CHAPTER TEN

Monday, October 29

“Do you actually have days off anymore?” Cindy asks at breakfast as I get ready to sacrifice a few more hours to the gods of journalism.

My pain is self-inflicted. This story is becoming like that piece of popcorn that gets stuck between your teeth. You can’t rest until you get it out.

If I don’t hit the road to Roanoke by eight forty-five, I won’t be able to reach Kathy Simmons by noon, and there’s every reason to believe she’s looking for any excuse to back out of this interview. Hell, I might get there on time and still ring the doorbell of an empty house.

But you have to try.

I place the cell phone on the front passenger seat in case Felicia Delmonico graces me with a call.

Word has it that cars made in the past decade have hands-off phone setups. Maybe I’ll get one of those when the Honda dies, but not before. I’m sentimental about old cars. Till death do us part. This one has lasted much damn longer than any of my marriages, maybe because I never cheated on it with a Ford or a Toyota.

Kathy Simmons gave me her address, which I printed out from Google Maps. Yeah, I know. GPS would be a good thing to have too.

After a quiet drive up I-64 to Staunton and then a white-knuckled run down I-81, the preferred route for every fucking eighteen-wheeler in the eastern United States, I’m to the spur into Roanoke with twenty minutes to spare.

My destination is in a pricey neighborhood wedged between the Roanoke River and that crazy-ass mountaintop star that is Roanoke’s signature.

The city’s a few hundred feet higher in elevation than Richmond, and this part is higher than that. It’s pretty obvious, from the houses and the view, that this neighborhood probably is not the home of a lot of working print journalists.

Chez Simmons is a Tudor half-timbered joint that looks like somebody bought it from Shakespeare and had it shipped over. Hey, it could happen. There’s a place in Richmond that was built somewhere in England when God was a boy. At some point in the early twentieth century, they took it apart, brick by brick, and reassembled it on the James.

This place, though, probably was built much more recently, a ye olde wannabe.

If there is a place in America that cries “Take me back to England” louder than Virginia, I haven’t heard of it.

I ring the doorbell twice, with growing apprehension, before it opens. I half expect to confront Jeeves the butler, but Kathy herself answers.

She is dressed well enough that I’m wishing I’d given myself another half hour to shower and shave. My assessment at the funeral is confirmed. She is an attractive woman. I think “well-tended” is the right expression. I’m wondering why T-Bone ditched her. Maybe he was like those guys who have to have a new car every two years or so.

Or maybe T-Bone was the ditchee.

Kathy seems to have gone to some trouble, considering her seeming reluctance to chat with me. There’s a nice little light lunch set up in the dining room, replete with an impressive chardonnay. I don’t see a maid anywhere.

“So,” she says, when we’ve finished talking about the weather, the traffic on I-81, and the house, “what do you want to know?”

I turn on the tape recorder.

What I want to know, I tell her, is as much as she can tell me about Teddy Delmonico.

“I only knew him as a middle-aged guy who used to play football,” I tell her. I’m lying a bit here; I didn’t really know T-Bone at all. “We still can’t figure out why someone would want to kill him.”

She arches her eyebrows.

“Really?”

“Well, you know, other than maybe some unhappy investors.”

“Or maybe an unhappy former wife?”

I decide to plunge in, since we seem to have gotten past the salad and plunged into the meat of things.

“Or maybe even an unhappy second wife,” I note.

She laughs, without a lot of humor in it.

“Yes, I heard stories about that. That Felicia, she’s a killer. I mean, not really a killer, but you know.”

It occurs to me that I would not want to tangle with either of Teddy Delmonico’s wives. I wisely stifle the urge to tell Kathy how much she reminds me of Felicia.

“What was he like,” I jump in, “back in the day?”

She looks out the window at the maple tree in the front yard.

“Oh, he had his moments,” she says. “We were sweethearts from our freshman year at Tech. He was just a smalltown boy then, and I was, by his standards, a big-city girl, all the way from Roanoke. Teddy didn’t even know how to dress himself properly. And I did love him.

