CHAPTER TWO

Tuesday, September 3

Willow Oaks Country Club is a little outside my comfort zone. Country clubs in general haven’t played a big role in my life. However, we’re bidding adieu to one of the old guard today, and respects must be paid.

I walk into the entrance nearest where we parked.

“Flemish bond,” Cindy whispers, as if she’s passing on a state secret.

I don’t know Flemish bond from James Bond. Cindy sighs and points to the brickwork.

I stub out my cigarette on the walkway because the woman just inside the door looks like she might Tase me if I don’t.

Inside, there’s a sign, “Prescott party,” at the entrance of a room big enough for two hundred or so people, looking out on a golf course and the James River that floods it every once in a while. I am heartened to see that a bar has been set up. I start to head in that direction. Cindy grabs my arm and says, “Later.”

Walter Prescott was my first city editor. He is currently dead, which is the excuse for the party. There’ll be a burial later, but they won’t have an open bar at Hollywood Cemetery. This is the “celebration of his life.” It’s a shame Pressy couldn’t be here to help us celebrate, but that’s the way it goes.

The obit said he was eighty-nine. I’ve got to hand it to him. He did not go gently. He was on the treadmill at the Y downtown and either through operator error or machine malfunction, the damn thing went from casual stroll to 100-meter dash and threw Pressy all the way into the glass wall facing Franklin Street.

“Never knew what hit him,” Bootie Carmichael said when he relayed the sad news to me last Friday. If my long-suffering lungs and liver carry me to eighty-nine and the reaper ambushes me when I’m not looking, I can live, or die, with that.

Pressy was a bastard to work for. He was already past fifty when I started at the paper, and he took great pride in pointing out my literary shortcomings in a voice loud enough to inform half the newsroom.

“Black!” he’d yell. I’d come over to take my beating.

“Where the hell did you learn English?” he might ask. “Is it your second language?”

And then he would point out the vast difference between “presently” and “at present,” or how “enormousness” and “enormity” were two entirely different concepts.

Why did I love the old hard-drinking son of a bitch then? I guess because he taught me more in six months than I’d learned in all my college journalism courses. And he raised the bar so high that, when you did something praiseworthy and he acknowledged it, you felt your life had not been completely misspent.

“Not bad,” he would mutter, so low that no one but you and he could hear it.

And he actually seemed to worry about me. When he retired, now damn near a quarter of a century ago, he told me that I would go far “if your dick and your smart mouth don’t do you in.”

I’d already run through a couple of marriages by then, and I guess he knew it was only a matter of time before my lack of reverence for authority would bite me in the ass.

After I was demoted to night cops for refusing to do a sneak interview with a guy dying of AIDS, he phoned me.

“Dammit, Willie,” he said. “What’d I tell you?”

“Would you have sent me to ambush that guy?” I asked him when I’d given him the full account of what I was ordered to do.

I heard him sigh.

“Times have changed, Willie,” he said. “Change or die.”

Well, unlike Pressy, I’m not dead yet. The night police beat might suck on occasion, but it is above ground.

All the old crowd is here at the celebration. Newer folk like Mal Wheelwright and Sarah Goodnight, the two top guns in the newsroom, are present as well. Our publisher, the inestimable Benson Stine, had a previous engagement.

We manage to get seats near the back, close to the bar.

Things go well enough, for a while. A family member and a friend from his church say what you should say about the dead.

But then I see a familiar face and body stand and teeter toward the microphone.

“Damn,” I mutter, mostly under my breath. “Jimbo Frisque.”

“Who?” Cindy whispers.

“I’ll tell you later, after you tell me about Flemish bond.”

I hear a few murmurs around me from other now-retired colleagues.

Jimbo was the state editor when I arrived on the scene. He and Pressy had a hate-hate relationship. It probably went back to some slight that happened before my time, but it was exacerbated by the fact that many stories could fall into the bailiwick of either the state or city staff, and any time there was a question of ownership, the two of them went at it like pit bulls at feeding time. It probably didn’t help that both of them kept fifths in their desk drawers.

I saw them actually exchange blows once, when a small-plane crash up near the Henrico-Hanover was near the boundary between city and state territory. It wasn’t much of a fight, but Jimbo did lose a perfectly good necktie. Newsrooms were livelier back then, although when I tell these stories to the young’uns today, they don’t seem to feel the charm.

