CHAPTER NINE

Sunday, October 28

We’re eating and drinking with a little more temperance than usual at Joe’s, having taken in a week’s worth of calories and alcohol at the football game yesterday. Cindy shocks us all by ordering a small Greek salad, causing the waitress to do a double take and our Hill contingent to castigate her for going against her upbringing and intentionally eating healthy food.

“What would Daddy say?” Andy asks his sister. Mr. Peroni, who tragically and inexplicably left us in his early sixties, believed that eating pork three times a day was a sensible life plan.

Actually “small” is a relative term. The salad comes with a salad dressing that probably has more calories than a milkshake and includes about a half-pound of feta cheese. I once asked the former owner how Joe’s could afford to put that much feta on a relatively cheap salad. He replied cryptically that he knew a guy in New York.

“Next thing you know,” I tell Cindy, “you’ll be wanting to go to the vegan festival.” But I follow her example by ordering the breakfast sandwich instead of the usual belly-buster.

“With fries?” the waitress asks.

“Sure.”

“Attaboy,” says R.P. McGonnigal, who was out touring wineries yesterday with his latest beau and is getting the rehash of the tailgate party.

Andy says he talked awhile with one of the old guys who organize the thing for every U.Va. home game.

“He said that two years ago, one of the college kids they were renting the space from e-mailed him; told him they’d have to keep the noise down, not be so rowdy. They were disturbing the students.

“The guy must have been mid-seventies. Said he’d never been prouder.”

Custalow’s here with Stella Stellar. We’ve convinced him that Stella should meet our merry group.

Stella’s hair is a royal blue today. She seems to fit right in. Cindy seems intrigued by the concept of hair color as a changeable thing. I quietly mention that I like her coiffure just the way it is.

“Oh, hush,” she says. “If you had any, you’d probably have dyed it blue too.”

This encourages R.P. and Andy to remember the time in eleventh grade when I tried to turn myself into a blond by peroxiding my hair and wound up a temporary redhead.

“You dared me to,” I tell R.P.

“Maybe that’s why it all fell out so early,” Cindy says. “Death by peroxide. Peroxicide.”

“You all remind me of the folks I used to hang out with in Powhatan,” Stella, who began life there as Carla Jean Crump, tells us. “They were crazy too. No offense.”

Goat Johnson calls. We put our out-of-state member on speakerphone. He congratulates Virginia for its football victory over North Carolina, noting that in the place he now lives, somewhere in the flat expanses of Ohio, they play real football.

“What the hell else is there to do in Ohio?” I ask.

He says he might be back among us before long. The college of which he is inexplicably the president is going through some tough times.

“We’re broke,” he explains.

Apparently Goat hasn’t done a good enough job of shaking money out of the old alums or getting his college remembered in their wills.

“The tuition’s ridiculous,” he says, adding that we should not quote him.

“Just on Facebook,” Andy promises.

The school, in a desperate attempt to cut expenses, is thinking about doing the unthinkable and dropping football.

“It was that or the English department,” he says. “Fielding a football team actually costs more.

“And that has the board ready to fire us all. Not that any of those fat fucks are giving us much money or any good ideas. You’d have thought I’d suggested that we start offering a master’s in Satanism.”

“Well,” I say, “it is Ohio.”

“Yeah, well, don’t give my seat away. Retirement’s looking pretty damn good right now.”

Looks good to me, too, I tell him. So does sprouting wings and flying.

“Must be nice to be in a profession where they have pensions generous enough to let your ass retire.”

“Nobody held a gun to your head and made you be a professional muckraker,” he reminds me. Fair enough.

We break up shortly before noon.

I tell Cindy that I’ve got a couple of things I have to do this afternoon. She accepts an offer to go to a movie with Abe and Stella. I tell her to stay away from the hair dye. She makes no promises.

BACK AT the Prestwould, I try again to make contact with Kathy Simmons. This time she answers, maybe because she doesn’t recognize my number.

She says she and Baxter have just gotten back from church but that I could call later.

I suggest two o’clock, and she says maybe.

I stress again that I am not out to do a hatchet job on her late ex-husband, just trying to get everything straight in my mind.

I hear a male voice in the background, and Ms. Simmons says she has to go.

Another trip out to Lake Anna is next on my agenda. I figure I can reach Kathy on my cell after I get there.

My plans get altered somewhat when I call Peachy Love. It’s always good to check in with Peachy occasionally, and Sunday’s a good time, when she’s away from the office and her police department peers, especially L.D. Jones.

I tell her that I hope I’m not disturbing her brunch with her fella who usually comes down from DC on the weekends.

