Nick's Trip

by George Pelecanos

  In the three days that followed, an article ran daily on the front page of the Post’s Metro section, detailing the violent events that transpired in the house near Fort Totten Park. Every day that week, when I arrived for my shift at the Spot, a newspaper was left for me by Darnell, folded behind the register to the story’s page.

  Darnell had not spoken one word on the ride back that night, had never mentioned the name Frank Martin, and he would never speak about any of it again. With Boyle it was the same, though he could not enjoy Darnell’s anonymity. Boyle’s daily entrance at the Spot invariably created a nervous flurry of whispers from the regulars. The papers had made him out to be the city’s premier badass, a Wyatt Earp–style lawman in a town whose initials had come to stand for Dodge City. No one took a stool next to Boyle at the bar again.

  By the time of the last article, some basic facts had been embedded in the public’s mind: Two detectives, Boyle and Goloria, had gone into a house without backup and had attempted to arrest a group of low-level bookmakers headed by a man named Bonanno. After the gun battle, in which Bonanno, his cohorts, and Goloria were killed, Boyle came upon evidence, through the notes of a young reporter killed months earlier, linking the group to a series of arsons, which in turn connected them to the reporter’s own murder. The murderer turned out to be a cop killer named Solanis, wanted in several states by the FBI.

  As for Goloria, he had died a hero, and he was given a hero’s burial, with separate features on his career in the Post and on the local TV news. His family was the recipient of a full pension, along with several remunerative gifts from local police associations and booster clubs. In one of the pictures that ran in the newspaper, Goloria’s wife and children stood graveside, the veiled wife holding a handkerchief to her grimacing face. Behind her in the picture, posture-straight and stone-faced, her badge clipped to her breast pocket, stood a stoic Detective Wallace.

  A CARD ARRIVED AT my apartment a few days later. The envelope was postmarked D.C., without a return address, and the card was plain white. Inside the card was a short note, in handwriting I didn’t recognize. The note read, “Nice work, Stefanos. And thanks.” It was signed, “A Fan.”

  I threw away the newspaper clippings on the case shortly thereafter and kept the card.

  A COUPLE OF WEEKS passed. February announced itself with a sunny, seventy-degree day. Two days after that a front traveled down from Canada and dropped a foot of snow on the area, and the cold air that hovered above for the next week kept the snow in place. Temperatures inched back up into the forties, and after another week the snow was gone.

  On one of those dull gray days in late February, as I was sifting through the mail at the Spot, I opened an envelope addressed to me from Billy Goodrich. Inside the envelope a check had been made out in my name for services rendered.

  The bar was slow that day, and it gave me time to sit next to the register and consider the check. As I did, I looked into the bar mirror, stared at my reflection between the bottles of Captain Morgan’s and Bacardi Dark, and I thought about the night that Billy Goodrich had walked into the Spot, and how I had been staring into that same mirror, between those very bottles, that night.

  The moment gave me the feeling that there was something dangling, something left to do. I stared harder, and my eyes began to burn from it, and I heard someone ordering a drink from far away, but now I wasn’t listening.

  I turned the bar phone toward me and punched Billy’s number into the grid.

  “Hello.”

  “Billy, it’s Nick.”

  Billy paused. “Nick, how you doin’?”

  “Good.”

  “You get my check? I sent it—”

  “I got it.”

  “It’s okay, isn’t it?”

  “It’s fine.”

  Billy cleared his throat. “What’s up, Nick?”

  “We got some unfinished business, Billy.”

  There was another pause, longer this time. I listened to the sounds of the Spot. “I’ve been waiting for your call,” he said.

  I said, “It’s time we settled up.”

  “That’s what I want too.”

  “Where and when?”

  Billy thought things over. “Down at April’s property, at Cobb Island. That’s where it is, right?”

  “That’s right, Billy. That’s where it is.”

  “You working tomorrow?”

  “I’m off.”

  “I’ll pick you up, then, at your place. About eleven?”

  “Eleven’s fine.”

  “See you at eleven.”

