Down By the River Where the Dead Men Go

SIXTEEN

" Nothin’!” LaDuke said as he hung up the phone in my apartment.

We had just called the first prospect from the classified section of D.C. This Week. LaDuke had done the talking, and he had put too much into it in my opinion, his idea of some swish actor.

“What’d he say?”

“Guy turned out to be legit. Some professor at Howard, doing a theatrical feature on street violence in D.C., trying to show the ‘other side,’ whatever that means. He was looking for young blacks males to play high school athletes sidetracked by drugs.”

“All right, don’t get discouraged; we’ve got another one here.”

LaDuke put his hand on the phone. “What’s the number?”

“Uh-uh,” I said. “I’m doin’ this one.”

I checked the number in the ad-this was the photographer, in search of healthy young black males-and pulled the phone over my way. My cat jumped up onto my lap as I punched the number into the grid.

“Yes?” said an oldish man with a faintly musical lilt in his voice.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m calling about an ad I saw in D.C. This Week, about some photography you were doing?”

“That’s a pretty old ad.”

“I was at a friend’s place; he had a back issue lying around. I was browsing through it-”

“And you don’t sound like a young black male.”

“I’m not. But I am healthy. And I’ve done some modeling, and a little acting. I was wonderingNothtght if you were exclusive with this black thing.”

The man didn’t answer. Another voice, stronger, asked him a question in the background, and he put his hand over the receiver. Then he came back on the line.

“Listen,” he said. “We’re not doing still photography here, not really. I mean, you got any idea of what I’m looking for?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think I know what you’re doing.”

“How. How do you know?”

“Well, I just assumed from the ad-”

“An assumption won’t get you in. And like I said, that’s an old ad. You have a reference?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“If you know what’s going on, then someone referred you. No reference, no audition.” I didn’t respond. The man said, “If you’ve got no reference, this conversation’s over.”

I took a shot. “Eddie Colorado,” I said, then waited.

“Okay,” the man said. “You come by tonight, we’ll have a look at you.”

“I don’t think I can make it tonight.”

“Then forget it, for now. We’re shooting tonight, and we only shoot once a week.”

“I’ll be there,” I said. “I’ll make it somehow. You’re down in Southeast, right?”

“That’s right. A warehouse, on the corner of Potomac and Half. The gate looks locked, but it’s not. What’s your name?”

“Bobby,” I said, picking one blindly. “What time?”

“No time. We’ll be here all night.” The phone clicked dead.

I looked somberly at LaDuke. Then I broke into a smile and slapped his open palm.

“You got something?” he said, standing up abruptly from his chair.

“Yeah. Get your shit, LaDuke. We’re going for a ride.”

“Why’d you have the smarts to mention Eddie Colorado?” LaDuke said. We were driving east on M in my Dodge, the morning sun blasting through the windshield. The wind was pushing LaDuke’s wavy hair around on top of his square head.

“No other option,” I said. “He asked for a reference, and that’s the only name that fits with Roland and Calvin. It was a lucky call. Apparently, Eddie’s referring potential movie stars to this guy, whoever he is. Eddie’s been siphoning it off from both ends.”

“Eddie. That mother fucker. I’d like to go back there and fuck him up, too.”

“Relax, LaDuke. Guys like Eddieuyser. I dry up and blow away. We’ve got to concentrate on Roland now.”

“You think this is it?”

“Too many other things are falling into place. Bernie Tobias talked about the Southeast location and the-one-night-a-week shoot. This guy I just talked to on the phone, he confirmed it.”

“Where we going?”

“Check the place out.”

“We goin’ in right now?”

“No. Chances are, even if this is the place, Roland’s not there yet. I want to see it, then we’re gonna find out who owns the warehouse, see if he’s got any information on his tenants.”

I put a cigarette to my lips, hit the lighter. LaDuke, nervous as a cat, nodded at the pack on the dash.

“Give me one of those things,” he said.

“You really want one?”

“Nah,” he said. “I guess not.”

Past the projects, we cut a right off M and went back into the warehouse district that sits on a flat piece of dusty land between Fort McNair and the Navy Yard. It was midmorning. Trucks worked gravel pits, drivers pulled their rigs up to loading docks, and government types drove their motor-pool sedans back toward Buzzard Point. In the daytime, this area of town was as populated and busy as any other; at night, there was no part of the city more deathly quiet or dark.

“That’s it,” LaDuke said, and I parked along a high chain-link fence where Potomac Avenue cut diagonally across Half.

The warehouse was squat, brick, and windowless, as undistinguishable from any of the others I had seen on the way in. A double row of barbed wire was strung around the perimeter, continuing at a sliding gate. One car, a Buick Le Sabre, sat parked inside the gate. Across the street was an almost identical building, similarly fenced and wired, with windows only at two fire escapes set on opposing faces. In front of that one, two white vans were parked, advertising LIGHTING AND EQUIPMENT. Next to this warehouse stood a lot containing a conical structure, some sort of urban silo, and an idling dump truck.

