A Murder of Justice

FOUR

The maroon Crown Vic idled at the curb, Jose at the wheel.

Still thinking about Kate and dinner, Frank got in.

Jose dropped the car into gear and pulled away. “Thought we might check the Rolex market.”

Ten minutes later, Frank and Jose sat in the car, watching as Waverly Ngame assembled his stand across the street.

First out of the white Dodge van, a longish rectangular folding table, the kind you see in church basements and at catered receptions. Ngame locked open the legs. With a toe, he nudged wood shims under them, working around the table until it was steady on the uneven brick sidewalk.

Ngame disappeared into the van. He came back out with racks of white plastic-coated wire-grid shelving under both arms, and a grease-stained canvas bag in his left hand. In swift, practiced motions, he picked the largest of the shelves and braced it upright on the side of the table facing the street.

Holding the shelf with one hand, he reached into the canvas bag with the other and brought out a large C clamp. He twirled the clamp with sharp snaps of his wrist, then opened the jaws just enough to slip over the shelf and the table edge. He tightened the clamp, and moved to repeat the process on the other side of the table.

Almost magically, more shelving and more C clamps produced a display stand.

Back into the van.

This time, Ngame reappeared with large nylon bags of merchandise. Several more trips, and Gucci handbags hung alluringly from the vertical shelving while Rolex watches and Serengeti sunglasses marched in neat ranks across the top of the folding table.

In the street, by Ngame’s van, a crow worried at the flattened remains of a road-killed rat.

With a little finger, Ngame made a microscopic adjustment, poking a pair of sunglasses to line up just so with its neighbors. He didn’t look up from putting the fine touches to his display.

“Detectives Phelps and Kearney. Good morning, sirs.”

As a boy in Lagos, Ngame had learned his English listening to the BBC. He sounded like a Brit announcer, except that he had a Nigerian’s way of softly rounding his vowels and stressing the final syllables of his sentences.

“How’s business, Waverly?” Jose asked.

Ngame gave the sunglasses a last critical look, then turned to face Jose and Frank. He was a big man, almost as big as Jose, with shiny blue-black skin.

He smiled, unveiling a mouthful of perfectly straight glistening teeth. “This is America!” The words exploded with exuberance. A-mare-uh-cuh! “Business is always splendid!” He waved a large hand down the crowded sidewalk-his sidewalk-taking in potential customers-his customers. “One is free to sell and free to buy… buy and sell.”

He caressed a handbag. “This purse, for example-”

Jose pulled Ngame’s string. “Mr. Gucci gets his cut?”

Ngame got the tried look of a long-suffering teacher with a slow student. “Detective Phelps! Do you suppose this is a real Gucci purse?” He swept a hand over the watches. “Or that these are real Rolexes?”

Jose’s eyes widened. “They aren’t?”

“And do you suppose that any of these good people who come to my stand believe they are buying real Guccis or real Rolexes?”

Jose opened his eyes wider, spinning Ngame up more.

“And do you suppose that my customers could buy a real Rolex?”

“Oh?” Jose said encouragingly.

“So who is hurt?” Ngame was into it now, eyes wide in enthusiasm, hands held out shoulder high, palms up. “Not Mister Gucci! Nor Mister Rolex! As a matter of fact, Mister Gucci and Mister Rolex ought to be pleased with me-pleased! Yes, pleased. My customers have learnt good taste here at my stand.” Ngame’s chin tilted up. “When they get wealthy, they’ll buy the real Gucci and the real Rolex.”

“Like Skeeter Hodges,” Frank said.

Ngame gave Frank a heavy-lidded, somber look. “He didn’t buy here. He kept the real Mister Rolex in business.”

“What’s the talk?” Jose asked.

Ngame looked up and down the sidewalk. He did it casually, but he did it.

“Conjecture?” Con-jec-ture?

Another glance, this time across the street. “From the Puerto Ricans I hear it was the Jamaicans. The Jamaicans tell me it was the Puerto Ricans. And the blacks”-Ngame shrugged-“the blacks all point their fingers at one another.”

“No names?” Frank asked.

Ngame shook his head. “No pretender to the throne. But then again, Detective Kearney, it was only last night.”

Ngame reached down, then came up with a watch in his hand, gleaming gold in the morning sunlight.

“A Rolex President? I will give a discount.”

A block north of Waverly Ngame’s stand, Frank and Jose made their way down an increasingly crowded sidewalk.

“Like I care.”

Frank angled his head slightly to catch the disembodied male voice behind him. It had a demented quality, like that of a man talking to himself.

“The garbage?”

The pitch rose.

“Ten dollars?”

The voice came nearer, and passed to Frank’s right.

“Mary? Mary?”

A lanky white kid in baggy jeans and a Bulls sweatshirt walked by. He held a cell phone out at arm’s length, as if that would somehow put him in visual contact with Mary? Mary?

“Shit,” the kid muttered.

Jose and Frank watched him walk on. Another couple of steps, and he was punching another number into his phone.

