CHAPTER SEVEN

Friday, October 26

I left a message last night with Felicia Delmonico and asked if I could meet her somewhere and ask a few questions.

To my amazement, she returned my call this morning.

“You do know I’m a little busy right now,” she said, reminding me that the election is eleven days away.

She further reminded me that there is the small matter of getting Teddy’s estate settled.

I apologized and explained that I wouldn’t be bugging her if it weren’t essential. I promised that I would not take up more than five minutes of her time.

There are questions about her late husband that I was still not clear about, I explained.

“Any place you say,” I added.

I heard her sigh as she looked at her calendar. She said she thought she could answer whatever questions I had between two appearances, one at a school in Hanover County and another with her more deep-pocketed supporters at a restaurant in the West End.

“I don’t know what you could ask me that the police haven’t already though.”

The two events are scheduled so that, if she leaves one on time, she will only be fifteen minutes late for the next one.

“Campaign managers are sadists,” she said.

“Why don’t I drive you from the first one to the second?”

She seemed OK with that. She asked me what kind of car I had. When I told her, I didn’t mention that the aged Honda has close to 200,000 miles on it.

“Well, just be damn sure we don’t break down on the road somewhere. That’d make me look kind of, you know, inept. Inept wouldn’t be a good look right now.”

I agreed to pick her up at the school at eleven, which is when she’s supposed to be appearing at Site Number Two.

Felicia said she had seven more calls to make.

“If you give this number to anyone else, I’ll know, and I’ll never talk to you again.”

Last thing on my mind, I assured her.

“So,” she said, “you idiots aren’t endorsing anybody for public office anymore?”

Not my department, I told her, without revealing that I think we’re as dumb as she thinks we are.

In the minute I had left before Felicia cut me off, I asked about Baer.

“I swear, I didn’t even know he was doing work for us,” she said, “until somebody told me he’d been let go at the paper. He never mentioned it. Some of these kids we’ve got writing press releases and such, they aren’t exactly Hemingway. I guess one of them figured it couldn’t hurt to seek a little professional help.”

“Any chance you’ll hire him now, over the table?”

“I’ll talk to the campaign manager. She’s my boss now. I’m just along for the ride. Hell, we ought to hire him to replace whoever’s been using him for free. Glad he’s such a fan, by the way.”

“It’s hard to imagine anyone being Felicia Delmonico’s boss,” I noted.

I also told her that being a fan isn’t really a requisite for professional journalists.

“Oh, Willie,” she said, before ringing off, “grow up.”

SO I’M here at ten forty-five, in time to catch the last part of Felicia Delmonico’s speech to her devoted followers. They do seem devoted, too, especially the young women, many of whom, I’m told, have been putting up campaign posters and knocking on doors for months.

In better times, before I fucked up, I covered state politics instead of the antics of Richmond’s homicidal class. Back then, Democrats and Republicans seemed to sort of get along. They even spoke to each other. A Dem might even cross the line if he thought the GOP candidate suited his fancy, or vice versa. Now, in our twenty-first-century era of bad feelings, you’d just be a pussy if you ever changed your mind and admitted that you might have previously been wrong. The purpose of campaign stops like this must be to keep the believers out there knocking on doors and writing checks.

It seems like both sides are just preaching to their respective choirs. The rancor runs all the way from Washington to Podunk local elections. The blue side is out here in droves today, and if what I hear as I wait for Felicia is indicative, the crowd’s zeal is driven at least as much by hatred of the Republican candidate as it is by devotion to Delmonico.

Some of the faithful make it clear that getting Delmonico into office is only part of the master plan. I count seven signs advocating the impeachment of our current president.

Felicia’s gotten good at the smooth goodbyes. She is able to extricate herself from what looks like a rock star’s fan club without making it appear that she’s blowing them off, and we’re on our way by ten after.

“Not bad,” she says, looking at her watch. “We’ll only be twenty minutes late. Hell, we were fifteen late for that one. By the end of the day, I’ll be an hour behind, but it is what it is. They’ll get over it.”

She sniffs.

“Goddammit,” she says, “you still smoke.”

I guess I’m immune to the smell. I remember that Felicia put away a pack or so a day back when.

“I’m going to smell like a fuckin’ Marlboro the rest of the day.”

“Camel.”

“What?”

“I smoke Camels.”

“Well, whatever, this car probably has an inch of nicotine on all its surfaces.”

She tries to open the window, but the control on the passenger’s side doesn’t work. I use the one on the driver’s side. This does not end well, since Felicia’s well-coiffed hair is now in the midst of a gale. I close the window.

“This was not one of my best ideas,” she says.

I assure her that ten minutes or so in my tobacco-scented Honda won’t cause permanent damage to either her lungs or her reputation.

