Hell To Pay

by George Pelecanos

  Blue appeared in uniform. He and Strange went back through the locker room and down a flight of stairs to the rear entrance. Blue told a sergeant, out in the lot catching a cigarette, that he was taking the Crown Victoria parked leftmost in a row of squad cars facing the building. He mentioned the car’s number, displayed on its side and rear, to the sergeant as well.

  Blue got behind the wheel of the Crown Vic, and Strange sat beside him. They drove out onto Georgia at just past midnight and headed south.

  The Fourth District, known as 4-D, ran north-south from the District line down to Harvard Street, and was bordered by Rock Creek on the west and North Capitol Street on the east. It included neighborhoods of the wealthy and those of the extreme lower class. With a high rate of sexual assault, auto theft, and homicide, 4-D had become one of the most troubled districts in the city. Chief Ramsey had been considering an eighth police district to break up the Fourth, probably in the form of a substation near 11th and Harvard. It had gotten that bad.

  The crime rate in the city, despite the propaganda issued to the media about “New Day D.C.,” was rising once again. In the first six months of the new century, homicides were up 33 percent; rapes had increased by over 200 percent. In ’97, detectives had been transferred and reassigned citywide after an independent investigation had reported substandard performance. Anyone who knew anything about police work knew that results came from a network of informants and neighborhood contacts, and confidences, built up over time. The reassignment had destroyed that system. The result was that the current homicide closure rate was at an all-time low. Two out of three murders in the District of Columbia went unsolved – a closure rate of 31 percent.

  The streets were fairly quiet. The temperature had dropped to sweater weather, and it was a work night, and kids had school the next day. But still, kids were out. They were out on the commercial strip and back on the corners of the residential streets, sitting on top of trash cans and mailboxes. A curfew law came and went in D.C., but even when it was in effect it was rarely enforced. No one was interested in locking up a minor who had stayed out too late. Police felt, rightly so, that it wasn’t their job to raise other people’s kids.

  “Anything new since the funeral?” said Strange.

  “Nothing on the forensic side,” said Blue. “The detectives are doing some serious recanvassing of the neighborhood over there around Rhode Island. And they’re heavily interrogating Lorenze Wilder’s associates and friends.”

  “He have any?”

  “He had a few. The plainclothes guys at Lorenze’s wake got some information until they got made. And they do have the sign-in book from the funeral home, has the names and addresses of those who bothered to use it.”

  “Anything yet from those interrogations?”

  “Lorenze was one of those fringe guys. Didn’t work for the most part, least not in payroll jobs. Even his friends admit he was no-account. But none of ’em say he was a target. He wasn’t mixed up in no big-time crews or anything like that. That’s what they’re telling our people, anyway.”

  “I’d like to get a list of his friends,” said Strange.

  “You know I can’t do that, Derek.”

  “All right.”

  Blue had said it. He had to say it, Strange knew. And Strange let it lie.

  They drove back into the neighborhoods between Georgia and 16th. Blue stopped to check on a drunken Hispanic man who was standing in the middle of Kenyon Street, his face covered in alcohol sweat. He said he had “lost his house.” Blue talked to him carefully and helped him find it. At 15th and Columbia he slowed the patrol car and rolled down his window. A man sat on the stoop of a row house, watching a young boy dribble a basketball on the sidewalk.

  “He’s out kinda late, isn’t he?” said Blue.

  The man smiled. “Aw, he’s just hyped. You know kids.”

  “I hear you,” said Blue, smiling back. “But you need to get him inside.”

  “Aiight then,” said the man.

  Blue drove away. Strange noted how relaxed he was behind the wheel. Blue had always liked working midnights. He said that the danger in these hours was greater, but the respect between the citizens and cops actually increased between midnight and dawn. The squares had all gone home and were sleeping, leaving an uneasy alliance for those who remained.

  Blue took a call on a domestic disturbance at 13th and Randolph. He asked the woman if she wanted the husband, whom she had accused of striking her, to spend the night in jail. She said she didn’t want that, and this call, like most domestics the police answered, ended in peace.

