by Neely Tucker
“Do I look like I go to cocktail parties?”
“Are you gonna help me out here?”
“I didn’t ask for a lawyer, I’m—”
“Sully—”
“—a friend to law enforcement, puppies, little old ladies, and—”
“Answer the goddamn question.”
Sully looked at him, tamping the rage back down. Down. He was going to keep it down. He was going to modulate his voice, his tone. He was going to get up and walk out of here and—
“Before this,” he said, listening to his own voice, “I wouldn’t have known her if she’d bit me.”
“Okay,” Weaver said.
“Okay.”
“Okay. I’m just saying it looks extremely weird, her calling you up, this guy she barely knows, calling him to the spot of her son’s murder, killing herself right there, wanting you for a witness.”
“Stipulated.”
“But you got nothing for me?”
“You think I’m lying, hey? Pull my phone records, do the legwork, I won’t take it personal. But why did she do that? I’m a reporter, not a psychiatrist. Who knows why anybody does what they do? Nobody ever knows motive, detective. We only know what they tell us, and that doesn’t mean shit.”
• • •
They turned him loose about three a.m. Weaver walked him out the door, stopping at the top of the steps. Sully went down to the street. His bike was at the curb. He half-turned and Weaver said he’d asked a uniform who could ride to bring it up, as it would have gotten jacked at the Bend. He went back inside for a minute and tossed him the keys, underhanded.
Sully made the grab one-handed and then asked about the helmet and Weaver cursed and went back inside again, then came back out with it. Sully met him halfway up the steps. When he got on the bike, he gunned the engine twice and peeled, the rubber barking off the pavement.
He was going to get the shakes soon, and he wanted to be off the bike before they hit.
• • •
The shower, rinsing off the blood. The water ran from his chest to his stomach to his crotch and down his legs. Both hands were palms out, against the steaming tile, the hot water beating over his back. His mind ran in loops, flopped over, went elsewhere. He had never held Nadia like that, that’s the thought that was circling around his head, that he was trying to keep out. No matter how hot the shower, how steamed the tile, he could not stay warm, and he felt the tremors start, back between his shoulder blades. He could feel the icy fingers of the Sarajevo morgue, the concrete and tile floor, the frozen light, Nadia among the other corpses, her black hair flowing, half her head gone.
You were going to find out, Delores had said. He stood there until the water ran cold.
TWENTY-FOUR
EDDIE WINTERS’S CORNER office, glass on two sides, was set on the southwest corner of the building. The Washington Monument rose in the near distance, the White House was just a few blocks over, and the Capitol was off to the east. On a morning in early May, with the sky overhead Carolina blue, it was easy to ignore the stalled traffic and alienation below and admire the austere lines of the federal city’s profile.
“So they did or did not ask you to include the information about Billy’s sexual orientation?” Eddie was saying. “Shellie Stevens was bellowing in my ear last night that you had promised that you were only including what was on the release they sent out. That you double-crossed him.”
Lewis, the attorney, was sitting on the couch, looking like he had heartburn at nine in the morning. R.J. sat next to him, legs crossed at the knee. Melissa leaned against Eddie’s bookcase, arms folded, studying the tops of her shoes.
Sully had not slept at all last night, coming out of the shower to put on sweats and a T-shirt and stare at ESPN, replays of baseball games watching him, until the sun came up. He had willed himself not to drink, knowing this meeting was coming.
Now, blinking back the sleep-deprivation headache, running on coffee and adrenaline, he tried to remember what Eddie had asked him. He was unaware of how long it had been since the question was asked, if people were staring at him or just looking. He brought his focus back from outside and returned Eddie’s gaze with detachment.
“I was unaware, in Washington, that we published information only if the subject agrees,” he said. “Certainly this would be news to our friends on the Hill.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“I lost the thread. Who is ‘they,’ and which story are we talking about? Is this the story about Bill Clinton and oral favors from interns in the Oval Office? I believe ‘they’ asked—actually I think it was demanded—that we not publish. And you’ll pardon the pun, but I believe we, and the rest of the Washington media, told them to suck it.”
“Don’t play games and watch your mouth,” Eddie snapped. “Different stories, different standards. Compelling national interest versus none. Public figure versus private.”
“Billy Ellison became a public figure the minute he got killed,” Sully said. “We accurately reported material, primarily from official police documents. We established through reporting that he was killed in the Bend, a well-known drug market. We established that Billy was frequently in that area because of the clubs on O Street, and thus his sexual orientation was relevant. Plus, he is the member of a prominent family whose matron is sometimes pictured in this and other publications, and thus there is little doubt that Delores Ellison, and the family, are public figures. I reached out to his family to see if they wished to comment. Mr. Stevens, speaking for Mrs. Ellison, declined. Ta-da.”
“Sully,” Eddie said.
“Ask Lewis.”
“Sully.”
He uncrossed and recrossed his legs, in the chair, his knee beginning to throb. His back ached but he had skipped the painkillers, wanting to be clearheaded. “Shellie Stevens said I was to only include what was in the statement. I didn’t agree to anything.”
