George Pelecanos - DC Noir

What with him attending Howard U on a full scholarship as a civil engineering major and only working part-time at various jobs — busboy, waiter, photo technician at Moto-Foto — restoring her had by no means been an easy task, but it had been worth it. Often women mistook it for a Porsche. Incredible! Yeah, Sweet Georgia Brown drew women’s attention that men like him could not otherwise draw, and that was priceless.

Rodney Grimes’s anxiety heightened when he opened the note and read it. The message, which was handwritten in a childlike scrawl, said: Heros don’t wear glasses.

Heros — the ignorant bastard couldn’t even spell heroes Under different circumstances, Rodney would have found this amusing, but nothing was funny about the situation. This was the killer’s subtle way of telling him that he knew not only who he was, but what car he drove. It was a good bet that he knew where he lived, too.

Grimes refolded the note and put it in his shirt pocket. He walked around the car, giving it a once-over to determine if any damage had been done. Satisfied that his sweetheart was still in great condition, he disarmed the alarm system and unlocked her, climbed in, started her up, and headed off.

The drive home to his tenth-floor apartment at the Wingate House East apartment complex on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in far Southwest Washington was no joy-ride. Rodney couldn’t shake the fear and a sense of impending doom he had not felt in years, not since he was in the seventh grade at Hart Junior High School.

When he’d attended Hart, he had been beaten and robbed on a daily basis, by people like the killer, until he fought back one day and maced a thug in the face when he’d attempted to rob him. That had been his last day, since to remain would have meant certain death. His mother had used her cunning by giving her sister’s apartment in a housing project on M Street, S.W. as his home address so that he could attend a school in another part of town, Jefferson Junior High. It had been smooth sailing from there and he had stopped living in fear. Until now.

But what he had experienced at Hart was nothing compared to the terror the killer instilled in him now. The killer had threatened not only him, but also “other people” Rodney cared about, and his concern for the safety of his friends and family was what really terrified him. His actions could cause them harm… but could he live with the consequences of inaction, of not cooperating with the authorities and letting the killer go unpunished? In fact, what would stop the killer from doing him and those he cared about harm once the danger of arrest and prosecution had passed? If something bad happened to April Knight, he’d never forgive himself.

As he parked his sweetie in the front parking lot of Wingate House East, Rodney Grimes could not shake the belief that he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.

Detective John Mayfield had seen better days, both careerwise and in his private life. His early years as a homicide detective had been good days. His closure rate was high, the envy of his peers, in fact. His late wife had always been in his corner, even though most homicide detectives’ marriages end in divorce. Understandable. Police work, with its constant shift changes, makes cultivating any meaningful relationship difficult, but this type of assignment, which requires a round-the-clock commitment, makes it virtually impossible. Few people can accept being married to a ghost. But his dear Katherine had put up with it and hung in there. She had deserved better than dying by the hands of a lowlife during a street robbery gone bad. The fact that her murder remained unsolved was a festering wound. To him, every murderer he brought to justice was Katherine’s killer, but the wound would never heal, he knew.

His closure rate seemed to diminish in direct proportion to his failing health, not because he lacked the stamina he once had as some might argue, though he was painfully aware that he did indeed lack the vigor of his youth, but because of obstacles he now had to hurdle to bring the guilty to justice. Nowadays, witnesses were hard to come by. A thug strapped with a MAC-11 can open fire on a crowded street or sporting event or concert hall, and no one sees a thing. If the perpetrators fail to intimidate witnesses, then murder definitely does the trick.

Cases that shocked and outraged the public humiliated the mayor and his “law and order” administration, and the pressure to quickly rectify each situation was passed on to the chief of police. Shit rolls down hill, and this time around Mayfield was at the bottom of the heap. With a caseload of thirty-seven murders for the year, more than half of them unsolved, John Mayfield was under a lot of pressure. As his boss Captain Lynch had put it, “Work better and faster if you want to keep your job!”

Yeah, the good old days of being a superstar homicide detective were definitely long gone as far as Detective Mayfield was concerned. But today would be like the good ol’ days, he mused. Today, he had a rock solid case against the prolific and ever elusive “Teflon Thug,” Isaiah “Ice” Hamilton, the suspect in the double homicide on Chesapeake Street, S.E., not only with strong physical evidence, but with three eyewitnesses: urban pioneer Terri Daulby; pillar of the community Ruthann Sommers; and Whiz Kid Rodney Grimes, some kind of nerdy genius who had risen above the social forces that seemed to conspire to keep black men down by turning them into Ice Hamiltons to become well-educated and gainfully employed. Each of them, separately, had picked Ice out a nine-mugshot black-and-white photo array — black-and-white instead of color so that Hamilton’s cold-as-ice, steely bluish-gray eyes wouldn’t set him apart from the mugshots of thugs of similar age, facial structure, and dark complexion.

The witnesses would stand by in separate waiting areas down the hall in an office just inside the secured, combination-lock doors leading to the lineup room where, one by one, they would see if they could pick out the suspect who had opened fire in broad daylight a couple of days ago on a cool, early September Saturday afternoon while the intended target, Francisco “Big Boy” Longus, was standing in front of 74 °Chesapeake Street, S.E.

Mayfield was driven by a burning desire to see Ice, the cold-blooded perpetrator — alleged perpetrator — of this and other sins before God, put away as soon as possible. But it was also important to him that by closing this case he got off his back the government officials, police brass, and community leaders who were all whipped into fever pitch by an outraged public.

Yes, closing this case swiftly had gotten him out from under not only the victims’ family — he had notified Aaliyah’s mother by phone as soon as the arrest warrant was issued — but from the good captain as well.

Detective Mayfield had arrived at the soot-stained, weather-beaten, and dilapidated municipal center, the Henry J. Daly Building, located at 300 Indiana Avenue, N.W., at around 7:45 a.m. for check-in at the Court Liaison Unit on the first floor, a prerequisite before he could log in at D.C. Superior Court across the courtyard for the long and ongoing “Simple City Massacre” murder trial at which he would testify against codefendants LaVon “Pooty” Kirkwood and Donzelle “Killa” Hilliard… whenever the prosecution got around to him.

After he had checked in to court and was placed on standby, to be paged shortly before they needed him on the witness stand, he’d returned to MPD HQ for his 10:00 a.m. appointment in the lineup room. He was anxious. Finally bringing down Isaiah “Ice” Hamilton had him wired.

Handcuffed and shackled, and escorted by two officers assigned to the Central Cell Block (CCB), the very dark-complexioned Isaiah “Ice” Hamilton, six feet four inches tall and lean but muscular, clad in the standard thug uniform of laceless sneakers, baggy low-riding jeans, and oversized T-shirt, stepped from the private express elevator that ran between the CCB in the basement and the prisoner holding area adjacent to the CID lineup room. Detective Mayfield, Detective Crawford of the Lineup Unit, and five plainclothes officers of similar build, age, and skin color, selected to participate in the lineup, were already there when Ice and his escorts arrived.