CHAPTER SIX

Monday

Why can’t they ever have press conferences in the afternoon, or at least on a day when I’m paid to work? I don’t have to be here, but if it wasn’t me, it’d be Mark Baer or Handley Pace or some other byline poacher half my age. It’s my story, even if it is my day off.

When I get to city hall, damned if Baer isn’t the first person I see, all spiffy and ready for an easy A1 byline to add to the résumé he still hopes he can convert into a job at the Washington Post.

“I thought this was your day off,” he says.

I tell him to get the fuck out of there, and he does.

There are only six of us there—me, some freelancer from the local entertainment weekly and four TV types. The Post hasn’t deigned to send somebody down. We’re outnumbered by the cops, which seems to piss L. D. Jones off. He shoots me a death-ray glare. He’s still harboring grudges from last year, when my “interference in police matters” led to the uncomfortable revelation that one of his lieutenants was a murderer.

“No smoking,” the chief says, looking at me.

We’re outside, for Christ’s sake, in front of City Hall, freezing our butts off. Am I going to give the birds cancer? But I don’t need any more trouble from L. D. Jones. I stub out my Camel. He’s still glaring at me. I reach down, pick it up and walk fifty feet to the nearest trash can. The chief says something to the flunky next to him. They laugh.

There is little news here that a four-year-old couldn’t have figured out. You free a man on Monday after he’s done twenty-eight years for a rape he didn’t commit, and then the woman who accused him gets shot through the head on Saturday. One plus one equals two. Richard Slade is back behind bars. They got him yesterday. He had six days of open windows and doors that locked from the inside.

The mayor’s there, too, to reassure the people of Richmond that he personally won’t let innocent people get shot to death in their cars. Well, he won’t let folks from Windsor Farms get shot that way, anyhow. He’s probably the one who insisted we do it outside, with City Hall as the backdrop. He must have laryngitis, though, because he lets the chief do the talking. In good health, Hizzoner would only relinquish a microphone when you tore it from his cold, dead hands.

Jones is asked if they’re sure they have the right man.

“We, ah, can’t go into that right now,” the chief says, “but we have strong evidence pointing to the suspect.”

“Do you have the murder weapon?”

Jesus. Whoever shot Alicia Simpson threw the weapon down on Cary Street, which is where the cops found it. No prints. No serial number. It was in the paper, dumb-ass. Can TV reporters not read?

He’s never going to call on me, so I yell it out, loud enough so he has to answer.

“Do you have forensic evidence of any type linking Richard Slade to Alicia Simpson’s murder?”

The chief would really like to pistol-whip me. He takes a deep breath. He seems to be counting.

“We can’t reveal that information at the present time,” he says, then adds, “but I’m sure we will have a breakthrough there very soon.”

In other words, no.

The TV types were hoping for a perp walk, but they’re disappointed. Slade is already in the city lockup, and they have at least spared him the usual public shaming, for now.

The press conference lasts all of fifteen minutes. Nothing is revealed, other than what we knew already. The television reporters and crews rush off to get it on the air at noon. I head back to the Prestwould to blog about it. The guy from the entertainment magazine is already posting his with his iPhone. You need one of those, Wheelie told me last week. Buy me one, I said.

The paper’s as close as my apartment, but I still have fond hopes of sneaking in another hour or two of sleep after I feed the blogees.

Custalow is there. I’d forgotten he was taking the morning off. He had to attend to a plumbing emergency that ate up half his Saturday. Custalow isn’t afraid of hard work, but he seems to have decided that he won’t go the extra yard for the folks who were ready to fire him for theft last year.

He’s watching one of the local channels. They’ve broken into some stupid-ass, bare-your-soul-in-front-of-strangers talk show with the breathless news that, yes, Richard Slade is arrested. It’s safe to go outside again.

“You need somebody to dress you,” Custalow says. I stand next to him and see myself on the screen, in the background. Maybe the jeans and the I AM THE MAN FROM NANTUCKET sweatshirt with chili stains on it weren’t a great choice. Maybe I should have worn socks. And shaved. Maybe I should have gone home from Penny Lane two hours earlier last night.

“You might as well have worn your pajamas,” he says, suppressing a laugh.

I suggest to Custalow that he could have saved me. He saw me headed out the door.

“I thought you must be going out for a walk, somewhere where nobody would see you.”

Yeah, he’s right. And I really don’t want a male housemate asking, “Are you going to wear that?”

Custalow turns away from the TV as they switch back to a couple who seem to be having a very public discussion about his having sex with her sister, in their bed.

“I can’t believe it,” Custalow says, and I assume he’s talking about Richard Slade, not the disaffected couple.

“What’s so hard to believe? Who had a better motive?”

