The Ways of the Dead

by Neely Tucker

  Sully looked behind him in the office. Cannan had a blank look on his face, but Russell had a contemptuous smile playing out across his lips, arms folded across his chest, enjoying it all.

  Sully returned the smile with a nod.

  “Judge?” he said, turning back to Reese. “Just a minute ago, when you snatched the recorder out of my hand?” He held the slim digital device aloft and twiddled it between two fingers. Then, swiftly, like a magician with a rabbit and a hat, he reached into the interior chest pocket of his sport coat and produced, with a slight flourish, a second digital recorder. The red recording light was glowing.

  “I’m sorry, did you mean to get this one, too? I wasn’t sure, and you never said. You gentlemen have a fine evening now.”

  thirty-six

  It was all going to happen now, no way to stop it. Calls to John Parker, spilling the Reese angle, asking if Reese had been in contact with MPD about Noel’s disappearance.

  “Absolutely not,” John said. “This is material to the investigation, you know that. You print this, I guarantee you we’ll move on it. Source it through the chief if you want to publish it, but I’m telling you, he never said a damn thing to us about it. And I will personally kick Dick Jensen’s ass for not following up with the sister. She ought to be spilling to us, not to you.”

  Then calls to R.J., to Eddie, narrating the interview, Reese’s blowup, the photographer, his conversation with John, whom he described only as a police official. The agreement with R.J. and Eddie was to meet first thing in the morning, reassess, then likely make the official calls to the chief in the afternoon, the last push before publication. Those calls had to be last, to keep it from leaking to other papers, the networks. You call those fuckers, they’d call CNN two minutes later, saying, “Hey, did you know the paper just called us and asked . . .”

  By the time he got to Halo, it was close to midnight and the place was thumping. He slapped down twenty bucks for the cover, checked his cycle jacket and helmet at the counter, and went up the steps, Mary J. Blige so loud the handrails vibrated. It was a converted tool and die warehouse, a five-story crumbling shell that an entrepreneur named Jeffrey Gaston had turned into the capital’s trendiest nightclub.

  Going for the glory of slumming, Gaston put Halo in the brutally ugly, dysfunctional eastern side of the city on New York Avenue two years earlier. There were the beat-to-shit used-car lots, the Harbor Light Center (old drunks in wheelchairs, livers and kidneys gone), the fast-food joints with the bathrooms littered with condoms and needles, the freight railroad tracks across the avenue, and Ivy City, the neighborhood devastated by crack, just down the street.

  Inside the fences and barbed wire lining the parking lot, inside the club, it was a different universe.

  The second floor was paneled walls of cherrywood and black marble bar counters, and Sully took the wide, circular stairwell to the third floor, which was the source of the Blige. He knew enough about the place to know that he would find Gaston on the fourth, penthouse level.

  Once there, he got a gin and tonic from the bar and waited, watching the dancers, the crowd light because it was still early in club time. In half an hour, Gaston finally showed, emerging from black curtains at the far end of the dance floor. He was flanked by a bodyguard and a young woman in a short black dress. They took up a booth at the rear of the room, the bodyguard standing post in front of the table.

  Sully gave him five minutes to get settled, then crossed the floor and gave the bodyguard his card. The man looked at it, then leaned forward to shout in his ear, “What’s it about?”

  “Noel Pittman,” Sully shouted back.

  When the man gave the card to Gaston and said something in his ear, Gaston looked up at Sully and motioned to the woman beside him to let him out of the booth.

  He was light on his feet for a big man, nimble. Close-cropped beard, perfect teeth, black suit, black shirt. It was a look that was good for looking respectable in a city council hearing, good for looking hip at the club. He shook Sully’s hand and motioned him to follow.

  They went through the black curtain, down a lighted hallway, framed pictures of club life on the walls, and wound up in a workers’ break room. Gaston pulled two petit bottles of French spring water from the fridge and sat down at a table.

  “What’s this about Noel?”

