The Ways of the Dead

by Neely Tucker

  “I’m sure you’ll tell me about it tomorrow,” he said, and clicked off the phone.

  A bartender had materialized from the back room, walking the length of the bar, turning the sound down on the television, sliding around Dmitri in the narrow space, her shoulder-length brown hair swinging as she did so. She walked up to Sully and put one hand, then two, on the bar between them. She took his whiskey glass and took a pull of the Sazerac.

  “Dusty,” he said, “as I goddamn live and breathe.”

  twelve

  She was in the shower, talking behind the curtain, the door to the bathroom closed, the mirrors steamed over. He had already gotten out of the shower and was sitting on the closed toilet seat, a towel wrapped around his waist. Two bourbons, ice melting in the glasses, were sitting on the top of the toilet tank.

  “So you’re saying, if I’m following this, the person who killed the judge’s kid is still out there? And Sly rigged it that way?”

  “More or less.” He liked her being in the shower. He liked listening to her voice and the water and the sound of the spray hitting the soft plastic of the curtain. It wasn’t often there was a voice in the house besides his, and hers, in its softer inflections and higher pitches, in its laughter and warmth, made the place seem better than it was.

  “So why? Why would he do that?”

  “Needed the cops off the street, or so he says. He knew where the suspects were, so he threw ’em to the cops.”

  “Sounds like a setup.”

  He was examining his toenails and wondered where the clippers were. “That’s what I just said.”

  “No. I mean to cover his own tracks.”

  “His tracks? You’re saying Sly Hastings killed David Reese’s daughter?”

  The shower water turned off. She pulled the curtain back and reached for her drink. She took a long draw on it, then set it back down and reached for a towel.

  “How should I know? He had time and opportunity, didn’t he? Did you ask him where he was? All that’s missing,” she said, stepping out of the shower, standing in front of him, her breasts at the height of his eyes, smiling playfully down at him, “is motive. Which you tell me no one ever really knows.”

  He uncrossed his legs and swept the towel to the side, trying to be, what was the word, present. There was him, a chasm, and then everyone else. When that had come to be, he could no longer say, but he had first noticed it after Nadia’s death. Then, after the shell that had blown him up, it had become a yawning gulf, a canyon, a thing so broad that the other side was out of sight. The assumption he’d made was that this was the new normal and it would never change. But hope was a stubborn thing, and in the eight or nine months he’d been dating Dusty (sort of steadily), there had been times like this when he could feel it closing—the gap. When he was a child, his father had taught him to swim in the Mississippi and told him classes were over when he finally swam from side to side, Louisiana to Mississippi, more than a mile, the old man beside him in a johnboat with an outboard and a shotgun for the cottonmouths. Since then, Sully tended to believe that vast distances could be crossed if you only had the grit for it.

  Dusty stepped forward and straddled his lap, sitting across him. He put his hands around her back, at the curve of her buttocks, and pulled her farther up on him. She leaned her head back, leaning into his grip, and used the towel to dry her hair. Then she leaned forward, draping the towel around her shoulders. She gently pressed her breasts into his face, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. “I missed you, I think,” she whispered into the top of his head.

  He nodded, turning his head sideways, his eyes closed. She was warm, the space between her legs and the back of her thighs still damp. The shower dripped.

  “I don’t see the percentage in Sly killing the kid,” he said. “Very high risk, for what reward? He’s got no beef with Reese.”

  “Can we talk about something else?”

  “Not right now.”

  “Why does it matter so much?” Her hands in his hair.

  “Because it’s my job.”

  “You’re off the clock.”

  “Because it’s me.”

  She held him, swaying the tiniest bit.

  “Okay,” she said, settling her shoulders. She was trying to work him through it, he could tell. “So—so somebody who does have a beef with the judge hired him? He’s setting up the guys in the store to take the fall for him?”

