Nick's Trip

by George Pelecanos

  The woman next to me slipped down off her stool and ripped the receipt from the body of her credit card voucher. “Thanks, Michael,” she said, stealing a contemptuous glance at me before winking in conspiracy at Michael.

  “It’s been my pleasure,” Michael said. The woman and her bobbed friend left the bar. Michael watched them until they had vanished at the top of the stairs.

  I sipped bourbon. “Can we talk?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m busy.”

  “I’m busy too. Answer a couple of quick questions. After that you won’t see me again.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “About William Henry.”

  Michael shifted his shoulders. “I don’t know anything about him.”

  “You were his lover.”

  Michael frowned. “I went out with him, one time. Like I told you—that’s my business.”

  “Sure, it is. And you can bury it, or go tell it on the mountain, for all I care. It makes no difference to me. But the cops are following up on that angle. I can give them your name, if you’d like. Or you can tell me what you know.”

  Michael made a head motion that encompassed the entire bar. “Listen, pal,” he said softly. “If I didn’t need this gig, I’d tell you to fuck off, right now.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, looking him over. “Anyway, you do need it.”

  He loosened his shoulders. “I’ll give you one minute.”

  “Fine. What was your relationship with Henry, the night he died?”

  “It was over, way before that.”

  “How long before?”

  “Months.”

  “He have many friends, besides you?”

  “No idea.”

  “He ever talk about anything, about being in any danger, while you knew him?”

  “No.”

  I sighed. “You’re not thinking too hard.”

  “I’m answering your questions,” he said behind a smirk.

  “And I’m trying to find my friend’s killer.”

  “What happened to William was a shame,” Michael said without a trace of sincerity. “He was a nice guy, but that’s all he was. I’m telling you, you’re going down the wrong street. Our relationship—it didn’t mean anything, understand?”

  “I’m beginning to.”

  Michael gave me his hard look. “So why don’t you just pick your things up and leave?”

  I dropped fifteen on the bar, rose, and put on my overcoat. “You’re real tough,” I said. “You know it?”

  Michael looked around for his manager, who had gone into the kitchen. He leaned over the bar and whispered through a clenched jaw. “Maybe I’ll see you sometime, out on the street.”

  I smiled and said, “It would be my pleasure.”

  I POURED A CUP of coffee, walked it into my bedroom, and had a seat at my desk. My cat followed me in and dropped on her belly, just resting against my feet. I turned on the gooseneck lamp that was clamped to the side of my desk and opened the manila folder that contained William Henry’s notes. The notes were entered by date. I read them chronologically over the next two hours, then read them again, this time highlighting several names and passages that recurred throughout.

  When I was done, I removed the third of the notes that were related exclusively to Henry’s last filed story and placed them back in the folder. What remained was cryptic and, in several spots, frustratingly coded. But seemingly at random, two genderless names continued to appear: Pyshak and Bonanno.

  I had one more cigarette and butted it halfway down. I washed up, undressed, and read a little until my eyes began to get heavy. My cat dozed on the blanket at my feet.

  The words Pyshak and Bonanno drifted through my head as I fell into the dark arms of sleep.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON I sat at the bar of the Spot with William Henry’s notes spread before me. A telephone and the area white-page directories rested on the bar, near the notes. The Spot’s reader, Dave, sat at the other end of the bar, his head buried in a slim novel. A coffee cup sat in front of him, and a lit cigarette burned in an ashtray next to the cup. Mai was on the long shift. She tried to talk to me about her latest military conquest while I looked over the notes. I kept my attention on my work.

  There were no Pyshaks in any of the three metropolitan directories, but there were several Bonannos. I spent two hours placing calls to every one of them. Many had answering machines, on which I left no message. To the ones I reached I took the long shot of asking to speak to William Henry. I was hoping for a fumble, or a hang-up, or some sign of recognition. What I got was bewilderment, and a dead end.

