by Mike Lawson
Emma could imagine Thompson leaving college, teaching certificate in hand, filled with hope and optimism and the desire to do good for her people. Now, twenty-five years later, she was beyond exhaustion. There had been too many children raised without fathers, too many children whose role models were kingpins of drugs and violence, too many children who believed the only honest way out involved a ball. Thompson’s job was holding back the tide with a toy shovel, and she had realized years ago the futility of it. But still she tried, God bless her, still she tried.
“He was a terrific kid,” Thompson said. “Headed for college, without a doubt. Great SATs, great grades, involved in all the right clubs.”
“Did he have a calculator?” Emma asked.
“Of course. He needed one for an advanced math class he was taking. The school bought it for him.”
“So why would he steal one?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
She should have said, He wouldn’t! Why didn’t she defend him? Emma wondered. Why did she, of all people, simply accept that Isaiah Perry had done what the papers had reported? Emma knew the answer: it had happened too many times before—a kid who seemed to have walked miraculously unharmed through a minefield of disadvantage and then falls within sight of the promised land.
This woman, this good woman, needed a different job, a job that would restore the optimism of her youth.
“Can I ask you one more thing?” Emma said.
“What?”
“How did Isaiah do it? How did he manage to do so well in school when so many others fail?”
The teacher smiled—a smile sadder than lilies on a grave. “His brother. His big brother, the drug dealer, helped him. Made sure he got to school. Made sure nobody messed with him. Made sure he stayed away from the gangs and the dope. Marcus came to a parent-teacher conference one time when Isaiah’s mother couldn’t make it; he scared the shit out of the teachers.”
Emma walked down the steps of the school, head down, as she rummaged in her handbag for her keys. She heard a cry off to her left. The boys she had seen sitting outside the school when she arrived were now playing basketball. The basketball hoop didn’t have a net and the backboard had a half-dozen holes in it that Emma was certain had been caused by bullets. Just as she glanced over, she saw a kid who couldn’t have been more than five foot eight soar through the air and dunk the ball. It was as if he had steel springs in his skinny legs. The expression of pure delight on the boy’s face as he hung from the rim delighted Emma.
She glanced away from the game and over to where her car was parked and was immediately less delighted. Charlie Eklund was standing next to her Mercedes. His bodyguard was standing a few paces away, head moving, as if looking for clear lines of fire.
“Why do you have a bodyguard?” Emma said when she reached her car.
“A year ago,” Eklund said, glancing over at his man, “we decided that the demise of a certain South American cocaine cartel would benefit the political aspirations of a certain ambitious colonel. We succeeded in destroying the cartel, but unfortunately its leader managed to remain alive. That hadn’t been part of the original plan. Well, this gentleman, this cocaine mogul, had a reputation for ruthlessness and he demonstrated it by killing our colonel and his family in a most gruesome manner, but more importantly, he somehow found out that I was personally involved in his troubles. And then, as luck would have it, the fellow disappeared and we can’t find him. It’s been six months and I suspect he might be dead, but I’m not certain, and until I am . . .” Eklund’s head tilted in the direction of his bodyguard.
“Beautiful,” Emma muttered. “And what are you doing here?”
“We—”
“Will you quit saying ‘we.’ The CIA isn’t involved in whatever you’re doing. This is your op, Charlie. For some reason you have been keeping Senator Morelli under surveillance and now you’re watching Joe DeMarco—and me.”
Eklund’s eyes crinkled when he smiled. “Whether it’s me or the agency,” he said, “we—excuse me, I—I want you to stop what you’re doing.”
“And what exactly do you think I’m doing?” Emma said.
“Right now you and your friend are investigating the death of Lydia Morelli and I want you to stop. Immediately. I want this little drama to play out without any outside interference. Now is that clear enough for you?”
Emma studied Eklund for a moment before saying, “You had people watching Paul Morelli the night his wife was killed. Didn’t you, Charlie?”
