A Murder of Justice (4 page)

Frank felt an acid clot of irritation in his throat.

Emerson stood behind his desk, a green glass slab supported by two matte black metal sawhorses. Resplendent in a creamy silk shirt and an Italian designer tie, he held a folder several inches thick. He studied the contents for a moment or two after Frank and José entered. Then he closed the folder and held it up.

“Looks like somebody did some street cleaning.”

“Somebody did murder one,” José said.

As if he hadn’t heard or didn’t care, Emerson regarded the closed folder in his hands. “Hodges was a busy boy,” he whispered to himself. He got a sly look that put Frank in mind of something slithering through the grass.

“He’s in cold storage now,” Frank said.

Emerson continued staring thoughtfully at the folder. Then, as if the comment finally registered, he put the folder on his desk and looked at Frank.

“Oh, no. Skeeter’s got one more job to do. A job for us.”

Without having to look, Frank knew that José was doing his slow eye-roll. He looked anyway. José was.

He looked back at Emerson. Emerson’s eyebrows were raised in a question mark.

“Beg pardon?” Frank asked.

“I said, ‘How many people you think Skeeter clipped?’ ”

“Rounded off to the nearest hundred?”

“Get serious.”

José yawned. “Belt-and-suspenders estimate? Fifteen. Twenty. Most of them competitors.”

“Okay. And how many times did he go to trial?” Emerson asked.

“None.” Frank shook his head.

Emerson sat down in his high-backed black leather
chair. It looked like it came off the bridge of the starship
Enterprise
. He tilted back. “And why was that?”

“Why was what?” José asked.

“Why didn’t he go to trial?” Emerson eyed the space just in front of him, the question hanging there, rotating slowly in midair. “I’ll tell you why,” he said, eyes still on the question. “Witnesses died, disappeared, or suddenly got Alzheimer’s.”

“Or they’d swear Skeeter was singing in the choir or babysittin’ their kids,” José added.

Emerson shifted his gaze to José, then to Frank, and back to José.

“We have cases where we know Skeeter was involved, but no evidence. But now, like you say, he’s no longer on the street. We don’t have to bring him to trial. We only have to dig a little. Push a little. Bend a little.”

He tilted forward and pushed Skeeter Hodges’s folder across the glass. “So why don’t you two see if some witnesses have reappeared or had a miraculous memory cure?”

“What you want us to do,” José said, “is pin a bunch a cold cases on Skeeter so we can make our numbers.”

Emerson’s lips thinned. “I want you two to do some retrospective investigation,” he said tightly. “Bring justice. Is that too much to ask?”

“What you’re asking us to do,” Frank countered, “isn’t investigating, it’s picking through a garbage dump.”

Emerson’s face flushed. He jabbed an index finger at the two detectives.

“You two prima donnas,” he shouted in a strangled voice, “are not . . . by God . . . going to fucking define . . . what your job is in this goddamn department!”

His eyes bulged and his finger trembled as he went on. “There are procedures . . . recognized procedures . . . legal procedures . . . for closing cold cases. And you will damn well get busy, or you will turn in your badges.”

Winded, Emerson paused. “Is that clear?” he asked in a flat, metallic voice.

“Clear. . .” José hesitated, then tacked on a silent “But . . . ?”

“Yes?” Emerson asked.

“You mind if we track down Skeeter’s killer while we’re at it?”

J
osé shook his head. “You had to know
that
was coming,” he said as they walked down the hall from Emerson’s office.

Frank felt the knot of anger tight in his stomach. “Emerson the weatherman.”

“Hunh. Weather
vane.
”

They stopped at a door with a sign that said “Records—Modus Operandi.” Frank tapped his five-digit access code into a keypad set into the wall beside the door.

Nothing.

Frowning, he entered the numbers again. Again, nothing.

“Damn thing’s fighting you,” José said unhelpfully.

Frank mentally went over the access code again.
Bank PIN, Social Security number, health insurance group number, frequent flyer account number
. “I thought it was only the army that made people into numbers.”

He tried a third time. The door unlocked with a metallic click, and Frank pushed through. Battered ranks of old-fashioned file cabinets filled the left side of the cavernous room. On the right, records analysts sat at four rows of desks. The analysts, mostly women, faced their computer screens with a vacant stare—the empty look of combat veterans who’d seen too much and who knew they were going to see more.

No one looked up as Frank and José made their way to a desk in the last row. There, a small-boned woman with short-cut iron-gray hair leaned forward, her fingers racing across her computer keyboard like those of a concert pianist at a Steinway. They stood watching until she looked up.

