Neely Tucker - The Ways of the Dead

Three songs down and another dancer up, a thick light-skinned woman, not really his type. As he looked up at her stepping out of her short black satin cover-up and then spraying the mirror with Windex, it bounced into his embalmed brain that Sly said Sarah Reese’s throat had been cut after she was dead.

Jason had told him that at the morgue. He had never used it. It had never gone public.

He blinked.

No. No no no no no no.

By 8:55 the next morning, he was outside the U.S. District Court clerk’s office, rumpled, the same jeans and wrinkled shirt from the day before, reeking of cigarette smoke and spilled gin. His mouth tasted like the floor of an adult-movie theater. He had not slept.

In the courthouse hallway, he waited for the clerk’s office to open. Sitting on a leather-upholstered bench, he chewed on the cuticle of his left ring finger.

At 9:01 someone opened the door and he bolted upright and walked to the public-access computer terminals.

“David Reese,” he punched into the computer’s case program, putting the name into the box for “Presiding Judge” and limiting the search to cases within the past three years. He clicked on the drop-down button to have the results displayed in alphabetical order by defendant. The array of cases came up a few seconds later.

The lawyer’s name flagged it first.

Kaufman, Avram.

His spine curled inward and he slumped as if the air were being let out of him.

The case had gone into Reese’s court for trial April 3, 1998, a year and a half earlier. The defendant’s name was Nikki Jacqueline Phillips. Sly Hastings’s sister, or half sister, to be precise, as Sly had told him back when this started. She was managing his rental properties for him. Nikki worked at D.C. Housing Authority, the pleadings said. Of course. How else would she have learned how to manage her half brother’s low-rent places?

Nikki had been up on charges of kickbacks from a contractor on a city contract, something like $238,000. There had been a motion to dismiss, and Reese rejected it. She’d been convicted on four of five charges. Reese sentenced her at the top of the guidelines, even more than the prosecution had asked for, on August 18.

Six weeks before his daughter was murdered.

Sully, too late now, remembering, I got that he was one of those Southern crackers from the accent, the time I heard him in court.

Staring at the screen, legs pumping under the desk.

Sly’s sister, his most precious asset in laundering his money, had gotten busted. He had looked for ways to get her out and free and back to work (“Nikki, she’s been distracted”) and that would have led him to any number of sources-and what do you know, the presiding judge’s daughter was taking classes in Sly’s backyard.

His legs stopped pumping.

Sly wouldn’t have had to go downtown to get to the judge. Just get to him at his most vulnerable, when he was dropping off his daughter, then going to see his mistress. Just sit with Lionel, watching him come drop off Sarah on a Saturday morning… and, lo and behold, up the sidewalk he went to Noel’s apartment, the one place where the judge would be certain not to have a trailing security detail. What a gift this was to a man like Sly.

He could see it, clear as day, the judge coming out of Noel’s. Sly and Lionel getting out of the Camaro, falling in step beside him, one on either side, Say, Judge Reese, we need to talk about this misunderstanding with my sister… Nobody’d want pictures of you in there with Noel getting around, right, sure, nobody wants anything to happen to a pretty thing like her…

But if this was the mild first step offered, it had not been taken. Reese had not dismissed the case.

That led to step two, and it opened so beautifully that Sully shook his head in equal parts admiration and disgust. Of course Sly would have known about Doyle. How could the warlord of the neighborhood not have? Doyle was perfect for Sly’s darker purposes-a patsy with a penchant for prostitutes and strangling them, right in his backyard. He made a perfect fall guy for any hit Sly needed to carry out.

So Sly or Lionel (or both) killed Noel, dumping her in the basement of the house behind Doyle’s Market, matching the man’s MO. Her disappearance was a mystery to everyone except its intended audience-David Reese. It hadn’t worked, though. The judge, thinking he was Texas-tough, flexed back at sentencing, hitting Nikki with the max, still not knowing the depths of Sly Hastings.

And so the killshot, the message back to Reese: Sly’s street soldiers, them three, follow Sarah into the store, spook her out the back. Sly waiting, Lionel waiting, one or both.

And then the cover story, Sly playing him like a violin.

Who told him the three suspects weren’t guilty, spurring him to look into the idea of a serial killer? Who delivered Lana Escobar’s stepfather? Sly had. Sully, properly fed, had put a story in the paper about the possibility of a serial killer. That story, the community meeting, the cops looking at it all again-it had not only opened an investigation, but it had also flushed Doyle. That had resulted in Sly’s lucky break, an unexpected bonus: Doyle outing the judge to Sully for his own reasons, panicking, trying to divert the sudden attention.

And then it had all been downhill. Who took him to Mommy, who told him what she’d been told to say, with a little theater thrown in? Who delivered the story about the nameless hooker miraculously seeing Michelle and Doyle in the back office? Who put Noel’s necklace in Doyle’s hand? Where did the knife from Sarah’s murder come from?

Bring the stuff. Them gas cans, too .

He closed his eyes against another wave of nausea, the bile in his gut churning, and suddenly he was back at lunch with Eva, back at Stoney’s on the first of October. She had told him. She had told him as clear as day. He gets rid of people who get in the way of him running things, and then he skates on it.

And what was Sully, an accomplice to the murder of Doyle Goodwin, ever going to do about it?

“Goddamn,” Sully said, closing his eyes, rubbing them, and the court clerk looked up from behind the counter. “Just godfuckingdamn.”

The clerk rapped the counter, frowning.

“Language,” she said.

Mom’s Place was more of a three-walled shed at the back end of a parking lot than it was a florist’s, but it was adjacent to the cemetery and the prices were reasonable. Across the open front of the shed, there were heavy plastic sheets that unfurled to keep out the wind and cold, and most of them were down when Sully pulled in. It was late November. The wind was up and rain was threatening. He bought a bouquet of bright gerber daisies, yellow and red and orange and white, wrapped in clear red plastic.

“These for next door?” Skinny kid, tall, bored behind the register.

“Yeah.”

“Trim them?”

“Why not.”

“Spray for the deer?”

“While you’re at it.”

The bike took him back through the cemetery, the flowers between the fuel tank and his hips, and he let it idle past the graves and the stones and the JACKSONs and the STEVENs and the CHANGs and the MARTINs.

Noel Pittman’s grave had only a flat marker. It took him a few minutes to find.

PITTMAN, NOEL ANGELIQUE

Sept. 30, 1972-April 25, 1998

Loved and Missed

There were two small metal vases set into circular rings on either side of the slab. He pulled a vase out of a ring on the right side and took it over to a spigot set by the white wooden-railed fence that set off the roadway from the grounds. The water was cold, clear. He shook his hands to dry them.