by Neely Tucker
By the door, there was a tray with several plates and glasses.
After a moment, there was a mild thump, a diminished sound. The water in the bathroom had been on, and now it was off. Shuffling followed, and then the bathroom door pushed open, Alexis wrapped in a towel, toothbrush in her mouth, foaming, hair wet, falling over her shoulders. She pulled the toothbrush out and looked at him.
“Good morning, cupcake,” she said, radiant, way too goddamn cheerful. “I thought I was going to have to leave you here.”
“Maybe you do. Where is here?”
“The Madison. My room. You don’t remember?”
He slumped back onto the bed, closed his eyes. The Madison. Four blocks from the paper. “Of course I do.”
“Liar,” she said, turning back to the bathroom. “You helped me kill a bottle of wine at dinner, then another one here in the room, and then you were drinking bourbon. You wanted me to get one of my girlfriends to come over and get naked with us.”
“Is that bad?”
“You always want a threesome when you get really drunk.”
He rolled over, looking up at the ceiling, yawning, trying to remember.
“When did she leave?”
There was a peal of laughter from the bathroom and now she came back, sans toothbrush, still with the towel.
“Don’t you wish. You barely could handle all of this.”
“You liked it.”
She leaned over and kissed him, letting the towel fall open. She walked over to the closet, dropping the towel on the floor.
“I’ve got one more portrait to shoot of families of the guys who got killed in the Bend. David Rennie’s mom and sister, what’s her name, Diamond? I’m shooting them at their place at noon.”
“Diamond. God. Talk about an attitude.”
“She was fine with me.” Pulling on jeans now, buttoning a shirt.
“What time is it?”
“Eleven.”
“Christ. The bulldog will be out in a few hours.”
“I know. This is the last shot I’m adding. Then it’s done. They’re holding a spot for it. Are you going to go in and put the story to bed or lay here on the eight-hundred-count and stare at the ceiling?”
• • •
Twenty-four hours later, Sunday morning going into afternoon, the day the story ran on the front page and over two open pages inside, the day it created a Washington media sensation, Sully was doing the television show circuit. Pancake makeup and the green rooms, then talking to a camera, alone in a freezing booth with a blue screen backdrop. Or there were the in-studio hits, him sitting at a table across from his host, the lights bright, reminding himself to cancel out his accent and sit up straight.
“I think it’s a story like Professor Young said,” he said over and over, sticking to his talking points, “about the dark side of the American dream.”
By the time it was all finished—how many shows, six, seven?—he went home, changed, and staggered over to Stoney’s for an early dinner and drinks with Eva Harris, from the U.S. Attorneys Office. The sun was out, it was warm for a change, the first hint of summer humidity in the air. May wasn’t a bad month in D.C.
They talked about everything but the story—her dad and his boat, the approaching summer—until they were finishing up. Then she said, by the way, that he was going to get shit for the Ellison story and he maybe should have thought twice about it. She said, sipping on her pinot, that nobody black in D.C. wanted to read something bad about the Ellisons, who were well liked and admired, and that the white folks didn’t give a damn about some dead black kid anyway.
This analysis caused the glitz on his good mood to fade. Eva had lived in and taken the temperature of this city a lot longer than he had. Sitting across from her in the booth, he called his work voice mail, putting it on speaker, while she listened in, leaning over.
There were thirty-two messages.
The callers Sully would identify as white were sometimes positive—“a tragic story,” one female caller said. But mostly they were bitter rants directed at the victims. Cokeheads, the callers said, who’d gotten it from their own. Thug A shoots Thug B, and this is news how? One guy went on a racist tirade so long that the call timed out on him and he called back, his next message consisting entirely of, “And fuck you.”
The callers he would identify as black, who were the overwhelming majority, called him things like a “neo-racist” and a “sensation-seeking white idiot.” The last one called him a “lying little crap weasel.”
“I don’t think anybody ever called me a crap weasel before,” he said, eating a french fry. “I would have remembered, because I would have punched them in the fucking face.”
“And he said you were a lying one,” said Eva. “You’ve got to like the creative insult. But I told you. Nothing good ever comes out of the Bend.”
She took a last bite of her salmon, kissed him on the cheek, and left for home. He went back through the calls. Hatred, America, he thought, your glowing hatred. God what a place this country was, the way people would talk when not looking at you, without any repercussions to their loathing. . . . He was deleting one call after another, but the last call was new, phoned in during the past few minutes.
“Mr. Carter? This is Delores Ellison,” it began. Her voice sounded clipped, tense. “Shellie and I are conducting a press conference at seven o’clock. It will be outside of his offices. Please call me after that.”
The call clicked off.
He looked at his watch: 6:55. No way he could get there and, he suspected, that was the point. They had set up a presser—TV heavy, no doubt—and skipped notifying the paper because they were going to lambaste him. If he was standing there, the assembled press corps would allow him to ask the first question as fair play, as theater, and then, when it was over, they would descend on him for comment. Stevens was too smart for that. The paper had their say that morning, and now he was going to have a response for the evening news.
“Hoo boy,” he said.
