The Man Who Came Uptown Read online

  “We don’t,” said Anna. “Didn’t you ask for this same book last week?”

  “Thought y’all might’ve got it in since then.”

  By policy, sexually explicit books and books that promoted violence were not available in the jail library. Some urban fiction made the cut, some did not. Certain heavily requested books that espoused outlandish conspiracy theories, like Behold a Pale Horse and The Forty-Eight Laws of Power, were also prohibited. The sexuality and violence standards set by the D.C. Public Library for the detention facility were murky and often went unenforced. Some serial-killer novels and soft-core potboilers made it through the gates. Anna had once seen a group of inmates in the dayroom watching a DVD of The Purge.

  “What you got for me, then?” said the man. “Don’t give me no boring stuff.”

  On the cart, Anna found something by Nora Roberts, a prolific, popular novelist who typically generated good feedback, and gave it to the man. She began to log the details of the inmate and the novel.

  “I read one of hers before,” said the man, inspecting the jacket. “She’s cool. That’ll work.”

  As he drifted, the next man came up to the table. He was tall, with a full beard and close-cut hair. Anna knew little about him except for his reading habits. He was nice-looking, had a lean build, and spoke with soft confidence. His name was Michael Hudson.

  “Mr. Hudson.”

  “What do you have for me today, Miss Anna?”

  She handed him two books that she had chosen for him when she had staged her cart the previous afternoon. One was a story collection called Kentucky Straight. The other was a single volume with two Elmore Leonard Western novels, written early in his career.

  Inmates could check out two books a week. She often gave Michael longish books or volumes containing multiple novels because he tended to run through the material very quickly. In the past year, since he had first been incarcerated, he had become a voracious reader. His tastes ran to stories occurring outside of East Coast cities. He liked to read books about the kinds of people he’d not met growing up in Washington, set in places he’d never visited. Nothing too difficult or dense. He preferred stories that were clearly written and simply told. He read for entertainment. Michael was new to this. He wasn’t trying to impress anyone. But his tastes were evolving. He was learning.

  He studied the jackets, glanced at the inner flap of Kentucky Straight.

  “The stories in that book are set mainly in Appalachia,” said Anna.

  “Like, mountain folk,” said Michael.

  “Uh-huh. The author grew up there. I think you’ll like the Westerns too.”

  “Yeah, Leonard. That dude’s real.”

  “You read Swag. One of his crime novels.”

  “I remember.” Michael looked her in the eye. “Thank you, Miss Anna.”

  “Just doing my job.”

  “So, tell me a couple more titles. For later.”

  As Michael had gotten more into reading, he had asked Anna to recommend some books for him to read in the future, either upon his release or when he transitioned to prison. Novels that were not in her inventory or were deemed inappropriate for the inmates. Books she thought he might like. She gave him the titles verbally. He’d write them down later, tell them to his mother when she came to visit. His mother had been surprised, and pleased, that he had developed an interest in books.

  “Hard Rain Falling,” she said. “By Don Carpenter. And a short-story collection called The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien. It’s set in Vietnam, during the war.”

  “Hard Rain Falling, Carpenter,” repeated Michael. “Things They Carried.”

  “Tim O’Brien.”

  “Got it.” He stood there, as if waiting.

  The man behind him said, “Shit. My hair about to go gray.”

  “Is there something else?” said Anna.

  “Just want to say…I never read a book in my life before I came in here. You know that, right? This pleasure I got now, it’s because of you.”

  “The DCPL put a branch in here a couple of years ago. That’s why you get to read books. But I’m glad you’re taking advantage of the opportunity. I hope you like those.”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  “You’re coming to book club next week, right?”

  “You know I am,” said Michael.

  “I’ll see you in the chapel.”

  “Right.”

  She watched him walk toward his cell. He was rubbing the cover of one of the books as if he were polishing something precious in his hands.

  THERE WAS a law library in the detention facility that the inmates used to research their cases. Anna had worked there when she’d first come to the jail.

