Nick's Trip Read online

  “And?”

  “I called your answering service, and the girl said…”

  “She’s a grandmother.”

  “Okay, the old lady said I could get you down here. I was surprised she gave me the information so easily.”

  “She’s the motherly type. Probably thought she was doing me a favor. Business has been slow, to say the least.”

  “Well,” he said, “the whole thing was a shock to me. I mean, I ran into Teddy Ball a couple of years ago, remember him from high school?” I nodded, though I didn’t really. “Anyway, he told me he heard you were some advertising bigwig for one of those electronics retailers.”

  “I was,” I said, and let it go at that. “Now I do this.”

  “Hey, that’s great,” Billy said, in the tone of voice one uses when soothing a sensitive child. “If that’s what you want, great.”

  “How about you, man? What are you up to?”

  He shrugged with studied carelessness and said, “A little bit of everything. My Ten-Forty says I sell commercial real estate”—and here Billy winked—“but I have an interest in a couple of cash businesses in the suburbs. Restaurants, carryouts, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Things are okay,” he said, then looked at the remainder of his beer and finished it off. Billy held the bottle up. “How about another one of these Green Guys?”

  I found him one and killed off the rest of my Grand-Dad, then poured myself another shot. While I did that I watched him nail half the bottle of Heineken. He looked up my way and stared at me for an uncomfortably long time.

  “It’s good to see you, Nicky,” he said finally.

  “It’s good to see you too, man.”

  After that there was another block of silence. I had a taste of bourbon and chased it with some beer while he looked away. The music had stopped, but he was drumming his fingers on the bar. I moved down to the stereo and switched it over to WDCU, to give him something to drum about. They were playing Charlie Parker’s “Lester Leaps In.” When I walked back Billy was grinning. It was still an ingratiating grin but a little forced now, as if he were attempting to smile against a cold wind.

  “So,” he said, “I never would have figured you to end up as a detective.”

  “It just happened. Anyway, I’d hate to think I ended up as any one thing.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “All too well. You meet somebody, right away, what’s the first thing they ask you? ‘What do you do?’ I never know how to answer that. I mean, I do a lot of things. I’m a bartender, I read books, I’m a private investigator, I go to movies, I drink, I box, I listen to music, I fuck—which activity are they referring to?”

  “I doubt they’re referring to the last one.” Billy shook his head and chuckled condescendingly. “You haven’t changed one bit, man.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But you probably knew that. And you came down here anyway to ask for my help. Right?”

  Billy finished his beer and replaced the bottle softly on the bar, then looked at me. “That’s right.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “I’d feel better if we went somewhere else.” Billy had a look around the bar. “I mean, this place is so depressing. Don’t you think it could use a few…”

  “Plants?”

  “Yeah, something.”

  “I don’t know. I kind of like it the way it is.”

  WE WERE GLIDING NORTH on Fourteenth Street in Billy’s sleek white Maxima, the glow of the dash lights rendering our complexions pale green. There was a car phone between the saddle leather buckets. The numbers on the car phone were also illuminated in green. A notepad filled with blank white paper was suctioned to the dash.

  Billy had a pull off one of the road beers I had grabbed before locking up the Spot, then wedged the bottle between his thighs. I flipped through his CD selection and tried to find something listenable, but all he owned—Steve Winwood, Clapton, Phil Collins, the Who (“Hope I die before I get old,” indeed—why didn’t you, then?)—were forty-minute beer commercials. I closed the box and settled for the soft, intermittent rush of the Maxima’s wipers.

  Outside, the snow was drifting down in chunked, feathery flakes. Soft, radiant halos capped the streetlights ahead. Children were out, laughing and running on the sidewalks and in the street. One of them, a boy no older than eight who wore only a red windbreaker, threw a powdery snowball that hit our windshield and dissolved. I made a mocking fist and shook it at him as we passed, and he smiled and shook his own fist back. Billy locked the doors with a rather awkward, fumbling push of a button.

