The Cut (Spero Lucas) (6 page)

“If Dad was here, the TV would be on right now. Mom would be with him, watching one of his westerns or karate movies, keeping him company. Even though she had no interest at all.”

“
Chinese Connection
,” said Leo. “
That
was one he liked.”

“Pop loved that fight in the yard between Bruce Lee and Robert Baker.”

“He was into Baker. Maybe ’cause he looked a little like him.”

“But the best fight scene was the locker room fight in
Game of Death
,” said Lucas. “Bob Wall played Carl Miller, remember?”

“That picture was some bullshit, though,” said Leo. “Bruce Lee was dead when they put that together. Matter of fact, they cut in doubles for most of that movie, man. That’s Scott Baio, or whatever his name is, fightin in that locker room scene. It sure ain’t Bruce.”

“Yuen Biao,” said Lucas. “I’m sayin, that was Dad’s favorite fight because of what Bruce says after he wastes the guy: ‘You lose, Carl Miller.’ ”

Leo chuckled. “That’s right.”

“Pop would say that to us when we were playing hoops in the driveway. After he’d score or block our shots. ‘You lose, Carl Miller.’ ”

“I remember.”

Spero folded his hands across his midsection. “I went and saw him the other day.”

“Yeah?”

“I go by there pretty often.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m still…”

“What?”

“I still struggle with it, man.”

“I know you do.”

“Him being there and all.”

“I know.”

“All last winter, when we got those big snows, and I’d think of him buried under it. Frozen. Or when it rains real hard, and I know the ground is full of water…”

“Spero.”

“I see him, Leo. Inside that dark box.”

“Stop.”

“You think I’m nuts.”

“No. But you gotta get right with this.”

“You never go to the cemetery, do you?”

“I haven’t been since the funeral,” said Leo.

“Well, I didn’t get to go to his funeral,” said Spero. “I was in Iraq, remember?”

“Wasn’t any way for you to get back. Me and him talked about it. He understood.”

“Maybe that’s why I keep visiting him. I didn’t get to say good-bye.”

“Look,” said Leo. “Do you know why I don’t go to Glenwood?”

“I think so.”

“Damn right you do. You been hearing Father John and Father Steve preach about it our whole lives. The reason I don’t go to that graveyard is because Dad’s not there. I don’t stress on him being cold or wet, or his state of decomposition, because that is not my father in that grave. That’s just a shell. He went from this good life to a glorious life. Hear?”

“If you say so.”

“You can’t be beating up on yourself for not being here when he was dying. Dad was proud of you, man.”

“I hope so,” said Spero, a catch in his voice.

“And you can’t undo his death, any more than you can shake the grief out of Mom. You’re always trying to
fix
shit, Spero. Like when you enlisted in the Marine Corps, and I asked you why. You said, ‘I’ve got to do something.’ ”

“I felt the need to.”

“But this is not that. And it’s not one of your cases that you treat like a puzzle to solve. You can’t draw a diagram in that book of yours and fix our mother or your guilt. It’s not something you can win. You need to let it work its way out.”

“Okay, Leo. Okay.”

Cheyenne came back out on the porch, got under the table, and dropped to the wood floor, resting against Spero’s feet.

“You know that thing I took on?” said Spero.

“You mean the weed dealer?”

“The guys who worked for him had that package delivered to a home on a street right across from your school.”

“On Clifton?”

“Twelfth.”

“Odd place for them to do it,” said Leo. “All that law around.”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

“How old are those guys?”

“Round twenty, I guess,” said Spero.

“There you go,” said Leo.

“What?”

“You’re looking for logic,” said Leo. “They’re still kids.”

I
N THE
morning, Lucas drew a crude sketch in his notebook of the eighteen residences on the 2500 block of 12th Street, Northwest. The row houses were depicted as simple adjoining squares in which he wrote address numbers, leaving room for the names of the owners.

