Nick's Trip (13 page)

He stared out the window, took a long drag off his smoke, and said, “Come on in.”

“Thanks.” I removed my overcoat and folded it over my forearm.

“You don’t need to be doin’ that,” Thomas said. “You won’t be stayin’ long. I said I’d see you because my mom asked me to. But now that I have, I want it short.”

“That’s the way I want it too, James.” I had a seat on the edge of his bed. Closer to him now, I caught the stale stench of yesterday’s cheap liquor seeping through his pores.

James Thomas turned his head in my direction. He was wearing a brown-and-orange-plaid flannel shirt that gapped at the buttons, stretched as it was from his barrel chest. His head
was round, dark, and cubbish. He had not shaved in days, though his facial hair was faint and spotty. His eyes were watery and rimmed red, the full-blown badge of a burned-down drunk.

“Let’s get to it,” he said.

“All right.” I handed him my card. He stubbed the butt in the aluminum ashtray that rested on his thigh, then blew smoke at the card while he looked it over. Thomas folded the card and slipped it into his breast pocket.

“So?” he said.

“I’m working on the William Henry case,” I said.

“Workin’ for who?”

“William Henry.”

“Guess you don’t plan on bein’ paid,” he said.

“
Somebody
got paid,” I said.

Thomas shook a Kool from the deck on the windowsill and put the filtered end to his mouth. I produced a matchbook from my trouser pocket and tore one off the pack. He watched my eyes as I fired him up.

“Say what you got to say,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll keep it simple. I’ve looked over the file on the William Henry case. I’ve talked to some people in the neighborhood, and I’ve been to the Piedmont. Nobody gets into that building unless they live there or unless they’ve been invited. I even tried to buy my way in. It didn’t happen. Not with the guy they’ve got on duty now.”

Thomas’s jaw tightened. “I told you to say what the fuck you got to say. Now, do it.”

I stood and walked to the window. Out on the street was an old Bonneville, a white BMW with dark tinted glass, and a new maroon Buick Regal. I pointed to the Regal, looked at Thomas, and said, “That you?”

“Yeah.”

“Not a tough call. I don’t make you for a dealer—that eliminates the drug car. And that shit-wagon Pontiac isn’t your style. No, a guy from your generation—what are you, early
forties?—a guy your age who just came into some money would probably head right down to the car dealership, first thing, and pick out a brand new Buick. Cash on the line. Am I right?”

“Got me all figured out,” Thomas said. “Nigger with some cash money, burnin’ a hole in his motherfuckin’ pocket. ‘Nigger rich.’ That what you and your boys say when you’re sittin’ around drinkin’ brew, tryin’ to feel all superior about yourselves?”

“That
is
your car, isn’t it, James?”

“It’s mine.” Thomas hung his head and glanced down at the floor. His anger was there, but it was weak, with only the residual strength of a cut nerve. He sighed. “Company gave me what they call a ‘golden handshake.’ They let me go after the Henry case made the TV news. Gave me a bunch of money to go real quiet. So that’s what I did. And now I got a new ride, all paid up.” He looked at it through the window and lowered his eyes once again.

“How much did they give you, James? Twelve thousand? Fifteen? Because that’s about what that car costs.”

“Ain’t none of your damn business what they gave me.” “It’s easy enough to find out.”

“Then go on and do it,” he said angrily. I put on my overcoat and shifted my shoulders beneath it to let it fall. When I walked to the door I turned to face him.

“I am going to do it, James. But it won’t change what we both know, right now. You didn’t kill that boy. You didn’t even have an idea that he was going to be hurt, or what it was all about. But you let somebody in the Piedmont that night for money, and because of it my friend got greased.” I fastened the buttons of my overcoat. “You see the body, James? He was stabbed with a serrated knife. Stabbed in the chest and in the stomach and in the legs. Through the hand when he was holding it up, to protect his face. And in the mouth, James. Twenty times.” I shoved a hand in my pocket. “You know the details—you’ve been swimming in a bottle of Early Times ever since.
When you’re ready to crawl out, you reach for my card and you call me, hear?”

