Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go

by George Pelecanos

  “What do you think?” LaDuke said, pointing his chin toward the warehouse where the Buick sat parked.

  “That’s it,” I said. “We know where it is now, and it’s not going anywhere. We’ll come back tonight.”

  “Lot of activity around here.”

  “Not at night. Used to be a couple of nightclubs, ten, fifteen years back, that jumped pretty good. But nothing now.” I pushed the trans into drive.

  “Where now?” LaDuke said.

  “Office of Deeds,” I said. “We find out who collects the rent.”

  THE OFFICE OF THE Recorder of Deeds sat around 5th and D, near Judiciary Square, the area of town that contained the city’s courts and administrative facilities. The building has a funny old elevator that doesn’t quite make it to the top floors; to get to where the records are kept, you have to get off the lift and take the stairs the rest of the way. LaDuke and I did it.

  There was one disinterested woman working a long line, but I was lucky to see a bar customer of mine, a real estate attorney by the name of Durkin, sitting in a wooden chair, waiting for his number to be called. He also had a copy of the Lusk’s Directory, a crisscross land reference guide, in his lap. I borrowed it from him and promised him a free warm Guinness Stout—his drink—the next time he was by the Spot. Durkin tipped the fedora that he wore even indoors and gave me the book. By the time my microfiche had been retrieved from the files, I knew enough with the help of the Lusk’s to have the name of the landlord who owned the warehouse at Potomac and Half. The name was Richard Samuels.

  From there, it wasn’t a stretch to get an address and phone. If Samuels was like every minimogul/land baron I’ve met, he could not have resisted putting his name on his own company. He would have told you the ID made good business sense, but it was as much ego as anything else. And his name was on the company—Samuels Properties was listed in the first phone book we hunted down, right outside the District Building; the address matched that printed on the deed. LaDuke flipped me a quarter and I rang him up.

  “Samuels Properties,” said the old lady’s voice on the other end.

  “Metropolitan Police,” I said, “calling for Richard Samuels.” LaDuke shook his head and rolled his eyes.

  “Let me see if he’s on the line.” She put me on hold, came back quickly. “If this is about the fund-raising drive, Mr. Samuels has already sent the check—”

  “Tell him it’s about his property at Potomac and Half.”

  “Hold on.” More waiting, then: “I’ll put you through.”

  Another voice, deep and rich, came on the line. “Yes, how may I help you?”

  “My name is Nick Stefanos—”

  “Officer Stefanos?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not a cop?”

  “Private.”

  “Well, then, you’ve misrepresented yourself. I guess we have nothing to talk about.”

  “I think we do. You might be interested in some activity going on in your property on Half Street in Southeast. And if you’re not interested, maybe Vice—”

  “Vice?” His tone lost its edge. “Listen, Mr. Stefanos, I’m certainly not aware of any illegal activities, not on Half Street or on any of my properties. But I am interested, and I’m willing to listen to what you’ve got to say.”

  “My partner and I would like to see you this morning. The conversation would be confidential, of course.”

  “That would be fine,” Samuels said. He confirmed the address.

  “We’ll be right over,” I said, and hung up the phone.

  LaDuke scrunched up his face. “You identified yourself as a cop, Nick. This guy Emmanual—”

  “It’s Samuels.”

  “He could turn us in.”

  “Come on, LaDuke. We’re standing at the door. Let’s go see what the man’s got to say.”

  THE OFFICE OF SAMUELS Properties was on a street of commercially zoned row houses just north of Washington Circle, in the West End. We parked the Dodge in a lot owned by Blackie Auger, one of D.C.’s most visible Greeks, and walked to the house. Samuels’s office was on the second floor, up a curving line of block steps.

  We had expected the geriatric receptionist, but it was Samuels himself who answered the door. He looked to be reasonably fit, a thin, silver-haired man at the very end of his middle years, with prosperity—or the illusion of it—apparent in every thread of his clothes. He wore a nonvented Italian-cut suit over a powder blue shirt with a white spread collar, and a maroon tie featuring subtle geometrics, gray parallelograms shaded in blue to pick up the blue off the suit. His face was long, sharply featured, and angular, except for his lips, which were thick and damp and oddly red, reminding me somehow of a thinly sliced strawberry.

