Neely Tucker - Murder, D.C.

Stevens stared, his lower jaw starting to tremble.

“Come on, Shellie. You repeat the end of everything I say. That would be ‘Hear that.’ Or do you want to sit down and let me explain the end of your professional life to you?”

“You-you presume to know things,” Stevens said, “that you couldn’t possibly-”

“Shut the fuck up,” Sully said. “MPD found Lambert Ellison III’s gun down at the Bend the other night, where it was used to kill two major-league drug dealers.”

Stevens’s face, the eyebrows starting up, the mouth moving.

“Billy also wrote at least a partial draft of the note he left you and Delores,” he said. “Which I happen to have with me.”

He pulled a single sheet of paper from his backpack and slid it across the coffee table.

Stevens’s face became very still, the tension in his forehead absolute and frozen, his lips paper-thin slits, his fingers reaching out to pick up the slip of paper. He brought it to his face and said, briefly, “This is just a copy of something. It’s not even-”

“I have the original,” Sully said, softly. “We’re using it for layout in the story.”

Stevens looked at him across the sheet of paper, which was quivering ever so slightly in his hand, but his face was still holding, Sully saw, for the last time in his career, keeping it together, not yet aware of how completely all of this-the power office, the lunches, the deference he was accustomed to and thrived upon-was about to end.

“The thing that was always bothering me,” Sully said, “was these investigators you hired. You told me they were to help out with the homicide investigation. ‘To make sure justice is done,’ that’s what you said in your statement, how they were going to help track down the killers.

“But look at me. I been down there in the Bend, the gay clubs on O Street, talked to the cops? Nobody saw these guys investigating anything. Nobody. I thought that was pretty strange, but I was thinking you guys had the drop. I figured that maybe we were in the wrong place-maybe Billy had been shot somewhere else and brought to the Bend to make it look like a drug deal, right, and your investigators had tracked down the real place of the killing? And that the police and I were just that dumb and that you guys were just that smart?

“Well. I was dumb, but not in the way I thought. You hired investigators to track down Billy’s research , not his killer. You know the only people to see your investigators? Elliot. And his new partner. Who don’t-and couldn’t possibly-know sweet fuckall about the Bend. You couldn’t possibly have been trying to find out who killed him because you already knew . You already knew he killed himself, and why, because he told you all of that in a note just like that one you’re holding. You ran upstairs, looked in that velvet box, the gun was gone, and you knew.

“And yet you and Delores blew right past that, past your grief or what have you, and you hired those goons to find Billy’s research, his thesis, and get rid of it. You and Delores-and really, just you-created this story about Billy being some sort of drug dealer, like that was the dark family secret. A wannabe rap star, right? Wasn’t that it? So that everybody would think he was shot by another dealer. Then my story about the Bend ran. Delores panicked and thought I was onto the whole thing-selling her son out like that, the family reputation gone to hell-and it ate her alive. So she called me up and said, ‘I got to show you something.’ She was eaten up with guilt. She wanted me to know that she went along with it, but that it was your idea. You told her that it would fix everything. But it didn’t.”

“What-what is it, Mr. Carter, that you think you know,” Stevens said, sitting now, taking a wing chair across the room, “that would prompt such actions on our part?”

Playing it to the end. Sully admired that. It was fucked up, but he admired it, in the way he admired how a snake’s head would bite you even after it had been severed.

“What I know,” Sully said, “is that the foundation of the family fortune, the basis of the empire, was not dear old Nathaniel Ellison and his bank. It was his mother, Jeanne-Marie.”

Stevens looked at him, and Sully could see everything inside the man melt and slide away from its moorings, like a wax figure melting from inside.

“Jeanne-Marie,” Sully said, “co-owner of Frenchman’s Bend, one of the largest slave-selling markets in the United States. She was at first the mistress, then business partner, of Didier Delacroix, the Frenchman himself. Delacroix’s wife, that was Lisette; she died in the 1840s, the consumption, which is what they used to call tuberculosis. They had one child, Joshua Steven, but he was just a tot. So, to help run the empire, who did Didier turn to? Who else? Jeanne-Marie, his black mistress. Who was French. She was the overseer, the one who split families apart and sold off black children like livestock. They were almost all teenagers, the stock at the Bend, did you know that? And she sold them all.

“It was good business, if you had the stomach for it, but then there was the war and all that unpleasantness. Two years after it ended-this is 1867-Didier up and died. A widower, he left half of everything to Joshua and half to Jeanne-Marie. Overnight, she became, very likely, the richest black woman in America. Whatever her last name had been, she changed it to Ellison, stayed in the shadows, and gave their child, Nathaniel, the inheritance. Which he had the good sense to launder and start a bank. And so the Ellison myth of American ingenuity began. But the real source of their wealth, like so many others of the era, was slaves. They kept it hidden for nearly a century and a half. Till Billy dug it up. Imagine what it did to him, a kid already beset by depression, mania-”

“This-this-”

“The Ellisons were never slaves, not a day in their lives, you knew that, right? Jeane-Marie came across on the boat with Didier from the old country, gay old Paris. She’d been his mistress for years, under the family-servant guise or nanny or whatever. When he went into the slave business, she was the one who dealt with the slaves, decided who to buy and sell, as she had the more native eye for it.”

Silence, the mouth coming open, a small and tiny O.

“You know all this, Shellie. You’ve known it all your life. Didier Delacroix is your great-whatever grandfather.”

“I-”

“Didier fathered Nathaniel by Jeanne-Marie, yeah, but don’t forget his, what should we call him-legitimate son?-dear old Joshua Steven Delacroix. By the time Josh was in his late twenties-after the war ended-the Delacroix name became inconvenient to have around here. Lincoln assassinated, vigilante groups, freed slaves-it was a nightmare. Both his parents were dead. So he dropped the surname and added an S to the middle. And appeared to vanish.

“But Billy found him, in that deep hell of research he was into. Joshua moved to New York. Invested in mines and railroads. And when his son moved back to D.C. during World War One, he was just another rich New York lawyer.

“Three generations later”-Sully spread his hands, encompassing the house, the grounds-“here you sit, counselor. The progeny of the Frenchman himself.”

IT TOOK STEVENSa moment to gather himself-like Lee at Gettysburg, Sully thought, doomed but taking the offensive to the end-and he rallied.

“Many people owned slaves, Carter,” he said. “My ancestors, Delores’s. It’s nothing to be proud of but in the context of the day it was not shocking. People, all over the South, descendants carry on without shame. Her family and mine shared a common bond, known to each generation but never aired in public.”