George Pelecanos - Shame the Devil

“I’m out, Dad,” said Christopher Jonas, getting into a coat and slinging a leather book bag over his shoulder. “You need anything before I go?”

“No, I’m all right. Your mother will be home soon. Take care, son.”

Bill Jonas made a face at his boy, rubbed two fingers together to indicate he had won the bet. Christopher rolled his eyes and left the house.

Jonas said, “Would you like a cup of coffee, Danny? A beer, maybe?”

“I could stand a beer.”

“Help yourself to one in the kitchen.”

“Anything for you?”

“I don’t drink the stuff.” Jonas looked down at his ample belly. “Last thing I need now is to fall in love with alcohol.”

Boyle left the room and returned with a can of beer. He noticed that Jonas now held an envelope in his hand. Boyle popped the can, had a swig, and sat down on the couch.

“So how’s it going?” said Boyle.

“Not bad. Rehab’s taken me a mile.” Jonas pointed to an aluminum tripod cane leaning against the wall. “I can take steps with that. From my bedroom to the bathroom, that sort of thing, which is a big load off my wife. And with the walker I can go even farther.”

“You gonna improve much more, you think?”

“Doctors didn’t think I’d come this far. The slug that nicked my spine did a lot of damage. But I just have to keep working at it, Dan. I mean, what else can I do?”

“You’ll get it. How you fixed for money?”

“Between my disability pay and my pension, I’m fine. College is all taken care of; I’d already saved that. Christopher’s in school, and Ted is on his way next fall. So me and Dee are out of the woods as far as that goes. Lookin’ forward to enjoying some good years together now.”

“Good. I’m happy everything’s working out.”

Jonas watched Boyle take a slow sip of beer. He’d never be able to explain to his son Christopher how he could sit here with a guy like Boyle. Jonas knew all about Boyle, his problems and instabilities, his bigotries and hatreds. All of it. He knew, but right now he didn’t care.

“Anything going on?” asked Jonas.

“Not that I know of,” said Boyle. “The cold-casers are focusing on it again, I know that. And they won’t stop. A quadruple homicide, five if you count the kid, it never goes away in the public’s mind. So far not a thing, but, hey, you never know. I mean, they just now caught that guy who was killing all those women in Park View.”

“I heard that, yeah. Tell me again what they know about my case.”

“Christ, Bill. Again?”

Jonas nodded. “Start with the guns.”

“Okay.” Boyle squinted as he thought. “The weapons used in the kitchen: a twenty-two Woodsman and a forty-five.”

“A Woodsman’s an assassin’s weapon.”

“Maybe, or the guy who was using it had just been around enough to know that it works real good close in. Anyhow, they never found the guns.”

“What about motive?”

“Money, but not from the registers. Gambling money. May’s was a known bookie joint. Hell, the federal boys were surveilling it for months, from a beauty salon across Wisconsin Avenue. They had infrared cameras pointed into the bar area at night, for Christ’s sake. Our people think the shooters were knocking off the place for book money. A couple of old employees came forward and told us as much. May’s was the last stop on a weekly bag run, and apparently the shooters knew it.”

“How would they know it?”

“Somebody tipped them off would be the obvious answer. Carl Lewin, the guy they called Mr. Carl, he had served federal time for gaming. Lewin was the bag man – and from what we got at the crime scene, it looks like he was armed. He made a play on the shooters, and they got the draw on him first. The other vics probably would have lived if Lewin hadn’t of made that play. It made them all witnesses to a murder. They got tied up and shot with their heads down on the tiles.”

“Should have been plenty of blood.”

“There was. And footprints tracking out of it. It’ll help to convict if we catch the guys.”

“How about fingerprints, hair samples, like that?”

“No prints. No hair that didn’t belong to the victims. Traces of powder, the kind they have on those examination gloves doctors put on when they jam their fingers up your ass.”

“Okay, they wore latex gloves.” Jonas nodded. “Now let’s take it outside. I killed the driver of the Ford in the street.”

“We don’t know that for sure.”

“I killed him.”

“But we can’t confirm that without a corpse.”

“The shooters, then,” said Jonas. “I got a pretty good look at them.”

“Right. And the witness from the apartment window pretty much duplicated your description. The likenesses have been out on the national networks for two years now. They’ve been cross-checked against wanted lists, lists of guys who have broken parole. Nothing.”

“What about the Ford?”

“The Ford was abandoned on Tennyson. Blood on the backseat, most likely the blood of the man you shot. Again, no prints. The tags were stolen locally. The vehicle was traced to an auction down South, bought under a phony name. The Ford was a sheriff’s car before it went to auction.”

“Funny joke.”

“Yeah. There must have been a drop car waiting on Tennyson, but it was a workday so there weren’t many people around. The ones who were around were seniors. And they didn’t see a thing.”

“The one I killed,” said Jonas. “The white shooter called him Richard.”

“That’s right.”

“Why would he use his name? These guys were older. Pros from the looks of it. They wouldn’t be likely to make that mistake.”

“We been over all this a hundred times.”

“Maybe we missed something, Dan.”

“Okay. Maybe the white shooter had an emotional attachment to the one you shot, and in the heat of things he made a mistake. So you shot his best friend, or lover, or his brother, maybe.”

“Or his son. The white shooter was all gray.”

“The point is, knowing his name hasn’t gotten us anywhere so far. His name might not even have been Richard. You know that.” Boyle leaned forward. “Here’s what I think, Bill. The leads we got on this case aren’t gonna break it. It’s like most of the investigations we’ve handled. Somebody’s gotta come forward. An old employee, someone who has something to deal by ratting out the shooters… like that.”

“You guys have hit all the ex-employees pretty hard, haven’t you?”

“Goddamn right we did. We went back two years into the May’s files, talked to all of them, then brought them back in and talked to them again. Carl Lewin’s partner, the skinny man, he’s serving time right now on racketeering. He could have avoided a Leavenworth jolt if he knew anything, but in the end all he knew is that he got took for a lot of money that day.”

“I just can’t believe it. In broad daylight, these bastards do what they did. We have nothing, and they just get away.”

“Listen, the reality is that there probably aren’t going to be any new leads. Even the pizza parlor is gone. Nothing’s left of the old place but that plaque you dedicated last year.”

Jonas handed his envelope to Boyle. “Which brings me to this.”

Boyle opened the envelope and examined its contents. It was a photograph that had run in the Washington Post over a story about the “healing process” begun the day the Sub Place opened at the old May’s site. There had been a ceremony arranged by the chain’s public-relations people, and William Jonas had been tapped to dedicate a bronze plaque that served to memorialize the victims. In the original photograph, Jonas was in his wheelchair and flanked by his son Christopher. In the photograph Boyle held in his hand, Christopher’s face had been punched through and torn out. A strip of paper had been glued across Christopher’s body. It was cut from a typical bill received in the mail. It read, “Your account is past due.”