Shame the Devil

FIFTEEN

Detective Dan Boyle fired up a cigarette off the dash lighter, cracking his window as he drove his unmarked into Northeast. He dragged hard on his Marlboro and kept the smoke down in his lungs.

Talking to the Karras guy at the bar had naturally made him think of his own kids. How rough he was on them sometimes, and how much he loved them. Christ, if anything ever happened to them… How could Karras just sit there quietly like that, eating his lunch? He guessed that Karras had just learned to live with it and was keeping it buried someplace deep inside. But Boyle would be crazy if it were him. Maybe this Karras was crazy, and no one knew.

Talking with Karras, it had also reminded Boyle that his friend

Bill Jonas had called a couple of days earlier and asked that he drop by. Boyle had a witness to interview out in the Langdon Park area, and Jonas lived in Brookland, not far off the route. This would be a good day for Boyle to visit Jonas.

Boyle figured that Jonas wanted to talk about the case. That was what they usually discussed during Boyle’s visits. But Boyle had no new information since his last visit. The Pizza Parlor Murders had been transferred over to a newly formed cold-case squad, a unit created in part due to citizen outrage at published reports of the department’s extreme number of unsolved homicides. Now the Feds were involved, too, in an “advisory capacity.” From what Boyle heard, no additional progress had been made.

Boyle went down the commercial strip of 12th and found Hamlin, a block of well-kept middle-class homes aligned on a gently graded street. He parked in front of Jonas’s house, a brick split-level with forest green shutters, and popped a breath mint in his mouth to cover the smell of booze. He got out of his car, noticing a curtain part in the front window of Jonas’s home. Probably one of Bill’s boys, checking him out.

Boyle looked around as he approached the house. The relative quiet of the street was deceptive. You could be lulled into thinking you were safe here, but there was plenty of crime on these blocks, some of it of the more violent kind. Anytime you have a black neighborhood, reasoned Boyle, you’re gonna have crime.

“Hey, Dad,” said Christopher Jonas. “Here comes your redneck friend.”

“Boyle?” said William Jonas, looking up as his son peered through the parted curtains of the living-room window. “Yeah, I’m expecting him.”

“Looks like he slept in that raincoat of his, too.”

“Probably was just sitting on it on some bar stool. Listen, Boyle’s rough around the edges, but he’s all right.”

“All cops are all right to you.”

“He’s just a little ignorant is all it is.”

“That’s all, huh? Well I’ll bet you a Hamilton he asks about my game, like he always does.”

“Ten dollars? You’re on.” Bill Jonas grinned. “How is your game, by the way?”

“Mr. Magoo could play basketball better than me. I’m a scientist, not an athlete. Proud of it, too. But your buddy there, when he looks at me, he sees a young black man and all he can think of after that is basketball.”

“All right, Chris, all right. Remember, I asked him out here, so be polite.”

Boyle knocked on the front door.

“You need a push, Dad?”

“No, Chris, I got it.” William Jonas wheeled himself across the living-room floor. “You show Mr. Boyle inside.”

“Chris, right?”

“That’s right. Come on in.”

As Boyle passed him in the foyer, Christopher Jonas caught the stale stench of nicotine and whiskey. Boyle went up a small flight of stairs to the living room, where William Jonas sat in his wheelchair beside a flowery couch. Boyle shook his hand.

“Bill.”

“Dan.”

Boyle removed his raincoat and draped it over the arm of the couch. He had a look at Bill Jonas: gray hair, a gut that rested on his lap, thin, atrophied legs. Jonas had aged ten years in the last two.

“I’m out, Dad,” said Christopher Jonas, getting into a coat and slinging a leather book bag over his shoulder. “You need anything before I go?”

“No, I’m all right. Your mother will be home soon. Take care, son.”

Bill Jonas made a face at his boy, rubbed two fingers together to indicate he had won the bet. Christopher rolled his eyes and left the house.

Jonas said, “Would you like a cup of coffee, Danny? A beer, maybe?”

“I could stand a beer.”

“Help yourself to one in the kitchen.”

“Anything for you?”

“I don’t drink the stuff.” Jonas looked down at his ample belly. “Last thing I need now is to fall in love with alcohol.”

Boyle left the room and returned with a can of beer. He noticed that Jonas now held an envelope in his hand. Boyle popped the can, had a swig, and sat down on the couch.

“So how’s it going?” said Boyle.

“Not bad. Rehab’s taken me a mile.” Jonas pointed to an aluminum tripod cane leaning against the wall. “I can take steps with that. From my bedroom to the bathroom, that sort of thing, which is a big load off my wife. And with the walker I can go even farther.”

“You gonna improve much more, you think?”

