Butterfly Knife

by Larry Matthews

Chapter Three

  The Philadelphia House was at the edge of Embassy Row on Massachusetts Avenue Northwest, on a block that contained a world-class think tank and a renowned university foreign policy graduate school. A half dozen apartment buildings lined the block, most having been built in the early Twentieth Century and converted to condominiums in the eighties. It was an international block, with the sounds of many languages floating above the sidewalk and into the lobbies of the apartment buildings and centers of higher thinking.

  Dave lived in five-hundred square foot efficiency in the back of the Philadelphia House, overlooking an alley that came in from Seventeenth Street. His primary view was the building’s garage, loading dock and service entrance. He lived on the third floor. It was a twelve-story building and, if he had been so inclined, he could have spent his evenings observing others in the nine stories above him in the apartments that looped around to form a kind of courtyard over the roof of the garage. His fellow residents were not always careful to close their blinds. He was not a peeping Tom but he had, on occasion, seen things best left private.

  He used his electronic pass to enter the lobby and checked with the desk to see if he had any messages or mail. All of the staff at the desk were male and all were from Cameroon and so spoke French as well as English. They were universally polite and helpful and could be counted upon for small favors. Each was well-tipped at Christmas.

  The young man on duty was wearing a blue blazer with a crisp opened collared white shirt. “We missed you. Have you been away?”

  “No, just working on a story. Anything for me?”

  The man went to a wall of small boxes and found Dave’s apartment number. “Yes. You have two items.” He handed Dave a letter and a small package wrapped in brown paper. “You look tired. I think you need some rest.” The man smiled and his teeth were like bright lights against his very black skin. Each of the Cameroonians had impeccable manners. They all went to Howard University.

  “Long night. Thanks.” Dave walked to his apartment, opened the door, and flopped onto his bed. He intended to reflect on the night’s events and put together a report he could file but he fell asleep as his thoughts drifted from the shelter to his conversation with O’Neil. His cell-phone woke him up an hour later with its ‘dobro riff’ ringtone, a telltale sign of his East Tennessee upbringing. It took him a minute to dig the phone out of his small backpack. It was his boss.

  “You ever think you might want to file a goddam story?” Sid Slackey was old school. He had humped a tape recorder through the jungles of Vietnam and had even jumped with the 82nd in Panama, the only journalist to have talked his way into a parachute in the invasion that toppled Manuel Noriega, a head of state who was also a drug lord. Now he was running Now News as a kind of drill-sergeant-slash-editor. “Let me see if I get this right. You’re working on a goddam enterprise piece at shelter when the priest who got you a bed gets killed. Then you sit on it all night so you can get some sleep. Is that about it?” Sid was pissed.

  “Yeah, ah, look. I’m working on some angles. So far this is just a local crime story. I don’t think any of our stations are interested in a local D.C. stabbing.”

  “Is that right? Maybe you haven’t turned on the morning shows. The national ones. It’s all over the national news. Did I mention that it’s a national story? Did you think to call the desk? You got any tape?” Audio recording was all digital now but Sid still referred to it as tape.

  “No, not yet.”

  “Jesus Christ! We’ve got a three o’clock feed going out to all the stations and I need you to file. We can get by without sending anything out this morning since it just happened and we like to tell ourselves that it’s better to be right than first, but we can’t let the whole day go by without being all over this. Now News! Get it? Now!”

  “Look, I’ve been up all night and I need to get a couple of hours’ sleep. I have a police source who’ll probably have something for me late this afternoon, so maybe I can have something after that.” Dave leaned back into his pillow and rubbed his eyes.

  “Not good enough. I need you to put together a background piece on the priest and the homeless issue in D.C. We can top it with the latest from the cops or whatever else comes up during the day. Call the desk when you’ve got it and come in to record it. Then you can get your beauty rest. I know you’re tired and I’m sure your story will be great, but we can’t sit on this. Shit, Dave, this is your fucking story.” Sid hung up.

  Dave made a cup of coffee at his small espresso machine and sat down at his dining table, which also doubled as his desk, and opened his laptop. “Father Phil was a beloved figure on the streets of Washington. Not the Washington of power figures and lobbyists, but the Washington of the down and out…” He had no sound bites so he kept it to two minutes, a minimum time for what the news types called a “think piece”. His office was a few blocks away on P Street where he recorded it and he was back in his apartment ninety minutes later.

  He was about to sink back into his bed when he noticed the items from the front desk and decided to open them before he went to sleep. The letter was a rejection from a magazine in response to a short story he had written. The package was wrapped and tied with a twine, so he used a kitchen knife to open it. It was a cardboard box, the kind used to contain inexpensive jewelry. Inside was a Rosary of simple black beads. There was a small tag attached to it. It read: Father Phil. Dave spread the brown wrapping paper on the table, looking for a name or a return address. There was nothing except for the block letters that addressed the package to him. He called the desk to ask when it had been delivered and the young man said he didn’t know. It was some time during the night. Was this Father Phil’s Rosary? Was someone playing a joke? He closed the box.

  He lay back and tried to work through his next move when he dozed off, unable to fend off the sleep that had escaped him the previous twenty-four hours.

  The Dobro riff woke him up at five. It was O’Neil.

  “You got anything for me?” The cop got to the point without any pleasantries.

  “I could ask you the same thing.” Dave had trouble shaking off the sleep.

  “I’m a block away from your place. Meet me out front.”

  The black sedan pulled into the drive in front of Philadelphia House two minutes later and O’Neil honked his horn as Dave hurried down the corridor, wishing he had time for coffee. The rush hour traffic on Massachusetts Avenue was heavy and the usual backup to Dupont Circle had drivers pounding their steering wheels. A few well-heeled deep thinkers from next door gazed at the commuters as though they were vermin to be avoided. A gay couple walked in front of the car as O’Neil pulled out, flashing his lights and waving his badge. The couple sashayed as if to tease the cop. “You gotta give ‘em credit. They got balls,” O’Neil said.