CHAPTER TWELVE

Wednesday, October 31

I call the chief from the Prestwould just after nine. When I tell him that I’ve come into possession of a ball cap that was sent to me anonymously, with a note declaring that it had been found on Belle Isle on Friday the nineteenth, not one hundred feet from where they discovered Teddy Delmonico’s body, he is understandably suspicious.

“And you don’t know who sent it to you?”

“That’s what ‘anonymous’ means.”

“So you have the note?”

“Yeah, but it’s a printout. Could’ve come from anywhere. It was mailed in Richmond.”

“You better not be obstructing justice,” the chief says.

“Hey, I’m calling you. Do you want to see the cap or not?”

Of course he does. I tell him that it might not mean anything but that, being a good citizen, I thought he ought to know about it.

I tell him that I got it in the mail yesterday. No, I didn’t save the package.

“OK,” he says. “I’ll send somebody around to pick it up.”

Hoping for some gratitude, I ask him if the cops have gotten around to questioning Felicia yet about those embarrassing if not incriminating photographs.

He hesitates but then says they have.

“And?”

“She’s got a pretty good alibi for where she was around the time Farrington probably was killed. If she found time to off him between all the campaign stuff she was doing and then dealing with her husband’s death, she’s one resourceful woman.”

“So,” I say, “you’ve got a couple of dead guys who used to be partners in an investment firm that fucked a lot of people’s lives up, and they both seem to have been murdered. Coincidence?”

“I don’t believe in coincidence,” he growls. “I already told you that.”

“Well, have you been investigating the DelFarr victims?”

He tightens up then and says they’re investigating everybody.

He says a cop will come by the Prestwould in half an hour to pick up the cap.

“You didn’t touch it or anything, did you?”

“Damn, L.D., it was in a package. Yeah, I touched it. Fuck, it had been out in the rain and mud probably for a day or more. What kind of prints do you think you’re going to find on that?”

He hangs up.

I go down to the lobby to wait for the chief’s go-fer to come for the cap. To my chagrin, Feldman, aka McGrumpy, the Prestwould’s resident pain in the ass, is there. He is in fine form.

He’s giving Marcia the manager hell because his upstairs neighbor, a wonderful lady in her eighties who sometimes doesn’t remember everything, forgot that she was running a bath in her tub. For about three hours.

“My walls are ruined,” he wails. “Who’s going to pay for all this?”

Of course, the upstairs lady’s insurance is going to pay for it, but McGrumpy is treating Marcia like she should somehow, using her X-ray vision, have seen that a tub on the fifth floor was overflowing.

This doesn’t promise to be a fun day for Custalow, the building’s maintenance supervisor. Sucks being him.

The cop is right on time. I hand him the cap. He asks me everything the chief did, and I tell him everything I told the chief.

As he’s leaving, my cell phone buzzes.

“Are you ever going to leave me alone?” Felicia asks, sounding more tired than angry.

I explain that we’ll be running a big story on Teddy on Sunday, and that part of the story is going to be the revelation that he had a new life-insurance policy written within the last year and that she apparently is his sole beneficiary.

She asks me where I got “that shit.”

“Damn, Felicia,” I reply. “He told about half the Commonwealth Club about it.”

She’s quiet. I hear a sigh.

“He wanted to do it,” she says. “He knew things were starting to go off the rails, mentally, and he wanted to put his affairs in order.”

“But he left it all to you. Nothing for his son?”

“He and Brady weren’t close. And he does have a will, in which he remembered Brady. I know because I’ve seen it. The last time Teddy tried to contact him, by the way, Brady wouldn’t let him in the door.”

I tell her about the cap that Pop found on Belle Isle.

“Huh,” is all she says.

I don’t know how to delicately ask the widow why the fact that she was doing the nasty with Teddy’s partner didn’t have a deleterious effect on her status as the beneficiary.

“Willie,” she says, “you don’t know shit. We’ve been together for twenty years. He knew who was going to be there for him when he couldn’t remember his name or control his bowels. We both had our fun. Marriage is a commitment, not a life sentence.”

Fair enough, I concede.

I ask her what I know already, that she’s been questioned because of those photographs. She tells me that’s none of my fucking business.

“So the source who said they’d cleared you, that was bullshit?”

She hesitates, then says that, for the record, she has been absolved of any involvement in Mills Farrington’s murder.

I tell Felicia that I truly do not wish her ill, but that I’m just trying to find out what happened.

“When you do,” she says before she hangs up, “please tell me.”

IT BEING Halloween, I’m supposed to go over to Andi and Walter’s place in the Fan so I can see my favorite and only grandson in his trick-or-treating garb.

