CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Wednesday

Our weather page nailed it, more or less. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

It’s been cloudy and cold, spitting snow but no accumulation likely. Sitting here in the dark with the heater in my Accord going full blast, I’m almost disappointed not to see a light in any of the windows at the Simpsons’ old house. I’m looking for an excuse not to do this. It would be a good night to hunker down in a nice, warm bar. It is, by my reckoning, not a good night to be snooping around somebody else’s backyard, armed with a garden trowel.

Custalow has his window open slightly, to let out some of the carcinogens. It’s my car and I’ll smoke if I want to.

Abe’s my chauffeur tonight. Kate’s a trouper, but I thought it might be smarter to have someone a little larger and scarier come with me on this little sortie. To my knowledge, Custlow hasn’t done physical damage to anyone recently. But the potential is definitely there.

But stealth isn’t Abe’s strong suit. I’m not sure he can even get over the fence separating me from the brick patio, and it’ll be easier for one out-of-shape old fart to do this undetected than it would be for two.

I tell Abe to wait, I’ll be right back. We’re no more than 100 feet from the start of the circular drive at the front of the house. When Kate drove me up here yesterday, she said it was Georgian, and I told her it did kind of look like some of the houses I’d seen in Atlanta.

“You sure you want to do this?” Abe asks me.

I tell him I am. Actually, I’m not, but what are the choices? I’ve got less than five days left of the seven Grubby gave me to make chicken salad out of all this. What are the cops going to do if I tell them I think there might be some paper buried maybe somewhere under the brick patio of the late Harper and Simone Simpson’s home that might have something to do with their daughter’s death. Hell, if I was a cop, I wouldn’t put down my doughnut for that. They have a perfectly good suspect, good as it gets, all locked up. Why keep looking?

“Sit,” I tell him. “Stay. And keep the heater running. I’m gonna be pretty cold when I get back.”

“Nah,” he says, and cuts the engine off. He’s right, of course. The quieter, the better. The Accord, in need of a tune-up, will be like a neon sign flashing “burglars about” if it sits here idling on this very rich, very private street. The police probably will question Custalow just for being here, if they happen to drive by. It’s rare to see a car here at all; most of them are ensconced in garages that are better built than the houses in Oregon Hill. I hope I’m not getting my oldest, most trusted friend into something that will cause an awkward moment with his parole officer.

“I’ll be right back,” I tell him, and hope I’m right.

I look at the lighted dial on my watch. It’s almost nine. It has been a long day.

Peggy phoned while I was still smoking breakfast. She hardly ever calls just to chat. Small and large emergencies occur often enough to make “chat” calls unnecessary.

The news was that Les was missing again. He wasn’t there when Peggy got up. He wasn’t on the roof, which I took to be a good sign. I hoped he wasn’t on anybody’s roof, because it wasn’t a good morning for climbing on stepladders and scuttering along Oregon Hill rooftops, hoping you didn’t step through the rotted-out spot that leaks when it rains.

“It’s been almost two hours, and nobody’s seen him,” she said.

I reminded her that I don’t at present have a driver’s license.

“Well, can’t you do something?”

Les doesn’t have a car either, unless he’s stolen one, so I figured he must be in the general area. To ease my mother’s deep-fried mind, I put on my winter coat and a serviceable hat and took the elevator down, en route to the Hill.

Clara Westbrook was in the lobby, waiting for a ride somewhere.

“Goodness,” she said. “It’s not a nice day for a walk, is it?”

I told her it certainly wasn’t, but that I was on an idiot hunt.

“Well,” she said, “good luck. If you see somebody else outside in this weather, that’s probably your man.”

I walked through Monroe Park, taking a zigzag course in hopes of finding Les out there somewhere, but not even the most shelter-phobic bum was braving this day outdoors. He didn’t show up anywhere along the route to Peggy’s.

She let me in, fazed enough that her eyes weren’t dilated yet. Awesome had come up from the basement to try to comfort her, but he wasn’t doing a very good job of it, reminding her, for some reason, that a homeless guy had frozen to death over by Texas Beach last week.

“But he was way crazier than ol’ Les,” Awesome added, trying to minimize the damage a bit.

I went out again, this time headed toward the river. Awesome insisted on coming with me, chattering all the way until I told him, as Peggy does in these situations, to shut the fuck up.

We weren’t yet to China Street when I looked over and pretty much knew where Les was.

The remains of David Junior Shiflett’s burned-out house still had a roof, more or less, and no one has been ordered to level the structure yet. The site of my near-death experience last year still gives me the willies, but I was pretty sure what I was going to find when I got inside. The cold overrode Awesome’s fear of the place, and he followed me inside.

Les was sitting on the floor, over where the stairs used to be. I walked over like I was treading on hot coals. Who knew how much weight those fire-damaged timbers could take?

“Les,” I said, “don’t you think it’s time to come home? It’s raining a little, and I don’t think you’re going to get much shelter in here.”

Les looked up. You could see gray sky through the holes. Les ran a roofing company after he left baseball.

