Murder, D.C.

by Neely Tucker

  Solved cases, which were only about a third of the total, got black crosses.

  Sully turned to the computer and began keying in the passwords to legal databases that tracked arrest records and court decisions. He opened the file drawer to his left, the one that housed the murders of the current year.

  His filing system: Each homicide victim got their own manila folder, filed alphabetically, the name of the victim and a number that denoted the order in which they were killed in the upper right corner of the tab. The police incident report, the PD 1099, was all that was in some, but it gave the essential details. Matching the numbers on the murder map to the numbers on the folders, he pulled out the folders of those killed this year in or near the Bend.

  They were: suspected drug shooting (no arrest), suspected drug shooting (no arrest), argument turned into a shooting (no arrest). This was pedestrian crap. But after a few minutes, a pattern started to register, to coalesce, his mind already sensing connections between the pin dots.

  On the map of Washington spread before him, the quadrants of the diamond-shaped city originated from of the Capitol—northwest, northeast, southeast, southwest—a daily reminder of the power that radiated out of that building; the entire city turned on its axis. Meanwhile, the cluster of red (unsolved) crosses, nearly all of them marked by black pins (black male victims), was a deluge across the Anacostia, in Southeast D.C.

  By comparison, Southwest was just a scattered shower of red raindrops and black pins. This wasn’t surprising because Southwest—a tear-drop-shaped, north-to-south sliver of land below the Capitol—was by far the smallest of the city quadrants. The National Mall cut it off to the north, the Washington Channel to the west, South Capitol Street on the east. The Anacostia cut it off to the south. Another chunk of Southwest existed on the other side of the Anacostia, most of it taken up by Bolling Air Force Base and that stinking sewage plant, Blue Plains, but neither of those was civilian turf.

  Southwest, Southwest, he mused, tapping the map with the butt end of his pen, you’re just a civic bunion south of the Mall, drug houses, apartment blocks, hipster whites and sort-of-but-not-really-upscale blacks living in condos, the occasional Supreme Court justice who doesn’t like a long commute, and whatever the fuck Fort McNair is. You’re some hairy-legged women and ganja-puffing douches on houseboats at the Gangplank Marina. You’re good for fresh seafood at the dockside markets, for the grown and sexy clubs up on the waterfront, but that’s about it.

  Most of the housing was that post-1960s modernist crap, or row houses that went back to the early twentieth century when it was a packed-dirt warren. Now, since the 1960s, as long as you hewed to the riverfront? There were four or five blocks of modern apartment buildings and condos, nice enough eight- to twelve-story things, sure.

  But once you hit the Bend? Construction yards, one-story warehouses, empty lots, a power station, a bus parking lot, cheap wire fences, and some of the most brutal projects in the city, a reminder of the days when thousands of people lived in carriage houses that opened onto brick alleys. If you crossed over South Capitol, you were technically in Southeast, but it was still on the peninsula dangling below the belly of the city, and it was spiritually still Southwest—car washes, long-term storage lots, the Navy Yard, that block of gay clubs on O Street, dilapidated row houses and street corner drug markets.

  He went to his file drawers and began to pull out the folders of the dead from near the Bend, not just this year, but from years past.

  “W1 (witness one) reports finding deceased BM facedown at base of wall of Fort McNair, in the Bend,” read the witness accounts of the killing of Henry Andre Douglas, a black male, dead in January of a gunshot wound to the head.

  “W1 and W2 report hearing shots in the Bend at approximately 3:15 a.m. Feb. 12,” another report read, quoting the two witnesses, “a body subsequently found at the base of a cherry blossom tree, roughly twenty yards from the waterfront.” The body belonged to Curtis Michael Lewis, “shot twice in the back of the head.”

