Neely Tucker - The Ways of the Dead

“Yes.”

“Mind if I ask?”

“I don’t mind, but I won’t tell you. Not for publication, anyway. My rates are on a sliding scale and I-I wouldn’t want clients to see what I’m charging others. So, not for publication?” Sully nodded. “Four thousand.”

Sully blinked. He had seen Noel’s checkbook, her credit card statements. She didn’t have that kind of money. Not anything like it. And Simmons, well, actually, didn’t seem like a four-thousand-dollar photographer. “Did she pay with a credit card? Do you remember?”

“I certainly do remember, because it was very odd. She paid in cash.”

“A college student paid you four thousand dollars in cash?”

“All one-hundred-dollar bills. It was the most unusual thing about the session. I don’t do a lot of erotica, Mr. Carter, but I do some. Most of my studio’s work is advertising, things for shoes, women’s fashions. All of it local, if you count Baltimore as local. Now, I do have private clients-I mean to say, men-who like to have photographs of their wives or girlfriends or what have you, in erotica. It’s very private, and it’s very… tasteful, if you will. This isn’t Players magazine, and there are no crotch shots. The women are not professional models. They’re excited but uncomfortable, particularly at the beginning of the session. Noel was a little different. She was not a professional model, but she had all the makings of one.”

“What about the other girl, who came the second day? Do you have her name?”

“No. She just mentioned her as a friend.”

“Didn’t you need her name? For a release, or whatever?”

“There was no release to give. I didn’t own the copyright. Remember, I never possessed the film. She asked what type of film I needed and how much. I told her, she got it, came by, and dropped it off the day before the shoot. I shot the pictures and gave her the rolls of film at the end. Whatever she did with it was her business. She could have sold them for a million dollars and I wasn’t going to get anything else.”

“I’m still stuck on the four grand. You mentioned a sliding scale. Why would you think she would have that kind of money?”

“She said they were for her boyfriend, and that money was no object. That he wanted the best.”

“Hunh.”

“So I, in the business sense, shot high.”

“Hunh.” Bullshit meter pegging out in the red now.

“Look, let me clear something up, Mr. Carter. I do not shoot pornography or sexual acts. I was clear with her about that, particularly when she mentioned she wanted to pose with another woman. If you’ve seen the photographs, they are composed, they’re not peekaboo nudie snapshots. She could have sent half of them to lingerie or swimsuit campaigns, which she said she might do. The shots of the pair of them, the women are embracing, as I recall, or entwined, or perhaps kissing. But it was all posed. They did not come into my studio and have sex while I took photographs.”

“Did she say, or even hint, who this boyfriend was? Did she mention anybody by the name of David, or just ‘D’?”

Simmons spread his hands and gave him that same resigned smile. “I thought the police said she was shooting it for a portfolio, for men’s magazines. They didn’t mention a boyfriend.”

“Ah. Just one more question, Mr. Simmons. You’ve been very generous with your time. Did a woman named Lana Escobar come in for some of the same type of photographs?”

The man tensed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Lana Escobar. Hispanic, early twenties, would have been nearly two years ago. Did she come in for nudes, too?”

“That’s the young woman in your story the other day.” The smile frozen, hard.

“Yes, actually.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“It turns out she had a boyfriend who liked nude pictures, too. I happened to see those photographs. I’m just asking.”

“You’re-you’re implying-I think this interview is over.”

“Michelle Williams, by any chance?”

Simmons stood.

“We’re done here.”

Sully came outside on the sidewalk and turned back up the residential street. He could go after Simmons right now, the sleazoid. Yeah, he’d passed MPD inspection-so what? They weren’t even looking hard for Noel when they interviewed Simmons, and they certainly weren’t thinking of Lana and Noel as a connection, because they didn’t know Lana had posed nude. That the cops hadn’t been interested in Simmons probably didn’t mean anything other than that he had a clean record and no sex offenses. But Christ, hadn’t John told him the guy had been sweaty? Simmons knew he wasn’t goddamned innocent of everything. Okay, okay, then how did Noel come to be in Simmons’s studio, peeling down? Sully thinking now, mind racing. She or a friend would have known about him, that’s how. That’s how she would have gotten there. Certainly not from Reese. So, okay, Sully would have to get into Noel’s realm, dig into the modeling circuit, the party crowd. Fine. He could start that tonight at Halo.

That left him time for a more urgent task. Leaning against the bike, he pulled out his cell and punched in the numbers for Reese’s chambers in District Court.

“Hi, it’s Sully Carter, over at the paper,” he told the secretary when she picked up. “I need to speak with David this afternoon.”

There was a pause, frost developing on the other end.

“That’s not going to be possible,” she said.

“Ah. Maybe he’s at that press conference. How about tomorrow?”

“I’m afraid the judge has no media availability for the foreseeable future.”

“I see. Well, look, could you do me a favor, ma’am? Could you ask the judge if he wanted to comment on a story about his extramarital affair with a college student named Noel Pittman, who is now dead? And that the last phone call she made was to him, eight hours after the rest of the world lost touch with her? And that D.C. police are going to find that very curious?”

“I-”

“Wait-wait. Ask him, also-ask him if he wants to comment on the documentation I have that he paid the-the-what is it-here, the Eric Simmons Studio to take sexually explicit photographs of Ms. Pittman and another woman, another dancer at a downtown strip club who worked under the name, I think it was, of ‘Bambi’?”

Glacial quiet. Then, “Is that all?”

“That seems to about cover it for today, yes.”

“Just a moment, please.”

He sat there, leaning against the bike, looking at the weak blue sky overhead. She came back to the phone a few minutes later.

“The judge said he will see you at six p.m. in his chambers.”

The U.S. District Court building officially closed at five, but was always open, save for federal holidays, via the guarded entrance off John Marshall Park. Sully walked in at ten minutes till six, after stopping by his house for a shave and slacks, white shirt, and a black sport coat. He kept the coat in his backpack, not pulling it on until he parked the bike on C Street.

The U.S. Marshals greeted him by name, but still made him go through the formality of the metal detector. He went down the hall, his hard-soled shoes quiet on the carpet. He went to the elevator, struck, as always, by the difference between this courthouse and D.C. Superior Court, catty-corner across C Street. This was federal court, a temple of Justice, with the uppercase J and the big-think ideas, red carpet covering the marble floors, massive oil portraits of past justices on the walls, muted lighting, the building symbolically situated between the Capitol and the White House, balancing the twin powers.

Superior Court, next door, was the local bus station of justice, the dead end of urban life-loud, profane, noisy, crowded, ill behaved, umbrellas dripping rain on courtroom floors and switchblades confiscated at the front entrance.