  “Well, one, people don’t hire Sly Hastings. He hires people. And, two, if he’s setting them up to take a fall, why tell me they didn’t do it? I don’t see the angle. He was mad Friday night. Somebody did something on his turf he didn’t want done, and he was pissed.”

  “So the real killer is out there walking around?”

  “I think so. I think Sly wants to find out who it is before the police do. I think he’s using me to help him do that.”

  “’Cause he’s going to wipe them out himself? He wants you to help him figure out who to get rid of?”

  “Not if I can help it. And I’d rather not think of it that way.”

  She coughed, stifling a laugh, he thought. Then she said, “Is this supposed to be foreplay?”

  He pulled his head back and smiled up at her, the spell the case had over him broken. “You Miami girls. So impatient.”

  “Fort Lauderdale, you moron,” she said lightly. “It’s not the same place. Well? Is it?”

  “Only if it’s working.”

  “You got to be kidding.”

  She stood up, pulling the towel around her body. She started out of the room. “Bring that massage oil, mister. You owe me for running out the other night. And bring my drink, too.”

  “You think you’re giving orders?”

  “Every day,” she said, voice disappearing down the hall to the bedroom.

  He turned out the light and got the drinks. He took three steps before he remembered the oil. “You always talk that smack,” he said, “until I tie you up.”

  He heard her getting in the bed in the darkness, saw her lying across the sheets in the slats of light coming in from the streetlights. She lay on her stomach, hair falling across her shoulders, her olive skin, her long, slender legs. She crossed her arms in front of her and lay her head across them.

  “Louisiana boys,” she said, “talk too much.”

  thirteen

  Dusty stirred. The black silk band Sully had used as a blindfold was pulled down around her neck. He slipped out of bed, looking at the clock—Christ, what was with the early goddamned phone calls?—and picked up the cell before it could buzz again. He didn’t recognize the number. He walked out in the hallway and down the steps, grabbing a pair of basketball shorts as he went.

  “This better be spectacular,” he said into the phone.

  “Good morning to you, sunshine, and yes, it is.”

  “John? Lieutenant Parker? Is that you? What number is this?”

  “Borrowed a line. Look. You need to get your skinny ass up to Princeton Place. And hey, nice to see you on the front page. I didn’t think you actually worked there anymore.”

  “Princeton Place? Can’t a man have company over every now and then without this shit?”

  “It’s a free country for white people, Sully. Stay in bed and bonk like a bunny rabbit, you want. I’d get my ass to Princeton Place, but that’s just me.”

  “What am I going to see there?”

  “Me, brother.”

  The line disconnected.

  He swore, standing there shirtless, thinking about it. Then he went back upstairs and found jeans and a shirt. He tiptoed to the bed, leaned over, and kissed Dusty between her shoulder blades. He left his mouth there. The taste of her skin was like peaches, that soft little down brushing against his lips.

  “Got to go. Something about this Reese thing.”

  “Umm
-hmm.”

  “Can you stay?”

  “Nnnhh. Work in Baltimore tonight.” She was half asleep.

  “I’ll call.”

  “Mmmm.”

  He walked out to the bike, parked on the street, and turned to look at the upstairs window, the smell of her still on him. It was open, the curtain twisting, flitting over the frame, and Dusty asleep a few feet away, unseen in the shadows.

  • • •

  The yellow police tape that had been blocking off the street during the Sarah Reese investigation was back, but this time one light pole farther up the block. Another squad car was parked diagonally across the street, in almost exactly the same spot as before. There were other squad cars down the street. Sully approached an unmarked car with the door open. A hand emerged from the window, waving him closer.

  He limped down the middle of the street, ducking under the yellow tape.

  “You showed,” John Parker said, sunglasses propped on his shaved head. He was wearing a light brown suit, a dark brown tie over a starched white shirt, sitting in the front seat.

  “You promised spectacular.”

  “I did. And I’ll deliver. Right after you tell me how you learned about that little takedown yesterday.” He got out of the car, his suit coat falling just so, the broad tie knotted perfectly at the neck. Sully always meant to ask him how he got the knot like that.

