Murder, D.C.

by Neely Tucker

  “But Dee Dee, he goes up to that McDonald’s on South Cap? Clear South Cap territory. Clear. He moves a little product out of his car, strolls on inside, gets, I don’t know, a burger and fries and then gets his whip cleaned up right next door at Splash. Sitting out front, chewing on a toothpick, talking shit with the Mexican ladies, the ones that dry off the car, do the detailing. That’s just asking for it.”

  “What happened?”

  “The car came out of the wash clean and had three bullet holes in the side by the time he made the light at P.”

  “So his demise a few weeks later was not unexpected.”

  “Dee Dee was moving new product. Clean, nearly uncut. Would take the top of your head off. Plus, the way he was dealing it, the way he was acting—”

  “Says that he was trying to start up his own operation.”

  Weaver nodded.

  “So, the connection here,” Sully said, “if there’s any, is that Billy Ellison was what, picking stuff up to sell back in Georgetown? To his gay buddies up there on O Street?”

  Weaver looked up at him then, the chin coming up a tick, the eyes holding.

  “So you got that, too. The gay thing. Let’s just say the investigation is wide open right at this point here.”

  “But, I mean, the Bend is M Street’s turf, the Hall brothers?”

  “Yeah. For years.”

  “Who’s running South Caps these days? I don’t even know.”

  “Terry Mungo. T-Money.”

  Sully, thinking it out, thinking that the issue was that D.C. didn’t have proper gangs, like the Crips and the Bloods in L.A. or the Folks and People alliances in Chicago. Those were big-city crime organizations and what they did made a certain business sense.

  D.C. was a small town and the drug business was run by neighborhood-based affiliations, crews, guys who had grown up together and had known one another since childhood. It was, in its own way, a brilliant business model: an enterprise that incubated for years of shared existence before the doors ever opened for customers. It was impervious to infiltration; if you weren’t in when you were six years old, you didn’t get in. Likewise, if you ever got busted and thought about flipping, testifying for the state? All your former friends knew where your momma lived, your sister and her baby lived. . . . Somebody in your family would be dead because of you. But the flaw in this business model was that since it was guys who had known each other since Head Start, shooting wars would take off from shit that happened fifteen years ago, and it would never make sense to anybody outside.

  “You guys braced the Halls?”

  Weaver snorted. “This morning. For what it was worth. Tweedle Dee and Dum. Didn’t say shit.”

  “Which one of them runs the show, you think?”

  “Tony does a lot of the business, can figure the profit margin on three keys of coke while he’s snorting a line for the test. Carlos, he’s not quite so bright like that, but the boy ain’t simple, either.”

  “You—”

  “They was looking—this was a couple years back now, I’m gonna say ninety-six—looking for this dude from Brookland who had stiffed them on a payment. They staked out his place but it was the dude’s girlfriend what came home first. Jalinda. Girl’s name was Jalinda. They grab her, throw her in the back of a van, drive her all over, take turns slapping her around, then, when she wouldn’t tell them when the dude was going to be home, they rape her in the back there while they drive around the Beltway. She kept begging them to let her see her baby before they killed her—she had a one-year-old, over at her momma’s—and they didn’t take that, obviously. After they got tired of fucking her, they beat her to death with a pair of garden shears they had in the back of the van. Threw her body in a trash dumpster on the back end of Capitol Hill. So, you ask me, which one of them does what, I say to you, this is a distinction without a difference.”

  “Jesus,” Sully said. “But, I mean, how do you know that?”

  Weaver took a bite of his sandwich. “Driver. Dude driving the van.”

  “Good god, he talked?”

  “I mean he talked to me, and he talked to me ’cause he went to Eastern High, two years before my little brother. I been knowing him since he was five.”

  “So why didn’t you charge the Halls?”

  “Cause Driver Man, he said he’d rather do the time for what we pinched him on, possession with intent, than flip. He wanted me to know why he wasn’t flipping, and that was ’cause he had a sister.”