  He read further into the reports, the newsroom emptying out, the time passing and his concentration growing as the jigsaw puzzle deepened and opened before him. As the hours passed and his awareness of them dimmed, an oddity became apparent in the police paperwork: Officers on the scene often denoted the address of the slaying as the entrance to the park, there at the intersection of P and Fourth streets. But the police action reports, the 1099s, of, say, Lewis and Douglas? Those killings actually took place in the Bend.

  Reaching beneath his desk, he pulled out the murder maps of previous years. He unfurled them, three feet tall by two feet wide, and pinned them to the wall of his cubicle, sequentially: 1996, ’97, ’98, ’99 and now, the first few months of 2000. This was the murder chart of the deadliest big city in America, a place that had been so for more than a decade. Four hundred or so homicides in a city of 550,000 in the heyday of the crack epidemic. The display took up the whole cubicle, making him stand back to take in the effect. There were no pins in the rolled-up maps, but the red Sharpie crosses remained: red for unsolved, black for solved.

  You put it together like this, with a street-map overlay, year in and year out—what was it, a longitudinal study—and then you could recognize the city’s worst housing projects and neighborhoods over the course of time. Benning Terrace, right over there in Southeast; Sursum Corda, closer to downtown; yeah, you could spot those. So, stepping back, looking at it, going to get a cup of coffee from the copy editor’s desk, and coming back, your vision better now, you could see the flurry of crosses in greater clarity. His eyes drifted, automatically, up to Princeton Place, the cluster of crosses that marked the killings that had taken over his life last fall, that had, in their way, ruined the relationship he’d been building with Dusty, then a bartender at Stoney’s. She was long gone now—he wasn’t even sure if she was in Baltimore or had gone back home to Miami, or Boca, or wherever.

  He blinked and his eyes refocused on the murder map and he saw something so obvious he’d never really noticed it before. It was a view of comparison and contrast, available only when you splayed it out like this on maps encompassing more than twelve hundred homicides over five years.

  Though Southwest had only a few dozen homicides each year, the Bend itself showed up as a radiant spot of red crosses—an effect enhanced when you moved some of those crosses from near the park, as the cops had listed them, and into it, where the killings had actually occurred.

  He counted all the crosses from the past five years that were in or near the Bend, and just to get the visual, moved them into the map of the most current year. He counted, his lips moving slowly to be sure, and stepped back to look at it.

  Forty-four.

  Over the past five years, forty-four people had been killed in the Bend, a knoblike park of little more than an acre, and not one had been solved. No mass shooting to skew the body count. It wasn’t a high-rise housing project. No one lived there. It was just open ground. It was where D.C. went to kill and be killed.

  “Frenchman’s Bend,” he said softly, already seeing it on the front page, above the fold. “The murder capital of the murder capital.”

  The idea floated across his mind, there in his reverie, that maybe he was wrong and the land itself really was somehow cursed with the history of its past, a settling of accounts that didn’t limit itself to the passing of time. The sins of slavery and degradation and depravity didn’t disappear into the ether, he knew that well enough from back home.

  Willie Baker had gotten shot one night outside the Club, the juke joint near his hometown of Tula, hard behind the levee. Sully was seven at the time and he remembered it, rightly or wrongly, as his introduction to murderous violence.

  Both his parents were still alive then. Everybody in Tula spent Friday nights in the fall watching Willie come out of the backfield and run over, through or just plain past the players from other rural schools. Everybody
knew he was going somewhere. It was a big deal, not that long after integration, folks from all over the county coming behind the team, them making it to the state semifinals. Willie, tall, lean, always with the laugh—he signed a game program for Sully, walking off the field after their playoff loss in his senior year, steam rising from his body in the early-winter chill. Then he went to the Club and came outside about one in the morning and took a chestful from a 12-gauge and everybody knew Carl Evans and his buddies had done it, because Willie had gotten a scholarship offer from LSU and Carl, who thought he was hot shit, had not. And the sheriff, whom Sully would come to know and hate later, never even interviewed anybody because he knew as well as they did that no jury in their postage stamp of a town was ever going to send a white kid to prison for killing a black one.

