George Pelecanos - DC Noir

No longer needy, armored with a widow’s prerogatives, Sally found herself invited to parties again, where solicitous friends attempted to fix her up with the rare single men in their circles. Now that she didn’t care about men, they flocked around her and Sally did what she had always done. She listened and she laughed, she laughed and she listened, but she never really heard anything — unless the subject was money. Then she paid close attention, even writing down the advice she was given. The stock market was so turgid, everyone complained. The smart money was in real estate.

Sally nodded.

Congress Heights, S.E./S.W.

Seventy-two-year-old Ida Logan was sitting in her rocker on her front porch when the gunman opened fire. She never knew what hit her. Neither did her five-year-old great granddaughter Aaliyah Gamble, who was sitting nearby at her red, blue, and yellow plastic Playskool desk, playing with Legos.

In but a few seconds, more than a half dozen hollow-point 9mm rounds ripped through each of them, their bodies performing the death dance that only the gunfire of automatic weapons can orchestrate, jerking to the staccato of the rat-tat-tat-ta of the machine gun, as though keeping time to the pulsating rhythm of a boogie rap tune.

To eyewitness Rodney Grimes, the carnage seemed to transpire in slow motion; amid the crimson mist of their splattering blood, the bullets appeared to strike the frail old woman and the fragile little girl forever.

The dreadful scene was punctuated, and made that much more grotesque, by Aaliyah’s head exploding, bursting like a ripe melon dropped from a high place. The pink halo of her vaporized brain was visible only for an instant, yet the obscene corona lingered around what little remained of the back of her neatly braided head; a ghastly image frozen in time… emblazoned upon his troubled mind.

Rodney Grimes didn’t think twice about cooperating with the police. His late father had taught him that “evil flourish when good men do nothing.”

Rodney Grimes was a good man, wasn’t he? He liked to think so. And even if he had not truly been good up to that point, couldn’t he be? Could he not rise to the occasion? Evil had been done and he was compelled to do his part to ensure that the gunman did not go unpunished. It was his duty. Voluntarily, he told the police who arrived first at the scene of the crime that he had witnessed the murders and provided them with a detailed description of the suspect, making sure to emphasize that the gunman had long dreadlocks and was very dark-skinned with unsettling bluish-gray eyes; and described the getaway car, a black late-model Ford Crown Victoria, like a cop car. And later that day, he assisted Detective John Mayfield, the lead on the case, by accompanying him to the Violent Crimes Branch headquarters and picking out a photo of a suspect from an array of nine mugshots. He’d also agreed to participate in the viewing of a lineup. “Sure, no problem,” he’d told the detective. “Just let me know.”

However, the day after the double shooting, the courage of his conviction diminished considerably when he looked up from the Spider-Man comic he was leafing through at the newsstand inside of Iverson Mall and noticed the killer with a lion’s mane of long dreadlocks standing next to him, towering above him.

The shooter held the latest issue of Superman , flipping its pages, but not looking at the comic book. Instead, his cold, disconcerting bluish-gray eyes were fixed on him.

Rodney hoped it was just his imagination at the crime scene; that the killer had simply looked in his general direction, not directly at him, directly into his face. But the killer’s presence here before him dashed that hope. The killer had seen him… and evidently knew who he was.

They stood there silent for a moment, an outlandish odd couple, Rodney Grimes’s clean-cut, black yuppie appearance in direct contrast to that of the killer, who looked like a hip-hop Rastafarian.

“Hey,” said the killer, finally breaking the ice, “you look familiar.” He paused, waited for a response. When Grimes did not reply, he continued. “Do I look familiar to you?”

Grimes remained silent.

“No?” the killer said. “I musta made a mistake.” The killer laughed. “I know what it is! Ever see that Eddie Murphy movie… um… Harlem Nights , yeah. Redd Foxx had on big, thick Coke-bottle glasses like yours, made his eyes look all big and shit, like he was wearin’ magnifyin’ glasses. Yeah, that’s it, you probably just reminded me of him.”

Grimes remained silent.

“Say,” the killer continued, “just how good can you see with eyes that bad? I’ll bet you be makin’ mistakes all the time, don’t you? Wavin’ at people across the street, then be like, ‘Oh, shit, that ain’t whoever.’ Yeah, must be hard recognizin’ people with eyes as bad as you got.”

Grimes remained silent.

“You kinda old to be readin’ comic books, ain’t you?” the killer asked. “What, you twenty-one, twenty-two? Sheeit, I gave up readin’ them joints when I was a little kid.” He snickered.

Grimes remained silent. The killer turned his attention to the comic book.

“You know,” the killer mused, “funny thing about heroes, ’specially comic book superheroes, none of ’em wear glasses. Take Superman here. His disguise, his costum , is Clark Kent, all mild-mannered and shit, wearin’ eyeglasses, ’cause Superman, he know that people who wear eyeglasses all weak and geeky and shit, so nobody will mistake him for a hero. So he can have some peace, un’erstand? ’Cause otherwise, people would bug his ass to death! ‘Superman, get my cat out the tree.’ ‘Superman, tow my car to the shop.’ Yeah, it just be Superman do this and Superman do that, all the goddamn time!”

The killer stared directly into Grimes’s magnified eyes and continued: “But the point I was tryin’ to make is, heroes don’t wear them shits. The eyes is the windows to the soul: weak eyes, weak soul. People who wear ’em is just plain weak. It’s a fact. But when it’s time to go to work, Superman snatch off them horn-rims and that Brooks Brothers and show off his Krypton clothes. ‘This is a job for Superman!’ Right? Voice get deep and everything.” The killer paused for a moment to let his point sink in, and then made his message plain. “Thinking your weak ass can take down a super villain could get you and other people you care about in some serious trouble and cause you some real heartache. Don’t make no mistake, Rodney, don’t try to be no hero. Heroes don’t wear glasses.”

Certain his point had been made, the killer put the comic book back on the rack, glared at Rodney Grimes a few long moments for good measure, and then turned and leisurely walked away.

Finally, after having been paralyzed like a deer caught in the headlights of a semi, Grimes returned the Spider-Man to the rack and, on unsteady legs, exited the newsstand.

He fretted and racked his brain, trying to fathom, How did the killer find out who I am? How did he find me?

The thought occurred to him that the killer might still be around, lying in wait to… to do what? Knife him and leave him bleeding on the floor? Gun him down in the parking lot? He looked around, trying to make sure he was not in immediate danger, but he was sure that his nervousness betrayed him.

Warily, his mind reeling, he walked to the escalator leading to the second level of the mall, wondering if being a good man was worth it.

When he got to his car in the front parking lot of Iverson Mall, he found a folded piece of paper under the left windshield wiper of Sweet Georgia Brown , his mint-condition 1970 metal-flake candy-apple-red, black-ragtop-with-black-leather interior Volkswagen Karman Ghia Coupe, which he had painstakingly refurbished personally over the last two years. Her personalized D.C. license tags read, GEORGIA