DC By the Book

Excerpt: I was in the waiting area of the Veteran’s Hospital emergency room off North Capitol Street, seeing to my father, when Detective Tony Barnes hit me back on my cell. My father had laid his head down on the crossbar of his walker, and it was going to be awhile before someone came and called his name. I walked the phone outside and lit myself a smoke.

Excerpt: Further west, along 16th Street, there were pillared mansions on half-acre lots arching down to Rock Creek Park. But where Liebmann lived, at the corner of Georgia and Juniper Street, the area was failing. He had watched his six or seven blocks ebb and drift in a long collapse, falling faster and harder in the last few years. Stores and cafés and the bakery and the pharmacy and the neighborhood dry cleaner had all closed or moved to the suburbs. There was an open-air shopping mall out in Wheaton, a new invention of commerce drawing shoppers like nothing before, and merchants were moving north to Maryland and the money.

Excerpt: At 10:00, like clockwork, the white Dodge van pulled up across Wisconsin at the corner of Prospect, by Restoration Hardware. “Hello, Nigerian,” Solomon whispered. He settled back to watch the sidewalk come alive. Each morning’s setup was a ballet, a precisely choreographed routine, and Solomon was a discriminating critic.

Excerpt: Sunday, the 23rd of August, was a muggy and humid morning. It also marked the last sermon Reverend Yancey would preach at the old Gethsemane Baptist Church. Gethsemane had been on that hilltop at Georgia Avenue and Upshur Street for twentysome years. The church was set to be “tore down,” as all the adults were saying around me. “It gon’ be tore down by Monday mornin’.” Torn down to make room for a Safeway. The church was so small I couldn’t see how a big old grocery store was gonna fit, but I didn’t know nuthin’ about buildings. I was eight years old at the time.

Excerpt: We moved into this two-story house on Crittenden Street between Georgia Avenue and 9th Street in the ’50s. There were a couple of white families when we came in, and everybody was friendly, but they had all left the neighborhood maybe a year after we moved in. Just as we started to play together, the white kids had to move someplace else.

Excerpt: The drive home to his tenth-floor apartment at the Wingate House East apartment complex on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in far Southwest Washington was no joy-ride. Rodney couldn’t shake the fear and a sense of impending doom he had not felt in years, not since he was in the seventh grade at Hart Junior High School.

Excerpt: Detective Mayfield had arrived at the soot-stained, weather-beaten, and dilapidated municipal center, the Henry J. Daly Building, located at 300 Indiana Avenue, N.W., at around 7:45 a.m. for check-in at the Court Liaison Unit on the first floor, a prerequisite before he could log in at D.C. Superior Court across the courtyard for the long and ongoing “Simple City Massacre” murder trial at which he would testify against codefendants LaVon “Pooty” Kirkwood and Donzelle “Killa” Hilliard…whenever the prosecution got around to him.

Excerpt: The Fantasy Nightclub used to sit on the corner of 14th and U Streets, N.W., in what was then D.C.’s red-light district. Pimps, whores, players, drug dealers, and every other sort of hustler swarming the deadly streets of the Chocolate City frequented this establishment. Even a sprinkle of lawyers and local politicians wandered through from time to time.

Excerpt: Chuck ordered Cort to ditch the deathwatch and get to Mount Pleasant. “There’s been a riot. A black cop shot a Latino man, and there’s rumors the man was handcuffed. They’ve torched about a half dozen cop cars on 16th Street, near Lamont. Didn’t you hear it on the scanner?

Excerpt: Cort reached the end of the riot zone, hooked a right, and ambled north on Mount Pleasant Street. The street featured dollar stores, bars, greasy carryouts, liquor stores, old apartment buildings, and Heller’s Bakery, which arguably produced the finest cakes in the city.

Excerpt: The MacArthur Park section of Los Angeles was Little El Salvador, and Mount Pleasant was its East Coast counterpart. Inside Haydee’s, a Salvadoran restaurant, former Marxist guerillas drank beer with ex—Salvadoran Army soldiers as they argued over soccer games playing on a TV behind the bar. Nearby, Salvadoran day laborers stood outside 7-Eleven, or “El Seven,” as they called it, waiting for work. Salvadoran vendors with metal carts dotted the street, hawking fresh mangos. To the west, a series of quiet, tree-lined residential streets with row houses sloped down toward Rock Creek Park and the National Zoo. The street was unscathed, except for El Seven. A window had been shattered and a store worker swept glass off the sidewalk.

Excerpt: A woman dispatcher said, “Attention units paged. Third District officers at a stabbing at an apartment building, the corner of Park Road and Mount Pleasant Street. Homicide requested. Cort pulled over to the curb. Mount Pleasant Street dead-ended at Park Road, three blocks north of 7-Eleven, one block over from 16th Street. A murder on the edge of the riot zone? Huh.

Excerpt: Across the street waited Capitol Hill’s neighborhood ball-field-sized Lincoln Park that 198 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence became D.C.’s first public site for any statue honoring a woman or an African-American.

Excerpt: Gibson crossed Thomas Circle and trudged through the neighborhood. A woman with a broken flower in her tangled hair sat on the wall of Luther Place Memorial Church, belting out a song that Gibson didn’t recognize. He walked past brick town houses and an apartment building with a sign that read “Starting in the low-400s!” as if that were something to be excited about. Office workers and tourists didn’t bother with this part of 14th Street, but for Gibson it was home, and it bothered him that even here a new upscale furniture store was bumping up against his favorite chicken joint.