The Ways of the Dead

by Neely Tucker

  Hector sat up straight, pulling his forearms off the table. “You want to look at my niece while she is naked?”

  “No, no. I wanted to see if the pictures might give me a clue about who shot them, or when, or where.”

  Hector took a deep breath. He rubbed his hands together, then pulled them apart and put them back together finally. “We have some good pictures of Lana. Nice pictures. When she was at school. I’ll ask my wife where they are.” He paused. “I did not keep the nasty pictures.”

  “Do you have any idea of who might have wanted to hurt Lana? Bad boyfriend?”

  Hector Ramos looked up at Sully. He blinked several times. There was some emotion behind the flatness; it was reserve that held him in check, not a lack of compassion. “We have asked ourselves that question many times. She was in this country with us.” He stopped and held up a hand. “I think it was right for her to leave. I do not regret that. You have to have some sort of—of—a conduct. But we should have known more of where she was. We should have not let her go so far out of our sight.”

  He looked at Sully and did not say anything more.

  twenty-one

  The two eight-by-tens were from parties that Lana had been to, something like a prom, where there was someone taking pictures of couples. The pictures were sitting across his lap. Sully raised his voice to be heard above the traffic, the wind blowing in from the rolled-down windows.

  “So how did you say you found Hector again?”

  “I didn’t,” Sly said from the front seat. “I said we found him, me and Lionel. So what you think?”

  “I think it was profitable.”

  Sly turned around and looked at him. “Hardy fucking har har, motherfucker.”

  “No, I mean it. Noel Pittman? Posed nude, naughty-girl pictures, for this photographer up in Petworth.”

  “And when were you going to tell me this?”

  “I just did. I just found out yesterday.”

  “Gimme the name.”

  “Don’t have it, but I can get it.”

  “Well, get on the motherfucking phone, man. Shit. Both these bitches take their drawers off for some dude to take pictures? And they turn up dead? Nah nah nah. This is the dude we want to go see.”

  “I dunno. The shots of Noel, they look professional, they’re not peekaboo porn. And she apparently called the photographer, so it wasn’t like he was out there trolling. Or so I hear.”

  “So who do you hear this from?”

  “MPD.”

  “They ain’t looking at it?”

  “Not hard, the guy they got on it, he’s just cold-casing it.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Dick Jensen.”

  Sly laughed, a bark. “Ha! That motherfucker. I know Dick Jensen. He arrested my ass, what was it, fifteen years ago?”

  “You don’t sound impressed.”

  “Look, what I’m saying, you get busted for a felony? Pray that Jensen is the man with the cuffs.”

  “So you beat it at trial.”

  “It was an AWD, and it didn’t even go to trial. Dismissed. Lawyer had a field day.”

  They rode for a bit, the passing traffic, Sully’s mind working, not liking the flow of information going from him to Sly.

  “So your girlfriend, she’s prosecuting the Sarah Reese case,” he said. “She seems pretty comfy thinking your three boys ain’t all that innocent.”

  “I ain’t said they was all that innocent. I said they ain’t killed the Reese girl.”

  “And you know that for sure because?”

  “Because they said they didn’t.”

  “They wouldn’t lie to you?”

  “I didn’t ask politely.”

  “Sly, dammit. What does that even mean?”

  Sly turned back in his seat to look at Sully. “It means Jerome, the oldest one? It means he got a sister, fourteen, name of Jazzmine. Day after this happened, Saturday, I picked up Jazzmine from the playground, the park, whatever you call it, there at the end of her block, you know? I took her over to one of my places and I had her call him from there so she could tell him where she was. I got on the phone and said tell me where you are. I left Jazzmine there with Lionel and I went to see him. They were down in Southeast in this little apartment, scared as shit. I said I’m going to go home and fuck your sister in the ass and then I’m going to cap her in the back of her head as soon as I come. Then I’m going to throw her ass in the Anacostia for the catfish. Unless you tell me what happened with that white girl.”

  Traffic went by for a few minutes.