“He says you did. I would say he was close to unhinged about it. That would be better. Unhinged.”
“A Washington lawyer is having a hissy fit. This means what to me?”
“This means, smart-ass, did you ask any follow-ups about why he made such demands?”
Sully’s eyebrows rose, and he looked to his left and to his right, but R.J. and Melissa were studying their fingernails now.
“Did you read the story?” Sully said. “Did we not have a meeting on this subject prior to publication? Jesus, man. If Shellie Stevens had a suicidal client, he should have said so.”
Almost imperceptibly, R.J.’s left hand, on the chair arm next to him, rose and fell, rose and fell, a gesture of caution, of warning.
“So how did this meeting with Stevens end?” Eddie said.
“I thanked him for the intel and said that the death of the sole heir to one of the city’s most prominent families in the city’s worst drug park was news by any standard and we were going to print it. They could comment or not, and we would be happy to reflect either of her choices in the story.”
Eddie turned toward the corner. “Lewis?”
The big man sighed, looking down at his notebook, then around the room. “This is terrible PR but legally speaking? Sully is correct. It’s really attenuated. The woman’s son was killed. They’re going to convince a jury she was more upset about a newspaper story than the death itself? No. This ice is not thin. And, while we’re on it, the dead have no legal rights to privacy.”
This merry-go-round had been going on for nearly an hour. Sully had been expecting R.J. to pipe up early and often, but he had been almost entirely quiet, watching the ebb and flow. Sully, trying to fend off Eddie, had the growing impression that something had been put in place before the meeting ever started, that there was an agreement among the brass, legal, and probably HR, and what he was sitting through was a show trial in which he would be given a fair and e
quitable hearing and then taken out and shot.
“But just because we can report a fact or series of facts doesn’t mean we should,” Melissa said now. “Lewis mentions the public relations aspect—we’re clear in the court of law, but I don’t know about the court of public opinion. A grieving mother commits suicide in front of our reporter who published a story about her murdered son over objections? And our response is, ‘Read the First Amendment’? I don’t think that makes us look like we’re comforting the afflicted.”
There was a pause, the air in the room still, people looking solemn, and again, what struck Sully was the complete absence of anyone saying anything on his behalf. Other than Lewis, who had quoted the law, not Sully’s judgment, as a defense.
In this conversational gulf, Sully turned to Melissa. “We’re also supposed to afflict the comfortable. Who aren’t exactly losing sleep about the murder rate in the—”
“Did you relay their—okay, Stevens’s—request to your editors?” she said.
“Christ in a G-string!” Sully snapped. “They took out a restraining order. I think that makes it pretty clear they didn’t want to cooperate. Everybody in here—including you—knew that.”
“I don’t remember hearing ‘suicide risk,’” she said.
“Did I say that Delores Ellison would kill herself if we wrote this? No, because nobody told me that. Did I have any reasonable expectation that she would do so? No, because in nearly twenty years of doing this, I have written stories about thousands of people in dozens of countries and not a single one of them, or any of their family members, or any of their friends, or their mommas, or some guy they met in a bar this one time, shot themselves in the head after publication.”
Melissa, softening her tone, maybe climbing down from her standard prosecutorial perch: “But you still met her, Sully, even with the restraining order.”
“Because she asked me to, and because my editor said it was my call.”
Eddie leaned forward. “Because you’re supposed to be a pro. Because you’ve been in war zones for damn near a decade. You made right call after right call. Now, you come home, and it’s like they took your common sense at customs. You know more than R.J. or any of us about this situation. You’re supposed to know. You made the call. And it was wrong. When Stevens said ‘family reputation’ you should have asked. You should have made some effort to ascertain Delores’s mental status.”
“Like I told the detectives,” he said, a ferocious headache coming on, “no one had any idea she was suicidal. I didn’t, they didn’t, Shellie fucking Stevens didn’t. She said she wanted to show me something, that it was at the Bend and it was urgent. What, then, am I supposed to do? Let her go by herself?”
“And she didn’t say anything?” Melissa said. “She just walked up and shot herself?”
You were going to find out. It ran through his mind again, as it had been all night, turning over and over, a riddle without a solution. His lower lip trembled, just for a second, and then he flicked his tongue around his lips, wetting them. He raised his hands and spread them. “I asked her what she wanted to show me, and she said something like, Yeah, I wanted to show you this. Bam.”
Eddie coughed into his hand, tapping his pen on his desk.
“So what we’re going to do, here, Sullivan, is try and head this off. We’re—”
“‘This’?”
“—going to—this? This is a nasty protest against the paper. Stevens, three ministers, and two civil rights groups were in here at eight a.m. We are looking at the following optics: hundreds if not thousands of predominantly black demonstrators out front, railing against a powerful newspaper that drove a grieving black mother to suicide. You know how easy that’ll be for the cable channels, the networks, to cover? With the background of the protests we had here in eighty-four? That time, we had the Urban League, the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, even Walter Fauntroy after our neck, and I like Walter. So we’re not—”
“This isn’t the same thing—”
“—not going to—what? No, no, you’re right. It’s not going to be the same thing. Because this time, we’re going to do something about it before Shellie drums up whatever he’s going to drum up. Notwithstanding your superb work from abroad, and on the Sarah Reese murder last year, there is still the Judge Foy matter, and that leaves a lasting mark, so—”
“There wasn’t any mark before you put it there,” Sully shot back. “You trusted a federal judge’s word over mine. That federal judge was Sarah Reese’s dad, David. You remember David? Now kicked off the bench? You want to clear up my reputation? Put the blame where it has belonged since jump street. On you.”
