George Pelecanos: The Cut

“Nothing serious,” said Spero, not wishing to worry his mother. “A little bit of this and that.”

The men had cleared the table and were sitting back out on the porch. Eleni was in the kitchen washing dishes, nipping at another glass of wine. Dark had come to the backyard, the lights from the candles moving across their faces with the passing breeze.

“So who was that woman at your apartment when I called?” said Spero.

“Girl name Kyra. She’s all right.”

“Stray cat or house cat?”

“Stray.”

“What about that teacher at your school?”

“We still hang out,” said Leo. “You seein that lawyer?”

“She’s not a lawyer yet. I like her.”

“How much?”

“We’re having a nice time.” Spero looked through the open French doors of the screened porch to the kitchen. “Mom’s hitting it pretty good tonight.”

“She’s happy we’re here.”

“You think it’s that? That this is a special night for her and she’s having an extra couple of glasses to celebrate? Or do you think that it’s like that every night for her?”

“I don’t know,” said Leo. “Gotta be hard for her to navigate her life without Dad. To figure out where it’s going next. I think you oughtta, you know, lighten up some. Let her flounder a little if that’s what she needs to do. If that means an extra glass of wine or two a night, so be it.”

“If Dad was here, the TV would be on right now. Mom would be with him, watching one of his westerns or karate movies, keeping him company. Even though she had no interest at all.”

“ Chinese Connection,” said Leo. “ That was one he liked.”

“Pop loved that fight in the yard between Bruce Lee and Robert Baker.”

“He was into Baker. Maybe ’cause he looked a little like him.”

“But the best fight scene was the locker room fight in Game of Death,” said Lucas. “Bob Wall played Carl Miller, remember?”

“That picture was some bullshit, though,” said Leo. “Bruce Lee was dead when they put that together. Matter of fact, they cut in doubles for most of that movie, man. That’s Scott Baio, or whatever his name is, fightin in that locker room scene. It sure ain’t Bruce.”

“Yuen Biao,” said Lucas. “I’m sayin, that was Dad’s favorite fight because of what Bruce says after he wastes the guy: ‘You lose, Carl Miller.’ ”

Leo chuckled. “That’s right.”

“Pop would say that to us when we were playing hoops in the driveway. After he’d score or block our shots. ‘You lose, Carl Miller.’ ”

“I remember.”

Spero folded his hands across his midsection. “I went and saw him the other day.”

“Yeah?”

“I go by there pretty often.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m still…”

“What?”

“I still struggle with it, man.”

“I know you do.”

“Him being there and all.”

“I know.”

“All last winter, when we got those big snows, and I’d think of him buried under it. Frozen. Or when it rains real hard, and I know the ground is full of water…”

“Spero.”

“I see him, Leo. Inside that dark box.”

“Stop.”

“You think I’m nuts.”

“No. But you gotta get right with this.”

“You never go to the cemetery, do you?”

“I haven’t been since the funeral,” said Leo.

“Well, I didn’t get to go to his funeral,” said Spero. “I was in Iraq, remember?”

“Wasn’t any way for you to get back. Me and him talked about it. He understood.”

“Maybe that’s why I keep visiting him. I didn’t get to say good-bye.”

“Look,” said Leo. “Do you know why I don’t go to Glenwood?”

“I think so.”

“Damn right you do. You been hearing Father John and Father Steve preach about it our whole lives. The reason I don’t go to that graveyard is because Dad’s not there. I don’t stress on him being cold or wet, or his state of decomposition, because that is not my father in that grave. That’s just a shell. He went from this good life to a glorious life. Hear?”

“If you say so.”

“You can’t be beating up on yourself for not being here when he was dying. Dad was proud of you, man.”

“I hope so,” said Spero, a catch in his voice.

“And you can’t undo his death, any more than you can shake the grief out of Mom. You’re always trying to fix shit, Spero. Like when you enlisted in the Marine Corps, and I asked you why. You said, ‘I’ve got to do something.’ ”

“I felt the need to.”

“But this is not that. And it’s not one of your cases that you treat like a puzzle to solve. You can’t draw a diagram in that book of yours and fix our mother or your guilt. It’s not something you can win. You need to let it work its way out.”

“Okay, Leo. Okay.”

Cheyenne came back out on the porch, got under the table, and dropped to the wood floor, resting against Spero’s feet.

“You know that thing I took on?” said Spero.

“You mean the weed dealer?”

“The guys who worked for him had that package delivered to a home on a street right across from your school.”

“On Clifton?”

“Twelfth.”

“Odd place for them to do it,” said Leo. “All that law around.”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

“How old are those guys?”

“Round twenty, I guess,” said Spero.

“There you go,” said Leo.

“What?”

“You’re looking for logic,” said Leo. “They’re still kids.”

In the morning, Lucas drew a crude sketch in his notebook of the eighteen residences on the 2500 block of 12th Street, Northwest. The row houses were depicted as simple adjoining squares in which he wrote address numbers, leaving room for the names of the owners.

He left his apartment, got into his Jeep, and went up to the Shepherd Park library on Georgia. The computers there were occupied by surfers who did not look as if they would be relinquishing their spots any time soon, so he drove to the nearest big-box office supply store and paid a rental fee for the use of a PC. He typically did the bulk of his investigative work on his laptop at home, using programs like People Finder, but he was about to use a public site and didn’t want to leave an electronic trail.

In a private stall, he got to work. He went to the D.C. government website, which was helpfully located under dc. gov. Above a blank box was the question, “What can we help you find?” and in the box Lucas typed, “research real property” and hit “enter.” This took him to the Real Property Tax Database Search. In the search box on that page he typed in the address on 12th Street to which the package of marijuana had been shipped. He got the name of the owner, the lot number, the current assessed value of the property, the last sale date, and the last sale price. The owner’s name was Lisa Weitzman. Lucas guessed that a person with the surname Weitzman would not be black, though it was possible, or Hispanic, which was even less likely. The last sale date of the property, 2008, told him that she was a newer resident and, in keeping with the recent history of the rapidly gentrified neighborhood, probably on the young side, and white. The assessed value of the house was currently a hundred thousand dollars below her purchase price; she had bought at the height of the market, before property values dipped. What the database did not tell him was whether she lived there; it listed owners, not tenants. But the data was valuable and had been easy to obtain.

Lucas repeated the process for every residential property on the block. As he did, he wrote the owner’s name inside the square of each address on 12th Street, along with the last sale date, on the drawing he had sketched into his notebook. When he was done he had a map of the block with each residence assigned an owner’s name and an indication of who was fairly new to the block and who was not.