Murder, D.C.

by Neely Tucker

  He picked up two motorcycle magazines, went to the checkout, and told the clerk he was in from out of town and was there a hotel nearby?

  “Sure,” she said, ringing him up. “If you’re not looking for a lot of frills, the Monticello is just right there on the first street, once you get outside the door. That’s Thomas Jefferson Way. Take a right and go down the hill.”

  “How far?”

  “Maybe fifty or sixty yards? It’s on the left. You’ll see it, a green awning.”

  He started to go, then stopped. “What if I’m looking for frills?”

  “Oh, that’d be the Four Seasons,” she said with a smile. “A few blocks down, on M.”

  “Whoa, the Seasons? That’s beyond my billfold. Look, do me a favor? A couple of buddies were supposed to leave work early and meet me here, like, twenty minutes ago. I guess they got held up. I’m going to go ahead and check in over at the Monticello there and then come back. If they stop by, looking for me, could you tell them where I am?”

  “Sure, but what’s your name?”

  He gave her his best smile. “Just tell ’em that guy with the limp. They’ll know.”

  • • •

  By the front door, he waited until a taxi stopped at the light. He looked both ways, then quick-stepped through the revolving door and into the cab.

  “The Four Seasons,” he said, slouching down in the seat, the bag with the files tumbling to the floor at his feet.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  BY MIDNIGHT, WHEN Delores Ellison was beneath six feet of well-tended dirt, the files her son had left behind were a mass of disheveled paperwork spread over the floor of room 426.

  It was a suite, actually. Sully splurged for the extra space, going for the in-room Jacuzzi. He figured he might be here a couple of days. If he was anything close to right, Stevens’s operatives were over at his house right now, tearing it apart. That was okay. He could settle that score.

  The nice thing about the Seasons was it had an honest-to-God bar. He’d had a bottle of Basil’s sent up to the room with a big bucket of ice. Quitting cold turkey, he’d decided, might be a little much. He’d ordered oysters on the half shell, too, and cocktail shrimp, and now, the food demolished, he was deep into Billy’s research, steadily working the bottle down.

  He spread the paperwork over the small writing table, just to get it all out in the open, until it became clear that wouldn’t contain the sprawl. So he moved the chairs and pushed the table against the wall, to give him space on the floor, only now the paperwork trail had spread into the adjacent bedroom in one direction and toward the front door in the other. There was a pile of pictures and booklets and other material he had yet to sort through on the couch. Still, he had to move the coffee table, grunting, to get more layout space.

  Spot-reading this census report, looking through that Who’s Who in Washington, squinting his eyes to read the tiny print on a handwritten property deed, he began sorting the piles in chronological order. There was a lot of stuff. There just didn’t seem to be a point.

  Finally, after two a.m., he refused to let himself refill the bourbon glass, not wanting the blur or the headache or lack of initiative, denying himself the relief from the ticking in his head. “What what what,” he said aloud. “Billy, you sad fuck, what is the what here?”

  Elliot said Billy had been unbalanced but coherent, and his research showed the same sort of bipolar fuckery. If it had been in any sort of order anyone else once might have understood, that had vanished when Elliot dropped the folder and scooped it all back together, helter-skelter.

  So, okay, okay, he told himself. Find the pattern. Find the sustained thought. What was Billy after?

  The general theme was black history in D.C. And yes, it was some sort of genealogical project. Incorporation papers of a bank, bylaws of long-forgotten social clubs. The Sons and Daughters of Moses. The Knights of Pythias. Pictures of the old Dunbar High School, faces circled in grease pencil. A program from a Saturday evening social hour at the home of Georgia Douglas Johnson, up there in Shaw, walking distance from Howard University. This caught Sully’s eye. A reading from Jean Toomer—what was the year—yeah, before Cane, and then “remarks” from Alain Locke and W. E. B. DuBois. He whistled low. The family was plugged in.

