The Ways of the Dead

by Neely Tucker

  She turned away, laughing, raising the coffee cup as a parting. “Keep me out of this shit.”

  “What about your number?”

  “You got to do better than this,” swinging the paper bag with the sandwich.

  Sully stood on the sidewalk for a moment. Victoria was, if he stopped to think about it, kind of damned hot, and she was playing with him, which he kind of liked, but there was Dusty and . . . He blinked and blew out a breath. Focus. Too much shit at once.

  He pulled out the cell and punched in Sly’s number.

  twenty-nine

  Five minutes later, Sly Hastings opened the door, unlocked the gate with the steel bars. Sully followed his angular frame into the hallway and then down the steps into the basement.

  There was music on—Sully recognized it as Miles Davis, that middle register—and Sly went to a bar stool and sat down. Donnell was asleep on the kitchen floor. The dog opened an eye and watched as Sully stepped over him and went to the refrigerator.

  “You got to start keeping bourbon in here,” he said, looking inside.

  “I don’t drink the shit.”

  Sully got a can of Miller, popped it open, and took a long swallow.

  “Somebody took a shot at me,” he said. “Shots.”

  Sly, settling on a bar stool, looking at the television, a news channel with the sound off, looked over at him. He did not seem surprised. “For real?”

  “In that house on Princeton, where Noel Pittman was found.”

  “Why?”

  “The fuck do I know? I was down in the basement poking around, seeing what there was to see. Fucker came in, put a hand in the basement door, and let loose. We didn’t talk about it.”

  “You didn’t get a look at who it was?”

  “No.”

  “Just one shooter?”

  “Near as I could tell.”

  “So why didn’t they come down and waste you?”

  “Possibly because I shot back.”

  Sly’s eyes narrowed, and there was a pause.

  “You went to this house, down into this basement thing, and you went packing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I didn’t know you carried.”

  “Since somebody blew me up with a grenade.”

  “That was in the war, though, right?”

  “I took it personal.”

  “I didn’t think reporter types were supposed to do that, carry a gun.”

  “Not that I’m aware of, no, we’re not.”

  “But you do.”

  “I do.”

  “And you tried to shoot this motherfucker over there just now?”

  “What did I just tell you?”

  “I’m just saying, you got two dudes shooting at each other, nobody hitting anything. Most times, you want to shoot somebody, you do.”

  “I’ma go to the range in the morning, work on my aim.”

  “What were you looking for down there?”

  “Whatever there was to see. I don’t know. You never know unless you go look.” He looked at his hand, the tremors again. “Jesus, don’t you got whiskey? At all?”

  Sly ignored him, thinking. “Well. This shooter. In that house, taking potshots at somebody in the basement. The dude didn’t see you? Didn’t know it was you in particular?”

  “Not so far as I know.”

  “Then this means what? That somebody out there, maybe who killed Noel, don’t want anybody down there. Maybe he thinks he left something.”

  “The cops have already been all over it.”

  “Yeah, well, still. Maybe they missed something. You trespassing in a house nobody owns. Don’t make any sense. Somebody’d havta be following you or watching the house—”

  “Wait a minute. I had a tail, I’d swear it, a blue Olds a few days ago. Tailed me from that presser at Reeses’s. Two chunky white guys, the sweatshirts, the hoodies, the whole undercover thing. I took them to be detailed to Reese’s case. I went into Reese’s house, we had an unpleasant conversation, so I figured they slapped me with a tail. A brushback pitch.”

  “What was unpleasant about the conversation with the judge?”

  “I—” It dawned on Sully, almost too late, that he had used Sly’s information to tell the judge the three arrests were bogus. He couldn’t tell Sly that. “I would say that every conversation I have with Reese is unpleasant. He’s a prick. Plus his daughter had just been killed.”

  “Hunh.”

  “But that’s not what I came here to tell you, though. David Reese. I came to tell you something else about David Reese.”

  Sly nodded, sitting at the counter, twiddling his pencil back and forth.

  “He was screwing Noel Pittman. Or at least I think he was.”

  Sly kept the poker face, but his pencil stopped mid-twitch. “And why do you think that?”

  “Because somebody who might know just outed him to me. I’m curious if anybody else who might know told you.”

  Sly leaned back on his bar stool and crossed his arms. Sly working to keep his jawline steady. They regarded each other for a moment. Sly waiting to see if he’d say more. Sully didn’t.

  “Well, then, we got ourselves another problem,” Sly said, “because nobody told me that shit at all.”

  His face seemed to become stronger and yet more diffuse, things working beneath the surface, a storm cloud building, lightning inside the vapor. Sly put his left hand to the top of his forehead, pulling it down his face until his hand cupped his chin. He cursed, suddenly, with a violent jerk of his head. “I don’t know how I didn’t think of this before.”

  Sully pulled another draft on the beer, eyeing him. “Think of what?”

  “Come on, goddammit,” Sly said, getting up. “Put that thing down. We got to talk to somebody.”

  He was up and out the basement door, no coat, no jacket, Sully pouring the rest of the beer down the sink, hurrying to catch up.