  “All right.”

  I hung the receiver in its cradle, waited for a dial tone, and phoned Hendricks at the station in La Plata. When he told me what I needed to know, I said good-bye, and stood there for a long while, running my finger along the thin scar on my cheek, a permanent reminder of the bungalow on Gallatin Street.

  I went to the men’s room to wash my face. When I was done I stood outside the bathroom door, rubbing my hands dry on the blue rag that hung on the side of my jeans. I walked back into the bar and finished off the remainder of my shift.

  THIRTY-ONE

  BILLY’S WHITE MAXIMA pulled up in front of my apartment the next morning at eleven sharp. On the way out the door I scratched the soft area behind my cat’s gnarled ear, felt her head push into my hand, and watched her eye slowly shut. I left her outside on the stoop with a dish of salmon mixed with dry meal and locked the door behind me.

  The sun that day was weak, high above an unbroken sheet of gray clouds, and I zipped my jacket to the neck. I walked to the Maxima and opened the passenger door, sliding onto the leather seat. Billy offered his hand, and I shook it.

  “Where’s Maybelle?”

  “I took her back to the pound,” Billy said. “I’m not a dog lover to begin with, you know that. Anyway, she was never mine.”

  Billy wore his logoed royal blue jacket with blue jeans and Timberland boots. His hair was long now, blond and disheveled, almost exactly as it had been fifteen years earlier. But there was a stretched quality to his smooth face, a pained tightness around his azure eyes.

  “Let’s stop for some coffee, Billy, on the way out.”

  “Sure,” Billy said, looking me over. “You can take that jacket off, man. I’ve got this heat workin’ pretty good.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Let’s get going.”

  We drove down North Capitol, cutting east around Union Station, following Pennsylvania to Branch Avenue, past car dealership row at the commercial hub of Marlow Heights, then down Route 5 through the ruin that was Waldorf. The road flattened as 5 became 301, the strip malls and antique dealers breaking the brown, leafless countryside.

  Billy pulled over in La Plata for a couple of burgers, and a few miles farther on we stopped again at the unmarked pool hall that advertised on/off sale. I bought a pint of Jim Beam from the woman with the raspberry birthmark and made a phone call from inside the bar and then returned to the Maxima. Billy gunned it back onto 301, and we continued south.

  At 257 Billy turned left across the highway, passing the hardware-and-bait store with the John Deere sign in the window. We stayed on the highway this time, Billy keeping the Maxima at sixty-five. He hadn’t spoken much on the ride down, though the silence was not uncomfortable; there was little between us left to damage. I pulled the pint of Jim Beam from my jacket, cracked the seal, and had a taste. I offered the same to Billy.

  “Too early,” Billy said.

  “Suit yourself.” I looked out the window at a row of evergreens blurred against a brown stretch of tobacco land and pasture. I had another drink and tightened the white cap onto the neck of the bottle.

  Billy downshifted at the gravel road that marked the entrance to April Goodrich’s property and turned left. We took the road into the woods and out through the open field, toward the creek. Billy coasted and came to a stop beneath the hickory tree that stood next to the trailer.

  “We can walk from here,�
�� he said.

  “Walk where?”

  “Into the woods, right?”

  I looked out toward the creek. “Whatever you want, Billy.”

  Billy said, “Wait here. I’ll be right out.”

  Billy got out of the car and went to the door of the trailer, where he used his key to enter. I watched him step inside, and after a while I got out of the Maxima and closed the passenger door.

  I stood with my hands in my jacket, facing the creek. A circle had opened in the sheet of clouds, and a tubular shaft of sunlight shot through the circle, illuminating a section of the creek. Some barn swallows darted through the light, just off the dock. The clouds closed and the light was wiped away. I heard the trailer door shut, and I turned.

  Billy stepped across the concrete patio, the old Remington shotgun from the trailer cradled in his arms. He stopped, reached into his pocket, and withdrew two shells. He shook the shells next to his ear, heard the rattle of buckshot, and thumbed the shells into the shotgun’s broken breach.

