CHAPTER EIGHT

Saturday, October 27

I rarely get a Saturday off. This is one of them. Andy Peroni is a friend of a guy who has four season tickets to University of Virginia football games. The guy had something better to do this weekend and he gave Andy his tickets to the Virginia-North Carolina game. Andy in turn invited Cindy and me and Custalow to accompany him.

So Chuck Apple will sub for me tonight, in exchange for a Sunday stint I’ll be doing for him next month, and it’s off to Charlottesville we go.

I offer to drive Andy’s new Toyota. Least I can do.

He’s reading the Saturday paper as we head west with the sun barely over the damn horizon. Apparently, it’s essential that we tailgate for about three hours before the game, which starts not long after noon. Cindy made it clear, before we left, that bitching about free tickets was not allowed.

“This is getting interesting,” Andy says as he folds the paper so he can read the rest of my sparkling epistle. “Do you think the wife is telling the truth?”

I tell Cindy’s brother and my old friend that he knows about as much as I do.

The story this morning made the bottom of A1. Now our shrinking readership knows about the alleged threats on Teddy and Felicia Delmonico’s lives, and that the deceased had taken one too many blows to the head on his way to becoming a local football legend. I was even able to hint at possible marital discord, with Felicia’s mention of “separate lives” planting the seed in suspicious readers’ minds. I haven’t reported on the visit to Mills Farrington’s lake house yet, but another visit out there is on my schedule for tomorrow.

The tailgate is actually kind of fun, even if it does start about the time I’m usually having my second or third cup of coffee. Cindy made some superb deviled eggs, and Andy stopped at the Wayside for enough fried chicken to clog many arteries.

The other members of the tailgating party, whom none of us except Andy know, have brought their share and more.

Some enterprising soul, I learn, goes up to C’ville every summer and gets in touch with the students who rent a particularly dilapidated apartment in the shadow of the stadium and pays them what sounds like a shitload of money to let us park in their front yard. I am assured that, by college football game-day standards, we’re getting a bargain.

There’s room for four cars and a couple of tents. The regular tailgaters have already covered the tables under the tents with everything from chips and dip to breakfast pizza to crab cakes to Smithfield ham biscuits. Somebody has a grill going, and I smell barbecue.

And there’s enough bourbon and beer to keep us happy even if the Cavaliers don’t please us. There are stories of people who came to the tailgate and never even bothered to go to the game itself. Who can blame them? It’s like a picnic on the grounds without having to listen to a damn sermon beforehand.

Before 9/11, you could leave a U.Va. game at halftime for a drink at the car and wander back in sometime in the third quarter. Now, when you leave, you can’t come back. Cynics claim that the aptly named pass-out policy was changed after 9/11 not for security purposes, but to force people to choose football over drinking.

“What the hell,” Bootie Carmichael said after they changed the rules, “some terrorist is going to watch the first half of the game, go outside for a drink, and then come back and blow the place up? Why not just do it during the National Anthem?”

Of course, you still can’t smoke anywhere around the stadium, for fear of giving the birds cancer. I sneak in a couple of Camels behind the apartment complex, next to the alfresco men’s room.

I do a quick count and figure that, by eleven, there are at least fifty people at this thing. Many of them are students, and some of them seem to have just wandered off the street, smelling free food and beverage. Considering the weather, some of the young women have come considerably underdressed. Of course, we would never consider giving underage coeds alcohol. Perish the thought.

One of the regulars here sums it up pretty well:

“We might lose a game or two, but we have never, ever lost a tailgate.”

A lawyer who says he’s been part of the tailgate group for damn near twenty years recognizes my name when we’re introduced.

He looks to be about seventy-five, and he’s right out of U.Va. alumni central casting: khakis, Topsiders, crisp blue shirt, and an orange-and-blue rep tie. He says he remembers me from various drunken legislative after-hours free-for-alls back when I covered the General Assembly. The lawyer, I remember now, served a couple of stints in the House of Delegates, representing Amelia or Powhatan or some such backwater. Eventually, as is the case with many of our state legislators, he realized that the janitors cleaning the legislative building were making about as much as he was, so he went back to working his way up to partner in a pretty good firm downtown.

