Soul Circus(49)

“I don’t need my eyes. I’m driving by memory.”

“And you’re gonna bust a stitch in your jeans, the way you’re trying to reach those notes.”

“Tell me this isn’t beautiful, though.”

“It’s dramatic, I’ll say that much for it. Kinda like, I don’t know, an opera or something.”

“Exactly. What I was trying to tell you yesterday.”

“The singer’s really got a nice voice, too.” Quinn’s eyes smiled from behind his aviators. “What’s her name?”

“Quit playin’. That’s a dude, Terry! Russell Thompkins Jr.”

“Produced by Albert Belle, right?”

“Funny,” said Strange.

“You got all of this group’s albums?”

“I’m missin’ Round Two. You asked me the same question last week.”

“I did?” said Quinn.

They got down into Anacostia. They drove the green hills as the sun came bright and flashed off the leaves on the trees. Generations of locals were out on their porches, talking on the sidewalk, and working in their yards.

“Just another neighborhood,” said Strange.

“On a day like this one, it does look pretty nice.”

“I was just thinking, looking at these people who live here… The world we run in, all we tend to see is the bad. But that’s just a real small part of what’s going on down here.”

“Maybe it is a small part of it. But a mamba snake is small, and so is a black widow spider. Doesn’t make those things any less deadly.”

“Terry, when you say Far Southeast, or Anacostia, it’s like a code or something to the rest of Washington. Might as well just add the words ‘Turn your car around,’ or just ‘Stay away.’ ”

“Okay, it’s a lot nicer here than people think it is. It’s an honest-to-God neighborhood. But the reality is, you’re more likely to get yourself capped down here than you are in Ward Three.”

“True. But there’s also the fact that Anacostia’s damn near all black. That might have a little somethin’ to do with the fear factor, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“Yeah,” said Strange, “absolutely. And it’s bullshit, too. But you can almost understand it, the images we get fed all the time from the papers and the television news. Listen, I had this friend, name of James, who lived down here. Still does, far as I know. He was a cameraman, worked for one of the network affiliates. So this network was doing a story down here, one of those segments on ‘the ghetto,’ and they found out that my buddy James lived in this part of the city. So the producer in charge got hold of him and said, ‘Take your video camera and go get some tape of black people down in Anacostia.’ ”

“He said it like that?”

“Exactly like that. This was about fifteen, twenty years back, when you could still say those kinds of stupid-ass things and not worry about gettin’ sued. So James does his thing and takes the footage back to the studio. They run it for the producer and it’s not exactly what he had in mind. It’s images of people leaving their houses to go to work, cutting their grass, dropping their kids off at school, like that. And the producer gets all pissed off and says to James, ‘I thought I told you to get some footage of black people in Anacostia.’ And James says, ‘That’s what I got.’ And the man says, ‘What I meant was, I wanted shots of people standing outside of liquor stores, dealing drugs, stuff like that.’ And James said, ‘Oh, you wanted a specific kind of black person. You should have said so, man.’ ”

“What happened to your friend?”

“I don’t think he got any work out of that producer again. But he’s doin’ all right. And he says it was worth it, just to make that point.”

Strange pulled into the parking lot of the strip shopping center on Good Hope Road. He fit the Caprice in a space near the hair and nail salon and had a look around the lot. Strange didn’t see Devra Stokes’s car, though the woman he had talked to on the phone had said she would be working today.

Quinn picked up his folder off the seat beside him. “I brought some flyers for Linda Welles, that girl went missing.”

“That’s all your doin’ on that is passing out flyers?”

Quinn hesitated for a moment before answering Strange. He had spent some time on a rough stretch of Naylor Road, knocking on doors, talking to people on the street. And he had tried to speak to a group of hard young men who seemed to gather daily on the steps of a dilapidated apartment structure that had been visible in the Welles video. But the young men had given him blank kill-you stares and implicit threats, and he hadn’t hung with them long, despite the fact that he felt they had to know something about the girl. In the end, he had walked away from them with nothing but shame.