“The director of the FBI highly recommended you,” he said. “I think Stephen Bowen’s a pretty good man. What do you think? Any opinion of him?”
“I agree with you. The Bureau has changed a lot in the past couple of years under Bowen. We work well with them now. That didn’t used to be the case.”
The President nodded. “Is this a real threat, Alex, or are we just taking wise precautions?” he asked me. It was a tough, blunt question. I also thought it was the right question to ask.
“I think the concern of the Secret Service is definitely a wise precaution,” I said. “The coincidence of the names Jack and Jill being the same as your code names with the Secret Service, that’s very disturbing. So is the killers’ pattern of going after famous people here in Washington.”
“I guess I fit that damn description. Sad but true,” President Byrnes said and frowned. I had read that be was as intensely private man and down-to-earth as well. He seemed that way to me. Midwestern in the best sense. I guess what surprised me the most was the warmth that came from the man.
“As you have admitted yourself, you’re ‘shaking up the toy box.’ You’ve already disturbed a lot of people.”
“Stay tuned, there are a lot more major disturbances to come. This government badly needs to be reengineered. It was designed for life in the eighteen hundreds. Alex, I’m going to cooperate in any way I can with the police investigation. I don’t want anyone else to be hurt, let alone die. I’ve certainly thought about it, but I’m not ready to die yet. I think Sally and I are decent people. I hope you’ll feel that way the more you’re around us. We’re far from perfect, but we are decent. We’re trying to do the right thing.”
I was already feeling that way about the President. He had quickly struck a good chord with me. At the same time, I wondered how much of what he’d said I could believe. He was, after all, a politician. The best in the land.
“Every year, several people try to break into the White House, Alex. One man succeeded by tagging onto the end of the marine marching band. Quite a few have tried to ram the front gates with cars. In ninety-four, Frank Eugene Corder flew a single-engine Cessna in here.”
“But so far, nothing like this,” I said.
The President asked the real question on his mind. “What’s your bottom line on Jack and Jill?”
“No bottom line yet. Maybe a morning line,” I told him. “I disagree with the FBI I don’t see them as pattern killers. They’re highly organized, but the pattern seems artificial to me. I’ll bet they’re both attractive, white, with well above normal IQ. They have to be articulate and persuasive to get into the places that they did. They want to accomplish some-thing even more spectacular. What they’ve done so far is only groundwork. They enjoy the power of manipulating both us and the media. That’s what I have so far. It’s what I’m prepared to talk about, anyway.”
The President nodded solemnly. “I have a good feeling about you, Alex,” he said. “I’m glad we met for a couple of minutes here. I was told that you have two children,” he said. He reached into his jacket and handed me a presidential tie clasp and a pin especially designed for kids. “Keepsakes are important, I think. You see, I believe in tradition as well as in change.”
President Byrnes shook my hand again, looked me directly in the eye for a moment, and then left the room.
I understood that I had just been welcomed to the team, and the sole purpose of the team was to protect the President’s life. I found that I was powerfully motivated to do just that I looked down at the tie clasp and pin for Damon and Jannie and was strangely moved.
CHAPTER
37
“SO DID YOU get to meet the royal couple yet?” Nana Mama asked when I entered her kitchen about four that afternoon.
She was making something in a big gray stewpot that smelled like the proverbial ambrosia. It was white bean soup, one of my favorites. Rosie the cat was prowling around on the counters, purring contentedly. Rosie in the kitchen.
At the same time Nana cooked at the counter, she was doing the crossword puzzle in the Washington Post. A book of her word jumbles was also out in view. So was No Stone Unturned—The life and Times of Maggie Kuhn. Complicated woman, my grandmother.
“Did I meet who?” I pretended not to understand her crystal-clear and very pointed question to me. I was playing the game that the two of us have had going for many years, and probably will until death do us part somehow, sometime, someway.
“Meet whom, Dr. Cross. The President and Mrs. President, of course. The well-to-do white folks who live in the White House, looking down on the rest of us. Tom and Sally up in Camelot for the nineties.”
I smiled at her usual high-spirited and occasionally bittersweet banter. I looked in the fridge. “I didn’t come home for the third and fourth degree, you know. I’m going to make a sandwich from this brisket. It looks moist and tender. Or are looks deceiving?”
“Of course they are, but this brisket is moist and you could cut it with a soup spoon. Seems as if they work very short hours over at the White House, considering all that they have to do. Somehow, I suspected as much. But I could never prove it until now. So who did you meet?”
I couldn’t resist I had been going to tell her this much anyway. “I met and talked with the President this morning.”
“You met Tom?”
Nana pretended to take a punch in the manner of the heavyweight boxer George Foreman. She did a stumbling stutter-step back from the counter. She even cracked a tiny smile. “Well, tell me all about Tom, for heaven’s sake. And Sally. Does Sally wear a black pillbox hat inside the White House in the daytime?”
“I think that was Jacqueline Kennedy. Actually, I liked President Byrnes,” I said as I commenced making a thick brisket sandwich on fresh rye with bib lettuce, tomatoes, and a dab of mayonnaise, lots of pepper, a whisk of salt.