  Sully said, “That is a very profitable way of asking questions.”

  “I noticed that all by myself.”

  “So what did he tell you?”

  “That they saw that girl in the store. Talked about her ass a little bit. She gets bitchy. Drops her wallet out of her jacket and runs out the back. They pick up the wallet and run out the front. It had like thirty-five dollars or some shit like that. They kept the money and threw the wallet in the trash can, the one at the basketball court, up there by the rec center. They go home, it’s all on the news that the police looking for they ass.”

  “They’re the last ones to see her and then wind up with her money, their prints.”

  “Seem to be.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “I already told you they’re going to walk. Look, this shit ain’t over. Whoever it was that brought this down on all us, who done killed the little white girl, and whoever killed that fine sister and the Mexican chick, I’m thinking they can’t be but one person that stupid out there. Now. There some brothers out here with a dick problem. I—”

  “She wasn’t Mexican.”

  “Who?”

  “Lana Escobar. She’s Guatemalan, not Mexican.”

  “Guatemalan, Mexican, Costa fucking Rican. She’s dead.”

  “What is it you think happened?”

  “To who?”

  “Any one of them. Sarah. Noel. Lana.”

  Sly looked out the front window. He started to chew on a nail and stopped.

  “The white girl is the biggest problem, see. I go asking around on that, you go asking around on that, we going to bump into dudes with badges, you see that? The way I got it, I find out who offed that Mexican chick, or Noel, or both, that’ll tell me something I need to know.”

  “How you figure?”

  “One, it’s going to tell me who killed two bitches on my turf.”

  “But you didn’t go looking when Lana got killed.”

  “She’s a ho. That shit happens. Noel, college girl passing through. Far as I knew, she’s in LA making look-at-my-ass porn flicks.”

  “But now?”

  “Now the white girl changes everything. This makes three, and you and me, we know the police are all wrong on it. So we find out who killed the other two? Maybe it’s nothing. Or maybe it’s the same one what killed the white girl. That’d be three-for-one shopping right there. But I can’t go around asking on the white chick. I’m taking the play that’s available. Cops go left. I go right.”

  He half turned in his seat. “You?”

  “Why you think,” Sully said, “I’m taking notes on Lana Escobar?”

  • • •

  Sly and Lionel dropped Sully off a few minutes later. He walked stiffly to the black iron gate at the sidewalk and then up the steps. The real problem, he thought, turning the dead bolt on the front door, was that if Sly figured out who the killer was first, no one would ever know. He’d off the dude and that would be that. There would just be years of unanswered questions.

  And Sly was motivated, he could see that. The nail chewing, the antsy chatter—the man was rattled by the police uptick in a neighborhood that usually got ignored, feds slapping on doors, busting guys on meaningless warrants just to get them
downtown, threaten to violate them on their probation, squeeze them. Usually, these were the neighborhood cops, who knew the perps, who knew them, and everybody knew the game.

  But the feds were assholes who didn’t care about the day-to-day rules. Who knew what knowledge was out there that, if it changed hands, could rain down hell in another direction? That was what Sly was sweating. That was why he needed Sully’s help to get Sarah’s murder solved and the feds out of his neighborhood. If resolving the other two killings helped do that, fine, but there was no fooling anyone—nobody cared who killed Noel and Lana. It was all about Sarah Reese.

  twenty-two

  Two hours later, the woman let him in, telling him to sit down, motioning toward a worn-out couch. There was a television and an empty bag of potato chips and two beer cans on the floor beside a chair. The house, a sagging brick row house in a crappy block of Thirteenth Street NW, ten or twelve blocks away from Princeton Place. The last known address of William J. Darden, hirer of prostitutes, beater of women.

  She went upstairs, was up there a minute, and Sully sat down on the couch, waiting, wanting to come out of this with something he could use, something about the grime of the trade, the whole poverty and debasement of it all, the soup they were swimming in. Footsteps came down the stairs, hard, fast, not feminine, and more than one set of them. Sully startled, spread his feet, ready to stand in a hurry, but did not get up.

