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

“You say you’re with the p-p-police?” She closed her eyes tightly on the stutter, as if she could concentrate her way through it.

“Unofficially, yes. I’m working with them on this,” I said, repeating my lie. “I know what you’ve told them already. I need to know if there’s anything else.”

“Like?”

“Things the police may not have asked. Like where Calvin usually went when he went out. What he did for money. That sort of thing.”

“You mean, was he druggin’? Ain’t t-t-that what you mean to say?” Her eyes flared momentarily, then relaxed. “Calvin wasn’t in the life. He was just a boy. Just a boy.”

I looked away from her. The crying from the toddler in the hallway intensified. I wondered, Why doesn’t someone pick that goddamned baby up?

“Those your children out there?” I said, hoping to loosen what had fallen between us.

“The girl is my oldest. The babies, m-m-my grandchildren, are hers. That boy out there, on the couch? That’s Barry. He’s the father to the youngest child. His little brother, the one back in the bedrooms, he’s stayin’ with us awhile. Got put out, up his way.”

“Mind if I talk to your daughter?”

“She don’t know nothin’ more than what I told you. What I already told the police.”

The television set clicked off and the sound from it died. The front door opened and shut, and soon after that the toddler stopped crying. The older child came into the kitchen then and stood by his grandmother’s side, patting his hand against her thigh. She picked him up and sat him in her lap, rubbed her palm over his bald head.

“Have the police been back in touch with you?”

“ ’Posed to be,” she said, brushing some crumbs off the child’s lips.

“They’re trying to find Calvin’s friend Roland,” I said. “Know if they had any luck?”

“Roland? If they did, n-n-nobody said nothin’ to me.”

I rubbed a finger down the scar on my cheek. “Mind if I have a look in Calvin’s room?”

“You can look,” she said, with a shrug and a grunt as she picked up her grandson and rose from the chair. “Come on, Mr. Stefanos.”

We walked out and through the living room, where the girl sat on the sectional couch, giving the toddler a short bottle of juice. I followed Vonda Jeter into the hallway, past a bathroom and then four bedrooms, which were really two rooms divided by particle-board in one and a shower curtain hung on laundry cord in the other. Three of the rooms contained single beds and scuffed dressers and small television sets on nightstands or chairs. In one of the rooms, the younger brother of the toddler’s father slept on his back, bare-chested in his shorts, with one forearm draped over his eyes. Vonda Jeter directed me into the last room, which she said was Calvin’s. She pulled on a string that hung from the ceiling and switched on a light.

The room was windowless, paneled in mock birch, separated from its other half by a chair-supported board running floor to ceiling. An unfinished dresser stood flush against the paneling, and next to that an army-issue footlocker. Some change lay on the top of the dresser, along with a set of house keys on a rabbit’s foot chain and a knit cap with the word TIMBERLAND stitched in gold across the front.

“The detective, that Mr. Johnson? He went through C–C-Calvin’s stuff.”

I looked back at Vonda Jeter. Her eyes, yellow and lifeless before, had moistened now and pinkened at the rims.

“Do you have a photograph of Calvin that I could borrow? In the meantime, I’d just like to have a quick look around. I won’t disturb anything.”

“Go on ahead,” she said, and walked from the room without another word.

I went through the dresser drawers, found nothing to study or keep. As a teenager, I had always kept a shoe box in my dresser filled with those things most important to me, and in fact, I still had it; Calvin’s drawers were filled with clothing, nothing more, almost obsessively arranged, as if he had no personal connection to his own life.

In the foock3"›In totlocker, a basketball sat in the corner on a folded, yellowed copy of D.C. This Week. Several shirts hung on wire, along with a couple of pairs of neatly pressed trousers. I ran the back of my hand along the print rayon shirts, my knuckle tapping something in one of the breast pockets. I reached into the pocket and withdrew a pack of matches: the Fire House, a bar on 22nd and P in Northwest. Across town, and in more ways than one a long distance from home. I slipped the matchbook into my shirt pocket, switched off the light, and left the room.

Vonda Jeter stood in the living room, by the door. I stepped around the couch and met her there. She handed me a photograph of a tough, unsmiling Calvin wearing a suit jacket and tie. He looked nothing like the boy I had seen lying in the river.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Whatever you can do,” she said, looking away.

She opened the door. I stepped out, quickly took the concrete steps up the stairwell, and walked out into the white sunlight. I heard her door close behind me as I moved across the grass.

I went to my car, unlocked it, and rolled the windows down. The father of the toddler, the game player from the couch, stood looking under the hood of a burnt orange 240Z parked beside my Dodge. He wore shorts that fell below his knees and a black T-shirt showing Marley hitting a blunt. Like most of the young men I had seen that day, he was narrow-waisted, thin, and muscled, with hair shaved to the scalp, broken by a short part. I put him somewhere at the tail end of his teens.

“Is it burnin’ a lot of oil?” I said, walking up beside him.

He pulled the dipstick, read it, wiped it off with a cranberry red rag, and pushed it back down into the crankcase.

“Nick Stefanos,” I said, extending my hand. “It’s Barry, isn’t it?” He ignored the question and my gesture. “These old Zs, they’re trouble. But they do have style. The two-forties have those headlights-”

“Somethin’ I can do for you? ’Cause if not, whyn’t you just go on about your business.” He closed the hood, wiped his hands off on the rag.

I placed my card on top of the hood. He read it from where he stood without picking it up.

“I’m looking for Roland Lewis,” I said. “Thought maybe he could tell me something about Calvin’s death.”

“That punk,” he muttered heavily, staring at the asphalt. He went around to the driver’s side and began to fold himself into the bucket. I could see some sort of garishly colored uniform thrown on the floor behind the seat.

“Let me ask you something, Barry,” I said, stopping him. “What do you think happened to Calvin? At least you can tell me that.”

He stopped, chuckled cynically, and looked me in the eyes for the first time. “What do I think happened? Whyn’t you just take a look around you, chief, check out what we got goin’ on down here.” Barry made a sweeping gesture with his hand and lowered his voice. “Cn voice. alvin died, man. He died.”

He got into his car, started it, and backed out of the lot. My card blew off the hood, fluttered to the asphalt. It landed next to a fast-food wrapper dark with grease. I left it there, climbed into my Dodge, and steered it back onto the street.

I stopped for another can of beer at Division Liquors and went back to my car, where I found some dope in the glove box and rolled a joint. I smoked half the number driving across town, slid an English Beat into the deck. By the time I hit my part of the world, upper 14th around Hamilton, “Monkey Murders” poured out of the rear-deck speakers of my Dodge, and I was tapping out the rhythms on my steering wheel, and singing, too, and many of the things I had seen that day seemed washed away.