Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go

by George Pelecanos

  I went into the kitchen. Darnell stood over a butcher block, chopping white onions, a piece of bread wedged inside his cheek to staunch the tears.

  “Goin’ on, Nick?”

  “Just stopped in to make a couple of calls.”

  “You see Phil?”

  “Yeah. He’s still punishing me over last Tuesday night.”

  “You got all liquored up, left his place wide open, and walked out into the street. You can’t really blame the man, can you?”

  “I know.”

  “Yeah,” Darnell said. “You know. But do you really know?”

  “Thanks, Father. Light a candle for me the next time you’re in church.”

  “Go on, man, if you’re gonna be actin’ funny.” Darnell cocked his head but did not look up. He said quietly, “I got work to do.”

  I left the kitchen and walked through the bar. Ramon came up from the cellar, both hands under a bus tray filled with liquor bottles and cans of juice. I slapped him sharply on the cheek as he passed. He called me a maricón and we both kept walking. He was cackling as I went out the door.

  THE LEWIS RESIDENCE, A nondescript brick row house with a corrugated green aluminum awning extended out past its front porch, was on an H-lettered street off Division Avenue in the Lincoln Heights area of Northeast. I had taken East Capitol around the stadium, over the river, past countless liquor stores, fried-chicken houses, and burger pits, and into the residential district of a largely unheralded section of town, where mostly hardworking middle-class people lived day to day among some of the highest drug and crime activity of the city.

  I parked my Dodge on Division, locked it, and walked west on the nearest cross street. I passed a huge, sad-eyed guy—a bondsman, from the looks of him—retrieving a crowbar and flashlight from the trunk of his car. Three more addresses down the block and I took the steps up the steeply pitched front lawn of the Lewis house to its concrete porch, where I knocked on the front door. No one responded and no sounds emanated from the house. The girl who had answered the phone earlier and her friends were obviously gone. I stood there, listening to a window-unit air conditioner work hard in the midday heat.

  I waited a few minutes, looked over my shoulder. The bondsman had gone off somewhere, leaving an empty street. I went to the bay window, stepped around a rocker sofa mounted on rails and springs, and looked through an opening in the venetian blinds: an orderly living room, tastefully but not extravagantly furnished, with African-influenced art hung on white-washed walls.

  I dropped my card through the mail slot in the door and walked back down to the street.

  DIVISION LIQUORS STOOD ON a corner a couple of blocks south of the Lewis house, between an empty lot and the charred shell of something once called the Strand Supper Club. Two other businesses on the block had burned or been burned out as well, leaving only the liquor store and a Laundromat open on the commercial strip. I parked in front of the Laundromat and walked towards Division Liquors.

  Several groups of oldish men stood in front of the store, gesturing broadly with their hands and arguing dispassionately, while a young man stood next to his idling Supra and talked into a pay phone mounted on the side of the building that faced the lot. The young man wore a beeper clipped to his shorts—some sort of statement, most likely meaning nothing—and swore repeatedly into the phone, punctuating each tirade with the words my money. I passed a double amputee sitting in a wheelchair outside the front door. His chair had been decorated with stickers from various veteran’s groups and a small American flag had been taped to one of its arms. The man sitting in it had matted dreadlocks tucked under a knit cap, with sweat beaded on the ends of the dreads.

  “Say, man,” he said.

  “I’ll get you on the way out,” I said, and entered the store.

  I grabbed two cans of beer and a pack of Camels, paid a white man through an opening at the bottom of a Plexiglas shield, and left the store. Out on the sidewalk, I slipped a couple of ones and some coin into Knit Cap’s cup, checked to see if the young man was still using the phone, saw that he was, and walked back to my car. Sometime later, as I finished off my first can of beer, the young man dropped into the bucket of his Supra and drove off. I got out of my car and walked to the pay phone, where I sunk a quarter in the slot and punched in a number that was written on the notepad in my hand.

  “Mrs. Jeter, please.”

  A bored young female said, “Hold on.” A television set blared in the background, competing against the sounds of young children yelling and playing in the room. A woman’s voice screamed out, silencing the children. She breathed heavily into the phone.