“I still remember the number you did on Wat Chenault,” he says, slapping my back in a collegial way.

I lie by assuring him that I took no pleasure in exposing Wat Chenault’s fat ass, helping turn him into a former state senator by reporting on his penchant for girls considerably younger than those aforementioned coeds.

“Well,” he says, “Ol’ Wat did OK anyhow. Got rich as shit.”

“Ol’ Wat” is lucky he’s not in prison down in Greensville, I want to say, but there’s no sense in telling this guy the goods I have on Wat Chenault, which I withheld from our readers and the police in exchange for the fat man not suing our asses after I scotched one of his more misguided real-estate deals.

I make enough enemies without really trying. Chenault’s only fifty-nine, and the last time I was in the same room with him, I could tell how much he wanted to lop my head off and mount it on his wall.

The lawyer has read the piece this morning on Teddy Delmonico. He and Teddy belonged to the same circles. They were in the same country club, and they were both members of the Commonwealth Club, where old white Richmond goes to bemoan the way the world’s gone to hell since 1954.

“He really did have some problems,” the lawyer says, lowering his voice a little so that I have to lean in to pick up what he’s saying, “with that CTE stuff and all. I’m pretty sure he was planning to be part of that class-action suit against the NFL, if he’d lived. But that wasn’t all of it.”

I open another Miller and press my chatty source on what other kind of problems T-Bone might have had, hoping as always to learn something I don’t already know.

“Well, he and Farrington, they weren’t exactly pals anymore.”

That is understandable, I say, considering the amount of crap that Mills Farrington apparently led Delmonico into.

“Well,” the lawyer says, “I don’t know how much Teddy had to be led, if you know what I mean.”

“So he knew what they were doing?”

He holds his hands up.

“I’m not saying that, but you’d have to be an idiot not to know something was wrong. And Teddy wasn’t an idiot. He didn’t start losing it until the last year or two.”

But, I press, he had issues with Farrington about something.

The lawyer leans closer.

“This is all off the record, but you might want to ask the delegate-to-be, or delegate wannabe, about that.”

OK. Didn’t see that one coming.

When I ask for details, my chatty source says there was an incident at a Commonwealth Club function a few months ago.

“We thought that was all over, when Mills went to jail,” he says, leading me to believe that everyone in the club must have known something was going on between the sheets. “But by the time this happened, he’d been out probably six months.”

Farrington wasn’t a member anymore, but somebody, probably somebody who hadn’t invested his life savings with DelFarr, brought him as a guest.

“Teddy was there. They didn’t speak, that I could see, but this friend of mine said he wandered into the men’s room at some point, and there were Teddy and Farrington. They were having a discussion.”

“A discussion?”

“My friend said Teddy had Farrington by the lapel, pinned up against the wall. He told Farrington that he’d kill him if he didn’t keep away from Felicia.

“Then he said Farrington told him it was none of Teddy’s fucking business what he did. And then they realized they weren’t having a private conversation, and they zipped up and shut up.”

I interject that Teddy Delmonico’s mental stability probably wasn’t the best by that time.

“Yeah, I know. But everybody at the club knew there’d been something between Farrington and Felicia in the past, so it didn’t seem like a stretch that they’d picked up where they left off. Plus, if Teddy’d been off his nut that day, he wouldn’t have backed off Farrington just because my friend walked in. I’ve seen Teddy when he was in CTE land, and, believe me, there was no stopping him.”

I thank my source for the information and promise that his name will never be tied to it.

“If you see Wat Chenault,” I tell the lawyer as we’re packing up to go into the stadium, “please tell him that Willie Black is thinking of him.”

That ought to make Chenault’s fat ass clinch up a little.

Even with three bourbon-and-waters under my belt, the lawyer’s revelation has my head spinning. As I gradually sober up, watching U.Va. win for a change, I know that there is yet another possible contender in the who-killed-Teddy sweepstakes. Add Mills Farrington to the irate investors and present and former wives who might have been interested in putting Teddy Delmonico in the cold, cold ground.

If Farrington was indeed romantically involved with Felicia, maybe he figured a way to eliminate her troublesome husband. Yet another reason to get back out to Lake Anna and try to find Farrington.

