Nick's Trip (37 page)

“Private party?” Darnell said.

“Uh-uh.”

“Mind if I hang?”

I gestured toward the empty stool to my right. “Have a seat.”

Darnell sat and picked up my bottle of beer. He looked at the label, studied it, and placed the bottle back with the shot glass. I cupped my hand around both, a low, even tone encircling my head, entering my ears.

Darnell said, “You look pretty far away, man.”

“I guess I am.”

“Trouble with the ladies?”

I concentrated, looking at myself in the bar mirror. I had been thinking about Jackie at the beginning of the night, and then Billy Goodrich. But afterward my thoughts had gone much further back, long before the day I had met Billy on the bench in Sligo Creek Park. More skeletons, come to life.

“No,” I said. “I was thinking about this Greek boy I knew way back. A kid named Dimitri.”

“Never heard you mention him.”

“He’s been gone,” I said, “a long time.” I had a drink of
bourbon, rolled it around the glass, and followed it with another swallow. I chased that with beer and rested the bottle on the bar, keeping my fingers on the neck. Costello’s beautiful country import, “Shoes without Heels,” flowed through the speakers.

Darnell said, “Talk about it, man.”

I looked into my shot glass. “I met this kid Dimitri, playing basketball in the church league, when I was seventeen. He was from Highlandtown—Greektown—up in Baltimore. We came from different places, but our friendship clicked for some reason, real fast. We started hanging out together, I’d drive up to Baltimore to see him, he’d take the bus to D.C. This kid was tough, big shoulders, but he had this smile…. He had a lot of life, you know what I’m saying?” Darnell nodded, watching my eyes in the mirror. “That summer, we used to crank up J. Geils’s
Bloodshot,
dance out front of his row house, the tape deck set up right on his stoop. So when Geils came to the Baltimore Civic Center, you know we were the first ones with tickets, the first ones at the show.” I paused. “Dimitri was wearing this hat that night, sort of like a Panama hat, but gangster style. And J. Geils came on—this was the
Ladies Invited
tour, they opened with the first track off the LP, ‘The Lady Makes Demands’—and turned the place out.” I poured another inch of Grand-Dad into the shot glass, downed it, and exhaled. The glass left a ring of water on the mahogany bar. “Somehow I lost Dimitri in the crowd. But later, from my seat above, I recognized him by his hat, pushing his way up to the front of the stage. That show was bumpin’, man.” I paused, picturing the crowd, girls in halter tops, a cloud of marijuana hovering in the arena. “Anyway, when Dimitri finally came back to the seats, he wasn’t wearing the hat—when I asked him where it was, he said he had handed it to Peter Wolf, on the stage. I told him he was full of shit, and Dimitri didn’t argue about it—that wasn’t his style. He just smiled.”

Darnell said, “What happened to that boy?”

I moved my face around with my hand and pushed hair
away from my eyes. “A couple weeks later he got into a car with a couple of Polish boys from the neighborhood. He didn’t know the car was stolen. They were driving down the Patterson Parkway, and a cop made the car, and the driver tried to outrun the cop. He flipped it doing seventy. Dimitri went through the windshield. He was in a coma for a week, and then he died. The boys who stole the car walked away with scratches.”

Darnell said, “You don’t need to be thinkin’ about that tonight, Nick.”

“Listen”—I smiled and shook my head—“that’s not the end of the story. Six months later I pick up an issue of
Creem
magazine, off the newsstand. Inside, there’s a story on the J. Geils Band, and on the facing page there’s a photograph of Peter Wolf. He’s wearing Dimitri’s hat, Darnell. And the caption underneath says, ‘Lead singer Peter Wolf wears a hat given to him by a fan at a Baltimore concert.’”

“That must’ve tripped you out.”

I had a sip of bourbon, put it down, and drank deeply of the beer. “Dimitri went out like a fuckin’ champ.”

Darnell frowned. “You don’t believe that, Nick.”

“You’re wrong,” I said. “Dimitri checked out at the top of his game. The way everybody should.” I lit a cigarette, blew smoke over the bar, and let it settle. “He never had to watch himself get old in the mirror. He never had to hold a fucking gun on his friends.”

Darnell looked at the drink in front of me and straight back in my eyes. “Man, you’re the one that’s wrong. That shit you’re drinkin, it’s got you all twisted up inside.” He put a hand to my arm. “I’ll tell you what that boy never got to do. He never got to walk his woman down the aisle. He never got to hold his baby up to the sky. He never got a chance to taste the good
or
the bad. You better see that, man. If you don’t, you’re lost.”

I reached for my drink. Darnell pushed the glass away, out of my reach.

“I’m all right,” I said.

“I’m drivin’ you home.”

“Let me sit here for a little bit.”

“I’m drivin’ you home,” Darnell said. “Come on.”

I steadied myself, my hand on the bar. “I’m all right.”

“Let’s go, man.”

I focused on Darnell’s eyes. “You lock the place up. Okay?”

“I’ll take care of it,” he said, getting under my arm.

We walked together to the front door. A cool blue light burned behind us in the room, and smoke rose off the ashtray on the bar.

I STOOD IN THE
shower and slept on my feet. The water temperature fell, and when it did, the coolness of it woke me. I exited the stall, dried off, combed out my hair, and dressed in a black sweatshirt and jeans. My cat followed me into the kitchen, circling my feet as I brewed a cup of coffee.

