Inez checked her watch. She’d done her job and now she needed to get back. She didn’t like to be away from her business, not even for a few minutes. No telling the customers she’d lost, doing this thing right here. She’d head back to the salon now. Phone Horace when she got there, tell him what he wanted to know.
chapter 26
QUINN put time in out front of Mart Liquors, talking to some of the men and women who were entering and leaving the shop. He spoke to the regulars who hung outside the place as well. Quinn asked them about Mario Durham and a guy named Donut. He showed them the flyer of the missing teenager, Linda Welles. Some answered politely and some were bordering on hostile, and a few didn’t bother to respond to his questions at all. He got nothing from any of them. They had made him straight off as some kind of cop.
He tried the Metro station. He tried the phone banks at the gas stations and accompanying convenience marts. He received the same nonresponse.
Quinn drove the neighborhoods next. He had no plan. He cruised Stanton Road, passing liquor stores and squat redbrick structures surrounded by black iron fences. He went down Southern Avenue, then got on Naylor Road. On Naylor were more liquor stores, Laundromats, and other service-oriented businesses. Around 30th Street, on a long hill, were the Naylor Gardens apartments, a complex as well tended and green as a college campus. Farther along, up past Naylor Plaza, the apartments abruptly went from clean and pampered to ghetto grim. And farther still were a couple of stand-alone units like those Quinn had visited several times before.
He slowed his Chevelle and idled it on the street. This was the complex that Linda Welles’s brothers had recognized in the sex video. The party had been held in one of these units. It was where she had last been seen.
Quinn looked up a rise of dirt and weeds to a three-story bunker of brick. On the stoop sat several young men wearing wife-beaters and low-hung jeans revealing the elastic bands of their boxers, skullies and napkin bandannas. They were passing around a bottle in a brown bag. They looked down at the street, where Quinn’s engine rumbled. One of them, a heavyset young man with blown-out hair, looked directly at Quinn and smiled.
Quinn pulled off from the curb. He had tried to interview that group earlier, remembered the smiler and his hair. He had had the sense then that they knew something about the fate of Linda Welles, but he hadn’t pushed it. He hadn’t done his job. He remembered feeling weak and punked as he’d driven away from them the last time. And he felt that way now.
Quinn drove over to the area of Valley Green. He pulled the Chevelle up along some street-side kids on their bikes. He asked about Mario Durham and “a dude named Donut.” He got some shrugs and smart remarks, and watched impotently as the kids rode away, doing wheelies, laughing, cutting on one another and the white man in the old car.
He parked at a small market and went inside. He questioned the woman behind the counter and got a shrug. He bought a pack of sugarless gum and thanked her for her time. Then he walked next door, into a Chinese carryout, where a thin man with fat freckles across the bridge of his wide nose stood in a small lobby in front of a Plexiglas wall with a lazy Susan in it. A Chinese woman stood behind the Plexiglas; her smile was welcoming, but her eyes were not. She looked friendly and frightened, both at once. Quinn got the woman’s attention and talked into a slotted opening above the lazy Susan.
“I’m looking for a guy named Mario Durham,” said Quinn.
“I don’t know.”
“How about a man they call Donut?”
“You want food?”
Quinn looked down at the linoleum floor and shook his head.
“I know Donut,” said the man with the freckles. “Boy owes me ten dollas.”
Quinn turned. “You know where he lives?”
“The building he lives in ain’t but two blocks from here. I don’t know the apartment number where he stays at, though.”
“The building’s good enough. He owes you ten?”
“Boy took me for a Hamilton, like, a year ago. He thinks I forgot. But I’m gonna get it someday.”
“You’ll get that ten sooner than someday,” said Quinn, “you give me the address.”
“Make it twenty,” said the man, “and I’ll give it to you now.”
HOMICIDE Detective Nathan Grady got a break soon after meeting with Strange and Quinn. A young man named Richard Swales, picked up on an intent-to-distribute beef, had offered his help, in exchange for some “consideration,” in locating Mario Durham. He told the arresting officer that he knew from talk on the street that Durham was wanted in a murder. From the substation, where they were keeping Swales in a holding cell, Grady was called and told of the lead. Grady said he’d be right in.