Neely Tucker - The Ways of the Dead

The yellow police tape that had been blocking off the street during the Sarah Reese investigation was back, but this time one light pole farther up the block. Another squad car was parked diagonally across the street, in almost exactly the same spot as before. There were other squad cars down the street. Sully approached an unmarked car with the door open. A hand emerged from the window, waving him closer.

He limped down the middle of the street, ducking under the yellow tape.

“You showed,” John Parker said, sunglasses propped on his shaved head. He was wearing a light brown suit, a dark brown tie over a starched white shirt, sitting in the front seat.

“You promised spectacular.”

“I did. And I’ll deliver. Right after you tell me how you learned about that little takedown yesterday.” He got out of the car, his suit coat falling just so, the broad tie knotted perfectly at the neck. Sully always meant to ask him how he got the knot like that.

“Come on, man.”

“Was it from us?”

“What, you worried I’m dating someone else?”

“Fun is fun and leaks are leaks, Sully, but that was in a different category. I’m trying to get control of this group, the squad. You know how bad we are right now? And that leak, brother, was high level.”

“You know I can’t say.”

“Was it from us?”

Sully paused, let out a breath for the theater of it. “No.”

“Alright,” John nodding, eyeing him, seeing if he believed it. “Alright, then. I’ll settle for it. I find out different, I’m not going to be amused, at you or your snitch. But you watch your ass, you hear? This is big-boy shit.”

“Noted. Hey. You got any guys working out of a blue Olds? Beefy white boys, plainclothes?”

“Not out of our shop. Somebody bothering you?”

“Not yet.”

“Also,” John said, touching his fingertips to his temples, bringing them back down, “before I forget. The beach house. Already booked for Christmas and New Year’s.”

“Super Bowl?”

“I can check. Mrs. Parker handles all that. Summer is still mostly open.”

“Never liked the beach in the summer. Winter is terrific. It’s deserted.” He nodded and lifted his chin to point farther down the street at the squad cars. Officers and lab techs were walking out of the house at the end of the block. “So what’s the attraction?”

John let out a sigh. “Noel Pittman. What’s left of her, anyhow.”

Sully coughed, the late night, the whiskey. It wasn’t what he was expecting.

“The girl from Howard?”

“Found her late yesterday, ID’d her this morning through the dentals. She was in the basement. It’s packed dirt with a wood floorboard over it, like big plywood panels with carpet over them? She was in this tight little space down there, covered up with a lot of trash and junk.”

“You guys had a cadaver dog in there?”

John blew out his lips in a raspberry, leaning on the car door. Twenty-three years on the force, started on the street, it was all white guys running Homicide, the big cases, and now here he was, the lieutenant, trying to get the homicide unit off its dysfunctional ass, kicking the shit with a reporter on a Monday morning, the rotting body his problem now.

“Fat fucking chance. Uniform just out the academy is doing a recanvass, seeing if somebody remembers something they forgot the other night about Sarah Reese. Him and a partner. Mr. Gung Ho goes to the abandoned house, 788, knocks, and, instead of saying it’s just empty, does a walk-through. Goes down to the basement. Sees a pile of old chairs, some lumber, stacked up odd in the middle of the floor. Pokes around, sees bones.”

“Goddamn.”

“Goddamn.”

“That was impressive.”

“I may make him chief of detectives.”

“Any connection to Sarah Reese?”

“Just the geography, apparently. Pittman lived right up there. That house, 742, at the end of the block.”

“So who owns this place?”

“The bank. Foreclosed on two years ago, some guy out of Delaware buying houses, trying to flip them.”

“What about-?” He was going to ask about Lana Escobar getting it on the baseball field, but skipped it. “What about-where-I mean, Pittman’s body’s been there the whole time?”

“I’d suppose but I don’t know.”

“Didn’t, ah, didn’t you guys search the hood after she went missing?”

“Some, it turns out, but not much. She was last seen pulling out of the club, not back here. We never found her car. And look, hey-this was a missing persons case, okay, not homicide. We have a hard enough time with our own.”

“Wouldn’t there have been a smell, though?”

“You may have noticed the crack squats on this block? The ones everybody’s scattered from this morning?”

“I have.”

“They all sorta smell.”

“Jesus H.”

“Yeah. You ever see the pictures of Pittman?”

“Nah. I mean, yeah, the one on the flier.”

“No, I mean the pictures. Girl was a model. Naughty model. Posed nude. They got around the department when she went missing. She’d done a test shoot, I think it was for Playboy . Girl-on-girl stuff.”

“I’m just a polite boy from a small town on the big river, John.”

“You won’t be after you see these.”

“Could you assist in a viewing of same?”

“Probably.”

Sully thought for a minute, the beer truck guy, Rodney Wilson, the bitterness, the black and brown girls, no word in the papers.

“I’m gonna write about this one, I think, Lieutenant Parker. You show me the naughty pictures? It’ll count as research.” He looked over the hood of the car, down toward the row house on the left side of the street, with squad cars out front and two officers standing on the front porch. “Anybody down there to talk to?”

John half turned in his seat, then turned back to Sully. “Just the techs scraping the place. Chief came and went. Mayor, too, since there was a TV camera.”

“This broke this morning?”

“While you were at your love-in. Saw your colleague up here earlier. Who was it, that fat one?”

“Chris. I’m surprised the desk didn’t-” And he thought of his call with Melissa the night before. She’d just paid him back. Well well well. This was getting better by the goddamned hour.

Twenty-five minutes later, he was walking into the newsroom, past the rows of cubicles, moving at a clip. His backpack was slung over a shoulder, and he’d stopped at the cafeteria downstairs for a soda, needing the caffeine. R.J. must have seen him getting off the elevator because here he was, already out of his chair, a tall, meaty blur moving toward him, heading him off before he got close to Melissa’s desk. R.J. shook a fist, bluff and hearty, booming out congratulations on the arrest story from last night.

“No one else was even there ,” he said. “Not even television. They’re crediting your story on the networks with the narrative of how it went down. Brand X didn’t have anything. ”

He guffawed, but Sully could see it in his eyes, the searching, seeing if he knew about the Noel Pittman discovery, testing the waters to see how angry he was, to see if he had the breath of bourbon on him.

Sully played it low-key. “So, hey, I was out at Princeton Place just now? Turns out I was the last one to the Noel Pittman party. Hear Chris was out there two hours back.”

R.J. peered at him over his bifocals, the bow tie at his neck, the beefy frame, the still-black hair oiled, the close-cropped beard. He had Norman Mailer bluster when he wanted, or he could sit and cross his legs, the dapper newspaperman, professorial, discussing not his first Pulitzer, but the second, still keeping himself between Sully and Melissa, who was somewhere back there in Metro.