The Cut

FIVE

In the morning, Lucas drew a crude sketch in his notebook of the eighteen residences on the 2500 block of 12th Street, Northwest. The row houses were depicted as simple adjoining squares in which he wrote address numbers, leaving room for the names of the owners.

He left his apartment, got into his Jeep, and went up to the Shepherd Park library on Georgia. The computers there were occupied by surfers who did not look as if they would be relinquishing their spots any time soon, so he drove to the nearest big-box office supply store and paid a rental fee for the use of a PC. He typically did the bulk of his investigative work on his laptop at home, using programs like People Finder, but he was about to use a public site and didn’t want to leave an electronic trail.

In a private stall, he got to work. He went to the D.C. government website, which was helpfully located under dc. gov. Above a blank box was the question, “What can we help you find?” and in the box Lucas typed, “research real property” and hit “enter.” This took him to the Real Property Tax Database Search. In the search box on that page he typed in the address on 12th Street to which the package of marijuana had been shipped. He got the name of the owner, the lot number, the current assessed value of the property, the last sale date, and the last sale price. The owner’s name was Lisa Weitzman. Lucas guessed that a person with the surname Weitzman would not be black, though it was possible, or Hispanic, which was even less likely. The last sale date of the property, 2008, told him that she was a newer resident and, in keeping with the recent history of the rapidly gentrified neighborhood, probably on the young side, and white. The assessed value of the house was currently a hundred thousand dollars below her purchase price; she had bought at the height of the market, before property values dipped. What the database did not tell him was whether she lived there; it listed owners, not tenants. But the data was valuable and had been easy to obtain.

Lucas repeated the process for every residential property on the block. As he did, he wrote the owner’s name inside the square of each address on 12th Street, along with the last sale date, on the drawing he had sketched into his notebook. When he was done he had a map of the block with each residence assigned an owner’s name and an indication of who was fairly new to the block and who was not.

Armed with this information, he left the store, phoned Tavon Lynch, bought a sandwich and a bottle of water at the nearest Subway, and drove south.

TAVON LYNCH and Edwin Davis were on the low end of the Clifton Street slope, down near 11th, sitting in Tavon’s Impala, when Lucas passed them in his Jeep. He did not slow down. He parked on 12th and waited for Tavon and Edwin to join him. Soon he saw them in the rearview, coming on foot. Tavon slid into the passenger seat beside him and Edwin got in back. It was close to 11 A.M.

Tavon was wearing a light jacket with epaulets over a Black Uhuru T-shirt, with a different pair of Lacoste sneaks on his feet than he had worn the day before. Edwin wore a UCB Live at the Crossroads T. From the two times they had met, Lucas surmised that Tavon was a reggae man and Edwin was into go-go, but with these guys their choice of shirts could have just been a fashion thing. Edwin had a belt on with a big G buckle, which Lucas guessed advertised Gucci, and he was sporting Ray-Ban aviators. Tavon was wearing, to Lucas’s untrained eye, an expensive pair of sunglasses, too. Maybe they were both wearing shades because they were high. They had reeked of marijuana when they got into the Jeep.

“What’s shakin, Spero?” said Tavon, and he offered his fist. Lucas dapped him up.

“On the job,” said Lucas.

“Us, too,” said Edwin, and Lucas saw him in the mirror, studying the screen of the phone in his hand.

“We’re gonna have to leave up out of here soon,” said Tavon. “Why’d you call us in?”

“I’ve got names to put inside the houses now,” said Lucas, patting his notebook, which rested atop the console on his right. “I was wondering if any of them meant anything to y’all.”

“Lemme see.”

Lucas opened the Moleskine notebook to the appropriate page and handed it to Tavon. Tavon moved his sunglasses to the top of his head, fitting them into his nest of braids, and stared at the diagram and notations, his lips moving soundlessly as he read.

Lucas looked through the windshield to the street. An old woman on the even-numbered side stood outside her weathered house, staring down at a garden of flowers and ground cover arranged at the base of her porch. She wore a faded housedress and held a trowel. On the same side of the street, farther down, a woman nearing middle age and wearing a business suit left her row house and walked briskly south on 12th. Lucas made voice notations into his phone, noting the addresses so that he could match the numbers to names later on.

