CHAPTER FIVE

Friday, September 6

I call Whit Charles’s number on Virgin Gorda shortly after nine A.M., which I figure will be ten o’clock island time.

A man with an island lilt to his English answers. No, Mr. Charles is not home. He is traveling. No, no one is sure when he will be back. When I ask if Mr. Charles is by chance in the United States, specifically in the state of Virginia, the man pauses and then says that he isn’t authorized to say, and neither is anyone else at Chez Charles.

Despite the fact that Whit Charles or someone authorized by him sent a certified check up here a few days ago to pay for Stick Davis’s funeral, my trusty reporter’s instincts tell me the man is somewhere in the commonwealth, maybe even in Richmond. I mean, if you’re going to pay for some underling’s funeral, wouldn’t you be a good bet to take the trouble to show up?

THE COPS confirm that the fingerprints match. Jerome Sheets definitely was in Stick Davis’s house in the recent past. That plus the goods with which he was caught red-handed would seem to seal the deal for ol’ Jerome, who claims he was just there for a burglary and didn’t have anything to do with any shooting. There were other prints besides Jerome’s and mine, but nobody knows who those belong to, and nobody seems to much care.

Peachy Love tells me, on the down-low, that the kid says the place was unlocked when he dropped by to burglarize it on Saturday night, making it likely that he was testing every unlit dwelling on the block, hoping to get lucky. He told the cops he saw the body but was afraid to report it. Not too afraid, it seems, to steal what he could.

I call Marcus Green. I suggest that Jerome Sheets might need his services more than I do.

“Off the hook, huh?” he says.

I express some doubts about Jerome’s guilt, evidence to the contrary.

“He might deserve some major time for burglary, but I’m not sure he did the killing.”

“Man,” Marcus says, “you just want to be the contrarian, don’t you? Not satisfied with getting off the Number One suspect hot seat. You just want to show up L.D. Jones and the police department.”

“Only if they’re wrong.”

“Yeah,” he says. “But this one sounds like it’d be a fool’s errand. Plus, who’s going to pay me?”

I mention that Jerome is under the protective wing of Big Boy Sunday.

“Good God. That guy. Just working for him makes the kid a viable suspect for just about any crime you want to think of.”

“Yeah,” I reply, “but Big Boy will pay well to see him get off the murder rap.”

Big Boy has been a client of Marcus’s in the past, the result of some unfortunate incidents in which I am sure Big Boy was blameless. Marcus knows there’ll be a payday out of this, beyond the free publicity he craves.

He does have one concern though.

“Big Boy doesn’t like it much when his people go to jail. What if I’m right and this is Occam’s Razor—the obvious answer is the right one?”

“Well,” I tell my old buddy, “then I guess he’ll just have to kill you.”

Despite his qualms, I have the feeling that Marcus finds this case irresistible.

I CHECK in at the office. The weather seems strangely placid for an area anticipating the storm of the century.

Sally Velez confirms what I gathered from the early morning weather-rama on TV. They still were giving the usual warnings, but the weather map told the story. We have dodged the bullet, as we usually do. Dorian, we hardly knew ye.

“Weather Guy is still somewhere on the Outer Banks,” she says. “They’ve told him to come on back, but he says there’s still time for the hurricane to make a hard left turn.”

“Wishful thinking.”

“Yeah. I’m sure he’s a little depressed that oak trees aren’t falling through people’s roofs up here.”

Hell, Weather Guy isn’t much if any worse than the rest of us. Who didn’t get a journalistic woody when those planes hit the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon and we spent a solid week working twelve-hour days covering something that really mattered? The mass murders at Virginia Tech? It seemed like half the damn newsroom headed for Blacksburg to hound the bereaved.

Weather Guy knows that he’s not going to make his bones around here on sunny and warm.

With Dorian headed for points north, there is time in the quiet late morning to do a little checking up on Stick.

The message box is full on McAllister’s phone when I call. She works as a waitress “somewhere around here, in the Fan, I think,” according to Snake.

Abe Custalow to the rescue. I’m talking about the case with my sub-lessee and lifelong friend, who drops by our shared domicile sometimes between errands. He’s in charge of maintenance at the Prestwould, and work breaks are hard to come by. The building is ninety years old and acts its age sometimes.

“Terri McAllister?” he says when I mention the girlfriend’s name. “Yeah, I think Stella knows her. Just a minute.”

