by Neely Tucker
And the guy in HR asking him, Why do you drink?
Maternal grief was as terrifying in its own way, true. The absolute hollow to the eyes, the voice you had to lean forward to hear, the way they would reach for your arm as they stood up and it felt like a leaf, like a dry and brittle leaf that fluttered across your wrist. Still, this was more in the course of gender expectations. The hollow-eyed mother was a kind of shorthand for Grief Eternal. And since newspapers were a kind of societal shorthand, everyone just understood it better. So you wound up going for Momma.
Down the line, Delores Ellison was still considering his proposition, breathing lightly into the phone. Sully tried to picture the room she was in, what she was looking at—the refrigerator, the television on with the sound off, pictures of her dead son, herself in the mirror—and what was going through her mind.
“Ms. Ellison?”
“Yes?”
“Just making sure you’re still with me,” he said.
She coughed drily, and finally said, “I think it would be helpful if you came by and I explained some things to you.”
Holding the phone in his right hand, he pumped his left fist, the interview he had to have, falling right in his lap. The tic in the back of his head loosened some more, and he felt himself coming into the groove of it, the mojo you had to have for a story like this.
“You want to come right now?” she asked.
“That would probably be best,” he said.
“There are all these television trucks out on the street, but I don’t think I want to go outside.”
“No, ma’am. I don’t blame you.”
“But you’ll come here? You can come to the front and ask for Ivan. He’s from the funeral home. He has the list.”
“The list?”
“Of people who can come in.”
“Right.”
“I’ll tell him to put your name on it. You’re not going to bring anyone else in with you, are you?”
“It’s your house, ma’am.”
“Okay. Okay. And what did you say your name was again? I’m sorry, I know you told me, but it’s just flown right out of my mind. I can’t seem to re—”
“Sully. Sully Carter.”
“From the paper.”
“That’s me. I’ll come look for Ivan, and he’ll bring me to you.”
“Right. Right. And when did you say you were coming?”
“Right now, Mrs. Ellison. What’s the address?”
“The address. Of my house? It’s ah . . . We moved over here years ago, it’s a nice street. Could you ask someone when you get here? They can tell you?”
“Yes, ma’am. That won’t be a problem. I’m walking out the door.”
• • •
He hung up and then clicked the phone back on and dialed the paper’s news research desk, moving upstairs for a change of clothes. Susan picked up as he made it to the top of the steps, and he said, “Hey, it’s me, redhead,” and then, “I need an address,” and gave her Delores Ellison’s name.
“Just a sec,” she said, and he heard her keyboard clacking. “Why are you breathing hard?”
“I just came up the steps.”
“Twelve stories?”
“My leg,” he said.
“Get off your ass a little more,” she said cheerfully. “Here it is—1729 Crestwood Northwest. You know where it is? The Gold Coast, just off Sixteenth?”
“You mean like Crestwood the street, not just the neighborhood?”
“Yeah. It’s this half-circle thing. Go across that bridge on Connecticut, the one with the lion statues, hook a left on Shepherd. Crestwood is your first left.”
• • •
The home of the Ellisons, D.C. society for a century, was among a tree-shaded collection of brick houses, well spaced, all along the right side of the street, with Rock Creek Park on the left-hand side, dropping away steeply down a hill, a forest in the middle of the city. A long line of black-hued limos and Lincolns and BMWs and Mercedes and Escalades and other Cadillacs lined the curb, people visiting Delores, the house with the hub of black-suited drivers congregating in the brick driveway, a pair of television trucks out front.
It was a handsome, two-story, acid-washed brick colonial, dark shutters, a two-car garage, manicured lawn, and arched windows. The add-on to the downhill side, also brick, featured a huge bay window. The open curtains allowed a view of a baby grand piano. He idled the bike past the house, away from the television trucks, and tucked it between a couple of the black Lincolns, killing the engine quickly, as even that seemed too loud for the address.
“Well-bred,” he said softly to himself, taking the helmet off, strapping it to the bike. It was a well-bred, old-money kind of place. He wondered if anyone living on the street had considered the middle distance of the western prairie at sunset, driving at a million miles an hour due west, the warm Pacific somewhere ahead, the endless rolling Plains, and he decided they probably had not. This was the East Coast, closed in and sheltered, a narrow horizon, the idea of a world beyond the Beltway both obscure and insignificant.
The cluster of drivers at the end of the driveway eyed him up as he walked past, mostly black but some white, the guys who didn’t speak much English standing off by themselves, propping their patent leathers on the bumper of a Lincoln, muttering in what was probably Amharic, if he guessed right. There wasn’t anybody who looked like an Ivan, so he just nodded and they nodded back, looking at the bike and letting out on the exhale of a smoke, not giving a damn about who he was or why he was here. He headed to the house like he was five minutes late, not even glancing at the television trucks. He didn’t want anyone over there calling out his name, piggybacking their way in.
