Soul Circus Read online

  So Quinn was doing his job. But he couldn’t get Mark Elliot’s face, his look of disappointment, out of his head. Quinn should have been up with the buzz of success. Instead he was ashamed.

  MARIO Durham noticed that the letter J had fallen off the word Jordan, printed real big across one of his sneakers, while he was riding the bus down Minnesota Avenue. He had those red, black, and white ones from last year he had bought off this dude said he didn’t want the old style in his closet anymore. They had looked good to Durham, but now he realized maybe he had got beat for twenty-five dollars. If he was here now, his brother, Dewayne, would say, That’s what you get for buying used shoes. But he had smelled the insides before he bought them, and they were clean, like they still sitting on the shelf at Foot Locker. They had looked all right to him.

  Durham took off the shoe still had a J on it and worked at the letter with his fingernail until it started to peel at the edge. He tore it off. Good. Now both of his shoes looked alike.

  He was still holding this shoe when he heard a girl laughing, and he looked around to see these two girls, sharing one of the seats a couple of rows up. They were staring at him, holding that shoe. A guy who wasn’t with them, sitting nearby, was looking around to see what they were laughing at, and now he was looking back at Mario and he was kinda smiling, too.

  People had been laughing at Mario Durham all his life. Wasn’t anything special about this bus ride right here.

  Soon those people went on about their business. He found that this was usually so, that folks would leave him alone after they got over the first thing they saw about him that made them crack on him and laugh: that he was skinny, or funny lookin’, or that he was tearing a letter off his shoe. And that was worse than being laughed at sometimes—just being ignored. Feeling that he wasn’t even important enough to notice, that’s what really cut him deep.

  Dewayne said that when someone stepped to you, then you had to step back. But what was he gonna do, even strapped like he was right now? Kill a Metrobus full of people for smilin’ at him? But it did make him mad. You came into this life trusting people to be good, and it seemed like they always did you dirt in the end.

  Like Olivia. She said she loved him and to prove it she was giving him that good thing, too. So when she asked him, could he ask his brother to front a pound of hydro so that they could sell it, make a little money together, and have some stash to smoke for their own selves, he had to say yes. She was the first woman who had shown some interest in him in a long while.

  Dewayne gave him the LB after a lecture about being responsible and shit, and this being his chance to show his kid brother that he could do right. And then Olivia had disappeared with the chronic, just took her son and booked right out of Southeast, and shamed him to his brother. Mario Durham had stood for just about everything, but he couldn’t stand for that. Now she was going to have to give the hydro back to him, or the money she’d made from it if she’d gone and sold it already. Because Dewayne had only been half right saying it was his “chance.” Really, it was his last chance, and he couldn’t let it slip by. He needed to show Dewayne that he could stand tall, that Dewayne could trust him, not just as a brother but also as a man. Maybe Dewayne would even put him on. Finding Olivia, getting back the pound she’d took, that’s how he could redeem himself in his brother’s eyes. For what she’d done, one way or another, the bitch was gonna pay.

  Mario Durham reached up and pulled the signal cord, as his stop was coming up ahead. He needed to transfer over to the Benning Road line and take that bus east. He wasn’t far now from where Olivia was at.

  Durham walked the aisle toward the door, hitching up his Tommys as he passed the two girls. He heard one of them laugh, and he heard the dude nearby say something about Secret Squirrel, then, “You lookin’ good, Deion” from one of the girls, then more laughs. He bit down on his lip and took the steps down off the bus, passing through the accordion doors that opened to the street.

  OLIVIA Elliot fired up a joint and sat back on the sofa. She took a good hit off it and held the smoke in, letting it lie in her lungs while she squinted at the TV set, had a rerun going of Martin. She thought she’d seen this one before, but she figured on watchin’ it anyway. Truth was, wasn’t one of these shows all that different from the others. Martin Lawrence was funny, too; he had come up over in Landover or something, which made his show more interesting to watch, ’cause she knew this girl who knew this other girl who claimed she knew his family. It was like Olivia felt she knew him herself.