  The law library was available to members of each housing unit for two hours per week and to inmates who were in Restricted Housing by request. A civilian law librarian ran the operation and was assisted by a legal clerk who was an inmate, a desirable, soft-labor position in the jail. Inmates had access to reading materials and to LexisNexis programs on computers but had no access to e-mail services or the internet. In addition to research, the law library’s space was used for voting, which was available to non-felons only, and for SAT and GED testing.

  Though the D.C. Jail’s library was an official branch of the DCPL, it was not a traditional library in that inmates could not enter a room and browse through the stacks. An actual library was to open soon, but for now, books were delivered to the inmates on a cart.

  There were fifteen units at the jail. The mobile librarian visited three units per day, so every unit received her services once a week. Among the units were GED, General Population, Fifty and Older, Mental Health, Juvenile, and Restricted Housing. Each unit had its own characteristics and needs. It was part of Anna’s job to anticipate those needs when she staged her carts and chose titles from the over three thousand books housed in the workroom. The library stocked paperbacks only.

  Four thirty was her quitting time. Anna was in the workroom and had been staging her cart for the Fifty and Older unit, which she was scheduled to visit the following morning. That particular unit housed mostly repeat offenders, parole violators, and drug addicts. She chose a couple of Gillian Flynn novels, popular among inmates, and some early Stephen Kings. Anything by King was in heavy play. The Harry Potter books were wildly popular as well.

  Anna’s assistant, Carmia, a recent graduate of UDC who had come up in public housing in Southeast, stood nearby, inspecting each book that had been returned, fanning through pages, checking for notes and contraband. For security reasons, books could not be passed from inmate to inmate. Each book was inspected between rentals.

  “You almost ready, Anna?”

  “Yes.”

  “We can walk out together. I got to get my boy out of day care.”

  “I’m nearly done.”

  Anna had been at the D.C. Jail for several years but not always in her current position. After her undergrad studies at Emerson, in Boston, she accompanied her husband, who had been hired as a junior attorney in a District law firm, to Washington, where she obtained her master’s in library science at Catholic University. Her first job in town was as a law librarian in a firm on H Street. This bored her silly, so when she saw an ad posted by the Corrections Corporation of America for the position of law librarian of the D.C. Central Detention Facility, she applied. To her surprise, she was quickly hired.

  Running the law library of the jail was her first encounter with lockup. Initially, the experience was troubling, especially the daily security process and the ominous finality of doors closing, locks turning, and gates clanging shut. But these procedures and sounds soon became part of her routine, and quickly she found that she preferred dealing with inmates to dealing with attorneys. Interacting one-on-one with men who were incarcerated was not problematic. She was there to help them, and they knew it. It unsettled her, sometimes, to sit with a man charged with rape or pedophilia and direct him toward informational avenues o
f appeal. But she never felt threatened. Rather, she was unfulfilled. It wasn’t a creative or particularly rewarding way to spend one’s day. Also, she had a deep love of fiction, and she thought it would be cool to promote literature and literacy. So when the DCPL opened a library branch in the jail in the spring of 2015, she applied for the position of librarian and got the job.

  “Coming?” said Carmia, a devout Christian with pretty brown eyes who was built small and stocky, like a low-to-the-ground running back.

  Anna shut down her government cell phone, then gathered the few belongings she had brought into the jail and placed them in a clear plastic handbag.

  “Let’s go.”

  ANNA AND Carmia exited the D.C. Central Detention Facility and walked to the lot where they had parked their cars. They passed a variety of guards, visitors, administrators, and law enforcement officers, driving, headed on foot to their vehicles, or standing around, catching smokes and talking about their day. The jail was at Nineteenth and D, Southeast, on the eastern edge of the 20003 zip code and residential Kingman Park. Longtime natives knew the area mainly as the 190-acre Stadium-Armory Campus, which housed the jail, the former D.C. General Hospital, now an enormous homeless shelter, and the beloved RFK Stadium, where the Washington Redskins had played during their glory years.

