D.C. Noir

by George Pelecanos

  “Oh Lord.” Weil sat back, resting his folded hands against his vest.

  “We’ve moved light years from what Ronald Reagan believed, and what I believe.”

  “Are you kidding?” Weil sat upright and plopped his hands on the table. “Jordie, do you think we give a good god-damn what you believe?”

  Port started to reply, but stopped when Weil lifted the bottle to refill his guest’s glass.

  “Listen, we plucked you out of the cornfield because we knew you would do what you were told,” Weil said, as the golden wine flowed. “You’ve still got that farm-fed puppy look, but by now, people have been trained to know what’s coming out of your mouth before you open it. Hell, you go off message and they’ll shut you down.”

  For effect, Weil laughed, reached across the table, and punched Port on the shoulder with the side of his fist. Not for a moment would he let Port know he was concerned. The manuscript Port had written used Reagan’s words and ideals to challenge the direction the Right had taken since the opportunity of 9/11. Once Mendes massaged the prose and smoothed out his newfound fanaticism, the book would be another Jordan Port bestseller. That could be deadly dangerous, a blueprint for a moderate coalition.

  “So here’s how it works, Jordie. We’re going to issue a press release telling people you’re on sabbatical. You’re going up to the cabin our money bought you in the Casper Mountains to write another book. You won’t answer the phone and there’ll be no email. You’ll return when we tell you and we’ll give you your next manuscript.”

  “Wait a minute, Doug, I—”

  Anticipating the protest, Weil held up his hand. “Don’t worry. Mendes will be involved. She’ll make it sound enough like you.”

  “I wrote those books, Doug. You can’t—”

  “The words are yours, sure; yours and Mendes’s. But not the ideas.”

  Weil took a short sip of the wine he considered pretentious and feminine, holding the glass by its stem.

  “If it was up to me, we’d be done with you,” he said, as Port looked on in silence. “But my father likes you. You helped us get Hollywood on board and you helped us turn around the FCC. But the end is in sight if you don’t wise up.”

  Port did not so much as blink.

  “Think you’d be happy working your way back up to the copy desk in Davenport, Jordie?” Weil asked. “No, I would think not.”

  The next day, Port joined Ana Mendes for lunch downstairs at Red Sage, a smart restaurant with a Southwestern theme. He ordered the salmon paillard, and his former mentor the pecan-crusted chicken dusted with red chili. In her briefcase was his latest manuscript, Betraying Ourselves

  “Ana, if he could’ve gotten away with it, he would’ve shot me right there,” Port said, sipping the Sancerre he’d ordered.

  “Wrung your neck is more like it,” Mendes replied. “Jordie, what were you thinking?”

  She recommended him out of college for his first full-time job at the Quad Cities Times. Something about Jordie brought out a tenderness in her, and so they kept in touch and she felt a sense of pride when he became the paper’s film critic. She followed his career when he moved to Fox’s KLJB-TV, and in 1991 she wrote a reference letter to the ACCC. He was telegenic, personable, reasonably bright, and she knew Ronald Reagan was his hero. A true believer, he’d be a perfect public face for Douglas Weil’s political action committee.

  Some years later, she asked one of Weil’s lawyers why they’d decided on Jordan Port.

  He fit the profile, she was told. His father, a son of a Roosevelt Democrat, was described as aloof and unsympathetic, and he died when Port was nine years old. In turn, Port spent his school days and early career in an unwitting search for praise and validation, particularly from older, plainspoken men. They knew he’d adore Douglas Weil, whose warm, folksy manner belied his cunning and drive.

  The clincher was his behavior as a film critic. Port gulped down every perk offered by every studio, from a sixty-nine-cent pen to a flight to Nice for Cannes. He’d convinced himself he had to do so for the job, not once questioning whether he really needed a foot-high figurine of Schwarzenegger as T2 for his desk, Molly Ringwald’s voice on his answering machine…

  This kid was waiting to be bought, the lawyer said.

  Mendes now sat across from Port and saw fear and determination mingling in his eyes.

  “Jordie, there are faster ways if you want to kill yourself—

  She stopped short, remembering Port’s mother had committed suicide.

