Shame the Devil (4 page)

Back in the office, Otis had changed into a brown-on-beige monochromatic shirt-and-slacks arrangement with matching brown
weave shoes. He had tied his hair back tightly in a ponytail and wore wire-rimmed shades that darkened in the light.

Otis smiled when Farrow walked back into the room. “Lookin’ all Clark Kent on me now.”

“You take your share?”

“I took it.” Otis picked up his pack. “Too bad about that pizza boy. I know he would have talked when it got hot. Shame, though,
we had to do him like we did.”

“We
did
have to. Come on.”

“Okay, amigo,” said Farrow as he and Otis reentered the garage. “Come on over here.”

Jaime ground a live butt under his boot and followed Manuel to where the hard men stood. Farrow chin-nodded in the direction
of two cars parked in the back of the garage.

“That us?” said Farrow.

“Yes,” said Manuel. “The Taurus is yours.”

“I ask for a shitwagon?” said Farrow.

“You asked for something that would not attract attention,” said Manuel. “The body is rough, I admit. I did not touch the
metal.”

“Does it run?”

“It will run, yes. It’s a SHO. I took the identifying bumper off. It looks quiet, like an old man’s car. But it is very quick.
Redline it if you wish.”

“How about mine?” said Otis, looking at the two-tone brown-and-beige ’79 Mark V parked beside the Taurus.

“The Bill Blass model,” said Manuel, a glint in his eye. “What you asked for. Under the hood is —”

“I ain’t never gonna look under the hood, Man-you-el, you know that. Will it take me across country?”

“Were it not for the ocean, it would take you around the world.”

“What about the sounds? You put that unit in I was tellin’ you about?”

“Yes. You load the disks in the trunk.”

Otis said, “Always wanted me a box like that, too.”

Farrow reached into the duffel bag and tossed a thick stack of bills to Manuel. “Count it with your fingers,” said Farrow.
“Go ahead.”

Manuel went through the money.

Farrow looked at Jaime and said, “Now you.”

Jaime shrugged, took the money from Manuel, licked his thumb and forefinger elaborately, and counted the bills.

Farrow said, “It’s what we agreed upon, no?”

Manuel regarded Farrow and nodded slowly.

“Give it here,” said Farrow, and when Jaime handed him the money he said, “I’ll just keep this stack as a souvenir. It’s got
your fingerprints on it — in case there’s any question of who was involved in what.”

“We’ll keep it on file,” said Otis, “just like the FBI.”

“But let me make this clear,” said Farrow, “in case you get the feeling you want to unburden your conscience.”

“You don’ haf to worry,” said Manuel.

“Let him make it clear,” said Otis.

“Well, we all know the code. I mean, we all came up the same way. But to remind you… You and Jaime, you ever feel the need
to talk, I want you to remember something —”

“Let me tell this part, Frank,” said Otis.

“Go ahead.”

“You talk,” said Otis, “we’re just gonna have to go ahead and fuck up your families.
Comprende?
”

“Is no problem,” said Manuel, shaking his head, his eyes closed solemnly.

“Didn’t think it would be,” said Otis.

Farrow tossed a new stack of money to Manuel. “That’s yours to keep. Count it.”

“I trust you,” said Manuel, and Otis laughed.

“The keys under the mats?” said Farrow.

Manuel nodded. Farrow and Otis began to walk away.

“What would you have us do with the man in the trunk?” Manuel asked.

Farrow turned. “You keep old car batteries here, right?”

“Yes.”

“Do this: Drop a battery on his mouth until his teeth are busted out.”

“Now wait —”

“Pour battery acid on his face and fingers. Cut his head and his limbs off, and bury his pieces in different spots. Bury the
guns and the gloves as well.”

“But… he is your
brother.
”

Farrow did not reply. He and Otis walked to the cars.

“That fingerprints-on-the-money thing,” said Otis. “That was pretty slick.”

“They’re scared enough to believe it.”

“I think you put the fear into ’em for real,” said Otis. “So where you gonna be?”

“Remember Lee Toomey?”

“Sure. He settled in this state, didn’t he? Down on the Eastern Shore?”

“Right. He hooked me up with a straight gig.”

“Straight, huh.”

“For a while. You?”