Eddie’s face flushed. The room, it was like no one was even breathing. Monasteries in Tibet made more noise.
“You’re suspended, Sully,” Eddie said softly. “For two weeks. While you’re gone, you’re going to go over your notes, you’re going to write me a report on exactly what happened here, come back, and present it to me. This is your second suspension, and HR can go over this with you, but a third—”
“Suspending me? How about tell me what I did wrong, when the Ellison story was approved by everyone in this room, prior to publication, and it is without error? No one has asked for a correction. No one has said our premise was wrong. There’s just heat from rich people because we published a story that they didn’t like. So if you don’t have the big-girl panties to deal with it, Eddie, just say you’re looking for somewhere to stick it and I’m the only billy goat in the pen.”
“You’re suspended,” Eddie repeated. “Two weeks. It was going to be with pay but you just talked your way out of that. Not only for this story, but for insubordination, just now. And for blowing off, what is it HR tells me, three of your required therapy sessions in the past four months. This gets out? The reporter on this Ellison fuckup had a drinking problem, was blowing off recovery? Good god. Two weeks, you go back to therapy. We clear? You clear?”
Smoldering, the veins in his temple about to pop.
“Crystal,” he said.
TWENTY-FIVE
THE PHONE HAD been ringing and ringing but he didn’t get off the porch to answer it. It was about half past dark and he’d been slowly but steadily drinking all day. He sat on the cold steel steps just outside his back door and looked at the cherry tree, the blossoms having faded and fallen two weeks back. They were still there, a pink carpet going brown. The pansies had come up from their winter hibernation, purple and white and yellow. The phone kept ringing and he took the bottle from between his legs and ice from the bucket he’d brought outside and poured another drink and watched the sky going from pale blue to black overhead.
He also had a fine view of the flat brick windowless sidewall of the neighbor’s house behind him. And above his yard was a small nest of electrical and cable wires. He’d planted the cherry tree both for shade and as a means of breaking up this grim little tableau, but the yard and the narrow alley behind it were shielded from streetlights, leaving it a dark pocket in the middle of the city.
When he’d bought the house, beat-up as it was, the real estate agent had told him the Hill just had to come around, being a short walk from the seat of national government, but he didn’t buy it as an investment. The neighborhood was two- and sometimes three-story brick row houses, lifted sashes and hardwood floors, no air conditioning and tin ceilings and fans in the hallway. They were a century old, places that people had talked and eaten and fought and fucked and died in, the bigger ones with carriage houses out back, the concrete alleys, where blacks had to live back in the day. You closed your eyes, you could hear the early years of the twentieth century the sound of trolleys and saloon music and women’s laughter and breaking whiskey bottles and after-midnight footfalls on the brick sidewalks, the broken moonlight floating down beneath the trees, the local weapon of choice a razor rather than a pistol.
It was a place he felt comfortable
, if not quite at home, this mixture of violence and family.
There had been a thumping on the street out front for several minutes before he realized it was somebody beating on his door and that he was perhaps a little drunk. He looked at the bottle and it was three-quarters empty.
The thumping stopped and he was glad whoever it was had gone away. He spilled some of the whiskey on the next refill, cursed, and then heard someone in the alley. He was surprised to hear a woman’s voice blaring from the shadows.
“Sully! Sullivan CARTER! Damn it, you answer up or I’ll put a brick through your window.”
He blinked. “The downstairs windows got bars over them, Alex,” he called out, “and if you get a brick upstairs? Buy you a beer.”
She stopped, her head and shoulders discernible behind the wall, vaguely illuminated by the streetlights on Constitution. She put a hand over her eyes. “Where are you?”
“The steps.”
She was at the steel gate to the backyard, rattling it, and then her shape became visible, smiling, her hair bouncing loose, spilling back over her shoulders, a tall, good-looking, athletic woman. She kissed him on the forehead and said, “I was knocking out front. I brought you this. From Schneider’s.”
A bottle of Basil’s. He held his own bottle up, clinking it lightly off hers.
“I’ll get you a glass,” he said.
“No no. I’ll work off yours.” She sat on the step below him, found his glass, and took a pull.
“Wow,” she said. “You going to cut that?”
He lopped in some ice cubes from the bucket. “Wait awhile,” he said.
She stood, went past him and inside, got a plastic bottle of water from the fridge, and came back, this time sitting beside him. She poured the glass half-full of water, the whiskey sloshing.
“Too late if you’re trying to water me down,” he said.
She sat there beside him.
“Heard you had a rough day,” she said after a while, her left arm going around his lower back, her right hand brushing the hair back over his forehead.