by Neely Tucker
But those reporters were not him, and one thing he didn’t like, one thing he didn’t like at all? People in this town thinking they were better than him, and that included menace-laden motherfuckers like Shellie Stevens.
NINE
THE STORY WAS glue. It was just flipping glue. A day hit, a little seven-hundred-word sashay down the journalistic boulevard of life . . . and the thing would not emerge on the screen in front of him.
Every time he started hammering out a lede and a couple more ’graphs, his fingers started sticking to the keyboard. Shellie Stevens, that little shit, was right: You couldn’t just say Ellison was at the Bend, because the police didn’t have the blood test back yet, and you couldn’t say it looked like he was in the Bend because of the shoe, because it wasn’t conclusive and because the police weren’t officially releasing that the shoe had been found. You couldn’t even say he was doing drugs because the toxicology wasn’t back yet, either.
“How we looking there, Sullivan?” R.J., appearing over the cubicle, looming, not pestering yet, but not far from it, either. Sully didn’t take his eyes off the screen or his fingers off the keys.
“Super most wonderful,” he said. “It’s all short skirts and cleavage.”
“I was asking because I was looking at what you’ve got in the system so far. It doesn’t look like cleavage. It looks pretty matronly, actually.”
“That’s because there isn’t much. I told you. We’re sailing the magical Sea of Inbetween, located between the continents of What We Know and What We Can Print. We know the kid was gay, doing drugs, and got shot in the Bend at about midnight on Monday night, by person or persons unknown. The only part of that we can print is none of it.”
“So you’re still thinking he, what, was hanging out at the O Street clubs and got into a coke deal a few blocks over?”
“I guess. You ever see him down there? The clubs?” And now Sully looked up and made eye contact, since he was asking his boss a question about his private life.
“El and I are a little long in the tooth for O Street,” R.J. said. “They had bathhouses down there before the health department made them shut down, back in the eighties. The AIDS situation.”
“Club Washington is still up and working.”
“It’s not a bathhouse.”
“They got little booths and X-rated movies. They call it a twenty-four-hour gym.”
“It’s not a bathhouse per se.”
“You sound pretty familiar for somebody who says they don’t go down there.”
“So do you.”
“Would you ask around?” Sully said. “You’re a society guy. Billy was society. It seems like you might could do a little reporting here.”
R.J. shuffled his feet, rubbed the back of his hand across his nose. “I can tell you Billy wasn’t out, if that’s what you’re asking. I know Delores, and an openly gay son would have been known in her circle. As a liability, I mean. Washington, conservative Washington—most particularly black conservative Washington—isn’t fashion forward on the issue. But that doesn’t mean anything. A lot of people are closeted, but it turns out this is a pretty big closet. Members of the closeted tribe are known to one another. They’re also known to those who are out, who keep their mouths shut. The agreed-upon meeting zone, from the city to the cops to the most closeted of the closeted, is O Street. Now. I myself haven’t been closeted since Stonewall. But, see, that’s why the O Street clubs exist—you won’t be seen by anybody who’s not a member of the tribe. It’s the social comfort zone for those both out and not.”
“And this applies, white and black? Gay and lesbian?”
“Mostly white, mostly gay. But yeah. Everybody. Washington is too small, too buttoned-down for two gay strips.”
“Ah.”
“All this discussion of gay chic and you still haven’t said what and when you’re filing. Melissa, you remember her? The editor of the section? She is most interested to know. She still doesn’t like you much, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“Soon and not much. I have a very helpful statement here from Shellie Stevens. It mentions that young master Billy had ‘been troubled by narcotics’ but had completed a ‘summer of therapy’ at the Rosenthal Center, which is I guess what they’re going to count as acknowledgment of his drug dealing.”
“It sounds like a spa.”
“Turns out it’s this inpatient rehab center up in Bethesda.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Neither had I. Incredibly discreet. And small. Like, ten beds. You go in for your seventy days and tell people you spent the summer in Provence.”
“So, okay. I say we write it short, just a straight bio, and hold our powder for the longer story on the Bend. That’s going to need to run on Sunday. And Stevens really told you he’d hit you with a restraining order?”
“He really did.”
“You have a way about you.”
“It’s a gift.”
“So, so,” R.J. said, patting at the chest pocket on his shirt, like he was looking for something that was usually there but wasn’t this time, the focus going from his eyes, his shoulders shifting, losing their frame, losing interest in the conversation, “fine, fine. Keep it to fifteen and kick it to me soon.” He turned and started walking off, still with the pocket thing, and then, with a graceful turn, he spun on a heel and came back. Leaning over the cubicle, his voice a whisper, his eyes suddenly alert behind the glasses, he looked like a bright-eyed owl with an attitude problem.
“Secrets has the only male full-nude striptease show on the East Coast,” R.J. stage whispered. “Of course we’ve checked it out. We’re not old queens sitting at home with our knitting.”
