by Neely Tucker
A shower sounded better now, and that was his definite destination, right up until he lay back down—just for a second—and sleep overtook him. His last thought, before darkness fell, was of Alexis, the way her hair bounced on her shoulders, the way she called his name, the taste of her skin, beneath her shoulder blades, above her buttocks. Just to put his mouth there.
• • •
“Sly Hastings. Brother. Digame.”
“Carter? That you?”
“You expecting Avon?”
Down the line, he could hear Sly moving, walking somewhere, had to be inside because there was a slight echo. Maybe his basement apartment over there in Park View.
“You got jokes, hunh?” Sly said. “That why you call me? Work on your material?”
“Where you at?”
“This duplex I got over in Southeast, the rentals. On Halley Terrace.”
“Your sister still working those for you?”
“Not so much anymore. I had to get more involved. These bathrooms, man, people will put any damn thing in the toilets.”
Sully was lying flat out on the bed in the Seasons, a place that probably went for as much a night as Sly could rent one of his junk boxes for a month. He had to call downstairs, ask them where they got these sheets. Thread counts were a real thing.
“I was wanting to ask you,” he said into his cell, “about what the fuck happened last night.”
“I really just don’t know what you talking about. I’m a businessman with apartment buildings to manage.”
“This was at a different apartment building. Two tenants.”
Silence down the line. Then, “We gots to talk.”
“You don’t say,” Sully said.
“That brother who can’t cook his greens? Meet me at his place.”
Sully smiled. “In forty-five.”
• • •
Kenny’s was in an old redbrick row house, three tables and takeout, the cook in the back behind the glass display cases, the cashier on the right. The house had been there probably eighty or ninety years, eight blocks from the Capitol, seven from the Supreme Court, and now it was a no-frills joint trying to bridge a couple of demographics, the neighborhood being what white people called “in transition.” Close to the Capitol, in the 300 of Massachusetts Avenue, you had institutions like Schneiders, the tiny liquor store, on a corner. A few doors down was La Loma, the Mexican place, in an old row house, dining rooms upstairs and down.
But, just a few hundred yards and five blocks back, it was another world. Here, you had Customer Base A, the older black folks who had been living on these streets for decades. Customer base B, the young palefaces who were moving in, fixing up the century-old places, turning them into well-heeled showplaces.
Gay, straight, Hill staffers, journalists, IT consultants. All these new residents, couples with young kids, turning up at Lincoln Park on Saturday mornings, walking their lapdogs. Thirty-one-year-old first-time home buyers who didn’t blink at dropping fifty thou on rehabbing the kitchen and bath.
Their row houses shared a brick wall with the older black couple next door who’d lived there forty years and kept plastic sheeting over the front-room furniture. Who went to one of the neighborhood churches every Sunday morning. Who bought their groceries at Murry’s on H Street, where the riots had gone crazy in 1968, before half of their new neighbors were out of short pants.
Sully had been sitting on what passed for the front patio of Kenny’s for twenty minutes, watching the comings and goings of the quick mart catty-corner across the intersection, the old dude panhandling out front. He was picking at a meat-and-three in one of the cast-iron chairs, which was chained to the cast-iron table, which was chained to the cast-iron fence.
Sly materialized from behind him, a Styrofoam container of his own, rattling another chair out from under the table to sit beside him.
“I was looking for the bike,” Sly said. “Lionel and me made the block three, four times before I saw you sitting here.”
“The bike’s at home,” Sully said.
“You walked over here?”
“More or less.”
Sly opened his container, the pork plate, but just sucked on his sweet tea and sat back in his chair.
“I don’t know, if that’s what you asking me,” he said.
“You moving in on the Hall brothers,” Sully said, getting to it. “They get capped, and you want me to believe you just don’t know.”
“I said I did not know.”
“Then you must be one scared motherfucker.”
“I wouldn’t say that, neither.”
“Police come tap-tap-tapping on your door?”
“About five this morning, yes they did.”
“They have a warrant, or was this a social call?’
“Hey, I’m a hardworking black man who has left his difficult youth behind, you hear? Earning an honest living in real estate. Low-income units. Sometimes? They elements in the police force, I don’t want to call them racist, but they got this cynical view and do not believe in, what do I want to say, my basic integrity. Sometimes these motherfuckers come by my house. ’Cause they too dumb to know the shit theyselves.”
“So, no warrant.”
“Not even.”
“And what did you tell them about the situation, this double homicide?”
“That I didn’t know shit and they ought to get up off my porch.”
Sully took a bite of his greens, using the little white plastic fork. “Hey Sly, you remember Noel Pittman? That fine sister who went missing on Princeton Place last year?”
Sly cut his eyes to him now, hard.
“You told me you didn’t know nothing about her, neither,” Sully said.
“I didn’t and I don’t,” Sly hissed.
“Then good luck with the Bend,” Sully said. “You going to need it.”