  “I’m just—”

  “I’m just about tired of hearing about it, is what I am,” Gaston cut in, crossing one leg over the other, tapping Sully’s card on the table. “Police out here yesterday. Wanting to know when the last time we saw her. Everybody knows when that was. This is some sort of trap, some sort of shit.”

  Sully twisted the top off the water and swallowed twice.

  “Who was out here, a detective named Jensen? Old white guy? Cranky?”

  “Asking me and Conrad the same questions the other detectives did last year.”

  “Like what? And, I’m sorry, who’s Conrad?”

  “Conrad runs security. The cop, he wanted to see the surveillance tape of her leaving. What was she wearing? Where was she going? Any problems with her.”

  “It sounds pretty basic.”

  “Yeah, basic, until they start trying to lay some shit on you.”

  “You think that’s what he’s doing?”

  “Who knows? Fucking cops.”

  “So what was the deal that night? What’d you tell him?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Nothing. Hey. But to—to you? It’s the difference between being suspects and helpful employers.”

  “Who said we’re suspects?”

  “You. You just said Jensen was out here yesterday asking you the same questions you’d already been asked. You know why they do that? To see if you say something different this time around. They’re looking at you. You want to stay out of a paper like mine? Help me know there ain’t shit to look at.”

  Gaston looked at him, still tapping the card, Sully looking back, poker-faced, playing it straight.

  “The deal was there was no deal,” he said, finally. “Conrad saw Noel out of the parking lot that night. It’s standard. We keep customers away from the girls. Some guys have a few too many, they want to chat ’em up. So the policy is the dancers wait thirty minutes after closing to leave. Conrad or a bartender or somebody walks them to their cars.”

  “You looked over the security tapes that last night?”

  “Made a copy for the cops when they came by last year. Jensen, he didn’t even know that. Made him another one.”

  Oh, yeah, Sully thought, getting the idea even clearer that Jensen was liking Gaston or Conrad or someone at the club as a suspect, asking for a second tape, seeing if they’d give him the same one, sweating them a little bit.

  “Jensen ask you anything about David Reese? Like, has Reese been coming out here, he a member of the VIP club, does he show up when Noel’s dancing, like that?”

  Gaston stopped tapping the card and his face started to open up, almost as if he were going to laugh. “Reese? The David Reese? The judge? At Halo?”

  Sully nodded, not grinning.

  “Ah, shit. Nah. No. David Reese? We don’t discuss our clientele, but him?” Then a facial tic, a thought registering. “What, you saying he was kicking it with Noel?”

  “Just checking a rumor. You hear wild stuff. You know anything about Noel’s modeling career? If she posed nude?”

  “Oh, man. You’re talking about those black and whites Eric shot. Look. Here’s what I’ll do. One, make it clear in your story that she shot those on her own time, not here at the club, okay? Two, I’ll call Conrad. He’ll take you to the office, show you the tape. And I’m guessing you’d like to talk to Elissa, which is fine as long as you don’t say she works here. You saw her out there dancing tonight.”

  “Elissa?”

  “You probably know her by her
stage name. Amber. She’s the one posed nude with Noel.”

  • • •

  “You shop off the rack?” Sully asked when Conrad walked him to the back room of the security office. The man looked like he could bench-press a Mercedes. Massive chest, arms, and the dude couldn’t go more than five-seven.

  Conrad gave him a “pah” and kept walking through the offices in the basement. “Not since college. Custom tailoring. I got a guy, you need one.”

  Once in the office, he unlocked a bookcase, pulled out a videotape, and returned to the desk. There was one small television monitor and a video deck. He popped the tape in and turned on the television. “I hope Gas told you this was short and sweet.” He motioned Sully to sit in his chair so that he could see it.

  “You don’t mind me asking,” Sully said, “you were the last one to see her alive. How bad did the cops sweat you on that?”

  “Some,” said Conrad. “They don’t like Puerto Ricans, you ask me.” He excused himself to the toilet.