• • •
Filing a basic story, a blip that would keep Melissa off his back and wouldn’t piss off Stevens just yet—he wondered if they taught this in J-school, if you paid professors to teach you how to walk this tightrope:
The slaying of Billy Ellison, the scion of one of D.C.’s most prominent society families, has local and federal investigators scouring the banks of the Washington Channel for clues after his body was found floating in the channel Tuesday afternoon. Ellison, 21, a junior at Georgetown University and the son of . . .
He made it back home just before eight, a light mist falling. He walked inside long enough to open the fridge, pull out deli slices of cheese and turkey, roll one slice around the other, and eat it standing up in the kitchen, staring at the little green clock numbers on the microwave. Then he did another.
If he called Alexis, that would be good to set up their reporting for tomorrow, but he didn’t want to get stuck in a longer conversation. And if she said she wanted to have dinner, he’d have to go and he was too jittery for that. So he put some things in his gym bag and walked through the dripping streets toward Eastern Market, letting the rain bead on his forehead, the hush of an early evening on the Hill, the only sound his cycle boots on the narrow brick sidewalks, the orange glow of the streetlights filtered by the overhanging branches, walking from light to shadow and back again.
The natatorium was a nondescript concrete one-story building set back from the street, deep in the shadows, a few yards behind the long thin redbrick buildings of the market.
Inside, Henry the pool guy nodded, not even asking for his ID. The air was heavy with chlorine and a dank odor that he could never place, something that could only live in dim fluorescent light. Shucking out of his pants and shirt in the locker room, he pulled on his trunks and reemerged, dropping feet first into the heated pool, hurrying now. He pulled on the goggles and spit in them, wiping the lens clean, and then pushed off, closing his eyes, floating and drifting. The rain seemed to melt into the pool and he melted into the water, the idea soothing to his frazzled brain, the reason he came here, the escape. Billy Ellison couldn’t find him here, nor could any of his bosses or the likes of Shellie S
tevens, not the memory of Nadia or any of the other dead whose faces floated past him in sleep, the land of dreams a disturbing realm of blackness that held as many ghosts as it did waves of peace. He could never tell what lay in wait for him in bed each night, the nightmares or the black slate of nothingness.
He was the only swimmer this late, closing time swinging near, and he reached out with an overhand stroke now, then another, pulling himself through the water with a grace he did not possess on land. It enveloped him, the water, the empty pool, the one place where he did not limp, where his scarred face drew no stares, the hollow nervous burning in his gut gone, dissipated. There was only his breathing, the pleasant tug on the lungs, the peaceful blue monotony of the bottom of the pool, the vacant white ceiling on the backstrokes, the lovely numbness of it all, no thoughts of the past or the killings in the present and no idea of the future, and this reverie was broken only at the end of one of these laps, when he saw a man’s hand dangle down in the water ahead of him, the fingers waving back and forth.
He pulled his head up, gliding to the wall, expecting to see Henry telling him they were closing up, that he’d lost track of time again. Instead, as his hand reached the tiled wall, he pulled his goggles up and found, through the lens of water spilling down his face, that he was looking at Sly Hastings, one of the deadliest men in the city, a killer and a sociopath, and perhaps his best source in town.
“Aquaman,” Sly said, smiling down at him. “I hear you been busy.”
• • •
They were the only two in the locker room, the only two still in the entire place, save Henry up front somewhere. Their voices echoed and bounced. Sully stuck his head under the shower to get the chlorine out, then was back out, getting dressed, Sly leaning against the peeling baby-blue paint on the wall, one foot crossed over at the ankle, the sleeves of his tracksuit neatly pushed up to the elbow. He took off his glasses, the little round ones, and polished them on the hem of his shirt.
“This place, why you come here? It looks like you going to catch something.”
“Water’s got enough chlorine to kill cancer,” Sully said, pulling a shirt over his head.
“I don’t mean just the water. Lookit this floor.” It was a slab of concrete, stained in patches that looked red or brown or slightly orange. The metal lockers were dented and had chipped paint and looked like any good tug would pull them halfway out of the wall. The trash can was three-quarters full, one of the lights was out, and the faucet dripped.
“It’s got character,” Sully said.
Sly snorted, looking up at the ceiling, like a disease was going to fall on him. “’S what white people say when they slumming.”
“You can’t slum in your own neighborhood,” Sully said. “And what white people is this you been hanging out with, to know what they say about anything?”
“I know some shit.”
“Un-hunh.”
“About you people.”
“Un-hunh.”
“You going to finish getting dressed or what? Never seen a man take so long to put clothes on.”
“Watch men get dressed a lot?”
“You know, you can get on a motherfucker’s nerves.”
Sully, deadpanning it now: “The way white people talk, how men get dressed—I’m learning a lot about you, brother.”
As he bent to pull on his boots, he saw Sly move toward the door out of the corner of his eye. He was finished, but dragged it out, letting Sly leave and go outside, allowing him a minute to take a deep breath and think, because dealing with a warlord like Sly was not something to do offhand.
