The Ways of the Dead

by Neely Tucker

  He took a deep breath, still standing. She was rushing, she wasn’t thinking, she appeared to have anger management issues. Might as well deal with that first.

  “Look,” he said. “I want us to be square. I want to thank you for having me out here today. But I want to make sure you’re okay with going forward.”

  “You’re asking if I’m going to spit on you again?”

  “More or less.”

  She touched the palm of her hand to the tip of her nose and looked down and back at him. “No. I mean, yes. I’m sure I want to go ahead. First impressions, though, right? I don’t blame you. I’m not psychotic, Mr. Carter, and neither was my sister. Noel and I were different, but we were family, and we were close. And I don’t mean to jump into this right now, but I’m still not absolutely positive the ‘D’ in her datebook was David Reese. I mean, we talked, she told me she was taking classes at Big Apple, and she did not ever say anything about him. It could be ‘D’ for ‘dance class.’”

  “If it’s him, it’ll be clear soon enough. And it’s Sully. Just call me Sully. You mentioned Noel’s files last night. That’s what’s in front of me?”

  “I mentioned to you how disciplined Noel was, particularly about finances? I used to tease her about being the world’s only accountant in fishnets and heels. So this is all of her datebooks, her files, her paperwork that was in filing cabinets. She was bad to keep receipts stuck in jars and coffee cans at first, apparently, and then she put them into some sort of filing system.”

  She was pulling out yearly planners, thin black spiral things that went back three or four years. There were notebooks and file folders with tabs denoting ACURA and RENT and HOWARD U and PEPCO and BANKING and TAXES and VERIZON and HALO and SATIN AND LACE and dozens of others.

  It was the dead woman’s entire life, spelled out in minutiae. He finally sat down and asked whether the police had ever looked at all of this. Lorena said no.

  “Not even after they discovered her body?”

  She did not look up from the files. “Mr. Carter—Sully—other than a detective calling to notify me of the recovery of Noel’s body, and of the autopsy nonresults? I have not heard from the police at all.”

  “What’s ‘Satin and Lace’?”

  “The lingerie shop where she worked. It’s at Union Station, the top level.”

  “Right, right,” he said. “I had forgotten.”

  Sully pulled out the Halo folder. It had copies of her pay stubs and a work contract and an employee handbook. She had signed on in the fall of 1997, about six months before she went missing. He sat down and started to pull out the brightly colored folders and flip through them, then caught himself.

  “When do you have to leave? For work?”

  “I took the morning off.”

  “Good,” he said.

  The material was a sprawling mass of information, but it was gold only if he could find the vein of her disappearance and follow it through the mountain of details that Noel had kept and codified. As he sorted through the boxes, as he pulled out folders and datebooks, he recognized that Noel’s mind saw the world around her and reduced it to slots and cubicles and placed things in a taxonomical order. He blinked, going through the Howard U folder. It was stuffed with class schedules and a map of the campus and student loan documentation.

  What did anyone need to know about a young girl who was dead? What was useful and what was prurient? Well. The last time anyone saw her, she was pulling out of the Halo parking lot at two in the morning in April 1998. Then, in October 1999, her decomposed corpse turned up in a basement of an abandoned house a dozen houses down from the upstairs apartment in the house she was renting.

  That was the puzzle. In front of him were more pieces than anyone had ever seen. He felt the drumbeat of a tension headache begin to thump just behind his eyes.

  “Sure you want to help?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then we’re going to build a chronology,” he said. “Let’s start it on the first of April. You’ve got a laptop? What we want to do is create a master file on that hard drive, and then we’ll copy it onto a floppy. That way we’ll both have the information. Everything, no matter the source, gets entered by date.”

  He picked up Noel’s checkbook and her datebook, opened them to the last month of her life, and glanced at the first few entries on both.

  “So April 1, she pays her rent, right? The girl’s a machine. April 2, her datebook says she’s got a meeting at two with her marketing professor. Like that. All these sources—canceled checks, datebook entries, receipts, class schedules—go into that master file, the chronology. That will create a timeline of the last three weeks of her life.”

  Lorena reached into the second plastic container, pulling out an answering machine. “The police listened to the messages on this, but the only caller on it was me. I don’t think that’s going to help.”

  She then walked into the kitchen and came back. “But they didn’t see this, because I didn’t come across it until this morning when I was going through her things to show you. It was in the front pouch of a Howard sweatshirt, one of those things with a hood. I had her clothes in boxes. I was going through them this morning, pulled out the sweatshirt, and it fell out. I didn’t know to look for it when she went missing, because I didn’t know where it was. I thought it was with her.”

  She held up a cellphone.

  “Jesus Christ,” Sully said. “How did she afford a cell? The job pays for mine.”

  “She said all the kids at college had them. The hip ones, anyway. Fad 101.”

  “Does it work?”

  “The service is dead, but the unit isn’t. It should still have her numbers and contacts.”

  He held up a hand for a moment, like a traffic cop, and then pulled out the appointment books, starting with the book for 1998. He couldn’t believe Jensen, the detective, had not followed up on this after Noel’s body had been found. He guessed they were too busy with the Reese case, but it was shoddy any way you looked at it.

