Darkness Descending

by Penny Mickelbury

  The refrigerator was a treasure trove of goodies and Gianna was surprised momentarily. Then she remembered that they were scheduled to have dinner here tonight. Scheduled. Like they were a business arrangement instead of a couple. And then she understood what was pressing so heavily on her mind and it wasn’t the weight of the work she still had to do that night. It was Mimi’s “You’re really here, you really came.” And it was Bev’s “She’s your next of kin.” Those phrases, those words, rolled around in her head while she fixed a plate of roast chicken, Italian green beans and risotto and put it in the microwave. Mimi had found the time and the energy to brave the traffic of Georgetown and the always frantic pace of the Whole Foods Market to buy food Gianna liked simply because Gianna liked it. And yet she’d been both surprised and relieved when Gianna showed up at her hospital bed. She’s your next of kin.

  Gianna took her plate, glass and a half bottle of Chardonnay, to the dining room table, where Michael Nelson’s writings were spread out in the order that she wanted to read them: Notebooks first, filled with page after page of thoughts, ideas, plans, schemes, all written in the neat, orderly script more likely to be found in someone twice his age. The punctuation, grammar and spelling were those of an educated, literate man, not the usual idiotic garbage they got from crazed criminals. Then there were five year’s worth of daily diaries, different from the notebooks in that they contained his thoughts and feelings about falling in love with Felicia Hilliard, courting and marrying her, and about the dissolution of their relationship. Here also were his thoughts and feelings about Natasha Hilliard. She read long after she’d finished the food and wine, long after the CD player had stopped, until the five-hour fake wood log had crumbled into dying embers.

  She made a chicken sandwich to take to work, cleaned the kitchen, and went upstairs to bed. Four or five hours’ sleep would be better than none, she told herself, knowing it not to be true given her recent lack of sleep. She needed to sleep for ten or twelve hours, free of even the thought that a phone could ring, to say nothing of the possibility of such a thing. Well...soon, perhaps. For now, four or five hours would have to suffice. Maybe the phone wouldn’t ring. The team meeting wasn’t until eight.

  There was enough coffee, muffins, Danish and doughnuts to satiate a work crew twice as large at the HCU because everybody had brought goodies, but it was Cassie’s offering that captured their attention that morning. She’d stopped at Ma’s Kitchen, the restaurant owned by the Phillips sisters and their family, and bought cheese and egg sandwiches for everybody. Gianna had added a couple of gallons of orange juice, and blood sugar, along with energy levels, soared. They talked while they ate. Instead of going home last night as Gianna directed, they’d all remained late and sifted through every file, every report, every bit and piece of evidence, and weren’t surprised that Gianna had done the same thing with Nelson’s papers. The surprise came when she told them what she’d found, and ordered the immediate arrest of the Ray Washingtons, both Jr. and Sr. While she was explaining why, Detective Schuster from Downtown Command arrived with the latest information on Michael Nelson: He was on a seventy-two hour psychiatric hold at Howard University Hospital after trying to hang himself in his cell.

  “That’s what happens when you turn your cases over to the Feds,” said Bobby said, disgust dripping off the words.

  “Wasn’t he supposed to beunder observation?” Gianna asked, feeling every bit as disgusted as Bobby sounded.

  Schuster shrugged. “They say so.”

  “Don’t let that son of bitch off himself until they find Felicia Hilliard,” Eric snarled.

  “I wish it was under our control,” Schuster said, “but you know how the Feds operate. We wouldn’t have known about the suicide attempt except we’ve got good contacts over at Howard Hospital.”

  “Is there any word at all on the search for Felicia Hilliard?” Gianna asked.

  Schuster shook his head. “Nada. My boss even called over there herself and they wouldn’t tell her anything.”

  “And I suppose they’re telling the parents even less?”

  Before Schuster could answer, Eric jumped to his feet, waving the report Schuster had brought. “Look at this! You won’t believe this shit!”

  They all crowded around him, Schuster included. He’d typed the report and obviously didn’t remember anything in it worth jumping up and down about. But then, he didn’t know what the Hate Crimes team knew: That the Reverend Doctor Ray L. Washington, who was listed as a spiritual advisor to Michael Nelson, was, at that moment, the subject of an arrest warrant.