  “Come on, man.”

  “Was it from us?”

  “What, you worried I’m dating someone else?”

  “Fun is fun and leaks are leaks, Sully, but that was in a different category. I’m trying to get control of this group, the squad. You know how bad we are right now? And that leak, brother, was high level.”

  “You know I can’t say.”

  “Was it from us?”

  Sully paused, let out a breath for the theater of it. “No.”

  “Alright,” John nodding, eyeing him, seeing if he believed it. “Alright, then. I’ll settle for it. I find out different, I’m not going to be amused, at you or your snitch. But you watch your ass, you hear? This is big-boy shit.”

  “Noted. Hey. You got any guys working out of a blue Olds? Beefy white boys, plainclothes?”

  “Not out of our shop. Somebody bothering you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Also,” John said, touching his fingertips to his temples, bringing them back down, “before I forget. The beach house. Already booked for Christmas and New Year’s.”

  “Super Bowl?”

  “I can check. Mrs. Parker handles all that. Summer is still mostly open.”

  “Never liked the beach in the summer. Winter is terrific. It’s deserted.” He nodded and lifted his chin to point farther down the street at the squad cars. Officers and lab techs were walking out of the house at the end of the block. “So what’s the attraction?”

  John let out a sigh. “Noel Pittman. What’s left of her, anyhow.”

  Sully coughed, the late night, the whiskey. It wasn’t what he was expecting.

  “The girl from Howard?”

  “Found her late yesterday, ID’d her this morning through the dentals. She was in the basement. It’s packed dirt with a wood floorboard over it, like big plywood panels with carpet over them? She was in this tight little space down there, covered up with a lot of trash and junk.”

  “You guys had a cadaver dog in there?”

  John blew out his lips in a raspberry, leaning on the car door. Twenty-three years on the force, started on the street, it was all white guys running Homicide, the big cases, and now here he was, the lieutenant, trying to get the homicide unit off its dysfunctional ass, kicking the shit with a reporter on a Monday morning, the rotting body his problem now.

  “Fat fucking chance. Uniform just out the academy is doing a recanvass, seeing if somebody remembers something they forgot the other night about Sarah Reese. Him and a partner. Mr. Gung Ho goes to the abandoned house, 788, knocks, and, instead of saying it’s just empty, does a walk-through. Goes down to the basement. Sees a pile of old chairs, some lumber, stacked up odd in the middle of the floor. Pokes around, sees bones.”

  “Goddamn.”

  “Goddamn.”

  “That was impressive.”

  “I may make him chief of detectives.”

  “Any connection to Sarah Reese?”

  “Just the geography, apparently. Pittman lived right up there. That house, 742, at the end of the block.”

  “So who owns this place?”

  “The bank. Foreclosed on two years ago, some guy out of Delaware buying houses, trying to flip them.”

  “What about—?” He was going to ask about Lana Escobar getting it on the baseball field, but skipped it. “What about—where—I mean, Pittman’s body’s been there the whole time?”

  “I’d suppose but I don’t know.”

  “Didn’t, ah, didn’t you guys search the hood after she went missing?”

  “Some, it turns out, but not much. She was last seen pulling out of the club, not back here. We never found her car. And look, hey—this was a missing persons case, okay, not homicide. We have a hard enough time with our own.”

  “Wouldn’t there have been a smell, though?”

  “You may have noticed the crack squats on this block? The ones everybody’s scattered from this morning?”

  “I have.”

  “They all sorta smell.”

  “Jesus H.”

  “Yeah. You ever see the pictures of Pittman?”

  “Nah. I mean, yeah, the one on the flier.”

  “No, I mean the pictures. Girl was a model. Naughty model. Posed nude. They got around the department when she went missing. She’d done a test shoot, I think it was for Playboy. Girl-on-girl stuff.”

  “I’m just a polite boy from a small town on the big river, John.”

  “You won’t be after you see these.”

  “Could you assist in a viewing of same?”

