The Ways of the Dead

by Neely Tucker

  Sully watched the new woman onstage for a minute. He leaned toward Sly, semishouting to be heard over the music. “The necklace? In his hand?”

  Sly kept his eyes on the dancer, sipped his cognac.

  “Nice, hunh? Couldn’t take a chance it getting lost in the fire.”

  “Where was it?”

  “On a shelf down there, the basement. He had a whole lot of Noel shit.”

  “Hunh. Didn’t see it. Didn’t see anything from Sarah.”

  “You didn’t look around in that back room. That was his—his what? His workshop. That’s what it was. His workshop.”

  Sly put his drink down, popped a crick in his neck. He seemed upbeat, almost ebullient. Sully had never seen him like this before. It dawned on him that perhaps Sly was slightly drunk himself.

  Now Sly leaned back over, shouting in his ear. “Coldhearted mother, got to give him that.”

  “Who? Doyle? How you mean?”

  “How I mean? How you think I mean? I mean all that shit. Noel? Bitch that fine, dumping her ass in the basement, by his own store? Michelle, in his own house? Who does that? He probably did the Mexican girl just for practice. And the white girl, goddamn.”

  “Sarah,” Sully said.

  “What a white-girl name.”

  “Don’t see a lot of white chicks named Keisha.”

  “You not getting racist over there,” Sly said.

  “It’s just an observation about your observation.”

  “Yeah, well, my man fucking chokes Sarah and then cuts Sarah’s throat after Sarah’s goddamned dead. That’s some sick shit, you wanna ask me. Why would a nigger do that?”

  “Am I supposed to answer?”

  The waitress came back and they both took another round. They watched the dancer onstage for a while without speaking. She put Sully in mind of Noel, a dancer herself, who was dead and buried at the hand of Doyle. Lorena, he thought. Today had to just be hell on her. It was too late to call now.

  “Noel must have died the same way,” Sully said, blinking back a sudden wave of nausea, an intense vision of her last moments of life, what she would have seen, heard, felt, sweeping over him. It had happened just a few hundred feet away.

  “How you mean?”

  “The knife. The throat.”

  “Hey, the fuck, you not going to be sick over there.”

  “No,” he said, opening his eyes, his forehead clammy. “Just tired. And this damn railroad gin.”

  Sly nodded. “Girl’s got skills,” he said, looking at the stage, but the evening felt spent. After the girl finished and another came on, Sly rapped his glass twice on the table during the middle of the song, something by Rick James. He nodded to Sully, slid out of the booth, walked between the tables and out of the place, that slow lope, unhurried.

  The liquor and the lack of food and the exhaustion settled into him now. He watched the spinning Donna Summer disco ball overhead. He felt like he weighed a million pounds. Standing up, getting out, it just felt impossible.

  Three songs down and another dancer up, a thick light-skinned woman, not really his type. As he looked up at her stepping out of her short black satin cover-up and then spraying the mirror with Windex, it bounced into his embalmed brain that Sly said Sarah Reese’s throat had been cut after she was dead.

  Jason had told him that at the morgue. He had never used it. It had never gone public.

  He blinked.

  No. No no no no no no.

  • • •

  By 8:55 the next morning, he was outside the U.S. District Court clerk’s office, rumpled, the same jeans and wrinkled shirt from the day before, reeking of cigarette smoke and spilled gin. His mouth tasted like the floor of an adult-movie theater. He had not slept.

  In the courthouse hallway, he waited for the clerk’s office to open. Sitting on a leather-upholstered bench, he chewed on the cuticle of his left ring finger.

  At 9:01 someone opened the door and he bolted upright and walked to the public-access computer terminals.

  “David Reese,” he punched into the computer’s case program, putting the name into the box for “Presiding Judge” and limiting the search to cases within the past three years. He clicked on the drop-down button to have the results displayed in alphabetical order by defendant. The array of cases came up a few seconds later.

  The lawyer’s name flagged it first.

  Kaufman, Avram.