He left his apartment, got into his Jeep, and went up to the Shepherd Park library on Georgia. The computers there were occupied by surfers who did not look as if they would be relinquishing their spots any time soon, so he drove to the nearest big-box office supply store and paid a rental fee for the use of a PC. He typically did the bulk of his investigative work on his laptop at home, using programs like People Finder, but he was about to use a public site and didn’t want to leave an electronic trail.

In a private stall, he got to work. He went to the D.C. government website, which was helpfully located under dc.gov. Above a blank box was the question, “What can we help you find?” and in the box Lucas typed, “research real property”
and hit “enter.” This took him to the Real Property Tax Database Search. In the search box on that page he typed in the address on 12th Street to which the package of marijuana had been shipped. He got the name of the owner, the lot number, the current assessed value of the property, the last sale date, and the last sale price. The owner’s name was Lisa Weitzman. Lucas guessed that a person with the surname Weitzman would not be black, though it was possible, or Hispanic, which was even less likely. The last sale date of the property, 2008, told him that she was a newer resident and, in keeping with the recent history of the rapidly gentrified neighborhood, probably on the young side, and white. The assessed value of the house was currently a hundred thousand dollars below her purchase price; she had bought at the height of the market, before property values dipped. What the database did not tell him was whether she lived there; it listed owners, not tenants. But the data was valuable and had been easy to obtain.

Lucas repeated the process for every residential property on the block. As he did, he wrote the owner’s name inside the square of each address on 12th Street, along with the last sale date, on the drawing he had sketched into his notebook. When he was done he had a map of the block with each residence assigned an owner’s name and an indication of who was fairly new to the block and who was not.

Armed with this information, he left the store, phoned Tavon Lynch, bought a sandwich and a bottle of water at the nearest Subway, and drove south.

TAVON LYNCH
and Edwin Davis were on the low end of the Clifton Street slope, down near 11th, sitting in Tavon’s Impala,
when Lucas passed them in his Jeep. He did not slow down. He parked on 12th and waited for Tavon and Edwin to join him. Soon he saw them in the rearview, coming on foot. Tavon slid into the passenger seat beside him and Edwin got in back. It was close to 11
A.M
.

Tavon was wearing a light jacket with epaulets over a Black Uhuru T-shirt, with a different pair of Lacoste sneaks on his feet than he had worn the day before. Edwin wore a UCB Live at the Crossroads T. From the two times they had met, Lucas surmised that Tavon was a reggae man and Edwin was into go-go, but with these guys their choice of shirts could have just been a fashion thing. Edwin had a belt on with a big G buckle, which Lucas guessed advertised Gucci, and he was sporting Ray-Ban aviators. Tavon was wearing, to Lucas’s untrained eye, an expensive pair of sunglasses, too. Maybe they were both wearing shades because they were high. They had reeked of marijuana when they got into the Jeep.

“What’s shakin, Spero?” said Tavon, and he offered his fist. Lucas dapped him up.

“On the job,” said Lucas.

“Us, too,” said Edwin, and Lucas saw him in the mirror, studying the screen of the phone in his hand.

“We’re gonna have to leave up out of here soon,” said Tavon. “Why’d you call us in?”

“I’ve got names to put inside the houses now,” said Lucas, patting his notebook, which rested atop the console on his right. “I was wondering if any of them meant anything to y’all.”

“Lemme see.”

Lucas opened the Moleskine notebook to the appropriate page and handed it to Tavon. Tavon moved his sunglasses to the top of his head, fitting them into his nest of braids, and stared at the diagram and notations, his lips moving soundlessly as he read.

Lucas looked through the windshield to the street. An old woman on the even-numbered side stood outside her weathered house, staring down at a garden of flowers and ground cover arranged at the base of her porch. She wore a faded housedress and held a trowel. On the same side of the street, farther down, a woman nearing middle age and wearing a business suit left her row house and walked briskly south on 12th. Lucas made voice notations into his phone, noting the addresses so that he could match the numbers to names later on.

Tavon passed the notebook over his shoulder to Edwin, then looked at Lucas. Tavon’s pupils were dilated and the whites were pink. “I don’t recognize none of the names.”

