George Pelecanos
The Man Who Came Uptown
To Charles Willeford and
Elmore Leonard
Part I
One
When Antonius thought of all the things they’d done wrong the day of the robbery, wearing hoodies might have been at the top of the list. Considering that it was ninety degrees out, four men in heavy, dark sweatshirts were bound to attract attention. Might even be the reason the armored-car guard drew on them first when he was coming out the drugstore. That and the fact that all of them were tooled up. Course, if Antonius and his boys hadn’t smoked all that tree before the job, they might have thought the sweatshirts through. The sweatshirts, and the vanity plates on the getaway car. The plates were high up on that list too.
Antonius, braids touching his shoulders, sat back in his chair and maintained eye contact with the investigator seated across the table. Antonius was in the number one seat in the interview room, the inmate’s spot, his back to a cream-colored wall. As he was currently housed in solitary, his legs were manacled. Other inmates were in various glassed-in rooms around them, talking to their lawyers, their girlfriends, their mothers, their wives. A guard sat in a nearby office, watching them. An alarm button had been mounted by the door of every room in the event that guard intervention was needed. Conversations here sometimes got amped.
“You musta been hot out in that parking lot,” said the investigator, whose name was Phil Ornazian.
Antonius looked him over. Broad-shouldered dude with short black hair and a three-day beard flecked with gray. Late thirties, early forties. Wedding band on his ring finger. Almost looked like an Arab, with his prominent nose and large brown eyes. Antonius had assumed he was Muslim when they’d first met, but Ornazian was some brand of Christian. He’d mentioned once that he and his family attended an “apostolic” church. Whatever that was.
“You think?” said Antonius. “It was August in the District.”
“The sweatshirts... whose idea was that?”
“Whose idea?”
“On the surveillance video, you guys are all standing around in winter clothing in the parking lot of the drugstore, and people are walking in and out of the store in T-shirts, polo shirts, and shorts. So I was just wondering, I was curious, who thought that was a good idea?”
It was Antonius’s lifelong friend DeAndre who had insisted they wear the black sweatshirts in the middle of a Washington summer. Hoods up, so their faces wouldn’t be caught on the cameras that were mounted on the building. DeAndre, that dumbass, never did do anything right. Boy could fuck up a birthday party at the Chuck E. Cheese.
“I don’t recall,” said Antonius.
Antonius was not trying to be difficult. He knew that Ornazian was there to assist him. The defense strategy was to paint DeAndre as the leader and decision maker of the group. To take that information into court and pull some of the shade off of Antonius. Ornazian was working for Antonius’s lawyer, Matthew Mirapaul, trying to dig up dirt that would help him when he went to trial. But Antonius wasn’t going to give up too many details about his boys, any of them, even though DeAndre had already put Antonius and the others in for the robbery. He had a code.
“Okay,” said Ornazian. “Let’s talk about your girlfriend.”
“Sherry.”
“You say you were with her at the time of the robbery.”
“We were riding in my car together. She had called me to come pick her up over at the Giant off Rhode Island Avenue, in Northeast. Sherry had just bought a rack of groceries. She phoned me at, like, two in the afternoon, and I went over there to snatch her up. I got her at, like, two thirty.”
“Why was she shopping at a Giant in Northeast when there’s two Safeways in your neighborhood?”
“She likes that Giant.”
“Anybody see you two together?”
“Nah. Not that I know. But, see, if the robbery was at three, and I was with her at two thirty, ain’t no way I could get across town to Georgia Avenue, in Northwest, in time to be involved in what went down over there. All you got to do is pull up the phone records and you’ll see that she called me at two. It proves that I wasn’t there.”
Ornazian made no comment. The phone call, of course, proved nothing of the kind. Sherry, the girlfriend, most likely had made the call, as she had been instructed to do. That, too, had been part of the plan. It was weed logic, creating an alibi through a phone call without a third-party eyewitness to corroborate the event. Unfortunately, there was no one who could testify and put Antonius and Sherry together at the time of the robbery.
Along with his own investigation, the prosecution’s discovery, and the store’s surveillance-camera footage, this is what Ornazian knew: Nearly two years earlier, on a sweltering midsummer day, an armed security guard had collected the daily cash deposits from a Rite Aid on upper Georgia Avenue and was in the process of exiting the building with canvas bags in hand. He was on the way to the company’s armored truck idling out front.
Waiting in the parking lot were four men in their early twenties, wearing black sweatshirts, hoods up, and sweating profusely. All were armed with semiautomatic handguns. The driver of the armored car could have seen one of them in his side mirror, but he was not paying attention, as, counter to company policy, he was eating the lunch he had recently purchased from the KFC/Taco Bell up near the District line.
The men in the parking lot were Antonius Roberts, DeAndre Watkins, Rico Evans, and Mike Young. They mostly spent their time in the basement of Antonius’s grandmother, who owned a house in Manor Park, where Antonius had a bed. There they smoked copious amounts of marijuana, watched conspiracy-theory documentaries on television, played video games, and made poorly produced rap videos and occasionally videos of themselves engaging in boxing and mixed martial arts matches, though none of them had studied or trained.
One afternoon someone got the idea to go over to the local drugstore on Georgia and observe the details of the daily cash pickup. They did this, stoned as Death Row rappers, for several days straight. It was always the same roly-poly dude came out with the bags, didn’t look like he’d put up any kind of fight, didn’t look like he could run or jump one foot off the ground. If you drew on him, said DeAndre, what could he do?
The guard’s name was Yohance Brown, and he was not as passive or as physically incapable as he appeared to be. Brown was ex-military and had done two combat-heavy tours of Iraq. Though he had put on weight after his return to the States, Brown took no man’s shit.
The day of the attempted robbery, the four accomplices arrived in two cars.
As Yohance Brown entered the protected entranceway of the drugstore, walled by sliding automatic glass doors front and back, he saw the hooded robbers standing in the parking lot, spaced out like gunmen in an Italian Western, holding nine-millimeter pistols tight against their thighs. As one of them raised his nine, Brown dropped the cash bags to the floor, pulled his Glock from its holster, calmly steadied his gun hand, and commenced firing. The robbers ran toward their cars, shooting over their shoulders in the direction of the store. Later, a flattened slug was found inside a Twinkie in the Rite Aid. Miraculously, no customers had been injured.
One of the robbers, Mike Young, was shot in the back by Brown. Young was later dropped off like dirty laundry outside the ER doors of Washington Hospital Center by Rico Evans, the driver of a Hyundai sedan day-rented from a Park View resident. Young survived.
Antonius and DeAndre got into an old Toyota Corolla, owned by DeAndre’s cousin Rhonda, and sped north on Georgia Avenue. Traffic cameras recorded the Corolla’s vanity plates, which read ALIZE, the brand name of a cognac-based liqueur popular in certain quadrants of the city. Later, at the Fourth District police station, officers of various races and ethnicities watched the traffic-camera footage repeatedly, laughing their asses off at the idiots who had driven a vanity-plated car to an armed robbery, laughing even harder at the word Alize. By then all the suspects had been apprehended and arrested. DeAndre Watkins quickly flipped on his friends in exchange for reduced charges. He was currently on the fourth floor of the Correctional Treatment Facility, the hot block most commonly referred to by inmates as “the snitch hive.”