by Neely Tucker
Sully waited, not giving him anything.
“So,” Sly said, after another drag on the smoke, “you been asking around about shit in the Bend.”
Nodding now, taking it in, putting the fingers of his right hand into the palm of his left to pop the middle knuckles. Sly’s home turf was up in Park View, just off Georgia Avenue, a few miles from the Bend. Sully was trying to make the connection. The Bend was south of the Capitol Building, cut off from the rest of town. It was small, low-end, sleazy, some of the lowest dregs of the trade. Not a profit center. Not in Sly’s wheelhouse.
“Glad to see you read the paper,” he said.
“That story wasn’t shit,” Sly said. “Scaring tourists. Bullshit. You down there ’cause that rich kid got popped and you put it together, you thinking, he got popped in the Bend. Ain’t no other reason for you to be there. So. You gonna keep being down there looking at that, the way I see it, am I right? Yes. Yeah. Sure. And so, you see what I’m saying, this here is what I need. I need to know what the Hall brothers thinking about. That would be helpful to me.”
Sully nodded, as if this were perfectly reasonable, that he could just walk up and start asking the Halls what their short- and midterm business plans might be. But, behind that, his sense of security was fading. Sly was way ahead. The story on the body being identified as Billy Ellison hadn’t run yet, and even if Sly had heard it on the radio or television, nobody had reported that the Bend was where Billy got killed. And yet Sly Hastings, who didn’t get things like that wrong, had just uttered both as facts.
“You want to know what Tony and Carlos are thinking,” Sully said, shrugging, “whyn’t you go ask them?”
“Smart-ass. Look, the play here, you see this? I need you down there, and I need whatever intel you’n get on the Halls—Tony, Carlos, both, either one, I don’t care.”
For the first time in the conversation, Sully began to see an angle for himself here. Sly had a need, he had come to Sully, which indicated, Jesus, that he had so little access or insight into the Hall brothers’ operation that whatever little surface intel Sully could get was worth having.
“What am I looking for? It would help to know.”
Sly let his cigarette drop and lightly stepped on it with his Nikes, the grinding sound on the pavement.
“There was this here brother named Dee Dee,” he said, “down there in the Bend. Was my what, what do you call it? My mole. My, like, eyes and ears. We were starting to move product.”
“Demetrius Allan Byrd,” Sully said. “Yeah. Somebody capped him.”
“That ain’t no secret. Yeah. Dee got popped. What don’t anybody know is that he was working for me.”
“And you want to know, what, if the Halls were onto him?”
Sly smiled at him in the dark.
“They ain’t gonna tell you that, nah nah nah. That’s not the play. See, you gonna be asking all over down there about that rich boy like you do. You gonna be talking to the police, the feds, and hey, sure, maybe you’ll drift by and talk to the Halls about it. That’s good. That’s real good. You just keep an ear out for what they all thinking, what they talking about, see if you hear my name, right? You see what the police will tell you about the Halls. What they thinkin’ about Dee Dee, not just about the rich kid. What they know. What they say about who’s moving what product down there in the Bend. You see?”
He pushed off the wall with his back, leaning forward, and then he was walking slowly, moving toward the street. Sully moved with him, walking alongside, the day finally settling over him, the weariness a ton of bricks, the rain still dripping. Ahead of them, out of the shadows and in the street, Lionel leaned over in the Camaro to push the passenger’s-side door open for the boss.
“Yeah, I see. I see that just fine. What I don’t see is how that helps me. I’m writing about the Ellison kid. How does this help me do that? You know who popped him? That would help me. That would help me a lot.”
Sly put his hands in the pockets of his tracksuit, adjusted the glasses on his nose, coughed.
“That there is the problem with you reporters,” he said. “Y’all always looking at the wrong thing, barking up the wrong goddamn tree. Woof woof over here, woof woof over there. Look here. Follow the money. Ain’t that what y’all like to say? Follow that money. That’s good right there. Cuz nobody cares who killed that little gay boy. Not nobody. Well. You’re curious, and I bet his momma ’nem is all upset, but he didn’t matter for nothing. No. What matters?”
