The Ways of the Dead

by Neely Tucker

  “So I’m looking at Pittman for any ties, similarities, you see what I’m saying? I’m not going to be defensive up here. The chief, over here to my right, and Council Member Belham, over there to his right, asked us to take time out of our work to be available. If I wasn’t here, I’d be working on the cases you care about instead of talking about them.”

  The room quieting now, people sitting back down.

  “I’ve been working major crimes in this city since Ford was in office. I know you’re worried. I know you saw the story in the paper, maybe watched some of the TV. But I want to stress this: There is nothing true today that wasn’t true last month or last week. You and your children, your family? You’re in no more danger than you were last Christmas, on the Fourth of July, or this morning when you woke up. The only thing that’s different is a misleading newspaper story. It takes three deaths that took place in a small area and suggests a link between them based on their proximity and nothing else. It’s ridiculous. Newspapers, television stations, the radio—they don’t have to be right at the end of the day. They don’t put people in prison. They got what they wanted here, which is a reaction. They sold some papers.

  “We are the police, and we have to get it right. It’s not as easy as publishing stories with selective facts and scaring people. Billy here did the work on the Escobar homicide. Which, as you know, took place right outside. There has never been a viable suspect. I can sit here and talk till I’m blue in the face about the work we have done on that, but one thing I can tell you is that no one, absolutely no one, has told us they saw anything. At all. Did you see something? Do you know something? Did all this prompt a memory?”

  His eyes went over the room, trying to catch an eye looking a second longer at him, a head with a half nod, a shoulder sagging with the weight of responsibility. Sully couldn’t see if anyone responded, but it was fully quiet for the first time since he’d entered the gym.

  “Tell me later. You don’t have to come say now. You know where we are.” He nodded to his partner, pacing to his right, then took a step back from the microphone, looking like he’d forgotten his place in a speech, like he had overrun some mental mark and now didn’t know where he was going.

  He approached the microphone again, speaking while he still had the room, selling his sincerity, selling that sense of purpose, a man with a sober haircut and a gun on his hip, working to get that trust, that tip. “I can also tell you that we just discovered Noel Pittman’s body, and the list of cooperating witnesses is just as long as in the Escobar killing. Zero. Nada. We’re working that case as the forensics dictate. The Sarah Reese case, we got a break. Someone identified suspects. Someone told us who they were. That is the one and only reason we’ve made an arrest. That one is white and the other two are not is coincidental.”

  “So you can’t arrest nobody unless you get lucky?” It was the man at the microphone. He hadn’t moved.

  “Pretty much,” Jensen said, “if by getting lucky you’re including witnesses who’ll testify. People kill people and then they hide. They don’t call us up and tell us about it. They don’t shoot each other in front of the precinct. So they have to leave something behind. Or they have to be seen. They have to screw up. Or, as you put it, we have to get lucky.”

  “When you going to search the rest of the houses?”

  It was a man’s voice, plaintive but demanding, coming from the far side of the room.

  “I’m sorry?” Jensen said.

  “The rest of the houses. When you going to search them? That Pittman girl turned up under one. You know how many abandoned houses there are around here? My daughter, she’s been missing a month now—”

  Sully’s cellphone buzzed. Shit. It was R.J. He lingered long enough to hear the man’s last name, Williams, and then quick-stepped to a side door, out into a hallway.

  “Sully! Lad!” the voice boomed into his ear. “So wonderful to hear your voice, particularly since we haven’t seen you in the newsroom. How are your peregrinations into the demimonde of our fair city? I trust you have not contracted any communicable diseases.”

  “I’m at this community meeting, over on Princeton. Working the streets to—”

  He paused to listen.

  “I’m going to need a few more days,” he said. “Escobar wasn’t so much in the life like we thought. Dug up her, what is it, sort of stepfather. Nobody’s talked to him before. And I found Noel Pittman’s sister. Was actually out there for the funeral.” Another pause. “Out in Colesville. She wasn’t friendly.”