  Sully watched the water picking up into little whitecaps out in the channel, the wind coming up now, and he was reminding himself to write all of this down as soon as he left. He started writing this shit down in front of Weaver, he’d spook.

  Weaver put a fist over his mouth and burped lightly. “Which is all to say, the Bend ain’t for amateurs, and little rich kid Billy Ellison? He was in way over his head down here. Goldfish swimming with the hammerheads.”

  EIGHT

  THREE HOURS TO deadline by the time he got to Shellie Stevens’s office. This was cause for relief, so he let himself take a deep breath and roll his shoulders backward once, then twice, letting some of the tension go. Stevens wasn’t going to give him more than half an hour, it wasn’t even fifteen minutes back to the office . . . he’d have two hours. Plenty.

  The office building—sleek, modern, stone and glass—fronted on Pennsylvania, America’s Main Street. It wasn’t the tallest building by any means, but it breathed the personality of its most fearsome inhabitant, which is to say it was polished, sophisticated, and inscrutable.

  When Sully walked into the lobby, his hard-soled shoes clicking on the marble, he had to show his ID to the pair of guards in three-piece suits at the chest-high reception desk. The tile was white and spotless and being mopped by a guy in blue coveralls. The black-and-yellow-and-red abstract painting behind the desk, huge and sprawling, the only splash of color in the room, likely was worth more than his annual salary. The only sound was a stone and boulder fountain, in the corner, and even that rippled rather than splashed. He had the unconscious habit of summarizing places or people in one word, and now “muted” blipped across his brain. The entire effect was—

  “Pardon me?” the guard sitting at the desk said, looking up at him, expectant. His partner looked at Sully, too.

  “For what?” Sully said, coming out of his reverie.

  “You just said something.”

  “I did? What?”

  The sitting guard flicked a glance at the standing one, both looking like they were wondering if this skinny guy with the scars was going to be trouble.

  “I don’t know. That’s why I said, ‘Pardon me.’ Because I didn’t hear what you said.”

  “Hunh,” Sully said, wondering if he’d been talking out loud again. “I don’t think I said anything. Is Mr. Stevens in today?”

  They paused, both sizing him up, wondering if he was a nutter or just on his way there, and then the sitting guy said, “The secretary will be down to get you. Go ahead and sign in?”

  He did and then wandered around the lobby, the only person there, wondering what other firms or agencies or bloodsucking leeches leased space in this sort of monument to soullessness. That biblical thing about cleanliness being next to godliness, he thought, standing by the boulders in the fountain, still feeling like somebody was going to come up and charge him for breathing the air, was that in federal Washington, cleanliness was next to power (if that was different than God in Washington).

  Cleanliness of reputation or at least cleanliness from scandal that stuck to the sole of your wing tips like dog shit; cleanliness from tarnish in the eyes of voters or the Securities and Exchange Commission; cleanliness from allegations; cleanliness from flavor, from funk, from style, from hair over the collar, from skirts above the knee. The entire goal of existence in these quarters seemed to be living your life as
an unscented sheet of white paper. It wasn’t enough to have money here—you had to have juice, you had to have influence on the bench and in the House and Senate and Oval Office, and to have that sort of juice and that sort of influence, you had to appear spotless, clean, scrubbed with the disinfectant of integrity and good judgment and decorum and the utter lack of any personality at all.

  And if you were Shellie Stevens, the man in the penthouse floor of this place, you didn’t even appear as this. You were the ether, the air, someone so above the fray, so above the act of cleaning, so as to not appear at all. This combination of traits made Stevens one of the most intimidating names in the city, the lawyer who made things go away for the rich and the unclean.

  Sully was supposed to be professionally free from bias, yeah, he knew that, except that he could not abide the very idea of Shellie Stevens, and he would have felt bad about this professional lapse, really, except for the fact that he was one hundred percent certain the feeling was mutual. Stevens’s contempt for the Fourth Estate was what passed for Washington legend.

