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Authors: George P. Pelecanos

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Nick Sefanos

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BOOK: Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go
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We took the carpeted stairs to the second floor—three small bedrooms and a bath. We passed the largest room, which I guessed to be Shareen’s. Its absolute cleanliness and frilly decor told me that, under this roof at least, Shareen Lewis slept alone. The next room belonged to the teenaged daughter, Roland’s sister, who had blown me off two days earlier on the phone. She was in there, sitting at a desk, listening to music through a set of headphones. She was already heavier than her mother, and she had chunkier features, or it could have been that she was at an awkward age. We made eye contact, and for some reason, I dumbed up my face. She laughed a little and closed her eyes
and went back to her groove. Then we were in Roland’s room at the end of the hall.

Shareen pulled the blinds open and let some light into the space. LaDuke leaned against a wall and folded his arms while I took it in: another clean room, too clean, I thought, for a boy his age. Maybe Shareen had tidied it up. But even so, there was something off about it, from the rather feminine color scheme to the schmaltzy souvenir trinkets on the dresser. A large dollar sign had been cut out and tacked to the wall. On an opposite wall, a poster of the group PM Dawn. No pictures of fat-bottomed women, no basketball stars, no hard rappers, no gun-culture or drug-culture symbolism, nothing representative of the mindless, raging testosterone of a seventeen-year-old city boy trying to push his manhood in the 1990s. Nothing like my own bedroom at seventeen, for that matter, or the bedrooms of any of my friends.

“Mind if I look in the closet?” I said.

“Go ahead,” Shareen said.

I went to it, opened it. I scanned a neat row of clothing, shirts of various designs and several pairs of slacks, the slacks pressed and hung upside down from wooden clamps. I put my hand on the shelf above the closet rod, ran it along the dustless surface. I found a back issue of
D.C. This Week
and took it down. I looked at it with deliberate disinterest, folded it, and put it under my arm.

“Anything?” LaDuke said, nodding at the newspaper.

“No,” I said, and forced a smile at Shareen. “You don’t mind if I take this, do you?”

“I don’t mind,” she said, looking very small, hugging herself with her arms as if she was chilled.

“Thanks. By the way, did you clean this room recently?”

“I haven’t touched a thing. Roland always kept it this way.”

“Have you noticed anything missing? Did he take any clothes with him, pack anything before… the last time you saw him?”

“I don’t think so,” she said, a catch in her voice.

“You keep a nice house,” I said, trying to keep things light.

“Thank you. It’s not easy with these kids, believe me.”

“I can imagine,” I said, but it was too much.

“You can?”

“Well, no. Actually, not really.”

“Then don’t patronize me.” The resentment crept back in her tone. “Let me tell you how it is. When I inherited this house from my mother, I also inherited the balance of the mortgage. That, and everything else it takes to be a single working mother—car, clothing, new stuff for the kids all the time. You come into this part of town, see what it is over here, and maybe you make a judgment about where I prioritize my family in the scheme of my life. What you don’t know is, I’d like to get my children out of this neighborhood, too, understand? But the way it is out here, in this economy, me and everyone I know, we’re all one paycheck away from the street. So, no, it’s not easy. But I’ve done pretty good for them, I think. Anyway, I’ve tried.”

I didn’t ask for all that, but I allowed it. LaDuke cleared his throat and pushed off from the wall.

“I’ll take that photograph of Roland now,” I said, “if you don’t mind. Then we’ll be on our way.”

She left the room. I walked out with LaDuke and told him to meet me at the front door. After some hesitation, he followed Shareen downstairs. I went to the daughter’s room, knocked on her open door. She pulled one earphone away from her head and looked up.

“Yeah.”

“I’m Nick Stefanos.”

“So?”

“What’s your name?”

“Danitra.”

“So how’s it going?”

“It’s goin’ all right.”

“Listen, Danitra, I’m here because your mom hired me and my friend to find your brother, Roland.”

“So?”

“Just wanted to introduce myself, that’s all. What are you listening to?”

“Little bit of this and that. Nothin’ you’d know.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right. But I recognized that Trouble Funk you and your friends had on the other day when I called.”

“That was you?”

“Yep.”

For a second, she looked like she might apologize for her attitude that day, but she didn’t. Instead, she shrugged and began to replace the earphone over her ear.

“Hold on a second,” I said.

“What?”

“You got any idea where your brother went off to?”

“Uh-uh.”

“You think he’s okay?”

“That fool’s all right,” she said.

“Why are you so sure?”

“ ’Cause if he wasn’t, he would’ve called. Listen, most likely he’s off on one of his money things. That boy just wants to be large, know what I’m sayin’? Always wantin’ to be like some movie star, ride around in a limousine. When he finds out it ain’t like that, he’s gonna come home.”

“You think so, huh?”

I stood there and waited for a reply. But she turned away from me then and went back into herself. I left her alone and headed back down the stairs.

“MRS. LEWIS REALLY DIGS
you, man,” LaDuke said with a laugh as he negotiated the Ford around RFK, then got it on to East Capitol. “Every time you open your mouth, she’d like to bite your head off.”

“Yeah, thanks for all your support back there.”

“Kinda liked watchin’ you bury yourself.”

