The Way Home

by George Pelecanos

  “Pardon me,” said Flynn to the male officer, as he stepped around him and went through the open kitchen door.

  Flynn went toward the front of the house, into the center hallway, and cut left into the library. He inspected the work that Chris and Ben had done. It had simply been a sloppy performance. One side of the carpet was misaligned with the wall and slanted away from the bead. On that side, nearest the built-in bookshelves, the corner of the carpet had not been laid properly and appeared to have been pulled up and hastily put back down.

  “Chris,” said Flynn, shaking his head. Flynn knew that he had measured correctly and he had double-checked the size of the roll when it had come into the warehouse. This was on Chris and his friend Ben. They just hadn’t done the job with conscience or care.

  He went to the spot that looked worse and got down on his knees. He lifted the corner to check on the padding and saw that a cutout had been made in the hardwood floor. With one knee holding down the bent-back carpet, he got his fingers under a notch in the cutout and lifted it away from the floor.

  A kind of basket, fashioned with wood slats, had been built in beneath the floor. It was meant to hold something, but it held nothing now. Flynn actually scratched his head. The concealed cutout and basket were nothing to him, and asking Mindy Kramer about them would only be a further complication. He replaced the panel, put the carpet back down, and phoned his son. Chris and Ben were headed south on 16th Street, just five minutes away.

  When they arrived, they came straight to the job site where Flynn was waiting.

  “Hey,” said Chris.

  “Chris,” said Flynn, “what’s this?”

  Chris breathed through his mouth, his eyes darting nervously as he revisited the work they’d done. What Flynn used to call his “what the fuck did I do” look. Ben stood beside him, silent, not able or willing to look at Flynn. Flynn smelled the alcohol sweat coming off Ben and could see a hard night and shame in his eyes. He wondered how long he could carry this man. When poor performance began to affect Flynn’s business, he had to reconsider the hire. Even if it was his own son.

  “That’s not how we left it,” said Chris.

  “C’mon, Chris. Don’t play me like that.”

  “Listen to me, Dad. We did this job right.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Chris thumb-stroked the scar above his lip, something he did unconsciously when he was struggling with a problem. “What are the police doing here? We saw ’em in the back of the house when we came down the hall.”

  “Somebody broke in last night,” said Flynn. “It’s got nothing to do with this.”

  Flynn noticed Chris glance at Ben, and he saw Ben stare down at his shoes, his posture slackening. Something wasn’t right.

  “Maybe whoever broke in came in here and messed up our work,” said Chris.

  “Please,” said Flynn.

  “I’m telling you. We did the job correctly.”

  “I don’t have time for this right now,” said Flynn. “You two get to work and correct it. I’ve got to go back out there and make some sort of price adjustment for the customer. It’s gonna cost me, but hey, what’s a few hundred dollars.”

  “Take it out my check,” said Chris.

  “You know I don’t do that,” said Flynn. “Go on, get to work.”

  Flynn left the room. Chris stared at Ben, who would not meet his eyes.

  “You heard him,” said Chris. “Let’s fix this shit.”

  CHRIS AND Ben refinished the job properly while Thomas Flynn dealt with Mindy Kramer and adjusted her bill. When they were almost done, two young police officers came into the room where they were working and had a look around. The female officer asked Chris what he was doing, and he told her that they were correcting a new-carpet install that had been done the day before. Chris and Ben said nothing further. If they had been asked other questions, their responses would have been similarly to-the-point and minimal. They did not hate police, but neither did they trust them or have any desire to cooperate or fraternize with them.

  The day had cooled little by early evening, when Chris pulled into the small parking lot behind Ben’s apartment house, finding a spot shaded, somewhat, by a thin-armed maple. Chris pushed the transmission arm up into park and let the motor run. Ben had his elbow resting on the lip of the window and was staring out toward the cemetery. They had spoken very little on the ride uptown.

  “You gonna talk to me now?” said Chris.

