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“You know that’s the truth,” she cackled, and turned up the burners. “You’re lucky I’m an old-school lady. You’re all lucky.”
“We know it, Nana.” Sampson smiled. He turned to the kids. “I need to talk to your father.”
“He’s retiring today,” Jannie said.
“So I’ve heard,” said Sampson. “It’s all over the streets, front page of the Post, probably on the Today show this morning.”
“You heard your uncle John,” I told the kids. “Now, scoot. I love you. Scat!”
Jannie and Damon rolled their eyes and gave us looks, but they got up from the table, gathered their books into backpacks, and started out the door to the Sojourner Truth School, which is abo
ut a five-block walk from our house on Fifth Street.
“Don’t even think about going out that door like that. Kisses,” I said.
They came over and dutifully kissed Nana and me. Then they kissed Sampson. I really don’t care what goes on in this cool, unsentimental postmodern world, but that’s how we do it in our house. Bin Laden probably never got kissed enough when he was a kid.
“I have a problem,” Sampson said as soon as the kids left.
“Am I supposed to hear this?” Nana asked from the stove.
“Of course you are,” John said to her. “Nana, Alex, I’ve told you both about a good friend of mine from my army days. His name is Ellis Cooper and he’s still in the army after all these years. At least, he was. He was found guilty of murdering three women off base. I had no idea about any of it until friends started to call. He’d been embarrassed to tell me himself. Didn’t want me to know. He only has about three weeks to the execution, Alex.”
I stared into Sampson’s eyes. I could see sadness and distress there, even more than usual. “What do you want, John?”
“Come down to North Carolina with me. Talk to Cooper. He’s not a murderer. I know this man almost as well as I know you. Ellis Cooper didn’t kill anybody.”
“You know you have to go down there with John,” Nana said. “Make this your last case. You have to promise me that.”
I promised.
Chapter 5
SAMPSON AND I were on I-95 by eleven o’clock that morning, our car wedged between caravans of speeding, gear-grinding, smoke-spewing tractor-trailers. The ride was a good excuse for us to catch up, though. We’d both been busy for a month or so, but we always got back together for long talks. It had been that way since we were kids growing up in D.C. Actually, the only time we’d been separated was when Sampson served two tours in Southeast Asia and I was at Georgetown, then Johns Hopkins.
“Tell me about this army friend of yours,” I said. I was driving, and Sampson had the passenger seat as far back as it would go. His knees were up, touching the dash. He almost looked comfortable somehow.
“Cooper was already a sergeant back when I met him, and I think he knew he always would be. He was all right with it, liked the army. He and I were both at Bragg together. Cooper was a drill sergeant at the time. One time he kept me on post for four straight weekends.”
I snorted out a laugh. “Is that when the two of you got close? Weekends together in the barracks?”
“I hated his guts back then. Thought he was picking on me. You know, singling me out because of my size. Then we hooked up again in ’Nam.”
“He loosened up some? Once you met him again in ’Nam?”
“No, Cooper is Cooper. He’s no bullshit, a real straight arrow, but if you follow the rules, he’s fair. That’s what he liked about the army. It was mostly orderly, consistent, and if you did the right thing, then you usually did all right. Maybe not as well as you thought you should, but not too bad. He told me it’s smart for a black man to find a meritocracy, like the army.”
“Or the police department,” I said.
“Up to a point,” Sampson said, nodding. “I remember a time,” he continued. “Vietnam. We had replaced a unit that killed maybe two hundred people in a five-month period. These weren’t exactly soldiers that got killed, Alex, though they were supposed to be VC.”
I listened as I drove. Sampson’s voice became faraway.
“This kind of military operation was called ‘mopping up.’ This one time, we came into a small village, but another unit was already there. An infantry officer was ‘interrogating’ a prisoner in front of these women and children. He was cutting skin off the man’s stomach.
“Sergeant Cooper went up to the officer and pressed his gun to the man’s skull. He said if the officer didn’t stop what he was doing, he was a dead man. He meant it too. Cooper didn’t care about the consequences. He didn’t kill those women in North Carolina, Alex. Ellis Cooper is no killer.”
Chapter 6