“So nobody did anything, like fire them or something?” Sarah asked me when she heard the story.

It was a lot harder to get fired back then, I explain.

I suppose some well-meaning member of Pressy’s small family thought it would be a good idea to ask the only other living retired editor from his heyday to say a few words.

It wasn’t.

Jimbo Frisque, who is pushing ninety hard, starts out on the right note. He mentions the time Pressy and a team of his reporters almost won a Pulitzer Prize. He praises his many years at the paper.

But then the paean turns into a roast.

“Pressy would have been even better,” he says, “if he had gone a little easier on the Jim Beam.”

A little nervous laughter rises up from the audience.

And then, after a couple of vignettes illustrating Pressy’s fondness for demon alcohol, he really steps in it.

Jimbo grins with his store-bought choppers and plunges on.

“And Walter Prescott was quite the ladies’ man,” he said. “Who can ever forget the Marshall Plan?”

“Oh, God,” I moan, as do others.

Cindy just looks at me.

And then Jimbo goes on to give the audience, those too young to have been there, the sordid details of the newsroom’s arrangement with a homeowner on Marshall Street.

Nobody knew how it began, but a handful of newsroom guys had an understanding with a man who lived there and who was willing to rent his place out during the daytime, while he was at work. The only caveat was that whoever possessed the sacred extra key and brought his honey there had to be out before five. The whole thing fell apart before I got there, something I will explain to Cindy later.

So Jimbo, using a few euphemisms, makes it clear that Pressy was an enthusiastic participant in the Marshall Plan.

By this time, no one is laughing.

It is a small mercy that Pressy’s wife of fifty-some years, Evelyn, passed a few years ago. However, his only son is sitting on the front row. He looks to be in his sixties. He walks up to the podium and tries to take the mic away from Jimbo.

Since the mic’s still on, we get treated to most of the play-by-play.

“Why don’t you sit down. I think you’ve said enough,” Pressy Junior says.

“I’m just telling it like it is,” Jimbo says. He’s hanging on to the mic.

“Sit the fuck down,” the son says.

“Like hell,” says Jimbo.

And then Jimbo gets his feet caught somehow and starts to fall. He grabs Pressy Junior and they both tumble. A couple of guys from the club, here to make sure we don’t steal the furniture, move in to separate them.

By the time it’s over, Jimbo is complaining about his hip and Pressy Junior has blood trickling from his mouth.

“Just like your old man,” we hear Jimbo shout. “Couldn’t take a joke.”

“Damn,” I hear Bootie Carmichael somewhere in front of me, “and they ain’t even opened up the bar yet.”

“The Marshall Plan,” Cindy says.

“I’ll tell you later.”

ONCE PEACE has been restored, the combo plays “Georgia on My Mind” because that’s where Pressy came from, and we all rush for the bar and the food.

Other than the Jimbo-Pressy Junior battle, the main topic of conversation at the “celebration” is Stick Davis, or rather my involvement with the late Mr. Davis. The story made A1 this morning.

Wheelie and Sarah knew I was working with Stick on his memoirs, with the understanding that I wouldn’t be doing anything on company time. We agreed that it would be just as well if Benson Stine was kept in the dark. B.S. believes that his underpaid toilers should spend all their waking hours pursuing good journalism until they are shitcanned in the latest bottom-line bloodletting.

“He probably is going to have a question or two about this,” Wheelie understates.

I give the assembled present and former staffers the quick version of the rise and fall of Stick Davis.

RANDOLPH GILES “Stick” Davis was, or could be, a lot of fun when we were younger. He had a disregard for rules and conventions that made him seem, to some, a romantic figure, the rebel who scoffed at such irritations as class assignments and alarm clocks.

He was a middle-class kid from the North Side. He grew up a block away from Tom Wolfe’s boyhood home, although a good bit later. We were both mass com majors at VCU, and, truth be known, I was no slave to others’ expectations, either, so we had that in common. And the drinking, of course.

What many of his acquaintances figured out earlier than I did was this: If you don’t really give a shit about anybody else’s needs, it does not make you a good person, or even a really cool person. As Stick grew older (he never graduated, despite seven years of pretending to be a student), the late, drunken appearances and no-shows eroded affections.