Eleanor Trowbridge intrigued Frank. R&MO’s senior analyst was a constant in a constantly changing world. She’d had the wrinkles and the gray hair when he and José
had first met her twenty-six years before. She knew damn near all there was to know about crime in the District. She’d turned in her battered Olivetti typewriter for a Gateway computer, but she was still the person you went to if you wanted to make sense of things that didn’t make sense to anybody else.

José started to say something.

Before he could, Eleanor swiveled her chair around to a file cabinet and pulled a thick file jacket from a drawer. “James Culver Hodges. Aka ‘Skeeter.’ ” She handed it to José.

José flashed a look of surprise, then smiled. “While you’re at it, got any picks for NBA playoffs?”

“Maybe the Powerball numbers?” Frank asked.

“Elementary, gentlemen,” Eleanor said, sighing. “Point one, Mr. Hodges is newly dead.”

José’s smile turned wry. “Bingo.”

“And you two want me to find you some cold cases you can bury with Skeeter?”

“Double bingo,” Frank said.

Eleanor looked at the two detectives over the top of her glasses. “This afternoon? After five?”

B
ack in the office, the answering machine flashed insistently. Frank jabbed the answer button.

“Frank?” The words came out burgundy. “Call when you can.”

José watched the smile gathering at the corners of Frank’s mouth. “Woman’s got a voice.”

Frank nodded and slouched comfortably into his chair. “She does indeed.”

He never thought about Kate without a flush of warmth somewhere between heart and stomach. He didn’t remember a world before her and couldn’t imagine a world after. He caught occasional reflections of himself in her, and it always surprised him, the goodness he saw there. Part of him marveled that the two of them had found each other,
while another part worried how he’d be if she weren’t there.

José watched Frank’s smile grow. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Meantime, you want to do . . . what?”

Frank thought about Kate some more, then sat up, took a deep breath, and surveyed his desktop. The overflowing in-box drew his eyes.

“We could”—he waved at the mound of paper—“get some of
that
done.”

José looked at his own in-box in distaste. “Let’s
not
. Let’s go check the street.”

Frank reached for his phone. “Let me call Kate first.”

“I’ll get the car.”

Frank picked up the phone and hit a speed dial. He looked out toward the Mall. The wind had picked up; the flags atop the Smithsonian castle stood straight out. How long, he wondered, had it been since he’d taken the time to—

“Hello.”

The Smithsonian and its flags vanished, and he felt warm in his chest.

“José says you’ve got a voice.”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

He waited several heartbeats. “You’re back tonight?”

Kate gave him a flight number.

“Missed you,” he said.

“It was only a week.”

Several more heartbeats. “Oh?”

Kate laughed. “You’ve got a voice.”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

Another laugh. “No.”

 FOUR

T
he maroon Crown Vic idled at the curb, José at the wheel.

Still thinking about Kate and dinner, Frank got in.

José dropped the car into gear and pulled away. “Thought we might check the Rolex market.”

Ten minutes later, Frank and José sat in the car, watching as Waverly Ngame assembled his stand across the street.

First out of the white Dodge van, a longish rectangular folding table, the kind you see in church basements and at catered receptions. Ngame locked open the legs. With a toe, he nudged wood shims under them, working around the table until it was steady on the uneven brick sidewalk.

Ngame disappeared into the van. He came back out with racks of white plastic-coated wire-grid shelving under both arms, and a grease-stained canvas bag in his left hand. In swift, practiced motions, he picked the largest of the shelves and braced it upright on the side of the table facing the street.

Holding the shelf with one hand, he reached into the canvas bag with the other and brought out a large C clamp.
He twirled the clamp with sharp snaps of his wrist, then opened the jaws just enough to slip over the shelf and the table edge. He tightened the clamp, and moved to repeat the process on the other side of the table.

Almost magically, more shelving and more C clamps produced a display stand.

Back into the van.

This time, Ngame reappeared with large nylon bags of merchandise. Several more trips, and Gucci handbags hung alluringly from the vertical shelving while Rolex watches and Serengeti sunglasses marched in neat ranks across the top of the folding table.

In the street, by Ngame’s van, a crow worried at the flattened remains of a road-killed rat.

With a little finger, Ngame made a microscopic adjustment, poking a pair of sunglasses to line up just so with its neighbors. He didn’t look up from putting the fine touches to his display.

“Detectives Phelps and Kearney. Good morning, sirs.”

As a boy in Lagos, Ngame had learned his English listening to the BBC. He sounded like a Brit announcer, except that he had a Nigerian’s way of softly rounding his vowels and stressing the final syllables of his sentences.

