Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go

by George Pelecanos

  I retrieved my one suit, a charcoal three-buttoned affair, from out of the cedar closet on Monday and made it over to the service at a Baptist church off East Capitol Street. The attendees were racially mixed—the whites representing fellow employees from Shareen’s law firm; the blacks representing family and friends. This was not a gang-death funeral, so there was not the traditional garb worn by crew members to honor their fallen comrade. In fact, there were very few young people in attendance at all. LaDuke, in his black suit and black tie arrangement, stood near the front, at the end of a pew. I watched him from the back of the church, his hands tightly clasped in front of him, as the beautiful voices of the choir resonated in the room.

  They buried Roland in a cemetery off Benning Road in Marshall Heights. I brought up the rear of the procession and watched the ceremony from a distance, leaning against my Dodge, smoking a cigarette in the shade of an elm. An unmarked car pulled up behind mine and Boyle stepped out of the passenger side. He came and stood next to me, his face hard and grim.

  “Nick,” he said.

  “Boyle.”

  “Thought you might be here.”

  “You were right on the money, then. I always said you were a good cop.”

  “Turn around,” Boyle said, “and look at the car I just got out of.”

  I did it, looked through the tinted windshield, saw no one identifiable, just the featureless outline of a suit-and-tie black man behind the wheel.

  “That good enough?” I said.

  Boyle nodded. “That’s Detective Johnson, assigned to the case. I told you about him. He just wanted to get a good look at you in case he gets proof that you been holding out on us with this one. If that’s true, he’s gonna want to talk to you again.”

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  “The ME’s report came in. The shooter used a silenced twenty-two on Roland Lewis. Same markings as on the Jeter murder. Same gun. But I guess you knew that.”

  I dragged on my cigarette, dropped it under my shoe. “I don’t know anything.”

  “You pulled the Lewis kid out of the warehouse on Potomac and Half, I’m pretty certain of that. His prints were all over the place. If you had turned him in to us, he’d be alive right now. He would have talked, too, and we’d probably have this whole thing wrapped up by now.” Boyle put his face close to mine. I could smell the nicotine on his breath and the previous night’s alcohol in his sweat. “You got this kid killed. Think about that, hotshot.”

  “Take it easy, Boyle.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, sure.”

  I listened to his footsteps as he walked away, and to the sound of the door shutting and Johnson putting the car in gear. I stared straight ahead, at the black pool of mourners huddled against the rolling green grounds. Low-slung sheets of flannel-colored clouds were moving in from the northeast. I reached into my jacket for another cigarette and fumbled through my pockets for a light.

  THE BAPTIST’S VERSION OF a wake was held at Shareen Lewis’s house off Division, directly following the burial. I dropped by, then stood around uncomfortably and wondered why I had. Shareen attended to the food table, a mix of fried chicken and cold cuts and some sort of dry punch, in a fragile but efficient manner, and Roland’s sister helped her, passing me several times without acknowledgment, trays and bowls balanced in her hands. LaDuke stood across the room talking to Blackmon, the bondsman who had turned him on to the case. LaDuke met my eyes only once, giving me an abbreviated nod with his chin, his own eyes drawn and red. I jiggled the change that was in my pocket and smiled when someone smiled at me, and after a while I left the house and walked outside to have a smoke.

  I went to the edge of the porch and looked down to the cars, shiny and wet, lined along the curb below. The rain had come in steady, quiet waves, clicking against the leaves, drumming on the aluminum awning of the porch. The rain brought steam up off the street, and woke the green and living smells of summer. I lit a cigarette, flipped the spent match off the porch, toward the grass.

  “You have an extra one of those?” said a woman’s voice behind me.

  I turned around. The voice belonged to Shareen Lewis. She was sitting on the rocker sofa in front of the bay window.

  “Sure,” I said. I went to her and shook out a cigarette, struck a match and gave her a light. She wore a simple black dress, black stockings, and black pumps. An apricot brooch closed the dress at the chest. Her nails were painted apricot, with her lips the color of the nails.

  She took some smoke into her chest, kept it there, closed her eyes as she let it out. “Sit down with me. Please.”

