CHAPTER EIGHT

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It always concerns me when our doughty police department is absolutely, positively cocksure they have their man. Call me a cynic, but at least three times in the last four years, our finest have been ready to throw away the proverbial key, only to be proven embarrassingly, spectacularly wrong. I would be falsely modest if I didn’t take at least a pinch of credit for being justice’s handmaiden. I still get an occasional note from Martin Fell. Robert Gatewood doesn’t write or call, seeing me for the self-serving newspaper jackal that I am, knowing that his freedom was just a way to get my byline on A1. Richard Slade is another matter. We are long-lost cousins, after all. We’ve had a beer or two in the last year. And because his mother, Philomena, has a hand in the effort to stop Wat Chenault from turning slave burial grounds into a Walmart parking lot, she wants to talk to me, too. She thinks that our blood is thicker than printers’ ink and that she can play the race and family card. She thinks she can get me to use my meager talents for good instead of, as usual, serving myself. My thought is that, if I play my cards right, I can finesse a two-fer.

Do the right thing or make our readers spit their cornflakes? Please, don’t make me choose.

At any rate, she called and wants to meet with me on Thursday. I promised to bring along our link, Peggy, whose hookup with an African American saxophone player lo those many years ago means the paper gets to trot me out as that most treasured of newsroom assets: a minority. I might look Greek or Italian to you, but to the folks who count that sort of thing, Willie Mays Black is as African American as his namesake.

In the meantime, there’s a story to write (after first, of course, giving the gist of it away for free to our freeloaders in the ether).

Being able to write a first-person account of Ronnie Sax’s surrender and (most of) the events leading up to it will definitely put me on A1. I probably can ride this horse for the foreseeable future. Arrest made in serial slayings/Reporter was there when photographer surrendered.

Wheelie asks me if we have to mention that Sax used to work for the paper, but he knows the answer to that one. I suspect that he already is getting marching orders from Ms. “Call Me Rita” Dominick, whose background in advertising makes her less squeamish than she should be about holding the paper to a lower standard than the one to which we hold everyone else. Once she’s been here a week or two, she’ll probably take the gloves off and start giving orders instead of trying the subtle approach.

“OK,” Wheelie says with a sigh, “but can you not lead the story with it?”

Fair enough. I don’t mention that Sax is an alumnus until the ninth graf.

I’m still somewhere on the other side of skeptical about Mary Kate Kusack Brown and have her on my short list of people to interview.

Sarah stops by to congratulate me. Wheelie wants her to go back and do stories on how relieved the female populace of Richmond is.

I tell her I just hope they have the right guy.

“Is there any reason to think they don’t?”

“Nothing but the police department’s sterling track record.”

“Well,” she says, “this one looks like a slam dunk.”

How many times, I ask her, have you seen a slam dunk bounce off the rim? Then I tell her to stop using sports metaphors. She asks me what a “track record” is, then. I tell her that’s different.

I intend to go home and take a nap. I’m supposed to be in for real in a couple of hours. Before I can get away, though, the phone rings. It’s an internal ring. Like a fool, I answer it.

It’s Wheelie. He wants to see me. I ask him if it can wait. He says it can’t.

He’s still packing up the crap he hauled up to the executive floor. Ms. Dominick already has moved some of her stuff in. The place looks a little crowded.

Wheelie doesn’t ask me to sit, so I’m optimistic that this will be a short conversation.

“We got the papers this morning,” he says. “Wat Chenault is definitely suing us.”

Well, I tell Wheelie, suing and getting aren’t the same thing. This doesn’t seem to mollify him.

“I just wanted you to know, so maybe we can go easy on Top of the Bottom.”

I don’t think it would be a good idea to tell Wheelie just yet that I’m meeting with Philomena and Richard Slade day after tomorrow. It would just worry him.

I remain as noncommittal as I can.

“We especially don’t see any reason to rehash all that stuff with the girl. That’s ancient history.”

OK, he’s probably right about that. One time reminding our readers that Wat Chenault got caught doing the nasty with a teenager probably is enough.

By the time our chat is over and I’m back downstairs, that two hours has shrunk to an hour and a half. Fuck it. Might as well stay here. I miss the days when I could get by on five hours of shut-eye. Back then, “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” was a life plan instead of a song. “I’ll Sleep When I’m Old” is more like it, and I’m feeling ancient today.

But Wheelie’s got my brain moving in an unforeseen direction.

It’s a slow night, and I do some checking in the electronic morgue. The person I’m looking for would be in her late twenties by now. Wheelie will crap his pants if he knows I’m sniffing along this trail, but it’s really just a shot in the dark. Probably won’t lead anywhere.

All I want to know is whether a certain young woman is still among the living.

WHEN SARAH COMES back from interviewing potential victims, I walk over to her desk.

“How would you like to do a little scavenger hunt?” I ask her.

She says her plate is pretty full. She knows, though, that I wouldn’t intentionally waste her time. She says she thinks she can find a spot over on the side, beside the broccoli.

What I want to know, I tell her, is the whereabouts of one Leigh Adkins. Sarah’s smart. She remembers the name right away.

“She’s probably living a normal life somewhere,” I tell her, “but I’d just like to know.”

Sarah’s better at database searches and other tricks of the trade that they didn’t teach when I was learning journalism.

“Is that all?”

