A Murder of Justice (5 page)

José didn’t hesitate. “Least two thousand gallons.”

Frank stared.

“Minimum.” José made a show of his first sip, taking it slow.

Frank dismissed it with a laugh. “That’s bullshit, Hoser—two thousand
gallons
?”

“Minimum,” José repeated. He sat quietly a moment for effect, then: “Okay. Cup of coffee is about eight ounces?”

“Minimum.”

“Okay, if we drink four cups a day that’s thirty-two ounces. Every four days . . . a gallon?”

Frank ran over the math in his head. “Yeah?”

“Well, that’s ninety gallons a year. Times twenty-six years . . .”

Frank tried to picture two thousand gallons of coffee.

“That’s if we just drink an average of four cups a day,” José added, “an’ you know, there been days—”

“Josephus and Franklin, our wall by day and night.” The voice came grating and rumbling, like a granite landslide.

A massively muscled man drove his motorized wheelchair up to the table.

“You were by my stall. I knew you’d stop here.”

Southeast Washington’s eyes and ears belonged to Gideon Weaver. A stray bullet during the ’68 riots had ended his career as a car thief, but a hospital conversion by
Titus Phelps had put Weaver in a new set of wheels and on the path toward becoming an inner-city missionary.

“Coffee and a roll?” Frank asked.

“Man does not live by bread alone, Franklin, but Deuteronomy doesn’t say anything about cappuccino and a bear claw.”

F
rank put the coffee and roll on the table in front of Weaver.

“Thank you,” he said. He bowed his head in brief prayer, then looked up at Frank and José.

“James Hodges,” he said.

“You hear who?” José asked.

Weaver shook his head. “People don’t know. They did, they’d talk, and I’d hear.”

He got a reckoning look, a man making an inventory, or weighing the value of a soul. “A tragic figure,” he offered slowly.

“You knew him?” José asked.

“He lived here in Southeast.” Weaver’s voice lifted at the end. As if to say, “I know everybody in Southeast.”

Frank asked, “Personally?”

“Franklin.” Weaver arched his eyebrows. “I
said
: ‘He lived here in Southeast.’ ”

Frank raised both hands, palms toward Weaver.

With a smile, Weaver accepted Frank’s surrender. “There was a lot written about James. His association with Juan Brooks.”

“We know,” Frank said, “but how’d
you
see him?”

Weaver worked at the bear claw with the side of a fork. He separated a piece, dipped it in his coffee, took a bite, and smiled in satisfaction. The smile went away and he put the fork down.

“James was a man who wanted to be king.”

Frank and José looked at each other. They both eyed Weaver.

“King,” José repeated.

Weaver took a moment to answer. “Yes.” He paused and nodded as if in agreement with himself. “I never thought of him
that
way. Until now—until you asked. ‘King’ just . . . just came out.”

“And what made it come out?” José asked.

Weaver considered this. “Do you know Belial?”

“No,” Frank replied.

“A fallen angel,” José answered.

Weaver rewarded him with a glance of approval. “James could have done much good. But he took the talents God gave him and turned them to evil uses. Still, it always seemed to me that he was searching for redemption. Trying to buy his way back into grace.”

“He had a head for business,” Frank put in.

“Numbers
and
people,” Weaver said.

“People?” José asked. “How ‘people’?”

“People underestimated him. Dropout. Child of the projects. A boy who didn’t know his father. The hustlers thought that they had a good recruit. Their mistake. They’d give James a little slack, a little headway—he’d hustle
them
.”

“You said ‘king,’ ” Frank reminded Weaver.

“Folks bowing to him—James hungered for respectability.” Weaver wagged a warning finger. “Not just
respect
. Difference between respect and respectability. . . . You can get re-
spect
because you got a gun in your hand. Or a hundred-dollar bill. What James wanted was respec-ta-
bil
- ity—something people give you without you asking. Without the gun or the Benjamin.”

 FIVE

C
apital Mortgage.” José pointed to the next door down the hallway.

The Majestic theater had opened in the 1920s, and generations of kids had grown up in Southeast spending Saturdays at double-feature westerns and horror movies. The theater folded in the 1970s. For years, it stood empty, a shelter for the homeless and an incubator for rats. Then developers reinforced the art deco façade, ripped out the rows of gum-bottomed seats, gutted the interior, and rebuilt the Majestic as an odorless, fully carpeted, color-coordinated office building. A Rite Aid drugstore, the inevitable Starbucks, and a branch of the Riggs Bank took up the ground floor. Capital Mortgage shared the second floor with an assortment of lawyers, dentists, and trade association lobbyists.