  Happy hour—a colossal misnomer at the Spot—soon came, and the regulars began to file in. Buddy and Bubba swaggered to the sports section and were followed shortly by Richard, who was immediately in their collective face over an ’86 Super Bowl point-spread dispute. Melvin Jeffers had a seat alone and ordered a gin martini (“extra dry, darlin’”), and asked Mai to change the music over to something more “upbeat.” Mai slid an old Michael Henderson tape into the deck and served Melvin’s drink. Henderson’s “Be My Girl” began to croon from the speakers.

  After two verses of that, Dave collected his paraphernalia and got off his stool. On the way out he stopped behind my back and tapped me on the shoulder. His reading glasses hung on a leash across his broad chest. He placed the glasses back on his nose and scratched his gray-and-black beard as he looked over my notes.

  “Workin’ on a puzzle?” he said with the deep rasp of a heavy smoker.

  “In a way.” I leaned back and rolled my head to loosen my neck. When I turned around, Dave was still standing behind me. I didn’t know what he wanted, or why he was waiting there with a fixed, dogged stare. But Dave read books, and he hadn’t had a drink in years. That put him miles ahead of everyone else in the joint, including me. “Have a seat,” I said.

  Dave touched the right stem of his glasses and bellied up. I signaled Mai for Dave’s dirty ashtray, and she retrieved it from his favorite spot and placed it in front of him. Dave lit a smoke and fitted it into the groove of the tray.

  “What’s got you stumped?” he said.

  I told him about the case, and about the two names, and about the calls I had made. Dave stared at the names for a few minutes. Then he turned over one of the sheets of notepaper, withdrew a pen from the plastic holder in his breast pocket, and began writing down words in two parallel columns. Afterward he let the glasses off his nose and set the pen down on the notepaper. He pushed the paper along the bar until it rested in front of me.

  I looked the words over and said, “What’d you do?”

  “You said the notes appeared to be in code, partially at least.”

  “I said I didn’t understand them—it’s not the same thing.”

  Dave said, “So you’re sure Pyshak and Bonanno are persons’ names.”

  “Not entirely. What do you think?”

  Dave tapped the filter on the cigarette that was wedged in the ashtray. He let it burn there and looked at me. “I think Bonanno’s a name. It’s common enough. And when you break it out phonetically, and syllabically, screw around with it a little”—he pointed to the column of words on the right—“you come up with nothing.”

  My eyes traveled to the column on the left. “Go on.”

  “Now do the same thing with Pyshak,” Dave said, twitching excitedly, putting his glasses on again and adjusting them on the tip of his nose. “Look what you get.” He ran his finger down the column of jumbled Pyshak mutations—Piss Hack, Pishe Ak—and stopped at the last two words. The words read Pie Shack.

  “It’s a business,” I said.

  “It’s a possibility,” Dave said, smiling.

  I smiled back, getting ahead of things. “A bakery?”

  Dave shook his head and watched me from the corner of his eye. “Think, Nick—the relationship to Bonanno. How many Italian bakers you know?”<
br />
  I thumped my fist on the bar until it hit me like a stone. “Pie Shack,” I said quietly. “As in pizza pie.”

  “If I was you,” Dave said, “that’s where I’d start.”

  THREE PIE SHACKS WERE listed under Pizza in the Spot’s year-old, tattered copy of the yellow pages. I wrote down the addresses and phone numbers and then had Mai place the bar’s sticky black Rolodex in front of me. I withdrew the cleanest business cards of several food and beverage distributors, put them in my wallet, and grabbed some related price books that had been left behind by various salesmen. Then I lifted my overcoat off the hall rack and exited the Spot.

  I stopped uptown at my apartment for a shower and a shave, and to feed my cat. Out of the shower, I dressed the cut on the inside of my hand and left the bandage off. I put on jeans and a black V-necked sweater over a white T-shirt, and slipped my Doc Martens oxfords onto my feet. Before I left I stroked my cat’s head until her eye closed. She slinked across the room to her dish. Her eye was still closed as her pink tongue lapped water from the dish. I closed the door silently and walked out into the night.

