Hell To Pay

chapter 19

FRIENDS, relatives, police, and print and broadcast media heavily attended Joe Wilder’s showing at a funeral parlor near the old Posin’s Deli on Georgia Avenue. At one point, traffic had been rerouted on the strip to accommodate the influx of cars. Except for a few acquaintances and a couple of black plainclothes homicide men assigned to the case, few came to pay their respects to Lorenze Wilder on the other side of town.

The boy and his uncle were buried the next day in Glenwood Cemetery in Northeast, not far from where they had been murdered.

Because of the numbing consistency of the murder rate, and because lower-class black life held little value in the media’s eyes, the violent deaths of young black men and women in the District of Columbia had not been deemed particularly newsworthy for the past fifteen years. Murders of young blacks rarely made the leadoff in the TV news and were routinely buried inside the Metro section of the Washington Post, the details consisting of a paragraph or two at best, the victims often unidentified, the follow-up nil.

Suburban liberals plastered Free Tibet stickers on the bumpers of their cars, seemingly unconcerned that just a few short miles from the White House, American children were enslaved in nightmare neighborhoods, living amid gunfire and drugs and attending dilapidated public schools. The nation was outraged at high school shootings in white neighborhoods, but young black men and women were murdered without fanfare in the nation’s capital every single day.

The shooting death of Joe Wilder, though, was different. Like a few high-profile cases over the years, it involved the death of an innocent child. For a few days after the homicide, the Wilder murder was the lead story on the local television news and made top-of-the-fold Metro as well. Even national politicians jumped into the fray, denouncing the culture of violence in the inner cities. As the witness at the ice-cream shop had mentioned the loud rap music coming from the open windows of the shooters’ car, these same politicians had gone on to condemn those twin chestnuts, hip-hop and Hollywood. At no time did these bought-and-sold politicians mention the conditions that created that culture, or the handguns, as easily available as a carton of milk, that had killed the boy.

Strange was thinking of these things as he pulled his Brougham into Glenwood Cemetery, coming to a stop behind a long row of cars that stretched far back from Joe Wilder’s grave site. Lydell Blue was beside him on the bench. Lamar Williams and Lionel Baker sat quietly in the back of the Cadillac.

Strange looked in his rearview. Dennis Arrington was pulling up behind him in his Infiniti. He had brought along Quinn and three of the boys from the team: Prince, Rico, and Dante Morris. Some of Joe’s other teammates had attended the church service, a ceremony complete with tears-to-the-eyes gospel singing, in the Baptist church where Joe and his mother had attended services.

Strange looked out at the automobiles, and the people getting out of them and crossing the lawn. Joe Wilder’s mother, Sandra Wilder, was stooped in the middle of a group of mourners who were helping her along to the grave site. She had just gotten out of an expensive German car. Lorenze’s casket and Joe’s, half the size of his uncle’s, were up on platforms under a three-sided green tent beside two open graves.

Most of the cars parked along the curb and up on the grass had been waxed and detailed out of respect. There was a van in the mix that Strange knew to be a police van, its occupants taking photographs of the funeral’s attendees. This was fairly routine in killings believed to be of the serial variety, as serial killers often showed up at the wakes and funerals of their victims.

Strange knew, and the police knew, that the killers would not show up here today. He was fairly certain what this had been about. This wasn’t a serial killing. It was a gang killing, or turf beef, or eyeball beef, or a death collect on a drug debt. The target was Lorenze Wilder; his nephew Joe just happened to have been in the car. A simple, everyday thing.

Again, Strange studied the cars. Many of them were not just clean. Many of them were drug cars. High-priced imports tricked out in expensive customized options. The men getting out of them were very young and flashily dressed. Strange didn’t even have to turn it over in his mind. It wasn’t black-on-black racism. He had lived in the city his whole life. It was real.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” said Blue.

“All kinds of young drug boys here,” said Strange. “Question is, why?”

“No idea.”

