CHAPTER FOUR

Thursday, September 5

Last night was quiet, by Richmond mayhem standards.

Nothing really felonious was brought to my attention. A couple of poor saps went off an exit ramp in a pickup just beyond where I-95 crosses the river and became very dead, but nobody told us about it until this morning. A guy out in Chesterfield caught a couple of kids rifling through his car for pocket change and thought that gave him the right to shoot them. Luckily he missed, succeeding in blowing out his own windshield and getting his own ass arrested, but that’s not my bailiwick.

So I had time to do a little checking up on the late Mr. Davis.

I was able to find one family member. Through my reliable cops source, Peachy Love, reporter turned police flack, I got the name of what passes for next of kin—one George Davis.

“I think he goes by ‘Snake,’ ” Peachy said, and she gave me his address.

Apparently the cops contacted the guy on Tuesday and got him to go down to the morgue and identify his brother.

“The officer I talked to said he didn’t seem all that broken up.”

The brother told the cops that their parents were dead.

“He seemed concerned that he might have to pay for burial expenses,” Peachy said.

Stick and Snake, I’m thinking. With nicknames like that, they should’ve grown up down the street from me in Oregon Hill.

Three times, I tried the number Peachy gave me. Finally, sometime after nine, I got an answer.

George “Snake” Davis, I knew from the records I’d looked up after talking to Peachy, was born in 1952, making him eight years older than Stick. He wasn’t guilty of anything worse, the record showed, than a couple of DUIs. I can hardly fault him for that. Glass houses and all.

I explained who I was and tried to build some rapport with Mr. Davis, who seemed to be a few sheets into the wind.

“Do you know anything about the funeral?” I asked.

He wasn’t terribly forthcoming. He figured I had an angle and was somehow going to cost him money.

Finally, though, I got it through his thick skull that I was only trying to find out what happened to his damn brother.

“You the one that found him?” Snake asked, although I imparted that information five minutes earlier.

“Well,” he said after I had confirmed that I was indeed the one, “he was shot up pretty good, wasn’t he?”

Yes, I agreed, he was.

I asked again about the funeral.

“Oh, that’s all taken care of.”

I have some knowledge of what funerals cost. I pressed for more information.

“The fella he worked for, down there in the islands. He sent a certified check.”

“Whit Charles?”

“Yeah. That’s the one. Don’t even know how he knew Stick died. But I got word from the morgue that he had somehow found out. They wanted me to make the arrangements.”

I asked about those arrangements. After the autopsy, Stick Davis had been cremated, his brother told me, but there will be a small gathering at O’Toole’s, a fine drinking and eating establishment not far from where Snake lives, on Saturday.

“And he paid to have something put in the paper. I give ’em all the information I knew. And I let that girl know, the one he’s been seeing.”

OK, I knew Stick had a girlfriend out there somewhere, but I never met her. I had to get her name from Snake, who also had her phone number. Terri McAllister. I wrote down the number.

“Do you know why anybody would want to kill your brother?” I inquired.

George Davis laughed, kind of a sad laugh, I thought.

“Oh, Stick, he was always gettin’ on somebody’s bad side. I suppose he finally picked the wrong one to piss off.”

He hadn’t known much if any more about what his brother had been up to for the past decade or so than I had.

“I’d get a Christmas card from him, usually in January. He hinted about having something big going on down there, but I never could get him to tell me what exactly. I seen him maybe three times since he come back here.”

Snake had no contact information for Whitney Charles, either, just his name on a certified check.

I asked if it would be OK if I came to the affair at O’Toole’s, and Snake said that’d be fine.

“The more the merrier. Hell, I don’t even know if Stick had ever been to O’Toole’s, but that’s where I hang out, and that girl, Terri, she knows where it is.”

I wondered who else would be there for a guy who seemed to have left almost no footprints in Richmond at all.

THIS MORNING, the obit’s in the paper. He’s listed as Randolph Giles “Stick” Davis, and his whole life is summed up in fifteen lines. Who his parents were, who his brother is, his “special friend” Terri McAllister, that he attended VCU, and was working in “international finance.” Snake must have pulled that one straight out of his ass. They give the time and place for a “celebration” on Saturday. When I die, I don’t want people to celebrate. I want wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I think that I could have added a little information, but at least, with the obit in the paper, maybe an old friend or two will show up, if Stick still had any.

Cindy’s gone already when I get up. I’m perusing Stick’s obit at the breakfast table, with Butterball perched at my feet, hoping for a few crumbs, when the phone rings.

The voice, like distant thunder, is unmistakable. Franklin “Big Boy” Sunday.

