CHAPTER THIRTEEN

X

Sunday

It doesn’t take long for the story I planted to take full effect. Not many people read the Scimitar. Even fewer get it by home delivery on Sundays. And the leadership of our paper is so far removed from the African American community that a rare newsworthy story in the Sunday morning edition usually wouldn’t reach their tone-deaf ears until Monday or Tuesday.

This one, though, grows legs. Earl Pemberton-Wise was smart enough to tip off the local TV stations. With their bare-bones staffs even more emaciated on Sundays, the good-hair folks were happy enough to read this tidbit out of Earl’s paper to their viewers. Earl didn’t tell them about it in time for what passes as TV news on Sunday morning around here, but three of the stations were awake enough to put it on their websites. Apparently, somebody looks at those things, because I am still enjoying my morning coffee, pondering whether to grace KubaKuba or Millie’s with my brunching presence, when the phone rings.

“Did you know anything about this?” Wheelie asks.

I wish him a good morning and ask for elucidation. I try very hard to sound both concerned and puzzled.

Wheelie is caught between a rock and hard place. He can’t exactly berate me for getting my ass beaten on a story from which I have been explicitly pulled. At the same time, he suspects that I somehow have had a hand in the latest unflattering chapter of the Wat Chenault saga finding daylight.

I remind Wheelie that I’ve been warned off anything involving our favorite developer and swear that I would never give aid and comfort to our enemy, the mighty Scimitar.

I hear him sigh.

“Well, I guess we’ve got to do something with it now. So help me, Willie, if I find out you are involved with this crap . . . Rita’s going to have a cow.”

No doubt. I suggest that perhaps he should have Sarah do our version. I’d kind of like to see my lovely protégée step back from the dark side, i.e., management. A good reporter is a terrible thing to waste.

Wheelie says he thinks our publisher has her working on something else.

“Like a puff piece on Wat Chenault?”

“We call them features, Willie.”

I explain to him that Sarah already knows some of what’s going on with Mr. Chenault and could hit the ground running.

“Plus, Baer would love to do a nice, frothy feature story.”

Baer probably would not, but he’ll do whatever they tell him to do. Plus, if Baer gets on Rita Dominick’s good side and winds up selling his soul . . . well, hell, he’s halfway there already.

“I’ll have to call Rita,” Wheelie says, “and see if we can switch.” He doesn’t sound like it’s going to be the high point of his morning. Our publisher doesn’t know about the Scimitar piece, or she’d have lit Wheelie up already. It’s funny how this place works. You’re encouraged to call everybody by his or her first name, but that doesn’t keep them from taking the chain saw to you. “Rita says you’re fired” hurts just as much as “Ms. Dominick says you’re fired.”

I do feel a teensy bit sorry for her, because she’ll be the one who has to call Wat Chenault and explain why we have to run the story, seeing as it’ll be on every TV station and website in Richmond by sundown. Then I think about her paycheck versus mine. She can handle it.

I MEET KATE and Marcus Green at Marcus’s office, which is starting to look more and more like Kate and Marcus’s office, what with the crib and baby mobile in the waiting area. I wonder if Greg Ellis, Kate’s most recent husband, is doing his share of the parental caregiving. The baby’s spending the afternoon with her doting maternal grandparents, who probably thank God every night that their daughter cut her losses, husband-wise, and traded up the second time around.

We’re going to talk with the lovely Ronnie Sax. I ride in the back and tell them as much as they need to know about Wat Chenault and the latest obstacle to his pet project. I stop short of letting them know who leaked the story.

“So you let the gotdamn Scimitar beat your ass?” Marcus says, obviously pleased. He pounds on the steering wheel and lets loose with that big booming laugh of his.

I tell him that we’ve been told to back off, for reasons he, as a registered ambulance chaser, can understand.

“Well, Wat Chenault is a racist pig asshole. I hope they put his butt in jail for this.”

I note that Chenault hasn’t been linked to anything just yet (at least until and if that bulldozer operator steps up and identifies him).