“Doctors didn’t think I’d come this far. The slug that nicked my spine did a lot of damage. But I just have to keep working at it, Dan. I mean, what else can I do?”

“You’ll get it. How you fixed for money?”

“Between my disability pay and my pension, I’m fine. College is all taken care of; I’d already saved that. Christopher’s in school, and Ted is on his way next fall. So me and Dee are out of the woods as far as that goes. Lookin’ forward to enjoying some good years together now.”

“Good. I’m happy everything’s working out.”

Jonas watched Boyle take a slow sip of beer. He’d never be able to explain to his son Christopher how he could sit here with a guy like Boyle. Jonas knew all about Boyle, his problems and instabilities, his bigotries and hatreds. All of it. He knew, but right now he didn’t care.

“Anything going on?” asked Jonas.

“Not that I know of,” said Boyle. “The cold-casers are focusing on it again, I know that. And they won’t stop. A quadruple homicide, five if you count the kid, it never goes away in the public’s mind. So far not a thing, but, hey, you never know. I mean, they just now caught that guy who was killing all those women in Park View.”

“I heard that, yeah. Tell me again what they know about my case.”

“Christ, Bill. Again?”

Jonas nodded. “Start with the guns.”

“Okay.” Boyle squinted as he thought. “The weapons used in the kitchen: a twenty-two Woodsman and a forty-five.”

“A Woodsman’s an assassin’s weapon.”

“Maybe, or the guy who was using it had just been around enough to know that it works real good close in. Anyhow, they never found the guns.”

“What about motive?”

“Money, but not from the registers. Gambling money. May’s was a known bookie joint. Hell, the federal boys were surveilling it for months, from a beauty salon across Wisconsin Avenue. They had infrared cameras pointed into the bar area at night, for Christ’s sake. Our people think the shooters were knocking off the place for book money. A couple of old employees came forward and told us as much. May’s was the last stop on a weekly bag run, and apparently the shooters knew it.”

“How would they know it?”

“Somebody tipped them off would be the obvious answer. Carl Lewin, the guy they called Mr. Carl, he had served federal time for gaming. Lewin was the bag man – and from what we got at the crime scene, it looks like he was armed. He made a play on the shooters, and they got the draw on him first. The other vics probably would have lived if Lewin hadn’t of made that play. It made them all witnesses to a murder. They got tied up and shot with their heads down on the tiles.”

“Should have been plenty of blood.”

“There was. And footprints tracking out of it. It’ll help to convict if we catch the guys.”

“How about fingerprints, hair samples, like that?”

“No prints. No hair that didn’t belong to the victims. Traces of powder, the kind they have on those examination gloves doctors put on when they jam their fingers up your ass.”

“Okay, they wore latex gloves.” Jonas nodded. “Now let’s take it outside. I killed the driver of the Ford in the street.”

“We don’t know that for sure.”

“I killed him.”

“But we can’t confirm that without a corpse.”

“The shooters, then,” said Jonas. “I got a pretty good look at them.”

“Right. And the witness from the apartment window pretty much duplicated your description. The likenesses have been out on the national networks for two years now. They’ve been cross-checked against wanted lists, lists of guys who have broken parole. Nothing.”

“What about the Ford?”

“The Ford was abandoned on Tennyson. Blood on the backseat, most likely the blood of the man you shot. Again, no prints. The tags were stolen locally. The vehicle was traced to an auction down South, bought under a phony name. The Ford was a sheriff’s car before it went to auction.”

“Funny joke.”

“Yeah. There must have been a drop car waiting on Tennyson, but it was a workday so there weren’t many people around. The ones who were around were seniors. And they didn’t see a thing.”

“The one I killed,” said Jonas. “The white shooter called him Richard.”

“That’s right.”

“Why would he use his name? These guys were older. Pros from the looks of it. They wouldn’t be likely to make that mistake.”

“We been over all this a hundred times.”

“Maybe we missed something, Dan.”

“Okay. Maybe the white shooter had an emotional attachment to the one you shot, and in the heat of things he made a mistake. So you shot his best friend, or lover, or his brother, maybe.”

“Or his son. The white shooter was all gray.”

“The point is, knowing his name hasn’t gotten us anywhere so far. His name might not even have been Richard. You know that.” Boyle leaned forward. “Here’s what I think, Bill. The leads we got on this case aren’t gonna break it. It’s like most of the investigations we’ve handled. Somebody’s gotta come forward. An old employee, someone who has something to deal by ratting out the shooters… like that.”

“You guys have hit all the ex-employees pretty hard, haven’t you?”

“Goddamn right we did. We went back two years into the May’s files, talked to all of them, then brought them back in and talked to them again. Carl Lewin’s partner, the skinny man, he’s serving time right now on racketeering. He could have avoided a Leavenworth jolt if he knew anything, but in the end all he knew is that he got took for a lot of money that day.”

