by Neely Tucker
He’d only been there a few moments when a thin young man in a suit stopped on the sidewalk dead in front of him. Sully pulled up short, nearly bumping into him. The face had said something. Christ, one of Stevens’s operatives, what—and then Sully realized that the face was familiar, he’d seen this guy. Where, what—
“Mr. Carter?” the face said, smiling, brown bangs over his forehead, the Adam’s apple bobbing. Reaching out to shake hands, his mind spinning furiously, it finally came to him.
“Elliot!” he said. “Elliot. Good god. Haven’t seen you since the cafeteria.”
“Yeah, hope I didn’t interrupt. You were talking.”
“What? Who? Who was I talking to?”
“Yourself.”
“I was?”
Billy’s onetime partner, a bow tie neatly knotted at his neck, moved back out of the middle of the sidewalk, standing beside Sully, so others could pass.
“Yeah,” he said. “You looked preoccupied.”
“Oh.”
“When I heard you had been suspended,” Elliot said, as if by way of explanation, “I was impressed. It told me that your story had really pissed Delores off, and that made you a friend of mine. I was hoping you might be at the funeral. So I came up. I saw a reporter over there and he said he was from the paper.”
Sully folded his arms and bit on his lower lip, wishing Elliot would go the fuck home. “Chris. That’s Chris. He told you I was over here?” If Chris could spot him, then, sweet Jesus—
“No, no. He caught me up on what was going on. I mean, I saw your story in the paper. Everybody did. Everybody was talking about it. Then it went around that Delores had committed suicide. That sounded bad.”
Sully wondered which part of it sounded bad, but it pretty much all was, so he let it go. “Well, yeah, I mean whatever, so, thank you. It is. But I should let you get over to the service. I think they’re starting soon.”
He nodded across the street. They were shutting the doors to the cathedral. Two of Stevens’s guys, in suits, stood tandem watch at the door, one on either side.
“Oh no,” Elliot said, again with the hair flip, “I didn’t come to go to the funeral. You’ll remember Delores had a very low opinion of me. I mean, I’m sorry she’s dead? But she made Billy miserable. I came because I thought I might find you. Your colleague said you weren’t here and I was leaving and wow, I walked right into you.”
“Me?” Sully felt his eyebrows arch, he couldn’t help it. There was a headache building behind his eyes and Elliot, in all his earnestness, wasn’t helping. Fucking kids, they got on his nerves, this lack of awareness of the rest of the world. “You put on a suit and tie and came to a funeral of a woman you can’t stand because you wanted to find me?”
“I don’t know that I would put it like that.”
“Okay. Whatever way you like. What’s on your mind?”
“Those morons his mom hired. Two of them are over there, guarding the doors.”
“The private investigators?”
“That’s dressing it up some, but yeah.”
“What about them?”
“They tore up Billy’s place.”
“His place, what are you talking about?” Sully said, moving under the awning, Elliot following.
“His apartment. Billy’s. They went through there and ransacked it.”
“They . . . I guess, what, they were looking for the drugs, get them out of there, keep it from getting in the news.”
Elliot’s eyebrows knit together. “Drugs? No, I don’t think that’s what they were looking for.”
“Why not?”
“Because they came to my house the next night, looking for the same thing.”
“They—”
“But it’s okay,” Elliot said, nodding again, that Adam’s apple. “I think I know what they were looking for. I’ve got it. You want to come see it?’
THIRTY-THREE
ELLIOT SAID THE thing wasn’t at his apartment but at a friend’s, and that this guy, he’d bring it to them. So they flagged a taxi and wound up in Georgetown, Sully letting Elliot tell the driver where to go. This turned out to be a bar called the Giraffe, on M Street, right on the main drag. They took a booth at the very back, set behind a partial wall of exposed brick. The waiter came, they ordered, and Elliot looked uncomfortable.