Thomas cocked his head and squinted. “What do you want?” he said slowly.

“Same thing as you,” I said. “To sleep at night. And no bad dreams.”

We looked each other over for a while. Then I closed the door behind me and descended the stairs. Mrs. Thomas was standing at the bottom, her hand resting on the scrolled end of the banister.

“I’ll see myself out,” I said with a nod. “I’m sorry for disturbing your day.”

“Did you get the information you wanted?”

“Yes.”

“My son didn’t kill that boy,” she offered with commitment. “I don’t think he had one thing to do with it.”

“I don’t think so either. But he can point me in the direction of the ones who did.” She walked me to the door, and once more we stood together. I asked her before leaving, “Do you know a Jonas Brown? He had an auto body shop down by the tracks.”

Mrs. Thomas’s facial features converged into an amalgamation of smile lines and rounded cheeks. “Yes, I know Mr. Brown quite well. He was in the congregation. He’s been gone ten years. Now he’s resting with the Lord.”

“Good-bye, Mrs. Thomas.”

“Good-bye.”

Out on Hamlin, I put the key to the lock of my sedan. The boys on the steps next door were gone, though somewhere close a drum machine ticked out from a boom box. I loocked up and caught a glimpse of James Thomas.

It was the last I saw of him. He was framed behind the window of his bedroom in the second story of the house, expressionless as he watched me climb into the driver’s side of my Dart. I lit a cigarette and stared at the growing end of ash, thinking of how things burn and fade, before I drove away.

T
HE HEALTH PRO
Center was a bunkerlike structure that endcapped a ubiquitous strip shopping center in the South Gaithersburg area of Montgomery County. I had driven out Rockville Pike early Wednesday morning with a quarter-inch of frost on my windshield, an ice sheet that had only begun to dissipate as my car neared the outer loop of the Beltway.

Rockville Pike is a track of fluorescence and concrete and traffic signals, five miles of heaven for the nouveaux riches who live to shop. To be fair to Maryland, all metropolitan areas seem to breed such cultureless outlying strips. The state of Virginia, in fact, has its own Rockville Pike. On that side of the river they call it Tysons Corner.

The sky was lightening as the hour neared seven. My Dart chugged north against the traffic that was already beginning to build. Sometime after the Pike changed over to its interstate moniker, 355, I hung a left onto Shady Grove Road and followed
that for another mile until I reached my destination. I pulled in, killed the engine, and walked across the lot to the doors of the bunker.

The glass doors were locked. I pushed a yellow button to the right of the doors and watched the barely lit lobby for some signs of life. After a few minutes of shuffling about in the cold air that by now had triggered an ache in my temples, a large man in a white smock waved from inside and strode toward me.

He unlocked the doors, and I stepped inside. The man was wearing jeans beneath his smock, the sleeves of which were rolled up to the elbow to reveal thick, hairy forearms. With his lumber-jack-meets–Gomer Pyle appearance (his smile matched that rube character’s jaw-jutting grin), it was difficult to tell if he was on the medical or the custodial staff. I asked him for a cup of coffee.

“No coffee,” he said, shaking his head slowly as he maintained that silly smirk. “It hinders the sample.”

“Oh.”

“Walk this way, please.”

I immediately thought of the old gag, of course, but walking behind him in an elephantine manner would have been pointless, since there was no one around to serve as an audience, and at any rate it was way too early for that type of nonsense. I followed him down a corridor and asked, to his back, “Why did the appointment have to be at seven in the morning?”

“Policy,” he said, stopping at an unmarked door, the smile fading for the first time. “We determined that most men find the procedure socially embarrassing. So we do it early in the morning, before anyone’s around. As a matter of course.”

He opened the door to a nondescript room that had a desk and a chair and a small Formica counter and cabinet arrangement. Beneath one of the cabinets hung a roll of paper towels. There were no prints on the white walls, and both the blinds and curtains were drawn, giving the whole deal the foreboding look of one of those emergency room side offices where doctors
tell you, with studied evenness and with theatrically lowered eyes, that your loved one “didn’t make it.”

