The Ways of the Dead

by Neely Tucker

  Sully turned to his right and walked to the dumpster. It was conspicuously green, without a spot of rust. It looked new. He walked down the rest of the alley, onto Princeton Place, and turned left. A few feet later, he was walking past the tiny parking lot for Doyle’s, and then onto the sidewalk of Georgia.

  Lights were on in the stores, the streetlights cast an overhead glow. Cars had their headlights on, red brake lights tapping. It was rush hour. Nobody was screaming, nothing had happened. The stars were in their courses. Just after he passed the Hunger Stopper and turned onto Otis, heading back toward the bike, Doyle flashed through his mind.

  Christ. He’d forgotten.

  twenty-seven

  Doyle was reading a magazine behind the counter. The store was empty, the light was flat. Something else was odd, and it took Sully a second to peg it—there was no television blaring.

  “She’s off getting her hair done,” Doyle said when Sully asked.

  Sully got a bag of peanuts and a Coke and headed for the counter, buying something just to be sociable, to give his hands something to do, the blood still thrumming from the shooting. Doyle, peering over his glasses, rang it up and said Bettie had taken to leaving him several days a week to mind the store on his own.

  “Scared silly,” he said, letting out a sigh. His khakis were pressed to a sharp crease, his blue oxford-cloth button-down shirt starched into place.

  “You have other folks working for you, though, right?”

  “A couple or three. But Bettie’s family. I pay her a salary. Everyone else is hourly. If I call somebody else in, I’m paying her and them.”

  “Maybe you should just tell her to take a week out.”

  “I guess I could. Customers do love her, though, and we need to keep people reassured right now. Business is bad enough off as it is.”

  Sully, chewing a handful of peanuts now, took another swig of the soda to wash them down. “Which reminds me,” he said. “Customers.” He reached into his backpack, giving Doyle time to get comfortable to say whatever he was going to say, rustled past the notebooks, and found the pictures of the girls.

  He set them out on the counter, spinning them around so they would be right side up for Doyle. “You recognize any of these three? Lana Escobar, Noel Pittman, and this one is Michelle Williams. I’m writing about the neighborhood.”

  “They all live right around here?” Doyle asked.

  Sully took another handful of peanuts, chewing as he talked. “Yeah. A couple blocks. I’m asking around this afternoon. They come in here much? You know ’em at all?”

  Doyle was looking down at them, peering through his glasses. He gave them a thoughtful looking over.

  “Maybe, I don’t know. Bettie does most of the register, I’m in the back. Who’s this one? Think I saw her walking on Princeton. This business, it’s hard to keep track of the young people. The older customers, the steadies? Those you know.”

  “That’s Noel,” Sully said, “I guess—”

  “Lord, boy, you been playing in the mud? What happened to your shoes?”

  Doyle, startled, peering over the counter. Sully looked down. The sides of the shoes, even the tops, were stained with dried mud from the basement.

  “Well, hell,” Sully said, looking down, stalling, debating whether to say he’d been snooping in the house next door, telling him something about the drama, the gunfire, and then went against it. “They’re watering the grass up there at the rec center, out on that baseball field? I was interviewing people and cut through. You come in off the outfield into that dirt path for the bases? I took two steps in it before I realized it was a mud pit.”

  He went outside, stomped on the concrete, rubbed the soles and sides of the shoes against a parking barrier, and came back in.

  “Sorry. I best get home and change. But hey, I was interested. What was it you wanted to tell me last night?”

  “Your shirt’s a mess, too.” He indicated Sully’s back using two fingers to tap the back of his own.

  Sully looked over his right shoulder and tugged at the shirt. He could see the dirt, the grime spreading over the right shoulder blade, a large smudge. It had to irritate a man with Doyle’s sense of starched order.

  He tugged at his own shirt now, shaking his head, nerves flaring again. “What else? Man, you lean up against one wall, some of the houses around here. Damn.”

  Doyle waved a hand, coughed. “Okay. Look. I just needed to—I just need to tell you something about this Reese thing, but privately? I didn’t want to do it in front of that crowd last night. I don’t know if this is important or not. But it’s just not right.”

  Sully kept brushing at the dirt, glad Doyle was finally getting to it. “Yeah? What’s on your mind?”

  Doyle nodded, his small, muscular shoulders rolling forward. He took his glasses off. “But you can’t print this. Or you can’t say that I said it. If somebody else tells it to you, fine, but there’s no way in hell I want my name attached.”

  “I can’t know what it is until you tell me, partner, but I’ll agree I won’t print it unless I get a second, if not a third, confirmation.”

  “Okay. So, here it is. I think. The judge? Sarah’s father?”

  “Yeah?”

  “He used to come in and get a Coke or something, sometimes late on Friday just after I’d taken over for Bettie. Saturday mornings, too. I open up, stay till noon. I guess he was taking the little girl to dance rehearsal.”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t mean to be any particular way about it, but there aren’t a lot of white folks in the neighborhood anymore. You notice one another, say hello. A well-dressed white man coming in the store? Not a lot of that clientele. You remember it. So this one Saturday morning I saw him at the top of Princeton Place, right by the baseball field. He was getting out of a car, a Mercedes or a BMW, something silver. Well, now. I was walking by, on my way in, and I recognized him, so I nodded, said hello. He stood there and looked at me like I hadn’t said anything at all. Looked at me and then just turned back to what he was doing. Rude as you can be.”