  R.J. spoke for a while.

  “Hey, man, I know nobody cares,” Sully said, pacing, his shoes clicking on the tile floor, still jittery, still wired. “We’re going to make them care, okay? But you gotta give me some time. I’m up to my ass out here in hookers and illegal immigrants and, funny thing, they don’t like white guys with notebooks, right? Turns out there may be some girls missing up here, too, not just dead, so tell Melissa to pipe the fuck down.”

  He clicked the phone off and yanked open the door to the gym. The meeting was breaking up, the stage empty.

  David Belham, the Ward 1 councilman, had come in front of the podium, into the center of a cluster of people, writing things down in a datebook and looking up at each constituent. You could see the man counting the votes. There was the woman who was the advisory neighborhood commissioner—no, he wasn’t going over to her, she was batshit crazy—and an MPD spokesman. The chief was somewhere in a larger knot of people. There were television cameras and lights around him. Sully looked, but didn’t see the Williams man anywhere. Jensen, there he was, working his way toward the door. Sully loped that way.

  Taller than those around him, the man looked over their heads, saw Sully, and tensed, stopping, his eyes locking on him.

  “You want to talk about the problem?” he said, a loud stage voice, halfway to the people around him, halfway toward Sully. “Why don’t you go talk to this guy? Carter here’s the one who wrote the story.”

  The trail of people around Jensen, elderly homeowners, a young activist, four or five women who looked indignant, stopped and turned, sizing him up.

  Play it straight, he told himself. He smiled, making eye contact all around.

  “I would have been happy to quote Detective Jensen in that piece if he had returned any of the three calls I made to him before I wrote it.”

  “We don’t talk to reporters, particularly about open cases,” Jensen said, playing out the theater. “Everybody knows that.”

  “An odd position for a man who just said he needed witnesses to talk in order for him to work.”

  Jensen turned to the people around him. “Listen, thank all of you for coming out. If you have information about any of these cases, you got my card. Call us. We’ll come to you.”

  He swiveled on a heel, turned, and walked. The crowd did not follow. They muttered among themselves, darting looks at Sully.

  Someone bumped his right shoulder from behind, hurrying past in the crowd. Sully turned, halfway between an “Excuse me” and “Watch where you’re going.” He was surprised to see it was Doyle Goodwin.

  “I need to see you tomorrow,” Doyle whispered at his ear, and then he was past him, melting into the crowd, the knots of people still forming and re-forming, their voices bubbling, the anger and tension in the room still fluttering, like cigarette ash that had been flicked into the air.

  twenty-four

  Just after nine the next morning, Sully edged the Ducati around stalled traffic on C Street, wedging it into a space between cars illegally parked in the designated “Motorcycles Only” spots.

  He walked past five or six cars and there was the hot dog cart at the curb in front of the Department of Motor Vehicles. A half smoke with mustard and ketchup, lord yes, he ate it sitting on the steps, washing it down with some sort of crappy iced tea they sold in a glass bottle. He’d reached Doyle on th
e phone earlier, making plans to meet him at the store later in the day. The man had offered no clue as to what had been on his mind the night before, or why he couldn’t say what he had to say over the phone. This was annoying but it wasn’t like he was being Jensen, blaming him for homicides that cops couldn’t solve. Sully burped softly into his fist. Half smokes.

  Just the other side of the two lanes was the U.S. District Courthouse, the federal seat of power, where the United States sued and was sued, where David Reese was the highest-ranking judge. It sat at the foot of Capitol Hill. Pennsylvania Avenue ran in front of it, America’s Main Street, and in the course of a dozen blocks to the west encompassed the Department of Justice, FBI headquarters, the U.S. Treasury, and the White House.

  C Street, all of two blocks long, ran just behind the court, the ass end of it, and offered nothing but a portal into the shithole of Washington. The DMV squatted on one end, the great time-waster of urban bureaucracy, and upstairs, in the headquarters of the MPD, were the cops who plowed into the city’s drug deals, stolen cars, burglaries, phone scams, homicides, rapes, and beat downs, usually to little effect.

