Ricardo sat in one of the chairs. He gestured to another. “Sit down, son.”
“I’d rather stand.”
“Sit. I ain’t about to look up at you.”
Larry took a seat and spread his legs wide.
“You shamed me in front of my people,” said Ricardo. “Talkin to me like that.”
“I’m not gonna have a heart-to-heart with you in front of that trash.”
“They serve their purpose.”
“Trash,” said Larry. “I don’t even want to be in the same room with ’em.”
“Beano’s my partner.”
“I’m talking about White and his little Jesus freak.”
“Far as those two go, I don’t see us needing them again. Not for, you know, the foreseeable future.”
“You tricked me, man.”
“How so?”
“I was supposed to watch the transaction,” said Larry. “Make sure no one rolled up on them while they were exchanging the money. It was you who called me on my cell and told me to bounce. You said that Nance and White had seen police cruising the neighborhood, down on Minnesota Avenue. That the situation was too hot. You got me to leave up outta there so Nance and White could murder those boys. You knew I woulda had nothing to do with that.”
“You’re right,” said Ricardo with a careless shrug.
“Why?”
“ ’Cause you’re soft,” said Ricardo. There was no malice in his voice, or threat. He was simply stating the fact.
“I’m not about to kill anyone, if that’s what you mean. You make it sound like a character flaw.”
“Look. A decision was made that required a solution that I knew you wouldn’t get behind. So I had to make sure you were removed from the scene. That simple enough for you?”
“Why’d you have to do those boys?”
“Let’s just say it was a mutual decision between interested parties.”
“Quit tryin to sound more educated than you are,” said Larry.
Ricardo’s face slackened and his eyes grew hard. He kept his voice level and low. “Those boys were punks playin a man’s game. We eliminated the middleman, is all. You profited. We all did. And we gonna keep makin money. I don’t need you to do no violence and I ain’t about to ask you to. I brought you in to identify persons of interest, seein as how you’re hooked into that narco squad. You just keep doin that from time to time and we’ll be straight.”
“No more killin.”
“I decide that.”
Larry stared at his father with anemic eyes.
Ricardo knew that his son was trapped. To turn Ricardo and his crew in was to turn himself, now a corrupt officer of the law, in as well. Ricardo had reached out to his boy at just the right time. He was vulnerable, eager to please his old man, who’d walked into Larry’s world with the promise of connecting and healing wounds. Shoot, the boy had become a police officer, in an act of twisted logic, to honor his father. Ricardo had played him well.
“I don’t wanna be in with y’all no more,” said Larry.
“You like what you got?” said Ricardo. “You like that pretty Escalade you drivin?”
Larry didn’t answer. He stared at the floor.
“You are in,” said Ricardo. “There’s more money on the way, too. You just keep doin your little piece of it. I’ll see to the rest.”
“Don’t be fuckin with no more kids,” said Larry.
He got up out of his seat and left the room. Walking through the office, he stayed in stride, said nothing to Nance, White, or Mobley, kept going through the indoor bays, went out into the sunlight and fresh air, and did not even nod at the young men who were detailing the SUVs in the lot. He got into his Escalade and drove away.
Larry Holley thought about his father as he drove back into the city on Bladensburg Road.
He hadn’t known Ricardo at all or seen him once throughout his childhood, coming up in the Kennedy Street corridor of Northwest. His mother worked hard, made it her mission to keep Larry in line. She did it, too. He grew up in an area where many boys failed, but he’d stayed straight. Had a half brother fathered by another man who got into some wrong, but he didn’t let that boy influence him. Got decent grades, was active in church groups, community outreach, all that. Was tapped to play basketball because of his height, but didn’t have the skills. Not a particularly social dude, not real good with women, but he knew that was partly due to his strange looks, which his mother called “unique.” She said he’d gotten his nose and coloring from the man who impregnated her. She never called Ricardo his father. As for Larry, he wondered about Ricardo often, prayed to God that he’d come by and take him to a ball game or Six Flags. But he never did. Relatives said the man had been a police officer in his youth and still lived in the city. They hinted that he wasn’t all the way right. It wasn’t said, as it often is of ne’er-do-well relatives, with affection. In his mind Larry defended this man. He wanted his father to be better than they said he was. Ricardo became an imagined hero.