Tavon passed the notebook over his shoulder to Edwin, then looked at Lucas. Tavon’s pupils were dilated and the whites were pink. “I don’t recognize none of the names.”

“Not even Lisa Weitzman?”

“Who’s she?”

“The woman who owns the house where you arranged the drop.”

“If you mean the white girl who left for work each mornin and stayed away all day, then that’s her. I didn’t feel the need to find out her name.”

“That’s sloppy, man.”

“Ain’t like we don’t have our operation in control,” said Tavon, with a small shrug.

“If you had it under control you wouldn’t have lost the package.”

“We’re makin money,” said Edwin, by way of rebuttal. He passed the notebook back to Lucas.

“These here are Christian Dior,” said Tavon, as if an expensive accessory erased Lucas’s criticism. He took the oversize sunglasses off his head and showed them to Lucas. “Three hundred dollars.”

Lucas grabbed a handful of his pants leg. “Dickies. Twenty-nine ninety-five.”

Tavon laughed, showing a slight overbite. It wasn’t that funny, but in his state he found it to be.

“You think we’re just dumb younguns,” said Tavon, still grinning.

“I don’t think you’re stupid,” said Lucas. “But both of you are baked right now. That tells me you’re capable of making bad decisions. And mistakes.”

“You don’t get high?”

“Not while I’m working.”

“We know what we’re doin,” said Tavon, and he looked over the backseat at Edwin, their eyes meeting meaningfully. Lucas had the feeling that they wanted to defend themselves, give him some kind of explanation or excuse for the loss of the packages. But the moment passed and a tangible silence fell inside the car.

“You into Black Uhuru?” said Lucas, nodding at Tavon’s T-shirt, breaking the quiet.

“They’re tight,” said Tavon. “Don’t tell me you know somethin about Uhuru.”

“I got some of their music. The Puma, Duckie, and Michael lineup is the best. I’m talking about the records Sly and Robbie produced. The roots stuff. ‘Leaving to Zion’ is the shit.”

“Ho,” said Tavon with surprise. “How you up with that?”

“I had a buddy in the Marine Corps who turned me on to reggae.”

“Jamaican dude?”

“White dude from Louisiana,” said Lucas, remembering his friend, that high-pitched laugh he had, the way he ducked his head when he smiled. Jamie Burdette, buried now in Metairie.

“You go to the dance halls and shit?”

“Nah,” said Lucas. “I wouldn’t know where to go, and I doubt I’d feel comfortable if I did. There was a place called Kilimanjaro, down in Adams Morgan, when I was a kid. It’s been closed for a long time.”

“I go sometimes,” said Tavon. “They got this warehouse out there in Maryland, off Colesville Road, where they be havin shows? But you need to be careful. The Rastas come to have fun, but then you got the rude boys mixed in the crowd. If things pop off, ain’t gonna be just a fistfight. Someone’s about to get shot.”

“That not your thing,” said Lucas.

“I’m a man of peace. A lover.”

“They got the best girls at Twenty Four,” said Edwin, speaking on the big club off Bladensburg Road, near New York Avenue in Northeast. “Them dance hall girls stink.”

“So do your drawers.”

“Your father’s.”

“Edwin likes the VIP room,” said Tavon.

“I just like the women.”

“You mean, like, the one I seen you with the other night? One they call Precious?”

“That’s her name,” said Edwin defensively.

“She look like that beast, too.”

“Go ahead, Tay.”

“Too bad you can’t satisfy the girls like I do,” said Tavon.

“I don’t need to. When I gyrate, they bug.”

“You know they call me the Cobra.”

“Now you gonna brag on your tongue,” said Edwin.

“When you break a woman off,” said Tavon, “you got to break her off proper.”

“If I can’t buy it at the Shoppers Food Warehouse,” said Edwin, “I don’t eat it.”

“Look there,” said Lucas, stopping them, because if he didn’t they would go on. “You guys see that old lady up by her house, with the shovel in her hand?”