“Of course, when he turned out to be this hotshot running back, a genuine football hero, our roles kind of changed. To use a football metaphor, I was blocking for him while he got to score the touchdowns.”

They were married in 1978 “because we had to.”

Charlie was born six months later.

Part of being a good reporter is being able to ask rude questions in such a manner that the subject doesn’t take a swing at you. Sometimes, just cutting to the chase works best.

“Would you have gotten married even …”

“Even if I hadn’t been knocked up? Oh, probably. Everybody expected us to. And it was all kind of glamorous, being T-Bone Delmonico’s girl.”

Brady, the one I’ve met, came along two years later.

Kathy tells me about T-Bone’s stunted NFL career, and the years after that.

“Athletes, the ones good enough to get paid to play, they’re kind of lost when the games end. Teddy was twenty-five when he found out his football-playing days were in the rearview mirror. He didn’t take it well.”

He bounced around for more than a decade as an assistant coach here and there.

“But by then, he’d figured out that no one was going to make him a head coach, which was the only way he could make enough money from football to feed us. I mean, I was making more selling real estate than he was bouncing around coaching running backs or tight ends or whatever for a bunch of second-rate programs. And chasing skirts.”

She stops and gives me a hard look.

“Wait,” she says, “can we delete that last part?”

Maybe, I tell her, if it isn’t relevant.

He was thirty-six when he quit coaching.

“The last straw,” Kathy says, “was when Tech wouldn’t hire him as an assistant of some kind or other. They had an opening that year, but it didn’t seem to carry any weight with them that he’d been their golden boy not that long ago.”

She sighs.

“Truth is, he probably wasn’t that good a coach. I think he was one of those people who are born with a skill and don’t really know how to pass it on to others. Plus, Teddy had never really had what you’d call a long attention span, and I think coaching kind of bored him. I think people figured that out.”

He never graduated from college, and he was finding how quickly people forget about old football heroes.

He got hired by a pretty reputable investment firm “mostly to glad-hand people, since, to my knowledge, he didn’t know a whole lot about how money works. I’m pretty sure I knew more about stocks than he did.”

At least, she says, they could now settle down in one place. Charlie, who seemed to have at least some of his father’s athletic genes, could spend all his high school years at one school.

“And Teddy had time to work with him. Unfortunately, he didn’t spend as much time with Brady. Brady was a good kid, but he wasn’t going to be anybody’s star football player.”

“So did that cause, you know, rifts?”

If she’s offended by my gracelessness, she doesn’t let on.

“Oh, I guess. But Brady idolized Charlie, even if he and his father weren’t real tight.”

I have been guiding us to a certain point, the point at which a family gets blown up. We’re almost there, and I’m pretty sure Kathy senses it.

“Tell me about Charlie.”

“That’s kind of what this is about,” she says. “I just wanted to talk about … what happened. To Charlie, and to us.”

I know that Charlie Delmonico was a high school football star, like his father. I know that he died when he was seventeen from a football injury, but Kathy wants to tell me more.

As Bootie Carmichael said, Charlie was all-district his junior year.

“But Teddy was all-state as a junior. Hard as Charlie tried, it was starting to look like he wasn’t going to be another T-Bone Delmonico.”

She takes a sip of her wine.

“People are so cruel,” she says. “They started calling him ‘Ground Chuck,’ you know, as opposed to T-Bone.”

Kathy says that Teddy was hard on his older son.

“But I thought it was OK. I mean, Teddy’s father had been rough on him, and it worked out. I thought he had Charlie’s best interests in mind, up until the end.”

She tells me about the last day.

“It was the state semifinals, and they were beating Hampton near the half, when one of the Hampton boys hit him, hard, and Charlie went down. And he didn’t get up for a while.”

She takes out a tissue, the first time I’ve seen the retelling really get to her.