“I just can’t believe it. In broad daylight, these bastards do what they did. We have nothing, and they just get away.”

“Listen, the reality is that there probably aren’t going to be any new leads. Even the pizza parlor is gone. Nothing’s left of the old place but that plaque you dedicated last year.”

Jonas handed his envelope to Boyle. “Which brings me to this.”

Boyle opened the envelope and examined its contents. It was a photograph that had run in the Washington Post over a story about the “healing process” begun the day the Sub Place opened at the old May’s site. There had been a ceremony arranged by the chain’s public-relations people, and William Jonas had been tapped to dedicate a bronze plaque that served to memorialize the victims. In the original photograph, Jonas was in his wheelchair and flanked by his son Christopher. In the photograph Boyle held in his hand, Christopher’s face had been punched through and torn out. A strip of paper had been glued across Christopher’s body. It was cut from a typical bill received in the mail. It read, “Your account is past due.”

“When did you get this?” asked Boyle.

“Couple of days ago. It was sent to the station house and forwarded here.”

“And you think -”

“Yeah. I think it might have come from the shooters.”

Boyle forced a reassuring smile. “Could have come from anybody, Bill. What we do for a living, we’re gonna accumulate a lot of enemies.”

“I know it. But the man I killed that day was the only man I’ve ever killed. I’ve been threatened plenty in my career, mostly by the families of men I put away. But the majority of that was talk. This here has a different kind of tone to it, wouldn’t you say?”

“It is pretty direct.”

“And it comes straight out of the local paper, which means the one who sent it could be right here in town. It worries me, man.”

“You can get the Post anywhere in the country.”

“It worries me just the same.”

Boyle looked down at the blank envelope Jonas had handed him. “This the way it came?”

“No, it was mailed. I have the original right here.” Jonas wheeled himself to an end table, opened a drawer, wheeled himself back, and dropped the envelope in Boyle’s lap.

“Can I touch it?”

“My prints are already all over it. Go ahead.”

Boyle studied the envelope. “Typed address… mailed from Los Angeles. I’m gonna take this with me, Bill. And the photograph, all right?”

“That’s why I asked you to come by.”

“Don’t worry. It’s nothing, most likely.”

“That’s my boy whose face is cut out there.”

“I know.”

They sat without speaking for a minute or so. Boyle closed his eyes and drank beer while Jonas stared down at the afternoon sunlight spreading across the floor.

“The families of those people,” said Jonas, his eyes still on the floor.

Boyle nodded. “I met one of them, just before I came over here. Dimitri Karras, the father of the boy got hit by the car. Karras is working in the kitchen of a bar I drink in from time to time.”

“The department still sponsoring that support group for those people?”

“Yeah. What I heard is that the group asked the shrink we put in there to leave. But they still meet on Tuesday nights, and we still pay for the space. As much as they were in the news, it’s hard to forget them: Karras and the bartender’s wife. The waiter’s father. The pizza chef’s best friend. Bet that’s one happy group, right?”

“I ought to stop by one night and sit in with them. For a long time I thought I’d be intruding. And there was that other thing, too – I dreaded seeing those folks. I had the idea that they’d think maybe I could have done more that day -”

“You did plenty.”

“I know, but that’s what was goin’ through my mind. How did Karras seem to you?”

“Quiet,” said Boyle.

“Those people won’t be right until we find the shooters.” Jonas rubbed his cheek. “Maybe they’ll never be right.”

Boyle stood up and got into his raincoat. He slipped the envelope and photograph into the inside pocket. “You want me to get a watch put on your house for a while?”

“No, that’s okay.”

“Bill, you’re still listed in the phone book, for Christ’s sake. Better let me do that, just for grins.”

“It’s okay. Like you said, it’s probably nothing. Didn’t mean to overreact. But someone threatens your kid -”

“No problem. How’s Christopher doin’, by the way?”

“Real good. Studying to be a biologist.”

“That’s great. He’s one tall kid, too. Bet he can jam a basketball without even thinking about it.”

Jonas chuckled and shook his head.

“What’s so funny?” asked Boyle.

“Nothin’. You just cost me ten bucks, is all.”

“How’s that?”

“Never mind. Listen, Dan… keep on it, hear?”

“Bet it,” said Boyle.

The two of them shook hands. Boyle killed his beer, crushed the can, and set it on the living-room table.

Jonas got himself over to the window and watched Boyle amble down the sidewalk toward his car. Two teenage boys approached him, and Boyle opened his raincoat enough so that the butt of his Python showed. The boys stepped off the sidewalk and let Boyle pass.

Stupid bastard, thought Jonas. Stupid, crazy bastard.

He needed a cop like Boyle now.