I turn on the tape recorder in the console.

I ask her about stories I’ve heard about things not being so swell between her and Teddy. Might as well cut to the chase. I mean, what’s she going to do, jump out of a moving car?

“I don’t know where you heard that from, but there’s no truth to it whatsoever,” she says. “We were very much in love. If we didn’t choose to spend every second with each other, well, that’s because we both had our own loves, er, lives.”

She puts her left hand on the recorder to stop it.

Don’t worry, I tell her. I’m not going to bust your chops over a Freudian slip.

“Nothing Freudian about it,” she says, and I start the recorder again.

She gives me a glowing testimonial to Teddy’s many good qualities.

I move on and ask her about the first Mrs. Delmonico, noting that neither she nor the surviving son, Brady, seem very eager to talk about the deceased.

I press on.

“I couldn’t help but notice that there was a lot of space between you and Kathy Simmons.”

She gives me a look, perhaps a glare.

“There’s always going to be some tension in a situation like that,” she says. “I have nothing but the utmost respect for both Mrs. Simmons and Brady. Brady and I haven’t been as close as I would like us to be. Neither were he and Teddy.”

She reaches over and stops the tape again.

“We need to go off the record.”

“Off the record” are not my three favorite words, way behind “I love you” and “It’s so big.” Off the record makes everything harder. I’ll just have to get someone else to confirm what she tells me, without letting on that I heard it from her.

However, given a choice between OTR and nothing, I’ll take what I can get.

“So what do I need to know that I can’t print?”

She frowns and turns toward me.

“I told the cops this, but I don’t know whether anything has come of it. There have been some threats.”

I’m all ears.

Felicia says she has gotten two different notes, mailed from somewhere in the Richmond area, threatening her and Teddy’s lives.

“Before or after he was killed?”

“Before. Both within the last month. I mean, they could have come from investors who lost their shirts in that DelFarr mess, which, by the way, was not Teddy’s fault. We didn’t pass them on to the police at the time, and by the time Teddy was killed, they’d been thrown away.”

“What did they say?”

“I’m paraphrasing a little, but basically, they called Teddy a bastard and said he’d ruined lives and now he would have to pay.”

She says there also were a couple of phone calls, apparently from burner phones, making more threats. She didn’t recognize the caller, other than that he was male. She said she thought whoever it was seemed to be trying to disguise his voice.

We’re coming up to the restaurant.

Felicia sighs.

“Teddy didn’t think it was worth going to the police about, but now I wish I had. I mean, he’d had to deal with occasional angry people ever since DelFarr collapsed, but it did seem to pick up lately.”

She also tells me something else I didn’t know. Teddy Delmonico had been, in the last year of his life, diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

In response to my blank stare, she says, “CTE. The brain thing you get from taking too many shots to the head.”

She says that he’d even been banned from playing tennis at his club after an unfortunate incident involving a double-fault two months ago.

Why haven’t I heard this before, I wonder.

“Nobody wanted to embarrass him,” she says. “But the doctors we went to said it was getting worse.”

Still, in the old days I would have heard rumors about things like this well before now. Maybe I’m losing my touch.

As she leaves the car, I wish Felicia good luck and assure her that she does not smell like a Camel.

ON THE way back downtown, I get a call from my mother. She wants me to stop by, she says, because Awesome Dude has something to tell me.

It occurs to me that there isn’t much that the Dude could tell me that I don’t know already. However, it further occurs to me that my mother’s wandering permanent houseguest sometimes learns things, in his perambulations, that are not known by the more stable members of our community.

Awesome has, on one occasion, given me information that led to one of my more award-worthy investigative efforts. Almost got my ass killed, too, but you take the good with the bad.

On the way to Oregon Hill, I try to get a mental bead on where Felicia fits into this. Despite what she said on the record, it seems probable to me that the honeymoon was over between her and T-Bone. It’s a hell of a leap, though, from separate lives to murder.

And the alleged death threats, for which there is no written record, make it interesting. Is Felicia just trying to misdirect the cops? Before the day’s out, I’ll have a chat with the chief. If I’m doing my job right, I’ll be able to get L.D. to concede that the police are aware of such threats, without letting on that Felicia told me about them.

Also, where the hell is Mills Farrington? Might not be anything, but his seeming disappearance about the same time Teddy was killed does make one wonder. Maybe he’s just visiting a cousin somewhere, but the timing is curious.

And the CTE thing. That should be easy enough to check out.

WHEN I get to Peggy’s, she and Awesome Dude are in the living room. The joint, so to speak, smells of recently enjoyed marijuana. Actually I think Peggy’s modest Hill dwelling will retain that aroma about as long as my car smells like Camels. Like forever. She always snuffs it out before I get there, like she thinks I won’t notice. She says she’ll quit smoking when I do.

