George Pelecanos - Hard Revolution

“I got a kid brother, took the straight road,” said Houston. “Went to one of those good Negro colleges down South, got a government job, owns a house, has a wife and kids… I mean, he did it all right. That could have been my brother got run down in that street. Cut down for nothin’ but his color, you understand?”

“What about the car?” said Vaughn.

“Couple of men brought it in on Monday. Red Galaxie Five Hundred, all messed up in the front.”

“Sixty-three or sixty-four?”

“Sixty-three and a half,” said Houston with a hint of pride.

“And these guys said what?”

“Driver of the Galaxie, little sawed-off, cross-eyed white boy name of Walter Hess. Goes by Shorty? Said he hit a monkey in the street. Was smilin’ about it, too. He was talking about that young brother you described, I expect. “

“Walter Hess,” said Vaughn, writing it down.

“White boy he came in with? Big dude, wears his sleeves rolled high to show his muscles. Last name Stewart. I don’t know what his Christian name is, but he goes by Buzz.”

“They came in two cars.”

“Yeah. This Buzz Stewart was drivin’ a red Belvedere, white hardtop, tricked out with a Max Wedge hood.”

As Vaughn wrote, he felt his face flush with blood. He knew that car. “Tag numbers?”

“I got ’em off the Ford,” said Houston. He pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and read the numbers off to Vaughn.

“Anything else?”

“The Belvedere had a name, kind of scripted on its side, you know how them gearheads do.”

“What was the name?”

“Bernadette,” said Houston.

Vaughn closed his eyes and tried to picture the car. He saw it parked beside the garage of the Esso station at Georgia and Piney Branch. He saw the big mechanic, the unfriendly greaser with the sleeves of his uniform shirt rolled up high, gunning the lugs off an Oldsmobile that was up on the lift in the bay.

“Bernadette,” said Vaughn, nodding his head. “I guess this Buzz has a girlfriend, huh?”

“I’d say he’s a Levi Stubbs fan.”

“What’s that?”

“The Four Tops,” said Houston with a small smile. “You listened to the radio the last ten years, you’d know.”

Vaughn shrugged.

“By the way, you overplayed it with that story, too,” said Houston. “You know, about them spray-paintin’ nigger in the street.”

“You didn’t buy it, huh?”

“It was the arrow-pointin’-to-the-body thing that did it. Too complicated for those two.”

“I guess I took it too far.”

“Thing was, you had me goin’ without it.”

“Thanks, Lawrence.” Vaughn reached across the bench and shook Houston’s hand. “You did right.”

Houston drove off in his Dart GT. Vaughn killed his Schlitz, flicked his smoke out the open window, and walked to a phone booth in the corner of the lot.

STRANGE STOOD ON the landing of the second floor of Lula Bacon’s row house, knocking on her apartment door. He wore his black leather car coat over gray slacks and a charcoal shirt, his service revolver in a holster clipped onto the belt line of the slacks. His badge was in the pocket of his coat.

“Yeah?” she said from behind the door.

“Lula Bacon?”

“Who’s askin’?”

“I’m a police officer.”

“You got some identification?”

Strange badged the peephole, which had darkened in the door.

“What’s this about?”

“Open the door, Miss Bacon.”

“You don’t look like no police.”

“You need to open this door right now.”

“Or what?”

“Or I come back with the welfare man,” said Strange. “He’s gonna be real interested in your lifestyle, I expect.”

Strange knew nothing about her lifestyle, but his limited experience told him that this was an effective way to gain entry. He heard a chain sliding off a catch and the turn of a dead bolt.

Strange had been to James Hayes’s place on Otis first, but Hayes was not in. Morning had become noon. He was due in at work for his four-to-midnight. He had decided to stop calling Dolittle and work this himself. What he was doing wasn’t procedure. It was beyond his duty limit and probably illegal. But he felt he was running out of time.

The door opened. A petite woman wearing a short navy blue shift stood in the frame. She had shapely legs and hips. She had big eyes accentuated by dark makeup, large hoop earrings, and store-done hair. A glass of amber-colored liquor over ice was loose in her hand. She smelled of whiskey and cigarettes. Bacon looked like a sloppy Diana Ross.

Strange did not move to go inside. “I’m lookin’ for Alvin Jones.”

“He ain’t in. I don’t expect him back, neither.”

“Any idea where he went to?”

“No idea,” she said lazily, leaning her figure into the door. A baby cried from far back in the apartment.

“He’s got another girlfriend, right?” said Strange, unconcerned with diplomacy or her feelings.

“That ain’t news.”

“Maybe he moved back in with her.”

“So?”

“You know her name or where she stay at?”

Bacon shrugged and drank off some of her liquor.

“Well?”

“I don’t know nothin’.”

“You lyin’, I’m gonna come back.”

“Big man,” said Bacon, looking him over, “you can come back anytime, even if I’m tellin’ the truth.”

“I’m spoken for,” said Strange.

“Then send your brother over, you got one. That is, if he looks like you.”

“Your baby’s crying,” said Strange in an even way. “You best get yourself together and see to that child.”

“You run into Alvin, you tell him he done lost this good thing forever.”

She was talking to his back. Strange had already begun to take the stairs down to the street.

VAUGHN COMMANDEERED THE phone booth in the lot of the Tick Tock. He phoned the Esso station and got the correct name of the employee, Carlton “Buzz” Stewart. He was told by the manager, who sounded harried, that this was Stewart’s day off. Vaughn then called the Sixth Precinct station and told the guy manning the Homicide desk what he needed. It required more than a little work, and he knew it would take time. While he waited, Vaughn stood in the lot, smoking and guarding the phone, and drinking Schlitz from a can wrapped in a brown paper bag. A county cop approached him about the open beer; Vaughn badged him and showed him his uppers, and the cop shoved off. By the time Vaughn got the return call, it was after noon. He put all the information into his notebook and went to his car.

He had instructed his man to put out a bulletin, with descriptions, over the radio: two men, Walter Hess, aka Shorty Hess, and Carlton Stewart, aka Buzz Stewart, were wanted for questioning in the hit-and-run death of Vernon Wilson. It was the very soft version of an all-points bulletin. If they were to be stopped for, say, a traffic violation, and the uniform radioed in the information, the bulletin would send up a flag. Both men had sheets, and Hess was an ex-con. But Vaughn suspected that their crime was the result of a drunken night, and though he thought they were stupid and probably cruel, he did not believe them to be dangerous. Plus, he wanted the collar for himself.

He drove to the 700 block of Silver Spring Avenue off Georgia, a quarter mile northeast of the District line. The street consisted primarily of bungalows set close to the curb, with deep, sloping backyards lightly forested in oak, walnut, and pine. The residents were second-wave, postwar, blue- and gray-collar workers, many of German descent, who had purchased these houses, built in the 1920s, on the GI Bill. Their kids were going or gone. Bikers and young tradesmen had begun to rent the houses as the homeowners neared retirement age and drifted off. Vaughn knew that some of these renters used and possibly dealt marijuana and speed. He had sat beside them at the bars up on Georgia on a couple of occasions, had struck up conversations with them and seen the drugs in their jacked-up eyes.