  “Mr. Stefanos?” he said in that fine brandy baritone.

  “Yes. My partner, Jack LaDuke.” The two of them shook hands.

  “Please, come in.”

  We followed him through the reception area, low-lit and deeply carpeted, with stained wood trim framing Williamsburg blue walls. Next was his office, the same cozy deal, but with a bigger desk, walls painted a leafy green, and a window view that gave onto the street. LaDuke and I sat in two armchairs he had arranged in front of his desk. Samuels had a seat in his cushioned broad-backed chair and wrapped his hand around a thick Mont Blanc pen.

  “You’re all alone,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “My receptionist is taking lunch. For one hour each day, I field my own calls.”

  “It’s just the two of you here?”

  “It hasn’t always been this way. I had a staff of six at one time, including my own in-house real estate attorney. But that was the eighties. And the eighties are over, Mr. Stefanos. The banks went through some tremendous changes near the end of the decade, as you know. When the flow of money stopped, everything stopped—all the growth. But this is a cyclical business that, by definition, adjusts itself. There are signs that the residential is coming back, and the commercial will naturally follow.”

  “Of course,” I said, though I didn’t have a clue. LaDuke had tented his hands, his elbows on the arms of his chair, and he was tapping both sets of fingers together at the tips.

  “So how can I help you?” Samuels said.

  “I’m working on a murder investigation,” I said. “As I mentioned to you on the phone, I’ve been privately retained. Through a series of interviews—I won’t bore you with the details—I’ve come to believe that there might be some criminal activity going on in your warehouse property at Potomac and Half.”

  “You mentioned that it might be related to Vice.”

  “For starters. I suspect pornography involving male minors. That kind of business is usually tied to something else.”

  Samuels frowned. “Let me say first that I’m not cognizant of any such activity in any of my properties. If what you’re claiming is a reality, however, it disturbs me. It disturbs me a great deal. You can never anticipate this kind of thing, not totally. All my potential tenants are interviewed, but as long as the rent checks arrive in a reasonably timely manner and there are no major physical problems with the property, you lose touch. Often a tenant will sublet without my knowledge and—”

  “We’d like to get in,” LaDuke said sharply.

  Samuels kept his dignity and his eyes on me. “I pulled the file after you called, Mr. Stefanos.” He fingered the edges of some papers on his desk. “The tenants on the lease are using the area both as a silk-screen production house for T-shirts and as a storage facility.”

  “Would it be possible to get in there and talk to them?”

  “Mr. Stefanos, in my business, in any business, in fact, control is very important. If I could both own these properties and run my own profit centers out of them—in other words, if I could control every aspect in the chain, all the way down the line—believe me, I’d do it. But unfortunately, I can’t. So essentially I’m in a partnership arrangement with my tenants, for better or worse. And I have to honor that
partnership. So you can see why I just can’t let you in there, willy-nilly, on the basis of some unsubstantiated accusation.”

  “But you also wouldn’t want the inconvenience, and publicity, of an official police intervention.”

  Samuels said, “And neither would you. You say you’re privately retained—if the cops, in effect, solve whatever it is you’re working on, wouldn’t that essentially make you unemployed?”

  “We’re talking about boys,” LaDuke said with obvious impatience. “They’re being forced against their will—”

  “Hold on a second,” Samuels said, his voice rising. He turned a framed photograph around on his desk so that it faced LaDuke. In the frame was a family picture—the businessman’s favorite prop—of Samuels, his wife, and two children, a teenaged boy and girl. Samuels regained his composure. “You see this? I’m a father, young man. Now, I didn’t say I wouldn’t help you. I’m only saying that we have to do this properly. Do you understand?”

  LaDuke didn’t answer. I said, “What did you have in mind?”