  The video was grainy security footage, taken from a second-story camera in the parking lot. Noel was a figure in a white sweatshirt with a hood beneath the security lights—you couldn’t really see her face. She paused at the door and Sully saw Conrad appear in the frame, coming outside, walking into the parking lot, she following. She had on running shoes. He could see the car’s fog lights flash as she hit the remote alarm button, and then she pulled the hood back from her hair and stepped into the car.

  A moment later, she was pulling out of the lot, her turn signal winking toward the left. Conrad gave her a half wave and her arm came out of the driver’s-side window, waving back. The car pulled out of the camera’s view and Noel Pittman vanished.

  Sully backed it up and watched it five or six times. It was the only time he had seen her in motion; he had still never heard her voice.

  The door opened and he turned to thank Conrad. Instead, there was a young woman with long brown hair, flat-ironed, stepping just inside the door and looking for him in the semidarkness. She was wearing a black silk robe, but he already knew what she looked like unclothed and in bed.

  “Hi, Amber,” he said.

  • • •

  He got to his bike in the parking lot, ears still ringing with the noise of the club and the sense of disappointment. You get right to the edge, think you’re onto something, and it goddamn belly flops.

  Amber said she was one of Noel’s best friends, they hung out some, partied some, but they weren’t that close. She did the shoot because Noel had offered her five hundred dollars from her “boyfriend” and she was les anyway so it’s not like it was a big taboo thingy; no, she’d never met the boyfriend or heard his name; Noel was “really pretty and really nice.” Eric, the photographer, she said, had not been particularly creepy, though she had thought it was embarrassingly obvious he had an erection during the shoot.

  La-de-fucking-da.

  Sully straddled the bike. Before he cranked it, he pulled his cell from his pocket.

  “It’s a little late, don’t you think?” Dusty said, her voice tired.

  “So, okay, look—I’m finally done for the day. I’m trying, okay? I’ll come up and see you. We can catch up. You have no idea how crazy this shit is getting. I got to be back down here early.”

  “It’s a little late for a booty call, Sully.”

  “Since when?” Trying it as a deadpan one-liner.

  Crickets.

  “Okay, Christ. Look, I was playing. I just would like—”

  “I know, Sully, I hear you, but I’ve been thinking this isn’t the best thing, you know? Like this? You’re still locked in on Nadia, and that’s understandable but—”

  “No, no, I’m not,” he said.

  “I’m not going to debate this. Last night? We went to sleep talking about New Orleans, Christmas, all that? Then it’s three a.m., you were sound asleep and mumbling. It woke me up. I had to nudge you to get you back to sleep. You were soaked with sweat. I went to the closet for a robe, a T-shirt or something, and her pictures were everywhere. That box you have of them.”

  His turn to be silent, smoldering. “Look,” he finally said, “I like us together. I like—”

  “And I like you, Sully. Which is one reason why I’m not coming back over there. I don’t like sleeping with ghosts. This has to be different, or it has to be better, or it has to stop. I don’t think it’s good for me. Or for you.”

  Air.

  “I want you to be better,” she said. “But I can’t help you with this.”

  thirty-seven

  A little after nine the next morning, a hangover banging on the front of his skull, Sully clicked the off button on the recording of Reese’s meltdown and the executive conference room of the paper was silent. Edward Winters sat leaning forward in his chair, forearms on the desk in front of him.

  After a while, Winters said, “I just can’t believe that.”

  R.J., seated beside Sully, shook his head. “Never heard anything like it. Not in this town, on tape.”

  “He’s unhinged,” Eddie said.

  “Caged,” said R.J. “Bear in a cage.”

  The morning meeting for the paper hadn’t even taken place, and it was clear this was going to dominate the day. Lewis, the attorney, chipped in, “His Supreme Court bid ends the instant we publish this. Probably his judicial career. Also, if you’re looking for the definition of clear and actionable damages—”

  “I know,” Eddie said, waving a hand, “I know.”

