The police found the park environment, as hopeless as it seemed, was preferable to the days of widespread drug dens in abandoned row houses and factory buildings. There the addicts would shoot up crack cocaine and heroin out of sight-but would then frequently simply disappear, their bodies discovered days or months later, if ever.
In the open, however, the officers-as well as various teams of volunteers, often those who had sons and daughters lost to the drugs-could approach those in and near the park and try talking them into attending a substance abuse program-detoxifications with the synthetic opioids Suboxone and Methadone-like the one at the addiction hospital across from nearby Norris Square.
The odds were great that the addicted, absent professional help would-sooner or later but most likely sooner-join the hundreds who died each year in Philly either from an overdose of heroin or, indirectly, from the violence associated with it-being killed in a robbery, for example, or in the course of performing sexual acts, as they tried to raise cash for their next high.
–
“Uh-huh,” Jamal said, nodding. “That’s Needle Park.”
“So McPherson-what you call Needle Park-that’s Antwan’s turf, right?”
“Antwan?”
“Antwan-Pookie.”
Jamal nodded again.
“I’ve seen Pookie there, if that’s what you mean-”
“Then it’s his turf?”
Jamal shrugged. “But I see lots of folks there.”
“Pookie work for anyone?”
Jamal again shrugged, then tried looking McCrory in the eye but looked away and said, “Guess you’d have to ask him about that.”
McCrory shook his head.
“So,” he pursued, “you see Pookie there working the park. And then along comes Dante Holmes. Was he trying to move in, work it, too? And that got him capped?”
Jamal, nervously chewing on his lower lip, did not reply.
“Okay,” McCrory then said, opening the manila folder on the table and placing a series of photographs before Jamal. The top one showed the street view of a row house with police line yellow tape strung from the porch out to the street. Evidence markers, inverted yellow plastic Vs with black numerals, filled the marked-off area.
“This is where the drive-by shooting took place,” McCrory said. “On the front stoop. .”
Jamal’s eyes darted to the photograph, then looked away.
“. . of Dante’s grandmother’s house in Kensington, on Clementine at E Street. Five o’clock on a Friday afternoon. Yesterday. Grandma happens to look out her upstairs bedroom window when a Chevy Impala with tinted windows comes rolling up Clementine and stops shy of her house. It’s dark already, but she can just make out the car’s front passenger window opening, and she sees a guy waving Dante to come over. Dante, probably thinking he’s about to move some product, starts walking toward the Impala. Then the back passenger window goes down and a hand reaches out with a semiauto. The night lights up with muzzle flashes as both passengers start firing multiple shots, at least twenty-five, at Dante. Grandma says that it looks and sounds like really loud Chinese firecrackers going off. Then the car speeds off. And Dante’s down. Three rounds, two to the chest, one to his thigh. He never had a chance. And right in front of his grandma.”
McCrory paused to let that sink in, then went on: “That’s bad enough. But what’s worse: most of those bullets skipped past Dante, some going into a neighbor’s row house. You have any family, Jamal, any brothers or sisters?”
Jamal, stone-faced, did not respond.
McCrory flipped to the next photograph. It showed three evidence markers-one by a large dark stain on a threadbare couch-in the living room of a home.
“Okay,” he said. “Well, this is where a ten-year-old girl was watching TV after school with her little brother. She takes one of those bullets to the head. Now she’s still in intensive care, and not looking like she’s going to make it. And Dante, he’s dead.”
McCrory stopped and cocked his head.
“Look at me, Jamal. You following all this?”
Jamal glanced at him, then looked back at his feet.
McCrory went on: “It’s important that you do. Because it’s my job to find out who’s responsible, and I’m telling you now that I don’t give up. Nobody deserves to die that way. Especially an innocent little girl.”
He paused to let that sink in, then pointed at the evidence markers in the photo of the street scene.
“See these? They’re.40 cal casings. These and the bullets that were collected at the drive-by can be matched to the gun that fired them. And if even one was fired by the gun you had on you. . then you need to start talking, Jamal.”
Jamal glanced at the photograph, then stared at his feet a long moment, anxiously crossed his legs the opposite way, then back again. He met McCrory’s eyes, and sighed.
“Told you I don’t know no Dante,” he finally said.
“So you keep saying,” McCrory said, his tone disgusted. “Not knowing him and shooting him are two different things. I can imagine that you don’t know the little girl, either. But that doesn’t change the fact that she may die.”
“I didn’t shoot nobody. That gun I got so I can defend myself. There’re crazy folks out there, shooting you for no reason. But that ain’t me.”
McCrory picked up the stack of photographs and began laying them out on the table so that they were all visible at once.
In the viewing room, Payne grunted, then glanced at Kennedy.
“Don’t know about you, Hal, but I say he’s lying.”
“How can you tell?” Kennedy said. “Because his lips are moving?”
“He may not have pulled the trigger, but he knows who Dante is and/or knows who did it. And you nailed it-we’re wasting our time with him right now.”
Payne then reached into his suit coat pocket and produced a folded sheet of paper.
“Show this to Jamal the Junkie,” Payne said, handing the sheet to Kennedy. “Just to throw him off. Maybe it’ll jar loose that rectal cranial inversion.”
Kennedy unfolded the sheet and saw that it was the Wanted flyer of the heavyset male suspect in the LOVE and Franklin parks murders. He shook his head as he looked at the cold, empty eyes and the spread of tattoos-the inverted heart under the left eye, the inverted peace symbol under the right one, “Family” inked in tall, dark lettering across his throat.
“What’ve we got to lose?” Payne said. “I just want to watch his reaction-if any-to seeing the doer.”
Kennedy left the viewing room and, a moment later, Payne heard him over the speaker knocking twice on the interview room door. McCrory cracked open the door, leaned toward it to listen as the Wanted flyer was passed inside, then nodded and closed the door.
Payne watched McCrory glance over the flyer, then extend it toward Jamal.
“What about this guy, Jamal?” McCrory said, his tone sarcastic. “Don’t know him, either?”
Jamal didn’t move to take the sheet, and McCrory put it on the table on top of the other papers before him.
As Jamal focused on it, his eyes grew wide and he wrinkled his forehead. He quickly tried to mask his reaction by taking off his glasses, then running his hand over his face and rubbing his eyes.
“So you do know him?” McCrory asked, making it more a statement.
Jamal’s body slumped as he shook his head.
“What?” McCrory said.
Jamal shook his head again, and, apparently thinking he was being clever, looked at McCrory and said, “Who is he? What’d he do?”
Payne grunted.
“At least he’s consistent with his lying,” he said.
McCrory had come to the same conclusion.
“You’re lying, Jamal. Who is this guy? How do you know him?”
Jamal looked at his shoes for a long moment.
“C’mon, Jamal. Talk to me. You’re looking at some serious time already with a gun charge on top of possession with intent to distribute. . or worse.”
After a moment, Jamal sighed.
“He’s one I’ve seen at Needle Park, too,” Jamal said. “I don’t know him. But a guy I did know there said stay away from him. Said he’s a really bad dude. Angry at everything, you know?”