Shame the Devil dq-4

by George Pelecanos

  “Yes.”

  “But there was something about Bill Jonas being there that made me want to talk about it. About how it was for Steve, at the end.”

  “I know.”

  Stephanie had told the group how her husband had been robbed many years before at an after-hours, high-stakes card game down off New York Avenue, near the Henley Park Hotel. The gunmen had made the gamblers put their heads down on the carpet. Steve had been the last to comply; he thought that if he were to put his head down, they’d kill him. His fear was so great that he’d fouled himself that night. He had told Stephanie that putting his head down was the hardest thing he’d ever done.

  “I didn’t mean to cry,” said Stephanie. “It’s just, when I was telling it, I could imagine seeing him there in that kitchen, how afraid he must have been… I couldn’t help myself, Dimitri.”

  “I know,” repeated Karras. Her hair had fallen across her cheek, and he brushed it away. “I’ve been thinking of you these last few days, Stephanie. What I mean to say is, you’ve been in my head. I know this is supposed to be a once-a-week thing, us being together. But I was looking forward to seeing you tonight. I was hoping this night would come sooner, understand? I’m not certain that I know what it means.”

  “I’ve been thinking of you, too.”

  Dimitri Karras awoke in the middle of the night, confused and oddly ashamed. He felt a strange sense of having committed a betrayal. It was as if he were considering breaking a promise he’d made never to be happy again.

  He walked barefoot down a hall to the darkened kitchen and found Stephanie’s wall-mounted phone. He dialed the number of his old house and let it ring several times.

  Lisa’s tired, fragile voice came through from the other side. “Hello.”

  Karras did not answer.

  “Hello? Is anybody there?”

  He listened to Lisa breathing, and then there was a soft, final click.

  Karras stood in the kitchen with the receiver pressed against his cheek. After a while he hung the phone in its cradle and returned to Stephanie’s bed.

  EIGHTEEN

  The morning after he had spoken with Roman Otis, Frank Farrow phoned his boss and told him that he was going home to Wilmington to bury his father, who had died in his sleep the previous night.

  “You comin’ back, Larry? You were the best dishwasher we ever had.”

  “I don’t think so. I’ve got to look after my mother now. You understand.”

  Farrow packed his personal belongings into a small duffel bag and threw the bedsheets stained with Grace’s blood in the alley Dumpster. He paid off his landlord, telling her the same story he had told his boss.

  Farrow drove the Taurus SHO southwest toward the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and rented a room in a motel on Kent Island. He registered under the name of Louie Pino and paid cash in advance for a five-day stay.

  The first day he kept to his room and read a paperback novel. That night he ate dinner at the bar of the Angler’s Restaurant, a small locals’ spot in Grasonville that served delicious vegetable crab soup and soft-shell sandwiches. After dinner he drank beer slowly until closing time and went back to his motel room with a Dundalk woman named Rita whom he had picked up at the bar.

  In the next four days he read two paperback novels written by Edward Anderson and A. I. Bezzerides, and at night he ate and drank at the Angler’s with Rita and took her back to his room, where he made Rita’s eyes roll back in her head with his workmanlike, rhythmic thrusts. Rita said nothing to anger him, and he did not hurt her.

  On the fifth day he drove the SHO down the road, parked it behind a restaurant, removed its plates, and walked back to the motel with his duffel bag in his hand. He had noticed that every morning a blue-collar man left his Ranger truck on the edge of the motel parking lot, out of sight of the manager’s office, and was picked up by another blue-collar man. The two of them would then go off together to their jobs. Farrow removed the Ranger’s plates, replaced them with the SHO’s plates, broke into the pickup easily using a bar tool he owned, hot-wired the ignition, and drove northeast. A bumper sticker on the Ranger read, “There Is No Life West of the Chesapeake Bay.”

  He thought of his brother as he made open road.