“Wanted you to know,” he rumbles. “They got Jerome in jail for killing that fella.”

“What fella?”

“The one you was supposed to of killed.”

Enlighten me, I implore.

Jerome is Jerome Sheets, who is or was one of Big Boy’s henchmen/drivers. He might have driven me the few times I’ve been uneasily in the company of his boss. All of Big Boy’s drivers looked as if they would have liked to have fucked me up just for being partly white.

Sometime after ten last night, the cops caught young Jerome, who is seventeen years old, allegedly breaking and entering at a place over east of Libbie, between Patterson and Broad. He made a run for it, but they caught him. He’d thrown the bag with whatever he’d stolen into a ditch, but they found that soon enough.

It was what else they found that has the kid in deep shit.

“He was wearing the man’s watch,” Big Boy says. “Had that Davis guy’s initials on it and everything. Some cop was smart enough to see the initials and had a hunch.”

Yes, I remember that watch. Stick was proud as hell of it, said it was worth five thousand dollars, which I doubted. Still, quite the watch.

Late in the evening, acting on that hunch, the city’s legal brain trust was able to get a judge to issue a search warrant for Jerome’s mom’s place. Sometime in the middle of the night, Big Boy says, they did the search. They found, among other things, Stick Davis’s wallet and his VCU class ring. I’m amazed that the cops didn’t notice his lack of jewelry or billfold on Monday. I’m amazed that I didn’t, considering how much Stick thought of that watch.

There were some unidentified fingerprints at the scene. Some will be mine, but it seems highly likely that some of them will be found to belong to Jerome Sheets.

“The thing is,” Big Boy says, after I hear him yell to somebody to bring him some more coffee, “I don’t believe the boy did it.”

As the previous prime suspect, this is not what I want to hear.

“Aw, hell, Willie,” my caller says, laughing, “I don’t think you killed the fella either. No offense, but you ain’t got the balls to go shoot somebody up like that.”

I don’t know whether to be offended or not.

“But Jerome, he ain’t no killer. Hell, I’ve known that boy since he was a baby. He acts tough. Got to act tough where he comes from. But he ain’t no killer. Hell, I don’t even let him pack. Don’t need anybody shootin’ people up while they’re in my employ. Bad for business.”

I have my doubts about Big Boy Sunday’s assertion but keep it to myself.

So Jerome Sheets is down at the lockup now, and I’m sure that word will get out very soon about a press conference this morning. When white folks get murdered in their own residences, L.D. Jones wants it known ASAP that the perp has been caught.

I thank Big Boy for giving me a head start on this one.

“Well,” he says, drawing it out to three syllables, “there is a little tit for tat here, if you know what I mean.”

Big Boy enlightens me.

He would consider it a very big favor if I’d look into this miscarriage of justice and try to ensure that Jerome doesn’t go to the death house for something he didn’t do.

“He’s been known to do a little burglary, now and then, but he ain’t no killer.”

I ask my caller how exactly I’m supposed to effect what he sees as justice.

“You got a reputation, Willie,” he explains. “I know you won’t stop just because the po-po say they got the right one this time. I’m counting on you, Willie.”

It is not wise to disappoint Big Boy Sunday. His boy Jerome might not be a killer, but Big Boy’s got a few associates who sure as hell are.

I ask him again why he’s so sure Jerome didn’t do the deed. He could, I suggest, have surprised Stick and been forced to shoot him. I mean, we have kids younger than him doing the deed all the time around these parts.

“I talked to his momma,” Big Boy says.

Jerome’s mother swears that her son has never owned a gun and hadn’t ever even fired one.

“And I believe her,” he adds. “I believe her because me and her been what you would call intimate for years, and I know she told me the truth. She knows it wouldn’t be smart to do otherwise. Plus, I know that boy.”

What can I do? I promise Big Boy Sunday that I will do the best I can.

“I know you, Willie,” the big man says. “I know you will.”

I DON’T wait to get a call from the office about a press conference. It’s too much fun to call L.D. Jones in person.

“Tell him,” I inform his aide, “that I want to talk to him about Jerome Sheets.”

The chief is on the line in no time at all.

“You don’t know shit,” he says by way of greeting. “This doesn’t get you off the hook. I hope you know that.”

I then tell him pretty much what I know he’s going to tell the assembled and shrinking news media in a couple of hours: Kid from the East End was arrested wearing Stick Davis’s watch. They found his wallet and class ring in his mother’s house after getting a late-night search warrant.

“All I need to know,” I tell L.D., “is whether or not the fingerprints match.”