  The sound was low on the set. She had the stereo going, Missy Elliot gettin’ her freak on, the remix joint that the Super Funk Regulator played on PGC.

  Olivia had another hit of the hydro and then she had to put it down. She’d learned not to take too much of this, to back up off it quick, because it was potent. Must have come from Dewayne Durham’s private stash. She had the feeling when she’d met his funny-lookin’ older brother, Mario, that he’d be good for something. This shit right here was what it was.

  It was like God had sent Mario down to her, and then the pound of herb with him. She hadn’t intended to take it straight off, not exactly, but it came to her, big surprise, when she was high up on it one night, not long after Mario had brought the pound over to her apartment. She had been way up and got to thinking, Why do I need Mario to make some money off this? Why don’t I keep it my own self, go somewheres away from here and sell it off? Mario, he wasn’t gonna be no problem. And, okay, Dewayne, he was a drug dealer for real, and he had a gang and a rep and all the bad shit that went along with it. But everyone knew those boys didn’t leave too far from their neighborhoods, not even to settle a beef, and especially not over some girl and her kid.

  So she decided to take the chronic and go away. Not too far, ’cause you didn’t have to go that far, but at least into Northeast. And then she’d seen that notice in the newspaper talking about a short-term sublease, fully furnished, and she was gone. Gathered up her clothes, and Mark’s clothes, and his bike, and not much else. The furniture she had, she was paying for it on time, and she had stopped making payments on it anyhow. The car she’d bought, a used Toyota Tercel, she was doing that the same way. She moved herself and Mark out of that place in Woodland Mews in a couple of hours, and she’d been living here since.

  For the first time since she’d left high school, in the tenth grade, she had some money in her dresser drawer. She’d sold off half of the chronic in one-hundred-dollar bags, just to friends and to people she’d met in the apartments around hers and to people they knew. And now she was flush. She didn’t have a job or nothin’ like that, but she intended to start looking for one soon. The important thing was, no one had found her or come looking for her, far as she knew, up till now. Mark had mentioned that some white dude had been by that day, and he was all embarrassed and stuff for telling the white dude where they lived, but she told Mark not to worry over it too much. The white dude was probably some bill collector, like from the furniture company or somethin’ like that.

  It touched her, the way Mark was always trying to please her and protect her. The flip side of that was, the only thing she worried about in her own life was Mark. She did love her boy and she wanted him safe. But he seemed to be adjusting to this new neighborhood. He looked happy most of the time and he made friends easy. She’d never lived in Northeast, but this was east-of-the-river Northeast, not too different from the Southeast side where she’d come up, and it seemed cool.

  Mark was smiling when she’d kissed him good-bye. She’d just seen him off a few minutes ago. Her brother, William, had picked him up, was gonna take him over to his place to watch the playoffs, the Lakers against the Sixers, and spend the night. William was going to keep Mark for a couple of days, the way he always did.

  Olivia missed him when he was gone, even for a night, but it was good for Mark to be around a man, and William was a strong role model and as straight as they came. He’d always disapproved of her lifestyle, telling h
er constantly to get herself together, but mostly she’d let it roll off her like everything else, ’specially since she knew deep down that her brother was right. And these nights that William took Mark, it allowed her to kick back, burn some smoke without having to hide it, listen to music by herself, and laugh at whatever was playin’ on the TV.

  Maybe she could fix this place up some, get an extension on the lease, settle here. Put curtains up or somethin’, ’cause the way they had this place painted, it was dark and kinda gray. Get an exterminator out here for the roaches that showed up all over the kitchen when you turned the lights on back there. Some new sheets for Mark’s bed. She had the money. It was hid good, too, right in between her mattress and box spring. Along with the rest of the herb.

  The buzzer rang from over by the phone. It was that buzzer from downstairs, said that someone was wantin’ to get in. She wasn’t expecting anyone, so she stayed where she was. Probably someone was down there hittin’ all the buzzers, just lookin’ to get inside.