The door was opening as he approached—people leaving—and he quick-stepped onto the patio. As he did, a sturdy black man appeared at his left. It was like he materialized, coming out from behind a column or something on the porch. His face was set in a grimace and he was dressed in a dark suit and sunglasses. He shot an arm in front of Sully’s chest, like the rail across train tracks stopping traffic, and looking at him through the glasses, said, “No.”
Sully took it with a smile, letting the man get in front of him, coming to a stop, raising his eyebrows in a gesture of expectation.
“Ivan?” he said, “Hey. Ms. Ellison said you’d be looking for me. I’m on the list.”
• • •
The door, when it swung open again, he couldn’t help but think medieval, it was so oaken, so heavy, the air behind it so dark, so dank. Ivan followed him in and closed it behind them, and the low murmur of voices came up in the crowded entryway, the drawing room set off to the right, also heavily populated. Ivan put a hand gently on Sully’s back, guiding him down the hall through a knot of hushed, well-dressed people, most of them holding stemware filled with orange juice, half of them turning to look at him, a new face in the gloom.
They made their way off the hallway, through the drawing room, the house opening before him in warm earth tones, a stairway now directly in his path, heavy wooden spindles, another parlor to his left. The illumination was from a series of lamps rather than overhead lighting, the curtains drawn, adding to the funereal air. The paintings on the walls were oils of ancestors and seasides, an island with Cape Cod houses along the dunes, and it dawned on him, thirty seconds in the door, that the Ellisons owned rather than rented on Martha’s Vineyard, a nice summer place of the type for which he could not afford a single mortgage payment. A Supreme Court justice, that one who always looked constipated, sat on a couch on his left, the No. 3 in the Justice Department conferred with a serious-looking woman in a suit, the head of the city council was to his right, a couple of congressional reps, a silver-haired guy who might be a senator, a lot of middle-aged men and women in expensive suits . . . Sully guessed they were from Stevens’s law firm, Hill staffers, or corpo
rate honchos he didn’t know. Robert Barnes, the mayor, corrupt soul that he was, materialized out of the gloom, a flicker of a smile crossing his face. He took Sully’s right hand to shake and patted his shoulder with his left as he passed, and Sully wondered if he learned that grip-and-pat move in some sleazy politicians’ school.
They kept moving deeper into the house, passing more knots of people, Ivan’s hand gentle but steady on his back. They stalled for a moment and a woman in black slacks, white shirt, black vest, and a bow tie glided up on his left, a silver tray with the glasses he’d seen a moment ago. He nodded thanks and took an orange juice—he always accepted hospitality in a subject’s home—but it did cross his mind that Delores Ellison either had staff or had someone call a catering company within hours of finding out her only child had been murdered. That was pretty brutal social efficiency.
And suddenly there she was, a small clump of people parting, a tall, athletic rather than delicate woman, standing there like a monument, her hair pulled back in a mercilessly perfect bun, setting off the diamond stud earrings. She was standing beside a coffee table and wing-back chair, having stood to see her guests away. She was wearing a black pantsuit and when Ivan leaned forward and took both her hands in his and whispered in her ear, her gaze turned over the man’s shoulder to Sully and the faintest of smiles etched the corners of her mouth. It did not extend to her eyes, which settled on his for a moment while she moved around Ivan to offer her hand. As she said hello and thanked him for coming, her eyes darted to the left and then right behind him, that Washington disease of looking for more important people in the room.
“Mr. Carter, thank you for coming so quickly,” she said, her eyes finally coming to rest on his, Sully guessing there was nobody better to talk to for the moment. “I’m just not going to be able to talk later in the day. It’s—it’s—it’s just so . . . overwhelming.”
“I’ll just stay a minute,” he said. “It’s kind of you to—”
“Billy was just here three days ago. Right here. Right in the house and now—now I don’t even know where he is. They’re doing something with him. They’re doing something. Someone killed him, and now someone else is doing something to him.”
“You mean at the funeral home?”
“Yes. I mean, someplace like that. The medical examiners, the coroner’s, the funeral home, I don’t even know.”
His eyes searched hers, seeking a glint of something that might tell him what they had her on, what chemicals were flowing through her brain. It would let him know if he could quote her or not, if she was in command of what she was saying or just babbling a brook of Valium-induced speech that she would never remember having uttered.
“It’s a terrible day,” he said. “It’s not something I enjoy, having to intrude, to come by. But I think it’s important we, the paper, mark Billy’s passing. We can’t just ignore it.”
“Of course, no, no, of course. I would like to help—I—would you rather talk in the kitchen or the parlor?” she asked. “We can talk in either.”
“Is this the parlor?” When she replied yes, he immediately said, “The kitchen.” She nodded and turned that way, touching Ivan on his arm, dispatching him, and Sully was following her now. The kitchen was better because it was usually the most informal room in any house, and he wanted her to feel at ease. It turned out to be an elegant, well-appointed room, marble island, large pots and pans dangling from above. The kitchen would suit. It was empty, save for one woman in the same bow-tie outfit pulling things out of the refrigerator, which looked to be about half a football field away. Delores gestured toward a small table set near a window with drawn curtains.
