A Murder of Justice

SIX

Fresh?” Frank asked. He was already measuring grounds into the coffeemaker.

Jose nodded. He opened Skeeter Hodges’s file jacket and spread an assortment of documents across his desk. “Lot of reading.”

Frank switched the coffeemaker on. “Skeeter had a long run.”

For the next hour, the two men worked through the files, taking notes, reconstructing Hodges’s life as seen through the prism of his brushes with the law. Frank came across a photograph of him in cap and gown, smiling into the camera, and behind him, with the same smile, Sharon Lipton, then a handsome woman in a silk dress and dramatically sweeping brimmed hat.

“Boy and happy mother?” he guessed, holding the picture up for Jose to see.

Over the top of his half-round reading glasses, Jose gave the photograph an appraising look. “A real mama, all right.” He sifted through the papers on his desk until he found a rap sheet. Tilting back in his chair, he eyed the document.

“Sharon Stilton Lipton,” he read, “aka ‘Babba,’ 1979, possession of narcotics, intent to sell…”

Fourteen, Frank thought, kid would have been fourteen.

“… 1980, solicitation for prostitution.” Jose shook his head. “ ’Eighty-two was a busy year… two charges receiving stolen goods, one sale of narcotics.”

Frank looked at the graduation picture again: Hodges, grinning with a kick-ass confidence. Proud mama, a hand on her son’s shoulder.

Hand… A special kind of hand on a kid’s shoulder. The encouraging squeeze you gave before you sent them out… to the first day of school… away for the first camping trip… back into a game already lost… off to basic training at Fort Jackson… when you tried your best to pass on a small measure of your own strength, of your own knowledge about the world. Where was Babba Lipton sending her son?

“Helluva education he got,” he said.

Jose slipped the rap sheet into the file. “Another testimonial for home schooling.”

Frank pushed his chair back, stood up, stretched, and walked to the window. Several blocks away, the trees along the Mall were greening up after winter. Off to the right, the castle towers of the Smithsonian, brick-red under the late-morning sun.

To the left, the Capitol crowned Jenkins Hill. All his life-as far back as he could remember, anyway-the massive building, white and shining, had reminded him of pictures of monasteries in Tibet. Every so often, he’d idly wonder how he’d come to think of it that way. The Hill certainly wasn’t a hangout for holy men. He’d probably made the connection as a kid, he thought. Back when he’d known for certain-without any doubt-that you could always tell the good guys because they wore the white hats.

The James Hodges that emerged from the files didn’t resemble the morning papers’ romantic spin about a charming and only slightly roguish urban outlaw.

A hot-out-of-the-box start in 1981-sweet sixteen and charged with assault with a deadly weapon. Charge dropped. A year later, a suspended sentence for heroin possession. Thanks, Mama Babba.

Grand theft auto gave Skeeter a year at Lorton and new contacts for his life’s work. There, he met one of Juan Brooks’s lieutenants.

For years, Juan Brooks had been the District’s kingpin of kingpins. A logistics genius, he built an organization of over five hundred street retailers and Uzi-toting enforcers, a ruthless enterprise that smuggled, packaged, and retailed hundreds of kilos of cocaine in the District each month.

Just days out of Lorton, Skeeter signed on with Brooks. By 1991, he had climbed the rungs to become a senior executive in Brooks’s multimillion-dollar monopoly.

Then, in December 1992, Brian Atkins bagged Brooks. Got him big-time, life without parole. Brooks went off to an isolation cell in the maximum-security lockdown of the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois.

Atkins, head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, got hero treatment: the cover of Newsweek, a 60 Minutes segment with Mike Wallace, a well-publicized lunch with President Clinton, a profusion of lawman-of-the-year awards, and a promotion to headquarters.

Skeeter went to work, picking up pieces of Brooks’s empire and adding chunks of his own. But where Brooks had left the street work to his enforcers, Skeeter had kept his hand in. One informant reported Skeeter’s holding forth about how great leaders led from the front, not from the rear. And so Skeeter Hodges had been at the front on Bayless Place, planning his next campaign, when somebody walked up and blew out his brains.

