by Neely Tucker
They looked at him.
“My mom, my dad?” he said. “Both of ’em died when I’s a kid. At the time, I would have liked to talk about them, if anybody’d asked.”
“Somebody shoot them?”
“Not entirely, no, ma’am.”
“Then you really don’t know the fuck you talking about.”
He stood up. “You’re right. Sorry about this. I am.”
He cut his eyes at Alexis—Christ, he was going to get up and leave and they were still going to forget she was over there—and his hand was on the doorknob when Mom said, “Dee was my baby. Firstborn, you know, the son? So he was special to me like that.”
Stopping, he looked at her.
“When he was six, seven?” she said. “I would come home and kiss him when he was sleeping. Beautiful child.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Made the good grades. Not great. But good. He liked school. He come home from school, show me all the stuff they did that day. Maps. Like Africa? He’d put in all the lakes, the countries, the deserts. Even weekends, he was a little boy, he’d lay on the floor and color in maps. Atlases.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Church. We went to church more then. Dee, he’d add up all the tithes for his class, then all of the Sunday school classes. The treasurer. He was the treasurer. And the maps, you know, of Galilee and Jesus and Bethlehem. He’d tell me, ‘Momma, it ain’t as big as you think.’”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And then he started growing hair where boys do. Fell in with them boys out there. Dropped out school. Acted like he didn’t want to know nobody in here no more.”
He half-turned, not even thinking about bringing out the notebook. It would kill the connection. He held her eyes with his and said, “It happens like that sometimes. It’s hard.”
“And me, working all the time. You think I had time to sit around here with him after school every day?”
“Where do you work, ma’am?”
“Did. Where did I work. D.C. Parks and Rec. At the community center up the street.”
“What did you do there?”
“Cook. Cleaned.”
“And it sounds like you got laid off, something like that?”
“Fired. I got fired. Four-five years back. Don’t put that in your paper.”
“No, ma’am. Where did he go to school?”
“Bowen, the elementary. Jefferson, middle. He got in some time at Eastern, but mainly he was over to Oak Hill.”
Sully risked the notebook now, nodding, just scribbling the names of the schools, Oak Hill the city’s disastrous juvie-d facility. It meant Dee had gotten busted and sentenced to something, who knew what, before he was eighteen.
“Did he wind up with his GED from over there?”
“Not that anybody told me about.”
“Okay. Okay.”
“He was good with his hands. He . . . where is it, over there, that bowl over there, next to the cereal box? He made that in one of them classes.” Sitting on the small dining table, with folding chairs pulled up to it, was a serving bowl, red and green, a little lumpy but not all that bad.
“He played ball in Pop Warner. He was good to his little sister. He used to go with Nana here to church, even after he got big.”
She was free-associating now, the mind beginning to seize upon all that it had lost and finding no grips for the grief or the pain or the rage.
“The Hall brothers?” He said it softly, as if he were in church himself, the crux of the interview right here. “They run the M Street Crew. Dee Dee knew them, yes?”
She sat down and flicked her eyes over to him, her gut empty now, no answers, no attitude. She looked punched out, flat on the canvas, the world a frightening and terrible place that needed an anesthetic to be faced even when the sun was out. He recognized the slack-faced look because he had seen it looking back at him out of his own mirror after Nadia got her head blown off.
“Like they was his muthafucking family,” she said.
“And a man named Sly Hastings? Did he know a Mr. Hastings, older? About my height, slim, tends to wear little round glasses?”
The heavyset woman turned to look at him, the mother’s face froze, and the air seemed to leave the room.
“You need to get the fuck up out of my house,” she said.
ELEVEN
YOU HAD TO run with the fever while it held you, that was the thing, and stories were fever dreams that came and passed through you and, later, left you looking back, wondering how the thing had possessed you so completely.
He moved up the street, walking quickly, leaving the Dempsys, limping up the block toward South Capitol. That’s all stories were, and to catch them was an art akin to photography; you captured the image when it existed, or it was gone and all that was left were shadows and light and a vague feeling of unease that you were less than you had been before. Stories were what he clung to instead of religion, that having deserted him shortly after his parents had died, one after the other, his sister sent away.
Alexis skittered behind, having lingered with Mom for a last bit of conversation or photograph or some bit of alchemy known only to her.
“Why didn’t you tell her your mom was shot?” she said softly, coming up alongside him. “Or even Nadia, I mean. It would have been—”
“It’s not what she was asking,” he said.
“She asked if—”
“She wanted to have the upper hand,” he said, impatient now, waving his left arm, a windmill motion. “The question was just the staging. I told her my parents died, it gives her an opening to talk, to ask a question, to come up out of herself. She didn’t. She didn’t give a damn, and she shouldn’t. It’s her kid who’s dead, not mine.”
“But—”
“So, right there, you know she wasn’t going to bond. She wasn’t going to say, ‘Oh, so you know, just like me,’ and we hold hands and exchange Christmas cards. She wanted to tell me that I didn’t know shit, and she wanted me to say I was sorry. I did. Then she told me about Dee. That was the transaction. Plain as day.”