Sometimes Richmond seems like a very small town. If you don’t know somebody, you know somebody who does.

Abe’s soon conversing with Stella Stellar, his main squeeze. Stella and her band, the melodious Goldfish Crackers, are trying with middling success to crack the big-time. When they’re in town, Abe sometimes keeps her sheets warm.

“Yeah. That’s what I thought. She’s the one, huh? She’s where? OK. Thanks.”

He hangs up and gives me the name of the eatery on West Main where’s she’s waitressing.

I pay the place a visit. It’s had four different names and owners in my memory. Hope springs eternal.

They’re getting ready for the lunch crowd, which might be a little light, since everyone hasn’t gotten the word yet that Richmond will not be wiped from the face of the earth by the killer hurricane. (Yes, it is a killer. Some guy down in North Carolina fell off a ladder putting up storm shutters and broke his neck.)

TERRI MCALLISTER looks to be in the general vicinity of fifty years old, far too long of tooth to be slinging hash in this place on West Main that apparently only serves food in order to keep its liquor license.

She, like the late Stick, has tinted her hair a bit, but her dark roots are showing. Unlike Stick, she could use a membership at the Y, although waiting tables looks to me like it’d be a good way to lose weight. One of her arms is tattooed as far up as I can see.

I catch her before the place starts filling up, and she grudgingly gives me five minutes.

I express my sorrow at her loss.

“Yeah,” she says, shrugging. “Stick was OK. I’m gonna miss him.”

She doesn’t seem excessively distraught over her boyfriend’s passing.

I ask how long they’d been “seeing” each other.

“Oh, since May, no April. Yeah.”

Then she puts two and two together.

“Willie Black. Shit. You’re the son of a bitch they said killed him,” she says, using her outdoor voice and drawing attention from the two habituals at the bar. “What the hell are you doing out of jail?”

I explain, as quickly and quietly as I can, that I was the one who found him, that he and I were working on a book and that the police have arrested someone else they suspect committed the crime.

“You mean to say some little shit shot him all that many times and burned him just because he wanted to rob him? Hell, I can’t see Stick putting up a fight over anything in that place.”

I tell her that, from what I can learn, there didn’t seem to be any resistance on his part.

Finally mollified that I didn’t kill her boyfriend, she motions for me to follow her outside.

“I’m coming back, goddammit,” she explains to a frowny-faced young man who must be the manager.

Outside, she walks me down half a block and into the garbage-scented alley that bisects it. She and I both light up.

“Stick was afraid,” she says.

“About what?”

“I dunno, exactly. But he told me one time that it’d be a good thing if I didn’t spread his name around town. He said he’d made an enemy or two.”

I note that Stick sometimes had a knack for making enemies.

She laughs.

“True dat. I mean, he was always good to me, but you could tell, the way he acted, that there was people he’d just as soon not run into.”

When I ask for more details, she either doesn’t have any or won’t share them.

“I kind of knew he was working on some kind of book,” she says, “but he wouldn’t tell me shit about it.”

She stamps out her cigarette.

“You going to the service tomorrow?” she asks.

“Plan to.”

“I don’t know who all is going to be there. I swear, Stick didn’t seem to have any other friends around Richmond. I was surprised when he said he grew up here. Didn’t seem much into reconnecting or any such shit. He had his brother, who seems like kind of an asshole, but I don’t know when he ever saw him.”

She says he met her at Bandito’s, and they kind of hit it off, but afterward he was mostly a homebody.

“We hung out, you know. I’d stay over at his place over on Stokes Lane sometimes, and he’d usually just order takeout.”

She lowers her voice a little although there’s nobody except a no-tail alley cat in the near vicinity.

“He said something about having some money,” she says. “And he did give me some nice shit. Gave me this little necklace for my birthday.”

She shows me what appears to be an actual diamond hanging around her neck, the chain bisecting a barbed-wire tattoo.

“He didn’t say anything about, like a will or something, did he?”

I give Terri the sad news that, no, I know nothing about a will. It is hard for me to imagine Stick, either the Stick I knew long ago or the one with whom I was passingly familiar recently, going to all that trouble.

“We weren’t, you know, serious. Not really,” she says. “He was good company, most of the time, but I don’t think whatever we were doing was going anywhere.”

Tough old girl that she appears to be, she seems to be getting a little choked up.