Hell, both she and Awesome have inhaled enough weed over the years that it hardly seems to affect them anymore other than dilating their pupils. Sometimes I think they light up out of habit.

“So,” I say, turning to Awesome after Peggy offers me a Miller and I accept, “what’s the big scoop you’ve got for me?”

“Aww,” he says, shielding his eyes from the light coming in the living room window, “it might not be nothin’, but I thought you ought to know.”

The story, which he finally divulges in a less-than-linear fashion, is that Awesome knows a guy who found something on Belle Isle.

The guy’s name is Popcorn, apparently because that is his primary source of nourishment.

“Sometimes, we just call him Pop.”

Most of Awesome’s friends from his more rootless days seem to travel so light in their homelessness that they don’t even have room for a full name anymore. He spent a lot of years out there at Texas Beach, beneath underpasses and in various shelters before Peggy took him in. Like any good friend, Awesome has not high-hatted his old buds just because he has a roof over his head these days. He visits.

What Popcorn, or Pop, found was a hat.

“A hat? So what?”

“Well, the thing is, he thought it might be something to do with that fella, the one that got his leg chewed off.”

Awesome explains that Pop was wandering around the island last Saturday morning, a few hours before those kids found Teddy Delmonico’s leg.

“Pop likes to get up early,” Awesome explains.

Somewhere near what would become known as the scene of the crime, Popcorn found what sounds like a ball cap, lying half-buried in the mud.

He showed it to Awesome when they ran into each other two days ago over on Grace Street. He was trying to get advice from the Dude. The point at which you go to Awesome Dude for intelligent direction is not a good place to find yourself.

“He said he didn’t want no trouble, with the cops or nothin’. He knew about that fella getting killed over there. He was afraid that if he showed that cap to the cops, they’d think he’d done something bad. Pop don’t exactly have a clean record.

“And …”

Here, Awesome pauses, and I can see he’s embarrassed.

“And he thought, you know, because he knows you’re my friend, that you might want to, you know, maybe buy it.”

Even the homeless are media-savvy these days, it appears. This guy has figured out that the cap might have some bearing on the Delmonico case. He’s afraid to take it to the cops, and he thinks he might be able to make a buck or two by selling it to a reporter.

I ask about the particulars of the cap.

“I seen it. It was red, or at least it looked like it was. It was kind of dirty, you know. Had some writing on it, but I didn’t notice what it said. Just a ball cap.”

“Does he still have it?”

“If he ain’t sold it. I told him to hang on to it until I could talk to you. I told him you’d know what he ought to do.”

How, I ask, can I get in touch with Mr. Popcorn?

“I told him I’d get back to him,” Awesome says, “but he tends to move around a bit. It ain’t like he’s got no fixed address. But I’ll find him.”

I reach into my billfold and take out ten bucks.

“If you get up with him,” I tell Awesome, “buy the damn thing.”

As I’m leaving, I ask Peggy about my daughter and grandson. She says they’re fine, but they don’t come around to see her often enough. Maybe, I’m thinking, Andi doesn’t want little William picking up bad habits. They lived with Peggy until the child services folks got a whiff of what they perceived to be an unhealthy atmosphere for a child.

There’s not much sense in letting the cops know, just yet, about that cap, which probably means nothing anyhow, just some ball cap that somebody lost and didn’t bother to look for. And even if there is a cap, will Awesome be able to get his hands on it? And what the hell does it mean anyhow? I’m sure people lose stuff on Belle Isle all the time. Hell, I lost my car keys over there once when I went for an unplanned swim after a few too many Millers. Shit happens.

Still though. The timing is interesting.

Maybe the chief can offer me some enlightenment. Prying enlightenment from the chief is like getting a pork chop from a pit bull, but I do have a plan.

When I get back to the office, first thing I do is call Peachy Love.

“Hey, don’t say anything. Just listen,” I tell her, before she can hang up. She’s understandably uneasy about me calling her at the office.

“What I want to know is this: Did Felicia Delmonico tell the police that she and/or Teddy had received death threats recently? If it isn’t true, just say ‘wrong number.’ I’ll count to five, and if I don’t hear anything by then, I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ ”

I count slowly to five. Nothing.

I hang up.

I decide to wait a few minutes to call L.D., whose office is close enough to Peachy’s cubbyhole that he might put two and two together for a change.

In the meantime, it’s the usual shit show in the newsroom. My co-workers are a little abashed about Baer’s unplanned departure.

“It just makes us look bad,” I heard Leighton Byrd say. “I mean, how can they trust us if they think we’re sleeping with the enemy?”

