Murder, D.C.

by Neely Tucker

  Tony Hall’s face appeared above him, three feet away. “The next one is going to be across your ugly-ass face, Cajun. I’n imagine that one’ll put your brains on the asphalt here.” He leaned forward then, spitting a thin stream of beer onto the pavement by Sully’s head. “Now hear me, nigga. You listening? Look at me when I’m talking to you. Yeah? Right? Get your punk—”

  Lights flashed over Tony’s face, pop pop pop, beams and bursts of illumination, the light bouncing off the back of Sully’s skull. He closed his eyes, the roaring in his head getting louder, then rolled away from Tony, trying to draw in air.

  When he opened his eyes again, the man with the bat wasn’t looking at him. Tony Hall wasn’t looking at him. They were both looking off to his left. The circle of men around the fire were all looking that way, some of them standing. Sully registered another pop-pop of light.

  Alexis stood at the outer edge of the tent, camera and flash looped around her neck, the camera at belt level. The flash went off, that pop of light, and he felt sick again. She had her cell in the crook of her neck, talking into it, taking a picture every few seconds.

  “. . . misunderstanding of some sort,” she was saying into the phone, glaring at Tony, at the man with the bat, not even looking at Sully. “These guys get a little too much firewater, officer, you know how it is, they get to horsing around and it looks like a fistfight. I get closer, they’re just girl-friends finger-fucking each other.”

  It was quiet as Sunday church in the tent, the men all staring at her.

  She said, “De Rossi. Alexis de Rossi. Photographer at the paper, down here at Leonard’s Cove, Grudge Night, you know? Doing a feature shoot? In this row of trailers toward the back of the parking lot. I’m looking at Tony and Carlos Hall, you know, the M Street Crew in D.C.? But you get a squad car out here, your guys could ask them. They’re just looking at me, sitting next to each other, like a bunch of puds.”

  Another pause, and she said, “That soon? No problem.”

  She clicked off the phone but kept it in her hand, still eyeing Tony, the man trying to figure out a play.

  Sully squeezed his eyes shut tight, trying to clear his vision, wondering if Tony or Carlos had ever seen a woman like Alex, who had dealt with men worse than them in a Central American jungle, absolutely unfazed by the situation. He wondered, briefly, if Alex had a snub-nosed.38 in her belt loop and figured she’d fucking-A better.

  He shook his head and pushed himself to his feet, nodding to Alex, taking two woozy steps in her direction, his feet feeling wobbly and a long way off. When he got to the edge of the tent—it felt like he’d walked a mile—he gave a half-turn. Tony was going back to his camping chair, the other men sitting down, the dude with the baseball bat choked up on the handle, looking hard at Alexis. It was over.

  A cough rattled up out of Sully’s lungs and he spit, a tinge of blood hitting the pavement. He blinked and said, “You got a misunderstanding.” He said this to Tony, lights dotting the air in front of him. “I was trying to give you a heads-up. You don’t understand. I was trying to help. But so help me God, when Sly comes for you, now? Don’t you come crying to me.”

  SEVENTEEN

  THEY WALKED IN silence back to the bike, staying close to the bleachers, where it was more open, with more light, more witnesses, at least an illusion of more security. Sully got to the bike and then leaned over and vomited, the beer and the hot dog and whatever else, coughing, heaving, spitting onto the asphalt. He sat there a minute, hands on his knees, hearing Alexis zip open her backpack, and a second later she was handing him a half-empty bottle of water. While he rinsed his mouth and spit, she said, quietly, shoving her cameras in her backpack, “If you can get on this thing, it’d be good to go. Nine-one-one told me it’d be twenty minutes before they could get a car out here.”

  He handed her the keys. “Crank it for me,” he rasped, “and unlock the helmets.”

  She did, the engine popping, then purring into life, smooth as a cat on a ledge.

  He leaned over and vomited again, spitting mucus. After a minute he stood up, a ragged jag in his back as he did, a grimace shooting across his face. He wondered, in the instant, if this was what old age felt like or if it was even worse.

