Murder, D.C.

by Neely Tucker

  “Have you called Stevens? To see if she’s of, what, sound mind?”

  “He didn’t give me his home or cell. It’s Sunday night.”

  “Then call him in the morning. Proceed in the sane light of day.”

  “She’s going now. She said that she read our story, represented to me that she had not given authorization for any restraining order. That gives us good faith.”

  There was dead air.

  “She just lost her son,” R.J. said finally. “That press conference, that was pre-suit language.”

  “Which means maybe she’ll call it off, I meet her down there, hear her out. Look, she said “now,” or “in an hour,” so it’s sort of a thing. How can we say no? How can we let a grieving mother go out into the worst section of the city, alone, at night? We can’t. You see that. We’re ensuring her physical safety, at legal risk to ourselves, and we’re not committed to printing anything. It’s goddamn chivalrous.”

  Another pause.

  “Eddie’s on the train, coming back from New York. It’s your call. But I’d say no.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE BEND IN the gloaming of the evening was a semi-populated expanse of the desperate and the forlorn. Smack freaks, crack whores, smoke hounds, drunken assholes, the lowest forms of prostitution known to mankind. Lording over it, the Hall brothers’ mini-empire of dealers and runners and enforcers, taking full control once darkness descended. There was not so much as a working streetlight.

  He parked the bike a block up on Fourth, in tight between two cars, not wanting it to be spotted. As soon as he turned in to the weed-and-dirt expanse that ran from Fourth down to the Bend—between the Carolina apartment building on the right and the high wall of Fort McNair on the left—a gaggle of prostitutes emerged from the gloom, two of them bone skinny, the other a chunky woman, a solid contender in the lots-to-love category.

  “Hey, baby.”

  “Ooooh, I like him.”

  “You want some of this sweet ass right here? Come to Momma.”

  Sully was pretty sure the second one was in drag, but he wasn’t going to stop to chat about it. He said hi, hey, nodded, and kept moving. They turned, the maybe–drag chick raising her hands, palms up, calling out, “You don’t got to be like that.” They muttered and went on for a second with he wasn’t quite sure what, but left him be and turned back to the street, looking for a john on a slow roll.

  A hundred feet farther down, two guys leaned against the wall of the fort, dealers sizing him up, and it occurred to him the lack of light might be to his aid, the shadows obscuring his face, making him harder to spot, and this happy thought made him slow down and attempt to minimize his limp.

  The last rays of twilight lay across the channel, a glimmering raft of waves, not even whitecaps, water that refracted and bent the light into rays of gold and orange and amber and maybe purple. Hains Point lay on the other side, green and dark, streetlights illuminating the waterfront roadway.

  He made it all the way down to the knoblike Bend and still no Delores.

  He drifted over to the concrete walkway that ran along the waterfront up to the Gangplank Marina and leaned against the railing. The white streetlights glowed across the channel, small dim orbs in the darkness. Daisy’s pier, he thought. You make that light green, it’s Daisy’s pier, the Great Gatsby and all that lost promise, Fitzgerald in his study, writing the lines, making it real. The lights themselves glowed and they ebbed with the wind, and he wondered if it was ever that simple, light and dark, or maybe the world was just a shimmering glob of gray and it was up to you to pick between the sort of lighter and sort of darker, and then there was a soft, high, thin voice floating across the wind.

  Delores Ellison stood maybe fifty feet to his left, a little farther down, out on the knob of the Bend itself—it was possible she’d been in the shadows the entire time—and it took him a second to recognize her. She had removed her wig or weave or whatever she’d been wearing each time he’d seen her. She stood there in a close-cropped natural, jeans, and a black T-shirt. It wasn’t her look at all.

  “Ms. Ellison?” he said, pushing himself off the rail, walking toward her, moving off the sidewalk and onto the grass.

  “That’s you, Mr. Carter,” she said. “I see you.”

  In seven words he knew it had all gone to shit, the whole thing a mistake, her words slurred—ah, Jesus.

  “Yes, ma’am, I was just wondering if maybe it would be better if I could walk you back to your car and we—”

  “You know this is the spot where Billy died? The detectives told me about it.” She walked a little farther out, away from him, toward the waterline.

  He took one step, then two; she was still forty feet away and she was going on about where Billy had fallen, talking too damn loud—“Yes’m, but this isn’t really the best time or place—”

  “It’s the perfect time and the perfect place,” she said, turning as if on a pivot, looking up at him, stopping the weaving. “You were going to find out.”

  Her right hand rose from flat against her leg. The gun, the dull black gleam of it, coming up. He thought he was dead. She was going to shoot him right damn here and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

  “Ms.—”

  Then her hand came past ninety degrees, and he knew.

  He pushed off on his bad foot, stumbling, his hands clawing the air for balance, for forward momentum, and he found her name in his throat, a guttural bellowing and stop stop stop stop stop but the pistol was to her temple and she smiled and the blast was flat and loud and it blew a hole in one side of her head and out the other, brains and gore sailing into the night air, her body dropping in a heap, still three steps in front of him.

