The Ways of the Dead

by Neely Tucker

  Sly went back to the paper. “You people.”

  There was jazz on the stereo, a sax on the lead, but Sully couldn’t place it and wasn’t going to give Sly the satisfaction. He drained the beer. “So what are we saying about yonder judge and his dearly departed?”

  “That he’s next in line for the Supreme Court.”

  “As long as the Republicans win next November, which is a done deal, you ask me.”

  “Y’all ought to be easier on brother Bill.”

  “Brother Bill ought to stop getting blown by interns.”

  “Look here. Y’all saying that there’s a ‘massive manhunt’ for them three. A federal agent, name withheld here, says so. Police chief sticks to that ‘persons of interest’ bullshit, but says, yeah, it’s on. Got a whole article here about his cases, like you trying to say somebody he sentenced got involved. They’re talking about the Junior Simpson trial last year. That crew he was running over in Trinidad, behind Gallaudet? Judge popped Junior to twenty-five to life. Junior said something at the end of sentencing”—he peered closer at the paper, through his glasses—“‘I’ll see you again.’ That’s what he said to the judge. Lawyer said Junior was talking about an appeal.”

  “What’s he say now?”

  “‘Declines comment.’”

  “I guess the fuck so.”

  “Judge also dealt out life without parole to some dude y’all call a terrorist. From Libya. Made bombs.”

  Sully was putting his dishes in the sink. “This is all busywork, ass covering, you-never-know stuff. Surely we put the token in there.”

  “Them dishes don’t wash themselves, brother.”

  Sully turned back around, took the dishes out of the sink, and put them in the dishwasher.

  “Thank you. I got an ant problem up in here.” Sly went back to the paper and, a moment later, rattled it approvingly. “Token white boy, right here. Well. Italian. Does that count? ‘The rest of Judge Reese’s calendar has mostly been white-collar corruption cases, court records show, but three years ago he presided over a racketeering case involving Joseph Fiori, an alleged member of the New York crime syndicate. Justice Department sources said they were skeptical of Mafia involvement in Sarah Reese’s slaying.’ Shit. That wasn’t hard.”

  “You don’t like the mob for this?”

  “Nobody from a professional organization would pull this. Even Junior knows better. Not that I’m calling his outfit professional.”

  Sully came and looked over his shoulder at the paper.

  The story he and Chris had written anchored the right side of the front page, the traditional spot for the lead news story of the day. The picture dominating the middle of the page was of the crime scene, the yellow police tape across the front of Doyle’s Market, two young white girls weeping and embracing just inside the tape. The headline: “Chief Judge’s Daughter Slain.”

  “Massive Manhunt for Three ‘Persons of Interest’” was the deck head.

  Tony had put the throat slitting in the third graf.

  The related stories inside took an entire page and a half. There was the story Sly had been reading from, the judge’s bio and his recent cases, and another story about Sarah, quoting friends and schoolmates. Christ, Sully thought, they must have been finding the kids on deadline. Hello, Mrs. Wealthy White Lady, may I please talk to your son Brandon? Hey, Brandon, I’m a reporter and I’m sorry to tell you your buddy Sarah is dead, yeah really, it’s terrible, I can’t even imagine what you must be going through, so . . . what was she like in class?

  He went to the coffee table and pulled his shoes out from underneath and sat down to put them on.

  “Should I be looking for them three today?”

  “If you want to waste your time.”

  “Jesus. Okay. So, then, who works with a knife?”

  “People who ain’t got a gun.”

  “We’re behind on this, brother.”

  “I know it.”

  “Then let’s move. You got somebody who can run me down to Stoney’s?”

  “Lionel’s at the end of the block. Tell him to get on back.”

  Sully walked out of the basement door and heard Sly bolt it behind him. He came to the top of the steps, the mist chilling his skin. Down at the corner of Rock Creek Church and Warder he saw Sly’s 1982 Camaro, black over gold. When he got within thirty feet of it, Lionel materialized, coming out of the corner market, head down, face obscured by a White Sox hat. The car alarm beep-beeped and Sully opened the door and sat down, heavy, in the passenger seat.