I don’t know her well enough to do this, but I step in and point out that the person you’re covering isn’t by definition the enemy, any more than he or she is a friend. And Baer is far from the first contemporary of mine to bail for “media relations,” usually for a lot more money. Baer was just dumber than most. He apparently went rogue simply because he believed in Felicia Delmonico.

“Whatever,” sniffs Leighton, who is wearing an ankle-length skirt and a blouse that, if it had one more top button, would choke her. Call it passive-aggression fashion.

Hell, Leighton Byrd should be damn grateful that Baer fucked up. Guess who, with damn near no experience, is covering the Felicia Delmonico campaign now?

As I head back to my desk, Wheelie motions me into his office. He wants to know where we are, Delmonico-wise.

“We don’t seem to be making much progress,” he says.

I tell him we’re about as far as the cops are, the best I can tell, but that I did get an interview with the widow.

“And did she tell you anything good?”

“Not much for the record.”

Wheelie sighs. He does that a lot. If someone had told us Baer would beat Mal Wheelwright out the door, we would have been surprised. Being editor of a midsize daily newspaper, even in print journalism’s sorry present state, ought to enable a person to cash in by shilling for Dominion Energy or one of the other big hitters who spend more money buying off the legislature than we seem to spend on salaries.

I guess that Wheelie has an unrequited love for the business. Who am I to judge?

Before going to make my call, I do give him reason to hope though. I tell him that I’m on the way to getting confirmation that Felicia and Teddy got death threats, both written and via telephone, shortly before T-Bone’s demise.

“Really?” he says. “That’d be great. Keep the publisher off my back for a while.”

Yeah, Benson Stine, our fourth publisher in the last decade, is not exactly my biggest fan. He never seems to think I’m earning my keep. Ever since the unfortunate and semi-factual Today in Richmond History series, I get the sense that he views old Willie with a gimlet eye.

I tell Wheelie that I’ll let him know something soon.

The call to L.D.’s office results in the usual bullshit from his aide. The chief is in a meeting and won’t be out for some time.

I doubt it. It’s three thirty Friday afternoon. L.D. is not in some meeting this close to bourbon-and-water time. If he’d already gone home, the aide would have just told me he had left for the day.

“Tell him that the paper is ready to print a story stating that Teddy Delmonico and wife received numerous death threats in the two weeks leading up to his murder, and that the police are refusing to comment on it.”

The chief calls me back less than five minutes later.

He greets me with the usual bonhomie.

“Where do you get this shit?”

“Can’t tell you, L.D. But we’re pretty comfortable with our source.”

“It was the damn widow, wasn’t it? She wasn’t supposed to talk about it.”

“Ongoing investigation, right?”

With my fingers crossed, I tell him that Felicia Delmonico isn’t talking, but that we have another good source, good enough to run even without attribution.

“But it’d look a lot better if we did have our chief of police saying that the authorities are looking hard into the allegations.”

L.D. is silent for about five seconds.

“Damn,” he says at last, “she didn’t even have copies of the letters. Said she threw them away. And no way to trace the phone calls.”

“So you think she might be making it up?”

For the second time today, I let a source go off the record.

“Willie, we don’t know what to think. I mean, the guy had enemies, no doubt. Investors were pissed off. His first wife might be carrying a hell of a grudge.”

“And then there was that thing at the tennis court. The fight?”

“How the hell did you know about that?”

I do now.

“Nothing to that,” he says. “The guy he beat up didn’t want to press charges. He’s got that CRV thing.”

“CTE.”

“Yeah. But putting all that aside, you know it’s always a good bet to start with the next of kin, even if she is running for the House.”

I note the obvious: This can’t be that good for Felicia’s campaign.

“Oh, I don’t know,” the chief says. “She comes across pretty good on TV as the damn grieving widow.”

When I ask him whether the cops tried to get in touch with Mills Farrington, he says he can’t talk about that. When I tell him that I paid a visit to Farrington’s place on Lake Anna and the lady next door said he was in parts unknown, the chief says I should stay the hell out of police business.

“So you have tried to contact him?”

“Fuck you,” he explains.

At the end of the conversation, I have L.D.’s affirmation about the death threats. Felicia might be pissed, but I’ve got the chief of police confirming the threats. She can just tell the reporters and her followers that she was keeping quiet at the request of the cops.

I stop by the editor’s office and tell Wheelie that we will have something new to write about Teddy Delmonico’s murder. He looks like he could use some good news.

“Do you know,” he says, “that we have a twenty-three-year-old covering the biggest political race in our area this year?”

It did occur to me, when I heard about Baer’s departure, to volunteer my way off the night cops beat, which was meted out to me years ago as a punishment. I was covering campaigns long before Leighton Byrd’s mother missed her period.

But, hell, I’m getting pretty interested in whatever happened to Teddy Delmonico.

There might be a story here.