Thrilling Thirteen

by Ponzo, Gary

  “Why’s that?”

  “Even if they came home before dinner, whenever that was, if they was downstairs, they coulda left any time through the basement door.”

  Damn. Scratch one alibi.

  <><><>

  The sun was low in the sky when I left Tanya Watson’s place. There was a chill and the acrid smell of burning firewood in the air. I started up the Mustang and sat shivering while the car warmed up. I should have brought a coat. Autumn, with its warm days and cool nights, always threw me off.

  What now? It was too late to knock on more doors. Too late to visit people, too late to be in this neighborhood. Shit, my childhood neighborhood was worse than this. I looked around. In the gloom, the houses looked depressingly old. The big old trees seemed to harbor shadow and menace. I thought about Bed-Stuy again and wondered how I’d survived my nine years there.

  I got to the office at six. Sheila, the receptionist for Kressler and Associates, the accounting firm where I sublet space, was packing it in for the day.

  “You got a visitor,” she growled. In her seventies, Sheila wore her gray hair in an efficient bun. She seemed to be growing increasingly terse with age. As if talking too much would squander whatever breath was left in her body.

  “A walk-in? Haven’t had one of those in a while.”

  “This guy said it was about a case you’re working on.” She squinted and lowered her voice. “He’s a big, tall black man. Sound familiar?”

  “I’m not sure.” I thought of William Jackson. I wondered if he’d come by to make an in-person pitch toward his cause for becoming Tina’s guardian. “Would you say he’s in his late thirties or early forties?”

  “More like mid-to-late twenties, if you ask me, but black people fool me on their ages all the time.” She paused and added, “Oh, ex-cuse me. Make that African-American people.” She rolled her electric blue eyes. “As if you ever heard one black person refer to themselves as such.”

  I laughed. “Thanks for letting me know.”

  “So . . . you want me to stick around?”

  I know her question was well-intended, but it grated. Was she asking because it was a man? Or because he was black? “No, no. Go on home.”

  “Okay,” she said in her four-pack-a-day contralto and grabbed her purse. “G’night.”

  I wished her good night and tromped up the steps. My office door was open. I prefer it that way during business hours. I didn’t want clients to feel they had to wait for me in the public area downstairs. Nothing had ever been stolen, so it worked out fine. I’d lock my office before leaving for the night, a mere after-hours formality—one more barrier beyond the front door for a would-be burglar.

  I stepped into the office and understood Sheila’s concern. A huge man sat hunched in my guest chair, dwarfing it. When he saw me, he unfolded himself and got up. He towered over me. Solidly built, his body was supported by tree trunks for legs. I wondered if he’d been a linebacker in a former life. He grinned as if he was pleased with himself; not in a threatening or condescending way. Damned if he didn’t have freckles sprinkled across his coppery face.

  “Sam McRae.” His voice rumbled in the subwoofer range and he extended a hand which enveloped mine like a catcher’s mitt. “I’m Darius Wilson,” he said. “But you can call me Little D. I think you’ll want to hear what I have to say.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “Well, Duvall was right.” I said. “There isn’t much truth to that nickname, is there?”

  Little D issued a throaty chuckle. “A mere accident of birth order.”

  “Have a seat.” I rounded the desk and sat down, while he wedged himself into the guest chair. “So what brings you to me?”

  “I understand you’re Tina Jackson’s attorney.” He made eye-to-eye contact. I liked that. “I want to help with her defense.”

  “How much would you charge?”

  “Nothing.” I must have looked surprised. “Shanae and I were friends,” he continued. “I feel I owe it to her to look after the girl.”

  “You were just friends?”

  He shrugged. “We did a bit of business, too. Mainly friends.”

  “When you say business, what does that refer to?”

  “I’m getting to that,” he said calmly.

  I gestured for him to continue.

  “First, let me just explain about Tina. I’ve met her and I know one thing—she may have done some bad things, but she’s not a killer.”

  The prisons are crowded with people who “didn’t do it.” I thought. “How can you be sure?”

