up over the bridge of his nose and wrote out a prescription for more Tylenols. When I was released I walked out to the parking lot alone. Hendricks leaned on the trunk of my Dart. His white car sat idling next to mine.
I followed him to the station in La Plata and sat at a nondescript metal desk in a room that had a gated chain fence run along its interior. Hendricks asked me the same questions he had asked earlier, and I tried to duplicate my answers exactly. When it was over I asked if I was to be charged with anything, and I asked if my name would be released to any of the local media. He answered no to both questions, and I thanked him again and wished him a good Christmas. He did the same, and as he handed me the keys to my car I shook his hand and said good- bye.
Two miles up the road I pulled off onto the shoulder, got out of the car, and walked back and unlocked my trunk. Inside was my automatic, and next to that the leather briefcase. I closed the trunk and got back into my car and stopped at the next open bar and had a beer and two shots of Jim Beam, then drove back to my apartment in Shepherd Park.
My landlord was waiting for me at the door with my annual Christmas present, a fifth of green-seal Grand- Dad. I gave him a hug and a kiss on his dark brown cheek, and picked up my cat on the way in, rubbing the scar tissue in the socket of her right eye as I carried her. My landlord followed me. I poured two slugs of Grand-Dad into juice glasses and shook two Tylenol 3s into his palm, and two into mine, and we washed those down with the bourbon. Two hours later the bottle was nearly empty, and I had the English Beat’s I Just Can’t Stop It on the stereo, full blown, and my landlord and I were dancing wildly around my living room while my cat watched calmly from her roost on top of the radiator. It was Christmas Eve, and I guess I had a right to celebrate, but I wasn’t thinking about the holiday. I was thinking that I had come close this time, that I had seen the empty black eye, and I had walked away. I was thinking how good it felt to be alive.
Hendricks phoned me from southern Maryland two days later. A dog search of Crane’s property had failed to turn up any sign of April Goodrich. The cottage had been combed as well, with no result. Only when Hendricks screened the tapes from the root cellar did he find the evidence.
The collection had consisted of the standard rough trade pornography, with a few snuff films in the bunch. On the tail end of one, some home video footage had been cut in.
“You sure it was her?” I said carefully to Hendricks.
“Yeah,” he mumbled. “You don’t want to know the details, Stefanos. Let’s just say he did her like one of his pigs. Tied up, with one bullet to the head.”
I thought about it and closed my eyes. Hendricks cougHenlked awayhed once on the other end of the line. I said, “That kind of thing can be faked, Hendricks. Any reason to think…”
“No reason. Listen, Stefanos-I’ve seen the tape, you haven’t. What I saw can’t be done with trickery, or special effects. April Goodrich is dead. Now, I don’t know the motive, except that Crane surely was one sick son of a bitch. But it doesn’t matter now, does it?”
“I guess not,” I said, thinking of the money.
“I called her husband,” Hendricks said.
“I know. I spoke to him myself.”
“How’s he doin’?”
“How would you be?” I said.
“Right,” Hendricks said.
“There’s a service for her tomorrow, outside of town.”
“I never get that close to D.C.”
“Bad things happen in the country too, Hendricks.”
“Bad things happen everywhere,” he said tiredly. “You take care.”
The memorial service for April Goodrich was held in a small Baptist church in Beltsville, just south of Laurel. April had no family, and none of her former friends were in attendance. The group consisted of Billy, his parents, me, and a pale, anemic minister. I kept three pews back from Billy and his family and watched Billy the entire time. He stood with his hands folded, expressionless throughout.
Outside the church I shook Billy’s hand and began to walk away. Billy told his parents to wait on the front steps and followed me across the gravel lot to my Dart. He caught me as I was putting the key to the driver’s side lock.
Billy thanked me for coming, and for seeing everything through to the end. Then he asked if I had “found anything” that day at Crane’s.
I shoved him back with both hands. Billy fell onto the gravel. He sat there looking up at me, and we stared at each other for what seemed to be a very long time. Finally I got into my Dart, started it, and pulled out of the lot.
In the rearview I saw him stand and brush the dirt from his billowing cashmere overcoat as he watched me drive away. Billy’s parents were behind him, staring at us both. They held each other on the steps of the church, wondering what kind of horrible thing had finally happened, just then, to end it between their son and his old friend.
TWENTY-TWO
The day after April’s service I took the Metro to Gallery Place and had lunch at the District Seen. A bartender in combat fatigues served me a club sandwich and a cup of vegetable beef to go with it. I washe Metrod that down with a Guinness, and then another while I read that week’s City Paper and listened to De La Soul on the house deck. When bicycle messengers started to crowd the place, and Jaegermeisters were served, I settled up my tab.
Out on the street I walked down Seventh, opened a common-entrance glass door, and took the stairs that led to both a portrait gallery and the offices of DC This Week, the alternative weekly that was itself a more hard-news alternative to City Paper. I entered the door marked DC THIS WEEK.
A young woman in rimless glasses was sitting at a desk, talking into a headset as she clipped art on a rubber mat. She looked up as I walked in, and raised one finger in the air to hold me off. I waited until she had released her call.
“Yes?” she said.
I placed my business card in front of her on the mat. As she looked it over I said, “I’d like to speak to your editor, if he has a minute.”
“Do you have an appointment with Jack?”
“Nope.” I smiled. She didn’t.
“What’s this abou-what’s this in reference to?”
“It’s about my friend, William Henry.”
She relaxed, took off her glasses, and rubbed her eyes. “You knew William?”
“Yes.”
The woman slid her glasses back on and punched a finger at the switchboard. “I’ll see if he’s in.”
I stood with my hands in my overcoat pockets and listened to her mumble into the phone. Other phones rang from beyond the makeshift barrier that nearly encircled her desk, and in between their rings the tapping sounds of several keyboards meshed with a dublike bass. The multitalented receptionist removed her headset and stood up.
“Follow me,” she said with a come-hither gesture.
I walked behind her through a room where several tieless young men and young women typed on word processors. In the corner of the room a man with no hair on the sides of his head but plenty on top leaned over a drawing table and drew a line down a straightedge. A small boom box sat on a makeshift ledge above the drawing table, and out of the box Linton Kwesi Johnson spoke over a throbbing bass and one scratchy guitar. None of the people in the room looked up as I passed.
The receptionist stopped at the first door on a row of small offices and opened her palm in direction. I thanked her and stepped into the office. A woman stood up from behind an oak desk.
She was my height, with full-bodied, shoulder-length red hair that had fine threads of silver running through it