“You need me, you can get me through my sister Cissy, out in Cali.”

“She still in the L.A. phone book?”

“You know it.”

Otis clapped Farrow on the arm, shook his hand as he would another black man’s.

“All right, Frank.”

Farrow said, “All right.”

Manuel had opened the bay door and was waving them on. Farrow drove the SHO out first, and Otis followed in the Mark V.

Manuel Ruiz closed the door and walked toward Jaime, who stood by the LTD’s open trunk. Jaime Gutierrez was staring into the
trunk while trying to put fire to a cigarette. His hand shook, and it was difficult to touch the flame to the tip.

Manuel put his thumb to his fingers and crossed himself. He went to the far corner of the garage, where a couple of old batteries
were resting on wooden pallets. He lifted one of the batteries and carried it back to the LTD.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

JANUARY 1998

NICK STEFANOS TUCKED
a black denim shirt into jeans and had a seat on the edge of his bed. He leaned forward to tie his shoes and felt a rush
of dizziness. Cool sweat broke upon his forehead. He sat up and waited for the feeling to pass. In an hour or so he’d be fine.

Stefanos shaved with a cup of coffee in front of him and the last Jawbox booming from his Polk speakers back in the bedroom.
“Iodine,” the CD’s soul-tinged rocker, had just kicked in. He rubbed his cheek, downed a last swig of coffee, and gargled
a capful of breath wash. In his bedroom he grabbed an envelope and a shrink-wrapped CD off his dresser.

Stefanos snagged his brown leather jacket off a peg by the door, turned up his collar, locked the apartment, and left the
house. He picked up the morning
Post
from his landlord’s front lawn and got under the wheel of his white-over-red Coronet 500, parked at the curb. He turned over
the engine and drove a couple of miles out of Shepherd Park to the Takoma Metro station, where he caught a downtown train.

He found a seat on the right side of the car. Seasoned Red Line riders knew to go there, as the morning sun blew blinding
rays through the left windows of the southbound cars, causing a sickening, furnace brand of heat. “Doors closing,” said a
recorded female voice, and Stefanos couldn’t help but smile. It always sounded like “George Clinton” to him.

The train got rolling as Stefanos pulled the Metro section from the
Post
and scanned its front page. One of the section’s rotating columnists had written yet another piece on the ongoing dismantlement
of Home Rule.

Quietly, and with surprisingly little resistance, the Feds had taken over the nation’s capital. Congress had appointed a control
board and a city manager, a white female Texan who would oversee a town whose black residents made up more than 80 percent
of the population. A former military general had been put in charge of the public school system, with little positive effect.
Under his “leadership,” public schools had opened seven weeks late the previous fall due to long-neglected repairs. D.C. residents
continued to pay taxes but had no meaningful voting representation in the House or the Senate, and the elected city council
had been stripped of its power. The mayor was now in charge of little more than parades.

Meanwhile, fat-cat politicians from Virginia and North Carolina, and suburbanites who made their living in town but paid no
commuter taxes, ridiculed the District of Columbia relentlessly. Stefanos, a lifelong Washingtonian, was fully aware of the
problems. Like most residents, though, he didn’t care to hear about them from leeches, tourists, and self-serving Southerners.

Stefanos read an article below the fold that detailed the state of the Metropolitan Police Department. The former chief of
police had resigned under allegations of mismanagement and corruption; his roommate, a lieutenant on the force, had been accused
of shaking down closeted homosexuals outside Southeast’s bathhouse strip. The Homicide division, with more than sixteen hundred
unsolved cases and a less than 40 percent closure rate, was under particular fire. Some Homicide detectives had recently been
caught overinflating the hours on their time cards. Murders occurring in the city’s poorest neighborhoods were lazily investigated
at best. An apparent serial killer was loose in the Park View section of town. And the most emblematic, high-profile case
of the decade remained unsolved: the slaughter at the pizza parlor called May’s, dating back to the summer of 1995.

The mention of May’s triggered a pulse in Stefano’s blood. In the 1980s, when Stefanos was still taking cocaine with his whiskey
in after-hours establishments, he had spent many late nights being served by Steve Maroulis, the house bartender at May’s.
And he had crossed paths with Dimitri Karras, the father of the child killed by the speeding getaway car, on several occasions
over the past twenty-two years. That Stefanos knew two victims of the same crime was not surprising. Stefanos, Maroulis, and
Karras were all of Greek descent, and though spread out now, the Greek community in D.C. had a shared history.

