George Pelecanos: Shame the Devil

Meanwhile, fat-cat politicians from Virginia and North Carolina, and suburbanites who made their living in town but paid no commuter taxes, ridiculed the District of Columbia relentlessly. Stefanos, a lifelong Washingtonian, was fully aware of the problems. Like most residents, though, he didn’t care to hear about them from leeches, tourists, and self-serving Southerners.

Stefanos read an article below the fold that detailed the state of the Metropolitan Police Department. The former chief of police had resigned under allegations of mismanagement and corruption; his roommate, a lieutenant on the force, had been accused of shaking down closeted homosexuals outside Southeast’s bathhouse strip. The Homicide division, with more than sixteen hundred unsolved cases and a less than 40 percent closure rate, was under particular fire. Some Homicide detectives had recently been caught overinflating the hours on their time cards. Murders occurring in the city’s poorest neighborhoods were lazily investigated at best. An apparent serial killer was loose in the Park View section of town. And the most emblematic, high-profile case of the decade remained unsolved: the slaughter at the pizza parlor called May’s, dating back to the summer of 1995.

The mention of May’s triggered a pulse in Stefano’s blood. In the 1980s, when Stefanos was still taking cocaine with his whiskey in after-hours establishments, he had spent many late nights being served by Steve Maroulis, the house bartender at May’s. And he had crossed paths with Dimitri Karras, the father of the child killed by the speeding getaway car, on several occasions over the past twenty-two years. That Stefanos knew two victims of the same crime was not surprising. Stefanos, Maroulis, and Karras were all of Greek descent, and though spread out now, the Greek community in D.C. had a shared history.

Stefanos looked out the window at a trash-strewn field bordering the old Woodie’s warehouse off North Capitol. Graffiti outlaw Cool “Disco” Dan, a D.C. legend, had tagged the loading dock. Below the moniker, someone had spray-painted a tombstone, on which was written, “Larry Willis, RIP,” and below that, his eulogy: “Heaven for a G.”

The Red Line train entered a tunnel. Stefanos folded the newspaper, preparing for his stop.

Stefanos stepped off the Judiciary Square station escalator and walked over to the Superior Court building at 5th and Indiana. He passed through a metal detector, navigated halls crowded with youths, their parents, uniformed cops, sheriffs, and private and court-appointed attorneys, and went down to the large cafeteria on the bottom floor.

He bought a cup of coffee, sugared and creamed it to cut the taste, and walked across a red carpet to a table close to the front entrance, where he had a seat in a chair upholstered in red vinyl.

A voice from a loudspeaker mounted on the wall announced, “Herbert Deuterman, please report with your client at this time to courtroom two-thirteen…”

Nearby, a middle-aged white attorney wearing rumpled, mismatched clothes talked his idea of black to a few of his bored black coworkers seated at the same table. He described a defendant who had accused him of being a racist, and then said, “If this homey knew me the way y’all know me, he’d’ve known that the only color that matters to me is green. I put it to this boy point-blank straight.”

As the attorney laughed, a woman seated at the table said, “So, you gonna cut a deal with his lawyer?”

“I’m gonna cut one every which way but loose. You can believe that.”

“Long as you don’t have to break a sweat, right Mr. Watkins?”

“Sugar, I’m gonna do as little as possible, and a little bit less than that.”

A kid sitting at the table to the right of Stefanos listened as his lawyer described the plea-out he was about to make “upstairs” on his client’s behalf, and how “Judge Levy definitely does not want to send another young man into an already overcrowded system, and she won’t, if she sees that your heart is in the right place.”

Stefanos looked at the kid, still in his teens: skinny, sloppily dressed, and slumped in his chair. Today was his court date, and no one had even instructed him to tuck in his shirt. “And try to get that scowl off your face,” said the tired young attorney, “when you go before the judge. You can do that for a minute, can’t you? Speak clearly and show remorse, understand?”

“I hear you,” said the kid. “Can I go get me one of them sodas now?”

“Go ahead.”

The young man glanced over at Stefanos and gave him a hard look before rising out of his seat to walk, deep-dip style, toward the cafeteria line.

Stefanos had choked down half his coffee by the time Elaine Clay entered the cafeteria. Clay was a Fifth Streeter, one of the court-appointed attorneys available to defendants under the Criminal Justice Act. In her middle years, with the legs to wear the skirt she wore today, she was tall and big boned, with a handsome, smooth chocolate face. Even before she had begun throwing work his way, Stefanos had heard of her rep from the cops who frequented the Spot, the bar where he worked part-time. Most cops derided the CJA attorneys – they were the enemy who undid police arrests. But over the years the strength and consistency of Elaine Clay’s performance had elicited a kind of muttered-under-the-breath respect from the cops. It had been one of the Spot’s regulars, in fact, homicide detective Dan Boyle, who had put Clay and Stefanos together the first time.

Stefanos stood as Elaine approached the table.

“Nick,” she said.

“Counselor.”

They shook hands. Elaine had a seat, dropping a worn leather bag at her side.

“Well?” she said.

“Here you go.” Stefanos placed an envelope into her hand. “I think I got what you were looking for.”

She studied the photographs from the envelope. “You got a night and a day shot.”

“Yeah. The day shot shows that the bulb of the street lamp’s been broken out. The night shot shows what you can see on that corner without the light – nothing. Newton Place dead-ends at the western border of the Old Soldiers’ Home property there, and there isn’t any light over that fence, either. There’s no way that cop saw your client dealing weed out of that car.”

“The arrest was six months ago. You took these pictures, what, last week?”

“Eight days ago. I know, it doesn’t prove the light was out the night those cops arrested him last summer. It doesn’t disprove it, either.”

“The prosecutor will argue relevance – that a busted street lamp from a week ago has no relevance to a crime that occurred six months ago. And the judge will sustain it.”

“Yeah, but I figure it’ll put, whaddaya call it, the seed of doubt into the jury’s mind.”

“Seed of doubt? You’re getting fancy on me now, Nick.”

“Sorry. But if the prosecutor can’t prove without a doubt that someone saw the kid dealing -”

“They caught him with a Baggie of herb in the Maxima.”

“Where was the buyer?”

“By then the alleged buyer had beat it on foot.”

“That’s possession, not possession with intent to distribute.”

“That’s my case. Which is why I’m going to use these photos – they’re the only thing I’ve got. I get this reduced to a simple possession charge, they throw the jury trial out. Under the new District law, crimes carrying penalties of less than six months go before the judge without a jury.”

“The kid’ll walk, then.”

“It depends on who I draw behind the bench and what their temperature’s like that day. But most likely my client will get a tongue-lashing and community service.”

Stefanos lit a smoke, side-exhaled, and tossed the match into the Styrofoam cup. In accepting these assignments from Elaine Clay, he’d known all along what his role would be. Still, it was hard to feel clean about his part in this daily cycle. He wondered how Elaine did this, every single day.