I looked at my watch and said, “I don’t mean to be rude.”
“Of course. I apologize. I bring you up here and then I ramble like some bitter old man.”
“Don’t worry about it. What’s on your mind?”
Pence’s veined hands clutched the arms of his chair. Some ash from his cigarette fell to his lap. He glanced down to make sure it wasn’t live, then looked back at me, making no effort to brush the ash away.
“I don’t know how much you really know about Jimmy,” he said. “His parents were killed when he was eleven, in a wreck on the Beltway, near what they used to call the Cabin John Bridge. He was their only child, and my only grandson.” He stopped to stub out the butt of his smoke.
“Is your wife still alive, Mr. Pence?”
He shook his head. “Janey died a year after we took Jimmy in. I guess you can imagine how hard it was. A man gets set to retire with his woman, all of a sudden he loses her and has to raise a son.” I had a quick, painful image of my own grandfather, a fisherman’s cap resting on his huge pinkish ears.
“How did it go for the two of you?”
“Fairly well, from my side of things. Jimmy was an easy boy to raise, easier than my own daughter.”
“Has he ever gone away before without telling you?”
“He’s nineteen years old,” he said by way of an affirmative.
“So what makes you think this is any different?”
“I’m not naive, Mr. Stefanos. The kid goes out with his friends, has a few beers, they wind up down at the shore, or
Atlantic City maybe, if one of ’em has a few bucks in his pockets. But he always called me the next day, let me know where he was.”
I shifted in my seat. “I’m not a detective, Mr. Pence. What Johnny McGinnes was talking about, we did some process serving together a couple of summers ago, for extra cash. It was for kicks mainly, we made a game of it. But I’m not licensed for anything like this. And I told you before that I thought this was a cop job. Unless there’s something you’re not telling, some reason you can’t or won’t go to the police.”
He lowered his eyes and lit another smoke. The sound of the Zippo slamming shut echoed in the room. He was squinting through the smoke when he looked back up at me.
“Jimmy has been hanging out with some tough customers,” he said. “The last couple of months, the guys who came to pick him up, they weren’t just kids out to get a little drunk and have a good time. They were different somehow.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know exactly. They wore a lot of leather. None of them ever smiled. And the music he started listening to in his room since he met those guys—it was, you know, more violent than what he used to listen to.”
“Go on.” So far, nothing he had described was all that disturbing, and the music probably wasn’t much different from the music I used to listen to in the clubs downtown almost ten years earlier.
“He’s been staying out all night, listening to music in bars supposedly. The way he looks when he walks in, I don’t know. I’ve done some drinking in my day. He just doesn’t look like he’s been on a bender. So I can only guess, maybe the boy is mixed up with drugs.”
“Do you know the names of any of his friends?”
“No, I’m sorry. They looked alike to me. All of these guys had crewcuts, shaved even closer than the kids wore them in the fifties.”
If they were skinheads, they either hung out at the Snake
Pit on F Street or at the Corps, which was near National Place. I figured the old man had the kid pegged on his drug use, though there was no way to tell how far he was gone.
“I don’t mean to make light of Jimmy’s situation, Mr. Pence. But I frequented the same clubs and listened to the same kind of music myself. I still do, occasionally. As for drugs, I’ve used plenty and I came out of it more or less intact.” His eyes seemed to widen, but only for a moment. He was obviously more interested in finding his grandson than in my lapses of morality.
“You
are
making light of this situation. You most certainly are. Because you don’t want to take any responsibility here. I
know
this boy. Even if he were on drugs, he would have called. He’s in some sort of trouble. If you don’t want to get involved, then fine. But don’t tell me there’s nothing wrong.”
“I admit there could be some problem,” I said. “And I see your angle for going private. If he’s just underground because of drugs, a private cop could get him home and to some help without a possession or intent to distribute rap on his record. But I’m not that person. I paste down pictures of television sets for a living.”
“You
are
the person.” He was on his feet now and close to me. I could smell cigarettes on him and, for the first time, a trace of whiskey. “Why do you think Jimmy talked to you so much at work?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your background and Jimmy’s background—they were very similar. Jimmy told me that you were born overseas. Your parents sent you to the States to live with your grandfather when you were very young, until they could afford to join you. For some reason or another they never made it, and you were raised by your grandfather. Is this correct?”
“Roughly,” I said.
“Jimmy was at that age—he needed someone to relate to. I think he found that a little bit in you.”
“My grandfather died last April,” I said, though I was no
longer talking to Pence. The moment his life ended I was doing lines off the bar in an after-hours club on upper Wisconsin Avenue.
I rose from the chair and walked to the window. The traffic had thinned out on Connecticut, the northbound headlights approaching at a relaxed pace.
“I don’t know if I’m up for it,” I said. He was silent behind me and I turned to face him. “I’ll ask around downtown. Maybe somebody knows where he is. But that’s all, understand?”
“Thank you,” he said, moving towards me and gripping my hand. “I’ll make it worth your while.”
I backed away. “We don’t need to discuss that now. I have somewhere to go. I’ll phone you tomorrow.”
I walked out quickly. He was shouting his phone number as I closed the door behind me.
I LET THE CAT
in as I stepped into my apartment. I put some dry food in her dish and drank some ice water from a bottle in the refrigerator. Then I took two cold cans of beer with me into the shower.
After leaving Pence, I had driven to a junior-high gym in Northwest to meet Rodney White, a friend of mine who had the curious distinction of being both a physician and a black belt. Though I knew next to nothing about tae kwon do, I had done a fair amount of Boys Club boxing, and enjoyed hooking up with White every couple of weeks to spar, provided he showed me some mercy.