  Richard had always been somewhat of a follower. Frank had easily turned him against their father, a Beverly Hills lawyer, at a very young age. But Richard could never go all the way like Frank. So as Frank began to seek perfection in his chosen career of crime, Richard continued to stumble through the subworld of amateur criminals inhabited by the true lowlifes: meth-heads and dope fiends, runaways and their pimps, street grifters, fences, and the like.

  In the meantime, Frank did his reform school stretches and then two major jolts as an adult, where he fell in love with the books in the prison libraries and made the contacts within the walls that would enable him to graduate to an ever higher level of success outside. Some believed that incarceration was a mark of failure, but Frank disagreed. Prison was an essential element of any career criminal’s education.

  When he had been released from his last sentence and done his parole, Frank was ready, and Richard, of course, was not. But he had brought Richard along on that final job because that was what a brother was obligated to do.

  Frank cracked the window and lit a Kool.

  The Farrow brothers’ birth mother had died very young – Frank remembered her vaguely and Richard not at all – and their father remarried quickly. To Frank’s mind, the father loved only money and its accoutrements. Frank hated him and his friends, and he would always despise everyone like them. By the time his father married for the third time, there was no familial connection that remained. Their father no longer considered Frank and Richard, who had been in serious trouble since their teens, to be his sons. Frank and Richard had not had any kind of contact with him for years. For all Frank knew or cared, their father was dead.

  Now Richard was dead, too. Frank didn’t dwell on it. He had loved Richard, he supposed, but he had no illusions of the afterlife, and he was free of sentiment. He knew there was no spiritual world where the two of them would meet again. Richard was now what all men were in the end: food for worms. Sentiment aside, though, Frank would have to kill the man who had killed his brother; retaliation was a part of the personal code he had adopted long ago.

  Frank was fascinated by the murder trials he had seen on TV. He’d watch the victims’ families, how they sat quietly in court, their soft hands resting in their laps, waiting for a justice that would never fully come. He was sure that they thought of themselves as good people. He only thought of them as weak.

  Weakness. It separated him from the straights. This separation would keep him alive.

  Frank parked the Ranger alongside the platinum Park Avenue in the lot of the New Rock Church. He checked the load on the. 38 that Toomey had given him and holstered the gun against the small of his back. He reached into his duffel bag, retrieved a pair of latex examination gloves, and fitted them onto his hands. He looked around the empty lot and down Old Church Road. The road was clear. He stepped out of the truck.

  Frank knocked on the door of the church and put his hands deep in the pockets of his coat. The door opened, and the Reverend Bob stood in the frame.

  “Larry?” he said, donning his salesman’s smile. “Why, I heard you had left town.”

  “I’m back. Can I come in?”

  “Certainly.”

  The reverend stepped aside to let Farrow pass through, and shut the door behind them. Farrow walked slowly down the center aisle of the church, allowing the Reverend Bob to get in front of him.

  “Shall we go to my office?”

  “Here is good,” said Farrow, stepping up onto the altar floor. He stood in a bar of light that entered narrowly from a glass panel on the roof and widened as it fell.

  “Well… okay,” said the reverend.

  Farrow heard a catch in the reverend’s voice.

  The reverend stepped up onto the altar and
stood beside him. Frank looked at him, immaculate in his starched white shirt.

  “That’s a Movado, isn’t it?” said Farrow, nodding at the reverend’s wrist.

  “Yes.” The reverend smiled. “I bought it secondhand. Of course, a new Movado is a little dear for a man in my profession.”

  “My father owned one of those. He was so proud of it, too. Always shot his cuffs around his friends, made sure they got a good look at it. My brother and I stole it off his dresser one night. I gave it to some street kid outside the Whiskey, over on the Strip.”

  The reverend looked at him quizzically. “Why do you mention this, Larry?”

  “My father fired our maid the next morning. A Chicano woman with four children. He was paying her twenty-five dollars a day.”

  “Larry?”

  “My name’s Frank Farrow.”

  Farrow took his hands from his coat and dropped them at his sides.

  The reverend looked at Farrow’s gloved hands and backed up a step. “What… what do you want?”

