Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go

by George Pelecanos

  I tried it, then tried it again. “Like that?”

  Rodney gave a quick nod. “Something like that. More snap, though, at the end. Like everything else, it’ll come.”

  “What now?”

  “Get your gloves, man,” Rodney said. “Let’s go a few.”

  After we sparred, I drove back to my place and grabbed a beer out of the refrigerator and took it with me into the shower. I didn’t think about it one way or the other, as this was something I did every time I returned from Rodney White’s dojo. No bells went off and I felt no guilt. The beer was cold and good.

  I stood in the spray of the shower, leaned against the tiles, and drank. I thought about what had happened at the river, and what I had heard: the inflection of the voices, the words themselves, the animal fear of the boy. The memory had resonance, like a cold finger on my shoulder. Everyone else had this wrapped up and tied off as a drug kill, another black kid born in a bad place, gone down a bad road. But I had been there that night. And the more I went back to it, the more I suspected that they were wrong.

  I got out of the shower and wrapped a towel around my middle, then got myself another beer. I cracked the beer and went to the living room, where I phoned Dan Boyle.

  “Yeah,” he said, over the screams and laughter of several children.

  “Boyle, it’s Nick Stefanos. What’s goin’ on?”

  “These fuckin’ kids,” he said, letting out a long, tired breath into the phone. “What can I do for you?”

  I told him, and then we went back and forth on it for the next half hour. In the end, against his better judgment, he agreed to do what I asked, maybe because he knew that we both wanted the same thing. I set a time and thanked him, then hung the receiver in its cradle. Then I tilted my head back and killed the rest of my beer.

  I could have called Boyle back and ended it right then. If I had just called him back, things might not have gone the way they did between Lyla and me, and I never would have met Jack LaDuke. But the thirst for knowledge is like a piece of ass you know you shouldn’t chase; in the end, you chase it just the same.

  THREE

  AFTER MY MONDAY shift, I walked out of the Spot and headed for my car, with Anna Wang at my side, a colorful day pack strung across her back. She wore black bike shorts and a white T-shirt that fell off one muscled shoulder, leaving exposed the lacy black strap of a bra. I let her into the passenger side and then went around and got myself behind the wheel.

  “Boss car,” Anna said as she had a seat in the shotgun bucket of my latest ride.

  “I like it,” I said with deliberate understatement. Actually, I thought it was one of the coolest cars in D.C.: a ’66 Dodge Coronet 500, white, with a red interior, full chrome center console, and a 318 under the hood. After my Dart blew a head gasket a year earlier, I had gone into the Shenandoah Valley and paid cash—two grand, roughly—to the car’s owner in Winchester, and I hadn’t regretted it one day since.

  Anna snagged a cigarette from the pack wedged in my visor and pushed in the dash lighter. I hit the ignition, and the dual exhaust rumbled in the air. Anna glanced over as she lit her smoke.

  “What are you, some kind of gearhead, Nick?”

  “Not really. I just like these old Chrysler products. My first car was a Valiant with a push-button trans on the dash. After that, I had a ’67 Polara, white on red, the extralong model, a motel on wheels. My buddy Johnny McGinnes called it my ‘Puerto Rican Cadillac.’ It had the cat-eye taillights, too. A real beauty. Then I had a ’67 Belvedere, clean lines, man, and the best-handling car I ever owned. I guess because of the posi rear. Then my old Dart, and now this. I’ll tell you something, these Mopar engines were the strongest this country ever produced. As long as there’s no body cancer, I’ll keep buying them.”

  Anna took a drag off her cigarette and smirked. “ ‘Posi rear’? Nick, you are a gearhead, man.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess you got me nailed.” I looked her over and caught her eye. “Speaking of which, there’s this tractor pull, next Saturday night? I was wonderin’… if you’re not doing anything, I’d be right proud if you’d care to accompany me—”

  “Very funny. Anyway, you can just take your girlfriend to that tractor pull, buster.”