“Joe wasn’t even close to being in the life. I know his mother, and she’s straight.”

“You see that car she got out of?”

Strange had seen it. It was a three-series BMW, late model, the middle of the line.

“I saw it.”

“She’s got, what, a thirty-five-thousand-dollar car and she’s living in government-assisted housing?”

“Could be a friend’s car,” said Strange.

“Could be.”

“Something to think about. But this ain’t the time or the place.”

They got out of the car. Lamar and Lionel joined Quinn, Arrington, and the boys from the team. They walked as a group to the gravesite. Strange and Blue walked behind.

“You okay?” said Blue.

“Yeah,” said Strange. But to Blue’s eyes his friend looked blown apart, both depleted and seething inside.

“I’m on midnights tonight,” said Blue. “Was gonna take a car out. Was wonderin’ if you wanted to do a ride-along.”

“I do,” said Strange.

“Just thought I’d see what’s out there.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Meet me at the station at around eleven-thirty. You’re gonna need to sign some papers.”

“Right,” said Strange.

Dennis Arrington had asked the group to form a circle. He took the hand of Quinn, who was standing beside him, and the rest of the boys joined hands until the unbroken circle went back to Arrington. They all bowed their heads, and the young deacon led Quinn and the boys in a quiet prayer. Nearby, Strange and Blue also lowered their heads and prayed.

When Strange was done he looked over to the grave site and saw Joe’s mother, Sandra, talking to a young man with closely cropped hair, immaculately dressed in a three-button suit. The young man looked over at Strange as Sandra Wilder talked. He kept his eyes on Strange and said something to the well-dressed young man beside him. His friend nodded. These two young men, Strange decided, were also in the life.

“Let’s go, Derek,” said Blue. “Looks like they’re about ready to say the final words.”

Blue and Strange walked to the site. Fifteen minutes later, Joe Wilder, eight years old, was lowered into his grave.

STRANGE woke from a nap at about ten o’clock that night, showered and changed, fed Greco, and locked the house. He had called Janine before he left, telling her that he would be out most of the night and would probably not be back in the office until the following afternoon. He had not spent the night at Janine’s place that week.

Strange drove north toward the Fourth District station house at Georgia, between Quackenbos and Peabody. Lydell Blue had already filled him in on the developments of the Wilder case. In the three days that had elapsed since the murders, much had been learned.

The ice-cream shop, called Ulmer’s, carried two employees in the fall and winter seasons, a young Salvadoran named Diego Juarez and the owner, Ed Ulmer, African American and fifty-nine years old. On the night of the shooting, Juarez was on the clock. His car, a black Nissan Sentra, was the only one in the lot when Lorenze Wilder pulled in and parked his Olds. After serving Wilder and his nephew, Juarez noticed that the boy tried to use the bathroom around the side of the building but quickly returned to the Oldsmobile. Ulmer had padlocked the bathroom doors after several incidents of vandalism.

Shortly after the boy got into the Olds, joining the older man, a white Plymouth, stripped down like an old police vehicle, came into the parking lot at a high rate of speed. Driven by a young black man with “a long nose, like a beak,” the Plymouth stopped in front of the Olds, blocking its forward path. Juarez stated that the “rap music” coming from the open windows of the car was quite loud. Very quickly, two young black men got out of the car, one from the passenger seat and one from the backseat, drew handguns, and began firing into the windshield of the Olds.

Diego Juarez mentally recorded the sequence of letters and numbers on the D.C. license plate of the Plymouth before retreating into the back of the shop. At this point, he phoned the police and then locked himself in the employee bathroom until he heard the squad cars arrive, five minutes later. He had nothing to write with in the bathroom, and in his nervous excitement he had forgotten one of the license plate’s two letters and most of its numerals. When he came out of the bathroom, he could recall none of the numerals. By then, of course, the shooters were gone.

