“He leave with anybody?”
She glanced at Teddy, who shrugged. “Honestly, I didn’t see. But there was hardly anyone left to leave with.”
“He stayed for last call?”
She nodded. “And a little bit past.”
“Where’d they find the body?”
Teddy chimed in. “Back lot. Bus boy found him when he took the garbage out.”
“Any reason for him to go out there?”
“That's where most of the parking is,” he said. “It was after three when the bus boy found him. The light’s bad back there and he thought the guy was passed out at first.”
“Did he fight with anyone? It is a rough crowd here?”
Both of them shook their heads. “No,” Nance said. “The regulars are pretty laid back. Anyway, he was so freaking big, no one wanted to find out how tough he was. And with Moonpie around, too, there wasn’t going to be any trouble.”
“Moonpie?” I asked.
“Yeah, this other guy, a regular. Huge, too, like your guy. Hands like this.” She held her own hands about a foot apart. “His face was round as a plate. Everybody called him Moonpie.”
“Black? White?”
“Black, too, but not…African, like the other guy, you know? Just black black. Is that okay to say?”
A tingle started near the back of my skull. “I’m not really qualified to judge.”
Nance giggled.
“Do you know Moonpie’s real name?”
“Y’know, I don’t,” she said, sounding surprised. “I probably checked his ID, but I was looking for numbers and a face, I guess.”
“Hold on a sec, will you?” I said, and ran out to my car to get my files. I came back in, leafing through the photos Bloch had given me. I found a staff picture of Clay Johnson and held it up for both of them to see. The one where he’d been beaten to a pulp probably wouldn’t have done much for the ID. Or their emotional well-being. “Is this, uh, Moonpie?”
Nance squinted at it then nodded. “That’s him. Oh. Do you…?”
“Think he did it?” I said. “No.”
“Then, if you have his picture…is he…?”
I nodded. “I’m afraid so.”
She put both hands to her face. “Oh my God.”
I gave her a second. “Was Moonpie here that night?”
She sniffed once and scrubbed her face with her hands, shook her head and shrugged.
“Clay, that was his real name, right?” Teddy asked. “I remember him now.”
I’d almost forgotten Teddy was there. “Yeah.”
“Took me a second. He hung out at the bar a lot. He liked making time with the girls who came in. He left with someone that night, in fact.”
“A woman?” I asked and he nodded. “What time?”
Teddy pursed his lips. “Early, I know that. One drink in. I could tell he was pretty pleased with himself for scoring so quickly.”
“Would you ever mistake Moonpie for the other guy, Isaac?”
“Maybe,” Nance said, doubtful. “I mean, they weren’t twins. But they were both kind of chubby. And huge. And, uh, black.”
“So I gathered,” I said.
“Maybe at a glance or if it was dark or something,” she said. “Then, yeah, maybe.”
“Did they see each other? Know each other?”
They glanced at each other, shook their heads. Both were more subdued than when I’d come in. Teddy said, “Moonpie…Clay, whatever…he was gone before the other guy even showed up.”
“What happened to him?” Nance asked in a small voice. She didn’t sound excited to be part of a murder investigation anymore. “How did he die?”
I thought about reaching into the file folder and showing her what some people are capable of, but it would’ve been gratuitous and smug.
“He just did,” I said, tired. “That’s really all that matters.”
. . .
I walked out the back door and looked around. In front of me was an asphalt lot like a million-billion others, with sloppy white lines showing you where to park and a couple of light poles jutting out of the ground. A Dumpster and the compressor for the AC were next to the building, hidden by a cheap vinyl fence about seven feet high. I slid the crime scene photos out of the envelope, then glanced at the autopsy report. Traffic on the Pike buzzed a few blocks away, a honk or two telling of distant anger. A starling flew down from a wire and pecked at a piece of crust, then flew off. The tingling feeling I’d had inside the bar was still with me.
Okonjo’s body had been discovered on the left side of the lot, between the Dumpster and the first row of parking. I paced it off from the back door, trying to get the location right. He’d been found lying with his arms wide, face up to a starless sky, shot twice in the back of the head near the base of his skull. Exit wounds had obliterated much of his forehead. Judging from that information, I was going to go out on a limb and say the shooter was shorter than the six-six Okonjo and that he shot him from behind. My deductions, however, would probably not get me the Detective of the Year Award.
