“What’s up?”
“What’s up with you? Anything on April?”
“Nothing,” I admitted, then waited for his reaction. Hearing only static, I continued. “I was thinking of heading down to southern Maryland on Saturday. Talk to her family, see if she’s been through.”
“Want some company?”
“I’m a big boy.”
“Sure you are,” he said. “A big city boy—you’ll be a fish on dry dock in that part of the country.” Billy paused. “Me and April spent a lot of time together down there, Nick. And I’ve got a key to the trailer on her property. We can stay there tonight.”
I thought about that. “I’ve got to make arrangements to have Mai take my shifts tomorrow. And I’ve got to go home, to feed the cat.”
“Fuck the cat,” Billy said with annoyance. “Listen, I’ll pick you up in an hour, hear? I’ve got another sales call, then I’ll swing by. We can go by my house first—there’s something I want you to hear.”
“I need warm clothes.”
“You can wear some of mine.”
“The ones with guys playing polo on them?”
“Turn ’em inside out, wise guy.”
“All right, Billy. See you then,” I said just before the click.
I glanced over at Happy to make sure there was still some paper left on his smoke. I dialed the number of my landlord and let it ring several times. No answer. Then I dialed Jackie’s work number and made it through an army of secretaries before I got her on the line.
“What’s going on, Nick?”
“Just checking in,” I said. “Trying to picture you right now. What do you, got your wing tips up on the desk, leaning back in your chair?”
“Yeah, it’s just a white-collar picnic around here. Come on, Nicky, I’m really busy. What’s up?”
“I got a clean bill of health, Jackie. So I just wanted you to know that I haven’t forgotten our date Sunday night.”
“Somehow I didn’t think you would,” she said.
“What time?”
“Make it seven,” she said.
“Okay. And Jackie—wear something provocative.” I heard her groan. “Anything you want me to wear?” I added cheerfully.
“Not particularly,” she said. “But there is something I don’t want you to wear.”
“What would that be?”
“That silly little grin,” she said, “that you’re wearing on your face right now.”
“Right,” I said. “Seven it is.”
I hung up the receiver, walked over to Happy, dislodged the butt from his callused hand, and crushed it in the ashtray. It woke him up, or at least a half of him. One of his eyes opened and he looked into mine and mumbled something brusquely, something I couldn’t make out.
“What?” I said.
“Gimme a fuckin’ manhattan,” he said. “That’s what.”
* * *
BILLY GOODRICH WAS THE
picture of Young Turk affluence, D.C. style. In the driver’s seat of his white Maxima, with his somber, subtly plaided Britches suit, suspenders, thinly striped shirt with spread collar, maroon-and-gold retro tie, and forty-dollar haircut, he oozed mindless ambition. Billy threw a glance in the direction of the passenger seat, where I was tapping the side of my index finger against the window.
“April called,” he said, “and left a message on my machine.”
“When?”
“Today. I called home for my messages and there it was.”
I spread my hands. “Well?”
Billy said, “You’ll hear it. We’re almost there.”
We had turned off 29 onto 214, a winding, gently rising road between the towns of Scaggsville and Highland. Only twenty minutes north of the District line over the Patuxent and into Howard County, the area was a mix of farmland broken by the creeping beginnings of development. Livestock dotted the landscape patched with last week’s snowstorm as the sun burned down in the west. I lowered the passenger visor and sat back.
About a mile past a small shopping center that housed a pizza parlor and video rental store, Billy hung a right onto a gravelly two-lane road. He eased into a circular driveway and cut the engine. The sun had dropped now, leaving his house, a long rambler of brick and stone, in shadow.
“Nice,” I said.
“I stole it,” Billy said. “Come on.”
We walked to his door, behind which we heard three deep barks and then some impatient crying from what sounded to be a large breed of dog. Billy turned the locks and a brown-eyed shepherd-Lab mix with a yellow coat appeared, her tail wagging slowly. She licked Billy’s glove and smelled mine, and we entered the house.