“You would. You like everybody unless they kill somebody,” Nana said as she began to slice up some more tomatoes. “Now that you’ve met Mr. President, you can get back on the Sojourner Truth School case. That’s very important to the people in this house. The Gray House. No black people care very much about the President and his problems anymore. Nor should they.”
“Is that a fact, Mrs. Farrakhan?” I said as I bit into my sandwich. Delicious, as promised. Cut it with a soup spoon, melts in the mouth.
“Should be a fact, if it isn’t. It’s close to a fact, anyway. I’ll admit that it’s a sad state of affairs, but it’s the sad state we all live in. Don’t you agree? You must.”
“You ever hear of mellowing with age?” I asked her. “Your brisket is terrific, by the way.”
“You ever hear of getting better, not getting older? You ever hear of taking care of one’s own kind? You ever hear about teeny-tiny, darling black children being murdered in our neighborhood, Alex, and nobody doing enough to make it stop? Of course the brisket is excellent. You see, I am getting better.”
I reached into my trouser pocket and took out the clasp and pin that the President had given me. “The President knew I had two children. He gave me these keepsakes for them.” I handed them over to Nana. She took them, and for once in her life, she was speechless.
“Tell them that these are from Tom and that he’s a fine man trying to do the right thing.”
I finished half of my overstuffed sandwich and took the remaining half with me out of the kitchen. If you can’t stand the heat and all that “Thanks for the delicious sandwich, and the advice. In that order.”
“Where are you going now?” Nana called after me. She was winding up again. “We were talking about an important matter. Genocide against black people right here in Washington, our nation’s capital. They don’t care what happens in these neighborhoods, Alex. They is them, and them is white, and you’re collaborating with the enemy.”
“Actually, I’m going out to put in a few hours on the Truth School murder case,” I called back as I continued toward the front door, and blessed escape fro
m the tirade. I couldn’t see Nana Mama anymore, but I could hear her voice trailing behind me like a banshee cry, or maybe the caw of a field crow.
“Alex has finally found his senses!” she exclaimed in a loud, shrill voice. “There’s hope after all. There’s hope. Oh, thank you, Black Lord in Heaven.”
The old goat can still get my goat, and I love her for it. I just don’t want to listen to her annoying rap sometimes.
I beeped the car horn of my old Porsche on the way out of the driveway. It’s our signal that everything is all right between us. From inside the house, I heard Nana call out: “Beep back at you!”
CHAPTER
38
I WAS BACK on the mean streets of inner Washington, the underside of the capital. I was a homicide detective again. I loved it with a strange passion, but there were times when I hated it with all my heart.
We were doing all that could humanly be done on both cases. I had set up surveillance on the Truth School during the day and also had day and night surveillance on Shanelle Green’s gravesite. Often psycho killers showed up at victims’ graves. They were ghouls, after all.
The circus was definitely in town.
Two of them.
Two completely different kinds of murder pattern. I had never seen anything like it, nothing even close to this chaos.
I didn’t need Nana Mama to remind me that I wanted to be out on the street right now. As she had said, Someone is killing our children.
I was certain that the unspeakable monster was going to kill again. In contrast to Jack and Jill, there was rage and passion in his work. There was a raw, scary craziness, the kind I could almost taste. The killer’s probable amateur status wasn’t reassuring, either.
Think like the killer. Walk in the killer’s shoes, I reminded myself. That’s how it all starts, but it’s a lot tougher than it sounds. I was gathering as much information and data as I possibly could.
I spent part of the afternoon ambushing several of the local hangarounds who might have picked up something on the murders: convivial street people, swooning pipeheads, young runners for the rock and weed dealers, a few low-level rollers themselves, store owners, snitches, Muslims selling newspapers. I gave some of them a tough time, but nobody had anything useful for me.
I kept at The Job anyway. That’s the way it goes most days. You just keep at it, keep your head down and screwed on straight. About quarter past five, I found myself talking to a seventeen-year-old homeless youth I knew from working the soup kitchen at St. Anthony’s. His name was Loy McCoy, and he was a low-level crack runner now. He had helped me once or twice in the past.
Loy had stopped coming by for free food once he had started moving nickel and dime bags of crack and speed around the neighborhood. It’s hard to blame kids like Loy, as much as I would like to some days. Their lives are unbelievably brutal and hopeless. Then one day someone conies along and offers them fifteen or twenty bucks an hour to do what’s going to happen anyway. The more powerful emotional hook is that their dope bosses believe in them, and in many cases nobody has believed in any of these lost kids before.
I called Loy over, away from the posse of fools he was hanging with on L Street They all wore black, machine-knit wool caps pulled low over their eyes and ears. Gold toothcaps, hoop earrings, baggy trousers, the works. His gang was talking about the movie based on the old Flintstones cartoon, or maybe about the actual cartoons. Yabba dabbas was one of the catchphrases used to describe police patrolmen and detectives in the ‘hood. Here comes the yabba dabba. Or, he’s a yabba dabba doo motherfucker. I had recently read a sad statistic that seventy percent of Americans got nearly one hundred percent of their information from television and the movies.
