Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go

by Pelecanos, George

  The shirtless young man said, “Hey, Barry, who’s your boy?”

  “Man’s a private detective,” Barry said mockingly. “He finds things.”

  Barry’s younger brother said, “Maybe he could find Roger some onion, know what I’m sayin’? ’Cause Roger ain’t had none in a long time.”

  “Go on, man,” Roger said. “I forgot about more pussy than you ever had, boy.” Barry’s brother and Roger touched hands and began to laugh.

  I looked at Barry. He wasn’t laughing, and neither was I. I tucked the newspaper under my arm and left the room.

  ON THE WAY TO my place, I stopped at Athena’s and had a seat at the bar. I lit a cigarette, drew on it, and laid it in the ashtray. It was early yet for any kind of crowd, but I recognized a couple of regulars in quiet conversation, along with an Ultimate solo drinker who was as beautiful as a model and an intense woman I knew who was running the pool table on a youngish woman I had never met. Stella came over and wiped the area in front of me with a damp rag. She cocked her head and raised her eyebrows. I nodded my head one time. She reached into the cooler and pulled a bottle of beer. She popped the cap and set it down on a dry coaster. I thanked her and had a swig.

  “So you’re back to it,” she said.

  “Never had any intention of getting off it. I’ve never kidded myself about what I am. I’ve just got to try and not be so stupid about it, that’s all. Like I was that night.”

  Stella adjusted her eyeglasses, put her fist on her hip. “That some kind of back-door apology?”

  “Yeah, and a thank-you at the same time. I was probably rude about you stepping in—you know how I get. I know you were just trying to look out for me.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “You’d do the same for me, right?”

  “You bet.”

  “Anyway, nobody got hurt.”

  I left that alone and reached across the bar and shook her hand.

  “So what’re you up to tonight, Nick?”

  “Date with Lyla. But I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You still play in that gay and lesbian bartenders’ softball league?”

  “Every Monday night.”

  “You know anybody from over at the Fire House, on P?”

  Stella rubbed a finger under her nose. “There was this guy, Paul Ritchie, played for a long time on our team. Knees went out on him a couple of years back. Good guy. Good ballplayer, too. Ritchie, he could really hit.”

  “You ever in touch with him anymore?”

  “He still comes to the games. It’s more a chance to see old friends now than it is a competition. So, yeah, he stays up with us.”

  “He still tends at the Fire House?”

  “He’s been there, like, a hundred years. Where’s he gonna go?”

  I drank off some of my beer. “I need to talk with him, if I can. I’m working on something that might involve that place.”

  “Something that could get him into trouble?”

  “Not unless he’s directly involved. The truth is, I don’t know yet. But I’ll do my best to keep him out of it. Could you hook me up?”

  Stella took her hand off her hip, pointed a stubby finger at my face. “I thought you came in here to apologize, Nick.”

  “I did, Stella.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, I’ll give Paul a call, see what he says.”

  “Tomorrow would be good for me,” I said.

  “Don’t push it,” Stella said sternly. “I’ll call him.”

  I told her to leave a message about it on my machine. She nodded and went to fix a cocktail for a customer. I drank the rest of my beer and put my cigarette between my teeth. Stella winked and gave me a little wave. I left ten on three and went out the front door. I walked to my car in the gathering darkness.

  THE TWO COPIES OF D.C. This Week were identical, the last ones printed before Calvin Jeter’s murder. That the issues were the same couldn’t have been a coincidence, but as I looked through them, sitting at the desk of my makeshift office in my apartment, I saw no connection to either Calvin’s death or Roland’s disappearance. I skimmed every article, weekly feature, arts review, and column and came up empty. So I showered, changed into slacks and a blue cotton shirt, and went to pick up Lyla.

  “Wow,” I said as she opened her door.

  She wore a gauzy green-and-rust sundress cut high above her knees. Her hair was pulled back, with some of it left to fall around her lovely face, the light catching threads of silver in the red.

  “You’re late, Nick.”