  “I gotta call my boss.” Schuster sprinted for a phone and was dialing before he caught himself. “I’m sorry. Is it all right?”

  Gianna waved off the apology. She was making her own phone call, to the Chief, to ask him to expedite getting the warrants for the Washingtons signed, and explaining to him why. And after that was taken care of, he demanded to know why she hadn’t called him last night.

  She didn’t know what he was talking about. “Sir? Call you last night why?”

  “Why!” he thundered. “I shouldn’t have to read about it in the newspaper like every other Joe in town, Maglione!” Then his voice changed, softened. “Don’t you think I’d have wanted to know?”

  He of course was talking about Mimi. There must have been a story about her emergency surgery in the paper. “I’m sorry, Chief. She’s doing well...may I call you later?”

  His answer was a dial tone. She’d indeed call him later. In the meantime, there were arrests to be made. Schuster’s boss, Shirley McManus, wanted a piece of it since Junior lived in her Command, and Gianna was only too happy to oblige; she could use the extra manpower as well as the relatively new facilities at Downtown Command, a four-cell lock-up and fully equipped interrogation rooms. Bobby, Linda, Tim and three of McManus’s people headed over to Washington, Junior’s Brookland apartment, while Kenny, Cassie, Alice, Schuster and two of McManus’s people headed across the Anacostia River to sit on Reverend Doctor Washington. Eric and Cassie went to pick up the warrants and Gianna went to Downtown Command to wait, and to explain to Captain McManus why so many bodies were needed to arrest two men who had no reputation for violence. On the drive downtown, Gianna worked to come up with language that would convey the possibility that the Washington’s might be the beneficiaries of the protection of the certain police officers without actually calling any cops dirty. She needn’t have worried her brain.

  “I’ve heard about them, Anna,” Shirley McManus told her. “I think I’ve even got a couple of ‘em in my Command. Arrogant, evil little pricks. One of ‘em called me a dyke once. Thought he’d spoken low enough under his breath that I didn’t hear him. When I got done wiping the floor with his sorry ass he was ready to believe that his mother was a dyke and to appreciate the fact!”

  Gianna couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Shirley McManus looked like the grandmother she was: Maybe five-foot-five with a head full of untamable blond-going-to-silver hair. She had sparkly blue eyes surrounded by crinkly laugh lines, and with good reason: She laughed a lot, and when she wasn’t laughing she was talking, still sounding like the Brooklyn she’d left as a teenager. She had the figure of a woman half her fifty-two years, and that figure and her personality had won her a legendary reputation as an undercover in her youth. These days she had a reputation as a crack administrator with her chief weapon being her mouth.

  “You actually hit him?”

  “Damn straight I hit him. Round house right to the jaw. He went down hard, got up quick and aimed one at me, but he’s about a foot taller than I am so I went in under his swing and caught him in the gut. Arrogant little bastard had the nerve to try and bring charges against me. When I got finished with him he was lucky to still have his badge.”

  “And he’s still here in your house?”

  Shirley gave an evil grin. “He keeps trying to transfer. I keep blocking him. He wants to go to Mid-Town in the worst way.” She gave Gianna a stead
y, appraising look when she said that, and waited.

  “I’m sure Inspector Davis’ll be happy to have him,” Gianna deadpanned. Captain McManus was still chuckling when she led Gianna down the stairs to the cells and the interrogation rooms. She’d brought a telephone, which she plugged into the wall in one of the rooms. “I’ve got some stuff to finish up but I’ll come down when they bring your perps in. I want to watch.”

  Gianna’s first call was to the hospital. She talked to a still groggy Mimi who was feeling well enough to complain about having been awakened “at some truly ungodly hour to have my temperature taken,” and about the doctor’s intention “for me to get up and walk. I can barely breathe and she wants me to get up and walk.” Gianna felt so much better after the call that she actually found that her head was clear, that ordering her thoughts wasn’t a struggle. She got out her notebook and began strategizing the interrogations of the Washingtons. Junior’s warrant charged him with suspicion of rape, Senior’s with conspiracy to commit murder. Her hope was that she could leverage information about Felicia Hilliard out of the elder Washington and information about Joyce Brown’s rape out of Junior. It was heavy-handed and it was a gamble but it was all they had. She wished she had some statistics from Atlantic City on how often a good poker face won the pot, no matter what cards were in the hand.