  “How’s Terry doing?” said Blue, as he cruised east toward the Old Soldiers’ Home.

  “He’s been quiet,” said Strange. “Got a new girlfriend, I think, and he’s been spending time with her. It’s been good for him to be with a woman this week.”

  “And you and Janine?”

  “Fine.”

  “Good woman. That son of hers is a fine young man, too.”

  “I know it,” said Strange.

  “Lionel gonna be at the game on Saturday?”

  “I guess he is.” Strange hadn’t thought much on the game.

  “You know we got to play it.”

  “Right.”

  “Think we ought to have a short practice tomorrow night. Talk to the kids.”

  “That’s what we ought to do.”

  “They need to pick themselves up, right about now,” said Blue. “They’re gonna see a lot of death in their young lives. I want them to remember Joe, but I don’t want this to paralyze them. You agree?”

  “Yes,” said Strange.

  Blue looked over at his friend. They had hugged and patted each other’s backs when they’d first seen each other after Joe Wilder’s murder. The both of them felt extreme guilt, Blue for tying Strange up after practice, and Strange for letting Joe out of his sight. But they had been tight since childhood, and this was not something that needed to be apologized for or discussed. Blue was dealing with it in his own way, but he wasn’t sure about how deeply it had burrowed into Strange.

  “Listen, Derek-”

  “I’m okay, Lydell. Just don’t want to talk about it much right now, all right?”

  Blue turned up Warder Street in Park View. They passed a group of row houses, all dark. Inside one of them, Garfield Potter, Carlton Little, and Charles White slept.

  BLUE drove around the Fourth. They bought coffee at the all-night Wings n Things at Kennedy Street and Georgia, and drove around some more. They stopped to tell some kids to get off the streets, and answered a domestic. Blue answered another domestic on 2nd but was called suddenly to a disturbance a block away.

  A fight had broken out in a bar on Kennedy at closing time, and it had spilled onto the street. Several squad cars were already on the scene. Officers were holding back the brawlers and trying to quiet some of the neighbors and passersby who had been incited by the police presence. The patrolmen carried batons. A guy shouted “cracker motherfucker” and “white motherfucker” repeatedly at the white policeman who had cuffed him. The policeman’s partner, a black officer, was called a “house nigger” by the same man. Blue got out of the car and crossed the street. Strange stepped out and leaned against the Crown Vic.

  Down the street was the Three-Star Diner, Billy Georgelakos’s place. Strange’s father had worked there as a grill man for most of his career. A riot gate covered the front of the diner. Nearby, concertina wire topped the fence surrounding the parking lot of a church.

  Blue returned to the Crown Vic with sweat beading his forehead. Most of the bystanders on Kennedy had disappeared. Whatever this had been, it was over without major incident. It would go unreported to the majority of the city’s citizens, safely asleep at home in their beds.

  Strange asked Blue to make a pass through Park Morton, where Joe Wilder had lived, and Blue agreed. In the complex, few people were out. A boy sat on a swing in the playground of the dark courtyard, smoking a cigarette. Dice
players and dope smokers moved about the stairwells of the apartments.

  “We put flyers with the artist’s renderings of the suspects in the mailboxes here,” said Blue. “Gonna post them around the neighborhood as well.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Most of the time we don’t get much cooperation up in here. Drug dealers get chased by the police, they find a lot of open doors, places to hide, in this complex.”

  “What I hear.”

  “They even got community guns buried around here somewhere. We know all about it, but it’s tough to fight.”

  “You sayin’ you think no one will come forward?”

  “I’m hoping this case here is gonna be different. We’re mistrusted here, maybe even hated. I got to believe, though, anyone with a heart is gonna want to help us find the people who would kill an innocent kid.”

  On the drive out, Blue went by the brick pillars and wall that were the unofficial gateway to the housing complex. Two children, girls wearing cartoon-character jackets, sat atop the wall. The girls, no older than eleven or twelve, cold-eyed the occupants of the squad car as they passed.