  His spine curled inward and he slumped as if the air were being let out of him.

  The case had gone into Reese’s court for trial April 3, 1998, a year and a half earlier. The defendant’s name was Nikki Jacqueline Phillips. Sly Hastings’s sister, or half sister, to be precise, as Sly had told him back when this started. She was managing his rental properties for him. Nikki worked at D.C. Housing Authority, the pleadings said. Of course. How else would she have learned how to manage her half brother’s low-rent places?

  Nikki had been up on charges of kickbacks from a contractor on a city contract, something like $238,000. There had been a motion to dismiss, and Reese rejected it. She’d been convicted on four of five charges. Reese sentenced her at the top of the guidelines, even more than the prosecution had asked for, on August 18.

  Six weeks before his daughter was murdered.

  Sully, too late now, remembering, I got that he was one of those Southern crackers from the accent, the time I heard him in court.

  Staring at the screen, legs pumping under the desk.

  Sly’s sister, his most precious asset in laundering his money, had gotten busted. He had looked for ways to get her out and free and back to work (“Nikki, she’s been distracted”) and that would have led him to any number of sources—and what do you know, the presiding judge’s daughter was taking classes in Sly’s backyard.

  His legs stopped pumping.

  Sly wouldn’t have had to go downtown to get to the judge. Just get to him at his most vulnerable, when he was dropping off his daughter, then going to see his mistress. Just sit with Lionel, watching him come drop off Sarah on a Saturday morning . . . and, lo and behold, up the sidewalk he went to Noel’s apartment, the one place where the judge would be certain not to have a trailing security detail. What a gift this was to a man like Sly.

  He could see it, clear as day, the judge coming out of Noel’s. Sly and Lionel getting out of the Camaro, falling in step beside him, one on either side, Say, Judge Reese, we need to talk about this misunderstanding with my sister . . . Nobody’d want pictures of you in there with Noel getting around, right, sure, nobody wants anything to happen to a pretty thing like her . . .

  But if this was the mild first step offered, it had not been taken. Reese had not dismissed the case.

  That led to step two, and it opened so beautifully that Sully shook his head in equal parts admiration and disgust. Of course Sly would have known about Doyle. How could the warlord of the neighborhood not have? Doyle was perfect for Sly’s darker purposes—a patsy with a penchant for prostitutes and strangling them, right in his backyard. He made a perfect fall guy for any hit Sly needed to carry out.

  So Sly or Lionel (or both) killed Noel, dumping her in the basement of the house behind Doyle’s Market, matching the man’s MO. Her disappearance was a mystery to everyone except its intended audience—David Reese. It hadn’t worked, though. The judge, thinking he was Texas-tough, flexed back at sentencing, hitting Nikki with the max, still not knowing the depths of Sly Hastings.

  And so the killshot, the message back to Reese: Sly’s street soldiers, them three, follow Sarah into the store, spook her out the back. Sly waiting, Lionel waiting, one or both.

  And then the cover story, Sly playing him like a violin.

  Who told him the three suspects weren’t guilty, spurring him to look into the idea of a serial killer? Who delivered Lana Escobar’s stepfather? Sly had. Sully, properl
y fed, had put a story in the paper about the possibility of a serial killer. That story, the community meeting, the cops looking at it all again—it had not only opened an investigation, but it had also flushed Doyle. That had resulted in Sly’s lucky break, an unexpected bonus: Doyle outing the judge to Sully for his own reasons, panicking, trying to divert the sudden attention.

  And then it had all been downhill. Who took him to Mommy, who told him what she’d been told to say, with a little theater thrown in? Who delivered the story about the nameless hooker miraculously seeing Michelle and Doyle in the back office? Who put Noel’s necklace in Doyle’s hand? Where did the knife from Sarah’s murder come from?

  Bring the stuff. Them gas cans, too.

  He closed his eyes against another wave of nausea, the bile in his gut churning, and suddenly he was back at lunch with Eva, back at Stoney’s on the first of October. She had told him. She had told him as clear as day. He gets rid of people who get in the way of him running things, and then he skates on it.