I walked around the Dumpster, on the far side of the fence, which put me behind the Asian grocer’s. I glanced at the steel door. The grocer would’ve been closed at three in the morning. As would the restaurant next to it. Quiet. Secluded. I stood at the corner of the fence in such a way that I was hidden from view from anyone coming out of Rudy’s, but could still see most of the parking lot. Swaying a little bit, I found a sweet spot between slats of the fence where I could see the door without losing my position. The smell wasn’t great, but that wouldn’t have been much of a worry. Just at that second the compressor turned on with a sound like a jet engine and I jumped about two feet off the ground.
Once my heart started again, I turned back to the parking lot. I made a gun out of my thumb and forefinger and said, “Bang.” Or, I think I did. I couldn’t hear myself over the industrial roar of the AC unit behind me. I let my arm fall and stared at the asphalt, thinking.
Three in the morning. Terrible lighting. Stark, blurring details. You’re tired. You’ve been hanging out for two or three hours, waiting for him to show. You catch a glimpse of movement through the fence as he finally comes out the door. A big black man. This is it. He can’t hear you, the AC's going full blast after a night of smoking and booze and bodies and the compressor is going like gangbusters. He walks at an angle in front of you, oblivious, intent on getting to his car. You step forward and pull the trigger from ten feet away. No one hears the shots or, if they do, they don’t know what they've heard. He twists at the last second or maybe you roll him over to make sure. And you find out…
“You got the wrong guy,” I said.
Chapter Twenty-One
“What are we doing here, again?” I asked.
“It’s a surprise,” Amanda said for the fifth time, an impish grin on her face.
We were back on the George Washington University campus, in an auditorium called Phillips Hall, mid-afternoon on a Friday. At about the same time most people in DC were loosening ties and thinking of sixteen-ounce drafts, I’d been commanded to dress as though going out for an embassy soiree. I had on black slacks, a gun-blue dress shirt, and a black blazer. I was allowed to skip a tie. The ensemble gave me a cool, hip look while avoiding the migraine ties always seemed to give me. Losing the tie also let me sidestep the awkward look from my recent weight loss; my neck now swam in the size 17 collars that used to be snug when I buttoned them. Amanda wore a sleeveless, shimmery lavender dress and black heels which put her at nearly eye level with me. We were the tallest, best-dressed, ersatz father-daughter couple on campus.
Amanda took my arm and hurried me through the auditorium lobby, keeping me from getting a look at the billboard, then snatched a program before I could grab one from the nice girl handing them out. Big double doors led into a darkened corridor that deposited us into the cavernous auditorium’s main seating area. Whatever it was we were going to see, it wasn’t very popular. The place could probably fit a thousand, but only the first three rows were filled and, assuming the mystery event was going to start on the hour, it was getting close to show time. Amanda dragged me down to the tenth row, end, then made me take the seat on the inside.
“This is just an experiment,” she said, turning to me with her big eyes. “Here’s what I want you to do. You’re going to sit here and listen for one hour. At the end of that hour, you’ll tell me what you think. If you don’t like it, I’ll never ask you to sit through anything like it again.”
“What exactly is being performed?” I said. “You’re making it sound like we’re here for an autopsy.”
“That might be your reaction after it starts. I’m just asking you to listen with an open mind. Don’t bring any preconceptions to the music.”
“So, it’s music, at least?”
“Yes, Marty. It’s going to be music.”
“Why are we sitting ten rows back, then? Don’t we want to hear it?”
“I don’t want you to be influenced by anyone around us. A lot of the audience is going to be made up of music students who have some strong opinions about what they hear.”
“And tenth row means I can get up and leave without anyone seeing,” I said.
She glared at me. “Don’t even think about it. Promise me you’ll hang on for the hour.”
“Without even knowing what it is first?”
“Marty,” she said. Warning me.
I held up my hands. “Okay, one hour. I promise.”