  “We gonna fly home,” he coughed, spitting again. “I mean it. No way I’m going to let these pricks roll up on us out there, some ‘accident.’ It’s twenty miles of dark road before we get back to the Beltway. Cops pull us over, we’ll have your call to nine-one-one to back us up.”

  “You get your money’s worth?” she said. She eyed him up, palms backward on her hips, pissed off good and for real. “That was the whole point of this? You getting your ass kicked?”

  “I was trying to make a play,” he said. “The Hall brothers are the two people on this earth who know who killed Billy Ellison.”

  “And you thought they would just tell you?”

  “No,” he said, the taste of vomit in his mouth, “I wanted to see if they jumped when I said the name Sly Hastings.”

  “And?”

  “They jumped.”

  “On you, yeah.”

  “I been kicked outta better bars,” he said. “And that reaction? That tells me they’re spooked. That they know Sly is making a move on the Bend. That maybe they’re the ones who offed Dee Dee, ’cause they pegged him as a mole. And if they offed Dee Dee—”

  “Then maybe your idea was right, that Billy Ellison went down there to the Bend, asking for Dee Dee, not knowing he was dead, and they offed him, too, as an example to all and sundry.”

  He nodded, leaning over to rinse his mouth again. After a while, she started tapping him on the arm with his helmet. He stood upright to take it, the world finally coming into clear vision.

  “Back there, how’d you find me, anyway?” he asked. “I said to meet me at the bike.”

  “Lucky for your punk ass, I met the dude with the dreadlocks. Saw him coming back on the track after your run.”

  “And he just told you?”

  “I think he kind of likes me.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, coughing again, “that I’d be advertising that.”

  • • •

  The next morning, a pair of deep bruises bloomed across his back like malignant cherry blossoms. In the light of the bathroom, naked, he looked at them in the mirror and said, “Goddamn.”

  They radiated pain, making him blink when he touched them, delicately plying them with his fingers. A cracked rib? Two?

  He decided not to be a baby and washed down three painkillers with a bourbon and a splash and took the bike up to Jimmy T’s. He put his files in his backpack and went to the same back booth that he and Alexis had sat in and Wanda brought him the standard waffle and coffee. After a few minutes, Wanda refilled his coffee and put a receipt under the cup and didn’t say a thing. He tipped her ten dollars and did not speak.

  Using the booth as his desk space, he set out the files from the backpack. Manila folders, each with the deceased’s name and dates across the tab, all recent homicide victims in Southwest. All the names but one were male, and all but one was black—the outlier being Latino. Each decedent’s home address, the location of their slaying, and any relevant phone numbers were written neatly across the top right of the folder. He sorted them by home address, looking for doors to knock on. He wrote these names and addresses on the back of a spiral-bound notebook.

  He had eight names listed in black ink when his cell buzzed. The caller ID, when he fished it out of the backpack, was that of Jeff Weaver, the homicide cop.

  “Detective,” he said, “how you—”

  “We got a match,” Weaver said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The blood. In the Bend. O negative. Same as Billy Ellison’s. John said you’d want to know.”

  “Excellent. Hey, that’s excellent. But, ah, isn’t that, like, the most co
mmon? Like, half the population?”

  “You’re thinking O positive. O negative excludes ninety-six percent of the black population, ninety two percent of white folks. But we know—can I speak freely here?—there ain’t no white folks down there, so . . .”

  “And Billy’s shoe, thirty feet away,” Sully said.

  “Yep.”

  “So can I use that? The blood match, the shoe?”

  “Yeah. I mean, as long as it’s ‘a source familiar with the investigation.’ Not me.”

  “What’s your comfort level with how the shoe got there?”

  “One hundred and forty-four percent.”

  “Fabulous. Suspects?”

