D.C. Noir

by George Pelecanos

  “You can’t tell. You can’t.”

  “I don’t want to, but—how can I give up my children?” Lynette understood, as only another mother could. The truth would destroy her; the secret would tear apart Sally’s life. And even if Peter agreed not to tell for now, the danger was still there.

  “Would he really do this?”

  “He would. Peter—he’s not the nice man everyone thinks he is. Why do you think we got divorced? And the thing is, if he gets the kids—well, it was one thing for him to do the things he did to me. But if he ever treated Molly or Sam that way…”

  “What way?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. But if it should happen—I’d have to kill him.”

  “The pervert.” Lynette was at once repelled and fascinated. The dark side of Sally’s life was proving as seductive as Sally’s quiet companionship.

  “I know. If he had done what he did to a stranger, he’d be in prison for life. But in a marriage, such things are legal. I’m stuck, Lynette. I won’t ruin your life for anything. You told me from the first that this had to be a secret. I just hope Peter will be satisfied with destroying me.”

  “There has to be a way…”

  “There isn’t. Not as long as Peter is a free man.”

  “Not as long as he’s alive.”

  “You can’t mean—”

  Lynette put a finger to Sally’s lips. These had been the hardest moments to fake, the face-to-face encounters. Kissing was the worst. But it was essential not to flinch, not to let her distaste show. She was so close to getting what she wanted.

  “Trust me,” Lynette said.

  Sally wanted to. But she had to be sure of one thing. “Don’t try to hire someone. It seems like every time someone like us tries to find someone, it’s always an undercover cop. Remember Ruth Ann Aron.” A politician from the Maryland suburbs, Aron had, in fact, tried to hire a state trooper to off her husband. But he had forgiven her, even testified on her behalf during the trial.

  “Trust me,” Lynette repeated.

  “I do, sweetheart. I absolutely do.”

  Dr. Peter Holt was hit by a Jeep Cherokee, an Eddie Bauer limited edition, as he crossed Connecticut Avenue on his way to the Thai restaurant where he ate lobster pad thai every Thursday evening. The remorseful driver told police that her children had been bickering in the backseat over what to watch on the DVD player and she had turned her head, just for a moment, to scold them. Still distracted by the children’s fight when she turned around, she had seen Holt and tried to stop, but hit the accelerator instead. Then, as her children screamed for real, she had driven another 100 yards in panic and hysteria. If the dermatologist wasn’t killed on impact, he was definitely dead when the SUV finally stopped. But the only substance in the driver’s blood was caffeine, and while it was a tragic, regrettable accident, it was clearly an accident. Really, investigators told Holt’s stunned survivors, his ex-wife and two children, it was surprising that such things didn’t happen more often, given the congestion in D.C., the unwieldy SUVs, the mothers’ frayed nerves, the nature of dusk with its tricky gray-green light. It was a macabre coincidence, their children being classmates and all, the parents being superficial friends. But this part of D.C. was like a village unto itself, and the accident had happened only a mile from the Dutton School. In fact, Peter Holt had just left the same soccer practice that the driver was coming from. He had been seen talking to his ex-wife, with whom he was still quite friendly, asking her if she and the children wanted to meet him for dinner at his favorite restaurant.

  At Peter’s memorial service, Lynette Mason sought a private moment with Sally Holt, and those who watched from a distance marveled at the bereaved woman’s composure and poise, the way she comforted her ex-husband’s killer. No one was close enough to hear what they said.

  “I’m sorry,” Lynette said. “It didn’t occur to me that after—well, I guess we can’t see each other anymore.”

  “It didn’t occur to me, either,” Sally lied. “You’ve sacrificed so much for me. For Molly and Sam, really. I’m in your debt, forever.”

  And she patted Lynette gently on the arm, which marked the last time the two ever touched. Sometimes, when Alan was working late, Lynette would call, a little high and a lot tearful, and Sally would remind her that they shouldn’t tie up the phone too long, lest the records of these conversations come back to haunt them or the children overhear anything. They had done what mothers should do. They had put their children first.