“You’ll get it when everybody else does,” the chief says. “And if I ever find out who’s feeding you this shit, he’s going to be a school safety guard for the rest of his natural police life.”

I make a deal with him. If he’ll let me take a quick look around the deceased’s study, I won’t post anything on our website until after the press conference. It’s a dicey deal, I know, but who the hell is going to care whether our readers learn this scintillating detail now or two hours later? These days, we are much more concerned with being first than being right, but I can always tell Sarah and Wheelie, if they find out I knew ahead of time, that I was just trying to make sure.

And I really need to get into that study.

L.D. is quiet for several seconds.

“Fifteen minutes,” he says when he finally answers. “And my men will be watching you like a goddamn hawk. You mess with evidence and I will mess you up.”

I agree with the chief’s rules.

So, I ask, am I free to leave the country now?

“You stay right where the hell you are,” he growls.

I wish the chief a nice day and say that I’ll see him soon, at the press conference.

THE PRESSER is at ten thirty. The chief assures the media that a “person of interest” is now behind bars, pending further investigation.

“Is Willie Black still a suspect?” one of the TV riffraff asks, a grin on his well-tanned face.

“Nothing has changed on that front,” L.D. replies, not looking in my direction.

I file for the website from my car, then head straight to the place in Westwood.

A couple of cops I don’t know are guarding it, and they look at me like I’ve got an extra head when I tell them the chief said I could look around. They won’t let me in until I finally get L.D. on the phone and he tells them it’s OK. They are less than thrilled about it.

“Your fifteen minutes just started,” one of them says to me as I slip under the yellow crime tape and we walk inside. I’m sure he’ll be timing me to the second.

I poke around for what I should have looked for last Monday but kind of got caught up in the moment.

They aren’t there.

Stick had kept notebooks, lots of them. He would refer to them sometimes when we were collaborating, but he wouldn’t let me look at them. The way it worked, he’d refer to the notebooks and tell me what he wanted me to write. I’d turn his ramblings into something publishable and then run the results past Stick. Then we’d get together at his place and he’d tell me what he did or didn’t like about what I’d done. It was a fairly amicable if tedious working relationship, but whenever I wanted to know what came next, or what was in all those notebooks, he turned into the goddamn sphinx.

I walk around the tape outlining the position of Stick’s fallen body, the carpet pretty much permanently ruined by his blood. I look around the desk and check all the drawers as the two cops bird-dogging me keep warning me not to take anything. There’s no sign of the notebooks.

Peachy Love has given me a good description of what the police found in that sack Jerome Sheets threw out, and what was hidden at his mom’s place, and there was nothing about any notebooks. And why the hell would a junior felon bother with stealing paper anyhow?

I have more than a hundred pages of the Stick Davis story on my computer at home, saved on Gmail as well, but we were just getting to the good stuff, I thought, when Stick’s clock ran out.

Stick was renting the place from some folks who bought it as an investment. It is a nice place: good-sized living room, the study, a small kitchen-dining room, two bedrooms, one bath, and a nice deck out back. I see nothing in any of those rooms that I’m looking for.

“Time’s up,” the lead cop says much too soon.

I tell him he’s been a big help. He doesn’t seem to understand sarcasm.

MY HEAD is spinning. I know I didn’t kill Stick Davis, and I’m pretty sure that somebody other than Jerome Sheets has been rummaging around in Davis’s office between the last time I saw him alive and my finding the body. And why is Whit Charles springing for the funeral expenses of his former major (or at least minor) domo?

While I ponder all this, there’s plenty of time to give my old mom a visit before heading into the office.

Peggy is, well, Peggy. She is, as she so elegantly puts it, “seventy-fucking-seven years old.” She is wearing a T-shirt and jeans. The T-shirt is Grateful Dead-themed, circa 1975, which is probably when she bought it. And she is, as usual, mildly stoned.

If they ever do a comprehensive study of the effect of long-term marijuana use on a person’s lungs, brain, and other parts, my mother should be Exhibit A.

She managed to hold a variety of jobs as I was growing up under her single parentage, and she always seemed to be there for me. I was probably in my mid-teens before I realized that her affinity for Oreos and her mellow outlook toward even the cruelest of life’s tricks was not organic, unless you count the fact that cannabis is a plant.

It didn’t really bother me. There were lots worse mothers than Peggy on the Hill back then, trust me. And despite it all, she’s in better shape than I am. She says I’m smoking the wrong thing.

Peggy and Awesome Dude, her permanent and platonic (please God, let it be platonic) houseguest, are watching some cooking show on one of the umpteen channels devoted to food.

