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

A small group attended, old-timers mostly, the very last of a generation, the men who had ruled at the picnics of my childhood, men in white shirts and pleated gray slacks who danced to the wild clarinets and bouzoukis and played cards and drank and laughed, the smell of grilled lamb and fresh phyllo in the air. Lou DiGeordano was there, as frail as I had ever seen him, held at the arm by his son Joey, and a few other men and women, stooped and small, with black marble eyes and hair like the frazz of white rope, men and women I no longer recognized. And Lyla was there, her red hair long and lifting in the breeze, our hands touching, the touch of two friends.

It hadn’t ended suddenly with me and Lyla, as it does not end suddenly between two people who are breaking things off but still in love. We went out a couple of times to our regular restaurants, but the restaurants had lost their shine and the people who served us looked to us as strangers. Lyla had given up drinking and I had not, the change just something else that had dropped between us. We slept together on those nights, the sex needed and good. But the sex, we knew, would not save us. So things continued like that, and one afternoon I realized that I had not spoken with Lyla for a couple of weeks, and I knew then that that part of us was finally over.

The weather did not begin to turn until late September. As the days cooled, I rode my bike more frequently and kept the Dodge parked and covered. Mai went off to Germany to visit her family and Anna returned to school. I took on double shifts at the Spot into October, and in that period there was Costa’s funeral and solitary nights and occasionally nights with friends, all of them unmemorable and with the certain sameness that comes with the worn wood and low light of bars and the ritual of drink. My face healed quickly, though when it healed, I noticed that I had aged, the age and a kind of fading in my eyes. My scars had become a part of me now, suggesting neither tougher lmes with thness nor mystery, rarely prompting the interest of acquaintances or the second look from strangers. No one came to me for outside work; I would not have considered it if they had.

In the days that followed the violence in the warehouse, I looked over my shoulder often and listened for the inevitable knock on my front door. The newspaper and television reports stayed on top of the story for a full week and then the next sensational multiple murder took the warehouse story’s place. It was always in my mind that Boyle and Detective Johnson knew I was connected in some way. But no one came to interview me and no one came to bring me in. And Boyle continued to come in on a regular basis and sit at his bar stool, his draft beer and shot of Jack in front of him, a Marlboro Red burning in the tray.

Then in late October, on a night when the first biting fall wind had dropped into town, Boyle walked into the Spot at closing time, his bleached-out eyes pink and heavily lidded, drunk as I had seen him in a long while. His shirttail hung down below his tweed sport jacket, and the grip of his Python peeked out of the jacket’s vent. He walked carefully to the bar, had a seat on a stool. I stopped the music on the deck and went down to see him.

“Closing time, Boyle.”

“Just one round tonight, Nick, before I go home. You got no problem with that, do you?”

“Okay.”

I drew him a beer and set it on a damp coaster while he arranged his deck of Marlboros and pack of matches next to an ashtray. Then I free-poured some Jack Daniel’s into a beveled shot glass. He drank off some of the beer and lit a cigarette. He knocked back half of the shot.

Darnell’s light switched off as he walked from the kitchen. He buttoned his jacket and looked at Boyle. Boyle’s head was lowered, his eyes dull and pointed at the bar.

“Hawk’s gonna fly tonight, looks like,” Darnell said. “You drive down, Nick?”

“Yeah, I got the Dodge out tonight, with the weather and all.”

“Mind if I catch a ride uptown with you?”

“Sure, if you can wait.”

I nodded toward Boyle and Darnell shook his head. “I don’t think so, man. Let me get on out of here. Take it easy, Nick.”

“Yeah, you, too.”

Darnell touched his hat in a kind of salute. He walked from the bar. I took a few bottles of beer from the cooler and buried them in the ice chest.

“God, I am drunk,” Boyle said, pushing his face around with his hand. “Have a drink with me, will ya, Nick?”

“All right.”

I opened a bottle of beer and put a shot of Old Grand-Dad next to the bottle. Boyle and I touched glasses and drank. I chased the bourbon with the beer.

“So,” Boyle said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well… I shouldn’t be so drunk. But I am. I’ve been driving around all day, and when I was done driving, I hit a couple bars. You know how that goes.”

“Sure. Where’d you go?”

“Out in the country. Frederick County.”

I lit a cigarette and shook out the match. I dropped the match in the ashtray.

“Out there in the country,” Boyle said, “lookin’ for some answers.”

“What kind of answers?”

“It’s this thing with that partner of yours, Jack LaDuke. How he just disappeared after those deaths in that warehouse. And the Samuels murder-I don’t know, it’s just been eatin’ away at me, you know? I mean, I could have just come to you and all that, but, the way you are, I knew you wouldn’t talk.”

I put my hand up in protest, but Boyle cut me off.

“Hold on a second, Nick, lemme just go on a little bit.”

“Go ahead.”

“So I went to talk to Shareen Lewis. Well, she didn’t say much of anything. But she did tell me the name of the bondsman-I forget his name right now-who turned her on to LaDuke. So I went to this bondsman, see, and he fills me in on some details on this LaDuke character. I finally found his old man out there in the country, but the old man said he hasn’t heard from his son in years. Imagine that, not talkin’ to your own kid for years.”

“It’s something,” I said.

“And you?”

“What about me?”

“You haven’t heard from him, either.”

“No.”

“Well,” Boyle said, “let me just tell you what I think. What I think happened is-and granted, it’s just a theory of mine-I think he checked out in that fire. You remember, fifteen, twenty years back, when all those faggots got caught in that fire down at that movie house, the Cinema Follies? Man, they were just piled up against that locked door. Well, that’s the way it looked the morning after that fire in the warehouse. There was a bunch of ’em, piled against the door. ’Course, some of them had been shot up, and there were a few shot-up ones up on the second floor. And we identified a few of them from prison dentals, that sort of thing. The thing is, I think LaDuke was one of the ones in that pile, one of the ones we couldn’t identify. What do you think?”

“If he went to that warehouse, he went on his own. I don’t know a thing about it.”

“Well, anyway, it’s just a guess.” Boyle walked two fingers over the top of his glass. “Pour me another one, will ya?”

I did it. "3" BoyleI dragged on my cigarette and Boyle dragged on his and our smoke turned slowly in the conical light.

Boyle put his glass down, looked into it thoughtfully. “But,” he said. “But… if LaDuke died in that fire, it doesn’t explain the Samuels murder.”

“I don’t follow.”

“The casings found at the crime scene match the casings found on the second floor of that warehouse. Same gun, Nick. I followed through with ballistics myself. So whoever was in on the warehouse kill also hit Samuels.”

I finished my bourbon and put one foot up on the ice chest.