I followed Billy through a marbled foyer and past a living
room elegantly but rather self-consciously appointed in Louis Quatorze furniture. The dog walked clumsily beside me, bumping my leg and looking up at me as she did it. We reached a kitchen done in white custom cabinetry with white appliances and a white Corian countertop ending in the shape of a modified mushroom cap.
“Take your coat off and have a seat,” Billy said. “Want a beer?”
“Sure.”
Billy pulled on the weighted door of the built-in refrigerator and withdrew a bottle of Sam Adams. He removed the cap with an opener and handed me the bottle. I had a pull of the cool, sweet lager and then another.
Billy said, “Listen.” He went to a small oak table with scrolled feet, on which rested an answering machine, telephone, large notepad, and a Ball jar of pencils and pens. He pushed the bar on the answering machine.
A female voice began to speak on the tape. It was a calm voice, the words spoken plainly and without anxiety, with the upward inflection at the end of each sentence that is the vocal trademark of the mid-Atlantic South.
“Hello, Bill…. It’s me, baby. You got my note I guess…. I guess the note kinda said it all. But I wanted to tell you, ’cause I figure you’d want to know… I figured you’d want to know that I’m all right, Bill. I went to see Tommy one last time and then I left, and now I’m… away. But I wanted you to know that I’m okay. Take care of Maybelle, baby, that’s all I’m going to ask…. I’m not scared, Bill…. Take care.”
Billy stopped the tape and hit the rewind. I stared at him as I listened to the whir of the machine.
“That her?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“She sound all right?”
“She sounded real calm, buddy. Real calm.”
“Who’s Maybelle?”
Billy chin-nodded the Lab and said, “Her dog.”
“And Tommy?”
“An old friend. An old boyfriend, I should say. In southern Maryland.”
“Then we’re headed in the right direction.”
“I’d say so,” he said unemotionally.
“You gonna play this for the cops?”
“Should I?”
“Don’t erase it,” I said. “But I don’t think you need to bring them in again, not yet.”
Billy nodded. “Relax while I get some things together. I’ll be out in a few minutes.”
When he was gone I walked to the kitchen’s bay window and looked out into the dusk that was rapidly turning to darkness. Maybelle stayed with me and smelled the leg of my jeans. “That’s my cat you’re smelling, girl.” I scratched behind her ears and rubbed the bridge of her snout. She licked my hand furiously, cementing our friendship.
Walking to the phone, I dialed my landlord. Still no answer. I finished my beer and tossed the bottle into a wastebasket that I found under the white porcelain sink. I drew another Sam Adams from the Sub-Zero and moved a chair to the bay window, where I drank it facing out into the night. Maybelle lay at my feet, breathing slowly.
Fifteen minutes later Billy emerged from the shadows of the hall and dropped a duffel bag at my feet. “Road trip,” he said, smiling. “Like the old days, Greek.”
“Right.” I found a black cotton turtleneck and navy shakerknit sweater in the bag and put them on. Billy handed me a blue Hollofil jacket. I zipped that up over the sweater and transferred my smokes from my overcoat to the jacket pocket. I patted the pocket. “What about Maybelle?”
“My neighbors can walk her tomorrow.”
“Let’s bring her.”
“She’ll be a pain in the ass.”
“She’s April’s. Let’s bring her.”
The mutt’s tail was already wagging. Billy shrugged and the dog woofed and trotted to the front door of the house. We followed and Billy locked the door behind him. Out in the driveway we walked to the car, where Maybelle waited patiently for Billy to release the front seat of the Maxima. Maybelle leaped into the backseat as I entered the passenger side.
“Thirsty?” Billy asked as he ignitioned the car.
“I could stand it.”
“We’ll stop in the old neighborhood on the way out,” he said, a trace of boyish mischief peeking through his smile. “For a short one.”
Billy tapped on the brights as we pulled out onto the gravelly road. In the vanity mirror of the visor I saw Maybelle staring out into the blackness. Her breath formed crystal gray spiders on the tinted glass.