  Melissa cleared her throat. “I hate to be the wet blanket again, Eddie, but to what end do we publish this? Are we insinuating that he had something to do with her disappearance? That he actually killed her? It seems to me that would be the implication of any story we write. I think we have to keep in mind that there’s the danger of his history with Sully, and then this one-potato, two-potato trick he just pulled with the recorder. I’m not saying—”

  “You’re not saying anything!” R.J. thundered. “I don’t give a goddamn about the recorder being on or off. What we’ve established is that Noel Pittman left her job at two thirty in the morning and, for more than a year, that was the last known sighting of her. Now, after her corpse has been recovered, we find out that she placed a call to the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia eight hours after she was last seen. I don’t care if it was for coffee or coitus. What we’re saying is that the chief jurist of the courthouse at the foot of Constitution Avenue did not bother to inform the police or Pittman’s family of that call, or of their relationship. That is the point, and that is what will keep him off the Supreme Court, and possibly have him expelled from the bench. Because he should be.”

  It was quiet again, and then Edward spoke.

  “Well, here we are again. Sullivan, as much as I admire your work, I do not admire—and we do not print—gotcha journalism. And that’s what that stunt with the second recorder amounts to. Given your history with him, it looks like you set him up. And the matter of the pictures and his payment may be a correct hunch, but it’s nothing we can prove.”

  “I did—” Sully said, but Eddie cut him off.

  “That said, R.J.’s point carries the day. Once Pittman was missing, Reese had an obligation to go to the police. We can demonstrate, to a clear and convincing standard, that he did not inform them. It may or may not be obstruction of justice, but it clears the bar of public interest. If his daughter’s death matters, so does that of Noel Pittman.”

  He looked at the room, people sitting still, looking back at him.

  “Which makes it news,” he said. “And I want it for tomorrow. Where are you in the writing?”

  “About thirty inches in,” Sully lied. “And for the record, I didn’t set him up. I was working with a recorder and a backup. It’s not even uncommon.”

  “And you had one on the table
and one in your jacket. Don’t bullshit me, Sully. Moving on. You’re at thirty inches. What’s it worth?”

  “Am I including the other missing girls, or is this just the judge and the dancer?”

  “Mention Escobar, Bolin, and Williams somewhere up high for neighborhood context, and maybe you can loop back in late for another couple of grafs. But this is about Noel Pittman and David Reese.”

  “Then I think it’s sixtyish.”

  “Good. You’re sure on the police, that they haven’t heard of this?”

  “It’s news to the head of Homicide, who would know. He wants us to have it come from the chief, though. I’ll call him in a minute.”

  “Okay. Now, if Reese releases their tape of your interview with him later today as some sort of preempt, and tries to make it look like you jumped to a conclusion about a murder investigation, I’ll have a very short conversation with him and Joe Russell about your second tape.”

  Lewis coughed and said, “Does that mean you’re going to threaten them with releasing Sully’s tape?”

  “Absolutely not,” Eddie snapped. “It means if I hear so much as a peep out of either one of them, I will release Sully’s tape.”

  • • •

  U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Chief Judge David H. Reese, widely viewed as the Republican favorite for the next Supreme Court opening, had a relationship with a missing Howard University student and spoke with her eight hours after she was last seen, phone records, documents and interviews show, and he has not disclosed that information to police.

  Noel Pittman, 25, disappeared after leaving work at the nightclub Halo in the early-morning hours of April 25 of last year. Her decayed corpse was discovered last week in the basement of an abandoned house in the 700 block of Princeton Place NW, a few houses down from where she lived and directly across an alley where the judge’s daughter . . .

  This was on the computer screen, Eddie sitting at the copy chief’s desk, reading over it, his fingers on the keys but only moving the cursor back and forth. Melissa, R.J., Sully, Lewis Beale, and editors from photo and layout were arrayed in a semicircle behind him. It was nearing eight p.m., deadline for the first edition.