Kathy was in the stands with some of the other parents. Teddy was on the sideline with the coaches, who tolerated him there.

“He never missed a game, or any practice he could get to.”

When Charlie came to, they took him to the locker room. Teddy went with him.

“I stayed in the stands,” she says. “I’ve kicked myself a million times for not going down there, too, but it was the boys’ locker room and, you know, I didn’t think it was appropriate.”

“What could you have done?”

She sighs.

“I could have maybe saved his life?”

I wait for the rest of it.

“I might not have heard the whole story if I hadn’t gone after the coach, whom we thought of as a friend.”

Charlie didn’t start the third quarter “but they put him in about five minutes into it. I was a little upset, but Teddy had given me a thumbs-up from the sideline when they came back after halftime, so I guessed he was OK. Back then, they called it getting your bell rung.”

Charlie Delmonico got hit hard on an off-tackle run four plays after he went back in the game. He went down. He never got up.

“He lived four days, and then they unplugged him.”

She stops to get a grip.

“But you said you could have saved his life …”

“Maybe,” she corrects me.

At the funeral, she confronted the coach who’d put Charlie back in. She says she more or less accused him of killing her son.

“I was out of my mind. I had asked Teddy about it, since he was in the locker room at halftime, and he was kind of evasive, said Charlie seemed OK, knew what day it was and all.”

Teddy managed to pull her away from the coach. Two days later, he called her, when he knew Teddy wouldn’t be home, and asked if he could come by.

“I told him we didn’t have a damn thing to say to each other, but he said we did. And I let him come over.”

She says she wouldn’t even let him into the house, just stood at the doorway and listened to him plead his case.

Charlie was throwing up at halftime, the coach said, and he was complaining about headaches. He needed two guesses to get the day of the week right. There was no doctor in the locker room, but the coach didn’t think Charlie was OK to play.

“But Teddy insisted that he get right back in there, the coach said. He said Teddy told Charlie that he’d been hit harder than that a hundred times and never complained about headaches.

“The coach said Teddy told our son, ‘Who cares what damn day it is? You’re going back out there. Show ’em how tough you are.’ ”

His exact words, as related to Kathy by the coach, were “Don’t be a pussy.”

She wipes her eyes.

“And so the coach sent him back in, at Teddy’s insistence. And that was that.”

Teddy denied it when she confronted him that night. “

We fought for months. He never would admit what he’d done, but I knew, just from the way he avoided my eyes.”

Despite her lingering animosity, Kathy still wants to keep Teddy’s extramarital dalliances out of the story. She tells me, off the record, that they had had their difficulties even before Charlie’s death, mainly about T-Bone’s wandering weenie.

“But that just tore it. I left him six months after Charlie died.”

Brady didn’t fare well, she says. In addition to losing his brother, he was now caught in the middle of his estranged and warring parents.

“He spent most of his senior year living with a family whose son was his best friend. I’m afraid I didn’t make much effort to hide the part I thought Teddy played in Charlie’s death, but Brady wasn’t too happy with either one of us by then.”

And less than two years after Teddy Delmonico got his walking papers, he was married to the former Felicia Davis.

“It wasn’t like they hadn’t, as the kids say now, hooked up before I threw Teddy out,” Kathy says. “Everybody in town knew about it. My friends called her ‘Fellatio Davis.’ Wait, don’t put that in either.”

A line like that might be too good to pass up, although Felicia would surely sue my ass if it ever got into print.

Teddy Delmonico didn’t get involved with Mills Farrington in the ill-fated DelFarr scheme until about ten years ago. In the interim, Kathy says, he just kind of drifted from one stock brokerage to another, wherever someone needed his name to bring in clients.

“But his name meant less and less as time went on.”

Kathy says that she ran out of anger for the former husband a long time ago.