  Next door, across a small park, was Superior Court, where the vast majority of defendants were no-papered the morning after their arrest, down in C-10, the same arraignment room that the Reese suspects had passed through. You could smell the depression in the room amid the piss and the plumbing and the burnt toast from the cafeteria down the hall. A tunnel ran between the court and MPD, used to shuttle defendants between the two without bringing them into daylight. If the defendants actually got charged, their plea bargains and their trials were heard in the brown-paneled courtrooms upstairs, where no one but a few family members and victims’ relatives were ever likely to show up.

  Sully threw his foil wrapper and the bottle into a curbside trash can and walked in the DMV entrance, taking the back entrance into police headquarters, so that any beat reporters around the front entrance would not see him enter the place. He turned left and then right and walked around the long corridor, passing through security and heading for the Youth and Preventive Services division on the third floor, the dead end of missing persons cases.

  The counter, a long marble divide that ran the length of the room, was not staffed. He stood there long enough to be noticed and a thickset woman in uniform pushed up from her desk in the back of the room and came to the counter and asked him what it was he thought that he wanted.

  “Looking for Rudy Jeffries,” he said. “Could you tell him Sully Carter is here?”

  “Why does Sully Carter want to see Rudy Jeffries?”

  “Because I’d like to ask him about a missing woman. Actually, maybe two.”

  She put both elbows on the counter and arched an eyebrow, bored or giving every appearance of it. “Relatives?”

  “No.”

  “Dependents?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then why do you need to talk to Sergeant Jeffries about them?”

  Sully shifted his weight. “Because I’m a reporter working on a story about them, and I think Sergeant Jeffries might be able to help. He knows me.”

  “I’m thrilled he does. You didn’t check in with Sergeant Malone, in the media relations department, did you? ’Cause he didn’t call up saying you were coming.”

  “I know Sergeant Malone, and no, I didn’t, because I’m not looking to quote Rudy. I’m just—”

  “Since you know so many people, you should know the protocol. Sergeant Malone is on the second floor. But then, hey, you know him. So you know where to find it.”

  She was turning her back to him when Sully rapped on the counter and leaned forward. “Nobody’s trying to get around any departmental regs, okay, Officer? I got a simple question for Rudy about how something works. It’s no big fucking deal.”

  He dropped the expletive for effect, figuring it would backfire or blast the door open a crack. It didn’t really matter if it was the former, since she was shutting him down already. Malone, he’d relay the request to Rudy, yes, but in his own sweet time, and Sully would lose half the day. She was the troll at the bridge, and trolls ran the bridges, and trolls were a pain in the ass, but you couldn’t get around them.

  She sauntered back between the desks, and then into the corridor of offices. A minute later, Rudy came into view, beckoned impatiently, and disappeared back down the hall. Sully lifted the divider in the counter, smiled sweetly at the officer, who ignored him, and walked down the narrow corridor. The door was open. Rudy had his bulk crammed behind his desk. He was on the phone and motioned for Sully to sit down.

  “’Cause I told him to be there,” he said into the phone. “I’m not interested in stories, Leon. I don’t care if it’s an excuse or a reason. I don’t care if his dick fell off. Tell him to pick it up and meet me at the time and place appointed.”

  He hung up but kept looking at the phone, keeping his hand on top of it, as if it were going to run off if it got the chance.

  “Kid is seventeen about to be eighteen and he’s got a dope problem, right, and he’s run off from home and now his momma’s looking for him, getting us involved?” he said, still looking at the phone. “Kid gets a lawyer. Didn’t hire him, see, just talking to him, right, on the phone, getting advice, and the kid doesn’t want to go home, and he’s saying, See, if I stay gone for another month then I’ll be eighteen, and the lawyer’s saying, Hhhmm, and I’m trying to get the kid’s ass outta wherever he’s staying before he gets picked up for something else, something that’s going to send his punk ass to lockup.”

