Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go

by George Pelecanos

  “Pull it!” LaDuke screamed.

  “You’re the man,” the black man said, “for now.” He put one hand up and reached the other behind his back. For a moment, I thought Roland might make a move—he was balling and unballing his fists, and he was leaning forward, like he was in the blocks—but then the black man’s hand came around, dangling an automatic by the barrel. He tossed it on the worktable and it slid neatly to the end. I went and picked it up, slipped it behind my back.

  “All right now,” LaDuke said. “The money.”

  “You’ve broken my crown,” the plump man whined, still on the floor, his hand and face smeared with blood. “You’ve broken it! Are you satisfied?”

  The black man laughed.

  Pretty Man raised his head from the floor, tears on his face. He looked at LaDuke.

  “Put your head down,” LaDuke said.

  “Please don’t make me put me head down,” Pretty Man said, his fat lip quivering like a piece of raw liver. “Please.”

  LaDuke pushed the muzzle of the shotgun against Pretty Man’s cheek, forced his head to the floor. Pretty Man’s back shook as he sobbed, and soon after that, the stench of his voided bowels permeated the room.

  “Whew,” the black man said.

  “Don’t be givin’ up no cash money, Coley,” Roland said to the black man.

  “Shut up,” LaDuke said.

  “Yeah,” Coley said, “you really ought to shut your mouth, Youngblood. ’Specially when a couple of crazy white boys are holdin’ the guns. You ought to just shut the fuck up and shit. Understand what I’m sayin’?”

  But Roland did not appear to agree. He went on staring at LaDuke and I as if we were stealing his future. Then Coley got off the table, went to a metal desk that adjoined it, and opened a drawer. He withdrew a cash box, the type used in restaurants and bars, placed it on top of the desk, and opened it.

  “It’s not all that much,” he said with a flourish and a wave of his hand. “Take it and go.”

  I wrist-jerked the Browning in the direction of the table, and Coley went back to it and took his seat. He was tall and lean, and he moved with an athletic confidence. He would have been handsome, if not for his pitted complexion and his left ear, which had been removed to the drum. I grabbed the money from the cash box—three banded stacks of hundreds and fifties—and stuffed it into my jeans.

  I said to LaDuke, “I’m gonna get the rope.”

  The spool was right outside the door. I came back in with it, tied Pretty Man’s hands to his feet, tried not to gag at his smell.

  “Yeah,” Coley said, “Pretty Man done shit his drawers. Kinda funny, tough man like him, needin’ diapers and shit. See, in the movie we’re makin’, he’s supposed to be some kind of carpenter. Guess you can tell by that tool belt he’s wearin’. And Youngblood here, he’s like the apprentice, come in for his lesson. The way the story line goes—what we call the screen treatment—the carpenter’s gonna teach the apprentice a thing or two about showin’ up late for his lesson—”

  “Oh no,” the plump man said. Blood and saliva pooled on the concrete where it had splashed from his mouth.

  “This here’s our director.” Coley gestured to the plump man with a contemptuous limp wrist and a flick of his fingers. “Maybe I ought to let him tell you about tonight’s film.”

  “My crown,” the plump man said.

  “Everybody,” LaDuke said, “keep your mouths shut.”

  I tied the plump man up, then pointed my chin at Coley. “Put the shotgun on him,” I said.

  I told Coley to roll over onto his stomach and lie facedown on the table. He did it without protest, and I bound him in the same manner, but more tightly than the others. I cut the excess with the razor and slipped the razor back in my jeans.

  I looked at Roland. “All right. You, come here. You’re next.”

  “No,” LaDuke said. “We’re taking him with us.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “Insurance,” LaDuke said.

  “Fuck no,” Roland said. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere with you motherfuckers—”

  “You’re coming with us now, Roland!” LaDuke said, and then he looked at Coley, who had rested his cheek on the worktable. “If you try and follow us, we’ll kill him. You understand?”

  “I understand everything just fine,” Coley said, a thread of a smile appearing on his face. His eyes moved to mine. “That gonna do it for you boys?”

  “No,” LaDuke said. “I don’t think so.”