  And what was Sully, an accomplice to the murder of Doyle Goodwin, ever going to do about it?

  “Goddamn,” Sully said, closing his eyes, rubbing them, and the court clerk looked up from behind the counter. “Just godfuckingdamn.”

  The clerk rapped the counter, frowning.

  “Language,” she said.

  epilogue

  Mom’s Place was more of a three-walled shed at the back end of a parking lot than it was a florist’s, but it was adjacent to the cemetery and the prices were reasonable. Across the open front of the shed, there were heavy plastic sheets that unfurled to keep out the wind and cold, and most of them were down when Sully pulled in. It was late November. The wind was up and rain was threatening. He bought a bouquet of bright gerber daisies, yellow and red and orange and white, wrapped in clear red plastic.

  “These for next door?” Skinny kid, tall, bored behind the register.

  “Yeah.”

  “Trim them?”

  “Why not.”

  “Spray for the deer?”

  “While you’re at it.”

  The bike took him back through the cemetery, the flowers between the fuel tank and his hips, and he let it idle past the graves and the stones and the JACKSONs and the STEVENs and the CHANGs and the MARTINs.

  Noel Pittman’s grave had only a flat marker. It took him a few minutes to find.

  PITTMAN, NOEL ANGELIQUE

  Sept. 30, 1972–April 25, 1998

  Loved and Missed

  There were two small metal vases set into circular rings on either side of the slab. He pulled a vase out of a ring on the right side and took it over to a spigot set by the white wooden-railed fence that set off the roadway from the grounds. The water was cold, clear. He shook his hands to dry them.

  The car topped the rise when he was halfway back to the grave. It slowed and stopped. Sully pulled the flowers from their plastic wrapping and set them in the little vase, and then set it back in its holder. He adjusted the flowers so that they didn’t list to one side.

  “They’re beautiful,” Lorena called out.

  He half turned and saw her. She was two steps out of the car, alone on the landscape, just the two of them, and the bouquet she was holding, a spray of red and white roses with carnations and baby’s breath tucked in the greenery, spread out from a light green wrapping. It was huge, something from a proper florist.

  He slumped on his good leg as she came over to him. “You’re making me look bad,” he said, knowing her just well enough to put an ironic spin on it.

  “Well, I didn’t know you were coming.”

  “Ditto.”

  She took his flowers from the vase, and mixed his in with hers, divided them into two smaller batches, and placed them in the vases on each side of the marker. She stepped back and they considered the effect. Neither of them said anything. The silence stretched out.

  “You come out here a lot?” he said into the breeze, finally.

  “Two or three times a week. You?”

  “The holiday, you know, I guess.”

  She nodded. They stood, silent again, looking at the marker and the flowers. The sky was gunmetal gray, the breeze in the limbs making a soft rustling noise, the traffic too far away to be heard.

  “I don’t think I ever said thank you,” she said.

  Thanks? Thanks for what? Jesus, the things people said.

  “What will you do now?” he said, ignoring it. “Now that this, well, this part of it, anyway, is over.”

  “I was thinking of getting away for a while,” she said. “Go back home maybe, for a week or two over Christmas. See some family. Reconnect with the old country. I don’t know.”

  “Negril? It’s beautiful,” he said. “Those cliffs, the volcanic things. Stayed there one time at a place where you could jump right off the edge into the ocean.”

  “The Xtabi,” she said. “Where they filmed—”

  “Papillon,” he said.

  She looked up at him and smiled. It was the first time he had ever seen her do so without some sort of irony or skepticism or anger, and he was surprised at how pretty she was, at how radiant.

  “Didn’t know you were a movie fan,” she said.

  “We didn’t really get a chance to talk.” He smiled.

  • • •

  She was gone a few minutes later, the car backing out and disappearing over the rise, a tap on the brake lights and then he was alone again.

