George Pelecanos - Soul Circus

“I’m looking for Olivia Elliot,” said Strange.

“I ain’t know her,” said the girl.

“Is your mother at home?”

“At work.”

“How long have you been living here?”

“We only been stayin’ up in here, like, a month.”

“What -”

“Bye.”

She closed the door. Strange was accustomed to having doors closed in his face, and he wasn’t about to knock again just to get the same response. Anyway, he had the feeling that this was a dead lead. The management company was the way to go. But he figured he’d upturn all the stones he could while he was here.

Strange knocked on another door, then tried a third. He walked back down the stairs to the open air. A man in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette beside a Dumpster, stared him down. Strange looked him over and walked on. With his cell holstered to his belt and his pen and pad, Strange was obviously some sort of official, cop, or inspector. He didn’t feel the need to explain himself or acknowledge the smoker in any way. Besides, Strange had sized up the man and decided that if it came down to it, he could kick his ass. Didn’t matter how old you got, there was always some kind of satisfaction for a man in knowing that.

He walked around the unit to the back, where the apartment’s balconies faced a small playground holding rusted and broken equipment. Strange studied the balconies. He noticed a boy’s bicycle in the 20-to-23-inch range chained to a rail on the third floor. That size bike would belong to a child who was somewhere between seven and twelve years old. He counted the apartments and where they were in relation to the stairwell, and he returned to the front of the building and took the steps to the door he thought he was looking for. He knocked on the door and soon it opened.

A dark-skinned, unkempt woman whose facial features had begun to collapse stood in the frame. Hung on a chain around her mottled neck was a large wooden crucifix that lay on a threadbare housedress. The furniture in the room behind her followed the lead of the dress. A piece of rug art, a brown-and-white pony standing in a field of black, was tacked to the wall over a shredded sofa.

“Yes?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Strange softened his eyes. “I’m trying to get up with Mark Elliot, little boy lives here, down on the floor below you. Trouble I’m having, the phone number I had on his mother, when I dial it I get a recording, says it’s been disconnected.”

“Well, that’s because they moved out.”

“I was afraid it might be that.”

The woman looked him over and crossed her arms beneath her sagging breasts. “And you are?”

“Excuse me. My name is Will, uh, William Sonnett. I’ve got a football team I coach every fall over in Turkey Thicket, run it through the, uh, church group. We do this camp in the summertime, kind of ease the kids into their conditioning, if you know what I mean. I was hoping to recruit Mark into the Pee Wee division. I heard from some of the neighborhood boys that he could play.”

The woman’s features untightened and she let her arms fall at her sides. “Mark would have liked to have played, if he still lived here. He’s a good little athlete. He played with my grandson all the time when he was living here.”

“That so.”

“Yes, they rode their bikes together day and night.”

Damn, thought Strange, I am good. His blood ticked the way it always did when he was getting close. He’d like to see Terry’s face when he told him that, just as he had predicted, he had found the woman in one afternoon.

“You don’t know how I can get in touch with Mark or his mother, do you?”

“No, I’m sorry. They left without a word.”

“And she hasn’t called you or nothin’ like that.”

“No. She hasn’t.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, Mark has called. He calls my grandson ’bout once a week or so. I think he must be lonely, wherever they’re stayin’ at.”

“So your grandson, he must call him back.”

“I don’t allow Daniel to call out on our phone.”

“Oh.”

“But I think Mark called here a couple of days ago. Maybe I still have the number on the caller ID.”

Strange smiled. “I sure would appreciate it if you’d check.”

In the small kitchen the woman handed Strange a cordless phone. He pressed the directory button and thumb-wheeled through the record of calls printed out, one by one, on a lit yellow screen. There were thirty old calls listed in the directory.

“I never think to erase them,” said the woman.

“Neither do I,” said Strange.

Strange found a number with the name Olivia B. Elliot printed above it. He copied the number onto his pad.

“Thank you,” said Strange.

The woman, ugly by anyone’s standards but with a peculiar bright-eyed energy to her, looked up at Strange with admiration. “You’re doing the Lord’s work helping these kids like you do, Mr. Sonnett. Praise God!”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Strange, unable to meet her eyes. “I better be on my way.”

IN the car Strange phoned Janine.

“Derek, I didn’t have any luck with the management company. Apparently she moved out without giving them any notice and she left no forwarding address.”

“That’s okay. I got a phone number on her. You ready?”

Strange gave her the number. Over the years, Janine had cultivated contacts all over town. But her contact at the phone company was the most valuable. Strange sent Christmas cards out to all the people he did business with. A few of these cards contained gift certificates. At Christmastime, Strange sent Janine’s contact at the phone company a Tower Records certificate along with a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill.

“I’m going to meet Devra Stokes,” said Strange. “Call me on my cell when you get an address.”

Strange’s cell rang as he parked in the lot of the strip center on Good Hope Road. Janine was on the line with Olivia Elliot’s address. Strange wrote it down, thanked her, and cut the connection. Then he phoned Quinn.

“Terry, can you get out for a while?”

“I think Lewis can handle the shop.”

“Yeah, what else is a cat like Lewis gonna be doin’ with his time? All right, write this down. Just need you to verify that she’s at the address.”

Quinn took down the information. “That’s up around Lincoln Heights. Northeast, right?”

“Yeah, it’s on the north side of East Capitol.”

“Took you, what, two hours to find her?”

“Some of it was lunch. And most of the rest was drive time.”

“You are one macho motherfucker.”

“And I drink the bad dude’s brew.”

“Gonna make beaver boy happy.”

“He’s gonna get some change back, too.”

“Why can’t you take care of this yourself?”

“I got some more work down here in Anacostia. The character wit I called on today, on the Oliver thing.”

“I’ll take care of it,” said Quinn.

Strange hit “end” on his cell.

He looked through the window of the hair salon. Devra Stokes’s little boy was holding on to her pants leg as she gathered up her things. Even his timing was on today. Sometimes, Strange thought, everything just goes right.

DEWAYNE Durham checked himself in a full-length mirror hung crookedly on a nail pushed into a bullet hole in a plaster wall. He wore a new pair of jeans his mother had pressed for him and a Nautica shirt with a black-and-beige Hawaiian print. He wore a pair of black Jordans, the Penny style, on his feet, which picked up the black of the shirt real nice. He looked good and he looked strong. A little on the thin side, but that was his fun-house reflection in the cheap mirror, which one of his boys musta bought from Target or someplace like that. He’d have to talk to that boy. Wasn’t no such thing as a bargain; you had to spend money to get nice things.