Any other time she’d have welcomed the praise. Now it just felt like too big a weight to carry. “Then I need some help.”
“Sure you do. I’ll send you Alice Long. I don’t know why I don’t let you just keep her, as much time as she spends in your outfit. And I’m sure you and Eddie Davis can work something out for getting somebody assigned to you from over there, somebody who knows the terrain. Give him a couple of days to get settled. I’ll tell him to expect to hear from.” He looked at his watch, then went back to his desk. “I gotta go. Tonight’s my anniversary. I’ve been married twenty-five years and I’ve been warned that this is one night I’d better not be late getting home.”
Gianna stood up. “Congratulations, Chief, to you and Beth.”
He nodded, then came from behind the desk and stood beside her. “Do me favor, Maglione. You go home, too. Directly home. Don’t argue with me and don’t disobey me. I know what time you left Lander Street on Friday night and I know what time you left Harley Street on Saturday night and I know what time you left here on Sunday night and I know what time you got here this morning. Go home, Maglione. I need you at full speed when the feces hit the rotating mechanism, and trust me, that’s going to be sooner rather than later.”
“You think that’s going to happen?”
“I know it is. Now go home.”
“Yes, Sir.” She threw him a salute and got as far as the door before his attention-getting throat clearing stopped her.
“How’s Mimi these days?” he asked, and laughed at the expression on her face, waving her on and out. He was still chuckling to himself when he picked up his private line phone and dialed. “How’s my favorite reporter?” he asked.
Mimi got her tape recorder out of her desk drawer and attached the telephone recording device to it. The chief of police didn’t just call to chat with her, or with anybody for that matter. He wasn’t a chatty kind of guy. “I’ve been out of town for three weeks, so whatever it is, I didn’t do it.”
“You might want to ask Maglione how it is that Eddie Davis replaced Frank O’Connell as Mid-Town District Commander effective immediately, but you might want to wait a day or so before you ask her.”
“Shouldn’t I ask you that?” she asked, switching on the tape recorder. “You certainly should, but not until after you’ve asked Maglione,” he said, and hung up on her. The only thing on her recorder was buzz and hiss.
Mimi switched the thing off and sat back in her chair, feet up on the desk, hands behind her head, and pondered how to play this one. She’d already put in a call to O’Connell requesting an interview about the murder on Lander Street and the rape on Harley Street but she hadn’t known that Gianna knew about Joyce Brown’s rape. Of course, they hadn’t done much talking the previous night...but at least now she knew why she hadn’t gotten a call back from O’Connell. And she’d much rather talk to Inspector Eddie Davis any way, though he wouldn’t tell her anything unless ordered to. She sat up straight. Would the chief be in that generous a mood?
The phone rang. Mimi snatched it up and switched on the tape recorder. “Patterson,” she said, waiting for the chief to add some more details.
“I want to soak in the hot tub for an hour listening to Miles Davis and Carmen McRae, then eat sushi and tempura and drink Chinese beer, and be asleep by nine o’clock,” Gianna said.
The Chief had called this one just right, Mimi thought. She said to Gianna, “You go put yourself in the hot tub and I’ll go pick up the sushi and beer. Just don’t fall asleep in the thing and drown before I get there.”
Mimi disconnected the recording device from the phone and cleaned off her desk. Then she called Carolyn Warshawski and told her to expect front page stories for both Saturday and Sunday. She was packing her rucksack when the phone rang again. This time it was Jose Cruz. Joyce Brown would see her tonight, after Ruby left for work, but he, Jose, would have to be present, at Joyce’s request. Mimi hesitated, then accepted the offer and the terms. She needed to talk to Joyce Brown but she wished it didn’t have to tonight because she didn’t want to talk to Gianna about all this tonight. Not after she just owned up to being completely exhausted.