  “Because I’ve met killers.” His gaze hardened. “And she ain’t one of them.”

  “I’m inclined to agree with you, but the police don’t. And they have evidence to back their position.”

  “Such as?”

  “Tina’s association with a gang. The bat used to kill Shanae had Tina’s fingerprints all over it.”

  He snorted. “‘Course it had her fingerprints on it. I’m sure it had Shanae’s fingerprints on it, too. When Tina quit her softball team, Shanae kept the damn thing around for protection, so either of them could’ve handled it. She also had a gun upstairs in her night table.” He shifted in the chair, a brown bear trying to squeeze into a kiddie seat. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

  I let it pass. “Did Tina know about the gun?”

  “Oh, yeah. Shanae wasn’t too happy about having it in the house, but she felt like it was insurance. She kept it unloaded, the clip beside it in the drawer. And she warned Tina to stay away from it.”

  I rocked back and forth in my chair, considering that. “If Tina knew there was a gun in the house, why would she beat her mother to death with a bat? Unless she was uncomfortable with the idea of using a gun.” I paused. “Or Shanae attacked her and she had to defend herself.”

  The way he squinted told me I’d never want to be on his bad side. “You think Shanae was still hitting on her? Roughing her up?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m playing devil’s advocate. The police know about Shanae’s history of domestic abuse. That kind of abuse can become mutual over time.”

  He shook his head. “Like them social workers say, Shanae had some issues. Okay, so she wouldn’t have won any Mother of the Year awards. But Tina’s not a killer. She’s a kid, just trying to fit in. What she needs is a little guidance. The kind of thing Shanae wasn’t real good at giving. Why you think she started hanging with a gang?” he asked. “A gang’s like family. What she didn’t get at home, she tried to find on the street.”

  Again, I thought of Bed-Stuy. How differently things might have gone, if I’d stayed.

  “You know, a neighbor saw what looked like a young kid, leaving the house late on the night Shanae died,” I said. “Could have been Tina. Could have been a friend. She’s not sure.”

  Little D pointed at me. “Maybe someone in the gang.”

  “Maybe. The neighbor didn’t get a good look at the kid’s face, so it might have been a boy.”

  His eyebrows knitted. “The neighbor give any description?”

  “Whoever it was looked a lot like Tina. Around her height, thin. Light-brown complexion. Do you know if any of Tina’s friends look like her?”

  “I don’t know many of Tina’s friends,” he said, then fell silent.

  Nobody knew Tina’s friends. Nobody saw Tina’s friends. Did they wear invisible cloaks when they visited Tina? Or sneak in the back door while Shanae was working? Maybe they never went to Tina’s house. Which would make it harder to argue that the kid at the house that night had been Tina’s friend.

  Dropping that issue for the moment, I said, “You were going to tell me about your business with Shanae.”

  His eyes widened and he appeared to refocus. “Right. Shanae had asked me to look into some of Rodney Fisher’s business dealings.”

  “To get evidence for the child support case against him?”

  He nodded. “I started looking into it, asking around. I hear that Fisher’s
been selling drugs, doing loan-sharking and money-laundering on the side.” He drummed his fingers on one knee. “If Shanae was going to win her case, she’d need more than the word on the street to prove it. That’s why I broke into the shop.”

  “Ah. And what did you find?”

  He picked up a thick file from the floor and handed it to me. “Found some tax returns that say what he’s supposed to be making. And a ledger that says what’s really coming in. Some checks signed over to the pawn shop, too. I copied everything I could.”

  I flipped through the photocopies. One set of papers, held with a clip, were the tax returns. Another set, handwritten ledger entries. A list of names with cryptic notes was on the left; columns of numbers on the right.

  “That’s yours to keep,” he said.

  “Too bad Shanae doesn’t care about child support anymore.”

  “Yeah, but when Shanae found out what he was doing, she was none too happy. And she was no shrinking violet. She told me she demanded he pay up, or she’d take him to court. And you know, if any of this shit came out . . . .” He whistled.

  “So Fisher had a definite motive for killing her?”

