by Rick Bennet
The detective lets out a long sigh. Says, tired, “The boy, he stands there, staring at it all. At his parents like that. How can he understand? I can’t understand. How can a twelve-year-old?”
“Yeah.”
“You know?”
“Yeah, man.”
“This boy, he stares and stares, he’s crying, he’s shaking. Then we hear another squad car’s siren. It was hard to tell which direction the sound came from, on the tape, but we checked the logs, and besides getting the exact time of death, we found out the first car had come down the street out front, and we think the second car was coming down the side street. There was a fight at a 7-Eleven a few blocks away, and a drunk hit an officer. Anyway, the boy, when he hears the siren, he snaps out of his shock or trance. And he does something weird. He goes to the television and grabs four videotapes from a stack there. And It must have been four exact tapes he wanted, because he pulled them out from under a pile of others. They were in movie boxes, and with some enhancement work we got the titles, but they don’t mean anything that we can tell, and besides, why would a kid think to grab any tapes at all?”
“I don’t know.”
“You can’t assume anyone, especially a child, is going to act logically in that situation, but still, that don’t figure. He takes the tapes and runs out of the camera’s picture in the direction of the back door, and just like when Ells left, we can hear the door open and shut.”
“And that’s the end of the tape?”
“Yeah.”
“What else was on it?”
“Their daughter’s birthday party. Ells started the tape just where the Jameses had left off, so it didn’t have that much room left on it. After the boy left, the camera kept recording for a few minutes, until the tape ran out. But even that ain’t the end of the shit. I saw the tape again just this morning? The Chief had had it, and some of the Mayor’s fucks? Man, the part where the boy gets the videos and leaves, that’s been erased.”
“Why would they do that?”
“See? I don’t know. But that’s why I am done with this fucking department. Why would they do that? I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“Yeah, I do. But I don’t.”
“How did they explain the erasure?”
“Accidental while switching from rewind to play.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“I’m done, man. I’m already gone. And I suggest you stay the fuck out of it too.”
“You checked all Henry James’s other tapes?”
“That was tedious, but yeah, we did. Nothing. I can’t figure it. Best I can figure it is that, because the boy took children’s movies, maybe they were comforting or something to him. Maybe he was emotionally attached to them. Maybe he’s seen them with his parents a few times and he connects them to each other. Something.”
“Did you get access to Henry’s office?”
“Limited. Had AD As hanging over me while I searched his files for anything related to Richard Ells or LTC. Noth-ing.”
“Did he have any videotapes there?”
“I didn’t think about that. But I’d remember seeing any, and I didn’t.”
“You check his den at home?”
“Yep.”
“No tape of Henry James and Jimmy Close?”
“No. Why?”
Kellogg explains, then asks, “What’s going on with the boy now?”
“We’re stuck. You can read the papers for the straight scoop about what’s happening with the boy. The area got grid-searched the morning the bodies were found. The boy’s friends and classmates were interviewed. His grandmother. Rock Creek Park got dog-searched. Nothing.”
“Figure it this way,” Kellogg says. “The boy goes out to the alley. Ells is still there. Or near there, because it wouldn’t take but a minute for him to figure out the siren he heard hadn’t been for him. Ells sees the boy. Grabs him.”
“That was my guess. Which don’t leave us nowhere nice.”
“You guys find Ells’s car?”
“Nah. And there’s none registered to him anywhere in the country.”
“I’ll still bet he had one. I don’t figure a country white like him to be taking subways or buses around Washington, especially at night.”
“Me, neither. And no cab company has a record of a drop-off on that block, not that their records mean shit.”
“If Ells grabbed the boy and killed him there, the body would’ve turned up, so that’s not it. If he’d taken the kid on foot, he would have had all night to bury the kid, but still, how’s he going to be walking around D.C. with a kid that’s screaming if he’s alive, bleeding if he isn’t, without getting any attention?”
“Don’t seem likely.”