He stopped walking, and Sully stopped to look at him. Sly came forward a step, tapped Sully on the chest, looked him in the eye, maybe a foot away. “Who. Killed. My. Boy. Dee. That was a power play right there. That’s what happening in the Bend. Your gay boy, shit. He’s going to turn out to be, like, collateral damage. Any of them crackheads down there coulda popped him for who knows what? A blow job? But whoever popped Dee Dee? That matters. That’s what’s happening in the Bend. Whoever killed Dee Dee, he’s yanking some strings. He’s making money change directions. He’s moving in on me. You follow who killed Dee Dee. That’ll take you to the end of the goddamned rainbow, little leprechauns and the motherfuckin’ pot of gold.”
TEN
“SO, WHAT YOU’RE telling me, Billy Ellison got crossways of the M Street Crew,” Alexis was saying, “and they popped him for it.” She was driving him down Fourth Street NE in her rental, midmorning, traffic light on the one-lane southbound, the row houses of Capitol Hill gliding past, heading back to the Bend, the Capitol off on their right. She had already been down there at dawn, for the light, the atmospherics, the mood and sense of place. She’d eaten at Jimmy T’s, called him at the house, rousted him, and picked him up twenty minutes later.
“That’s what I understand from last night,” he said, still blinking, dry-mouthed. “Him or his connection or both. The way I got it, he was likely buying shit from this dude, Demetrius Byrd, goes by Dee Dee.”
“Okay.”
“And Dee Dee gets popped, right?”
“If you say so. When was this? Dee Dee getting shot.”
“A week or two ago. Not long. So, my working theory here is that Billy, naive little fucker that he was, didn’t see Dee at their usual hookup, which is going to be somewhere near the gay clubs down on O, and so he went down to the Bend asking for Dee Dee, not knowing he was even dead.”
“So,” she said, goosing the car to beat a yellow light, “when he shows up asking for Dee Dee, the Hall brothers realize that Billy was working with him on his side business, and they kill him so that—”
“Everybody gets the message. Yeah. Just shut the whole thing down. Probably dragged his ass out there and shot him in front of people. Real theater. I doubt they had any idea who Billy was. Family-wise. I mean, look, all this is just a working idea, but you know, I’m betting it’s going to be something close to the real thing.”
“And that fits into your story because . . .”
He turned to her, surprised she didn’t see the angle. “Because it illustrates the power and the pull of drugs and the city’s worst drug market, which happens to be a former slave-trading post in your nation’s capital,” he said. “Talk about blunt symbolism. If Billy Ellison, rich kid of this privileged family, is tied to a drug-running crew in the Bend? The fucking Hall brothers? Wow.”
“And how do you propose to figure that out? You said you’ll get hit with a restraining order if you talk to Billy’s mother again. Those two guys in the Bend said they’d shoot you if you came back.”
“I can be a charming little bastard.”
She laughed and said, “If you mean a little charming and a lot of bastard.”
He looked out the window and coughed twice and popped his neck, to the left and then to the right. He wasn’t about to tell her about Sly, about the real way this was going to work. He was going to work the story of Dee Dee’s murder, and in return Sly wou
ld eventually give him enough to peg Billy Ellison’s killer. Questionable tactics, maybe, but if you want to know what the bad guys are doing, you find out from other bad guys. Same way the cops did it.
“So tell me about the art you shot this morning.”
“It’s opener stuff, atmospherics,” she said. “Good light. Four or five guys were already out there, scoring some heroin. They took me inside that apartment building right off the park—”
“The Carolina, the two-story brick thing?”
“And inside, yeah, I think that’s the name of it. Does it have a name on it? They shot up right there in the entryway.”
“They let you shoot them?”
“Faces averted or tight shots, yeah, sure.”
“Surprised nobody braced you.”
“Well. We were there in the hall, me shooting the camera and them shooting the smack, and then the big kids must have heard I was there. Two of them came in from outside and saw us and that was that.”
“One of these enforcer guys, he real short?” he asked. “And the other one tall, lanky, with dreads?”
