Death and Friendship in the Sordid Swamp

Washington DC is an amazing place to live.

"Paul dead?" I blurted out in the middle of dessert last night.

I was at a friend's house, someone I had gotten to know years ago as part of a fellowship program I had been pulled into by a man named Jim Denton. Jim was one of these people you can only meet in Washington. He had been in the Navy and came from a military family. In the early 1980s, he had…