“Too bad you won’t get to meet Ruby,” Gianna said, and added, “I’ll be dead to the world when you get in. Just letting you know ahead of time.” She dipped another salmon skin make into the wasabi and soy sauce mixture and popped it into her mouth, then squeezed her eyes shut when the fiery condiment hit the roof of her mouth and penetrated her nasal cavities. “That is so good. Sure you won’t have one?” Her eyes were watering and she was breathing through her mouth.
Mimi, drinking seltzer water instead of beer because of her meeting with Jose Cruz and Joyce Brown, shook her head. “Thanks, anyway, but I’ve got to go.” She looked at her watch. “The way Jose described Miss Brown, I’m surprised she’s still alive. I don’t want her to die before I get there.”
Gianna stopped chewing. “I thought she should’ve been in the hospital. The poor woman was—” She shook her head, unable to produce the words. “No matter how many times I see it, I’m still rendered speechless by that kind of brutality, and by the bravery of some people to withstand it.”
“Gianna, are these two cases connected in any way?”
She shook her head. “We don’t have any reason to think so at this point.”
“Thank you,” Mimi said, her gratitude palpable. This was new territory for them, such open discussion of their work in that place where it had collided in the past, with disastrous results. “That helps, but it doesn’t totally explain why, or exactly how, Frank O’Connell is out on his ass and buried so deep inside the bureaucracy the sun won’t shine on him for a light year, though it couldn’t happen to a more deserving asshole.”
Gianna laughed out loud. “I love that analogy,” she said, lifting another piece of sushi with her chopsticks. “Be sure to share that one with His Excellency. He’ll appreciate it.” She wanted so much to tell Mimi how he’d put O’Connell on his knees with the chop to the gut but knew that she could not. Could never.
Mimi kissed her quickly and hurried out the door, equal parts amazed at how relaxed Gianna was with their open discussion, and grateful for it. Since neither of them was a candidate for a career change, this definitely was the least stressful approach. Of course, it probably wouldn’t stay that way for long. Similarities notwithstanding, they did totally different jobs, and the point of divergence often was the point of contention and conflict. Gianna’s job was to apprehend a killer and a rapist. Mimi’s job was to find out why a police captain had allowed a murder and a rape—because that’s in effect what he had done by not reporting potential hate crimes to the Hate Crimes Unit.
While the owners of The Snatch had come to appreciate if not exactly welcome the presence and attention of the Hate Crimes Unit, the owner of the Pink Panther harbored no such warm feelings. In fact, Raymond Washington said, the only people he hated worse than D.C. cops were FBI and IRS agents, and he suggested that if Officers Linda Lopez and Bobby Gilliam knew what was good for them they’d get their asses out of his bar double time. He had, he said, too much work to do before opening to waste time talking to them.
Bobby, an intense, sometimes nervous, but usually mild-mannered man, tried reasoning with Washington, appealing to his sense of decency, and when that didn’t work, to his common sense: It couldn’t help his business if it became known that patrons were subject to assault on a fairly regular basis, for Hate Crimes had learned, from the newly installed and very cooperative Mid-Town commander Eddie Davis, that Joyce Brown was just the latest Pink Panther patron to be assaulted within a block of the place. The first and so far only woman—the bar catered primarily to gay men—but the attack on her was much more violent than on the four men before her. Two of them had been robbed, one chased three blocks to his car in a hail of verbal abuse, the fourth beaten and kicked and saved from a worse fate by passers-by who heard his screams and either were brave enough or foolhardy enough to
intervene.
“You won’t have to worry about being ready for your customers if you don’t have any customers,” Bobby said to the bar owner in what he thought was a very reasonable tone, “and you won’t have any customers if they come to think that having a drink in your bar means getting their asses kicked.”
“If I want your advice, asshole, I’ll ask for it,” was Washington’s response. “I don’t care what happens outside. It’s none of my business what happens outside.”
