Free Murder at Ford's Theatre by Margaret Truman Page B

since retiring as a cutter in the garment district.
    “Is Mom there?”
    “I’ll get her.”
    His mother and father had been vehemently against Rick’s joining the Washington MPD—any MPD, for that matter. His degree from City College of New York had been in history, and he’d graduated near the top of his class. The world was open to him: law, medicine, investment banking—all respected and lucrative professions, from his father’s perspective, options that were unappealing to their son.
    Rick had been fascinated with law enforcement since his early years, envisioning himself as a cop, a detective, questioning people, solving puzzles, and bringing criminals to justice.
Doing something.
There was a fantasy dimension to such visions when he was young. He saw himself as considerably taller and more muscular than he was in reality, athletic, able to scale tall fences in mean alleys in pursuit of bad guys, or drop on them from fire escapes. Kid stuff. Cops and robbers. But he learned early in his career as a uniformed cop with the Washington MPD that his self-perception of his physical abilities was, more accurately, self-deception.
     
    H E ’ D BEEN WALKING a downtown beat when he came upon a mugging of an older woman. The attacker was a bear of a man, which didn’t deter Klayman from leaping on his back as he tried to flee the scene. The mugger tossed Klayman off, slammed him against a wall, and was pummeling him when another uniformed cop intervened and helped subdue the mugger. Klayman broke a finger in the fracas and spent a week on medical leave. It wouldn’t be his last physical challenge as a cop.
    Despite his slender build, he earned a reputation as a fearless cop, willing to put his life on the line in almost any situation, especially when it involved the safety of a fellow officer. Mo Johnson was somewhat aware of that reputation when he was paired with the skinny Jewish kid from New York, and had a chance to experience it firsthand during their early months together.
    They were working backup for an undercover narcotics officer involved in a buy-and-bust operation on Martin Luther King Boulevard in the Anacostia section of the city, an impoverished, hardscrabble area seething with crime, much of it fueled by drug trafficking. Their target was a young Hispanic drug dealer, Manuel “Chi Chi” Ortiz, with whom the undercover detective had forged a relationship. Klayman and Johnson were stationed in an unmarked car parked around the corner from the buy; a small loudspeaker delivered what was being said between the narc and Ortiz.
    At first, only the voices of the detective and Ortiz were picked up by a tiny microphone worn beneath the cop’s jacket. But then other voices were heard, three or four, speaking rapid-fire Spanish and black street slang, sounding angry. Then the spray of voices was shattered by rapid gunshots.
    Klayman peeled away from the curb and the car careered around the corner. The undercover narcotics detective was face-down on the sidewalk. Klayman barked into his radio, “Officer down! Officer down!” and gave the location. He and Johnson leaped from the car and pursued Ortiz and another dealer, who disappeared behind a row of boarded-up stores. Johnson pointed at an alley to his left; Klayman went in that direction. Johnson followed the route taken by the dealers, which led to a garbage-strewn lot separated from an auto repair shop and junkyard by a crumbling six-foot-high concrete wall.
    As Johnson sprinted toward the rear of the stores, the dealers had almost reached the wall and were preparing to scale it. But Ortiz suddenly stopped, ducked behind a small Dumpster overflowing with trash, looked back at Johnson, and raised a Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter automatic. As he did, Johnson tripped over a broken, twisted bicycle frame and sprawled a few feet from the dealer, his own weapon flying from his hand and landing six feet away. Ortiz slowly stood, the pistol held steadily in both