Eklund didn’t respond but his eyes were both bright and flat at the same time, like the shiny plastic eyes they use in cheap dolls.
“I’m assuming,” Emma said, “that you’re here to make a threat, to tell me what’s going to happen if I don’t do what you want.”
“Correct,” Eklund said. “It’s such a pleasure dealing with smart people.”
“So get on with it.”
“Very well. You have a friend, that lovely young woman who lives with you, the one who plays the cello. She travels a lot. We were just talking about drugs. Don’t you think it would be unfortunate if the next time she traveled a large lump of heroin was found in her suitcase?”
Emma took a step toward Eklund but he didn’t back up. He just craned his neck upward to look at her.
“And your friend, DeMarco, by virtue of his birthright, has links to organized crime. I can think of a number of ways to exploit that situation.”
Emma lowered her head so her face was an inch away from Eklund’s.
“Charlie,” she said, her voice almost a whisper, “do you think your bodyguard is good enough to keep me from killing you?”
After lunch, DeMarco went back to his office and found two messages on the answering machine. The first message was from Emma relaying what he’d already suspected, that Isaiah Perry was a good student with nothing but positive prospects. Emma’s message ended with the cryptic statement that Charlie Eklund of the CIA had just spoken to her again. She said she’d tell DeMarco later what Eklund had said, but for a while she wasn’t going to be able to help him with his investigation. Instead, she said, she had to find a way to pry Eklund off their backs.
The second message was from a congressman who had confided to the Speaker that he was afraid his son was using drugs, but couldn’t be sure. Mahoney had given him DeMarco’s number.
DeMarco was surprised Mahoney had drummed up a new job for him when he had just told him to investigate Lydia Morelli’s death, but then he realized that Mahoney might have spoken to the congressman before his current assignment. The other possibility, of course, was that Mahoney didn’t care how many jobs he gave DeMarco simultaneously. He thought about just ignoring the congressman’s call for a few days, but since he didn’t know what to do next about Lydia, he figured he might as well go talk to the man about his kid. He also figured that if he was being followed, this extracurricular mission might confuse a tail—and it’d be damn nice to have someone beside himself confused, if only for a little while.
Half an hour later he was seated in front of the congressman’s desk, pretending to take notes while the politician talked. The congressman was a big, florid man from Ohio with arms like a stevedore’s, and DeMarco knew that he’d been a college football star twenty years ago. On Capitol Hill he had a reputation as a comer—decisive, insightful, aggressive. A real political linebacker. But when he talked about his son, all his poise deserted him. His hands fluttered nervously and his eyes looked everywhere but at DeMarco. Although confident he could run the nation, he didn’t know what to do about the fourteen-year-old boy he had sired. He gave DeMarco a picture of his kid, told him where the boy went to school, and looked relieved when DeMarco left his office.
The campus of the prep school looked like a small Ivy League college. The boys wore blue blazers and striped ties. DeMarco saw the congressman’s son and another boy come out together when the bell rang. They were both blond and clean-cut, and had that superior, tothe-manor-born air about them. They
were America’s future, God help us.
Instead of getting on the private bus that was taking their classmates home, the two teenagers caught a city bus and rode into downtown D.C. DeMarco followed them into a J.Crew store and watched as they shoplifted a pair of gloves.
For the next hour they stood on a street corner, obviously waiting for someone. While they waited, DeMarco thought: So now what? What was he going to do, now that he knew Isaiah Perry was most likely not a thief or a killer?
At six o’clock, DeMarco watched the congressman’s kid shake hands—twice—with a skinny, furtive Hispanic man wearing a cowboy hat. When he and his buddy went into the restroom of a fast-food restaurant, DeMarco followed and heard them snort cocaine.
As the boys were waiting for the metro to take them back to Chevy Chase, a question occurred to DeMarco that had nothing to do with the yuppie brats he was tailing. How did Isaiah Perry get from the project where he lived in Alexandria to Georgetown? The police report said nothing about finding a car belonging to Isaiah near the senator’s house. The Metro didn’t have a stop in Georgetown, at midnight bus service would be problematic, and people didn’t normally take a taxi to commit a double murder.