  LaDuke walked over to the spotlight. He raked the barrel of the shotgun sharply across the bulb. The bulb exploded, glass chiming, showering the plump man’s head. LaDuke went to the fills and did the same. The stands fell to the floor, sparking on contact. The color of the light changed in the room.

  “That about how you did the one in my trunk?” LaDuke said, his eyes wide and fully amphetamized.

  “Something like that,” I said, knowing he wasn’t done.

  LaDuke said, “Watch this.”

  He turned, pointed the shotgun at the video camera. Roland hit the floor and Coley closed his eyes.

  “Hey,” I said.

  LaDuke squeezed the trigger. There was a deafening roar, and then the camera was just gone, disintegrated off its base.

  “Oh no,” the plump man moaned, against Pretty Man’s steadily rising sob. “Oh no.”

  My ears stopped ringing. I checked the rest of them—no one appeared to have been hit.

  LaDuke pumped the Ithaca, smiled crazily, walked through the smoke that hovered in the room. “All right,” he said. “All right.”

  He picked up a T-shirt that was draped over a chair and dropped it on Roland’s bare back. Roland got to his knees shakily and put the T-shirt on. LaDuke grabbed him by the arm, pulled him up. He hustled him toward the door and the two of them left the room. I walked backward, the Browning at my side.

  “You made a mistake tonight,” Coley said in a very easy way. “Now you’re fixin’ to make the biggest one of your life.”

  “That right,” I said, the speed riding in on the blood that was pumping through my head.

  “Yeah. You’re gonna walk out of here and let us live. When really, what you ought to do—if you really think about it—is kill us all.” His eyes were dead as stone. “I mean, that’s what I would do.”

  “I’m not you,” I said.

  I backed away and left him there, moved into the hall. LaDuke and Roland had already turned the corner. I followed them, caught them at the end of the next hall, near the outside door. Sweet was lying there, unconscious and bound, his face ballooned out and black. We stepped around him and walked out to the lot.

  LaDuke pushed Roland toward the gate. Darnell kept the headlights off and pulled the Ford along the fence. We slipped out, then put Roland in the backseat. I gave LaDuke my Browning and the extra clip, along with Coley’s automatic. He dumped them and his own hardware into the dark trunk. He went around and got into the front seat and I climbed into the back with Roland. Roland looked at the back of Darnell’s head, then at me.

  “I don’t wanna die,” Roland said, looking suddenly like the teenaged kid he was.

  “Boy?” Darnell said. “These two just saved your dumb life.”

  I reached over the front seat and found a cigarette in the visor. LaDuke grinned and clapped my arm. I sat back, struck a match, and took in a lungful of smoke. Darnell pulled out into the street and headed north. He switched on the lights and gave the Ford some gas.

  “Where we goin’?” Roland said, the toughness back in his voice.

  “We’re takin’ you home,” I said.

  None of us said anything for some time after that.

  DARNELL GOT US OUT of the warehouse district and kept the Ford in the area of the Hill, driving down the business strip on Pennsylvania and then into the surrounding neighborhoods. It was near midnight, and most of the shops were closed, but people still moved in and out of the doorways of bars, and on the residential streets
the atmosphere was thick and still.

  “Pull over,” LaDuke said, pointing to a pay phone standing free in the lot of a service station. Darnell drove the Ford into the lot.

  “What we gonna do now?” Roland said.

  “Call your mom,” said LaDuke.

  “Shit,” Roland said.

  LaDuke left the car and made the call, gesturing broadly with his hands, smiling at the end of the conversation. He returned and settled back in the front seat.

  “Let’s go,” LaDuke said to Darnell. “His mother’s place is in Northeast, off Division.”

  “I ain’t goin’ home,” Roland said. “Anyway, we got some business to discuss.”

  “What kind of business?” I said.

  “That money you took, it must have been ten, maybe more. I can turn that ten into twenty.”

  “Forget about the money.”

  “I only want what’s mine. I worked for it. On the real side, man, that shit is mine.”

  “Forget about it,” I said.

  LaDuke pointed to the shifter on the steering column. “Put it in gear,” he said.

  “I told you,” Roland said, “I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  I shifted in my seat, turned to Roland. “Maybe you’d like just to sit here and talk.”