  Ray Junior strode into the interrogation room huffing and puffing and demanding a lawyer. He was wearing sweat pants, a tee shirt, a pair of expensive high top sneakers, and he looked ready for action of some kind. He refused to sit down, refused even to look at Gianna. He called Linda a Spic and Bobby an Uncle Tom. (And Gianna had thought she was old school.) Then Alice Long walked into the room, wearing a black suit and a white silk tee shirt, every article of clothing fitting her body as if painted on. The high heeled boots made her seem longer and taller than usual. Ray took one look at her and collapsed into his chair. Before they could ask the first question he was giving up information. Eric stopped him, switched on the recorder, Mirandized him, made him say that he understood the warning, then stood back and let him talk. He couldn’t keep his eyes off Alice.

  “Murph said there was something off about you.” He said that three times, his eyes boring into her. “A cop.” He shook his head, then rested it in his hands. “I should’ve let him have at you.”

  “What did you say?” Eric leaned over him. “Sit up, Mr. Washington, and repeat what you just said.” Washington didn’t move. Eric slapped at his hands and they fell away from his face. Washington was still looking at Alice—staring at her. “What did you just say?” Eric repeated, and Washington slowly turned his gaze to Eric.

  “Murph wanted to take her but I wouldn’t let him.”

  “Take her. You mean rape her?”

  Washington nodded. “I wouldn’t let him. That other one—that never should ‘a happened.”

  “Thomas Murphy raped Joyce Brown?”

  “His buddies did.

  Alice walked over close to him and he devoured her with his eyes, licking his lips. “Who are his buddies? What are their names?” Alice was killing him with her eyes and biting her lips to keep from killing him with her bare hands.

  He ogled Alice the whole time he was giving up Patrol Officer Thomas Murphy and his three friends: Roger Holcomb, Slim Jim Johnson, and “some guy with a Wop name I can’t pronounce. Dee-Chechy-something. Vinnie’s his first name.” He shook his head at Alice again. “I still can’t believe you’re a cop, and I know damn well you’re not a dyke. I told Murph you were no dyke but he didn’t believe me. He’s not gonna believe you’re a cop, either.”

  “Just goes to show you how stupid Murph is,” Alice drawled. She turned away from him, the effort to keep her face under control visible to everyone. She took a deep breath then turned back toward him. “How much was Murphy getting off the back room, Ray?”

  Ray Washington’s eyes bugged and his mouth dropped open. He couldn’t speak. Alice crossed her arms over her chest and stood looking at him, waiting for an answer to her question. He finally got his mouth and his brain on the same page. “How do you know about that?”

  “Same way we know about the club you used to have up on Columbia Road. Same way we know everything about you. See, the cops we hang out with aren’t stupid like your pal Murph. Whatever you were giving him, it was too much.”

  “Five hundred a week,” Washington mumbled. “That’s what he was getting from me. I don’t know how much he was getting on the side.”

  Eric moved to stand beside Alice. “What’s on the side, Ray?”

  Washington shook his head. They thought he was done talking, but then he threw his head back and let go a scream. It was primal and it was a major release of something that he’d kept inside for a long, long time. He looked at Eric, then at Alice, and it was to her that he spoke. “He was shaking down the DL guys. They’d come in, do their thing in the back, then leave, and he’d follow them, get their license plate numbers, find out where they lived, worked. It was a pretty good hustle ‘cause he knew they’d never complain. Who’re they gonna tell?”

  “You hate homosexuals that much, Ray?” Alice asked.

  “I hate all freaks that much,” Ray said.

  In the room next door, Ray, Senior was considerably less forthcoming. He had all but dismissed his Miranda warning with a flick of his hand, claiming that as a minister of God he didn’t need it because God’s law took precedence over man’s. Gianna made him listen to, and made him say, in those exact words, on tape, that he waived his right to have a lawyer present.