  Sly walked them down Warder and then turned right onto Princeton Place. The baseball field was just across the street. Sly walked past the first large house, past an alley paved with brick, and then past three, four houses, the yards slightly elevated from the sidewalk, more so as the street sloped downhill. At one house, Sly turned right, went up four or five concrete steps, and, motioning Sully to follow, strode across the sidewalk and then up five or six more steps to the porch. There was a wooden swing and two iron chairs with striped cushions.

  Sly rapped on the door, hard. “Open the door, Mommy. It’s me. Open the door.”

  They stood, waiting. Sully could hear footsteps just behind the door and felt, rather than saw, someone looking through the peephole. The door slid open, chain still in place, and an elderly woman’s face appeared through the slot. She peered unhappily at them both.

  “I said it was me, Mommy,” Sly said. “Now open the door. Come on.”

  The woman closed the door and the chain slid back and the door opened into darkness, with a light on in a room at the end of the hall. Sly followed her into the kitchen. Sully trailed them both. It reminded him of Curtis Williams’s home, only decorated in grandmotherly fashion. There were cheap prints on the wall, of black people at an island-style open-air market, of a woman drinking from a coconut.

  In the kitchen, the woman returned to the stove, stirring whatever was in the pot before her. Sully was about to guess she was from the Caribbean when she opened her mouth and removed all doubt that she was Jamaican.

  “What are you wanting me for?” She said it to Sly but was looking at Sully. She was wearing jeans, a floral print top, slippers, small gold hoop earrings, and a scarf wrapped around her head. The television was blaring from the other room. Sully saw two bottles of ginger ale on the table. He wondered where the other ginger ale drinker was.

  “He’s a reporter dude,” Sly said, noddin
g back at Sully. He pulled a chair out from the kitchen table and sat down without being asked. “He wants to ask you something. I wouldn’t mind knowing myself.” He nodded at Sully.

  Sully sat down, pulled out his backpack, and laid out the pictures of the three girls.

  The woman came over from the stove and said, “Oh my Jesus.”

  Sully looked inside the backpack again and pulled out a newspaper. He flipped to an inside page, the story of Reese’s driveway press conference, a large photograph of him at the microphones, folded and quartered the paper so the picture was dominant. Spinning it around so it was in front of her, he cleared his throat and said, “My name is—”

  “Skip all that old shit,” Sly said, cutting him off. “She knows you’re a reporter, right, Mommy?” The woman narrowed her eyes and nodded.

  “My name is Sully Carter and I work at the paper,” Sully said, glaring at Sly, giving his standard spiel anyway. “Okay, then. I’m working on a story about these three girls. You recognize them, I think. What I want to know is if you’ve seen this gentleman on the block.” He tapped on the picture of Reese, smoothing the paper out as he did so.

  The woman looked at Sly, who nodded. She pulled her glasses, hanging on a thin gold chain around her neck, up to her eyes, and opened them wider. She slid her feet across the floor and sat down at the table. She leaned down over it, then reached out a finger and tapped the picture.

  “Long time, but I know him. He came to see she over there across the street. Saturday mornings. Sometime Fridays.”

  “Which she are we talking about?”

  “She. The bad one. She from Manchester parish. She had the devil in her.” She tapped the picture of Noel.

  “When was the last time you saw her? Noel?”

  She shrugged. “Not since nobody saw her no more.”

  “And how long before? How long was he coming over there?”

  “I have no notebook,” she said. “But six months. Maybe even one year.”

  “And you’re sure? Absolutely sure?”

  She nodded. “The white devils around here are few.”

  Sly slapped a fist onto the table. “And did you think, did you one goddamn time think, that I might want to know that information? That the goddamn chief judge of the U.S. District Court was fucking a college student in my neighborhood? Four blocks from my goddamn house?”

  The woman took one step back to the stove and, lightning quick, snatched a knife off the countertop and stepped back, the blade toward Sly’s throat. It had seemed a single motion, slippery as mercury and as quick.

  “It is my house! My house! You black Americans have no respect! I have no fear from you!” She held the blade out, three inches from Sly’s neck, the blade steady.

  Sly regarded her with a glare. He spoke softly and with menace. “I pay you, Mommy.”

  “You didn’t tell me who this one was! I told you a white man came to see a black girl on the street and you say to me, ‘So what?’”

  Sly blinked and sat back in the chair. He thought for a moment, his eyes still on the woman. His hands were flat on his legs. He raised one hand and then softly put it back down, tapping the leg, one two three, a gesture of recognition, of defeat. “I did,” he said, finally. “You did. I was in the middle of—I did.”

  The woman went back to her pot and put the knife down. It was quiet.

  After a minute, Sully whispered to Sly, “I can’t use it if I don’t have her name.”

  “Tell him your name, please, Mommy,” Sly said. He looked like he had a migraine.

  “Is it in the paper?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want it so.”

  “I didn’t ask you, woman.”

  She stared at him and then looked back at Sully. Her tone softened. “Marilyn Winston,” she said. “You will keep me safe.” This was directed at Sly. He nodded, rubbing his forehead.

  “Ms. Winston, I have to ask, what is your profession? Or what was your profession if you are retired?”

