Washington, D.C., is laid out in quadrants with the Capitol serving as the point at which they all meet. Numbered streets progress, well, numerically, and run north to south. Lettered streets are arranged alphabetically and run east to west. At the border of each quadrant this numerical progression begins again. Thus it is nearly impossible to get lost in our nation’s capital. Unless, of course, one hails from some hotbed of logic like, say, Baltimore.
I had parked my Dodge early Monday morning on Florida Avenue, facing west. Florida Avenue bisects the city at the fall line of the Piedmont Plateau. It is no accident that well-to-do whites live on the more stable high ground of upper Northwest, while moderate to poor blacks reside in North and Southeast; rather it is a geographic divination that seems to evolve in all the major cities of the Northeast. It is also no accident, then, though it can be said to have been mildly prophetic, that Florida Avenue once went by the name of Boundary Street.
I turned the collar of my overcoat up to warm my neck against the stinging wind and walked beside a retaining wall toward Sixteenth. On the wall was spray-painted, in red, STOP THE PHONY U.S. DRUG WAR IN PANAMA. At the corner of Sixteenth and Florida, on the opposite side of the street, was the apartment building gone condo where William Henry had lived and died. I gave it an uncritical eye as I waited for the light to change. The light changed, and I crossed Sixteenth and passed beneath a concrete archway, on which was painted the slogan CHE LIVES!. When I was through the archway, I was in Meridian Hill Park.
Meridian Hill Park could have been the most beautiful park in the city, a cross between a European palazzo and a garden. Neighborhood people in the pre-air-conditioned forties used to sleep here on summer nights and enjoy starlit concerts ranging from classical to swing. The park also had a grand view of downtown, until a high rise erected a F@etart Florida and New Hampshire avenues put an end to that. Sometime in the seventies the D.C. government renamed it Malcolm X Park, though since they had no legal right to do so (the Feds owned it), the place is still known officially as Meridian Hill. Most people who follow the teachings of Malcolm X agree that this is for the better, since Meridian Hill Park is now little more than a drug market.
I walked across a balustraded promenade that spanned an empty pool situated at the foot of a graduated series of empty fountains. I passed the large statue of James Buchanan on the east side of the park and climbed a set of concrete steps that led to the mall. On the wall that bordered the steps was painted the names of the members of a local gang called the Crew-Easy E, Duck Derrick, and Million $ Eric.
All of the activity that day was on the terrace at the crest of the park. Some kids were playing an informal soccer game on the grassy mall, where several posted signs forbid such activities. Though the air was quite cold, the game’s participants wore light jackets, and a couple of them were in shirtsleeves. The curly-haired forward who was controlling the ball had his shirttail in his mouth as he dribbled upfield.
Everyone else in that part of the park was in the process of either buying or selling drugs. They were walking the perimeter of the mall-nobody was standing still-and there was the occasional brief hand contact as the deals went down. Some of the walkers were obviously cops, with their fatigue jackets and knit caps. Nobody, however, was being busted.
A Latino in a matching jean outfit with black shoes and white socks quickly glanced up as he approached in my path. He mumbled, “Sense! Sense!” as I shook my head and passed him on my way to the center of the terrace. At the front of the Joan of Arc statue, I stopped and leaned on the concrete wall that overlooked the fountains and the pool.
Some skateboarders with shaved heads were traversing the bowl of the last fountain in the grotto below. A boom box was set next to the bowl, out of which came a cut from local heroes Fugazi. A young man in a sweatsuit stood at the wall to my right, looked at me, and then yelled at the skateboarders, “I hope you break your muthafuckin’ heads.” Then he walked away.
I watched a thin figure emerge at the spot where I had entered the park minutes earlier. The man pointed a one-finger wave in my direction as he crossed the promenade. His hair had grown gray since I had seen him last, but there was still the quickness in his step. Winchester Luzon had kept our appointment.
I first met Winnie Luzon on my premier day as a stock boy at Nutty Nathan’s on Connecticut Avenue, in early summer of 1973. I had wandered into the employee lounge at the back of the store, with a dust rag in my hand and a look of stoned innocence across my face. I had just been given my first words of direction from Phil Omajian, a sweet-natured down freak who was the store manager at the time: “Never walk into the stockroom without something in your hands, and never walk out of the stockroom without something in your hands.” So I had picked up a rag and, coming down from the joint I had blown on my way to work (I hitched down Connecticut in those days, and invariably my patron driver would produce some weed-even strangers got strangers high in the early seventies), I entered the lounge with every intention of doing nearly nothing until my shift was done.
