by Neely Tucker
Sully wrote down the names and details of Turner and Green. Both were young, tall, and heavy—men who could strangle a woman if they wanted to—and they had priors for assault, and both lived within a few blocks of Princeton Place. On their last contact with police, both were unemployed.
Jasper, a stringy white dude who appeared to have a long love affair with meth, was another possible. He lived in an apartment block on North Capitol, not far away, but neither his picture nor his record gave off vibes of fatal violence.
Darden, Sully liked him because he liked his hookers young, which might have been a draw to Sarah, an impulse crime that went wrong before he could get her panties off. Sully’s eyebrows raised—one of Darden’s prior arrests was for assault with a deadly weapon—a butcher knife he’d pulled from his girlfriend’s kitchen.
John came in at ten till midnight. The room was otherwise empty.
“I’m going, which means you got to, too. You see anything I need to know about? That my aces missed?”
Sully gave him the marked cards, and John ran off two copies on the machine, handing one set back to Sully. He looked at the names. “Not a cast I’m worried about. Darden, I remember that asshole. Busted him, what was it, ten years ago? Beat the shit out of his woman at the time. I was working out of 4-D. You go see him? Tell him I said I got no problems popping his ass back to lockup just on GP.”
nineteen
He was lying on his bed in the dark, sleepless, still wired, mind racing in circles, going in loops. The green LED numbers on the bedside clock read 2:23 a.m. Dusty finally answered.
“You just closed up?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“Want to drive down?”
“From Baltimore?”
“I’ll come up. Always liked the bike late at night.”
“It’s closer to morning.”
“Details, details.”
“I guess not,” she said.
He was in basketball shorts and nothing else, the window open, the October coolness flooding the room, the soft orange light of the halogen streetlights filtering through the trees, casting the bedroom in shadows that moved and shifted, ghosts in the darkness. He was throwing a tennis ball up in the air and catching it, the phone in the crook of his neck.
“So, you know, I would like to see you,” he said.
“Other than at night, in bed?”
“Hey, wow, slow down. Yes. Sure. Daytime, a late lunch and a matinee. I’ll play hookey.”
“We tried that. You canceled on me.”
“The one time you were available,” he said.
“It was twice, and don’t try to flip this on me. It’s almost a year we’ve been trying to make this work. Basically I’ve been at your beck and call and you’ve been available when you want to. Nadia. Is this how you did it with Nadia?”
He caught the ball and held it.
“That’s one toke over the line,” he said.
“It always is, anytime someone says her name.”
A deep breath. “Okay, look, maybe I’ll—”
He heard an equally exasperated sigh come down the line back at him. “Okay, look. Look. Sorry. Our schedules don’t exactly match. You’re doing your thing, I’m doing mine. You’ve got irregular hours, I’ve got the bartending and nursing school. This isn’t easy.” The apology, yes, but her voice held that distant tone, the way she was when she was tired, or moody, or off, or whatever it was she was.
“Look, I voiced a desire, that’s all,” he said, the ball going back up, and then down. “I said I wanted to see you. Tell me again how that was wrong.”
A pause. She was walking. He could hear the footsteps.
“You walking to your car?” he said.
“The apartment.”
“You got home fast.”
“Yep.”
“Long night?”
“And I’ve got an early start. A nine-thirty class.”
“So—”
“So lemme call you back tomorrow afternoon. When I’m in a better mood. This place I’m working now? Not the harbor tourist crowd. Mangy. Makes John Waters look like a Boy Scout.”
“Can’t you land at a bar down here full-time?”
“See, that’s what I’m talking about. Can’t you. Like it’s up to me. I’ve got another year of classes up here before I get the degree.”
“I know, I just—”
“It’s late, Sully. Really.”
“Okay, okay. We can—”
The line clicked off.
He looked at the receiver, then put the phone on the bed. Up the ball went again, back down. Higher, back down. Palmed it, a one-handed grab to end the inning. It helped to consider the opposing point of view. Their schedules were crazy, that was true. And maybe, he being the older one (seven years older? eight?), his career already established, maybe he was being the jerk and she was the patient and loving girlfriend. It could be. It might be. But he knew he wanted to hold her as he did the tennis ball, safe, strong, secure. He did. Really. But the gulf. The gap. To connect, like, really connect, it was—it was—it was a lock without a key. For the first time, he felt her slipping away through his fingers, like water, like blood, and he got the idea she had been feeling it for longer.
The clock now read 2:31. Sleep was not going to come. It was another four hours and change until daylight.
Up went the ball, down went the ball.
twenty
The morning mint julep was on the back step, just to make him feel right, something to beat back the sleep-deprivation headache, his mind turning, setting up moves on the chessboard for the day. R.J. had said three days and today was either day two, as Sully would count it, or day three, if you counted the half day when R.J. gave him the deadline, and it would be just like a fucking editor to call this the third day.
To do, to do. He punched in Eva’s office number on his cell and closed his eyes when it began to ring.