  The air was misty and cold. Halos ringed the streetlights on Sixteenth as I drove south. I hung a right at U Street and parked my Dart near the firehouse. The engine coughed a bit as I cut it. I locked up and crossed over to the south side of the street, where several bars and carryouts were grouped on this farthest corner of Adams-Morgan.

  I checked the address from the list in my overcoat pocket and walked west. I passed Rio Loco’s, the Tex-Mex bar that Jackie and I patronized with frequency. I passed an open but empty frozen-yogurt parlor and a pizza-and-sub shop named the Olde World. Just past that stood a bankrupt “art bar,” and next to that the Pie Shack. Or, as I realized as I neared its boarded entrance, the Pie Shack’s burnt remains.

  A red condemnation sticker from the fire department hung crookedly on the front door. The plate-glass window that fronted the store had been busted out, replaced by iron bars. Cupping my hands around my eyes, I looked through the bars. The interior had been swept out, with remaining equipment, booths and counters pushed irregularly into one far corner. The ceiling had fallen through, leaving wires and fixtures dangling into the space. The interior walls were sooty and charred black. Nothing but a burnt shell. I backed away and retraced my steps, walking east on U.

  A few doors down stood the Olde World, fluorescently lit and open for business. I entered and leaned my elbows on the Formica counter. Next to me at the counter was a long-haired man wearing a fringed leather jacket. He held in his hand a slice of pepperoni with extra cheese, and he studied it with interest between bites. There were no employees behind the counter, but through the door that led to the kitchen I heard the laughter of two young men over an LL Cool J single. I tapped my palm on the knob of a bell that sat next to the electronic register.

  One of the young men emerged from the kitchen, still laughing as he downstepped out, yelling back to his partner about some “serious bitch” that had been in earlier that evening. He stopped at the counter, looked over my shoulder onto U Street, and said, “Yeah.”

  “Let me get a slice of cheese.”

  “Anything to drink?” Still looking past me.

  “Just the pizza.”

  The young man turned his head back to the kitchen and yelled, “One slice o’ plain, Dopey.” He turned back to me. “Dolla-fifty.”

  I handed him two ones. He bobbed his head to “Round the Way Girl” and mouthed the chorus, shutting his eyes soulfully as he rang me up and slapped the change onto the counter. “What happened to that place two doors down, the Pie Shack?”

  The young man shook his head, stopped mouthing LL Cool J, and shrugged. “Motherfucker burned, man.”

  “When was that?”

  He shrugged again. “Don’t know. Before I came to work here.”

  “When was that?” I repeated.

  “Near six months,” he said, and spun back into the kitchen. There was more laughter, then he bounded back out with my slice and dropped it on the counter in front of me. I thanked him, but by the time I got the words out he had disappeared into the back. I ate the pizza in silence, standing at the counter, next to the man in the fringed leather jacket.

  Out on the street a Ford Escort came to a screaming halt in front of the Olde World. An orange-and-red cardboard sign logoed identically to the sign that hung above the Olde World’s entrance was fastened to the roof of the Escort. The baseball-capped driver double-parked and jumped out of the car, a black thermal cover cradled in his arms. He ran past me and dashed into the entrance of the shop.

  I stood on the street for a few minutes with my hands in my overcoat pockets and watched the activity. Outside Rio Loco’s, a shirtsleeved man in his twenties wearing a fraternity cap leaned against the brick facade and vomited at his feet. I walked around him and entered the bar. The place was packed with college kids and neighborhood regulars. Some of the college kids were grouped near the back of the bar, loudly singing “New York, New York,” drowning out the juke. My regular waitress saw me from across the room and fetched me a Bud from the service area near the kitchen. I leaned against the wall and drank it standing up, then placed the empty on the bar with a five spot pinned underneath. Fifteen minutes later I was in bed in my apartment, making plans to visit Pie Shack Number Two early the next day.

  THE SECOND PIE SHACK listed in the yellow pages was located on Sligo Avenue in Silver Spring. I drove up Georgia the following morning, passed under the railroad bridge, and turned left on Sligo. Just beyond a used bookstore and a body garage, I parked my Dart in front of the address written in my notes.

