Authors: DC Noir
George Pelecanos (10 page)
Leibmann
sat long after the kid was gone and the night's silence regained. An occasional
car hissed along the wet street outside. He sat in the dark and looked at the
wall and marveled that no police had come, no fire truck, not a curious
neighbor, nobody seemed to have heard a thing. Shepherd Park is not the
neighborhood it once was, he thought. The idea brought no feeling one way or
another. In the morning he would call the police and the insurance company to
file the reports and pretend that he happened on the devastation when he opened
the store in the morning.
Just another morning coming to
work, only this time to a bad surprise.
He would describe his distress
at what he discovered. Because what could anybody do? Besides, he could never
explain. Or say why it happened, even if it was possible to carry it that far.
Or why he had not called the police when he saw the lights in the store and
heard the sounds of the damage being done. Now, looking at the wall, exhausted,
vaguely ill, Liebmann knew he could not explain his shame to strangers. There
had been a problem, and it was his, and he had taken care of it--he would leave
it at that, in his own mind. He was not about to relate the way he had gone
down under the heel of time, how a simple animal rage had blossomed against the
ways his life was taken from him.
He
had no language for that kind of story.
Three
cops came, two uniforms with a plainclothes officer who picked around in the
ruins, trying to protect his shoes. The uniforms glanced at the scene from the
door and went back to sit in their cruiser at the curb out front.
"Any
idea of the damages?" the officer asked.
"Not
yet," Liebmann said. "I need a few days. I have to inventory."
"Right,"
the officer said. "I understand." He slipped, but caught himself against a
shelf. "Damn. This is some kind of mess. Who would've done this?"
Liebmann
was sweeping glass with an industrial push-broom. He said nothing.
The
officer looked around with the expression of a man who needed to move on to
some other part of his day.
"No enemies, huh?
No big
fights with anybody? Upset customer?"
"No,"
Liebmann said.
The
officer shrugged.
"Vandalism.
It's getting worse.
We're seeing more of it all the time.
Tough to connect
anybody to these things, though.
Not unless you walk in on them
red-handed."
The
insurance adjuster came a few hours later.
Older than the
cop, world weary, wearing black-frame eyeglasses and a tired off-blue suit.
By the time he arrived Liebmann had swept paths through the glass. The floor
was sugared with congealed liquor and the insurance man's wing tips stuck and
sucked to the floor as he walked. He had a clip-board. He looked closer and
harder at the damage than the police officer had, made notes as he moved
through the wreckage, then left his business card with Liebmann, mum-bling
something about how sorry he was.
From
time to time Liebmann's sister would appear and speak in his dreams. He had
never seen her again after that morning in their bedroom in the family
apartment in Berlin. Outside on the street the Nazis had separated the males
and females--he watched his mother and his sister led away. An officer was
saying over a bullhorn that everybody was being relocated for their own safety,
away from Berlin and the Allied bombing runs, and he watched his sister in her
little brown shoes, holding his mother's hand, walking off. Just before he lost
sight of her, she turned back and smiled and waved.
Dreaming,
Liebmann heard her voice lift in the open happiness of a child, speaking in a
language he did not understand, that seemed more like bells heard at a great
distance than any sort of words he might recognize. As she spoke, her tiny
white face hung suspended in the opalescent air of his vision.
Neither
the police officer nor the insurance adjuster noticed the bullet holes in the
outside wall. Liebmann found them when he came to the store the next morning.
They were there if somebody cared to look. But he knew nobody would.
Reports
were filed. Liebmann hired a clean-up crew, and inventoried, and replaced the
losses, and filed his receipts with the insurance company. He sold the pistol
to a dealer at a gun show at the Armory for twenty-five dollars, and about six
weeks later a check arrived from the insurance company for the damages.
Business went on as usual.
Thrived as usual.
People
still came in every day to get the boxes they wanted for storage, for shipping,
for whatever they needed. A few of the regular customers offered consolation.
Sorry about what happened, Jacob. Maybe it's time to get out of here. Move up
the road to Wheaton.
Liebmann
nodded. Maybe, he said. Maybe I need to think about that.
In
that neighborhood, they said, you learned fast where trouble came from. All you
had to do was keep your sense of direction and walk the other way. Hill East
was still a little rough around the edges but most of the people wanted to be
friendly. Stay away from the hot spots and say hello to everybody: That was the
rule.
A
month after we moved to Potomac Avenue we knew the places to avoid--mostly north
and east, like the intersection of 17th and Independence, where the crackheads
hung out, and the New Dragon, an all-night takeout joint over at 13th and C
that sold liquor to go. You didn't want to mess with the kind of people who
patronized that joint. They didn't go there for the food.
The
Dragon was where the local pusher known as the Wheelchair Bandit did business.
Having a disability didn't make a person any more law-abiding than anybody
else, apparently. Instead of a motorized chair, the Bandit had an old pit
bull--I know it's a cliche but it's the truth--who used to pull him around
when he wasn't staked out for customers just outside the restaurant. Some
people on the neighborhood listserv said you could hear the jangle of his
keys--he carried at least fifty of them on a belt chain--and the panting of his
dog before you saw the man himself. If you heard those sounds, they said, you'd
better get yourself clear.
Nobody
knew whether the food was any good at the New Dragon or whether in actual fact
they even served any. Nobody moved to Hill East for the food anyway. Good
pizza, decent Mexican, KFC--that pretty much covered the range. Thai takeout, if
you were an office type with a little more disposable cash than the longtime
residents, the federal workers and postmen and steady jobbers who'd bought
their places forty years ago and couldn't believe what those old houses--nothing
fancy, just solid 1920s brick numbers with modest front porches and envelopes
of land front and back--went for these days.