“Oh.”
“You’re not understanding how to ask questions.”
“Apparently not.”
“You’re not seeing this. I mention the personal, you see that? My parents, her kid, now I’m talking family-to-family. I broke the journalist-to-source wall. It’s not an interview. It’s survivor-to-survivor. So she’s got two options. She can hold my hand and tell me personal stories, or tell me to fuck off. She picked B. So I backed off, and then, hey, what do you know? She felt bad. So she told me personal stuff about Dee, once she had peed on my grief.”
Alexis, walking, her cameras bouncing into each other, the only noise other than traffic and their footsteps.
“So you played her.”
“Did I seem insincere to you?”
She thought. “No.”
“Then how did I play her?”
“Because you had thought out that exchange before she did.”
“I need people to tell me things. Personal things. So I encourage them to confide in me, and one of the ways to get people to feel instantly familiar with you is by mentioning one’s less-than-perfect family.”
“If you say so.”
“I do not say so. It’s an act of human bonding, don’t you see that? I’m talking to her, I’m asking questions based on family relations. I’m not all, ‘Vomit out your personal details for me to exploit.’ I’m talking to her, person-to-person.”
“Okay, okay,” she said, looking over at him as they left the car behind, moving deeper in the neighborhood, toward the Bend. “I just hadn’t thought of it that way before. No offense.”
“None taken.” He blew out a breath. He had not thought of his mother’s killing in at least a week and it had rattled him.<
br />
“So what’s the plan now?” she said, hitching her lens straps over her shoulder, them coming to the street to cross, pausing for the light to change.
“The gay clubs, the strip up here on O Street,” he said, regaining some momentum, motioning forward and to his left, a low sling of the arm. “Our boy Billy was into it, or so says Elliot, his partner. There’s got to be a connection between those and the Bend.”
“What about Dee?” she said. “What was that back there? You mentioned a name and his mom threw us out.”
“Threw me out,” he said. “You were invisible. I said to her, I said, ‘Sly Hastings.’ I wanted to see what reaction it got.”
“Well, great. Now you know. It killed the interview.”
“Nah. I was done. Well. Since she knew who Sly was, then I was done. He’d been in that apartment. The way she looked at me? She’d seen him up close. And if she’s seen him up close, she was not going to gab to us any more than she already had.”
“So why’d you bring him up? You think he killed Dee?”
“Nah, see, no. Dee was in the M Street Crew. Everybody knew that. She didn’t have a problem confirming that. But I threw Sly out there to see if she knew of him, if she knew who he was. She did, and that confirmed for me the level this is at.”
“So this Sly.” She stopped to pull out a cigarette and light it. “What crew is he in?” Blowing out the smoke, concentrating, absorbing it all.
“Sly,” he said, “is in the crew of Sly. Those things are going to kill you, you know. Sly is, put it this way, like in South Sudan? He is the warlord of warlords. He is the dust, he is the shadow, he is the walking apocalypse. Dee was a secret employee of his. A mole. Somebody popped Dee and Sly isn’t happy about it.”
“So if somebody killed Dee, Sly’s boy, why is Mom afraid of him? Seems like he would be on her side, looking for who killed his guy.”
He shook his head, smiling, keeping up with her despite his gimp-legged walk. “You got to remember it’s entirely possible Sly killed Dee, because Dee fucked up or shorted him or God only knows why, and now he’s acting all innocent and shit.”
“Why would he go to the trouble?”
“Who knows? I’m not a drug lord.”
“You seem to know a lot about this Sly person,” she said.
“He is known to me, and I to him,” he said, trying to change the subject before she got too much into his business. “But what we’re doing now, right, is legwork. We’re heading up to the gay bars, the clubs, the dives on O Street. We need to know how some rich college boy got killed four days and about a hundred feet from a mid-level dealer like Dee. Billy was gay, he was at least semi-closeted. The only way he wound up in the Bend? My bet is that he had been down here in this neighborhood, in these clubs. Otherwise, he’d never have a reason to be within two miles of here.”
“Yeah?”
“This isn’t on the way to somewhere else, so, yeah.”
It was the smart money, he thought. The gay clubs in the slum of O Street, like R.J. said, were not here by happenstance. They had been forced out of their old haunts on Fourteenth Street NW and shoehorned here, by both development there and the anonymity of the neighborhood here —old, decrepit, impoverished.
They were coming up on the corner, the only pedestrians, the road itself six lanes wide. It looked barren, left for dead, but they were still less than two miles from the Capitol dome.
O Street itself was a block or so of low-slung warehouses that had once been carpet-cleaning businesses or storage facilities or some shit like that. Now it was an industrial zone that housed some of the most explicit gay clubs outside of San Francisco or Key West. Sully didn’t know all that much about the area, other than it was patrolled on party nights by gay ex-Marines from the nearby barracks on Eighth Street, who went by the nom de guerre GEMS (gay ex-Marines), and that nobody found these places by mistake.