  “Where are the parents?” whispered Strange.

  chapter 20

  ON Saturday morning, the Petworth Panthers defeated a Lamond-Riggs team on the field of LaSalle Elementary by a score of twenty to seven. Joe Wilder had not been mentioned by name in the pregame talk, but Dennis Arrington had led a prayer for their “fallen brother.” The boys went to one knee and bowed their heads without the usual chatter and horseplay. From the first whistle, their play on the field was relentless. The parents and guardians in attendance stood unusually quiet on the sidelines during the game.

  Afterward, as they were gathering up the equipment, Quinn put his hand on Strange’s shoulder.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey, Terry.”

  “You feel like gettin’ a beer later this afternoon?”

  “I gotta drop these kids off.”

  “And I’ve got to work a few hours up at the store. Why don’t you meet me up at Renzo’s, say, four o’clock? You know where that is, right?”

  “Used to be Tradesman’s Tavern, up on Sligo Avenue, right?”

  “I’ll see you there.”

  Lamar Williams, Prince, and Lionel Baker were waiting by Strange’s Cadillac, parked on Nicholson. Lydell Blue’s Park Avenue was curbed behind it. Strange told the boys to get in his Brougham as he saw Blue, holding a manila folder, approaching him from behind.

  “Derek,” said Blue, holding out the folder. “Thought you might want this Migdets roster back for your master file.”

  Strange took it and opened his trunk. He started to slip the folder into his file box as Blue began to walk away. Strange saw some notation written in pencil on the Pee Wees folder. He pulled it and studied his own writing, the description of a car and a series of letters and numbers, on the outside of the folder. He thought back to the evening he had written the information down.

  “Lydell!” he said.

  Blue walked back to Strange, still standing by his open trunk. Strange took the papers out of the Pee Wee folder and handed the folder to Blue, pointing at the notation.

  “Probably nothin’,” said Strange, “but you ought to run this plate here through the system.”

  Blue eyed the folder. “Why?”

  “Not too far back, a week or so, I noticed some hard-looking boys up in the Roosevelt lot one night when we had practice. Thinking back on it, it was a night that Lorenze Wilder was down on the field, waitin’ on Joe. I wrote down the plate number and car description out of habit. The car was a Caprice. I guessed on the year, but I do know it was close to the model year of the one I own. I put down it was beige, too.”

  Strange flashed on the image of the boys. One of them wore his hair in close cornrows, like those on one of the shooters the ice-cream employee had described. But that meant nothing in itself, like noting he wore Timberlands or loose-fitting jeans; a whole lot of young boys around town kept their hair the same way.

  “A beige Caprice. Why you got ‘beige-brown’ on here, then?”

  “Had one of those vinyl roofs, a shade darker than the body color.”

  “Okay. I’ll get it into the system right away.”

  “Like I say, probably nothin’. But let me know it if turns up aces.”

  “I will.”

  Strange watched Blue go back to his car. He took the papers from the Pee Wee folder and decided to put them together with the Midget papers in the folder Blue had just given him. He opened the folder. Inside was a mimeographed list of Lorenze Wilder’s friends and acquaintances, along with notations describing interview details, taken from the official investigation.

  Strange turned his head. Blue had ignitioned his Buick and was pulling off the curb. Strange nodded in his direction, but Blue would not look his way. Strange put the papers together, slipped the folder into his file box, and closed the lid of his trunk.

  STRANGE drove Lionel to his mother’s house on Quintana. As Lionel was getting out of the car, he asked Strange if he was coming over for dinner that night. Strange replied that he didn’t think so, but to tell his mother he’d “get up with her later on.” Lionel looked back once at Strange as he went up the walk to his house. Strange drove away.

  Prince was the next to be dropped. He had been quiet during the game and had not spoken at all on the ride. The boys who were always cracking on him were on their usual corner, across from his house. Prince asked Strange if he would mind walking along with him to his door. At the door, Strange patted Prince’s shoulder.