“No sweat, Willie,” she says. “I’m having to scramble a little right now.”

What, I ask, has disturbed her peace on this lovely fall Sunday afternoon?

“You know that Farrington guy? The one who was partners with Teddy Delmonico, went to jail for bilking his clients? Well, they’re pretty sure they found him.”

“Dead or alive.”

“Extremely dead. They’re trying to ID him now.”

It’s definitely him though. Peachy says they found his car at the end of a rut logging road about three miles from his Lake Anna place early this morning. A couple of guys who probably were hunting illegally on Sunday found it.

The guy inside had been dead for quite a while, from a couple of gunshot wounds, one to the body, one to the head. He was, Peachy says, pretty far on the way to decomposed.

The state police have contacted his brother, who lives in Northern Virginia, and he’ll identify the body.

“But from pictures we have of Farrington, this is him.”

So the Richmond police were alerted, along with the local cops, and they’re either at the lake or on their way now. Farrington’s not a city resident anymore, but L.D.’s boys still feel they have a vested interest in the case. With Teddy, his partner in white-collar crime, dying violently about the same time, suspicious minds might suspect a connection.

Peachy is headed out the door as well.

“There might be some media shit. The chief thinks maybe the brother or one of the cops up in Louisa might have called one of the Washington TV stations, because the TV guys have been calling him. So I’ve gotta get my ass up there too.”

I assure her that I’ll be right behind her.

“You know where it is?”

I don’t, but she gives me pretty specific instructions as to how to get there.

“But you’re gonna say you found out about this some way other than me, right?”

The chief hates it when his media-relations person talks to the media.

“Have I ever burned you, Peachy?”

Yeah, this story definitely could resonate outside the greater Richmond area. The DelFarr thing, I’ve learned, was pretty big in the DC area, where many of its burned investors live. It could spark news media interest up there on a quiet Sunday afternoon.

I’ve already been up to the lake house once, I tell Peachy, who directs me from there to the place where the body was found. I assure her that I can convince the chief that I got a tip from a source at another media outlet.

“I think the chief is surprised these days when you aren’t one step ahead of where he wants you to be,” she says.

I suppose I should take that as a compliment.

Two Camels and the first quarter of the Redskins-Giants game later, I’ve finally found the rut road, which is absolutely in the middle of damn nowhere. The car is a couple of hundred yards off the humpbacked barely two-lane road that led me here. The road is now one-lane, because the other lane is filling up with city, county and state police vehicles, along with a couple of TV trucks and various other curious onlookers.

The rut road itself has been blocked off, which means we have to walk, an easier job for me than for the poor schmucks who have to carry in all the TV crap.

The cop at the entrance to the rut road lets me in when I show him my press credentials, something of which I’m sure L.D. would not approve. As I get closer to the scene, I see that apparently no other print journalists are here yet. Like other Americans, Farrington’s brother or whoever the unknown tipster is doesn’t think “newspaper” when he’s thinking “news.”

I see that it’s two o’clock, so I step off the path and try Kathy Simmons’s number, praying that they have cell service out here.

They do, and she answers.

I ask her if I can drive down to Roanoke tomorrow and have a chat with her.

She’s quiet for a few seconds, like she’s trying to make up her mind.

“OK,” she says at last. “But you’ll have to be gone by four. That’s when my husband gets home.”

She adds that Mr. Simmons is not a big fan of newspaper reporters. She had me call back at two because she knew her husband would have left for some autumn golf by then.

“He thinks you’re just trying to use me,” she says, “and you probably are.”

Over my protests, she goes on. “But there are things that I want to get out there, about Teddy. There’s things that ought to be known.”

She sounds like she might have been crying.

I promise her that I will not take advantage of her and hope that I can keep that promise. I tell her that I will be there by noon and out of her hair long before four.

I put the phone away and head toward the chief, who looks somewhat irked at having his Sunday ruined by police business. He’s talking with Peachy. I give them a little time to themselves so my connection with her isn’t so obvious.

I see the RAV4. It looks like someone drove it into a bunch of pine striplings. It’s barely visible from the rut road. The only other vehicles in here are a rescue squad van and L.D.’s car. The EMTs are loading what is surely Mills Farrington’s body into the van. From twenty feet away, I can smell it. I guess they’ll wait here until the brother arrives to identify it.

As Peachy goes off to placate some good-hair woman from one of the DC stations who looks the worse for her trek through the woods, I approach the chief.

He shakes his head, as he often does when he sees me.

“I at least thought I’d be spared the aggravation of having to deal with you today.”