Once, when I was still married to my first wife, Jeanette, I had a rare weekend off, and it was arranged that we, Stick, and his (soon-to-be-ex) wife would go up to the mountains for a couple of days. I had rented a cabin with two bedrooms.

We were supposed to leave at nine Saturday morning. I called Stick at ten, and eleven, and noon. At some point, midafternoon, Jeanette and I took off alone. It was before cell phones, so we had no further contact with Stick until we got back from our abbreviated getaway late Sunday afternoon.

When I called sometime after five, Stick answered the phone.

“Oh, man,” he said when I inquired about his absence. “Was that this weekend?”

He didn’t even offer to pay his half of the bill for the room.

No saint myself, I stayed with him longer than just about anyone else.

The last straw was back when my third wife, Kate, and I invited him over for drinks and dinner, probably a dozen years ago. He arrived at the Prestwould an hour and a half late and stewed to the gills. Kate’s chicken cordon bleu had to be reheated in the microwave, and shortly after we finally sat down to eat, he got up to go to the john, stumbled, and knocked over a nearly full bottle of chardonnay, which went all over the tablecloth and then the floor.

“Sorry,” he said.

When I saw him to the door, I was pretty sure I wasn’t ever going to see Stick Davis again in a social setting, or at least one at which I played host. Kate reinforced this belief even before the elevator arrived to take him away.

He didn’t reenter my life for a long time. Some of us who knew him wondered what happened to him in recent years, but nobody gave enough of a shit to really check it out.

ONE NIGHT last October, I got a call.

“Hey, man,” the voice said. “Long time, no hear.”

I was just about to hang up when he told me who it was.

He gave me the short version: He’d been away for a while, like ten years, “Down in the islands, man. Good money down there, I tell you.”

He said he was back now, and that he wanted to talk over an idea with me.

“Could be some big bucks in it. More than that damn paper’s paying you, I bet.”

I could hear his laugh break into a smoker’s hack.

I had never benefitted from any of Stick’s schemes over the years. He was the one who tried to hook me into selling Amway. He was the one, when we were still in college, who thought I might be interested in going partners with him retailing recreational drugs.

I therefore was a little skeptical. I told Stick I had enough money, a lie, but I was trying to make it clear that whatever he was selling, I wasn’t buying.

“Ah, man,” he said. “I’m talking about serious money. I’m talking about a book.”

I should have hung up. Instead I let him talk.

The book he wanted me to write, or ghost-write, was his autobiography, his “memoirs.” I resisted the urge to ask him what he’d ever done that would justify a memoir. I know everybody who can read and write and has hash to settle is writing them now, but Stick Davis’s life, or the part about which I knew, was hardly the stuff of best sellers. Recent top-ten lists notwithstanding, being an asshole should not be the only requirement.

He got my attention, though, when he said he’d pay me fifty thousand dollars, five thousand up front. He further piqued my interest with what he said next.

“Timing is kind of essential,” he said. “I think I might be on somebody’s shit list, if you know what I mean.”

I didn’t know exactly what he meant, but 5K is 5K, and I figured it couldn’t hurt to have a cup of coffee with the guy. So we agreed to meet the next day at the Lamplighter over on Morris Street, an easy walk from the Prestwould.

When I told Cindy about it, she was less than thrilled. She’d heard the stories.

“He doesn’t come here,” she said. I agreed. Kate, now our landlady, would probably pull the plug on our rental agreement if she knew Stick Davis had set foot inside our unit.

I was at the Lamplighter at ten. Amazingly so was Stick. Had my old drinking buddy finally found a conscience and an alarm clock?

I hadn’t seen Stick in more than a decade. In that time, he had, unlike most of us, lost a few pounds. His hair, graying at forty, had magically turned kind of a dirty blond, worn long and shaggy. He had a nasty-looking goatee and a mustache; he seemed to have tanned himself half to death and now was kind of a burnt-orange color. He was wearing sunglasses inside. College students having their morning lattes sneaked stares at him. A dog growled when he walked by.

So, I asked, where the fuck have you been?

He told me. At least he told me some of it.

He’d been back in Richmond for six months “just kind of chilling out, you know.”