  William Darden was a big man—Jesus, the arrest card hadn’t said the man was a fucking grizzly—and he stomped into the room, a head of steam, barreling forward. There were two men behind him, not as big, but Sully didn’t have time to look.

  “You—” he said, pointing at Sully, moving forward. “You are one dumb motherfucker.”

  Sully stood. The man was fully sleeved, the jailhouse tats running down both arms. “Mr. Darden, I was just looking to talk to friends of Lana Es—”

  The pistol came out in Darden’s right hand as if he’d shucked it out of a sleeve and he brought it hard and fast, head level, not even slowing down. Sully got an arm up and turned, blocking part of it, the force of it knocking him sideways, skittering by the couch but keeping his feet.

  His vision blurred and one of the men behind Darden, quick as a cat, got both hands on his shoulders, shoving him into the foyer and into the wall.

  The notebook went flying, his shoulders banging against the wood paneling. He kept his feet but kneeled over, out of breath, reaching into his cycle jacket. Darden was closing on him and Sully sat down backward and then he was whipping the heavy Yugoslavian pistol up and out of the jacket in both hands, flicking the safety down with his thumb and firing two rounds into the ceiling, the muzzle flashing, then pointing it back at Darden’s chest.

  Darden flinched backward at the shots, nearly falling over himself.

  “The fuck you doin’?” he bellowed. “You can’t do that!”

  “Swing on me one more time and I’ll put two in your goddamned brain,” Sully said. He had both hands on the pistol, sitting on the floor, back against the wall, three feet from the door, his hands steady as iron. The man on his left wasn’t moving. The third one had vanished back up the stairs.

  “Repo men can’t get a goddamned gun,” Darden said, still looking shocked. “You—you can’t come in here shooting.”

  “I’m not a goddamned repo man.”

  “What? She said you were here about the flat-screen.”

  “I could give a fuck about your big-ass TV. I—”

  “You a narc? Show me—show me the badge.”

  “I’m a fucking reporter. At the paper. I don’t give a goddamn about what you—”

  “A reporter? With that thing? What, it was your daddy’s?”

  “Put the goddamn gun down,” Sully said. “This is some shit. All I wanted to ask you about is a hooker.”

  “A what?” But the tone softening.

  “Lana Escobar. A hooker. You got busted two years ago, an undercover female cop, a sting? You gave up Lana’s name as one of your steadies. Girl’s Hispanic, about five-two, thick. Nice ass.”

  Darden pointed his gun down. Sully did, too.

  “Show me the ID. And keep your voice down.”

  The woman upstairs somewhere, listening.

  The press card was on a metal-beaded lanyard around his neck. Sully pulled it off and tossed it. Darden caught it, looked at it, then tossed it back.

  “Thought you came for the television. She’s behind on it.”

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t.”

  Darden went to the half-ass couch and sat down, still looking at him, amazed. Sully put the pistol back in his jacket pocket, then mopped the sweat from his face with his shirttail. He let out a long breath. “I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Darden, that was some shit just then.”

  “You telling me?”

  Sully almost laughed, and then he did. “Alright, Christ. Okay. Let’s get this over with and get on with our happy lives. So. Lana Escobar. You gave her up in the sting.”

  “Man, I barely remember. I don’t know nobody’s name. They showed me some pictures. I picked her out. They violated me on parole. Got to, you know, give up somebody unless you want to go back.”

  “You take any pictures of Lana? Like, naked?”

  “What, I look like a freak? And who’s gonna pay for them holes in the ceiling?”

  • • •

  The rest of the list he checked out by dark.

  Jasper had moved, and nobody knew where. Nobody answered at Green’s. Darrell Turner, living on the top floor of a two-story walk-up, didn’t answer. Sully knocked and could hear footsteps on the wooden floorboards inside. A shadow, blocking the light at the bottom of the door, someone just on the other side, not moving. There was no peephole. Sully knocked again, the person stood there, three inches away, not moving. Sully tensed, holding his breath, watching the shadow beneath the door. It didn’t move. He backed way, not turning his back, and left.

