Nick's Trip (12 page)

“That’s right,” I said as Luzon’s smile turned down. “And I’d like to know what happened.”

“They say a light-skinned dude—”

“I read that already.”

“Listen, Nicky. The only thing I know, they got the Piedmont locked down tighter than a schoolgirl, man.”

“You’ve tried to get in, then.”

Luzon looked up, sheepishly. “I’ve made some attempts, yes.”

“What’s your point?”

“That ‘light-skinned dude in a blue shirt’ routine—it’s just smoke, man. That way the public thinks it’s just a junkie kill, from the neighborhood. But no junkie got into that building unless he greased somebody’s palm or unless that boy let him up. You see what I’m sayin’?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Winnie. See what you can dig up on that too, hear?”

“Sure, Nicky.” Luzon shifted his feet and looked down at his shoes. “You positive you don’t want no smoke?”

I drew a folded twenty from my pocket and my business card and placed them both in his palm. “Keep the weed,” I said, “and call me.”

Luzon eyeballed the card, smiled, and shook his head. “Good to see you again, Nicky. Or is it Nicholas?”

“Nicky,” I said.

Luzon smiled again before he turned and walked smoothly back along the walkway that encircled the grassy mall. I eyed him until he became too small to watch, shoulders up with a white curl of smoke that seemed to circle around his head. If there is one thing I cannot reconcile, one inevitable, it is the slow, sad progression of decay.

WILLIAM HENRY’S BUILDING STOOD
at the intersection of Sixteenth and Florida and was on the way to my car. I stepped behind the building and had a cigarette while I watched a delivery being made to the truck bay in the alley. An unsmiling man in a blue maintenance uniform checked the delivery in and then pulled
the doors closed from the inside when the process was done. There were no outside handles on those steel doors and only one similarly fashioned door on the left side of the building. I crushed the butt under my shoe and walked around to the front.

The Piedmont was gray stone and six stories tall, with swirled detail work above each window. Black wrought-iron balconies had been added to the apartments at the time of their condo conversion, adding to the price tag but adding little in the way of practical use, since the balconies appeared to be only three feet deep. A couple of bicycles were chained to the railings, a few of which were strung with Christmas lights. I moved along the front walk to an open heavy glass door. Inside I encountered a locked set of similar doors and a black telephone on the gray wall. Next to the telephone was a slot for a magnetic card that I presumed would allow tenants to gain entrance. The telephone had no dial or numbers. I picked it up and heard a ring on the other end.

“Yes,” said a large voice.

“Detective Stefanos,” I said. “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions.”

“Metropolitan Police?”

“That’s right,” I lied.

The phone clicked dead, and then a man as large as his voice walked across the marble lobby to the glass doors. This one was a hard two-fifty if he was a pound. He stopped on the other side of the door, folded his thick arms, and looked down into my eyes. The aluminum tag clipped to his shirt pocket read
RUDOLPH
. On the arm of his shirt, above the bicep, was sewn a red patch with the coat-of-arms logo of the Four-S Security Systems company.

Rudolph raised his eyebrows as I put my business card against the glass and quickly pulled it back. He pointed to the badge on his chest and then made a come-on gesture with his fingers. I put the card back up on the glass along with a ten spot
that I produced from my slacks. Rudolph stared at me until I squeezed out another ten and put it behind the first one. He kept staring while he pointed once again to his badge and then at me. When I didn’t produce one he walked away. He was still walking as I tapped my fingers on the glass.

Out on the street I buttoned up my black overcoat and found a pay phone on the corner nearest my car. I dropped a quarter getting the number of Four-S, then another dialing that number. After a few minutes I was directed into the office of personnel.

“How may I help you?” said an aging female voice.

“Jim Piedmont,” I said, as I looked at William Henry’s building across the way. “Bartell Investigative.”

“Yes, Jim, what can I do for you?”

“I’m doing an employment check on a James Thomas, just on the essentials. Do you mind?”

“I’ll help where I can,” she said coolly.

“I just need to verify his current address. I have him at Fourteen-twelve P Street, in Northwest. Is that correct?”

“Hold on and I’ll check,” she said. I listened to the tapping of a computer keyboard while I wondered if there was any such address at Fourteenth and P. The woman got back on the line.

“I have him at Thirteen-forty-three Hamlin Street in Northeast.”

“Over in Brookland area, right?”

“That I don’t know.”

“Can you tell me, Miss—?”

“Sheridan.”

“Miss Sheridan, can you tell me the circumstances of Mr. Thomas’s severance with the company?”

“No,” Miss Sheridan said, “I can’t.”

“I understand,” I said. “One more thing. I recently met one of your employees, a big fellow by the name of Rudolph.”

“Yes?”

“I just wanted to tell you—he’s doing one hell of a job.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Thank
you,
” I said, and hung up the phone.

I ripped a ticket off the Dart’s windshield and threw it in the glovebox with all the others. Then I swung a U on Florida and headed across town to the Brookland section of Northeast.

J
AMES THOMAS LIVED
in a pale green two-story house with pine green shutters, on a gently graded piece of Hamlin Street between Thirteenth and Fourteenth in Northeast. The lots were large in this part of town, with wide yards whose once-grand homes were set far back from the curb.

My grandfather had still owned some Brookland property in the midsixties, when we would drive across town in his black Buick Wildcat once a month on Sunday to collect the rent. Papou’s property was a brick warehouse on Ninth Street that faced railroad tracks that later were to parallel those of the Metro. The dark-skinned man we met each month was elderly and bald, except for two neatly trimmed patches of gray above each ear, and he paid my grandfather with a roll of twenties that he had ready as we pulled up to the lot. His name was Jonas Brown, and he ran a clean little auto body shop out of the space, and he called my grandfather “Mister Nick” and me “Young Nick.”

