D. C. Noir 2

by George Pelecanos

  “Yeah, I remember him,” said Nicodemus, after thinking about it for a short while. He gave me the once-over and leaned forward. “This was your friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “They found a bullet in the back of his head. A twenty-two.”

  I nodded and turned the teacup in small circles on the table. “The Tribune didn’t say nothing about that.”

  “The papers don’t always say. The police cover it up while they look for who did it. But that boy didn’t drown. He was murdered first, then dropped in the drink.”

  “You saw him?” I said.

  Nicodemus shrugged. “Sure.”

  “What’d he look like?”

  “You really wanna know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He was all gray and blown up, like a balloon. The gas does that to ’em, when they been in the water.”

  “What about his eyes?”

  “They were open. Pleading.”

  “Huh?”

  “His eyes. It was like they were sayin’ please.”

  I needed a drink. I had some more gin.

  “You ever heard of a Pinkerton man?” I said.

  “Sure,” said Nicodemus. “A detective.”

  “Like the police?”

  “No.”

  “What, then?”

  “They go to work with other guys and pretend they’re one of them. They find out who’s stealing. Or they find out who’s trying to make trouble for the boss. Like the ones who want to make a strike.”

  “You mean, like, if a guy wants to get the workers together and make things better?”

  “Yeah. Have meetings and all that. The guys who want to start a union. Pinkertons look for those guys.”

  We drank the rest of the gin. We talked about his kid. We talked about Schmeling and Baer, and the wrestling match that was coming up between Londos and George Zaharias at Griffith Stadium. I got up from my seat, shook Nicodemus’s hand, and thanked him for the conversation.

  “Efcharisto, patrioti.”

  “Yasou, Vasili.”

  I walked back to my place and had a beer I didn’t need. I was drunk and more confused than I had been before. I kept hearing John’s voice, the way he called me “friend.” I saw his eyes saying please. I kept thinking, I should have gone to his goddamn meeting, if that was gonna make him happy. I kept thinking I had let him down. While I was thinking, I sharpened the blade of my Italian switch knife on a stone.

  The next night, last night, I was serving Wesley Schmidt his dinner after we closed. He was sitting by himself like he always did. I dropped the plate down in front of him.

  “You got a minute to talk?” I asked.

  “Go ahead and talk,” he said, putting the spoon to his stew and stirring it around.

  “I wanna be a Pinkerton man,” I said.

  Schmidt stopped stirring his stew and looked up my way. He smiled, showing me his white teeth. Still, his eyes were cold.

  “That’s nice. But why are you telling me this?”

  “I wanna be a Pinkerton, just like you.”

  Schmidt pushed his stew plate away from him and looked around the dining room to make sure no one could hear us. He studied my face. I guess I was sweating. Hell, I know I was. I could feel it dripping on my back.

  “You look upset,” said Schmidt, his voice real soft, like music. “You look like you could use a friend.”

  “I just wanna talk.”

  “Okay. You feel like having a beer, something like that?”

  “Sure, I could use a beer.”

  “I finish eating, I’ll go down and get my car. I’ll meet you in the alley out back. Don’t tell anyone, hear, because then they might want to come along. And we wouldn’t have the chance to talk.”

  “I’m not gonna tell no one. We just drive around, eh? I’m too dirty to go to a saloon.”

  “That’s swell,” said Schmidt. “We’ll just drive around.”

  I went out to the alley where Schmidt was parked. Nobody saw me get into his car. It was a blue ’31 Dodge coupe with wire wheels, a rumble seat, and a trunk rack. A five-hundred-dollar car if it was dime.

  “Pretty,” I said, as I got in beside him. There were hand-tailored slipcovers on the seats.

  “I like nice things,” said Schmidt.

  He was wearing his suit jacket, and it had to be eighty degrees. I could see a lump under the jacket. I figured, the bastard is carrying a gun.