There was that low, excited murmur that you hear in theaters and auditoriums as people tried not to make noise finding their seats, but saw friends or whispered to companions or swore as they stubbed their toes. A low-wattage excitement ran through the tiny audience. I felt a little thrill of anticipation myself. It had been more than a year since I’d even gone out for a movie and…well, I don’t know how long it had been since I’d seen live music. And, hell, I’d just gone out to dinner a few nights ago! I frowned. What did I do with my time? Sure, cancer fills up your day-planner, but still. I needed to get a life.
The overhead lights went down and the whispers stopped, then the curtains swung away from center, revealing six musicians illuminated by the soft glow of footlights. One guy was on drums, another at a baby grand piano off to the right. A third kid was on a standing bass and a girl was on guitar. Two more players, an older black man and an Asian girl, made up a tiny horn section front, stage left. The crowd broke into applause and there were a few whoops. The musicians on stage tried to ignore it, but the kid on the bass grinned ear to ear as his friends shouted his name.
The drummer clicked his sticks lightly, setting the tempo. I expected the whole ensemble to jump in, but the piano player started a soft, almost introspective stop-and-go solo. It lasted just a minute when the piano paused and the bass player, all business now, slipped in with a short, barely audible riff that repeated and swelled. The drummer came in with a cool hi-hat and snare rhythm that had me thinking of Scotch and velvet and smoke. The instruments eased into the pattern seamlessly. After another minute, the black guy stood up, trumpet in hand, and started to blow.
I stifled a groan. It was jazz. I hated jazz. You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but I’d dedicated every waking moment of my early years to punk music. In the early 1970s I was young, angry, and looking for something to give me a voice. Punk was it. Everything else was a sticky sweet anthem for singles’ bars, a look back to the Summer of Love, or the black hole of Your Parents’ Music. Even as I got older and my tastes changed, I couldn’t wrap my head around jazz. All the random, off-key honking made me antsy and gave me the urge to run away.
Amanda punched me in the arm and I looked over. She was glaring again and mouthed the words,
You promised
. I let my head loll to one side with my tongue falling out of my mouth, but turned my attention back to the stage when Amanda wouldn’t look at me.
The trumpet player had sat back down to applause and the Asian girl stood, a sax half her height dangling from a strap around her neck. Still staying inside the structure of the rhythm and the original riff, she took off where the trumpet had ended, her fingers flying up and down the keys. She, in turn, gave the stage to the piano. The piece uncurled in front of me, flying around the room and finally coming in for a landing with the same drawn-out, two-note riff that the piano had started with, dying out entirely with the second of those two notes. I let out a breath as the audience went nuts.
Amanda was grinning at me. “Well?”
“What was that one called?”
“So what.”
“Huh?”
“
So What
. That’s the name. It’s a classic. Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans. Catchy, isn’t it?”
“It was okay, I guess.”
“So you were tapping your feet because you were nervous, huh?”
“Quiet, please,” I said. “The musicians are playing again.”
I stopped kidding around and paid attention to the next set, trying to relax and soak it in. Thirty years in law enforcement makes you a judgmental kind of guy and I found it hard to forget what I thought, forget the things I’d told myself, and just listen in the moment. It helped to watch each instrument in turn, rather than let my mind wander on its own. The jazz combo was in full swing, each player doing their own thing, but obviously very aware of what the others were doing. After peering at them for five or ten minutes, even I—with the musical sensitivity of a concrete block—could see that, while they all were careful to stay within the framework of the piece, they were given permission to go off on tangents, as long as they came back to the original at some point. They weren’t just improvising, they were inventing.
It wasn’t all my cup of tea. Some pieces were more avant-garde than others, going too far out on a limb for my tastes. I drew the line when I couldn’t tell if the musician had made a mistake or was ad-libbing. But it was, by far, the best jazz experience of my life. I might not run out and buy the complete Blue Note boxed set, but I was impressed. The combo finished up with a furious sax solo that made it pretty clear the little Asian girl with the big horn was the first among equals and the audience, filled out to the sixth or seventh row now, erupted into applause. I found myself clapping hard enough to knock my hands off. The whole ensemble was grinning like the bass player had been at the start. They gave nervous, perfunctory bows, as though unused to playing in front of an audience. Eventually, the applause died off, the lights came up, and the musicians descended to seat level to chat with friends and colleagues.