Chapter 54
POW. At 2:30 on Tuesday afternoon (I got back to Washington at eleven o’clock), I got a call from Sampson. He wanted to meet me at the Sanders house. He thought we’d made a new connection between the kidnapping and the project murders. He was pumped as hell with his news. Hard work was paying off on one of our early leads.
I hadn’t been back to the Sanders crime scene in several months, but it was all sadly familiar. The windows were dark from the outside. I wondered if the house would ever be sold, or even rented again.
I sat in my car in the Sanders driveway, and read through the original detectives’ report. There was nothing in the reports I didn’t already know and hadn’t gone over a dozen times.
I kept staring at the house. The yellowing shades were drawn, so I couldn’t see inside. Where was Sampson, and what did he want with me here?
He pulled up behind me at three o’clock sharp. He climbed out of his battered Nissan and joined me in the front seat of the Porsche.
“Oh, you are brown sugar now. You look sweet enough to eat.”
“You’re still big and ugly. Nothing changes. What do you have here?”
“Police work at its very best,” Sampson said. He lit up a Corona. “By the way, you were right to keep after this thing.”
Outside the car, the wind was howling and heavy with rain. There had been tornadoes down through Kentucky and Ohio. The weather had been bizarre the whole weekend that we were away.
“Did you snorkel, and sail, play tennis in your club whites?” Sampson asked.
“We didn’t have time for that kind of stuff. We did a lot of spiritual bonding you wouldn’t understand.”
“My, my.” Sampson talked like a black girlfriend, played the part well. “I love to talk the trash, don’t you, sister?”
“Are we going inside?” I asked him.
Selective scenes from the past had been flashing into my head for several minutes, none of them pleasant. I remembered the face of the fourteen-year-old Sanders girl. And three-year-old Mustaf. I remembered what beautiful children they had been. I remembered how nobody cared when they died here in Southeast.
“Actually, we’re here to visit the next-door neighbors,” he finally said. “Let’s go to work. Something happened here that I don’t understand yet. It’s important, though, Alex. I need your head on it.”
We went to visit the Sanderses’ next-door neighbors, the Cerisiers. It was important. It got my full attention, immediately.
I already knew that Nina Cerisier had been Suzette Sanders’s best friend since they were little girls. The families had been living next door to each other since 1979. Nina, as well as her mother and father, hadn’t gotten over the murders. If they could have afforded to, they would have moved away.
We were invited in by Mrs. Cerisier, who shouted upstairs for her daughter Nina. We were seated around the Cerisiers’ kitchen table. A picture of a smiling Magic Johnson was on the wall. Cigarette smoke and bacon grease were in the air.
Nina Cerisier was very cool and distant when she finally appeared in the kitchen. She was a plain-looking girl, about fifteen or sixteen. I could tell that she didn’t want to be there.
“Last week,” Sampson said for my benefit, “Nina came forward and told a teacher’s aide at Southeast that she might have seen the killer a couple of nights before the murders. She’d been afraid to talk about it.”
“I understand,” I said. It is almost impossible to get eyewitnesses to talk to police in Condon or Langley, or any of D.C.’s black neighborhoods.
“I saw he been caught,” Nina said in an offhand manner. Beautiful rust-colored eyes stared at me from her plain face. “I wasn’t so scared no more. I’m still some scared, though.”
“How did you recognize him?” I asked Nina.
“Saw him on the TV. He did that big kidnapping thing, too,” she said. “He all over TV.”
“She recognized Gary Murphy,” I said to Sampson. That meant she’d seen him without his schoolteacher disguise.
“You sure it was the same man as on TV?” Sampson asked Nina.
“Yes. He watch my girlfriend Suzette’s house. I thought it real strange. Not many whites ’round here.”
“Did you see him in the daytime, or at night?” I asked the girl.
“Night. But I know it him. Sanderses’ porch light on bright. Missus Sanders afraid of everything, everybody. Poo ’fraid you say boo. That’s what Suzette, me, used to say she like.”
I turned to Sampson. “Puts him at the murder scene.”
Sampson nodded and looked back at Nina. Her pouty mouth was open in a small “o.” Her hands constantly twirled her braided hair.
“Would you tell Detective Cross what else you saw?” he asked.
“Another white man with him,” Nina Cerisier said. “Man wait in his car while the other, he looking at Suzette’s house. Other white man here all the time. Two men.”
Sampson turned the kitchen chair around to face me. “They’re busy rushing him to trial,” he said. “They don’t have a clue what’s really going on. They’re going to finish it, anyway. Bury it. Maybe we have the answer, Alex.”
“So far, we’re the only ones who have a few of the answers,” I said.
Sampson and I left the Cerisier house and drove downtown in separate cars. My mind was racing through everything we knew so far, half-a-dozen possible scenarios culled from thousands. Police work. An inch at a time.
I was thinking about Bruno Hauptmann and the Lindbergh kidnapping. After he’d been caught, and possibly framed, Bruno Hauptmann had been rushed to trial, too. Hauptmann had been convicted, maybe wrongly.
Gary Soneji/Murphy knew all about that. Was it all part of one of his complex game plans? A ten-or twelve-year plan? Who was the other white man? The pilot down in Florida? Or someone like Simon Conklin, Gary’s friend from Princeton?