  “All right.”

  The springs creaked as I took a seat, and the sofa moved back and forth on its track. It settled to a stop, and then there was just the clicking on the leaves and the drumming on the awning. Shareen flicked some ash to the concrete of the porch and I did the same.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “Thank you for bringing my son back to me.”

  “It’s okay.”

  Shareen put her lips to the cigarette, dragged on it, blew a stream of exhale. The smoke jetted out, then slowed and roiled in the stagnant, heavy air.

  “You know,” Shareen said, “I only had him for that one night. He left the next day.”

  I flicked a speck of lint from my trousers.

  “Before he left,” she said, “I made him his favorite lunch: a grilled cheese sandwich on white bread, with tomato right out of my garden, and a little mustard. Mustard on the bottom and the top slice of bread. The way he liked it, from when he was a little boy. He’d come in after the playground, come runnin’ through that screen door there—don’t you know he’d always slam that screen door—and he’d say, ‘What’s for lunch, Mom?’ And I’d say, ‘Grilled cheese, honey.’ And he’d say, ‘All right!’ ” Shareen flipped her hand in an excited, childish gesture, the way her son might have done.

  I hit my cigarette and looked down at my shoes. One foot was moving metronomically, left to right and back again.

  “After he had lunch on Thursday,” Shareen said, “he said he had to go out, and out he went. He slammed that screen door, too. You know that, Mr. Stefanos?”

  “Mrs. Lewis—”

  “Then they called me on Friday and asked me to come down to the morgue. And I went in there to identify him; they pulled back the sheet, and there he was. And for a moment there, you know, I just didn’t believe it was him. I mean, intellectually, I knew it was my son. But it just wasn’t him. You understand? This was just a dead thing lying on a piece of cement. Not my son. Just something dead.”

  Shareen took in some more smoke, then dropped the cigarette and crushed it with the toe of her pump. She stared off into her front yard and flattened her hands in her lap.

  “When he was first starting out school, he hated it, you know. As many times as I’d call upstairs to him in the morning, try to get him to wake up, he’d never answer. He’d just keep pretending that he was asleep, ’cause he didn’t want to go to school. So I had this thing: I’d go into his bedroom and shake him and shake him and shake him. And finally, I’d put my index finger up into his armpit, just touch it, you know. And Roland, ticklish as he was, he’d still have his eyes closed, but he couldn’t help but crack a smile. We did that every morning, Mr. Stefanos, when he was a boy. That was our routine. It was the only way I could get him up to go to school.”

  “Mrs. Lewis, maybe we better go on inside.”

  “Down in the morgue on Friday, I put my finger there, underneath his arm. Don’t you know, that boy didn’t even crack a smile!” Shareen grinned, the grin horrible and artificial. “I could have put my mouth right up to his ear and screamed to God in heaven. It wouldn’t have made any difference. And that’s when I knew—I knew—that the boy in there on that slab, that boy was not my Roland. ’Cause Roland, when I touched him there? My Roland would have smiled.”

  “Mrs. Lewis,” I said.

  He
r grin slowly went away. I put my hand on top of hers. The hand was cool and thin, wormed with veins across its back. She looked at me, then through me, her eyes hollow and all the way gone. We sat there and listened to the rain. After a while, she rose abruptly and walked back into her house. I got up off the rocker, crossed the porch, and took the steps down to my car.

  I HAD ANOTHER EVENING shift at the Spot, and I worked it without saying much of anything to anyone, not even Anna or Darnell. The regulars made comments on my attire between calling for their drinks, and I let them, and when the bar fell silent for long periods of time, they reminded me to change the music on the deck. I started drinking in the middle of happy hour, one beer after another, buried in the ice chest to the neck. By the time I closed the place down, I had a beer buzz waiting on a shot of liquor to keep it company, so I poured two ounces of call bourbon into a glass.

  Darnell shut off the light in the kitchen, stopped to get a good look at me, and walked out the front door. He didn’t even bother asking for a lift uptown. I had a couple more rounds and somewhere around eleven I heard a knock on the front door. I turned the lock and LaDuke stepped inside.

