Murder, D.C.

by Neely Tucker

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Shellie hired private investigators last night. They have more time and, if I may, more energy than the D.C. police force, such as it is.”

  “It’s good you can do that. So many parents I talk to, in situations like this, they feel helpless.”

  She nodded emphatically, as if he were a slow student. “That’s why I want you to ask Shellie anything you need to know. You’ll need to ask him if it’s okay that I talked to you, and ask him what I can be quoted as saying.”

  He had to work to keep the poker face. There was a conscious effort not to fold his arms—you had to make every gesture an indication of being open—but now he leaned back in his chair, making no move toward writing in the notebook. “I’m not following. Shellie Stevens is your employer, and you want to check with him if you can say something about your son?”

  Delores Ellison leaned forward now, a half smile, indulging him but not dismissing him.

  “Well, like everything else he does, if you know him, Shellie doesn’t want any publicity. He’s already met with the police, with the mayor’s office, the DOJ, the coroner. I wouldn’t want to just say something in the paper without him saying, you know, okay on that.”

  “So, you’d like me to ask him myself?”

  “That would be wonderful,” she said. “And could you do me a favor? Could you just not mention that you and I talked today? That you just came to his office and asked if you could talk to me?”

  “Well.” This was getting creepy. “Why would he be expecting me to ask permission to talk to you?”

  “You know Shellie?”

  “Of him.”

  “Interviewed him?”

  “To the best of my knowledge, no one ever has, at least on the record.”

  “Then you know the value he puts on being invisible. On not having his name, the firm’s name mentioned, at all. His whole practice is based—”

  “On not leaving fingerprints,” Sully said. “I know. So why would he talk to me about this?”

  “Oh, he’s not,” she said. “He’s absolutely not. That’s not what I was saying. You’ll contact the firm, leave a message that you’d like to talk to me off the record, about Billy, and that you’re touching base with him out of respect for the firm’s privacy.”

  Heat rose behind his eyelids. “The firm’s privacy is a position they take to the rest of the world, particularly the media,” he said, as evenly as possible. “That’s not necessarily the position we’d take toward them. Look, it’s up to you if you talk to us, no one else. If you’re trying to tell me you’re feeling some pressure from your employer not to talk about the murder investigation of your son, then the paper would take a very dim view of that and we’d—”

  “Do you want to talk to me, and maybe see the files his investigators produce?”

  “Of course,” he said. Playing dumb.

  “Then do it his way. Shellie’s not going to say anything to you, but if it’s okay, he’ll tell me he got this call from you, and ask if I want to talk to you, and so on. Really. He’s doing so much. You don’t understand.”

  He nodded. The number of people in this town who lectured him, who told him he didn’t know what he was doing, that he didn’t understand, that . . . yeah, okay, whatever. It was endemic, this superiority complex, these fuckers—you give them some money, make them partner, a strategist, you get them close to a congressional committee on fuckall, they start acting like they legislated the goddamn world into being. He leaned forward in the chair now, picked up the pen, put it to paper, stuffing his contempt back down into a tube of social propriety.

  “And what number should I call Mr. Stevens on, ma’am?”

  SIX

  SEVEN HOURS TILL deadline and he still had his dick in his hand. Jesus.

  He made two calls, right foot tapping.

  The first one, Stevens’s secretary answered and said that the great man was not available until four thirty but she would pencil Sully in then.

  The second one was to Jeff Weaver, the homicide cop John had designated to lead the investigation. Weaver said he didn’t have any time and Sully told him that you got to eat sometime and the man said he would be down at the Bend, round about two, and if Sully wanted to try to catch him there then, well, hey, fine, none off his.

  That gave him about two hours.