Could there have been an accomplice right from the beginning?
Later that night, I was with Jezzie. She insisted that I quit work at eight. For over a month, she’d had tickets for a Georgetown basketball game I wanted to see in the worst way. On our ride over there, we did something we rarely do: we talked about nothing but The Job. I dropped the latest bomb, the “accomplice theory,” on her.
“I don’t understand one beguiling aspect of all this,” Jezzie said after she had listened to me tell Nina Cerisier’s story. She was still nearly as hooked on the kidnapping case as I was. She was more subtle about it, but I could tell she was hooked.
“Ask the Shell Answer Man. I understand everything beguiling. I know beguiling up the wazoo.”
“Okay. This girl was friends with Suzette Sanders, right? She was close to the family. And still, she didn’t talk. Because relations with the police are that bad in the neighborhood? I don’t know if I buy it. All of a sudden, now, she comes forward.”
“I buy it,” I told Jezzie. “The Metro police are like rat poison with lots of folks in these neighborhoods. I live there, they know me, and I’m just barely accepted.”
“It’s still strange to me, Alex. It’s just too odd. The girls were supposed to be friends.”
“It sure is strange. The PLO would talk to the Israeli Army before some of the people in Southeast would talk to the police.”
“So what do you think now that you’ve heard the Cerisier girl and her supposed revelation? What do you make of this… accomplice?”
“It doesn’t quite track for me yet,” I admitted. “Which means that it tracks perfectly with everything that’s happened so far. I believe the Cerisier girl saw someone. The question is, who?”
“Well, I have to say it, Alex, this lead sounds like a wild goose chase. I hope you don’t become the Jim Garrison of this kidnapping.”
Just before eight, we arrived at the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland. Georgetown was playing St. John’s from New York City. Jezzie had choice tickets. That proved she knew everyone in town. It’s easier to get into an inauguration ball than certain Big East games.
We held hands as we strolled across the parking lot toward the glittery Cap Centre. I like Georgetown basketball, and I admire their coach, a black man named John Thompson. Sampson and I catch two or three home games a season.
“I’m psyched to see the Beast of the East,” Jezzie supplied some basketball lingo, with a wink, as we got close to the stadium.
“Versus the Hoyas,” I said to her.
“The Hoyas are the Beast of the East.” She popped her gum and made a face at me. “Don’t get cute with me.”
“You’re so smart about every goddamn thing.” I grinned. She was, too. It was difficult to bring up a subject she hadn’t read about, or experienced. “What’s the nickname for St. John’s?”
“The St. John’s Redmen. Chris Mullin came from there. They’re also called the Johnnies. Chris Mullin plays for Golden State in the pros now. They’re called the Warriors.”
We both stopped talking at the same time. Whatever I was about to say caught in my throat.
“Hey… hey, nigger-lover!” someone had shouted across the parking lot. “Say hey, salt and pepper.”
Jezzie’s hand tightened around mine.
“Alex? Be cool. Just keep going,” Jezzie said to me.
“I’m right here,” I told her. “I’m as cool as can be.”
“Let it go. Just walk into the Cap Centre with me. They’re a*sholes. It doesn’t deserve a response.”
I let go of her hand. I walked in the direction of three men who were standing at the rear of a silver and blue four-by-four. Not Georgetown students, or St. John’s Redmen, either. The men were wearing parkas, and peaked hats with company or team logos. They were free, white, and over twenty-one. Old enough to know better.
“Who said that?” I asked them. My body felt wooden, unreal. “Who said, ‘Hey, nigger-lover’? Is that supposed to be funny? Am I missing a good joke here?”
One of them stepped forward to accept the credit. He spoke up from under a peaked Day-Glo Redskins hat. “What’s it to you? You wanna go three on one, Magic? That’s the way it’s gonna be.”
“I know it’s a little unfair, me against the three of you, but I might just do that,” I told him. “Maybe you can find a fourth real quick.”
“Alex?” I heard Jezzie coming up behind. “Alex, please don’t. Just walk away from them.”
“F*ck you, Alex,” one of the men said. “You need your lady’s help on this one?”
“You like Alex, honey? Alex your main man?” I heard. “Your very own jungle bunny?”
I heard a sharp snap behind my eyes. The sound of the snap seemed very real. I felt myself snap.
I hit Redskins Hat with my first punch. I pivoted smoothly, and smacked a second one of the trio on the side of his temple.
The first man went down hard, his ball hat flying like a Frisbee. The second guy was staggered. Out on his feet. He went down on one knee and stayed there, indefinitely. All the fight was out of him.
“I am so tired of shit like this happening. I’m sick of it.” I was shaking as I spoke.
“He had too much to drink, mister. We all did,” the guy who was still standing said. “He’s been all f*cked up. Lot of pressure these days. Hell, we work with black guys. We got black friends. What can I say? We’re sorry.”
So was I. More than I cared to say to these a*sholes. I turned away from them, and Jezzie and I walked back to the car. My arms and legs felt as if they were made of stone. My heart was pounding like an oil derrick.
“I’m sorry,” I said to her. I felt a little sick. “I can’t take shit like that. I can’t walk away anymore.”
“I understand,” Jezzie said softly. “You did what you had to.” She was at my side. In this thing for the good and the bad.
We held one another inside my car for a long moment. Then we went home to be together.