No, I tell her. I also would like to know if one Wat Chenault has had any other unsavory experiences with young girls.

“And, it’s got to be just between us.” I explain about the lawsuit.

“Yeah, I can see where you might want to keep that one under your hat, and maybe hand the ball to somebody else. Shit. I did the sports thing again, didn’t I?”

“No harm, no foul.”

I’ve made her laugh. It’s always a pleasure to make a pretty woman laugh, as long as it’s not at you.

SINCE I’M SUPPOSED to back off Wat Chenault, that’s exactly where my perverse desire to piss people off takes me. I do some reading. Chenault’s people gave us a proposal for their plans for the Bottom, and for the first time I go over it line by line instead of speed-reading it. From what I’m reading, I think I might be the first person in the newsroom to actually parse this crap.

There are a lot of ifs and maybes in the Top of the Bottom scheme. There are grandiose plans involving boutiquey shops and mixed-use housing, a bow to building some kind of museum to honor the slaves who are buried in the Bottom. There’s even my favorite bullshit vehicle of all, the artist’s rendering. In the rendering, happy people of all races are wandering blissfully and peacefully through pedestrian streets lined with brightly colored shops where smiling merchants are handing out balloons and free food samples. There’s a Ferris wheel in the background, next to the slavery museum. About the only thing missing is a goddamned unicorn.

What there’s not a lot of, though, are hard, cold promises. Reading carefully, you can see that none of this has to be the way it’s spelled out if the power that be, Wat Chenault, doesn’t think he’s making enough money. The phrase “economically viable” appears three times. And I’ve seen how easy it is for some sharpster to come to town, get sixty condominiums, a parking deck and a fitness center approved, only to come back three years later, pleading poverty, and get it zoned down to 120 apartments with no off-street parking. And, too often, the old building that was going to be converted turns out not to be “economically feasible,” and here come the bulldozers. Even if you don’t have Wat Chenault’s connections, it ain’t that hard.

Some of the best things Richmond has going for it are the preservationists. The mossbacks who want the Civil War to be best-two-out-of-three are the same ones who have resisted tearing down beautiful but old and abandoned buildings. What once was decrepit can one day become charming. And yet, there is always somebody with money and/or influence who wants to bring in the wrecking ball.

So I’m thinking it is going to be very hard to stay away from Wat Chenault while all this is going on.

I’ve got Sarah trying to find Leigh Adkins, but I decide to take a whack at it. I don’t get much beyond Google when it comes to armchair sleuthing, but in this case, that’s all it takes.

The story I find never made our paper. There wasn’t much to it, really.

One of the little Southside weeklies went high-tech and had its stories scanned for the last forty years or so. When I search for Ms. Adkins, I find out that there are a lot of Leigh Adkinses out there. But when I cut it down to her name and her hometown, only two stories pop up.

The first one was of little Leigh being Junior Miss Peanut in a local beauty pageant. There she is, beaming and posing with Mr. Peanut. She looks like she’s about twelve. It looks like Mr. Peanut has his hand on her butt.

The second one was dated July of 2002, less than a year after the sudden and spectacular end of Wat Chenault’s political career.

“Girl missing” was the headline, halfway down the front page. Leigh Adkins, then in high school, might have run away from home, but she’d been gone for two days when her mother called the local police. It was not, I imagine, the first time young Leigh had run away.

But there was no other story, at least not one that I could Google.

The story had the mother’s name and even the street she lived on.

I called. The woman who answered admitted, after a certain amount of apprehension about talking to a reporter, that she was Mrs. Emily Adkins.

As gently as I could, I asked her about Leigh’s whereabouts.

There was quiet on the other end of the phone.

Finally, she said, “Do you know where she is?”

I assured her that I did not.

“Well, I don’t neither. She just took off. We don’t know where she is. She might be dead for all we know.”

Her voice breaks a little. I apologize for disturbing her. She says Leigh went out to a dance that night and never came home.

“She was kind of wild,” the mother says. “Sometimes she would stay over at a friend’s and not tell me. It like to of drove me crazy.”

After a second night of no Leigh, her mother turned in a missing-person report.

“Fat lot of good it did,” she says. “The cops didn’t act like they even wanted to find her.”

I ask about the older sister, only to wish I hadn’t. Leigh’s sister was killed by a hit-and-run driver five years ago.

“It’s just me now,” Ms. Adkins says. I apologize again for disturbing her and hang up.

One thing leads to another. One thought sets another one to tumbling, and soon they’re falling like dominoes.

I’m remembering something I hadn’t thought of in years.

It must have been six months after Wat Chenault’s fall from grace that I was at the Tobacco Company, having a drink with several other reporters and a few of our fine statesmen.

I asked one of them, who had sponsored a bill or two with Chenault, if he ever heard anything from his former colleague.

“Oh, yeah,” the guy said. “He was up here the other day. We had a few over at the Commonwealth Club.”

And then the senator shook his head.

“If I was that girl,” he told me, “I think I’d consider moving somewhere else.”

“Because of the scandal?”

He took a sip of bourbon and laughed.

“Nah. I don’t think that town’s big enough for her and Wat Chenault. He said he’d like to wring her scrawny neck for what she did to him.”

I didn’t mention that it seemed like Wat was responsible for most of the “doing,” and I forgot the whole conversation after sharing it with a reporter or two.

Now, though, it does make me wonder.