  “You played a good game today, son.”

  “Thanks, Coach Derek.”

  “See you at practice, hear? Now go on inside.”

  Lamar Williams rode shotgun for the trip down to Park Morton. He stared out the window, listening to that old-school music Mr. Derek liked to play, not really paying attention to the words or the melody. It was always that blue-sky stuff about love and picking yourself up, how the future was gonna be brighter, brother this and brother that. Lamar wondered if everyone had been more together back then, in the seventies or whenever it was. If those brothers weren’t killin’ each other every day, like they were now. If they were killin’ on kids “back in the day.” Anyway, that kind of music, it sure didn’t speak to the world Lamar was living in right now.

  “You thinkin’ of Joe?” said Strange.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s okay. I was, too.”

  Lamar shifted in his seat. “That boy was just good. I never thought he’d die. You’d think he’d be the last one living in my complex who’d go out like that.”

  “Just because he was a good boy? You know better than that. I’ve told you before, you always got to be aware of what’s going on around you, living where you do.”

  “I know. But I don’t mean that, see? Word was, Joe was protected. Even the ones liked to step to everybody, they kept their hands off that boy. I mean, he was a tough little kid and all. But the word was out; everybody knew not to fuck with Joe.”

  Strange started to correct Lamar from using the curse word, but he let it pass. “Why you think that was?”

  “No idea. Was like, people got the idea in their heads he was connected to someone you didn’t want to cross. It was just one of those things got around, and you knew.”

  “I saw some fellas at his funeral,” said Strange, “had to be drug boys.”

  “I saw ’em, too,” said Lamar.

  “Any idea why they were paying their respects?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Was his mother involved with those people?”

  “Not so I knew.”

  “What about that car she came in?”

  “Everybody drivin’ a nice car these days, seems like. Don’t make you in the game.”

  “True. But you never saw her hangin’ with people you thought were in the life?”

  “No. There was these young boys, was lookin’ for her one night. Th
ey rolled up on me when I was walkin’ through the complex. Said they owed her money. I didn’t tell ’em where she lived, though. They didn’t look right.”

  Strange looked over at Lamar. “How did they look?”

  “I don’t recall, you want the truth. Don’t mind tellin’ you, Mr. Derek, I was scared.”

  “Did one of them have cornrows?”

  “I don’t remember. Look, I didn’t even want to meet their eyes, much less study on ’em. I only remember this one boy in the backseat, ’cause he was, like, goofy lookin’. Had a nose on him like one of those anteaters and shit.”

  “What about their car?”

  “It was white,” said Lamar. “Square, old. That’s all that registered in my mind. That’s all I know.”

  “You did right not to meet their eyes, Lamar. You did good.”

  “Yeah.” Lamar snorted cynically. “It’s all good. Good to be livin’ in a place where you can’t even be lookin’ at anyone long for fear you’re gonna get downed.”

  Strange pulled into Park Morton and went slowly down its narrow road.

  “You got be positive, Lamar. You got to focus on doing the things that will get you to a better place.”

  Lamar looked Strange over. His lip twitched before he spoke. “How I’m gonna do that, huh? I can’t read all that good, and I’m barely gonna graduate high school. I got no kinda grades to get me into any kind of college. Only job I ever had was dustin’ your office and taking out your trash.”

  “There’s plenty of things you can do. There’s night school and there’s trade school… whole lotta things you can do, hear?”

  “Yessir,” said Lamar, his voice devoid of enthusiasm. He pointed to the road going alongside the playground in the courtyard. “You can drop me right here.”

  Strange stopped the car. “Listen, you been good to me, Lamar. Conscientious and efficient, and I’m not gonna forget it. I’ll help you in any way I can. I’m not going to give up on you, young man, you hear me?”

  Lamar nodded. “I’m just all messed up over Joe right now, I guess. I miss that boy.”