“The first time we talked?” he said, taking off his bow tie. “Right after Billy died, and you came to meet me at the cafeteria? I really wasn’t all that sure who you were. I sort of held out on you. I mean, you didn’t know anything. No offense, I mean.”
“None taken,” Sully said, wishing he’d smacked the little prick the first time. “I never know much about anything.”
Elliot looked at him, nodding. The kid didn’t even get sarcasm.
“But then? A day or two later? After Billy’s funeral?” Elliot said. “They came by my apartment and asked if I had a key to his place, if I had been in there since he died, if—”
“They?”
“—if—they, those guys? The thugs Billy’s mom hired. Or that dickhead she works for.”
“We’re back to the investigators now.”
“Whoever. They wanted to come in and look around, can you believe it? In my place. I said, ‘What are you looking for?’ and they said, ‘We’ll know it when we see it.’”
“You didn’t let them in.”
“Of course not,” Elliot said. “The way Delores treated Billy, the things she said about me? No no no. Of course I had a key to his place. We were partners for more than a year! You think I’m going to tell Delores that, just hand over my key?” He blew out his lips, getting worked up. “I told them to fuck right on off. One of them, the one with a shaved head, he called me ‘faggot’ and ‘cocksucker.’”
“That’s not good.”
“It’s insulting.”
“This one with the shaved head, he have these big shoulders? Little pug nose?”
“Yeah. That’s him. That’s just the one.”
“He’s the one who shoved me into a car at Billy’s funeral,” Sully said.
“He did?”
“Yeah. They’re sort of pricks, whether they think you’re gay or not.”
“He better be glad he didn’t shove me,” Elliot said. “Not in my—”
“So what happened? After he went all homophobic.”
“They left. They were kind of disgusted. You could tell.”
“No threats?”
“I don’t think they’re the kind who make threats,” Elliot said. “I think they’re more the kind that just do it.”
“I think you’re probably right.”
The waiter came, set down a Basil’s over ice for Sully and a Cosmopolitan in front of Elliot. The kid looked at it, then took an exploratory sip, leaning over and slurping from the martini glass without picking it up.
“They didn’t come back, but I was pretty pissed,” he said, puckering his lips after the drink. “Intimidation? Butch boys? Please. I’ve put up with that since high school. Football players. So, look, to get even, I went over to Billy’s place the next day? With a couple of friends? We opened the door, took one step inside—and that was it. They had turned the entire place upside down. Bookshelves knocked over, furniture shoved around. We got out before we got blamed for it.”
Sully added a tiny splash of water to his Basil’s, took a respectable pull. God, it was fine. Quitting this . . . “Billy was dealing drugs,” he told Elliot. “Maybe they were trying to clean it out. Or maybe one of his connections came looking for his stash after they shot him.”
“Why do you keep saying that?” Elliot hissed. “What is this with the drug thing? You put that in that story, something about his rehab, drug problems—”
“He was a dealer, getting deep into it,” Sully said. “Delores told me. Shellie
told me. Billy got popped in the Bend. I mean, he was dealing, so—”
“Bullshit,” Elliot said, shaking his head, tapping the table. “Oh man. Oh man. That’s what they told you?”
“Yeah.”
“You got suckered. No no no. Billy had—God love him—Billy had depression issues, sort of a bipolar thing—”
“Right, that’s what they told me.”
“And he was therefore terrified of drugs. Mental about it. ‘I’m crazy enough as it is,’ I can hear him now. Not a toke, not a toot.”
“Maybe he—”
“I knew him since his freshman year,” he said, shaking his head. “We dated off and on, more in the past two years, a lot this past year. Never saw him do anything harder than beer. He had friends from high school, Sidwell? And they’d say the same thing. Billy, he liked beer, at least sort of, but he was really very . . . fragile.”
“How you mean, ‘fragile’?”