  Letters. Whole pouches of letters, held together with a rubber band, the missives still in the envelopes. He thumbed down through them, stopping at the return address of Mary Church Terrell. Inside, the cream-colored paper fading, the ink still there, was a thank-you note from the grand dame of D.C. black society to an Ellison whose first name Sully didn’t recognize. It concerned a generous contribution to the Colored Women’s League.

  Scattered through these were property deeds for what looked to be houses or businesses in the city, or slim crisp copies from the National Archives, detailing Civil War records—he imagined he was going to find that one of the ancestors had fought among the colored Union troops—and copies of D.C.’s Social Register. Stapled to these pages was a long-ago article from a black newspaper—the Washington Bee, likely—which boasted that seven black families had made the Register. The Ellisons, the Syphaxes, the Quanders et al.

  Billy, you crazy bastard, you were way down in the weeds, he thought. It wasn’t a sensation unknown to him, this kind of research piling up, getting out of hand, but with Billy’s mental instability, this was teetering into madness.

  Huge chunks of paperwork documented the life of Nathaniel Benjamin Ellison, the fabled patriarch, the founder of the Washington Trust Bank, the nation’s first black-owned financial institution. Established in 1887, a copy of a newspaper ad stated, showing the five-story building standing alone, arched windows, hulking on its stretch of U Street.

  On and on, Billy’s obsession spilled out over the room, defying categorization. Property rolls, tax rolls, handwritten source documents. And it struck Sully suddenly, looking over these sprawling mounds of history of the city’s black elites—the absence of political ambition.

  Patronage jobs, yes. Federal staff positions, judgeships, a staff job at the Department of the Interior. But the city was a federal enclave, and the overwhelming majority of the black aristocracy, the homegrown Talented Tenth, seemed, based on what he was looking at, to have kept their vision on social climbing. They made calls, from the pulpit or the academic podium, for social integration and partnership, but mainly fought against segregation with the now quaint belief that by acquiring wealth, education, and social airs, they would be more palatable to white society. Adam Clayton Powell, the most powerful black man in Congress in the 1950s and 1960s, hailed from Harlem. Shirley Chisholm came down from New York, too. Their new black neighbors in D.C. neither had a vote in Congress nor governed their own city. They were presided over by the feds, as if an occupied people.

  So, when the Civil Rights Movement swept into and over the city in the late 1960s and home rule took effect, the hands taking the reins of political power in the federal city were often the callused palms of the dispossessed and their champions, the interlopers from elsewhere, who galvanized the Slightly Less Talented Ninety Percent.

  And thus, in a city of serious and sober black men of achievement and good standing for more than a century, the city’s dominating power broker almost overnight became Marion Barry, the charismatic cotton chopper from the Mississippi Delta. Indianola. Jesus. Sully wondered how many people in D.C. had ever been to that place, or knew the difference between Greenwood and Greenville.

  The Ellisons and their peers, embarrassed if not offended by Barry, kept to their pleasant smiles and good manners along the Gold Coast, invested in their children’s futures, summered on the Vineyard, and slowly, steadily began migrating to the finer suburbs of McLean, Bethesda, Potomac, and maybe Silver Spring, watching the old neighborhoods of Shaw and Logan Circle and U Street melt into urban decay.

  So this is the world Billy had re-created, seeking to b
ring his vanished family back to life. It appeared to be a labor of love, and Sully could not help but be touched by it. He followed the genealogy backward, laying out clumps of paperwork for each generation.

  William Sanders, his dad, did not seem to have been of much interest to Billy, and certainly none of his ancestors had been, who were scarcely mentioned. William had come up from Georgia. High school football star, the son of a marine. William himself went on to serve as a marine in Vietnam, where he was decorated for combat bravery and heroism. Scholarships. Eventually accepted at Harvard Law, where he met Delores.

  In the files, then came Delores and William’s life together—some of their Jack and Jill connections, a copy of the deed for their house on the Vineyard (modest four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath, close to the waterfront but not on it). Press releases from when they were both hired at the Stevens firm.

