I shook my head. Now wasn’t the moment to face those issues but, unfortunately, thoughts of Julie made me think of my ex-partner, Jim Kransky, who was dead and gone, thanks to a lunatic’s bullet. A faltering friendship that would, now, never be fully healed.
Which left Amanda, who had made an emergency landing in my life with her own problems not long ago, but now it seemed like she’d always been there. And at some of the lowest points of dealing with my cancer she’d given me something to think about besides myself, which was exactly what I’d needed. If she left, it wasn’t just a matter of loss for me, it was a matter of survival.
“Marty, are you feeling okay?” she said, as if on cue. Both my disease and chemo had made me queasy in the past and she’d seen the effects firsthand.
I forced a smile. “I’m great. Who’s up for a bottle of champagne?”
Chapter Six
Wealth, ethnicity, age, and function divide most cities into distinct neighborhoods, giving them their own particular character and sense of difference. But a lack of industry in DC brought the common divisions of race and financial status into starker relief than almost anywhere else. Without factories or docks or rail yards, the only thing that separated people from each other was themselves.
As a result, DC has always been two cities in one, split down the north-south axis. White middle- and upper-class residents lived almost without fail in the northwest and southwest. Southeast and northeast DC were black and usually poor. The only exceptions were a few blocks around Capitol Hill where the old brownstones of the late Victorian period had become gentrified by virtue of the ever-increasing real estate prices and the encroaching stony gray buildings of government that were, in effect, a no-man’s land.
The section of Southeast that Terrence and Florence Witherspoon called home was Barry Farm, a neighborhood that—though located across the Anacostia River—was still technically part of DC. It was an area synonymous with crack dealing, shootouts, and car-jackings.
I got depressed thinking about it. I remembered the area before crack poked its ugly head in the door back in the eighties. It hadn’t been a playground of delights back then, either, but when crack hit the streets, it was as if violent crime found an extra gear that it didn’t know it had. There were nights we’d just hang around a murder scene after things wrapped up, since we knew we’d have to turn around and come back in an hour, anyway. Crack became a way of life after a while, but unfortunately so did the level of violence and now no one really remembers it any other way. There were kids who thought it perfectly normal that there were five murders a night. You could get shot, stabbed, or mugged in the north-west part of DC, too, but at least the odds seemed to be on your side. In Southeast, there were no odds. It was a sure thing.
But it was time to talk to Terrence Witherspoon’s widow. I broke my rule about calling first—I realized I’d be doing a lot of driving if I was going to chase down the leads in four different murders. I’d gotten lucky that Libney Garcia had been home and willing to talk and I might not get that lucky again. I didn’t want to waste time chasing empty leads.
I had no idea when people were awake, asleep, or at work anymore. I remembered a time when you knew within a couple of minutes when people were at their desks, at lunch, or at home watching the tube. With the Internet making all things possible in all places, I didn’t know if I was catching someone as they were waking up, going to bed, or sitting at work.
But if I didn’t call, I’d never know. So, I picked up the phone and dialed Florence Witherspoon’s number. It rang ten or twelve times before someone answered.
“’Lo?” The voice was a man’s, sleepy and deep.
“Could I speak to Florence Witherspoon, please?”
“Who this?”
“Marty Singer. I’m a friend of Sam Bloch’s with the DC police department,” I said, framing it in such a way that I neither alleged nor denied that I was a cop.
“Who?”
“Marty Singer.”
“Who you with?”
“DC Police,” I said, dropping the sham. “Florence Witherspoon there?”
But he was already not listening, talking to someone else. I couldn’t make out what the other voice said, but then my surly friend said, “He say he with the police.” Then, “I don’t
know
. He didn’t say he an insurance man.”
The phone was dropped, then picked up again. A woman’s voice came on the line. Soft, worn, like a cotton shirt that had been washed too much. “Hello, this is Florence Witherspoon. Who’s this, please?”
“Marty Singer, Mrs. Witherspoon. I’m sorry about calling like this, but I was hoping to talk to you regarding your husband’s death.”
“You said you worked with my husband?”