  “Look that way to me.”

  “When did Shanae tell you this?”

  “At her house, the day she died.” His mood was somber. That he made no secret of having been there relieved me.

  Fisher was sounding more like a promising suspect than ever. If he’d gone to the house and had an argument with Shanae, maybe that was what woke up the neighbor, Mrs. Mallory. He might have grabbed the bat in anger and beaten the life out of Shanae and, in a panic, failed to dispose of the weapon. But then what about fingerprints? And who was the kid Mrs. Mallory saw leaving the house? Could she have mistaken Fisher for Tina? Didn’t seem likely.

  Scanning the checks, I halted abruptly when I noticed one for $5,000 made out to ITN Consultants. I blinked and stared at it. The check had been drawn from the Kozmik Games account. Hello! The back of the check bore an illegible signature.

  Stunned, I tried to process this bizarre coincidence. Little D had just mentioned loan-sharking and money-laundering. Could the embezzlers have been laundering the stolen money through Fisher’s pawn shop and signed the check over to him? It was sloppy, but even the most sophisticated criminals could get sloppy. Hell, the Watergate investigation started with a cashier’s check intended for Nixon’s re-election fund, which ended up in a burglar’s bank account. I scanned the handwritten records, ordered by date, searching for a notation for ITN around the time the check was written. I found the entry, with “$5,000” entered next to it; “$500” and “$4,500” were written in the right-hand columns. I flipped back a month and found ITN again—this time with “$7,000” next to it. In the right-hand column: “$700” and “$6,300.” It looked like Fisher was getting a ten percent cut. But where was the rest going?

  Little D was still talking. “I’m kind of hooked into that scene. That’s how I know him.”

  “I’m sorry. I drifted off. Know who?”

  “Dude named Narsh. Worked as a drug runner for a while. Fisher got him acting as—what do you call it?—liaison between his clients and the shop. An enforcer, too.”

  “So he should be able to tell us who Fisher is dealing with.”

  “He should. Why?”

  “Because it looks like Fisher is handling a transaction that involves a phony company. Something related to another case I’m on. I’d like to know who’s behind that company.”

  “I can ask Narsh about it when I see him.”

  “You’re going to talk to Narsh?”

  “How else we gonna verify all these rumors about what Fisher been up to?” He leaned forward, hands on his knees and said with a sly smile, “Ain’t you been listening?”

  “Sorry. I got a little distracted looking through the records.” I switched gears to Tina’s case. “You think he’ll talk to you?”

  “Oh, he’ll talk to me.” Little D beamed confidence. “Eventually.”

  His smile made me nervous. “You think Fisher had Narsh kill Shanae?”

  “With a baseball bat? Hired killers don’t beat people to death.”

  “It looks more like a crime of passion,” I said. “Unless that was the intent.”

  Little D shrugged and shook his head. “Nah. Too subtle. If Narsh was hired to kill Shanae, he woulda just capped her ass.”

  Little D’s tendency to alternate between the Queen’s English and street slang was amusing. A cross between a Rhodes Scholar and a gansta rapper. Just the kind of guy I needed to help me with this case. “If you’re going to talk to Narsh, I want to be there.”

  “This may not be the friendliest discussion. Be better if I handled it and got back to you.”

  “No,” I said. He stared at me, as if I’d spoken a foreign language. “I want to meet him. Look at him while he answers the questions. Size him up for myself. Not that I don’t trust you. There are just some things I have to do myself.”

  Little D leaned back and smiled. “Damn, girl. Well, all right. You want to meet Narsh, I’ll have to take you to him, ’cause he ain’t gonna come to you. And we’re talking about Southern Avenue, babe. So you will want me to be there.”

  I thought about that decaying stretch of road, dividing the worst of D.C. from its mirror image in P.G. County. “Yeah,” I said. “I will.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  With no client meetings or court appearances, I wore jeans and an old long-sleeve pullover to the office the next day. Casual dress seemed in order for a trip to the ’hood. Though I had other work to do, my thoughts were stuck on Little D’s promise to take me that afternoon to meet Narsh at a local bar serving as his office. My cases kept me occupied, but anticipation charged through me.