  Billy showed up in the records as an Ellison on his birth certificate. Got his dad’s first two names, took his mom’s last. From the research, it appeared Billy had agreed with the emphasis on the Ellisons—there was almost nothing in the files on the Sanders of Georgia. It was like his dad had been reduced to a posthumous footnote.

  “Daddy dearest,” he said.

  In the middle of the floor by the couch, he’d placed the records of Delores’s parents, Lambert Ellison III and his wife, Ruth. They’d lived—and here a photograph was clipped to a weathered copy of a property deed—in a four-story Victorian off Logan Circle. It had also been, it turned out, the family home of Billy’s great-grandfather, Lambert Ellison II, just a few steps from the gray stone and brick Gothic marvel of the Mount Gilead Baptist Church.

  The next stack, moving backward in time, was that of Lambert Ellison himself. Born in 1879, married at twenty, a banker and the son of the founder of the empire, Nathaniel Benjamin Ellison.

  Nathaniel himself seemed to come up from nowhere to found the Washington Trust Bank. He had been a founding member of Washington’s black aristocracy—banker, financier, the heart of the community’s ambition. He loaned, he built, he planned, he set his family up for a century of wealth and prominence. A photo showed him: light skinned, high forehead, thick eyebrows.

  That appeared to be as far back as Billy had gotten.

  The rest seemed to be documents regarding slavery in the city. There was one, from a Works Progress Administration project, that Billy had marked up in yellow highlighter:

  The District of Columbia, too small for slave rearing itself, served as a depot for the purchase of interstate traders, who combed Maryland and northern Virginia for slaves to buy and resell. Since the slave jails, colloquially known as “Georgia pens,” and described by an ex-slave as worse than hog holes, were inadequate for the great demand, the public jails were made use of, accommodations for the criminals having to wait for the more pressing and lucrative traffic in slaves.

  There were pens in what is now Potomac Park. More notorious were McCandless’s Tavern in Georgetown; in Washington, Robey’s Tavern at Seventh and Maryland Avenue; and Williams’s “Yellow House” at Eighth and B street SW.

  In Alexandria, the pretentious establishment of Armfield and Franklin, who by 1834 were sending more than a thousand slaves a year south to . . .

  Scholarly articles from the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian. A speech by one Joshua Giddings. The escape attempt by seventy-seven slaves aboard the Pearl, a schooner that made it all the way down the Potomac before being caught.

  Finally, there was a cluster of papers about the Bend. Property records of Didier Delacroix, the man who owned the place. An 1830 census, listing the slaves held at the Bend:

  One male under 10.

  50 males 10–24

  20 males 25–36

  4 females under 10

  50 females 10–24

  20 females 25–36

  “Working and breeding stock,” he said out loud to himself. “Christ.”

  A traveler’s description of the place in 1846, showed the population to have grown north of three hundred, crammed into an acre, and acre and a half.

  Frenchman’s Bend lies along the waterfront, a peculiar spit of land in the waters of the Potomac, well recognizable from quite a distance. The outer walls of the slave pen are brick in nature, rising at least ten feet. Outside this expanse are three buildings. Two are wooden, barnlike structures, dedicated to the keeping of foodstuffs and equipment particular to that trade. Leg chains, neck chains, manacles, well-oiled and kept, hang from long rows of wooden rails. The other building is a two-story frame house, white, set farther down, which the owner, Didier Delacroix, uses upon occasion, although his main residence is in the city proper.

  The inside of the slave pen is largely open, a packed-dirt courtyard that is given over to mud and muck after rainfall. The door is well steeled and covered by a type of cantilevered awning, set higher above the wall and tilting back to it. It provides a type of shade or protection from the elements. The slaves themselves are kept in ramshackle structures, one-story in nature, divided by their gender, with long rows of slats for sleeping.

  It is not an uncommon observation for those passing on the roadway or sailing on the waters to report hearing the strains of the lash and the cries of the afflicted.

