Her grin slowly went away. I put my hand on top of hers. The hand was cool and thin, wormed with veins across its back. She looked at me, then through me, her eyes hollow and all the way gone. We sat there and listened to the rain. After a while, she rose abruptly and walked back into her house. I got up off the rocker, crossed the porch, and took the steps down to my car.
I had another evening shift at the Spot, and I worked it without saying much of anything to anyone, not even Anna or Darnell. The regulars made comments on my attire between calling for their drinks, and I let them, and when the bar fell silent for long periods of time, they reminded me to change the music on the deck. I started drinking in the middle of happy hour, one beer after another, buried in the ice chest to the neck. By the time I closed the place down, I had a beer buzz waiting on a shot of liquor to keep it company, so I poured two ounces of call bourbon into a glass.
Darnell shut off the light in the kitchen, stopped to get a good look at me, and walked out the front door. He didn’t even bother asking for a lift uptown. I had a couple more rounds and somewhere around eleven I heard a knock on the front door. I turned the lock and LaDuke stepped inside.
“Hey,” I said, clapping him a little too roughly on the shoulder.
“Nick.”›
He was still in his suit and tie, jacket on in the heat, the tie’s Windsor knot centered and tight.
“Come on in, Jack, have a drink with me.”
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Suit yourself.”
I went back behind the bar. LaDuke stayed where he was, at the top of the two-step landing, leaning against the entranceway’s green wall. I had a sip of bourbon and put fire to a smoke.
LaDuke said, “You’re wasting time with that shit. We’ve got work to do.”
“Maybe tomorrow,” I said. “Tonight I’m gonna drink.”
“Tonight and the next,” he said, “and the one after that. You’re no good that way.”
“Thanks for the lecture, Boy Scout.”
“We’ve got to finish what we started.”
“I am finished,” I said. “I don’t want to see any more death. They kill and we kill and it doesn’t stop and nobody wins. I’m tellin’ you, man, I’m through with it.”
“Well, I’m not through,” he said, his voice cracking. “Roland’s dead because of me. I’ve got to fix it now.”
“Roland offed himself. He went back to them because of greed, flat out. They killed him, Jack, not you.”
“No, Nick. It was me. That night in the warehouse, I called him by his name. You remember? I s aid, ‘You’re coming with us, Roland!’ The one named Coley, he must have picked up on it. It made it look like Roland was in on the robbery, in on it with us. You understand, Nick? It was me.”
“Roland was headed that way all along. You had nothing to do with it, hear?”
LaDuke pushed off from the wall. “I’m not done. Come along or don’t come along-it makes no difference to me.”
“Come on.” I smiled and raised my bottle of beer. “Come on over here, Jack, and sit down with me. Sit down with me and have a drink.”
He looked me over slowly, his eyes black with contempt.
“The hell with you,” he said.
LaDuke walked from the room. I listened to the door close, then the silence. My shot glass sat empty on the bar. I reached for the bottle and poured myself a drink.
TWENTY-TWO
Cases break, and major changes get put in motion, in seemingly innocuoutt sis ways.
My ex-wife and I met in a bar, on a night when I decided to go out for a late beer at the incessant goading of an acquaintance whose name I don’t remember. Similarly, I got my start in the sales business when, as a teenager, I happened to be hitching down Connecticut Avenue and found myself standing in front of the Nutty Nathan’s plate-glass window, staring at a HELP WANTED sign. And then there was my friend Dimitri, a Greek boy out of Highlandtown, who got into a car he didn’t know was stolen, then died after a high-speed chase at the age of seventeen. I often wonder how my life would have turned out had I not gone out for that beer, or had I been picked up hitchhiking farther north on the avenue that day. And I think about Dimitri, an innocent smile on his face as he climbed into that car, and I think of all the things my friend has missed.
The Jeter case was like that, too. The Jeter case might have ended with me and LaDuke parting company on a hot summer night. It might have ended, but it did not. The very next morning, I took a different route to work than I normally take, and everything got heated up again and boiled over in a big way.
My normal path out of Shepherd Park is 13th Street south, straight into downtown. From Hamilton Street on down, there was some road repair that morning, forcing a merge into one lane. I got into the lane and inched along for a while, but my hangover was scraping away at my patience. So I cut right on Arkansas, with the intention of hitting Rock Creek east of 16th.
I wasn’t the only one with that plan, however, and the traffic on Arkansas was as backed up as it had been on 13th. After Buchanan Street, the flow ebbed considerably, and just before Allison, things came to a complete stop. I was idling there, looking around absently and trying to clear my head, when I noticed the brick building of the Beverley ice company on my right. Some employees were walking out of the rear door of the icehouse, on the way to their trucks. The temperature that morning had already climbed to ninety-plus degrees, the sun blazing in a cloudless sky. Sitting in my car, I could feel the sweat soaking into my T-shirt; the men walking out of the icehouse wore winter coats.
I landed on my horn. The guy ahead of me moved up a couple of feet, enough for me to put two wheels on the sidewalk and get the car onto Allison. I punched the gas and got it on up to 14th, parking in front of a corner market. There was a pay phone outside the market, with a directory, miraculously intact, beneath the phone. I opened the book, flipped to the I ’s. I found plenty of wholesale ice merchants, most of them located in Northeast. There was only one located in Southeast: a place called Polar Boys, northwest of M, not too far from the Anacostia River-not too far from the river and only a short walk from the John Philip Sousa Bridge.
I dropped a quarter in the slot, woke Mai at home, and asked if she could work my shift.
“I’ll do it,” she said after the obligatory mild protest. “But I still want my whole two shifts tomorrow. And you owe me now, Nicky.”
“I’ll cover for you, Mai, anytime. Thanks a million, hear?”
She said good-bye. I ran down the sidewalk to my car.
Most detective work consists of watching and waiting. The job requires patience and the ability to deal with boredom, two character traits I do not possess. It’s one of the reasons I don’t take tail gigs anymore, following errant wives and hard-dick husbands to motel parking lots, waiting for them to walk out the door of room 12 so I can snap their pictures. The tip jar from the Spot not only keeps me solvent, it also allows me the luxury of selectivity.
I was thinking of the waiting game as I sat across the street from Polar Boys off M. I had parked near a store called Garden Liquors, though there appeared to be no garden or greenery of any kind in the general vicinity. The projects were located one block over, and some vampire was doing landmark business out of the store, selling forties and pints and lottery tickets at 11:30 in the morning. I sat behind the wheel of my Dodge, alcohol sweat beaded on my forearms, my ravaged stomach and my own smell making me sick. I could have used a beer myself, and another one after that.
A half hour later, some men began to filter out of the steel door of Polar Boys, removing their jackets in the sun as they walked across the broiling brown grass, some toward the liquor store, others toward a roach coach parked by the loading dock. Soon another man walked out alone, a bearded man approaching middle age, with a pleasant face framing quiet, serene eyes. He wore khaki pants, thick-soled boots, and a brilliant blue coat. I felt my pulse quicken as I stepped out of my car, then a chemical energy as I crossed the street.
“How’s it going?” I said, blocking the man’s path on the sidewalk.
