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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.