Along Came A Spider

CHAPTER 76

T EIRHT-THIRTY that night, Sampson and I walked along New York Avenue. It is in the tenderloin of AD.C.'s ghettos. It's where Sampson and I hang out most nights. It's home.

He had just asked me how I was holding up. “Not too good, thanks. Yourself?” I said.

He knew about Jezzie Flanagan. I'd told him everything I knew. The plot thickened and thickened. I couldn't have felt any worse than I did that night. Scorse and Weithas had laid out a thorough case involving Jezzie. She'd done it. There was no room for doubt. One lie had led to another. She'd told me a hundred if she'd told me one. Never flinched once. She was better at it than Soneji/Murphy. Real smooth and confident.

“You want me to keep my mouth shut? Or talk at you?” Sampson asked me. “I'll do it either way.”

His face was expressionless, as it usually is. Maybe it's the sunglasses that create that impression, but I doubt it. Sampson was like that when he was ten years old.

“I want to talk,” I told John. “I could use a cocktail. d to talk about psychopathic liars.”

“I'll buy us a few drinks,” Sampson said.

We headed toward Faces. It's a bar we've been going to since we first joined the police force. The regulars in Faces don't mind that we're tough-as-nails D.C. detectives. A few of them even admit that we do more good than harrn in the neighborhood. The crowd in Faces is mostly black, but white people come by for the jazz. And to learn how to dance, and dress.

“Jezzie was the one who assigned Devine and Chakely in the first place?” Sampson reviewed the facts as we waited for the stoplight at 5th Street.

A couple of local punks eyed us from their lookout in front of Popeye's Fried Chicken. In times past, the same kind of street trash would have been on the same corner, only without so much money, or guns, in their pockets. “Yo, brothers. ” Sampson winked at the thugs. He fucks with everybody's head. Nobody fucks back.

“Right, that's how it all started. Devine and Chakely were one of the teams assigned to Secretary Goldberg and his family. They worked under Jezzie.”

“And nobody ever suspected them?” he asked me.

“Not at first. The FBI checked them out. They checked everybody out. Chakely's and Devine's daily logs were off. That's when they became suspicious. Some watchdog analyst at the Bureau figured out that the logs had been doctored. They had twenty people for every one we had. Besides that, the FBI removed the doctored logs so none of us could find them.”

“Devine and Chakely spotted Soneji checking out one of the kids. That's how the whole circus began? The double take.” Sampson had the general rhythm of the thing now.

“They followed Soneji and his van out to the farm in Maryland. They realized they were stalking a potential kidnapper. Somebody got the idea to kidnap. the kids after the actual kidnapping.”

“Ten-million-dollar idea.” Sampson glowered. “Was Ms. Jezzie Flanagan in on it from the beginning?”

“I don't know. I think so. I'll have to ask her about that sometime. ” “Uh huh. ” Sampson nodded with the flow of our conversation. “Your head above, or below, the water line right now?”

“I don't know that, either. You meet somebody who can lie to you the way she did, it changes your perspective on things. This is very tough to handle, man. You ever lie to me?”

Sampson showed some of his teeth. It was halfway between a smile and a growl. “Sounds like your head's a little below water to me.”

“Sounds like it to me, too,” I admitted. “I've had better days. But I've had worse. Let's have that beer.”

Sampson gave the gunner's salute to the punks on the corner. They laughed and gave us the high sign. Cops and robbers in the 'hood. We crossed the street to Faces. A little oblivion was in order.

The bar was crowded, and would be that way until closing. People who knew Sampson and me said hello. A woman I'd gone out with was at the bar. A real pretty, real nice social worker who had worked with Maria.

1 wondered why nothing had come of it. Because of some deep-down character flaw I have? No. Couldn't be that.

“You see Asahe over there?” Sampson gestured.

“I'm a detective. I see everything, right. Don't miss a trick,” I said to him.

“You soundin' a little sorry for yourself. Little ironic, I'd say. Two beers. Nah, make it four,” he told the bartender.

“I'll get over it,” I said to Sampson. “You just watch. I just had never put her on our suspect list. My mistake. ” “You're tough, man. Got your nasty old grandma's genes. We gonna fix you up,” he said to me. “Fix her ass, too. Ms. Jezzie's.”

"Did you like her, John? Before any of this came up.

“Oh yeah. Nothing not to like. She lies real good, Alex. She's got talent. Best I've seen since that movie Body Heat,” said Sampson. “And no, I never lie to you, my brother. Not even when. I should.”

The hard part came after Sampson and I left Faces that night. I'd had a few beers, but I was mostly coherent, and nearly dulled to the worst of the pain. And yet it was such a shock that Jezzie had been part of it all this time. I remembered how she'd led me away from Devine and Chakely as suspects. She'd pumped me for anything new the D.C. police had picked up. She'd been the ultimate insider. So confident and cool. Perfect in her part.

Nana was still up when I got back to the house. So far I hadn't told her about Jezzie. Now was about as awful a time as any. The beers helped some. Our history together helped even more. I told Nana the truth straight out. She listened without interrupting, which was an indication of how she was taking the news.

After I had finished, the two of us sat there in the living room, just looking at each other. I was on the hassock, with my long legs spread out in her general direction. Screaming silence was everywhere around us.

Nana was bunched under an old oatmeal-colored blanket in her easy chair. She was still nodding gently, biting her upper lip, thinking over what I'd told her.

“I have to start someplace, ” she finally said, “so let me start here. I will not say, 'I told you so,' because I had no idea it would be this bad. I was afraid for you, that's all. But not about anything like this. I could never have imagined this terrible thing. Now please give me a hug before I go up and say my prayers. I will pray for Jezzie Flanagan tonight. I really will. I'll pray for us all, Alex.”

“You know what to say.” I told her the bottom-line truth. She knew when to slap you down and when to give a needed pat on the rear end.

I gave Nana a hug, and then she trudged upstairs. I stayed downstairs and thought about what Sampson had said earlier-we were going to fix Jezzie's ass. Not because of anything that had happened between the two of us, though. Because of Michael Goldberg and Maggie Rose Dunne. Because of Vivian Kim, who didn't have to die. Because of Mustaf Sanders.

We were going to get Jezzie, somehow.