  And Sully, at seven, looking at his program the next day, asking his momma if they could go to the funeral whenever they had it and her blowing out cigarette smoke, saying she didn’t go to nigger funerals because it was a bunch of caterwauling that went on for three hours.

  It would be easy, Sully thought, to label that sort of hypocrisy and fear and loathing and violence a white southern virus, but the world was much more complicated than that. The dark verities weren’t cultural. They had been around so long that they had become genetic, worming their way into the very blood of the living, the flesh and the DNA of successive generations. They came to the fore over the millennia because the world is Darwinian and hatred and fear and loathing were not left out like a sixth finger or a useless appendage, but were adapted into the core of the species. They spawned from generation to generation to generation because they had proven themselves to be stronger, more resilient, and more vicious than other attributes. You could not kill hatred and fear and loathing. They were hardwired into the neural pathways. They found homes in the webs of the neocortex. In the gene pool of survival, nature selected them and it selected them because they had proven themselves to be an integral survival skill. They had earned the right to survive.

  “Hey, R.J.?” he called out, half-distracted, his eyes dancing across the map. “I’m thinking we got something here.”

  FOUR

  “WILLIAM SANDERS ELLISON,” Parker was saying, “floater man, known to friends and family as Billy. Twenty-one-year-old black male, son of Delores Ellison and the late William G. Sanders.”

  Sully, in his row house on Capitol Hill, half-undressed, twenty minutes to midnight, crooking the phone between his ear and his shoulder, scribbling it down on the back of the Chinese takeout menu from the place on H Street, the one you’d rather order from than pick up, as the pickup area was walled off with six-inch-thick plexiglass, people had robbed the place so often.

  “All right, all right, give me a second here. . . . Any more holes in him than the extra one in his head?” he said, sitting up on the couch, careful not to knock over his drink on the coffee table, Alexis sitting up herself now, pulling her unbuttoned blouse back over that racy bra, not happy about him taking the call, smoothing her skirt back down over her fishnets, things just getting interesting when his cell had buzzed. She still had her heels on—he was fine with them staying on, even if he stripped everything else off—and she was looking at the blank television screen, listening to the Van Morrison he’d had on when she had pulled up in a taxi, reaching for her chardonnay now.

  “Nah,” Parker said. “Just the one. Untouched otherwise, toxicology pending. But, really, the name is more important than the cause.”

  “It is?”

  “The Ellisons? This doesn’t register for you?”

  “Not, ah, at the moment, I’m sort of—”

  “The Ellisons. D.C. black society, brother. The e-lites, as the missus would say. Quiet, respectable, old money, Jack and Jill, the Links, house on the Gold Coast, summer home on the Vineyard, first black this, first black that. Dad, he married in, he was a young turk in the Carter administration.”

  “They’re like, what, the Quanders, the Hairstons?”

  “Bigger. Or, well, richer. By a lot.”

  “And you still thinking junior was a coke freak, scoring down in the Bend?”

  There was a pause. “I did not say that.”

  “You were thinking it, out there on the boat. Come on. That’s how they do it down there. I looked it up. Three homicides this year in Frenchman’s Bend already. All three got dumped in the channel. Floater man was a tourist, he fell off a boat? Somebody would have called 911 when it happened.”

  Parker sighed. “So you were the white guy who went down there asking questions. Our guys get to the Bend this afternoon, bracing the usual suspects, and they start popping off about some narc.”

  “They made me for a narc?”

  “I don’t think they could believe a civilian would have been dumb enough to walk in there like he owned the place.”

  “Flattered. So, young Billy had a drug problem.”

  “Possibly. They tell me it happens in the best of families.”

  “You don’t sound all broke up.”

  “They’re very wealthy people.”

  “Isn’t that what this great country is all about?”