DeMarco told Emma about his latest insight into Lydia’s murder and she told DeMarco about her conversation with Charlie Eklund.
They were sitting at Emma’s kitchen table. DeMarco, a man who liked to cook, loved Emma’s kitchen. It was large, bright, and spacious, and contained every culinary gadget known to modern man. From the back of the house Christine could be heard playing her cello. DeMarco recognized the piece she was playing, which meant it wasn’t the highbrow stuff she normally played. Considering what he and Emma were discussing, a requiem of some sort would have been more appropriate.
“So Eklund is protecting Morelli,” DeMarco said.
“I think he is now,” Emma said. “But I think you were right before when you said that van Horn and Suttel weren’t working for Eklund, that they were working for this powerful man that Lydia spoke of.”
“Great,” DeMarco said. “So now Morelli has two people helping him.”
“Yes. And Eklund is threatening to do things to you and Christine if we don’t stop looking into Lydia’s death. So I have to find a way to . . . to neutralize him.”
“What do you want me to do?” DeMarco said. “Back off for a while?”
“No. You can’t do that.” Emma paused. “I think we have one thing going in our favor. I’m pretty sure—no, I’m positive—that what Eklund is doing has not been sanctioned by CIA management. This means he doesn’t have teams of people helping him. He may have paid a couple of guys to watch the Morellis—freelancers like Suttel and van Horn, or maybe retired agents—but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have fifty people involved in this and they aren’t using satellites to track us. This is Charlie’s op, not Langley’s.”
“How does that help us?” DeMarco said.
“It helps because Eklund’s manpower is limited and if you make the effort, you can probably lose whoever might be following you.”
So DeMarco, who had never been trained on how to avoid being followed by spies, left Emma’s house and once again made erratic high-speed turns and darted down alleys and peered continually into the rearview mirror as he tried to shake a tail he couldn’t see. And all the time he drove he wondered what sort of things Charlie Eklund might be planning to do to destroy his life.
Chapter 34
DeMarco had not enjoyed visiting the Alexandria housing project during daylight hours. He liked it even less at night.
He parked his car under the only streetlight still burning on the block, then exited and locked his car, and walked up to the Perrys’ front door. He knocked, waited a minute, then knocked again. The door was finally opened by a stout black woman in her fifties wearing a faded pink bathrobe. She had a seamed, work-worn face and the skin beneath her eyes was smudged gray from fatigue. Her dark eyes recorded a lifetime of grief, poverty, and bad luck.
In her arms was a little boy, no more than two years old. He had on pajamas covered with cartoon pictures of jumping bunnies and sucked a pacifier as he looked at DeMarco. His eyes were huge, innocent, and curious, and unlike the woman’s, the baby’s chubby features showed no concern. He wasn’t old enough to know that unexpected callers in the night usually brought bad news.
“Yes?” the woman asked.
“I’m sorry to bother you so late, ma’am. Are you Marcus Perry’s mother?”
“Yes. Who are you? Another reporter?”
“No, ma’am. I’m looking for Marcus. Is he home?”
“You the police? What’s he done now?”
“I’m not with the police either, ma’am. I’m a lawyer. I have some business with your son.”
“Business? You a customer of his?”
“No, ma’am. I just need to talk to him. It’s important.”
She studied DeMarco, the look of disgust on her face making him squirm. She apparently thought he was buying dope from Marcus.
“Please, ma’am, can you tell me where I can find him?”
“At this time of night,” she said, “he’s usually with his trashy friends at this club in the District.”
DeMarco asked her for the name of the club.
“It’s . . . I can’t remember. Here, take this baby,” she said, thrusting the infant at him. “There’s a matchbook somewhere in the kitchen.”