He had all the sympathy in the world for Delores Ellison, he did—a dead husband and a dead son and an empty house—but it didn’t mean he could rewrite the facts or change history, and now she and her lawyer were going to get their pound of flesh out of him. It came with the paycheck.
Going to the bar to get closer to the bank of televisions, he pulled out a stool and asked Dmitri, the bartender, to channel surf, head down to Channel 8, they’d be carrying it live. When he hit the right station—Shellie at the podium, Delores a step behind his right shoulder, the thing already under way—he waggled his hand back and forth.
“Turn it up, turn it up,” he said.
“. . . utterly irresponsible and pointless,” Stevens was saying into the microphone, looking at the cameras in front of him, both hands firmly on the wooden podium. He looked and sounded like he’d just come down from Sinai, the lowered, serious eyebrows, the blazing eyes, the tone of righteous indignation. “This is purple journalism. It does nothing to bring a killer to justice. Instead it seeks to smear the name of a murder victim with innuendo and circumstance. It is”—and here he paused, looking at the cameras—“a low thing.”
“Well played, counselor,” Sully said under his breath, tapping his fingers, onetwothreefourfive, on the wooden bar top.
Delores, her hands clasped before her, in a somber black dress, looked at the back of Stevens’s head, her face set in stone. In front of her, Stevens looked from left to right, as if surveying a congregation in the pews. “The reporter who wrote this story,” he continued, “was so relentless, so probative and scandal seeking, that we had to serve him with a restraining order—at Billy’s funeral, no less—and yet this hatchet job still appears, in the most prominent position of the most prominent edition of the most prominent media outlet of the nation’s capital. It serves only to libel the Ellison family name a
nd besmirch the reputation of Billy Ellison, who was nothing more than a victim in a crime of violence.”
Watching it, listening to the rise and fall of the man’s voice, the cadence and delivery, Sully couldn’t help but be impressed. Stevens was full of shit but he gave fabulous television, and he was burying Sully in the court of public opinion. Nobody was going to contradict him at the end of this. The television stations would dutifully call Eddie for comment, and Eddie could only say something along the lines of “We stand by our story,” which was what the lawyers were going to tell him to say, and it was going to sound weak and cowardly and lawyerly, and the good people of Washington were going to go to bed despising Sully Carter and the shit rag of a paper that employed him.
“We will pursue this issue with the full weight and heft of the law,” Stevens said. “We will not sit idly by. This story, this libel, will not be just corrected. It will be rectified.”
Stevens turned from the podium then, offering the crook of his arm to Delores Ellison. They retreated inside the building, and the camera moved to the reporter at a stand-up, holding a microphone to her mouth, repeating what Stevens had said, summing it all up, holding aloft the front of the paper.
Sully applauded.
“Sounds no good,” Dmitri said, holding the remote out, switching to an NBA game.
“A non-denial denial,” Sully said. “Did you hear him say anything was factually wrong? Did you hear him say Billy Ellison was not in the Bend when he got shot? Did you even hear him say that he was going to sue?”
Dmitri looked at him, one hand on the counter, his heavy black hair a tousle. “He say he will rectify you,” he said, his Russian accent trilling the r.
“Gimme another Basil’s while I think of my sins,” he said.
“You are the angry.”
“A little bit.”
“He said he was going to bury you.”
“Dmitri?”
“Da?”
“Bourbon?”
Dmitri shrugged and flipped the hair back from his eyes, getting a glass from behind the bar, reaching for the bottle in front of the mirrored backdrop. “One more. Odin.”
“Oh, for chrissake.”
“Boss says we got a law problem, drunks go driving.”
Sully’s cell, sitting on the counter, buzzed and illuminated, buzzed again. He punched it on and said, “Yes?”
“Mr. Carter?” It was a woman’s whisper.
“That was the old man. I’m Sully.”
“I’m so glad you answered,” the voice said.
“Delighted to hear it,” he said, sipping the whiskey Dmitri had put down in front of him, “but who’s this?”
“Delores. Delores Ellison.”
The whiskey caught in the back of his throat. He took the burn, feeling it in his nostrils, trying not to spit it out, swallowing it straight. He moved the phone away from his face, coughed. Pinched the bridge of his nose, between his eyes, a tear. He blinked several times and then coughed again, into the crook of his arm, and brought the phone back to his mouth.
“I was just—just watching you on television,” he managed.
“Yes, yes,” she said quickly, still with that staged whisper. “I’d left you a message to please call me after that. When the conference ended and you hadn’t called, I looked up your cell, from the card you gave me.”
“I got it, that call, the message,” he said, the whiskey still burning behind his eyes. “I just hadn’t had a chance to call you yet. That conference just—”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. That exactly. That was Shellie’s doing. I didn’t want to do it. Not at all.”
“Ah. I see. Mrs. Ellison, not that it’s any of mine, but why are you whispering?”
“Because I’m still in Shellie’s office. He’s going to come back any second now, and I had to talk to you.”