“I’m stung to the core, L.D.,” I say. “Here I was minding my own business, watching a little football, when this source of mine calls and says that they might have found Mills Farrington’s body out in the woods up here. And since I’d paid Mr. Farrington a visit just last week, I thought I’d come up here and check it out.”

He takes the explanation with a grain of salt. But, with the Washington TV crowd here already, and no doubt their Richmond brethren not far behind, he’s not really in a position to sit on this one.

“It’s bound to be him,” the chief says. “We’ll be informing the media shortly.”

“Can you tell me anything else, like how long he’s been dead, what he died of, anything?”

“Can’t do that yet,” the chief says, happy as always to sit on news. “The family hasn’t been notified yet.”

“I heard that his brother was already on his way down here. Is that right?”

L.D. gives me the fish eye. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned the brother.

“I mean,” I go on, “that’s what the guy who called me said.”

“Yeah, we’re still waiting for the guy to get here, driving down from Annandale.”

I don’t press the chief for the time being. Maybe when the brother gets here, he’ll be more forthcoming. And, if he isn’t, I can always call Peachy.

The brother gets there a few minutes later. He looks like a younger version of Mills, from the pictures I’ve seen. He seems reasonably distraught. He and L.D. have a conversation, and then they both go off a few yards, away from prying eyes and cameras. They’re joined by some state and county cops and a couple of city detectives.

When L.D. comes back from his alfresco confab, I tell him more about the neighbor lady I talked with on Wednesday. I tell him about the RAV4 that was in Farrington’s driveway last Sunday night and wasn’t there Monday morning.

The chief scolds me for interviewing folks before his minions can get to them, but it’s obvious that what I’m saying is news to him.

L.D. makes a waving motion as if he’d like to make me disappear.

“We don’t know if that’s so,” he says. “That’s just hearsay.”

I invite him to ask her himself. I even tell him which house she lives in. He doesn’t seem to appreciate my helpfulness, nor the fact that I’m not asking him why the fuck somebody other than me hasn’t been knocking on the doors of Mills Farrington and his neighbors before this.

L.D. says that, whatever else I get, I’ll have to get it from the press conference that Peachy is getting ready to conduct.

Peachy tells me, along with what is now a pretty good assemblage of Washington and Richmond TV people, that Mr. Mills Farrington has been found in a vehicle, dead of a gunshot wound, confirming what we all know already. The body, she says, seems to have been there for some days.

“Smells like it,” I heard a TV jerk mutter.

“As long as a week?” I ask. She nods. She doesn’t say much else that’s newsworthy, and the TV crowd heads back to deal with that rarest of things, actual news on a Sunday afternoon.

It isn’t that news doesn’t happen on Sunday afternoons; it’s that there are so damn few journalists anymore that we often don’t find out about it until sometime Monday.

Farrington’s brother takes his leave without talking to me or anyone else among the inquiring media.

I call the paper and reach Sarah Goodnight, who has to be the adult supervision on Sundays.

“Holy shit,” she says. “That’s going to liven up the Monday morning paper. Right now, we’re going to lead with a follow-up on the bacon-vegan brouhaha. This might bump that.”

“Might?”

“It depends on how good you write it. It’ll be hard to bump bacon off the top of A1.”

I assume she’s yanking my chain and tell her I’ll be back soon. It is somewhat difficult, fond as I am of Sarah, to have your chain yanked by someone who was your mentee in the not-too-distant past. One of the less-appealing aspects of getting older is seeing a person whom you wet-nursed turn out to be your boss.

WHEN I call Peachy later, as we’re both driving back toward Richmond, I ask her what she can tell me that the chief wouldn’t.

“All this is deep, deep background,” she says after a pause. “It can’t show up in the paper, or the chief will know where it came from.”

I have enough for a pretty good story already. Teddy Delmonico’s former partner in a firm that cost many people their life savings was shot to death, probably not more than a day after Delmonico’s body was found on Belle Isle. And I have a semi-reliable source telling me that Teddy’s now-widow and Farrington probably were doing mixed-doubles pushups, although I’m hesitant to put that particular tidbit into print just now. Libel suits are a bitch. Got to have another chat with the candidate.

So I’ll put whatever Peachy’s going to tell me into the vault for possible future use.

I agree to her terms.

“They did finally get into Farrington’s lake house. One of the cops, looking through drawers in the bedside table, found some pictures.”

“So?”

“Of Felicia Delmonico.”

“Yeah?”

“She didn’t have any clothes on.”

Peachy says it looks like the pictures were taken in a bedroom with paneling identical to that in Farrington’s boudoir.