“Ah,” I said, thinking maybe I shouldn’t have left the sham behind so quickly. “Not exactly. I used to be with the MPDC but since I was in Homicide, I never knew your husband personally. I’m working with another department that’s investigating your husband’s case as well as that of several other officers.”
“‘Another department’?” she asked. I could hear the frown in her voice. “‘Used to be’? This doesn’t have the ring of something official.”
“It’s not,” I said, feeling the fragility of the conversation and trying not to misstep. “A colleague still with the force noticed that your husband’s death wasn’t being investigated as…thoroughly…as it should be and asked me to look into it. There’s no official connection to the MPDC or any investigation they’re doing right now.”
“You don’t think DC police are doing their job?” she asked.
“I didn’t say that. I think they’ll do their best on your husband’s case. It’s more a problem at the top.”
She paused, then said, “This is all sounding very mysterious, Mr. Singer.”
“It would be easier to explain in person, I think. Could I swing by sometime today, perhaps, and talk to you about it?”
“Don’t you work?” she asked, sounding amused and a little less worn out.
“I’m retired, ma’am,” I said. “My time is my own.”
“Well, you’re in luck. It’s spring break at my school and so is mine. For this week, at least. Do you know where we live?”
I dressed casually but with an eye towards professional neatness: black slacks, blue shirt, black blazer. Fashion wasn’t a strength of mine, so I scanned the shoes stacked in the back of my closet like they were suspects in a felony lineup. Loafers? Cowboy boots? Did I want to look casual or like I was there to kick ass? I was a white cop—or the closest thing to one—going into a predominantly black neighborhood looking for information I wasn’t actually entitled to. Snakeskin cowboy boots probably weren’t what I was looking for. I went with the loafers.
I might’ve ditched the blazer to tone down the image even more, but it gave me an air of respectability. Besides, that’s where the gun went, a SIG Sauer P220 Compact in a shoulder rig. I grabbed my keys and headed out early. I knew Southeast as well as most, having spent plenty of time there in my role with Homicide, but it wouldn’t hurt to look the place over before I actually knocked on the Witherspoons’ door. I rolled the windows down, cracked the sun roof, and headed for town.
. . .
The 14th Street bridge took me from Virginia and into the District by way of the lunatic’s plaything that is the combination of Route 1 and Interstate 395. Ten lanes of vehicular madness, all gunning at about seventy-five not half a mile from the White House. Staying alive took precedence over sightseeing, but in my mind’s eye, I could see the Jefferson Memorial resting along the waters of the Tidal Basin to my left, an elegant, white bump along the flat, serene banks of the Potomac. After a minute, the highway curved to the east and I could almost feel the thrum of DC to the north. Ninety percent of the city was on my left. But I was headed across the Anacostia River, the murkier, less-loved sister to the Potomac, and on to Barry’s Farm.
The off-ramp gave me my first taste of Southeast in nearly a year. Soiled, discarded clothes and plastic bottles of all shapes, sizes, and colors littered the sides of the road like it was the high-tide mark after a hurricane. Shattered glass had been swept to the shoulder, but not removed, marking the sites of at least three separate accidents. Chain-link fencing—leaning to one side or another, but never straight—lined the ramp, trapping flyers, newspapers, and fast-food wrappers like a fisherman’s net, piling the catch as high as my knees in places.
As I drove towards the Witherspoons’, the streets got slightly cleaner and a little less depressed-looking than the entry into the neighborhood. I shouldn’t have judged the whole place from the state of its off-ramp. But, still, just an hour past noon, the place had too many people hanging around on the corners, too many zombies plodding aimlessly up streets or passed out on steps, too many guys laughing and kidding each other, but looking in three or four directions at once. The few store fronts that didn’t have For Lease signs on the front had bars across every window. A couple only had cashier-style windows with a small drawer to take cash in and slip goods through. Graffiti covered most open spaces on businesses and some homes. The sides of many buildings sported efforts to sand-blast or paint the vandalism away…but the attempts were usually covered by a half-dozen new tags.