  “Probably.”

  Sully thought for a minute, the beer truck guy, Rodney Wilson, the bitterness, the black and brown girls, no word in the papers.

  “I’m gonna write about this one, I think, Lieutenant Parker. You show me the naughty pictures? It’ll count as research.” He looked over the hood of the car, down toward the row house on the left side of the street, with squad cars out front and two officers standing on the front porch. “Anybody down there to talk to?”

  John half turned in his seat, then turned back to Sully. “Just the techs scraping the place. Chief came and went. Mayor, too, since there was a TV camera.”

  “This broke this morning?”

  “While you were at your love-in. Saw your colleague up here earlier. Who was it, that fat one?”

  “Chris. I’m surprised the desk didn’t—” And he thought of his call with Melissa the night before. She’d just paid him back. Well well well. This was getting better by the goddamned hour.

  fourteen

  Twenty-five minutes later, he was walking into the newsroom, past the rows of cubicles, moving at a clip. His backpack was slung over a shoulder, and he’d stopped at the cafeteria downstairs for a soda, needing the caffeine. R.J. must have seen him getting off the elevator because here he was, already out of his chair, a tall, meaty blur moving toward him, heading him off before he got close to Melissa’s desk. R.J. shook a fist, bluff and hearty, booming out congratulations on the arrest story from last night.

  “No one else was even there,” he said. “Not even television. They’re crediting your story on the networks with the narrative of how it went down. Brand X didn’t have anything.”

  He guffawed, but Sully could see it in his eyes, the searching, seeing if he knew about the Noel Pittman discovery, testing the waters to see how angry he was, to see if he had the breath of bourbon on him.

 
Sully played it low-key. “So, hey, I was out at Princeton Place just now? Turns out I was the last one to the Noel Pittman party. Hear Chris was out there two hours back.”

  R.J. peered at him over his bifocals, the bow tie at his neck, the beefy frame, the still-black hair oiled, the close-cropped beard. He had Norman Mailer bluster when he wanted, or he could sit and cross his legs, the dapper newspaperman, professorial, discussing not his first Pulitzer, but the second, still keeping himself between Sully and Melissa, who was somewhere back there in Metro.

  “Pittman is a sideshow. A stale story for Chris, something to keep the youngster busy. This—this, now, is your chance to take over the Reese story. You see it now? The play here? The suspects are going to have their initial appearance in court this afternoon. We can have you there, overseeing, and moving on to takeouts on—”

  “The C-10 is a presentation,” Sully said. “There’s no bail in the District. It’s just flight risk and danger to the community. They’re not going anywhere. Keith covers the courts. Give it to him.”

  “Yes, but we’re going to need to know everything about these men, teenagers, whatever, so yes, Keith can handle the hearing. But we need you out in the neighborhood, the old pro, going for the families, the relatives, the neighbors.”

  “Lemme guess. I’d dig up a fucked-up home life, discipline problems in school, a mom who says her baby just wouldn’t do this, and a father who—”

  “Did you have a point in mind, Sullivan?”

  “Yes. I did. I do. We’re going to advance this story through the killings on Princeton Place, not the killing. That’s what I was trying to say yesterday, and Melissa and Eddie didn’t want to hear it. Three women have been killed within 150 yards of one another, none of the cases solved. The Reese kid is just the latest. It’s—”

  “Wait wait wait. Sarah Reese, Noel Pittman. Who’s the third?”

  “Lana Escobar. Prostitute. Got killed up at the baseball field at the top of the block, last summer. Lana, Noel, Sarah. Three.”

  “A prostitute? Well, Christ, Sullivan, take off your tutu and come back from the ball. I just don’t think so. They just got the bad guys on the Reese killing, or did I misread your story on the front page? Now, this morning, we got the body of some young woman, perhaps more fond of cocaine than a fixed address, discovered in a basement a few doors down the block. No arrests on that one, probably never will be. And a street hooker. You put this in what blender to get a story?”