Neely Tucker - The Ways of the Dead

“Well, now wait. Are we talking to put in the newspaper? Because, I don’t mind telling you, I don’t want to spend another night at MPD going over the same damn things with detectives fifty-eight times and looking at photo arrays until three in the morning. It was the one time I regretted bringing Bettie up here.”

“Why so?”

“Well, look, she’s my aunt, you know. Lost her job at the nursing home back home-we’re from just outside of Newport News-had to be five years ago now. Some cousins called me and put me up to offering her a job. She’s been fine, if you can get past the soap operas, but she was a damned embarrassment in the police station. Screaming and hollering and crying.”

“I imagine she was pretty scared.”

“She’s thinking those guys in the store, or their friends, are going to come in and shoot us to pieces.”

“It’s not totally paranoid.”

“No, but-” He pulled off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Sully could see the slight bags around the eyes, testament that he wasn’t sleeping well himself. “But there’s a way things are done. You just don’t-well. You didn’t come here to listen to family woes. What is it you wanted?”

“Just to hear a little bit more about what happened. And to find out a little more about Noel Pittman, if you know anything. It’s her I’m actually writing about.”

“Pittman? I thought this was about Sarah Reese?”

“It’s a little bit about both. And about Lana Escobar, the young woman who got killed up on the baseball field last summer.”

Doyle did not look pleased.

“Okay, that was what you wrote in the paper that’s got everybody so upset. Look. We’re barely getting by here, and this thing is bad for us, bad for the neighborhood. I can’t have the store in the paper again, not like this. Bettie might lose what’s left of her mind.”

“Off the record. Just for my information, so I’ll have a better understanding of what’s happening.”

“It’s not going to help you much. You already know Bettie was the last to see the little Reese girl alive, except for whoever killed her, I suppose. The girl got scared of the three black kids. She ran out the back door, Bettie said. We didn’t know anything until, I don’t know, half an hour later, something like that, when the police came in.”

“Did she come past you here? In the office?”

“To get to the back door, she would have had to go through that walkway we just did,” he said, and put his glasses back on. “But I can’t tell you for sure. I was at home. I open the store in the mornings, Bettie comes in from about ten till seven or so, and I come back and work until closing. In the afternoon, I go home and take a break, a siesta, have a cold beer, something. I was down there-it’s just two blocks-when I heard all sorts of sirens. I walked the first block. When I got to the top of that rise, there at Warder, I could see all the police cars were here at the store. I ran the rest of the way.”

“So you didn’t know Sarah Reese at all?”

“Never saw her, to the best of my knowledge, till they showed me her picture at the police station.”

“What about Noel Pittman?”

He shook his head. “I read your story that said she lived here on the street, between my house and the store. But I don’t remember her any which way.”

“Lana Escobar?”

“You mean the prostitute? It’s possible if she was working out there on Georgia that she came in here to pee or get warm for a minute in the winter. I let the girls do it. Cost of doing business. But no, I didn’t know anything about her.”

“Hunh. So the day Sarah Reese got killed, nothing unusual?”

“Not until the police came banging in. It got pretty unusual after that.”

“Any creepy-looking guys, or maybe not so creepy, but guys that hang around a lot?”

“Not such as I’d call creepy. The neighborhood characters, you know. Why do you ask?”

“I got an idea, maybe those three guys didn’t kill Sarah, but maybe the killings in the neighborhood are related, something like what I wrote about, but I’m pushing it hard now. Don’t know if you saw-”

“I can’t put much to that. I mean, I just don’t know. We work right here every day, and we haven’t seen anything like that, like somebody stalking or anything.”

“Could you show me that alley back there? I don’t know exactly where they found her.”

Doyle looked at him, and Sully noticed a certain exasperation. “No, I’m sorry. You’re welcome to look yourself. I go back there to throw out the trash, and I leave through that door during the middle of the day to go home. There’s a sign that says an alarm will sound, but that’s just to scare off any shoplifters who sneak back there. So that’s all I know about the alley. I can tell you the police have put a new dumpster back there. They took the old one.”

“That stands to reason, I suppose,” Sully said, standing up. This was going nowhere.

Doyle stood with him. He ran a hand through his hair, then put his hands on his hips.

“Look, Sully, I don’t mean to be abrupt. I run a business, I keep my nose clean, and I don’t get into it with the city councilman or the neighborhood commissioner. I sponsor a kid’s basketball team in the city rec league. I don’t prosecute the shoplifting. It costs me a small fortune, but I don’t. And part of that has part to do with this… business right here. You know this as well as I do-Bettie and me are white witnesses, or whatever, against black teenagers in a murder case involving a little white girl. We don’t have a winning hand here.”

“I can see that.”

“Okay, so can you tell me what the police are saying? Do you think these guys’ friends, associates-whatever they call them, their crew-are going to come after us?”

“No, but you’re right to be careful. I bet in this case the cops must have DNA and other stuff, to have made those arrests so quickly. I bet those guys know they’ve got bigger problems to worry about than Bettie.”

Doyle nodded. He gave a brief smile that showed, at least to Sully, that he didn’t buy a bit of it. The man was, Sully thought, rattled to the bone, in a way they can’t teach you about in the military, when you have a gun and authorization to use it. Civilian life didn’t carry those kinds of comforts.

Outside, the rain clearing off, he leaned against the bike, making a call, getting John Parker at his desk.

“I tried Jensen three times, John. He’s not calling back.”

“Figured, but I can’t tell him to call you.”

“Yeah, so, okay-so okay-so let’s go at it a different way,” Sully said. “I need to look at a photo array of johns arrested in 4-D. Repeat offenders only. Their cards, it’ll have the name of the girls they worked with, right?”

“I’m not sure that’s-”

“It’s a public record, John. You know it is.”

There was a pause. “You’re wanting to see if there’s a guy who got busted with Escobar, and maybe Pittman. But Pittman wasn’t a working girl. We already ran the cards on Escobar when she got killed. She hadn’t been at it that long, didn’t have any sort of steady clientele. If there was something there to see, we would have moved on it.”

“But there’s more to look at now. It’s a bigger canvas. Maybe the guy who did Pittman, maybe he only thought she was a working girl. Maybe he’s a guy been out to Halo, followed her home. Maybe there’s somebody in the john cards, does prostitutes, got a separate record for working with a knife.”

“You’re reaching. You’re back to the idea that we got the wrong guys on Sarah Reese.”

“Escobar was strangled. Reese got her throat cut. Pittman is unknown. It’s somebody working with their hands. It’s worth looking into, at least on my clock.”