CHAPTER THREE

Wednesday, September 4

Maybe leaving Stick Davis’s body where I found it, carefully wiping the doorknob and anything else I touched, and letting somebody else discover it when it started to smell might not have been the worst idea. No good deed, etc.

I got a call from one of L.D. Jones’s detectives first thing this morning. Could I come down to headquarters to clear up a couple of matters regarding Randolph Giles Davis?

Well, of course I could. Nothing would please me more, except maybe a colonoscopy without anesthesia.

L.D.’s empire is only a few blocks away. I detour to pay a visit to the esteemed law practice of Green and Ellis. Marcus Green, the town’s most self-promoting ambulance chaser, is now partner, in business and in bed, with Kate Ellis, my third and second-to-last wife. She opted not to change her name, maybe to honor the memory of the husband she married and then lost between me and Marcus due to the unfortunate merger of an airplane with a local eatery.

Marcus and I help each other out occasionally, and there are no hard feelings about the bed thing. Hell, I even went to their wedding.

“I wondered how long it’d take you to show up,” Marcus says when I walk into their little two-lawyers-and-an-aide operation on Franklin. He is immaculate in his three-piece suit. His mahogany head looks like he polished it this morning. He seems to be smirking. “I knew you were a bad man, Willie, but murder?”

He lets go with that rumbling, baritone laugh of his. Obviously Marcus thinks this is a hell of a lot funnier than I do.

I tell him what he already knows, that I might need a lawyer.

“Don’t know if you can afford me,” he says.

He pauses for effect.

“Just kiddin’. We’ll work something out.”

Marcus often takes cases on the cheap, or even pro bono, if they promise to enhance his image as the man to see if you’ve done something really bad and can pay big bucks to make it go away. Now that Kate’s his partner, they’ve had to tweak the TV ad you see every five damn minutes during the evening news around here. The new one: “Want to get ruthless? Call Green and Ellis.” It is my opinion that Kate does not scowl nearly as well as Marcus in the video, although in our years of marital bliss, she did have plenty of opportunities to work on her frown lines.

Marcus asks me if I want him to come with me to this morning’s session with the cops. I tell him I’ll handle this one on my own, that I want to know how damn serious the police are about me being a suspect.

Kate comes out of her office and says hello, among other things.

“You didn’t tell me that you were on speaking terms with that jerk again,” she says, giving me a pretty good scowl.

I assure her that Stick Davis has not been inside the unit she’s renting to us and that I haven’t forgotten the infamous chardonnay incident.

“If I’d had a gun,” she mutters, as she turns around, “I’d have shot him myself.”

“Take care, Willie,” Marcus says when he shows me out. “Don’t say anything you’ll wish you hadn’t later.”

I’m not too worried about that. There aren’t a lot of perks to being night police reporter, but knowing how the cops operate is one of them.

I DRIVE down to the paper and park in the lot I’m paying for already, then take the one-Camel walk back to police headquarters.

The chief wants to sit in on this one. L.D. and a couple of his detectives invite me into a too-small room where, I am assured, smoking is not permitted, although a little nicotine might improve the smell of the place.

“We just want to get the facts straight,” the bigger one, a white guy with a mustache and a beer gut, says. “Just tell us what happened.”

The other one just nods his head. I don’t think they’re dumb enough to try good-cop, bad-cop on me, but who knows?

And so I start to explain it all again. I take out my notebook, where I wrote it all down two days ago, just to be sure there are no inconsistencies.

“You’re not sure what happened?” the other dick, a black guy who is about five foot six and weighs maybe 120 pounds, asks. He seems to adopt something between a smirk and a sneer.

I just stare.

“Go on,” the chief says. I just look at him and shake my head, then continue.

When I’m done, they ask me a few questions designed to trip me up, trying to cast doubt about the time frame, inquiring again as to whether I’d seen Stick since we last met in person on Thursday.

“And you’d never been in the deceased’s home until you went in and allegedly found the body on September 2.”

I slam my right fist down on the table, startling the two detectives and causing L.D. to spill some coffee on his shirt.

“I just told you three goddamn minutes ago that we met at his apartment several times over the last few months, to go over what I’d written so far,” I explain with all the calmness and civility these idiots deserve. “Aren’t you listening?”