Frank saw a flag being raised over the chambers of the House of Representatives. There were other flagpoles on the Capitol roof. All day, a handful of congressional employees would be up there, raising scores of American flags-raising them, then immediately lowering them. They’d fold the flags and box them, and later, members of Congress would send them to their more important constituents with a certificate saying that the flags had flown over the Capitol.

Frank realized Jose was standing beside him, watching the flags. “Congress at work,” he said.

“Wonder what it would be like, being a flag raiser?” Jose asked.

“Lot of ups and downs.”

“Like us.”

“Ups and downs?”

“Job never finished.”

Jose watched a flag go up, come down.

“My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut,” Frank complained.

Jose turned away from the window. “Get carry-out and find a bench on the Mall?”

Ruth threw in a pint of potato salad with the salami for Frank and the pastrami on rye for Jose. They walked across Constitution Avenue and found a bench under a hundred-year-old water oak on the Mall, facing the National Air and Space Museum.

Jose motioned to Air and Space. “Haven’t been there in a long time.”

Frank looked at the huge building. He liked going there. But he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been. You live in a city like D.C. and the only thing you see is killers and dead people. He unwrapped his sandwich and took a small, experimental bite. The salami was slick and spicy on his tongue, and there was just enough mustard to make his eyes wrinkle slightly. He sat back and watched a runner make her way down the Mall. Skeeter Hodges and the dream came back in faded tones.

“I was thinking, Hoser… maybe Emerson was right.”

“That Skeeter’s a key to the cold-case locker?”

“He liked working the street personally.”

“So he had to whack a lot of guys.”

“One way to thin out the competition.”

“Business killings.”

“So to speak.”

“Yeah. So to speak.”

“So what you’re sayin’ is he was good at his business.”

“Or very lucky.”

They took their time with their sandwiches and the potato salad, then sat drowsily for a quarter-hour under the springtime sun.

When they got back to the office, the answering machine held two messages: Kate, with her flight number and ETA, and Eleanor, saying the printout was ready. Frank punched the machine and listened to Kate’s message one more time.

You asked for it.” Eleanor indicated a stack on the desk beside her computer.

“Damn.” Frank sighed. The printout was at least six inches thick.

“You were right,” Jose said. “Lot of trees died for that.”

Eleanor shrugged. “Just the cold cases since 1990.”

“How many?” Jose asked.

“Fifteen hundred and change.”

Fifteen hundred. One thousand five hundred unsolved homicides. In ten years.

“But the rate’s going down,” Jose protested.

Eleanor rapped out a riff on her computer keyboard, scanned the results on the monitor, and nodded.

“The homicide rate is,” she said. “In 1990, we clipped off four hundred eighty-three citizens. In 1999, we dropped down to two hundred forty-one. But”-she threw her hands up-“look at the closure rates. In 1990, you guys were closing fifty-seven percent of the cases one way or another. In 1999, with half the killings, you were closing only thirty-seven percent of the cases. Over the ten-year period, we had almost four thousand homicides. Of those four thousand, over fifteen hundred are still open.”

Frank looked at the stack of cold cases, still trying to get his head around fifteen hundred unsolved murders in ten years.

“Sweet Jesus,” Jose murmured.

In the hallway, headed back to their office, Jose muttered, “Fifteen hundred… One thousand… five hundred…”

“Numbers,” Frank said absently. “Somebody said one death is a tragedy, a million’s just a statistic. I wonder where fifteen hundred comes down?”

They were passing Emerson’s office. Jose jerked a thumb toward the door. “We’d been good at cooking the numbers, we’d be sitting behind glass desks and have nasty-ass secretaries with long nails and big tits to guard the front door.”

“Remember what your uncle says about ifs?”

Jose laughed. If my daddy hadn’t died in the poor house, I’d be a rich man.

“What say we work on that”-he tapped the printout Frank was carrying under his arm-“till six or so, then go out for ribs?”

“Give me a rain check. Kate’s coming in at seven.”