Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go (14 page)

I watched him walk around the front of the car, moving heavily, shifting his shoulders awkwardly, a tall, gawky guy not entirely comfortable in his own skin, like an adolescent who has grown too fast. There was something else, too, something a little off center and soiled beneath Jack LaDuke’s fresh-scrubbed looks. I couldn’t put my finger on it that day, and when I did, it was way too late. Eventually, the snakes that were crawling around inside his head found their way out. By then, there was nothing I could do but stand beside him, and watch them strike.

L
YLA MCCUBBIN HAD
grown up in a boxy brick house on a street named Bangor Drive, in an unremarkable but pleasant development called Garrett Park Estates in the Maryland suburb of Kensington. Her parents had raised three children there, and they had remained long after Lyla, the last child, had graduated from college and gone out on her own. Lyla said that the neighborhood had changed very little since her childhood: a mixture of starter homes and rentals, none too ostentatious, a comfortable kind of place, where you came to recognize the bark of every dog through the open window of your bedroom as you drifted off to sleep on summer nights.

Lyla’s mother, Linda, had practically raised the children herself, as the father, Daniel McCubbin, was usually off at some meeting, organizing the unions or planning the demonstration for his latest cause. The first day I met Lyla, in her office at
D.C. This Week
, I had noticed the photograph of her as a child, stand
ing between her bearded father and straight-haired mother, at a Dupont Circle rally circa 1969. Lyla said that the family never had a dime, but there was some pride in her voice as she said it, never regret. Her father, a fine trial lawyer by all accounts, had managed to resist the advances of the corporate firms in town throughout his career, preferring to use his talents to advance the causes of those individuals whom he considered to be on the side of “right.” He wasn’t your typical pompous windbag, though. I liked him and I admired him, despite the obvious fact that he was not awfully crazy about me.

We were greeted at the door by Linda McCubbin, who kissed Lyla and then me on the cheek. Linda was Lyla with thirty years added to the odometer, with more silver in the hair than red now and an organic heaviness around the waist and in the hips. Men were always told to look at the mothers, as if that was some kind of test; it never had been for me, but if it had been, then Lyla would have passed.

“Here, Ma,” Lyla said, handing Linda a bag containing two liter bottles of white wine. Lyla had insisted we stop for it, though both of us had once again consumed a little too much the night before.

Linda took it, said, “Come on in.”

Daniel sat under an overextended air conditioner in the simply furnished living room, in a La-Z-Boy chair, the arms of which had been shredded by the McCubbin cat, a mean tom that someone had ironically named Peace. Lyla bent to her father and kissed him, and then he shook my hand without rising from the chair.

“Don’t get up,” I said.

“Didn’t plan to,” he said. “Hot day like this, I’m going to expend as little energy as possible. How’s it going, Nick?”

“Good. Good.”

Daniel smiled, studied me, and kept the smile until it looked nothing like a smile at all. Maybe I had overdone the aftershave, or maybe it was the unironed khakis or the color of
my shirt. Or maybe he liked me just fine, and it was just that I was dating his baby daughter.

“Linda,” Daniel said, watching my eyes. “Get Nick here a drink. What’ll it be, Nick?”

“Nothing just yet. Too early for me,” I said, rocking on my heels.

“Is it?” Daniel said, scratching beneath the white of his beard.

“Well,” Lyla said, “
I’ll
have one. C’mon, Mom, let’s go in the kitchen. I’ll help you get ready.”

Lyla winked, left me there with her dad. I gave her a brittle smile as she walked away. I had a seat on the sofa, crossed one leg over the other, nervously missed it on the first go-round.

“Where’s the rest of the family?” I said.

“They’ll be along,” Daniel said. “How’s the bar business going?”

“Good. Real good.”

“You know, I used to go into that place, in the old days, when I was working on the Hill.”

“Really.”

“Yes, it was called something else back then. You’ve been there awhile, haven’t you? Thought you might own a piece of it by now.”

“No, not me. Tough business, that.” Real tough.

“And your investigative work?”

“Coming along,” I said as I watched my free foot wiggle in the air. “How about you… how’s retirement?”

Daniel raised his substantial eyebrows. “Linda says I don’t know how to spell the word
retirement
. I guess the difference is, now I don’t get paid for what it is I do. Right now, I’m setting up group homes for Haitian refugees. Our church owns these properties, so… I’m helping fix them up.”

“Why fix them up?” I said, my foot pinwheeling now, out of control. “You could make more profit by, you know, leaving them the way they are. Crowd a bunch of people in the rooms, I
mean—where they come from, they’re used to it. Jack up the rents, too, while you’re at it.”

A smile came into Daniel’s eyes. “Of course,” he said, “you’re ribbing me, aren’t you?”

“Just a little.”

“You know, you don’t always have to work so hard at being cynical around me, Nick. I know that, in your own way, you have a fairly clear idea of what’s right and what’s wrong. Not all the good that gets done in this world gets done in a church or a meeting hall, I realize that.”

“Yeah, well, we make do with what we have, and work with it, you know?”

“Yes, I do.”

He stopped giving me the business and picked up the Outlook section of the
Post
that was lying by his chair. I noticed a makeshift bar that had been set up on a mobile cart near a mirrored armoire in the corner of the room. There were bottles of gin and vodka, tonic and ginger ale, an ice bucket, and a sealed bottle of Old Grand-Dad. Apparently, that had been purchased just for me; I had never seen the old man take a drink, and Lyla’s mother drank wine, and only with dinner. Something pushed out at the base of the curtains at the bay window and moved along behind them with a deliberate slink: That would be Peace, stalking me as he always did when I came to the McCubbin house for dinner.