One of the shooters, apparently, had vomited a mixture of alcohol and hamburger meat on the asphalt of the parking lot before he’d gotten back into the Plymouth.

Both victims had been shot several times. Lorenze Wilder had been shot in the back as well as the face and neck, indicating that he had initially tried to protect the boy. This was before the force of the bullets had spun him around. Joe Wilder had taken five bullets, one in the groin area, two in the stomach and chest, and two in the face and head. Both victims, lying in melted ice cream and blood, were dead when the police arrived. A rubber action figure, also covered in blood, was found near the boy’s hand. A football helmet with a mouthguard wedged in its cage was found at his feet.

Ten 9mm casings were found in the lot consistent with those that would be ejected from an automatic weapon. Their ejection pattern suggested that they came from the gun of the shooter on the right, described by Juarez as the one with “the braids in his hair.” There were no casings found from the gun of the second shooter. Either he had picked them up, highly unlikely, or they had remained in the chambers of his gun. If the latter was the case, the weapon he used was a revolver. Indeed, the slugs that had done the most damage to the bodies would later be identified as hollow-points fired from a.357.

Juarez described the second shooter as “a tall and skinny black” with light skin and a skully. Juarez said that the shooter was smiling as he fired his weapon, and it was this smile that had persuaded him, Juarez, to retreat into the back of the shop. He had since worked extensively with police artists to come up with drawings that would closely resemble his brief recollection of the faces on the young men he had seen.

There were no other witnesses to the shooting, and none of the occupants of the nearby residences claimed to have seen a thing.

The white Plymouth was found the next morning on a rural stretch of road bordering a forest in Prince George’s County. The car had been doused in gasoline and burned. The smoke rising above the trees had been seen by a resident of a community situated on the other side of the woods, which had prompted him to call the police. The first letter of the license plate matched the letter recalled by Juarez. This was the shooters’ car. The arson job had been thorough, obliterating any evidence save for some clothing fibers; the automobile had been wiped clean of prints.

The Plymouth was registered to a Maurice Willis of the 4800 block of Kane Place in the Deanwood section of Northeast. Squad cars and homicide detectives were dispatched to his address, where Willis was taken in without resistance for questioning. The Plymouth belonged to Willis. It had been stolen from the Union Station parking lot while he was attending a movie at the AMC. He had not reported the theft, he explained candidly, because he had been driving the car without insurance. Based on his recollection of the movie he had seen and his certainty of its time, the detectives were able to pinpoint a two-hour window for the theft.

By the end of this next day, the surveillance tapes from the pay booth at the parking garage had produced a photographic record of the one who had stolen the Plymouth. The image was of a light-skinned young black man wearing a sheer black skullcap and shades. On top of these visual obstacles, the suspect had deliberately kept his face partially turned away from the camera while he paid the parking fee. The camera evidence wouldn’t find them the shooter, but it would be useful in court.

Detectives continued to canvass the neighborhood where the shooting had occurred. They posted sketches of the suspects and kept the sketches on hand when interviewing potential wits. They interviewed friends and relatives of Lorenze and Joe Wilder extensively, focusing on the acquaintances of the uncle. Most important, the police department had issued a ten-thousand-dollar reward for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of the shooters. This was the most important element and effort of the investigation. In the end, Strange knew, it would be a snitch who would give them the identity of the killers.

They’re doing a good job. A damn good job so far. They’re doing everything they can.

Strange pulled into the parking lot behind the Fourth District station, found a spot, and cut the engine on his car.

STRANGE went around to the front of the station house, named in honor of Charles T. Gibson, the uniformed officer slain outside the Ibex Club a few years earlier. He went directly to the front desk in the unadorned, flourescent-lit lobby. The police officer on desk duty, a woman he did not recognize, phoned Lieutenant Blue in his second-floor office while Strange signed two release forms for insurance purposes. These were required of all citizens requesting ride-alongs.