Capital’s reception area conveyed an impression of rectitude: sturdy, unpretentious furniture, navy wool carpet, pale-blue walls hung with large black-and-white photos of old Washington, and a conservatively dressed receptionist
with a Jamaican accent who offered a choice of V8, orange juice, or bottled water.

Frank and José waved away the receptionist’s offer. They settled into armchairs, José picking up a
New York Times
, Frank a
Newsweek.

José rattled the
Times
and groaned. “Shouldn’t do it.”

“Do what?” Frank asked.

“Kiss those Chinese asses.” José held up the paper. Front-page headline, the Chinese demanding an apology for the EP-3 spy-plane incident.

“Can’t just let them rot there.”

José shook his head.
“Apologize,”
he muttered with contempt. “Bush got himself off on the wrong foot. You the new guy on the block, somebody’s gonna test you.” He was searching for the sports section when the receptionist got up and walked to a closed door.

“He’s off the phone, now.” She opened the door.

Simultaneously Frank saw Lamar Sheffield and the Capitol building. Sheffield sat at a large desk, and behind him, the Capitol filled a picture window.

Tom Kearney, Frank’s father, had once remarked that Sheffield was a double for Nelson Mandela. Ever since, Frank thought Mandela when he saw Sheffield: a man with a starched backbone and silver hair, a man whose eyes said quietly that he had known fear and had mastered it. Both men had learned much about themselves while serving time in prison . . . Nelson Mandela for resisting apartheid, Lamar Sheffield for executing three of his criminal associates who had disobeyed his order to stay out of the drug business.

At first glance, the view of the Capitol seemed to demand a larger, grander office. But after you took in the Azerbaijan carpet, the well-aged club chairs upholstered in butter-soft leather, the walnut credenza with the silver-framed family photos and the Waterford crystal decanters, the room was not so much an office as the private hideaway of an old friend. A place where you could believe what you heard.

“I don’t suspect you’re here for refinancing,” Sheffield
said, getting up to shake hands. He had a surprisingly round voice, something, Frank thought, like Nat Cole’s.

“Should we?” Frank asked.

“If you wait, rates may go up,” Sheffield said, “but on the other hand, they may go down.”

“And Capital Mortgage wins either way,” José said.

“Only if we’re smart,” Sheffield said dismissively, as he led them to the club chairs. He sat, carefully hitching up his trouser legs to protect the crease. “And that’s what you’re here for, isn’t it . . . to get smart? Skeeter Hodges?”

“Yeah, Skeeter. We’ll settle for a little less dumb,” Frank said.

Frank studied the man he and José had sent to Lorton twenty years before. Times had been changing around Sheffield. Prostitution, gambling, and loansharking had been sufficient to satisfy humanity’s basic sins—sins that history and longevity somehow legitimized. Drugs, however, were different in Lamar Sheffield’s view. They corrupted humanity in a way the old sins couldn’t. A man had to be a man. Stand for something, even in the face of the inevitable. And so Sheffield had killed Mookie, Travis, and Snake, knowing what it would mean. And Frank and José had taken him in, and Sheffield had done hard time in Lorton at an advanced age—something that would have killed most men. But he had come out leaving one life behind and started a new one. Yet the old ties remained: people talked to Lamar Sheffield—residual perks of a reputation earned by a lifetime on the street.

“No word out as to who might have done it,” Frank said.

Sheffield frowned. “There’s always talk. Sometimes before. Most always after.”

“You haven’t heard anything about Skeeter?”

Sheffield smiled mockingly. “You talking to the other mortgage brokers in town?”

“Other brokers don’t have such nice offices,” José said.

“Or such rap sheets,” Sheffield came back. “You thinking about a hit? Man gets shot in his car in that business, you know it was a hit.”

“A competitor?” Frank asked. “I thought he didn’t have any.”

“Never can tell. It could have been one of his own people,” Sheffield said sadly. “No loyalty these days. Too much on the table. Your best friends get greedy and you end up with a bullet in the back of your head.”

“I heard it happens that way, Lamar,” Frank said.

“Curious thing about Skeeter,” Sheffield mused. “How he managed to slip by you folks with the badges. Took over when Brooks got sent away, and just dropped out of sight.”

He paused to think about it. “A matter of style,” he finally said. “Skeeter didn’t wear the diamonds and fur coats, didn’t charter planes to the Vegas fights. He paid attention to business.”

“You think he may have had top cover?” José asked.

“Like I said, there was a lot on the table. Skeeter was in big business. Bound to have some investors.”

“But you don’t
know
if he did or didn’t have cover,” Frank said.