  “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Jeter?”

  “Y-y-yes?”

  “My name is Nick Stefanos. I’m working with the Metropolitan Police on your son Calvin’s murder,” I said, breaking some kind of law with the lie.

  “I’ve done talked to the p-p-police three times.”

  “I know. But I’d like to see you if possible. I’m in your neighborhood right now.” I gave her the name of the liquor store.

  “You’re in the neighborhood all right. Fact, you’re just around the corner.” I listened to the TV set and the kids, who had started up again, as she thought things over. She told me how to get to her place.

  “Thanks very much. I’ll be right there.” After I shotgun another beer, I thought, hanging the phone in its cradle.

  THE JETER APARTMENT WAS in a squat square structure housing five other units, oddly situated on a slight rise in the middle of a block of duplex homes. I parked in a six-car lot to the right of the building, beside a green Dumpster filled to overflowing with garbage. Bees swarmed around a tub-sized cup of cola abandoned on top of the Dumpster, and two boys stood nearby on brown grass and swung sticks at each other in the direct sun. I finished my beer, popped a stick of gum in my mouth, locked my car, and walked across the grass. One of the boys, no older than eight, lunged at me with his stick. I stepped away from it and smiled. He didn’t smile back. I walked around to the front of the apartment.

  A woman sat in a folding chair outside the entrance, her huge legs spread, the inside of each wrinkled thigh touching the other, fanning herself with a magazine. Some kids stood out on the street, grouped around an expensive black coupe, the name MERCEDES scripted along the driver’s side rocker panel. Bass boosted and volumed to distortion thumped from the sound system, burying the rap. A kid looked my way and spread his fingers across his middle, and one of his friends smiled. I approached the woman and asked her the number of the Jeter apartment. A wave of the magazine directed me to a dark opening centered in the front of the building.

  The Jeter apartment was one of two situated down the stairs. The stairwell smelled of urine and nicotine, but in the depth and insulation of the cinder block, things were cooler and there was less noise. I wiped sweat off my face and knocked on a door marked 01.

  The door opened, and a woman who could have been forty or sixty-five stood in the frame. She wore turquoise stretch pants and a T-shirt commemorating the reunion of a family name I did not recognize. Her breasts hung to her belly and stretched out on the fabric of the T-shirt. Her face was round as a dinner plate and her hair was doing different things all at once on different parts of her head. By anyone’s standard, she was an unattractive woman.

  “Mrs. Jeter? Nick Stefanos.” I put out my hand.

  She took it and said, “C-c-come on in.”

  I walked into a living room crowded with a plastic-covered sectional sofa and two nonmatching reclining chairs. Over the sofa, on a pale yellow wall, hung a black blanket embroidered with a fluorescent wild pony. A rather ornate sideboard of cheap material stood against the next wall, with just about a foot of space between it and the sofa. Except for one dusty teacup, the shelves of the sideboard were empty. A big-screen television sat flush on a stand against the next wall, with wires extending from the Sega beneath it, the wires leading to the hands of a young man sitting on the sofa next to a young wo
man. Around them both, and on the table where the young man’s feet rested, were scattered junk-food wrappers and plastic cups. The young man played the game with intensity, his features twitching with each explosion and laser simulation from the set. As I entered, he glanced up briefly in my direction with a look that managed to combine aloofness with contempt. The young woman, who I guessed had answered the phone when I called, did not acknowledge me at all.

  I followed Mrs. Jeter toward the kitchen, looking once into a deep unlit hallway where a little boy and a toddler of indeterminate sex jostled over a rideable plastic fire engine. In the shadows, I saw another young man move from one room to the next.

  The kitchen, lit with one circular fluorescent light and a bit of natural light from a small rectangular window, was through an open doorway to the right of the television. Mrs. Jeter leaned against an efficiency-size refrigerator and folded her arms.

  “Can I get you somethin’, Mr. Stefanos?”

  The heat, oppressive in the living room, was stifling in the kitchen; I rolled my sleeves up over damp forearms to the elbow. “Water. A little water would be great, thanks.”