• • •
He came in his backyard through the alley, walked up the steel steps to the back door, his breath catching short, even though he was expecting it: The window on the Dutch door was broken. None of it outside. When he walked up and peeked in, he saw it all shattered on the kitchen floor. The deadbolt was pulled back. Door wasn’t locked.
He pushed it open with a knuckle and the smell of bourbon was everywhere. They’d taken his stash in the kitchen and poured it over the floors, the walls, the furniture. The plates and glasses were raked out of shelves and onto the floor, shards everywhere. The dining room table was knocked on its side. Broken glass, he saw, stepping into the front room; they’d smashed the bottles against the marble of the fireplace mantel, breaking off a chunk of it in the process. The couch upended. CDs pulled out of the racks, dumped on the floor.
Upstairs was worse. Sheets ripped off the bed, books pulled off the shelves, clothes pulled out of closets. File cabinets pulled out and dumped on the floor. A puddle of urine on the bathroom tiles, just a little smooch on the cheek. The sense of violation was there, the fury, but it was in check until he went to the bedroom window, the one fronting Sixth Street, and looked on the street outside.
The Ducati lay on its side, the rearview mirrors knocked off, the panels dented, the paint keyed.
“You motherless little bastards,” he whispered. “You sister-fucking freaks. I will find you.”
For fifteen minutes he walked the place, checking out the basement (equally trashed), his mood oddly calm. Nothing appeared to be taken. It was just a calling card, a cheap shot to let him know they could get to him.
After a while, he went back upstairs. He pulled open the folding doors to the hallway closet. He’d had it lined in cedar, one of his little upgrades, and stood on the lower shelf, where he put his sweaters. That gave him access to unlatch the small trapdoor into the attic. Reaching his hand up there, he found the small velvet pouch.
Sitting
on the edge of the bed, unfolding the cloth, he felt the weight of the Tokarev M57, a gift from the Bosnian commander that night on the mountain. He pulled the last fold of cloth back and it lay open before him, black, dull, and deadly. He popped the magazine open, checked the rounds, and then ratcheted it back into place.
He dropped it in his jacket pocket and picked up the phone, calling news research at the paper.
“Hey gorgeous, it’s me,” he said, getting Susan, thank God. “I need an address and a home number this time.”
She talked.
“Of course, it’s off the books,” he said. “I got suspended, didn’t you hear?” Then he said, “Sheldon Stevens. The home, not the office.” And, “Wait. Lemme get a pen.”
• • •
Six minutes later, the phone rang down the other end. Shellie Stevens picked up.
“Hey motherfucker,” Sully said. “Love what you did with the place.”
There was a pause. “What I did with what place?”
“When you see me coming? Counselor, I advise you to run.”
“Run? Is this you, Carter?”
“You hear me? I know. What you know? What Delores knew? What Billy found out? Counselor, I know. That sound you hear? It’s the dirt thumping on your coffin.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
THE FOURTH FLOOR at D.C. Superior Court held, just to the right of the escalator, the pending- and past-records room, the history of the city’s crime and criminals in thousands upon thousands of folders and case files.
The reception area to the records room was a grimy little rectangular space, with an ever-present line of unhappy people waiting to get to the counter. A good many, like those today, were there to get an official records search on themselves. To get a stamped document for a prospective employer that showed they were no longer on probation, or parole, or that the arrest that had shown up on their record was actually, like, long since closed, or that some other dude had been arrested for it, only he had a similar sort of name, you see that right here. Or there were women trying to track down men they wished they had not dated, or fucked that one time, or married, or ever seen once in their goddamn lives, and is that son of a bitch locked up down at Lorton.
The floor was peeling linoleum and the tiled ceiling had brown spots of water damage. It smelled like disinfectant and felt like the waiting room for the end of the world.
One wall held a printer, and against the opposite wall were two public-access terminals for computerized record searches. One computer was out of order and the screen was dark. Seated at the second one was a fat-ass PI with a bad haircut and a yellow notepad filled with a long list of names, potential employees for some company or another, running them through the system. He had a Styrofoam cup of coffee from the cafeteria downstairs and talked a mile a minute into his cell. When he got a hit on a name on his pad, he scratched a line through it and went to the next. After a while, he looked over his shoulder and acknowledged Sully by holding one finger aloft, as in, “just a minute.”
Twenty-two minutes later, the dude got up, pulling his notepad and briefcase with him, still gabbing, giving Sully a pat on the shoulder as he left. Sully took the still-warm seat and winced at the sensation when he sat down, moving his ass to the edge of the seat, then rolling the chair up to the terminal.
He only had one name: Ferris, George.
He punched it in, the machine thought about it and spit out one match: George Mercury Ferris. Date of birth August 16, 1976. Police Department ID number 673214. Aliases: Curious.
“Bingo,” Sully said, hitting the button to call up the case histories.
More computer humming, and then lines and lines of green type popped up, filling the screen. Assault with a deadly weapon (baseball bat); assault with a deadly weapon (shod foot); possession of narcotics (marijuana, less than one ounce); possession with intent to distribute (cocaine); public intoxication; breaking and entering; robbery; robbery; simple assault. Nine arrests, and the man had been an adult all of five years.
