'Two weeks ago.'
Now Craig gave me the beady eye. 'You said Sudbury was down in Mexico in the last couple of months. Which is it? Two weeks ago or the last couple of months?'
'Two weeks ago is within the last couple of months,' I said. 'Neither of us is telling you anything that's remotely contradictory to what the other is saying. So, what's the problem, Lieutenant?'
'The problem is that I think you two faggot assholes are telling me lie after lie after lie. The problem is, I think your buddy Maynard T. Sudbury doesn't just write about Mexico when he goes back and forth down there. And the problem is, I think when he goes down there, he may be involved in the type of illegal activities that can get a man shot in the gut on E Street when there's no other reason for that to happen. And the other problem is, I think you two pathetic queers know it.'
Timmy shook his head in disgust.
I said, 'That's a lot of problems you've got to contend with there, Lieutenant.'
'That's what I say.'
I said, 'The biggest problem of all, as far as I can make out, Lieutenant, is you.
With police work like this, in fact, it's no wonder Washington has one of the highest murder rates in North America. Up in Albany, New York, where we come from, police investigations aren't always handled as skillfully as a lot of us would like. But I've rarely encountered police presumption and speculation as wildly prejudiced and inaccurate and harmful to an investigation as I've witnessed tonight. This city obviously is not only the murder capital of the Eastern seaboard, it's also looking more and more like the capital of police fecklessness. You strike me as a blithering incompetent, Lieutenant, a disgrace to your department and to your profession.'
This was not calculated, just sincere. It was reckless, too, although with hospital staff often passing by in the corridor, there seemed little chance an inflamed Craig would pistol-whip us or attempt to arrest us on a trumped-up charge.
Craig did not, in fact, explode. He just colored again, looked at me dully, and said, 'The murder rate in D.C. isn't all that high if you don't calculate in the niggers. The niggers distort the stats. It's easy to get a misleading impression.
But Sudbury is no nigger. Even though it sounds to me like he sucks nigger dick.'
I gazed at Craig and said nothing. Timmy was looking at his own lap and slowly shaking his head.
'So you two cocksuckers are sure you don't want to tell me about some trouble your buddy Sudbury said he was in? Some trouble down in Mexico?'
Timmy muttered, 'There's nothing to tell.'
Craig studied us with his dead eyes, then said, 'Listen to what I say to you.
Don't leave the District without checking with me. Have you got that straight?'
Neither of us had a copy of the Constitution to wave in Craig's face, but I knew it wouldn't have helped. For Craig stood up without another word, turned, and quickly walked out.
After a moment, Timmy said, 'Is he just a rotten human being and one of the worst cops in the United States, or was there a lot more going on just now than was apparent on the surface? Why, for God's sake, did he keep harping on Mexico, for instance, over and over and over again?'
Before I could think about what might have been paranoid imaginings and what was well-founded fear, a doctor in OR gear walked into the lounge and came over to us. He didn't look happy, but he wasn't averting his eyes either.
Chapter 4
Maynard's chances of surviving were better than even. The surgeon told us that the head wound was messy but superficial, and the much more serious abdominal injuries had required major replumbing-just short of a colostomy and if Maynard lived through the next twelve hours, full recovery was a good possibility. The surgeon said Maynard's sturdy constitution and overall good health were a big help, but that infection was a danger and Maynard would have to be closely watched over the next day.
Timmy said, 'He's already got a stomach infection.'
'He does? What's that?' A small, soft-eyed man with a cleft chin, the surgeon looked interested in this.
Timmy explained how Maynard had apparently picked up a parasite that wouldn't let go in Zambia, Burkina Faso, or Kyr-gyzstan. 'He's had it for going on a year,' Timmy said.
'That'll be the least of Mr. Sudbury's problems,' the doctor said. 'Infections like that are a month in the country compared to the kinds that urban North American hospitals have to worry about.'
Timmy said he didn't find that reassuring, and the surgeon left us with instructions on how to attempt to pry information on Maynard's condition out of the hospital bureaucracy.
At just after 2 A.M., in a cab rolling south and east through Washington's nearly deserted early-Sunday- morning streets, I said to Timmy, 'Ray Craig isn't the worst cop I've ever run into in my long career of running into law officers who'd have been equally comfortable on either side of the law, but he may be the second or third worst. He's so in thrall to his own insecurities and hatreds that he can survive professionally only in a place where most of the actual criminals fit his idea of a criminal stereotype- black or Hispanic or whatever. Bust enough black heads, and he's bound to catch an actual criminal sooner or later. It's cops like this that create juries like the one that acquitted O.J.
'But nasty as Craig is, Timothy, I didn't come away with any sense that he's aware of Jim Suter's letter to Maynard or Suter's alleged perilous situation, or the Suter quilt panel or Betty Krum-futz or any of that. He's not a party to a nefarious plot who was digging around to see what we know. Craig is just another unimaginative, mildly disturbed cop in love with the obvious who, when he hears about shootings and Mexico, he immediately figures drugs. But I wouldn't interpret his remarks to mean anything more extensive or more worrisome than that. Trust him with what we know about the Suter situation? No way-the guy's a flake and an incompetent. Clue him in at this point and he's liable to get Suter killed, and maybe us, too. But is Craig worse than a bigoted hack? I don't think so.'
Timmy had been fidgeting restlessly as I spoke, and now, keeping his hands down low, he gestured urgently in the direction of the cabdriver and said, 'Yes, I'm sure you're right. Maybe we should just forget about all that.' Then, looking otherwise wild-eyed, he winked at me.
Now he thought the cabdriver was in on it? Whatever he thought 'it' was? I leaned up and read the driver's name spelled out alongside his photograph on the cabbie's license mounted on the visor. He was a slim black man in a brown sport coat that gave him a dressed-up look, and his name was Getachew Tessemma. The man had been soft-spoken and polite when we'd climbed into his cab. I assumed the name was African, maybe Ethiopian; with his slender nose and dark, delicate eyelashes the size of marquees, Tessemma resembled the maitre d' at the restaurant we'd eaten in six hours earlier.
Tessemma's had been the only cab parked outside the hospital when Timmy and I came out. I was aware that sweet, placid people could be treacherous-I had been deeply involved in the great Southeast Asian disaster arranged for the nation by Johnson, Nixon, Kissinger, and others. But was it remotely possible that this unprepossessing African who waited for fares outside a hospital in the middle of the night was somehow out to do us both in? I thought not.
I caught a glimpse of the street signs as we rode along Seventeenth Street, NW, the American Red Cross headquarters on our right, and then the old Pan American Union building. Timmy had gone to school in Georgetown and knew D.C. much better than I did, but I had visited the city often enough to know its basic layout. I said, 'This is a good route to Maynard's house, isn't it? We're going to the Hill by way of the Tidal Basin and the Southwest freeway. We've been with Maynard when he's taken this route.'
'It's one way of getting there,' Timmy said, and glanced nervously left and right at the passing Washington scene.
We cruised past the Mall, where, just east of the Washington Monument, the AIDS quilt panels had been folded up and stowed away for the night. The exterior columns of the Lincoln Memorial, off to our right, were dark, but I caught a glimpse of the big, illuminated marble statue within the structure. The great man was seated stiffly in an armchair in a characteristically formal pose of the era. Today he'd be grinning in a designer polo shirt, maybe