  The receptionist came to claim him then, swiping a card in the elevator to access the penthouse floor, and then, once there, swiping it to open a locked set of double doors. Once inside, there was light classical music in a cavern of wood-paneled walls and oil-on-canvas paintings of Georgetown from the water and the Capitol in the eyes of an impressionist, hues of granite and limestone and fading light. The floors were polished hardwood, draped with Persian rugs that bled money. There were no windows in this space, but when you stepped into Stevens’s inner sanctum, a corner suite commanding views to the east and south, the windows ran from the floor to the ceiling, a dozen feet above. Watery winter light, as thin as weak tea, filtered across the room.

  In the middle rear of this space, backlit, Shellie Stevens sat behind his oaken desk, elbows on the table, his interlocked fingers beneath his chin, eyes flickering only slightly to take in Sully’s appearance. He did not get up.

  “Mr. Carter,” he said from the slight shadow in which he sat. The receptionist, almost invisible, walked gently backward, pulling the doors closed behind her on the way out.

  “Mr. Stevens,” Sully said, making his way across the carpeted room, sitting down in one of the heavy leather chairs across the desk. There was no question of a handshake. The man wouldn’t have taken his hand if he gave it to him gift wrapped.

  “How may I help?” Gravel-voiced, impatient, the words more a demand than a query.

  Stevens was thin, approaching sixty, short silver hair slicked straight back, wearing his suit jacket at the desk, the white shirt and light blue tie setting off his eyes of the same color. He assessed Sully like he was a fish flopping on a pier.

  “I’m at work,” Sully began, “on a story about—”

  “I know that.”

  “—and I—well, then you’d know how you could help. Delores Ellison said I should talk to you.” He reached into his backpack for what he knew would be a fool’s errand. “Let me get my notebook and recorder, so I can keep—”

  “This is not an interview. No notes, no recording.” Stevens still had not moved.

  “Fine,” Sully said, pulling himself back up into the chair. “An off-the-record chat. Delores Ellison said I should talk to you about her son, Billy. Why would she do that?”

  Stevens blinked, finally, then looked at him blankly, as if he were slow of mind. He inhaled and let it out slowly. “Why would Delores,” he said, “ask you to talk to me.” He considered. “Because I told her to. Because this is a private matter. Because there is very little that needs to be in the public sphere.”

  “I see. And what is it that should be public? That I might print?” He was trying to keep his tone neutral, but it was already wobbling.

  “That you might print?” Another pause. The shoulders still had not moved, nor had the elbows on the desk, nor the hands clasped at the chin. “I have a statement prepared. It will be given to you on the way out. A list of Billy’s notable achievements, his schooling, his social memberships.”

  “I look forward to seeing it. But you’re describing an obituary. I’m writing a crime story.”

  Stevens did not nod or indicate that he had heard Sully. “This situation is not in any way a public news event. The family would prefer not to have Billy’s name mentioned in the newspapers at all. However, Delores recognizes her family’s social standing, and that Billy’s many, many friends and admirers would want to know of his passing. Also, to assure them that the police will, in due time, apprehend his killer. Therefore, a statement. But in this story of yours, you will not mention anything about Billy that is not mentioned in the statement given to you.”

  The instructive had never been one of Sully’s favorite tenses, particularly when applied to him in this tone. He did not shake his head, and barely moved his lips. “He’s a public figure,” he said.

  “A public figure?”

  “You have echolalia, counselor? You hear me okay? Yes. A public figure. Billy. All homicide victims are. Police reports are public documents. As politely as I can put it, I do not need yours, or anyone else’s, permission to publish what police officers write down on criminal reports. Surely you know that. Surely you know that includes the murder of the last heir of a prominent family in the nation’s capital. So when you tell me that I won’t print anything but what you write in a statement, you know that’s bullshit.”

  “Your language, Mr. Carter. What is it you think you know of Billy?”

  “That he was in Frenchman’s Bend at about a quarter of midnight Monday when somebody shot him in the head at close range. Likely, this would indicate a drug deal of some nature, as that is what constitutes most killings in the Bend. Also, that he was gay.”

