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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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“What else?”

“One important thing, maybe the only real lead we got. There’s a potential witness, someone who actually might have seen something. A worker down at the boatyard says there’s this guy, some crazy boothead, sits under this bridge”—Boyle patted the concrete—“sits right on these blocks, wearing a winter coat, every morning just before dawn, reading books, singing songs, shit like that. And the estimated time of death was just around dawn.”

“That’s about right,” I said.

“And if your friends drove under the bridge, then turned around and drove back, and if this mental deficient was here, there’s a very good chance he got a good look at the car. Maybe he noticed the license plates. Maybe he can ID the shooters themselves.”

“So who’s the guy?”

“The guys at the boatyard, they don’t know him. They never introduced themselves, on account of the guy was stone-crazy.”

“Anybody interview him since?”

Boyle flicked a speck of tobacco off his chin. “He hasn’t been
back
since. We don’t even know if he was here that particular morning. Johnson’s checked it out a couple of times, and we’ve got a couple of uniforms sitting down here at dawn for as long as we can spare ’em. But so far, nothing.”

“All this stuff in the reports?”

“Yeah.” Boyle pushed the envelope my way but did not hand it over.

“What’s the problem?”

“I know what’s going with you, that’s all. You think because you got polluted and happened to fall down near where a kid got shot, that makes you responsible in some way for his death. But you ought to be smart enough to know that you had nothin’ to do with it—that kid woulda died whether you had been laying there or not. And consider your being drunk some kind of blessing, brother. If you coulda got up off your ass, most likely they woulda killed you, too.”

“I know all that.”

“But you’re still gonna go out and ask around.”

“Yes.”

Boyle sighed. “You got no idea what kind of trouble I could get into.” He pointed one thick finger at my face. “Anything you find, you come to me, hear?”

“I will.”

Boyle tossed me the envelope. “Don’t fuck me, Nick.”

He walked away and left me standing under the bridge.

FOUR

 

T
HAT EVENING, I
categorized and studied the Xeroxed police file on the Jeter case, and in the morning I sat at the desk of the small office area in my apartment and studied it all over again. I showered and dressed, grabbed some of the pertinent material, and took a few legitimate business cards and some phony ones and slid them in my wallet. Then I took a dish of dry cat food and a bowl of water, placed them out on the stoop, and got into my Dodge and headed downtown.

I stopped for some breakfast at Sherrill’s, the Capitol Hill bakery and restaurant that is the last remnant of old Southeast D.C., and had a seat at the chrome-edged lunch counter. My regular waitress, Alva, poured me an unsolicited coffee as I settled on my stool, and though the day was already hot, I drank the coffee, because you have to drink coffee when you’re sitting at the counter at Sherrill’s. Alva took my order, watching me over the rims of her eyeglasses as she wrote, and five minutes
later I was sweating over a plate of eggs easy with a side of hash browns and sausage and toast. After the food, I had a second cup of coffee and a cigarette while I listened to a nearby conversation—the uninitiated might have called it an argument—between the owner, Lola, and her daughter, Dorothy. I kept my eyes on the Abbott’s ice cream sign hung behind the counter and grinned with fondness at the sound of their voices.

Out on the street, I fed the meter and walked the four blocks down to the Spot. Darnell was in the kitchen prepping lunch and Mai sat at the bar, drinking coffee and reading the
Post
. The sandaled feet at the end of Mai’s stout wheels barely reached the rail of the stool, and her blond hair was twisted and bound onto her head in some sort of pretzelized configuration. Phil stood at the register, his back to me, his lips moving—I could see them in the bar mirror—as he counted out from the night before.

“What’s going on, Mai?” I said, walking toward the phone.

“Jerome,” she said happily. Jerome had to be her latest Marine from the nearby barracks, but I didn’t ask.

I placed the list of numbers and addresses in front of me on the service bar and picked up the phone. I began to dial Calvin Jeter’s mother, then lost my nerve. Instead, I dialed the number for the Roland Lewis residence. Ramon walked from the kitchen, smiled a foolish gold-toothed grin, and sucker punched me in the gut as he passed. I was coughing it out when a girl’s voice came on the other end.

“Yeah.”

“Is Roland there?”

“Uh-uh.”

“How about Mrs. Lewis? Is she in?”

“Nope.” Some giggling by two other females in the background over some recorded go-go. I listened to that and watched Mai send Ramon down to the basement for some liquor.

“You expect her in?”

“She’s workin’, fool.” A loud explosion of laughter. “Bah.”

I heard the click of the receiver on the other end. I hung up the phone and checked the list for Mrs. Lewis’s work number, saw that I had it, and decided, Not yet. Phil walked by me without a glance or a word, took his keys off the bar, and split.

I went into the kitchen. Darnell stood over a butcher block, chopping white onions, a piece of bread wedged inside his cheek to staunch the tears.

“Goin’ on, Nick?”

“Just stopped in to make a couple of calls.”

“You see Phil?”

“Yeah. He’s still punishing me over last Tuesday night.”

“You got all liquored up, left his place wide open, and walked out into the street. You can’t really blame the man, can you?”

“I know.”

“Yeah,” Darnell said. “You know. But do you
really
know?”

“Thanks, Father. Light a candle for me the next time you’re in church.”

“Go on, man, if you’re gonna be actin’ funny.” Darnell cocked his head but did not look up. He said quietly, “I got work to do.”