  “We going hunting, Billy?”

  “No,” Billy said. “Guy got killed on this property, two years back, in those woods. Fuckin’ rednecks get drunk, shoot at anything. I don’t walk back in there without this shotgun, not anymore.” He nodded toward the line of trees, three hundred yards west across the field. “We’ll go in over there.”

  “I’m with you. Let’s go.”

  We walked over the winter wheat ground cover, through pockets of mud spotted in the hard earth. The sun broke through again and retreated. In the open field the wind was damp and cold, and it blew Billy’s hair back on his scalp.

  At the end of the field we cut right and walked along the tree line, passing a matted deer carcass in a ditch at the edge of the woods. Fifty yards later there was a break in the brush and trees, and we took it. I looked behind to get my bearings; the trailer, the hickory tree, and the car sat dwarfed on the open land, very far away.

  The trail narrowed and dipped, and ended at a thin stream that ran down toward the creek. We followed the stream northwest, deeper in the woods, to a marshy area, where tadpoles swam through leaves beneath the last of the winter’s ice, and then on through a section of high grass that had been flattened by sleeping deer. After that the ground became a bed of soft needles, and we were in a forest of oak and tall pine, the thickness of the pine trees broken by the occasional holly that grew underneath. We walked through the forest for nearly a mile, until it seemed as if we were deep inside of it, and we reached a small clearing near another marsh. Billy said then that we should stop, and I had a seat on the trunk of a fallen oak that had begun to rot before the freeze.

  I pulled the bottle from my jacket and took a slug of warm bourbon. I swallowed it, breathed deeply, and smelled the air. “Where to now?” I said.

  Billy said, “You tell me.” He was standing in front of me, fifteen feet away, his legs wide, his boots planted in the damp leaves and pine needles, the shotgun across his arms. “You said it was down here.”

  “It?”

  He frowned. “Don’t fuck with me, Greek. Not today. I lost my wife because of some cockeyed scheme that went all wrong. I can’t bring her back. But I have to be real now.” Billy looked a little past my eyes. “If I let this go, then it was for nothing. I’m talking about the money, Nick. It’s out here in these woods, isn’t it?”

  “Who told you that? Tommy Crane?”

  Billy’s face became tight with anger. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I stood and slid the pint into my side pocket, unzipping my jacket halfway down. A flock of crows glided in over the trees and landed in the clearing. “Settle down, Billy. We’ll get back to that. You want to talk about the money, fine. Let’s get that out of the way.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You were right about one thing. I found the suitcase in Crane’s root cellar, the day Hendricks took him out.”

  Billy squinted. “Where is it?”

  “I used it,” I said.

  “Used it how?”

  I pushed some hair off my eyes and shifted my weight. “To save your ass, Billy. I met Louis DiGeordano at Hains Point a few weeks ago, and I gave him the money. He owed me a favor, going back a long time ago. I asked that there wouldn’t be any retribution against you, for what you tried to pull on his son. He agreed.”

  Billy’s shoulders hunched and shadows fell beneath his eyes. He rubbed his hand over the barrels of the shotgun. “I didn’t need that kind of help from you,” he said, looking at the ground, moving his head slowly from side to side. “That money was dirty. It didn’t belong to anybody. I didn’t hire you to give that money away.”

  “I know that, Billy. I know exactly what you hired me for.”

  “I hired you to find my wife, and that’s it.”

  “You knew where your wife was,” I said. “You knew it all along. You knew it the night you came to me in the Spot, the night you asked for my help. She was already dead, Billy. She’s buried in these woods right now.”

  “What’s that?” Billy said softly. “You sayin’ I killed my wife?”

  “No. Tommy Crane killed April. You didn’t put the gun to her head. But you were part of it.”

