Detective Wallace had seen it all in his twenty-two years on the force. From the gangland slayings of the projects that were a weekend ritual, to the white-collar company employee who tried to kill his co-workers with doses of poison sprinkled on the powdered donuts. On any given night, Detective Wallace knew he would see the worst side of society, the dark side most people prefer to think exists only in movies and TV dramas. After a bad night, the real miracle came the next morning—when he woke up, got dressed, and prepared for another day of the same.
His first case in the homicide and robbery division set the tone for a career that he lived, breathed, and somehow loved. They say the first kill is the hardest for soldiers, and Wallace was sure he would take to the grave the image of the victim in his first case.
Twenty-two years later, the case was as fresh as yesterday. At first, no one had noticed the sleeping passenger in the back seat. For two hours the double-door white Metrobus made its scheduled stops along Route 2B. At some point during an otherwise lovely autumn afternoon, an elderly passenger made his way up the aisle of the bus and whispered in the driver’s ear. The driver pulled over, walked to the back of the bus, and then turned to make a brief announcement. The uniformed driver spoke softly in an attempt to keep everyone calm. When he finished explaining the situation, the passengers flew from their seats and clawed their way off the vehicle, one on top of another. It was the natural human reaction to riding with a corpse.
Detective Wallace arrived on the scene, made his way to the back of the bus, and swallowed hard at the painful expression frozen on the dead man’s face. An empty garbage bag lay crumpled at the feet of the slumping young man.
Wallace searched the body for evidence and identification. There were no visible wounds to the man’s face or chest. The driver’s license in the wallet indicated the victim was only twenty-seven, youthful for a heart attack, but not impossibly young. Wallace patted down the body one last time and pulled out an identification badge from the victim’s shirt pocket that nearly made his own heart stop. According to the laminated blue ID with the victim’s photograph, the dead young man worked in the reptile house of the Washington Zoo. Detective Wallace, relying on intuition as much as real detective work, radioed to the dispatcher who in turn called the dead man’s employer. When Wallace heard the dispatcher’s response, he jumped off the floor of the bus and climbed on the top of the seats to the vehicle’s rear exit.
Two Russell’s vipers, stolen from the zoo earlier in the day by the employee, had chosen the local transportation system to make their escape. The Russell’s vipers—referred to by Vietnam vets as “two-step” snakes due to the fact that once bitten, the victim took two steps and died—had sunk their fangs into the hand of their captor when he opened the bag to check on them. The young man died without the courtesy of his allotted two paces.
It was a manhunt the likes of which had never been seen in the downtown area of a major city. A small family of Mongoose was released near the bus, as if the snake-killing rodent hunted its prey like a bloodhound. Poisons and traps were thrown around like rice at a wedding. In the end, the snakes were never found. To this day, Earl Wallace looked around his tiny back yard before letting his grandchildren run free. Twenty-two years and forty pounds ago. His short curly black hair was now heavy with gray, giving the detective a distinguished look to his black features. Twenty-two years.
Cigarette in his mouth, he patted down his shirt and swerved as he ran his hand on the floor and in the crack of the passenger seat searching for a lighter. The radio crackled and Earl Wallace tuned in, catching every word of the seemingly secret language of police radio dispatchers. The radio ended with a statement that even the Sesame Street crowd could comprehend. “Police requested at McPherson Metro station. Body discovered.”
Earl Wallace snatched the unlit cigarette from his mouth and threw it out the window. The Metro station was two blocks ahead. ***
Two marked squad cars stopped beside Wallace as he pulled his increasingly heavy frame from the seat. Wallace paused at the top of the escalator and looked down at the scene below. He shook his head and walked down the stairs, his knees creaking the creak of an old athlete with new arthritis. The Metro Transit Authorities arrived ten minutes later and joined the EMTs as they made their way down the long escalators that were still powered off.
“Does Metro Transit want this? It’s your jurisdiction if you call it,” Detective Wallace asked the two Metro Police officers who had yet to approach the body. Wallace already knew the answer. When it came to dead bodies, the Metro Transit Police deferred to the D.C. Police. The city cops had more “stiff” experience.
“It’s all yours, detective,” came the reply.
Detective Wallace nodded and forced his heavy frame down on his painful knees and got to work.
The emergency personnel took up official positions at official distances around the scene. Detective Wallace gathered Marilyn’s personal belongings and put them into separate plastic bags. He grabbed the broken shoe and the heel that had hung from the bottom of the hooker-red footwear by a strip of leather. He looked at the break in the heel and rubbed it with his fingers through latex gloves.
He looked up at the escalator and the steep angle at which it dove underground.
“If I had to guess, I would say that she broke a heel and then fell,” Detective Wallace said, based purely on the evidence. “Or lost her balance as she broke her heel and then fell.”
“No chance that the heel broke during her fall?” a white Metro Transit officer asked out of curiosity, as if the detective had all the answers.
“Maybe. Maybe she just lost her balance. But looking at the shoe, one thing is certain. If she had been walking on the broken heel it would have been scratched or embedded with grime. The break is very clean,” Wallace said, putting the shoe into a plastic bag, the heel into another.
Both officers looked up at the looming staircase and the long tunnel to the lights of the street above. “Ouch,” the white officer said. “A true fashion victim,” he added with the type of police humor that was a prerequisite to get fellow officers through the reality of the job.
Detective Wallace didn’t reply to the comment. He was still on the job. He asked the commuter who found the body a few questions, got his name and number, and then released him. He dragged his former-college-football-star body up the escalator stairs and checked the top of the landing for clues. Seemingly a mile below, the uniformed police entourage watched as the body was put on a stretcher. Detective Wallace stayed until the crime scene was officially closed. He took one last look down the stairs, rubbed his chin, and went back to the police station to fill out the paperwork for an accidental death. ***
Chow Ying, refreshed from the kill, walked the fifteen blocks to his home-away-from-home at the Peking Palace in Chinatown. The old man who ran the hotel was watching an old circa Seventies black and white TV. When Chow Ying walked in, the TV went off.
“Mahjong?” the old man asked, inviting Chow Ying into his living room at the back of the house-turned-hotel.
“And beer?” the old man added with a gappy smile.
Chow Ying, as politely as he could, asked him if he had anything stronger.
The old man nodded, walked to the kitchen, and pulled out a bottle of label-less liquor from a cabinet.
“Are you sure your wife won’t mind?” Chow Ying asked as the host poured a glass of the nameless high-octane brew for each of them.
“No. It’s almost midnight. She has been asleep for hours. And at our age, she isn’t waiting up for a roll in the hay,” the old man said with a straight face.