Neely Tucker - Murder, D.C.

“That’s because there isn’t much. I told you. We’re sailing the magical Sea of Inbetween, located between the continents of What We Know and What We Can Print. We know the kid was gay, doing drugs, and got shot in the Bend at about midnight on Monday night, by person or persons unknown. The only part of that we can print is none of it.”

“So you’re still thinking he, what, was hanging out at the O Street clubs and got into a coke deal a few blocks over?”

“I guess. You ever see him down there? The clubs?” And now Sully looked up and made eye contact, since he was asking his boss a question about his private life.

“El and I are a little long in the tooth for O Street,” R.J. said. “They had bathhouses down there before the health department made them shut down, back in the eighties. The AIDS situation.”

“Club Washington is still up and working.”

“It’s not a bathhouse.”

“They got little booths and X-rated movies. They call it a twenty-four-hour gym.”

“It’s not a bathhouse per se.”

“You sound pretty familiar for somebody who says they don’t go down there.”

“So do you.”

“Would you ask around?” Sully said. “You’re a society guy. Billy was society. It seems like you might could do a little reporting here.”

R.J. shuffled his feet, rubbed the back of his hand across his nose. “I can tell you Billy wasn’t out, if that’s what you’re asking. I know Delores, and an openly gay son would have been known in her circle. As a liability, I mean. Washington, conservative Washington-most particularly black conservative Washington-isn’t fashion forward on the issue. But that doesn’t mean anything. A lot of people are closeted, but it turns out this is a pretty big closet. Members of the closeted tribe are known to one another. They’re also known to those who are out, who keep their mouths shut. The agreed-upon meeting zone, from the city to the cops to the most closeted of the closeted, is O Street. Now. I myself haven’t been closeted since Stonewall. But, see, that’s why the O Street clubs exist-you won’t be seen by anybody who’s not a member of the tribe. It’s the social comfort zone for those both out and not.”

“And this applies, white and black? Gay and lesbian?”

“Mostly white, mostly gay. But yeah. Everybody. Washington is too small, too buttoned-down for two gay strips.”

“Ah.”

“All this discussion of gay chic and you still haven’t said what and when you’re filing. Melissa, you remember her? The editor of the section? She is most interested to know. She still doesn’t like you much, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“Soon and not much. I have a very helpful statement here from Shellie Stevens. It mentions that young master Billy had ‘been troubled by narcotics’ but had completed a ‘summer of therapy’ at the Rosenthal Center, which is I guess what they’re going to count as acknowledgment of his drug dealing.”

“It sounds like a spa.”

“Turns out it’s this inpatient rehab center up in Bethesda.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Neither had I. Incredibly discreet. And small. Like, ten beds. You go in for your seventy days and tell people you spent the summer in Provence.”

“So, okay. I say we write it short, just a straight bio, and hold our powder for the longer story on the Bend. That’s going to need to run on Sunday. And Stevens really told you he’d hit you with a restraining order?”

“He really did.”

“You have a way about you.”

“It’s a gift.”

“So, so,” R.J. said, patting at the chest pocket on his shirt, like he was looking for something that was usually there but wasn’t this time, the focus going from his eyes, his shoulders shifting, losing their frame, losing interest in the conversation, “fine, fine. Keep it to fifteen and kick it to me soon.” He turned and started walking off, still with the pocket thing, and then, with a graceful turn, he spun on a heel and came back. Leaning over the cubicle, his voice a whisper, his eyes suddenly alert behind the glasses, he looked like a bright-eyed owl with an attitude problem.

“Secrets has the only male full-nude striptease show on the East Coast,” R.J. stage whispered. “Of course we’ve checked it out. We’re not old queens sitting at home with our knitting.”

Filing a basic story, a blip that would keep Melissa off his back and wouldn’t piss off Stevens just yet-he wondered if they taught this in J-school, if you paid professors to teach you how to walk this tightrope :

The slaying of Billy Ellison, the scion of one of D.C.’s most prominent society families, has local and federal investigators scouring the banks of the Washington Channel for clues after his body was found floating in the channel Tuesday afternoon. Ellison, 21, a junior at Georgetown University and the son of…

He made it back home just before eight, a light mist falling. He walked inside long enough to open the fridge, pull out deli slices of cheese and turkey, roll one slice around the other, and eat it standing up in the kitchen, staring at the little green clock numbers on the microwave. Then he did another.

If he called Alexis, that would be good to set up their reporting for tomorrow, but he didn’t want to get stuck in a longer conversation. And if she said she wanted to have dinner, he’d have to go and he was too jittery for that. So he put some things in his gym bag and walked through the dripping streets toward Eastern Market, letting the rain bead on his forehead, the hush of an early evening on the Hill, the only sound his cycle boots on the narrow brick sidewalks, the orange glow of the streetlights filtered by the overhanging branches, walking from light to shadow and back again.

The natatorium was a nondescript concrete one-story building set back from the street, deep in the shadows, a few yards behind the long thin redbrick buildings of the market.

Inside, Henry the pool guy nodded, not even asking for his ID. The air was heavy with chlorine and a dank odor that he could never place, something that could only live in dim fluorescent light. Shucking out of his pants and shirt in the locker room, he pulled on his trunks and reemerged, dropping feet first into the heated pool, hurrying now. He pulled on the goggles and spit in them, wiping the lens clean, and then pushed off, closing his eyes, floating and drifting. The rain seemed to melt into the pool and he melted into the water, the idea soothing to his frazzled brain, the reason he came here, the escape. Billy Ellison couldn’t find him here, nor could any of his bosses or the likes of Shellie Stevens, not the memory of Nadia or any of the other dead whose faces floated past him in sleep, the land of dreams a disturbing realm of blackness that held as many ghosts as it did waves of peace. He could never tell what lay in wait for him in bed each night, the nightmares or the black slate of nothingness.

He was the only swimmer this late, closing time swinging near, and he reached out with an overhand stroke now, then another, pulling himself through the water with a grace he did not possess on land. It enveloped him, the water, the empty pool, the one place where he did not limp, where his scarred face drew no stares, the hollow nervous burning in his gut gone, dissipated. There was only his breathing, the pleasant tug on the lungs, the peaceful blue monotony of the bottom of the pool, the vacant white ceiling on the backstrokes, the lovely numbness of it all, no thoughts of the past or the killings in the present and no idea of the future, and this reverie was broken only at the end of one of these laps, when he saw a man’s hand dangle down in the water ahead of him, the fingers waving back and forth.