it. Soon after that was the opening of a door and her voice, then a voice intermingled with hers that was low but gentle. In a few minutes she moved back down the stairs and stood before me.
“James will see you,” she said. “Please don’t stay too long.” It was less a command than it was a solicitous request. I nodded and moved away.
At the top of the stairs was a half-shut beveled door stained dark cherry. Above the door a transom window was cracked open just a bit; a barely visible fall of smoke flowed out from the crack. I knocked on the door and pushed as I did it. Then I stepped into the room.
It was a bedroom, probably the same bedroom James Thomas had been raised in. The oak furniture was scratched; its copper hardware pulls had long ago tarnished. An ashtray spilling over with butts was on the dresser and another ash Sd aont›
He stared out the window, took a long drag off his smoke, and said, “Come on in.”
“Thanks.” I removed my overcoat and folded it over my forearm.
“You don’t need to be doin’ that,” Thomas said. “You won’t be stayin’ long. I said I’d see you because my mom asked me to. But now that I have, I want it short.”
“That’s the way I want it too, James.” I had a seat on the edge of his bed. Closer to him now, I caught the stale stench of yesterday’s cheap liquor seeping through his pores.
James Thomas turned his head in my direction. He was wearing a brown-and-orange-plaid flannel shirt that gapped at the buttons, stretched as it was from his barrel chest. His head was round, dark, and cubbish. He had not shaved in days, though his facial hair was faint and spotty. His eyes were watery and rimmed red, the full-blown badge of a burned-down drunk.
“Let’s get to it,” he said.
“All right.” I handed him my card. He stubbed the butt in the aluminum ashtray that rested on his thigh, then blew smoke at the card while he looked it over. Thomas folded the card and slipped it into his breast pocket.
“So?” he said.
“I’m working on the William Henry case,” I said.
“Workin’ for who?”
“William Henry.”
“Guess you don’t plan on bein’ paid,” he said.
“ Somebody got paid,” I said.
Thomas shook a Kool from the deck on the windowsill and put the filtered end to his mouth. I produced a matchbook from my trouser pocket and tore one off the pack. He watched my eyes as I fired him up.
“Say what you got to say,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll keep it simple. I’ve looked over the file on the William Henry case. I’ve talked to some people in the neighborhood, and I’ve been to the Piedmont. Nobody gets into that building unless they live there or unless they’ve been invited. I even tried to buy my way in. It didn’t happen. Not with the guy they’ve got on duty now.”
Thomas’s jaw tightened. “I told you to say what the fuck you got to say. Now, do it.”
I stood and walked to the window. Out on the street was an old Bonneville, a white BMW with dark tinted glass, and a new maroon Buick Regal. I pointed to the Regal, looked at Thomas, and said, “That you?”
“Yeah. S='3 at Thoma”
“Not a tough call. I don’t make you for a dealer-that eliminates the drug car. And that shit-wagon Pontiac isn’t your style. No, a guy from your generation-what are you, early forties? — a guy your age who just came into some money would probably head right down to the car dealership, first thing, and pick out a brand new Buick. Cash on the line. Am I right?”
“Got me all figured out,” Thomas said. “Nigger with some cash money, burnin’ a hole in his motherfuckin’ pocket. ‘Nigger rich.’ That what you and your boys say when you’re sittin’ around drinkin’ brew, tryin’ to feel all superior about yourselves?”
“That is your car, isn’t it, James?”
“It’s mine.” Thomas hung his head and glanced down at the floor. His anger was there, but it was weak, with only the residual strength of a cut nerve. He sighed. “Company gave me what they call a ‘golden handshake.’ They let me go after the Henry case made the TV news. Gave me a bunch of money to go real quiet. So that’s what I did. And now I got a new ride, all paid up.” He looked at it through the window and lowered his eyes once again.
“How much did they give you, James? Twelve thousand? Fifteen? Because that’s about what that car costs.”
“Ain’t none of your damn business what they gave me.” “It’s easy enough to find out.”
“Then go on and do it,” he said angrily. I put on my overcoat and shifted my shoulders beneath it to let it fall. When I walked to the door I turned to face him.
“I am going to do it, James. But it won’t change what we both know, right now. You didn’t kill that boy. You didn’t even have an idea that he was going to be hurt, or what it was all about. But you let somebody in the Piedmont that night for money, and because of it my friend got greased.” I fastened the buttons of my overcoat. “You see the body, James? He was stabbed with a serrated knife. Stabbed in the chest and in the stomach and in the legs. Through the hand when he was holding it up, to protect his face. And in the mouth, James. Twenty times.” I shoved a hand in my pocket. “You know the details-you’ve been swimming in a bottle of Early Times ever since. When you’re ready to crawl out, you reach for my card and you call me, hear?”
Thomas cocked his head and squinted. “What do you want?” he said slowly.
“Same thing as you,” I said. “To sleep at night. And no bad dreams.”
We looked each other over for a while. Then I closed the door behind me and descended the stairs. Mrs. Thomas was standing at the bottom, her hand resting on the scrolled end of the banister.
“I’ll see myself out,” I said with a nod. “I’m sorry for disturbing your day.”
“Did you get the information you wanted?”
“Yes.”
“My son didn’t kill that boy,” she offered with commitment. “I don’t think he had one thing to do with it. ing to d?h it. i
“I don’t think so either. But he can point me in the direction of the ones who did.” She walked me to the door, and once more we stood together. I asked her before leaving, “Do you know a Jonas Brown? He had an auto body shop down by the tracks.”
Mrs. Thomas’s facial features converged into an amalgamation of smile lines and rounded cheeks. “Yes, I know Mr. Brown quite well. He was in the congregation. He’s been gone ten years. Now he’s resting with the Lord.”
“Good-bye, Mrs. Thomas.”
“Good-bye.”
Out on Hamlin, I put the key to the lock of my sedan. The boys on the steps next door were gone, though somewhere close a drum machine ticked out from a boom box. I loocked up and caught a glimpse of James Thomas.
It was the last I saw of him. He was framed behind the window of his bedroom in the second story of the house, expressionless as he watched me climb into the driver’s side of my Dart. I lit a cigarette and stared at the growing end of ash, thinking of how things burn and fade, before I drove away.
NINE
The Health Pro Center was a bunkerlike structure that endcapped a ubiquitous strip shopping center in the South Gaithersburg area of Montgomery County. I had driven out Rockville Pike early Wednesday morning with a quarter-inch of frost on my windshield, an ice sheet that had only begun to dissipate as my car neared the outer loop of the Beltway.
Rockville Pike is a track of fluorescence and concrete and traffic signals, five miles of heaven for the nouveaux riches who live to shop. To be fair to Maryland, all metropolitan areas seem to breed such cultureless outlying strips. The state of Virginia, in fact, has its own Rockville Pike. On that side of the river they call it Tysons