“It doesn’t make any sense.”

I sit back. Custalow chews his words for a while before he spits them out. You have to wait for it.

“He was in my cellblock for a while. I remember, at lunch one day, he got to talking. He didn’t talk that much, so when he did, you listened.”

Another pause.

“He said that if he did get out, all he was going to do was sit under the big shade tree in his momma’s backyard, drink lemonade and watch the world go by. When it got cold, he said, he’d feed the birds, then sit in his momma’s kitchen and watch them.”

Pause.

“One of the young bucks on our block kind of laughs and asks him, ‘How about the white bitch that put your ass in here. Ain’t you got sumpin’ for her?’ By this time, most of us believed Slade when he said he didn’t do it.

“Slade just looked at him for a minute. Then he said, ‘That woman didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t mean any harm.’ And then he just got his tray and walked off.”

“You don’t think he killed her?”

“Anything’s possible,” Custalow said. “But if I gambled, I’d bet against it.”

I blog, and then I nap. When I wake up, Custalow’s gone to work. After I shower, shave and exchange the sweatshirt for a button-down, a sweater and a sports jacket, I do the same. I wouldn’t have showered and shaved for the desk monkeys at the paper, especially on a day I’m not getting paid for, but I have another stop in mind.

At the office, somebody has already done a screen grab and has left a printout on my desk. There’s the press conference, with the TV “talent” in their camel-hair overcoats, and there’s me. Somebody got a red pen and drew a line to one of the talking heads standing next to me, then wrote in “TV journalist,” then drew another line to me. That one was titled, “real journalist,” but somebody had marked through it and wrote “homeless person asking TV journalist for spare change.”

“Nice of you to dress,” Sally Velez says.

“It’s my day off. You’re lucky I’m wearing pants.”

“Very lucky.”

I lean closer to her, so no one else can hear.

“That’s not what you used to say.”

Sally comes as close to blushing as she ever does.

“Are you writing the story?”

“No, I just went to the press conference to wipe Baer’s butt.”

She looks surprised.

“Baer was there?”

Mal Wheelwright is in his office.

“Wheelie,” Sally calls over, “did you send Baer over to cover the chief’s press conference?”

Wheelie, looking up and seeing me, looks embarrassed.

“Uh . . . yeah. He told me he’d cover it, since it was Willie’s day off.”

Every year at the state press contest awards dinner, where everybody’s a winner, Mark Baer leads the league in shared awards. A good story turns up on somebody else’s beat, and suddenly, there’s Baer, “helping” and earning a byline or two for a sidebar, or stepping in when the reporter’s been chasing the story for nine days and needs a break.

It only takes me a few minutes to bang out fifteen inches for the Tuesday paper. I tell Sally that there might be a write-through later.

She’s already given my story a cursory read as I’m putting on my jacket.

“Where to now, Clark Kent?” she asks. “It’s too early for happy hour.”

“Always happy hour somewhere,” I tell her. I blow her a kiss, and she graces me with the smallest of smiles and gives me the finger.

Philomena Slade’s home is pretty easy to find. By the time I get there, the TV types have already gone. This isn’t Los Angeles, and paparazzi might as well be some appetizer at Mamma Zu’s.

Still, I don’t relish this. I only hope a couple of large male relatives haven’t been left in charge of dispatching snooping reporters. It’s hard to hurt my feelings, but I have a strong aversion to pain.

I knock three times, then wait a few seconds and knock again.

Finally, the door opens. There’s a storm door, locked, I’m sure, between me and Richard Slade’s mother. I can barely see her with the sun reflecting off the glass.

“Go away,” she says. I don’t think she even realizes yet that I’m the SOB from the paper that she threw out of Marcus Green’s Yukon a week ago.

“Please, Mrs. Slade,” I say, trying to make myself heard through the storm door. “I’m not here to make trouble. I want to get his side of the story.”

This goes about as far as I thought it would. She’s starting to shut the door when I play the only card I have.

“Wait. Please. I’m Artie Lee’s son.”

The door shuts. I wait for about two seconds. The door opens.

She looks me up and down.

“Bull,” she says.

Then, she opens the storm door and squints at me, giving me the once-over.

“You’re passin’,” she says.

As in passing for white. We both know it isn’t necessary to “pass” these days. They get extra PC points where I work if they can claim you’re black. But, yeah, maybe I have been passing, for about half a century.

She asks me who’s my momma, and I give her a concise enough description of Peggy Black that she finally believes me.

“Peggy still smoking that weed?” she asks.

I tell her I think she’s trying to quit. Yeah. She’s down to a joint a day.

As I start to step inside, though, she stops me again.

“You’re the one I had them throw out of Marcus Green’s car. That reporter from the paper.”