  A coughing laugh down the line. “Everybody wants to be a comedian. Nah. No. Un-unh. Look, Mr. Carter, Sully, we’re giving this one an extra shake or two because of the family connection, right? But I got three open homicides on my sheet. He’s number four. And I’m going to be catching another case soon, I can tell you that, because ain’t nobody taking a holiday out there on the gangster front. This thing? Man, no wits, no ballistics. The one lady in the Carolina who called in the gunshot, like I told you, now she don’t know nothing.”

  “So you sitting there with your dick in your hand.”

  “Glad to hear you been listening.”

  “The family, they said they hired a private investigation firm.”

  “My nipples are erect just to hear it.”

  “You haven’t bumped shoulders?”

  “No, and we better not. The guys, PIs, whatever, go dig up one wit—one—who says he thinks he saw something, they’ll express-deliver him to the evening news, Channel 4 live at six, and whether he’s full of shit or not, I’ll get a captain crawling up my ass. I’ll spend two days tracking the wit down, checking him out, and I’ll find out he was talking about a gunshot the previous Saturday night. Which you guys will put on page B-thirteen, if you put it anywhere.”

  “I hear you.”

  “Which don’t do shit for me.”

  “I hear you.”

  “People got to understand—and look, if you’re going to do some big story on the Bend, don’t fuck me on this—this Ellison case ain’t the blue-light special. I don’t care who his momma is. This ain’t a child homicide. This ain’t a momma raped and tortured on her way to work. You understand? I know he’s from a rich set of people and all? Trust me, I’m getting that from up top. But this is, by all that’s holy, this is another drug killing in a city with about three hundred, three hundred twenty every goddamn year. Maybe ten or fifteen of your homicides are going to get a special ride. This one, a little bit, but not so much.”

  “Any word on his drug connections?”

  “Small-timer, if anything,” Weaver said. He sounded tired, like he was sitting back in his chair, tie askew, reports to be typed and collated, filed, sixteen calls to make on four different open files, and the wife hassling him about picking up the kids after school once for a change. “He’d buy, maybe over at the gay club he hung out at, bring some blow back to campus, move it over there. Maybe. But very, very small time.”

  “So why’s the family telling me he’s John Gotti?”

  “Maybe they think an ounce is a bushel.”

  “Who was he buying from?”

  “Not known. This guy, that guy. He wasn’t moving no keys, I can tell you that. Only thing I can find? A couple of uniforms were trolling O Street a few months ago and happened across boyfriend here. He comes out of a club, high, talking shit, they frisk him, like that.”

  “No arrest?”

  “None.”

  Sully sat back in his booth, arching his back, trying to keep the pain at bay by stretching.

  “What about any street buzz that he was tapping into some of that top-end coke that’s been popping up down there? He involved?”

  “No way. No fucking way. He was nothing like that high on the food chain.”

  On the other end of the line, there was a clunk, a noise, Weaver moving his phone from one ear to the other, getting impatient, and Sully said, “Hey, what if he stopped over at the Bend on his way to the clubs? You know, cut out the middle man? Slumming, something like that?”

  “Maybe he sashayed over there,” Weaver said. “He was, what do I want to say, classically gay? The kind you know it right off? And maybe some brother over there didn’t like the swish aspect.”

  “Could be,” Sully said.

  Still, something stunk.

  Stevens’s private investigators were supposed to be out there kicking over rocks, and yet nobody had seen them. Not Sully, not Weaver, not the bartender at the club. Meanwhile, Stevens was doling out threats that the Ellison family did not want to read about their son’s drug dealing in the newspaper. It didn’t add.

  And then it came to him in a rush: Weaver and MPD, Sully suddenly realized, were meant to be fall guys for the family. The chump representatives, the incompetents, the Keystone D.C. police. If the family wanted Billy’s reputation exalted, he saw now, then it was in their best interest that his case never be solved—certainly not if he’d been shot in a drug deal gone bad. Better to have it unsolved, unknowable.

  “So you there?” Weaver was saying. “You with me? You seein’ why this one isn’t going to get much push?”

