CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Friday, November 9

The newsroom mail is a sometime thing. As with other parts of our operation, the mailroom has been cut to the nub.

Consequently, the letter I get, addressed to “Willie Black/bastard” doesn’t show up in my mail slot until I check in earlier than usual today. It appears to have been posted on Monday, four days ago.

I’m not unaccustomed to such fan mail. Most of it, though, comes via the telephone or e-mail or the response section online. It’s heartwarming to think that some haters still take the time to write an actual letter.

“Huh,” Sally says when I show it to her. “He got your title right.”

There’s no return address. After I open it, the first thing I look for is the signature.

“Holy shit.”

“What,” Sally asks.

I show it to her.

“Damn.”

A day before he died trying to kill his late father’s wife, Brady Delmonico seemed to have taken the trouble to write me a letter.

But then the audio disc falls out of the envelope. I catch it before it hits the floor.

Sally finds a CD player, and we take it and the disc to a vacant conference room.

Brady’s voice sounds raspy and tired.

“You bastard,” it begins. “By the time you read this, I’ll be dead if I do it right.

“You think you know everything, but you don’t. But I want everybody to know why I did it, and I figure a big-mouth like you is the best way to get the word out.”

He rambles on for six minutes. Some of what he says is semi-unintelligible, but between Sally and me, we manage to decipher it.

He says he called his father late the last Thursday afternoon of Teddy’s life and asked him if they could have a little heart-to-heart. “I told him we really needed to talk.

“The old man was surprised, since I didn’t have much to do with him when I could help it. Maybe if his brain hadn’t been so scrambled from his precious football days, he might not have gone along with it.”

What Teddy Delmonico went along with was a one-way trip to Belle Isle.

“I told him it was a nice day for a walk, and I led him down to the parking lot and then up on the bridge and over to the island.”

According to Brady, they did small talk as they walked around Belle Isle.

“Then, when we got to the picnic tables, I did what I’d wanted to do for most of my life. I told him how he had fucked up my life, fucked up our whole family.

“It was kind of funny. He told me he was sorry, the first time he’d ever done that. The son of a bitch actually had tears in his eyes.

“But it was too late for that. He always treated me like a loser. He killed Charlie. He left us for that whore. What I did, I don’t regret for a damn second.”

Brady said he had stashed the metal pipe behind a tree beside the picnic tables two days before.

“I did wipe it for prints, just in case I got away with it.

“It was pretty simple really. I just got up and walked over to the tree, picked up the pipe, and bashed his fucking brains out. He was looking at some ducks out there on the river. He never knew what hit him.”

Somewhere near the four-minute mark, Brady turned his attention to Felicia.

“That bitch,” he said, “completed what the old man started. She tore everything apart.”

One day when he was fourteen, he was walking home from school and saw his father and Felicia sitting in a car, parked on the street beside a park, making out like teenagers.

“That was the year before the old man got Charlie killed. I didn’t say anything about it to my mother or anyone.

“But then, when the old man moved out, and it became known who he was leaving Mom for, I recognized the bitch. If it hadn’t been for her, maybe it all would have worked out. But that was the last straw.”

He said he would see his father and Felicia around Richmond from time to time after he resumed his studies at VCU. She made herself scarce on those rare occasions when he and his father were in the same room.

“It was always on my mind that I would kill him someday. Lately, though, I’ve been hearing some voices that other people don’t seem to hear. And every time I see that bitch at some political bullshit, it’s like she’s rubbing my nose in it.

“So, I decided, what the fuck, I’d already taken care of the old man. They’re bound to find me eventually, especially now that I know the cops have that damn cap.”

He said he’d lost it in the scramble, after he beat his father to death, dragging his body into the underbrush so it wouldn’t be found right away.

“It was windy, and it flew off my head and into that pond. I figured it would just sink. And then I heard some people coming down the trail, so I just left. I didn’t want to risk going back to look for it.”

So with nothing to lose, “I figured I might as well do her too. Funny, I never even owned a gun until now. Guy had to show me how to shoot it. It ain’t exactly rocket science.”