  At the top of 8th, we passed an old haunt of mine, a club where you used to be able to catch a good local band and where you could always cop something from the bartender, something to smoke or snort or swallow in the bathroom or on the patio out back. I had met my ex-wife Karen there for the first time one night. The original club had closed years ago, shut down at about the same time as my marriage.

  Anna looked out the window. “You ever go in that place?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “I thought ’cause, you know, they cater to that thirty-plus crowd.”

  “Thanks a lot.” I could have backhanded her one, but she was so damn cute. “Where you headed, anyway?”

  “Drop me at the Eastern Market Metro, okay?”

  I did it and then got on my way.

  I DROVE DOWN M Street, past the Navy Yard and the projects and the gay nightclubs and the warehouses, and kept straight on past the 11th Street Bridge ramp as M continued unmarked, past Steuart Petroleum, down through the trees toward the water, past a couple of marinas and the Water Street turnoff, to the wooded area where the rusted houseboat sat submerged in the river amid the wooden pilings. I pulled off in the clearing and parked my car next to Boyle’s.

  An old man with closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair sat in a metal folding chair, holding a cheap Zebco rod, a red plastic bucket and green tackle box by his side, a sixteen-ounce can of beer between his feet. Two young men leaned against a brilliantly waxed late-model Legend parked beneath the trees and looked out toward the carpet green of Anacostia Park across the river. Boyle stood on the edge of the concrete bulkhead, his shirtsleeves rolled above his elbows, his beefy hands at his side, a manila envelope wedged under one arm, a hot cigarette drooping lazily from his mouth. I walked across the gravel and joined him.

  “You’re a little late,” Boyle said, glancing at his watch.

  “Had to wait for Anna to clean her station. Gave her a lift to the subway.”

  “What’re you, sniffin’ after that Chinee heinie now?”

  “Just gave her a ride, Boyle.”

  “Like to have me some of that. Never did have a Chinese broad when I was single. Any suggestions on how to get one?”

  “You might start by not calling them ‘broads.’ Women don’t seem to like that very much these days. They haven’t for, like, forty years.”

  “Thanks for the tip. I’ll work it into my next sensitivity discussion. The department’s very big on that now, since those uniforms handcuffed that drunk broad—I mean, inebriated woman—to that mailbox last winter. Maybe I could get you to come down and lecture.”

  I looked at the envelope under Boyle’s arm. “So what you got?”

  “Not yet,” Boyle said. He transferred the envelope to his hand and dragged deeply on his cigarette. A large drop of sweat ran down his neck and disappeared below his collar. “Where were you that night?”

  I pointed to a dirt area of paper and cans and garbage just inside the tree line, behind the fisherman. “Right about in there.” One of the young men leaning on the Legend gave a brief, tough glance my way, and the other stared straight ahead.

  “If they were parked where we are—”

  “I don’t know where they were parked. I didn’t see anything. I couldn’t even lift my head.”

  “Well, the freshest tire prints we got were there. We were lucky to get those—someone called in an anonymous on the murder pretty soon after it happened. That was you, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Boyle moved his head in the direction of our cars. “So if that’s where they were parked, and they took the kid straight down to the water and did him, then went right back to their vehicle, it’s possible they didn’t see you layin’ back there in the trees.” />
  “What, you don’t believe me?”

  “Sure, I believe you all right.” Boyle took a last hit off his smoke and ground it under his shoe. “Just tryin’ to figure things out. C’mon, let’s take a walk, get away from those two entrepreneurs.”

  “Those guys dealers?”

  Boyle shrugged. “That’s a thirty-thousand-dollar car, and they ain’t real estate developers. Anyway, I’m Homicide, not Narcotics, so I couldn’t give a rat’s ass. But it’s a bet that they aren’t holdin’ right now. This road dead-ends up ahead, past the bridge at the last marina. The locals know not to do business down here—no place to run to. Those guys are probably just relaxing before going to work later tonight. But I don’t need any witnesses to what I’m about to do. Come on.”

  We went back to the road and walked north toward the Sousa Bridge. A mosquito caught me on the neck. I stopped and slapped at it, looked at the smudge of blood on my fingers. Boyle kept walking. I quickened my step and caught up with him.