  Ben turned his head and looked into his friend’s eyes. “I didn’t take the money, Chris.”

  “You told me that already.”

  “You believe me, right?”

  “I do. But you know who took it.”

  Ben nodded slowly. “Had to be Lawrence Newhouse.”

  “Shit. You told Lawrence?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why him?”

  Ben briefly shut his eyes, as if that could erase what he had done. “Lawrence came past my spot last night.”

  “He just dropped in for no reason.”

  “Nah, he wanted something. You know that. Ali’s been tryin to help his nephew out. Young man’s up on charges, I expect. So Ali’s lookin to, you know, help him get a job at a McDonald’s, someplace like that. Lawrence don’t think that’s good enough for his nephew. He wanted to see if your father could put him on.”

  “I’m not doing that,” said Chris. “I’m not getting involved with Lawrence or anyone in his family. I wouldn’t do that to my old man.”

  “I told Lawrence the same. In a different way, but I told him. And then I went for a drive with him, just to get him out my apartment.”

  “I would’ve shown him the door.”

  “That’s what I should’ve done, but I didn’t. We ended up down by the river, and Lawrence got me all fucked up on weed and alcohol. You know I can’t hold my drink. I started to talk behind the vodka. I’m not making an excuse. I’m just sayin, I was trippin and that’s what I did. I can’t even tell you what I said to him. I mean, I was that far gone. But I woke up this morning and I knew I had told him enough and that I had messed up bad.”

  “Shit, Ben.”

  “I know, man. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry don’t fix this.”

  “I could talk to Lawrence. He still stays down there at Parkchester. Ali could get up with him through his nephew.”

  “What for?” said Chris.

  They sat there for a while without speaking. They thought about what to do, and it came to Chris that there was nothing to do. There was no one to return the money to. There was simply a basket, now empty, underneath a floor in an unoccupied row house. No one would miss the money or know that it had been there or that it was gone.

  Naturally, their thoughts drifted toward regret and then resentment. Why hadn’t they gone ahead and taken the money themselves when they had come upon it the day before? If taking it had no consequences, and it appeared that there would be none, then what had been the wrong in it? Now Lawrence Newhouse had the money, and he didn’t deserve to have it. Lawrence would blow it on bad clothing, strippers, potent weed, and stepped-on cocaine. And Chris and Ben would be ass-broke and back at work at seven in the morning, sweating through polo shirts they hated to wear.

  “Bughouse,” said Chris under his breath. He managed a small incredulous smile.

  “Stupid,” said Ben, shaking his head. “Stupid.”

  “Anyway,” said Chris.

  Chris and Ben shook hands.

  “Same time tomorrow?” said Ben.

  “I’ll pick you up.”

  Ben left his tool belt in the back of the van and shut the doors. Chris watched his friend go into the stairwell of his building, then pulled from the lot and headed out of the city. By the time North Capitol became Blair Road, his bitterness had dissipated. He was thinking of a cool shower, a cold beer, and Katherine.

  In his apartment, Ben Braswell washed up and changed his clothing. He phoned Renee to see if she wanted to hook up that
night, and she said she did. She’d come by with a pizza and a Blockbuster movie when she got off work, around ten o’clock.

  “See you then, girl,” said Ben.

  “That’s a bet,” said Renee.

  He took a catnap on his sofa. When he woke, the room had darkened. He got up, went to the window, and parted the blinds. There was still light left in the day.

  Ben slipped a paperback into the back pocket of his jeans, left his place, went along the black iron fence to the open gate at Rock Creek Church and Webster, and entered the cemetery grounds. He was headed toward the Adams Memorial, where he would sit on the marble bench shielded by evergreens and read until dark.

  He stepped down a road so narrow it was no kind of road, then went off it, taking a shortcut across a stand of graves. The dying sun settled on the headstones and threw shadows at his feet.

  SIXTEEN

  MINDY KRAMER ate in the same place most every weekday. It was a Thai restaurant up in Wheaton, off University Boulevard, in an area heavy with Hispanics and Orthodox Jews, where nothing was upscale and fast-food wrappers and cigarette butts littered the streets.