  “I know. I’m sorry, I just got hung up in what I’ve been working on.”

  “That’s okay.” She held up her goblet of wine. “But I got started without you.”

  “I’ll catch up,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  We drove across town in my Coronet 500, all four windows down, some Massive Attack pumping from the deck. Lyla was moving her head, digging on the music and the night, and I reached across the buckets and put my hand in her hair. At the next stoplight, we kissed and held it until the green. The air felt clean, with a crispness running through it, a rarity for that time of year; it was a fine summer night in D.C.

  We ate at a Thai place on Massachusetts Avenue, in a row of restaurants east of Union Station. We talked about our respective days over satay and spring rolls and a barbecued beef salad; Lyla stayed with white wine while I worked on a couple of Singhas. By the time the waitress served our main course, a whole crispy fish with hot chili and garlic, the subject turned to Lyla’s newspaper and what I had found that day.

  “Any thoughts?” I said.

  “If you think something criminal is going on in relation to the newspaper, a good bet would be the personals.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s all sort of things happening in there—messages for meeting places that are really drop locations, model searches looking for porno candidates, stuff like that. Nick, you wouldn’t believe how many of the entries are just ads for prostitution, or for some other scam that’s even worse.”

  “And you guys know about it?”

  “We don’t knowingly take any ads or personals that are criminal. But we’re running a business. The Post and City Paper are doing it and making good money at it, and we have to do it, too. With the personals—it’s a nine hundred number—we get ninety-five cents a minute. There’re a couple hundred of those in each issue. When you annualize the revenue—well, you figure it out.”

  “Yeah, I see what you’re saying. I’ll go back to it, check it out.” I cut a piece of fish off and dished it onto Lyla’s plate. “Here.”

  “Thanks.” Lyla had a bite and signaled the waitress for another wine.

  “You’re hittin’ it pretty good tonight,” I said.

  “It’s all this hot stuff,” she said. “This fish is making me thirsty.”

  “It’s making me thirsty, too. Next time that waitress goes by, get me a beer, as well.”

  After dinner, we walked across Mass to a nice quiet bar in a fancy restaurant run by friends of Lyla’s. We ordered a couple of drinks—a bourbon rocks for me and a vodka tonic for Lyla—and had them slowly, listening to the recorded jazz that was a particular trademark of the house. A local politician whom Lyla had once interviewed and buried in print stopped on his way to the men’s room and talked with her for a while, leaning in close to her ear, a toothy smile on his blandly handsome face. I sat on my stool and drank quietly and allowed myself to grow jealous. On the way out of the place, Lyla tripped on the steps and fell and scraped her knee on the concrete. We got into my car and I leaned forward and kissed the scrape, tasting her blood with my tongue. From that fortuitous position, I tried to work my head up under her dress. She laughed generously and pushed me away.

  “Patience,” she said. I mumbled something and put the car in gear.

  We stopped once more that night, to have a drink on the roof of the Hotel Washington at 15th and F, a corny thing to do,
for sure, but lovely nonetheless, when the city is lit up at night and the view is as on time as anything ever gets. We managed to snag a deuce by the railing, and I ordered a five-dollar beer and a wine for Lyla. We caught a breeze there, and our table looked out over rooftops to the monuments and the Mall. A television personality—a smirky young man who played on a sitcom called My Two Dads (a show that Johnny McGinnes called My Doo-Dads)—and his entourage took a large table near ours, and on their way out, Lyla winged a peanut at the back of the actor’s head. The missile missed its target, but we got a round of applause from some people at the other tables who had obviously been subjected to the show. I could have easily had a few more beers when I was done with the first, could have sat in that chair for the rest of the night, but Lyla’s eyes began to look a little filmy and unfocused, and her ears had turned a brilliant shade of red. We decided to go.