  We drove up to Colvin’s, on 14th Street. Schmidt went in and returned with a bag of loose bottles of beer. There must have been a half-dozen Schlitz’s in the bag. Him making waiter’s pay, and the fancy car and the high-priced beer.

  He opened a coupla beers and handed me one. The bottle was ice cold. Hot as the night was, the beer tasted good.

  We drove around for a while. We went down to Hains Point. Schmidt parked the Dodge facing the Washington Channel. Across the channel, the lights from the fish vendors on Maine Avenue threw color on the water. We drank another beer. He gave me one of his tailor-mades and we had a couple smokes. He talked about the Senators and the Yankees, and how Baer had taken Schmeling out with a right in the tenth. Schmidt didn’t want to talk about nothing serious yet. He was waiting for the beer to work on me, I knew.

  “Goddamn heat,” I said. “Let’s drive around some, get some air moving.”

  Schmidt started the coupe. “Where to?”

  “I’m gonna show you a whorehouse. Best secret in town.”

  Schmidt looked me over and laughed. The way you laugh at a clown.

  I gave Schmidt some directions. We drove some, away from the park and the monuments to where people lived. We went through a little tunnel and crossed into Southwest. Most of the streetlamps were broke here. The row houses were shabby, and you could see shacks in the alleys and clothes hanging on lines outside of them. It was late, long time past midnight. There weren’t many people out. The ones who were out were coloreds. We were in a place called Bloodfield.

  “Pull over there,” I said, pointing to a spot along the curb where there wasn’t no light. “I wanna show you the place I’m talking about.”

  Schmidt stopped and cut the engine. Across the street were some houses. All except one of them was dark. From the lighted one came fast music, like the colored music Laura had played in her room.

  “There it is right there,” I said, meaning the house with the light. I was lying through my teeth. I didn’t know who lived there and I sure didn’t know if that house had whores. I had never been down here before.

  Schmidt turned his head to look at the row house. I slipped my switch knife out of my right pocket and laid it flat against my right leg.

  When he turned back to face me he wasn’t smiling no more. He had heard about Bloodfield and he knew he was in it. I think he was scared.

  “You bring me down to niggertown for what?” he said. “To show me a whorehouse?”

  “I thought you’re gonna like it.”

  “Do I look like a man who’d pay to fuck a nigger? Do I? You don’t know anything about me.”

  He was showing his true self now. He was nervous as a cat. My nerves were bad too. I was sweating through my shirt. I could smell my own stink in the car.

  “I know plenty,” I said.

  “Yeah? What do you know?”

  “Pretty car, pretty suits … top-shelf beer. How you get all this, huh?”

  “I earned it.”

  “As a Pinkerton, eh?”

  Schmidt blinked real slow and shook his head. He looked out his window, looking at nothing, wasting time while he decided what he was gonna do. I found the raised button on the pearl handle of my knife. I pushed the button. The blade flicked open and barely made a sound. I held the knife against my leg and turned it so the blade was pointing back.

  Sweat rolled down my neck as I looked around. There wasn’t nobody out on the street.

  Schmidt turned his head. He gripped the steering wheel with his right hand and straightened his arm.

>   “What do you want?” he said.

  “I just wanna know what happened to John.”

  Schmidt smiled. All those white teeth. I could see him with his mouth open, his lips stretched, those teeth showing. The way an animal looks after you kill it. Him lying on his back on a slab.

  “I heard he drowned,” said Schmidt.

  “You think so, eh?”

  “Yeah. I guess he couldn’t swim.”

  “Pretty hard to swim, you got a bullet in your head.”

  Schmidt’s smile turned down. “Can you swim, Bill?”

  I brought the knife across real fast and buried it into his armpit. I sunk the blade all the way to the handle. He lost his breath and made a short scream. I twisted the knife. His blood came out like someone was pouring it from a jug. It was warm and it splashed onto my hands. I pulled the knife out and while he was kicking at the floorboards I stabbed him a coupla more times in the chest. I musta hit his heart or something because all of a sudden there was plenty of blood all over the car. I’m telling you, the seats were slippery with it. He stopped moving. His eyes were open and they were dead.