  “Have a blessed day,” said Carmia, veering off toward a Japanese import that she would be paying on for the next five years.

  “You also,” said Anna. She found her car, a boxy black-over-cream Mercury Mariner, the discontinued sister car to the Ford Escape. It had good sight lines and fulfilled its function as an urban runner. More important to Anna, it was paid for.

  Seagulls glided down from overhead and landed in a small group in the parking lot. It sometimes took her aback to see the birds but of course she was steps from the Anacostia River and not far from the Potomac and the Chesapeake Bay.

  She got into her SUV and retrieved her wallet and personal cell from the glove box, where she locked them up each morning. She let down her hair and lowered her driver’s-side window. Anna took a moment, breathed in fresh air, and listened to the call of the gulls.

  Three

  PHIL ORNAZIAN stepped out of his house, a neat brick brownstone southeast of Grant Circle, in Petworth, on the 400 block of Taylor Street, Northwest. The closing of his front door muffled the sounds of his two raucous dogs, his laughing sons, and his wife, Sydney, who was chastising the boys for something, like trampolining on the furniture or throwing a ball in the living room, or…something. For being kids. They were doing what children do, and she was doing what mothers do. His role, as he conveniently saw it, was to keep the roof over their heads, the utilities on, and the refrigerator and pantry full. “Going hunting,” he would typically say before he left the house. “Gotta drag the meat back to the cave.” This was his unsubtle rationalization for the time he spent away from home.

  Ornazian quickstepped off the porch, went down to the street, and opened the gate on the chain-link fence he’d had installed as soon as his older boy had learned to walk. Toys, balls, a trike, and a training-wheeled bike were in the “yard,” which was mostly dirt. Ornazian couldn’t get to his car, a 2013 double-black Ford Edge, fast enough.

  Men like him were at peace only when they were away from home. The office, which for him was mostly his car and the streets, was much more orderly and controllable than his house. He was into his wife and his children but felt it was unnatural and unproductive for a man to work at home.

  They had agreed early on that Sydney would raise the children and he would bring in the dosh. Syd did not have a paying job but she worked as hard as any person he knew. She was not insecure around women who were professionals and didn’t want to miss out on the experience of being with her children as much as possible, knowing instinctively that time spent away from them, in a window that was, after all, very short, was time she could never get back. Unfortunately, it meant that they sacrificed extras and sometimes struggled financially. But Phil Ornazian was above all a hustler. When his legit business was not flourishing, when his investigation work dried up, as it tended to do, he improvised.

  “Hello, Miss Mattie,” he said, to an elderly neighbor who was walking her small, short-haired mutt whose coat had gone gray. They both moved very slowly.

  “Phillip,” she said. “Off to work?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mattie Alston was one of the dwindling number of long-term home owners still on this block. Many of the homes had been sold off by their original owners at a tremendous profit or passed on to heirs who had either moved in themselves or taken the money and bought elsewhere. That was the upside of gentrification. Longtime property owners did well, if they wanted to. Renters, however, were typically displaced and left with nothing.

  Ornazian had bought this house on the cheap when he was single, fifteen years earlier, before Petworth turned, before young, new-Camelot college graduates flowed in and put down roots in sections of the city that white Washingtonians had once fled. If he were to sell his house now, he’d walk with three, four hundred thousand dollars or more. But where would he go?

  Ornazian got into his Ford, hit the push-button ignition, and heard the engine roar to life. With twenty-twos, custom rims, and extended pipes, the Sport model had a little more flair than the standard Edge, and it was as horsed up as a Mustang GT. Ornazian was something of a car freak and felt he needed the extra power in case he had to get out of trouble. That was how he explained it to his wife. Like all of the vehicles he had purchased since his marriage, this one was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

  “What’s this, then?” said Sydney, with her working-class-Brit accent, the day he’d driven the car home. From their concrete-and-brick-pillar porch, she eyed him and the black SUV suspiciously.