Sheffield leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers together. “Look, Frank,” he said patiently, “when I got out, Skeeter was just another kid on the street with a couple of friends who’d do what he told them. Then he tied in with Juan Brooks. When the feds got Brooks, Skeeter came out top dog.

“Man was like one of them trapeze acts in the circus,” he said reflectively. “He’d do the damnedest things. I’d hear about him tying up with the boys from Medellín. I thought he was in over his head. Those were hard boys playin’ hard games. I’d say he was gonna fall. I’d
know
it. But he never did. Man does things like that . . . knows he’s got a net.”

Sheffield thought some more about it, then nodded. “Knows he’s got a net,” he repeated.

Frank and José stood.

“John doing okay?” Frank asked.

Sheffield’s eyes flicked to one of the larger photos on the credenza: Lamar Sheffield standing beside a tall young
man on a basketball court. The young man wore his father’s smile and a Dartmouth jersey.

“Could be better. Killings aren’t good for the real estate business.”

“Helps if you’re buying,” José said.

Sheffield shook his head. “But the profit’s in the selling.”

F
or going straight, he stays in touch,” Frank said when they were in the hallway.

“I played football at Howard,” José said.

“Yeah. So?” Frank replied.

“I’m not on the team anymore . . . but I still know the lineup.”

 SIX

F
resh?” Frank asked. He was already measuring grounds into the coffeemaker.

José nodded. He opened Skeeter Hodges’s file jacket and spread an assortment of documents across his desk. “Lot of reading.”

Frank switched the coffeemaker on. “Skeeter had a long run.”

For the next hour, the two men worked through the files, taking notes, reconstructing Hodges’s life as seen through the prism of his brushes with the law. Frank came across a photograph of him in cap and gown, smiling into the camera, and behind him, with the same smile, Sharon Lipton, then a handsome woman in a silk dress and dramatically sweeping brimmed hat.

“Boy and happy mother?” he guessed, holding the picture up for José to see.

Over the top of his half-round reading glasses, José gave the photograph an appraising look. “A real mama, all right.” He sifted through the papers on his desk until he found a rap sheet. Tilting back in his chair, he eyed the document.

“Sharon Stilton Lipton,” he read, “aka ‘Babba,’ 1979, possession of narcotics, intent to sell . . .”

Fourteen,
Frank thought,
kid would have been fourteen.

“. . . 1980, solicitation for prostitution.” José shook his head. “ ’Eighty-two was a busy year . . . two charges receiving stolen goods, one sale of narcotics.”

Frank looked at the graduation picture again: Hodges, grinning with a kick-ass confidence. Proud mama, a hand on her son’s shoulder.

Hand
 . . . A special kind of hand on a kid’s shoulder. The encouraging squeeze you gave before you sent them out . . . to the first day of school . . . away for the first camping trip . . . back into a game already lost . . . off to basic training at Fort Jackson . . . when you tried your best to pass on a small measure of your own strength, of your own knowledge about the world. Where was Babba Lipton sending her son?

“Helluva education
he
got,” he said.

José slipped the rap sheet into the file. “Another testimonial for home schooling.”

Frank pushed his chair back, stood up, stretched, and walked to the window. Several blocks away, the trees along the Mall were greening up after winter. Off to the right, the castle towers of the Smithsonian, brick-red under the late-morning sun.

To the left, the Capitol crowned Jenkins Hill. All his life—as far back as he could remember, anyway—the massive building, white and shining, had reminded him of pictures of monasteries in Tibet. Every so often, he’d idly wonder how he’d come to think of it that way. The Hill certainly wasn’t a hangout for holy men. He’d probably made the connection as a kid, he thought. Back when he’d known for certain—without any doubt—that you could always tell the good guys because they wore the white hats.

The James Hodges that emerged from the files didn’t resemble the morning papers’ romantic spin about a charming and only slightly roguish urban outlaw.

A hot-out-of-the-box start in 1981—sweet sixteen and
charged with assault with a deadly weapon. Charge dropped. A year later, a suspended sentence for heroin possession.
Thanks, Mama Babba.

Grand theft auto gave Skeeter a year at Lorton and new contacts for his life’s work. There, he met one of Juan Brooks’s lieutenants.

For years, Juan Brooks had been the District’s kingpin of kingpins. A logistics genius, he built an organization of over five hundred street retailers and Uzi-toting enforcers, a ruthless enterprise that smuggled, packaged, and retailed hundreds of kilos of cocaine in the District each month.

Just days out of Lorton, Skeeter signed on with Brooks. By 1991, he had climbed the rungs to become a senior executive in Brooks’s multimillion-dollar monopoly.

Then, in December 1992, Brian Atkins bagged Brooks. Got him big-time, life without parole. Brooks went off to an isolation cell in the maximum-security lockdown of the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois.