“Not even Lisa Weitzman?”

“Who’s she?”

“The woman who owns the house where you arranged the drop.”

“If you mean the white girl who left for work each mornin and stayed away all day, then that’s her. I didn’t feel the need to find out her name.”

“That’s sloppy, man.”

“Ain’t like we don’t have our operation in control,” said Tavon, with a small shrug.

“If you had it under control you wouldn’t have lost the package.”

“We’re makin money,” said Edwin, by way of rebuttal. He passed the notebook back to Lucas.

“These here are Christian Dior,” said Tavon, as if an expensive accessory erased Lucas’s criticism. He took the oversize sunglasses off his head and showed them to Lucas. “Three hundred dollars.”

Lucas grabbed a handful of his pants leg. “Dickies. Twenty-nine ninety-five.”

Tavon laughed, showing a slight overbite. It wasn’t that funny, but in his state he found it to be.

“You think we’re just dumb younguns,” said Tavon, still grinning.

“I don’t think you’re stupid,” said Lucas. “But both of you are baked right now. That tells me you’re capable of making bad decisions. And mistakes.”

“You don’t get high?”

“Not while I’m working.”

“We know what we’re doin,” said Tavon, and he looked over the backseat at Edwin, their eyes meeting meaningfully. Lucas had the feeling that they wanted to defend themselves, give him some kind of explanation or excuse for the loss of the packages. But the moment passed and a tangible silence fell inside the car.

“You into Black Uhuru?” said Lucas, nodding at Tavon’s T-shirt, breaking the quiet.

“They’re tight,” said Tavon. “Don’t tell me you know somethin about Uhuru.”

“I got some of their music. The Puma, Duckie, and Michael lineup is the best. I’m talking about the records Sly and Robbie produced. The roots stuff. ‘Leaving to Zion’ is the shit.”

“Ho,” said Tavon with surprise. “How you up with that?”

“I had a buddy in the Marine Corps who turned me on to reggae.”

“Jamaican dude?”

“White dude from Louisiana,” said Lucas, remembering his friend, that high-pitched laugh he had, the way he ducked his head when he smiled. Jamie Burdette, buried now in Metairie.

“You go to the dance halls and shit?”

“Nah,” said Lucas. “I wouldn’t know where to go, and I doubt I’d feel comfortable if I did. There was a place called Kilimanjaro, down in Adams Morgan, when I was a kid. It’s been closed for a long time.”

“I go sometimes,” said Tavon. “They got this warehouse out there in Maryland, off Colesville Road, where they be havin shows? But you need to be careful. The Rastas come to have fun, but then you got the rude boys mixed in the crowd. If things pop off, ain’t gonna be just a fistfight. Someone’s about to get shot.”

“That not your thing,” said Lucas.

“I’m a man of peace. A lover.”

“They got the best girls at Twenty Four,” said Edwin, speaking on the big club off Bladensburg Road, near New York Avenue in Northeast. “Them dance hall girls stink.”

“So do your drawers.”

“Your father’s.”

“Edwin likes the VIP room,” said Tavon.

“I just like the women.”

“You mean, like, the one I seen you with the other night? One they call Precious?”

“That’s her name,” said Edwin defensively.

“She look like that beast, too.”

“Go ahead, Tay.”

“Too bad you can’t satisfy the girls like I do,” said Tavon.

“I don’t need to. When I gyrate, they bug.”

“You
know
they call me the Cobra.”

“Now you gonna brag on your tongue,” said Edwin.

“When you break a woman off,” said Tavon, “you got to break her off proper.”

“If I can’t buy it at the Shoppers Food Warehouse,” said Edwin, “I don’t eat it.”

“Look there,” said Lucas, stopping them, because if he didn’t they would go on. “You guys see that old lady up by her house, with the shovel in her hand?”

“So?” said Edwin.

“That little garden she’s got, looks like it’s her pride. At her age, you know she’s not working. This time of year, I bet she’s out there every day, tending to her flowers.”