  People liked to get upset about homicide, Sully thought, phone in hand, acting like it was the worst thing ever done, something no civilized society would stand for . . . and yet most cases went unsolved because no one who knew enough cared to get involved. The shooters who got away with killings weren’t brilliant. They just killed people nobody really cared about.

  “I got it,” Sully said. “I got it.”

  Now Weaver was going on about the other cases he had piling up, this mother calling him about her seventeen-year-old, killed three weeks ago outside Ballou High, and that case, as fucked up as it was, had better prospects of being closed than the Ellison thing. . . .

  Sully listened, doodling, looking at the names of the dead on the folders in front of him, pulling Ellison’s to the top, flipping it open to look at his notes. Sure, under different circumstances, the murder of a rich kid might have been a case to elevate Weaver’s homicide career, a great big gaudy closure. The chief would have him right there by the microphones at the press conference, announcing the collar. As it was, this was dirty laundry that no one wanted.

  “Hey, detective, tell me something,” he said. “You ever brace somebody down there in the Bend, an enforcer kinda guy, dreadlocks, tall, raspy voice? Dreads got little highlights on the end of ’em?”

  “You talking about Curious George?”

  “I don’t know,” remembering how Short Stuff had called the man Curious.

  “Light-skinned brother, can’t stop talking sometimes? Blinks all the damn time?”

  “Yeah. Him.”

  “Curious George. George Ferris. An assassin for the Hall brothers. Tends to run around with a partner, short dude, that’s Antoine Gillespie. Why you want to know?”

  “He was sweating me the other day, when I’s down there.”

  “Yeah, well, you give him room, you hear? Curious’ll pop a cap in your ass just to hear what it sounds like. He fucks people up just to see. There was this guy one time? They were in grade school together, and he wound up pissing George off? We found the brother in a hotel room, one of those dumps down there in Southwest. Half of him was in the shower. You don’t want to know about the other half.”

  EIGHTEEN

  BY MIDMORNING, SULLY was going up and down the streets and alleys of Southwest, case files in his hand or half-stuffed into his backpack, knocking on doors on this pile of bricks or that one, back and forth in the James Creek public housing project. Right in the heart of Southwest, anorexic two-story row houses mortared together, thirty or more to a block, all of them looking like staggering drunks leaning on one
another. Them with their crappy front and backyards behind sagging steel link fences. In the yards, plastic play sets and balls with half the air out of them. In the alleys, bottles of OE 800, empty packs of smokes, wrappers from rib joints. All these lives slapped up against one another. It put you in a mood.

  Rap rap rap, he went on the door of 1729 Carrollsburg Place, home of Curtis Michael Lewis, killed in the Bend last year.

  He stood there two minutes, sucking on wind. Finally the door opened.

  He gave his name, showed his press ID and a picture of Lewis, and asked.

  “I don’t know,” said the girl—she couldn’t have been more than eighteen—who answered the door, not opening it past the length of the chain lock.

  “Miss, are you a relative of Mr. Lewis? I don’t mean to pry, I’m—”

  “Who are you again?”

  “Sully Carter,” he said, pushing a card through the narrow opening. “I’m a reporter at the paper, and looking—”

  “You not a cop?”

  “—into the—what? No, I’m a reporter, not the police, but I was—”

  And he was talking to a closed door.

  It was the same drill at the former residence of Henry Andre Douglas, one street and three doors over. The man was dead since January. A no-nonsense dude, pushing fifty, wearing a wifebeater, answered the door. A smoke was perched on the edge of his lips. He looked at Sully’s ID and listened to about twenty-three seconds of his opening spiel and shut the door, drawing the bolt behind him.

  The next file was one David C. Rennie, last known address a couple of blocks down at 1510 First Street SW. Sully cranked the bike and rolled down there. The address said apartment 322. Great. Top floor and a walk-up.

  He waded through the ankle-high weeds, pulled open the door, paused, relieved there were no gang-bangers in the stairwell. Hoofing it up the steps, alone, the place smelling of greens and macaroni and cheese and Clorox.