“Delicate. He could be very giddy, a little loud at times, but there was a brittleness to it, if you knew it well enough to spot it. His moods, they’d fluctuate. Really not good self-esteem. He had weight issues, just mortified if he gained five pounds. Sometimes he stayed in bed and read all day. He wasn’t, wasn’t, really all that easy to know.”
“His mom said he wanted to be a rap star.”
Elliot rolled his head back and laughed, loud enough for the bartender to look over.
“So, I’m guessing—”
“Billy? Hip-hop? What, RuPaul does rap?” The laughter bubbled out of him, rolling across the place.
Sully sipped his bourbon and waited.
“I’m—” Elliot coughed, dabbing his eyes—there were little dewdrops at their edges—and he gave in to another round of it, squinching his eyes shut tight, waving his hand back and forth, then patting his chest, taking in air. “Okkkaaay. Sorry. Okay. Okay. I’m done. That rap business, though. Billy.”
“You’re telling me his mother lied to me.”
“Yes, I, I am,” Elliot said. “Billy was Tinkerbell with dreadlocks. He made Luther Vandross look like a middle linebacker.”
“Somebody, guy I talked to, said Billy made Little Richard look butch.”
“That would be somebody who knew Billy, yes.”
It had always bugged him, getting hustled, getting played, and here it was, smacking him in the face. People lie right to your face and you got no idea. Jesus. He had sailed right by it, never doubting the rap star thing because it came from his mom. Rich, nice house, high on the social meter . . . and he’d gone for it, the circumstances coloring his vision, the weight he’d given her story. Would he have given Dee Dee’s mom that sort of break? Nah. His own bias, assumptions, biting him in the ass. It was what you got for trusting anybody further than you could throw them.
“But why—why would she lie to me?” he said. “If everyone knew he—”
“Oh, c’mon, don’t be dense,” Elliot said. He all but snorted. “Delores didn’t want to know Billy was queer, and she didn’t want you to put it in the paper. She was so concerned with the family image, with getting invited to the White House each Christmas, with her precious clients. She wanted Billy to be a brand-new version of his dad. Who was, like, this Marine, a hard-ass, decorated, blah blah, then a lawyer. Billy wasn’t like that. He was a terrible disappointment. They fought about it. She—”
A stocky young guy, had to be another college dude, sidled up to the table, holding a tote bag, THE STRAND emblazoned on the side. “Elliot,” he said.
“Oh, Todd, hi.” He stopped, looking at the bag. “You brought it. You wonderful man. You can just set it on the table.”
Todd did. Two thick manila envelopes slid out, heavy things so stuffed with paperwork that the top of the envelopes could not be closed. Sully had to rescue his whiskey before it got toppled over.
“Sorry,” Todd said.
“That’s okay,” Elliot said. “Thanks so much.”
Todd nodded to them both and was gone.
“What’s with him?” Sully said.
“He’s just a boy I know. He was keeping this for me. After those goons came by, I didn’t want to keep it at my apartment any longer.”
“So this is it? What they were after?” It didn’t look like much. Papers and, at the bottom of the bag, a square wooden box.
“I’m pretty sure. Billy brought it over to me the night before he was killed. He’d just had a huge fight with Delores, with Shellie. He’d been over at her house, he said, and he was very upset. Said he wanted me to keep it for him for a while.”
“Like, bipolar upset?”
“Billy had stopped taking his medication a few months earlier. He had done it before. He didn’t like taking it. I guess a lot of people who need that stuff don’t want it.”
“It dampens the highs, knocks them down,” Sully said.
“Yeah. He said it made him feel dull. Like bread without yeast, that’s how he said it. So he stopped taking the stuff and, no surprise, started getting weird. The racing thoughts, the rapid-fire talking? You know? It was something you had to learn to live with if you wanted to be his friend.”
“So, him showing up at your house, a little wound up, wasn’t that unusual.”
“It wasn’t an everyday thing, no, but it just seemed like another episode, another round with his mom. I thought he was just being a little paranoid.”