  “Why’s the lawyer care?”

  “Leon. Leon King, one of your pale-faced brethren on a mission to save us from ourselves. Kid’s telling him life’s shit at home, momma’s a crackhead, blah blah.”

  “Is she?”

  Rudy rolled his neck, popping his vertebrae as he did so and finally looked up at Sully. “Merlie? I really don’t fucking think so. We graduated Roosevelt the same time. She works at Macy’s, the makeup counter. Sings alto at Metropolitan AME. So no, dipshit is not being raised by a crack momma. Her problem is she loves the little chump, which is a losing proposition, you ask me, but she called me up and got in my ear about it.” He leaned forward, meaty forearms on the edge of the desk, already looking somewhere between tired and worn down. “Which is not why you’re here.”

  “Thought I’d come by and flirt with my girlfriend. What’s her name out there?”

  “Sherice? Nah, Sherice don’t care for your kind.”

  “Which ‘my kind’ we talking about?”

  “Reporters. But now that I think about it, she probably don’t care for white people too much, neither.”

  “Pity.”

  “Well.”

  “Noel Pittman.”

  “Yes.”

  “You ever see the pictures?”

  “They are legend, brother.”

  “You guys chasing it as a homicide?”

  “Go ask Homicide.”

  “It started off as a missing persons.”

  “Out there in 4-D, yeah.”

  “The homicide case did. But I’m talking about when it was just a missing persons thing. Don’t y’all track missing adults, citywide, out of this office?”

  “Used to. But in that reorg the chief loves so much? He moved all the missing persons cases out to each ward last year, when he transferred Homicide out of central command.”

  “Ah, shit.”

  “Yeah, baby. The way it is now? The seven wards, they’re supposed to report their numbers into us but work the cases themselves. The adult cases, that is. The kids, citywide? We still do that here.”

  “This sounds sort of fucked up.”

  “It sort of is.”

  “So even though Pittman started out as a missing person—an adult—you guys didn’t do anything with it down here out of headquarters.”
>
  “Goodness, but you’re a bright boy.”

  “The name Lana Escobar ring a bell?”

  Rudy paused. “Last year. I was still in Vice. She turned up dead, up there at Park View.”

  “So she was, as they say, known to the vice squad?”

  “You’d have to call over there for the Rolodex. If she got booked, there’d be a record. It wasn’t a big enough name for me to know about, I can tell you that. I just remember, you did a little squib on it. Again, all this is when Chief started moving shit around. I was leaving Vice. People were leaving downtown, Homicide and Major Crimes and all that, out to the wards.”

  “Her family says they filed a missing persons report.”

  “Bully for them.”

  “I mean, they said that when they reported her missing, that’s when they found out she was a Jane Doe down at the morgue.”

  “I am grieving for them still.”

  “It bother you that Noel Pittman, once a missing person, turns up in a basement in the 700 of Princeton Place, and Lana Escobar, once a missing person, turns up on the outfield grass at Park View Rec Center, which is also in the 700 of Princeton Place? And that they went missing within about six months of one another?”

  Rudy leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. The fluorescent light overhead gleamed on his shaved dome. He looked up at the ceiling. “This is your story the other day.”

  “Dick Jensen didn’t like it.”

  “Dick’s not all bad. A hard-ass and old-school, but there’s worse. Played golf with him once. He didn’t cheat.”

  “So you think the story was bullshit, too?”

  “Well, look, you put it like you just did, the missing females? Yeah, it sounds off. But you know how many missing persons cases we get? Forty-one hundred last year. We’re at three thousand and change this year. That’s about ten a day, all year long, including weekends, holidays, and your religious observances. I think the homicide number last year was 260. This year, so far it’s 190? Something like that. So in a city that’s all of sixty-nine square miles, filled with thousands of reports of missing people, and where you get a homicide about every thirty, thirty-five hours, you’re asking is it odd that you get a combination on the same block?”