Larry had a goal. He did his two years of community college and then entered the academy. He became a policeman, like his father. In his fantasies, he would find his pop and, on a day he was wearing his uniform, visit him. His father would be pleased to see that Larry had made it. He’d be proud.
It didn’t happen that way. Ricardo had come to him.
Larry had always heard, from the do-good types and folks at church, how a boy needed a man in his life to make him whole. But Larry had been doing fine before Ricardo Holley had sought him out. And when he did, it was as if Larry were terminal. He’d been ill since the day that cripple came to see him with his honeyed words and slick grin. It was like Ricardo had pulled him into an open grave. The man stank of death.
FOURTEEN
TIM McCARTHY had short curly hair of ginger and gray, a freckled face deeply lined from age and the sun, and a sturdy build. He sat at a table in a nondescript bar in a large hotel on New Jersey Avenue, not too far from his Internal Affairs Bureau office, located in MPD headquarters on Indiana. He had walked over to the hotel at lunchtime to meet Spero Lucas. Lucas sat across the table from him, his Moleskine notebook and iPhone set neatly before him. Both of them were having iced teas.
“Lawrence Holley,” said Lucas.
“Goes by Larry,” said McCarthy. “Narcotics and Special Investigations. What’s your interest?”
“Just curious. He drifted into the margins of something I’m working on for a client.”
“That’s pretty vague.”
“I can’t say more.”
“It’s confidential, huh?”
“Exactly.”
McCarthy laced his fingers together and rested both hands on the table. He had a serene, confident way about him, a trait seen most often in military and law-enforcement types.
“Well?” said Lucas.
“I can’t tell you anything,” said McCarthy. “I agreed to meet you as a favor to Tom Petersen.”
“So if you had something on Larry Holley…”
Smile fans appeared at the corners of McCarthy’s eyes. “That would be confidential.”
“You must have looked into him after our phone conversation.”
“Something about the last name was familiar,” said McCarthy.
“It rang a bell.”
“More like an alarm.”
“But you’re not going to tell me why.”
“No.”
“Well, then,” said Lucas amiably. McCarthy was one of those people, you looked at him and liked him. Lucas guessed no one had ever swung on this guy in a bar just for fun.
“Petersen said you served in Fallujah,” said McCarthy.
“I did. And you went in with the initial wave.”
“First Recon Battalion. I was just a chaplain.”
“Just.”
McCarthy looked Lucas over. “I heard you guys caught hell.”
“It was interesting.”
“I wish I could help you,” said McCart
hy.
“I understand.”
They shook hands firmly across the table.
HE TOOK a bike ride that afternoon. He rode all the way to Lake Artemesia in Berwyn Heights, Maryland, a twenty-five-mile round trip, some of it into a headwind, on roads and the Northwest Branch trail. His idea was to lose himself in his pedaling and empty his brain to the degree that something new would come to him upon his return. He was pleasantly exhausted and ripped but no smarter after his shower. He sat in his reading chair and looked out onto the street, thinking, I have come to that part of the road that simply ends.
His eyes fluttered. He knew that he was about to drift to sleep. He thought, Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m not good enough for this job. I was a pretty good marine. I came back alive, though that was luck as much as training or skill. I protected my brothers. I killed men who were trying to kill me. But I am not much of an investigator, because I seem to have gone nowhere on this case at all.
His phone rang on the end table beside him. The light had dimmed in the room. He had been asleep for a while.
Lucas looked at the screen, showing a 301 number. He did not recognize the caller’s name.
“Yes?”
“Spero Lucas?”
“That’s right. Who’s calling?”