  Peter’s estate went to Molly and Sam—but in trust to Sally, of course. She determined that it would be in the children’s best interest to pay off the balloon mortgage in cash, and Peter’s brother, the executor, agreed. Peter would have wanted the children to have the safety and sanctity of home, given the emotional trauma they had endured. He wouldn’t want them forced out in the housing market, cruel and unforgiving as it was.

  No longer needy, armored with a widow’s prerogatives, Sally found herself invited to parties again, where solicitous friends attempted to fix her up with the rare single men in their circles. Now that she didn’t care about men, they flocked around her and Sally did what she had always done. She listened and she laughed, she laughed and she listened, but she never really heard anything—unless the subject was money. Then she paid close attention, even writing down the advice she was given. The stock market was so turgid, everyone complained. The smart money was in real estate.

  Sally nodded.

  PART III

  Cops & Robbers

  COLD AS ICE

  BY QUINTIN PETERSON

  Congress Heights, S.E./S.W.

  Seventy-two-year-old Ida Logan was sitting in her rocker on her front porch when the gunman opened fire. She never knew what hit her. Neither did her five-year-old great granddaughter Aaliyah Gamble, who was sitting nearby at her red, blue, and yellow plastic Playskool desk, playing with Legos.

  In but a few seconds, more than a half dozen hollow-point 9mm rounds ripped through each of them, their bodies performing the death dance that only the gunfire of automatic weapons can orchestrate, jerking to the staccato of the rat-tat-tat-ta of the machine gun, as though keeping time to the pulsating rhythm of a boogie rap tune.

  To eyewitness Rodney Grimes, the carnage seemed to transpire in slow motion; amid the crimson mist of their splattering blood, the bullets appeared to strike the frail old woman and the fragile little girl forever.

  The dreadful scene was punctuated, and made that much more grotesque, by Aaliyah’s head exploding, bursting like a ripe melon dropped from a high place. The pink halo of her vaporized brain was visible only for an instant, yet the obscene corona lingered around what little remained of the back of her neatly braided head; a ghastly image frozen in time…emblazoned upon his troubled mind.

  * * *

  Rodney Grimes didn’t think twice about cooperating with the police. His late father had taught him that “evil flourish when good men do nothing.”

  Rodney Grimes was a good man, wasn’t he? He liked to think so. And even if he had not truly been good up to that point, couldn’t he be? Could he not rise to the occasion? Evil had been done and he was compelled to do his part to ensure that the gunman did not go unpunished. It was his duty. Voluntarily, he told the police who arrived first at the scene of the crime that he had witnessed the murders and provided them with a detailed description of the suspect, making sure to emphasize that the gunman had long dreadlocks and was very dark-skinned with unsettling bluish-gray eyes; and described the getaway car, a black late-model Ford Crown Victoria, like a cop car. And later that day, he assisted Detective John Mayfield, the lead on the case, by accompanying him to the Violent Crimes Branch headquarters and picking out a photo of a suspect from an array of nine mugshots. He’d also agreed to participate in the viewing of a lineup. “Sure, no problem,” he’d told the detective. “Just let me know.”

  However, the day after the double shooting, the courage of his conviction diminishe
d considerably when he looked up from the Spider-Man comic he was leafing through at the newsstand inside of Iverson Mall and noticed the killer with a lion’s mane of long dreadlocks standing next to him, towering above him.

  The shooter held the latest issue of Superman, flipping its pages, but not looking at the comic book. Instead, his cold, disconcerting bluish-gray eyes were fixed on him.

  Rodney hoped it was just his imagination at the crime scene; that the killer had simply looked in his general direction, not directly at him, directly into his face. But the killer’s presence here before him dashed that hope. The killer had seen him…and evidently knew who he was.

  They stood there silent for a moment, an outlandish odd couple, Rodney Grimes’s clean-cut, black yuppie appearance in direct contrast to that of the killer, who looked like a hip-hop Rastafarian.

  “Hey,” said the killer, finally breaking the ice, “you look familiar.” He paused, waited for a response. When Grimes did not reply, he continued. “Do I look familiar to you?”

  Grimes remained silent.