Luzon was sitting at Omajian’s desk when I walked in, licking the seal of a manila envelope. His pink tongue continued to slide along the edge of it as his eyes shifted in my direction. I was wearing a Nutty Nathan’s T-shirt that day, the one with the old logo that made Nathan look like, in the words of one outraged customer, “a goddamned mongoloid.” (I could not have known then that years later, as advertising director for the company, I would design a new caricature of Nathan that was less offensive but equally ridiculous.)
Luzon squinted through the smoke of his filterless cigarette and said, with the accent and brown hairless skin of a Filipino Charles Boyer, “You work here, kid?”
“Yes,” I said, phrasing it as a question.
Luzon tossed me the envelope, rose from the chair, and produced a five from the pocket of his brocaded slacks, placing the bill in my hand. “Run the envelope down to the mechanic at the Amoco, a big cat named Spade. Black dude,” he added redundantly. “On the way back pick me up a Mighty Moe from the Hot Shoppes. Tell Mary at the counter it’s for Winnie-she’ll toothpick an extra pickle to the top. Use the five and keep the rest for yourself. Hear?”
I nodded and did it. In fact, I delivered that package and picked up his food every day for the remainder of the summer. Though I knew there was something “wrong” in those envelopes, I was hardly concerned with questions of morality. If it was gambling chits (which I now know it to have been), well, gambling was something that was part of my life with Papou. And if it was drugs, then my opinion was equally neutral. Doing and moving pot was, after all, almost a duty for kids my age in those years. That was, of course, before cocaine crept into town and made the whole party a bloody nightmare.
Winchester Luzon was not the biggest character I met that summer (those honors go to the amazing Johnny McGinnes), and we never became too close. There was the wet-eyed Omajian, who drove me home on those sticky summer nights and waxed with a barbiturate deliberateness about the brevity of life: “Nicky, does it seem as if it’s all moving so quickly?” (For him, it was-he died in 1975 of a massive coronary. The makeup men at Gawler’s had, for once, done a fitting job when they froze a boyish smile across his ashen face.) Gary Fisher was the store’s audio man, a good salesman who was fond of gadgetry and Colombian and who played Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic and a group called If in the sound room all day long. There was my friend Andre Malone, audio enthusiast and stone-free lover, fresh then with the bottomless energy and optimism of youth. There was part-time salesman Lloyd Danker (“Void Wanker,” we called him, to his face), a zombified Jesus freak who was my tormentor. And of course there were the cashiers, Lisa and Lois, two young women whom I was to alternately feel and fuck in various locations of the store over the course of the summer. With all the giggly, pot-induced laughter, the music, the camaraderie of my sagelike new friends, and of course with all that sweet, sweet teenage lust, those dry humps against chipped wallboards in musty stockrooms, those rushed blue-balled moments at closing time, those achingly pungent smells of cheap musk and thick vaginal heat, it was natural that I couldn’t wait to wake up on those hot mornings and head downtown for my next day of work.
Nevertheless, Winnie Luzon was a character. Everything about him, from his tight black poodle curls to his point K to sied, tin-man nose, to the crease on his slacks, to the toes of his Italian shoes, was sharp. He reminded me at times, especially in profile, as we watched the Watergate hearings that summer on the fifty television sets that lined the wall, smoke dribbling from his thin mouth as he slowly shook his head, of a cardboard devil.
Luzon had been fired late in August that summer, as I prepared for my junior year at a new high school. Omajian had found some clock radios in the Dumpster out behind the store, on a day when Luzon had uncharacteristically offered to empty the trash. Omajian reluctantly let him go, then ate a soper and drank some beers at his desk and brooded about it for the rest of the evening. I had not seen Luzon since, though Johnny McGinnes continued to cop from him on a monthly basis. It was from McGinnes that I had gotten Winnie Luzon’s number.
Now Luzon was upon me, with the slight, gassy smile that twisted up on one side of his face. His hair was slick and still high and tight, though any hint of blackness was gone. I figured him at about fifty, but the seventeen years that had passed had turned him into an old man. His face was lined and swollen.
