George Pelecanos - Down By the River Where the Dead Men Go

“We don’t need that,” I said.

Lyla pushed me onto my back on the bed and spit a mouthful of wine onto my chest. She straddled me, bent over, and began to slowly lick the wine off my nipples.

“You sure about that?” she said.

I could only grunt, and close my eyes.

Lyla’s heavy breathing woke me in the darkness. I looked at the LED readout on her clock, laid there for a half hour with my eyes open, then got out of bed, ate a couple of aspirins, and took a shower. I dressed in my clothes from the night before, made coffee, and smoked a cigarette out on her balcony.

I came back into the apartment, checked on Lyla. In the first light of dawn, her face looked d Sfactil arawn and gray. Her mouth was frozen open, the way she always slept off a drunk, and there was a faint wheeze in her exhale. I kissed her on the cheek and then on her lips. Her breath was stale from the wine. I brushed some hair off her forehead and left the place, locking the door behind me.

I drove straight down to the river, passed under the Sousa Bridge, turned the car around, and parked it in the clearing. No sign of a crazy black man in a brilliant blue coat. No cops, either; I guessed that, by now, the uniforms had been pulled off that particular detail.

I got out of my car, sat on its hood, and lit a cigarette. A pleasure boat pulled out of its slip and ran toward the Potomac, leaving little wake. Some gulls crossed the sky, turned black against the rising sun. I took one last drag off my cigarette and pitched it into the river.

Back in Shepherd Park, my cat waited for me on my stoop. I sat next to her and rubbed the hard scar tissue of her one empty eye socket and scratched behind her ears.

“Miss me?” I said. She rolled onto her back.

I entered my apartment and saw the blinking red light of my answering machine. I hit the bar, listened to the message. I stripped naked, got into bed, and set the alarm for one o’clock. Stella had come through; I had an appointment with Paul Ritchie for 2:30 that afternoon at the Fire House on P.

The Fire House had changed hands several times in my lifetime, but as long as I could remember, it had been a bar that catered primarily to homosexuals, in a neighborhood that had always been off center in every interesting way. This particular corner unofficially marked the end of Dupont Circle, where the P Street Bridge spanned the park and led to the edge of Georgetown. There were many hangouts down here, restaurants and a smattering of bars-the Brickskeller for beerheads, Badlands for the discophiles-but the Fire House had become something of a landmark for residents and commuters alike. For many years, gas logs burned day and night behind a glass window that fronted P at 22nd, the logs being the establishment’s only signage. The building’s facade had been redone now in red brick, and the window and the logs had been removed. But the fire imagery remained in the bar’s name, a small nod to tradition.

I had taken the Metro down to Dupont, then walked down P. By afternoon, the day had become blazing-hot, with quartz reflecting off the sidewalk and an urban mirage of shimmering refraction steaming up off the asphalt of the street. My thrift-shop sport jacket was damp beneath the arms and on my back as I reached the entrance to the Fire House. I pushed on the door, removed my shades, and entered the cool darkness of the main room.

Several couples and a few solo drinkers sat in booths and at tables partitioned off from the empty bar. I went to the stick and slid onto a stool, dropping the manila folder I had been carrying on the seat to my right. The heat had sickened me a bit, that and my activities from the night before. I peeled a bev nap from a stack of them and wiped my face.

A thin young waiter stepped up to the service area and said in a whiny, very bored voice, “Ooordering.” The bartender ignored him for the time being, walked down my way, and dropped a coaster in front of me on the bar.

“How’s it going?” he said. He was large-boned, with some gut to go with it. His brown hair had streaks of red running through it, and there was a rogue patch of red splotched in the chin area of his beard.

“Hot.”

“Not in here, it isn’t. Thank God for work, when it’s air-conditioned. What can I get you?”

“A cold beer.”

“Any flavor?”

“A bottle of Bud. And a side of ice water, thanks. By the way, where’s the head?”

“Top of the stairs. You’ll see it.”

I took the stairs, passed an unlit room where a piano sat in the middle of a group of tables. The men’s room was at the end of the hall. I went in and took a leak at one of two urinals. A mirror had been hung and angled down, centered above the urinals. I understood its purpose but didn’t understand the attraction. Years ago, I had a date with a woman who at the end of the night asked me to come into her bathroom and watch her while she took a piss. I did it out of curiosity but found it to be entirely uninteresting. I never phoned her again.

I zipped up my fly, bought a pack of smokes outside the bathroom door, and went back down to the bar. The bartender had served my beer and was placing the ice water next to it.

“Nick Stefanos,” I said, extending my hand.

“Paul Ritchie.” He shook my hand and said, “How do you know Stella?”

“I tend at the Spot. A couple times a week, I go into Athena’s, shoot a little pool.”

“You that guy that used to hang out with Jackie Kahn?”

“You knew Jackie?”

“Sure. I heard she had a kid.”

“Yeah.”

“Heard she had some straight guy impregnate her.”

“I heard that, too.”

“You know, I think I met you, in fact, one night when I was in Athena’s with a friend.” His eyes moved to the beer in my hand, then back to me. “I guess you don’t remember.”

“Must have been one of those nights,” I said. “You probably know how that is.”

“Not anymore,” he said.

“Ooordering, Paul!” said the prematurely world-weary voice from down the bar.

P [nt ght=aul Ritchie said, “Give me a minute,” and went to the rail to fix the waiter a drink. I gulped down the ice water and lit a cigarette. By the time Ritchie returned, I had finished half my beer; my stomach had neutralized, the quiver had gone out of my hand, and my head had become more clear.

“Thanks for seeing me.”

“No problem. What can I do for you?”

I put the manila folder on the bar, opened it, and slipped out the photographs of Calvin Jeter and Roland Lewis. I turned them around so that Ritchie could have a look.

“You recognize either of these guys?”

Ritchie studied the photos. “Uh-uh. I don’t think so.”

I searched his face for the hint of a lie, saw nothing irregular. I tapped my finger on Calvin’s photo. “This one here, I found a book of Fire House matches in one of his shirts.”

“What’d he do?”

“He got himself murdered.”

Ritchie breathed out slowly. “I don’t work every shift, obviously, so I can’t say he’s never come in here. But I know he’s not a regular. And these two look like minors on top of that, and we make a pretty good effort not to serve minors. They are minors, right?”

“Yeah. What else?”

“To tell you the truth, neither of these kids look like my type of clientele.”

“You mean they don’t look gay.”

“Look schmook, Stefanos. I don’t have much of an idea what a gay person ‘looks’ like anymore. Do you?”

“I guess not. But what did you mean? They’re not your clientele-what, because they’re black?”

“No,” he said tiredly, “not because they’re black. Turn your head and take a look around this place.”

I did. I saw some men getting on into their thirties and forties, some wearing ties, most of them with expensive haircuts and fine watches. The racial mix seemed to be about 80 percent white to 20 black; on the social and economic side, though, the group was homogenous. I turned back to Ritchie.