Under Siege

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Why? Tell me why.”

“Because I wanted it,” Elizabeth snarled. “Is that too difficult for you to understand?”

Thanos Liarakos pinched his nose and stroked an eyebrow. His associates had seen him do this many times in the courtroom, and they knew it was an unconscious mannerism to handle stress. If his wife knew the significance of the gesture, she ignored it now. She hugged her knees and stared at the hospital’s stenciled name on the sheets.

After a moment he said, “That stuff will kill you.”

She sneered.

“What am I supposed to say to you? Should I talk about the kids? Should I tell you how much I love you? Should I tell you once again that you’re playing Russian roulette? And you are going to lose.”

“I’m not one of your half-witted jurors. Spare me the eloquence.”

“You’re prostituting your soul for this white powder, Elizabeth. Prostituting your dignity. Your intelligence. Your humanity. You are! You’re trading everything that makes life worth living for a few minutes of feeling good. God, you are a fool.”

“If that’s the way you feel, why don’t you get out of here? I’m not going to sit quietly while you call me a whore. You bastard!”

“What do you want, Elizabeth?”

She glared at him and wrapped her arms around her chest.

“Do you want to come home?”

She said nothing.

“I’m going to lay it out for you in black and white. You’re a cocaine addict. When they discharge you in a few days you’re going back to that clinic. I’ve already made the phone calls and sent them a check.” This would be her third trip. “You are going to sign yourself in and stay until you are cured, finally, once and for all. You are going to learn to live without cocaine for the rest of your life. Then you may come home.”

“Jesus, you make it sound like I’ve got a nasty virus or a pesky little venereal disease. ‘When the pus in your vagina drys up—’ ”

“You can kick it, Elizabeth.”

“You’re so goddamn certain! I’m the one that’s in here living it. What if I can’t?”

“If you don’t, I’ll file for a divorce. I’ll ask for custody and I’ll get it. You can whore and steal and do whatever else you have to to maintain your addiction, and when the people from the morgue call, the kids and I will see that you get a Christian burial and a nice little marble slab. Every year on Mother’s Day we’ll put flowers on your grave.”

Tears ran down Elizabeth’s face. “Maybe I should just kill myself and get it over with,” she said softly. But too late. Her husband missed this histrionic fillip. He was already halfway through the door.

Before she could say anything else he disappeared down the corridor.

Henry Charon was at the apartment on New Hampshire Avenue at nine a.m. when the truck from the furniture rental company came. Grisella Clifton wasn’t home, and Charon felt vaguely put out. He showed the truck crew where to put the bed, the couch, the dresser, the chairs, and the television, then tipped the driver and his helper a ten-spot each.

At eleven o’clock he was at the apartment he’d rented in Georgetown when the truck from the furniture rental company in Arlington arrived, A-to-Z Rentals. The deliverymen had the furniture inside and arranged by eleven-forty. He tipped both those men and locked the door behind him as he left.

At one he was at the apartment near Lafayette Circle. The telephone company installation person — a woman — showed up a half hour late. She apologized and Charon waved it aside. She had almost finished when the furniture arrived, this time from a rental company in Chevy Chase.

At four p.m. he bought a car from an elderly lady living in Bethesda. He had called five people with cars for sale in the classified section of the newspaper and settled on her because she sounded like an elderly recluse.

She was. Even better, she peered at him myopically. At her daughter’s insistence, she explained at length while he nodded understandingly, she was giving up the car, a seven-year-old Chevrolet two-door sedan, brown. The plates were valid for three more months. He paid her cash and drove it straight to a Sears auto service center where he had the oil and plugs changed, the radiator serviced, all the belts and hoses replaced, and a new battery and new tires installed. While he was waiting he ate a hamburger in the mall.

As he strolled through the evening crowd toward the auto service center at the north end of the mall, he passed an electronics store. In he went. Fifteen minutes later he came out with a police band radio scanner.

