Murder, D.C.

by Neely Tucker

  “Not as bad as Delores Ellison’s yesterday.”

  “Well. Not that bad. But pretty bad.”

  “Pretty bad.”

  “How are you?”

  “If I still had a dog I’d shoot it.”

  “That’s pretty bad.”

  “It is.”

  “Eddie can be such a fucker.”

  “So much for the suspension being hush-hush.”

  “This is why you don’t want to be in the newsroom,” she said. “Nothing’s a secret.”

  “So what’s the talk?”

  “That Eddie’s pissing his pants about a protest, or a lawsuit, or both, and covering the paper’s ass.”

  “Well.”

  “Let’s go inside,” she said.

  “No no, not yet. I like it out here.”

  “You’re a little drunk.”

  “Yeah,” he said. Then, “She said something.”

  “Who? Said what?”

  “Delores. Before she shot herself. She said, ‘You were going to find out.’”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “She starts raising the gun, right, it’s going up, I thought to Christ she was about to blow me a new one, and she says, ‘You were going to find out.’ And then blam.”

  “Find out what?”

  He shrugged. “She asked me—this was on the phone, before—if I was going to be writing more about the Bend, and I said, well, maybe, whatever. I got there, she comes from over against the wall and says, ‘This is where Billy died.’ Then she says, ‘You were going to find out,’ and pulls the gun up.”

  “So did Eddie and Melissa assign somebody to track it down, what she meant?”

  “I didn’t tell them.”

  “Why not? Jesus, what’s wrong with you?”

  “Because she told me,” he said, opening his eyes. “Because, because . . . it was supposed to mean something. She was telling me something, she thought something was obvious. That I was going to find out and put it in the paper.”

  “So she killed herself to prevent you from finding it out, or to take herself out of the consequences when you did?”

  He spread his arms out, bumping into her, banging the other hand on the railing. “Or, did it to help me find it out.”

  Alex took a sip of his whiskey. “That’s a mind fuck.”

  “Yeah. It is. It seriously is.”

  She let out a deep breath and put the glass down. “Now. Look. I want you to listen to me. Whatever it was, it’s done. Done. I don’t care what she meant. Let this one go.”

  He turned and looked at her, her shoulder against his.

  “Why would I do that? Why would I ever possibly do that? The woman kills herself right in front of me. There’s some moral responsibility here—”

  “No there’s not.” She was speaking just above a whisper. “No. We come into people’s lives for a few minutes, a few days, what are we to them? A voice on the phone, a sympathetic face? They see us as those reporters, those people who put that picture in the paper. They don’t really know us and we don’t really know them. This was an unhinged person. She projected that shit on you and that’s her problem, not yours.”

  “Was her problem.”

  “I’m serious. Don’t get caught up in all this D.C. crap, the office politics. Let Eddie cover the paper’s tail. And keep your eye on getting back abroad. That’s where you belong. Not in this . . . what do you even want to call Washington?” She laughed now, deep in her throat. “Soap opera? I’ve been back a week and I’ve already got the hives.”

  “How’s the Middle East project thingy?” he said, switching the subject.

  “I’m on a plane in thirty-six hours and change. I got a fixer who says he can get me into Hezbollah leadership if I get there quick. Now, come on in. Come on inside. Come on upstairs. I’m going to make you take a bath and get in the bed. Then I’m going out with the girls from photo. They’re taking me clubbing.”

  “But you came here first?”

  “I did.”

  “Because you just love me that much?”

  “Because we are friends. With the occasional benefits package. And I like you even if may be I shouldn’t. Now, stand up.”

  “You said ‘package,’” he said.

  “Hilarious. I did. Now, stand up.”

  She picked up the bottles, the ice bucket, the glass, pushing the door all the way open. “Get as drunk as you want tonight. Then you’re going to take two weeks off, sleep late, and forget all about Delores Ellison and Frenchman’s goddamn Bend. Right?”

  He raised his chin and kissed her forehead and slung an arm around her shoulder.

  “Right,” he lied.

  TWENTY-SIX

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, as required by the paper’s HR department, he walked into the psychiatric offices of Gene Henderson. It was on one of the upper floors of an airless office building just off Eye Street downtown.

  “You decided to come back,” Henderson said, gray curly hair, a slight paunch, filling the doorframe. Sully walked past him into the office and sat down in the leather-upholstered chair facing his desk, slouching back, crossing his legs at the ankles.

  Henderson closed the door and sat behind the desk. Sully looked at his degrees on the wall behind him: Morehouse, Princeton. The other framed items were three large photographs of land and water, a running creek in autumnal New England, a tropical beach, leaves dripping fat beads of rainwater.

  There was a pause, the older man writing in some ledger on his desk, and Sully said, “Go ahead. Rub it in.”

  “No, no, that wasn’t the point. Just that it is good to see you again.”

  “At ninety bucks an hour, I’d be glad to see me, too.”