A college football experience, done with enthusiasm, turns out to be an all-day sucker. The game ends around three thirty, but we don’t get on the road until two hours later. The post-game tailgate, in which everything that wasn’t eaten and drunk earlier is dispatched, gets us back to an acceptable level of non-sobriety again. Some of the younger set, not yet veteran imbibers, seem to be a little wobbly. One hopes they’re walking back to the dorms.

Being the designated driver, and with a couple of DUIs on my record, I barely taint my water with Early Times at the post-game festivities.

“You’re a prince,” Andy says when he sees what a small dent I’m making in the bourbon. He seems to be sincere. The reward for a life embracing intemperance is that even the smallest gestures toward sobriety are greeted the way you praise a puppy for not crapping on the carpet.

It’s after seven by the time we get back to the Prestwould. Since we have eaten our weight in most of the food groups proscribed by the American Heart Association, and since we’ve also been up and at ’em since before dawn, collapsing on the couch and letting mindless televised football wash over us seems like a good option to me. Custalow says he has to be somewhere, which means Stella Stellar is back in town.

“Isn’t there anything else on?” Cindy complains. “We’ve been doing football all day.”

I hand her the clicker.

“Find it.”

After running through the cable guide twice, she hands the clicker back.

“What the hell are we paying for all these channels for?” she says. “Not a damn thing on any of them.”

I congratulate her for being the last person in America to figure that out.

I do make a call to the office. Sally, who’s just put the early edition to bed, fills me in on the latest with Baer.

He has, she tells me, been given a job of some sort with Felicia Delmonico’s campaign.

“Probably won’t pay as much as he was making here, but it’ll keep him off the streets.”

Sally and I agree that he could wind up smelling like a rose, with a semipermanent job in our nation’s capital, as long as Delmonico beats the incumbent. The pollsters say it’s neck-and-neck right now.

Not much of a future, though, for ex-reporters who go all in for a losing candidate.

“Well,” I note, “there’s always government work.”

Sally agrees that there are advantages to living in the state capital. Nobody is trying to drain our own little mud puddle here in Richmond. There’s hardly a state agency that doesn’t have $80,000 jobs available for wordsmiths who value loyalty over neutrality. Of course, every time a new governor comes in, those guys have to trot out their résumés again.

I ask Sally how Chuck Apple is faring.

“Chuck’s had an interesting day,” she says. “Maybe he ought to tell you about it.”

He answers my call to his cell. I can hear sirens in the background.

He explains that he’s at a fire.

“No casualties, no story.”

The place that’s burning is on a side street down in the Bottom. From the one meal I had there, the chief suspect probably is grease.

I ask him about the rest of his day.

“You picked a good one to miss,” he says.

What I missed was a food fight.

It seemed humorous to many of us that Baconfest and a vegetarian/vegan festival would fall on the same weekend. What took it beyond funny was the fact that the former was held in the old train shed while the latter, in a last-minute switch, took place in the farmers’ market, right next door.

Nobody really knew how it got started. Maybe a guy munching on a sausage sandwich made an unkind remark about tofu. Maybe someone threw a vegetarian spring roll at a guy chowing down on a BLT.

At any rate, it went downhill in a hurry. One guy who was there at the start said it reminded him of the scene in Gandhi where the Indians and Pakistanis are walking past each other into exile when two of them suddenly start cursing each other’s religion, and then everybody’s down in the pit, trying to kill one another.

“I didn’t know vegetarians were so mean,” the guy told Apple as he was trying to wipe some eggplant Parmesan off his shirt.

“He said it actually tasted pretty good,” Apple said.

Since the Hatfields-and-McCoys version of food festivals took place less than two blocks away from the fire, I ask Chuck if there’s any connection.

“Dunno. But I doubt there’s a vegetarian-vegan link. I don’t think you could get that crap to burn.”

Hell, Apple probably will get a state press award for his coverage of the food festival clusterfuck. A bacon vs. broccoli brouhaha makes for much better reading than a boring double-homicide.

Before we stagger off to bed, I make a to-do list for tomorrow. Mills Farrington and Kathy Simmons are at the top of it.