The Man Who Came Uptown
- Автор: Пелеканос Джордж
- Год: 2018
- Язык: английский
- Год: Mulholland Books / Little, Brown and Company
- ISBN: 978-0-316-47982-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Man Who Came Uptown». Краткое содержание книги:
The afternoon after he spoke to Michael Hudson, Ornazian was parked on a block of nice but unspectacular homes on a residential street in Bethesda, between River Road and Bradley Boulevard, waiting for Billy to return home from school. Ornazian had used Billy’s Facebook page, which identified the father, and the people-finder program to find the Hanrahans’ address. Billy was a senior, and if tradition in this zip code was intact, he would have his own car, most likely a model that was highly rated for safety and had been handed down or purchased used. Sure enough, twenty minutes after school let out, a ten-year-old ruby-red Volvo XC90 with aftermarket roof bars rolled down the block and stopped in front of the Hanrahan house.
Ornazian got out of his car at the same time Billy did. Billy was solidly built, average height, with wavy black hair that just touched his collar. He wore a navy blazer, Dockers khakis, a white shirt, and the school’s rep tie, loosely knotted. Like Christopher Perry, he carried a book bag on his shoulder. As Ornazian approached him, he stood straight and puffed up his chest.
“Can I speak to you for a minute?”
“What for?”
Ornazian pulled his wallet and flashed his license. “I’m an investigator.”
“I was there,” said Billy.
“Good,” said Ornazian. “That’s a start.”
They were tight against the Volvo, standing in the street. Billy glanced over his shoulder at the bay window that fronted his house. Ornazian wondered if one or both of his parents were home. There was a black BMW X5 parked in the driveway.
“I won’t keep you long,” said Ornazian. “Answer my questions and you can go inside.”
“I can go inside right now.”
Ornazian looked him over. He was handsome, and aware of it, with a lock of hair that was carefully styled to hang over his forehead. He cocked an eyebrow when he spoke. He knew where the camera was at all times.
“Is that your mom’s BMW?”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe I’ll go in with you and we can all talk together.”
“I’ve already spoken with my mom and dad. I told them what happened at the party. They know I wasn’t involved.”
“So you covered yourself.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Do your parents know that you didn’t step in and help that girl when she was being assaulted?”
Billy looked away. “I wasn’t in that room.”
“I have it on good authority that you knew one of the guys who assaulted the girl.”
“Who told you that?” Ornazian didn’t answer and Billy said, “Britany?”
“Never mind who.”
“That little trick.”
“Easy, Billy. That’s not nice. Now, I’m pretty sure the ones who assaulted Lisa are the same ones who trashed the house and robbed it. And don’t say it was those black guys who came up from D.C., because I know that’s not true.”
“I’m not sayin anything. You’re not with the police and I don’t have to speak to you.”
“That’s true.”
“My father told me that if anyone tried to question me about the party, I should tell them they should speak with our lawyer.”
Billy began to walk away.
“Where you going to school next year, Billy?” This stopped the kid in his tracks. “You’re a senior, right? I know you must be going on to college.”
“So?”
“Your prep school has a code of conduct. I downloaded it right off their website. Your parents might not be too concerned about what happened that night, but I’m guessing your headmaster might. All the drinking and drugs. The robbery. The rape of a sixteen-year-old girl. Your presence there, and the fact that you didn’t step in to try and stop it or report it to the police... it could very well affect your future.”
“What the fuck.”
“Tell me what you know and I won’t bring this to your school.”
“You’d do that?”
“I wouldn’t take any pleasure in it. But, yes, I would.”
Billy lowered his gaze. “Okay. I recognized one of those guys.”
“I can’t hear you.”
Billy looked up, anger flaring in his eyes. “Can you hear me now?”
“Yes.”
“I have a friend at school I’m pretty tight with. Brian Kelly. He’s got an older brother named Terrance. Goes by Terry. He was one of them.”
“Did you speak to him that night?”
“No.”
“Tell me about him.”
“All I know is what Brian’s told me. Terry’s, like, twenty-three now. When he went to our school he was a pretty good baseball player. Real good. He could hit and he had a hot glove. Second baseman. He was D-One material but he fucked it up.”
“How?”
“Started hanging out with guys on the east side of Montgomery County. He was one of those kids who was always trying to act black. You know, like he thought he was gangsta.”
“That’s black?”
“You know what I’m saying. He got caught up in it, nearly failed out his senior year. Then he got busted on a distribution charge, lost his scholarship money, his college acceptance, everything.”
“Marijuana?”
Billy nodded. “He flipped on his friends to get off. After, he started getting messages on his cell about what happens to snitches. Word was Terry got scared ’cause he thought those kids in Silver Spring, out Cherry Hill Road way, were gonna smoke him. All of a sudden he wasn’t so black anymore. Basically, he got punked out. That’s when he changed.”
“Changed how?”
“He went the other way. Like, all the way. He hooked up with these guys who hated on black people, Muslims, Mexicans... shit like that.”
“White supremacists.”
“That’s what his brother says. Terry’s head got turned around. He’s all fucked up.”
“Were those the guys he was with that night?”
“I guess so. They had those fashy haircuts. Ink.”
“Hipsters wear their hair that way too. And you been to the beach lately? Grandmothers have ink.”
“All right, it was those kinda guys. He was with them. Okay?”
“Does Terry stay with his parents?”
“Brian says he’s in and out.”
“Terry has a car?”
“He drives a Charger his father bought him, back when he was doing good in school.”
“Where does the Kelly family live?”
“Over in Glen Echo Heights, off MacArthur Boulevard. Wagner Lane.”
“You got an address?”
“I never looked at the numbers on the house.”
“Okay.”
“Is that all?”
“You can go.”
But Billy didn’t move. His face had reddened and his right fist was clenched. Ornazian wondered if Billy was going to swing on him. It was plain that he wanted to.
“I said you can go,” said Ornazian.
“Who are you?”
Ornazian left him there and walked back to his Ford.
Sixteen
Late in the afternoon, Anna staged the next morning’s mobile library carts down in the workroom as her assistant, Carmia, checked in books and inspected them for contraband. Earlier that day, Anna had serviced the Fifty and Older unit. The men there, who had not outgrown their troubles, had tastes and sensibilities going back to their childhoods. Sidney Sheldon was very popular, as were Ernest Tidyman’s Shaft novels, Chester Himes’s Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones books, the street pulp of Donald Goines, and the potboilers of bestselling author Harold Robbins. The Carpetbaggers, a novel that was a thinly veiled version of Howard Hughes’s life, featured a character named Nevada Smith and spawned the cult Steve McQueen Western of the same name. It was an inmate favorite. The lead character in the book was a man called Jonas Cord, referred to with admiration as a “cock star” by the men. Many of the inmates had read the dirty parts of the novel, filched off their fathers’ or mothers’ nightstands, when they were kids. The carnal scenes in Robbins’s books were discussed with an almost academic intricacy, though nothing that approached the reverence surrounding that most hallowed sex passage in popular fiction, the one involving a bridesmaid, Sonny Corleone, and his “enormous, blood-gorged pole of muscle,” commonly referred to around the jail as “Page 28.”