That evening at the Lafayette Circle apartment he read the instruction book and played with the dials and switches. The radio worked well whether plugged into the wall socket or on its rechargeable batteries. He stretched out on the bed and listened to the dispatcher and the officers on the street. They routinely used two-digit codes to shorten the transmissions. Tomorrow he would go to the library and try to find a list of the codes. And he would visit more electronics stores and buy more scanners, but only one at each store.

Tomorrow the telephone people were installing phones in the other two apartments. And tomorrow he would have to shop for food and first-aid supplies. Then tomorrow night he would begin moving food, water, and medical supplies to the subway hideout.

Maybe the following night he could put some dried beef and bandages in the cave in Rock Creek Park.

So much to do and so little time.

As he listened to the scanner he mentally went through the checklist one more time.

The real problem was afterward, after the hunt. He did not yet have a solution and he began to worry about it again. The FBI would have his fingerprints — that was inevitable. Henry Charon had no illusions. The fact that the fingerprints the FBI acquired would match not a single set of the tens of millions they had on file would eventually cause the agents to look in the right places. They would have plenty of time — all they needed, in spite of exhortations by politicians and outraged pundits — and the cooperation of every law-enforcement officer in the nation.

Eventually, inevitably, the net would pull him in. Unless he was not there. Or unless the FBI stopped looking because they thought they already had their man. The false clues would not have to hold up forever; indeed, every day that passed would allow the real trail to get colder and colder. A month or so would probably be sufficient.

Why not a red herring?

At three the following afternoon Jack Yocke was finishing a story on the collapse of Second Potomac Savings and Loan. His editor had told him earlier to keep the story tight: space was going to be at a premium in tomorrow’s paper. The Soviets had just announced an immediate cessation of foreign aid to Cuba and Libya. Both nations would be permitted to continue to purchase goods from the Soviet Union but only at world market prices, with hard currency.

Yocke hung up the telephone without looking and kept right on tapping on the computer keyboard. The authorities were fully satisfied that the late Walter P. Harrington had been using Second Potomac to launder money for the crack trade. Local crack money or from somewhere else? No one was saying, not even off the record.

And someone had used a high-powered rifle to blow his head off while he drove the left lane of the Beltway at fifty-five miles per hour — his widow fervently insisted that he always drove fifty-five.

It certainly had not been a motorist enraged over Harrington’s highway manners. Not using a rifle.

Money, money, money. Hadn’t the other man killed the evening Harrington died also had something to do with money? Didn’t he own some kind of check-cashing business?

The phone rang.

Still tapping the Second Potomac story, Yocke cradled the receiver against his shoulder and cheek. “Yocke.”

“Jack, there’s been a shooting at the day-care center in the Shiloh Baptist Church, next door to the Jefferson projects. About thirty minutes or so ago. Would you run over there? I’m also sending a photographer.”

“Yo.”

Yocke looked over his story, pushed RECORD, and then left the terminal to turn itself off.

The Jefferson projects was not the worst public housing project in the city, nor was it the best. It was simply average. Ninety-eight percent black and Hispanic, the tenants existed in a netherworld of poverty and squalor where the crack trade boomed twenty-four hours a day and men sneaked in and out to avoid jeopardizing their girlfriends’ welfare eligibility.

All the legitimate merchants in a five-block radius of the projects had long ago gone out of business, except for one sixty-year-old Armenian grocer who had been robbed forty-two times in the last sixty months, a record even for Washington. Yocke had done a story on him six months or so ago. He had been robbed four times since then.

“One of these crackheads is going to kill you some night,” Yocke had told the grocer.

“Where am I gonna go? Answer me that. I grew up in the house across the street. I’ve never lived anywhere else. The grocery business is the only trade I know. And they never steal over a day’s receipts.”

“Some strung-out kid is going to smear your brains all over the back counter.”

“It’s sorta like a tax, y’know? That’s the way I look at it. The scumbags take my money at gunpoint and buy crack. The city takes my money legally and pays the mayor a salary he doesn’t earn and he uses it to buy crack. The feds take my money legally and pay welfare to that crowd in the projects and they let their kids starve while they spend the money on crack. What the hell’s the difference?”