  “H-h-have a seat.”

  She gestured to one of four chairs set tightly around a small folding table with a marbleized red Formica top. I sat in one, under a clock whose face featured a Last Supper depiction of white disciples grouped around a white Jesus. Mrs. Jeter turned her back to me, withdrew a glass from a sinkful of dirty dishes, rinsed the glass out, and filled it from the spigot. She placed the glass in front of me and took a seat in a chair on the other side of the table.

  Mrs. Jeter watched my face as I looked at the grayish water in the glass, the lip of which was caked yellow. I turned the glass inconspicuously in my hand and had a sip from the cleanest side. The water was piss-warm and tasted faintly of bleach. I put the glass down on the table.

  “Mrs. Jeter—”

  “Call me Vonda, if you don’t mind. I ain’t all t-t-that much older than you.”

  I nodded. “My sympathies on your son’s death, Vonda.”

  “Your sympathies,” she said quietly and without malice. “Your sympathies gon’ bring my baby back?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s just that… I’d like to help, if I can.” I rotated the glass in the ring of water that had formed beneath it and listened to the sounds of the toddler crying in the hallway and the explosions coming from the game on the television set in the other room.

  “You say you’re with the p-p-police?” She closed her eyes tightly on the stutter, as if she could concentrate her way through it.

  “Unofficially, yes. I’m working with them on this,” I said, repeating my lie. “I know what you’ve told them already. I need to know if there’s anything else.”

  “Like?”

  “Things the police may not have asked. Like where Calvin usually went when he went out. What he did for money. That sort of thing.”

  “You mean, was he druggin’? Ain’t t-t-that what you mean to say?” Her eyes flared momentarily, then relaxed. “Calvin wasn’t in the life. He was just a boy. Just a boy.”

  I looked away from her. The crying from the toddler in the hallway intensified. I wondered, Why doesn’t someone pick that goddamned baby up?

  “Those your children out there?” I said, hoping to loosen what had fallen between us.

  “The girl is my oldest. The babies, m-m-my grandchildren, are hers. That boy out there, on the couch? That’s Barry. He’s the father to the youngest child. His little brother, the one back in the bedrooms, he’s stayin’ with us awhile. Got put out, up his way.”

  “Mind if I talk to your daughter?”

  “She don’t know nothin’ more than what I told you. What I already told the police.”

  The television set clicked off and the sound from it died. The front door opened and shut, and soon after that the toddler stopped crying. The older child came into the kitchen then and stood by his grandmother’s side, patting his hand against her thigh. She picked him up and sat him in her lap, rubbed her palm over his bald head.

  “Have the police been back in touch with you?”

  “ ’Posed to be,” she said, brushing some crumbs off the child’s lips.

  “They’re trying to find Calvin’s friend Roland,” I said. “Know if they had any luck?”

  “Roland? If they did, n-n-nobody said nothin’ to me.”

  I rubbed a finger down the scar on my cheek. “Mind if I have a look in Calvin’s room?”

  “You can look,” she said, with a shrug and a grunt as she picked up her grandson and rose from the chair. “Come on, Mr. Stefanos.”

  We walked out and through the living room, where the girl sat on the sectional couch, giving the toddler a short bottle of juice. I followed Vonda Jeter into the hallway, past a bathroom and then four bedrooms, which were really two rooms divided by particle-board in one and a shower curtain hung on laundry cord in the other. Three of the rooms contained single beds and scuffed dressers and small television sets on nightstands or chairs. In one of the rooms, the younger brother of the toddler’s father slept on his back, bare-chested in his shorts, with one forearm draped over his eyes. Vonda Jeter directed me into the last room, which she said was Calvin’s. She pulled on a string that hung from the ceiling and switched on a light.

  The room was windowless, paneled in mock birch, separated from its other half by a chair-supported board running floor to ceiling. An unfinished dresser stood flush against the paneling, and next to that an army-issue footlocker. Some change lay on the top of the dresser, along with a set of house keys on a rabbit’s foot chain and a knit cap with the word TIMBERLAND stitched in gold across the front.