“I guess old Earl Pemberton-hyphen-Wise finally got himself a reporter who can find his ass with both hands,” Marcus says.

Kate is giving me the kind of look she used to employ when she suspected I wasn’t being completely honest with her, which was often. But she turns around and doesn’t say anything.

SAX SEEMS GLAD to see us. He’s been in here for five days now, and he looks like he’s enjoyed about all of it he can stand. He knows about the letter I got on Thursday, and he wants to know when we’re going to get him out of “this shithole.”

I want to tell him that I’m far from sure a shithole isn’t the best place for him, until we get more evidence to the contrary, but I’d like to not piss him off just yet. As always, I need information.

“Do you have any idea who might be trying to spring you?” I ask him. “Know any psychopaths that might have done this and let you take the fall and then enjoy laughing at us for arresting the wrong guy?”

Sax glares at me and tells me he doesn’t know any “goddamned psychopaths,” and notes that it seems like everybody in Richmond, “especially your fucking paper,” wants to put him away forever.

“They’ve got it in for me,” he adds.

You make it easy, I want to tell him. I do point out that about the only people around who might possibly be interested in his seeing daylight again are a handful of folks (me, maybe Sarah) at my “fucking paper.”

“Well,” he says, “I hope you do something quick. I don’t like the way these guys are looking at me.”

Yeah, I’m thinking, guys who molest and murder girls and young women probably have a pretty full social life behind bars.

He claims not to know who his silent Good Samaritan is, and he’s sticking with his claim that his sister can attest to his whereabouts that Wednesday night.

On the way back to Marcus’s Yukon, I decide it’s time to let Kate and Marcus know about my nagging suspicions about Chenault. They seem like they might be on the verge of just bailing on Ronnie Sax, and who could blame them? But the truth is a slippery bastard sometimes, and I want to make sure we’ve got it wrestled to the ground before we throw the world’s most guilty-seeming slimebag to the wolves.

Marcus is silent as I recount my concerns about Chenault, especially our so-far unsuccessful efforts to find the girl who helped ruin his political career twelve years ago. I mention that Chenault, with an office nearby, where he’s masterminding his development deal, has been around long enough to do everything that Ronnie Sax is accused of doing.

Kate is less silent, trying to jump in two or three times to ask me why the hell I didn’t tell them about this already.

I hold her off until I’ve finished laying it out for them.

“You’re crazy,” my ex-wife says when she can finally get a word in edgewise. “You think this guy’s been killing girls and young women for twelve years, and he’s never been arrested for anything?”

I offer that maybe he hasn’t been a serial killer for twelve years, that maybe he just took some kind of turn for the worse the last few years. But, I add, the killings over the last eighteen months do coincide with Chenault’s moving his business to the Bottom. He even has an apartment in one of those expensive high-rises overlooking the river downtown, not five minutes away.

“Willie,” Marcus says, “are you sure you aren’t just going after this guy for personal reasons? I mean, I know he’s suing your butt, and I’ve heard that crap about what he used to call you when you were covering the General Assembly.”

I assure Marcus and Kate that I am not holding some kind of grudge against the pig-eyed sack of shit, and that if I were going to decide who killed those girls on the basis of personality, I might actually rather spend time with Wat Chenault than Ronnie Sax. I don’t like either one of the sons of bitches, but that isn’t what this is about.

I mention the rumors, via Johnny Grimes, in the South-side town where Chenault lives when he’s not trying to rape Richmond’s landscape and history.

“And, there’s the letter.”

“He could’ve had somebody write it for him,” Kate says.

“Somebody that knew about the silver dollars.”

“He could have told them that.”

I observe that, whoever it is, he or she is certainly going out of the way to get involved in a major and heinous crime.

“Who cares that much about Ronnie Sax?”

They concede that this would be a small universe. His sister?

“Have you talked to the sister?” I ask Marcus.

“No. We plan to talk with her tomorrow.”

“Don’t bother. I’m meeting her tonight.”