  Okay, good god, he thought, flipping through the papers, describing more of the land and the layout, his eyes glazing now. What ancestor was this about, Nathaniel’s mother or father? Who had been bought or sold or brought here?

  He was looking for a name when he saw it, circled, at the bottom of one page of financial records—and it began to glow on the page, red as the ink in which it was circled, one single name, for that’s all the woman was listed as—Jeanne-Marie—and Billy’s notation, “Nathaniel’s mother.”

  And then he got it. He put two or three of the census records together, documents about Jeanne-Marie over a thirty-year period, and it all blew open for him, as it must have for Billy, and then he was ransacking the rest of the files, the paper, scrambling to find the rest of her awful history, the suffering and the misery, and it took him a full minute before he realized the ringing he heard was not in his head but was from the phone, someone calling him over and over again.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THE CLOCK ON the nightstand read 2:47. Coming up on the witching hour, closer to daybreak than sundown . . . and still it kept ringing. He got up, padded around the room, looking—where was the goddamn thing? Why did they make them so small? It was . . . it was under the turned-back comforter on the bed. He snatched it, scowling at the caller ID, his temples throbbing. The number, he knew it, Take a deep breath, calm down. . . .

  “Parker,” he said finally into the phone. “John, what the hell, man, I didn’t know you loved me this much, two in the morning.”

  John’s voice, when it spoke back to him, was buried by static, by wind in the background, voices shouting, and there was a whoop whoop of a siren.

  “Parker,” he said, louder. “Where you at? Speak up.”

  There was a rustling and a clump and then the wind dropped out and Sully guessed he’d cupped a hand around the cell, tucked his chin down to his chest. “I said I’m back in the Bend, where you think?” he shouted.

  “Why’s that, brother? It’s sort of late for—”

  “Somebody just shot the Hall brothers.”

  “—this sort of bull—the what??”

  “Both of ’em. Carlos, Tony. Dead as disco. Right down here at the waterline. Looking at ’em now. Hear that? That’s me kicking Tony’s foot. Or is it Carlos? Can’t tell ’em apart, facedown like this here. Why all the gangstas wear Timberlands?”

  Sully slumped down on the bed, mouth half-open, running his free hand through his hair, pulling on it, this change of direction, trying to put together the angles, Sly, T-Money—

  “What happened?” is what he got out. “What the f
uck happened?”

  “That’s what I wanted to ask you, brother. You write a story about the Bend maybe being the murder capital and now it sure as hell is. Dee Dee, Billy Ellison, Antoine, Billy’s momma, and now two heavyweights—I mean the guys running this place for six, seven years—all of ’em dead within what, fifty, sixty feet of each other.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “This some of your Louisiana voodoo?”

  “It had started when I—”

  “Yeah yeah yeah. Look, you coming to see these boys before we bag and tag ’em or what? I ain’t going to be out here all night.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  THE BODIES WERE, as promised, hard by the water, draped in plastic sheeting, illuminated by work lights the techs had set up. One right by the rocks, another a few feet over. The yellow tape was up at the street entrance to the park, at Fourth and P. There were no gawkers, the sidewalks and streets empty.

  John Parker and Jeff Weaver were ahead of him on the right. There were two other men in Windbreakers, who Sully guessed were DEA agents. Three or four techs were milling about little orange cones marked 1 and 2 and 3 and 4, near the bodies; Sully was pretty sure those were designating ejected shells.

  Both bodies were facedown in the clumps of grass, the packed dirt. The one on the right, whoever it was, one boot had come off. Sully couldn’t help but think, Shot right out of his shoes.

  John and Jeff looked at him as he stood at the edge of the light.

  “Didn’t a uniform stop you at the top of the hill?” John asked.

  “I told him I was a friend of yours and that you had invited me special.”

  “You wearing a sport coat at three in the morning?” John said. “Where’s the Ducati? And wait a minute, you found a taxi that would actually bring you here?”