The big one seems to be in favor of giving me a good Tasing, but the chief motions for him to back off.

I tell them about Stick mentioning, back when this whole project started, that he might have an enemy or two out there. Nobody seems to take much interest in that.

They ask a few more inane questions. Then they slap their little notebooks shut.

“We’ll be speaking with you later,” the short one says. “Don’t leave town.”

I tell him he’ll be leaving town before I do, and that the next time we meet, I’ll have Marcus Green with me.

“Only a man with something to hide gets a lawyer,” the big one says.

“Only a fool doesn’t,” I reply.

After the detectives leave, L.D. asks me to hang back.

“Do you really think I killed Stick Davis?” I ask my old frenemy.

He sighs.

“Willie, I don’t believe or disbelieve. I just go with the facts. And we don’t know of anybody who’d had contact with Mr. Davis recently except you.”

I express the hope that he and his minions are trying to find alternative suspects. He assures me that they are.

I note that I don’t even own a gun. The only one I’ve had in my whole life I turned in during one of those police department buy-backs years ago.

“People borrow guns,” the chief says.

“Do you know how crazy this is?”

L.D. doesn’t answer at first.

“Willie,” he says when he clears his throat. “Do you remember that guy that was murdering those young black boys around here a few years back?”

Hell, I should, since I helped show the cops that the late James Alderman was a stone psychopath.

“Well,” he goes on, “that man was a so-called pillar of the community, and we find out he was slaughtering little kids.”

“Your point?”

He looks at me and shakes his head.

“You never know,” he says. “You just never know.”

We leave it at that. I advise him to get smarter detectives, and then I leave.

I’m sure something, DNA or a witness or something, will clear all this up. Still, it pisses me off.

BACK AT the word factory, there is reason to hope that our publisher will be distracted from reading me the riot act over (a) doing freelance work on the side without telling him and (b) managing to make myself the prime suspect in a murder case.

“We don’t have enough homicides around here, you’ve got to start doing them yourself?” Sally Velez asks, not looking up. I emphasize to her how much I am not amused.

The shiny object that I pray will distract Benson Stine from chewing on my ass is a hurricane.

We get all quivery around here when there’s a storm somewhere between the Cape Verde islands and downtown Richmond. And this one looks like it might justify the fact that we now have a full-time weather reporter. Dorian hit somewhere in the Bahamas with 185-mile-per-hour winds three days ago, and now it’s treading water out there in the Atlantic like a mean drunk trying to decide who to hit next.

Yesterday it started moving in our general direction, causing a serious run on water, toilet paper, beer, Cheetos, and other necessities.

Usually these things skirt the coast and wind up in Nova Scotia or some damn where else up north. On the off chance that this one will head straight for the holy city, though, we are overplaying the shit out of it. Maps, predictions, interviews with idiots in line at the grocery store, updates on Dominion Power’s plans for after the apocalypse. We’ve got it all. Hey, it sells papers. Our readers would much rather read about possible death and destruction than peruse some happy-news piece about people trying to make the world a better place.

And so I find the newsroom a relative whirlwind of activity. I say “relative” because it’s hard to stir up a big media storm when you only have about a third of the people we had back when newspapers were relevant and turned a profit.

Still we try. The weather guy, who’s about half my age and is, I understand, making about as much as I am, is scurrying around like he runs the place. Hell, from the way B.S. is sitting there, letting him order people about, maybe he does.

The kid is dressed for heavy weather, even though the sun’s shining here. He’s headed down to the Outer Banks so he can feel Dorian’s vibe firsthand.

“Sure would hate to have something happen to the weather guy,” I hear Enos Jackson mutter. That’s actually what everyone calls him: Weather Guy. His real name is Guy Flowers, but hardly anybody calls him that. It’s either Weather Guy, or W.G.

Unfortunately, Stine spots me before I can duck into the snack room. He is walking in my direction, and it seems like bad form to turn and run. What the hell. Might as well face the music.

He motions me into the managing editor’s office. Wheelie, our ME, is, as usual, in a meeting elsewhere.

“So,” our publisher says, “I understand that we’re not paying you enough.”

“Have I asked for a raise?” I inquire.

“You have not,” he says. “And it would have been a waste of time if you had. No raises until we turn the bottom line around.”