“So?” said Edwin.

“That little garden she’s got, looks like it’s her pride. At her age, you know she’s not working. This time of year, I bet she’s out there every day, tending to her flowers.”

“You sayin she might have seen something?” said Tavon.

“She’d be someone I would try to talk to,” said Lucas.

“Don’t let us stop you.”

“I’m just giving you an idea of how I work.”

“We don’t need to be schooled on that,” said Tavon. “That’s your specialty. That’s why Anwan hired you. We’ll stick to our thing.”

“Matter of fact, we gotta bounce,” said Edwin, seeing something on his phone screen and putting his hand on Tavon’s shoulder.

“Y’all got a pickup?” said Lucas.

“A’ight, Spero,” said Tavon, pointedly ignoring the question. “You know how to get up with us if you need us.”

“You guys be safe,” said Lucas.

They left the Jeep and walked back toward Clifton and their SS. Lucas watched them in the side-view mirror, cracking on each other, laughing. He liked them both. He also felt they were in way over their heads.

Lucas checked his notebook, got out of his Cherokee, crossed the street to the east side of 12th, and walked toward the house where the old woman still stood near her garden. The owner of record was Leonard Woods. The home had been purchased for well under a hundred grand and was assessed at six times that today.

Lucas stood at the foot of the concrete steps looking up at the woman, shapeless in her dress. Her hair was white, thin, and uncombed. Even from this distance he could see that her face was dotted with raised moles.

“Afternoon,” Lucas called out.

“Just about,” said the woman. Her tone did not invite further conversation, but it did not deter him.

“Nice garden,” he said. “Is the ground cover there, the purple flowers, is that phlox?”

“Creeping phlox, yeah,” she said sourly. “You selling somethin? Cause if you are, I don’t talk to solicitors. I got a sign right up there on the door says the same.”

“No, ma’am,” said Lucas.

“Well?”

“I’m an investigator. I’m looking into the disappearance of a package from the porch of a home on this street.”

“Investigator for who?”

“I represent a client.”

“Who is it?”

“Unfortunately, that’s confidential.”

“Well then, we got nothing to talk about.”

“I’m attempting to retrieve my client’s lost property.”

“An in surance thing,” she said with something close to disgust.

“Is it Miss Woods?”

“Young man, you don’t know me. Don’t even be so bold as to call me by my name.”

“I apologize,” said Lucas, knowing that the conversation was completely blown. “Maybe we’ll talk again when it’s a better time.”

“Ain’t gonna be a better time,” said the woman. “Go on, now.” She made a shoo-away motion with the hand that held the trowel. “Before I call my son at his job. You do not want that.”

“Sorry to trouble you,” said Lucas, bowing his head slightly and walking back to his car. When he got in it, he looked at her house. She had gone inside. He didn’t blame her for being ornery. She was somebody’s mother, probably a nice person when she wasn’t being bothered by a stranger. He was sorry he had spoiled her peaceful day.

Shadows shrank and disappeared. They grew elsewhere as the sun moved across the sky.

A late-middle-aged man with a large belly came out of a row house. He was wearing old khakis, a long polo shirt, and a Redskins hat. He walked down the sidewalk in the direction of Lucas’s Jeep. He was softly singing a song, a slo-jam that Lucas was familiar with but could not identify.

“ ‘Make me say it again, girl,’ ” sang the man.

In his notebook, Lucas checked the diagram of the street.

The man neared, and Lucas, his arm resting on the lip of the open window, said, “Mr. Houghton?”

“Huh?” The man stopped walking. He seemed momentarily dazed. Then he looked back over his shoulder at the house he’d come from.

“Mr. Houghton, is it?” said Lucas.

“Nah, that’s not me,” said the man genially. “Mr. Houghton’s deceased. His daughter stays there now. I was just visiting.”

“Oh,” said Lucas. “Look, I don’t mean to bother you, but I’m looking into a theft on this block.”

“You police?”

“I’m an investigator,” said Lucas. It didn’t answer the question exactly, and it wasn’t a lie. “A package went missing from the porch of a home across from your friend’s house. About a week and a half ago.” Lucas told him the exact day.