  We drove to Lyla’s apartment off Calvert Street, near the park, and made out like teenagers in her elevator on the way up to her floor. At her place, I goosed her while she tried to fit her keys to the lock and then we did an intense tongue dance and dry-humped for a while against her door, until a neighbor came out into the hall to see what the noise was all about. Inside, she pulled a bottle of white from the refrigerator, and we went directly to the bedroom. Lyla turned on her bedside lamp and pulled her dress up over her head while I removed my shirt. The sight of her—her freckled breasts, the curve of her hips, her full red bush—shortened my breath; it never failed to. She draped the dress over the lamp shade, kicked her shoes off, and walked naked across the room, the bottle in her hand. She took a long pull from the neck.

  “We don’t need that,” I said.

  Lyla pushed me onto my back on the bed and spit a mouthful of wine onto my chest. She straddled me, bent over, and began to slowly lick the wine off my nipples.

  “You sure about that?” she said.

  I could only grunt, and close my eyes.

  LYLA’S HEAVY BREATHING WOKE me in the darkness. I looked at the LED readout on her clock, laid there for a half hour with my eyes open, then got out of bed, ate a couple of aspirins, and took a shower. I dressed in my clothes from the night before, made coffee, and smoked a cigarette out on her balcony.

  I came back into the apartment, checked on Lyla. In the first light of dawn, her face looked drawn and gray. Her mouth was frozen open, the way she always slept off a drunk, and there was a faint wheeze in her exhale. I kissed her on the cheek and then on her lips. Her breath was stale from the wine. I brushed some hair off her forehead and left the place, locking the door behind me.

  I drove straight down to the river, passed under the Sousa Bridge, turned the car around, and parked it in the clearing. No sign of a crazy black man in a brilliant blue coat. No cops, either; I guessed that, by now, the uniforms had been pulled off that particular detail.

  I got out of my car, sat on its hood, and lit a cigarette. A pleasure boat pulled out of its slip and ran toward the Potomac, leaving little wake. Some gulls crossed the sky, turned black against the rising sun. I took one last drag off my cigarette and pitched it into the river.

  Back in Shepherd Park, my cat waited for me on my stoop. I sat next to her and rubbed the hard scar tissue of her one empty eye socket and scratched behind her ears.

  “Miss me?” I said. She rolled onto her back.

  I entered my apartment and saw the blinking red light of my answering machine. I hit the bar, listened to the message. I stripped naked, got into bed, and set the alarm for one o’clock. Stella had come through; I had an appointment with Paul Ritchie for 2:30 that afternoon at the Fire House on P.

  NINE

  THE FIRE HOUSE had changed hands several times in my lifetime, but as long as I could remember, it had been a bar that catered primarily to homosexuals, in a neighborhood that had always been off center in every interesting way. This particular corner unofficially marked the end of Dupont Circle, where the P Street Bridge spanned the park and led to the edge of Georgetown. There were many hangouts down here, restaurants and a smattering of bars—the Brickskeller for beerheads, Badlands for the discophiles—but the Fire House had become something of a landmark for residents and commuters alike. For many years, gas logs burned day and night behind a glass window that fronted P at 22nd, the logs being the establishment’s only signage. The building’s facade had been redone now in red brick, and the window and the logs had been removed. But the fire imagery remained in the bar’s name, a small nod to tradition.

  I had taken the Metro down to Dupont, then walked down P. By afternoon, the day had become blazing-hot, with quartz reflecting off the sidewalk and an urban mirage of shimmering refraction steaming up off the asphalt of the street. My thrift-shop sport jacket was damp beneath the arms and on my back as I reached the entrance to the Fire House. I pushed on the door, removed my shades, and entered the cool darkness of the main room.

  Several couples and a few solo drinkers sat in booths and at tables partitioned off from the empty bar. I went to the stick and slid onto a stool, dropping the manila folder I had been carrying on the seat to my right. The heat had sickened me a bit, that and my activities from the night before. I peeled a bev nap from a stack of them and wiped my face.

  A thin young waiter stepped up to the service area and said in a whiny, very bored voice, “Ooordering.” The bartender ignored him for the time being, walked down my way, and dropped a coaster in front of me on the bar.