  “Hey,” I said, clapping him a little too roughly on the shoulder.

  “Nick.”

  He was still in his suit and tie, jacket on in the heat, the tie’s Windsor knot centered and tight.

  “Come on in, Jack, have a drink with me.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “Suit yourself.”

  I went back behind the bar. LaDuke stayed where he was, at the top of the two-step landing, leaning against the entranceway’s green wall. I had a sip of bourbon and put fire to a smoke.

  LaDuke said, “You’re wasting time with that shit. We’ve got work to do.”

  “Maybe tomorrow,” I said. “Tonight I’m gonna drink.”

  “Tonight and the next,” he said, “and the one after that. You’re no good that way.”

  “Thanks for the lecture, Boy Scout.”

  “We’ve got to finish what we started.”

  “I am finished,” I said. “I don’t want to see any more death. They kill and we kill and it doesn’t stop and nobody wins. I’m tellin’ you, man, I’m through with it.”

  “Well, I’m not through,” he said, his voice cracking. “Roland’s dead because of me. I’ve got to fix it now.”

  “Roland offed himself. He went back to them because of greed, flat out. They killed him, Jack, not you.”

  “No, Nick. It was me. That night in the warehouse, I called him by his name. You remember? I said, ‘You’re coming with us, Roland!’ The one named Coley, he must have picked up on it. It made it look like Roland was in on the robbery, in on it with us. You understand, Nick? It was me.”

  “Roland was headed that way all along. You had nothing to do with it, hear?”

  LaDuke pushed off from the wall. “I’m not done. Come along or don’t come along—it makes no difference to me.”

  “Come on.” I smiled and raised my bottle of beer. “Come on over here, Jack, and sit down with me. Sit down with me and have a drink.”

  He looked me over slowly, his eyes black with contempt.

  “The hell with you,” he said.

  LaDuke walked from the room. I listened to the door close, then the silence. My shot glass sat empty on the bar. I reached for the bottle and poured myself a drink.

  TWENTY-TWO

  CASES BREAK, AND major changes get put in motion, in seemingly innocuous ways.

  My ex-wife and I met in a bar, on a night when I decided to go out for a late beer at the incessant goading of an acquaintance whose name I don’t remember. Similarly, I got my start in the sales business when, as a teenager, I happened to be hitching down Connecticut Avenue and found myself standing in front of the Nutty Nathan’s plate-glass window, staring at a HELP WANTED sign. And then there was my friend Dimitri, a Greek boy out of Highlandtown, who got into a car he didn’t know was stolen, then died after a high-speed chase at the age of seventeen. I often wonder how my life would have turned out had I not gone out for that beer, or had I been picked up hitchhiking farther north on the avenue that day. And I think about Dimitri, an innocent smile on his face as he climbed into that car, and I think of all the things my friend has missed.

  The Jeter case was like that, too. The Jeter case might have ended with me and LaDuke parting company on a hot summer night. It might have ended, but it did not. The very next morning, I took a different route to work than I normally take, and everything got heated up again and boiled over in a big way.

  My normal path out of Shepherd Park is 13th Street south, straight into downtown. From Hamilton Street on down, there was some road repair that morning, forcing a merge into one lane. I got into the lane and inched along for a while, but my hangover was scraping away at my patience. So I cut right on Arkansas, with the intention of hitting Rock Creek east of 16th.

  I wasn’t the only one with that plan, however, and the traffic on Arkansas was as backed up as it had been on 13th. After Buchanan Street, the flow ebbed considerably, and just before Allison, things came to a complete stop. I was idling there, looking around absently and trying to clear my head, when I noticed the brick building of the Beverley ice company on my right. Some employees were walking out of the rear door of the icehouse, on the way to their trucks. The temperature that morning had already climbed to ninety-plus degrees, the sun blazing in a cloudless sky. Sitting in my car, I could feel the sweat soaking into my T-shirt; the men walking out of the icehouse wore winter coats.

