“You can’t mean—”
Lynette put a finger to Sally’s lips. These had been the hardest moments to fake, the face-to-face encounters. Kissing was the worst. But it was essential not to flinch, not to let her distaste show. She was so close to getting what she wanted.
“Trust me,” Lynette said.
Sally wanted to. But she had to be sure of one thing. “Don’t try to hire someone. It seems like every time someone like us tries to find someone, it’s always an undercover cop. Remember Ruth Ann Aron.” A politician from the Maryland suburbs, Aron had, in fact, tried to hire a state trooper to off her husband. But he had forgiven her, even testified on her behalf during the trial.
“Trust me,” Lynette repeated.
“I do, sweetheart. I absolutely do.”
Dr. Peter Holt was hit by a Jeep Cherokee, an Eddie Bauer limited edition, as he crossed Connecticut Avenue on his way to the Thai restaurant where he ate lobster pad thai every Thursday evening. The remorseful driver told police that her children had been bickering in the backseat over what to watch on the DVD player and she had turned her head, just for a moment, to scold them. Still distracted by the children’s fight when she turned around, she had seen Holt and tried to stop, but hit the accelerator instead. Then, as her children screamed for real, she had driven another 100 yards in panic and hysteria. If the dermatologist wasn’t killed on impact, he was definitely dead when the SUV finally stopped. But the only substance in the driver’s blood was caffeine, and while it was a tragic, regrettable accident, it was clearly an accident. Really, investigators told Holt’s stunned survivors, his ex-wife and two children, it was surprising that such things didn’t happen more often, given the congestion in D.C., the unwieldy SUVs, the mothers’ frayed nerves, the nature of dusk with its tricky gray-green light. It was a macabre coincidence, their children being classmates and all, the parents being superficial friends. But this part of D.C. was like a village unto itself, and the accident had happened only a mile from the Dutton School. In fact, Peter Holt had just left the same soccer practice that the driver was coming from. He had been seen talking to his ex-wife, with whom he was still quite friendly, asking her if she and the children wanted to meet him for dinner at his favorite restaurant.
At Peter’s memorial service, Lynette Mason sought a private moment with Sally Holt, and those who watched from a distance marveled at the bereaved woman’s composure and poise, the way she comforted her ex-husband’s killer. No one was close enough to hear what they said.
“I’m sorry,” Lynette said. “It didn’t occur to me that after — well, I guess we can’t see each other anymore.”
“It didn’t occur to me, either,” Sally lied. “You’ve sacrificed so much for me. For Molly and Sam, really. I’m in your debt, forever.”
And she patted Lynette gently on the arm, which marked the last time the two ever touched. Sometimes, when Alan was working late, Lynette would call, a little high and a lot tearful, and Sally would remind her that they shouldn’t tie up the phone too long, lest the records of these conversations come back to haunt them or the children overhear anything. They had done what mothers should do. They had put their children first.
Peter’s estate went to Molly and Sam — but in trust to Sally, of course. She determined that it would be in the children’s best interest to pay off the balloon mortgage in cash, and Peter’s brother, the executor, agreed. Peter would have wanted the children to have the safety and sanctity of home, given the emotional trauma they had endured. He wouldn’t want them forced out in the housing market, cruel and unforgiving as it was.
No longer needy, armored with a widow’s prerogatives, Sally found herself invited to parties again, where solicitous friends attempted to fix her up with the rare single men in their circles. Now that she didn’t care about men, they flocked around her and Sally did what she had always done. She listened and she laughed, she laughed and she listened, but she never really heard anything — unless the subject was money. Then she paid close attention, even writing down the advice she was given. The stock market was so turgid, everyone complained. The smart money was in real estate.
Sally nodded.
Part III
Cops & Robbers
Cold as ice
by Quintin Peterson
Congress Heights, S.E./S.W.
Seventy-two-year-old Ida Logan was sitting in her rocker on her front porch when the gunman opened fire. She never knew what hit her. Neither did her five-year-old great granddaughter Aaliyah Gamble, who was sitting nearby at her red, blue, and yellow plastic Playskool desk, playing with Legos.
In but a few seconds, more than a half dozen hollow-point 9mm rounds ripped through each of them, their bodies performing the death dance that only the gunfire of automatic weapons can orchestrate, jerking to the staccato of the rat-tat-tat-ta of the machine gun, as though keeping time to the pulsating rhythm of a boogie rap tune.
To eyewitness Rodney Grimes, the carnage seemed to transpire in slow motion; amid the crimson mist of their splattering blood, the bullets appeared to strike the frail old woman and the fragile little girl forever.
The dreadful scene was punctuated, and made that much more grotesque, by Aaliyah’s head exploding, bursting like a ripe melon dropped from a high place. The pink halo of her vaporized brain was visible only for an instant, yet the obscene corona lingered around what little remained of the back of her neatly braided head; a ghastly image frozen in time… emblazoned upon his troubled mind.
Rodney Grimes didn’t think twice about cooperating with the police. His late father had taught him that “evil flourish when good men do nothing.”
Rodney Grimes was a good man, wasn’t he? He liked to think so. And even if he had not truly been good up to that point, couldn’t he be? Could he not rise to the occasion? Evil had been done and he was compelled to do his part to ensure that the gunman did not go unpunished. It was his duty. Voluntarily, he told the police who arrived first at the scene of the crime that he had witnessed the murders and provided them with a detailed description of the suspect, making sure to emphasize that the gunman had long dreadlocks and was very dark-skinned with unsettling bluish-gray eyes; and described the getaway car, a black late-model Ford Crown Victoria, like a cop car. And later that day, he assisted Detective John Mayfield, the lead on the case, by accompanying him to the Violent Crimes Branch headquarters and picking out a photo of a suspect from an array of nine mugshots. He’d also agreed to participate in the viewing of a lineup. “Sure, no problem,” he’d told the detective. “Just let me know.”
However, the day after the double shooting, the courage of his conviction diminished considerably when he looked up from the Spider-Man comic he was leafing through at the newsstand inside of Iverson Mall and noticed the killer with a lion’s mane of long dreadlocks standing next to him, towering above him.
The shooter held the latest issue of Superman, flipping its pages, but not looking at the comic book. Instead, his cold, disconcerting bluish-gray eyes were fixed on him.
Rodney hoped it was just his imagination at the crime scene; that the killer had simply looked in his general direction, not directly at him, directly into his face. But the killer’s presence here before him dashed that hope. The killer had seen him… and evidently knew who he was.
They stood there silent for a moment, an outlandish odd couple, Rodney Grimes’s clean-cut, black yuppie appearance in direct contrast to that of the killer, who looked like a hip-hop Rastafarian.