“It’s only a few blocks to Rock Creek Park, but they aren’t dead blocks.”
“If he got the kid, he had a car. Figure he takes the kid, dead or alive, out of town. But then he comes back? He’d have time, but it’s still a tough guess.”
“You guys check all unaccounted-for cars around there?”
“Yep.”
“Go out to the suburban subway stops and check the parking lots there?”
“Yep. Had the dogs out sniffing the trunks. Nothing.”
“Then what else figures? He grabbed the boy. Took him out of the city. Came back to the crime scene alone, just for the psycho fuck of it.”
“How about: The boy’s in shock. Wanders out into the woods. Curls up somewhere deep. Gets missed on the first go-through. Maybe meanders down to the Potomac and falls or jumps in. Maybe Ells took him to the Potomac. And then again, there’s the tabloid theory. Theories.”
“I’ve heard them.”
“That Ells wasn’t acting alone. That LTC did this and they’ve got the boy”
“And they left their initials painted in blood on the walls. Right.”
“I said it was tabloid.”
“Is there anything connecting Ells to LTC, besides that he went to a meeting?”
“No. The FBI’s position is that it might be a kidnap, so they’re following that up. But they got nothing to work with, far as I know. And the agents assigned to it, they are the worst. The same sorry-ass morons who’ve been assigned to investigate corruption in the Mayor’s new administration. I spoke to some other agents. They said these four agents are known within the division as the Goof Squad, because they’re such idiots. Like the Director pulled the four worst agents he could find in the whole FBI into one squad.”
“Speaking of idiots, is there anything more to Mallory’s involvement than meets the eye?”
“You can call John Mallory a lot of things, but idiot isn’t one of them.”
“I know.”
“And no, it seems to have been a straight thing. There was talk about him being a Jack Ruby here. Believe it or not, there’s been some demand for an investigation into whether John’s connected with LTC or Ells. But the Mayor’s fucks squashed that idea.”
“John’s always been tight with them.”
“His dick must have got hard when the Mayor got reelected. But as to him shooting Ells, he was home when the call went out for all day-shift detectives to come in early and help out on this, and he didn’t get there ahead of no one. It isn’t like he could have planned on being called in, or being assigned to that particular street and all.”
Kellogg and the Black Detective talk for another hour, going over the same ground again.
After hanging up, the Black Detective thinks about how long he’s been doing this. About how he and Kellogg and Mallory were in the same cadet class back in ‘68. Had only two weeks under their belts when the riots came.
Fought together. He and Mallory hadn’t been close the way he and Kellogg had, but Mallory had been a true liberal on a force that was still real white then. And Mallory had joined him in supporting the Mayor’s first candidacy. But Mallory had become friends with the Mayor and stuck with the Mayor long after it became obvious to t
he Black Detective that the Mayor was corrupt and the police force being destroyed, so he and Mallory were no longer friendly. But he and Kellogg, that was different. He remembered especially Kellogg’s willingness to stand up to the white racist sergeants who ran things back then, and he couldn’t remember many other whites who had.
8
ON TELEVISION A MAN IS SAYING, In a steady, solemn voice, “When whites wrote of a Garden of Eden they meant Africa, where all humans lived in peace, harmonious with nature. But there was among us there a sick brother, a physical and spiritual weakling, who ate of the tree of knowledge, and by this is meant began developing technology. Our African ancestors caught this wicked brother in his blasphemous act and drove the défiler out of Eden. He ran north to the ice country, where he lost his color and became as to ice as we are to earth, the same in color, the same in spirit. There in the frozen north, living like an animal in caves, the défiler mad scientist spawned a race of devils and developed the technology by which he, thousands of years later, angry about his physical inferiority, angry about his expulsion from Eden, came back and enslaved us.”
The speaker is a young black man. A light-skinned, quick-featured young man with a great smile who isn’t smiling. He’s staring sternly into the camera. He’s wearing a black suit, white shirt, bright green-red-and-brown striped tie. That’s the New Africa uniform. This is the New Africa show, broadcast weekly on the Black Television Network cable channel. With him, behind him, is a line of other young people, dressed the same way, expressing the same way. Their leader, this speaker, is Khalid. One name. Khalid.