  “No?” the killer said. “I musta made a mistake.” The killer laughed. “I know what it is! Ever see that Eddie Murphy movie…um…Harlem Nights, yeah. Redd Foxx had on big, thick Coke-bottle glasses like yours, made his eyes look all big and shit, like he was wearin’ magnifyin’ glasses. Yeah, that’s it, you probably just reminded me of him.”

  Grimes remained silent.

  “Say,” the killer continued, “just how good can you see with eyes that bad? I’ll bet you be makin’ mistakes all the time, don’t you? Wavin’ at people across the street, then be like, ‘Oh, shit, that ain’t whoever.’ Yeah, must be hard recognizin’ people with eyes as bad as you got.”

  Grimes remained silent.

  “You kinda old to be readin’ comic books, ain’t you?” the killer asked. “What, you twenty-one, twenty-two? Sheeit, I gave up readin’ them joints when I was a little kid.” He snickered.

  Grimes remained silent. The killer turned his attention to the comic book.

  “You know,” the killer mused, “funny thing about heroes, ’specially comic book superheroes, none of ’em wear glasses. Take Superman here. His disguise, his costum, is Clark Kent, all mild-mannered and shit, wearin’ eyeglasses, ’cause Superman, he know that people who wear eyeglasses all weak and geeky and shit, so nobody will mistake him for a hero. So he can have some peace, un’erstand? ’Cause otherwise, people would bug his ass to death! ‘Superman, get my cat out the tree.’ ‘Superman, tow my car to the shop.’ Yeah, it just be Superman do this and Superman do that, all the goddamn time!”

  The killer stared directly into Grimes’s magnified eyes and continued: “But the point I was tryin’ to make is, heroes don’t wear them shits. The eyes is the windows to the soul: weak eyes, weak soul. People who wear ’em is just plain weak. It’s a fact. But when it’s time to go to work, Superman snatch off them hornrims and that Brooks Brothers and show off his Krypton clothes. ‘This is a job for Superman!’ Right? Voice get deep and everything.” The killer paused for a moment to let his point sink in, and then made his message plain. “Thinking your weak ass can take down a super villain could get you and other people you care about in some serious trouble and cause you some real heartache. Don’t make no mistake, Rodney, don’t try to be no hero. Heroes don’t wear glasses.”

  Certain his point had been made, the killer put the comic book back on the rack, glared at Rodney Grimes a few long moments for good measure, and then turned and leisurely walked away.

  Finally, after having been paralyzed like a deer caught in the headlights of a semi, Grimes returned the Spider-Man to the rack and, on unsteady legs, exited the newsstand.

  He fretted and racked his brain, trying to fathom, How did the killer find out who I am? How did he find me?

  The thought occurred to him that the killer might still be around, lying in wait to…to do what? Knife him and leave him bleeding on the floor? Gun him down in the parking lot? He looked around, trying to make sure he was not in immediate danger, but he was sure that his nervousness betrayed him.

  Warily, his mind reeling, he walked to the escalator leading to the second level of the mall, wondering if being a good man was worth it.

  When he got to his car in the front parking lot of Iverson Mall, he found a folded piece of paper under the left windshield wiper of Sweet Georgia Brown, his mint-condition 1970 metal-flake candy-apple-red, black-ragtop-with-black-leather interior Volkswagen Karman Ghia Coupe, which he had painstakingly refurbished personally over the last two years. Her personalized D.C. license tags read, GEORGIA

  What with him attending Howard U on a full scholarship as a civil engineering major and only working part-time at various jobs—busboy, waiter, photo technician at Moto-Foto—restoring her had by no means been an easy task, but it had been worth it. Often women mistook it for a Porsche. Incredible! Yeah, Sweet Georgia Brown drew women’s attention that men like him could not otherwise draw, and that was priceless.

  Rodney Grimes’s anxiety heightened when he opened the note and read it. The message, which was handwritten in a childlike scrawl, said: Heros don’t wear glasses.

  Heros—the ignorant bastard couldn’t even spell heroes Under different circumstances, Rodney would have found this amusing, but nothing was funny about the situation. This was the killer’s subtle way of telling him that he knew not only who he was, but what car he drove. It was a good bet that he knew where he lived, too.

