Neely Tucker - Murder, D.C.

He blinked and his eyes refocused on the murder map and he saw something so obvious he’d never really noticed it before. It was a view of comparison and contrast, available only when you splayed it out like this on maps encompassing more than twelve hundred homicides over five years.

Though Southwest had only a few dozen homicides each year, the Bend itself showed up as a radiant spot of red crosses-an effect enhanced when you moved some of those crosses from near the park, as the cops had listed them, and into it, where the killings had actually occurred.

He counted all the crosses from the past five years that were in or near the Bend, and just to get the visual, moved them into the map of the most current year. He counted, his lips moving slowly to be sure, and stepped back to look at it.

Forty-four.

Over the past five years, forty-four people had been killed in the Bend, a knoblike park of little more than an acre, and not one had been solved. No mass shooting to skew the body count. It wasn’t a high-rise housing project. No one lived there. It was just open ground. It was where D.C. went to kill and be killed.

“Frenchman’s Bend,” he said softly, already seeing it on the front page, above the fold. “The murder capital of the murder capital.”

The idea floated across his mind, there in his reverie, that maybe he was wrong and the land itself really was somehow cursed with the history of its past, a settling of accounts that didn’t limit itself to the passing of time. The sins of slavery and degradation and depravity didn’t disappear into the ether, he knew that well enough from back home.

Willie Baker had gotten shot one night outside the Club, the juke joint near his hometown of Tula, hard behind the levee. Sully was seven at the time and he remembered it, rightly or wrongly, as his introduction to murderous violence.

Both his parents were still alive then. Everybody in Tula spent Friday nights in the fall watching Willie come out of the backfield and run over, through or just plain past the players from other rural schools. Everybody knew he was going somewhere. It was a big deal, not that long after integration, folks from all over the county coming behind the team, them making it to the state semifinals. Willie, tall, lean, always with the laugh-he signed a game program for Sully, walking off the field after their playoff loss in his senior year, steam rising from his body in the early-winter chill. Then he went to the Club and came outside about one in the morning and took a chestful from a 12-gauge and everybody knew Carl Evans and his buddies had done it, because Willie had gotten a scholarship offer from LSU and Carl, who thought he was hot shit, had not. And the sheriff, whom Sully would come to know and hate later, never even interviewed anybody because he knew as well as they did that no jury in their postage stamp of a town was ever going to send a white kid to prison for killing a black one.

And Sully, at seven, looking at his program the next day, asking his momma if they could go to the funeral whenever they had it and her blowing out cigarette smoke, saying she didn’t go to nigger funerals because it was a bunch of caterwauling that went on for three hours.

It would be easy, Sully thought, to label that sort of hypocrisy and fear and loathing and violence a white southern virus, but the world was much more complicated than that. The dark verities weren’t cultural. They had been around so long that they had become genetic, worming their way into the very blood of the living, the flesh and the DNA of successive generations. They came to the fore over the millennia because the world is Darwinian and hatred and fear and loathing were not left out like a sixth finger or a useless appendage, but were adapted into the core of the species. They spawned from generation to generation to generation because they had proven themselves to be stronger, more resilient, and more vicious than other attributes. You could not kill hatred and fear and loathing. They were hardwired into the neural pathways. They found homes in the webs of the neocortex. In the gene pool of survival, nature selected them and it selected them because they had proven themselves to be an integral survival skill. They had earned the right to survive.

“Hey, R.J.?” he called out, half-distracted, his eyes dancing across the map. “I’m thinking we got something here.”

“WILLIAM SANDERS ELLISON,”Parker was saying, “floater man, known to friends and family as Billy. Twenty-one-year-old black male, son of Delores Ellison and the late William G. Sanders.”

Sully, in his row house on Capitol Hill, half-undressed, twenty minutes to midnight, crooking the phone between his ear and his shoulder, scribbling it down on the back of the Chinese takeout menu from the place on H Street, the one you’d rather order from than pick up, as the pickup area was walled off with six-inch-thick plexiglass, people had robbed the place so often.

“All right, all right, give me a second here… Any more holes in him than the extra one in his head?” he said, sitting up on the couch, careful not to knock over his drink on the coffee table, Alexis sitting up herself now, pulling her unbuttoned blouse back over that racy bra, not happy about him taking the call, smoothing her skirt back down over her fishnets, things just getting interesting when his cell had buzzed. She still had her heels on-he was fine with them staying on, even if he stripped everything else off-and she was looking at the blank television screen, listening to the Van Morrison he’d had on when she had pulled up in a taxi, reaching for her chardonnay now.

“Nah,” Parker said. “Just the one. Untouched otherwise, toxicology pending. But, really, the name is more important than the cause.”

“It is?”

“The Ellisons? This doesn’t register for you?”

“Not, ah, at the moment, I’m sort of-”

“The Ellisons. D.C. black society, brother. The e-lites, as the missus would say. Quiet, respectable, old money, Jack and Jill, the Links, house on the Gold Coast, summer home on the Vineyard, first black this, first black that. Dad, he married in, he was a young turk in the Carter administration.”

“They’re like, what, the Quanders, the Hairstons?”

“Bigger. Or, well, richer. By a lot.”

“And you still thinking junior was a coke freak, scoring down in the Bend?”

There was a pause. “I did not say that.”

“You were thinking it, out there on the boat. Come on. That’s how they do it down there. I looked it up. Three homicides this year in Frenchman’s Bend already. All three got dumped in the channel. Floater man was a tourist, he fell off a boat? Somebody would have called 911 when it happened.”

Parker sighed. “So you were the white guy who went down there asking questions. Our guys get to the Bend this afternoon, bracing the usual suspects, and they start popping off about some narc.”

“They made me for a narc?”

“I don’t think they could believe a civilian would have been dumb enough to walk in there like he owned the place.”

“Flattered. So, young Billy had a drug problem.”

“Possibly. They tell me it happens in the best of families.”

“You don’t sound all broke up.”

“They’re very wealthy people.”

“Isn’t that what this great country is all about?”

“Yeah, which is what I’m saying. The Oval Office has already called the chief, right? And our lovely congressional representative called me fifteen minutes ago, which, I conclude, was about seventeen seconds after she found out about it.”

“The Oval Office? On a shooting in the Bend ? Come on.”