Atkins, head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, got hero treatment: the cover of
Newsweek,
a
60 Minutes
segment with Mike Wallace, a well-publicized lunch with President Clinton, a profusion of lawman-of-the-year awards, and a promotion to headquarters.

Skeeter went to work, picking up pieces of Brooks’s empire and adding chunks of his own. But where Brooks had left the street work to his enforcers, Skeeter had kept his hand in. One informant reported Skeeter’s holding forth about how great leaders led from the front, not from the rear. And so Skeeter Hodges had been at the front on Bayless Place, planning his next campaign, when somebody walked up and blew out his brains.

Frank saw a flag being raised over the chambers of the House of Representatives. There were other flagpoles on the Capitol roof. All day, a handful of congressional employees would be up there, raising scores of American flags—raising them, then immediately lowering them. They’d fold the flags and box them, and later, members of Congress would send them to their more important
constituents with a certificate saying that the flags had flown over the Capitol.

Frank realized José was standing beside him, watching the flags. “Congress at work,” he said.

“Wonder what it would be like, being a flag raiser?” José asked.

“Lot of ups and downs.”

“Like us.”

“Ups and downs?”

“Job never finished.”

José watched a flag go up, come down.

“My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut,” Frank complained.

José turned away from the window. “Get carry-out and find a bench on the Mall?”

R
uth threw in a pint of potato salad with the salami for Frank and the pastrami on rye for José. They walked across Constitution Avenue and found a bench under a hundred-year-old water oak on the Mall, facing the National Air and Space Museum.

José motioned to Air and Space. “Haven’t been there in a long time.”

Frank looked at the huge building. He liked going there. But he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been. You live in a city like D.C. and the only thing you see is killers and dead people. He unwrapped his sandwich and took a small, experimental bite. The salami was slick and spicy on his tongue, and there was just enough mustard to make his eyes wrinkle slightly. He sat back and watched a runner make her way down the Mall. Skeeter Hodges and the dream came back in faded tones.

“I was thinking, Hoser . . . maybe Emerson was right.”

“That Skeeter’s a key to the cold-case locker?”

“He liked working the street personally.”

“So he had to whack a lot of guys.”

“One way to thin out the competition.”

“Business killings.”

“So to speak.”

“Yeah. So to speak.”

“So what you’re sayin’ is he was good at his business.”

“Or very lucky.”

They took their time with their sandwiches and the potato salad, then sat drowsily for a quarter-hour under the springtime sun.

When they got back to the office, the answering machine held two messages: Kate, with her flight number and ETA, and Eleanor, saying the printout was ready. Frank punched the machine and listened to Kate’s message one more time.

Y
ou asked for it.” Eleanor indicated a stack on the desk beside her computer.

“Damn.” Frank sighed. The printout was at least six inches thick.

“You were right,” José said. “Lot of trees died for that.”

Eleanor shrugged. “Just the cold cases since 1990.”

“How many?” José asked.

“Fifteen hundred and change.”

Fifteen hundred. One thousand five hundred unsolved homicides. In ten years.

“But the rate’s going down,” José protested.

Eleanor rapped out a riff on her computer keyboard, scanned the results on the monitor, and nodded.

“The
homicide
rate is,” she said. “In 1990, we clipped off four hundred eighty-three citizens. In 1999, we dropped down to two hundred forty-one. But”—she threw her hands up—“look at the closure rates. In 1990, you guys were closing fifty-seven percent of the cases one way or another. In 1999, with half the killings, you were closing only thirty-seven percent of the cases. Over the ten-year period, we had almost four thousand homicides. Of those four thousand, over fifteen hundred are still open.”

Frank looked at the stack of cold cases, still trying to get
his head around fifteen hundred unsolved murders in ten years.

“Sweet Jesus,” José murmured.

I
n the hallway, headed back to their office, José muttered, “Fifteen hundred . . . One
thousand
 . . .
five hundred
 . . .”

“Numbers,” Frank said absently. “Somebody said one death is a tragedy, a million’s just a statistic. I wonder where fifteen hundred comes down?”

They were passing Emerson’s office. José jerked a thumb toward the door. “We’d been good at cooking the numbers,
we’d
be sitting behind glass desks and have nasty-ass secretaries with long nails and big tits to guard the front door.”

“Remember what your uncle says about ifs?”

José laughed.
If my daddy hadn’t died in the poor house, I’d be a rich man.

“What say we work on that”—he tapped the printout Frank was carrying under his arm—“till six or so, then go out for ribs?”

“Give me a rain check. Kate’s coming in at seven.”