“My name’s Pete Gibson. I think you and I should meet.”
“What is this?”
“It’s about Holley.”
“How’d you get my number?”
“Tim McCarthy. We were on the force together, way back in time.” Gibson coughed. “I’m free tonight.”
“Where?”
“You’re over in Sixteenth Street Heights…”
“How do you know that?”
“Let’s see, that’s near Colorado Avenue…. Too bad Cagney’s is closed.”
“Been closed. There’s a place up on Georgia, between Geranium and Floral, coupla doors away from the Humane Society.”
“Christ,” said Gibson. “That joint. Give me an hour. I’m coming down from Frederick.”
“How will I know you?”
“I’m sixty,” said Gibson. “I still look like police.”
Lucas ended the call. He got up out of his chair, energized.
LEO’S HAD an oak bar going front to back, twelve stools, and several deuces and four tops. The walls held a poster advertising an old Dick Gregory concert, a signed head shot of Jackie “Moms” Mabley, a Globe poster of James Brown and the Famous Flames at the Howard, and travel posters of little white houses set against the blue of the Aegean Sea. The jukebox was filled with obscure soul singles. The place was owned by a Greek, the bald, eagle-beaked Leo, who, like Lucas’s brother, was only called Leonidas by his mother. It was a neighborhood spot that serviced all types, determined alcoholics and casual drinkers alike.
Lucas had spotted Pete Gibson right away when he’d come through the door. Gibson indeed looked like a cop. He had a strong jaw, a neatly trimmed Vandyke beard, pinkish skin, and a clean dome shaved close on the sides. His light blue eyes were intense; his smile was white and tight. He wore neatly creased slacks and a plaid button-down shirt with a pack of Marlboro Reds in the breast pocket. Lucas guessed that the shirt’s label read Arrow or Gant.
They were seated at a deuce in the center of the room. Gibson was drinking a Bud Light straight from the neck. Lucas was working on a Heineken. An old song with a female vocalist and big production was coming from the juke, and two guys standing up at the bar were arguing loudly about the singer.
“It’s Bettye LaVette,” said one of the men, a short guy with a white-man’s Afro that looked like a Harpo wig.
“Nope,” said the other man, blond, rail thin, with a little beer hump. “It’s that chick who did the Stones song before the Stones. What the fuck is the name of that song?” It came to him and he slammed his palm down on the bar. “ ‘Time Is on My Side.’ Irma Thomas!”
“But what’s the name of this song?”
“Buy me a drink and I’ll tell ya.”
“Drink this,” said the guy in the wig.
“All the Einsteins come in here,” said Gibson, jerking his thumb in the direction of the two guys at the bar. “I used to stop in once in a while on my way home. The Greek behind the stick was a kid then.”
“When was that?” said Lucas.
“The early seventies, when I was a patrol officer in Four-D.”
“You grow up in D.C.?”
“No. I was raised over in Cheverly. You know why I picked the MPD? It paid two hundred dollars more a year than the PG County police. And in the District I could become an officer at twenty years old. They didn’t require any college then, either. I wasn’t about to sit in a classroom. I was ready.”
“So, patrol in the Fourth District,” said Lucas, trying to move it along.
“Yep. Worked K-Nine for a while after that. I was good with dogs. Then I moved over to Six-D, where the action was. They made me a sergeant. I worked patrol first, then Tact. Then I got my own investigative squad. Tim McCarthy was one of my detectives. Good guy, real good character.”
“You guys were on homicides?”
“No. We investigated crimes that were serious but not homicides. Unarmed robberies, B-Ones…”
“B-Ones?”
“Burglary Ones. Dudes who break into houses. Dangerous guys, much more serious than burglars who do warehouses and commercial properties. We also assisted the sex squad when they went after multiple offenders.” Gibson patted his breast pocket, jonesing for a smoke. “That squad I had was a good bunch. This was in the mid to late eighties. The low years. You’re too young to remember.”