  “I told you I’d be back. When I make a promise like that, I keep it.” The color drained from the reverend’s face. He looked desperately around the empty church and back at Farrow. He tried to smile and use a tone of sincerity, but his voice shook as it came forth.

  “Listen… Frank, is it?”

  “Frank Farrow.”

  “Frank, I never meant to offend you or infringe on your privacy. I was only looking to bring another person into our congregation. If you were ever incarcerated, it makes no difference to me.”

  “You were right on the money, Reverend Bob. I’ve been in one kind of prison or another for the better part of my life.”

  “Frank – atonement is everything in the eyes of the Lord. Whatever you did, you served your time.”

  “You have no idea what I’ve done. And you shouldn’t have pried.” Farrow reached into his coat and drew the. 38 from where it was holstered in his belt line. “Get on your knees.”

  Tears dropped instantly from the reverend’s eyes. He raised his hands as in prayer. His lip trembled violently, but he couldn’t speak.

  “On your knees,” said Farrow.

  The reverend dropped to his knees on the altar. Urine spread across his crotch and darkened the thighs of his slacks. The stench of it grew heavy in the church.

  “Are you afraid?” asked Farrow.

  The reverend nodded.

  “It’s funny,” said Farrow, looking down at him. “I find that those the most afraid are those who believe in God. The same ones who hide their eyes at horror movies are the ones who bow their heads in a place like this. And for what? Something that does not, cannot, exist.”

  “Please,” said the reverend.

  “Your journey is just beginning,” said Farrow with a smile. “You’re going to a better place. Isn’t that what you’ve been telling those old people out at the home, the ones who are about to die?”

  “Yes, but -”

  “But, what?”

  The reverend looked up at Farrow with bloodshot eyes. “What if I was wrong?”

  Farrow laughed. His laughter echoed in the church and then it was erased by the deafening explosion of the. 38. The reverend’s hair lifted briefly from his scalp and fragments of his brain sprayed out across the altar. He fell back; his head made a flat, hollow sound as it hit the wooden floor. A widening pool of blood spread behind it.

  Farrow stood over the reverend and shot him again in the side of the face. He walked from the church.

  Farrow drove a half mile down Old Church Road in the opposite direction of the interstate until he reached Lee Toomey’s house at the edge of the woods. Toomey was loading some cable wire into his utility truck as Farrow pulled the Ranger into the yard. Toomey’s eyes clouded when he saw that it was Farrow behind the wheel. He noticed the light yellow gloves on Farrow’s hands as Farrow stepped out of the truck and crossed the yard.

  “Lee.”

  “Frank. Thought you left town.”

  “I didn’t. Where’s that family of yours?”

  “Martin’s playin’ that TV game of his. My wife and daughter are in the kitchen, I’d expect.”

  “Let’s walk into those woods a bit.”

  Toomey spit tobacco juice to the side. “Why would we need to do that?”

  “We won’t be but a minute. C’mon.”

  They went in through a trail and then off the trail until they were out of the house’s sight line. Toomey leaned against the trunk of a pine and regarded Farrow as he lit a cigarette.

  Farrow let the Kool dangle from his mouth. He pulled the. 38 and tossed it to Toomey. Toomey caught it and stared back at Farrow.

  “I just used that on the Reverend Bob, back in the church. Blew the top of his head off, right up there on the altar. That’s a real efficient weapon you gave me, Lee.”

  “Thought I heard a shot,” said Toomey slowly, not taking his eyes off Farrow’s.

  “What you need to do now,” said Farrow, “is get over there with some cleaning supplies. I wouldn’t wait for the blood to get too dried in. Scrub that altar down real good and drive the reverend out to that nature preserve we talked about. I was you, I’d bury him up there. Ground’ll be hard, but not too hard. You can thank this mild winter for that. Then I’d throw your gun in the bay, seeing as how it’s got your prints all over it.”

  “You,” said Toomey.

  Farrow chuckled. “You know, for a moment there I saw the old Toomey in your eyes. Now, that was one bad-ass boy. Getting the Jesus into you, though, it really tripped you up. You and I both know how soft you are now. You’d never make any kind of play on me.”