“Now that you mention it.”
“Them’s my friends.”
“The ones who said they’d pop you if you came back?”
“The same.”
“Hunh,” she said. “They just asked me if I needed any shit and I took the cue.”
“That’s because you’re a girl.”
“It’s because I’m not a dick.”
A weak sun was filtering through the clouds, the streets still a little slick. Traffic was light and now they were on K Street SW, the discount shoe stores and liquor joints and nail salons still shuttered behind iron bars. The grocery store was open, the buggies wet and dripping from being left out in the rain overnight, a couple of patrons rattling them toward the double glass doors.
“I wonder what the fruits and vegetables are in there.” She slowed, not braking, just letting off the gas, and said, “You said get back to the neighborhood, on K.”
Sully took a moment to blink, to assess. He flipped open his notebook, thick-fingered, bleary-eyed still—he’d just splashed water over his face and hair, stumbling into jeans and a lightly starched gray dress shirt, coming down the steps and into her car, rolling up the cuffs—and now he flicked his tongue around his lips, wondering if he’d brushed his teeth. He thought so.
“I did, I did, and here we go. . . . Where is it? Ah. Byrd. We’re looking for the family of dear old Demetrius Allan Byrd, unknown to all but family and law enforcement. It’s in the Dempsys, God help us, this housing project right here. Slow down. It’s coming up. Your right. On your right.”
The Dempsys, a mean little squadron of two-story tenements, appeared on the south side of the street, easy to see, the entrance marked as it was by a ragged collection of teddy bears, votive candles, grocery store flowers wrapped in plastic, and a hand-lettered sign on green construction paper that read, RIP DEE. Balloons, three shiny Mylar things, fluttered in the breezeway of the main building. Nobody looked out windows, nobody stopped walking, nobody said anything; Alexis just pulled alongside a parked car and put on a blinker to back into the space behind it.
“That’s a hotel?” she said, waiting for traffic to clear, looking across the street at a stucco three-story with railings that leaned outward and a front office with the blinds down. A pole stood sentinel out front, but the sign it had once held was jagged broken plastic and exposed fluorescent bulb.
“Motel.”
“The difference?”
“You park in front of your room at the latter.”
“Americanos.”
“You’re one.”
“By passport.”
She backed in and parked at a street meter and they got out, Sully still coughing his lungs awake, Alexis pulling her gear from the backseat.
He blew out his breath through his lips, assessing their target, his face slack this early. The Dempsys were four apartments to a floor around a concrete stairwell with rusted iron handrails, set five or six blocks from Fort McNair. It fronted on K Street SW, which was the polar opposite of its better-known cousin, K Street NW, the heart of Power Washington. A few miles away from all that power, the Dempsys existed in a parallel universe—eight, could be ten buildings in all, surrounded by a head-high steel fence with spikes along the top. There was a central courtyard, packed dirt, and stubs of weeds.
The only thing that passed for green in the complex, even in the spring, when everything was blooming, was half a dozen anorexic trees, saplings, that looked like they had spent the winter with bags over their heads. The Dempsys had gone up in the eighties, Marion Barry–inspired urban renewal, built on the cheap and looking like it. Five or seven blocks from where Dee Dee had wound up dead. Sully wondered what was the farthest the kid had ever been from home and guessed the lockup down at Lorton, thirty miles south.
The buildings had no markers to tell you which one was which. They had fallen off or been ripped off. You had to live here or be the mailman or a public housing cop to know the difference. When they were halfway through the courtyard, a heavyset woman emerged from the building to Sully’s right, leaning against a support pole, near the teddy bears, looking at them without expression, lighting a smoke. She was wearing jeans that were too tight and some sort of green blouse that was too loose.
Sully looked over but it was Alex who was walking toward her, three cameras around her neck. And she said softly, almost reverently, Sully catching up, “We’re looking for Mr. Byrd’s family?”
• • •
Sully was the only man in the room.