  “About what?”

  “We could start with what happened to Calvin.”

  Roland licked his lips and exhaled slowly. “Man, I don’t know. Calvin just left—see what I’m sayin’? He didn’t want to come along. The next thing I knew, I was readin’ about that shit my own self, in the papers.”

  “You must have been real broken up about it,” I said. “You didn’t even go to his funeral.”

  “Look, Calvin was my boy. But I had my own thing to take care of.”

  “Get going,” LaDuke said to Darnell.

  Roland said, “I ain’t goin’ nowhere, not till we settle up on my cash money.”

  Darnell’s eyes met mine in the rearview. “You thirsty, man? You look kinda thirsty.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m thirsty.”

  “Why don’t I just drop you off, maybe the two of you could have a beer. I’ll swing back, pick you up.”

  “What’re you going to do in the meantime?”

  “Me and Roland here,” Darnell said, “we’re gonna drive around some. Have ourselves a little talk.”

  DARNELL PUT US OUT on Pennsylvania. LaDuke and I went into the Tune Inn, noisy and packed, even at that hour, with Hill interns and neighborhood regulars. We ordered a couple of drafts from one of their antique bartenders and drank the beers standing up, our backs against a paneled wall. LaDuke and I didn’t say a word to each other or anyone else the entire time. At one point, he began to laugh, and I joined him, then that ended as abruptly as it had begun. I was killing my second beer when the Ford pulled up on the street outside the bar window.

  We drove across town and over the river, deep into Northeast. Roland sat staring out the window, the streetlights playing on his resigned face, his features very much like his mother’s in repose. I didn’t ask him any more questions; I was done with him for now.

  We pulled up in front of the Lewis home, Darnell letting the engine run on the street. On the high ground, where the house sat atop its steep grade, I saw Shareen in silhouette, sitting in the rocker sofa on her lighted porch. She got up and walked to the edge of the steps. Roland stepped out of the car, moving away from us without a word of thanks. We watched him take the steps, slowly at first, then more quickly as he neared his home. As he reached his mother, she embraced him tightly, and even over the idle of the Ford, I could hear her crying, talking to her son. Roland did not hug her back, but it was more than good enough.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  “Sure,” Darnell said.

  LaDuke did not comment. He smiled and rubbed the top of his head.

  We dropped Darnell at his efficiency near Cardoza High, in the Shaw area of Northwest. I thanked him and peeled off a couple of hundreds from the stack. He protested mildly, but I pressed it into his hand. He shrugged, pocketed the cash, and walked across the street.

  “I could use a drink,” I said.

  “Yeah,” LaDuke said, surprising me. “I could use one, too.”

  NINETEEN

  STEVE MAROULIS SHOUTED, “Ella, Niko!” as LaDuke and I entered his bar.

  Maroulis was the tender at May’s, below Tenleytown on Wisconsin, a liquorized pizza parlor and hangout for many of the town’s midlevel bookies. Though quantities of cocaine had moved through the place for a brief time in the eighties, gambling remained the main order of business here, a place where men in cheap sport jackets could talk with equal enthusiasm about Sinatra’s latest tour or the over/under on the game of the night. LaDuke and I had a couple of seats at the bar.

  Maroulis lumbered our way, put a smile on the melon that was his face. “Way past last call, Nick. Drinks got to be off the tables in a few minutes.”

  “Put four Buds on the bar, will you, Steve? We’ll leave when you say.”

  “Right.”

  He served them up. I grabbed mine by the neck and tapped LaDuke’s bottle, then both of us drank. Tony Bennett moved into Sam and Dave on the house system, a typical May’s mix of fifties pop and sixties frat. I shook a cigarette out of my pack, struck a match, and put the flame to the tobacco.

  “How’d you think it went tonight?” LaDuke said.

  “We got Roland out of there.”

  “You didn’t push it too hard with him.”

  “I’ll talk to him again.”

  LaDuke motioned to my pack of smokes. “Give me one of those things.”

  “You really want one?”

  “I guess not. No.”

  I dragged on mine, flicked ash off into the tray.