  “Family car,” said Ornazian.

  “The Dale Earnhardt Jr. family,” she’d said.

  Ornazian took Fifth Street south to Park Place, going along the Soldiers’ Home, and then back on Fifth, between the McMillan Reservoir and behind Howard University, bypassing the congestion of Georgia Avenue and coming out around Florida to the western edge of LeDroit Park. He was headed for New York Avenue and a quick route out of the city. Ornazian knew the backstreets and the shortcuts. He didn’t need Waze or any other app. He’d lived in the District his whole life.

  AT DUSK, he came off 295 onto Eastern Avenue, drove along the easternmost border of Maryland and D.C., crossed Minnesota Avenue, then hung a left and dipped off into Maryland.

  A half mile out of the city, on a tough stretch of road, in a low-income area of Prince George’s County, he parked in a lot before a complex of brick buildings, a one-stop-shop arrangement catering to various needs. There was a barbecue restaurant with a drive-through, a supper club touting dancers, a barbershop, a pawnbroker, a check-cashing service, and a liquor store with barred windows. Beside the liquor store were the offices of a bail bondsman. The sign outside read WARD BONDS, 24 HOURS, AT YOUR SERVICE. A phone number was prominently displayed below the words.

  At the door of Ward Bonds, Ornazian rang a buzzer, looked up into a camera mounted on the brick wall, and heard a click. He stepped into a kind of lobby, a small waiting area bordered by a dirty wall of Plexiglas, through which it was just possible to make out the main office. Customers or potential clients could talk to the employees through a circle of holes bored through the Plexiglas until they were cleared for entry. The setup resembled a combination bank and urban Chinese carryout.

  There was a door at the end of the Plexiglas wall and again someone buzzed him through. He walked past scattered desks, mostly empty, three of them occupied by two men and one woman, all in their twenties, wearing company T-shirts and Dickies slacks. One of the men nodded at Ornazian as he continued on to a glassed-in office. There behind a desk sat Thaddeus Ward, late sixties, barrel-chested, and hard to hurt. He was snaggletoothed and sported a neat gray mustache.

  Ward stood, came to Ornazian with a
brisk, square-shouldered step, and shook his hand.

  “Been a while,” said Ward. “You could visit.”

  “It’s not like I’m out here too often. When you had your offices in D.C., I saw you more.”

  “Ain’t no bail-bond business in D.C. anymore. Only skips. Criminals got that nonfinancial-release option there. I had to come out to P.G.”

  “I know it.”

  “You only come by when you need something,” said Ward.

  “Didn’t realize you were so sensitive, Thaddeus. You want a hug or something?”

  “If I wanted to touch you, I’d bend you over my desk.”

  “Don’t be so butch.”

  “Glad you called me, though. I could use a little extra. Got too many people on my payroll right now and not enough work.”

  “Then lay some of them off.”

  “Can’t do that. They’re veterans.”

  “See? You are sensitive.”

  “Fuck you, man.” Ward went back behind his desk. “Let me just call Sharon and tell her I’ll be out tonight.”

  As Ward picked up his cell and speed-dialed his daughter, Ornazian examined a wall where many cheaply framed photographs hung. There were several of Ward and his buddies, standing and seated around their hooches in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. They looked like kids, and many were. Ward himself had told a lie and enlisted when he was seventeen years old. In another photo, Ward cradled an M-60 machine gun and posed next to a photographic collage of topless women, images cut from magazines and glued to a large piece of cardboard. Other photographs showed Ward in his Metropolitan Police Department uniform, in plainclothes, accepting commendations from a senior officer in a white shirt. Ward shaking hands with Jesse Jackson. Ward with Darrell Green. Art Monk. And one incongruous photograph of a champion heavyweight boxer standing next to a nearly identical younger man who had to be his son. The boxer was wearing the champ belt over his suit pants. The son, also a former boxer but with an undistinguished career in the ring, had his hand on his father’s shoulder.