“I say, my people, what I always say, and what you know to be true, every one of you—we will never be free in the white man’s country. It is only with the creation of our own country that we can be our own people. Only with the creation of New Africa, a land of freedom from white oppression.
“And do not doubt that we can do this. For we have a weapon before which the white is powerless—his hatred of us. Yes, you heard me right. We can use the white man’s hatred for us against him. I say, my beautiful people, do to the whites what they fear most. Fulfill their own worst stereotypes of us.”
Khalid’s long and slender fingers are intertwined before him, prayer-like. His head is tilted forward so that he is peering intensely out from under his eyebrows.
“Understand the devil,” he says. “Understand his breeding.
“First among the devil’s kind is the Jew, killer of the black man Jesus, the most cunning of our enemies, who manipulates the world by controlling the movies, the television, the newspapers. And we can never forget that the holocaust he suffered is but a drop in the bucket compared to the holocaust he perpetrated on us by masterminding the slave trade, is but a drop in the bucket compared to the genocide we are suffering even now.
“Next most evil is the Asian, by far the most inferior, a weakling who branched off from the sick brother we banished to Europe and who bred like vermin to number in the billions. The Asian is here now, infiltrating our neighborhoods with the help of Jew bankers, to take our money, our hope.
“Next most evil is the common white, a pathetic tool of the Jew, always the overseer, never the overlord. His role in the devil’s world is to police us, which the Jew and Asian are afraid to do themselves. White men prostitute themselves as abusers of law in the name of law; his women prostitute themselves because it is the devil’s way to tempt us with the whore-slut.
“And last among the devil’s people is the Latino, lackey to his white masters, brought here to do the work we refuse to do ourselves. Creatures of so little pride they will gladly be maids or dishwashers, ditchdiggers and busboys; like the Asian, short, and spiteful for it.”
Khalid isn’t always so radical, but he knows that this is just another cable show to most people watching, which means he might have only a few seconds to get people’s attention before they use their remote control.
Joan Price is among those watching. She’s a middle-aged white woman, short, stocky, with badly permed, tightly curled brown hair. She watches Khalid. She records the show. She takes notes.
When it ends she turns off the television and leans back on her couch, tired. Always tired, never quitting.
She looks up at the wall. At a picture of her husband and daughter.
Six months ago they were here, in their suburban Maryland house. Joan was not here. She was working. FBI Special Agent Joan Price. Outstanding Joan Price. Working.
She came home that night. She called out for them when she came in the front door, and when they didn’t answer she went downstairs, expecting to find them playing Ping-Pong or doing homework. Instead she found her nightmare.
Her husband’s body was stuffed in a closet, as if the killer thought hiding it would help. Joan Price had found that body first and, trembling but thinking, searched the house, gun drawn, not knowing if she wanted to find her daughter. But she did find her. In her room upstairs. Thirteen years old. Beaten to death with her own baseball bat.
Joan stared at that body She didn’t faint or scream or cry. She stared. And felt a monster rise in herself. The devil. Because on a part of the bloody sheet that still was white, the sheet on which her blond daughter lay with brains spilled and face destroyed, was a hair. A kinky black hair. Which Joan decided belonged to a black man. And on the floor, poking out from under the bed, was an empty forty-ounce beer bottle. About which she reached the same conclusion.
Joan Price has grown up here in Prince George’s County. She sees the hair, the forty, knows how black is crime in this county, doesn’t call 911. Gets an unregistered handgun she’s had for years. Gets in her car. Drives. Deep into the city. Slowly down a block. The right block. The wrong one. First and Kennedy Northwest.
A black man sees her. Waves her down. Assumes she’s after what white women driving around here at this time of night are usually after.
Hey baby, what you looking for? I got what you need.
