Shame the Devil Read Online Free PDF Page B

tourists, and self-serving Southerners.
    Stefanos read an article below the fold that detailed the state of the Metropolitan Police Department. The former chief of
     police had resigned under allegations of mismanagement and corruption; his roommate, a lieutenant on the force, had been accused
     of shaking down closeted homosexuals outside Southeast’s bathhouse strip. The Homicide division, with more than sixteen hundred
     unsolved cases and a less than 40 percent closure rate, was under particular fire. Some Homicide detectives had recently been
     caught overinflating the hours on their time cards. Murders occurring in the city’s poorest neighborhoods were lazily investigated
     at best. An apparent serial killer was loose in the Park View section of town. And the most emblematic, high-profile case
     of the decade remained unsolved: the slaughter at the pizza parlor called May’s, dating back to the summer of 1995.
    The mention of May’s triggered a pulse in Stefano’s blood. In the 1980s, when Stefanos was still taking cocaine with his whiskey
     in after-hours establishments, he had spent many late nights being served by Steve Maroulis, the house bartender at May’s.
     And he had crossed paths with Dimitri Karras, the father of the child killed by the speeding getaway car, on several occasions
     over the past twenty-two years. That Stefanos knew two victims of the same crime was not surprising. Stefanos, Maroulis, and
     Karras were all of Greek descent, and though spread out now, the Greek community in D.C. had a shared history.
    Stefanos looked out the window at a trash-strewn field bordering the old Woodie’s warehouse off North Capitol. Graffiti outlaw
     Cool “Disco” Dan, a D.C. legend, had tagged the loading dock. Below the moniker, someone had spray-painted a tombstone, on
     which was written, “Larry Willis, RIP,” and below that, his eulogy: “Heaven for a G.”
    The Red Line train entered a tunnel. Stefanos folded the newspaper, preparing for his stop.
    Stefanos stepped off the Judiciary Square station escalator and walked over to the Superior Court building at 5th and Indiana.
     He passed through a metal detector, navigated halls crowded with youths, their parents, uniformed cops, sheriffs, and private
     and court-appointed attorneys, and went down to the large cafeteria on the bottom floor.
    He bought a cup of coffee, sugared and creamed it to cut the taste, and walked across a red carpet to a table close to the
     front entrance, where he had a seat in a chair upholstered in red vinyl.
    A voice from a loudspeaker mounted on the wall announced, “Herbert Deuterman, please report with your client at this time
     to courtroom two-thirteen.…”
    Nearby, a middle-aged white attorney wearing rumpled, mismatched clothes talked his idea of black to a few of his bored black
     coworkers seated at the same table. He described a defendant who had accused him of being a racist, and then said, “If this
     homey knew me the way y’all know me, he’d’ve known that the only color that matters to me is
green.
I put it to this boy point-blank straight.”
    As the attorney laughed, a woman seated at the table said, “So, you gonna cut a deal with his lawyer?”
    “I’m gonna cut one every which way but loose. You can believe that.”
    “Long as you don’t have to break a sweat, right Mr. Watkins?”
    “Sugar, I’m gonna do as little as possible, and a little bit less than that.”
    A kid sitting at the table to the right of Stefanos listened as his lawyer described the plea-out he was about to make “upstairs”
     on his client’s behalf, and how “Judge Levy definitely does not want to send another young man into an already overcrowded
     system, and she won’t, if she sees that your heart is in the right place.”
    Stefanos looked at the kid, still in his teens: skinny, sloppily dressed, and slumped in his chair. Today was his court date,
     and no one had even instructed him to tuck in his shirt.