  “It’s all true, Ana. I challenge you to tell me it’s not.”

  Mendes sighed. “Jordie, this town is fucked. You’re not going to get anything done here. This book…I can’t make it happen.”

  “I can take it to New York,” he said.

  “Jordie, ask yourself if you want to blow up the bridge. Ask yourself if you have any friends on the Left.”

  “Ana, I want to do what’s right,” he said earnestly. “Reagan’s legacy—”

  “Jordie, will you…Jordie, stop,” she said sternly. They were a block from the Treasury Department, a short walk from K Street, and she was no longer certain she could match a face with a title. Looking around, she whispered, “Jordie, there’s no right or wrong. There’s no dissent and no discussion. There is what is.”

  “They mock Reagan,” Port said, ignoring his salmon. “They call his philosophies ‘paleo-conservatism.’ They say his lessons don’t apply.”

  “Jordie, I know,” she said tiredly. “I read your manuscript. So did Randy.”

  Randy Dawson, her boss and stepson of a nationally syndicated columnist. The house, Patriot Publishing, was a subsidiary of a marketing firm funded by the pharmaceutical industry and an ad-hoc coalition of brokerage firms.

  Port said, “I’m sick of going to these luncheons where they praise Reagan in public and then mock him when the paying guests leave.”

  “Jordie, will you listen to yourself? I know you almost twenty-five years and you’re lecturing me,” she said.

  She reached across the table and held his hand. “Please. You have to stop. You have no chance of success. They will bury you. Do yourself a favor and burn the manuscript.”

  “I can’t,” he said, drawing up. “Someone will publish it. It’s good and it’s right.”

  “Jordie, I’m trying to help you. You have to under—”

  Port’s cell phone rang.

  It was Douglas Weil Jr., and he asked Port if he was alone.

  Without knowing it, Port had stood and was now next to the table. Last night, whenever he closed his eyes to sleep, Weil was there, teeth bared.

  Mendes saw him quiver.

  “Find a corner,” Weil told him.

  Port walked to one of the private dining rooms, and he shut the door behind him.

  “You’ve booked yourself on MSNBC tomorrow night,” Weil said.

  “Yes. Yes, I did.”

  “Cancel,” Weil said forcefully.

  “Doug, I can’t. I’m—”

  “Cancel,” he repeated and cut the line.

  When Port returned to the table, he saw it had been cleared.

  Mendes was gone.

  Jordan Port was in the lead-off slot on MSNBC’s Hardball The producers knew him well—the appearance was Port’s seventy-third in the past fifteen years. There hadn’t been a more charming Clinton basher.

  The guest host, with whom Port had scuba dived in the Caymans, called him Jordie. On air, he referred to him as “still one of Washington’s young wise men.”

  He threw Port the softball he asked for.

  “You’ve written a book Washington doesn’t want to see in print. Am I right?”

  Eleven minutes later, Port ended his comments with a quote from Ronald Reagan:

  “When we begin thinking of government as instead of they, we’ve been here too long.”

  As he stepped into darkness outside the MSNBC offices on Nebraska Avenue, Port’s cell phone rang.

  A senior produce
r from Larry King Live, who excoriated him for going elsewhere. She then cheerfully invited him to appear tomorrow night, asking if he’d messenger the manuscript to her.

  Friday was a dead night for news, Port knew. But he figured he could parlay a King appearance into fodder for Sunday’s TV roundtables and shout fests. He’d send the show a chapter, but he’d hold the work close until he went to New York on Monday to find a high-powered agent. The media buzz would give him wings.

  No sooner had he cut the line than the phone rang again.

  The caller, whose voice he couldn’t recognize, gave him the address of a website and a password. In the e-address, the jordanport came after the second backslash.

  Heart pounding, Port raced his ACCC-owned Lexus back to Dupont Circle. He parked at a fire hydrant, the car’s flashers flickering on his nineteenth-century red-brick row house.