“What do you think?” LaDuke said, pointing his chin toward the warehouse where the Buick sat parked.

“That’s it,” I said. “We know where it is now, and it’s not going anywhere. We’ll come back tonight.”

“Lot of activity around here.”

“Not at night. Used to be a couple of nightclubs, ten, fifteen years back, that jumped pretty good. But nothing now.” I pushed the trans into drive.

“Where now?” LaDuke said.

“Office of Deeds,” I said. “We find out who collects the rent.”

The office of the Recorder of Deeds sat around 5th and D, near Judiciary Square, the area of town that contained the city’s courts and administrative facilities. The building has a funny old elevator that doesn’t quite make it to the top floors; to get to where the records are kept, you have to get off the lift and take the stairs the rest of the way. LaDuke and I did it.

There was one disinterested woman working a long line, but I was lucky to see a bar customer of mine, a real estate attorney by the name of Durkin, sitting in a wooden chair, waiting for his number to be called. He also had a copy of the Lusk’s Directory, a crisscross land reference guide, in his lap. I borrowed it from him and promised him a free warm Guinness Stout-his drink-the next time he was by the Spot. Durkin tipped the fedora that he wore even indoors and gave me the book. By the time my microfiche had been retrieved from the files, I knew enough with the help of the Lusk’s to have the name of the landlord who owned the warehouse at Potomac and Half. The name was Richard Samuels.

From there, it wasn’t a stretch to get an address and phone. If Samuels was like every minimogul/land baron I’ve met, he could not have resisted putting his name on his own company. He would have told you the ID made good business sense, but it was as much ego as anything else. And his name was on the company-Samuels Properties was listed in the first phone book we hunted down, right outside the District Building; the address matched that printed on the deed. LaDuke flipped me a quarter and I rang him up.

“Samuels Properties,” said the old lady’s voice on the other end.

“Metropolitan Police,” I said, “calling for Richard Samuels.” LaDuke shook his head and rolled his eyes.

“Let me see if he’s on the line.” She put me on hold, came back quickly. “If this is about the fund-raising drive, Mr. Samuels has already sent the check-”

“Tell him it’s about his property at Potomac and Half.”

“Hold on.” More waiting, then: “I’ll put you through.”

Another voice, deep and rich, came on the line. “Yes, how may I help you?”

“My name is Nick Stefanos-”

“Officer Stefanos?”

“No.”

“You’re not a cop?”

“Private.”

“Well, then, you’ve misrepresented yourself. I guess we have nothing to talk about.”

“I think we do. You might be interested in some activity going on in your property on Half Street in Southeast. And if you’re not interested, maybe Vice-”

“Vice?” His tone lost its edge. “Listen, Mr. Stefanos, I’m certainly not aware of any illegal activities, not on Half Street or on any of my properties. But I am interested, and I’m willing to listen to what you’ve got to say.”

“My partner and I would like to see you this morning. The conversation would be confidential, of course.”

“That would be fine,” Samuels said. He confirmed the address.

“We’ll be right over,” I said, and hung up the phone.

LaDuke scrunched up his face. “You identified yourself as a cop, Nick. This guy Emmanual-”

“It’s Samuels.”

“He could turn us in.”

“Come on, LaDuke. We’re standing at the door. Let’s go see what the man’s got to say.”

The office of Samuels Properties was on a street of commercially zoned row houses just north of Washington Circle, in the West End. We parked the Dodge in a lot owned by Blackie Auger, one of D.C.’s most visible Greeks, and walked to the house. Samuels’s office was on the second floor, up a curving line of block steps.

We had expected the geriatric receptionist, but it was Samuels himself who answered the door. He looked to be reasonably fit, a thin, silver-haired man at the very end of his middle years, with prosperity-or the illusion of it-apparent in every thread of his clothes. He wore a nonvented Italian-cut suit over a powder blue shirt with a white spread collar, and a maroon tie featuring subtle geometrics, gray parallelograms shaded in blue to pick up the blue off the suit. His face was long, sharply featured, and angular, except for his lips, which were thick and damp and oddly red, reminding me somehow of a thinly sliced strawberry.

“Mr. Stefanos?” he said in that fine brandy baritone.

“Yes. My partner, Jack LaDuke.” The two of them shook hands.

“Please, come in.”

We followed him through the reception area, low-lit and deeply carpeted, with stained wood trim framing Williamsburg blue walls. Next was his office, the same cozy deal, but with a bigger desk, walls painted a leafy green, and a window view that gave onto the street. LaDuke and I sat in two armchairs he had arranged in front of his desk. Samuels had a seat in his cushioned broad-backed chair and wrapped his hand around a thick Mont Blanc pen.