  “I’m going to speak to my attorney this afternoon. We’ll see how we can work this out. I’m thinking maybe by tomorrow, we’ll be able to get you in there, or at least get you some kind of answers. How can I reach you, Mr. Stefanos?”

  “I’ll call you, first thing in the morning. And thanks. I appreciate the cooperation.”

  We all stood then, as there was nothing else to say. Samuels showed us to the door. Out on 22nd, we walked to the Dodge.

  “How’d I do?” LaDuke said.

  “You gotta learn when to use the muscle and when not to. Samuels, he’s not going to respond to that. He doesn’t have to. He’s a developer—he probably has a relationship with every member of the city council. He could erase us, man, if we push it too hard.”

  “You sayin’ I almost blew it?”

  “You could use a little seasoning, that’s all.”

  “You think he’s gonna help us?”

  “He’ll help us,” I said. “He’s a smart man. The way I put it to him, he’s got no other choice.”

  I drove to my apartment and cut the engine. LaDuke said that he had something to do, and I let him go. I watched his brooding face as he walked to his Ford, then I watched him drive away. Then I went inside and sorted through my mail, my cat figure-eighting my feet. The red light was blinking on my answering machine. I hit the bar.

  A voice that I recognized came through the speaker: “Stefanos, this is Barry. I met you at Calvin Jeter’s apartment, at his mom’s? I’m the father to his sister’s baby…. Anyway, I was headin’ over to Theodore Roosevelt Island this afternoon. Up behind the statue, there’s a trail, to the left? Down there to the end, where it comes to a T. You go straight in, on a smaller trail, down to the water, facing Georgetown. That’s where I’ll be. I just thought, man… I just thought you might want to talk. Like I say… I don’t know. That’s where I’ll be.”

  I walked quickly from the apartment, the sound of the machine rewinding at my back.

  SEVENTEEN

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT ISLAND is a nature preserve, eighty-eight acres of swamp, forest, and marsh in the middle of the Potomac River, between Virginia and D.C. I took the GW Parkway to the main lot and parked beside Barry’s Z. A couple of immigrant fisherman sat with their rods on the banks of the Little River, and a Rollerblader traversed the lot, but typical of a midweek day in midsummer, the park looked empty.

  I took the footbridge over the river, then hit a trail up a grade and into the woods, to the monument terrace. I crossed the square, walking around the seventeen-foot-high bronze statue of a waving Teddy Roosevelt that sat on a high granite base, and walked over another footbridge spanning a dry moat. Then I cut left onto a wide dirt path that wound through a forest of elm, tulip, and oak and took the path down to where it met the swamp trail that perimetered the island. I stayed straight on in, toward the water. Barry was there, wearing a white T-shirt and shorts, sitting on a fallen tree, beneath a maple that had rooted at the eroded bank.

  “Hey, Barry.”

  “Hey, man.”

  I sat on the log, my back against the trunk of the maple. Barry watched me as I shook a cigarette out of my deck and struck a match. I rustled the pack in his direction. He closed his eyes slowly and I put the pack away.

  Across the channel, the Georgetown waterfront sprawled out, with K street running below the Whitehurst Freeway. Behind it were buildings of varying size, with the smokestack tower of the Power House rising above the skyline. To the right was the Kennedy Center; to the left, Key Bridge; and on the hill beyond, the halls of Georgetown University. Barry stared at the crew-graffitied bulkhead on the D.C. side, transfixed by it, or maybe not thinking of it at all.

  “You come down here a lot?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “This here’s my spot. Know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Sure.” I thought of my own place, the bridle trail off Oak Hill.

  “Use to be, I’d ride my bicycle across town, come down here, when I was in junior high and shit, just look up at Georgetown U. Patrick was playin’ then, and Michael Graham. I used to dream about going to Georgetown some day, playin’ for Coach Thompson. ’Course, I never even thought you had to get the grades, the scores on the tests. Didn’t know that shit was all decided for you, even before the first day of elementary school. Just some kind of accident, where you get born, I guess.” Barry chuckled cynically to himself. “And you know what, man? I never could play no ball, anyway.”