  Running into his dark apartment, he ignored the blinking light of his answering machine and scurried to his desk, still wearing his camel’s hair topcoat and the blue blazer, blue shirt, and blue-and-pink club tie he’d chosen for his Hardball appearance

  His hands shaking, it took him several tries before he typed the correct address. He’d kept trying to put an ampersand between the letters.

  Finally, the screen went blank, and then it flashed a site for S&M aficionados.

  Port used the password he’d been given, drove down two pages, and found photos of a burly man in leather, cat-o’nine-tails dangling from his broad fist. On a table, face burrowed into a short stack of towels, was a naked man whose butt had been whipped raw.

  The next photo showed the man’s face, and it was Port’s.

  Port’s face, as clear as if in a Sears portrait, though he had never—not once—participated in such activity.

  Much of Washington assumed Port was gay, but he n’t. He had little interest in sex, and hadn’t been with anyone in almost five years.

  But there he was, in every photo.

  Including several on the final page where the burly man in black-leather chaps was sodomizing him.

  In the harsh light of the monitor, Port sat with his mouth hung open. His mind raced as he stared at the images.

  He jumped when his cell phone in his pocket rang.

  The same man who’d called earlier said, “Make it right on Larry King and the site comes down. Fuck up and the password comes off.”

  Anxious, distraught, Port arrived at the CNN offices on First Avenue for the interview. A hard-driving storm pounded the city since dawn and though it had passed, he wore a Burberry trenchcoat over his suit, shirt, and tie. He wanted to give the impression that he spent the day running from meeting to meeting, but in truth he hadn’t left his apartment, answering the door only for the CNN messenger.

  When the interview ended, he planned to stay at the Dupont 5 Cinema for as long as they’d allow, dodging calls by watching movies, hiding in the dark, preparing to flee by train to New York.

  The segment producer, a young Asian woman in a khaki crewneck sweater and ill-fitting cargo slacks, met him at Security.

  “What are you doing here?” She held a silver clipboard. “You’re cancelled.”

  Port frowned. “No, I—”

  “The ACCC called,” she said. “You’re not feeling well, you’re under some kind of stress…”

  Port tried to smile. “I’m right here, Hisa.”

  She touched his coat sleeve. “You look awful, Jordie.”

  She was right: dread, a second sleepless night; listening to footsteps in the apartment above, cars on Riggs Place…“

  But I can do it, Hisa.” He bucked up, thrusting out his chest. “Raring to go. Dependable as always.”

  She looked at him. Agitated, fidgeting in place…

  Her boss told her the pages he sent were an incoherent rant.

  He saw confusion and sympathy on her face.

  “Yeah, I’d better go,” he said, sagging. “I don’t know. This flu…”

  “Rest easy, Jordie,” she told him, as she turned to scurry back to the elevator.

  Five hours and two films later, Jordie arrived home.

  The password no longer worked on the S&M site, and he permitted himself to think they’d taken the photos down. The thought lasted seconds.

  He had several emails, but one immediately caught his eye. The subject line read, Urgent! From Ana Mendes via her home AOL e-address.

  “Jordie,” she wrote, “I must see you. News! Meet me at the Bombay Club, Sunday, 1 p.m. Happy, happy.” It was signed, AM

  The signature and the “Happy, happy” made it real for Port.

  Years and years ago, he ran into Mendes at an Editor & Publisher conference in Chicago. Drinks, sentiment, more drinks; two people alone, despite the glad-handing at the banquet and bar. He wanted her—the embrace mattered, the affection—and she thought, Why not? Up to her room, and afterwards, as he lay with his head on her sweat-soaked shoulder, she asked, “Happy?”

  “Happy, happy,” he replied.

  Port stared at the email, and he permitted himself to think she had spoken to her boss, who somehow got to Douglas Weil Sr. at ACCC. A book promoting Ronald Reagan and his ideals was what America needed now. We ought to pull away from these guys, Mr. Weil. They’ve only got a couple of years left anyway, and the country’s not going to keep tacking right…

  The thought lasted seconds.

  It took Port less than three minutes to hustle through the early-afternoon chill to the St. Regis, and another two to reach the fifth floor. Room 523 was in the center of the long, rose-carpeted corridor that was lined with white floral-pat ern wallpaper.