  He flipped the book to April.

  The first few days looked like all the rest. On April 24, the last day she went to work, there was her marketing class at Howard in the morning. There was nothing else during that day, with “Halo 10-2” written in ink for that night.

  On the morning of the twenty-fifth, at ten fifteen, there was written in her elegant, spidery hand, a single, one-letter notation: “D.” That night was another notation for her shift at Halo.

  Turning the pages backward one week, then two, three, four, five. The same “D,” at the same hour.

  He reached to Lorena. “Let me see that, please,” he said, taking the phone. She had already turned it on, and he tapped around on it until he found the contacts folder. There were a lot of names. And right there, plain as day, in its place alphabetically, was a single letter “D.”

  There was a tension in his gut as he clicked on it. Two numbers came up. One was a 202 area code with a 354 exchange, which he immediately recognized as that of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The other was a 703 area code.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  He pointed it out to her. “‘D.’ That first number? Beginning 354? That’s the courthouse. I’m giving eight to five it’s David Reese. Want to make a call for me?”

  She nodded.

  “Wait, not the house phone. Do you have a company cell?”

  “Of course. I’m on call all the time.”

  “Is it in your name?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The phone. Would caller ID show your name, or the name of the firm?”

  “The firm. It shows a switchboard number.”

  “Fabulous. May I?”

  She got it out of her purse and he punched in the courthouse number from
Noel’s contact list. “Just say you’ve got the wrong number if there’s an answer,” handing the phone back to her.

  She put it on speaker. After four rings, David Reese’s answering machine came on. His chambers, not that of the secretary out front. Sully reached over and disconnected the call. He then rapidly dialed the 703 number, before he could change his mind. He held it up between them. Lorena leaned over, putting her ear above the phone, looking over at him as she did so.

  The phone rang three, four, five times. Then it picked up. A man’s voice, low, guarded, said, “Yes? Who is this?”

  Sully pointed at Lorena. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Wrong number.” She clicked it off and looked at him.

  He leaned back against the couch and blinked. “That was David Reese.”

  Lorena punched buttons on Noel’s cell, going into the list of recent calls.

  She looked, then turned it to him. The glowing screen showed that the last call that Noel Pittman had ever made was to the 703 number they had just dialed.

  It was placed on April 25, at 10:47 a.m., more than eight hours after she drove away from Halo and into the ether.

  thirty-one

  “So we’re about to say what, exactly?”

  Melissa was sitting behind her desk, looking at him as if he had a bad disease. Eddie Winters leaned up against a glass wall of her office, flanked by the deputy executive editor and the assistant managing editor for news. The national editor and the paper’s top attorney were seated in chairs against the back wall. R.J. was sitting next to him, as if he were his attorney and they were in court.

  She continued: “That the chief judge of the U.S. District Court in D.C. was having a personal if not intimate affair with a wannabe porn star? And that said wannabe is the young woman who turned up dead, buried in the basement of a house immediately adjacent to where the judge’s teenage daughter was murdered a year later? Oh—and he’s white and wealthy and fifty-three. She was black and twenty-five and an exotic dancer. Have I left out anything?”

  “She called his personal cellphone eight hours after she was last seen,” Sully said. “I would add that.”

  Her forehead wrinkled, her hands splayed out, sarcasm personified. “Thanks, yes. I’d forgotten. Did she write in her datebook how he killed her, too?”

  “Let’s wait a minute here,” Eddie said.

  His arms were folded across his chest, and the gold and steel Rolex glittered as he shook it loose from a tight grip on his left wrist. He’d been watching Sully while he gave the summation of his findings of the past several days, the missing Michelle Williams, the dead Rebekah Bolin. He had leaned forward and nodded as Sully described how Lorena Bradford had given him access to her dead sister’s files, information that law enforcement had not seen, and that she had spent several hours helping him start a timeline for that information.

  “How many sources again? How many put Reese and Pittman together?”

  “Four,” Sully said, ticking them off on his fingers.

  “One, Doyle Goodwin, who runs the market at the bottom of the street, but I can’t see him going on record. Too scared, too much to lose. Two, the lady across the street, Marilyn Winston. She’s on the record. Three, Pittman’s datebook and her cellphone. Four, an off-the-record source at the dance studio, who confirms Noel and Sarah’s lessons overlapped, and that Reese often dropped his daughter off and picked her up. But the killshot is that the numbers listed as ‘D’ on her cell were his personal line at his office and his cell. He answered the latter this morning when we called it, or at least I would say I recognized his voice. I checked the court directory this morning, called directory assistance, and went online. Neither of those numbers are listed.”

  Eddie considered. “Can we get more on the record?”

  “I’ll take his picture up and down the street and see what we get.”

  “How could they have plausibly met?”

  “The dance studio. Pittman’s lessons were ending when Sarah’s were starting on Saturday mornings, and then there was a second class after Sarah’s. He was walking in, she was walking out, something like that.”

  “Can we prove that? On the record?”