  Just past Fourteenth and Irving we passed the remains of the Tivoli Theater. My grandfather had taken me there in 1963 to see Jason and the Argonauts, a film noted as the pinnacle of Ray Harryhausen’s work in stop-motion photography. The scene in which the skeletons come to life to do battle with Jason inspired some of the most frighteningly memorable, sheet-soaked nightmares of my childhood. The night of the film my grandfather and I had walked through a heavy snowstorm from our apartment to the theater. I can still feel the warmth of his huge and callused hand in mine as we made a path through the snow.

  “Hey,” Billy said. “Your papa still around?”

  “Papou,” I said. “He died a couple of years back.”

  “How about your folks? You ever hear from them?”

  “No.”

  At my direction Billy pulled over and parked near the intersection of Fourteenth and Colorado. He double-checked all the locks before we headed down the block, turning his head back twice to look at the car as we walked.

  “Relax, will you?”

  “That’s twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of car,” he said. “I don’t want to see it up on cinder blocks when I come out of this place.”

  “You worry too much,” I said, but judging from the pale look on Billy’s face, that bit of analysis didn’t help. I pulled on the thin door and we entered Slim’s.

  Slim’s was a small jazz-and-reggae club owned and run by a couple of East Africans, neither of whom was named Slim. At night there was always a live but unobtrusive band, and the Ethiopian food was top-notch. Slim’s had a ten-dollar minimum tab, a quota I never once had trouble making, to keep out any undesirables. I stopped in once in a while on my way home and had a couple of quiet drinks at the bar while I listened to some of the cleanest jazz, mostly of the bebop variety, in town.

  We crossed the room to a deuce in the back that was centered under a stylized portrait of Haile Selassie. Our waitress showed momentarily and took our order for two beers. Her name was Cissy. She was wearing a plain white T-shirt and blue jeans, and had beautifully unblemished burnt-sienna skin.

  The band that night was the club’s regular sextet—trumpet, sax, piano, drums, guitar, upright bass—whose members took turns soloing on practically every number. The turban-headed trumpeter was the coleader, though oddly the least talented of the group, and his partner was the saxman, an aging, bottom-heavy Greek I had seen around town who took his scotch through a straw. The youngest man of the bunch was the guitarist, and also the musician with the most potential, but obviously a heavy user. When he wasn’t soloing he sat on a wooden stool with his chin on his chest, a crooked knit cap pushed over his brow, deep in his down world.

  Billy and I sat through the rest of the band’s set without speaking. Cissy had given us two unsolicited Jim Beam Blacks (a very smooth bourbon that is in fact too smooth for my taste) and served them in juice glasses halfway full to the lip. The band ended its set with a pumped-up version of Miles Davis’s “Milestones.” The young bartender put some low-volume Jamaican dub on the house stereo. Billy, who was starting to look a little pickled, leaned my way.

  “Let’s talk business,” he said.

  “All right.” I pulled the deck of Camels from my overcoat and shook it in his direction. He started to reach for one but then waved it away. I slid one out, lit it, and took in a lungful.r />
  Billy said, “I guess you’ve noticed the ring on my finger.”

  I nodded and said, “So?”

  “This is about that.”

  “I don’t tail wives or husbands anymore. I should tell you that straight up. My bartending job keeps me off that sort of thing.”

  “It’s not what you think,” he said.

  “What is it then?”

  “My wife has left me, Nick.” Billy took the matches that rested on the top of my cigarettes and pulled one off the pack. He struck it, watched it flare, then blew it out. “She walked on her own accord. You’d call it desertion, I guess, if it was a man doing the walking.”

  “Kids?”

  “None. We tried for a couple of years, but it wasn’t in the cards.”

  I had a sip of bourbon then followed it with a deep drag off my cigarette. When I exhaled I blew the smoke past his head and tried not to look into his eyes. “Like you said, Bill, this is business. I’m going to ask you some questions that are personal….”

  “Go ahead.”

  “This type of thing—and not to make it seem small—well, it happens every day. Hell, man, in a way it happened to me. So why hire a detective?”

  “I’m worried about her,” he said. “It’s that simple. And since there’s no evidence of foul play, the cops won’t give it the time of day.”

  “You’ve been to them?”

  “Yeah, I reported it the first day. They came around, asked me a couple of questions, I never heard from them again.”