  Not once did he ask himself why Mendes wanted to meet in a hotel when she had a town house in Georgetown.

  Port knocked on the unlocked door. Then he stepped inside.

  He saw the red bedspread had been tossed aside, and the bed was in shambles. On the off-white wall beyond the bed was an array of blood spatter. Blood was smeared from the center of the stains to the floor where Mendes lay. A dimesized hole was above her right eye.

  Port retreated in shock, stumbling against the desk chair, his arms flailing. He stopped when he hit the closet door.

  Bringing his hands to his mouth, Port shuddered and he felt weak, and he understood.

  Standing in a silence broken only by the hum of the heating system, he tried to remember what he had touched and who had seen him in the lobby or on 16th Street. Then he went over and looked at Mendes, a friend who had tried to warn him.

  She wore a black chemise and was naked below the waist.

  In death, she seemed terrified. Ana Mendes, the most self-possessed woman he’d ever known.

  As he turned from her, he saw on the desk an almost-empty bottle of wine, a 2001 Viognier from a Virginia winery. There were two glasses, a mouthful of golden wine remaining in each, and he was sure one of the glasses wore his finger-prints, gathered days earlier at Off the Record.

  Port hurried to the bathroom, grabbed a hand towel, and—

  The front door opened, and Port was joined by the Indian busboy and the black man from valet parking.

  The black man spoke with cool assurance, as the man from India barred the door.

  “You have no possibility of escape,” said the black man. “But you are left with a choice.”

  Port’s mouth had dried and he struggled to speak. “I didn’t—”

  “Your call, Mr. Port.”

  Port noticed they were both wearing latex gloves.

  “First choice: You killed her in a fit of rage brought on by the depression that’s been responsible for your erratic behavior.”

  “I didn’t—I wasn’t angry with Ana. I—”

  “You argued at Red Sage. Several people noticed that she left when you took a phone call.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Dozens of threatening emails to her from your ACCC computer. Calls from your ACCC cell phone.”

  The Indian man stepped next to his associate. “You quar
reled because you learned Ms. Mendes had written a book about you.”

  “About me?” he asked, his voice cracking.

  The man counted on his thin fingers. “Your attempt to blackmail Douglas Weil and the ACCC with your latest manuscript. Your mental decline. Your troubled childhood. Your reputation at the newspaper. The sadomasochism…”

  The black man now had a gun in his hand. With the silencer, the barrel seemed more than a foot long.

  “I’ve read this book by Ms. Mendes,” said the Indian man. “Fascinating. Who would’ve known? This will surely profit Patriot Publishing.”

  Said the black man, “If I shoot you from here, it’s the second choice: You were killed with Ms. Mendes when your tryst was interrupted. A jealous ex, a robbery? Someone with an obsession…”

  “An obsession,” the Indian man repeated.

  “Or I step up, put the gun to your temple, and make it look like murder-suicide. If so, Ms. Mendes’s manuscript is released, the S&M website…Your psychological records. Anecdotes. Your name will become synonymous with a spokesman gone mad.

  Said the Indian man, “A Jordan Port is a pig looking for a new trough.”

  Port’s mind reeled. He could see it unfolding—the headlines, the patter on talk radio, schadenfreude, the mounting disgrace; reporters invading Davenport to interview his step-mother, neighbors and high-school teachers to track down rumors fed them by Doug Weil’s PR machine.

  “But I don’t deserve…I don’t want to die,” he said meekly, his voice dripping resignation.

  “Mr. Port,” said the Indian man, “you are already dead. It’s a matter now of how you are remembered.”

  The black man raised his arm.

  “Take off your clothes, Mr. Port. Let’s do it right.”

  As his tears began to flow, Jordan Port slowly removed his camel’s hair coat.

  The Indian man hung it in the closet next to Mendes’s suit.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ROBERT ANDREWS, a former Green Beret and CIA officer, has lived in Washington, D.C. for over thirty years. His last three novels, A Murder of Honor, A Murder of Promise, and A Murder of Justice, feature Frank Kearney and Jose Phelps, homicide detectives in the Metropolitan Police Department.