“That’s making me hungry,” Peggy says as she watches some woman whip up a four-course dinner for eight without seeming to break a sweat.

Then she remembers that her darling boy has been making the news lately, and not in a good way.

“You didn’t kill that fella, did you?” she asks.

“Nah,” Awesome interjects. “Willie wouldn’t kill nobody.”

I assure them both that this is true and let them know that Richmond’s finest have found a more likely suspect.

“Well, I didn’t think you did,” Peggy says and offers me a Miller, the family beverage.

She says she called me right after the news broke that I was a suspect “but then I kind of forgot about it.” I tell her no harm, no foul.

She gets out some cold cuts and the three of us have lunch. I try to keep an eye on my mom to make sure she isn’t drifting into an area where she’ll need more help than the feckless Dude can give her, but I can’t detect anything. Since Peggy is a little bit buzzed all the time, it might be hard to tell when and if real and true dementia sets in.

She assures me that all is well with Andi, Walter, and young William, my five-year old grandson and light of our lives. Andi did call me after the news broke about Stick Davis, and I have assured her that her dad’s not going to the slammer.

I give my mom a little rundown on Stick, going back to the days when he managed to eventually alienate most of his friends.

“He sounds like an asshole,” is Peggy’s assessment. “What the hell were you doing working with a guy like that?”

“Money.”

“Yeah, money can screw things up,” she says. “Luckily I never let it ruin me.”

She laughs loud enough to disturb the neighbors.

I COME to work a little early. There’s the story on Jerome Sheets to write, plus I’d like to do something more on Stick Davis, like why a guy from the British Virgin Islands is springing for his funeral expenses.

Our publisher comes by and pats me on the back.

“I knew you didn’t do it,” he says, in a way that indicates that he wasn’t sure at all until Jerome Sheets’s arrest. I remind him that I’m not in the clear yet. He frowns and walks away.

The newsroom rumor mill is working overtime. The latest gossip has it that deadlines are going to be moved up.

This has been a sore point for years, especially among the boys and girls in Toyland, the sports department. Every time we are gifted with a new technological breakthrough, the deadlines seem to get tighter.

Bootie Carmichael can remember when our city-edition readers were privy to the previous night’s West Coast baseball box scores. Now they’re lucky if they get all the East Coast games.

And, as we have learned, things can get worse—apparently are getting worse. Starting soon, rumor has it, the lockup for our last (and now only) edition will be ten P.M. That means a nine thirty deadline for copy. If a college hoops game starts shortly after seven and there are the requisite number of TV timeouts, we figure the hapless sportswriter will have about five minutes to write the game story.

And, of course, we will have to politely request that our local felons start shooting each other a little earlier in the evening.

We will, as usual, tell the readers that they can read all about it on our handy online website, for free until they hit the firewall, at which point most of them just go to another site.

A cynic might think we didn’t want to be pestered with putting out a print newspaper, with all that expensive paper and all those costly freelance carriers.

Will the last print subscriber please turn off the printing presses?

After I finish my piece on Jerome Sheets’s arrest, I have to hustle out to the scene of a shooting on Chamberlayne Avenue. Two young men, allegedly minding their own business, were sprayed coming out of a place specializing in hot wings. One of them is not expected to make it. Nobody in the fairly crowded eatery saw anything.

I do manage to squeeze in a couple of hours to do a little online research on Whitney Charles.

Mr. Charles, who seems to prefer “Whit,” appeared in our electronic files a few times before he left the commonwealth in 2005. He was and presumably is a lawyer. He was involved in a few development deals around Charlottesville that were mentioned by our business department, and he made the state and local front three times that I could find because he seemed to be a little careless with some of his clients’ money. He managed to get himself named guardian for several of them, and the clients’ heirs, upon getting the final accounting, wondered where the hell all of Uncle Fred’s life savings went.

There were threats of lawsuits and even disbarment, but apparently Whit was able to dodge the bullet.

The last word we had on Whit Charles was a piece in the Home section about him selling his place in Albemarle County for a couple of million in 2005. The story quoted Mr. Charles as saying he was taking some time off to sail the Caribbean.

I figure Whit Charles set off for paradise about three years before he and Stick Davis met and Stick subsequently went south. Obviously Mr. Charles made a few trips back to Virginia between 2005 and 2008, because Stick said they connected in Charlottesville during that time. He didn’t do anything in the Old Dominion recently to earn himself a mention in our newspaper though.

I was able, with a little help from Ed Chenowith, who knows how to find shit, to get an address and a phone number for Whit Charles down in Virgin Gorda.

He’ll be getting a wakeup call from me tomorrow.