I fired a smoke off the dash lighter. “Well, the funny thing is, in some ways I agree with what she’s saying. She’s out there working for a big firm, and she probably knows just about as much law now as the people she’s working for. You know how that goes, Xeroxing and taking messages for people who really have no more intelligence than you. I mean, lawyers, they’ve got the degree, and they worked for it, but that doesn’t necessarily make them geniuses, right? But I’m sure that doesn’t stop them from condescending to her all day long. Then she’s trying to raise those kids in a bad environment, with no way to get out…. I don’t know… I guess I can see why she’s so angry. ’Course, that doesn’t explain why she’s so angry at me.”

“Maybe you remind her of the type of guy that left her with those kids,” he said.

“Yeah, maybe.” The thought of my failed marriage crossed my mind. The thought must have transferred to my face.

“Hey look, Nick, I didn’t mean anything.”

“Forget it.”

LaDuke punched the gas and passed a Chevy that was crawling up ahead. He drove for a couple of miles, then said, “You get anything from the sister?”

“Uh-uh. Typical teenager with no time for me, and nothing good to say about her brother. She thinks he’s just out there being an entrepreneur, trying to make some kind of score.”

“You saw the dollar sign plastered on his bedroom wall. Maybe that
is
all he’s into. Maybe he’s running some kind of game.”

“What else you see in that room?”

“I saw what you saw,” he said.

“No, I mean the details.”

LaDuke rubbed the top of his head, something I had seen him do over the last couple of days when he was trying to think. “Well, it’s kind of a funny room for a seventeen-year-old boy. It looked like it could have been his sister’s room.”

“Right. How about that PM Dawn poster?”

“PM Dawn? What the hell is that?”

“It’s a rap group—but soft, man, all the way soft. Not what anyone down here would call ‘street authentic.’ Like what U2 is to rock and roll.”

“U2?”

“Yeah. The Eagles, in black leather.”

“What?”

“Never mind. It’s just not the kind of music a kid in that neighborhood would want to advertise that he was into. That and the room, you know, if it got around, it’s something that could get your ass kicked for you.”

LaDuke breathed out through his mouth. “You sayin’ that maybe him and the Jeter kid were boyfriends?”

“No, not exactly.”

But I thought of Barry calling Roland a “punk.” And the killer had called Calvin one, too. And then there was the Fire House matchbook from Calvin’s room. I dragged on my cigarette, blew the exhale out the open window.

“What, then?”

“It’s just that this Lewis kid is different, that’s all, at an age when being different from your peers is the last thing you want to be. It might not mean anything. I don’t know if it does, not yet.”

I picked up Roland Lewis’s photograph: unsmiling, like Calvin’s, but with a certain vulnerability. Unlike the sister, Roland looked very much like his mother. I slipped the photograph in the folded-up newspaper. LaDuke watched me do it.

“What’s with the paper, anyway?” he said.

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit. Don’t hold out on me, Nick.”

I hot-boxed my cigarette and pitched it out the window. “I’m not.”

“Yes you are,” he said. “But you won’t keep holdin’ out, not for long. ’Cause we’re gonna do this thing, you and me. You hear me?” He was pumped, his face lit and animated. A horn blew out as he lost his attention and swerved into another lane.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll find the kid, LaDuke. But do me a favor.”

“What?”

“Keep your eyes on the road.”

He dropped me in front of the Spot. I thanked him for the lift, picked up the newspaper, and started to get out.

“What are we, done already?”

“I am. I’ve got a date tonight.” He looked a little deflated. “Listen, man, we’ll get on this again, first thing tomorrow. Hear?”

“Sure, Nick. I’ll see you later.”

He pulled away from the curb and drove down 8th. I went to my Dodge and fumbled with my keys. When LaDuke was out of sight, I walked into the Spot, phoned Lyla, and told her I’d be a little late. Then I returned to my car, ignitioned it, and headed back into Northeast.

EIGHT

 

T
HE HEAVY WOMAN
with the elephantine thighs sat out front of the Jeter apartment, her folding chair in the same position as it had been two days before. I turned into the lot and parked beside Barry’s Z, walked across the worn brown grass, into the cool concrete stairwell, and down the steps to the Jeters’ door. I knocked on it, listening to the noises behind it, television and laughter and the cry of a baby, until the peephole darkened and the door swung open. Calvin’s sister stood in the frame, her baby resting on her hip.

“Yes?”

“Nick Stefanos. I was here the day before yesterday, talking to your mom.”

“I remember.”

“Is she in?”

The girl looked behind her. Barry’s younger brother and another shirtless young man about his age sat on the couch,
describing a movie they had both seen, talking loudly over the minstrel-like characters acting broadly on the television.

“Uh-uh,” the girl said. “She’s at the store.”

“Can I talk to Barry for a minute?”

She thought about it while I listened to the shirtless young man talking about the movie: “Carlito” did this and “Carlito” did that, and “Carlito, he was badder than a motherfucker, boy.” Then the young man was on his feet, his hand figured in the shape of a pistol, and he was jabbing the hand back and forth, going, “Carlito said, bap-bap-bap-bap-bap.”

“Come on in,” the girl said, her lips barely moving.

I followed her into the room and back through the hall. The young men stopped talking as I passed, and when my back was to them, they broke into raucous laughter. I supposed that they were laughing at me. Calvin’s sister gestured me toward a bedroom. I stepped aside to let her pass back through the hall.

I went to the bedroom and knocked on the frame. Barry stood next to an unmade double bed in a room as unadorned as the rest. He read from a book, one long finger on the page. He looked up at my knock, gave me an eye sweep, and returned his gaze to the book.

BOOK: Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go
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