  She shook a Newport out of her pack and lit it. The menthol, it tasted good after you smoked some get-high. Olivia smiled, looking at the face Martin was making on the TV show. The music sounded good, too, coming from the stereo. She looked at the joint resting in the ashtray and considered picking it back up. But she was already trippin’ behind this shit, so she let it lay there where it was.

  chapter 11

  SUE Tracy had met Quinn over at his apartment on Sligo Avenue, in a boxy brick structure near a small convenience market in Silver Spring. When they spent the night together they did it at his place. More often these days, Sue, who had a one-bedroom off Rockville Pike, seemed to prefer to stay on his side of town.

  Silver Spring had beer gardens and restaurants within walking distance of Quinn’s, and live music if you wanted it, and you could leave the house and go to any of those places wearing whatever you had on without thinking twice. The city was starting to take on the concrete sterility of white-bread Bethesda, and it was getting the same upscale chains, and the fake Mexican cantinas, and the grocery store where people could be “seen” eating overpriced sushi in the window booths and overpaying for vegetables in the checkout lines. But Silver Spring hadn’t lost its personality or its mix of working immigrants and blue-collar eccentrics yet. You could still rest your can of Bud on the engine block of your car while you fiddled around under the hood on a sunny day and not get a reproachful look. You could say that you liked women, not just as people but also in bed, and not feel as if you were wearing a swastika band around your arm. If that ever changed, Quinn swore he’d be gone.

  Earlier in the evening they’d had dinner at Sue’s favorite place, Vicino, on Quinn’s street. Then they caught a set of Bill Kirchin’s band up at the Blue Iguana on Georgia Avenue. Quinn had suggested it, as the drummer, a guy named Jack who lived in the neighborhood, cooked. They bought a six on the way back to Quinn’s place. They could have walked everywhere, but they took Quinn’s ’69 Chevelle, a 396 with Cregars and Flowmaster pipes. Sue was used to driving her work vehicle, a gray Econoline van, so it was a treat for her to get behind the wheel of something that had some muscle. She especially liked to move the Hurst shifter through its gears.

  They were a little high on red wine and beer when they got to his spartan apartment. Sue opened a couple of cold ones while Quinn searched his CDs for something she would like. He was into Springsteen, Steve Earle, and the like, his collection running toward big guitars, male singers, and male concerns. Sue had come up in the fabled eighties D.C. punk movement. Occasionally their tastes converged.

  “What do you want to hear?” said Quinn. “Dismember Your Man?”

  “It’s the Dismemberment Plan,” said Tracy. “And you don’t own any, so shut up. Why don’t you put on the new Dave Matthews?”

  “Cute. You know I don’t get that guy. Music for old people who look like young people. It’s not rock, it’s not jazz. What the fuck is it?”

  “I’m kidding.”

  “How about some Neil?”

  “Neil’s good.”

  Quinn dropped Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere into the carousel and let it play. “Cinnamon Girl” came forward as he joined Tracy on the couch. She wore a sky blue button-down stretch shirt out over slate gray pants. Her blond shag-cut hair fell to her shoulders. The shirt was open three buttons down and showed the curves of her breasts, full and riding high. Quinn thinking, This is a sweet night right here.

  They drank off some of their beer. Sue removed her Skechers, put her feet up on the table set before the couch, and smoked a cigarette while Quinn told her about his day.

  “Anything on Linda Welles?” said Tracy.

  Quinn shrugged. “I passed out flyers down at the Metro station in Anacostia.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Her brother, he called the police, right?”

  “Sure, but the police don’t get all that mobilized for a missing girl in the city.”

  It usually was reported to Youth and Preventive Services and pretty much sat. Most were runaway and not criminal cases. The girls stayed local and moved quadrant to quadrant. So families went to people like Sue for help finding them.

  “She could be shacked up with some older boy, has drug money, a nice car,” said Quinn.

  “That’s right, she could be,” said Tracy, crushing her cigarette in the ashtray. “But we still need to find her.”