  Billy’s finger curled around the trigger of the shotgun. “You got everything all wrong, Nick.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I should have seen it when I woke up in the trailer. You were down by the creek, washing Maybelle with a brush. She had gone off and spent the night in the woods, and she had found April.” I moved to the side, away from a branch that partially blocked my view of Billy. “April had taken the money and left town—that part of what you told me was true. You knew she’d head right down here and see Crane. I think you phoned Crane and tipped him off about the cash. You probably told him to get it from her, and then there’d be some sort of split between the two of you. But Crane killed April—maybe because she resisted, or maybe just because he wanted to watch her die. When it was over, Crane decided to keep it all himself—he didn’t need you anymore, and he could always use blackmail if you tried to get rough.”

  A forced, sickly smile spread across Billy’s face. “You’re way off,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not. You didn’t hire me to find your wife. You hired me to shake down Crane for the money. You knew I wouldn’t give up on it. You knew it because we were friends, and our being friends meant something.” I looked him over. “You were really slick, Billy. Those photographs you sent me, of April. They weren’t pictures of April at all. It wasn’t much of a risk on your part—I wouldn’t have shown them to anyone who knew her, there wouldn’t have been any need. And April’s jewelry—you planted it in the bathroom of Crane’s cottage while I was with him in the sty. The bathroom was the one room of his house I had told you I’d be in. When I confronted Crane with the ring, he told me that it was a stupid trick. It didn’t hit me at the time, but that’s exactly what it was—a trick you used, with a duplicate ring, to get me back down to Crane’s. If it worked, fine. If it didn’t, and Crane took me out, then there was no loss there either, right, Billy? I’m willing to bet that when the cops dig April up, that ruby ring will still be on her finger.”

  “This is bullshit,” Billy said. “You’ve got no proof of any of this. None.”

  “I’ve got proof. April was killed on Tuesday night—I confirmed it with Hendricks. The date and time of her death were displayed right on the videotape. And Crane was seen with April, earlier that night, at Polanski’s. Crane had two beers in front of him on the bar, and Tuesday’s two-for-one night. But you told me you went drinking with your wife on Tuesday night, at Bernardo O’Reilly’s.”

  “You confirmed it yourself. You went there and—”

  “Shut up, Billy. Shut up and let me finish. The bartender at Bernardo O’Reilly’s said you were with a woman that night who polished off nearly a fifth of rum, all by herself.”

  “That’s right,” Billy said. “Rum was April’s drink. It’s all s
he could keep down.”

  “April was grape-sensitive. That means she could only drink rum that was bottled in Jamaica. The woman you were with in O’Reilly’s was drinking Bacardi Dark.” I spoke slowly. “That’s Puerto Rican rum, Billy.”

  Billy swung the shotgun in my direction. I reached into my jacket and drew the Browning from its holster, locking back the hammer. I pointed the gun at Billy’s chest.

  “Break that Remington,” I said. “Break it and throw the shells to the right. Then toss the shotgun to the left.”

  A watery redness had seeped into Billy’s azure eyes. “Nick, you don’t think—”

  “Do it,” I said, my voice rising. Billy separated the shotgun from the shells and threw them onto the leafy earth. Behind him the crows lifted out of the clearing and flew over the trees.

  “So,” Billy said. “This is how we end it.”

  “That’s right.”

  Billy dug his feet into the leaves and looked up at the tops of the trees, then back at me. “I would have been square with you from the beginning, Nick. That was my intention—to get your help in getting my money back from Crane, with a piece of it going back to you. But from the first minute I hooked up with you, I could see it wasn’t going to be like that.” He stared down at his boots. “The world isn’t all good or all bad, like you think. It’s somewhere in between. The ones who come out of it all right are the ones who pull from both ways.”

  “Skip the bullshit,” I said, my knuckles bloodless on the automatic’s grip. “Our friendship—any friendship—it’s the only thing that sticks. Everything rots, but that’s always supposed to be there. You used it, man. You ruined it.”

  Billy looked me over and shook his head. “You better wake up,” he said. “You think anything I did when I was nineteen means anything to me? You talked about that time in the park when we tripped, when I gave you my shoes. You talked about it like it was important. Shit, Nick, I barely even remember it. That might as well have been two different people that day. It’s got nothing to do with this.”

  “It’s got everything to do with this.”