The Cut (Spero Lucas) by George P. Pelecanos Read Free Book Online Page A

or his state of decomposition, because that is not my father in that grave. That’s just a shell. He went from this good life to a glorious life. Hear?”
    “If you say so.”
    “You can’t be beating up on yourself for not being here when he was dying. Dad was proud of you, man.”
    “I hope so,” said Spero, a catch in his voice.
    “And you can’t undo his death, any more than you can shake the grief out of Mom. You’re always trying to
fix
shit, Spero. Like when you enlisted in the Marine Corps, and I asked you why. You said, ‘I’ve got to do something.’ ”
    “I felt the need to.”
    “But this is not that. And it’s not one of your cases that you treat like a puzzle to solve. You can’t draw a diagram in that book of yours and fix our mother or your guilt. It’s not something you can win. You need to let it work its way out.”
    “Okay, Leo. Okay.”
    Cheyenne came back out on the porch, got under the table, and dropped to the wood floor, resting against Spero’s feet.
    “You know that thing I took on?” said Spero.
    “You mean the weed dealer?”
    “The guys who worked for him had that package delivered to a home on a street right across from your school.”
    “On Clifton?”
    “Twelfth.”
    “Odd place for them to do it,” said Leo. “All that law around.”
    “I was thinking the same thing.”
    “How old are those guys?”
    “Round twenty, I guess,” said Spero.
    “There you go,” said Leo.
    “What?”
    “You’re looking for logic,” said Leo. “They’re still kids.”

FIVE

    I N THE morning, Lucas drew a crude sketch in his notebook of the eighteen residences on the 2500 block of 12th Street, Northwest. The row houses were depicted as simple adjoining squares in which he wrote address numbers, leaving room for the names of the owners.
    He left his apartment, got into his Jeep, and went up to the Shepherd Park library on Georgia. The computers there were occupied by surfers who did not look as if they would be relinquishing their spots any time soon, so he drove to the nearest big-box office supply store and paid a rental fee for the use of a PC. He typically did the bulk of his investigative work on his laptop at home, using programs like People Finder, but he was about to use a public site and didn’t want to leave an electronic trail.
    In a private stall, he got to work. He went to the D.C. government website, which was helpfully located under dc.gov. Above a blank box was the question, “What can we help you find?” and in the box Lucas typed, “research real property”and hit “enter.” This took him to the Real Property Tax Database Search. In the search box on that page he typed in the address on 12th Street to which the package of marijuana had been shipped. He got the name of the owner, the lot number, the current assessed value of the property, the last sale date, and the last sale price. The owner’s name was Lisa Weitzman. Lucas guessed that a person with the surname Weitzman would not be black, though it was possible, or Hispanic, which was even less likely. The last sale date of the property, 2008, told him that she was a newer resident and, in keeping with the recent history of the rapidly gentrified neighborhood, probably on the young side, and white. The assessed value of the house was currently a hundred thousand dollars below her purchase price; she had bought at the height of the market, before property values dipped. What the database did not tell him was whether she lived there; it listed owners, not tenants. But the data was valuable and had been easy to obtain.
    Lucas repeated the process for every residential property on the block. As he did, he wrote the owner’s name inside the square of each address on 12th Street, along with the last sale date, on the drawing he had sketched into his notebook. When he was done he had a map of the block with each residence assigned an owner’s name and an indication of who was fairly new to the block and