I don’t mention that making a print newspaper turn a good profit these days would be too much even for a competent publisher who didn’t work for the Grimm Group, hands-down the stingiest media chain in North America.

“So you just decided to give yourself a raise,” he says.

I point out that not one damn minute of the time I spent working on Stick Davis’s memoirs was stolen from the company.

“What if there had been a triple homicide when you were working on this character’s so-called memoirs?”

I have the answer for that one, except it was a double homi. It happened three weeks ago, and I stopped writing the Stick Davis story long enough, on one of my alleged days off, to rush over to the East End and cover it.

“Well,” B.S. says, “that might be the case, but …”

“It is the case. If I say it was the case, dammit, it is the case.”

“Just a figure of speech,” Stine says, backing up a little. “But now you’ve got us dragged into a murder story. We aren’t here to make the news, Willie, we’re supposed to be here to cover it.”

How, I inquire, am I supposed to be responsible for the city cops thinking I killed somebody?

“Don’t be at the scene of the crime?” he suggests. “Don’t be the only one known to have seen Mr. Davis in the days before his death? I can think of lots of ways, Willie.”

I’ve taken my full quota of crap about something I didn’t do.

“If you really think I’m a liability to this paper, or I’ve been stealing time from it,” I tell B.S., “then do what you have to do. Meanwhile I’m going to do my job, assuming I still have one.”

I turn to walk out of the office, wondering if the parting words from our publisher will be “You’re fired.”

Instead, Stine says, “Just get this mess cleared up. It’s making the paper look bad.”

I resist the urge to do a U-ey and make Benson Stine’s nose look bad. Hell, I need the job.

There isn’t much to do except try to find out what really happened to Stick Davis. During all the sessions we had after I agreed to ghostwrite his memoirs, he never said anything solid about enemies he might have accumulated over the years, just that one hint about someone or ones he’d pissed off.

We had gotten to the part where he found himself a benefactor, Whitney Charles, and followed him down to the Caribbean, specifically to Virgin Gorda. Stick had told me a lot about his sexual adventures down there, many of them not age-appropriate, and a little about some of the things he was doing for Charles acting as what Stick called his majordomo. He was still a little coy about what exactly he did do, but it was pretty obvious that, unless the laws in the British Virgin Islands were drastically different than they are in Virginia, felonies were committed.

How, I asked Stick, is all this going to turn into something that will make it worthwhile for you to pay me fifty thousand dollars to write it?

“Just wait,” he said. “The good stuff is coming.”

Halfway through, I was still waiting for the good stuff when somebody made Stick Davis dead.

IT’S TOO early in the day for much mayhem to erupt, so I slip out from hurricane central.

I drive over to Westwood. There’s yellow crime tape around the door of the place Skip was renting, and I see that there’s a cop car outside. I figured that would be the case, but it doesn’t hurt to try.

Despite the impending killer hurricane, it’s a pretty nice day. I delay trying to get into the scene of the crime long enough to drive around the neighborhood.

It’s hard to imagine what it must have looked like, back when it was a tucked-away haven for former slaves, far enough away from Richmond to have its own identity. It’s a little sliced-up these days, and a lot of the houses that still stand have been added on to.

From what I hear, a lot of the folks who come to services at the Baptist church live elsewhere now, scattered to the winds but still faithful to their parents’ and grand-parents’ church.

I watch some kids playing basketball on the church’s outdoor courts and contemplate Stick Davis.

There must be something somewhere in his last dwelling that could tell me how the hell all this happened.

I drive back to Stick’s place and park.

The cops, two of them, are still there, sitting in their squad car. When I walk up and lean into the driver’s-side window, I see the face of my old pal Chauncey Gillespie.

“Any chance I could get in there and take a look?” I ask, knowing what the answer will be.

Gillespie just laughs.

“So you can destroy evidence?”

I tell him that there are some notebooks in there that I need to get my hands on.

Stick alluded more than once to his notebooks, as if all would be revealed in those sacred texts.

Gillespie and his partner not only won’t let me inside, they won’t even let me get close enough to peek in the windows.

“No donuts for you,” I admonish my old pal, who tells me to get the fuck out of there.

I’ll get into Stick’s place somehow, but not today.

There’s nothing else to do but go back to the office and await the demonic Dorian.