  I had a last pull off my smoke and butted it. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Find her, that’s it. You don’t even have to talk to her. Just report her location back to me, and I’ll do the talking. If she doesn’t want to come home, then at least I gave it a shot.” Billy looked at me briefly and then looked away.

  “What else?” I said.

  “Like?” He nodded me on with his chin.

  “Did she leave you for someone else?” Instead of answering, Billy finished the bourbon in his glass, an answer in itself. I signaled Cissy for two more. “Do you know him?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I know him. He was a man I did business with.” The waitress brought our Beams and two more beers. Billy and I lightly touched glasses, and I had a drink while he continued. “I met this guy as a client. I was showing him around town, some spots for a chain of carryouts he was thinking of opening. Anyway, I did him a couple of serious solids in terms of negotiating leases, that sort of thing. He liked my style, and he put me on the payroll of his corporation in a retainer capacity.”

  “You kept your job with the real estate company?”

  “Yes.”

  “Kind of a conflict of interest there, wasn’t it?”

  “It depends on how you look at things, I suppose. I’ve learned some very creative ways of putting deals together, and I guess Mr. DiGeordano didn’t want me doing that for anyone else but him.”

  “Joey DiGeordano?”

  “That’s right.”

  I whistled softly. “You got yourself pretty connected, didn’t you, Bill?”

  “You’ve heard of him, then.”

  “I read the paper,” I said, leaving out the fact that my grandfather had known the old man. “The DiGeordanos have been in it once or twice through the years. They’re what passes for a small-time crime family in this town. Nothing serious, by today’s standards—a little gambling, some Jewish Lightning in the old days.”

  “I’m aware of those things,” he mumbled.

  “Keep going,” I said.

  “April and I—April, that’s my wife’s name—we socialized with Joey and his wife a few times early on. Right from the beginning I could see Joey had the eye for April. But that didn’t bother me much. I mean, I was used to it. April is a very good-looking woman.”

  “Did they have an affair?”

  “I can’t prove it if they did,” he said. “Let’s say it was a suspicion I had.”

  “What was your relationship like when she left?”

  “I thought it was good. We had our problems, but in general I was pretty content. And I was willing to work at it, that’s the thing. Then I came home one day and she was just gone. Her closet was emptied and there was a note, and that was that.”

  “When was that?” I asked.

  “A week ago yesterday,” he said. “Wednesday.”

  “Anything unusual about the note?”

  Billy considered that. “It came off a printer. I guess that’s unusual, huh? A typed Dear John.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “She ran the thing off on my computer. That was always a sticking point with her—I’d come home from work and immediately get on my computer and start running spreadsheets and figures. I guess I was pretty obsessed with making it and all that. Anyway, she certainly thought so. And the note was just her way of twisting the knife.”

  I thought that over and said, “What about Joey DiGeordano? Are you still doing business with him?”

  Billy said, “Our business relationship has become strained. I can’t exactly talk to him about it, even though I think he might have some idea where she is. That’s where you come in.”

  I lit another cigarette and exhaled a thin gray veil that settled between us. “I’ll need to know a few things about your wife. Her history, family, that sort of thing. A recent picture.”

  “Then you’ll help me.”

  I nodded and said, “Yeah.”

  “Thanks, Nick.” Billy shook my hand and held it for more than a few seconds. His felt cool. “I want you to understand that I didn’t come to you for any friendship deals.”

  “There won’t be any,” I said. “I get two-fifty a day plus expenses, with a day’s worth up front.”

  “No problem.” A few strands of his moussed hair had fallen across his forehead, and he brushed it back. “Listen, man, I’m a little drunk right now.”

  “Me too,” I admitted.

  “Anyway,” he said, “it’s as good a time as any to apologize for all the years that went by. The thing is, Nick, I think of life as being more… linear than you do, you know what I mean? High school, college, career, marriage, family, retirement—and I have no trouble leaving the last phase behind me when I start a new one. Anyway, when I went away to school, I could see you just weren’t going to come along. I just don’t want you to think I forgot about you, man. I never did.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You’re calling it straight. That’s exactly the way it was.”