Blue appeared in uniform. He and Strange went back through the locker room and down a flight of stairs to the rear entrance. Blue told a sergeant, out in the lot catching a cigarette, that he was taking the Crown Victoria parked leftmost in a row of squad cars facing the building. He mentioned the car’s number, displayed on its side and rear, to the sergeant as well.

Blue got behind the wheel of the Crown Vic, and Strange sat beside him. They drove out onto Georgia at just past midnight and headed south.

The Fourth District, known as 4-D, ran north-south from the District line down to Harvard Street, and was bordered by Rock Creek on the west and North Capitol Street on the east. It included neighborhoods of the wealthy and those of the extreme lower class. With a high rate of sexual assault, auto theft, and homicide, 4-D had become one of the most troubled districts in the city. Chief Ramsey had been considering an eighth police district to break up the Fourth, probably in the form of a substation near 11th and Harvard. It had gotten that bad.

The crime rate in the city, despite the propaganda issued to the media about “New Day D.C.,” was rising once again. In the first six months of the new century, homicides were up 33 percent; rapes had increased by over 200 percent. In ’97, detectives had been transferred and reassigned citywide after an independent investigation had reported substandard performance. Anyone who knew anything about police work knew that results came from a network of informants and neighborhood contacts, and confidences, built up over time. The reassignment had destroyed that system. The result was that the current homicide closure rate was at an all-time low. Two out of three murders in the District of Columbia went unsolved – a closure rate of 31 percent.

The streets were fairly quiet. The temperature had dropped to sweater weather, and it was a work night, and kids had school the next day. But still, kids were out. They were out on the commercial strip and back on the corners of the residential streets, sitting on top of trash cans and mailboxes. A curfew law came and went in D.C., but even when it was in effect it was rarely enforced. No one was interested in locking up a minor who had stayed out too late. Police felt, rightly so, that it wasn’t their job to raise other people’s kids.

“Anything new since the funeral?” said Strange.

“Nothing on the forensic side,” said Blue. “The detectives are doing some serious recanvassing of the neighborhood over there around Rhode Island. And they’re heavily interrogating Lorenze Wilder’s associates and friends.”

“He have any?”

“He had a few. The plainclothes guys at Lorenze’s wake got some information until they got made. And they do have the sign-in book from the funeral home, has the names and addresses of those who bothered to use it.”

“Anything yet from those interrogations?”

“Lorenze was one of those fringe guys. Didn’t work for the most part, least not in payroll jobs. Even his friends admit he was no-account. But none of ’em say he was a target. He wasn’t mixed up in no big-time crews or anything like that. That’s what they’re telling our people, anyway.”

“I’d like to get a list of his friends,” said Strange.

“You know I can’t do that, Derek.”

“All right.”

Blue had said it. He had to say it, Strange knew. And Strange let it lie.

They drove back into the neighborhoods between Georgia and 16th. Blue stopped to check on a drunken Hispanic man who was standing in the middle of Kenyon Street, his face covered in alcohol sweat. He said he had “lost his house.” Blue talked to him carefully and helped him find it. At 15th and Columbia he slowed the patrol car and rolled down his window. A man sat on the stoop of a row house, watching a young boy dribble a basketball on the sidewalk.

“He’s out kinda late, isn’t he?” said Blue.

The man smiled. “Aw, he’s just hyped. You know kids.”

“I hear you,” said Blue, smiling back. “But you need to get him inside.”

“Aiight then,” said the man.

Blue drove away. Strange noted how relaxed he was behind the wheel. Blue had always liked working midnights. He said that the danger in these hours was greater, but the respect between the citizens and cops actually increased between midnight and dawn. The squares had all gone home and were sleeping, leaving an uneasy alliance for those who remained.

Blue took a call on a domestic disturbance at 13th and Randolph. He asked the woman if she wanted the husband, whom she had accused of striking her, to spend the night in jail. She said she didn’t want that, and this call, like most domestics the police answered, ended in peace.

