Neely Tucker - Murder, D.C.

A couple of taps on the computer, deeper into the records: Most charges had been no-papered the day after the arrest, meaning the cases were immediately dropped. A plea on the possession with intent; six months probation.

That meant there would be an intake form and a pretrial assessment. He stood in line to fill out a card with a request that it be pulled from the file room. After a while, Sully drumming his fingers on the countertop, the clerk returned with it, the slim manila folder handed back to him across the counter. You could step over to the left, review it, and ask for copies.

Sully moved down and flipped the folder open.

When you got arrested and were headed for trial, one of the indignities suffered was that you had to be interviewed by a social worker, who worked up a case report and put all of your personal business into a little history that was, to those who knew where to look for it, public record.

George’s file wasn’t very thick, his report on a fading printout on pulp paper, the kind with tear-off perforations on each side. You had to unfold the connected pages to read it. George, one of two children, the only boy, born to a single mother who’d worked at a gas station, then a grocery store. The family moved every other year or so, but only a few blocks each time, always staying in Southwest, the grandmother living with them. This was not, by local standard, a particularly hard lot in life. George had the opportunity to turn out okay. A report from a school counselor, entered into the school record, recorded a concern in sixth grade that George had begun to be disruptive in class and had fought on the playground. Seventh grade, another report that George often did not come to class. The next year, another report, this was about a dog being shot on school grounds. Several students said George had done it, although no gun was ever found and George denied it, but he was invited to attend a different middle school. In ninth grade, there was another incident, involving a cat, its mangled body left by the school’s front door. By the tenth grade he was a dropout.

“Juvenile record under seal,” was the line that explained that.

The social worker’s psychological evaluation: Average intelligence, narcissism, anxiety disorder, antisocial personality. Treatment recommendations: probation, therapy, and possible medication. Last known address, the James Creek projects in Southwest D.C., his mother’s place. A subsequent arrest, last year, held the notation that none of the recommendations had been followed through.

Sully wrote down the address of his mom and the name of his sister and handed the file back to the clerk.

Later that afternoon, he was on Half Street SW at the James Creek row houses, low-income public housing, the flat-faced two-story brick ovens sagging into one another since World War II. The front doors were fifteen feet off the sidewalk. No awnings, no porches, a few trees and gasping shrubs out front. Steel bars covered every downstairs window of every house on the block, and some had upstairs bars, too. There were tiny backyards to each, like his own, marked off from one another by rusty steel fences. He found himself knocking on a green door in the middle of the block. This pleasant-faced gent, about sixty-five, opened the door about six inches. Wearing jeans and a tucked-in dress shirt, sporting a close-cropped beard, he heard Sully out, nodding, then said he didn’t know shit about whoever he was asking about and never had and he would be happy as hell if Sully left.

Sully apologized, saying he didn’t blame him, and went out to the curb, hearing the door and the bolt close behind him. He called back Susan in news research.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he said.

“Hi, darling yourself.”

“I need another address.”

“I need a date.”

“I don’t know any good guys,” he said.

“I’m lesbian, stud.”

“Oh. Forgot. You hot redheaded Irish les, you.”

“An irresistible combination to women the world over.”

“Well. I dunno any hot women, either. That I’m not dating myself.”

“Did you call for a reason or just to fuck with me?”

He gave her Curious’s name and asked for the address of his sister. She said hold on and set the phone down. Waiting, waiting, looking at his nails, the scuff on his cycle boots, wondering where Alexis was by now… Susan came back on the line.

Sis, it turned out, lived in Clinton, out in Prince George’s County. He rode out there in half an hour, coming into a nice neighborhood, small brick ranchers, two-car garages, basketball hoops in the driveway. People mowed their yards, trimmed the hedges. He got off the bike. No dogs barking. No engines gunning. Suburbia. It was kind of nice, though the burbs tended to give him the hives. There was quiet and there was too quiet.

When he knocked, a slender, attractive young woman came to the door and asked what it was about.

“George,” he said, and she started to slam it shut.

“Wait,” he said, sticking a foot in front of the door, keeping it a few inches open. “I’m not the police. I’m not an investigator. I’m just a reporter, at the paper? I don’t want to bother you. I’m sorry to be here. Just tell George, next time you hear from him, that I know. Okay? That I know. About what happened with Billy Ellison. That I’ve got intel from MPD on what happened with the Hall brothers.”

He put a card on the floor, and moved his foot. The door slammed shut.

Two nights later, when he had finished trolling through the Bend on his scratched-up and beat-to-shit bike and was back on the Hill, on Pennsylvania Avenue, some idiot started gliding alongside, a hoopty Chevy slow-rolling past the shuttered little restaurants and bars, pulling even with him at the stoplight on Fourth.

They were the only two vehicles out and he ignored it when the driver’s-side window came down. It wasn’t until the car jerked slightly in front of him that he looked over.

Curious leaned out of the window, tilting his head back up the street. “Come on up here,” he said, that rasp, “and leave my sister the fuck out of it.”

They parked on Seventh SE, a dark, narrow little street of row houses, about halfway between Sully’s place and the James Creek projects, which is to say, about three-quarters of a mile from either. Curious had killed the engine, sitting there behind the wheel, blowing a spliff with the window rolled down. Sully was sitting on the passenger’s side, window rolled up, cycle helmet at his feet. He waved a hand in front of him, clearing the cloud, and told Curious one more time that if he wanted his information about what the police knew about the Hall brothers shooting, then he was going to cough up some intel, too.

“You wanted to know what happened, you shoulda gone down there and asked them,” Sully said. “That’s work I did. So, hey, you want me to talk to you, you talk to me.”

“That what you do with Sly?” Curious rasped. The man’s eyes were red, bleary, his mind floating off somewhere, high as a kite.

“Go ask Sly, you wanna know his business,” Sully said. “You want to know what John Parker and MPD know, what he told me he knows, anyway? We trade. Capiche?”

“Whatever.” A wave of the hand.

“What I got for you,” Sully said, “the first part, is that they got the murder weapon on the Hall brothers killing.”

Curious looked down, remembering his joint, sucking in another toke, blowing it back out, slow and easy, the sodium-vapor streetlight up the block casting an orange glow into the car. It caught him about the shoulder, leaving his face in the gloom.

“Yeah?” he finally grunted. “Well, good. Good. T-Money and them, rolling up on Tony and Carlos. That shit’s wrong . Two and two, even MPD can see that’s four.”