“Doesn’t have shit to do with the murder investigation,” she says, “but it does seem like she was pretty, um, close to the victim.”

Felicia might have a problem, I’m thinking. When two people you’ve been intimate with both suffer separate and violent deaths within days of each other, it does make you wonder.

I wonder out loud what the cops will do with this information.

“I don’t know, Willie. There’s nothing to suggest that she killed anybody, and if all this got out, right before the election, well, you know how that would end.”

Yeah, it’d end with Felicia losing by about twenty points.

I tell Peachy that I’d heard that there might be something hanky-pankyish between Felicia and Farrington, without going into details.

“Well,” she says, “she’s got a hornet’s nest on her hands now.”

The only other thing Peachy imparts to me is the fact that Farrington’s watch, which his brother said was a fancy-ass Rolex, was missing, along with whatever cash he had in his pocket.

I ask her how Felicia looked in the photographs.

She calls me an asshole and hangs up.

BACK AT the office, I bang out a few grafs for the website, then start writing something for A1 tomorrow.

“Did I mention,” I ask Sarah, “that I’m supposed to be off on Sundays?”

“We could have sent someone else out to Lake Anna, if you’d only asked. I know those Sunday brunches kind of wear you out, and you’re not getting any younger. Or we could have just let TV whip our butts on it.”

I call her a whippersnapper and go to write my story.

It’s meaty enough, even if I can’t write everything I know.

A call to Felicia Delmonico is in order, even though I’m not hopeful of reaching her. For politicos nine days out from Election Day, Sunday is not a day of rest.

I do throw the kind of firecracker that might elicit a callback though.

After identifying myself, I ask the candidate if she cares to comment on reports that she and the now-deceased Mills Farrington were romantically involved. I say “reports” instead of “rumors.” Sounds a little more ominous. For now, I don’t mention the photos.

By the time I send my story, a little before seven, she hasn’t replied. She probably hasn’t even gotten that far into her voice mail yet.

We can say, in print, that Mills Farrington’s body was found in his RAV4 on a logging road on the backside of Lake Anna. We can say that he died of gunshot wounds; that there’s an ongoing investigation; that he and Teddy Delmonico, whose body was found a week ago, were partners in the benighted DelFarr investment firm; and that Delmonico had, in recent years, more than a few death threats from people DelFarr screwed. We can’t really do anything yet with those compromising photos, but they’re out there, in the hands of the city police, who sometimes don’t keep secrets very well, especially the salacious kind.

It might be time, I’m thinking, for the city cops’ brain trust to turn their attention to the screwees, although I’m pretty sure that they’ve also been thinking about shining the spotlight on a certain House of Representatives candidate, either before or after the election, nine days from now.

AFTER I’VE filled Cindy in on my less-than-restful Sunday afternoon, I ask her about her outing.

Cindy says the movie didn’t suck, and that she, Custalow, and Stella Stellar went out and had a few beers afterward.

“She’s a lot of fun,” is her assessment. “She kind of gets Abe to open up a little.”

Abe, my old Native American friend, is normally as stoic as a cigar-store Indian, so I’ve got to give Stella points for that.

“Just don’t do anything with your hair,” I plead.

The other thing on Cindy’s mind now is her only-born, the feckless Chip.

“He called while we were at Buddy’s having a beer and said they were going to have to shut down and then rename their restaurant and open again, maybe in the spring.”

Maybe, I’m thinking, when hell freezes over.

The restaurant they started had large aspirations. It was full of dishes with French names I can’t pronounce. How the fuck, I asked Cindy, do you say “mille-feuille”?

“Not like that, I’m pretty sure,” she said.

Anyhow, their plan, as full of holes as Swiss cheese that’s been used for target practice, is to reopen with a few more entrees that cost less than forty bucks, and maybe throw in some hamburgers, some cheap pasta, the kind of stuff normal people eat.

“He said they were really hurt by the fact that one of the best French restaurants in the area was only two blocks away.”

“And they didn’t know that when they started out?”

Cindy sighs.

“I know. He was such a sweet little boy, and now I’m afraid that he’s gotten the worst of both worlds. He has that same greed gene that Donnie always had, but he might not have the smarts to make it work.”

Cindy’s ex is, from all accounts, a guy who wants his share and everyone else’s too. That includes pussy. His free-range dick is what caused Cindy to finally leave him. For that, I thank you, Donnie Marshman.

I’m afraid to ask the question, but I do anyhow.

“He’s not hitting you up for another ‘loan,’ is he?”

“Not yet,” she says.

Good God.