A
T 29 WE
stopped at a deli for a six of Bud cans and drank two of those on our way into Silver Spring. Billy talked about the soft real estate market the whole way in, shaking his head solemnly between swigs of beer. He was wearing jeans and oilskin Timberland boots and a logoed, royal blue jacket over a heavy wool shirt. We kept the radio off, the low, steady hum of the engine the only sound around our silences.
Billy parked in Wheaton and cut the engine in front of Captain Wright’s, near the intersection of Georgia and University. Captain Wright’s had stood stubbornly at that corner through twenty years of modernization, and though it was in the geographical domain of the now-closed Northwood High, it had always been the hangout for students and “alumni” of Blair. Blair boys liked to think that their Territorial Wrights (as they called them) had evolved from the fact that the place was just too tough for Northwood boys, but in truth many of the bars in
that part of the county, from Silver Spring to Aspen Hill, were roughly alike. It was a headbanger’s bar, with the stale, vinegary smell of cheap liquor oiled into every wooden crack. A suburban boy on his way to a rotten liver could maybe get laid here, and if not, he could always skin his knuckles. The sign outside read
CAPTAIN WRIGHT’S
, but every teenager who gunned his glass-pack Firebird or muscle car Malibu up Georgia and University in the seventies had called this place, with some misplaced degree of affection, “Captain Fights.”
I patted Maybelle on the head and cracked a window for her before we headed into Wright’s. Over the door a plastic marquee announced that the Jailbaiter Boyz (from Frederick, no doubt, in that all the boogie/glam-metal outfits from that part of the state substituted their
s
’s with
z
’s) were the headliners that evening. We pushed on a thick door and left fresh air behind for stale as we entered.
The Jailbaiter Boyz, pale and strangers to exercise, were in midset, pounding out their deafening rendition of “Sweet Home Alabama.” A confederate flag hung over the empty dance floor, surrounded by unaligned four-tops filled with flanneled and T-shirted young men drinking long-necked Buds and Lights. Few heads were moving to the music. We caught the perfunctory hard stares from the most insecure members of each group as we passed and made our way through the maze of tables to the dart room.
In the dart room several groups were in play. Some of the male players had their sleeves rolled up past their biceps and all had Marlboro hardpacks in their breast pockets. I recognized one woman as a high school acquaintance, her features heavy now and swollen from drink. She had been part of a group of wild ones who rode around in a lavender Gremlin on weekends, a car that Blair’s males had collectively dubbed the Meatwagon. I had made out with her one night in someone’s dark basement while Billy had had his way with one of her friends in the side room. I nodded to her, but she didn’t know me, and I walked on.
In the back room Billy and I stepped up and leaned on the
bar. A wiry ex-wrestler from Blair named Jimmy Flynn was tending, where he had been since graduation. Flynn had always managed to make weight and go to the mat in the one-twenty-nine class; there wasn’t much more of him now. He nodded and said, “I see you two jokers are still hanging out together.”
Billy said, “And you’re still pushing beer.”
“Yeah.”
“Give us two Buds, then.”
“I’ll have a bourbon with mine, Jimmy,” I said.
“What’ll it be?”
“Grand-Dad, if you’ve got it.”
Flynn pointed to the unlit call rack. “Jack and Beam is what it is.”
“The Jim Beam will do it,” I said.
Billy put money on the bar and walked back toward the dart room, where I saw him move toward a woman in a half-length black leather coat. Her hair was as black as the coat, and she wore blue jeans and a loose purple sweater that didn’t work at hiding her lush shape, if that was what she was after. She smiled at something Billy said, and he leaned into her slightly and returned one of his patented pretty-boy grins. I looked around the bar.
I knew one guy standing up, an alcoholic named Denneman who was memorable for having thrown up whiskey one morning in junior high first period industrial arts, thrown it up with stunning ferocity on the varnished oak of the center drafting table. His young porcine features had mutated into an obese mask of pink splotches and scars. Someone bumped my back—on purpose, I supposed—and I didn’t bother to find out why. Instead I searched for a friendly face.