My daughter and new son-in-law have been married for six months now. Walter and I haven’t bonded, in the sense that we haven’t gotten knee-walking drunk together, but he has been the rock my wild-ass daughter has needed to anchor her life in the general vicinity of happy and settled. He’s the kind of guy who takes off work to come home in the middle of the day so he can see what his stepson, young William, will be wearing when he plunders the neighborhood’s candy supply.

I wish I didn’t remember the year I wasn’t home in time to see Andi, who was about twenty months old, get up on Christmas morning. Covering a Christmas Eve fire kept me out until almost three, and then somebody had a bottle back at his house …

Some things you can’t undo. You just keep pushing that fuckin’ boulder up the hill and hope it doesn’t roll back on your ass this time.

Halloween has gotten weird. In my youth, when the Earth’s crust was still warm, it belonged to the kids. It didn’t get started until the sun went down. And the “trick” part, to Oregon Hill hoodlums like me, Custalow, R.P., Andy, Goat, and the rest, was almost as much fun as the treats. If you ran out of candy before the oldest marauders, the ones who had driver’s licenses, came by, God have mercy on your soul. We always brought a carton of eggs with us.

Now, the kids go out before dark, usually accompanied by both parents, because there are worse monsters out there than the make-believe ones seeking candy. Or at least the helicopter mommies and daddies think so. And if you run out of goodies before seven, no sweat. The little beggars are already home and well into their sugar highs.

That’s when the adults take over, or alleged adults anyhow. Andi and Walter, who really isn’t a party guy, will leave William in the loving if addled care of my mother and Awesome Dude, and they’ll go out to their own Halloween bash.

Halloween is not a good night to be on night cops these days, unless you crave excitement. While I’m pretty sure Walter will keep my daughter from committing any felonies tonight, many will not be so constrained. Last year, we had three shootings, one of them fatal, on the thirty-first, bleeding over into the next morning, and somebody tried to burn down one of my favorite watering holes while it was packed with revelers, leading to a stampede and a host of mostly minor injuries.

It makes me mourn the days when getting your house splattered with eggs or your trees TP’d was about the worst outcome on this unholy night.

Young William Jefferson Black is now, as he proudly tells me, “four and a half.”

“Not quite,” his mother says.

He’s dressed as, in his words, “Piderman.” He and his parents will join the parade of beggars at five. There’s one block on Hanover Avenue where a kid can apparently be given his approximate weight in candy in a fairly short period.

I spend some quality time with the young folks and make William promise to share some of his loot with me.

I STOP by the offices of Green & Ellis to deliver the month’s rent in person. Kate gets anxious when I don’t show her the money in a timely fashion.

In the tangled web of my life, one of the more convoluted threads involves Marcus Green and Kate Ellis.

Marcus has been my lawyer for some time, a shameless self-promoter who seems to specialize in ensuring that the guilty go free. He’s also, though, been my ally on more than one occasion when I’ve tried to comfort the afflicted. Guilty or innocent, he’s a good mouthpiece to have on your side.

And Kate, my third ex-wife and also my landlord, is soon to be the first Mrs. Marcus Green. She’s been kind enough to me, even after Cindy became the fourth Mrs. Black. Actually I’m pretty sure she likes Cindy better than she likes me.

Kate’s parents are not what you would call open-minded about the upcoming nuptials. The idea that their fair-skinned daughter is about to marry a man on the other end of the color chart probably doesn’t fill them with glee, although they’re too tight-assed, I’m sure, to say so out loud.

It’s like they’re being immersed into the real world a step at a time.

Bombastic bullshitter that he is, I imagine Marcus will be a better husband than I was, assuming two lawyers can get along 7/24.

The great man himself is out somewhere trying to effect justice or at least earn a good paycheck. I ask Kate how it’s going, and she tells me all about the wedding. This one’s going to be at the Jefferson Hotel, with a couple of hundred guests, quite a step up from our intimate little ceremony in a well-to-do friend’s back yard.

“His father’s not too happy about the whole thing,” she confides.

Yeah, I’ve heard Marcus talk about his dad, who sounds a lot like Frederick Douglass turned loose in the twenty-first century. I tell my ex that I’m glad to know white folks don’t have the monopoly on prejudice.

She asks me about the Delmonico case. I tell her, for her ears only, about the insurance policy, and about the fact that Felicia knew Farrington, in the Biblical sense.

“Well,” she says, “somebody should’ve shot him. We had a couple of his victims as clients.”

“Any of them mad enough to off him?”