  “Not everything is cynicism, Sully. This is your mode of conversation, of deflecting things. That’s not what we’re about here. It doesn’t work.”

  “All right.”

  “Leave it at the door.”

  “All right already.”

  “You got suspended. I saw your story. I saw the woman killed herself.”

  “The woman?” Sully said. “You’ve lived here, what, thirty years? You knew the Ellisons.”

  “Of. They are not quite my social set.”

  “Were.”

  Henderson nodded, smiling, “Were.”

  “A real charmer, that broad. Killed herself right in front of me.”

  Henderson let that settle. “That is, that is terrible. Did you know her well?”

  “No. We talked a couple of times, just about Billy. I sort of liked her, sort of didn’t.”

  “What didn’t you like?”

  “Seemed to think her late hubbie was a yokel.” Because he was from people who had to break a sweat when they worked. In Georgia.

  “Perhaps he was.”

  “With a Harvard law degree? Doubtful. Plus, weird to make it so obvious, what, fifteen years later, to a reporter, just after your son was killed. I mean, who cares what I think?”

  “The Ellisons, you must know by now, are—were—quite class conscious.”

  Sully waved a hand, dismissively.

  “Your paper has said you were at the scene of her death. The cable channels said something about it, but I didn’t catch it all.”

  “I was five feet away. Sat there with her head in my lap till the cops came.”

  “My god, man.”

  “I really don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I would think you’d be in shock.”

  “Truly don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Okay, okay.” Henderson clasped his hands over his stomach and looked over the desk at Sully, a pleasant, comfortable smile across his face. “What shall we talk about, then?”

  “I was thinking Nadia.”

  “Ah.
Nadia. Our recurring theme.” A hand raised, falling back over his stomach, the man swiveling in his chair. “You see the connection, do you not? Nadia, dead in Sarajevo, Ms. Ellison—”

  “Spare me, Dr. Freud. How many women have you seen with their heads blown open? This is professional curiosity.”

  “I was in the military, you’ll remember.”

  “Evasive response, Dr. Lecter.”

  “We are not here to discuss me.”

  “Zero. What I figured.”

  Dead air. The clock on Henderson’s desk. The stillness of the sterile, refiltered air.

  “Your mother,” Henderson said, “was also a homicide victim, a gunshot wound.”

  “Three of them, if you want to get technical.”

  “One was to her head, as I recall.”

  “Yeah, Dr. Phil, I think that was the big one.”

  A long look with a grimace, a tightening of the lips, the lower jaw.

  “Sully, your problem here is not depression.”

  “Hallelujah.”

  “It is not malaise.”

  “Preach, pastor.”

  “It is anger.”

  Sully looked at him.

  “You are boiling with it. Everything you do, it cascades out of your eyes, your mouth, your pores. You are filled—”

  “Do you even bother with calling yourself a doctor?”

  “—with it, in—I am not answering attacks. It is your—”

  “Because you—you went to school, you went to college, you went to med school, and this is it? Your genius diagnosis? Anger? That some prick whose mother was shot to death and whose girlfriend had her head blown in two—you, your professional opinion, is that this guy might just be a little pissed off.”

  “This—”

  “I hope you can get your fucking money back. Princeton, my Cajun ass. I, I coulda told you that and I didn’t even go to college—”

  “Sully.”

  “—and I—what?”

  “If you will calm down. It is very hard to learn anything while shouting.”

  “Which presumes I have something to learn from you.”

  Air.

  “This event,” Henderson said after a moment, “this matter with Delores Ellison. It had to strike very close to home. You went to see Ms. Ellison that night for a reason. One that certainly is not known to your employers, and perhaps not even to yourself. You wanted to do something for her. You wanted to save her.”

  “I wanted to do my job. She said she had something to tell me, something about the Bend. She said I had to meet her there. I didn’t go jumping on a white horse, I wasn’t the catcher in the fucking rye. I was doing—”

  “Did you try to stop her, once you saw the gun?”

  “Who wouldn’t? Look. I’m not doing this with you. Last time I was here, you asked me to write something about Nadia.”

  “What?”

  “Nadia. You asked me to write about her.”

  Henderson blinked, his mind racing to keep up. “I think I—”

  “Well,” Sully said. “I did. A couple of weeks ago.”

  Henderson nodding, Sully saw, trying to figure out where this was going. “Right, right, yes. I asked you to write. Since you were having a hard time talking about her, about Nadia.”

  Sully nodded, exhaling. He unfolded the paper, taken from a sketch pad. Henderson, rattled now, leaned over the desk to take the paper from him, then pulled his bifocals down from his forehead.

  the night wind slipped through the curtains

  leaving the lights of town below

  but I saw it flicker through your hair

  and felt the shiver of your skin

  but now

  i look at my hands

  they look as they always did

  i look in the mirror

  but do not see your shadow in my eye.

  i lick my lips

  to find no taste of your skin.

  i touch my chest but feel no

  trace of your fingertips.

  and yet

  you are there, behind my eyes and

  under my tongue in the weakness

  of my heart, for in memory

  love does not drown in the well of time.