The plan was to kill Felicia and then eat his gun. I guess he sent me the recording because he wanted to make sure that somebody knew he wasn’t just an armed lunatic, which of course he was.

He ranted on a while longer, enumerating the real and imaginary harm done to him by his father and, later, Felicia.

“He didn’t give a shit about me,” he concluded, “so why should I give a shit about him? Maybe by the time you read this, they’ll be roasting like a couple of pigs in hell.”

“Nice,” Sally says as Brady signs off.

Among the ironies here, I’m thinking, is that Brady died pretty much the same way he killed his father. A video camera did the trick instead of a pipe. Can’t lay this one on the NRA.

If he knew about the life-insurance policy or had any illusions about inheriting anything from the father he murdered, he didn’t mention it.

“You’re sure that’s him?” Sally asks.

“About 99.9 percent,” I reply. The letter even has Brady’s return address on it.

There isn’t any doubt about what we’re going to do with this. The newspaper’s lawyer might worry about besmirching the reputation of our newly elected congresswoman, but Felicia’s got bigger problems than this.

Baer makes one last plaintive call begging us to go easy on his new boss, but her goose is pretty much cooked. Every newspaper and TV station in the United States picked up on this one after the press conference yesterday. Felicia had already made the national news by almost getting her ass assassinated on Election Day, her pretty mug on network news and in every paper from Maine to California.

Now, this morning, she’s implicated in Mills Farrington’s misdeeds. She might not go to jail for that, but our stainless leaders in Congress might be a little uncomfortable seating her. Already, the Republican asshole she lost to is demanding action, meaning a new election with a new Democratic candidate or letting him keep his seat.

With that turd floating in Felicia’s punch bowl, Brady’s recording explaining why he felt justified in trying to murder her won’t make the punch much less potable.

About the only thing that isn’t hanging over her head right now is a murder rap. The chief and his minions don’t really know who killed Mills Farrington, and I kind of hope they never will, but after the cops got the anonymous letter taking credit for the deed, Felicia isn’t high on the suspect list, although the public does know now that she slept with ol’ Mills. Sure, she could have somehow gotten the right numbers to access Farrington’s accounts in the Caymans and then killed him so she could have it all herself, but what about Mills’s brother, who was in on the scheme too?

And now we have it from a very reliable, very dead source that Brady was the one who ended Teddy Delmonico’s life on Belle Isle.

So all Felicia has to worry about is being a likely accessory after the fact to stealing investors’ money and being exposed as someone of somewhat low moral character.

She might not serve a day in Congress, but if I’m any judge of the lady’s ability to land on her pretty feet, she’ll never serve a night in jail either.

So it looks like a long day. The recording will be run verbatim minus some of the profanity. While the speaker identified himself as Brady Delmonico and sounded like Brady, we can’t be 100 percent sure. We will tell our lawyer to go fuck himself. Even Wheelie, ever the cautious newsroom steward, agrees on that, and he promises that he will clear it with Benson Stine.

I’ll do a piece explaining how I came to be the recipient of said recording. That will be secondary, though, to the follow-up to this morning’s bombshell. If I were Felicia Delmonico, I wouldn’t be renting an apartment in Crystal City.

FOR TODAY’S story, I can work in some of the quotes coming from DC. Even other Democratic House members are backing away from what looks like a toxic problem. There are enough Dems to control the House even if Felicia doesn’t get seated. The message received is that they’ll be willing to throw her under the Greyhound in order to give their constituents the sense, probably false, that they would never do the same damn thing if they needed the money and had the chance.

By the time everything’s filed, it’s after nine. In a fair world, the city would be quiet and let me coast home.

But no. Two unfortunates get themselves murdered in the double-digit hours, necessitating a quick run to the East End, where the body found in a wrecked car and the one lying on the street two blocks away seem to be related, but since nobody saw nothin’, it’s hard to say.

How long a day was this? When Bootie Carmichael invites me to come along with him to a friend’s house to try to empty his liquor cabinet, I demur.

“Are you feeling OK?” Bootie asks. He seems genuinely concerned.

I tell him I’m old, I’m tired, and I am in need of a wife and a bed.

And my ear hurts.

Bootie shakes his head.

“That’s just sad.”