  “I will.”

  “My hero.”

  Quinn put his beer bottle down on the table and slipped his hand under the tail of Tracy’s shirt and around her waist. “I’m larger than life.”

  “Don’t be so boastful.”

  Quinn kissed her. He unbuttoned her shirt and kissed the tops of her breasts, then pulled one cup of her bra down to kiss her darkish nipple. It hardened at the lick of his tongue, and he felt her stretch like a cat beneath him. Quinn tried to undo her bra but fumbled it.

  “You got oven mitts on or something?”

  “I need a manual for this thing.”

  “It’s a back-loader, Terry.”

  “Oh.”

  Tracy’s chest was flushed pink and her hair was a beautiful mess. She sat up, undid her bra, and pulled it free. Quinn drew her shirt back off her shoulders.

  “Gulp,” said Quinn.

  “You look surprised.”

  “I always am,” said Quinn. “And thankful, too.”

  They undressed quickly, “Cowgirl in the Sand” filling the room. Quinn laughed as her panties flew past his head. They embraced and were down on the pillows and then knocking the pillows off the couch. They were all over each other and she moved him roughly to her center. She was wet there, and Quinn smiled.

  “Damn, girl, where’s the fire?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “What I mean is, why the rush?”

  “Quit fucking around.”

  Soon he was all the way in her, her back arched to take it, her mouth cool on his, her damp muscled-up thighs flanking his sides. Quinn thinking, This is something God dreamed up, has to be. Something this good, it can’t be an accident.

  STRANGE picked up Greco at the office and drove the dog up to the row house on Buchanan Street. Strange had lived here for many years before marrying Janine. He was perfectly content and comfortable at Janine’s place and as certain as any man could be that their marriage was going to last. But he still spent time at his old house. The house was paid for, so there weren’t any issues with money, and he had not considered selling it.

  He told Janine that he needed this place to keep his duplicate case files and to work away from his primary office. But there were other reasons for his reluctance to give up the Buchanan residence. It had been his first and only real-estate purchase, and the pride of home ownership was, for him, still strong. And of course he needed to know that there was always some other place he could go to, run to, some would say, when the space between him and Janine and Lionel got too close. He had lived with women briefly, but
in those cases there’d always been an exit door. He’d been a bachelor his whole life and he had married in his fifties. This new life, this whole new thing, was going to take some getting used to.

  Strange went down to his basement and did three sets of ab crunches, lying on a mat. He then did a dumbbell workout and put in fifteen minutes on the heavy bag with a pair of twelve-ounce gloves, more than enough to break a good sweat. Then he showered, fed Greco, and went on up to the second floor to his office.

  He tore the shrink-wrap off a couple of soundtrack CDs he had purchased through the Internet that had just come to this address in the mail today. A Morricone import called Spaghetti Western, which held six tracks from the film A Gun for Ringo, among others, had arrived in the shipment. He slipped the CD into the CPU of his computer and sat down behind his desk. The music came through the Yamaha speakers on his desktop, and he nodded his head. This was exactly what he had hoped it would be. He had been looking for this particular soundtrack for some time.

  Strange filed that day’s Xeroxed records on the Granville Oliver case into the cabinets that supported the rectangle of kitchen-counter laminate that served as his desktop. He did some bills, killed more time listening to his CD, and then went looking for Greco, who was lying by the front door and ready to go. Strange grabbed some cruising music, locked the house down, and walked with Greco to his free-time vehicle, a black-over-black ’91 Cadillac Brougham with a chromed-up grille.

  He popped some Blue Magic into the dash deck and drove north on Georgia Avenue. The school year had not quite ended, and night had fallen, but there were plenty of kids out, hanging on corners and walking the streets. In fact, he had seen his young employee, Lamar, heading on foot toward the Capitol City Pavilion, a go-go venue the young ones called the Black Hole, on a recent evening. Strange wondered, as he always did, what these kids were doing out so late, and he wondered about the adults who were responsible for them, why they had let them out of their sight.