  “That’s right, Frank. I never would.”

  Farrow dragged on his smoke. “But just to make sure, I ought to let you know that I’m not going to be far away. I’ve got a little business to take care of up in Washington, D.C., probably keep me in this part of the country for the next couple of weeks. If I even get an idea that you’ve been talking to the law about me, Lee, I want you to remember that I’m just an hour and a half away. I can easily get down here and make a visit to that beautiful family of yours. Or I could pay someone else to do the same. And I’d never forget. Do you understand?”

  Toomey felt his blood ticking and his head grow hot. He hadn’t had this feeling for a long while, but it was a familiar feeling, nonetheless. He wanted to kill Farrow right now. He could kill him right now.

  Toomey said, “I understand, Frank.”

  “Good. You’ll be okay if you move fast and leave nothing behind. The reverend leaving town, well, it happens. Folks’ll just figure he was throwing it to one of the parishioner’s wives. Anyway, you bury him deep enough and they’ll never find him.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  Farrow looked at Toomey. “See you around, Lee.”

  Farrow dragged on his cigarette, dropped it on a bed of pine needles, and crushed it beneath his boot. He walked out of the woods and straight to the truck. Toomey stayed behind, the gun in one hand, the other picking at his beard.

  Later that night, when Toomey had finished his task, he phoned Manuel Ruiz at the garage outside D.C. “Manny?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Toomey, bro.”

  “Lee, what’s up?”

  “Frank Farrow’s heading back to D.C.,” said Toomey. “We need to talk.”

  NINETEEN

  Two o’clo,” said Maria Juarez. “My time, right, Mitri?”

  “Yeah, Maria,” said Dimitri Karras, checking his watch. “Go ahead and let it roll.”

  Maria slipped the tape that Karras had bought her into the boom box and turned up the volume. Karras had picked it up at an international record store near the old Kilamanjaro club the night before. He had asked for something danceable and Latin, and the clerk had assured him that this one moved.

  A Spanish female vocal with Tito Puente’s band behind it came from the box. Maria met James Posten in the middle of the kitchen, and the two of them began to
dance, James doing his idea of a chacha. Darnell, from where he stood over the sink, turned his head and smiled. He looked over at Karras, leaning on the expediter’s station, and nodded one time.

  “Ole, baby!” said James. His eye shadow was on the maroon side of the rainbow this afternoon.

  “Like this, Jame,” said Maria, taking two steps in, retreating two steps, and twisting her hips on the dip.

  “That’s what I’m talkin’ about,” said James, following her lead, twirling the spatula like a baton.

  “You doin’ it, Jame,” said Maria.

  “Tell the truth,” said James, “and shame the devil.”

  Karras studied Maria’s face. She had shown up that morning with her right eye blood gorged and swollen close to shut. She had a truly beautiful spirit; anger had welled up in him immediately when he had walked in that morning and seen her face. He was glad he had picked this day to give her a gift.

  Anna Wang entered the kitchen, a cigarette dangling from her lips, a tray of butter patties in her hands. She joined Maria and James momentarily on her way to the refrigerator, where she stowed the covered butter in the rear.

  “Nice work today, Karras,” said Anna on her way out the door.

  “She wants somethin’,” said James, still dancing. “You could bet it.”

  “Just giving the man a compliment, J. P.,” said Anna.

  Karras said, “Thanks.”

  A half hour later they had begun to shut down the kitchen. James switched the radio to R amp;B as Maria covered the components of the cold station with plastic wrap. Ramon hurried in with a bus tray and dropped it off on the edge of Darnell’s sink. He stepped on Darnell’s foot deliberately, and Darnell grabbed his hand, pressing his thumb down on the crook of Ramon’s thumb. Ramon pulled his hand away and stood there rubbing it, a crooked smile on his face.

  “Ah, here we go, y’all,” said James as the Army Reserve commercial came on the radio at its usual time. James turned it up as the announcer’s voice rose with the build of the music.