I say my goodbyes on the street and tell Ms. McAllister I’ll see her at O’Toole’s tomorrow.

I wonder out loud why I never ran into her during my visits to Stick’s place.

“Oh,” she says, sighing, “Stick played it pretty close to the vest.”

Driving back to the Prestwould for lunch, I think about what Terri McAllister has told me. As best I can tell, she and I spent more time with Stick Davis than anybody else over the past several months, and both of us are a bit mystified as to how Stick managed to piss somebody off enough to get himself killed, but both of us know something had him a little spooked.

Maybe Marcus Green is right. Occam’s razor. Maybe, Stick being Stick, he said something insensitive to a young bandit wielding a big-boy gun.

Maybe.

THERE ISN’T much to write about Stick’s murder. The cops are happy with a likely suspect in jail, even if they haven’t been able to find the weapon.

There is a sense of letdown in the newsroom, what with our killer hurricane spurning us. There’s no point in bumping the paper up four pages now. As a matter of fact, our tiny staff might have trouble filling the Saturday rag at its present size.

“Think you can do something on the kid who killed your buddy? Like a takeout or something?” Sarah Goodnight asks hopefully.

“Allegedly killed,” I correct her, “and he wasn’t my buddy.”

“Did you have any kind of contract with him, I mean for the rest of the money, or something in case the project didn’t work out?”

“I think they call it a kill fee.”

I explain about the 5K I got up front, and now that’s all I’m expecting to get.

“Too bad,” she says.

“Too bad his ass is dead,” I reply.

“Yeah. That too.”

I worry sometimes that my former mentee and present boss is getting hardened beyond her thirty-three years. There’s nothing wrong with being a tough old newspaper broad, like Sally Velez, but Sarah’s gone from dewy-eyed to hard-bitten in an alarmingly short period of time.

I don’t think she’s married to the paper, thank God. She is actually supposed to exchange vows with another human being in May, and I would be a sexist pig were I to suggest that she sweeten up a little. Still the urge is there.

I tell her that I’ll see what I can cobble together for tomorrow.

“Kill fee,” I hear her mutter as she walks away.

There isn’t much to do except go over to the North Side and let Jerome’s mother and friends tell me what an exemplary young man he is. Maybe I can even get Snake to say a kind word about the tragic passing of his brother. I already have a couple of usable quotes from Terri McAllister.

I call Marcus, who does not surprise me by telling me that he has indeed agreed to take on Sheets as his client.

“Big Boy pays promptly and well,” he says, “and he owes me for keeping his butt out of prison a couple of times.”

I note that I’m sure that Big Boy Sunday already has paid him dearly for that accomplishment.

“Nevertheless, he really doesn’t think the kid did it. So I’m supposed to go over to the lockup tomorrow and talk to the boy.”

I’m impressed. Marcus doesn’t usually condescend to working on Saturdays. The pay must be good.

“Can I tag along?” I ask him.

“Yeah,” he says, “I guess so. Call it your finder’s fee.”

I never do get over to the North Side to try to talk to Jerome’s mom. All hell breaks loose outside a club in the Bottom. The odd thing is that it happened in the late afternoon. Usually you’re safe over there until midnight or so, when the drunks start spilling out onto the sidewalks.

Obviously the gents who tried to make Swiss cheese out of each other were harboring grudges.

All I can get out of anybody at the scene is that two of them seemed to be accosting a third man. As is Richmond’s wont, they were all armed like Rambo. When the shooting stopped, one of the two alleged assailants was dead and his partner and the other guy were hauled away by two different sets of “associates,” only to show up at the emergency room separately an hour later, almost dead.

Oh, yeah. One of them (the cops didn’t know who) also managed to shoot a female bartender right between the eyes when she got caught in the crossfire. Collateral damage.

So, two dead, two dying. Somebody said they thought drugs were involved.

No shit.

During Andi’s bartending days, my daughter worked at this joint for six months or so. Yeah, it could have been her.

Sometimes I think we’ve gotten past the point that gun control could even work. The NRA has managed to turn us into Dodge City already. Maybe we ought to just arm everybody.

Sarah says they should take all the guns away from men and give every woman one.

When I mentioned that I might not be above ground now if those had been the rules back in the day, she shrugged and said something about omelets and broken eggs.

BY THE time I crawl between the covers sometime before one, Cindy wakes up to ask me how my evening went.

I ask her not to ask.