  “The detective, that Mr. Johnson? He went through C-C-Calvin’s stuff.”

  I looked back at Vonda Jeter. Her eyes, yellow and lifeless before, had moistened now and pinkened at the rims.

  “Do you have a photograph of Calvin that I could borrow? In the meantime, I’d just like to have a quick look around. I won’t disturb anything.”

  “Go on ahead,” she said, and walked from the room without another word.

  I went through the dresser drawers, found nothing to study or keep. As a teenager, I had always kept a shoe box in my dresser filled with those things most important to me, and in fact, I still had it; Calvin’s drawers were filled with clothing, nothing more, almost obsessively arranged, as if he had no personal connection to his own life.

  In the footlocker, a basketball sat in the corner on a folded, yellowed copy of D.C. This Week. Several shirts hung on wire, along with a couple of pairs of neatly pressed trousers. I ran the back of my hand along the print rayon shirts, my knuckle tapping something in one of the breast pockets. I reached into the pocket and withdrew a pack of matches: the Fire House, a bar on 22nd and P in Northwest. Across town, and in more ways than one a long distance from home. I slipped the matchbook into my shirt pocket, switched off the light, and left the room.

  Vonda Jeter stood in the living room, by the door. I stepped around the couch and met her there. She handed me a photograph of a tough, unsmiling Calvin wearing a suit jacket and tie. He looked nothing like the boy I had seen lying in the river.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Whatever you can do,” she said, looking away.

  She opened the door. I stepped out, quickly took the concrete steps up the stairwell, and walked out into the white sunlight. I heard her door close behind me as I moved across the grass.

  I went to my car, unlocked it, and rolled the windows down. The father of the toddler, the game player from the couch, stood looking under the hood of a burnt orange 240Z parked beside my Dodge. He wore shorts that fell below his knees and a black T-shirt showing Marley hitting a blunt. Like most of the young men I had seen that day, he was narrow-waisted, thin, and muscled, with hair shaved to the scalp, broken by a short part. I put him somewhere at the tail end of his teens.

  “Is it burnin’ a lot of oil?” I
said, walking up beside him.

  He pulled the dipstick, read it, wiped it off with a cranberry red rag, and pushed it back down into the crankcase.

  “Nick Stefanos,” I said, extending my hand. “It’s Barry, isn’t it?” He ignored the question and my gesture. “These old Zs, they’re trouble. But they do have style. The two-forties have those headlights—”

  “Somethin’ I can do for you? ’Cause if not, whyn’t you just go on about your business.” He closed the hood, wiped his hands off on the rag.

  I placed my card on top of the hood. He read it from where he stood without picking it up.

  “I’m looking for Roland Lewis,” I said. “Thought maybe he could tell me something about Calvin’s death.”

  “That punk,” he muttered heavily, staring at the asphalt. He went around to the driver’s side and began to fold himself into the bucket. I could see some sort of garishly colored uniform thrown on the floor behind the seat.

  “Let me ask you something, Barry,” I said, stopping him. “What do you think happened to Calvin? At least you can tell me that.”

  He stopped, chuckled cynically, and looked me in the eyes for the first time. “What do I think happened? Whyn’t you just take a look around you, chief, check out what we got goin’ on down here.” Barry made a sweeping gesture with his hand and lowered his voice. “Calvin died, man. He died.”

  He got into his car, started it, and backed out of the lot. My card blew off the hood, fluttered to the asphalt. It landed next to a fast-food wrapper dark with grease. I left it there, climbed into my Dodge, and steered it back onto the street.

  I STOPPED FOR ANOTHER can of beer at Division Liquors and went back to my car, where I found some dope in the glove box and rolled a joint. I smoked half the number driving across town, slid an English Beat into the deck. By the time I hit my part of the world, upper 14th around Hamilton, “Monkey Murders” poured out of the rear-deck speakers of my Dodge, and I was tapping out the rhythms on my steering wheel, and singing, too, and many of the things I had seen that day seemed washed away.