What It Was by George P. Pelecanos Page B

liked Red Jones for that murder-for-hire.
    They passed a tall, chiseled, uniformed security guardwho worked for a private company under contract with the hospital. His name was Clarence Bowman, and he had been raised in an alley dwelling known as Temperance Court.
    Bowman followed Vaughn and Cochnar out to the parking lot, RFK Stadium and the D.C. Armory looming over the landscape. He kept well behind them so he would not be noticed. The big white man got into a large Dodge sedan. He looked like police, so that was no surprise. The stocky white boy in the suit unlocked a shiny pea-green Ford Maverick and settled into the driver’s side. Young dude with his first real job out of law school, driving his first new car. Cochnar, the government prosecutor. Had to be.
    STRANGE SAT on 13th in his Monte Carlo, listening to the radio, waiting. He was hoping that the man he had seen the day before would reappear. It wasn’t just a blind man’s grope. Street people had their favorite spots and seldom changed locations until chased off.
    He was there a half hour or so when the man came out of an apartment building across the street from Odum’s. The man used the crosswalk, went to the retaining wall that was his chair, and had a seat on the edge of it, his feet dangling over the sidewalk. Strange got out of his car.
    The man did not move as Strange approached, nor did he look away. Strange came up on him, his arms loose, his stance unthreatening, and stood before him.
    “Afternoon,” said Strange. “I was hoping we could talk.”
    Up close, the man’s eyes were not unintelligent, nor were they the empty eyes of a dope fiend, but he looked beaten. Though it was warm out, he wore an old-style cardigansweater over a shirt with a frayed collar. His hair was shaved close to the scalp with a slash part, a barbershop cut from ten years back. The slope of his shoulders and his folded arms suggested surrender.
    “You police?”
    “Not anymore. I’m private. My name’s Derek Strange. Can I buy you a beer, something?”
    “I don’t drink. You got a smoke?”
    “Sorry.”
    The man bit his lip as something came to mind. “I knew a Strange. Boy named Dennis. Older than you, about your size.”
    “Dennis was my brother.”
    “We used to hang out some, at house parties and all, before he joined the navy. I heard he passed. My sympathies, man.”
    “Thank you.”
    The man put his hand out and Strange shook it. “Milton Wallace.”
    “Pleasure,” said Strange. “You served, too?”
    “Army,” said Wallace, and then Strange knew. This wasn’t any street person, or drunk, or junkie. The man was a veteran who’d been in it and come out torn on the other side.
    Strange looked up at the sky. Raindrops had begun to fall and more were on the way. “We should get out of this.”
    “I live with my mother in that building,” said Wallace, pointing to the door from which he’d exited. “But I don’t want to disturb her.”
    “My Chevy’s right over there.”
    Wallace smiled wistfully. “That’s a pretty MC.”
    THE NEW Stylistics song, “People Make the World Go Round,” was on the radio and playing low, Russell Thompkins Jr.’s angelic vocals an apt, melodic narration to the life they were seeing, tableau-form, through the windshield. On 13th, a tired woman shuffled down the sidewalk, carrying a bag of groceries. A group of young girls double-Dutched on the corner, and on a nearby stoop a man was pleading with a woman, gesturing elaborately with his hands to make his case.
    “City ain’t all that different since I been back,” said Wallace. “Little burned around the edges, maybe. But still the same rough old ghetto.”
    “You missed the trouble.”
    “I had my own troubles to worry on.”
    “Where were you?”
    “Bao Loc, mostly. Northeast of Saigon. I was with Charlie Company, the One Seventy-Third.”
    Strange had heard tell of the company. Lydell had occasionally invoked its name with reverence.
    “You?” said