  “I can ask the studio owner if she’ll confirm, but it’s solid. My source taught Noel, knew Sarah. Sarah’s Saturday morning class? Ten o’clock. The time in Pittman’s datebook she was to meet ‘D’ or ‘David’? Ten fifteen.”

  “Does Reese have any idea we know what we do?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. Lorena called his office and cell from her cell. It wouldn’t trace back to us.”

  “Lorena?”

  “Her sister. Noel’s.”

  There was a pause. Lewis Beale, the paper’s lawyer, heaved into the conversation, his great girth wobbling as he sat forward in his chair. “Tell me again how we came to be in possession of Pittman’s phone and personal effects.”

  “The sister, Lorena. There may be more things coming. We’re meeting back at her place tonight, after she gets off work, to keep going through the files. And, Lewis? Technically, we don’t have possession. The sister does.”

  “Wait. Isn’t she the one who spit on you at the funeral?” he asked, spreading his hands.

  “Yes.”

  “Now she loves you.”

  “‘Love’ is a little strong.”

  “What happened?”

  “Myself, I’d put odds that she wants us to put heat on MPD, to stick Noel’s death as a homicide.”

  “So she’s using you?”

  “Most women do.”

  Guffaws around the room, everyone looking down for a minute, doodling on their notebooks, relieved.

  “No. I mean, do you trust her?”

  “As much as I do or don’t anyone else. I have great faith in documents, though, and cellphones with David Reese’s private numbers on them.”

  Lewis sighed and looked over at Eddie, then at Sully, then back to the boss.

  “Originals, possession, if at all possible,” Eddie said, taking the cue. “If we print this, it’s going to have to be bulletproof. This will be litigated. With real money on the table.”

  “Eddie, you can’t be serious,” Melissa cut in. “If this were from another reporter, maybe. But Sully’s had a vendetta against Reese since the Judge Foy thing. You heard how he went off when I asked him to cover the family statement—like a madman, cursing—and, if we can just name the elephant in the room, he is drinking on the job.”

  Eddie gave her a sharp glance. “You are wading into HR—”

  “Everybody knows it! Why is it HR material? We can’t trust it because of who reported it. Besides—look, let’s say all of this is completely true. We still don’t have Reese being guilty of anything other than an extramarital affair, poor judgment, and perhaps the victim of a gruesome coincidence.”

  She looked around the room, to the lawyers, the other editors. “It’s bullshit. It’s tabloid. The blowback will be tons of sympathy for Reese and vitriol for us. And what are we going to do this time when it’s wrong? We can fire him, but we’ll look like such parasites—”

  “When did we get in the popularity business?” R.J. boomed, suddenly leaning forward in his chair, his gruff voice bursting out, people jumping.

  “We don’t run stories because we think they will make people like us. We run stories, these kinds of stories, because we are in the public accountability business. David Reese is an eminent public figure in Washington. If there is a timely change in the administration at the next election, he will almost certainly be the next Supreme Court justice, at which time he would determine the law for three hundred million Americans. His judgment isn’t one thing about him, it’s the only thing about him. Some of us in this room know that he lied to the upper management of this newspaper in an attempt to have Sully fired—don’t look at me like that, I never signed off on the suspension—in th
e name of saving himself from an embarrassing political gaffe. This is a far more emphatic moral failing. What if, let us say, this affair with Noel Pittman and perhaps others emerge during confirmation hearings? And it becomes public that we knew of this liaison and did not publish? You haven’t said one word about the actual facts of—”

  “That’s not—” Melissa started.

  “And that isn’t even quite the main focus, to my mind.” He was steamrolling now. “The issue here is not, ‘What does this mean for poor David Reese?’ The issue is, ‘What does this mean for poor Noel Pittman?’ She was a child of this city, a college student, never arrested and never convicted of any crime. She disappeared after work one night. She was murdered, buried in a basement. We know from multiple sources, who have no apparent benefit in lying, that she was romantically involved with one of the most powerful men in this city, who is incidentally married to someone else. We know this man’s own child was murdered less than fifty yards away. And, today, Sullivan tells us that the last call she made, eight hours after she was last seen, was to this man’s cellphone.”

  R.J.’s voice had been slowly building, rising in tone and moral indignation. Now he was almost shouting, staring at Melissa through his bifocals. “And you’re telling me that isn’t a newspaper story? You’re saying it would not merit the interest of law enforcement agencies investigating her murder?”

  “There is no murder investigation,” Melissa shot back. “Pittman’s death isn’t labeled as a homicide.”

  Sully had been chewing the inside of his lip, and then the anger burst clear of him.

  “There’s no murder investigation now because that’s the narrative,” he said, leaning forward. “‘Rich, pretty, white Sarah Reese gets jumped by three bad black guys.’ That’s the story. It’s a cautionary tale about being in the wrong place at the wrong time, it’s the modern scary bedtime story. Now. ‘Poor, maybe not-so-smart, black Noel Pittman gets whacked and stuffed in the floorboards of an abandoned house because crazy-ass shit like that happens in Park View.’ Everybody knows that story line, too, because that’s the story we tell all the time. Us, Brand X, cable television, the talks shows.”