  LaDuke said, “Those guys at the warehouse—Sweet and Coley. You think they had anything to do with Calvin’s death?”

  “I’m not sure yet. But I’d bet it.”

  “Why didn’t you press Coley?”

  “Calvin’s dead. Gettin’ another kid killed isn’t going to even anything up. The object was to get Roland the fuck out of there. We did that. It’s only over for tonight. That doesn’t mean it’s done.”

  “Why you figure it was Sweet and Coley?”

  “It was a black man and a white man killed Calvin.”

  “How do you know that?”

  I hit my cigarette, watched myself do it in the barroom mirror. “Because I was there.”

  LaDuke whistled through his teeth. “That’s not what you told me.”

  “I know what I told you. I wasn’t hired by Calvin’s mother. I stumbled right up on that murder, man. I got drunk, real drunk that night, and I ended up down by the river, flat on my back and layin’ in garbage. I heard the voices of a black man and a white man; they were dragging someone to the waterline. I heard them kill him, man, but I couldn’t even raise my head. I was just fucked up, all the way fucked up, understand?” I rubbed at my eyes, then killed the first bottle of beer. I pushed that one away with the back of my hand. “That’s the way this thing started—with me on a drunk.”

  I picked up the fresh beer, drank some of it off. LaDuke looked at the bottle in my hand.

  “You better be careful with that stuff,” he said. “You fall in love with it too much, there’s no room for anyone else.”

  “I know it,” I said, closing my eyes as I thought of Lyla.

  “How is she, anyway?” LaDuke said.

  “Who?”

  “You know who. You haven’t mentioned her much these last few days.”

  “It’s over,” I said, hearing the words out loud for the first time. “I’ve just got to work out the details. I’m doing it for her, man. She’s going nowhere fast, hanging out with me.”

  “Self-pity, Nick. Another curse of the drinking man.”

  “Thanks for the tip, Boy Scout.”

  “I’m only talking about it because I know. My mother left us when I
was a kid. She liked the bottle better than she liked raising a family.”

  “Your father raised you?”

  “Me and my brother, yeah.”

  “Where you from, anyway?”

  “Frederick County, not far over the Montgomery line. Place about forty minutes outside of D.C.”

  “Your father still alive?”

  “Yeah,” LaDuke said, and a shadow seemed to cross his face.

  “What’s he do?”

  “Country veterinarian. Horse doctor, mostly.” LaDuke swigged at his beer, put it back on the bar. “What are you, writin’ my life story?”

  I shook my head. “It would take way too long. You’re a work in progress, LaDuke.” I got off my bar stool, grabbed my beer. “Be right back. I gotta make a call.”

  I went back to the pay phone outside the rest rooms. A couple of kitchen guys were working a video game nearby, and someone was puking behind the men’s room door. I sunk a quarter in the slot, dialed Boyle’s number at the station, and left a taped message directing his Vice boys to the warehouse on Potomac and Half.

  LaDuke was finishing his beer when I returned to the bar. Maroulis had brought the white lights up, and he had put on “Mustang Sally,” the traditional “clear out” song for May’s. Most of the regulars had beat it. I ordered a six to go, and Steve arranged them in a cardboard carrier. I left thirty on eighteen, and LaDuke and I headed out the door.

  We drove southeast, all four windows down and the radio off. The streets were empty, the air damp and nearly cool. I lit a cigarette, dangled the hand that held it out the window, drank off some of my beer. The speed had given me wide eyes and a big, bottomless thirst; I could have gone all night.

  I had LaDuke stop at an after-hours club downtown, but even that had closed down. We sat on the steps of it, drank a round. Then we got back into the Ford and headed over to the Spot. LaDuke urinated in the alley two doors down while I negotiated the lock and got past the alarm. He joined me inside and I locked the door behind him. The neon Schlitz logo burned solo and blue. I notched up the rheostat, the conicals throwing dim columns of light onto the bar. My watch read half past three.

  LaDuke had a seat at the bar and I went behind it. I iced a half dozen bottles of beer and put two on the mahogany, along with the bottle of Grand-Dad from the second row of call. I placed a couple of shot glasses next to that, an ashtray, and my deck of smokes.