  • • •

  There were hands on him, rough, shoving. Angry voices. There was yelling and people calling out motherfucker and paramedics and lights in his face and he was still cradling her in his lap, the remains of her head, the weight of her upper body on his legs.

  He did not speak or resist or fight or say anything. Everything was very far away. The men pulled at him and cursed him and they dragged him down toward the water and rolled him over and cuffed him and stepped on his back and then pulled him hard into a sitting position. There were more lights in his face and it seemed about three hours before one of the lights dropped and he heard a familiar voice say his name.

  He looked up, out of the shell he was in, and he could see John Parker’s face in front of him, incredulous, talking from behind a flashlight, “Carter? Carter? Can you hear me? The fuck?”

  Parker, too, looked very, very far away. Sully understood he was yelling but his voice was not loud. It seemed to stand out in perfect clarity, like the words were glowing in the darkness. He could see them, hanging in the air.

  “Get those things off him, the cuffs,” Parker was saying. “Get him up, get him up.”

  Sully stood up and wobbled and a uniform turned him to the wall and unlocked the cuffs and he felt them drop away. He turned and looked.

  The black plastic was already over the body. There were temporary lights set up and what had to be a dozen uniforms and plainclothes. Yellow police tape was already fluttering. Jeff Weaver stood by the body, looking down, speaking into a walkie-talkie, glaring over at him. A crowd of dopeheads was behind the yellow tape, taking in the show.

  Sully turned his gaze back to Parker, the face bringing him back, the sounds now coming in clearer and clearer, and he said, “Is it the suicide capital, too?”

  TWENTY-THREE

  WEAVER DROVE HIM down to 1-D, the nearest police district station, after a while. It was on the Hill, ten or twelve blocks from his house. It was in an old house by the dog park. There were seven or ten patrol cars parked out front.

  When he got out of Weaver’s unmarked Ford, he felt his jeans and shirt stiffen and then crinkle when he stood, and he looked
down at them. Dried blood and gunk. Gobs and streaks and smears. In the shifting streetlights from overhead, the shadows moving from trees in a light breeze, they appeared as Jackson Pollock splotches.

  Weaver led them up the steps. He went through the door first. The sergeant at arms buzzed them through a locked door, a half-interested flicker across his face when he saw Sully, looking him up and down to assess whether the blood was his or someone else’s. Figuring the latter, he went back to the paperwork.

  Weaver led him upstairs to the second floor, the detectives’ room, the place smelling of stale cigarette smoke and sweat and potato chips and an air that nothing good happened in here. There was one other guy, on the far side of the room, watching a small television on his desk. He looked over, raised a hand to Weaver, and went back to the show. The television had rabbit ears.

  They walked on, Sully dimly following, and Walker finally stopped. His desk was a heavy metal thing in a room full of them. It was cluttered with paperwork, a typewriter, two coffee cups, old newspapers.

  “Sit, sit.” He motioned to a metal chair, parked by the side. Sully did. Then Weaver went to the back of the room. He came back with a clutch of forms in his hand and asked him if he wanted to go to the bathroom. Sully shook his head.

  “Your arms, brother. Your hands.”

  Sully looked down. The techs at the scene had wiped him down, but not really. Crusted red streaks on his forearms, his shirt, his hands coppery.

  “I’ll clean up when I get home.”

  Weaver sat down lightly on the chair, putting both hands on the table, and then said, “I’m not going to do this, you sitting there with blood all over you.”

  Sully sighed. “You got an old T-shirt?”

  Weaver got up and went to a closet, pulled out a dark blue DC MPD shirt, and tossed it to him. “Back there, on your right.”

  Sully went down the row of desks, tapping on each one as he passed, his eyes idly skipping over the framed portraits of previous generations of officers on the wall, notices stapled to a bulletin board, a large chalkboard filled with what looked like a roster of active cases.

  The bathroom had a toilet, a urinal, and a sink. He turned on the faucet to get the hot water going, then stripped off his black pullover. The caked sections stiffened and cracked as the shirt came over his head, little rust-colored flakes popping loose and drifting down to the floor. He dropped it in the trash and looked at himself in the mirror.

  Hands streaked with blood, heaviest in the webs between the fingers, thick on his forearms. You could tell the sleeves had been pushed up to the elbow because the blood stopped there. His chest, with those railroad-track scars from Bosnia, had only a faint red tint in spots, from the blood soaking through. His face was streaked with it, he guessed from absently rubbing his hand across his brow, his cheek.

  The water stung his face. He took the soap and rubbed his hands and forearms. He turned off the water and stood there dripping over the sink, the streaks of blood on his face melting away. He tapped the mirror twice with two fingers of his right hand.

  “Don’t,” he said, “tell him anything.”

  • • •

  “So I got to fill this out,” Weaver was saying, Sully coming back, still drying his hands on a rough brown paper towel, Weaver nodding toward the typewriter, “and Darrell over there put on a fresh pot. Sugar’s there, you want it.”

  He started tapping, without looking up at him, a hunt-and-peck guy. Tired, Sully thought. The man looked tired, worn down, ready to be done with this, his face slack, the dress shirt he had on wilted, the tie pulled halfway down his neck. A wedding ring. Somewhere a woman was wondering when he was going to come in through the door.