  Billy had been a history freak, his mom had said, so Sully made a couple of calls to where he’d been a student, Georgetown’s history department, sitting there in the chilly windless shade on the bike outside the Ellisons’. He got a receptionist on the line and it turned out Billy boy had been in the American Studies program, and the offices were right down on Prospect Street, near the top of the Exorcist steps. Fifteen minutes later, he was down there, pulling out his press ID, a little blue card on a lanyard, hanging it around his neck so everyone could see it, and then started pegging bright, fresh-faced students for intel. Of course, a rich dead kid like that on the evening news, one of only three black kids in the American Studies program—hey, man, everybody knew Billy.

  The second guy he talked to said he knew Billy, liked Billy, had been to some parties with Billy, but that Elliot? Elliot, man, he really knew Billy, and Elliot, you could find him—wait, what time was it? Twelve thirty? Elliot always ate lunch in the cafeteria, like, every single day in the same place.

  • • •

  Elliot was sitting upright and alone, a skinny kid eating a tuna-fish sandwich out of a ziplock bag in the back right corner, looking down at a textbook. He half-stood when the kid made the introductions and left. Sully took the chair across the table and Elliot sat back down. He had glasses, square bifocals with black frames, and Sully wondered if that look had gone retro-hip, Elliot’s flannel shirt and jeans, the brown shoes, the whole getup singing nerd.

  Elliot said he’d heard about Billy last night—officially, because he didn’t trust the television news and didn’t know anyone who did—but that he had known something was wrong because Billy had not come to classes or lunch Friday or Monday and that was just so unlike him.

  “Two days, no lunch, hunh?” Sully said. “I’m guessing he must have eaten with you most days.”

  Elliot regarded him blankly. “Who told you that?”

  “Nobody,” Sully said. “Well, you. You said he didn’t come to lunch for two days. You would have had to be eating with him on a pretty regular basis to know he wasn’t in his usual spot, right?”

  Elliot thought about it. “I guess.” And then he said, “Why did Ted bring you here?”

  “Because, well, I don’t know. Ask him. I was over there at the American Studies program office, you know, where Billy was majoring, and asking around, and Ted said that you knew Billy pretty well. Then he brought me over here, looking for you.”

  “I eat here every day,” Elliot said. “I’m a senior. I’m in the ASP, too.”

  “Well, I guess that’s why Ted brought me here. So Billy must have sat right here where I am?”

  Elliot looked uncomfortable but took a bite of his sandwich and said, “Yes. The next chair over. No. To your left.”

  “So you guys were pretty good friends. How did you say you found out he had, ah, died?”

  “The television, like I said. And then everybody was talking about it. Well, wait. First everybody was saying, ‘Where’s Billy?’ ’cause he wasn’t around for a couple of days, and that was weird. You’d usually see him. He was around. And then there was the television and then all the professors knew. They put out a statement.”

  “Before you found out he was dead, did you try to reach him? Since he didn’t show for lunch, or class?”

  “Oh, yeah, to see if he was at home sick or something.”

  “And he didn’t answer?”

  “Well, he was dead, so, no.”

  Sully flipped a page in the notebook and resist
ed the urge to lean right over and smack the little twerp, a line like that. “So a couple of days would have gone by before you called him, right?”

  “I guess. It was the weekend. I wasn’t looking at a calendar. He wasn’t at class, wasn’t at lunch, so I called his apartment. There was no answer.”

  “Now I’m with you. Remember the last time you saw him?”

  “You’re asking a lot of questions.”

  “It’s sort of the job description.”

  Elliot squinted. “Thursday? Thursday afternoon. Lunch. I saw him at lunch on Thursday.”

  “Hunh. Right here? He seem upset about anything?”

  Elliot shook his head, loose black bangs, a library reading-room pallor to his features, the kid reminding him of a young Lou Reed. “No. Not really.”

  “What’d you guys talk about?”

  “My thesis. I’m wrapping it up. It’s a senior year project. You have to have it to graduate in American Studies. It’s a multidisciplinary degree. Arts, sciences, politics. You have to pick an era. So I’m near the end of it. Billy, he was asking about that, since he had his coming up next year.”

  “What was he going to do it on?”