I took the coffee out into the living room and had a seat on the couch, resting the cup on the couch’s arm. I sat there and drank the coffee, stroking the cat on my lap. I did that for a while, and then the phone rang. The cat jumped off as I picked the phone up from the floor and placed it in my lap. I put the receiver to my ear.

“Hello.”

“Stefanos?” It was a woman’s voice, unidentifiable but familiar.

“Yes.”

“You never called me.”

“Who is this?”

“A fan,” she said.

I thought about that, and I remembered the note. Then I thought some more about the voice. “How’s it going?” I said.

“It’s goin’ good. Why didn’t you call?”

“I’m not the aggressive type.”

“You got aggressive pretty quick on the William Henry case.”

“What’s that?”

“I read the
Post
,” she said. “I figured you were behind it somehow, though I don’t know how you finessed it.” I let her talk. I liked the sound of her voice. “Don’t want to discuss it, huh?”

“Uh-uh.”

“You drunk, Stefanos? You sound a little drunk.”

“Tired,” I said.

“Well, it is late. So I’ll get right to the point. Listen, I was wondering—you didn’t call, so I thought I’d take the initiative here—I was wondering if maybe you wanted to take in a double feature tomorrow night, down at the AFI.”

My cat sat on the radiator, watching me twist the phone cord around my hand. “What’s on the bill?” I said.

“Some shoot-em-up out of Hong Kong, and a Douglas Sirk melodrama.
Magnificent Obsession
. Something for you, something for me.”

“No Liz Taylor?”

“Nope,” she said. “And no Isaac Hayes.”

I grinned. “Sounds good to me. You buy the tickets, I’ll spring for whatever comes up next. Okay?”

“Okay. I’ll pick you up at your place,” she said. “About six-thirty.”

“You know where I live?”

“Your number’s on the card. I crossed-referenced it to your address in the Hanes Directory.”

“You’re a hell of an investigative reporter.”

“See you tomorrow night, Stefanos.”

“Right.”

I got off the couch with the phone in my hand, and I stood in the center of the room. A Dinah Washington number played from my landlord’s apartment above. I danced a few steps and put the phone down. My cat watched me and blinked her eye.

I took the coffee cup to the kitchen and found the note that had been signed “A Fan” on the plain white card, in the basket
where I dumped my overdue bills. I walked with the note to my bedroom, and I opened the top dresser drawer.

I wasn’t certain that night as to why I kept the note. Call it a feeling, listening to the woman’s voice on the phone, that something right would happen next. But as spring became summer, I began to understand.

That was the summer that I first noticed the texture of the crepe myrtle that grew beside my stoop, the summer I woke each morning to the sweet smell of hibiscus that flowered outside my bedroom window. That was the summer that a tape called
The La’s
played continuously from my deck, the summer that a Rare Essence go-go single called “Lock It” raged from every young D.C. driver’s sound system on the street. And that was the summer that I held hands in the dark with a freckly, pale-eyed redhead with the perfectly musical name of Lyla McCubbin.

Under a shoe box filled with trinkets from my youth, in the bottom of the dresser drawer, lay the envelope that held the few memories I had chosen to hold on to through the years. I placed the white card into the envelope, behind the photograph of me and Billy Goodrich sitting high on the fire escape in New Orleans. I slipped the envelope back under the shoe box and closed the drawer. My cat walked slowly into the room and settled at my feet.

A novel by

GEORGE PELECANOS

Have you always had an interest in writing?

Yes. I would say that before I was into books, I was mainly a movie freak, and music—all popular culture. But I came to writing relatively late in life after being influenced and turned on to books by a professor of mine at the University of Maryland. But all my earlier pop culture influences make their way into my books.

Do you remember your first story that you wrote, and where you buried it so it won’t see the light of day?

That’s a good one. Actually, I do. The first thing I wrote was a novel when I was ten years old. It was a war novel. It was called
The Two Wars of Lieutenant Jeremy
. And, you know, it was a long book. I illustrated it and all that. I didn’t bury it; it was lost. The only thing I have left is one sheet of reviews that I wrote myself. And that’s what remains of that. I didn’t try to write a second book for another twenty years.

You have written eight novels set in and around Washington, D.C. Apart from the fact that you live in the D.C. area, what do you find so intriguing about D.C. that you are inclined to set all of your novels there?

When I started out, I didn’t feel as if Washington, D.C., had been fully represented in literature. And by that I mean the real, living, working-class side of the city. The cliché is that Washington is a transient town of people who blow in and out
every four years with the new administration. But the reality is that people have lived in Washington for generations and their lives are worth examining, I think. I didn’t have a specific plan in the beginning, but the way it’s worked out, I’ve pretty much covered the century in Washington, going back to the 1930s and the societal changes that have occurred there.

Your novels have been said to be very “streetwise.” What kind of research do you do in order to write stories that capture the real pulse of the city?

Well, the main thing is, I’ve lived there for my whole life, which is forty-two years. And I continue to live in a very mixed working-class neighborhood. So this is not an archaeological thing for me; rather it’s more a case of me being out on the street and listening and talking with my neighbors. Now there are things that I do. I have sources. I ride with the police at night frequently, and I know private detectives in Washington who can get me an audience with, for example, prostitutes and people like that who are out at night and see more than the cops do. And it’s also a case of my personal history—where I’ve worked in kitchens, bars, warehouses, and sales floors. I have gotten a wealth of material like that.