“You’re all alone,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “My receptionist is taking lunch. For one hour each day, I field my own calls.”

“It’s just the two of you here?”

“It hasn’t always been this way. I had a staff of six at one time, including my own in-house real estate attorney. But that was the eighties. And the eighties are over, Mr. Stefanos. The banks went through some tremendous changes near the end of the decade, as you know. When the flow of money stopped, everything stopped-all the growth. But this is a cyclical business that, by definition, adjusts itself. There are signs that the residential is coming back, and the commercial will naturally follow.”

“Of course,” I said, though I didn’t have a clue. LaDuke had tented his hands, his elbows on the arms of his chair, and he was tapping both sets of fingers together at the tips.

“So how can I help you?” Samuels said.

“I’m working on a murder investigation,” I said. “As I mentioned to you on the phone, I’ve been privately retained. Through a series of interviews-I won’t bore you with the details-I’ve come to believe that there might be some criminal activity going on in your warehouse property at Potomac and Half.”

“You mentioned that it might be related to Vice.”

“For starters. I suspect pornography involving male minors. That kind of business is usually tied to something else.”

Samuels frowned. “Let me say first that I’m not cognizant of any such activity in any of my properties. If what you’re claiming is a reality, however, it disturbs me. It disturbs me a great deal. You can never anticipate this kind of thing, not totally. All my potential tenants are interviewed, but as long as the rent checks arrive in a reasonably timely manner and there are no major physical problems with the property, you lose touch. Often a tenant will sublet without my knowledge and-”

“We’d like to get in,” LaDuke said sharply.

Samuels kept his dignity and his eyes on me. “I pulled the file after you called, Mr. Stefanos.” He fingered the edges of some papers on his desk. “The tenants on the lease are using the area both as a silk-screen production house for T-shirts and as a storage facility.”

“Would it be possible to get in there and talk to them?”

“Mr. Stefanos, in my business, in any business, in fact, control is very important. If I could both own these properties and run my own profit centers out of them-in other words, if I could control every aspect in the chain, all the way down the line-believe me, I’d do it. But unfortunately, I can’t. So essentially I’m in a partnership arrangement with my tenants, for better or worse. And I have to honor that partnership. So you can see why I just can’t let you in there, willy-nilly, on the basis of some unsubstantiated accusation.”

“But you also wouldn’t want the inconvenience, and publicity, of an official police intervention.”

Samuels said, “And neither would you. You say you’re privately retained-if the cops, in effect, solve whatever it is you’re working on, wouldn’t that essentially make you unemployed?”

“We’re talking about boys,” LaDuke said with obvious impatience. “They’re being forced against their will-”

“Hold on a second,” Samuels said, his voice rising. He turned a framed photograph around on his desk so that it faced LaDuke. In the frame was a family picture-the businessman’s favorite prop-of Samuels, his wife, and two children, a teenaged boy and girl. Samuels regained his composure. “You see this? I’m a father, young man. Now, I didn’t say I wouldn’t help you. I’m only saying that we have to do te h bohis properly. Do you understand?”

LaDuke didn’t answer. I said, “What did you have in mind?”

“I’m going to speak to my attorney this afternoon. We’ll see how we can work this out. I’m thinking maybe by tomorrow, we’ll be able to get you in there, or at least get you some kind of answers. How can I reach you, Mr. Stefanos?”

“I’ll call you, first thing in the morning. And thanks. I appreciate the cooperation.”

We all stood then, as there was nothing else to say. Samuels showed us to the door. Out on 22nd, we walked to the Dodge.

“How’d I do?” LaDuke said.

“You gotta learn when to use the muscle and when not to. Samuels, he’s not going to respond to that. He doesn’t have to. He’s a developer-he probably has a relationship with every member of the city council. He could erase us, man, if we push it too hard.”

“You sayin’ I almost blew it?”

“You could use a little seasoning, that’s all.”

“You think he’s gonna help us?”

“He’ll help us,” I said. “He’s a smart man. The way I put it to him, he’s got no other choice.”

I drove to my apartment and cut the engine. LaDuke said that he had something to do, and I let him go. I watched his brooding face as he walked to his Ford, then I watched him drive away. Then I went inside and sorted through my mail, my cat figure-eighting my feet. The red light was blinking on my answering machine. I hit the bar.

A voice that I recognized came through the speaker: “Stefanos, this is Barry. I met you at Calvin Jeter’s apartment, at his mom’s? I’m the father to his sister’s baby… Anyway, I was headin’ over to Theodore Roosevelt Island this afternoon. Up behind the statue, there’s a trail, to the left? Down there to the end, where it comes to a T. You go straight in, on a smaller trail, down to the water, facing Georgetown. That’s where I’ll be. I just thought, man… I just thought you might want to talk. Like I say… I don’t know. That’s where I’ll be.”

I walked quickly from the apartment, the sound of the machine rewinding at my back.