  The Pie Shack was there, but it was closed, with black bars on the front window and a red fire sticker attached to the door. One block down, near the corner of Sligo and Fenton, stood the Olde World carryout. I grabbed my price books off the seat beside me and climbed out of my Dart.

  The wind blew my knit tie back over my shoulder as I walked. I smoothed it down when I reached the glass door of the Olde World, and stepped inside. The layout was the same as in Adams-Morgan—a small waiting area, two or three tables with red vinyl chairs, and a Formica counter.

  A thin, young dark-skinned man in his early twenties sat on a stool behind the counter, reading what looked to be a textbook. The man had sharply defined cheekbones and a small, pinched nose. Some Caribbean music played softly from a trebly speaker in the kitchen.

  At my entrance the young man stood and closed the book. I put my own book on the counter and smiled.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I hope so,” I said in a chipper tone.

  “What can I get you?”

  I placed a business card in front of him. The business card was from Variety Foods, and the name on it was Ron Wilson. “Ron Wilson,” I said, still smiling as I shook his hand. “Variety Foods. And you are?”

  “My name’s Elliot,” he said with an island lilt, putting a palm up in front of my face in a halting gesture. “Before you get into your pitch, man, let me tell you that you’re talking to the wrong guy.”

  “Who should I be talking to?”

  “The main office is out of our store in Northwest. They do all the buying from there.”

  “Write that address down for me, will you?” I handed him my pen and a torn piece of paper out of the notebook. While he wrote it, I said, “What happened to the Pie Shack, down the street? I was supposed to make a call on them today.”

  Elliot passed me the notepaper. “You got some old information, man. The Pie Shack’s been closed for a long time, since right before we opened. Electrical fire is what I heard.”

  “Who do I talk to in your main office?”

  “Guy named Francis. Frank. Runs the operation.”

  “Thanks,” I said as I shook his hand once again. “By the way”—I nodded toward the kitchen—“who are we listening to?”

  “The Mighty Sparrow, man.” Elliot smiled. “The Sparrow rocks.”

  “He do
es. Thanks again.” I walked toward the door.

  “Hey,” Elliot said from behind my back. “Don’t work so hard, man—it’s New Year’s Eve.”

  I waved back at him and walked out onto the sidewalk. Back in my Dart, I cracked a window and lit a smoke. Across from the pizza shop, two Ford Escorts sat parked, signs strung to their roofs. I studied the delivery cars. The orange-and-red lettering of the signs’ logos matched the orange-and-red logo on the Olde World’s facade.

  James Thomas’s voice filled my head: “I want you to know I didn’t kill that boy…. That boy sure didn’t deserve to die…. The man from the orange and the red…”

  The orange and the red.

  I pitched my cigarette out the window and spit smoke as I retrieved the address that Elliot had written out for the Olde World’s office. Then I checked it against the address of the third Pie Shack. By then it was an exercise. I knew that they would be on the same block, and I knew without question that the last Pie Shack would be empty, burnt, and abandoned.

  I pumped the gas once and turned the ignition key. Six cylinders fired and I pulled away from the curb.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  THE OLDE WORLD headquarters stood in the street-level space of an office building at the southeastern corner of Twenty-first and M. I parked my Dart in the lot behind a movie theater and restaurant at Twenty-third and slid the white-shirted attendant a couple of bucks for the privilege. At the restaurant’s back door a Latino busboy sat on a black railing, smoking a joint. He took a hit, held it in, and followed my path with his gaze as I crossed the lot.

  I walked east on M Street. Downtown had begun to empty out for the holiday. An early rush hour thickened the streets, leaving few pedestrians afoot. Underdressed homeless men shared the sidewalks with blue-blooded attorneys in plain charcoal suits and with women dressed unimaginatively and mannishly in their pursuit of success. The West End balanced poverty and ambition, granite and spit, money as new as the morning paper and glass-eyed hopelessness older than slavery.