After the riots, Papou sold the warehouse to Jonas Brown, and I had since rarely returned to Brookland. I remembered it as being as peaceful as any section of D.C., with its stately Victorians surrounded by huge clusters of azaleas in the spring. In my gauzy childhood visions, middle-class black families walked slowly down city streets, the men wearing striped suits and brown felt hats, the women in brightly colored dresses cinched with white ribbons, and Brookland was always Sunday morning.

So the drive that day down Twelfth Street, the neighborhood’s main avenue, saddened me. A painfully thin, coatless woman stood at the corner of Twelfth and Monroe in what looked to be a chiffon Easter dress, her head bowed as she fought to remain upright against the strong, cold wind. At Michigan Liquors a young man in a thick red down coat stood talking into a pay phone, gesturing broadly with his free hand, his beeper clipped to the waistband of his sweatpants, the door open to his window-tinted Chevy Blazer that sat idling near his side. I noticed several other drug cars, Jags and Mercedes with gold wheels and spoilers and gold-framed licence plates, parked in the lot of the Pentecostal Church of Christ. The movie theater was gone, replaced by a chain drugstore. There were hair salons and dry cleaners and delis; outside their doors teenage boys heavily paced the sidewalks. At Lucky’s Cocktail Lounge a warping sign depicted a logo of a forked-tongue Satan. Under the Satan a slogan was printed with red bravado:
WHERE THE DEVILS PLAY, AND THE LADIES MAY
.

I had parked my Dart two doors up from the Thomas residence, in front of a leaning Victorian that was fronted with stone steps leading up to a rotting porch. Two young men sat on those steps and watched me as I walked by. Ice T’s “Drama” was coming out of their box. One of the boys smiled malignantly in my direction as the words “Fuck the damn police” rapped out of the speakers. All of the house windows were barred on this street, and the deep barks of large-breed dogs were alternately close and distant in the air. I walked on.

On the porch of the Thomas residence I knocked on a heavy oak door. After my second knock there were muted footsteps and the darkening of the peephole centered in the door. Then the release of deadbolts and the metallic slide of a chain. The door opened, and a tiny dark woman in a print housedress stood before me, looking up with quizzical, kindly brown eyes. Her hair was thin and white; her deeply lined features nearly aboriginal.

“Yes?” she said in a manner that wedded curiosity to trepidation.

“Is James Thomas in, ma’am?” I gave her my card along with my least threatening smile. She handed back the card after a brief inspection.

“That would depend on your business with him, Mr….?”

“Stefanos.”

“What is your business with him, Mr. Stefanos?” she repeated, with the greatest degree of forced unpleasantness that a woman of her frailty could muster.

“It concerns a case I’m working on,” I said, adding, “I’m not with the police, ma’am.”

She considered that as the December chill continued to intrude upon her house through the open doorway, along with the rap from the boom box on the porch of the house to her right. Her shoulders finally slumped in visible submission as she motioned me in. I thanked her and followed as she led me into a den furnished with throw rugs and faded overstuffed furniture.

Mrs. Thomas had a seat on the couch; I took mine in a cushiony chair. She folded a slim pair of hands in her lap after pulling the hem of her housedress down to her knees, then looked into my eyes. I don’t know what she was looking for, or if the look was meant to intimidate me. It did. There were seventy years of hard life in those eyes, seventy years of churchgoing faith and hope in answer to deterioration and disappointment and death. The wooden clock on the fireplace mantelpiece ticked loudly in the otherwise silent room.

“I’d like to see your son,” I said. “If he has a few minutes.”

“Does this concern the young man’s death at the Piedmont?”

“Yes, it does.”

Mrs. Thomas sighed slightly but retained her posture. “The District police have gone over the case with us very thoroughly, Mr. Stefanos. I believe they were satisfied that my son had nothing to do with that boy’s death.”

“I’m not working with the police,” I said. “So I’m not privy to what was said between them and your son. But I do have an interest in seeing that the murderer is found. William Henry was my friend, Mrs. Thomas.”

Her hands moved together in a washing motion in her lap, as if it were her hands that were doing the deliberating. She looked away briefly and up the stairs, where I assumed James Thomas was residing. Then she looked back at me, her features softened but unresigned.

“When one person dies, his suffering is over, Mr. Stefanos. Those left behind often bear the weight of the hardship. I didn’t know that Henry boy. The papers and the police said he was an innocent young man. Anyway, he’s in the hands of the Lord now—neither you nor I can help him. But my son has been hurt enough. He’s lost his job and he’s lost all his self-respect. He sits in that room upstairs all day, and he doesn’t come out, except for dinner and to walk down to the liquor store.” Mrs. Thomas looked down at her lap. “I couldn’t help that young man. It wasn’t my job to help that young man. But it
is
my job to protect my son. And I don’t want him hurting anymore.”

“I didn’t come here to hurt your son. I came here for a few simple answers. You believe in justice in heaven. I respect that belief, if a person can be satisfied with it. I can’t. So I have to believe in justice on earth.” I rose slowly, walked in her direction, and stood over her. “Let me have a couple of minutes with your son, and I’ll be on my way.”

“I’ll ask if he’d like to see you,” she said.

I stepped aside to let her pass and watched her ascend the
stairs. She held the wooden banister as she did 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 ashtray just like it was on the nightstand next to the unmade bed. By the nightstand was a wastebasket lined with a brown paper bag. The neck of a fifth leaned out from the top of the bag. James Thomas sat in a small wooden chair facing the window, a smoking Kool Long in his hand. There was a third ashtray balanced on one very thick thigh.