Neely Tucker - The Ways of the Dead

“That’s Noel,” Sully said, “I guess-”

“Lord, boy, you been playing in the mud? What happened to your shoes ?”

Doyle, startled, peering over the counter. Sully looked down. The sides of the shoes, even the tops, were stained with dried mud from the basement.

“Well, hell,” Sully said, looking down, stalling, debating whether to say he’d been snooping in the house next door, telling him something about the drama, the gunfire, and then went against it. “They’re watering the grass up there at the rec center, out on that baseball field? I was interviewing people and cut through. You come in off the outfield into that dirt path for the bases? I took two steps in it before I realized it was a mud pit.”

He went outside, stomped on the concrete, rubbed the soles and sides of the shoes against a parking barrier, and came back in.

“Sorry. I best get home and change. But hey, I was interested. What was it you wanted to tell me last night?”

“Your shirt’s a mess, too.” He indicated Sully’s back using two fingers to tap the back of his own.

Sully looked over his right shoulder and tugged at the shirt. He could see the dirt, the grime spreading over the right shoulder blade, a large smudge. It had to irritate a man with Doyle’s sense of starched order.

He tugged at his own shirt now, shaking his head, nerves flaring again. “What else? Man, you lean up against one wall, some of the houses around here. Damn.”

Doyle waved a hand, coughed. “Okay. Look. I just needed to-I just need to tell you something about this Reese thing, but privately? I didn’t want to do it in front of that crowd last night. I don’t know if this is important or not. But it’s just not right.”

Sully kept brushing at the dirt, glad Doyle was finally getting to it. “Yeah? What’s on your mind?”

Doyle nodded, his small, muscular shoulders rolling forward. He took his glasses off. “But you can’t print this. Or you can’t say that I said it. If somebody else tells it to you, fine, but there’s no way in hell I want my name attached.”

“I can’t know what it is until you tell me, partner, but I’ll agree I won’t print it unless I get a second, if not a third, confirmation.”

“Okay. So, here it is. I think. The judge? Sarah’s father?”

“Yeah?”

“He used to come in and get a Coke or something, sometimes late on Friday just after I’d taken over for Bettie. Saturday mornings, too. I open up, stay till noon. I guess he was taking the little girl to dance rehearsal.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t mean to be any particular way about it, but there aren’t a lot of white folks in the neighborhood anymore. You notice one another, say hello. A well-dressed white man coming in the store? Not a lot of that clientele. You remember it. So this one Saturday morning I saw him at the top of Princeton Place, right by the baseball field. He was getting out of a car, a Mercedes or a BMW, something silver. Well, now. I was walking by, on my way in, and I recognized him, so I nodded, said hello. He stood there and looked at me like I hadn’t said anything at all. Looked at me and then just turned back to what he was doing. Rude as you can be.”

“Snotty little prick, ain’t he?”

“But that’s not what I’m telling you about. What I’m telling you about is that I was sort of peeved about it. I said to myself, ‘You know, he thinks he’s some big-shot judge and I’m a little storeowner, and he didn’t even recognize me. Or doesn’t think I’m worth talking to.’ I’m retired navy. I served my country. I don’t have an apology to make to anybody. I’ve been making this store work for a dozen years now, and I knew he recognized me. I turned around, honest to god, and I was going to go back and say, ‘My name is Doyle Goodwin, and you come shop in my store down there at the bottom of the block and you damn well know who I am.’”

“Good for you, coming back at him.”

“But I never got anywhere with that, because when I turned around, what did I see? He was on the front porch of that house the Pittman girl was living in. She opened the door. She kissed him on the mouth.”

Sully choked, the Coke going up into his nostrils, burning his sinuses. “You said what ?”

“She had some little nightie-something on. They went into her house there.”

“They knew each other? Like, biblically?”

“That’s what I was wanting to tell you.”

Sully stood flat-footed. “I can’t-I just-what did the police say?”

“Didn’t tell them.”

“Didn’t tell them?”

“They interviewed me before the Pittman girl turned up dead. When they were interviewing us, I didn’t see the point. The man’s daughter is dead, and I’m going to go tell the police he was catting around? I wouldn’t have done that in a million years. But after the Pittman girl turned up dead, it started feeling different.”

“You still haven’t called them?”

Doyle sat on his stool behind the counter. He rubbed a hand across his chin, his cheek. He rocked back and forth slightly.

“Thought about it. But look. Like I told you, this girl getting killed out back has really hit us. People, they think we fingered those guys to the police, they don’t want to come in no more. So in the midst of this, to go wading into that police office and tell them a federal judge was fooling around with this black girl up the block? If I thought the scales were fair, maybe. But they’re not, Sully, and you know it as well as I do. All it would do is get covered up. And hey, surprise, I’d get a ton of grief from everyone from the zoning administration to the IRS. I’d get audited eighteen years in a row. I’m a little guy, Sully. He’d bury me.”

“I can see your thinking. I can. I’m not trying to talk you into anything. But, Doyle, I got to tell you, this is a big goddamned deal. A federal judge involved with a young woman who turns up dead? And his daughter killed on the same block?”

Doyle slapped the counter with a flat palm, making his glasses teeter down the end of his nose. “Which is why I don’t want my name on it! We’re barely staying in business! You been in here ten minutes, you seen anybody? Bettie flinches every time the doors open, thinking she’s gonna get shot up!”

He took a deep breath, reining himself in. He put both hands on the countertop. His voice dropped. He was working at it.

“We might be okay by Christmas. Might, this thing blows over. But not if I get crossed up with some federal judge. I. Will. Be. Dead. Meat.” He popped an open palm on the counter with each word, the cords on his neck standing out, his face flush.

Sully, taken aback by the outburst, leaned against the ice-cream case, hoping to God no one came in the store. His mind was scattering, bright little shells bursting against the back of his eyes.

“Okay. So okay,” he said. “Here’s what I can do. Okay. I won’t put your name to this, but I will tell people that I have a source who saw Reese and Pittman together, romantically involved. I won’t tell them who that source is. If my bosses press me for it, I’ll have to tell them, but that doesn’t mean it goes into the paper. It just means they want to be sure I’m not making it up.”

“Why would they think that?”

“It’s not personal. It’s the way it is. Things go in the paper, everybody wants to be sure. You were in the navy. Somebody says, ‘I see a Russian sub!’ the captain isn’t gonna say, ‘Sink it.’ He’s gonna say, ‘Show me.’”

Doyle looked down, then back at Sully. His arms were folded across his chest. “So who is it you’re going to be telling you’ve got this source? You can’t tell the police.”