“Mr. Sully.” Her voice smooth.
“Screening our caller ID?”
“We have things to do.”
“You doing enough to know those knuckleheads didn’t kill Sarah Reese?”
There was a pause.
“We are talking on background?”
“Jesus. Everybody. Sure.”
“I would say the case is very strong. There is very solid evidence for obstruction of justice, possession of stolen property, and theft.”
“I didn’t hear ‘murder in the first.’”
“The rest of the case is developing, as they say in the courthouse.”
“But murder one was included in the presentation in court the other day.”
“It was, yes.”
He paused. The idea of floating the postmortem throat slitting popped into his head, to show her he had something, but he held back. Instead, he said, “So what’s happening is, you haven’t found the weapon and none of them are talking.”
“I’ll neither confirm nor deny. I will observe that they are charged with murder and that we like our case.”
She was at her office and being close to inscrutable. He sipped his drink.
“Okay, so does the timeline bother you? And motive?”
“You’re asking me to give you a psych eval of people who kill other people? I don’t really know. I don’t really have to know. I have sent people to prison for always and forever and had no idea why they did what they did. But I would say that opportunity is a powerful motivator. And chance. And, without being indelicate, sex, or the possibility thereof.”
“In the alley behind the store?”
“Did I omit stupidity?”
“But all those things could apply to something opportunistic, but stops short of murder.”
There was an exhalation on the other end of the line. “You think you know something, Sull
y?”
“No. I would just—” He heard a voice calling his name.
Sly Hastings’s head and upper body appeared above the chest-high brick wall bordering his backyard from the alley, the man wearing a white shirt and sunglasses. He looked at Sully and took off the shades, then reached for the handle that opened the metal back gate. Sully wagged a finger at him, signaling him not to come closer.
“I would just do your usual excellent job. Just look out on this one. Thanks for the time.”
“If there’s something you’re hearing—”
“I’ll call you.” He hung up.
“Been knocking out front, brother,” Sly said, unhooking the gate. “You really got to be more sociable. People could get the wrong idea. Come on. We got work.”
• • •
Sully was sitting in the back of the Camaro, Lionel driving, Sly in the passenger seat. Lionel was taking North Capitol heading up to the neighborhood, Sly leaning sideways in the front seat, talking back to him, shades on.
“Me and Lionel, we been driving around,” he said, “the past few days. We been asking people a few questions every now and then, if it looks like it might be profitable for us to do so.”
“Profitable? You just said ‘profitable’?”
“I did, yes, genius. Profitable. Fuck with me again—go ahead. See if it gets you where you want to go. We asking around, seeing what’s profitable. I talk to this dude down there on Columbia Road, the 500 block. He starts telling me his niece ain’t around no more. His niece—it’s his niece, Lionel?”
“Niece. From his ex-wife.”
Sully looked from Sly to Lionel and back again.
“Some dude can’t find his ex-wife’s niece? And this is profitable to know?”
“I said she wasn’t around no more. I didn’t say a thing about they can’t find her. They can find her just fine. She’s out to Lincoln Memorial Cemetery. Girl’s name is Escobar. Lana Escobar.”
He turned all the way in the seat and pulled off his glasses. “You want to talk to my boy now?”
• • •
Sully went up the steps of the narrow row house and into the front door, behind Sly and in front of Lionel. There was a small group of people, Hispanic, in the front room. Sully nodded, trying to make eye contact, and got nothing for it. They were in a hallway and then in a small kitchen, disheveled, a cabinet door open. A barrel-chested man with a mustache was sitting at a folding table. He was wearing work pants and a large white T-shirt. There was a cup of coffee in front of him. He was leaning forward on the table with his elbows and looking from Sly to Sully. Sully couldn’t interpret whether this meant he was accustomed to strangers barging into his kitchen or whether Sly had told him that was the way it was going to be.
Sly whispered to him for a minute and the man gestured for Sully to sit. He did, in a green chair on the opposite side of the table.
“No hablo español,” Sully said to the man, getting a smile in on the end of it. “Not much, anyhow.”
The man regarded him with his still brown eyes. It occurred to Sully he resembled Gabriel García Márquez, the slight potbelly, the salt-and-pepper gray hair and mustache, the flat gaze.
“It’s okay,” the man said. His voice was highly pitched. It didn’t match his physique, it was like Aaron Neville, that angelic voice in the bar bouncer body. “I been living in Washington fifteen years. I speak English pretty good.”
“I’m Sully,” reaching across the table to shake his hand.
“I’m Hector Ramos.”
“I’m a reporter.”
“I’m a grass mower.”
“Let me ask you something,” Sully said. “And it doesn’t matter to me at all personally, but are you here legally?”
The man shook his head no.
“So you don’t want to be quoted in my newspaper, right?”
“Never. They would deport me.”
Sully looked at Sly.
“Hector, tell the man about your niece. He don’t gotta know your name. Tell him what you was telling me.”
