CHAPTER NINETEEN

X

Saturday

That thing that has been rattling around in my brain has been driving me nuts. It’s like when you try to think of some movie you used to love or an old girlfriend whose name has slipped just beyond your field of memory.

Sometimes it’s best to just let it be. It will eventually come to you. My memory is like my Honda’s semiworthless radio. It emits a lot of static, but once in a while it picks up a clear signal just when I least expect it.

And so it was that, lying in bed this morning, I had my epiphany.

Last night was only a two-beer evening at Penny Lane after work. This relatively healthful development along with the buzz I got from what I remembered has me up and at ’em a little after eight. I get a couple of Saturdays off per year, and this is one of them. So might as well make the most of it.

I go over to Peggy’s, being very careful to knock and announce my presence. My mother offers me coffee. Andi asks me when it’s going to be safe to work again, since her employer doesn’t seem eager to pay her to stay home, death threat or no death threat. And then there’s the school thing. If she can pass the three courses she’s taking this semester, she will be perhaps one semester away from the Promised Land of graduation, although, with a baby on board, that semester might have to wait. Her professors have been understanding, but she’s afraid of falling behind.

Awesome Dude is on one of his walkabouts. Peggy gives me a general idea of where he might be. I promise to drop by later for a more extensive visit. I wonder again about the effect of second-hand reefer smoke on fetuses.

“Be sure you have the safety on that thing,” I tell her, pointing to the pistol on the kitchen counter.

“Of course I will,” she says. “I’m not an idiot.” As she says this, she reaches over and puts the safety on.

AFTER TWENTY MINUTES of scouring Oregon Hill, as I’m passing the river overlook for the second time, I spot him down below me. He seems to be taking in the view. I know that sometimes Awesome just needs to be by himself. I can relate.

He’s sitting there on the ground, leaning forward with his head down. He gives a grunt and jerks up when I approach. I think I woke him up.

“Dude,” he says. “Don’t be sneaking up on me like that.”

At least Awesome, unlike Peggy, is not armed. I apologize for interrupting his solitude.

I settle down beside him, and we both watch the James flow by for a couple of minutes. Some kayakers far below us are risking their lives for no good reason.

“Do you remember when you told me about the guy you saw, the night the Jonas girl was killed?”

It’s been two weeks since he told me about it. Two weeks is a very long time for Awesome Dude’s skittery memory. I try to bring him up to speed.

Finally he and I are, if not on the same page, at least in the same book.

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “That girl down at the beach. Yeah. You didn’t tell anybody about that, did you? Still feel bad about not saying nothing.”

I ask him again about what he told me.

“There was a sound you said you heard there.”

He doesn’t seem to remember that.

“Was it like this?”

The sound works on him like an electric jolt.

“Shit! Yeah, damn! That was it. That was it. That’s what I heard.”

ON THE WAY back to my car, I call L.D. Jones’s home number. I tell him why he and his troops ought to try really hard to reincarcerate Ronnie Sax. He understandably wants a little more information. I give it to him. After he curses me for doing what I promised I would, telling our readers about the latest communication with the killer, we eventually settle into a conversation modulated enough that I don’t have to hold the phone three inches from my ear.

“That’s sketchy as hell,” he says. I further explain why my alternative theory about the Tweety Bird killings went south with the discovery of the quite alive-and-well Leigh Adkins.

I know the police have been turning Greater Richmond upside down, trying to find the bastard who’s doing this, and nothing’s turned up. Now they’ll be back looking for Sax. Nobody at his apartment complex had set eyes on him as of last night.

“It was all your bullshit that made us release him in the first place,” Jones says. “You and that damn Marcus Green and your wife.”

I concede that this is true. My heart is heavy. I always try to be the dispassionate observer. I wonder if my genuine dislike for Wat Chenault has clouded my objectivity.

I apologize to the chief. He seems taken aback, having never heard me apologize before.

“Well,” he says, “don’t kill yourself over it. We’re on this.”

I truly hope they are. I have never wanted to see anybody fry as much as I do Ronnie Sax right now.

When I get back to my car, there’s a ticket there. I never saw the no-parking sign. I doubt if L.D. Jones is going to fix this one for me.

AFTER A QUICK breakfast at Joe’s, I call Cindy Peroni.

When I explain, in broad terms, what I want to do, she says she was afraid I was calling with some half-ass excuse for reneging on our date tonight. I assure her that a case of Ebola couldn’t keep me away.

“That’s comforting, in an insane kind of way.”

“I really need to talk to her. I thought you might be able to break the ice.”

Cindy sighs.

“I have a hair appointment at two. Let me see what I can do.”

I give her her script.

“You want me to threaten her?”

“I just want you to tell her how it is.”

Cindy calls back fifteen minutes later.

“OK. I told her what you said. I think it scared her. We can meet her at her house in an hour.”

WE ARRIVE AT Mary Kate Brown’s house at eleven forty-five. At first I don’t think she’s going to answer the door. Finally, though, it opens.

Ronnie Sax’s sister looks like she hasn’t been sleeping well. What I’m going to tell her isn’t going to cure her insomnia. I really don’t give a shit, at this point.

“You said some bad things to me,” she says, casting an accusing look at Cindy. I’m thinking this friendship is on life support.

“She was just passing it on,” I tell Ms. Brown. “She just told you what I told her to say. And, yes, I do think you’re about this close to some big-time obstruction of justice.”

She shakes her head.

“All right. What do you want to know?”

I explain about having found a witness who will swear he heard a camera whirr in the near aftermath of Kellie Jonas’s murder down by the river. I oversell Awesome Dude’s reliability as a witness. I explain my suspicions about the disappearance of Wat Chenault’s one-time underage sex toy and how those suspicions were put to rest only yesterday.

“There isn’t much else to think,” I tell her in conclusion, “other than that the cops had the right guy all along.”

She reaches for coffee. She hasn’t offered us any. Her hand shakes.

“So why don’t you go to the police?”

I explain that I have, and that they soon will be tearing our fair city apart brick by historic brick looking for her brother, but that she could help a lot by telling me just what parts of that bullshit story about Ronnie Sax’s alibi the night of the last murder don’t jibe with the hard, cold truth.

Yes, I could have passed this on to L.D. Jones. Part of me, though, wants to do it myself. Call me an egotistical bastard, but I’ve been chasing this story in circles, and I want some resolution. Plus I do have a little credibility with Mary Kate Kusack Brown. Just the fact that I’m not the police might help.

“OK,” she says. “Ronnie got here a little later than I said, maybe eight thirty. But he didn’t leave. I told the truth about that part.”

I note that the detectives say the body was dumped down at the train station around nine thirty, based on when the now-unemployed night security guy went over to Havana 59 for his free drinks.

Ms. Brown nods her head. At first she doesn’t offer any enlightenment. I wait.

Finally she gets up and starts pacing.

“I knew it,” she says. “I knew it was going to be trouble. Ronnie, he isn’t really a bad man. But he’s easily led.”

She doesn’t elucidate. Finally, I ask.

“Led by who?”

She sits down again.

“Mr. Black,” she says, “let me tell you about my brother.”

I start to tell her that I know quite a bit about her brother already.

She stops me.

“No. My other brother.”