He’d first met him shortly after coming back from the war, in Benning Terrace, better known as Simple City. Sly was an enforcer for the crew that ran the place, and Sully, just coming out of rehab and laced on painkillers most of the time, did not give a particular fuck about anything.
Sly had dragged the body of a police informant, one Kermit S. Allen, nicknamed Froggie, into the main courtyard of the project at high noon. The man was already shot twice through the chest and dying. A crowd gathered.
Sly pulled Allen’s head up off the dirt, clutching him by his hair, Allen weakly trying to claw at the hand holding him. Sly bellowed two or three times—it depended on which witness you believed—that this was what happened to motherfuckers who talked to cops. Then he shot Froggie through the forehead, blowing his brains out into the dirt. When Froggie was flat on the ground again, Sly shot him twice more in the face. Then he looked up and asked the assembled if there were any motherfucking questions.
When police came, no one talked to them.
Sully went down there to write a story about witness intimidation at the height of the city’s crack wars. He was walking down a crappy hallway in one of the crappy buildings of the complex when Sly emerged from a door, shoved him into a wall, put a Glock to his temple, and asked him if he wanted to die.
Sully answered in Bosnian, sounding bored, looking straight ahead. Sly, who didn’t recognize the language, slowed down enough to tell him to speak the English.
“I said,” Sully told him, “that if you don’t get that piece of shit off my face, then a pair of Chetniks that I sponsored for immigration will slit you from gullet to crotch.”
Sly lessened his grip just enough for Sully to know that this was over and said, “What’s a Chetnik?”
Of such things friendship and respect were born.
He had not seen Sly in what, two months, maybe three, hardly at all since the series of killings last fall up on Princeton Place. It had included the murder of the daughter of the chief judge of U.S. District Court in D.C. and a gorgeous Howard University student and both had been nasty. It had also ended badly, leaving a bitter taste in Sully’s mouth and business with Sly he needed to avenge.
This was easier said than done. By Sully’s count, Sly was responsible for at least five murders and probably double that. He was manipulative and ruthless. He was also a product of a disastrous upbringing in the projects who wanted better out of life, had used his drug profits to buy a couple of small apartment complexes, and now read books on property management and stock-market investing. He was loyal to what was left of his family, not a bad guy to watch a football game with, and a terror at the New York Times crossword puzzle. A good source who had given Sully better street intel than the cops had, but would also play him for a pawn if it suited his larger purposes.
No way to pigeonhole, to typecast, to write off.
Sully sat up straight now, arched his back, and took a deep breath, letting it out, onetwothreefourfive, and then he was as good as he was going to get, standing up and grabbing his bag and flicking off the light to the locker room on his way out.
The pool area was dark and the lobby was dim, the sound of his footsteps coming back to him. At the glass-walled front entrance, Henry was at the door, waiting to let him out and close up.
“Night, Henry,” he said, nodding, but the man didn’t even look at him. His face was set in a grimace, looking stiffly out the window; Sully knew he had recognized Sly and knew him for who and what he was. Sly had that effect on people, like they’d just seen the dead arise, and not the dead ones you loved and missed, but the dead you feared and loathed.
• • •
The rain had stopped but it was still dripping off the leaves overhead. They were standing in the darkness by the side of the building, the street fifty feet ahead of them. Two of the three nearest streetlights were out. Sully could make out Sly’s car, the yellow-over-black Camaro at the curb, engine idling, and he knew that Lionel would be behind the wheel, keeping an eye on the boss. A match struck and flared to his left and Sully moved toward it, picking up Sly’s outline in the glow. He was leaning against the wall, under the slight overhang, cupping the match till it lit the cigarette. Then he shook it dead. The light from the roadway glinted from his glasses when he moved his head an
d spoke, his voice soft and deep, an unseen thing in the dark.
“The Hall brothers,” Sly began, blowing out a stream of smoke, “are a problem of mine.”
Sully’s mind lit up, connections flaring, instantly looking for where this was going. So . . . so Sly knew he’d been in the Bend—that could have come from the article he’d written about the body in the channel. It didn’t mean Sly had been tailing him. He kept it straight, looking up at the trees, the water dripping, rubbing a shoe on the slick asphalt.
“Yeah? How so?” he said. The strap from his gym bag was slung over his shoulder, the bag light, almost weightless.
“They been looking to expand out they turf, M Street, down there like that. But, see, the problem with things expanding? They got to expand into something else. You know chemistry? Like, ions? They reactive, they bounce into other little molecules, and well, they change that other thing. That’s the Hall brothers. They been expanding into me.”
“Hunh.” Sully said, still waiting, not sure where this was headed. “I didn’t do all that well in chem class. But I didn’t think anybody did that sort of thing, expand into your turf.”
Sly’s shoulders hunched and released, a deeper shadow in the gloom. “People try anything now and then. This business here, though, they don’t know they been expanding into me. Right? And it needs to stay that way.”