  Lionel talked like he had to pay by the word, and Sully wasn’t in the mood this morning himself.

  They passed a couple of miles in silence, the easy rhythm of Saturday morning traffic going by, making good time.

  “This’s going to be some shit,” Lionel said finally.

  “He seems pissed,” Sully agreed.

  “When he’s like that? Nothing good happens.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  Lionel pulled into the narrow street and stopped in front of Stoney’s. The bike, a 1993 Ducati 916, sat alone, rear tire at the curb. He’d bought it, cash, through some highly creative expense reports during the war. It was known as filing for overtime.

  There had been a million ways to do it, the easiest of which was telling your employer that the bureau car in Sarajevo had been stolen, backed up with a police report. In reality, Sully and half the foreign press corps had kicked $500 per report to a compliant officer, who would complete the form—amazing, the bureaucracy that kept functioning—and then you sold your car, at an exorbitant price, through your interpreter (another $500 tip) to an aid agency or the UN or the highest bidder. You’d pocket $18,000 to $25,000 and change.

  When he straddled the bike and cranked it, the engine rumbled into life. The seat was still soaking wet and cold, a clammy hand grasping his crotch. He let out on the clutch, twisted the throttle, leaned over the gas tank, and lifted both feet off the ground. The rear wheel spun on the wet pavement and found traction, the bitch hitting seventy before the first light.

  • • •

  His place was small, narrow, a brick kiln in the summer, a 107-year-old row house on Capitol Hill, on Sixth Street. It was spare and decorated with pictures and carpets and paintings and things from his overseas postings. Persian rugs he’d bought in Beirut and a teak dining room table that had been made from railroad sleeper cars in what had been Rhodesia. The dishes and plates all came from a tiny ceramic studio in Warsaw. He’d bought the entire set on a freezing winter morning just after the fall of the Wall in Berlin. He’d thought, at the time, it might help domesticate him. There were post-impressionistic paintings from the Netherlands in a narrow hallway, and two framed pieces of mud cloth he’d bought at a market in Nigeria.

  Nadia’s photograph, a portrait he’d taken of her on a snowy morning in Sarajevo, was the only thing that passed for a picture of family or a friend. The black hair, long and only partly pulled back out of her eyes, no makeup, her prominent nose, the full lips. She was wearing jeans and one of his Chart Room T-shirts, from the bar where he’d worked in New Orleans. He had been leaving Sarajevo that morning for a reporting trek in the countryside and she’d walked him down the steps from her third-floor flat. She’d tugged on the clothes after their hurried predawn roll in the hay, he scrambling to meet the other reporters at the Holiday Inn before they left, and when the door swung open she had stepped into the snow and crossed her arms, shivering. When he’d brought the camera up, she’d playfully put her index finger to her pursed lips, making the sign to hush, don’t tell, don’t let anyone know . . . It was in a teak frame beneath the lamp by the couch.

  This morning, he grabbed a Corona from the fridge, stripped off, got in the shower, and thought of what to tell his bosses he was doing today—particularly before they called him with some bullshit assignm
ent. The water beating down on his back, his skull, he decided that he believed Sly that the three suspects were bogus, and he did not want to get sucked into that if it was going to be a dead end later on. He’d let Chris and Jamie run with that. The long money? That was on nailing the actual killer. For that, he was going to need street intel, and for that, he needed to be hoofing it around Princeton Place, keeping Sly close, kicking over rocks, looking for a man with a knife. So until you had that, stall.

  He got out of the shower and called R.J. at home. “I’m going to write you a moody neighborhood profile,” Sully said. “Swing sets in the rain, poverty, meanness.”

  “Bukowski,” R.J. said, not missing a beat. “Pure Bukowski.” Sully pictured R.J. in his living room, coffee in hand, up since dawn and his morning hike through Rock Creek Park already finished. He could hear Elwood, his partner for a quarter century, noodling on their baby grand, but he couldn’t place the tune. “I love it,” he continued, after a sip on the coffee. “But don’t you want in on the manhunt?”