“Let’s start with the Emporium,” he said, nodding toward a spot three doors down, the door painted lavender. “Might as well go door-to-door. You want to piggyback with me or split up?”
Alex flicked her half-burnt cigarette into the street and left it there, blowing out a stream of smoke. “After that bit with Dee Dee’s mom? Seriously? Split up. You run people off.”
• • •
The first two places were dead ends. The Emporium wasn’t open yet and the bartender in Secrets, the only guy in the place, told Sully to go fuck himself, asking about customers. He waited twenty minutes for the manager of Ziegfield’s to show, the guy finally coming downstairs and leading him up some narrow stairs to a cluttered office, offering him tea or coffee, then sitting down, listening seriously to him, and finally saying no comment. The guy eyeballing him, like he was gay and maybe just looking for a little action.
It was nearly an hour before he met Kenneth, the bouncer at Storm, who was bringing in cases of beer, wine, and whiskey from a truck parked out front. The place wasn’t open yet—not for business, anyway—but Kenneth told him that he could ask whatever he wanted as long as he was carrying a case inside while he did.
Sully picked up a case of Amstel Light off the flatbed and stumbled inside. The lighting was dim, the walls were black, and the hallway narrow before you went through a curtain of beads and into a large room, a long wooden bar with a mirror-lined wall behind it, bottles of spirits on the shelves, all the way up to the ceiling. He set the case on the counter, looking around, the banquettes along the wall looking greasy, like they needed to be wiped down.
“So who is it you work for again? You’re not with the cops?” Kenneth was talking, moving behind the bar, bottles clinking.
Sully pulled a card out of his wallet and flicked it across the bar. “D.C.’s finest already been here about the Ellison kid?”
Kenneth, looking at the card, fiddled with it. He shrugged. “I guess. I dunno. A couple of detectives were in here the other day, asking about Billy.”
“What’d they ask?”
“They talked to the boss, upstairs.”
“Right. When was this?”
“Yesterday.”
“I think you’re talking about the lead detective on Billy’s killing. You know what he talked about with the boss?”
“I wasn’t upstairs, so, hey, no idea. Other than I’m not supposed to talk to anybody about Billy. Nobody is. That’s what he came out and said.”
“Okay. So, ah, you’re not worried about talking to me?”
“Long as you don’t put my name to it. Boss is in Alexandria for the day.”
“While we’re chatting, anybody else been down here, asking around? Other reporters, maybe they look like private investigators?”
“Nah. It was the cops, the boss says, the cops want us to shut up; there hasn’t been anybody else asking around. Well. This photographer lady stopped in a few minutes before you did, but she had a card from the paper, too.”
“You didn’t talk to her?”
“I don’t like cameras.”
Sully nodded—too bad for Alex—and waded in. When he asked Kenneth if he knew Billy pretty well, Kenneth snorted and said of course and that there were hardly any black guys in here anyway, much less ones with dreads. Kenneth had some sort of New York accent but Sully didn’t have the familiarity to place the borough. He had this no-nonsense, confident manner, leaning forward slightly when he talked, heavy on the eye contact.
“Billy’d be in here Friday nights, Saturdays, sometimes Thursdays,” he said. “He liked to sit over there.” He motioned to the back corner away from the dance floor, a circular booth set into a corner notch.
“Okay, yeah,” Sully said, “the party nights. People like him? He a pain in the ass, what?”
“Liked. Billy was liked. Sweet kid. He’d pull up in a Benz convertible, one of the old four-fifties, one of the classic ones, always a white boy on his arm. Like he wa
s the Great gay fucking Gatsby. You couldn’t miss him.”
“So, he was dealing ganja, a little coke out of the corner booth?”
A full stop, pausing, looking at him. “Not that I knew about.”
“Come on. You’re the bouncer. He brought it in, you had to be taxing that.”
Kenneth snorted again and stopped pulling wine bottles out of their cardboard cases and asked what it was to him, both hands on the bar.
“Nothing? He was doing nothing?” asked Sully. “I’m just trying to figure out if he used or dealt. Was he a big player or an end user? You see what I’m asking here.”
“I’n see it fine, I just don’t know why you’re asking it,” Kenneth said, going back to sorting the bottles. “There’s a connection or two in here, yeah, sure, whatever. But it wasn’t Billy.”
Sully, rubbing his hand across his mouth, trying to square this. “Maybe he did at the other clubs?”
“Nah. Something like that, I’d have known. The bouncers, the bartenders, the owners—it’s a small block. Now, hey, look, maybe Billy snorted a line or blew a spliff? But a dealer? No way.”
“Okay. I’d had somebody tell me he was.”
“They were wrong.”
“Fine. Okay. No skin off mine. You know Billy’s white boy?”
“Which one?”
“I was talking to one of his buddies, over at Georgetown, he seemed to think they were dating. Kid named Elliot.”
“You want some advice?”
“Sure.”
“Stop using people’s names.”
“Great. The white kid from Georgetown.”
“I know who you mean.”
“He seemed to think he and Billy were a pair.”