  By the time he got back home, getting ice into a plastic bag, putting the bag on his jaw, trying to lower the welt that Darden had given him with the gun, he felt it coming on. Darden, Darden had rattled him, Jesus Christ. This fucking job, the dipshits you had to deal with . . . Your nerves, man, your precious bloody nerves. When the shit was going down, he was fine, just fine, always had been. But Nadia, the shell, and now look at him. Just fucking look. The shakes. It was all over and gone and now he had the tremors, standing in his kitchen in front of the refrigerator. His left hand, held aloft in front of his eyes, vibrated all on its own, like a tuning fork. The gun had come up and out and fired as if it had its own mind. The air in his lungs getting less, his chest growing tight, the noise in his head building to a roar, like standing next to a tarmac with a jet taking off, goddammit, just goddamn. He crossed the kitchen in a rush, feeling like he was about to vomit, opening the top of the Dutch door to the backyard, some fresh air, trying not to gag or hyperventilate. Bend over, breathe. Deep breaths now. Come on. Come on. It was alright. It was alright now. It wasn’t the night on the mountain. It wasn’t. It was all okay. The doctor at Landstuhl, he’d told him there would be things like this, and he should have stayed on the medication, yes, he should have, but he just couldn’t stand the shrink looking at him, asking him questions. He felt his breath coming back to him. The left hand, when he held it aloft, was slowing down. There was a crystal tumbler right there on the counter. Five cubes of ice and a splash of Basil’s, sit on the back porch . . . and then, shit, he remembered the community meeting he’d caused, the panicked citizens of Park View, worried a serial killer was loose among them.

  twenty-three

  The Park View Recreation Center sat at the corner of Warder and Otis, an early 1970s American urban renewal project, its no-frills brick architecture testifying to government frugality and the utter lack of Nixon-era imagination. Thirtysomething years of use made it look sixty
something years old, a hulking relic from another time, a mound of metal and brick filling space in a low-slung skyline.

  The noise of the community meeting, being held on the basketball court, reverberated before he got into the arena itself. He checked his watch. Nearly seven. Dick Jensen was already at the microphone, trying to talk over the accusations.

  “So you saying three dead girls and no arrest is nothing we need to worry about,” the man at the microphone in the audience was saying. He was standing, holding the microphone with both hands even though it was on a stand, as if he had a choke hold on a python. Impossibly skinny, he looked to Sully to be Ethiopian. “I got girls here. I got a wife here. I got—”

  “You got what we all got here, which is a stake in a safe place to live,” Jensen cut in, louder. “Don’t look at me and think because I’m white I don’t give a damn or that I can’t tell your son in baggy pants from a three-time loser just out of Lorton.”

  Jensen had surprised himself with the outburst, Sully saw, taking a seat in a folding chair at the back of the crowd. He’d also silenced the audience. The tension hung, suspended, somewhere high in the room, as if in a balloon that might pop.

  “Look,” Jensen said, his voice lowering. “We’ve been at this nearly an hour. All of you are upset. I get it. I am lead detective for MPD on the Noel—”

  “And you ain’t done shit!” a woman shouted. “Where’s the lead cop on the Hispanic girl?” A roiling flush of crowd noise followed, “Whoo” and “That’s it” and “Can’t hear ya now” and clapping and an unfocused surge of hoo-has and catcalls and emotion that seemed to swell from the back of the room to the front, the balloon threatening to burst.

  “If you’d let me finish,” Jensen said. His voice was exasperated and tight, the words clipped. Wearing a three-piece suit, keeping the jacket on, Sully figured, to keep the sweat stains from showing under the armpits.

  “I am the lead on the Noel Pittman case. Lead on Pittman, and liaison to the Sarah Reese case, which is being worked, in our shop, by my partner, Billy Hairston, who is seated just to my left. Billy—” He reached over, a gesture, making sure people saw a stern black face, Hairston with his shaved head, arms folded, pot-bellied, looking grumpy, looking mean.