Joan looks around. Sees no one else. Asks the man for what she knows he’s got.
He says, Yeah, you know I got that.
She says, Good, boy, that’s good.
His eyes widen at the “boy,” but it ain’t no thing, just business.
She reaches in her handbag.
He thinks it’s for money.
Quick is that gun in his face.
She stares at him. Devil in her. Hate.
One, two, three, four seconds go by. She stares at him, not breathing, not shaking, not scared.
He starts to say something. Doesn’t get to.
When his body is found the next day, it seems to be just another clueless drug kill.
She goes home and calls 911 to report finding her family murdered. And as she waits, in the bloody house, with that unregistered gun in her hand, for the police to arrive, she holds that gun to her own head. What if she’s wrong about who killed her family? She’s panicking, thinking of that. What if she’s wrong? She knows it isn’t only blacks who might have kinky black hair, it isn’t only blacks who buy forty-ounce beers, and it isn’t only blacks who commit murder. She decides to kill herself if she’s wrong.
Her family’s killer was quickly identified. A black man. He’d been visiting cousins down the street, and when those cousins, nervous about him anyway because they knew his history, heard about the murders, they called the police, intuiting that their visitor might have had something to do with it. He was easily found, instantly confessed. He’d done it before, been caught before, confessed before, been sentenced before. He said he needed money. Targeted the Price house. Climbed in through a second-floor window after seeing that Mr. Price and his daughter went down to the basement. He said he hadn’t wanted to kill anyone, but when the girl had come back upstairs and caught him, he’d had to silence her. He’d beaten her instead of shooting her to keep the noise down, but when he’d then heard her father calling up for her, he’d forced him at gunpoint back down the stairs and shot him.
At the killer’s senten
cing hearing, Joan was allowed to address the court. She ignored the court.
She spoke to the killer. Screamed at him. Held nothing back.
Her testimony, taped, was played first on local television, then nationally. It was captivating. The black man sitting passively, stone-faced; the white mother and wife, devastated, ferocious.
Joan received letters afterward, even donations. Sympathy.
She had a personal meeting with the director of the FBI. He asked what he could do for her. She told him she wanted a special assignment.
“Name it,” he said.
“LTC,” she said.
“The white organization?”
“Right.”
“That’s interesting. We’ve already been working on a plan to investigate it. We’re in every other white supremacist group. LTC hasn’t actually been proven to be racist, but we’re under pressure to show that it is.”
“Let me do it.”
“Why you?”
“I’ve heard from them. Been invited to speak to them.”
The Director smiled. Said, “Great. That’s perfect. You’ll have to publicly resign from the FBI first, because you’ve been identified as an agent by the media. A false resignation, of course, and just for the duration of the assignment.”
“When can I start?”
“Right away?”
“Okay.”
“Let’s have you report directly to me.”
“Okay.”
“Take your time on this. Work your way in slowly. Give that speech. Do some homework first, so you’ll have a better idea of what they want to hear. Earn their trust. Work your way up their ladder.”
Joan did that. Earned LTC’s trust. Worked her way up the organizational ladder. Only she didn’t do it slowly. She was too good. Her enthusiasm was too sincere, her talent too obvious. She kept media attention because she proved such a good guest on talk shows, with her articulate expressions, her victim’s résumé, her compelling presence. Someone called her a white Malcolm X. The tag stuck. Joan Price. Joan d’Arc Price. FBI special agent supposedly on an undercover mission to find and expose criminal conduct at LTC.
But Joan Price was a step ahead of the Director on that. Because there was no way she was going to hurt LTC. She wouldn’t gather evidence against them, because it was her role as an undercover agent that was false. Her work for LTC was her true mission. She would not again settle merely for killing a drug dealer, because the killing of whites was a minor part of the race war she thought blacks were waging. Politics was the bigger part. So it was through politics that she’d give them the war she thought they wanted. She’d give them a war they wouldn’t believe. Joan Price. White Malcolm.