Neely Tucker - The Ways of the Dead

“Were they ever in a magazine? You know, one of the magazines with pictures of naked women?”

“I do not know. How would I know? I do not look at such things. Never if I knew it had Lana in it. I was very ashamed.”

“And angry.”

He nodded. “This was all just before she died. Maybe four, five months. It was in February. She left the house. I did not see her again. She was dead in July.”

“She left, or you threw her out?”

Hector raised his shoulders, then lowered them and looked at the table. “It was some of each, you know what I am saying? She said I was a filthy man for looking at her pictures. I said she was a nasty girl to take the pictures.” He shrugged. “She said she would go and I said okay. She found some little apartment several blocks away, on Thirteenth Street. She moved all of her things there. She did not call us. My wife-my new wife, not my old one-would call and talk to her. I did not call her.”

“When did you find out she had been killed?”

“Not until the week after she was dead. My wife, Saundra, she went to file a missing persons report. She was nervous for her. She liked Lana. She thought Lana was just angry and ashamed for the pictures, you know? And that she would calm down in some months? She did not hear from her for one week, then two. She went by the apartment-”

“Sorry to interrupt, but do you remember the exact address?”

“It was Thirteenth Street, 3508? Yes, 08. The apartment, it was 36-A.”

“Okay, good. So your wife went by there?”

“She goes by there and she sees the police tape across the front door, but she thought only that maybe she had not paid the rent and had been kicked out. She went to the police station. She filled out the forms for a missing person. That’s when they came back and said, ‘Oh, this woman is dead.’”

“But she had her ID on her when she was found, didn’t she? I mean, they identified her. Didn’t they call you?”

“No, no. Lana was my ex-wife’s niece, not my daughter. She is Escobar. I am Ramos. Hector Ramos. She was only my ex-wife’s sister’s daughter, you understand? Her mother is in Guatemala. We were not on any of the same forms.”

“You didn’t see the story in the paper? Nobody mentioned it to you?”

“We do not read the English newspaper. If it was on one of the Spanish radios, I did not hear it. It was only to the funeral that someone brought your newspaper.”

Sully wrote fast to keep up. He knew now why it had seemed Lana had been alone in the world when she’d been found. New address, nothing much there, no papers, maybe a prostitution bust when she tried to turn a few tricks to pay her new, higher rent. The little investigation that got done, she appeared to be a Hispanic prostitute in a bad neighborhood who turned tricks on playgrounds. The police never knew of any relatives until Ramos’s wife went down there. By that time, no reporters, including Sully, were looking at the case.

“Do you have any nice pictures of Lana? That I could put in the paper? And did you happen to keep the naked pictures?”

Hector sat up straight, pulling his forearms off the table. “You want to look at my niece while she is naked?”

“No, no. I wanted to see if the pictures might give me a clue about who shot them, or when, or where.”

Hector took a deep breath. He rubbed his hands together, then pulled them apart and put them back together finally. “We have some good pictures of Lana. Nice pictures. When she was at school. I’ll ask my wife where they are.” He paused. “I did not keep the nasty pictures.”

“Do you have any idea of who might have wanted to hurt Lana? Bad boyfriend?”

Hector Ramos looked up at Sully. He blinked several times. There was some emotion behind the flatness; it was reserve that held him in check, not a lack of compassion. “We have asked ourselves that question many times. She was in this country with us.” He stopped and held up a hand. “I think it was right for her to leave. I do not regret that. You have to have some sort of-of-a conduct. But we should have known more of where she was. We should have not let her go so far out of our sight.”

He looked at Sully and did not say anything more.

The two eight-by-tens were from parties that Lana had been to, something like a prom, where there was someone taking pictures of couples. The pictures were sitting across his lap. Sully raised his voice to be heard above the traffic, the wind blowing in from the rolled-down windows.

“So how did you say you found Hector again?”

“I didn’t,” Sly said from the front seat. “I said we found him, me and Lionel. So what you think?”

“I think it was profitable.”

Sly turned around and looked at him. “Hardy fucking har har, motherfucker.”

“No, I mean it. Noel Pittman? Posed nude, naughty-girl pictures, for this photographer up in Petworth.”

“And when were you going to tell me this?”

“I just did. I just found out yesterday.”

“Gimme the name.”

“Don’t have it, but I can get it.”

“Well, get on the motherfucking phone, man. Shit. Both these bitches take their drawers off for some dude to take pictures? And they turn up dead? Nah nah nah. This is the dude we want to go see.”

“I dunno. The shots of Noel, they look professional, they’re not peekaboo porn. And she apparently called the photographer, so it wasn’t like he was out there trolling. Or so I hear.”

“So who do you hear this from?”

“MPD.”

“They ain’t looking at it?”

“Not hard, the guy they got on it, he’s just cold-casing it.”

“Who’s that?”

“Dick Jensen.”

Sly laughed, a bark. “Ha! That motherfucker. I know Dick Jensen. He arrested my ass, what was it, fifteen years ago?”

“You don’t sound impressed.”

“Look, what I’m saying, you get busted for a felony? Pray that Jensen is the man with the cuffs.”

“So you beat it at trial.”

“It was an AWD, and it didn’t even go to trial. Dismissed. Lawyer had a field day.”

They rode for a bit, the passing traffic, Sully’s mind working, not liking the flow of information going from him to Sly.

“So your girlfriend, she’s prosecuting the Sarah Reese case,” he said. “She seems pretty comfy thinking your three boys ain’t all that innocent.”

“I ain’t said they was all that innocent. I said they ain’t killed the Reese girl.”

“And you know that for sure because?”

“Because they said they didn’t.”

“They wouldn’t lie to you?”

“I didn’t ask politely.”

“Sly, dammit. What does that even mean?”

Sly turned back in his seat to look at Sully. “It means Jerome, the oldest one? It means he got a sister, fourteen, name of Jazzmine. Day after this happened, Saturday, I picked up Jazzmine from the playground, the park, whatever you call it, there at the end of her block, you know? I took her over to one of my places and I had her call him from there so she could tell him where she was. I got on the phone and said tell me where you are. I left Jazzmine there with Lionel and I went to see him. They were down in Southeast in this little apartment, scared as shit. I said I’m going to go home and fuck your sister in the ass and then I’m going to cap her in the back of her head as soon as I come. Then I’m going to throw her ass in the Anacostia for the catfish. Unless you tell me what happened with that white girl.”

Traffic went by for a few minutes.

Sully said, “That is a very profitable way of asking questions.”

“I noticed that all by myself.”

“So what did he tell you?”

“That they saw that girl in the store. Talked about her ass a little bit. She gets bitchy. Drops her wallet out of her jacket and runs out the back. They pick up the wallet and run out the front. It had like thirty-five dollars or some shit like that. They kept the money and threw the wallet in the trash can, the one at the basketball court, up there by the rec center. They go home, it’s all on the news that the police looking for they ass.”