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

“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 bookem" readings, 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.

That 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 andont 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?” er nt size“ 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 maricon 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.