“It just kind of faded away, like an old photograph. I feel worse for Brady. People would say I landed on my feet.” She makes a gesture that seems to include her fancy house and everything else that goes with it. “But Brady was kind of a lost soul. His father didn’t have much to do with him, and Brady didn’t seem to want to have much to do with either of us. Sometimes I go a whole year without seeing him.”

The only time they’ve talked about that day in the last ten years, she says Brady told her, “You should have stopped him.

“And I should have.”

Brady, she tells me, never graduated, although he played at being a college student for quite a while.

“He’s an artist now,” she says, much as she might have said, “He’s homeless.” He has a studio over in Scott’s Addition “but I don’t know that he sells much.”

“That day,” Kathy Simmons says, and it’s obvious to which day she’s referencing, “just tore us apart. None of us were really like each other’s family again. I know it’s hard to say that, but I think it’s true.”

“Some people,” I say as we’re winding up my interview, “might think that the former wife might have some reason to be glad Teddy Delmonico’s dead, maybe even give him a little help in that direction.”

She laughs.

“Maybe, between the time Charlie died and Teddy married Felicia, I might have wanted to kill him. I really hated him then. But that’s ancient history. I’m sorry he was murdered. Whatever mistakes he made, he didn’t deserve that.”

I thank her for baring her soul to me, and I tell her I will keep any of her comments about T-Bone’s wandering boner to a minimum, without promising a complete whitewash.

We shake hands at the door, and then we give each other a hug. It seems appropriate.

“My husband is going to be pissed,” she says, as if we’ve been doing the nasty instead of an in-depth interview. “He hates publicity, or anything that reminds him of my life before him. I think he’d like to pretend that Teddy Delmonico never existed.”

BACK IN the car, I turn my cell phone back on and see that I do indeed have a call from Felicia Delmonico, whom I am now going to have to try mightily to avoid calling “Fellatio.”

The call came half an hour ago. She has left a message, beginning with the greeting, “You bastard.” She says to call her at three thirty, when presumably she will be between baby kissings.

It’s only two thirty, so I give a call to L.D. Jones. The chief is, as usual, not available at the moment. I tell his assistant that I might have some information pertinent to the untimely deaths of Teddy Delmonico and Mills Farrington.

Actually what I want to do is hear what the chief says when I ask him about those Felicia Delmonico photographs, the ones I’m not supposed to know about.

L.D. does call me back, five minutes later, as I’m trying to keep my Honda from being flattened by a truck on I-81.

“This had better be good,” he says. He sounds like I’ve disturbed his non-working lunch.

I tell him that I’ve been talking with the first Mrs. Delmonico, and that she has some interesting information that I’d like to share with him when I get back into town. Actually nothing that Kathy Simmons has told me gives me more than good material for a big take-out piece on our fallen hero. The odds that she murdered her ex are about the same as my chances of winning the Powerball jackpot.

The chief says he’ll await my return with bated breath and assures me that the cops are well on their way to solving T-Bone’s murder, which I figure is pure bullshit. I already know an overnight rain before the body was found probably washed away anything that might have been used as evidence.

“One thing I did want to ask you about though,” I say as it seems L.D. is about to hang up. “What about those photographs you all found at Farrington’s place, the ones of Felicia Delmonico? I understand she wasn’t wearing much.”

The chief is silent for a few seconds. I have to strain to hear him over the highway noise.

“Goddammit,” he says, “where did you get the idea we had anything like that?”

I tell him that I never divulge my sources, as he knows, having been the unnamed source himself more than once. He knows there’s a leak somewhere in his fiefdom, and I think he might suspect the hapless Gillespie just because he’s been seen talking to me. Somehow Peachy Love has stayed off his radar screen so far, although he did once ask her if she still had any contact with me, from her newspaper days.

She said she told him that I was persona non grata to her, that I was always hitting on her when we worked together, not mentioning that Peachy and I, in our day, were more like two cars that had occasional carnal head-on collisions.

“Well, that’s not official,” L.D. says at last. “It’s still an ongoing investigation, and if you write it, I’ll deny it.”