  I didn’t get tangled up about it or nothing like that. I wasn’t scared. I opened up his suit jacket and saw a steel revolver with wood grips holstered there. It was small caliber. I didn’t touch the gun. I took his wallet out of his trousers, pulled the bills out of it, wiped it off with my shirttail, and threw the empty wallet on the ground. I put the money in my shoe. I fit the blade back into the handle of my switch knife and slipped the knife into my pocket. I put all the empty beer bottles together with the full ones in the paper bag and took it with me as I got out of the car. I closed the door soft and wiped off the handle and walked down the street.

  I didn’t see no one for a coupla blocks. I came to a sewer and I put the bag down the hole. The next block I came to another sewer and I took off my bloody shirt and threw it down the hole of that one. I was wearing an undershirt, didn’t have no sleeves. My pants were black so you couldn’t see the blood. I kept walking toward Northwest.

  Someone laughed from deep in an alley and I kept on.

  Another block or so I came up on a group of mavri standing around the steps of a house. They were smoking cigarettes and drinking from bottles of beer. I wasn’t gonna run or nothing. I had to go by them to get home. They stopped talking and gave me hard eyes as I got near them. That’s when I saw that one of them was the cook, Raymond, from the kitchen. Our eyes kind of came together but neither one of us said a word or smiled or even made a nod.

  One of the coloreds started to come toward me and Raymond stopped him with the flat of his palm. I walked on.

  I walked for a coupla hours, I guess. Somewhere in Northwest I dropped my switch knife down another sewer. When I heard it hit the sewer bottom I started to cry. I wasn’t crying cause I had killed Schmidt. I didn’t give a damn nothing about him. I was crying cause my father had given me that knife, and now it was gone. I guess I knew I was gonna be in America forever, and I wasn’t never going back to Greece. I’d never see my home or my parents again.

  When I got back to my place I washed my hands real good. I opened up a bottle of Abner-Drury and put fire to a Fatima and had myself a seat at the table.

  This is where I am right now.

  Maybe I’m gonna get caught and maybe I’m not. They’re gonna find Schmidt in that neighborhood and they’re gonna figure a colored guy killed him for his money. The cops, they’re gonna turn Bloodfield upside down. If Raymond tells them he saw me I’m gonna get the chair. If he doesn’t, I’m gonna be free. Either way, what the hell, I can’t do nothing about it now.

  I’ll work at the hotel, get some experience and some money, then open my own place, like Nick Stefanos. Maybe if I can find two nickels to rub together, I’m gonna go to church and talk to that girl, Irene, see if she wants to be my wife. I’m not gonna wait too long. She’s clean as a whistle, that one.

  I’ve had my eye on her for some time.

  A RICH MAN

  BY EDWARD P. JONES

  Claridge Towers

  (Originally published in 2003)

  Horace and Loneese Perkins—one child, one grandchild—lived most unhappily together for more than twelve years in Apartment 230 at Claridge Towers, a building for senior citizens at 1221 M Street, N.W. They moved there in 1977, the year they celebrated forty years of marriage, the year they made love for the last time—Loneese kept a diary of sorts, and that fact was noted on one day of a week when she noted nothing else. “He touched me,” she wrote, which had always been her diary euphemism for sex. That was also the year they retired, she as a pool secretary at the Commerce Department, where she had known one lover, and he as a civilian employee at the Pentagon, as the head of veteran records.

  He had been an army sergeant for ten years before becoming head of records; the secretary of defense gave him a plaque as big as his chest on the day he retired, and he and the secretary of defense and Loneese had their picture taken, a picture that hung for all those twelve years in the living room of Apartment 230, on the wall just to the right of the heating-and-air-conditioning unit.