  The restaurant itself had little ambience, holding eight four-tops and a half-dozen deuces, with the standard royal family portraits hung on plain blue walls. But the food was clean, the service mostly efficient, and the specials went for four dollars and ninety-five cents, including a choice of spring rolls or watered-down lemongrass soup.

  Thai Feast was out of the way from Mindy’s core business, which was down in Dupont, Capitol Hill, and that broad area of Shaw that included the neighborhood she and her fellow real estate professionals called Logan. Mindy made the half-hour trek out to Wheaton because Thai Feast had become her base camp. The girl who always served her, Toi, gave her the same deuce by the window, leaving it unoccupied until her arrival, and had her ice water and iced coffee on the table shortly after Mindy had taken her seat. As Mindy made her calls and answered e-mails from her BlackBerry, Toi was busy fetching the spring rolls that came with the special and making sure the main dish that Mindy had chosen would come out right behind it. The bill was always seven forty-nine, and Mindy always left one forty-nine in the tip column of the check, exactly 20 percent.

  Mindy Kramer was all about routine and organization. She had married at twenty-two, had one daughter, Lisa, and divorced her layabout husband at twenty-five. She had raised and supported Lisa by herself as she got her license and grew her business. Now she had an office in Northwest, where “a girl” handled the phones and paperwork. Mindy had trained and polished two young sales protégés who, along with her, made up the Dream Team. Unfortunately, Lisa had made the same mistake as her mother and married a young man who had no energy or ambition outside the bedroom. She was now single with two little girls, ages six and four, of her own. Because she felt that Lisa was not emotionally equipped to be a proper mother to them, Mindy often took the children, Michelle and Lauren, with her to the office or dropped them off at summer day camp.

  She handled all of this because she was efficient. And she looked good. At fifty-five, she was toned, well-dressed, and properly made up and manicured. There wasn’t one gelled, spiked, highlighted hair out of place on her head.

  “How is your family, Toi?” said Mindy Kramer, as she added the tip and signed the credit card voucher before her.

  “They are well,” said Toi with a smile.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Mindy.

  “Thank you so much,” said Toi, her smile frozen in place.

  Mindy Kramer got up and, smoothing her sleeveless lavender shift down her thighs, her purse in hand, left the restaurant, donning her oversize sunglasses as she walked toward her C-class, parked in the lot.

  Watching Mindy through the plate glass window of Thai Feast, Toi let her smile fade. She couldn’t stand this weathered shrew with the stupid haircut, who would never round up the tip one penny to an even one fifty, who asked about her family but never really listened to the reply or looked into her eyes. But this was what you put up with every day. It was work.

  Mindy got into her Mercedes and turned the ignition. She glanced at the Anne Klein watch on her tan, lightly freckled wrist. She was exactly on schedule to make her meeting down at the row house in Logan. She had gotten a call from a gentleman that morning, telling her he was interested in taking a look at the house. It had been a week since the break-in, and several months since she had bought the home at auction. The market was extremely soft, her interest rate had not been optimum, and the clock was ticking. But, like all good sales professionals, she was an optimist. Perhaps this would be the client she had been waiting for. It could very well be Mindy’s day.

  THERE WERE two men standing at the top of her row house steps as Mindy Kramer pulled into a nearby space on the street. Her immediate impression, looking at them through the windshield of her sedan, was that these men could not be her potential buyers. They looked more like workmen than clients.

  She got out of her car, smile in place, and walked across the sidewalk and up the steps to greet them. She kept her smile rigid as she got a good look at them, thinking, God, why are they wasting my time? She would qualify them quickly and let them know with diplomacy that this was too much house for them and that perhaps she could find them someplace else, in a neighborhood, say, where trailer trash was more welcome.

  “Mindy Kramer,” she said, extending her hand to the larger of the two men.

