Along Came a Spider

the tenderloin of D.C.’s ghettos. It’s where Sampson and I hang out most nights. It’s home.
    He had just asked me how I was holding up. “Not too good, thanks. Yourself?” I said.
    He knew about Jezzie Flanagan. I’d told him everything I knew. The plot thickened and thickened. I couldn’t have felt any worse than I did that night. Scorse and Weithas had laid out a thorough case involving Jezzie. She’d done it. There was no room for doubt. One lie had led to another. She’d told me a hundred if she’d told me one. Never flinched once. She was better at it than Soneji/Murphy. Real smooth and confident.
    “You want me to keep my mouth shut? Or talk at you?” Sampson asked me. “I’ll do it either way.”
    His face was expressionless, as it usually is. Maybe it’s the sunglasses that create that impression, but I doubt it. Sampson was like that when he was ten years old.
    “I want to talk,” I told John. “I could use a cocktail. I need to talk about psychopathic liars.”
    “I’ll buy us a few drinks,” Sampson said.
    We headed toward Faces. It’s a bar we’ve been going to since we first joined the police force. The regulars in Faces don’t mind that we’re tough-as-nails D.C. detectives. A few of them even admit that we do more good than harm in the neighborhood.
    The crowd in Faces is mostly black, but white people come by for the jazz. And to learn how to dance, and dress.
    “Jezzie was the one who assigned Devine and Chakely in the first place?” Sampson reviewed the facts as we waited for the stoplight at 5th Street.
    A couple of local punks eyed us from their lookout in front of Popeye’s Fried Chicken. In times past, the same kind of street trash would have been on the same corner, only without so much money, or guns, in their pockets. “Yo, brothers.” Sampson winked at the thugs. He fucks with everybody’s head. Nobody fucks back.
    “Right, that’s how it all started. Devine and Chakely were one of the teams assigned to Secretary Goldberg and his family. They worked under Jezzie.”
    “And nobody ever suspected them?” he asked me.
    “Not at first. The FBI checked them out. They checked everybody out. Chakely’s and Devine’s daily logs were off. That’s when they became suspicious. Some watchdog analyst at the Bureau figured out that the logs had been doctored. They had twenty people for every one we had. Besides that, the FBI removed the doctored logs so none of us could find them.”
    “Devine and Chakely spotted Soneji checking out one of the kids. That’s how the whole circus began? The double take .” Sampson had the general rhythm of the thing now.
    “They followed Soneji and his van out to the farm in Maryland. They realized they were stalking a potential kidnapper.
Somebody
got the idea to kidnap the kids
after
the actual kidnapping.”
    “Ten-million-dollar idea.” Sampson glowered. “Was Ms. Jezzie Flanagan in on it from the beginning?”
    “I don’t know. I think so. I’ll have to ask her about that sometime.”
    “Uh huh.” Sampson nodded with the flow of our conversation. “Your head above, or below, the water line right now?”
    “I don’t know that, either. You meet somebody who can lie to you the way she did, it changes your perspective on things. This is very tough to handle, man. You ever lie to me?”
    Sampson showed some of his teeth. It was halfway between a smile and a growl. “Sounds like your head’s a little below water to me.”
    “Sounds like it to me, too,” I admitted. “I’ve had better days. But I’ve had worse. Let’s have that beer.”
    Sampson gave the gunner’s salute to the punks on the corner. They laughed and gave us the high sign. Cops and robbers in the ’hood. We crossed the street to Faces. A little oblivion was in order.
    The bar was crowded, and would be that way until closing. People who knew Sampson and me said hello. A woman I’d gone out with was at the bar. A real pretty, real nice social worker who had worked with Maria.
    I wondered why nothing had come of it. Because of some deep-down character flaw I have? No. Couldn’t be that.
    “You see Asahe over there?” Sampson gestured.
    “I’m a detective. I see everything, right. Don’t miss a trick,” I said to him.
    “You soundin’
a little
sorry for yourself. Little ironic, I’d say. Two beers. Nah, make it four,” he told the bartender.
    “I’ll get over it,” I said to Sampson. “You just watch. I just had never put her on our