  “Nah,” Sully said, going with Sly’s word on the three suspects being a dead end, but not coughing that up just yet. He’d take the high road. “Not my turf. Don’t like bigfooting.”

  “We may pull you into it later. But we could use the neighborhood scene for atmosphere. Think 1-A here. We’ve got to own this one. For tomorrow, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll let the desk and photo know. Go, boy, go.”

  Sully wolfed down a turkey and cheese sandwich standing up in the kitchen, in front of the sink, looking out at his postage stamp of a backyard. The cherry tree—he’d planted it when he bought the place, before his first foreign posting—was shimmering in the mist, leaves wet and dripping, spreading over the lawn. Three weeks every spring, it was a pink cloud. He went to the bedroom and pulled a light sweater over his head and stepped into black slip-on shoes. He got a slender backpack and put a notebook, a camera, a recorder, and a couple of pens inside. There was a moment of hesitation; then he went to the closet, the top shelf, a small box. He pulled out the Tokarev M57, the Zastava, ancient but accurate, that the commander had given him after the night on the mountain, him blown to shit. He checked the clip, then got his backup cycle jacket, the one for bad weather, and tucked the pistol into the right interior pocket. Because if he’d had a pistol when that night started instead of when it ended he wouldn’t look or walk like he did now.

  The bike took him up Massachusetts Avenue to North Capitol, then left on the four-lane expanse of Irving Street NW, and he was back in the Park View neighborhood. The row houses sprang up on each side of the road, their porches coming to within a few feet of the sidewalks, their rusting iron gates and railings hard on the edge of the concrete.

  He parked the bike on the top half of Princeton Place, looking at the row of weathered houses, picking one in the middle of the block. When he got to the front door, he pressed the doorbell, looking down, hands clasped in front of him, notebook tucked under an arm, trying to look as non-threatening as possible. An elderly, diminutive black woman opened the door a crack. She was wearing a pink house robe and did not take the business card he held out.

  “Hi, ma’am, I’m sorry to disturb you this early, but my name is Sully Carter and I’m a reporter for the paper? I’m working on a story about this incident down to Doyle’s last night? I was—”

  The woman blinked, her brown eyes steady, and gently closed the door in his face.

  eight

  You never stopped moving. That was the thing. You just kept pushing, driving, asking, sticking your nose in people’s faces, taking the shit, the insults, fighting back the depression and the sense of hopelessness and then, out of the void, sometimes somebody told you something.

  The basketball court at the rec center, where the three suspects had been playing the night before, was roped off with police tape, the afternoon game moving to an adjacent alley, the netless hoop nailed to a telephone pole. He was three steps in the alley and the players were taunting him.

  “Hey, paleface, the fuck you doin’?”

  “’less you got a warrant, keep walking, bitch.”

  “Whyn’t you walk right?”

  He went a block up. There were two houses, crack squats, a small cluster of zombies out front, guys with hands in their pockets, eyeing him, seeing if he was trolling for a dime bag, a nickel rock . . . A woman sitting on the front step of an abandoned house—flabby, ashy knees, bloodshot eyes—offered to blow him for twenty bucks. When he turned to say something to that, she said, “Ah, you know the price, yeah? Gimme ten.”

  Roll-down steel gates shuttered the entrance to the Big Apple. The gates were at half-staff at Doyle’s, lab techs ducking their way in and out. He remembered that Doyle lived somewhere near the store but he didn’t have an address. Directory assistance said there was no such person listed. He should have thought to have news research run property records last night.

  The strip joint up the block was the Show Bar. It hadn’t changed since he’d stopped in while working on the Lana Escobar story. Six customers, one woman on the pole, a bartender with a light thumb, a queasy reddish light to the interior. Les Samuels, the manager in the jumbled office in the back, not telling him anything he didn’t already know.

  By three in the afternoon, Sully had knocked on fifteen doors, talked to half a dozen store owners, heard nothing about the three suspects, and was getting the distinct idea that nobody in or around Princeton Place gave a good goddamn about Sarah Emily Reese.

