George Pelecanos: Shoedog

Constantine took Katherine in the yellow light that spilled in from the streetlight outside the window.

Katherine showered while Constantine freshened his drink. He sat on the edge of the bed and sipped vodka, listening to the water run behind the door. After a while it stopped running and ten minutes later Katherine walked out into the room.

She was dressed and made up exactly as she had been when he had looked at her in the lobby through the smoked glass of the lounge. He watched her walk to the dresser and clasp her watch to her wrist. He watched her straighten herself in the dresser mirror.

She looked at his reflection in the mirror as she pulled the cuff of her shirt down over her watch. For the first time that night he could not see a trace of the girl in the woman’s face.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Katherine said. “Why did you have to do that?”

Constantine butted his cigarette in the night-table ashtray. “It was the one thing we never did,” he said.

She looked him over. “So that’s what it’s about for you. New experience. Nothing deeper than that.”

Constantine shrugged unconsciously. Katherine’s eyes glazed.

“You want to know something?” she said, their eyes still connected in the mirror. “What I told you earlier, about those good times we had-that was all bullshit, Constantine. The truth is, I’ve got a life now, and a career, and a beautiful family. When I look at my children, and I think I ever knew guys like you, it just makes me feel dirty.”

Constantine said, “How do you think you’re going to feel when you look at them tonight?”

Katherine took her eyes from the mirror and picked her handbag up off the dresser. She tucked it under her arm and walked with her head up to the door. She opened the door and walked out, closing it softly behind her.

Constantine listened to her footsteps in the hall, and when he heard the bell of the elevator he rose and stepped over to the window. A minute later Katherine walked through the lobby doors and out onto the sidewalk below.

He watched her step off the curb into the wet street. A car filled with kids passed in front of her and accelerated at a puddle. Katherine stepped back and avoided the splash. She wound her straight hair back behind one ear, walking with a forced bounce in her step as she crossed the street. She slipped once on a patch of slick asphalt, the heel of her pump sliding out from under her. But she caught herself, and quickly put the key to the lock of her imported sedan. Katherine lit the smooth ignition, pulled away from the curb, and drove north toward the suburbs.

Constantine turned his head, stared deeply into the darkness of the motel room. So that was over now too.

Constantine sat freshly showered under the cloth awning of the motel the next morning at nine o’clock, his backpack leaning up against the brick wall at his side. The rain had continued in spasms through the night and now came steadily and with the added push of wind. He smoked and listened to the hiss of the southbound tires on the wet street.

The yellow Super Bee approached just after nine and stopped at the curb, pointing north. Constantine put his Jansport over his shoulder and trotted through the rain, across the street to the car. He threw his pack in the backseat and climbed in next to Polk.

“Mornin’,” Polk said.

“Morning.”

Polk wore the blue windbreaker buttoned high, with a triangle of white T-shirt showing below the neck. He held a styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand, a small ring of plastic cut from the top. He took another full cup off the dash and handed it to Constantine.

“This’ll start us off,” he said.

Constantine tore a piece from the lid. He blew on the steam that twisted out of the hole before he sipped. He took his Marlboros out of the breast pocket of his denim shirt and tossed them onto the deck of the dash. It was a gesture to let Polk know that the cigarettes were theirs. The ride south was going to be long, and everything from then on would be cut straight down the middle.

They rode out toward the suburbs of Wheaton and caught the Beltway east. A half hour later they were on Route 4, and soon after that the crispness of country had returned to the air. Gradually the traffic died out and then it seemed to be just the two of them and the occasional pickup passing from the opposite direction. Constantine noticed a stone marker at the head of the unnamed two-lane that they had taken the previous day. Polk turned onto the road and gave the Dodge some gas.

They drove past woods and took a wide curve, past more woods fenced with a split rail, and then a clearing. The big colonial sat back in the clearing. Polk slowed and steered the Super Bee between the squat brick pillars, stopping at the iron gate. He glanced at his watch and shifted in the bench.

Through the windshield Constantine could see the figure with the field glasses framed above the portico in the center window. The figure moved out of the frame, and the iron gate opened inward. Polk eased through the gate and drove toward the house.

A thickly barred cage containing a doghouse stood thirty yards to the left of the house. In front of the doghouse, behind the bars, a black Doberman lay calmly on its belly, its thick head up and tracking the movement of the Dodge. The bars on the cage matched the thickness of those on the front gate.

They stopped the car between a late model Buick and the black Olds, where Polk cut the engine. Constantine retrieved the smokes off the dash and slipped them into his breast pocket. He turned to look at Polk.

“In and out, right Polk?”

“That’s right, Connie. A quick twenty grand, and then we walk.” Polk glanced in the rearview, wet his fingers with his tongue, and ran the fingers through the bristles of his flattop. “You’re going to see some shit in there, and hear a little bit too. It’s smoke, that’s all you gotta remember. They’re nothing but hoods. So keep quiet and don’t sweat it.”

“All right.”

Polk pulled back on the interior latch. “Let’s go.”

They got out of the car and took the three steps up to the front door, Polk grasping the railing for support. He pushed on an oval button set to the left of the door while Constantine studied the brick face of the house. Floodlights hung from the top corners, facing out toward the lawn.

The door opened. Gorman, skinny and gray, stood back in the frame. He nodded at Polk and jerked his head back and up. Constantine marked Gorman as a boozehound, but there was something else-drugs, maybe, and nothing designer-that was eating off the color in his complexion and in his eyes.

They walked behind him through a white marble foyer, past large open rooms done in green leather and dark wood. Two staircases bookended the foyer, leading like bowed legs to the upstairs landing. Gorman chose the left, and they fell in behind him. Constantine ran his hand along the shiny cherry-wood banister as he ascended the marble stairs.

The landing ran square around the second floor, with double doors centered in each wall. Gorman walked them around to the wall situated at the front of the house. He knocked twice on the door, turned the brass knob, and stepped in. Polk and Constantine followed.

Two men sat in armchairs upholstered in green leather, in front of a cherry-wood desk set next to the large bay window that gave a view out onto the lawn. One of the men was Valdez. The other, a lean man with muttonchop sideburns, wore an open-necked lime green shirt tucked into pleated tan slacks. Neither he nor Valdez looked up or acknowledged the entrance. The lean man was using a thin metal file to pick dirt from his thumbnail.

Behind the desk sat a trim older man with short, slicked gray hair. He wore a navy sport blazer over a green polo shirt. His tan face was tight and handsome.