The Turnaround by George Pelecanos

The Turnaround by George Pelecanos

ALEX AND Vicki Pappas sat in their living room, nursing glasses of wine, red for Alex, white for Vicki. He had told her about their son’s day at work, and of Johnny’s gift for interaction with the customers and help. She said that Johnny’s presence in the store was going to be good for their relationship, that it would help bring them closer together. He had been prepared to argue the point, but in all honesty, he had to agree. He did like having Johnny there. And having him in the shop was going to be good for business, too.

Alex then told her about the man who’d visited him at closing time. She listened carefully and asked some questions but did not seem particularly interested in prolonging the conversation or invested in the subject. The incident had happened years before she’d met Alex. To her, it was an abstract event that had happened to a boy she did not know and had little to do with the man she loved and had been married to for twenty-six years.

“You don’t think this is some sort of scam, do you?”

“It’s him,” said Alex.

“I’m asking you, is this an extortion thing?”

“No. He had a nice way about him. I don’t think it’s anything like that.”

“Will you call him?”

“Should I?”

“Honey, that’s up to you.” Vicki shrugged and got up out of her chair. “I’m bushed. I’m going to bed.”

She leaned in and kissed him on the mouth. He gripped her hand and held the kiss.

“Good night, Vicki.”

“Kah-lee neech-tah.”

After he had poured out the rest of his wine, Alex went to the family’s computer station off the kitchen and got on the Web. He first searched the archives of the Washington Post and found several articles related to the incident, from the initial reporting of the crime in metro to the conviction announcement, eighteen months later, in the spring of 1974. He had read most of these articles at the time, had even kept a few of them, suspecting that he would someday want to revisit them, but he had thrown them out a year into his marriage, hoping that with the birth of his first son, that chapter of his life had been closed.

His recollection of that period was as hazy as the incident itself. He had not gone to the funeral of Billy Cachoris. At the time of Billy’s burial, Alex had been hospitalized at Holy Cross, and then there were the two reconstructive surgeries in the fall. His stay at the hospital was one druggy, painful day after another, his only entertainment a high-mounted television set, which strained his good eye, and his clock radio, which his parents brought from home. He listened to Top 40 because he could not get the progressive stations he favored in his room, and the playlist mocked him. “Rocket Man,” “Black and White,” “Precious and Few.” Songs that had been playing that day. Songs that they had joked about only hours, minutes before Billy had been killed. Introducing each song, the disc jockey on PGC would announce, “Nineteen seventy-two, this is the soundtrack to your life!” And Alex would think, What a laugh.

Like many teenage boys who have found serious trouble, he felt that the sun would never shine on his side of the street again. Back at home, he listened to his Blue Öyster Cult album incessantly, returning to the song “Then Came the Last Days of May” over and over again. Three good buddies were laughin and smoking In the back of a rented Ford.  They couldn’t know they weren’t going far. It seemed to have been written for him and his friends.

Except in the presence of legal authorities, Alex had little further contact with Pete Whitten. Pete’s father had forbidden him to socialize with Alex, and their few phone conversations were awkward and filled with blocks of silence. Pete would be off to an out-of-state university the following summer, unaltered by the event, as neither he nor Alex had been charged with crimes. Alex understood that their friendship was done.

For Alex, the strangest aspect of the aftermath was returning to school. He felt that his face was ugly and frightening, though of course his perception of it was far worse than the reality. His eye drooped severely at the corner, and the scar tissue around it was waxy. It would never go unnoticed, but it was far from horrific; in a way, he just looked permanently sad. He broke up with Karen, assuming she would no longer be attracted to him. One day, in the E wing hall, a kid named Bobby Cohen innocently said, “Hey, man, I heard you got jumped by some black dudes,” and Alex grabbed him by the shirt and threw him up against the lockers. The boy had said nothing wrong, but Alex had been looking for an excuse to explode.

He grew more sullen every day. He was not a tough kid, but he acquired a reputation as a badass simply because he had been involved in a racial incident in which one of his friends was shot and killed. The black kids at his high school, numbering about thirty in a population of five hundred, stopped speaking to him. He had been friendly with a few of them before the incident, mostly through interaction on the outdoor basketball court near the teachers’ parking lot, but that would be no more. A group of greasers, the last of their breed, reached out to him, thinking he shared their racial biases. They called themselves, unimaginatively, the White Masters, and he rejected them. His aim was to get through his senior year with his head down. He was racked with guilt over Billy’s death and desired no new friends. He wanted to be alone.

Working for his father, in its way, kept him human. The customers, readers of the Washington Post and the Evening Star, certainly knew of his involvement in the event. Some shunned him, but the majority of them were polite. Inez, typically, made no mention of the incident and sometimes chuckled, as if she knew something about him that he did not, as he passed by her colds station. Whatever they were feeling, Junior and Paulette kept it to themselves. The hardest part for Alex was facing Darlene for the first time. But thankfully, Darlene was kind.