Sully picked up one of the envelopes, pulled out a sheet. It was a copy of a property record over on Logan Circle.
“So what is all this?”
“His thesis.”
“His thesis? He was hiding his thesis?”
“It was interesting for me to see all of the research, because he’d been very vague about what he was going to do it on, you know? He’d never tell me. But it turns out he was really focused. Look at all this.”
Sully considered the heft of the envelopes. Why did people do this, after death? Pass along the writings or poems or letters of the dead, like it meant something to somebody else? And god, this stuff looked like it went a good five pounds.
“It’s something about his family history,” Elliot said. “Billy was terribly interested in all that. I think it was in some sort of order. But after he gave it to me at my apartment, I just put it in the bookcase. I didn’t even think about it until after those creeps came looking for it. When I pulled it out, it all spilled on—”
He stopped dead still, looking toward the front of the bar, then slid to the back side of the booth. “Get the bag! Get over!”
Sully started to turn in the booth—his back was to the door—and Elliot kicked his leg under the table.
“It’s those morons! Shaved head!”
Sully leaned over, pulling the bag with the envelopes on the seat beside him. The half wall of exposed brick behind them gave them shelter from the door, but they’d be in plain view if the men walked farther back.
“They followed us from the church,” Elliot said. “The fuckers.”
“What are you—”
“They had to be sitting out front, waiting on us to come back out, then saw Todd come in with the bag.”
“Todd? They know Todd?”
“He’s—he’s—he was over at my apartment when they came over.”
Sully started to say, This is ridiculous, they’re not going to rob us in broad daylight, we call 911—and then got a mental flash of the investigators calling the police, charging them with theft. The cops would come, everybody would get hauled downtown, the bag would go into evidence and eventually be returned to the family—hell, it was Billy’s property—and he’d get fired, harassing the poor Ellisons even when he was suspended.
His eyes locked on the narrow hallway a few feet behind them, leading to the toilets. EMERGENCY EXIT, read the sign above the hall. Well.
He looked at Elliot—they bot
h had their heads about six inches above the tabletop, leaning as far down as possible—and said, “Get up. Take your drink to the bar. They’ll look at you, rag you some, but they can’t do anything. That’s going to give me a screen to run out the back with the bag.”
“You don’t look like you can run that fast.”
“Fine. You take the bag and run and I’ll—”
“No, no!”
“Do it then, before they come back here.”
Elliot rubbed his hand across his face. “Call me,” he said. He sat up, got his drink, and pushed out of the booth, walking bold as fuck up to the front. Sully, counting to three, decided he liked the kid after all.
• • •
“Hey! You, Carter!”
The voice bellowed when he was halfway down the hall, passing the restrooms. He hit the back door at full throttle, banging it open with his shoulder. He came out on a small deck with steps down to an alley. Covering that with an awkward leap, skittering on the loose gravel, he looked up to see garbage dumpsters, ten or twelve cars, the backs of stores. The alley narrowed and led to a street to his left.
Five seconds, ten, and they’d come out the door.
A Ford Explorer, a Cadillac, Nissan Sentra—maybe get under one of them or—another store door opened, thirty feet down. A guy carrying two trash bags emerged, heading to the dumpster. The bookstore. It was the back of that big-ass bookstore on the corner. Sully ran ten steps, getting to the door, the guy at the dumpster half-turning, Sully holding out his bag, saying, “Left my wallet upstairs,” and ducked inside.
He found himself in a back storage room, books on pallets halfway to the ceiling. There was only one turn, though, and it led to a set of double doors into the store proper. Banging it open, he found himself in Cookbooks and Home Entertaining. Moving, moving. Past Psychology and Science and Discounted. At the front of Bestsellers, he stopped and picked up one of store’s cloth tote bags from a stand. He took it to the Magazine section and dumped the envelopes and the wooden box into the new bag. The tote from the Strand he stuffed behind the porn mags in their sealed plastic wrappings.