Still pondering the crack tax, Yocke slowed the pool car as he went by the Armenian’s corner grocery and looked in. The old man was bagging groceries for an elderly black lady.

He parked the car two blocks from the project and walked. As he rounded a corner, there they were, long three-story gray buildings, four to a block, decaying without grace under a cold gray sky.

Something about the scene jarred him. Oh yeah, the place was deserted. The teenage boys who manned the sidewalks and sold crack to the white people who drove in from the suburbs were gone. The cops were here.

Yocke veered onto a sidewalk between the buildings and strode along purposefully, his steps echoing on the cinderblock walls and the gray, vacant windows.

White man, white man, the echoes said, over and over. White man, white man …

The church was across the street from the projects, on the western edge. Police cars in front, lights flashing. An ambulance. One cop keeping an eye on the vehicles.

Yocke showed the cop his ID. “Understand there’s been a shooting?”

The cop was a black man in his fifties with a pot gut. The strap that held his pistol in its holster was unlatched. The gun could be drawn in a clean, crisp motion. The cop jerked his thumb over his shoulder and grunted.

“Can I go in?”

“After they bring the body out. Be another ten minutes or so.”

Yocke got out his notebook and pencil. “Who is it?”

“Was.”

“Yeah.”

“The woman who ran the day care. I don’t know her name.”

“What happened?”

“Well, near as I can figure, from what I’ve heard, a couple squad cars stopped over on Grant.” Grant was the street bordering the west side of the projects. “The dealers ran through the projects. A cop chased one guy. He went charging into the church, through the day-care center toward the playground door, and when the victim didn’t get out of his way fast enough, he drilled her. One shot. Right through the heart.”

The radio transceiver on the cop’s belt holster crackled into life. He held it to his ear with his left hand. His right remained near his gun butt.

Other cops were searching the abandoned buildings and tenements to the west of the church. The cryptic transmissions floated from the radios of the parked cruisers.

When the radio fell momentarily silent, Yocke asked the patrolman, “Where were the kids when the shooting occurred?”

“Where the hell do you think? Right there. They saw the whole thing.”

“When?”

“About two-forty or so.”

“You haven’t got the killer yet?”

The cop spit on the sidewalk. “Not yet.”

“Description?”

“Black male, about eighteen or so, five feet ten to six feet, maybe a hundred fifty or sixty. Medium-length hair. Was wearing a red ball-cap, black leather coat, white running shoes. That’s the description from the cop chasing him. All the kids say is that he had a big gun.”

Big gun, Yocke scribbled. Yeah, any pistol vomiting bullets into real people, with real blood flying, it’s a big gun when you remember it. Big as your nightmares, big as evil personified, big as sudden death.

“How old are the kids?”

“Youngest’s a few weeks. Oldest is almost six.”

“Name of the cop chasing the shooter?”

“Ask the lieutenant.”

“Why was the cop chasing the shooter?”

“Ask the lieutenant.”

“Is there anything else you can tell me?”

“Your newspaper sucks.”

Yocke put the notebook in his pocket and rolled his collar upright. The wind was picking up. Dirt and trash swirled around the cars and funneled between the barracks of the projects. A chilly wind.

“May rain,” the cop said when he saw Yocke looking at the gray sky.

“Might.”

“Been a dry fall. We need the rain.”

“How many years you been on the force?”

“Too fucking many.”

The minutes passed. Yocke fought the chill wind as the police radio told its story of futility. The man who had done the shooting was nowhere to be found.

The Post photographer showed up. He burned film as Yorke shivered.

Finally, after twenty minutes, the ambulance crew brought the body out on a wheeled stretcher covered with a white sheet, which was strapped down to keep it from blowing away. It went into the vehicle and the crew followed. One man got in the driver’s seat, turned off the flashing overhead lights, and drove away.

“You can go in now,” the cop beside Yocke told him.

The church foyer was dirty and dark and needed paint. The sounds of children sobbing were plainly audible.

On the wall a small announcement board gave the title of this Sunday’s sermon: “The Christian’s Choice in Today’s World.” Beneath the sermon board was a faded poster with a girl’s picture: “Missing since 4/21/88. Black female, 13, five feet two.” Her name was there, what she had been wearing that evening nineteen months ago, a phone number to call.