“Voices everywhere,” Jose said.

“Schizophrenia or Sprint?”

The 7-Eleven had a frayed, secondhand look, as though time had been working it over with an eraser. A ragged man sprawled on a bench near the entrance. Close by, a clear plastic bag stuffed with blankets, aluminum cans, and scraps of unidentifiable clothing. Over his head a sign warned “No Loitering-Violators Will Be Prosecuted.” At the curb, a battered and rusting ten-speed bike, stripped of its front wheel, was Kryptonite-locked to a parking meter.

Frank stopped to take in a faded poster in the 7-Eleven window. It carried an image of a gold-foil District Metropolitan Police Department shield; above the shield, “Official Location,” and below it, “Police Community Work Station.” Malcolm Burridge, the previous mayor, had had these posters put up after a wave of convenience-shop holdups and killings. They hadn’t stopped the killings, but they’d made one of Burridge’s political fat cats a little fatter with the proceeds from the printing contract.

“Hex sign,” Frank thought he heard Jose say. He looked at his partner. “What?”

Jose was looking at the poster too. “Hex sign,” he repeated, “like on those barns… up in Pennsylvania… Keep away the devil.”

Kim Tae Ho looked up from the Post sports section. Two blurred foreigners. The first through the door black and big. Kim’s right hand dropped under the counter, under the cash register. At the same time, he ducked his head to peer over the top of his reading glasses. His hand came up from below the counter.

“Ah! Mr. Phelps. Mr. Kearney.” He smiled.

“Mr. Kim.” Jose took his hand.

“Mr. Kim,” Frank said, shaking the man’s hand after Jose.

“You still keeping the forty-five under the counter, Mr. Kim?” Jose asked casually.

Kim widened his eyes. “Mr. Phelps! A private citizen cannot possess a handgun in the District. It is illegal.”

Frank glanced around. A male customer at the back rummaged through the beer cooler; otherwise the place was empty.

“Somebody shot Skeeter Hodges last night, Mr. Kim,” Frank said.

“Yes.”

The pinched way Kim said it, Frank knew there wasn’t going to be any more.

“You hear any talk?” Jose asked.

“No.” Kim looked past the two men.

Frank heard footsteps behind him. The man from the cooler stood there with a tall can of Wild Bull. Frank stepped aside. Wordlessly, the man set the can on the counter and pulled a couple of rumpled singles out of his pocket. Frank noticed the man’s hand trembled ever so slightly.

Kim made change and slipped the can into a paper bag. He stood still and watched the man leave. The door closed. Kim’s eyes came back to Frank and Jose.

“No,” Kim repeated. The tension in his voice had disappeared. “There is no talk. After a killing, there is usually much discussion of it. Such as after a baseball game.”

Frank thought of Edward Teasdale, sitting in his Barcalounger, watching the Birds shut down the Red Sox.

“You knew Skeeter?”

“Oh, yes.” Kim’s face tightened.

“And…?”

“He held me up.” Kim pointed. “He walked right through that door and he held me up.”

The forty-five… when was that?” Frank asked.

He and Jose stood on the sidewalk outside the 7-Eleven. The man on the bench hadn’t moved. Frank glanced at him to see if he was breathing.

Jose massaged the back of his neck. He looked at the man on the bench too. “Two, three years ago. June… no… July. Yeah, July. Right after the Fourth.”

Frank placed it. He and Kate, just back from Spain. An epidemic of violent holdups and dead convenience-store owners in Southeast, near Eastern Market.

“Cecil and Forrest…?” The last name floated just outside Frank’s reach.

“Gibbons,” Jose furnished.

It had been a hot summer night, and the 911 dispatcher had reported shooting inside Kim’s 7-Eleven. First officers on the scene found the Gibbons brothers sprawled among toppled shelves of canned goods. Each had been killed with a single headshot: Cecil between the eyes, Forrest through the right temple. Cecil’s fingerprints were all over a SIG-Sauer, and Forrest still clutched a Glock 17. Forensics connected both weapons to the earlier Southeast killings.

Kim had claimed that the Gibbons brothers and a third gunman had gotten into an argument. He-Kim-had ducked behind the bullet shield by the cash register. The third gunman had fled after shooting the Gibbonses. The convenience-store killings stopped. The alleged third gunman had never been found, nor had the forty-five he’d allegedly used.

The man on the bench yawned.

“Might try that, one a these days,” Jose mused.

“Sleeping on a bench?”

“Fella makes it look comfortable.” Jose checked his watch. He pointed down Seventh Street toward the nineteenth-century rambling brick building that was Eastern Market. “What say we buy Gideon a roll?”

Mid-morning shoppers filled the market’s aisles. Gideon Weaver’s stall was empty. A broad counter ran around the three walls. Above and below the counter, bookshelves. Bibles crowded the counter and the shelves: Leviathan family Bibles, small vest-pocket testaments. Bibles in Braille. Spanish, French, German Bibles. Bibles in Kiswahili, Bihari, Shona. A cigar box minus its lid sat on the counter next to a portable CD player. Several tens, fives, and singles lay in the box, and “Lead On, O King Eternal” came from the CD player. Taped above the box and the CD player a paper banner-“Message of the Day.”