Hector looked at Sully. “You want for me to tell you about Lana?”
Sully nodded, pulling out his notebook. “But, okay, look. If I write a story—si, if, maybe—I’m not going to name you. I’ll say you’re a relative who is in the country illegally. I will use what you say, but not your name. Is that okay? Is there someone else in the family who could talk and use their name?”
Hector shook his head. “Only me. And the other, so, okay. Just no name.”
“Sin nombre.”
Hector nodded, a slight tic of the head.
“Thank you,” Sully said. “What can you tell me about Lana? I don’t know much. I wrote a very short story when she was found, but that was about it.”
Hector’s face tightened, the muscles contracted.
“So, okay, Lana, she did not run around with men for money, like you say in the paper.” He held up his hand before Sully could say anything. “The police say it, but you write it. It was on the television, too. Well. Maybe she did once or twice—I cannot say for sure because I was not there. How am I to know? She was an illegal, too, but was taking some college classes, someway she and her aunt figure it out. That was my wife then, you know? Her aunt. Then her aunt and me, we divorce, and her aunt went back home, to Guatemala. Lana stayed here. We got along okay. She was going to help me with my business. She was going to answer the phone and talk to the people. Her English was very good. It was like she was born here.”
“She wasn’t?”
“No. We are all from Guatemala. Chimaltenango is the city. I met my ex-wife and Lana here. My ex-wife, she brought her here for her sister.”
“How did you meet your ex-wife? Lana’s aunt?”
“Her cousin was a friend of my cousin.”
“Lana have a boyfriend?”
Hector blinked. “She was not smart with men. She took the pictures for one of the men.”
“A picture.”
“Without the clothes.”
“Oh,” Sully said. “Naked? No clothes at all?”
“Only her shoes.”
“Her shoes.”
“Yes. The ones I saw, she had on only shoes.”
“You don’t look happy about this.”
The man shook his head, hard. “No, no. This is not how my family does things. We go to Mass. We work. We do not do drugs or—or things like this. It is a nasty business.”
“Who was the guy taking the pictures?”
“I do not know. I never met him, and Lana, she would not say.”
“How did you come across the pictures?”
“She left them in her room. On the bed. We lived a few blocks away then. Many of us. Lana had her room. Her phone was ringing and I went in to get it. The pictures were on the bed.”
“Were they ever in a magazine? You know, one of the magazines with pictures of naked women?”
“I do not know. How would I know? I do not look at such things. Never if I knew it had Lana in it. I was very ashamed.”
“And angry.”
He nodded. “This was all just before she died. Maybe four, five months. It was in February. She left the house. I did not see her again. She was dead in July.”
“She left, or you threw her out?”
Hector raised his shoulders, then lowered them and looked at the table. “It was some of each, you know what I am saying? She said I was a filthy man for looking at her pictures. I said she was a nasty girl to take the pictures.” He shrugged. “She said she would go and I said okay. She found some little apartment several blocks away, on Thirteenth Street. She moved all of her things there. She did not call us. My wife—my new wife, not my old one—would call and talk to her. I did not call her.”
“When did you find out she had been killed?”
&n
bsp; “Not until the week after she was dead. My wife, Saundra, she went to file a missing persons report. She was nervous for her. She liked Lana. She thought Lana was just angry and ashamed for the pictures, you know? And that she would calm down in some months? She did not hear from her for one week, then two. She went by the apartment—”
“Sorry to interrupt, but do you remember the exact address?”
“It was Thirteenth Street, 3508? Yes, 08. The apartment, it was 36-A.”
“Okay, good. So your wife went by there?”
“She goes by there and she sees the police tape across the front door, but she thought only that maybe she had not paid the rent and had been kicked out. She went to the police station. She filled out the forms for a missing person. That’s when they came back and said, ‘Oh, this woman is dead.’”
“But she had her ID on her when she was found, didn’t she? I mean, they identified her. Didn’t they call you?”
“No, no. Lana was my ex-wife’s niece, not my daughter. She is Escobar. I am Ramos. Hector Ramos. She was only my ex-wife’s sister’s daughter, you understand? Her mother is in Guatemala. We were not on any of the same forms.”
“You didn’t see the story in the paper? Nobody mentioned it to you?”
“We do not read the English newspaper. If it was on one of the Spanish radios, I did not hear it. It was only to the funeral that someone brought your newspaper.”
Sully wrote fast to keep up. He knew now why it had seemed Lana had been alone in the world when she’d been found. New address, nothing much there, no papers, maybe a prostitution bust when she tried to turn a few tricks to pay her new, higher rent. The little investigation that got done, she appeared to be a Hispanic prostitute in a bad neighborhood who turned tricks on playgrounds. The police never knew of any relatives until Ramos’s wife went down there. By that time, no reporters, including Sully, were looking at the case.
“Do you have any nice pictures of Lana? That I could put in the paper? And did you happen to keep the naked pictures?”