“I know about it.”
“Four hundred and some homicides a year, all kinds of violent shit, a big piece of it east of the river. The Mayfair-Paradise homes alone, Christ. The Jamaicans came down here from New York, got off the train at New Carrollton, and took over the crack trade. Auto pistols, Mac-Tens, you name it. That was when the department switched over from the thirty-eight to the Glock, ’cause we couldn’t compete with the firepower on the street. Anyway, eventually I made lieutenant, got shipped off to Seven-D, and then Two. That was a cakewalk. That’s where I ended my career as an LT. Like, twelve years ago.”
“So you couldn’t have known Larry Holley.”
“You mean the kid. He was a baby when I was in uniform.”
“You said—”
“I said this was about Holley. I didn’t say anything about Larry.”
“You lost me,” said Lucas.
“First things first. McCarthy called me to say you two had a meet. But I didn’t get any information from him and he doesn’t know that we’re sitting here. I’m not gonna do anything to jam Tim up.”
“I get it.”
“I’m not here about the kid,” said Gibson. “I’m here to talk about his father. Richard Holley.”
Lucas had no idea where this was going, but Gibson had his attention. “Go on.”
“Richard came on the force during that hiring binge, when the Feds mandated that the MPD bring on police in numbers because of the crack wars and the homicides. Some of those people turned out to be good police. Some of them were plain unqualified. They must not have background-checked Richard Holley too good, ’cause he was a real cumsack. Came up with some drug dealers west of North Capitol and south of Florida, down around O and N, the area around Hanover Place. First time I heard about Holley, a sergeant from Vice came into my office and made some inquiries. Holley was a patrolman at the time. This guy had suspicions that Holley was pointing out vice officers when he was off duty to his little knothead buddies from the neighborhood. After that I had my eye on him.”
Lucas had opened his notebook and was taking notes. Gibson stopped talking and watched him.
Lucas looked up. “You mind?”
“That’s fine. One thing you should know: I hear Richard goes by Ricardo now. He might even have legally changed his name. You know why? He’s a P-hound. Real liberal in that way, cel
ebrates diversity and all that shit. Likes all the women, any kind of color he can get, long as it’s pink inside. Asshole probably thinks he can score more Spanish pussy with a name like Ricardo. I mean, he’s black, allegedly, but he doesn’t look like any black guy I ever saw. Weird-lookin dude. With that fucked-up poof of hair he had, and his long nose. The guys used to call him Rooster.”
“I’m guessing he didn’t like that.”
“Yeah, but fuck what he didn’t like.” Gibson killed his beer, caught the eye of the bar’s sole waitress, and put up two fingers in the air. “One night Holley was Ten Ninety-nine in a patrol car over by Forty-second and Dix, near Fort Mahan Park.” Gibson looked at Lucas’s notebook. “Ten Ninety-nine means he was riding alone.”
“I know what it means.”
“This is what Holley told the investigators: He pulled over to speak to a young man who was sitting on a bench and looked suspicious. Holley exited his vehicle and approached the subject. At that time, he said, he spotted narcotics and ancillary narcotic materials on or around the bench and ordered the subject to stand. Holley said that there was a flash of light and extreme pain in his hip and he knew he had been shot. He went down, the subject stood and fired twice more, Holley returned fire, and the subject fled.”
“Holley was okay?”
“The round went in his side and came out his ass, but it did some permanent damage. At the scene, Mobile Crime recovered a vial of rock, an empty pint of Bacardi and a plastic cup, tinfoil, match pads, and a napkin.”
“You got a good memory.”
“I know. A daylight search of the area recovered a Charter Arms five-shot thirty-eight with partially shaved numbers, two live rounds, and one spent round lying under the hammer. The assault weapon. Holley said that he had an extended mag in his service weapon. Twenty rounds, one live in the chamber. But when the techs checked out his weapon, it was fully loaded. No expended casings were found at the scene.”