I wait, not bothering to deny it. Finally, though, family wins out.

“Well,” she says, “come on in anyhow.”

We go through a living room full of photographs and time-worn furniture, with a pre-flat-screen TV sitting in the corner. We dodge kids’ toys, which seems strange until we get to the kitchen, where two little boys, maybe four years old, are sitting at the table, coloring.

“Momma Phil,” one of them says, “look.”

She offers the first smile of the day.

“That’s very good, Jamal. Very good. You stayed between the lines and all, just like I told you to. Let’s see, Jeroy. Umm. Yes. That’s nice. Now, you all go on back to the bedroom. This gentleman and me have got to talk.”

They ask her if they can watch TV, and she says maybe after a while. They whine a little but don’t question her.

“That TV,” she says, shaking her head.

I observe that she seems to have a way with kids.

She looks at me and kind of snorts.

“You caught ’em on a good day.”

She says Jamal and Jeroy are her great-nephews, her niece’s twins. She’s keeping them while their mother works at the post office.

“You’re related to them, I suppose. Chanelle would’ve been Artie’s cousin, too. Anyhow, there’s always somebody needs some help. And now I’m retired, I’ve got the time.”

She offers me a Coke or some water. I can see when she opens the fridge that there’s no beer.

“I’d meant to work until next year, when I’m sixty-five,” she says, “but when I found out Richard was getting out . . .”

She pauses for a few seconds. She has her back to me, pouring the Coke. I see her left hand clench into a fist, then relax.

“It just seemed like a good time to quit.”

She says she was a secretary for thirty-two years at Philip Morris, “long enough to pay for this place.”

After an appropriate amount of time, I get around to asking what I came to ask. At first, it looks like she’s just going to tell me to leave.

“Richard was here Friday night,” she says at last. “Some folks came over, but they were gone by ten, and Richard went to bed right after that. He’s used to going to bed early. He says he has trouble sleeping here, because it’s so quiet.”

Philomena says she went to bed right after the eleven o’clock news, and that Richard was asleep when she looked in on him at eleven thirty—in the bedroom she’d kept waiting for him to return to for the past twenty-eight years.

“Then, when I got up Saturday morning to fix breakfast, about seven, he was in here, watching that sports channel on the TV. You could tell that he’d just woke up.

“I told the police that, told ’em three times, but they believe what they want to believe.”

She’s chopping up some onions, getting supper ready for the boys, or maybe just for herself. She turns toward me and points with her hand, still holding an impressive chopping knife.

“He didn’t do it. He didn’t do it twenty-eight years ago, and he didn’t do it now.”

I’m not inclined to argue with anybody holding a knife that big, but I wonder. Is it possible that Richard Slade could have left the house, done the deed and come back before his mother got up? The shooting happened about a quarter past five. He would have had time.

I ask her about her car. There’s a ten-year-old Camry outside on the street, which must be hers.

“I keep the keys in my purse,” she says. “I keep my purse by my bedside table. I told the police that, too.”

Well, he could have jump-started it. Or, he could have just gotten somebody else to do the deed. Slade probably knew a character or two, from nearly three decades as a guest of the state, who could have done it for him. Or maybe it was just a cousin or a nephew. Maybe revenge takes a village, too.

Philomena shows me his room. There are trophies, from Little League baseball and pee-wee football, then a few from junior high and high school. She probably dusted them off every week, waiting.

“He was quite an athlete,” she says, “and he was full of himself, the way boys are. He was running with some boys that he shouldn’t of been running with. And I was always on him about his grades. But he was a good boy.

“He always told me not to worry, that he was going to go to college and make me proud.”

When they heard the news, later on Saturday, about Alicia Simpson’s murder, Philomena says Richard just “kind of wilted.”

“ ‘Oh, lord, Momma,’ he told me. ‘They gonna think I did it.’ ”

She says it was all she could do to keep him from running, right then.

“I told him, ‘You stay right here, and when they come asking questions, you and I both know where you were, and we’ll tell ’em.’

“And we did, like it did any good. They came for him on Sunday morning, just as we were getting ready to go to church. They took him away, and they stayed here and asked me the same damn—excuse me—the same questions over and over. And telling them the truth didn’t seem to matter.”

I ask her if she thinks Richard would like to talk to somebody from the newspaper, to give his side of the story.

“I don’t know. I’d have to ask Marcus Green.”

Well, I should have figured that one out. I can’t believe our premier bomb-throwing mouthpiece hasn’t already called a press conference of his own.

I tell her I’ll call Mr. Green myself.

At the door, she puts her hand around my wrist. She’s strong for such a wiry woman.

“You come back, now,” she says. “You’re family, even if you do work for that newspaper.”