  “Snotty little prick, ain’t he?”

  “But that’s not what I’m telling you about. What I’m telling you about is that I was sort of peeved about it. I said to myself, ‘You know, he thinks he’s some big-shot judge and I’m a little storeowner, and he didn’t even recognize me. Or doesn’t think I’m worth talking to.’ I’m retired navy. I served my country. I don’t have an apology to make to anybody. I’ve been making this store work for a dozen years now, and I knew he recognized me. I turned around, honest to god, and I was going to go back and say, ‘My name is Doyle Goodwin, and you come shop in my store down there at the bottom of the block and you damn well know who I am.’”

  “Good for you, coming back at him.”

  “But I never got anywhere with that, because when I turned around, what did I see? He was on the front porch of that house the Pittman girl was living in. She opened the door. She kissed him on the mouth.”

  Sully choked, the Coke going up into his nostrils, burning his sinuses. “You said what?”

  “She had some little nightie-something on. They went into her house there.”

  “They knew each other? Like, biblically?”

  “That’s what I was wanting to tell you.”

  Sully stood flat-footed. “I can’t—I just—what did the police say?”

  “Didn’t tell them.”

  “Didn’t tell them?”

  “They interviewed me before the Pittman girl turned up dead. When they were interviewing us, I didn’t see the point. The man’s daughter is dead, and I’m going to go tell the police he was catting around? I wouldn’t have done that in a million years. But after the Pittman girl turned up dead, it started feeling different.”

  “You still haven’t called them?”

  Doyle sa
t on his stool behind the counter. He rubbed a hand across his chin, his cheek. He rocked back and forth slightly.

  “Thought about it. But look. Like I told you, this girl getting killed out back has really hit us. People, they think we fingered those guys to the police, they don’t want to come in no more. So in the midst of this, to go wading into that police office and tell them a federal judge was fooling around with this black girl up the block? If I thought the scales were fair, maybe. But they’re not, Sully, and you know it as well as I do. All it would do is get covered up. And hey, surprise, I’d get a ton of grief from everyone from the zoning administration to the IRS. I’d get audited eighteen years in a row. I’m a little guy, Sully. He’d bury me.”

  “I can see your thinking. I can. I’m not trying to talk you into anything. But, Doyle, I got to tell you, this is a big goddamned deal. A federal judge involved with a young woman who turns up dead? And his daughter killed on the same block?”

  Doyle slapped the counter with a flat palm, making his glasses teeter down the end of his nose. “Which is why I don’t want my name on it! We’re barely staying in business! You been in here ten minutes, you seen anybody? Bettie flinches every time the doors open, thinking she’s gonna get shot up!”

  He took a deep breath, reining himself in. He put both hands on the countertop. His voice dropped. He was working at it.

  “We might be okay by Christmas. Might, this thing blows over. But not if I get crossed up with some federal judge. I. Will. Be. Dead. Meat.” He popped an open palm on the counter with each word, the cords on his neck standing out, his face flush.

  Sully, taken aback by the outburst, leaned against the ice-cream case, hoping to God no one came in the store. His mind was scattering, bright little shells bursting against the back of his eyes.

  “Okay. So okay,” he said. “Here’s what I can do. Okay. I won’t put your name to this, but I will tell people that I have a source who saw Reese and Pittman together, romantically involved. I won’t tell them who that source is. If my bosses press me for it, I’ll have to tell them, but that doesn’t mean it goes into the paper. It just means they want to be sure I’m not making it up.”

  “Why would they think that?”

  “It’s not personal. It’s the way it is. Things go in the paper, everybody wants to be sure. You were in the navy. Somebody says, ‘I see a Russian sub!’ the captain isn’t gonna say, ‘Sink it.’ He’s gonna say, ‘Show me.’”

  Doyle looked down, then back at Sully. His arms were folded across his chest. “So who is it you’re going to be telling you’ve got this source? You can’t tell the police.”

  “No, no. I’ll just use it as a basis of reporting. I’ll go around the neighborhood here, take Reese’s picture, like I did with these three girls here, and ask if anybody recognizes him. Like I just did with you, right? I showed you the pictures, asked you if you recognized them. I didn’t say anything about anybody else.”

  “Okay.”

  “Alright. So.” He took a breath. “Did, did Reese keep coming in the store after Noel went missing?”

  “I wasn’t taking notes on it. But it’s been a while since I’ve seen him.”

  “Okay. Okay. I’ll ask Pittman’s family about it, and tell them someone says she was involved with a guy named David and see what they say.”

  “The judge. Will you tell him?”

  “If some other people say they saw him, or I find another way that shows he and Pittman were having an affair, then I’d have to go see him and see what he says before I could print it.”

  “But you’re not going to use my name?”

  Sully extended his hand over the counter. “I don’t burn people, Doyle.”