“How’s business, Waverly?” José asked.

Ngame gave the sunglasses a last critical look, then turned to face José and Frank. He was a big man, almost as big as José, with shiny blue-black skin.

He smiled, unveiling a mouthful of perfectly straight glistening teeth. “This is America!” The words exploded with exuberance. A-mare-uh-
cuh
! “Business is
always
splendid!” He waved a large hand down the crowded sidewalk—
his
sidewalk—taking in potential customers—
his
customers. “One is free to sell and free to buy . . . buy and sell.”

He caressed a handbag. “This purse, for example—”

José pulled Ngame’s string. “Mr. Gucci gets his cut?”

Ngame got the tried look of a long-suffering teacher with a slow student. “Detective Phelps! Do you suppose
this is a real Gucci purse?” He swept a hand over the watches. “Or that these are real Rolexes?”

José’s eyes widened. “They aren’t?”

“And do you suppose that any of these good people who come to my stand
believe
they are buying real Guccis or real Rolexes?”

José opened his eyes wider, spinning Ngame up more.

“And do you suppose that my customers could buy a
real
Rolex?”

“Oh?” José said encouragingly.

“So who is hurt?” Ngame was into it now, eyes wide in enthusiasm, hands held out shoulder high, palms up. “Not Mister Gucci! Nor Mister Rolex! As a matter of fact, Mister Gucci and Mister Rolex ought to be
pleased
with me—
pleased!
Yes, pleased. My customers have learnt good taste here at my stand.” Ngame’s chin tilted up. “When they get wealthy, they’ll buy the
real
Gucci and the real Rolex.”

“Like Skeeter Hodges,” Frank said.

Ngame gave Frank a heavy-lidded, somber look. “He didn’t buy here. He kept the real Mister Rolex in business.”

“What’s the talk?” José asked.

Ngame looked up and down the sidewalk. He did it casually, but he did it.

“Conjecture?” Con-jec-
ture
?

Another glance, this time across the street. “From the Puerto Ricans I hear it was the Jamaicans. The Jamaicans tell me it was the Puerto Ricans. And the blacks”—Ngame shrugged—“the blacks all point their fingers at one another.”

“No names?” Frank asked.

Ngame shook his head. “No pretender to the throne. But then again, Detective Kearney, it was only last night.”

Ngame reached down, then came up with a watch in his hand, gleaming gold in the morning sunlight.

“A Rolex President? I will give a discount.”

A
block north of Waverly Ngame’s stand, Frank and José made their way down an increasingly crowded sidewalk.

“Like I care.”

Frank angled his head slightly to catch the disembodied male voice behind him. It had a demented quality, like that of a man talking to himself.

“The garbage?”

The pitch rose.

“Ten dollars?”

The voice came nearer, and passed to Frank’s right.

“Mary? Mary?”

A lanky white kid in baggy jeans and a Bulls sweatshirt walked by. He held a cell phone out at arm’s length, as if that would somehow put him in visual contact with Mary? Mary?

“Shit,” the kid muttered.

José and Frank watched him walk on. Another couple of steps, and he was punching another number into his phone.

“Voices everywhere,” José said.

“Schizophrenia or Sprint?”

T
he 7-Eleven had a frayed, secondhand look, as though time had been working it over with an eraser. A ragged man sprawled on a bench near the entrance. Close by, a clear plastic bag stuffed with blankets, aluminum cans, and scraps of unidentifiable clothing. Over his head a sign warned “No Loitering—Violators Will Be Prosecuted.” At the curb, a battered and rusting ten-speed bike, stripped of its front wheel, was Kryptonite-locked to a parking meter.

Frank stopped to take in a faded poster in the 7-Eleven window. It carried an image of a gold-foil District Metropolitan Police Department shield; above the shield, “Official Location,” and below it, “Police Community Work Station.” Malcolm Burridge, the previous mayor, had had these posters put up after a wave of convenience-shop holdups and killings. They hadn’t stopped the killings, but
they’d made one of Burridge’s political fat cats a little fatter with the proceeds from the printing contract.

“Hex sign,” Frank thought he heard José say. He looked at his partner. “What?”

José was looking at the poster too. “Hex sign,” he repeated, “like on those barns . . . up in Pennsylvania . . . Keep away the devil.”

K
im Tae Ho looked up from the
Post
sports section. Two blurred foreigners. The first through the door black and big. Kim’s right hand dropped under the counter, under the cash register. At the same time, he ducked his head to peer over the top of his reading glasses. His hand came up from below the counter.