  Stevens unclasped his hands and sat back in his chair.

  “Gay,” he said.

  “Queer,” Sully said. “As fuck.”

  They looked at one another, the Washington game of the loser breaking the silence. Sully, playing on Stevens’s turf, let him have a home-court win.

  “Elliot Cane, his partner and a fellow student at Georgetown,” he said, “says that Billy was quite familiar with that stretch of gay clubs down on O Street Southwest. Which is only a few blocks from the Bend. Which might also explain why he was there. If he was a thrill seeker who liked slumming—well you can get a blow job or a baggie down there after dark. All of that is, you know, public record, too.”

  Stevens’s eyes were flat. You couldn’t even see the wheels spinning, this guy.

  “Billy was not just one of my employees’ sons, Mr. Carter. He was my godson. I have known Delores’s family for a very long time. You will not drag their name through the mud so that you can sell a few more papers. You will be given a statement upon your exit. It will be spelled out for you what may and may not be printed without legal action.”

  “I think you said that already.”

  “There is a sentence that states Billy was successfully completing ‘recovery therapy,’ which is the only allusion that will be made about his dependence on, and trafficking in, narcotics. Billy dealt drugs. In substantial quantities. It was his weakness, some sort of street credibility issue. He wanted to appear something that he was not, which was tough, worldly. It cost him his life. However, he was never arrested and there is no”—and here he leaned forward—“public record of it. Likewise, the police have not made a final determination on where the shooting took place. So you have no standing to report that he was in Frenchman’s Bend. Libeling Billy—a dead young man who hurt no one—or his family, will be addressed appropriately. Swiftly.”

  “You can’t libel the dead, counselor, but yeah, I kind of got the rest of that.”

  “This is the type of story that has gotten you in trouble before.”

  “I wouldn’t say so.”

  “Judge Foy. It is a well-known incident.”

 
“Judge Foy,” Sully said, “is lucky to still have his job.”

  “An irony, for you to make the observation.”

  Sully smiled. This was starting to be fun. “How’s your private homicide investigation going?” he said. “You an expert now on the M Street and South Caps? You realized yet you’re out of your league?”

  “Another ironic observation.”

  Sully stood to go. “This has been edifying, counselor. I bet you can spell that without looking it up.”

  Stevens did not rise. “If you contact Delores again, the firm will file a restraining order against you. I’m sure you’re aware that restraining orders are also public documents, and, should they become known, that you so hounded a bereaved mother to take such—”

  “You’ll be on the phone, explaining all this to Eddie Winters before I get back to the office,” Sully said. “So yeah yeah yeah. I hear you barking. But all of this is going to come out in any story about Billy’s death, so save yourself the oxygen.”

  “It is?” Stevens raised an eyebrow, the first time his face had so much as moved. “Where? In what publication? Other than local television and the Washingtonian magazine, no one but you has inquired, Mr. Carter. Television will go away after a day or so. The Washingtonian will mention Billy’s loss in a society column. The New York Times called but agreed to my request for non-publication of a family tragedy. So. You are the only reporter in play.”

  Sully shrugged. “Then what a lousy stretch of luck for you.”

  He hit the door downstairs a few minutes later, the statement tucked in a crisp envelope under his arm, the fresh air in his face, the spring sunlight washing over the Potomac. Crossing at the light and briskly now, walking for the office, checking his watch, composing the story in his head. Shellie Stevens’s Washington was rarefied air, the federal enclave. But this was not Sully’s Washington, and it was intoxicating to a different type of reporter. Yeah, the Sunday morning political talk show hosts and guests, the ones who name-dropped whose table they’d been sitting at for the White House Correspondents’ dinner, the type of reporters who posed for grip-and-grins with the sitting president at the Gridiron dinner and then put them on their mantels at home—those were reporters who would go to Shellie Stevens’s office and let a thing like the death of an employee’s son pass, chalking it up to cultivating a source, thus keeping the lines of behind-the-scenes access open to stories of national power and scope.