“Yeah,” he said, “I think that roof needs a little work, all right. I don’t know if we can save it or not.”

He went on about the vagaries of fixing roofs in old, dilapidated buildings as I led him outside, sharing my umbrella. Awesome had a poncho he got from somewhere.

Les looked back at the place where he’d saved my life.

“Sometimes, I come here,” he said. “I felt like I was right when I was here.”

Maybe Les thinks he can regain his off-and-on grip on sanity in the shell of David Junior Shiflett’s house. It kind of makes sense. He never seemed saner than he did the night he broke through that door and pulled me from the flames. Maybe Les can’t break out of the fog anymore unless the stakes are so high that he doesn’t have any choice.

Either way, I’m glad he was able to see clearly that one night. I will never forget that, and I will never stop looking for him when he wanders off.

“We found him,” Awesome announced as we came in, a little worse for the chill and damp, happy to share the coffee Peggy’s made. Soon, I smelled the sweet scent of weed and knew my mother was feeling more or less back to normal.

I had promised to take Peggy over to see her granddaughter in the hospital. I was afraid, though, to risk driving. Too many Richmond cops know me, and would be more than pleased to bust my ass over driving with a suspended license.

“I can drive,” Les said. I stifled a laugh.

“He’s tellin’ the truth,” Peggy said. “He doesn’t have to get his license renewed until year after next. If you tell him where to go, he’s a good driver.”

The thought that Les had been driving my mother around, in somebody’s borrowed car, made me tremble, but I couldn’t come up with a better idea.

I told them that Les and I would walk over to the Prestwould to get my Accord, and then come back and pick her up.

Awesome said he would stay and guard the house. I don’t think he likes hospitals very much. Who does?

Still, it worked out. Les can still drive OK, with a little direction.

We all went up to Andi’s room, and Peggy, not obviously stoned, gave her a big hug. The two of them have always been pretty close. I think my daughter probably sees more of her grandmother than she does of me. Left out of the conversation, Les and I excused ourselves at some point and stepped into the hallway for a while.

As the three of us were leaving, the nurse practitioner pulled me aside and said they probably would be releasing Andi on Friday.

“The mother said you might be taking her.”

When did Jeanette tell her that?

“Um, yes. I guess so. But, I mean, will she need special care—you know, special attention?”

“I’m sure she will,” the nurse practitioner said. “We’ll go over all that with you on Friday.”

I nodded my head, unwilling to admit to a stranger that the thought of taking care of my adult daughter somehow freaked me out. I am a liberal arts major, I wanted to tell her. If I had wanted to minister to the sick, I would have taken a biology course or two.

On the way back to the car, I told Peggy what the plan was. She told me, again, that she and Les could take care of Andi.

I told her I was afraid she’d misplace her.

“She won’t be the most difficult person I’m taking care of, and at least I want to do it.”

I looked at my mother, wondering: Is it that obvious?

“Don’t worry,” I tell Peggy. “I’m on it.”

“You damn sure ought to be.”

Coming back meant dropping Peggy off, guiding Les back to the Prestwould parking lot, then walking Les back, lest he forget the way.

When I headed home, it was already two thirty. So I stopped at the 821, had a burger and then, when the food was gone, continued with the longneck Miller High Life’s, which are damn near free. I like to go in, slap down a ten dollar bill, and say, “Keep ’em coming.”

With nothing to do until tonight except drink and sober up, I went at the former pursuit with some vigor.

It was dark when I stumbled up the steps. The wind had picked up, and the snow peppering my face had an icy feel to it.

Upstairs, I didn’t say much to Custalow, just reminded him that he had promised to drive me somewhere.

“When?”

“When I wake up.” And I asked him to rouse me at eight. I figured that would be late enough.

I’m glad for the wind and generally nasty conditions. It’ll make it easier to do what I mean to do.

I feel like a fool, chasing Bitsy’s long-shot hunch. I’ve learned that long shots seldom pay off. But if you don’t bet, you don’t win.

So here I am. The Simpsons’ old house looks as grand as Monticello in this light. My knowledge of old homes that are only sporadically lived in, though, tells me that a closer inspection would show broken tiles, half-empty rooms and water damage.

I don’t intend to do any home inspections tonight, though. I try to make my running shoes as silent as possible as I creep along the driveway, headed for the fence that separates me from the patio. I figure the wind covers what little noise I’m making. There’s a streetlight out front. When I get to the fence, I see that someone has left the light on over the back door, but there’s no other light either inside the house or out. I won’t be in total darkness, but close enough. The red fleece jacket probably wasn’t the best idea, but I forgot to change into my burglar’s clothes. I can feel the garden trowel sticking out of the pocket of my khakis every time I move.

The fence has nothing on the outside for me to boost myself up with. The gate is locked, like I figured it would be, but I’m finally able to get something of a toehold by putting one foot on the lower hinge. I wonder if I’m providing Custalow with his night’s entertainment as I swing one leg up and, on the third try, am able to rather painfully straddle the fence. A minute or so more, and I’m inside, doing a half-gainer into the garden as my trailing foot catches on the top of the gate.

