Neely Tucker - Murder, D.C.

“Well,” she said, chewing her toast. “Wait a minute. Doesn’t sound all that bad, you put it that way. You want me to shoot it?”

He was drowning his waffle in syrup and looked up. “You said last night the great Alexis de Rossi was on R and R.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I could shoot a splashy something for you, for the Sunday takeout. I’m not running out there to do a daily on this rich little snot, I’ll tell you that, but I wouldn’t mind seeing what you’re up to. Keep an eye on you while I’m here.”

“How long is that again?”

“A week. Ten days. You know home leave. Doctor, dentist, bosses, shop-ops.”

The thing he liked about Alex-well, other than she’d never ask him about Nadia, instinctively knowing not to intrude on the truly private, and that she looked fabulous with her clothes off-was that he didn’t have to tell her the Bend was dicey, that it was violent, and ask her did she really want to do this. Alex, she’d done the civil war in Nicaragua, shit in El Salvador he didn’t even want to know about, guerrillas in the jungle, and that was before he’d met her in South Africa. The Bend wouldn’t come close to making her Top 10 Hellhole list.

“If they’re eyeballing you to make sure you’re good to go back abroad,” she said, finishing off the omelet-god, the woman could eat-“then knock this story out of the park, pass Go and collect your two hundred. Maybe I get some art to help get them juiced. Nobody on Metro is doing shit, artwise, at least that I can see. And stop popping off at people in the office. Your name came up at dinner. Eddie said you were ‘brilliant but erratic,’ and I nearly spewed my pinot. You get crossways of Eddie? You are so fucked.”

“Great tip.”

“See? That. That’s going to get you in trouble. Or more of it. Now. Today. Do some fucking work. Where you headed?”

“Track down the dead kid’s mom, his friends, touch base with some folks in the hood, maybe the cop who caught the case.”

“Good. You need to start wowing them again.”

“Second person in two days to tell me that.”

“They seem to be pegging you as more erratic than brilliant.”

“Keep fucking with me, go ahead.”

“Get this thing rolling, I’ll swing down by the Bend tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? What is it you’re so busy with today?”

“The Madison,” she said, stifling a yawn. “I’ll be very busy at the Madison’s spa. I need a massage and a good nap. Some Cajun kept me up half of last night. What’s with you and the bondage thing, anyhow?”

BACK HOME WITHAlexis bundled off in a taxi, he went into the kitchen and made himself a morning mint julep. The pewter cup frozen, the tang of the herb, the frozen ice rattling-got damn . Bourbon. It was evidence there might be a benevolent God after all.

He sat down and looked at the phone. The night and morning with Alexis had cheered him, given him energy and a sense of calm, but there was no getting around looking at the worst part of the job: calling the mother of the recently and unnaturally dead.

Another long pull on the julep and the dread of punching the digits eased the tiniest of fractions, some tic in the back of his head faded, pressure being released from a valve. He blinked. He let out a long, slow breath, reminding himself to clean up any hints of his accent. Then he quit dicking around and punched in the number for the home of Delores Ellison and from that moment on, he knew it wasn’t going to end until he could tell her what had happened to her son. You didn’t wade into the realm of the dead unless you had a purpose.

The phone rang several times, and when it picked up he was about to start his spiel into voice mail when a woman’s voice said hello.

“Hello?” he said.

“Yes, hello?” The voice sounded tired, exasperated.

“Hello, ah, I thought I hit the recording. My name’s Sully Carter, I’m a reporter for the paper? And I was trying to reach Delores Ellison, in reference to her son, William Ellison.”

Air.

Then, “Yes. This is his mother. This is Delores.”

He blinked twice, rapidly, kicking into gear. He had thirty seconds, perhaps a minute to gain her trust or lose her. “Ms. Ellison, I hate to bother you, but it’s my job today to write a story about William and who he was and, what-what-all you lost with him.”

More air.

Then the woman’s voice said, “Billy. We called him Billy. His dad, we called William.”

“Yes, ma’am, Billy. I-”

“Everybody who knew him two minutes called him Billy.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“His father’s been dead fifteen years now.”

“I heard about that, and I was sorry to have done so.”

“I just-I just-thank you for your interest in my son. He was the last piece of me on this earth. He was the last of the family, of the entire Ellison line.”

Medicated. She was laced on the stuff. The slowed speech, the precise diction, the world seeming to move at underwater speed, the world above water too painful to navigate, the crushing burden of sunlight.

“Yes, ma’am. You do have someone with you right now, don’t you?”

“Yes-what? Yes. A lot of people are here.”

“That’s great. That’s the best way to handle it. Ms. Ellison, I do not want to intrude in any way, but I have a very short period of time in which to write a story about who Billy was, and what he had going for him in life, and I hate-well, I just don’t talk to people over the phone in this type of situation. I’d like to come by for a few minutes and sit down next to you for a minute and let you talk about Billy. Just as little or as much as you’d like.”

He pinched one eye shut, hating how he sounded. Even working from a place of sincerity, cold-calling the relatives of the dead could only sound like a ghoulish pitch.

Still, you choked that down and you started with Momma. No matter where you went on the planet, if somebody under thirty got dead, the first thing any half-ass hack did was turn around to the next guy standing there and say, “Where’s his momma?”

Dads were not terrible by default. You could work with Dad, if you could find him. But the problem was, when dads lost their children? They tended to be angry or stoic or ready to whip your ass just for showing up. Worst, the absolute worst of all, they’d break down crying, great gut-wrenching sobs that left them leaning on a woman’s shoulder or bent over with hands on knees or-Sully’d had this happen-a grown man falling over on you, keening and sobbing, and you could feel the soul leaving the body, a great black blob that would then crawl over your skin and the flesh would shrivel and there was nothing to do but absorb it, let it go through you.

And the guy in HR asking him, Why do you drink?

Maternal grief was as terrifying in its own way, true. The absolute hollow to the eyes, the voice you had to lean forward to hear, the way they would reach for your arm as they stood up and it felt like a leaf, like a dry and brittle leaf that fluttered across your wrist. Still, this was more in the course of gender expectations. The hollow-eyed mother was a kind of shorthand for Grief Eternal. And since newspapers were a kind of societal shorthand, everyone just understood it better. So you wound up going for Momma.

Down the line, Delores Ellison was still considering his proposition, breathing lightly into the phone. Sully tried to picture the room she was in, what she was looking at-the refrigerator, the television on with the sound off, pictures of her dead son, herself in the mirror-and what was going through her mind.

“Ms. Ellison?”

“Yes?”

“Just making sure you’re still with me,” he said.