“How’s Terry doing?” said Blue, as he cruised east toward the Old Soldiers’ Home.

“He’s been quiet,” said Strange. “Got a new girlfriend, I think, and he’s been spending time with her. It’s been good for him to be with a woman this week.”

“And you and Janine?”

“Fine.”

“Good woman. That son of hers is a fine young man, too.”

“I know it,” said Strange.

“Lionel gonna be at the game on Saturday?”

“I guess he is.” Strange hadn’t thought much on the game.

“You know we got to play it.”

“Right.”

“Think we ought to have a short practice tomorrow night. Talk to the kids.”

“That’s what we ought to do.”

“They need to pick themselves up, right about now,” said Blue. “They’re gonna see a lot of death in their young lives. I want them to remember Joe, but I don’t want this to paralyze them. You agree?”

“Yes,” said Strange.

Blue looked over at his friend. They had hugged and patted each other’s backs when they’d first seen each other after Joe Wilder’s murder. The both of them felt extreme guilt, Blue for tying Strange up after practice, and Strange for letting Joe out of his sight. But they had been tight since childhood, and this was not something that needed to be apologized for or discussed. Blue was dealing with it in his own way, but he wasn’t sure about how deeply it had burrowed into Strange.

“Listen, Derek-”

“I’m okay, Lydell. Just don’t want to talk about it much right now, all right?”

Blue turned up Warder Street in Park View. They passed a group of row houses, all dark. Inside one of them, Garfield Potter, Carlton Little, and Charles White slept.

BLUE drove around the Fourth. They bought coffee at the all-night Wings n Things at Kennedy Street and Georgia, and drove around some more. They stopped to tell some kids to get off the streets, and answered a domestic. Blue answered another domestic on 2nd but was called suddenly to a disturbance a block away.

A fight had broken out in a bar on Kennedy at closing time, and it had spilled onto the street. Several squad cars were already on the scene. Officers were holding back the brawlers and trying to quiet some of the neighbors and passersby who had been incited by the police presence. The patrolmen carried batons. A guy shouted “cracker motherfucker” and “white motherfucker” repeatedly at the white policeman who had cuffed him. The policeman’s partner, a black officer, was called a “house nigger” by the same man. Blue got out of the car and crossed the street. Strange stepped out and leaned against the Crown Vic.

Down the street was the Three-Star Diner, Billy Georgelakos’s place. Strange’s father had worked there as a grill man for most of his career. A riot gate covered the front of the diner. Nearby, concertina wire topped the fence surrounding the parking lot of a church.

Blue returned to the Crown Vic with sweat beading his forehead. Most of the bystanders on Kennedy had disappeared. Whatever this had been, it was over without major incident. It would go unreported to the majority of the city’s citizens, safely asleep at home in their beds.

Strange asked Blue to make a pass through Park Morton, where Joe Wilder had lived, and Blue agreed. In the complex, few people were out. A boy sat on a swing in the playground of the dark courtyard, smoking a cigarette. Dice players and dope smokers moved about the stairwells of the apartments.

“We put flyers with the artist’s renderings of the suspects in the mailboxes here,” said Blue. “Gonna post them around the neighborhood as well.”

“That’s good.”

“Most of the time we don’t get much cooperation up in here. Drug dealers get chased by the police, they find a lot of open doors, places to hide, in this complex.”

“What I hear.”

“They even got community guns buried around here somewhere. We know all about it, but it’s tough to fight.”

“You sayin’ you think no one will come forward?”

“I’m hoping this case here is gonna be different. We’re mistrusted here, maybe even hated. I got to believe, though, anyone with a heart is gonna want to help us find the people who would kill an innocent kid.”

On the drive out, Blue went by the brick pillars and wall that were the unofficial gateway to the housing complex. Two children, girls wearing cartoon-character jackets, sat atop the wall. The girls, no older than eleven or twelve, cold-eyed the occupants of the squad car as they passed.

“Where are the parents?” whispered Strange.