  A month before they moved in, they drove in their burgundy-and-gold Cadillac from their small house on Chesapeake Street in Southeast to a Union Station restaurant and promised each other that Claridge Towers would be a new beginning for them. Over blackened catfish and a peach cobbler that they both agreed could have been better, they vowed to devote themselves to each other and become even better grandparents. Horace had long known about the Commerce Department lover. Loneese had told him about the man two months after she had ended the relationship, in 1969. “He worked in the mail room,” she told her husband over a spaghetti supper she had cooked in the Chesapeake Street home. “He touched me in the motel room,” she wrote in her diary, “and after it was over he begged me to go away to Florida with him. All I could think about was that Florida was for old people.”

  At that spaghetti supper, Horace did not mention the dozens of lovers he had had in his time as her husband. She knew there had been many, knew it because they were written on his face in the early years of their marriage, and because he had never bothered to hide what he was doing in the later years. “I be back in a while. I got some business to do,” he would say. He did not even mention the lover he had slept with just the day before the spaghetti supper, the one he bid good-bye to with a “Be good and be sweet” after telling her he planned to become a new man and respect his marriage vows. The woman, a thin school-bus driver with clanking bracelets up to her elbows on both arms, snorted a laugh, which made Horace want to slap her, because he was used to people taking him seriously. “Forget you, then,” Horace said on the way out the door. “I was just tryin to let you down easy.”

  Over another spaghetti supper two weeks before moving, they reiterated what had been said at the blackened-catfish supper and did the dishes together and went to bed as man and wife, and over the next days sold almost all the Chesapeake Street furniture. What they kept belonged primarily to Horace, starting with a collection of six hundred and thirty-nine record albums, many of them his “sweet babies,” the 78s. If a band worth anything had recorded between 1915 and 1950, he bragged, he had the record; after 1950, he said, the bands got sloppy and he had to back away. Horace also kept the Cadillac he had painted to honor a football team, paid to park the car in the underground garage. Claridge Towers had once been intended as a luxury place, but the builders, two friends of the city commissioners, ran out of money in the middle and the commissioners had the city government people buy it off them. The city government people completed Claridge, with its tiny rooms, and then, after one commissioner gave a speech in Southwest about looking out for old people, some city government people in Northeast came up with the idea that old people might like to live in Claridge, in Northwest.

  Three weeks after Horace and Loneese moved in, Horace went down to the lobby one Saturday afternoon to get their mail and happened to see Clara Knigh
tley getting her mail. She lived in Apartment 512. “You got this fixed up real nice,” Horace said of Apartment 512 a little less than an hour after meeting her. “But I could see just in the way that you carry yourself that you got good taste. I could tell that about you right off.” “You swellin my head with all that talk, Mr. Perkins,” Clara said, offering him coffee, which he rejected, because such moments always called for something stronger. “Whas a woman’s head for if a man can’t swell it up from time to time. Huh? Answer me that, Clara. You just answer me that.” Clara was fifty-five, a bit younger than most of the residents of Claridge, though she was much older than all Horace’s other lovers. She did not fit the city government people’s definition of a senior citizen, but she had a host of ailments, from high blood pressure to diabetes, and so the city people had let her in.

  Despite the promises, the marriage, what little there had been of it, came to an end. “I will make myself happy,” Loneese told the diary a month after he last touched her. Loneese and Horace had fixed up their apartment nicely, and neither of them wanted to give the place up to the other. She wanted to make a final stand with the man who had given her so much heartache, the man who had told her, six months after her confession, what a whore she had been to sleep with the Commerce Department mail-room man. Horace, at sixty, had never thought much of women over fifty, but Clara—and, after her, Willa, of Apartment 1001, and Miriam, of Apartment 109—had awakened something in him, and he began to think that women over fifty weren’t such a bad deal after all. Claridge Towers had dozens of such women, many of them attractive widows, many of them eager for a kind word from a retired army sergeant who had so many medals and ribbons that his uniform could not carry them. As far as he could see, he was cock of the walk: many of the men in Claridge suffered from diseases that Horace had so far escaped, or they were not as good-looking or as thin, or they were encumbered by wives they loved. In Claridge he was a rich man. So why move and give that whore the satisfaction?