  “Yeah, which is what I’m saying. The Oval Office has already called the chief, right? And our lovely congressional representative called me fifteen minutes ago, which, I conclude, was about seventeen seconds after she found out about it.”

  “The Oval Office? On a shooting in the Bend? Come on.”

  “You’d grown up here, you’d know. The family is your local institution. Major Democratic boosters, but not hostile to the party of Lincoln. Fund-raisers, society things. This is Delores’s family we’re talking about. Dad, William, got killed in a car wreck on the Beltway ten, fifteen years back.”

  “Well, wait. If Dad was Sanders, how come the kid has mom’s last name?”

  “Talk to them. This town, Ellison is the family name you want. Delores is on the White House social list, regardless of the administration. Dad worked for Shellie Stevens. Delores still does.”

  Sully paused, tilting his head slightly, thinking maybe he hadn’t heard correctly. “The lobbyist dude, Shellie Stevens, what gets everybody out of trouble?”

  “Himself.”

  “Wow.”

  “Which is what I was telling you—my phone is ringing.”

  “Any connection?”

  “How you mean?”

  “Did the kid, what, Billy, work for Stevens, too?”

  “No, no. You got it crooked. Dad was a partner in Shellie’s firm, back in the day. Now, Mom is some sort of ‘strategist’ at the firm. That’s what she said in the interview. Told the detective she works for Shellie—he says, ‘In what capacity,’ and she says, ‘I’m a strategist.’”

  “Oh.”

  “Like it’s a title.”

  “You go down to the ME’s for the cut?”

  “To make sure it didn’t get fucked up, that we’re covering our bases, showing concern, won’t rest till the killer or killers are caught, yeah, sure.”

  “Who you assigning?”

  “Jeff Weaver, the lead in 1-D, since it looks like it happened in the Bend. He was down there for the cut, too.”

  “I don’t know him much,” Sully said.

  “The ace in Southwest at the moment. Or what we have that passes for an ace. You wouldn’t believe this place.”

  “How’s the overhaul coming?”

  “You got jokes now? Slow. Remaking an entire department? Icebergs make better progress.”

  “Obvious leads on Billy boy?”

  “None. But you got to remember we didn’t make a positive ID until about six this evening. He was already dead something like twenty-four hours, coroner says. Mom didn’t tell us anything off the bat that sounded fishy. He was finishing his junior year at Georgetown, going to go into law like his old man. Like that.”

/>   “So what is it she says happened to baby boy?”

  “No clue. She tells us he was living in an apartment, not at home. Didn’t know anything was wrong till someone called her up and said they saw this body being pulled out of the water on television and it looked like Billy.”

  “So Billy, no known enemies.”

  “This is his momma.”

  “She know he had a drug problem?”

  “Said she was in shock when we asked her about him being at the Bend.”

  “They always are,” Sully said. “And so, look, I was going through the files? That murder map I keep? And—”

  “You know that thing’s not gospel, right? You know how bad the record keeping is here? The way the previous administration was trying—”

  “Okay, so, okay, stipulated, but it looks like to me that the Bend? It’s got maybe the highest density of killings of anyplace in the city.”

  “I haven’t run it like that, but it’d be close, yeah.”

  “Just so we’re straight, I’m thinking about that idea for a story.”

  He was still scribbling on the menu and sensed movement out of the corner of his eye. Alexis was finishing her wine and standing up—Jesus no, that couldn’t happen. He smiled and lightly grabbed her wrist, shaking his head, no no no. She looked down at him, a little peeved now, blouse still open, that body, god alive—Billy Ellison could wait.

  “Your business,” Parker was saying. “There’ll be a little more evidence tomorrow. Turns out there was a report of a gunshot in or near the Bend last night. There’s gunshots down there most every night, hey? But do not—are you listening to me?—do not go fucking around in the Bend. That’s the Hall brothers. They don’t play.”

  “So I’ve been told,” Sully said, clicking off the cell and tossing it on the table.