A couple of taps on the computer, deeper into the records: Most charges had been no-papered the day after the arrest, meaning the cases were immediately dropped. A plea on the possession with intent; six months probation.
That meant there would be an intake form and a pretrial assessment. He stood in line to fill out a card with a request that it be pulled from the file room. After a while, Sully drumming his fingers on the countertop, the clerk returned with it, the slim manila folder handed back to him across the counter. You could step over to the left, review it, and ask for copies.
Sully moved down and flipped the folder open.
When you got arrested and were headed for trial, one of the indignities suffered was that you had to be interviewed by a social worker, who worked up a case report and put all of your personal business into a little history that was, to those who knew where to look for it, public record.
George’s file wasn’t very thick, his report on a fading printout on pulp paper, the kind with tear-off perforations on each side. You had to unfold the connected pages to read it. George, one of two children, the only boy, born to a single mother who’d worked at a gas station, then a grocery store. The family moved every other year or so, but only a few blocks each time, always staying in Southwest, the grandmother living with them. This was not, by local standard, a particularly hard lot in life. George had the opportunity to turn out okay. A report from a school counselor, entered into the school record, recorded a concern in sixth grade that George had begun to be disruptive in class and had fought on the playground. Seventh grade, another report that George often did not come to class. The next year, another report, this was about a dog being shot on school grounds. Several students said George had done it, although no gun was ever found and George denied it, but he was invited to attend a different middle school. In ninth grade, there was another incident, involving a cat, its mangled body left by the school’s front door. By the tenth grade he was a dropout.
“Juvenile record under seal,” was the line that explained that.
The social worker’s psychological evaluation: Average intelligence, narcissism, anxiety disorder, antisocial personality. Treatment recommendations: probation, therapy, and possible medication. Last known address, the James Creek projects in Southwest D.C., his mother’s place. A subsequent arrest, last year, held the notation that none of the recommendations had been followed through.
Sully wrote down the address of his mom and the name of his sister and handed the file back to the clerk.
Later that afternoon, he was on Half Street SW at the James Creek row houses, low-income public housing, the flat-faced two-story brick ovens sagging into one another since World War II. The front doors were fifteen feet off the sidewalk. No awnings, no porches, a few trees and gasping shrubs out front. Steel bars covered every downstairs window of every house on the block, and some had upstairs bars, too. There were tiny backyards to each, like his own, marked off from one another by rusty steel fences. He found himself knocking on a green door in the middle of the block. This pleasant-faced gent, about sixty-five, opened the door about six inches. Wearing jeans and a tucked-in dress shirt, sporting a close-cropped beard, he heard Sully out, nodding, then said he didn’t know shit about whoever he was asking about and never had and he would be happy as hell if Sully left.
Sully apologized, saying he didn’t blame him, and went out to the curb, hearing the door and the bolt close behind him. He called back Susan in news research.
“Hey, sweetheart,” he said.
“Hi, darling yourself.”
“I need another address.”
“I need a date.”
“I don’t know any good guys,” he said.
“I’m lesbian, stud.”
“Oh. Forgot. You hot redheaded Irish les, you.”
“An irresistible combination to women the world over.”
<
br /> “Well. I dunno any hot women, either. That I’m not dating myself.”
“Did you call for a reason or just to fuck with me?”
He gave her Curious’s name and asked for the address of his sister. She said hold on and set the phone down. Waiting, waiting, looking at his nails, the scuff on his cycle boots, wondering where Alexis was by now . . . Susan came back on the line.
Sis, it turned out, lived in Clinton, out in Prince George’s County. He rode out there in half an hour, coming into a nice neighborhood, small brick ranchers, two-car garages, basketball hoops in the driveway. People mowed their yards, trimmed the hedges. He got off the bike. No dogs barking. No engines gunning. Suburbia. It was kind of nice, though the burbs tended to give him the hives. There was quiet and there was too quiet.
When he knocked, a slender, attractive young woman came to the door and asked what it was about.
“George,” he said, and she started to slam it shut.
“Wait,” he said, sticking a foot in front of the door, keeping it a few inches open. “I’m not the police. I’m not an investigator. I’m just a reporter, at the paper? I don’t want to bother you. I’m sorry to be here. Just tell George, next time you hear from him, that I know. Okay? That I know. About what happened with Billy Ellison. That I’ve got intel from MPD on what happened with the Hall brothers.”
He put a card on the floor, and moved his foot. The door slammed shut.
• • •
Two nights later, when he had finished trolling through the Bend on his scratched-up and beat-to-shit bike and was back on the Hill, on Pennsylvania Avenue, some idiot started gliding alongside, a hoopty Chevy slow-rolling past the shuttered little restaurants and bars, pulling even with him at the stoplight on Fourth.
They were the only two vehicles out and he ignored it when the driver’s-side window came down. It wasn’t until the car jerked slightly in front of him that he looked over.