“Does it hurt?” she said, putting out her hand and touching her fingers to the scar, the only person outside his doctors and mother to do so.

“Not anymore,” said Alex. “Listen . . .”

“You don’t have to talk about it. It hurt me when I read about you in the newspaper, I can’t lie. But part of that was knowing that you were hurtin, too. Look, anyone can get into the wrong car. Because that’s all it was. That’s all it had to be. Alex, I know you. So you don’t have to say one more word.”

Sometimes after work they’d sit in the darkened store past closing time. His father had gone, having handed Alex the key. The two of them would quietly talk and listen to music from the portable eight-track deck Darlene carried with her to and from the job. Marvin Gaye, the Isley Brothers, and Curtis Mayfield, most memorably the tape called Curtis, with the cover photo of the man sitting casually in his lemon yellow suit. Timeless songs like “The Other Side of Town,” “The Makings of You,” “We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue,” Curtis’s beautiful falsetto and his dreamy arrangements playing softly in the shop as two teenagers spoke to each other about teenage things, sometimes holding hands but never going past that, the two of them friends.

As for the trial, Alex’s part in it was minimal. He had been coached by the state’s attorney, a prosecutor named Ira Sanborn, but on the stand there was little for him to relate. He hadn’t seen the actual shooting. He hadn’t seen the young man who’d ruined his face. He could only describe the sounds, sensations, and words he had heard. On the cross-examination, the defense attorney assigned to the case, a young man named Arthur Furioso, attempted to paint Alex and Pete as young racists who were ultimately responsible for the murder by putting the event into play, but Sanborn provided enough character witnesses to refute his claim. To the jury, there was the fact of a murdered teenager and the sight of Alex’s face. Also, there had never been any question as to who had pulled the trigger. The older of the two brothers, James Monroe, had confessed to the shooting hours after the incident occurred. He, his younger brother, Raymond, and their friend Charles Baker, who had admitted to the beating of Alex, were charged with murder, assault with intent, and multiple gun offenses. The only question, Sanborn told the Pappas family in private, would be the final degree of the murder charge and whether Raymond Monroe and Charles Baker would also be convicted and serve time.

Alex, sitting in front of the computer screen, got out of the Post site without reading the last article in the archives. He typed “Heathrow Heights” and the word “murder” into a search engine and eventually found a site that sold partial transcripts of trials going back fifty years. Using his credit card to pay the access fee of four dollars and ninety-five cents, he printed a document that read “State of Maryland v. James Ernest Monroe,” along with the case number and date, a Judge Conners presiding.

Alex Pappas moved the crane neck of a desk lamp toward him. He sat back and read the document.

On a hot summer day, three boys drove into the Heathrow Heights area of Montgomery County and, “on a lark,” threw a cherry pie and yelled a racial epithet at three young black men standing on the street outside Nunzio’s market. The court document described their action as a “perverted form of entertainment.” One of the occupants of the vehicle, Peter Whitten, testified that the plan was initiated by the driver, William Cachoris (the third occupant, Alexander Pappas, testified that he could not recall who had decided to drive into Heathrow Heights). After the pie was thrown and the epithet delivered, Cachoris attempted to drive the vehicle away but came to a dead end and was forced to turn the car around. At this time Peter Whitten left the vehicle on foot and escaped into the woods and down the railroad tracks. Cachoris and the remaining passenger, Pappas, drove back up the road, which was now blocked by the three young men. Cachoris got out of the car and tried to reason with the young men, asking, “Can’t we work this out?” One of the young men punched him in the face, knocking out a tooth and loosening several others. Alexander Pappas attempted to escape on foot but was captured and assaulted, resulting in serious injuries to his body and face. One of the young men then produced a pistol and shot William Cachoris in the back, the bullet puncturing his lung and heart. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Police arrived and locked down the neighborhood. A woman, her name deleted from the document, had been watching from the window inside Nunzio’s market at the time of the shooting, and told the store manager to call the police. Upon questioning, she described the young men who had been involved in the crime but claimed she could not identify them. Upon further, more intense questioning, she recalled the names of the young men.

Police raided the home of Ernest and Almeda Monroe, who were both at work, and arrested their sons, James and Raymond Monroe, without resistance. They found a cheap .38 pistol in the dresser drawer of the older brother. The woman in Nunzio’s had described the shooter as a tall young man wearing a T-shirt with numbers hand-printed upon it. James Monroe, when the police found him, was wearing the shirt. It appeared to be stained with blood. At this time, James Monroe admitted to firing the gun that killed William Cachoris. Ballistics tests would later match the bullet to the gun.

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