  “It’s expressive,” Henderson said. “It’s about the dead lingering in the physical sensations of the living. It gets at what has happened to you.”

  “A lot more happened to Nadia.”

  “This is true. But you are the only one still living.”

  “Another genius observation.”

  “Sully,” Henderson said, attempting a smile. Trying to bring him down.

  “So how wound up am I today?”

  “A good bit.”

  Sully turned in the chair. “You should have a window for people to look out of or something.”

  “Let’s slow down for a second,” Henderson said. “Take a deep breath. Now, listen: There is nothing more to be done for Nadia, or for Ms. Ellison, or for your mother, or for any of the dead, for that matter. There is only tending to the part of them that still lives within us. But I want you to see this: It’s not them we’re helping, or tending, or nurturing, or even perhaps abusing. It is the part of ourselves that they still inhabit. That part may be smaller or larger, and it may be a positive force or a destructive one. But it is still the matter of the dead living within us.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Nadia is where she is, and that is all. You did all that you could for her, and yet you feel her moving inside your body.”

  Sully looked at his fingernails.

  “If you sit in my chair, this is normal,” Henderson said. “The dead have always been with us, Sully, and they always will be. It is one of the things that make us human. How much they are with us is the issue.”

  “Yeah, well, the thing is?” Sully said, shifting in his chair. “What I learned from covering war, open conflict? When you’re done with it, it doesn’t mean it’s done with you.”

  Henderson nodded. “Yes. Yes. The past is not a light switch. You can’t flick it to ‘off’ when you board a plane or cross borders. And yet you came home from war—you flipped that switch, yes—but now you cover . . . homicide.”

  “You want me to do the gardening column?”

  “Again, the sarcasm. You could do other things at your paper, but this, this is the business you have chosen. You are familiar with Don McCullin, the combat photographer?”

  “Everybody is.”

  “Belfast, Vietnam, Lebanon—black-and-white images of the worst places on earth. He went back home to the UK, eventually. You know what he does now?”

  “Landscapes.”

  “Now he shoots landscapes,” Henderson said, nodding. “Pictures of the earth, of nature.”

  “It’s still pretty dark, you ask me,” Sully said. “A lot of depth and shadow. A lot of weight. I wouldn’t call it carefree.”

  “Fair enough. But he didn’t come home and photograph more bodies and killings.”

  “You’re saying my career has changed but I’m stuck in the same gear.”

  Henderson sat there, letting it play out, the artful silence of the interviewer.

  After several minutes, Henderson cleared his throat. “Sully? What are you thinking now? We were talking about Nadia. About finding tranquility.”

  “You know what I’m thinking?” he said. “I’m thinking I’m not going to sit here and second-guess what I do for a living. I’m not going to second-guess that the loss of life through violence is an important thing, and that it’s worth covering. But Nadia? You asked me to write something about her, so I did. And it told me something I’ve never said out loud.”

  “And what is that?”

  “That I wish she’d leave me alone now. I don’t want the gho
sts anymore. She comes, she goes, the tremors come, they go. Half the time, it feels like I’m not in control of it. That—that there’s something in me that is not me, and I can’t get rid of it. I want that to go away. I want to make them go away. All of them.”

  “I’m not sure I’m following. Who is ‘them’?”

  “Are you listening? The dead.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  HE SAW ALEXIS off from the hotel the next morning. She looked fabulous: jeans and a light sweater against the early chill, the light of the day still soft, glowing. Her hair was pulled back, her skin holding a touch of sunlight that brought out the faint set of freckles along her cheekbones.

  “I got a hangover,” she giggled against his ear, giving him a hug. “We were out late.”

  “You got eight hours to sleep it off before Heathrow,” he said. He held on to her longer than usual.

  “Hey,” she said, feeling it. “You’re going to kick butt, right?” Pulling back to look at him, only a few inches shorter, her eyes searching his. She held his elbows with her hands, assessing, looking into him. She whispered, “You’re going to take your two weeks, get some sleep, ride the bike. Then you’re going to come back, smite some righteous ass, and come back overseas. Try to get the Cairo gig. It’s going to be major.”

  A little shake of the arms and she stepped back, moving to the open door of the taxi.

  “The Middle East has been big,” he said, “for, like, the past two thousand years.”

  “Yeah, but no shit this time around.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “I mean it. Hit me on the sat phone,” she said. “They’re so much better than they used to be. You have to get the hotel room facing wherever the satellite is—you can tell the foreign hacks, standing there at check-in with a compass on the counter—but it’s reliable. Amazing. Sarajevo, only the AP and Newsweek had sat phones, going off at $18 a minute. Now—”

  She kept prattling on, and he wanted to stop her, right here, right now. He wanted to say something to make her stay, to close the gap he felt yawning between himself and the rest of the world. It would be good to do that. He would say something funny and warm and she would look at him, taking him seriously, and the thing between them would deepen.