Neely Tucker - Murder, D.C.

“Then Daddy died, in a car wreck, and Billy’s mom, she kept it right up there on the same shelf. Told Billy all about it. Like it was magic. A birthright. Which is where Billy plucked it from, two nights before he came down here and shot himself. He was going loco at the end. He’d stopped taking his meds. He liked the mind-fuck historical aspect of his own suicide-putting an end to his family’s bloodline with a family heirloom.”

“You-you-there ain’t no way you know-”

“Sure I do,” Sully said, opening the car door, getting his cycle helmet off the floor. “I’ve got the case the gun was in. It’s a little wooden box. Billy wrote the whole thing down-the gun, taking it from his mother’s house, all that. He just didn’t know I was going to be the one to wind up with it. He thought it would be Elliot.”

He got out then, closed the door behind him, felt his knee twinge on him and bent it, and just that fast the passenger door swung open behind him. Curious had slid across the seat, pulled out a gun, and had it up and pointed, his jawline set.

“That gun, what you saying, the family’s going to ID as soon as they hear about it,” he said, “and you saying that’s gonna lead them right back-”

“No no no, you not listening,” Sully said. “That’s your break. The family has known it’s been gone since the night Billy shot himself. They’ve known it was suicide, the gun he used, the whole time. They found out Granddad’s gun was missing? Then they set him up, you hear? All that ‘Our Billy was a drug dealer’ routine? It was bullshit, to protect the family’s history. They sold him out. So trust me on this. They don’t want anybody to know anything different. They ain’t never, ever going to ID that gun.”

He took two steps, then turned back.

“And, hey, motherfucker? You point a gun at me one more time? Ima tell Sly you capped Dee Dee. Your sister, George? You know what Sly’ll do to your sister?”

IT TOOK SOMEconvincing with Sly to backstop him on the move he had set up. It took another mention of Noel Pittman and what he knew about it. But after a few days of no-bullshit hardball, and a few more days of scouting, Sly Hastings and Lionel reluctantly drove Sully out to Shellie Stevens’s house in Great Falls, the Virginia suburb of the posh and posher, late on a Sunday afternoon, neither of them wanting to be there.

They were all riding in a black Lincoln Town Car with stolen plates. Sly had borrowed the car for the afternoon from a guy who owed him, then jacked the plates. They’d picked up Sully a few minutes later. Sly started to explain the whole situation and Sully said he didn’t even want to know.

“You got to admit, it’s a pretty good cover,” Sly said. “We roll up on the man’s house, looking like we just got out of a private jet at Dulles.”

“The last thing anybody in Great Falls is going to look at,” Sully said, “is a white man getting out of a chauffeured Town Car.”

Sly, riding shotgun, turned to look at him in the backseat. “I didn’t even know you had a suit. You got your piece in there?”

Sully tapped the coat’s outer left pocket. “I’m not gonna need it.”

“What about his wife? Kids?”

“Wife goes to the Kennedy Center every Sunday afternoon, this classical concert series. She’s an official patron. Kids grown and gone.”

Shellie Stevens’s house was a monstrous stucco thing on a leafy street full of them. It was set back from the road on several acres. It was three stories, set among towering oaks with evergreens lining the drive. Lionel pulled up in the circular driveway, right around the fountain, and parked. Wearing a black suit and a chauffeur’s cap, he walked to the front door and, using what appeared to be a suction cup and a glass-cutting knife, sliced a quick circle in the glass, pulled it back with the suction cup, reached in, and turned the dead bolt. He poked his head in the door, called out, heard nothing, and then walked back to the car. He opened the rear passenger door. Sully, wearing a black two-button Versace suit and carrying a leather briefcase, got out and walked smartly into the house like he was ten minutes late.

Sly and Lionel pulled out of the drive. They would tool around the neighborhood until Sully paged them. Then they’d circle back through and he had better be there when they did.

The house was lovely. He liked it. He really did. Stevens-or more likely his wife, or even more likely her decorator-had good taste, you had to give that up. The piedmont red in the dining room gave him ideas for his own place. The hallways were wide, the wooden floors polished to a scream.

Sully went to the kitchen-big as a tennis court-found the crystal, got a glass, and used the ice maker in the fridge for four, then five cubes.

The liquor took a minute to find but it was in a built-in cabinet between the kitchen and dining room. Stevens, pretentious little prick that he was, apparently drank mostly Scotch. But there was a bottle of Maker’s Mark, its red wax seal peeking out from behind the Scotch and in front of the mixers. Not Basil’s, but it would do.

He poured two fingers over the ice, picked up the briefcase, and went to the living room, setting the ice-filled glass on the coffee table-he was guessing teak here-so that it would be sure to leave a water mark. Then he opened the briefcase and sat back to wait.

A little before five, the garage door opened. He walked to the windows and saw a black Jaguar pull in. He settled back on the loveseat. A few minutes later, Stevens came in through a side door from the garage, wearing ridiculous golf pants and a light green knit shirt, visor still on his head. He had taken his golf spikes off and was holding them in his hand, padding across the floor in his socks.

He went to the kitchen and poured something from the refrigerator and was about to walk up the stairs when he rounded the corner, looked up, and saw Sully. The glass dropped from his hand, liquid and ice sloshing out, glass shattering on the floor.

“Counselor,” Sully said, with a slight nod.

“How did-how did-”

“The same way your assholes got into my place,” he said. “But I didn’t fuck up your car, like you did my bike, and God knows I didn’t waste your whiskey like you did mine. I just had one. Well, two. Since you took so long.” He held up his glass, nodding. “You should really drink better shit. Not that there’s-”

Stevens, ashen, moved across the room. “The police will take care of this. Of you. I can’t-”

“Which ‘this’ are we talking about? You want to tell them about ‘this’?”

He took the wooden box that had held the Singer.45 from his briefcase and set it on the coffee table in front of him. He lifted the lid. It was, of course, empty.

Stevens stopped short, his eyes going from searching for the phone to the pistol case.

“You been looking for this so hard,” Sully said, “since the night Billy argued with you and Delores and ran out of the house with it.”

“You-”

“Billy took the pistol out of this case,” Sully said, “and shot himself in the head with it. You knew that from the beginning. His last little fuck-you to the both of you. Going to the Bend so you’d be sure not to miss the point. Like you could possibly.”

Stevens’s eyes had gone to the case, not seeing anything else.

“So, you want to call the police, partner,” Sully continued, “you go right the fuck ahead. You call John Parker, head of D.C. Homicide. You tell him you found evidence that Billy Ellison was a suicide, not a homicide. Then you tell him the same weapon was used to execute the Hall brothers in the Bend a few days ago. Closing out three homicides-brother, I can’t tell you how happy he’s going to be to hear that .”