Actually it was a ruse to get myself in the same room with Cindy Peroni. I asked Cindy to set up a meeting of the three of us, at Cindy’s place. I haven’t set foot inside there since I scotched (bourbon-ed, actually) the best chance I’ve had in some time to spend the rest of my life with a good woman.

Marcus isn’t happy. He accuses me of hindering his investigation. I tell him that, without me, he doesn’t have much of an “investigation.”

“I’m just an honest reporter, trying to get a story,” I tell them. “If you’re good, I’ll share it with you.”

Marcus threatens to take me to Gilpin Court and feed me to the drug dealers. I laugh and tell him they’d have his Yukon stripped for parts before he could get out of there. Marcus, because he’s more African American than me (on the outside, anyhow), loves to go all ’hood on me. I like to remind him that he grew up in the suburbs and now resides in stately splendor at a place on River Road with a post-racial lawn jockey out front.

“Well,” he says, “just don’t do anything to screw up my case.”

He drops me at the Prestwould. I grab a bite and a beer, check in on the Redskins, who are in the process of breaking Custalow’s heart again, and then head out.

Sarah calls on my cell.

“Thanks a lot,” she says.

I tell her she’s welcome. She is not pleased as punch to be assigned cleanup duty, telling our readers what most of them already will know about those bones in the Bottom.

“I thought you’d be happy to be doing real journalism again,” I tell her.

“I had that damn feature halfway done, and now Baer gets to take it over. And I get to rewrite the fucking Scimitar.”

She’s quiet for a few seconds.

“Wait a minute,” she says. “You know that guy, that Earl Washington-Wise.”

“Pemberton-Wise.”

“Yeah, and you’ve been trying to get this crap in the paper. And now, we don’t have any choice but to run it.”

“Just a little serendipity.”

“Serendipity, my ass. You can’t write it, and I’ll bet you’re the one that told Wheelie to put me on it.”

I exercise my right to remain silent.

“Dammit, Willie. I’m ready for a little stability. Whoever writes this story isn’t going to be very popular with Rita Dominick. I need to do something that’ll ensure that I’m not Cary Phillips in ten years.”

Cary Phillips was a very good reporter. She worked several beats, won lots of state press awards, and then she merged her writing skills and passion for flicks by becoming as good a movie critic as a paper this size could ever want. Then with the last round of layoffs, they sent her packing. Nothing she did wrong; they just eliminated her position. They decided we could get our movie reviews off the AP wire from now on. She was forty-seven, and now she’s doing freelance editing, which pays worse than freelance panhandling, and reviewing movies gratis on some damned blog.

I assure Sarah that she will not be Cary Phillips, but in this business, who knows? I do tell her, though, that she will be here longer than our new publisher, if she chooses to be. I’m pretty sure about that one. I’ve seen Rita Dominick’s type before. They’re already angling for the next job even before the business cards are printed.

“Let Baer do the suck-up stories,” I tell her. “Trust me, you won’t be happy if you let the suits guide your future.”

“I’d have a future, at least.”

It does make me sad. When I first signed on for journalism, the bar was pretty low and the cotton was high. All the ad guys had to do was go to the two big downtown department stores once a week and come back with a wheelbarrow full of money. Now people like Sarah, more talented and much more driven than I was at her age, have to make deals with the devil all the time. We keep losing good young ones to “media relations” jobs, where they get paid to hide the truth from their former compatriots.

“And I guess this is all connected with me trying to find that girl, the one Chenault was banging,” Sarah says.

I have to admit that it all seems to be coming together.

“And the Tweety Bird killings . . .”

I am silent.

“Shit,” she says. I think I might have reeled her in, at least temporarily, from the dark side.

MY MEETING WITH Thomas Jefferson Blandford V is at three. Andi doesn’t know about this and, I hope, won’t. I do have to get a couple of things straight with young Quip, though.

We meet at a place on Main Street that has a bar upstairs and around back. I prefer it because it’s one of the few places in town where I can drink alfresco without inhaling bus fumes.