Loy smirked as he slow-shuffled up at me at the street corner. He was maybe six one, but about only a hundred and forty pounds. He had on baggy, layered winter clothes, artfully torn, and he was “grittin” me today, trying to stare me down, put me down.
“Yo, you say c’mon over, I got to come?” Loy asked in a defiant tone that I found both irritating and monumentally sad. “Whyzat? I pay my taxes,” he rapped on. “I ain’t holdin’. Ain’t none of us holdin’.”
“None of your bullshit attitude works on me,” I told him. “You better lose it right now.” I knew that his mother was a heroin addict and that he had three little sisters. All of them lived at the Greater Southeast Community Hospital shelter, which was like having the tunnels under Union Station as your home address.
“Say your business, an’ I get back to my business,” Loy said, remaining defiant. “My time’s money, unnerstand? Axt me what you got to axt.”
“Just one question for you, Loy. Then you can go back to your big money business dealings.”
He kept “grittin” me, which can get you shot in this neighborhood. “Why I have to answer any questions? What’s in it for me? What you have to deal?”
I finally smiled at Loy and he cracked a half-smile himself, showing off his shiny gold caps. “You give me something, maybe I’ll remember. Then maybe I’ll owe you one sometime,” I said.
“Yo,” he came right back at me. “Wanna know a big fat secret, Detective? I don’t need your markers. And I don’t much care about these murdered kids’ homocides you lookin’ into.” He shrugged as if it were no big deal on the street. I already knew that.
I waited for him to finish his little speech, and also to process my offer. The sad thing was that he was bright. Crazy smart. That was why the crack boss had hired him. Loy was smart enough, and he probably even had a decent work ethic.
“I can’t talk to you! Don’t have to, neither!” He finally did a little exasperated spin and threw up both his skinny arms. “You think I owe you ‘cause once upon a time you fed us Manhandler soup-slop at the po’boy kitchen? Think I owe you? I don’t owe you shit!”
Loy started to strut away. Then he looked back at me, as if he had just one more irritating wisecrack to hurl my way. His dark eyes narrowed, caught mine, and held on for a second. Contact. Liftoff.
“Somebody saw an old man where that little girl got kilt,” Loy blurted out. It was the biggest news we had so far on the Truth School case. It was the only news, and it was what I had been looking for all these days working the street.
He had no idea how fast I was, or how strong. I reached out and pulled him close to me. I pulled Loy McCoy very close. So close I could smell the sweet peppermint on his breath, the scent of pomade in his hair, the mustiness of his badly wrinkled winter clothes.
I held him to my chest as if he were a son of mine, a prodigal son, a young fool who needed to understand that I wasn’t going to allow him to be this way with me. I held him real tight and I wanted to save him somehow. I wanted to save all of them, but I couldn’t, and it was one of the big hurts and frustrations of my life.
“I’m not fooling around here, now. Who told you that, Loy? You talk to me. Don’t fuck with me on this. Talk to me, and talk to me now.”
His face was inches from mine. My mouth was almost pressed against his cheek. All of his swagger and the attitude had disappeared. I didn’t like being a tough guy with him, but this was important as hell.
My hands are large and scarred, like a boxer’s, and I let him see them. “I’m waiting for an answer,” I whispered. “I will take you in. I will ruin your day and night.”
“Don’t know who,” he said between wheezing breaths, “Some people in the shelter be sayin’ it. I just heard it, you know. Old homeless dude. Somebody saw’m hangin’ in Garfield. White dude in the park.”
“A white man? On the southeast side of the park? You sure about that?”
“That’s right. What I said. What I heard. Now, let me go. C’mon, man, let go!”
I let him pull away from me, walk away a few steps.
Loy regained his composure and cool as soon as he realized that I wasn’t going to hurt him, or even take him in for questioning.
“That’s the story. You owe me,” he said. “I’m gonna
collect, too.” I don’t believe Loy saw the irony in what he was saying.
“I owe you,” I said. “Thanks, Loy.” I hope you don’t ever have to collect.
He winked at me. “Be all you can be, al-riii!” he said and laughed and laughed as he walked back to the other crack runners.
CHAPTER
39
AN OLD HOMELESS MAN near the murder scene. In Garfield Park That was something solid to work with, finally. I had paid some dues and gotten a return on investment.
A white man. A white suspect.
That was even more promising. There weren’t too many white males hanging out in the Garfield Park area. That was for sure.
I called Sampson and told him what I’d found out. He’d just come on duty for the night shift I asked John how it was going on his end. He said that it wasn’t going, but maybe now it would. He would let the others in our group know.
At a little past five, I stopped by the Sojourner Truth School again. There were several forces strongly pulling me in the direction of the school. The new information about the homeless white man and the constant feeling that just maybe my nemesis Gary Soneji might be involved. That was part of it. Then there was Christine Johnson. Mrs. Johnson.
Once again, nobody was sitting at the desk in the outer office. The multiracial dolls on the desk looked abandoned. So did some “face doodles” and a couple of Goosebump books. The heavy wooden door into the main office was shut tight.
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