I was watching the curtains, thinking of my possible defense against an attack from that lousy cat, when the front door opened and four people stepped inside: Lyla’s brother, Mike, his wife, Donna, Lyla’s older sister, Kimmy, and Kimmy’s husband, Leo. This time, Daniel stood up from his chair, and we all did our back-slapping moves around the living room. A half hour later, we were seated at a cramped table in the dining room, with Daniel McCubbin leading a prayer. During the prayer, our hands were all joined underneath the table, a McCubbin tradition, and my index finger was wiggling around on the inside of Lyla’s
thigh. Lyla, seated to my right, dug a fingernail into my own thigh, leaving a crescent mark that I discovered an hour later in the bathroom.

“Amen,” everybody said, and then Leo, as usual, reached across the table for the first shot at the main course, and started pushing thick slices of roast beef onto his plate.

“Leave some for the rest of the family, Leo,” Kim said, only kidding by half.

“Sure, honey,” he said, then issued his trademark high cackle, a sound that was always surprising coming from a man as fat as Leo. “You know I can’t help it. The Irish love their liquor, and us Greeks love to eat. Right, Nick?”

Daniel McCubbin’s eyes flashed on Leo. I nodded weakly, not wanting to appear too anxious to admit to being a member of Leo Charles’s ethnic tribe. Leo
was
a Greek—the Charles had been Charalambides before his grandfather stepped off the boat—but he was not a kid my friends or I had known growing up. Leo Charles was also a bigot, and like all bigots, black and white, he was a loser, and he directed his shortcomings and utter lack of self-confidence outwardly and onto the backs of others. Lyla said Kimmy had zero self-esteem and that was why she had married him. And all the time, I’d thought it was his 280-pound frame, all five foot eight inches of it.

“How about those Orioles?” Mike said in the too-gentle way of his that unfortunately suggested a weaker version of his father. Mike ran a volunteer soup kitchen operation out of Le Droit Park. He plopped a mound of mashed potatoes onto his plate and passed the platter to his wife, Donna, a shame-about-the-face public defender with just a killer body. All these do-goodniks at the table, and me. Well, there was Leo, too.

“Yeah, how about ’em, Nick?” Leo said. “Think the bullpen’s gonna take ’em through to the Series?” Leo loved to talk sports but couldn’t do a push-up.

“Lookin’ good,” I said, feeling not so good. I really could
have used a drink. “I’m going up to Camden Yards tomorrow with a buddy of mine, a guy named Johnny McGinnes.”

“An Irishman,” Leo said, spitting a little ball of mashed potato across the table in the process.

“They love their liquor,” Daniel said, but it went over Leo’s head, missed him by a mile. He kept right on chewing, breaking down the load that was in his mouth. Lyla’s mother laughed a little, and she and Mike exchanged fond looks.

“You didn’t tell me you were going to the game,” Lyla said.

“Yeah, Johnny won some tickets, sold a million refrigerators last month in some promotion, something like that.”

“
That
ought to be interesting,” Lyla said, killing the remainder of the wine in her glass. She picked up the bottle off the table and poured herself some more, clumsily trying to fill the glass to the top, spilling some in the process. Daniel looked at her and then at me. Lyla’s ears were a little red, her cheeks flushed.

“Anybody want a little more cool in here?” Lyla’s mother said. “We could turn up that air conditioner.”

“Let me handle this,” I said with a wink. “I used to be in electronics—I know how to operate the unit.”

I got out of my chair and walked to the window where the air conditioner had been set. As I got to it, I saw something black seem to rise out of nowhere from behind the curtains near my feet, and I heard a woman’s voice cry out behind me just as the wail of an animal pierced the air. I felt a slash of pain, pulled my hand back as the crazy tomcat cartwheeled in the air, landed on his feet on the carpet, and took off back across the room, scurrying for his hiding place behind the drapes.

“Fuck!” I shouted, waving my hand, the blood already coming to the surface of the cut. That quieted the rest of them down.

Mike got up and found the cat, carried him back into the room. Lyla tossed me a napkin and went to get a Band-Aid. She returned with it, but by now the cut had stopped bleeding. I put
the Band-Aid on anyway, a sympathy play to make my obscenity seem more justified.

“Peace, man,” Mike whined, stroking the cat.

“Peace, man,” I said, and made a V with my fingers, smiling stupidly at the McCubbin family. Nobody laughed.

“I guess that cat doesn’t like you so good,” Leo said. “Right, Nick?”

“Leo,” Kimmy said, “you’ve got a piece of lettuce on your cheek.”

I sat back down. Lyla patted my thigh under the table. We finished our Sunday dinner.

A COUPLE OF HOURS
later, when Lyla’s siblings and their spouses had gone and Lyla went to the kitchen with her mother to wash and dry the dishes, I took a beer to the concrete patio out back and had a seat in one of four wrought-iron chairs grouped around a glass-topped table. I lit a cigarette and watched a young father play catch with his son in an adjacent yard. The man rubbed the top of his son’s head when they were done, and the boy skipped off toward their house. Then the back door of the McCubbin house opened and Daniel came out and stepped down to the patio.

“Mind if I join you?”

“Of course not,” I said. “Have a seat.”

He grunted as he settled into a chair across the table. I dropped my lit butt into the top of the beer can and heard it hiss as it hit the backwash. I put the can at my feet.

“How was it?” Daniel said.

“Cold beer on a Sunday in the summer, it’s always pretty good.”

“Yes, I remember. Watching you today, it took me back to when I was first dating Linda, the times we’d go to her parents’ house for dinner. I could have used a drink on those occasions, wanted one desperately, as a matter of fact. It really would have relaxed me, taken the edge off. There’s nothing more humbling
than dealing with the potential in-laws, no matter how much confidence you have. It’s like, all of the sudden, you’re a little boy again.”