I brush the dirt off me and unlock the latch, then wait a few seconds to let my eyes adjust to the dark. Only the back-door light gives me any illumination at all, and its range stops well short of where I know the brick patio is.

Moving forward a step at a time, I find the patio with my feet. By now, I can see a little bit, and it takes me only a couple more minutes to find the loose bricks Bitsy told me about.

I pry one of them up with the trowel, then the other one. At first, there doesn’t appear to be anything but West End mud underneath. But then I dig a little and feel something that doesn’t give. After scraping away the mud, I reach down and feel plastic. A penlight would have been another good thing to have brought along tonight.

It doesn’t take long to unearth it. It could be what Alicia Parker Simpson buried there in the recent past, or it could be plastic-wrapped Nancy Drew books from 1980.

I pull it out, and then stand stiffly as the ice pelts me with a little more enthusiasm. It could be little Alicia Simpson’s seventh-grade term paper, but it’s definitely paper, and a fair amount of it.

Mission accomplished, I’m saying to myself, when I turn and come very close to losing control of my sphincter muscles.

How Wesley Simpson got that close to me without me hearing is a mystery. I suppose the wind, my alleged friend, was just as good at covering the sounds of Wes’s footsteps as I thought it was at covering mine.

“What are you doing?” he asks. He seems calm. I can barely hear him over the wind. It wouldn’t be as spooky, I’m thinking, if he was yelling and screaming. I can feel the snow hitting my face. My eyes have adjusted well enough to the darkness that I can see him now. He looks every bit as out of it as he did at the funeral, the last time I saw him.

He has a shovel in his right hand, as if he has come to help me dig. I start to answer when he brings the shovel around, faster than I would have thought possible for a man who’s supposed to be on mind-numbing anti-psychotics.

“You were looking for something,” he says. There’s a gash in the side of my face, and my left ear’s ringing like a damn phone.

There’s nothing much I can say to that. I’m crawling around his parents’ patio, digging up the bricks, and I have five pounds of plastic-wrapped contraband in my hand. Busted.

It doesn’t appear to me, though, that Wesley is interested in calling the police. He seems to have something more immediate and permanent in mind. He seems to want to dispatch me the same way he’d take care of a mole that was digging up his garden.

I partially ward off his second blow with my left arm, but I’m knocked on my side by the force of it. Wesley has quite an impressive swing for a guy who probably hasn’t played baseball in a while.

I’m greatly outgunned here, with nothing but my little garden spade, which I’m still gripping in my right hand. I notice that Wesley is wearing bedroom slippers in the cold February night. I guess Lewis and Carl have been letting him stay over here since he was shipped back from Arkansas. Better than having him at their place—for them, at least.

He’s standing over me, and he’s lifting that big shovel over his head when I do the only thing I can think of that might save my butt.

The spade isn’t as good as a knife, but it does have a point at the end, and when I drive it into the top of Wesley Simpson’s left foot, I can feel little bones cracking. That’s got to hurt.

He howls and falls to his knees. I drop the spade, hang on to my plastic-protected treasure and try to get the hell out of there.

My legs are working OK, although my left arm is numb, making it hard to get up. I can feel blood rolling down my face. I push myself up with my right arm and I’m making the transition from prone to running for my life, when Wesley grabs my ankle. I kick his face hard enough to make him let go and scramble for the gate. The fact that I left it unlocked probably makes the difference. He’s limping toward me, screaming, using that damn shovel like a crutch, but he’s too late.

I’m out the driveway, up the street and back in the car in Olympic record time. Custalow has started the engine before I even get there, sensing some urgency in my bloodied face. As we speed past the Simpson house, I see Wesley coming across the front yard at a forty-five-degree angle from us, running hard like a dog chasing a car, waving the shovel. He gets close, and then I hear a thump as we pass him. I’m afraid we’ve hit him, but when I turn around, I see him standing there, and the shovel is spinning around in the road. He must have thrown it when he realized he wasn’t going to catch us.

Back at the Prestwould parking lot, Custalow wipes my face as clean as he can with his handkerchief and has me put on his jacket—which is not covered with blood—while I carry mine.

“You might scare the guard,” he says, referencing the VCU kid who’ll be sleeping at the front desk when we come in. I appreciate that Abe isn’t asking any questions. I don’t mind answering questions, but my face hurts. When I look at the right side of the car, there’s a dent, compliments of Wesley’s shovel. I wonder if he’s left one on my head, too.

We get up to the sixth floor, and I collapse in the Eames chair. Kate’s going to be really pissed that the carpet probably has blood on it now.

“Looks like you got it,” Custalow says.

“What?”

He nods at my right hand.

I look down and see that I’m still gripping what I just took a major beat-down to get.

“Happy reading,” Abe says. “I hope it was worth it.”

A couple of Advils later, I realize that I never even thanked him for risking his freedom to help me chase some half-assed hunch.