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said Vaughn. “Just Red?”
    “I heard him called Red Fury, too. I don’t know why.”
    “No Christian name. No last name, either.”
    “Red’s all I know,” said Martina, telling Vaughn a prudent lie. Wasn’t any kind of accident that Martina Lewis was a survivor.
    Out on U Street, Vaughn lit a cigarette. Red was a fairly common street name for light-skinned, light-haired black dudes, but thinking hard on it, no specific Reds came to mind. Still, it was a start.
    Vaughn would go to the station and search through the cards, where the rap sheet descriptions included known a.k.a.’s. But not just yet. He was energized.
    LINDA ALLEN lived in an apartment in the Woodnor, on 16th, near the bridge end-capped with the statues of lions. She was a secretary at the Arnold and Porter law firm on the 1200 block of 19th, and Vaughn had been calling on her here for almost fifteen years. Linda was his special friend.
    She greeted him at the door in a spring-blue dress that showed off her upper curves and a pair of Andrew Geller heels that did justice to her calves. A leggy brunette on thedownward slope of her forties, she was tall and healthy, with pleasingly muscled thighs and the big firm rack of a straight-off-the-farm centerfold. Linda had never married or given birth, which no doubt explained her still-youthful figure. Twenty-year-old studs did double takes when she walked down the street.
    “How’s it goin, doll?” said Vaughn.
    “Better now,” said Linda, and she nudged the door closed with her foot and came into his arms. They kissed passionately and Vaughn felt his pants get tight.
    “Glad to see me?” His sharp white teeth gleamed in the lamplight of the living room.
    “I need a shower, handsome. Fix us some drinks.”
    “Keep your shoes on,” said Vaughn.
    Vaughn put a Chris Connor record on Linda’s console stereo, built a couple of Beam rocks from her bar cart, and took the cocktails into her bedroom. The water was running behind her bathroom door.
    He took off his jacket, tie, pants, socks, and shoes, and sat on the edge of the bed, feeling himself unwind with each sip of bourbon. A little while later, Linda came naked and scented into the room, the high-heeled Gellers refitted on her feet. She picked up her drink off the nightstand, took a long pull of it, and stood there proudly, in profile, letting him look at her because she knew he liked to. Soon he had her split atop the sheets, the missionary man, in control, giving it to her without the word
lovemaking
entering either of their minds, his thick, helmeted cock plunging in and out of her warm, wet box, a pure physical act, which was what both of them were there for. Afterward, smoking cigarettesand finishing their drinks with the sex smell lingering in the room, laughing easily, talking softly, never about anything serious or with the pretense of plans, because Vaughn loved his wife, and Linda understood that this was something else.
    Linda’s fingers traced the fading shoulder tattoo Vaughn had gotten one drunken night in the Pacific, twenty-seven years ago. “Olga,” written across a flowing banner, scripted on a deep-red heart.
    “What’re you working on these days, Frank?”
    Vaughn said, “A case.”

 
    C OCO WATKINS’S place of business was located on 14th, Northwest, between R and S, on the second floor of an old row house. On the ground floor was a neighborhood market, once a DGS store owned and operated by a Jew, now run by an ambitious Puerto Rican. Fourteenth, from U Street north to Park Road, had gone up in flames the night of Dr. King’s assassination, and though the major fires had not burned this far south, the event had made the once-grand street a near commercial dead zone. But not every enterprise had been negatively affected. There was still a steady nightly stream of customers, married suburbanites and white teenage boys looking to lose their virginity, who kept one part of the local economy alive.
    Coco was a madam,