A stairway led up to the left. To the sanctuary, probably. Yocke continued along the hallway, toward the sobbing. At the end of the hall the door stood open.

A young woman had the children huddled around her. About a dozen of them. God, they’re so small! Talking softly among themselves were three policemen in uniform, two in plainclothes. Two lab technicians were repacking their cases. And curiously, no one stood on or near the ubiquitous chalk outline on the floor.

The Post photographer, Harold Dorgan, followed Yocke in. He began taking pictures of the children and the young woman trying to comfort them.

The lieutenant was in his forties. His shirt was dirty and he needed a shave. He also needed a breath freshener, Yocke soon discovered. After Dorgan had taken a dozen pictures, the lieutenant told him that was enough and shooed him out.

The victim’s name was Jane Wilkens. Age thirty-six. Unmarried. Mother of three children. Killed by one .357-inch-diameter slug that had gone through her entire body, including her heart, and buried itself in the wall near the rear door. Wilkens had started shouting as the gunman burst through the door with the pistol in his hand. As he came at her he pointed the weapon and fired one shot from a distance of perhaps five feet. She was still falling when he ran by her. He jerked open the door to the playground and ran out.

No one saw which way he went after he went through the door. The playground was surrounded by a five-foot-high fence that an agile man could vault anywhere he wished.

The pistol had not been found, so searching officers had been advised to proceed with caution. “Maybe a thirty-eight Special,” the lieutenant said, “but more likely a three fifty-seven Magnum. Damn bullet went through plaster, a layer of drywall, and shattered a concrete block. Almost went through it.”

“A cop was chasing this guy,” Yocke murmured.

“Yeah. Patrolman Harry Phelps.”

“Why?”

“Because he ran.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean a couple cruisers pulled up over on Grant and a bunch of those kids took off like jackrabbits. Officer Phelps ran after this guy. The suspect pulled a weapon, looked back over his shoulder several times at the officer, and charged into this church. Officer Phelps kept coming, heard the shot, and stopped by the victim to administer first aid. She lived for about fifteen seconds after he reached her.”

“So Jane Wilkens would still be alive if Phelps had not elected to chase this guy?”

“Whatever you’re implying, I don’t like it,” the lieutenant snarled. “And I don’t like your face. Phelps — Officer Phelps — was doing his job. We’re trying to police this shithole, Mr. Washington fucking Post!”

“Yeah, but—”

“Get outta my face!”

“Listen. I—”

“Out! This is a crime scene. Out!”

Jack Yocke went.

Dorgan was sitting on the curb in front of the church. Yocke sat down beside him. The overweight cop attending the door ignored them.

“What d’ya think?” Dorgan said.

“I don’t think. I gave that up years ago.”

“I’m going to walk over to Grant and snap a few, then head back downtown. I think I got some good shots of the kids. Really tough on them to see that.”

“Yeah.”

“Try not to get mugged.” With that Dorgan rose, adjusted his camera bags, and trudged away. Yocke watched him go.

The curb was cold on his fanny. He stood and dusted his seat, then walked back and forth on the sidewalk.

After a while the kids came out. Each of them was carrying a little brown paper bag. Yocke watched them disappear into the projects.

A few minutes later the cops began dribbling out. When the lieutenant came out he ignored Yocke and climbed into the passenger seat of a cruiser. The uniformed officer with him got behind the wheel.

Yocke saw the man coming a block away. With his hands in his jacket pockets, his head up, he walked rapidly in this direction.

He’s coming here, Yocke decided, and watched him come. About forty-five, he had short gray hair. His chocolate skin was stretched tight over his cheekbones and jaw.

The man looked at the cop and Yocke and went up the three steps and through the door without pausing.

Yocke leaned on the little railing that protected what had once been grass. The temperature had dropped at least five degrees and the sky was grayer. He was wondering whether he should return to the office or try to get back inside when a drop of rain struck him.