Quip’s there when I arrive, nursing some kind of beer in a multicolored bottle that indicates it might taste like honey and cranberries. I order a Miller.

“So,” I say to young Master Blandford after we’ve dispensed with scant pleasantries, “I understand you’ve been threatening my daughter.”

He seems surprised by the direct approach. In the Blandfords’ world, they use stilettos instead of meat cleavers.

“No. No. I don’t know what you mean. We talked, but . . .”

I pull my chair a little nearer to the table separating us, close enough that my gut is pushing against it.

“I heard that you made some kind of reference to the baby having a ‘white trash’ upbringing,” I continue, speaking softly, making serious eye contact. “The thing is, Quip, he’d be growing up pretty much the way I did, and I think I turned out all right. That’s just my opinion, but do you think I’m white trash? If you think so, we can move on up to the next step.”

Quip is looking around, maybe for a witness.

“Look,” he says, holding his palms out, “I was pissed off. I didn’t mean it. I really want to marry her.”

“Well, I guess that’ll have to be her decision, won’t it?”

He clears his throat.

“But he’ll be my son, too.”

I assure Quip that Andi will want him to be a part of her son’s life.

“The thing is, though, she isn’t interested in marrying you. She thinks, to put it bluntly, that you’re a bit of a fuckup. After checking with some people, I kind of have to agree with her.”

It’s amazing what doesn’t get prosecuted if your daddy has enough money. I recount the two DUI arrests I know about that didn’t make it onto Master Quip’s permanent record, reduced to speeding and reckless driving. As someone whose drinking and driving issues don’t get swept away, I particularly take offense at this abuse of power. Peachy Love is a wonderful source.

And then, there was the cocaine bust. Thomas Jefferson Blandford IV must have paid a king’s ransom to get that one knocked down to probation and keep his son out of jail. The amount of coke in Quip’s car usually would have earned a trip to a medium-security federal prison for a few years, maybe ten to twenty if he were of the wrong ethnic persuasion.

I am appalled that my daughter has been living with such, to use Quip’s word, trash.

“How do you know all that?”

I explain that I am, after all, a reporter. I also explain that I am sure we can come to an agreement here: I don’t write a story about the inequality of our justice system with the Blandfords as Exhibit A, and he stops leaning on my pregnant daughter.

“Plus, I won’t have to kill you,” I add, smiling to let him know I’m only kidding.

“Besides,” I tell him as we part, “you can’t be calling us ‘white trash.’ The baby will be one-eighth African American. I think your great-great-grandaddy would have called him an octoroon.”

I leave him pondering that.

I ARRIVE AT Cindy’s condo just after six. When she shows me in, allowing me only a chaste peck on the cheek, Mary Kate Kusack Brown is already there. She’s sitting on the livingroom couch, nervous as a cat.

She looks a little like Ronnie, but not too much, for which she must be grateful.

We chat for a minute or two, but she wants to cut to the chase.

“He was at my place,” she says. “I told the police that. I don’t think they believed me.”

I mention the images they got from his computer. She seems a little shocked, and I’m wondering if she’ll be asking her brother to do any more babysitting, just to be on the safe side.

She frowns and then shrugs.

“Ronnie hasn’t always been the best at looking out for himself. He’s done some kind of crazy things.”

She confirms that her brother was at her house at eight or so the night of the eleventh, and that he was there until sometime after eleven.

“He said he spoke to your neighbors, but they didn’t see him.”

“That’s right. I imagine they could identify his voice.”

“But there’s nothing you know of that would keep you from backing up his story?”

Again, a little hesitation. She looks away.

“No. Nothing. Ronnie’s been good. He’s always trying to look out for me and the kids. And Cord, too.”

“Cord?”

“His—rather, our—brother.”

She goes on to explain that their older brother, living up in Ohio, sends her money sometimes.

I note that it’s nice to have family watching your back. I’m not quite sure how she takes it.