“Ah! Mr. Phelps. Mr. Kearney.” He smiled.

“Mr. Kim.” José took his hand.

“Mr. Kim,” Frank said, shaking the man’s hand after José.

“You still keeping the forty-five under the counter, Mr. Kim?” José asked casually.

Kim widened his eyes. “Mr. Phelps! A private citizen cannot possess a handgun in the District. It is illegal.”

Frank glanced around. A male customer at the back rummaged through the beer cooler; otherwise the place was empty.

“Somebody shot Skeeter Hodges last night, Mr. Kim,” Frank said.

“Yes.”

The pinched way Kim said it, Frank knew there wasn’t going to be any more.

“You hear any talk?” José asked.

“No.” Kim looked past the two men.

Frank heard footsteps behind him. The man from the cooler stood there with a tall can of Wild Bull. Frank stepped aside. Wordlessly, the man set the can on the counter and pulled a couple of rumpled singles out of his
pocket. Frank noticed the man’s hand trembled ever so slightly.

Kim made change and slipped the can into a paper bag. He stood still and watched the man leave. The door closed. Kim’s eyes came back to Frank and José.

“No,” Kim repeated. The tension in his voice had disappeared. “There is no talk. After a killing, there is usually much discussion of it. Such as after a baseball game.”

Frank thought of Edward Teasdale, sitting in his Barcalounger, watching the Birds shut down the Red Sox.

“You knew Skeeter?”

“Oh, yes.” Kim’s face tightened.

“And . . . ?”

“He held me up.” Kim pointed. “He walked right through that door and he held me up.”

T
he forty-five . . . when was that?” Frank asked.

He and José stood on the sidewalk outside the 7-Eleven. The man on the bench hadn’t moved. Frank glanced at him to see if he was breathing.

José massaged the back of his neck. He looked at the man on the bench too. “Two, three years ago. June . . . no . . . July. Yeah, July. Right after the Fourth.”

Frank placed it. He and Kate, just back from Spain. An epidemic of violent holdups and dead convenience-store owners in Southeast, near Eastern Market.

“Cecil and Forrest . . . ?” The last name floated just outside Frank’s reach.

“Gibbons,” José furnished.

It had been a hot summer night, and the 911 dispatcher had reported shooting inside Kim’s 7-Eleven. First officers on the scene found the Gibbons brothers sprawled among toppled shelves of canned goods. Each had been killed with a single headshot: Cecil between the eyes, Forrest through the right temple. Cecil’s fingerprints were all over a SIG-Sauer, and Forrest still clutched a Glock 17.
Forensics connected both weapons to the earlier Southeast killings.

Kim had claimed that the Gibbons brothers and a third gunman had gotten into an argument. He—Kim—had ducked behind the bullet shield by the cash register. The third gunman had fled after shooting the Gibbonses. The convenience-store killings stopped. The alleged third gunman had never been found, nor had the forty-five he’d allegedly used.

The man on the bench yawned.

“Might try that, one a these days,” José mused.

“Sleeping on a bench?”

“Fella makes it look comfortable.” José checked his watch. He pointed down Seventh Street toward the nineteenth-century rambling brick building that was Eastern Market. “What say we buy Gideon a roll?”

M
id-morning shoppers filled the market’s aisles. Gideon Weaver’s stall was empty. A broad counter ran around the three walls. Above and below the counter, bookshelves. Bibles crowded the counter and the shelves: Leviathan family Bibles, small vest-pocket testaments. Bibles in Braille. Spanish, French, German Bibles. Bibles in Kiswahili, Bihari, Shona. A cigar box minus its lid sat on the counter next to a portable CD player. Several tens, fives, and singles lay in the box, and “Lead On, O King Eternal” came from the CD player. Taped above the box and the CD player a paper banner—“Message of the Day.”

“ ‘With the ancient is wisdom, and in length of days, understanding,’ ” Frank read aloud.

“Job Twelve, twelve.”

Frank turned to José. “For sure?”

“Coffee and a roll?”

“Sure.”

Frank knew he’d lose. Never do Bible bets with a preacher’s kid.

B
ean There used to be a soda fountain named Cherry’s. Cherry had had the business for forty years before he retired and moved to Arizona. Two employees had bought him out, and latte, cappuccino, and a dozen variants of espresso had replaced banana splits, hot fudge sundaes, and of course, the signature cherry sodas. Bean There had, however, kept the round marble-top tables and the drugstore chairs with their curling wrought-iron backs and legs.

Frank watched José fix his coffee. Two spoons sugar, half-and-half to muddy brown. “How much coffee you think we’ve drunk?” he asked.