Bobby remembered that Dee Phillips had had that same attitude until they showed her the error of ways, but what he wanted to show this Washington character was a close-up of his fist. The two men were about the same height but Bobby clearly was stronger of the two. He could knock Washington down with a single shot, which he so very much wanted to do.
Linda Lopez, quiet and bookish, tried a different approach. After all, Dee Phillips had come to have a change of heart and mind. Ray Washington would, too. One way or another. “I need to see your business license, your occupancy permit, your ABC permit, your food service permit—”
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” If they were in were a cartoon instead of a mid-town D.C. dive, steam would be puffing from Ray Washington’s ears. “You can’t come in here ordering me around, intimidating me. No crime has occurred here and nobody here has been accused of a crime.”
“Yet.”
The way Linda said the word, it was a threat, and that’s how Ray Washington took it. Linda was in the man’s space, crowding him. Bobby circled around behind, still wanting to hit him, waiting for a reason to take a shot. The man was caught between those two places and it was not comfortable for him, but he was no limp-wristed sissy, liable to come apart at the seams at the slightest hint of discomfort. Besides which he could serve up attitude with the best of them. “I don’t know what you think you mean by that and I don’t really care. I haven’t done anything illegal.”
“What do you call setting a woman up to be raped?” Linda demanded.
“What the fuck are you talking about, setting up a woman to be raped? Are you fuckin’ crazy? I didn’t...you mean that woman from Saturday night? I never even knew anything happened to her until you people called and said you were coming here to talk to me.”
“Miss Brown thinks maybe she remembers you talking to the men who followed her out of here and raped her. Do you remember something like that, Mr. Washington? Talking to three men at this end of the bar while Miss Brown sat down there drinking her CC on the rocks?”
Ray Washington looked from one end of the bar to the other as if it were foreign territory. Unlike the long, curving, polished, shimmering bar at The Snatch, this one was short and ugly, scarred and stained. In fact, the whole place was ugly, scarred and stained, and it stank like old beer and whiskey and cigarette smoke and bodies. The mirror behind the bar was smudged, the neon beer lights out of date. “You know this is a gay bar, right? So what kind of sissies—drunk ones at that—you think followed a woman into an alley and raped her? Y’all ain’t makin’ no sense at all.” Washington was adamant but he also was out of steam. “Why y’all hassling me like this?” He almost whined the question.
“Because we don’t like your attitude, Mr. Washington,” Bobby said. “We came here asking for your help and what we got was an earful of how much you hate D.C. cops. How ‘bout I tell you how I feel about you? How ‘bout I show you?” Bobby took a step toward Washington and he backed up.
“No cause for you to be treating me like this, Man.”
“I think I’ve got plenty of cause, but I’m a reasonable guy. So, how about we take it from the top?”
Washington looked at his watch, looked around his establishment, gave a heavy, resigned sigh, then pulled out a chair at the nearest table and sat down. Bobby and Linda looked around, too, both of them comparing it to the inside of The Snatch. This room was about one-fourth of size. There were three booths along the back wall with a tiny square of a dance floor fronting them, and a dank hallway leading to bathrooms at the rear. Tables and chairs filled the rest of the room—square tables with four chairs, round tables with two chairs, all on top of a sticky, grimy carpet the color of which was not discernable. Washington sat at one of the round tables. The two cops checked out the chairs at the adjacent table, took in the ripped, sticky-looking faux leather seat bottoms, and opted to stand.
“We’re listening,” Linda said as Bobby took out his notebook.
“You don’t want to be bothering the people who come in here, the regulars,” Washington said.
“You don’t get to tell us what to do, sir,” Linda said.
“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t. Lot of those guys, they’re on the DL, but that don’t make them rapists, you understand what I’m telling you?”
“They’re on the what?” Linda snapped. She was out of patience with Ray Washington and didn’t mind letting him know it.
“DL means Down Low,” Bobby said. “It’s when dudes won’t own up to being gay. Kinda like being in the closet, but different. They’re not really gay, they just like to have sex with other men.”