Couldn't believe
their property taxes, either.
They cashed in or they stayed put until
they couldn't afford to stay put any longer. I used to wonder, once in a while,
where they went when they left.
Drugs
and real estate: two good lines of work to be in on the Hill if you weren't a
Republican or a lobbyist, or maybe even if you were. We didn't care for the
Republicans or the dealers, but none of that made trouble, not for us. It was
just life in a town lousy with people who had too much money--the folks looking
to buy up anything they could get their hands on--and even lousier with people
who didn't have enough to do anything at all. Not everybody could be a winner.
Overall
I couldn't complain about how things were going. Baseball had come back to town
after thirty-five years--the Nationals were even on a streak, the winning
kind--and after years paying good dough to bad landlords, we had a house of our
own.
We
felt lucky, finding that house. Lucky to have a front porch and a little bit of
land to call our own, lucky to have a bedroom for each kid--Dani, who was almost
four, and her baby brother Jack--when a lot of people we knew had theirs
double-bunking.
Especially if they lived in the older row
houses to the west, over in the lockdown zone around the Capitol and the
Supreme Court where the Homeland Security folks concentrated their loving
attention.
For the most part they left Hill East alone. There was nobody
fancy here to protect, no essential governmental personnel, unless you counted
the famous residents of Congressional Cemetery two blocks over. John Philip
Sousa and J. Edgar Hoover were good neighbors.
I
couldn't say that of everybody. In the mornings, on my way to the Metro, I got
in the habit of picking up the Styrofoam containers and soda cans thrown out of
car windows by the people who blew down Potomac Avenue. You could find all
kinds of things in the bushes along that strip--condoms (used), CDs
(unplayable), every type of wrapping known to the fast-food industry.
The
weirdest thing I found was a baby doll the color of an old copper penny. I say
I found it but in fact it was Dani who did, on one of the aimless stroller
expeditions she and the baby and I used to take down the alley behind the house
when we had time to kill before dinner. The backyards of our block were as diverse
as the residents. A couple had been shrubbed and landscaped until they looked
like pages out of House and Garden. Others, like ours, were crammed full of
kiddie gear, plastic slides, and sandboxes shaped like enormous frogs and
ladybugs. A few, including William and Ida's next door, had evolved over
decades from outdoor storage to junkyards where unwanted objects went to die:
broken-down jalopies, odd pieces of wood from home-renovation projects
abandoned halfway through, steel meat smokers that looked like mini-submarines.
Next
to William and Ida's on the other side was a group house for the mentally
disturbed, muttering sad cases who boarded a van each weekday morning and were
taken off to some useful occupation and brought back each night to Potomac
Avenue. At home, if the weather was nice and even if it wasn't, they drifted
along the sidewalk like so much human litter. That's not a very nice way of
putting it. But whenever I saw Louis and Juanita and the other residents, whose
names we didn't know, they looked emptied out like the discards I picked up
along the margins of the avenue. If they were sad, though, they didn't know it.
They used to try to bum cigarettes off us. They never could remember that we
didn't smoke.
The
backyard of the group house was a wasteland where even grass was too depressed
to grow. One scraggly tree managed to stay alive there and shelter, under its
few remaining branches, a row of those cheap molded-plastic chairs you could
pick up for a song at Kmart or Wal-mart. Early in the morning and late in the
afternoon, the inmates of the group house would park themselves in those chairs
like so many city birds--what my mother would call "trash birds," grackles and
starlings and the like--and smoke themselves closer to an early grave. I could
have done without the smoke that sometimes carried across William and Ida's
backyard and into our kitchen windows.
The
alley doglegged across the block, connecting the streets--16th and Kentucky--that
angled into Potomac on either end. Two lines of garage-style, brick-walled
storage units faced each other across a narrow strip of concrete, sealed off
from the alley by a chain-link fence that didn't look like it would keep the
rats out, must less any would-be burglars. That eyesore filled the lot right
across from us, although it was interesting to speculate what might be hidden
in those units. William said he'd seen a Rolls Royce in one of them, but that
might just have been wishful thinking.
The
day we found the doll, Dani was investigating a section of wall on the storage
unit that bordered the alley. Three or four bricks had come out and created a
gap. Right on the edge of it sat the doll, naked as the day it came off the
Chinese assembly line. Other than that it looked right at home.
Over
Dani's strenuous objections I took it inside, put it in a place where she
wouldn't see it--who knew where that thing had been?--and forgot about it. I put
a note in the alcove where we'd found it--
We
have your
doll, come ring the bell at...--and then I forgot about that too. You forget a lot
of things when you're looking after a couple of kids.
Dani
asked me if it belonged to William and Ida. I told her I didn't think so. They
had been there as long as I'd been alive, long enough for him to be called
Mister William by most of the young people in the vicinity, while Ida stayed
just plain Ida. They'd raised their kids and now they liked things quiet.
As
for the young people, well, I didn't much care for the teenagers who liked to
hang out and yell at each other in the little park across the street, one of
those orphan triangles of public space you find in D.C. where three or four
streets come together at crazy angles. The teenagers scared me the first few
nights we were in the house, but they weren't real trouble. They just acted
like they were. They liked to shout it up after hours when the rest of the
neighborhood had locked itself behind doors for the night, but I never heard
that they did anything but make noise. They weren't part of the New Dragon
posse. If you really wanted to freak them out, all you had to do was drive by
slowly, roll down a window, and say hello in a big cheerful voice.