  I landed on my horn. The guy ahead of me moved up a couple of feet, enough for me to put two wheels on the sidewalk and get the car onto Allison. I punched the gas and got it on up to 14th, parking in front of a corner market. There was a pay phone outside the market, with a directory, miraculously intact, beneath the phone. I opened the book, flipped to the I’s. I found plenty of wholesale ice merchants, most of them located in Northeast. There was only one located in Southeast: a place called Polar Boys, northwest of M, not too far from the Anacostia River—not too far from the river and only a short walk from the John Philip Sousa Bridge.

  I dropped a quarter in the slot, woke Mai at home, and asked if she could work my shift.

  “I’ll do it,” she said after the obligatory mild protest. “But I still want my whole two shifts tomorrow. And you owe me now, Nicky.”

  “I’ll cover for you, Mai, anytime. Thanks a million, hear?”

  She said good-bye. I ran down the sidewalk to my car.

  MOST DETECTIVE WORK CONSISTS of watching and waiting. The job requires patience and the ability to deal with boredom, two character traits I do not possess. It’s one of the reasons I don’t take tail gigs anymore, following errant wives and hard-dick husbands to motel parking lots, waiting for them to walk out the door of room 12 so I can snap their pictures. The tip jar from the Spot not only keeps me solvent, it also allows me the luxury of selectivity.

  I was thinking of the waiting game as I sat across the street from Polar Boys off M. I had parked near a store called Garden Liquors, though there appeared to be no garden or greenery of any kind in the general vicinity. The projects were located one block over, and some vampire was doing landmark business out of the store, selling forties and pints and lottery tickets at 11:30 in the morning. I sat behind the wheel of my Dodge, alcohol sweat beaded on my forearms, my ravaged stomach and my own smell making me sick. I could have used a beer myself, and another one after that.

  A half hour later, some men began to filter out of the steel door of Polar Boys, removing their jackets in the sun as they walked across the broiling brown grass, some toward the liquor store, others toward a roach coach parked by the loading dock. Soon another man walked out alone, a bearded man approaching middle age, with a pleasant face framing quiet, serene eyes. He wore khaki pants, thick-soled boots, and a brilliant blue coat. I felt my pulse quicken as I stepped out of my car, then a chemical energy as I crossed the street.


  “How’s it going?” I said, blocking the man’s path on the sidewalk.

  “Very well,” he said, “thank you.” He went to move around me. “Excuse me, please.”

  I stepped in front of him, keeping a friendly smile on my face. “Kind of hot to be wearin’ that coat, isn’t it?”

  “Hot? Yes, I suppose it is.” He tried again. “Excuse me.”

  I withdrew my wallet from my back pocket, flipped it open. “My name is Nick Stefanos. I’m a private investigator.” He glanced at my license despite himself.

  “Yes?”

  “There was a murder down by the river a couple of weeks ago. A young man was shot in the mouth.”

  He waited, spoke carefully. “I read about it in the papers, I think. Yes, I seem to recall it.”

  “I’m working on that case. I’m going to be blunt with you, because I don’t have much time. I believe you witnessed the murder.”

  “You’re mistaken,” he said. “Or misinformed. Now if you’ll excuse me, I only have one hour for lunch.”

  “I’ll just talk to your employer, then. And maybe after that I’ll go over to that pay phone, give the police a call. Since this is just a misunderstanding, you won’t mind clearing things up with them, right? Upstanding citizen like you—”

  “Now wait a minute,” he said, his shoulders relaxing. “What is it that you want?”

  “An hour of your time, an answer or two. And then I’ll go away.”

  He looked back at the icehouse, then at me. “You have a car?”

  I jerked my chin toward the Dodge. Something came into his eyes, passed just as quickly. The two of us crossed the street. I opened the passenger door, looked at him as he began to climb inside.

  “You know?” I said. “You don’t look too crazy to me.”

  “Crazy?” he said, glancing up at me as he settled into his seat. “Why, Mr. Stefanos, of course I’m crazy. As crazy as Ahab, or Lady Macbeth, or the quiet man who trims your neighbor’s lawn. We’re all a little bit crazy, in our own way. Don’t you agree?”