The lady had gone certifiable. Vilify him on television and call him two minutes later . . . and it dawned on him, in his paranoia, that maybe Shellie was setting this up, coaching her from three feet away.
“Okay,” he said, mind spinning, taking the idea that he was speaking into a tape recorder. He blinked and shook his head, trying to get the burn out of his sinuses. “What is it I can do for you, Mrs. Ellison?”
“Actually, a great deal,” she said, as if the idea was just coming to her. “Are you going to be writing more about Frenchman’s Bend?”
“I might, yes, ma’am, as time and space allows,” he said, making it up as he went, feeling this out. “Fascinating place. A lot of history.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said, and now her ragged breath came more quickly. He wondered if she was still on meds. “I mean, how I read that, it seemed like you knew a great deal about the place, that you were going to do more.”
“Well. I did find out a great deal about the history of the Bend,” he said, going with it, raising his hands, wondering where in the hell this was going, his mind alighting on the events Prof. Young had recounted, “the slavery, the postwar years. Much more than what I printed, sure. Fascinating stuff. Billy, I mean, I’m sorry, he was just—”
“That’s what I thought,” she said again.
“Well, I did my homework, I suppose. It’s one of the—”
“You did?”
“—everything that—what? Yes. I did. Your family, the bank. I suppose I get a kick out of research. Billy must have, too. That thesis, he must have put a lot of work into it. And I’m terribly sorry, Ms. Ellison, I know a lot—”
“Billy’s thesis? You saw that?”
“Well, I’m familiar with it, what he was working on, that—”
“I see, I see. The thesis. Yes. Yes. Do—do you think you could meet me there, in about an hour?”
“Where is that, ma’am?”
“Frenchman’s Bend.”
He snorted, a cough again, a hand slapped the bar involuntarily, causing Dmitri to turn, looking at him like he’d gone nuts. “The Bend? I’m sorry? What? Mrs. Ellison, maybe you’re not aware, but Mr. Stevens took out a restraining order after I came to your house the second time. I really don’t know that this call is even a good idea, since it sounds like he doesn’t even—”
“I didn’t want that,” she hissed. “He did. I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to explain. Now it’s all . . . it’s all out there, everything, everybody knows, it’s just all—all—and now all this time, and now it—”
It sounded as if she were sobbing, trying to choke it back.
“Ma’am? Ms. Ellison?”
“I need you to meet me,” her voice more controlled, but still that whisper, urgent, “at the Bend. Now. I mean, an hour from now. Latest.”
“Ms. Ellison, it’s getting dark soon and the Bend is not a nice place even—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” she burst out, spittle-flecking furious. “You put my dead son on the front of the paper and now you act scared to even talk to me? I know about the Bend. Billy knew about the Bend. That’s what I want to show you. Now.”
She hung up.
• • •
He pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at it like it was going to blow up or melt into a little black pile of plastic. It didn’t.
“Dmitri, brother, could you bring me one more of those?”
“That was last.” With an upward tick of the chin.
“Yeah, but I just spit and spilt all of it.”
This drew a long sigh, a blowing out of air from puffed cheeks. He took the glass, without nodding, and went to the bar, bringing down the bottle.
Sully, hands flat on the bar, bap bap bap. Then he nodded to himself, picked up the phone, and punched in R.J.’s number at home. By the time Dmitri brought back the Basil’s, he’d rattled off what Delores had told him.
“You sober, Sullivan?” R.J. s
aid.
“As a judge.”
“And why, exactly, would she go to the Bend? Much less meet you there?”
“Got none. She has exactly zero business down there.”
“Didn’t you tell her that?”
“I tried to tell her that.”
“And?”
“She said to be there in an hour. Or now. Something.”
“For chrissake.”
“Emphatically said to be there.”
“She’s off her rails,” R.J. said.
“I think I gotta go,” Sully said, rattling the ice in his glass. “What, she goes and we just leave her out there, that place? Jesus. Maybe she wants to get all emotional about the spot where Billy died. Maybe she’ll tell me something about this shadow investigation that Stevens is financing. That’s what I got my money on.”
“Why wouldn’t they have announced that at the presser?”
“She says, just now, that she has always wanted to talk, that Stevens wouldn’t let her. Quite excited about that.”
“So why doesn’t she tell the police?”
“Who says she hasn’t? Maybe she did and they sat on it. Look, at the political level? The West Wing, Senator whoever, flipping Main Justice? They’re leaning on MPD to make a collar, but the case is a dog. So maybe Momma Ellison isn’t thrilled about hearing that. Maybe she thinks MPD is blasé about another young black corpse. Now that we’ve put Billy boy’s real life out there in front of God and everybody else, maybe she wants to get back at the cops.”
“Fascinating,” R.J. said. “But you can’t go. The restraining order.”
“Fuck that. She called me.”
“What part of ‘restraining’ don’t you understand?”
“The part that her boss served me with it, not her.”
“He’s representing her. Don’t be dense.”
“Without contradictory information, yeah, sure. But we just got contradictory information. A principal player in a story that’s on today’s front page, the story everyone in D.C. is talking about, just told me she wants to meet. How can I not go?”