  “Why you need that?”

  “Mommy. Jesus. Please.”

  “Nurse. I was a nurse at the Washington Hospital Center for twenty-five years. In the intensive care ward.”

  • • •

  The idea floated around his mind for an hour before he screwed up the nerve to actually do it. He was sitting at Stoney’s, nursing his second Basil’s, the night getting late, looking up at the television behind the bar, listening to the desultory chatter around him. He pulled out his cell and looked at it.

  He didn’t want to make the call. He also didn’t see any way of not making the call.

  The 411 operator answered on the third ring, and he said in a resigned sigh, “A residential for Lorena Bradford, living in the District or maybe, I guess, in Prince George’s County, Maryland.” There was typing on the other end. He rattled the ice in his drink and looked at it without hope. Then she said, “Currently not showing any Lorena Bradford in the District of Columbia or surrounding counties in Maryland, but I do have five L. Bradfords.”

  “How many can you give me without me calling back?”

  “Two.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  She read the numbers and he wrote them on a cocktail napkin, then looked at his watch. A little after nine. It was late but not radically so. He pressed the numbers and wondered what hell Sly was inflicting on his network of neighborhood sources, who had failed to notice a district court judge wandering up and down Princeton Place. That wasn’t going to be pretty.

  The first two numbers the operator gave him both went to answering machines, with a male voice on each one. He pegged each of them to be white, and crossed them off. Noel’s sister had not seemed like the interracial type.

  Hers was the fourth number. She picked up and he recognized her voice immediately.

  “Miss Bradford, hi, sorry to call you so late, but it’s Sully Carter at the paper. I know you made it pretty—”

  “You the one at the cemetery?”

  “Yes. And I wouldn’t—”

  “I’m glad you called,” she said. There was a breath and her voice shifted to a softer, more feminine tone. “I wanted to apologize for that—that scene. I lost your number and then the idea just got lost, too. I—I shouldn’t have done that. Spit on you, I mean. I can’t believe you came to the funeral to interview me—that was just plain wrong—but that doesn’t make what I did right.”

  Phone crooked between his shoulder and his ear, raising his hands in front of him, good god, people, you just never knew . . .

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “But—I didn’t like being there myself—thank you. I am still interested in what happened to your sister, though. There has been some information that has come to my attention that I just can’t avoid, about one of her relationships, and I would like to come by to talk to you about it, to see if—”

  She said, “Is this about David?”

  thirty

  The District is a diamond-shaped city, elongated north to south, and Lorena Bradford lived in the far northern tip, at the apex of the diamond, at the top of Rock Creek Park.

  The house was on the 3000 block of Chestnut, about five blocks west of the park and about the same distance south from Western Avenue, which marked the Maryland line. On the north side of Western, you were in Chevy Chase. Property values skyrocketed, the public school system catered to parents who could afford private-school tuition, and the median income was double what it was on the south side of the street, in the District.

  Lorena’s house, on the modest side of the divide, was a solid one-and-a-half-story redbrick bungalow, four steps up to a front patio and a dormer roof. She was at the door, opening it, already dressed for work, when he was halfway up the walk the next morning.

  “What do you know about David?” he had asked, shell-shocked, the night b
efore.

  “A little,” she had said. “I sat up nights going through her things after she went missing. She kept datebooks. The Week-at-a-Glance things. ‘David’ or ‘D’ was written on each Saturday morning, and sometimes Friday evenings, in the months before she disappeared. That’s it. Why? Do you know who he is?”

  When he told her what he thought he knew, there had been a very long pause. The invitation to her house followed.

  Now, just over twelve hours later, he having barely slept, the long watch of the night filled with nightmare-filled patches of sleep and pacings of the house, sitting on the back step, wanting to call Dusty but feeling burned from the other night, the daylight never seeming to come, and now, finally, he was walking up the steps, calling out, “Not going in early, are you?” smiling, acting as if he were on top of the world, a man in control, motioning to her outfit. He was vaguely conscious of trying to make himself appear to be disarming. Gentle, he said to himself, gentle. Gentle. You are gentle. He saw her eyes flick away from his as he approached—the scars—before returning.

  “No, no,” she said, stepping to the side to let him enter. “Just wanted to make sure I didn’t run out of time, talking to you, and have to run to work without my face on.”

  The interior of her house was compact and neatly presented. A few prints on the wall, grown-up furniture, runners in the hallways, polished wood floors, all speaking of maturity and sensible choices. The couch in the front parlor, the coffee table, the sitting chairs—they could have been ordered from Ethan Allen. She was the IT director at a small law firm, she told him, and the house looked like it. He couldn’t help but think, Serious big sis, wild-ass little sis.

  There were four large plastic boxes sitting by the coffee table, and she sat on the couch by them, gesturing to a parlor chair for him.

  “I packed up all this in such a hurry,” she said. “By that time I—this was when she was missing for three months—I knew she was dead. I was just throwing things in boxes. It’s just crazy.”

  As she was talking, she was removing the tops from the containers. The contents looked, to Sully, incredibly well-organized. Maybe this was the difference between reporters and IT people.