  “Something about black life in D.C. in the 1920s and 1930s, you know, the New Negro Movement, the Harlem Renaissance. He was researching it, tying it in to his family.”

  “Un-hunh,” Sully said. “Where was Billy’s place? His apartment?”

  “It was . . . there—what is that, Thirty-fourth Street? I always just walked over, you know, you ever do that? Just walk someplace all the time and not know the streets? I don’t even know the address. He had some parties, sometimes. It was before you get to Wisconsin. Lots of row houses. He was staying in one of those little old wooden places, you know that looks like a can of saltine crackers turned on its side? He was renting one of those.”

  “You guys hang out?”

  “Some, I don’t know. Maybe. What do you mean, ‘hang out’? We had History 181 together. It’s a req.”

  And then, with that same flat voice, devoid of inflection, not looking up, with all the other information he was going to get already in hand, Sully tossed out the real question, the reason he’d come. “So Billy was one of the campus hookups for a little ganja and coke, right?”

  Elliot stopped chewing and looked at him. “Not that I know of.”

  “Hunh.”

  “Why do you even think that?”

  “Well, the place that police think he was shot? It’s a major drug market. Hard to picture him having another reason for being over there.”

  Elliot resumed chewing and didn’t say anything.

  “So, okay, any problems you’d noticed about Billy recently? Either last Friday or before? He angry, scared, upset? Anything at all?”

  Dabbing a napkin to his lips, Elliot said, “No. Well.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, what we talked about, not so much history, but what we talked about a lot, was him and his mother.”

  “His mother? Him and his mother? What about them?”

  “Well, she was kind of, and don’t print this, but she was kind of a pain. They’d just gotten in a huge fight on Friday night, the day after I saw him last. He called me, crying, really really upset.”

  “What about?”

  “Ah, I don’t know. She just came down on him so hard all the time. She was just so . . . negative.”

  Sully making eye contact, trying to draw something from the kid. “I could see how you could kind of say that.”

  “And Billy was so open with her, so honest, and she just—it was all about law school, the career, making partner, doing as well as his dad.”

  “Hunh. And Billy, he just wasn’t—”

  Elliot was looking over the table at him, a quizzical expression crossing his freckled face, his manner so earnest, god you had to love kids, they were just—

  “I mean,” he said, “you know that Billy was gay, right? That we were partners? That this is what we’re talking about?”

  SEVEN

  THEY HAD PUT yellow crime scene tape up at the bottom of P Street, blocking off the sidewalk that led down to the Bend. There was a crime scene truck and one marked vehicle and three or four unmarked Crown Vics that might as well have been painted iridescent orange for all the good it did. A uniformed cop stopped him at the tape, but Sully showed him his ID and told him Weaver was waiting on him. The uniform rattled that off on his walkie-talkie, and a corresponding squawk—Sully had no idea what it said—led him to raise the tape, looking off in the distance, letting Sully under, not really giving a damn about it one way or the other.

  Weaver, the detective, was way down there, one hand against the bedraggled cherry tree on the Bend’s namesake knob of land, his tie fluttering off his chest and back down again in the wind. Weaver had dark slacks and an unbuttoned sport coat, the gun holstered on the right hip. His sunglasses were pushed up on his head and he was eating a sandwich still half in a plastic wrapper. In his left hand he held a can of soda.

  It was five minutes after two. Five hours, more or less, till deadline.

  “How you living, detective?” Sully said, raising his voice to be heard above the wind. There were two techs working around the set of small orange cones in the grass, more or less in a triangle, fifty feet forward, nearer the water. They looked up at Sully, then at Weaver, then turned back, poring over the grass, the dirt.

  Weaver, still chewing, held a hand up, a stop sign, then rolled the fingers forward, as in gimme a minute, while he finished. “We got a location,” he said, taking a slurp of the soda, “of a pool of blood over there. And a shoe, down by the water.”

  “So this is what John was talking about, the new evidence. They Ellison’s? The blood? The shoe?”