DeMarco awkwardly held the little boy and they looked at each other in silence, inquisitive brown eyes gazing into cynical blue ones. The kid reached out once and squeezed DeMarco’s nose, then finding nothing else on his face worth playing with, resumed staring and sucking on his pacifier. Mrs. Perry came back with a book of matches from a nightclub, and handed it to DeMarco as she took the baby from him. DeMarco thanked her and turned to leave.
“Hey,” she said. “When you see him, you tell him that that girl he hired to look after his son didn’t change his diaper all day. Now this baby has a nasty rash from sittin’ in his own shit. You tell him the little bitch was so high on crack when I got home, she didn’t even know me. You tell him that, ya hear?”
She slammed the door in DeMarco’s face before he could answer.
Rap music, soothing as a jackhammer, assaulted DeMarco’s ears when he entered the dance club. His eyes adjusted to the dim light, and he saw he was the only white person in the room and that every head was turned in his direction. He instantly felt the vulnerability of being different.
He peered through the smoky darkness until he found Marcus Perry seated with a young woman at a table in the farthest corner of the room. He was dressed in more formal attire than when DeMarco had last seen him. Gone was the hooded Raiders jacket and unlaced tennis shoes. He was wearing a double-breasted black suit over a white silk turtleneck sweater. There were gold chains around his neck and the scant light in the room was captured momentarily, then scattered, by the diamond stud in his ear. Tonight he would fit right in at the best clubs in town—unless they noticed the gun in the shoulder holster.
The young black woman with him was a long-necked beauty with the profile of a Nubian queen. She was wearing a tight red dress cut low enough to show a magnificent cleavage, and short enough to expose flawless legs. Marcus’s lovely companion didn’t appear very happy, though; she was looking out at the room, a bored expression on her beautiful face, tapping long-nailed fingers impatiently on the table top.
“Mr. Perry, I need to talk to you again,” DeMarco said.
Marcus ignored DeMarco, not even bothering to look at him. He raised a glass slowly to his lips, took a sip, then set the glass down carefully next to a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He had the slow-motion movements and glassy-eyed look of the very drunk.
Before DeMarco could repeat himself, the young woman said to Marcus, “Honey, I’m gonna go on over and sit with Regina while you talk to this man. I’m sorry about your brother—you know that, sugar—but I don’t know why you asked me out toni
ght. You ain’t said two words since we been here. Come over and get me later, if you want. Okay?”
Marcus didn’t respond. He continued to sit, facing straight ahead, eyes focused on an invisible horizon. The young woman gave a small, disgusted shake of her head and rose from her chair. She stood next to DeMarco, and looked down at him; in high heels she was well over six feet tall. DeMarco could feel heat coming from her body as if there was a small furnace burning inside her loins.
“I’d be real careful if I was you, mister,” she said to DeMarco. “This thing with his brother has made him mad-dog crazy. He already beat on one man tonight who didn’t do hardly nothin’.”
Great. DeMarco took the woman’s seat across the small table from Marcus.
“How’d you find me here?” Marcus asked, still not looking at DeMarco. His words were slurred and spoken so softly that DeMarco barely heard him.
“Your mother told me you’d be here.”
Marcus barked a humorless laugh.
“Bet she was damn happy about that too.”
“She wasn’t.”
DeMarco told Marcus what his mother had said about the babysitter.
“Gonna break that little bitch’s head,” Marcus muttered darkly.
“The reason I wanted to see you tonight was—”
For the first time, Marcus looked directly into DeMarco’s eyes. “You think I don’t give a shit about my son, don’t you?” he said. “You think he’s just another crack baby, got a dead hooker for a mother, a drug dealer for a father. Ain’t that right?”
That was exactly what he thought, but DeMarco didn’t say anything.
“Well, you’re wrong. I married that boy’s mama. And she wasn’t no doper and she wasn’t no hooker. She didn’t OD or die from AIDS, or any o’ that shit. She got cancer, this lymph thing. I love my son.”
“I’m glad to hear that, Mr. Perry. But it’s your brother I want to talk about.”
“I already told you everything I know.”
“No you didn’t,” DeMarco said.