  The band was gathering for their next set. Billy reached for his wallet and said, “Come on, let’s get out of here. I’ve had enough.”

  “You go on,” I said. “I only live a couple of blocks away. I’ll walk home.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  Billy shrugged and left a twenty on the table. I let him do it and watched him button his coat. “I’ll courier all that stuff to you tomorrow.”

  “Send it here,” I said, and we traded business cards. His said WILLIAM GOODRICH.

  “Thanks again, Nick.”

  I nodded and he walked away. As I watched him cross the room, I felt an odd sadness, that sense of irrevocable loss one feels upon seeing a friend who has changed so drastically over so many years. I recognized the feeling as little more than a burst of self-pity for my own youth, a youth that had quietly slipped away. But the recognition in itself didn’t seem to help.

  He was right when he said that I had chosen not to come along, but it was not really something I was sorry for. He had become that characterless, you-can-have-it-all predator that was everything I had come to hate. But somewhere in that cadaver was the long-haired kid who had called out to me one day in the park, and now he was calling out again. William Goodrich had hired me, but it was for Billy that I was taking the case.

  I had another bourbon while I watched the last set, then settled up my tab. Out on the sidewalk, I tucked a scarf into my black overcoat and weaved north. T
he branches of the trees were heavy with powder, and the streets were still. The snow was ending, but its last flakes were still visible in the light of the street lamps. The snow made a sound like paper cutting skin as it fell. Tomorrow there would be a quick melt and a nightmare rush hour, a city of horns and tight neckties. But tonight D.C. was a silent, idyllic small town.

  I turned the corner of my block and saw my cat huddled on the stoop of my apartment. I watched her figure slip down and cross the yard, a ball of black moving across a white blanket. Her grainy nose touched the fingertips of my outstretched hand.

  FOUR

  FRIDAY AFTERNOON’S LUNCH had been typically hectic.

  Our regulars had arrived early, shuffling in and nodding hello with pleading doe eyes while I hurriedly sliced fruit and tossed bleach tablets into the rinse sink. The patrons were eager to start their weekend binges. Darnell’s Fish Platter, a house favorite, began to get a lot of action, and at one point he was sliding the plates onto the platform of the reach-through faster than I could serve them. Ramon was lurking around somewhere, but, having blown a stick of sensimillion in the basement just before opening time, he was virtually useless.

  That, however, had been the easy part of my day. When the rush ended I was left to baby-sit those few drinkers who had decided, as early as their first beer, not to return to work. Today this group of geniuses included Happy, who in his perfect world would someday be buried with one hand rigor mortised into a glass-holding C, the other in a horizontal victory sign, the fingers spread just wide enough to accommodate a Chesterfield; Buddy and Bubba, today arguing about boxing (confusing it with bullying) and splitting a pitcher with such intense closeness that they appeared to be joined at the hip; an alcoholic Dutch secretary named Petra for whom we exclusively stocked Geneve, a syrupy gin that was rumored to have the power to induce hallucinations; and, least tolerable of all, a fat federal judge by the name of Len.

  The fact that Len Dorfman was a federal judge is a point worth mentioning only in relation to his repulsive personality. Len would swagger in after a tough morning on the bench, announce to our deaf ears that he had just “worked out” at the gym (I would wager any amount that he could not, if a gun were to be placed in his mouth, execute one sit-up), and order a Grand Marnier because, he claimed, he had “earned” it. After one snifter he would check over the clientele and begin to brag about all the “savages” he had put away that morning, adding with bluster that he had “thrown away the key.” Then, like some third-rate Don Rickles (“Hey, if we can’t make fun of ourselves, who can we make fun of?”), he would launch into his “I’m a cheap Jew” routine, a tired shtick that had everyone at the bar staring into their drinks in embarrassment. The fact that Len himself was Jewish made it, contrary to his belief, no less offensive. Finally, after his third round, he would begin to trash gays with a lispy, plump-mouthed imitation so filled with vicious self-hatred that there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Len was a man who had, on several occasions and probably in some bathroom stall in our very hallowed halls of justice, fallen to his soft knees and, with a fervor equal in enthusiasm to his flamboyant bar soliloquies, sucked cock.