  “What about now?”

  “Now? I come down here just to get away. You still see some of the city on this island—the drug deal once in a while, and sometimes those sad-eyed old motherfuckers, walking around the trail, lookin’ to make contact with some boy. But mostly, over here, it’s clean. It makes me feel good, for a little while, anyway. And jealous, too, at the same time. I look across this river, I see the people on the freeway in their cars, and sometimes a plane goes over my head, takin’ off from National—everybody but me, goin’ somewhere.”

  I blew some smoke down toward the water. A breeze came off the river and picked it up. “You’re not doin’ so bad, Barry. You’ve got a steady job, and you’re sticking with your family. It means something, man.”

  “My job. You know how I feel sometimes, workin’ there, with these young drug boys comin’ in, parkin’ their forty-thousand-dollar shit right outside the door, makin’ fun of me, of my uniform?”

  “I know it can’t be easy.”

  “Then I read the Post, these white liberals—so-called—talkin’ about this brother, wrote this book, talkin’ about how he went into some MacDonald’s with a gun, stuck up who he called the ‘Uncle Tom’ behind the counter, then went to prison, got reformed and shit, became a newspaper writer himself.”

  “I read about it.”

  “That man behind the counter, he was no Uncle Tom. He was probably some young brother like me, just tryin’ to do a job, maybe pay the bills for his family or have a few dollars in his pocket to take his girl out on Saturday night. And that punk calls him an Uncle Tom? And those white boys at the Post, print that magazine they got, they be glorifyin’ that shit. Makes him wanna holler? Man, that shit makes me wanna holler!”

  “What you’re doing,” I said again, “it means something.”

  Barry looked in my eyes. “You really believe that tired shit, don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  “I know you do. That’s why I called you up. You got this one way of lookin’ at things, like it’s right or it’s not, and nothing in between. I guess, in my own way, that’s the way I got to look at things, too. I mean, somebody’s got to, right?”

  I hit my cigarette hard and ground it under my shoe. “What did you want to tell me, Barry?”

  Barry picked up a twig lying at his feet and snapped it in his hands. “About Calvin.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He was mulin’ powder.”

  I felt something twist in my stomach. “For who
?”

  “I don’t know. But I do know this: The powder’s for the white man, and the rock is for the niggas. You know it, too. Even got separate laws for that shit.”

  “Muling it where?”

  “Into the projects, man, straight to the cookin’ house.”

  “You got names?”

  “Uh-uh,” Barry said. “You?”

  “No. But I found out he was involved in some other things, too. Prostitution, and pornography.”

  “That was Roland,” Barry said hatefully. “That punk.”

  “Roland got him into it?”

  Barry nodded, spoke quietly against the sound of the current lapping at the bank. “The man in charge, the man with the drugs—whoever he is—he favored boys. Told Roland that if he and Calvin got into this… movie shit, they could mule the powder for him, too. Calvin came to me—he wanted the money, man, he wanted to get out of his situation in a big way, like we all do, where we live. He didn’t know about that other shit, though. Calvin wasn’t no punk. Roland could do it, man, without a thought, ’cause inside he always was a bitch. He told Calvin, ‘Just do it, man—it’s only lips.’ I got no thing against a man who is that way—understand what I’m sayin’? Matter of fact, I got this cousin like that, over in Northwest, and the man is cool. But Calvin wasn’t about that. I told him, ‘Don’t be lettin’ no man suck your dick, not for money or for nothin’, not if you don’t want to.’ ”

  “Calvin went ahead with it, though, didn’t he?”

  “The last time I saw him, he was scared.”

  “When was that?”

  “The night he died. He told me they only did this shit once a week, and he had to make his mind up right then, or the mule job, and the money, was out. I told him not to go with Roland that night. He did, though. I got to believe he changed his mind, but too late. I think he tried to get out of the whole thing. And they doomed his ass because of it. They put a gun in his mouth and blew the fuck out of that boy.”