We warmed up with some stretching and light movement. Gradually we began making contact and our sparring intensified. After punishing me for a while with hand and foot combinations, he motioned me to stop. We tapped gloves and removed our mouthguards.
“What were you just doing?” he asked. “You let me back you all the way across this gym. You accepted all of my forward energy.”
“I was letting you kick yourself out. Anyway, I tagged you pretty good at the end.”
He shook his head. “You had already lost. You start backing up, you’re defeated, believe me.”
“I thought I’d use a little strategy.”
“Don’t get too wrapped up in strategy. Technicians lose in the street. The winner in a fight is usually determined before the first punch is thrown.”
“Too mystical for me” I said, adding, “I’ll stick to boxing.”
“Stick to whatever you want, Homeboy. But step on over here and let me show you a little something.”
In the shower I drank the first beer while washing. A bruise had formed on my bicep from a Rodney White side kick, and there was a scratch on my cheek from the nylon tie of his footgear.
After rinsing, I popped the second beer and leaned against the tile wall, shutting the cold spigot off completely. I drank deeply of the icy beer and closed my eyes, as the burning hot water rolled down my back.
T
HE NEXT MORNING
I called the office at nine
A.M.
from a payphone located in the side parking lot of the Connecticut Avenue store. Ric Brandon picked up his extension.
“Hello, Ric?”
“Yes.”
“Nick Stefanos here.”
“Where are you?” In his typically tight-assed manner he was asking why I was late for work.
“I’m on my way to Connecticut Avenue,” I lied, not wanting to get the boys in trouble. None of them had arrived yet to open the store.
“What for?”
“Listen, Ric. All of last night I thought about our discussion yesterday in your office. I think one of the reasons I don’t have that team spirit is that I’ve lost touch with what’s going on out in
the stores, out on the firing line.” I stopped speaking so as not to make myself sick.
“I understand.” Since he had never been on the “firing line,” that imaginary, danger-filled zone that lowly salesmen are so keen on referring to, he could not have understood. But I had counted on that.
“What I figure is, I’ll get back on the floor for a few weeks, see what’s going on again, talk to some customers and find out what they do and don’t respond to in our ads.”
“What about your regular duties?”
“What I can’t do here, I’ll finish up at night. I have a key to the office, and my
Post
contacts can do pickups here at the store. As for any important meetings or appointments, you call me here, I can be back in the office in fifteen minutes.”
“I can see the merit in this,” he said, adding, “if you apply yourself. Understand that I’d like you to report to Gary Fisher every day as to the merchandising and advertising plans.”
“Sure, Ric. Transfer me over to Fisher then, will you?”
The phone rang several times, then Fisher picked up. In contrast to the dead calm of Brandon’s office, I could hear people laughing, typewriters clacking, and unanswered phones ringing in the background. I imagined a cigarette lodged above Fisher’s ear.
“Fish, it’s Nick.”
“Where the fuck are you?”
“The Avenue. I’m going to be working out of here for a while. I had to get away from the office, man. You know what I mean?”
“Not really. You worked your way up from stockboy to sales to management, now you want to go backwards. Besides, I need you here.”
“I’ll still do my job, only I’ll do it from the store.”
“You see Electro-World’s ad today?” he asked, changing the subject as if to ignore it.
“I haven’t seen the paper yet.”
“They ran a TP400 for two ninety-nine, the lousy giveaway artists. Tell the fellas not to match that price, hear? If we have to take a bath, we can wait till Black Friday.”
“You’re going to wait till the Friday after Thanksgiving to run a piece that everyone’s in the paper with now?”
“I’m not worried,” he said. “There’s gonna be a shortage of low-end goods this Christmas. The Japs and the Koreans are holding back, trying to drive up the costs to the distributors. My guess is, the longer we hold back on the bait, we’ll be the only ones in town with the plunder come D-Day. We bring ’em through the door, pass a few out, lose our asses—we’ll make it up on add-ons and service policies.”
Fisher was a typical merch manager, a sloppy, chain-smoking, audiophilic post-smoking salesman who had grudgingly been promoted to management. He was built low to the ground, had an unfashionably long Prince Valiant haircut, and motored around the office pitched forward, his fists clenched like some driven cartoon villain. He would never advance beyond his current position—the image wasn’t there, and neither was the will—but he was unequaled at Nathan’s in his knowledge of retail.
“What else?”
“That bitch Fein called again from Montgomery County Consumer Affairs,” he said. “Said we’ve got to stop using the word
sale
in the head of our ads if we’re not lowering our everyday prices.”
“So I’ll call this next ad a
blowout.”
“Perfect.”
“Do me one favor, Fish. Keep Brandon away from me as much as you can, will you?”
“Yeah, sure. But, Nick, why does the guy spell his name R-i-c?”
“I guess R-o-c-k was already taken.”
“Talk to you later.” He hung up.
I walked around the building to the front of the store and looked in the plate-glass display window. Louie Bates, the store manager, had arrived. He ambled along the left wall, switching on television sets.
I pushed on the door and entered. The layout of the floor had changed very little. Up front was a glass case that surrounded a desk and register and contained small electronics and accessories. This was also the cashiers’ station and the area where the salesman closed, TO’d to the manager, and wrote deals.
The left half of the store contained televisions of all varieties, portable to widescreen. An aisle in the middle of the store was wide enough to handtruck merchandise from the stockroom to the front door. The right half of the store contained low-end rack stereos, boom boxes, clock radios, auto sound, microwave ovens, small appliances, and other low-commission goods. The entire rear of the showroom housed high-end audio, a “room” that was simply a thinly carpeted part of the store where the lights had been dimmed. A banner hung across its entrance, grandly announcing this area as “The Sound Explosion.”