  “Got to wait for a match on either,” he said. “Techs just scraped the blood this morning. It wasn’t bad cop work. We’d foot-walked the place twice, missed it. It’s over there near that red little flag, see that? Some grass, by that patch of dirt? Looks like somebody tried to kick dirt over it, bury it. The shoe was down in the rocks there, with some other trash, where you see the red flag with the number two on it. His mother IDed it as his, for what that’s worth.”

  “It’s been, what, two days now? Will they be able to match the blood?”

  A breeze came up and it fluttered Weaver’s plastic sandwich wrapper and he had to snap a hand out to catch it, shrugging off the question. Sully didn’t know much about him, only that he was a uniform who had made detective four or five years back and had a solid rep, particularly down here in 1-D. Late thirties, a shade over six feet, serious time in the gym. If he hit you—and Sully didn’t doubt he’d popped some noncompliant dudes upside the head—you’d stay hit. He was lifting the bread on his sandwich, looking critically inside, then replacing it. “This, what we’re talking about, it’s off the record, right?”

  Sully rolled his eyes and nodded. “I won’t attribute it to you. Just a law enforcement source.”

  “Good, good. Well, see, the blood will only match by type, so it won’t say it was him, just indicate if it was somebody with the same type. It’s good for excluding people, but not for positive ID. The shoe—now, that’s better, but without the blood, it could have just washed up from when he was swimming. If we can match the blood, though, that, with the shoe, then I’m feeling good about saying he got popped right here.”

  “Sure.”

  “Yeah, but even then? We got a decedent and we know where he went down. Hooray for our team. But we got no wits, we got no weapon, we got no ballistics worth having, we got no prints.”

  “What about the ticktock? When was the last time somebody saw him?”

  “That we know about right now, Sunday night. At his mother’s. Leaves and then it’s just into the void. Doesn’t go to classes Monday. If that gunshot, the one that got calle
d in? If that matches up with him, which I’m thinking it does, then he got popped about a quarter of midnight Monday.”

  “So he was dead when he went in the water?”

  “Yeah. No water in the lungs, no aspirated anything.”

  “Any idea how long he was dead before he got tossed in?”

  A shrug. “Long enough not to be breathing no more.”

  “Toxicology?”

  “Not back yet.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I told you. You want to boost your closure stats, you catch a domestic with six wits and the dumbass still standing there with the knife. You catch the shooting at the McDonald’s, the one on Pennsylvania right by the bridge over the Anacostia? You remember that, last year? The whole thing on video, the license plates, and we look it up, and they still got the Big Mac wrappers in the car?”

  Sully, nodding, thinking to himself that what you really didn’t want to catch was the competently carried-out drug crew execution, particularly when the victim was then tossed in the channel, which then buggered the autopsy.

  “This thing, it’s a bad case,” Sully said.

  “It’s a bad case,” Weaver said. “But, now, look here. We had another decedent right over there on the edge of the park, last week. Thursday, to be exact. Four days before the Ellison thing.”

  “Hunh,” Sully said. “Didn’t hear about it.”

  “This kid’s momma wasn’t rich,” Weaver said, “so who did? One Demetrius Allan Byrd, twenty-two, known to law enforcement.”

  “For?”

  A sigh. “Dee Dee was a regular in the M Street Crew, the Hall brothers’ outfit. Tony and Carlos. The twins. Not exactly what I’d call a major player, but he wasn’t selling no dime bags, either. More a runner to the runners, that level right in there. He starts acting up a month or so back. Telling people what to do, using product like he paid for it.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “You fucking-A, uh-oh. And so Dee Dee, he gets to instigating with the South Caps, beefing for no reason. The way it breaks down, South Capitol Street runs north to south, right? And M Street intersects, east to west. Now. That South Cap–M Street intersection, about a block around it, that’s open turf. It’s the DM-fucking-Z. Otherwise, South Cap runs their avenue, M Street runs theirs, and the world spins.