Jack & Jill

house. The
Gray
House. No black people care very much about the President and his problems anymore. Nor should they.”
    “Is that a fact, Mrs. Farrakhan?” I said as I bit into my sandwich. Delicious, as promised. Cut it with a soup spoon, melts in the mouth.
    “Should be a fact, if it isn’t. It’s close to a fact, anyway. I’ll admit that it’s a sad state of affairs, but it’s the sad state we all live in. Don’t you agree? You
must.”
    “You ever hear of mellowing with age?” I asked her. “Your brisket is terrific, by the way.”
    “You ever hear of getting better, not getting older? You ever hear of taking care of one’s own kind? You ever hear about teeny-tiny, darling black children being murdered in our neighborhood, Alex, and nobody doing enough to make it stop? Of course the brisket is excellent. You see, I
am
getting better.”
    I reached into my trouser pocket and took out the clasp and pin that the President had given me. “The President knew I had two children. He gave me these keepsakes for them.” I handed them over to Nana. She took them, and for once in her life, she was speechless.
    “Tell them that these are from Tom and that he’s a fine man trying to do the right thing.”
    I finished half of my overstuffed sandwich and took the remaining half with me out of the kitchen. If you can’t stand the heat and all that “Thanks for the delicious sandwich, and the advice. In that order.”
    “Where are you going now?” Nana called after me. She was winding up again. “We were talking about an important matter. Genocide against black people right here in Washington, our nation’s capital. They don’t care what happens in these neighborhoods, Alex.
They
is
them,
and
them
is
white,
and you’re collaborating with the enemy.”
    “Actually, I’m going out to put in a few hours on the Truth School murder case,” I called back as I continued toward the front door, and blessed escape from the tirade. I couldn’t see Nana Mama anymore, but I could hear her voice trailing behind me like a banshee cry, or maybe the caw of a field crow.
    “Alex has finally found his senses!” she exclaimed in a loud, shrill voice. “There’s hope after all. There’s hope. Oh, thank you, Black Lord in Heaven.”
    The old goat can still get my goat, and I love her for it. I just don’t want to listen to her annoying rap sometimes.
    I beeped the car horn of my old Porsche on the way out of the driveway. It’s our signal that everything is all right between us. From inside the house, I heard Nana call out:
“Beep
back at you!”

CHAPTER
38

    I WAS BACK on the mean streets of inner Washington, the underside of the capital. I was a homicide detective again. I loved it with a strange passion, but there were times when I hated it with all my heart.
    We were doing all that could humanly be done on both cases. I had set up surveillance on the Truth School during the day and also had day and night surveillance on Shanelle Green’s gravesite. Often psycho killers showed up at victims’ graves. They were ghouls, after all.
    The circus was definitely in town.
    Two of them.
    Two completely different kinds of murder pattern. I had never seen anything like it, nothing even close to this chaos.
    I didn’t need Nana Mama to remind me that I wanted to be out on the street right now. As she had said,
Someone is killing our children.
    I was certain that the unspeakable monster was going to kill again. In contrast to Jack and Jill, there
was
rage and passion in his work. There was a raw, scary craziness, the kind I could almost taste. The killer’s probable amateur status wasn’t reassuring, either.
    Think like the killer. Walk in the killer’s shoes,
I reminded myself. That’s how it all starts, but it’s a lot tougher than it sounds. I was gathering as much information and data as I possibly could.
    I spent part of the afternoon ambushing several of the local hangarounds who might have picked up something on the murders: convivial street people, swooning pipeheads, young runners for the rock and weed dealers, a few low-level rollers themselves, store owners, snitches, Muslims selling newspapers. I gave some of them a tough time, but nobody had anything useful for me.
    I kept at The Job anyway. That’s the way it goes most days. You just keep at it, keep your head down and screwed on straight. About quarter past five, I found myself talking to a seventeen-year-old homeless youth I knew from working the