He set off through the projects, back toward the car. Droplets of rain raised little puffs of dirt beside the empty sidewalks. He met a policeman coming the other way. The officer had his pistol in his right hand, down by his leg, and was talking on his hand-held radio. He ignored Yocke.

The pool car was still intact. All four wheels still attached, the windshield unbroken, the doors still locked and closed. Another miracle.

Yocke drove slowly through the projects as rain spattered the windshield. On impulse, he went back to the church and parked in front.

All the cops were gone.

Yocke locked the car and went inside.

In the foyer he paused and listened. The door to the day-care center was still open and he could hear voices. He walked toward it.

The young woman who had comforted the children was crying on the shoulder of the man Yocke had seen enter, the man with the gray hair and the skin stretched tight across his face.

“You a reporter?” the man asked.

“Yes.” Yocke looked at the children’s chairs, decided they were too small, and lowered himself into a cross-legged position on the floor.

“I want you to write this down. Write it down and write it good. It’s all the writing that Jane is ever gonna get.”

Yocke got out the notebook.

“Jane Wilkens was the mother of my children. Had two kids by her. We never lived together. Asked her to marry me years ago but she wouldn’t. She knew I used to be on heroin and if I lived around these damn projects, I’d go off the wagon. But she couldn’t live anywhere else. This was where her work was, these kids. These kids were her work. She was trying to save some of them.

“She grew up in the Jefferson projects, but got herself out. Got an education. Got a scholarship to George Washington and got a degree in biology. Went to Pennsylvania and got a masters. She worked for a couple years as a microbiologist, then gave it up and came back here to this church to run the day care. Work with the kids.”

“Why?”

“You been in those projects? Really looked? Try to imagine living in there. No privacy, walls paper thin, kids abused and hungry, trash everywhere, light bulbs out, doors kicked in, liquor sales out of one apartment and crack out of another, the white women from the suburbs buying theirs down on the streets, the smell of shit and piss and filth and hopelessness. Yeah, it stinks. It gets in your nose so bad you’ll never get it out. I smelled it again coming down the street this evening.

“So the kids are growing up in this manure pile, growing up like little rats, without love, without food, without anybody to hug them. Jane wanted to give them what their mamas couldn’t. She wanted to give them a little love. Maybe save a couple. Can’t save ’em all, but maybe save a few. Their mamas — all strung out, head nursing, whoring, whatever will turn a dollar to get the stuff from the number-one man.”

“She took two kids to the emergency room last week,” the young woman said. “One was starving to death even though she was eating — eating here, anyway — and the other had a bacterial infection of the lungs. Jane did things like that all the time.”

The man shook his head, faintly irritated. “But Jane never tried to shut down the trade,” he said slowly, “never interfered with anybody’s addiction, never passed judgment, never talked to the police. She just tried to save the kids. The kids …”

“What’s your name?”

“Name’s Tom Shannon. I work for the city. Drive a street sweeper. I’m president of a chapter of Narcotics Anonymous. Biggest chapter in the city. Me, I try to do what I can to help the people who want to help themselves. I tried to get a chapter started over here in the Jeffersons, but there wasn’t no interest. You gotta want to help yourself.

“Maybe that’s what’s wrong. Jane was trying to save a few little kids and I was trying to save the grownups that wanta save themselves, and nobody was doing anything for all these people who are locked in the cycle. Nobody was attacking the trade. So the trade killed Jane.”

“A man killed Jane.”

“No, the crack trade killed her. That guy who pulled the trigger, he was an addict and a dealer. He had it on him. So he ran from the cops. And he shot Jane because she was standing in front of him screaming. No other reason. She was just there. All the people who are making money from the crack business killed her as sure as if they pulled the trigger. They don’t give a damn who they hurt. They don’t give a damn if the world blows up, as long as they get theirs. They killed Jane.”

The young woman was sitting by herself now, drying her eyes, listening to Tom Shannon. He was looking straight into Yocke’s eyes.

“Now I’m telling you and you can write it any way you want, but I’m not going to be a victim anymore. Jane was a victim and I was a victim. No more! I’m not going to be a victim anymore!”