She gives me a very thin smile.

“If I told you that, Willie,” she says, “I’d have to kill you. Seriously, though, the clients were mostly kind of old. They didn’t fit the general profile of revenge killers.”

I mention how I thought Teddy was somewhat generous in taking out a $3 million policy on his life with his wife—who he was pretty sure hadn’t been completely faithful—as the beneficiary.

“An unfaithful spouse,” she says. “Imagine that.”

“Don’t start.”

BACK AT the office I let Sally, Sarah, and Wheelie know that Teddy Delmonico had a $3 million life-insurance policy, with his wife as beneficiary, and that while she seemed to be intimate with Mills Farrington, she probably was elsewhere at the apparent time of his death.

The first thing, Wheelie tells me, is to put it on the website. I tell him we can’t, that it’ll be part of the big Sunday story. He says bullshit to that. Usually my managing editor is trying to rein me in, but he’s right this time. We need to run this one now.

I call Felicia and leave a message, apologizing for dumping this on her and our readers so soon. She’ll get over it, or not.

I’ll never get used to it. I will report this rather shocking news at eleven A.M., and by noon it’ll be on the local TV news, with or without giving us/me credit.

If we can get enough suckers, er, readers, to start paying to get their news via their iPads and iMacs, I’m told, the world will be a better place. No printing costs. No delivery costs. Nothing but milk and fucking honey. But I’ll be dead before that happy day arrives. In the real world where I live now, a minority of subscribers are online only, for a dirt-cheap price, and the online advertisers pay damn near nothing.

We’re doing our best to drive the readers there. Home subscriptions prices for the print (real) newspaper have gone up about 40 percent in the last eighteen months. But when everybody goes digital and we sell the presses for scrap metal, are all those online profits going to trickle down to the newsroom?

From what I’ve seen so far, what trickles down to the ink-stained wretches is the stuff you get when the toilet upstairs overflows.

I do write a passable story on the latest Teddy Delmonico and Mills Farrington developments, and I write about fifty inches of the Sunday takeout I’m doing on Delmonico.

And I find time to visit the address Kathy Simmons gave me over in Scott’s Addition, in search of Brady, who surely can add something to my epic on his late father, even if they weren’t, as everyone assures me, close.

Scott’s Addition is a part of Richmond that was, until fairly recently, terra incognita to most of our residents not in search of a strip club. Its architecture is pedestrian enough that only the most die-hard preservationists could object to bulldozing a lot of it. It was home for warehouses and places that specialize in things like sheet-metal work and rug cleaning. Most of us knew it primarily for a “gentleman’s club” where young women still are willing to let you put money in their underwear while they dance.

But then the artists moved in, first with studios and then for the cheap housing, which led to a few restaurants opening. And then the state changed its laws so that small breweries didn’t have to sell food, which meant everybody who could afford a beer kit opened a microbrewery, unshackled by pesky regulations regarding food sanitation. The rent was cheap in Scott’s Addition, and soon the place was awash in breweries, distilleries, cideries, meaderies, and God knows what else-eries. The food trucks followed them, and the millennials were close behind.

Actually the place has its charms. Not far from the address I’m searching for is a joint that serves beef barbecue good enough to let you close your eyes and pretend you’re in Texas, with one of those aforementioned breweries just out the back door.

Brady Delmonico lives in a one-story building that inexplicably has “Lofts” as part of its name. I see Brady Delmonico listed on a mailbox outside, but I can’t get in if I don’t live there.

A helpful resident, though, tells me that Brady’s studio is a couple of blocks away, on West Clay.

He isn’t there, either, but I do leave a note wedged in the door, asking him to please call me. Considering his attitude when I last saw him, I’m probably pissing in the wind.

I HAVE to leave the office twice after nine p.m., first visiting some apartments on Chamberlayne Avenue and then a house on the South Side, for two separate incidents that are indicative of what can happen when you give adults, many of them armed, a holiday designed specifically for fools.

The shooting on South Side, off Broad Rock Road, was particularly tragic, if something can be stupid and tragic at the same time.

A bunch of teenagers, old enough to drive and too damn old to be terrorizing the neighborhood for candy, went to the wrong address. They thought they were at the home of one of their female classmates, and they just wanted to kind of rattle her folks’ cages a little, one of them said later.

Unfortunately, it was a crack house whose dwellers did not take kindly to having their own little party spoiled by kids wearing masks. Gunfire ensued. One of the arrestees said he thought they were being robbed.

The kid was fifteen. His body is lying under a sheet when I get there. You could just see the tip of his Jason mask, the one he wore on his final Halloween.