“ ‘With the ancient is wisdom, and in length of days, understanding,’ ” Frank read aloud.

“Job Twelve, twelve.”

Frank turned to Jose. “For sure?”

“Coffee and a roll?”

“Sure.”

Frank knew he’d lose. Never do Bible bets with a preacher’s kid.

Bean There used to be a soda fountain named Cherry’s. Cherry had had the business for forty years before he retired and moved to Arizona. Two employees had bought him out, and latte, cappuccino, and a dozen variants of espresso had replaced banana splits, hot fudge sundaes, and of course, the signature cherry sodas. Bean There had, however, kept the round marble-top tables and the drugstore chairs with their curling wrought-iron backs and legs.

Frank watched Jose fix his coffee. Two spoons sugar, half-and-half to muddy brown. “How much coffee you think we’ve drunk?” he asked.

Jose didn’t hesitate. “Least two thousand gallons.”

Frank stared.

“Minimum.” Jose made a show of his first sip, taking it slow.

Frank dismissed it with a laugh. “That’s bullshit, Hoser-two thousand gallons?”

“Minimum,” Jose repeated. He sat quietly a moment for effect, then: “Okay. Cup of coffee is about eight ounces?”

“Minimum.”

“Okay, if we drink four cups a day that’s thirty-two ounces. Every four days… a gallon?”

Frank ran over the math in his head. “Yeah?”

“Well, that’s ninety gallons a year. Times twenty-six years…”

Frank tried to picture two thousand gallons of coffee.

“That’s if we just drink an average of four cups a day,” Jose added, “an’ you know, there been days-”

“Josephus and Franklin, our wall by day and night.” The voice came grating and rumbling, like a granite landslide.

A massively muscled man drove his motorized wheelchair up to the table.

“You were by my stall. I knew you’d stop here.”

Southeast Washington’s eyes and ears belonged to Gideon Weaver. A stray bullet during the ’68 riots had ended his career as a car thief, but a hospital conversion by Titus Phelps had put Weaver in a new set of wheels and on the path toward becoming an inner-city missionary.

“Coffee and a roll?” Frank asked.

“Man does not live by bread alone, Franklin, but Deuteronomy doesn’t say anything about cappuccino and a bear claw.”

Frank put the coffee and roll on the table in front of Weaver.

“Thank you,” he said. He bowed his head in brief prayer, then looked up at Frank and Jose.

“James Hodges,” he said.

“You hear who?” Jose asked.

Weaver shook his head. “People don’t know. They did, they’d talk, and I’d hear.”

He got a reckoning look, a man making an inventory, or weighing the value of a soul. “A tragic figure,” he offered slowly.

“You knew him?” Jose asked.

“He lived here in Southeast.” Weaver’s voice lifted at the end. As if to say, “I know everybody in Southeast.”

Frank asked, “Personally?”

“Franklin.” Weaver arched his eyebrows. “I said: ‘He lived here in Southeast.’ ”

Frank raised both hands, palms toward Weaver.

With a smile, Weaver accepted Frank’s surrender. “There was a lot written about James. His association with Juan Brooks.”

“We know,” Frank said, “but how’d you see him?”

Weaver worked at the bear claw with the side of a fork. He separated a piece, dipped it in his coffee, took a bite, and smiled in satisfaction. The smile went away and he put the fork down.

“James was a man who wanted to be king.”

Frank and Jose looked at each other. They both eyed Weaver.

“King,” Jose repeated.

Weaver took a moment to answer. “Yes.” He paused and nodded as if in agreement with himself. “I never thought of him that way. Until now-until you asked. ‘King’ just… just came out.”

“And what made it come out?” Jose asked.

Weaver considered this. “Do you know Belial?”

“No,” Frank replied.

“A fallen angel,” Jose answered.

Weaver rewarded him with a glance of approval. “James could have done much good. But he took the talents God gave him and turned them to evil uses. Still, it always seemed to me that he was searching for redemption. Trying to buy his way back into grace.”

“He had a head for business,” Frank put in.

“Numbers and people,” Weaver said.

“People?” Jose asked. “How ‘people’?”

“People underestimated him. Dropout. Child of the projects. A boy who didn’t know his father. The hustlers thought that they had a good recruit. Their mistake. They’d give James a little slack, a little headway-he’d hustle them.”

“You said ‘king,’ ” Frank reminded Weaver.

“Folks bowing to him-James hungered for respectability.” Weaver wagged a warning finger. “Not just respect. Difference between respect and respectability… You can get re-spect because you got a gun in your hand. Or a hundred-dollar bill. What James wanted was respec-ta-bil- ity-something people give you without you asking. Without the gun or the Benjamin.”