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:
Ward had come from a solid blue-collar family. His father worked in a diner and his mother was a line cook in a government-agency cafeteria. They were good people and good role models, but, as many parents discover, that wasn’t enough to overcome the influence of their children’s peers, or stop their daughter from temporarily losing her teenage mind. Ward’s sister, Ella, who had been a church girl and good student, started slipping away at age fifteen and somehow got herself introduced to a man who called himself Ace. Ace was a pimp and an addict who seduced Ella and got her hooked on heroin. She was tricking on the Fourteenth Street corridor by the time she was sixteen. Ace got turned out by another pimp, and from the moment that Ace had been punked, he lost his power and could no longer mack. He was just a heroin addict, no longer a stud. Ella stayed with him because she liked him, but she never slept with him again. They lived together only as junkies. Ella’s body was found, stiff as plywood, in a needle pad not long after her eighteenth birthday.
Ward never forgot. But his side work with Ornazian wasn’t just about hate, and it wasn’t about money. He had been a fierce combat soldier in Vietnam and a driven police officer in D.C. Now he was staring at seventy and the other side of the hill. He knew what was coming, and it was very difficult for him to face it. So he’d hold on to his image of himself for as long as he could. He liked the action. That’s really all it was, when you got down to it. He wasn’t ready to let that part of himself go.
Not yet.
As night settled in, Phil Ornazian parked his car on Wagner Lane in Glen Echo Heights, a community of quiet affluence off MacArthur Boulevard, near the C & O Canal and the Potomac River. He was watching the Kelly residence, a simple brick-and-shingle Cape Cod near the top of the street that had been built when the neighborhood was affordable to the middle class. It was his third trip out here and so far he had come up empty. No Terry Kelly, no Dodge Charger. Just a vanilla Honda Pilot in the driveway that, in the hours of his surveillance, had not moved.
He was in a tough spot. He intended to rob Terry and his friends of the Tiffany bracelet, so he couldn’t just go up to the door and question Terry’s parents. The usual search programs on his laptop had placed Terry at his childhood home on Wagner and gave no alternative addresses. If Terry didn’t show he would have to think of something else. But right now, as he pondered it, there didn’t seem to be a something else.
His head began to hurt from all the thinking. Also, he was hungry. He hit the ignition button on the dash and headed back to D.C.
Ornazian met Sydney and the boys at a soul food spot on Second and Upshur, not far from their house. He had money in his pocket and he felt like treating them. His sons loved the fried chicken there and Syd was into their crab cakes. The new owner had spiffed up the place but it still had its charms, which included a nice middle-aged waitress and a wall jukebox featuring seventies R & B. The waitress was obviously a Teddy fan, as she had programmed the juke for a nightlong Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes mix. Sydney, like many Brits, was into the American soul and funk of that glorious decade, and because Ornazian was a native Washingtonian, it was in his blood too. The family had a nice night out. Thankfully, the boys were relatively well behaved.
Out on Upshur they walked to Ornazian’s Ford. The father, mother, and sons were all different skin shades, but in Petworth and in Park View, few gave them a second look. This acceptance was one reason that Ornazian was determined not to leave the city. They were in the realm of the norm here. He had once taken the family to a friend’s wedding in Vermont and he, his wife, and children had received blatant stares while walking down the street. So much for the progressive North.
Back at the house he rewarded the boys for their good behavior and let them sleep in his and Sydney’s bed. Whitey and Blue were snoring, passed out on their cushions nearby. The boys soon drifted off too. Ornazian had Gregg on one side of him, Vic on the other. Gregg was close against him and his scalp warmed Ornazian’s chest. Ornazian smiled, thinking, My puppies.
Sydney, on the far side of the bed, spoke quietly. “Thanks for dinner, love. We should go out more often together. The boys aren’t as wild as they used to be.”
“Yes, they are. They just had an off night.”
“I’m saying, we’ll have more time to do things as a family now. You’ve finished with this last thing, right?”
“I’ve got other pots boiling on the stove.”
“Then take them off the stove.”
“All I’m hearing from you right now is cacophony.”
“Huh?”
“From the Greek. Caco means ‘bad.’ Phony is ‘sound.’”
“Oh my God. That again.”
“You’re making bad sounds.”
“Don’t get turned around by money,” said Sydney. “That’s all I’m saying. What’s important is right here, in this bed.”
“No need to stress on it, Syd. I’ve got it wired up tight.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Go to sleep.”
The wind picked up and rattled the branches of the oak outside their window. Its shadows crawled across their bed.
Twenty-One
A security guard had remotely opened the cell doors on the Gen Pop unit from inside the fishbowl, and inmates clad in orange jumpsuits had formed a line leading to a desk that was bolted to the floor. Anna sat behind the desk, her rolling cart of books beside her. She was talking to the man with heavy-lidded eyes and a gravelly voice whose name she could not recall.
“You got The Adventurers?” he said.
“It’s checked out. How about The Carpetbaggers?”
“I guess I could read it again. Jonas Cord is my man.”
Anna found a battered paperback of the Harold Robbins favorite and checked it out to the inmate.
Donnell, the sleepy-eyed misdemeanant who had nearly served out his term, stepped up to her and placed The Passenger on the table. Donnell had asked Anna for books to help him “figure out” women, and Anna had chosen this one for its female voice and perspective. Also, it was a compelling story, well told.
“I got into this one, Anna. That lady can write the shit out of a book.”
“Glad you liked it.”
“When that girl Tanya broke into those vacation houses and just kinda lived there in the off-season, while the owners weren’t around? That was crafty. I can see why this book would be popular. ’Cause, you know, the idea that you can dye your hair a new color, cash in your bank account, change your ID cards, and disappear into thin air? It’s kind of everyone’s fantasy, right? To have a new start.”
“It is for some,” she said.
“So what you got for me now?”
Anna took a book off the cart. It was one of Wallace Stroby’s crime novels about a professional thief named Crissa Stone. “Try this one. It’s got a female protagonist. Written by a man but he gets women right.”
Donnell opened the book and read some of the flap copy. “Thank you. I’ll let you know what I think.”
She logged in the information of his returned book and gave Donnell a DCPL receipt.
Larry, the man up on felony manslaughter charges who had recently found Jesus, was next in line.