I followed the man into the room as he walked me over to the counter, where he pointed to (but did not touch) a capped plastic bottle sitting atop a magazine. A piece of tape with
N. STEFANOS
written across it was affixed to the jar.

“Just leave the bottle on the counter when you’re done, and you can leave. There’s paper towels if you need to clean up.” His hick smile was beginning to appear once again.

“Are there any directions?” I said. “I mean, you’re just assuming that I’ve done this before.”

His smile was gone now. “Ninety-nine percent of adult men masturbate, Mr. Stefanos. And the other one percent,” he said solemnly, “are liars.” He walked to the door and kept his eyes on me as he closed it behind him. I’m not certain, but before he closed it, I believe he winked.

The first thing I did was check the lock. Then I walked over to the counter, dropped my trousers, and flung my tie back behind my shoulders. I unscrewed the lid on the jar, moved it to the side, and picked up the magazine. The title of it was
Girls Who Crave Huge Ones,
leading me to believe that if this was not one of the classier clinics in the area, it certainly had some very bizarre smart alecks working in the acquisitions department.

Between the ethnic young ladies in the front of the mag and the little scenario I was now developing in my mind (in which a checkout girl from my local market named Theresa lured me into the stockroom so that we could “log in” a shipment of olive oil), it wasn’t long before my compass had begun to point north. But, flipping through the pages of
Girls Who Crave Huge Ones,
trying (rather feverishly now) to find that one perfect photograph that would send me flailing away into bug-eyed nirvana, I came upon (I mean, stumbled upon) a rather odd pictorial.

It was a series of Polaroid photographs of a certain aging rock-and-roll singer, a man who had cut a classic single in the
fifties about the relationship between a backwoods young man and his guitar. Strangely enough, that single was never a number one record—it took a novelty hit, years later, called “My Wing-Dang-Doodle,” to propel that singer to the top of the charts. And now, under the border-to-border headline of
HIS WING-DANG-DOODLE
, were several photographs of the totally naked singer, his arm around various young, equally naked women (their eyes masked in black to “protect their identities”), a lizardly lascivious smile on his aging face.

And what of his “Wang-Dang-Doodle”? Well, for one thing, it appeared to be longer and thicker than my own forearm. And the result was that this strange pictorial spread that had both grabbed my rapt attention and taken the bark out of my angry dog only delayed my mission at the clinic, so that it wasn’t until fifteen minutes and several stop-and-go fantasies later (not to mention two more waddles across the room to check on that lock), that I tossed the paper towel in the wastebasket, cavalierly zipped up my fly, and walked with as much dignity as I could muster out to the lobby, where I signed out in a lined logbook.

“Everything go all right?” asked Gomer, who was now behind the desk.

“Like the Fourth of July,” I said. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

The white-smocked man lowered his reddening face and pretended to go over some paperwork. He was slowly shaking his head as I walked out the door.

MY NEXT STOP WAS
at the private office of another doctor, just a few miles away from the Health Pro Clinic, in a low-rise medical building south on the Pike. After filling out a new-patient form on a clipboard, on which I left both the insurance section and the emergency contact sections blank, I settled in among the mostly geriatric crowd in the white lobby and picked up a magazine.

I don’t quite know how long I sat waiting, but I managed to
finish a fairly long magazine article in
Washingtonian,
written by a friend of mine from college named Marcel DuChamp. DuChamp had been a copywriter around town for years until he decided to be a man and put his name (well, not exactly
his
name—he was called Mark Glick when I knew him) and reputation on the byline. Copywriters, of course, have as much in common with writers as bowlers do to athletes, but at least M. DuChamp was making a go of it. The last time I saw him he claimed, with just a trace of bitterness, that at a party one could always tell the writers from the copywriters. The writers drink straight liquor and situate their frumpy selves in front of their host’s bookshelves, while the copywriters stand together in a well-dressed circle with their well-dressed wives and tell “off-color” jokes. The wives of the writers, Marcel said, stand alone and stare with envy at the wives of the copywriters.