The grandma, wrinkled, freckled, sagging onto the sagging couch, feet in slippers, the heavyset woman they’d seen out front now sitting beside her. There was a rail-thin, light-skinned woman in the narrow kitchen, eyeing him as he sat down.
She was wearing too-big sweats and a pullover T-shirt that read BUSTIN’ LOOSE above Chuck Brown’s visage, a cigarette in her nervous left hand. Two little kids, a girl and a boy, couldn’t be older than three either one, half-hiding behind the couch, looking at him like an extraterrestrial had whiz-banged down into the living room. Alexis had, by the magic that photographers worked, gotten herself into a sitting position against the far wall, a Leica pressed to her face, all but forgotten.
“Why you think Dee got jumped?” the nervous woman said, looking at Sully like he’d said she owed taxes or something. He pegged her as Mom and a walking advertisement for the wonders of long-term smack use.
He’d told them their names and what they did when they’d walked in, Alex making busy with the kids. He made his condolences and asked them polite questions about Dee’s winning personality and school record and then, jeez, did they have any idea about who might have wanted to harm the bouncing baby boy? This was the question that had given offense.
“You saying he was in the life?” the thin woman said.
“I think—”
“I’m out here looking, looking for work, a job or something, you hear me, trying to get something, my baby gets killed, and you asking me if he was in the life.”
“I don’t think, ah, I don’t think I quite asked—”
“He don’t even go out, you hear me?”
“I do. I’m trying to—”
“Somebody’d ask a nigga they’d know.”
“—to—to—learn a little bit more about him. All I know is what the police tell me, and that’s not a complete picture, you know? Court records aren’t fair to anybody. I know it’s—this is difficult. We’ll leave if you want us to.”
He had to nod toward Alex, she was that forgotten already, this us confusing the woman. Smiling slightly, fighting for this interview because he had to have it, taking the initial volley of hostility. You let people talk shit at you for five minutes and not take the bait, most of the time they calmed down. Most. �
��But what I was trying—trying to ask, and I’m sorry to be here like this, is if maybe you could tell me a little bit more about Dee Dee. That I wouldn’t find in the police report.”
They all looked at him. He said, “Which is what brought us here.”
The skinny woman said, “Police already been here.” Her lip trembling.
“I’m glad to hear that. Good. But the police are looking, they’re only looking for who did this to Dee. I’m asking about Dee, to see what he was like, what he was doing, you know.”
Silence.
“Ms. Byrd?”
“What?”
“You’re Ms. Byrd? You’re Dee’s mother?”
The skinny woman pulled on her smoke again, looked over at her heavyset companion, blew out the smoke, and rolled her eyes. “And he so smart, too.”
The other woman smirked, eyes darting back to the television. Some square yellow cartoon character, tiny little arms and legs, standing next to a pink thing, underwater. The sound was blaring but the ankle biters ignoring it, google-eyeing him. A talking sponge in his underwear and him, the bigger freak. He heard Alex take three frames, chikchikchik, nobody moving.
Sully took two steps forward and handed Mom his card over the kitchen counter, then sat down on the edge of the couch next to Grandma without being asked. Grandma skirted her eyes over to look at him. The place was brown-paneled walls, a four-bulb fixture overhead with three of the bulbs out. Styrofoam food trays were scattered in the corner, like Chinese carryout. Green carpet stained, worn down to nubs.
“So, Dee Dee,” Sully said, trying to kick-start things one more time, “can you tell me about what he was like, meeting him? I never got to, and I mean, like I say, the court file, that’s just not a fair picture.”
“Something like what?” Mom looking to go off, ready to detonate.
“Ms. Byrd.” He smiled. This was going to be over soon if he didn’t rescue it.
“Mmm-hmm.”
“I’m looking in the room here, I see hurting people, a family. Good people. You were kind to let us in. We’re not the police. We’re not social services. We have no right to be here unless you want us to be. I’m not trying make your life unhappier right now than it already is. Sometimes families like to talk about the ones they’ve lost. Sometimes they don’t. But I don’t know until I—until we—come ask. There’s no disrespect intended, and I’m sorry that us coming has gotten you a little bit upset.”