  Boyle said, “That thing you pulled with the silencer. That was pretty cute. It didn’t hit me until I got off my bar stool. ’Course I phoned the detective in charge of the case soon as I left the Spot. Ballistics report had come in earlier that day.”

  “And?”

  “You were right. A silenced twenty-two. A Colt Woodsman, I’d guess, if it was some kind of hit.”

  “A twenty-two. That proves it wasn’t a gang thing, right?”

  “It doesn’t prove anything. A kid on the street can get his hands on any piece he wants, same as a pro, and for all I know, a twenty-two is the latest prestige weapon. Don’t get ahead of yourself, Nick.”

  We went beneath the bridge and moved to the last set of legs before the river. A gull glided by and veered off toward the water. The metallic rush of cars above us echoed in the air.

  Boyle leaned against a block of concrete, one of many that sat piled near the legs. “Tell me why else you think this isn’t a drug kill.”

  “Let me ask you something, Boyle. You ever know whites and blacks to crew together in this town?”

  “ ’Course not. Not in this town or any other town I ever heard of.”

  “It was a white man and a black man killed that kid. I heard their voices. And I’ll tell you something else. You might want to check up in Baltimore, see if some similar shit has gone down. The white guy, he talked about going ‘home,’ used that extra long o the way they do up in South Baltimore. The guy was definitely out of BA.”

  “You got it all figured out. A pro hit, out-of-town talent. Come on, Nick, you’re puttin’ an awful lot together with nothin’.”

  “I’m telling you what I heard.”

  Boyle looked down at the manila envelope in his hand, then back at me. “I give you what we got, what are you gonna do with it?”

  “I know what’s going to happen to this if the shooters aren’t found in a few more days. Not that it’s the fault of you guys. They got you working two, maybe three homicides at a time, and I know it doesn’t stop.” I shrugged. “I’m just going to get out there, ask around like I always do. I find anything you can use, I’ll head it in the direction of the guy who’s assigned to the case.”

  “Through me.”

  “Whatever. Who’s on it?”

  “Guy named Johnson’s got it. He doesn’t come in the Spot, so you don’t know him. He’s a competent cop, a little on the quiet side. But he is straight up.”

  “If I find out anything, it’ll come to you.” I pointed my chin at the envelope.

  Boyle breathed out slowly. “Well, we got nothing, really. Nothing yet. The kid’s name was Calvin Jeter. Seventeen years of age. Dropout at sixteen, high truancy rate before that, no record except for a couple of f.i.’s, not even misdemeanors. Johnson interviewed the mother, nothing there. Said he was a good boy, no drugs. It’s like a broken fuckin’ record. Jeter didn’t run with a crowd, but he hung real tight, all his life, with a kid named Roland Lewis. Haven’t been able to locate Lewis yet.”

  “Lewis is missing?”

  “Not officially, no.”

  “What about forensics, the crime scene?”

  “The slug was fired at close range. You saw the burn marks yourself. A twenty-two’ll do the job when the barrel’s pressed right up there against the chin.” Boyle’s eyes moved to the river. “The tire tracks indicate the doers drove some kind of off-road vehicle. Similar tracks were found in a turnaround area at the end of the road, past the last marina. Which tells me that when they left, they headed right for the dead end, had to backtrack—so maybe they weren’t local guys after all.” Boyle looked at me briefly, then away. “Like you said.”

  “What else?”

  “One important thing, maybe the only real lead we got. There’s a potential witness, someone who actually might have seen something. A worker down at the boatyard says there’s this guy, some crazy boothead, sits under this bridge”—Boyle patted the concrete—“sits right on these blocks, wearing a winter coat, every morning just before dawn, reading books, singing songs, shit like that. And the estimated time of death was just around dawn.”

  “That’s about right,” I said.

  “And if your friends drove under the bridge, then turned around and drove back, and if this mental deficient was here, there’s a very good chance he got a good look at the car. Maybe he noticed the license plates. Maybe he can ID the shooters themselves.”

  “So who’s the guy?”