  A beer delivery man got out of a truck in front of the Hunger Stopper, the vehicle burping exhaust from the tailpipe. Sully, half jogging up the street now, deadline looming, flagged him down with an “Excuse me.” Getting a dolly out of the back, the man eyed Sully, the grayness of the day reflected in his expression.

  “Not to be any sort of way about it,” he said when Sully said what he was doing and why, “but you a little late to the party, aren’t you, brother?” He broke eye contact to look at the scars, then back at Sully directly. “Park View’s been beat to shit for years. That Hispanic girl, she got killed last year. Noel went missing? I didn’t read nothing ’bout that in the newspaper.”

  He kept going, white girl gets it, lookit the TV cameras, white girl gets it, lookit the papers . . . But the name blossomed over Sully—Noel. Noel Pittman. That was the incident he’d been trying to remember the night before. Howard student, party girl. Disappeared after leaving a club last year. She’d been living on Princeton Place.

  Sully leaned back on his good leg, letting the man talk but working his way into the monologue. “Lana, Lana, I remember Lana,” he finally elbowed in. “I wrote a little something on her. But you’re right, it wasn’t much. Back of Metro.” A shrug. “Her dad was a federal judge, I imagine we would have done more.”

  “Daddy was a federal judge,” the man said, “it would have gotten solved.”

  Sully smiled. “Sounds like you knew the other one? Noel?”

  “Don’t I wish. To say hello. You’d see her at the clubs. She was one of the dancers out at Halo, on the elevated platforms? Then one day I’m making the rounds and see her face on a ‘Missing’ poster.”

  “And that was it? She was just gone? No loco boyfriend?”

  The man leaned on the dolly, reaching a hand out, shaking it, as if flicking water from his fingertips. “You heard neighborhood talk, flapping gums.” He stepped inside the truck and opened the glove compartment. He sifted through a stack of papers, then unfolded a sheet, eleven by fourteen, that had holes in the top and bottom where it had once been stapled to a telephone pole.

  The picture showed a young woman smiling at the camera, brown eyes, brown skin, radiant complexion. Bold-faced lettering spelled out her name at the top, above the picture. Below, it read, “Last seen—April 24, 1998.” There was a phone number underneath.

  “Mind if I hang on to this?” Sul
ly asked. “I’m sorry, I didn’t ask your name.” He leaned forward to shake his hand. White guys in this town, you didn’t really do this with, lean forward, shake, make the eye contact. Black men, you damn well better.

  “Rodney,” the man said, taking his hand in a solid grip. “Rodney Wilson. Grew up over on Warder. Keep the poster, put her name out there, hunh?” The man looked at him, taunting: “Do a little something for the block, other than just feed off it?”

  Sully nodded, letting it slide. A couple of television crews were doing stand-ups in front of Doyle’s Market. The rain had started misting again. He pulled out his cell and called the number at the bottom of the Pittman flyer. A recorded woman’s voice said to leave a message if the caller had information about Noel, no questions asked. There was a beep and Sully explained himself and asked for a call back.

  The watch on his wrist read 4:17.

  • • •

  The sixth floor of the newsroom was vast and unpopulated, nobody around on a Saturday afternoon except the sports staff, televisions hanging from the ceiling, ablaze with college games.

  He walked through the low cubicles spread across the expanse of the room, checking to see if the top staff were in their glass offices on the south wall. Edward Winters was in his executive editor’s office—always always—but Sully didn’t see anyone else. In the main newsroom, a handful of weekend editors were seeing the Sunday edition into print. Over on National, there were a hardful of reporters. It was quiet and most of the overhead fluorescents were dark.

  His desk was tucked into the far left corner, around a small nook, in the no-man’s-land between Investigative and Metro. Chris had draped his jacket over the chair and set his helmet on the desk. There was a spent brass mortar shell, carved in intricate patterns, that he had bought from refugees in Bosnia. There were a dozen or so prayer beads he’d collected, more as tourist keepsakes than religious talismans, draped over it, along with purple and yellow and green Mardi Gras beads.