  Grimes refolded the note and put it in his shirt pocket. He walked around the car, giving it a once-over to determine if any damage had been done. Satisfied that his sweetheart was still in great condition, he disarmed the alarm system and unlocked her, climbed in, started her up, and headed off.

  The drive home to his tenth-floor apartment at the Wingate House East apartment complex on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in far Southwest Washington was no joy-ride. Rodney couldn’t shake the fear and a sense of impending doom he had not felt in years, not since he was in the seventh grade at Hart Junior High School.

  When he’d attended Hart, he had been beaten and robbed on a daily basis, by people like the killer, until he fought back one day and maced a thug in the face when he’d attempted to rob him. That had been his last day, since to remain would have meant certain death. His mother had used her cunning by giving her sister’s apartment in a housing project on M Street, S.W. as his home address so that he could attend a school in another part of town, Jefferson Junior High. It had been smooth sailing from there and he had stopped living in fear. Until now.

  But what he had experienced at Hart was nothing compared to the terror the killer instilled in him now. The killer had threatened not only him, but also “other people” Rodney cared about, and his concern for the safety of his friends and family was what really terrified him. His actions could cause them harm…but could he live with the consequences of inaction, of not cooperating with the authorities and letting the killer go unpunished? In fact, what would stop the killer from doing him and those he cared about harm once the danger of arrest and prosecution had passed? If something bad happened to April Knight, he’d never forgive himself.

  As he parked his sweetie in the front parking lot of Wingate House East, Rodney Grimes could not shake the belief that he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.

  Detective John Mayfield had seen better days, both careerwise and in his private life. His early years as a homicide detective had been good days. His closure rate was high, the envy of his peers, in fact. His late wife had always been in his corner, even though most homicide detectives’ marriages end in divorce. Understandable. Police work, with its constant shift changes, makes cultivating any meaningful relationship difficult, but this type of assignment, which requires a round-the-clock commitment, makes it virtually impossible. Few people can accept being married to a ghost. But his dear Katherine had put up with it and hung in there. She had deserved better than dying by the hands of a lowlife during a str
eet robbery gone bad. The fact that her murder remained unsolved was a festering wound. To him, every murderer he brought to justice was Katherine’s killer, but the wound would never heal, he knew.

  His closure rate seemed to diminish in direct proportion to his failing health, not because he lacked the stamina he once had as some might argue, though he was painfully aware that he did indeed lack the vigor of his youth, but because of obstacles he now had to hurdle to bring the guilty to justice. Nowadays, witnesses were hard to come by. A thug strapped with a MAC-11 can open fire on a crowded street or sporting event or concert hall, and no one sees a thing. If the perpetrators fail to intimidate witnesses, then murder definitely does the trick.

  Cases that shocked and outraged the public humiliated the mayor and his “law and order” administration, and the pressure to quickly rectify each situation was passed on to the chief of police. Shit rolls down hill, and this time around Mayfield was at the bottom of the heap. With a caseload of thirty-seven murders for the year, more than half of them unsolved, John Mayfield was under a lot of pressure. As his boss Captain Lynch had put it, “Work better and faster if you want to keep your job!”

  Yeah, the good old days of being a superstar homicide detective were definitely long gone as far as Detective Mayfield was concerned. But today would be like the good ol’ days, he mused. Today, he had a rock solid case against the prolific and ever elusive “Teflon Thug,” Isaiah “Ice” Hamilton, the suspect in the double homicide on Chesapeake Street, S.E., not only with strong physical evidence, but with three eyewitnesses: urban pioneer Terri Daulby; pillar of the community Ruthann Sommers; and Whiz Kid Rodney Grimes, some kind of nerdy genius who had risen above the social forces that seemed to conspire to keep black men down by turning them into Ice Hamiltons to become well-educated and gainfully employed. Each of them, separately, had picked Ice out a nine-mugshot black-and-white photo array—black-and-white instead of color so that Hamilton’s cold-as-ice, steely bluish-gray eyes wouldn’t set him apart from the mugshots of thugs of similar age, facial structure, and dark complexion.