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,