  For the umpteenth time, I called Hirschbeck and got his voice mail. I left another message for him to arrange an audit and check the company’s computers for tampering. I was beginning to feel like a parrot.

  The deeper I got into the Higgins embezzlement case, the more certain I was that our client was getting hosed. I had no clue what to do about it. Brad Higgins hadn’t been fired, so we couldn’t sue for wrongful termination. And, as an “at-will” employee, I didn’t see how we could sue Kozmik even if they let Higgins go. Still, I had to do something. For the moment, that “something” was to stay on Hirschbeck like a yellow jacket on a picnicker.

  Walt called to tell me Higgins was a free man, for the time being. The police seemed suspicious, he said, due to Brad’s appearance on the security video. Walt thought the cops might try to get a warrant to search Brad’s condo. I updated Walt on my conversation with Little D—the records he’d found and our plan to see Narsh. I also told him about hiring Alex Kramer to find Cooper while Duvall was out of town.

  “Maybe Cooper knows something about the pawn shop connection,” Walt said.

  “I hope so.” I thought back to my conversation with the lovely Elva McKutcheon. “There was also a black man in a blue jumpsuit looking for Cooper in Philadelphia. Maybe it was Narsh or Fisher.”

  “Whoever it was may be able to identify the real embezzler.”

  “I hope to find out more from Narsh today.”

  “Good luck,” Walt said. “I’ll keep you posted on Brad’s situation.”

  I hung up and went to meet Little D out front. The weather was still mild. A breeze showered colorful leaves onto the ground and sent them scampering down the street. I found their rustling soothing, like the patter of gentle rain.

  I’d been in bad neighborhoods before—my childhood home in Bed-Stuy being the worst by far—but times had changed. Today’s ’hoods made those of the past look pretty tame. Having Little D as a guide would help, but even he couldn’t guarantee safe passage through the war zone shared by D.C. and P.G. County. The area had a reputation for harboring perps who evaded the law by crossing to the other jurisdiction. Cooperative enforcement was a work in progress.

  Despite the risks, I won’t delegate some work
, like questioning people for information that might make or break my cases. I had to question Narsh face-to-face and judge his answers for myself.

  At a couple minutes past three, Little D pulled up, his green Lexus sparkling, chrome wheels spinning and shining. Sliding onto the tan leather seat, I said, “Nice car to be driving in such a crappy area.”

  “Don’t matter,” he said. He turned to me. “Don’t nobody mess with my car.”

  “You sure everyone on Southern Avenue got the memo on that?”

  “If they didn’t, they gonna hear it from me personally, after I find their sorry asses.” He hunched over the wheel, his oversized frame filling the space, already scoping the streets for would-be car thieves.

  <><><>

  Southern Avenue, with its tiny houses, liquor and convenience stores, and gas stations, depressed me. Most houses had barred windows, reminding me of mini-jails.

  Calvin’s Bar was so dark, I had trouble seeing. But my nose didn’t fail me. It smelled like the morning after a frat party—stale beer, cigarette smoke, and bodily fluids assaulted my nose. I held my breath. My eyes adjusted to the low light, and I noticed a few people in booths along one wall. A middle-aged man, round-faced and chestnut-complected, stood behind the bar having a loud conversation with two younger men—and possibly the rest of the neighborhood. At the far end of the bar, one customer, slumped with his head on his arm, appearing not to hear.

  “So I told that motherfucker,” said one man in a Dallas Cowboys jacket, “I said, look here, you insult my peoples, you insult me. You gotta step off. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Sheee-it. What he do then?” said the smaller man. His pants hung so low, he flashed his Fruit-of-the-Looms to the world.

  “He try to get up in my face, but I slapped him around and he back off like the little whiny-ass bitch he is.”

  “You lucky he weren’t carrying,” the bartender said.

  “That bitch be carrying my size-twelve boot up his ass, if he try that shit wit’ me again.”