to try and shake his hand. Heidel was staring out the window as I left, smoking and squinting, as if straining to see his friend Redman walking down the street.
At the foot of the stairs I noticed the girl who had answered the door, sitting with her legs draped over the arm of a shredded easy chair. She was watching a game show on TV while listening to Joy Division on the stereo. I walked in and turned the amplifier’s volume knob down. She looked over at me, only mildly bothered.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hey.”
“John said it was all right to ask you a couple of questions.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m a reporter.” An image of Jimmy Olsen came to mind.
“What do you want to know?”
“I need to talk to Eddie Shultz and the girl he was going around with.”
“Eddie left town,” she said, looking out the corner of her eye at the interchangeable horse-toothed host on the television screen.
“I know. You wouldn’t happen to know where they went?”
“Uh-uh. He and Kimmy just split, with that Jimmy kid. A couple of weeks ago.”
“Kimmy.”
“Yeah. Kim Lazarus.”
“She a local?”
“I don’t know,” she said, anxiously shifting her gaze to the screen. “Why don’t you ask Redman’s old lady. They live in Prince Georges County someplace. I was there with him once.”
“You remember the address? The street?”
“Something ‘wood.’ Edgewood, Ledgewood, some shit like that.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Eddie and John were pretty tight, weren’t they?”
“They were, until this Kimmy chick came around.”
I readjusted the volume on the stereo, walked to the front door, and stepped out. I breathed cool, fresh air as the funereal bass trailed behind.
ELEVEN
MARSHA PICKED UP and responded in her usual cheerful manner when I phoned her from my apartment.
“Nutty Nathan’s,” she nearly sang.
“Hi, Marsha. It’s Nick.”
“Nicky! Where are you?”
“Home. Taking the day off.”
“That’s nice,” she said.
“Marsha, I need a favor.”
“Sure, Nicky.”
“Go to service dispatch and borrow their Hanes Directory, you know, the ‘crisscross.’”
“Okay.”
“Now write down this name.” I spelled Shultz for her. “In P.G. County, locate all the Shultzes for me who live on streets that end with the word wood, like Dogwood Terrace or Edgewood Road. Know what I mean?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s it.”
“Okay, Nicky. Want me to call you back?”
“Please. You’ve got my number?”
“Yup. I won’t be long,” she promised, and hung up.
I pulled the metro phone books from the hall closet and laid them out on my desk. There were about forty total listings for the last name of Lazarus, and I began calling.
It was early afternoon and many people weren’t in, though I left messages on their machines. Those that were home generally muttered the “wrong number” response and hung up quickly; a couple of elderly folks were eager to talk, but these too were not the homes of Kim Lazarus.
Two hours later I dialed the final listing and received the same treatment. I called Marsha back.
“It’s Nick, Marsha.”
“I’ve been trying to get you for over an hour,” she scolded.
“What have you got?”
“I found a Joseph Shultz on Briarwood Terrace in Oxen Hill,” she said. “And there’s a Thomas and Maureen Shultz on Inglewood in Riverdale.”
“Give me both phone numbers and the addresses.” She read me the information. “I owe you lunch, Marsha. Thanks a million.”
WHEN I DIALED THE second number and asked for Eddie, Maureen Shultz told me he wasn’t in. I identified myself as DeGarcey from the Washington Times and explained the sympathetic portrait of Eddie and his friends that I was struggling to finish on deadline. Could I come over to the Shultz residence to get those last few details? Sure, she said.
I drove north over the district line into Maryland, then made a right on 410, which wound, primarily as East–West Highway, through Takoma Park, Chillum, Hyattsville, and Riverdale. Inglewood was on my detail map. It was a street of Cape Cods with large, treeless front lawns. A row of oaks ran down the government strip the length of the street.
Judging by the number of nonrecreational pickups parked in the driveways, this part of the neighborhood was largely blue-collar and middle-income at best. But the properties and houses had been functionally kept with that quiet pride peculiar to the working class.
I knocked on the door of the address Marsha had given me and a heavy-hipped woman answered. Her worn housedress and graying, closely cropped hair made her appear older than I would have guessed from her phone voice. She let me into a house that was visibly free of dirt but smelled of dogs. One of them, an old setter,