“I ain’t been to this street but twice in the last year. And my lady friend wasn’t around then. She just got back from a three-week cruise, no lie.”

“Got it.” Lucas pointed his chin up at the man’s hat. “ ’Skins gonna do it this year?”

“Not this year.”

“I like Donovan.”

“The fans in Philly treated him like dirt.”

“Yeah, I know. I hope when we play the Eagles we shove it up their asses.”

“We’ll play up. But we ain’t got that full squad yet that can compete at the next level. Wasn’t anything wrong with Jason Campbell. They never did give him an O line. He had heart.”

“No doubt.”

“I like McNabb, too. But this move wasn’t about upgrading the position. It was about sellin jerseys and merchandise. I won’t even go out to that stadium and put money in that owner’s pocket. I’m a fan for life, but until we get a new owner I’ll just watch the games on TV.”

“I heard that,” said Lucas. In fact, he heard a similar version of that sentiment in D.C. damn near every day.

“Good lookin out, young fella.”

“You, too.”

The man walked away. Lucas heard him singing the same song as he neared the Clifton Street cross.

Lucas ate his sub, a BMT, and washed it down with water. Time passed and he felt the need to pee. He reached into the back of the Jeep and retrieved an empty half-gallon plastic jug he kept there when he was doing surveillance. He urinated into the jug, capped it, and placed it on the floor of the backseat.

Minutes later, an MPD squad car turned onto 12th and cruised slowly by Lucas. Lucas did not stiffen, nor did he eye the officer behind the wheel of the car beyond taking mental note of the driver’s race (black), general age (on the young side), and gender (male). Lucas was not breaking any law, but he was not looking for any unnecessary confrontation. The car, affixed with 4D stickers, kept on going, and at the end of 12th the driver turned right on Euclid. Something flickered faintly in Lucas’s mind as the car disappeared from view.

The street settled back to quiet. The sun moved west.

Teenage kids began to appear later in the afternoon. Those who had been visited by a guest speaker that day wore street clothes, as they were allowed to do, but most wore white or purple polo shirts with khakis, the school’s uniform. Though there were many white residents in this neighborhood now, the kids coming from the schools were African American, African immigrant, and Hispanic, with a few Vietnamese and Chinese in the mix. The air was filled with their conversations: loud, boisterous, and laced with profanity. Even as they moved in groups of two or three, they occasionally stared at the phones in their hands and texted as they walked.

A young man walked alone down 12th. Lucas studied him in the side-view: sixteen, seventeen, on the tall side, very thin, dark skin, and braids that touched his shoulders. He was wearing purple over khaki. His lips were moving. He was talking to himself.

Lucas watched him turn up the steps of a house on the odd-numbered, west side of the street, the row house that was left-connected to the house of Lisa Weitzman, where the package had disappeared. Lucas checked his notebook quickly and stepped out of his Jeep. He jogged across the street as the young man neared his porch.

“Hey, Lindsay,” said Lucas, using the last name of the home’s owner, a woman named Karen Lindsay.

The young man stopped and turned. “Yeah?”

“You got a minute?”

The boy studied Lucas-his age, his build, his utilitarian clothing-and then he looked down the block toward his high school. Lucas’s eyes naturally followed. Back on Clifton there remained many students, hanging out in groups, walking slowly; uniformed police officers standing on the sidewalk, verbally moving the students along; an occupied squad car parked nose-east on the street.

“I just have a quick question for you,” said Lucas, turning his attention back to the Lindsay boy.

“No,” said Lindsay, moving quickly again, going up the steps.

“Hold up,” said Lucas.

“No!” shouted Lindsay, turning the key to his front door and disappearing inside his house.

Lucas walked back to his Jeep. He had enough experience to know that his time spent on 12th Street had not been wasted. He always learned something, even if that nugget of knowledge was not readily apparent. It was possible that the Lindsay boy distrusted anyone who looked like police, or didn’t want to be seen by his peers talking to an authority figure. It was also possible that he had real information related to the theft. At any rate, Lucas knew where this Lindsay kid lived and where he went to school. He would be easy to find.