The Witherspoons lived on a street called Douglas Place on the very edge of Barry Farm. I was pleasantly surprised as I drove past the house and apartment complexes; the area was greener than what I’d passed through to get here. There were actual lawns and the houses were small, real small, but maintained. No broken windows, no trash in the yards, no tire-less junkers parked out front. The cars were still ten years old, but the block gave off a feel of community instead of desperation.
I parked and got out. A waist-high chain-link fence surrounded the property, so I stopped at the gate and looked the place over from the sidewalk. The Witherspoons’ was one of the neatest homes on the block, a prim, single-family house with vinyl siding and a black, wrought-iron railing going up a simple cement set of steps. The walkway leading to the front step from the sidewalk was cement slab, but the grass was so neatly trimmed it appeared to have been edged by hand with a pair of scissors. Open windows, framed with shutters, flanked the door. Through them, I could see filmy curtains rising and falling with the breeze.
A woman wearing a broad-brimmed hat was on her hands and knees gardening underneath one of the windows, patiently turning up the earth and sifting through the dirt, looking for pebbles and stones that she tossed into a growing pile by the porch. She wore jeans and a pink warm-up jacket. She was slim, with a good figure.
“Mrs. Witherspoon?”
She straightened and turned around. She plucked off a pair of gardening gloves, a finger at a time, and dropped them on the ground next to the trowel she’d been using. She kept the hat on, though, and the edges bounced and waggled as she approached me from across the shallow lawn.
“Mr. Singer,” she said as she came near. She was about five and a half feet tall and had a slow, graceful swing to her walk. She seemed to be one of those women who kept her bearing no matter what she had on. The way she moved across the grass, she could’ve been gardening in a ball gown. Her face was a cocoa brown, with dark circles under her green eyes. Her nose was graced with a spray of freckles and was small but wide, giving her an almost feline appearance.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
She gave me a low-wattage smile. “No ma’ams, please. I get that at school all fall, all spring, and sometimes all summer, too. Flo is fine.”
“Marty, then,” I said.
“Marty,” she said, holding out a hand. I shook, feeling how thin and light her hand was. The fingers were hot on the outside, damp and cool on the palm from her gardening. “Why don’t you come inside and we can talk? This doesn’t sound like something we can solve standing on the sidewalk.”
I opened the gate and she led the way down the walk and inside, taking her hat off as she went. Her hair was pinned up. The door led directly into a small but tidy living room: a couch, two chairs, a modest TV. Sprawled on the couch, paying a lot of attention to the screen in front of him, was a young black kid, maybe fifteen or sixteen, in a white tank top, satin basketball shorts, and white Nikes. He held some kind of video game controller in both hands. Bleeps and bloops and blood-curdling screams were coming out of the speakers of the TV like it was Armageddon. A glance at the screen showed me that I was right. As we came into the room, we had to pass through his field of vision, but rather than look up, he did a bob-and-weave around us so he wouldn’t lose eye contact with the action. In the middle of everything, his cell phone—which was on his lap—rang with some hip-hop ring tone. With the flair of someone much-practiced, he paused the game and answered. Whoever it was must not have rated, since he pinned the phone to his shoulder, unpaused the game, and went back to saving the universe while he talked.
“Come on, let’s go back to the kitchen,” Flo said. “There’s no use trying to get him away from that thing. With weather like we’re having, I might be tempted to force him to get outside but since his father died, I don’t have the heart.”
I trailed her through a modest dining room filled with knobby-looking oak furniture I remember had been popular in the seventies. Decorative plates of hunting scenes hung in a column on one wall and a large painting of the Washington Monument took up space across from them. On a sideboard in a tasteful gold frame was a hinged triptych of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers. There were knick-knacks—a tiny glass vase, a paperweight, a bouquet of silk flowers—on the tables and sideboard.
Flo took me through to the kitchen, which had a small table and two chairs. The window above the sink was open and a lace curtain pressed against the screen, then dropped as the wind sighed in and out of the house. Music from a neighbor’s filtered in through the open back door, too soft to be annoying.
She motioned me to one of the chairs while she reached into the fridge. “Iced tea?”