  “Ralph Cotter,” he said, vise-gripping her hand, showing her a row of grayish, cheaply capped teeth. “This is my friend Nat Harbin.”

  “Pleasure,” said Nat Harbin. Tattoos of some kind showed on his veined biceps beneath the rolled-up edges of his T-shirt, and tattoos sleeved his forearms. He wore black ring-strap boots.

  Cotter had not released her hand. She looked at his and saw a tattoo, like a four-leaf clover, on the crook of it. Cotter let go of her, stepped back, and smiled.

  Both were in their late thirties and both wore jeans. Harbin in a black T-shirt and Cotter in a windbreaker with a white oxford underneath. Harbin had some sort of chain going from his wallet pocket to his belt loop. He was short and wiry, with a bushy mustache that appeared to originate in his nose. His eyes were flat and brown. His long brown hair was parted in the middle and it was unclean.

  Cotter was tall, broad, and strong, with a big chest and an unchecked gut. His black hair was also on the long side and swept back behind his ears. He wore a dark walrus mustache on a face with high, pronounced cheekbones. His eyes were black, mostly pupil, and did not appear to be threatening or unkind.

  Mindy prided herself on reading people. She was in a business that required such a talent, after all. These two were strange, stuck in a time warp, perhaps new to the city, and uninterested in current fashions. But they weren’t here to do her any harm. In any event, there had never been a situation that she couldn’t handle.

  Mustaches, wallet chains, boots… costume macho. Gay bikers, thought Mindy Kramer. Okay, I’m projecting. Gay would fit fine here, though. But do they have the dosh to buy this house?

  “You gentlemen are both interested in the property?” she said. “You’re considering it… together?”

  “Yeah,” said Ralph Cotter. “Can we have a look inside?”

  “Of course!”

  Mindy opened her small purse, where she kept her BlackBerry and keys, and negotiated the lockbox hung on the doorknob.

  “No alarm system?” said Cotter.

  “No need,” she said, looking over her shoulder and up because he was so tall.

  “Street looks peaceful enough.”

  “You notice no bars on the windows, either. We really don’t have those kinds of problems in this neighborhood. It was dicey at one time, but”… she opened the door… “no longer.”

  They stepped into a foyer, where a staircase led up to the third-floor bedrooms and a hall went straight back to the body of the house. The little one, Nat Harbin, shut the door behind them. The cl
osing of it darkened the foyer, and Mindy switched on a light.

  “Where did you find out about this home?” said Mindy. “I always like to know if my advertising dollars are well spent.”

  “Drove by it and saw the sign,” said Cotter. “Then we got on the Internet and learned the particulars.”

  “So you’ve read the entire listing.”

  “We know the price,” said Cotter patiently. “We can handle it.”

  “You gentlemen are in what business?”

  “Don’t worry, we qualify,” said Cotter. Not annoyed, just matter-of-fact. “Let’s see the house.”

  “Okay,” said Mindy. “We’ll start with the kitchen.”

  They went down the hall. The one named Nat eyed the layout and various rooms as they went along, but Cotter kept his focus on Mindy. He looked down at her head, noticing her scalp showing through all the clumps of hair glued together and sticking up straight. There didn’t seem to be much to her under that dress. She had an ass but not enough of one. She had small cans and she was old. He didn’t mind the old part, but he liked a woman with big tits.

  “Here’s the kitchen,” she said, casually sliding a dimmer switch mounted on the wall and bathing the room in a yellowish glow. “Granite countertops and stainless steel appliances, as you can see.”

  Granite countertops were now as remarkable as toilet paper holders in bathrooms, and stainless steel surfaces had no bearing on the quality of the appliances themselves, but the public was gullible. Who was Mindy Kramer to educate them when she was merely trying to move a house?

  “Nice,” said Cotter, nodding his head.

  “And all new,” said Mindy. She placed her purse on the granite counter. “Do you two like to cook?” Neither of them answered, and Mindy said, “This is a very diverse neighborhood, you know.”