Stefanos looked out the window at a trash-strewn field bordering the old Woodie’s warehouse off North Capitol. Graffiti outlaw
Cool “Disco” Dan, a D.C. legend, had tagged the loading dock. Below the moniker, someone had spray-painted a tombstone, on
which was written, “Larry Willis, RIP,” and below that, his eulogy: “Heaven for a G.”

The Red Line train entered a tunnel. Stefanos folded the newspaper, preparing for his stop.

Stefanos stepped off the Judiciary Square station escalator and walked over to the Superior Court building at 5th and Indiana.
He passed through a metal detector, navigated halls crowded with youths, their parents, uniformed cops, sheriffs, and private
and court-appointed attorneys, and went down to the large cafeteria on the bottom floor.

He bought a cup of coffee, sugared and creamed it to cut the taste, and walked across a red carpet to a table close to the
front entrance, where he had a seat in a chair upholstered in red vinyl.

A voice from a loudspeaker mounted on the wall announced, “Herbert Deuterman, please report with your client at this time
to courtroom two-thirteen.…”

Nearby, a middle-aged white attorney wearing rumpled, mismatched clothes talked his idea of black to a few of his bored black
coworkers seated at the same table. He described a defendant who had accused him of being a racist, and then said, “If this
homey knew me the way y’all know me, he’d’ve known that the only color that matters to me is
green.
I put it to this boy point-blank straight.”

As the attorney laughed, a woman seated at the table said, “So, you gonna cut a deal with his lawyer?”

“I’m gonna cut one every which way but loose. You can believe that.”

“Long as you don’t have to break a sweat, right Mr. Watkins?”

“Sugar, I’m gonna do as little as possible, and a little bit less than that.”

A kid sitting at the table to the right of Stefanos listened as his lawyer described the plea-out he was about to make “upstairs”
on his client’s behalf, and how “Judge Levy definitely does not want to send another young man into an already overcrowded
system, and she won’t, if she sees that your heart is in the right place.”

Stefanos looked at the kid, still in his teens: skinny, sloppily dressed, and slumped in his chair. Today was his court date,
and no one had even instructed him to tuck in his shirt. “And try to get that scowl off your face,” said the tired young attorney,
“when you go before the judge. You can do that for a minute, can’t you? Speak clearly and show remorse, understand?”

“I hear you,” said the kid. “Can I go get me one of them sodas now?”

“Go ahead.”

The young man glanced over at Stefanos and gave him a hard look before rising out of his seat to walk, deep-dip style, toward
the cafeteria line.

Stefanos had choked down half his coffee by the time Elaine Clay entered the cafeteria. Clay was a Fifth Streeter, one of
the court-appointed attorneys available to defendants under the Criminal Justice Act. In her middle years, with the legs to
wear the skirt she wore today, she was tall and big boned, with a handsome, smooth chocolate face. Even before she had begun
throwing work his way, Stefanos had heard of her rep from the cops who frequented the Spot, the bar where he worked part-time.
Most cops derided the CJA attorneys — they were the enemy who undid police arrests. But over the years the strength and consistency
of Elaine Clay’s performance had elicited a kind of muttered-under-the-breath respect from the cops. It had been one of the
Spot’s regulars, in fact, homicide detective Dan Boyle, who had put Clay and Stefanos together the first time.

Stefanos stood as Elaine approached the table.

“Nick,” she said.

“Counselor.”

They shook hands. Elaine had a seat, dropping a worn leather bag at her side.

“Well?” she said.

“Here you go.” Stefanos placed an envelope into her hand. “I think I got what you were looking for.”

She studied the photographs from the envelope. “You got a night and a day shot.”

“Yeah. The day shot shows that the bulb of the street lamp’s been broken out. The night shot shows what you can see on that
corner without the light — nothing. Newton Place dead-ends at the western border of the Old Soldiers’ Home property there,
and there isn’t any light over that fence, either. There’s no way that cop saw your client dealing weed out of that car.”

“The arrest was six months ago. You took these pictures, what, last week?”