Neely Tucker - The Ways of the Dead

He pulled out the notebook, started scribbling. “Went over there by herself?”

“Like I said.”

“The girls, the students, they tend to do that after class?”

A nod.

“How much later were the sirens?”

She folded her arms across her chest and grimaced. “The first cops, they didn’t come with any sirens. They may have been what, Secret Service? Who is it the judges call? The cops, the sirens, the ones that went over to Doyle’s? That was right at eight.”

“Marshals,” he said. “Judges are protected by U.S. Marshals. Why do you remember the time so well?”

“’Cause I was closing up. Eight thirty, we’re all done.”

“Anybody from the studio go over there, to Doyle’s, before the cops, to, what, look for her?”

“Probably. Maybe. I don’t know. Once Momma got here. I mean, look-their lessons were over, okay? They’re supposed to wait in the lobby. I saw Sarah go over there and I had another class. We didn’t know she was missing until Momma came in.”

“Had problems with Sarah before?”

“She was alright. Maybe a little scared of the sisters, you know.”

“How did she come to be taking lessons down here?”

“Maybe she heard Gina’d been in Alvin Ailey, I don’t know. Gina gets girls from all over, the serious ones.”

“Did Dad bring her to class, or was it Mom?”

“Mostly Momma, from what I know. But I’ve seen Daddy in there on Saturdays dropping her off. Handsome, like.”

“How many lessons did Sarah take a week?”

“What is this, two million questions?” Arms unfolding. Sully caught it from the corner of his eye. He looked up. You had to have eye contact or they got pissed.

“Sorry. Hey, look-I’m not an ass, I just play one on TV. You’re helping me out here. So. About how many classes?”

“I think it was two. Friday night, Saturday morning, lots of girls do that. Gina’d know for sure.”

“Okay. Sarah ever come with a boyfriend, anybody like that?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Any pervs hanging out? Strange calls to the studio?”

“I don’t answer the phone, mister.”

“Don’t imagine you do. We got started talking, I didn’t even ask your name.”

“You going to put it in the paper?”

“Only if you say I can. I don’t know your name right now. If you don’t tell me,” and here he looked up again, smiling, trying to muster some charm, “I don’t have any way of doing that.”

“Why you got to put me in there? Police’ll tell you all that.”

“Hard as it is to believe, ma’am, we get accused of making the shit up.”

“I see a little white girl run off to get killed and you want to tell everybody where to find me?”

“How about first name only?”

“Gee, that’ll help.”

“So, okay, look-if you gave me your middle name I wouldn’t know the difference. And nobody would recognize it. And I wouldn’t have to make you an anonymous source.”

“Anonymous. I like anonymous. Make me anonymous.”

“They won’t use it. Which would be bad, because I think you’re telling the truth.”

“Why would I lie?”

“Because everybody does.”

She eyeballed him.

“I been doing this twenty-something years,” he said.

“My middle-okay, it’s Victoria? You can put that in there. Make it ‘Vicky.’ But don’t put I work at the studio. Gina’ll fire my ass, talking to you.”

“Deal, Miss Vicky.” He reached out and tapped the card she was holding. “You remember something else? Call your old friend Sully. You work here most every day?”

“Yeah.”

“I might stop by.”

She nodded, walking away, looking at the card. He waited for her to toss it in the grass, but she didn’t, and he had a little hope.

He looked at his watch. He had forty-fucking-three minutes.

He started walking away, pushing back through the crowd. He turned left on Otis, hustled past the recreation center to Warder Street, then turned left for a block until he got back to Princeton Place. He turned left again, having made the block, and now came down the street behind Doyle’s Market.

Halfway down, a cruiser blocked off the street and yellow tape stretched all the way across both sidewalks. Sully walked down the middle of the street until the yellow tape stopped him. This was a block of old houses, duplexes, at least half a dozen of them boarded up. Most of the streetlights were out. A cop in the cruiser was talking on his radio and stood up out of the car to eyeball him. Sully stopped and held up his press ID and gave the cop a half wave. The cop nodded and went on transmitting, still eyeing him.

He was maybe seventy yards from the intersection, fifty from the alley in back of the store where Sarah’s body had been found. Houses and trees blocked the view, but it was easy to see squad cars, a forensics van, unmarked vehicles. He walked over to a light pole just off the sidewalk and leaned against it, taking the weight off his knee.

He had thirty-one minutes to file.

The child’s killer or killers had left the scene three hours before, maybe two and a half, and had vanished into the breeze. Nobody on the street knew a goddamned thing. Right at this minute, local cops and the feds were crushing perp lists, sex offender files, credible threats to the judge, Sarah Reese’s lists of schoolmates… and he had dick. Sweet fuckall. He didn’t have any more time to work a source, to play an angle.

But because of the paper’s reputation, if not his own, the story in tomorrow’s paper would be regarded as a cornerstone document in shaping the narrative of the murder of Sarah Reese in the national imagination. He was going to dictate a large chunk of that narrative while tired, not exactly sober, and knowing little more than any sad son of a bitch on the sidewalk.

He spat. Nothing like starting in last place.

“Sully, my boy. You are calling in poetry, I know it. But I got to ask you something first.”

Tony Rubin’s cigarette-scarred voice blared down the line, followed by his smoker’s cough and the flurry of keyboard tapping in the background. Tony had the abrupt nature of a man who’d spent the past twenty-one years switching subjects on deadline and the attaboy patter of a Little League third-base coach, coaxing writers past the freezing point on deadline, the fate of the late-night man on the rewrite desk. He’d gotten divorced, for the third time, two years earlier and spent the following four months living in the newsroom, mostly without detection, as he showered in the old pressmen’s locker room and slept in the deserted warrens of the Sunday Magazine. Sully had come across him there one morning, dozing and sweaty, a jacket for a pillow, curled beneath a copy editor’s desk, dreaming of anarchy and knifing his third wife’s boyfriend.

“Yeah?” Sully said. “What?”

“Sunday, the Skins? Four-point line against Carolina. At home. Too much chalk? Talk to me.” The patter, nervous, finishing up a previous feed, stalling him until he was ready for the dictation.

“I’m a Saints man. I don’t really-”

“You’re a gambling man.”

“Only games I know something about. But off the top of my head-look, we beat Carolina and we suck. Skins are scoring like crazy, so at home I’ll say they cover. You see the Giants game? Fifty points, I mean-”

“Got it,” Tony said and then, finally, the flurry of typing stopped. “Okay. I’m clear. Go go go go.”

“You got the BOLO on the three black suspects?”

“Yeah.”

“Not from Chris, though, am I right?”

“Nope.”

“Boy couldn’t find his dick with a flashlight. Okay. I got the BOLO, too, secondhand, coming out of 4-D, but from a hack I trust.”