Neely Tucker - The Ways of the Dead

“Ms. Pittman’s corpse turned up a dozen houses down from her apartment in such a decomposed state that no cause of death has so far been determined, whether by means fair or foul. Homicide has not been ruled out. But the freight train is moving down the line, Mr. Russell. Try to address it. I can use smaller words if need be. Again, has Judge Reese disclosed his ties to Ms. Pittman to law enforcement? There is no murder investigation into the death of Ms. Pittman, but the case’s status with D.C. police is listed as open. Has the judge aided that investigation? Has he told them he spoke to her eight hours after she was last seen or heard from? I can’t imagine he has, because if he had they wouldn’t keep telling me she was last seen at Halo. They wouldn’t keep telling me the nude photographs were shot for a men’s magazine, when in fact they were shot for him.”

Reese’s head, he thought, was going to explode. The man’s face was red and his jaw was clenched. He was leaning forward against his desk. Cannan was keeping his head still but cutting his eyes back and forth between the two.

And Joseph Russell, as he was handsomely paid to do, looked as if he were riding a gondola in a spring breeze.

“These are lies, but we have heard your questions, Mr. Carter, and we are not going into your cesspool of innuendo. You may publish these-these things if you wish, but you are aware that we will pursue legal action if you do. This is your career on the line, Mr. Carter, not his. Don’t think it isn’t.”

“‘Cesspool of innuendo.’ I like that, Mr. Russell. That’s a very fresh cliché. I’d say we’re done.” He reached forward and clicked the recorder off.

He put his notebook in his backpack and the three men on the other side of the table leaned back and conferred in whispers. Sully stood to go, picked his recorder up from the table, and walked toward the door. He heard, before he saw, Reese get up from his chair and hustle around the table, rushing to get to him. Sully slowed, ever so slightly, to let the judge beat him to the door.

“Carter,” he snapped, pressing the door handle closed to keep him from pulling it open. He leaned forward, using his bulk to press in close.

“I can hear fine, Judge Reese. You don’t have to stand three inches from my face to talk to me.”

Reese snatched the recorder from Sully’s hand and glared at it, making sure it was turned off. “You limp-legged little prick, you will be dead to the world when I’m finished with you,” he sneered. “ Dead. I don’t care if you print this piece of shit or not. You think you can fuck with me? You think that what I did to you last time was bad? That was a fucking warning shot.” He ripped opened the door, slapping the recorder back in Sully’s palm. “Now get the fuck out of my sight.”

Sully looked behind him in the office. Cannan had a blank look on his face, but Russell had a contemptuous smile playing out across his lips, arms folded across his chest, enjoying it all.

Sully returned the smile with a nod.

“Judge?” he said, turning back to Reese. “Just a minute ago, when you snatched the recorder out of my hand?” He held the slim digital device aloft and twiddled it between two fingers. Then, swiftly, like a magician with a rabbit and a hat, he reached into the interior chest pocket of his sport coat and produced, with a slight flourish, a second digital recorder. The red recording light was glowing.

“I’m sorry, did you mean to get this one, too? I wasn’t sure, and you never said. You gentlemen have a fine evening now.”

It was all going to happen now, no way to stop it. Calls to John Parker, spilling the Reese angle, asking if Reese had been in contact with MPD about Noel’s disappearance.

“Absolutely not,” John said. “This is material to the investigation, you know that. You print this, I guarantee you we’ll move on it. Source it through the chief if you want to publish it, but I’m telling you, he never said a damn thing to us about it. And I will personally kick Dick Jensen’s ass for not following up with the sister. She ought to be spilling to us, not to you.”

Then calls to R.J., to Eddie, narrating the interview, Reese’s blowup, the photographer, his conversation with John, whom he described only as a police official. The agreement with R.J. and Eddie was to meet first thing in the morning, reassess, then likely make the official calls to the chief in the afternoon, the last push before publication. Those calls had to be last, to keep it from leaking to other papers, the networks. You call those fuckers, they’d call CNN two minutes later, saying, “Hey, did you know the paper just called us and asked…”

By the time he got to Halo, it was close to midnight and the place was thumping. He slapped down twenty bucks for the cover, checked his cycle jacket and helmet at the counter, and went up the steps, Mary J. Blige so loud the handrails vibrated. It was a converted tool and die warehouse, a five-story crumbling shell that an entrepreneur named Jeffrey Gaston had turned into the capital’s trendiest nightclub.

Going for the glory of slumming, Gaston put Halo in the brutally ugly, dysfunctional eastern side of the city on New York Avenue two years earlier. There were the beat-to-shit used-car lots, the Harbor Light Center (old drunks in wheelchairs, livers and kidneys gone), the fast-food joints with the bathrooms littered with condoms and needles, the freight railroad tracks across the avenue, and Ivy City, the neighborhood devastated by crack, just down the street.

Inside the fences and barbed wire lining the parking lot, inside the club, it was a different universe.

The second floor was paneled walls of cherrywood and black marble bar counters, and Sully took the wide, circular stairwell to the third floor, which was the source of the Blige. He knew enough about the place to know that he would find Gaston on the fourth, penthouse level.

Once there, he got a gin and tonic from the bar and waited, watching the dancers, the crowd light because it was still early in club time. In half an hour, Gaston finally showed, emerging from black curtains at the far end of the dance floor. He was flanked by a bodyguard and a young woman in a short black dress. They took up a booth at the rear of the room, the bodyguard standing post in front of the table.

Sully gave him five minutes to get settled, then crossed the floor and gave the bodyguard his card. The man looked at it, then leaned forward to shout in his ear, “What’s it about?”

“Noel Pittman,” Sully shouted back.

When the man gave the card to Gaston and said something in his ear, Gaston looked up at Sully and motioned to the woman beside him to let him out of the booth.

He was light on his feet for a big man, nimble. Close-cropped beard, perfect teeth, black suit, black shirt. It was a look that was good for looking respectable in a city council hearing, good for looking hip at the club. He shook Sully’s hand and motioned him to follow.

They went through the black curtain, down a lighted hallway, framed pictures of club life on the walls, and wound up in a workers’ break room. Gaston pulled two petit bottles of French spring water from the fridge and sat down at a table.

“What’s this about Noel?”

“I’m just-”

“I’m just about tired of hearing about it, is what I am,” Gaston cut in, crossing one leg over the other, tapping Sully’s card on the table. “Police out here yesterday. Wanting to know when the last time we saw her. Everybody knows when that was. This is some sort of trap, some sort of shit.”

Sully twisted the top off the water and swallowed twice.

“Who was out here, a detective named Jensen? Old white guy? Cranky?”