  “The guys at the boatyard, they don’t know him. They never introduced themselves, on account of the guy was stone-crazy.”

  “Anybody interview him since?”

  Boyle flicked a speck of tobacco off his chin. “He hasn’t been back since. We don’t even know if he was here that particular morning. Johnson’s checked it out a couple of times, and we’ve got a couple of uniforms sitting down here at dawn for as long as we can spare ’em. But so far, nothing.”

  “All this stuff in the reports?”

  “Yeah.” Boyle pushed the envelope my way but did not hand it over.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “I know what’s going with you, that’s all. You think because you got polluted and happened to fall down near where a kid got shot, that makes you responsible in some way for his death. But you ought to be smart enough to know that you had nothin’ to do with it—that kid woulda died whether you had been laying there or not. And consider your being drunk some kind of blessing, brother. If you coulda got up off your ass, most likely they woulda killed you, too.”

  “I know all that.”

  “But you’re still gonna go out and ask around.”

  “Yes.”

  Boyle sighed. “You got no idea what kind of trouble I could get into.” He pointed one thick finger at my face. “Anything you find, you come to me, hear?”

  “I will.”

  Boyle tossed me the envelope. “Don’t fuck me, Nick.”

  He walked away and left me standing under the bridge.

  FOUR

  THAT EVENING, I categorized and studied the Xeroxed police file on the Jeter case, and in the morning I sat at the desk of the small office area in my apartment and studied it all over again. I showered and dressed, grabbed some of the pertinent material, and took a few legitimate business cards and some phony ones and slid them in my wallet. Then I took a dish of dry cat food and a bowl of water, placed them out on the stoop, and got into my Dodge and headed downtown.

  I stopped for some breakfast at Sherrill’s, the Capitol Hill bakery and restaurant that is the last remnant of old Southeast D.C., and had a seat at the chrome-edged lunch counter. My regular waitress, Alva, poured me an unsolicited coffee as I settled on my stool, and though the day was already hot, I drank the coffee, because you have to drink coffee when you’re sitting at the counter at Sherrill’s. Alva took my order, watching me over the rims of her eyeglasses as she wrote, and five minutes later I was sweating over a plate of eggs easy with a side of hash browns and sausage and toast.
After the food, I had a second cup of coffee and a cigarette while I listened to a nearby conversation—the uninitiated might have called it an argument—between the owner, Lola, and her daughter, Dorothy. I kept my eyes on the Abbott’s ice cream sign hung behind the counter and grinned with fondness at the sound of their voices.

  Out on the street, I fed the meter and walked the four blocks down to the Spot. Darnell was in the kitchen prepping lunch and Mai sat at the bar, drinking coffee and reading the Post. The sandaled feet at the end of Mai’s stout wheels barely reached the rail of the stool, and her blond hair was twisted and bound onto her head in some sort of pretzelized configuration. Phil stood at the register, his back to me, his lips moving—I could see them in the bar mirror—as he counted out from the night before.

  “What’s going on, Mai?” I said, walking toward the phone.

  “Jerome,” she said happily. Jerome had to be her latest Marine from the nearby barracks, but I didn’t ask.

  I placed the list of numbers and addresses in front of me on the service bar and picked up the phone. I began to dial Calvin Jeter’s mother, then lost my nerve. Instead, I dialed the number for the Roland Lewis residence. Ramon walked from the kitchen, smiled a foolish gold-toothed grin, and sucker punched me in the gut as he passed. I was coughing it out when a girl’s voice came on the other end.

  “Yeah.”

  “Is Roland there?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “How about Mrs. Lewis? Is she in?”

  “Nope.” Some giggling by two other females in the background over some recorded go-go. I listened to that and watched Mai send Ramon down to the basement for some liquor.

  “You expect her in?”

  “She’s workin’, fool.” A loud explosion of laughter. “Bah.”

  I heard the click of the receiver on the other end. I hung up the phone and checked the list for Mrs. Lewis’s work number, saw that I had it, and decided, Not yet. Phil walked by me without a glance or a word, took his keys off the bar, and split.