I left the kitchen and walked through the bar. Ramon came up from the cellar, both hands under a bus tray filled with liquor bottles and cans of juice. I slapped him sharply on the cheek as he passed. He called me a
maricón
and we both kept walking. He was cackling as I went out the door.

THE LEWIS RESIDENCE, A
nondescript brick row house with a corrugated green aluminum awning extended out past its front porch, was on an H-lettered street off Division Avenue in the Lincoln Heights area of Northeast. I had taken East Capitol around the stadium, over the river, past countless liquor stores, fried-chicken houses, and burger pits, and into the residential district of a largely unheralded section of town, where mostly
hardworking middle-class people lived day to day among some of the highest drug and crime activity of the city.

I parked my Dodge on Division, locked it, and walked west on the nearest cross street. I passed a huge, sad-eyed guy—a bondsman, from the looks of him—retrieving a crowbar and flashlight from the trunk of his car. Three more addresses down the block and I took the steps up the steeply pitched front lawn of the Lewis house to its concrete porch, where I knocked on the front door. No one responded and no sounds emanated from the house. The girl who had answered the phone earlier and her friends were obviously gone. I stood there, listening to a window-unit air conditioner work hard in the midday heat.

I waited a few minutes, looked over my shoulder. The bondsman had gone off somewhere, leaving an empty street. I went to the bay window, stepped around a rocker sofa mounted on rails and springs, and looked through an opening in the venetian blinds: an orderly living room, tastefully but not extravagantly furnished, with African-influenced art hung on white-washed walls.

I dropped my card through the mail slot in the door and walked back down to the street.

DIVISION LIQUORS STOOD ON
a corner a couple of blocks south of the Lewis house, between an empty lot and the charred shell of something once called the Strand Supper Club. Two other businesses on the block had burned or been burned out as well, leaving only the liquor store and a Laundromat open on the commercial strip. I parked in front of the Laundromat and walked towards Division Liquors.

Several groups of oldish men stood in front of the store, gesturing broadly with their hands and arguing dispassionately, while a young man stood next to his idling Supra and talked into a pay phone mounted on the side of the building that faced the lot. The young man wore a beeper clipped to his shorts—some
sort of statement, most likely meaning nothing—and swore repeatedly into the phone, punctuating each tirade with the words
my money
. I passed a double amputee sitting in a wheelchair outside the front door. His chair had been decorated with stickers from various veteran’s groups and a small American flag had been taped to one of its arms. The man sitting in it had matted dreadlocks tucked under a knit cap, with sweat beaded on the ends of the dreads.

“Say, man,” he said.

“I’ll get you on the way out,” I said, and entered the store.

I grabbed two cans of beer and a pack of Camels, paid a white man through an opening at the bottom of a Plexiglas shield, and left the store. Out on the sidewalk, I slipped a couple of ones and some coin into Knit Cap’s cup, checked to see if the young man was still using the phone, saw that he was, and walked back to my car. Sometime later, as I finished off my first can of beer, the young man dropped into the bucket of his Supra and drove off. I got out of my car and walked to the pay phone, where I sunk a quarter in the slot and punched in a number that was written on the notepad in my hand.

“Mrs. Jeter, please.”

A bored young female said, “Hold on.” A television set blared in the background, competing against the sounds of young children yelling and playing in the room. A woman’s voice screamed out, silencing the children. She breathed heavily into the phone.

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Jeter?”

“Y-y-yes?”

“My name is Nick Stefanos. I’m working with the Metropolitan Police on your son Calvin’s murder,” I said, breaking some kind of law with the lie.

“I’ve done talked to the p-p-police three times.”

“I know. But I’d like to see you if possible. I’m in your neighborhood right now.” I gave her the name of the liquor store.

“You’re in the neighborhood all right. Fact, you’re just
around the corner.” I listened to the TV set and the kids, who had started up again, as she thought things over. She told me how to get to her place.

“Thanks very much. I’ll be right there.” After I shotgun another beer, I thought, hanging the phone in its cradle.

THE JETER APARTMENT WAS
in a squat square structure housing five other units, oddly situated on a slight rise in the middle of a block of duplex homes. I parked in a six-car lot to the right of the building, beside a green Dumpster filled to overflowing with garbage. Bees swarmed around a tub-sized cup of cola abandoned on top of the Dumpster, and two boys stood nearby on brown grass and swung sticks at each other in the direct sun. I finished my beer, popped a stick of gum in my mouth, locked my car, and walked across the grass. One of the boys, no older than eight, lunged at me with his stick. I stepped away from it and smiled. He didn’t smile back. I walked around to the front of the apartment.

A woman sat in a folding chair outside the entrance, her huge legs spread, the inside of each wrinkled thigh touching the other, fanning herself with a magazine. Some kids stood out on the street, grouped around an expensive black coupe, the name
MERCEDES
scripted along the driver’s side rocker panel. Bass boosted and volumed to distortion thumped from the sound system, burying the rap. A kid looked my way and spread his fingers across his middle, and one of his friends smiled. I approached the woman and asked her the number of the Jeter apartment. A wave of the magazine directed me to a dark opening centered in the front of the building.

The Jeter apartment was one of two situated down the stairs. The stairwell smelled of urine and nicotine, but in the depth and insulation of the cinder block, things were cooler and there was less noise. I wiped sweat off my face and knocked on a door marked 01.

BOOK: Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go
10.55Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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