“I just need to know if Felicia’s become a suspect,” I say, knowing there’s no chance he’s going to confirm that.

He calls me a nosy-ass bastard, as he’s prone to do. He tells me I’ll know what everybody else knows as soon as he decides I need to know.

“But you don’t see any connection here, with the two partners in a scam investment firm dying violently about the same time?”

“We don’t deal in coincidences,” he says. “We deal in facts.”

Yeah, I’m thinking, and if the same Wells Fargo branch gets knocked off twice in two days, you don’t connect the dots there either.

I wish the chief a nice day. He does not return the sentiment.

At 3:25, I pull off at one of the Lexington exits with an eighteen-wheeler about two inches from my rear bumper so that I can light up and devote all my attention to Felicia Delmonico.

I went online first and saw that she’s up by two points in the latest poll, for what it’s worth.

I congratulate her on that.

She sounds like she’s in traffic, too, although she says she does have a driver for this one. I guess that’s why she’s talking so low that I’m glad to be away from the interstate bedlam.

“What you said, in that message about me and Mills. I swear to God, that better never see the light of day in print, or I’ll sue you and that rag for so much money that I’ll own it, and then I’ll fire your ass.”

In the meantime, I ask after she’s hurled a few more unpleasantries at me, what about you and Mills Farrington?

“Nothing about me and Mills Farrington,” she says. “Who’s telling you this shit?”

I mention the run-in at the club, which most of the people there that day must have heard about.

“We were old friends,” she says. “We went on vacations together, partied together. If Mills flirted with me, maybe I flirted back a time or two. But that was it. I’m torn up about his death. I hadn’t seen him much lately.”

“So those photographs the cops found in his bedside table drawer were of somebody else, who just happened to look like you.”

There’s a two-second silence. When she speaks again, I’m pretty sure that whoever is driving her can hear.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

But she knows.

When exactly, I ask, did you see Mills Farrington last?

“This is definitely off the record,” she says.

“OK, but I might get it from somewhere else.”

“Bastard. How did you get to be such a muckraking asshole? You used to be a nice guy.”

I assure her that her memory is faulty.

She concedes that she did perhaps go over the line a time or two with Farrington “but it wasn’t anything serious.”

I suggest that, now that the cops have reason to believe she was there in the recent past, it might be a problem, in terms of her political career and perhaps her freedom.

“Those were old pictures,” she says, talking low. “I can’t believe he kept them.”

“So when did you see him last?”

A short silence.

“Still off the record, right?”

“Yeah. Muckraking asshole that I am, I don’t reveal sources. To anyone.”

So she spills the beans.

She “visited” Farrington on the nineteenth.

“The day Teddy was killed?”

“I didn’t know he was going to be killed. Don’t you think I feel like shit about that? Yeah, shoot me. I was in bed with the ex-partner of my husband probably around the time somebody was beating him to death.”

The cops figured Farrington could have been dead as much as a week when they found his body yesterday. Felicia says she last saw him ten days ago.

“And nothing after that?”

“Do you really think I could have or would have gone up there to be with him while I was planning my husband’s funeral? To say nothing of the fact that you can pretty much account for every minute of my time the last week. There’s an election, you know? Just seeing him a couple of hours that Friday was a hell of a risk.”

She says her driver is pulling into the parking lot of a Catholic church where she was supposed to appear ten minutes ago.

“Willie,” she says, “I liked Mills. We had a thing, OK? Even before he went to prison. But we weren’t making any plans. You know what fuck buddies are, right? Oh, of course you do. That’s all we were. I’ll miss him, and I sure as hell didn’t kill him. I’ve got enough on my plate now without having to deal with this shit.”

Most of what Felicia told me can’t be published. It will get out though.

I wonder how it’s going to look in print when the cops finally acknowledge that the one link between the two most prominent deaths in the Richmond area in the recent past is the current favorite to win a seat in the United States House of Representatives next week.