  “You are aware that Michael Nelson is in serious trouble,” Gianna said.

  Washington looked down at his manicured nails, then up at the ceiling, and said nothing. Neither did Gianna, and she proved that she could outwait him.

  “If you’re waiting for me to talk about anything that Mr. Michael Nelson has said to me, you’ve got a long wait,” he said, explaining, as if to the intellectually challenged, that any conversation with Michael Nelson was sacred communication. The muscles in his jaws worked when Gianna told him that his mail order degrees didn’t hold the same weight as divinity degrees from legitimate institutions of higher learning or ordination into a legitimate and recognized religious institution, but otherwise, he showed no reaction. Still, Gianna knew she’d touched a nerve.

  “Ray, you’re just another wanna-be with some mail order degrees and nothing Michael Nelson said to you is privileged. At this point, you’d do well to forget about protecting him and start worrying about taking care of yourself.”

  “I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  It was clear to see where Ray Jr. had gotten his arrogant, imperious manner. Ray Sr. was a tall, thin man. His close-cut hair bore no traces of gray though his thin mustache did. He wore thin, gold-rimmed glasses that added to his distinguished look. The well-cut gray pin-striped suit completed the picture. Or it would have had he been allowed time to add a tie to the white shirt or socks to the black wingtips. As it was, the arresting officers thought they’d been more than generous to allow him to dress at all. He sat with his long legs crossed at the knee, his bare ankles a humorous distraction from the proceedings. Unlike his son, he refused to look at the woman questioning him. Perhaps because he could believe all too well that she was a cop.

  “Oh, but you have, Ray,” Gianna said in her most condescending, patronizing tone. “You told Mike Nelson to kill Natasha and you helped him kidnap Felicia. If she’s dead now, too—.”

  He was on his feet, eyes blazing. “That’s a lie.”

  “Well,” Gianna said, borrowing a bit of a drawl from Alice, “if it is, it’s one a lot of people are willing to believe. You see, Ray, even though Mike has real degrees from real universities, it’s clear that he’s, well, not the most stable person in this situation. Or the smartest, to tell you the truth. You, on the other hand, are the picture of stability, and more than capable of conceiving and executing a plan to—”

  “I conceived and executed nothing.�
�� Spittle formed in the corners of his mouth and anger radiated from him. “I am that boy’s spiritual advisor and that is all.”

  “Mike’s a Muslim. What does he need with you? He’s got an Imam.”

  “I help out with certain...matters. I interpret certain points of Christianity for him, clear up things he’s heard from other...ministers.”

  “You mean like his former mother-in-law, who really does have a Doctor of Divinity degree from a real university and who really is ordained and who really and legitimately can be called Reverend Doctor?” Gianna was goading, baiting, praying to put a crack in his steely facade. “What points of hers can you possibly clear up? You don’t know half of what she knows.”

  “I know more than she’ll ever know! She produced a pervert! From her loins sprung the hated of God and for her there will be no redemption! She blasphemes! She calls herself a preacher of the Gospel! I call her Jezebel! Mary Magdalene! No woman can be ordained of God to preach the Gospel and no perversion can go unpunished. Draw nigh and hear the word of God, the only true word of the only true God: There is no mercy for the evil doers, there is only justice, and that justice shall be meted out with the sword of righteousness! They shall die that they shall be born again into truth. She shall no more preach evil. Her mouth is silenced.”

  What the hell was he saying! “Ray, you’ve just proved my point.” Gianna stood directly in front of him, forcing him to look at her, forcing him to climb down off the bully pulpit and return to the hard chair in the interrogation room. “What you’ve just said, Ray, proves what I said about Mike not being quite up to speed. He might have killed the wrong woman, Ray. The mother is fine, Ray. Reverend Doctor Christine Hilliard is at this moment in a suite at the Radisson Dupont Circle. Felicia is who Mike kidnapped—his ex-wife, Natasha’s sister. He killed Natasha like you told him to, but not the mother, Ray. He messed up, and now he’s messed it up for you, too. Reverend Dr. Hilliard will be sermonizing about you for years.”