  He was looking down at the marker, letting his thoughts blow around to whatever they settled on. Trees at the edge of the cemetery, the pines and a few hardwoods, the oaks and maples, a small stand surrounding a narrow creek if not more properly called a ditch, three-story apartment blocks and a crappy grocery store with a parking lot on the other side, low-rise, low-income, discount-market suburban America.

  “I think this is it, Noel,” he said, finally. “I don’t imagine I’ll be back. I didn’t fix anything for you. I didn’t get the right guy. I tried. I’m sorry.”

  He walked back to the bike, the wind ruffling his hair.

  • • •

  Late in the afternoon, Stoney’s was almost empty, a lazy Sunday, the evening settling in, the lights spilling out onto the patio. There was a murmur of voices, the television above the bar showing the West Coast game, the Raiders and Broncos, the sound on low.

  Sully sat with Eva in their regular booth, a half-finished grilled cheese in front of him. Eva was playing with her salad. She was drinking white wine, maybe her third glass, her manner a little looser. Sully kept stealing looks at the bar, to where Dmitri was cleaning glasses with a towel and watching the game. The Broncos converted a third and four, just past midfield.

  After a while, Eva said, “Dmitri said she quit. You can stop looking.”

  Sully dropped his gaze and looked over at her, tilting his head, a jab he hadn’t seen coming. “What do you know about it?”

  “Enough.” Steady, not even tipsy.

  “And what’s enough, lady?”

  “You’re not, Sully—you’re not the only one who knows secrets.”

  He paused, waiting to see if she was going to add something, about Dusty, which is what she was talking about, or about Sly, which is possibly what she meant. Their eyes held. She didn’t add anything, but he could not determine if the silence implied an innocence of knowledge or a tactical omission.

  “Isn’t it convenient Doyle killed himself?” she said.

  “Not for him.”

  “For everybody else.”

  He saw the sudden flicker in her eye, nothing more, some fleck of the pupil that flashed and was gone. The door is open. I think but I don’t know. Tell me. Tell me what you know. He held her eyes but did not give any acknowledgment something had passed between them. No, he thought. I’ll take care of it my way.

 
“You ever get tired of all this?” he asked, finally, breaking the gaze, gesturing in the air with his glass, a roll of the wrist.

  “This?”

  “Yeah, this. All this shit. The assholes and the shooters and the half-assed cops and the coke and the ganja and the general lack of intelligence or productive thought and, every goddamned day, more hustles, more stiffs, more vics, more rapes, more robberies.”

  “Well,” she said.

  “We operate in the goddamned margins.”

  “I don’t know about that,” she said. “I think it means something. It almost goes to the eternal.”

  “Jesus H.”

  “No, listen. Sometimes I don’t think my decedents are even really all that dead. Sometimes it seems like they’re right there in the next room, or they’re going to come around the corner and their mom or dad or their cousin or girlfriend or whoever will go, ‘Oh, hey, sorry, there he is now.’ Like it was all a bad dream, the time they got the call, the police.”

  “Hunh,” he said.

  “I can hear them talk at night sometimes, you know? They talk and talk but it’s not like anything you can understand, it’s like a conversation in the next room. Mumbles and phrases, nothing distinct, and then I fall asleep.”

  She paused. Sully was looking at his drink.

  “Hey, you. Any of this make sense? You know what I mean?”

  Sully Carter looked out of the front entrance of the saloon, the twin doors flung open, a little of the last light of day falling inside onto the tile floor, making a skewed rectangle. Leaves blew up on the street and one fluttered upward, in a lazy looping circle, and then it came sailing downward, sliding just inside the door. It stopped in the rectangle of light. It was brown, brittle, lifeless, and the image of Nadia’s grave four thousand miles away blossomed before him, her body entombed in a casket on a wooded hillside, deep in the earth, the freezing silence of winter descending. He thought of her body again, warm in the bed beside him, the white sheets, her tanned brown skin, the scent of her body, her breasts against his chest, her leg draped over his, Nadia, warm, breathing, sleeping, safe, his.