Linda looked from one man to the other. “You’re telling me that gay guys pretending to be straight guys...or is it straight guys pretending to be gay guys—anyway, whatever they are, they hang out here in your gay bar and what, Mr. Washington, they couldn’t possibly be rapists because, why? There’s obviously something I’m not understanding here.” Linda was in no mood to give Washington any wiggle room. “I want the names of the men who were in here Saturday night.”
“I don’t know their names.” Washington spat the words at her.
“You said they were regulars. Every bartender in the world knows the names of his regulars. Including those who refer to their clients as sissies.”
“First names is all I know, and I don’t know nothing else about ‘em.”
“Fine,” Linda said, heading for the door. “Come on, Bobby, let’s go.”
Bobby, commanding his face not to register the surprise he felt, slapped his notebook shut and followed her to the door, where she stopped and turned back to the bar owner. “By the way, there’ll be a cruiser parked outside your door by the time you open, and we’ll have some trainees from the Academy roaming around, taking down license plate numbers. Let’s see what that does for your low down business.”
The very idea had a miraculous effect on Ray Washington’s knowledge bank. He discovered that not only did he know the full names of the three men who drank at the other end of the bar from Joyce Brown on Saturday night, he knew where they lived and where they worked. “But I’m asking you again not to tell ‘em I gave ‘em up. My customers need to believe they can trust me.”
“Too bad Joyce Brown couldn’t trust you,” Linda said, slamming the rickety door behind her and understanding and appreciating Dee Phillips’s preference for steel doors anchored in brick walls. Ray Washington also made her appreciate Dee Phillips, and the DL men who hung out at the Pink Panther made her appreciate the Ags and the Doms who hung out at The Snatch. At least they were fully and proudly who they were. And at least being who they were didn’t put anybody else’s health and life at risk, unknown to them.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MID-TOWN COMMANDER RE-ASSIGNED;
INACTION MAY HAVE LED TO HATE CRIMES
By M. Montgomery Patterson
Staff Writer
Inspector Francis X. O’Connell, a 22-year
veteran of the Metropolitan Police Department,
abruptly was relieved of his command duties at
the Mid-Town Police District and reassigned to
administrative duties following the murder of
one woman last Friday night and the rape of
another last Saturday night. Both crimes occurred
in the vicinity of nightclubs known to cater to a
gay and lesbian clientele, and both were reported
to be only the latest in a series of what now are
be
ing investigated as hate crimes.
Police Chief Benjamin Jefferson confirmed
O’Connell’s re-assignment but refused to give a
reason for it. However, Lt. Giovanna Maglione,
head of the Hate Crimes Unit, has confirmed
that both the rape and the murder are being
investigated by her Unit. All District commanders
are under orders to turn over suspected crimes
against persons based on race, religion, gender,
or gender preference to the Hate Crimes Unit.
Not only did O’Connell fail that directive, but
there is no indication that Mid-Town
Command investigated half a dozen incidents in
the four hundred block of Harley Street where
The Snatch Club is located, and the six hundred
block of Lander Street where the Pink Panther
Club is located.
“We have not had any success bringing our
concerns to Inspector O’Connell in the past,”
said Jose Cruz, director of the Victim Assistance
unit at the Metropolitan Washington Gay and
Lesbian Community Organization. “But even
though Inspector O’Connell has not been at
all sympathetic to our concerns, I hate to think
that his inaction has resulted in something so
horrible as rape and murder.”
At the same moment that O’Connell was
learning his fate, Inspector Eddie Davis was
taking over at Mid-Town. Chief Jefferson
emphasized that moving Davis, who was head
of the Criminal Investigations Division, was not
a demotion but rather “an expression of confidence
in his abilities.”
Davis, a 20-year veteran, formerly commanded
both the Downtown and the East River Districts,
and is well-regarded as a fair and able administrator.
His job at CID is being filled on an interim basis by
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