  “How’s it going?” he said. He was large-boned, with some gut to go with it. His brown hair had streaks of red running through it, and there was a rogue patch of red splotched in the chin area of his beard.

  “Hot.”

  “Not in here, it isn’t. Thank God for work, when it’s air-conditioned. What can I get you?”

  “A cold beer.”

  “Any flavor?”

  “A bottle of Bud. And a side of ice water, thanks. By the way, where’s the head?”

  “Top of the stairs. You’ll see it.”

  I took the stairs, passed an unlit room where a piano sat in the middle of a group of tables. The men’s room was at the end of the hall. I went in and took a leak at one of two urinals. A mirror had been hung and angled down, centered above the urinals. I understood its purpose but didn’t understand the attraction. Years ago, I had a date with a woman who at the end of the night asked me to come into her bathroom and watch her while she took a piss. I did it out of curiosity but found it to be entirely uninteresting. I never phoned her again.

  I zipped up my fly, bought a pack of smokes outside the bathroom door, and went back down to the bar. The bartender had served my beer and was placing the ice water next to it.

  “Nick Stefanos,” I said, extending my hand.

  “Paul Ritchie.” He shook my hand and said, “How do you know Stella?”

  “I tend at the Spot. A couple times a week, I go into Athena’s, shoot a little pool.”

  “You that guy that used to hang out with Jackie Kahn?”

  “You knew Jackie?”

  “Sure. I heard she had a kid.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Heard she had some straight guy impregnate her.”

  “I heard that, too.”

  “You know, I think I met you, in fact, one night when I was in Athena’s with a friend.” His eyes moved to the beer in my hand, then back to me. “I guess you don’t remember.”

  “Must have been one of those nights,” I said. “You probably know how that is.”

  “Not anymore,” he said.

  “Ooordering, Paul!” said the prematurely world-weary voice from down the bar.

  Paul Ritchie said, “Give me a minute,” and went to the rail to fix the waiter a drink. I gulped down the ice water and lit a cigarette. By the time Ritchie returned, I had finished half my beer; my stomach had neutralized, the quiver had gone out of my hand, and my head had become more clear.

  “Thanks for seeing me.”

  “No problem. What can I do for you?�
��

  I put the manila folder on the bar, opened it, and slipped out the photographs of Calvin Jeter and Roland Lewis. I turned them around so that Ritchie could have a look.

  “You recognize either of these guys?”

  Ritchie studied the photos. “Uh-uh. I don’t think so.”

  I searched his face for the hint of a lie, saw nothing irregular. I tapped my finger on Calvin’s photo. “This one here, I found a book of Fire House matches in one of his shirts.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “He got himself murdered.”

  Ritchie breathed out slowly. “I don’t work every shift, obviously, so I can’t say he’s never come in here. But I know he’s not a regular. And these two look like minors on top of that, and we make a pretty good effort not to serve minors. They are minors, right?”

  “Yeah. What else?”

  “To tell you the truth, neither of these kids look like my type of clientele.”

  “You mean they don’t look gay.”

  “Look schmook, Stefanos. I don’t have much of an idea what a gay person ‘looks’ like anymore. Do you?”

  “I guess not. But what did you mean? They’re not your clientele—what, because they’re black?”

  “No,” he said tiredly, “not because they’re black. Turn your head and take a look around this place.”

  I did. I saw some men getting on into their thirties and forties, some wearing ties, most of them with expensive haircuts and fine watches. The racial mix seemed to be about 80 percent white to 20 black; on the social and economic side, though, the group was homogenous. I turned back to Ritchie.

  “So you run a nice place.”

  “Exactly. These men that come in here, they’re not just well-adjusted; they’re well-connected. That guy’s suit over there—no offense, Stefanos—it’s probably worth more than your whole wardrobe. I know it’s worth more than mine.”

  “What about these kids?”

  “Straight or gay,” Ritchie said, “it’s irrelevant. These two are street. This isn’t their kind of place.”

  “So how do you think this kid came to get a hold of your matchbook?”