“What’s going on, Nick?” he said as I shook his callused hand.
“Nothing much, Winnie. Thanks for coming.”
“Hey, bro’, you said nine o’clock at Joanie on the Pony, I’m here.” Luzon pointed at the statue, with its broken lance. Joan of Arc’s eyes had been painted red. “Shame what they did to her, huh? They fucked up this whole park, man.”
“The dealers?”
“No, man, not the dealers. We do business here, we keep it clean. I’m talkin’ about the fuckin’ trashheads, bro’.”
“You work out of here, Winnie?”
“Yeah,” he said, then reached into his overcoat and drew a trademark white cigarette. Luzon lit it, coughed, then took a second drag. “I sell herb only, man, dime bags. The Post calls this a drug market, but nobody’s selling crack, love boat, none of that shit. It’s safe here, man, you want herb, you come up into the park, it’s like the fuckin’ Safeway, Holmes.”
“You sell information too? McGinnes said you knew most of what was going on around town.”
“Maybe for you, Nicky, I give it away. You were a good kid, man, you did me some solids.” Luzon looked me over. “You put on some weight too. Some meat on those bones.” His forehead wrinkled. “You wouldn’t be no undercover man, would you?”
“I’m in business for myself,” I said. “And anyway, I wouldn’t blindside you, Winnie.”
“Course not. Like I said, you were a good kid.”
“I was sixteen.”
“Sixteen. Shit.” Luzon looked down at the wrinkled hand that held the smoke, then brought it to his mouth, as he stared over the wall at the skateboarders in the fountain below. “What do you want to know, Nicky?”
“The DiGeordano family.”
“Yeah?”
“What do you know about them? Lately.”
Luzon shrugged. “There’s not much to know, man, not anymore.”
“They a factor?”
“What?”
“Are they important? Are they still players?”
“Small players,” Luzon said. “Very small. The old man’s always had a numbers runner’s mentality, never any big-time stakes. When the legal game happened, the business dried up for everybody but the big guys. Yours truly included.”
“I know all about the old man,” I said. “What about Joey?”
Luzon pursed his thin lips and slowly shook his head. “He’s nothing. Hangs out at May’s with all those other ring-a-ding-ding boys and dreams about the fifties. Places a few bets every so often, and sometimes he hits. Mostly track action. Long shots.”
“I heard he got burned pretty bad recently,” I said.
“On the odds?”
“Uh-uh. A woman.”
“Oh, that,” Luzon said, making a small wave with his hand. “I heard something too.”
“You don’t seem too surprised.”
“It’s not the first time a woman took DiGeordano to the cleaners. Joey D’s been chasin’ pussy all his life. Sometimes the pussy bites back.”
“They say it bit back to the tune of two hundred grand.”
Luzon chuckled. “Then that’s some serious shit, Holmes.”
“I’m looking for the woman who did it,” I said.
“I guess Joey is too.”
“That’s right.”
“You working for Joey?”
I shook my head. “The woman’s husband.”
“What’s her name?”
“April Goodrich.”
Luzon said, “I’ll ask around.”
“One more thing,” I said.
“Talk about it.”
“You remember hearing about that boy got killed across the street, earlier this year? At the Piedmont, in his apartment.”
“White boy?” Luzon said.
“Yeah.”
“Knife job, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Heard some talk about it that day. Then the next dude got offed somewhere else, and that took its place in the conversation sweepstakes. You know how it goes around here.”
“What was the word on the boy?”
“You saw the papers, just like me. Nobody knows anything, and if they did, who would they tell? I mean, what for? Just another punk-ass bitch, dead. We got our own problems, real ones, man.” Luzon blew me a kiss and said, “He a friend of yours, man?”
“That’s right,” I said as Luzon’s smile turned down. “And I’d like to know what happened.”
“They say a light-skinned dude-”
“I read that already.”
“Listen, Nicky. The only thing I know, they got the Piedmont locked down tighter than a schoolgirl, man.”
“You’ve tried to get in, then.”
Luzon looked up, sheepishly. “I’ve made some attempts, yes.”
“What’s your point?”
“That ‘light-skinned dude in a blue shirt’ routine-it’s just smoke, man. That way the public thinks it’s just a junkie kill, from the neighborhood. But no junkie got into that building unless he greased somebody’s palm or unless that boy let him up. You see what I’m sayin’?”