  “Thanks,” Sully said, adding two packets of sugar to the black coffee and plunking down in the chair. He smelled. The pants, the blood smelled. The coffee was hot and, he noticed after an exploratory sip, god-awful. He pulled his lips back from the cup and ran his tongue around his mouth. “But I already done told you what happened.”

  “Yeah.” Weaver kept tapping, not looking up.

  “So that was it. I mean, I got nothing else.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “If there’s a yeah-but, this is the part where I say I want a lawyer.”

  Now Weaver looked over at him and leaned back in the chair, taking his hands off the typewriter.

  “No, yeah, well—look, Sully, you can, but you’re not a suspect here. You’re a material witness.”

  “A material witness.”

  “To what appears to be a suicide.”

  “It appeared to be a suicide to me, too.”

  Weaver started typing again, a pen stuck in his mouth. “So all right, then. Let’s get this done. Again, why did she ask to meet you at the Bend?”

  “You know you haven’t given me the Miranda.”

  “I do,” Weaver said, looking up. “So why’d she call you?”

  “You’d have to ask her.”

  “That’s probably not going to work out.”

  “Then I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “You said, back there at the Bend, you said something about her telling you that she had something she wanted to show you.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Then that’s probably why she called you.”

  “If you say so.”

  “No idea what that was?”

  “Apparently blowing her brains out of her head.”

  “And why would she want you to witness that?”

  “I got none.”

  “You had just written . . . written this story right here.” He shuffled papers around on his desk, found the previous day’s A section. “Page one. Right there in the middle. Her son’s case is the beginning what do—”

  “Anecdote.”

  “—anecdote, right, yeah. And Billy pops up in the middle and then at the end, too. A lot of it is about him, in fact. You talk to her about this while you were working on that story?”

  “It says in the piece she declined comment.”

  “That’s the official version,” Weaver said.

  “That’s the only version.”

  “Nothing, while you were working on the story, nothing on background?”

  “The paper does not comment on anything beyond what’s in print. If somebody asks me if someone in this department talked to me about an investigation,” Sully said, looking at him evenly, “I’d say the same thing—we don’t give up confidential sources.”

  Weaver shifted in his chair, the pressed slacks, the wing tips, that wrinkled dress shirt; Sully wondered if it was his regular shift.

  “So, was that a ‘get outta my face’ no comment, or an ‘I’d love to talk but my lawyer says I can’t no comment?”

  “It was a ‘no comment’ no comment.”

  “Where did this transpire?”

  “At her house. The day after you guys fished Billy out of the channel. I went by there, she said she couldn’t talk, said to talk to Shellie Stevens. He said no comment.”

  “He says, actually, a good deal more than that. He says—he was blasting the chief on this a half hour ago—that you went by there after that, that you were bothering the hell out of her and that they had to serve you with a restraining order.”

  From amid the papers on his desk, he moved things around again, picked up a coffee cup, tapped on a stapler, picked up a pen, and put it in the top drawer. “That’s right here. A copy of which. This look familiar?”

  Sully held his eyes on Weaver, not looking at the crisply folded paper. “Yeah.”

  “Well? A valid restraining order and we show up, she’s laying in your lap.”

  “Then write me up. Go ahead. She asked me to meet her. Check her phone records, call my editor. I didn’t do anything she didn’t ask me to do. Told me the order was Shellie’s bull
shit, that she signed it against her better judgment. And, I mean, give me a break, the restraining order. Super court hands those out like Kleenex.”

  “Stevens says he told you not to include him in the story, and you—you included him anyway.”

  “It’s called the First Amendment.”

  “Sounds like some bad blood. Like you were tweaking him.”

  “He’s used to getting his way. Like most small children.”

  “So, today, she called you, did she say anything to you about the reaction to the story? Did she call you today and say that someone had called or threatened her about talking about her son’s murder?”

  “It was right after the presser, which I’m assuming you saw. Stevens raked me over the coals and then she called and asked me to meet her at the Bend. Period.”

  “You know what I’m asking. Lighten up. This is a prominent, well-to-do woman who just killed herself. It’s all the hell over television. Cable is eating this alive. That means we’re getting sweated, and shit, you know, flows downhill. Which means from me to you at this point. So. Now. I don’t have any problems with the suicide. I’m asking, what I’m trying to get at, is maybe did her son’s killers call or contact her in some way that resulted in this? You see where I’m going here.”

  “She said that her phone had been ringing off the hook, and she asked me to meet her at the Bend because she wanted to show me something.”

  “But she made no particular mention of any one call?”

  “She did not.”

  “What did her state of mind seem to be? She crying, yelling, what?”

  “Urgent, emotional, but controlled. It was weird, yeah, but she hung up pretty quick and, if nothing else, I didn’t want her hanging out at the Bend by herself. I went by there to meet her, get her out of there, let her vent.”

  “Did you and she have a history?”

  “The fuck does that mean, ‘history’?”

  “Did you and she have any sort of relationship? Did you sit next to her at the Ken Cen one time? Were you at the same cocktail parties?”