Manuel put his thumb to his fingers and crossed himself. He went to the far corner of the garage, where a couple of old batteries were resting on wooden pallets. He lifted one of the batteries and carried it back to the LTD.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
JANUARY 1998
THREE
Nick Stefanos tucked a black denim shirt into jeans and had a seat on the edge of his bed. He leaned forward to tie his shoes and felt a rush of dizziness. Cool sweat broke upon his forehead. He sat up and waited for the feeling to pass. In an hour or so he’d be fine.
Stefanos shaved with a cup of coffee in front of him and the last Jawbox booming from his Polk speakers back in the bedroom. “Iodine,” the CD’s soul-tinged rocker, had just kicked in. He rubbed his cheek, downed a last swig of coffee, and gargled a capful of breath wash. In his bedroom he grabbed an envelope and a shrink-wrapped CD off his dresser.
Stefanos snagged his brown leather jacket off a peg by the door, turned up his collar, locked the apartment, and left the house. He picked up the morning Post from his landlord’s front lawn and got under the wheel of his white-over-red Coronet 500, parked at the curb. He turned over the engine and drove a couple of miles out of Shepherd Park to the Takoma Metro station, where he caught a downtown train.
He found a seat on the right side of the car. Seasoned Red Line riders knew to go there, as the morning sun blew blinding rays through the left windows of the southbound cars, causing a sickening, furnace brand of heat. “Doors closing,” said a recorded female voice, and Stefanos couldn’t help but smile. It always sounded like “George Clinton” to him.
The train got rolling as Stefanos pulled the Metro section from the Post and scanned its front page. One of the section’s rotating columnists had written yet another piece on the ongoing dismantlement of Home Rule.
Quietly, and with surprisingly little resistance, the Feds had taken over the nation’s capital. Congress had appointed a control board and a city manager, a white female Texan who would oversee a town whose black residents made up more than 80 percent of the population. A former military general had been put in charge of the public school system, with little positive effect. Under his “leadership,” public schools had opened seven weeks late the previous fall due to long-neglected repairs. D.C. residents continued to pay taxes but had no meaningful voting representation in the House or the Senate, and the elected city council had been stripped of its power. The mayor was now in charge of little more than parades.
Meanwhile, fat-cat politicians from Virginia and North Carolina, and suburbanites who made their living in town but paid no commuter taxes, ridiculed the District of Columbia relentlessly. Stefanos, a lifelong Washingtonian, was fully aware of the problems. Like most residents, though, he didn’t care to hear about them from leeches, tourists, and self-serving Southerners.
Stefanos read an article below the fold that detailed the state of the Metropolitan Police Department. The former chief of police had resigned under allegations of mismanagement and corruption; his roommate, a lieutenant on the force, had been accused of shaking down closeted homosexuals outside Southeast’s bathhouse strip. The Homicide division, with more than sixteen hundred unsolved cases and a less than 40 percent closure rate, was under particular fire. Some Homicide detectives had recently been caught overinflating the hours on their time cards. Murders occurring in the city’s poorest neighborhoods were lazily investigated at best. An apparent serial killer was loose in the Park View section of town. And the most emblematic, high-profile case of the decade remained unsolved: the slaughter at the pizza parlor called May’s, dating back to the summer of 1995.
The mention of May’s triggered a pulse in Stefano’s blood. In the 1980s, when Stefanos was still taking cocaine with his whiskey in after-hours establishments, he had spent many late nights being served by Steve Maroulis, the house bartender at May’s. And he had crossed paths with Dimitri Karras, the father of the child killed by the speeding getaway car, on several occasions over the past twenty-two years. That Stefanos knew two victims of the same crime was not surprising. Stefanos, Maroulis, and Karras were all of Greek descent, and though spread out now, the Greek community in D.C. had a shared history.
Stefanos looked out the window at a trash-strewn field bordering the old Woodie’s warehouse off North Capitol. Graffiti outlaw Cool “Disco” Dan, a D.C. legend, had tagged the loading dock. Below the moniker, someone had spray-painted a tombstone, on which was written, “Larry Willis, RIP,” and below that, his eulogy: “Heaven for a G.”
The Red Line train entered a tunnel. Stefanos folded the newspaper, preparing for his stop.
Stefanos stepped off the Judiciary Square station escalator and walked over to the Superior Court building at 5th and Indiana. He passed through a metal detector, navigated halls crowded with youths, their parents, uniformed cops, sheriffs, and private and court-appointed attorneys, and went down to the large cafeteria on the bottom floor.
He bought a cup of coffee, sugared and creamed it to cut the taste, and walked across a red carpet to a table close to the front entrance, where he had a seat in a chair upholstered in red vinyl.
A voice from a loudspeaker mounted on the wall announced, “Herbert Deuterman, please report with your client at this time to courtroom two-thirteen…”
Nearby, a middle-aged white attorney wearing rumpled, mismatched clothes talked his idea of black to a few of his bored black coworkers seated at the same table. He described a defendant who had accused him of being a racist, and then said, “If this homey knew me the way y’all know me, he’d’ve known that the only color that matters to me is green. I put it to this boy point-blank straight.”
As the attorney laughed, a woman seated at the table said, “So, you gonna cut a deal with his lawyer?”
“I’m gonna cut one every which way but loose. You can believe that.”
“Long as you don’t have to break a sweat, right Mr. Watkins?”
“Sugar, I’m gonna do as little as possible, and a little bit less than that.”
A kid sitting at the table to the right of Stefanos listened as his lawyer described the plea-out he was about to make “upstairs” on his client’s behalf, and how “Judge Levy definitely does not want to send another young man into an already overcrowded system, and she won’t, if she sees that your heart is in the right place.”
Stefanos looked at the kid, still in his teens: skinny, sloppily dressed, and slumped in his chair. Today was his court date, and no one had even instructed him to tuck in his shirt. “And try to get that scowl off your face,” said the tired young attorney, “when you go before the judge. You can do that for a minute, can’t you? Speak clearly and show remorse, understand?”
“I hear you,” said the kid. “Can I go get me one of them sodas now?”
“Go ahead.”
The young man glanced over at Stefanos and gave him a hard look before rising out of his seat to walk, deep-dip style, toward the cafeteria line.
Stefanos had choked down half his coffee by the time Elaine Clay entered the cafeteria. Clay was a Fifth Streeter, one of the court-appointed attorneys available to defendants under the Criminal Justice Act. In her middle years, with the legs to wear the skirt she wore today, she was tall and big boned, with a handsome, smooth chocolate face. Even before she had begun throwing work his way, Stefanos had heard of her rep from the cops who frequented the Spot, the bar where he worked part-time. Most cops derided the CJA attorneys – they were the enemy who undid police arrests. But over the years the strength and consistency of Elaine Clay’s performance had elicited a kind of muttered-under-the-breath respect from the cops. It had been one of the Spot’s regulars, in fact, homicide detective Dan Boyle, who had put Clay and Stefanos together the first time.
Stefanos stood as Elaine approached the table.
“Nick,” she said.
“Counselor.”
They shook hands. Elaine had a seat, dropping a worn leather bag at her side.
“Well?” she said.
