Neely Tucker - Murder, D.C.

“Because, well, I don’t know. Ask him. I was over there at the American Studies program office, you know, where Billy was majoring, and asking around, and Ted said that you knew Billy pretty well. Then he brought me over here, looking for you.”

“I eat here every day,” Elliot said. “I’m a senior. I’m in the ASP, too.”

“Well, I guess that’s why Ted brought me here. So Billy must have sat right here where I am?”

Elliot looked uncomfortable but took a bite of his sandwich and said, “Yes. The next chair over. No. To your left.”

“So you guys were pretty good friends. How did you say you found out he had, ah, died?”

“The television, like I said. And then everybody was talking about it. Well, wait. First everybody was saying, ‘Where’s Billy?’ ’cause he wasn’t around for a couple of days, and that was weird. You’d usually see him. He was around. And then there was the television and then all the professors knew. They put out a statement.”

“Before you found out he was dead, did you try to reach him? Since he didn’t show for lunch, or class?”

“Oh, yeah, to see if he was at home sick or something.”

“And he didn’t answer?”

“Well, he was dead, so, no.”

Sully flipped a page in the notebook and resisted the urge to lean right over and smack the little twerp, a line like that. “So a couple of days would have gone by before you called him, right?”

“I guess. It was the weekend. I wasn’t looking at a calendar. He wasn’t at class, wasn’t at lunch, so I called his apartment. There was no answer.”

“Now I’m with you. Remember the last time you saw him?”

“You’re asking a lot of questions.”

“It’s sort of the job description.”

Elliot squinted. “Thursday? Thursday afternoon. Lunch. I saw him at lunch on Thursday.”

“Hunh. Right here? He seem upset about anything?”

Elliot shook his head, loose black bangs, a library reading-room pallor to his features, the kid reminding him of a young Lou Reed. “No. Not really.”

“What’d you guys talk about?”

“My thesis. I’m wrapping it up. It’s a senior year project. You have to have it to graduate in American Studies. It’s a multidisciplinary degree. Arts, sciences, politics. You have to pick an era. So I’m near the end of it. Billy, he was asking about that, since he had his coming up next year.”

“What was he going to do it on?”

“Something about black life in D.C. in the 1920s and 1930s, you know, the New Negro Movement, the Harlem Renaissance. He was researching it, tying it in to his family.”

“Un-hunh,” Sully said. “Where was Billy’s place? His apartment?”

“It was… there-what is that, Thirty-fourth Street? I always just walked over, you know, you ever do that? Just walk someplace all the time and not know the streets? I don’t even know the address. He had some parties, sometimes. It was before you get to Wisconsin. Lots of row houses. He was staying in one of those little old wooden places, you know that looks like a can of saltine crackers turned on its side? He was renting one of those.”

“You guys hang out?”

“Some, I don’t know. Maybe. What do you mean, ‘hang out’? We had History 181 together. It’s a req.”

And then, with that same flat voice, devoid of inflection, not looking up, with all the other information he was going to get already in hand, Sully tossed out the real question, the reason he’d come. “So Billy was one of the campus hookups for a little ganja and coke, right?”

Elliot stopped chewing and looked at him. “Not that I know of.”

“Hunh.”

“Why do you even think that?”

“Well, the place that police think he was shot? It’s a major drug market. Hard to picture him having another reason for being over there.”

Elliot resumed chewing and didn’t say anything.

“So, okay, any problems you’d noticed about Billy recently? Either last Friday or before? He angry, scared, upset? Anything at all?”

Dabbing a napkin to his lips, Elliot said, “No. Well.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, what we talked about, not so much history, but what we talked about a lot, was him and his mother.”

“His mother? Him and his mother? What about them?”

“Well, she was kind of, and don’t print this, but she was kind of a pain. They’d just gotten in a huge fight on Friday night, the day after I saw him last. He called me, crying, really really upset.”

“What about?”

“Ah, I don’t know. She just came down on him so hard all the time. She was just so… negative.”

Sully making eye contact, trying to draw something from the kid. “I could see how you could kind of say that.”

“And Billy was so open with her, so honest, and she just-it was all about law school, the career, making partner, doing as well as his dad.”

“Hunh. And Billy, he just wasn’t-”

Elliot was looking over the table at him, a quizzical expression crossing his freckled face, his manner so earnest, god you had to love kids, they were just-

“I mean,” he said, “you know that Billy was gay, right? That we were partners? That this is what we’re talking about?”

THEY HAD PUTyellow crime scene tape up at the bottom of P Street, blocking off the sidewalk that led down to the Bend. There was a crime scene truck and one marked vehicle and three or four unmarked Crown Vics that might as well have been painted iridescent orange for all the good it did. A uniformed cop stopped him at the tape, but Sully showed him his ID and told him Weaver was waiting on him. The uniform rattled that off on his walkie-talkie, and a corresponding squawk-Sully had no idea what it said-led him to raise the tape, looking off in the distance, letting Sully under, not really giving a damn about it one way or the other.

Weaver, the detective, was way down there, one hand against the bedraggled cherry tree on the Bend’s namesake knob of land, his tie fluttering off his chest and back down again in the wind. Weaver had dark slacks and an unbuttoned sport coat, the gun holstered on the right hip. His sunglasses were pushed up on his head and he was eating a sandwich still half in a plastic wrapper. In his left hand he held a can of soda.

It was five minutes after two. Five hours, more or less, till deadline.

“How you living, detective?” Sully said, raising his voice to be heard above the wind. There were two techs working around the set of small orange cones in the grass, more or less in a triangle, fifty feet forward, nearer the water. They looked up at Sully, then at Weaver, then turned back, poring over the grass, the dirt.

Weaver, still chewing, held a hand up, a stop sign, then rolled the fingers forward, as in gimme a minute, while he finished. “We got a location,” he said, taking a slurp of the soda, “of a pool of blood over there. And a shoe, down by the water.”

“So this is what John was talking about, the new evidence. They Ellison’s? The blood? The shoe?”

“Got to wait for a match on either,” he said. “Techs just scraped the blood this morning. It wasn’t bad cop work. We’d foot-walked the place twice, missed it. It’s over there near that red little flag, see that? Some grass, by that patch of dirt? Looks like somebody tried to kick dirt over it, bury it. The shoe was down in the rocks there, with some other trash, where you see the red flag with the number two on it. His mother IDed it as his, for what that’s worth.”

“It’s been, what, two days now? Will they be able to match the blood?”

A breeze came up and it fluttered Weaver’s plastic sandwich wrapper and he had to snap a hand out to catch it, shrugging off the question. Sully didn’t know much about him, only that he was a uniform who had made detective four or five years back and had a solid rep, particularly down here in 1-D. Late thirties, a shade over six feet, serious time in the gym. If he hit you-and Sully didn’t doubt he’d popped some noncompliant dudes upside the head-you’d stay hit. He was lifting the bread on his sandwich, looking critically inside, then replacing it. “This, what we’re talking about, it’s off the record, right?”