  The man nodded and shook his hand. He leaned back on his stool. He cleaned his glasses with a cloth by the register, apparently a nervous tic. “I just feel better now that I told somebody,” he said. He managed a dry cough, his eyes lighting up, relieved. “I felt terrible, holding on to a secret like that.”

  twenty-eight

  Sully came out of the store, his mind aflame, and before he could think of anything else, there was the bright red light of the Big Apple Dance Studio directly across the street, like a slowing magnet.

  Crossing during a lull in traffic, the cold and the dark settling in, he tugged the glass door open, the thumping music from the studio upstairs assaulting his ears. The receptionist desk was along the wall.

  He asked for Regina Blocker, the owner, and the lady told him she had gone for the day. He was about to ask for Victoria, then remembered that was her middle name. He was tongue-tied until he turned and she was coming down the steps from upstairs, as if on cue.

  She had on tights and running shoes and a white sweatshirt, the top collar scissored open for a deep V-neck. She had a white hair band keeping her braids back and a gym tote bag slung over one shoulder. Sully thought she looked athletic, attractive, like a small forward on a college basketball team.

  “Look at you,” he called out, “right on time.” He jerked his head toward the door and started walking, as if they had plans.

  She gave him a wary look but went outside with him. “I’m just running across the street to get something to eat,” she said, gesturing toward the Hunger Stopper.

  He nodded. “Then let’s make it my treat.”

  Halfway across the street, she said, “Something going on? I don’t mind helping you out, but I don’t wan—”

  “Nobody made you as ‘Victoria,’ did they?”

  “No,” she said, flashing him a smile. She was comfortable, opening the door to the restaurant, stepping up to the carryout window, looking up at the menu items listed overhead, on her turf. “We’re good.”

  “I still don’t know your name, you know.”

  “A tragedy.”

  Sully, itchy from the news Doyle had given him, stood beside her, waited while she ordered a roast beef on rye and coffee to go. “You eating that right before class?” he asked. “After,” she said. “They close before class lets out. Get it now or go hungry.” He reached into the backpack for the three pictures. He spread them out, as much as he could, on the takeout counter, glad no one was in line behind them. “So I got to ask you one more question,” he said.

  “That’s Noel,” she said.

  “And I didn’t even have to ask.”

  “She used to come in the studio. Hip-hop.” She looked at the other pictures. “That’s that Spanish girl you were asking about last year. Don’t know the other one.”

  “Noel took classes?”

  “Yeah. She had this gig out at Halo. She didn’t want to be embarrassing herself out there.”

  “Was she a regular student?”

  “More off and on. She just came to a group class, so far as I know.”

  “You saw her in there?”

  “I taught the class.”

  “Oh.” He paused. “So you can dance like that, like they do out at Halo?”

  “You like that sort of thing, Mr. Newspaper Man?”

  He laughed, caught. “No, no. I didn’t say that exactly, I just—”

  “Guys do. Don’t be so shy about it. So why you showing me these pictures while I’m trying to get something to eat? I got to get on back.”

  “I—I was working in the neighborhood and happened to stop in. You know David Reese?”

  “Sarah’s dad, sure.”

  “He around the studio?”

  “Drop off, pick up. Mainly Saturdays. Like I told you before.”

  “He hang out at the studio while Sarah danced?”

  “Nah. Sometimes he’d be ten, fifteen minutes late picking her up.”

  “You remember what time those classes were?”

  “Sarah’s? She was in Intermediate Modern. Starts at six on weekdays, ten on Saturdays.”

  “Okay, so when were the
lessons that Noel came in for?”

  “Saturday mornings. First thing. Well—and, well, there was a second hip-hop class. It started at eleven. I taught that, too.”

  “I’m guessing the first one started at like nine.”

  “Aren’t we the smart little cookie.”

  “Which means that early class of Noel’s would have been breaking up right when Sarah’s was starting.”

  “And the second one started when Sarah’s finished. It bookended.”

  The man behind the counter brought a paper cup of coffee with a plastic lid on it and a folded brown paper bag. Before Victoria could put any money down, Sully handed him a ten-dollar bill and told him not to worry about change.

  “You remember which one Noel came in for most often?”

  “Why, look at you,” Victoria said. “Thanks. And no. It’s a ten-week group class. You sign up and pay, you can come as much or as little as you like.”

  She was walking then, back outside, sipping the coffee, waiting for traffic to clear so she could cross back to the studio.

  “So how long did Noel take classes?” he said.

  “Can’t remember. You can ask Regina, but she’s not going to say anything. It was maybe a year. Probably less.”

  “Was she coming to class right up until she disappeared?”

  She shrugged, a hunch of the shoulders. “I don’t know when she went missing. She just didn’t come anymore. There were six or eight girls in the class. It’s not like I was keeping attendance.”

  The traffic cleared then, and she started across the street. Sully stayed on the sidewalk. “You can tell me your name if you want to,” he called after her.

  She turned in the street, walking backward, smiling. “You asking for my number?”

  This was unexpected. It wasn’t unwelcome, it just threw him, the idea, maybe something other than Dusty . . . “Should I?”