Sometime after we parted company all those years ago following the unfortunate wine incident, he had moved to the Charlottesville area and managed to get involved with a man named Whitney Charles.

“He was looking for a personal chef, man,” Stick said as he poured about a pound of sugar into his coffee. “And I had done some work as a cook at a couple of places. And one night, we were at the same bar and got to talking. Next thing you know, I had a damn job, just cooking for one guy and his guests.”

Stick said he did a crash course in gourmet cooking.

“I was actually pretty good at it,” he said, kind of wistful, the unspoken part being that Stick was never much good at anything else, including journalism. He said he chose mass communications as his major because ‘that’s where the chicks are.’

“There was a lot more to it than just cooking,” he said.

Whitney Charles, who owned one of those big-ass places you see down in the valley when you’re driving through western Albemarle on I-64, decided to relocate.

Stick said “Virgin Gorda” like everybody would know where the hell it was. I had to look it up later on Google Maps. It seemed like the kind of place you went where you weren’t expecting or wanting a lot of company.

“Fat virgin,” Stick said, laughing. “But nobody much was fat, and there weren’t a hell of a lot of virgins around, if you know what I mean.”

At any rate, he told me enough about what went on outside the kitchen to make me think Stick Davis maybe had led an interesting enough life to merit a half-assed memoir.

But he wouldn’t tell me everything.

“You’ll know the whole story when we get there,” he said.

Without the other 45K awaiting me when we finished, I’d have told him to take a hike, I guess. I had to admit, though, that he had piqued my interest. Like, for instance, where the hell did Stick Davis, who used to borrow money from anyone stupid enough to loan him any, come up with enough dough to give a newspaper hack that kind of money to write his life story?

I did suggest to Stick that he could do this himself.

He shrugged.

“Aw, hell, Willie. Just because I majored in that shit didn’t mean I could write. And you could. Still can. I read the paper.”

He handed me a check for five thousand dollars. When I deposited it, it didn’t bounce.

And so we began.

I would go over to Stick’s rental in Westwood and interview him two or three times a week, then go home and write what I could. I told him that it would work better if I knew where this story was going, but he said wait and see.

BY THE time I’ve brought my colleagues up to date on the late Stick Davis, a small crowd has gathered around the bar the club set up for us. The staff is starting to put the booze away, so everybody gets one more to go.

“But how does it end?” Ray Long on the copy desk asks.

I take a sip of bourbon and shrug.

“Hell if I know. We never got that far.”

“So you didn’t bump him off?” Bootie Carmichael asks, grinning.

“I haven’t killed anyone in years.”

I DROP Cindy off at the Prestwould before heading in to work. She’s a little concerned about my status as a possible suspect in a homicide, but she’s kind of preoccupied. Her loving son, Chip, has been sniffing around again, trying to wheedle a loan from his mom.

“He says this time he and his ‘associates’ have found just the right place for a restaurant,” she told me last night. “This one, he says, can’t miss.”

The last one sure as hell did, I remind her.

The way she says “he says” tells me that she’s not buying any of the Chipster’s bullshit. Still, it weighs on a mother when she can’t give her retirement savings to her feckless son so that he can piss it away.

I pat her knee and tell her I know she’ll do the right thing.

“Willie,” she says as she opens the passenger-side door on my venerable Honda, “you don’t know anything about what might have gotten that guy killed, do you?”

I assure her that I do not.

“Could have been a burglary gone bad,” I tell her.

Back at the paper, ready to cover whatever mayhem a pleasant Tuesday evening might bring to the night police beat, I think about it.

Leighton Byrd comes by to thank me for letting her write the story of Stick Davis’s demise. I remind her that, from this point on, this baby is mine.

She seems miffed, but the fetching Leighton will have to pad her résumé elsewhere, assuming I can keep my ass out of jail. This story has more legs than a millipede.

A botched burglary is a reasonable explanation, but they don’t happen that much in the part of Richmond where Stick was renting. And even in the rare break-in gone bad, the victim usually isn’t turned into Swiss cheese and used as an ashtray.

Somebody didn’t like Stick Davis very much, is my belief at this point. He had hinted that he might have some enemies.

Or maybe he just showed up late one time too many.