the year, but I do know it was close to the model year of the one I own. I put down it was beige, too.”

Strange flashed on the image of the boys. One of them wore his hair in close cornrows, like those on one of the shooters the ice-cream employee had described. But that meant nothing in itself, like noting he wore Timberlands or loose-fitting jeans; a whole lot of young boys around town kept their hair the same way.

“A beige Caprice. Why you got ‘beige-brown’ on here, then?”

“Had one of those vinyl roofs, a shade darker than the body color.”

“Okay. I’ll get it into the system right away.”

“Like I say, probably nothin’. But let me know it if turns up aces.”

“I will.”

Strange watched Blue go back to his car. He took the papers from the Pee Wee folder and decided to put them together with the Midget papers in the folder Blue had just given him. He opened the folder. Inside was a mimeographed list of Lorenze Wilder’s friends and acquaintances, along with notations describing interview details, taken from the official investigation.

Strange turned his head. Blue had ignitioned his Buick and was pulling off the curb. Strange nodded in his direction, but Blue would not look his way. Strange put the papers together, slipped the folder into his file box, and closed the lid of his trunk.

STRANGE drove Lionel to his mother’s house on Quintana. As Lionel was getting out of the car, he asked Strange if he was coming over for dinner that night. Strange replied that he didn’t think so, but to tell his mother he’d “get up with her later on.” Lionel looked back once at Strange as he went up the walk to his house. Strange drove away.

Prince was the next to be dropped. He had been quiet during the game and had not spoken at all on the ride. The boys who were always cracking on him were on their usual corner, across from his house. Prince asked Strange if he would mind walking along with him to his door. At the door, Strange patted Prince’s shoulder.

“You played a good game today, son.”

“Thanks, Coach Derek.”

“See you at practice, hear? Now go on inside.”

Lamar Williams rode shotgun for the trip down to Park Morton. He stared out the window, listening to that old-school music Mr. Derek liked to play, not really paying attention to the words or the melody. It was always that blue-sky stuff about love and picking yourself up, how the future was gonna be brighter, brother this and brother that. Lamar wondered if everyone had been more together back then, in the seventies or whenever it was. If those brothers weren’t killin’ each other every day, like they were now. If they were killin’ on kids “back in the day.” Anyway, that kind of music, it sure didn’t speak to the world Lamar was living in right now.