“There’s been another bad murder over in Langley Terrace. It looks like a thrill killer. I’m afraid that it is,” I tol
d her.
“That’s too bad,” Nana Mama said to me. Her soft brown eyes grabbed mine and held. Her white hair looked like one of the doilies she puts on all our living-room chairs. “That’s such a bad part of what the politicians have let become a deplorable city. Sometimes I think we ought to move out of Washington, Alex.”
“Sometimes I think the same thing,” I said, “but we’ll probably tough it out.”
“Yes, black people always do. We persevere. We always suffer in silence.”
“Not always in silence,” I said to her.
I had already decided to wear my old Harris Tweed jacket. It was a murder day, and that meant I’d be seeing white people. Over the sport coat, I put on my Georgetown warm-up jacket. It goes better with the neighborhood.
On the bureau, by the bed, was a picture of Maria Cross. Three years before, my wife had been murdered in a drive-by shooting. That murder, like the majority of murders in Southeast, had never been solved.
I kissed my grandmother on the way out the kitchen door. We’ve done that since I was eight years old. We also say good-bye, just in case we never see each other again. It’s been like that for almost thirty years, ever since Nana Mama first took me in and decided she could make something of me.
She made a homicide detective, with a doctorate in psychology, who works and lives in the ghettos of Washington, D.C.
CHAPTER 2
I AM OFFICIALLY a Deputy Chief of Detectives, which, in the words of Shakespeare and Mr. Faulkner is a lot of sound and fury, signifying nada. The title should make me the number-six or -seven person in the Washington Police Department. It doesn’t. People wait for my appearance at crime scenes in D.C., though.
A trio of D.C. Metro blue-and-whites were parked helter-skelter in front of 41-15 Benning Road. A crime-lab van with blackened windows had arrived. So had an EMS ambulance. mortuary was cheerfully stenciled on the door.
There were a couple of fire engines at the murder house. The neighborhood’s ambulance-chasers, mostly eye-fucking males, were hanging around. Older women with winter coats thrown over their pajamas and nightgowns, and pink and blue curlers in their hair, were up on their porches shivering in the cold.
The row house was dilapidated clapboard, painted a gaudy Caribbean blue. An old Che-vette with a broken, taped-up side window looked as if it had been abandoned in the driveway.
“Fuck this. Let’s go back to bed,” Sampson said. “I just remembered what this is going to be like. I hate this job lately.”
“I love my work, love Homicide,” I said with a sneer. “See that? There’s the M.E. already in his plastic suit. And there are the crime-lab boys. And who’s this coming our way now?”
A white sergeant in a puffy blue-black parka with a fur collar came waddling up to Sampson and me as we approached the house. Both his hands were jammed in his pockets for warmth.
“Sampson? Uh, Detective Cross?” The sergeant cracked his lower jaw the way some people do whey they’re trying to clear their ears in airplanes. He knew exactly who we were. He knew we were S.I.T. He was busting our chops.
“Wuz up, man?” Sampson doesn’t like his chops being busted very much.
“Senior Detective Sampson” I answered the sergeant. “I’m Deputy Chief Cross.”
The sergeant was a jelly-roll-belly Irish type, probably left over from the Civil War. His face looked like a wedding cake left out in the rain. He didn’t seem to be buying my tweed jacket ensemble.
“Everybody’s freezin’ their toches off,” he wheezed. “That’s wuz up.”
“You could probably lose a little of them toches,” Sampson advised him. “Might give Jenny Craig a call.”
“Fuck you,” said the sergeant. It was nice to meet the white Eddie Murphy.
“Master of the riposte.” Sampson grinned at me. “You hear what he said? Fuck you?”
Sampson and I are both physical. We work out at the gym attached to St. Anthony’s—St. A’s. Together, we weigh about five hundred pounds. We can intimidate, if we want to. Sometimes it’s necessary in our line of work.
I’m only six three. John is six nine and growing. He always wears Wayfarer sunglasses. Sometimes he wears a raggy Kangol hat, or a yellow bandanna. Some people call him “John-John” because he’s so big he could be two Johns.
We walked past the sergeant toward the murder house. Our elite task force team is supposed to be above this kind of confrontation. Sometimes we are.
A couple of uniforms had already been inside the house. A nervous neighbor had called the precinct around four-thirty. She thought she’d spotted a prowler. The woman had been up with the night-jitters. It comes with the neighborhood.