“Billy,” he said, sitting down, smiling softly. “Billy. I didn’t know him, Mrs. Ellison. Not at all. Don’t know what his voice sounded like, how he walked, if his smile was crooked or straight. I hate to barge right in here, but can you tell me some things about him like that? I don’t mean where he went to school or that he wanted to be a lawyer.”
She looked at him, appearing surprised at the nature of the question—she looked like she had a spiel ready to unload—and then she looked off to her right, to a clock on the kitchen wall, or something in the middle distance that he couldn’t see.
“His—his—his—heart,” she said. “Billy had such a good heart. Always had. When he was three—I think it was three; he might have been four—there was a tiny little frog in a puddle in the backyard. A tadpole, really, I guess, he couldn’t even really hop. Something was wrong with him. Billy put him on a leaf and brought him inside and asked me to help the frog.”
Sully smiled, writing furiously. “What a gentle little boy.”
“He had tears in his eyes. He was crying.”
“And he stayed like that, you say?” The gentle prompt for another story.
“Always. He didn’t play sports, other than cross-country; he just didn’t like hitting other boys. He played the piano. He loved to read. Especially history, black history, you know, sort of how we, the Ellisons, came to be.”
“And Mr. Sanders died, what was that, 1984?”
“January 13, 1985. A single-car wreck. He was driving home from Dulles, late, after a flight coming in from Chicago. It had been snowing. Billy was six.”
“And Mr. Sanders, he—”
“William. We called him William, and we called our son Billy.”
“And, to be clear, Billy’s last name was Ellison?”
She smiled, nodding her head, slightly off to the left, with an almost imperceptible hunch of the shoulders. “A little odd, people said, at least at the time Billy was born. Things have changed now. So many single mothers, I suppose. But yes. The Ellison name is, is rich in history, but not in male descendants. I am an only child, as Billy was an only child. He was the only one to carry on the name of Nathaniel Ellison, the patriarch, as I’m sure you know. William understood. We gave Billy the Sanders surname as his middle, to carry that along. But the Ellison name was his last.”
“And Mr. Sanders—”
“Was from Georgia.”
It left her lips like an indictment, as if that explained everything he needed to know. He was far more familiar with condescension from northern whites than blacks, but the tang of it was just the same. He wondered if Delores Ellison understood that she was, herself, from south of the Mason-Dixon.
“I see.”
“He overcame so much. Served in the Marines in Vietnam. Then Harvard Law. He was only thirty-eight when he died, but already was the first black partner at the firm.”
“He was—”
“Billy attended Sidwell, where he was senior class president. The first black child to do so. Then he went to Georgetown. Dean’s list every semester. History major. He was planning to stay at Georgetown for law school, though he hadn’t ruled out Harvard.”
Sully was writing all of this down, letting her talk to the air, but he couldn’t help but notice that in spite of his request for the intimate, when she ticked off the measures of her only child’s life, the things she mentioned were items of achievement, name-dropping Sidwell, the private school the presidents’ kids usually attended. These were the markers of her life that she felt worth telling and important.
“It’s quite an impressive set of achievements,” he said, playing along, looking up, making eye contact, crossing his legs at the knee. “It seemed especially tragic, a young man with so much promise. Just to check, have the police contacted you with any leads at all? Possibilities, suspects?”
“Why—what—why do you ask?”
“Well, because the police would tell you things they wouldn’t necessarily tell the public, and that might keep me from making some sort of mistake in the paper. The police seem to think he may have been shot in Frenchman’s Bend.”
Her shoulders seemed to lock in place. “There’s a great deal of information about Billy’s death that isn’t public,�
�� she said, choosing her words, “but it isn’t at the precinct.”
He waited, but there wasn’t anything.
“And where would I find that?” he said finally.
“With Shellie.”
It was a pet peeve when people did this, make an obscure statement and force him to ask a follow-up question because of the intentional vagueness of their initial response. He shifted on the wooden kitchen chair—hell, it was probably mahogany—and said, gamely, to increase her sense of control of the situation, “Shellie?”
“My employer. William’s former partner.”
“Shellie Stevens,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Ah. It’s none of mine, Ms. Ellison, but since you mention it, why would your employer be in possession of information about your son’s death?”
“Because he’s conducting his own investigation,” she said. “He’s hired private investigators.”
“Ah.”
He eyed her pleasantly, as if this made sense, as if everybody’s son got killed and their employer funded some sort of parallel homicide investigation. But the look coming back at him now was no longer so doe-eyed and confused. Her eyes seemed more black than brown, her manner more focused, more of an air of condescension.
Sully set his pen down on his notebook.
“Do the police know of this private eye investigation?”
“Of course. They seem to have no idea who killed Billy. It’s shocking. You hear of killings, homicides, you expect the police to know the, the landscape. They don’t seem to. No ideas at all. Shellie is trying to help. You can’t have any idea of how it is, your only child a murder victim, and for all you know, the killer watching your house each day.”