“Yeah. Thanks, Winnie. See what you can dig up on that too, hear?”
“Sure, Nicky.” Luzon shifted his feet and looked down at his shoes. “You positive you don’t want no smoke?”
I drew a folded twenty from my pocket and my business card and placed them both in his palm. “Keep the weed,” I said, “and call me.”
Luzon eyeballed the card, smiled, and shook his head. “Good to see you again, Nicky. Or is it Nicholas?”
“Nicky,” I said.
Luzon smiled again before he turned and walked smoothly back along the walkway that encircled the grassy mall. I eyed him until he became too small to watch, shoulders up with a white curl of smoke that seemed to circle around his head. If there is one thing I cannot reconcile, one inevitable, it is the slow, sad progression of decay.
William Henry’s building stood at the intersection of Sixteenth and Florida and was on the way to my car. I stepped behind the building and had a cigarette while I watched a delivery being made to the truck bay in the alley. An unsmiling man in a blue maintenance uniform checked the delivery in and then pulled the doors closed from the inside when the process was done. There were no outside handles on those stee Kon n and tl doors and only one similarly fashioned door on the left side of the building. I crushed the butt under my shoe and walked around to the front.
The Piedmont was gray stone and six stories tall, with swirled detail work above each window. Black wrought-iron balconies had been added to the apartments at the time of their condo conversion, adding to the price tag but adding little in the way of practical use, since the balconies appeared to be only three feet deep. A couple of bicycles were chained to the railings, a few of which were strung with Christmas lights. I moved along the front walk to an open heavy glass door. Inside I encountered a locked set of similar doors and a black telephone on the gray wall. Next to the telephone was a slot for a magnetic card that I presumed would allow tenants to gain entrance. The telephone had no dial or numbers. I picked it up and heard a ring on the other end.
“Yes,” said a large voice.
“Detective Stefanos,” I said. “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions.”
“Metropolitan Police?”
“That’s right,” I lied.
The phone clicked dead, and then a man as large as his voice walked across the marble lobby to the glass doors. This one was a hard two-fifty if he was a pound. He stopped on the other side of the door, folded his thick arms, and looked down into my eyes. The aluminum tag clipped to his shirt pocket read RUDOLPH. On the arm of his shirt, above the bicep, was sewn a red patch with the coat-of-arms logo of the Four-S Security Systems company.
Rudolph raised his eyebrows as I put my business card against the glass and quickly pulled it back. He pointed to the badge on his chest and then made a come-on gesture with his fingers. I put the card back up on the glass along with a ten spot that I produced from my slacks. Rudolph stared at me until I squeezed out another ten and put it behind the first one. He kept staring while he pointed once again to his badge and then at me. When I didn’t produce one he walked away. He was still walking as I tapped my fingers on the glass.
Out on the street I buttoned up my black overcoat and found a pay phone on the corner nearest my car. I dropped a quarter getting the number of Four-S, then another dialing that number. After a few minutes I was directed into the office of personnel.
“How may I help you?” said an aging female voice.
“Jim Piedmont,” I said, as I looked at William Henry’s building across the way. “Bartell Investigative.”
“Yes, Jim, what can I do for you?”
“I’m doing an employment check on a James Thomas, just on the essentials. Do you mind?”
“I’ll help where I can,” she said coolly.
“I just need to verify his current address. I have him at Fourteen-twelve P Street, in Northwest. Is that correct?”
“Hold on and I’ll check,” she said. I listened to the tapping of a computer keyboard while I won Kd w"27dered if there was any such address at Fourteenth and P. The woman got back on the line.
“I have him at Thirteen-forty-three Hamlin Street in Northeast.”
“Over in Brookland area, right?”
“That I don’t know.”
“Can you tell me, Miss-?”
“Sheridan.”
“Miss Sheridan, can you tell me the circumstances of Mr. Thomas’s severance with the company?”
“No,” Miss Sheridan said, “I can’t.”
“I understand,” I said. “One more thing. I recently met one of your employees, a big fellow by the name of Rudolph.”
“Yes?”
“I just wanted to tell you-he’s doing one hell of a job.”
“T hank you,” she said.
“Thank you, ” I said, and hung up the phone.
I ripped a ticket off the Dart’s windshield and threw it in the glovebox with all the others. Then I swung a U on Florida and headed across town to the Brookland section of Northeast.