eleven, in a wreck on the Beltway, near what they used to call the Cabin John Bridge. He was their only child, and my only grandson.” He stopped to stub out the butt of his smoke.
“Is your wife still alive, Mr. Pence?”
He shook his head. “Janey died a year after we took Jimmy in. I guess you can imagine how hard it was. A man gets set to retire with his woman, all of a sudden he loses her and has to raise a son.” I had a quick, painful image of my own grandfather, a fisherman’s cap resting on his huge pinkish ears.
“How did it go for the two of you?”
“Fairly well, from my side of things. Jimmy was an easy boy to raise, easier than my own daughter.”
“Has he ever gone away before without telling you?”
“He’s nineteen years old,” he said by way of an affirmative.
“So what makes you think this is any different?”
“I’m not naive, Mr. Stefanos. The kid goes out with his friends, has a few beers, they wind up down at the shore, or Atlantic City maybe, if one of ’em has a few bucks in his pockets. But he always called me the next day, let me know where he was.”
I shifted in my seat. “I’m not a detective, Mr. Pence. What Johnny McGinnes was talking about, we did some process serving together a couple of summers ago, for extra cash. It was for kicks mainly, we made a game of it. But I’m not licensed for anything like this. And I told you before that I thought this was a cop job. Unless there’s something you’re not telling, some reason you can’t or won’t go to the police.”
He lowered his eyes and lit another smoke. The sound of the Zippo slamming shut echoed in the room. He was squinting through the smoke when he looked back up at me.
“Jimmy has been hanging out with some tough customers,” he said. “The last couple of months, the guys who came to pick him up, they weren’t just kids out to get a little drunk and have a good time. They were different somehow.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know exactly. They wore a lot of leather. None of them ever smiled. And the music he started listening to in his room since he met those guys-it was, you know, more violent than what he used to listen to.”
“Go on.” So far, nothing he had described was all that disturbing, and the music probably wasn’t much different from the music I used to listen to in the clubs downtown almost ten years earlier.
“He’s been staying out all night, listening to music in bars supposedly. The way he looks when he walks in, I don’t know. I’ve done some drinking in my day. He just doesn’t look like he’s been on a bender. So I can only guess, maybe the boy is mixed up to is mixewith drugs.”
“Do you know the names of any of his friends?”
“No, I’m sorry. They looked alike to me. All of these guys had crewcuts, shaved even closer than the kids wore them in the fifties.”
If they were skinheads, they either hung out at the Snake Pit on F Street or at the Corps, which was near National Place. I figured the old man had the kid pegged on his drug use, though there was no way to tell how far he was gone.
“I don’t mean to make light of Jimmy’s situation, Mr. Pence. But I frequented the same clubs and listened to the same kind of music myself. I still do, occasionally. As for drugs, I’ve used plenty and I came out of it more or less intact.” His eyes seemed to widen, but only for a moment. He was obviously more interested in finding his grandson than in my lapses of morality.
“You are making light of this situation. You most certainly are. Because you don’t want to take any responsibility here. I know this boy. Even if he were on drugs, he would have called. He’s in some sort of trouble. If you don’t want to get involved, then fine. But don’t tell me there’s nothing wrong.”
“I admit there could be some problem,” I said. “And I see your angle for going private. If he’s just underground because of drugs, a private cop could get him home and to some help without a possession or intent to distribute rap on his record. But I’m not that person. I paste down pictures of television sets for a living.”
“You are the person.” He was on his feet now and close to me. I could smell cigarettes on him and, for the first time, a trace of whiskey. “Why do you think Jimmy talked to you so much at work?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your background and Jimmy’s background-they were very similar. Jimmy told me that you were born overseas. Your parents sent you to the States to live with your grandfather when you were very young, until they could afford to join you. For some reason or another they never made it, and you were raised by your grandfather. Is this correct?”
“Roughly,” I said.
“Jimmy was at that age-he needed someone to relate to. I think he found that a little bit in you.”
“My grandfather died last April,” I said, though I was no longer talking to Pence. The moment his life ended I was doing lines off the bar in an after-hours club on upper Wisconsin Avenue.
I rose from the chair and walked to the window. The traffic had thinned out on Connecticut, the northbound headlights approaching at a relaxed pace.
“I don’t know if I’m up for it,” I said. He was silent behind me and I turned to face him. “I’ll ask around downtown. Maybe somebody knows where he is. But that’s all, understand?”
“Thank you,” he said, moving towards me and gripping my hand. “I’ll make it worth your while.”
I backed away. “We don’t need to discuss that now. I have somewhere to go. I’ll phone you tomorrow.”
I walked out quickly. He was shouting his phone number as I closed the door behind me.
I LET THE CAT in as I stepped into my apartment. I put some dry food in her dish and drank some ice water from a bottle in the refrigerator. Then I took two cold cans of beer with me into the shower.
After leaving Pence, I had driven to a junior-high gym in Northwest to meet Rodney White, a friend of mine who had the curious distinction of being both a physician and a black belt. Though I knew next to nothing about tae kwon do, I had done a fair amount of Boys Club boxing, and enjoyed hooking up with White every couple of weeks to spar, provided he showed me some mercy.
We warmed up with some stretching and light movement. Gradually we began making contact and our sparring intensified. After punishing me for a while with hand and foot combinations, he motioned me to stop. We tapped gloves and removed our mouthguards.
“What were you just doing?” he asked. “You let me back you all the way across this gym. You accepted all of my forward energy.”
“I was letting you kick yourself out. Anyway, I tagged you pretty good at the end.”
He shook his head. “You had already lost. You start backing up, you’re defeated, believe me.”
“I thought I’d use a little strategy.”
“Don’t get too wrapped up in strategy. Technicians lose in the street. The winner in a fight is usually determined before the first punch is thrown.”
“Too mystical for me” I said, adding, “I’ll stick to boxing.”
“Stick to whatever you want, Homeboy. But step on over here and let me show you a little something.”
In the shower I drank the first beer while washing. A bruise had formed on my bicep from a Rodney White side kick, and there was a scratch on my cheek from the nylon tie of his footgear.
After rinsing, I popped the second beer and leaned against the tile wall, shutting the cold spigot off completely. I drank deeply of the icy beer and closed my eyes, as the burning hot water rolled down my back.
THREE
The next morning I called the office at nine A.M. from a payphone located in the side parking lot of the Connecticut Avenue store. Ric Brandon picked up his extension.
“Hello, Ric?”
“Yes.”
“Nick Stefanos here.”
“Where are you?” In his typically tight-assed manner he was asking why I was late for work.
