CHAPTER SIX

Saturday, September 7

I meet Marcus Green at his office at nine, which is about seven hours since my head hit the pillow last night.

Marcus seems a little quiet, for Marcus, as he drives us over to the city lockup.

Then he clears his throat.

“Ah, Willie, I just wanted you to be the first to know. We’re expecting.”

He says it like he thinks I have a vested interest in Kate’s future. Hell, she always wanted kids, and her biological clock has got to be ticking like a motherfucker. I congratulate him and ask the usual questions.

“February, they say. And it’s a boy. And no, we’re not going to have one of those damn ‘reveal’ parties.”

I’m surprised I didn’t notice when I saw her the other day, but obliviousness was one of my many faults back when she was Kate Black.

I ask Marcus how old he is.

“What the fuck has that got to do with it?” he inquires.

“Just thinking. The boy might be the only one at his high school graduation whose daddy has to use a walker.”

“I’ll still be able to kick your ass in eighteen years,” he replies.

I wish him luck with that and emphasize that I am pleased beyond all reason at the good news.

At the jail, we’re able to see young Master Sheets after about half an hour of what I consider to be excessive suspicion on the part of the authorities.

“Do you think I’ve got a gun up my ass?” I ask the guy tasked with searching us.

“Don’t joke about stuff like that,” Marcus says.

I do recognize Jerome Sheets, although he doesn’t seem to remember me. I guess all half-white guys look alike to Jerome.

He appears to weigh about 120 pounds and probably isn’t more than five eight. He doesn’t seem quite the modern urban gangster he fancied himself before he got himself arrested on Wednesday.

He appears, in a word, scared.

He looks like he might have been treated rudely by some of his fellow detainees, although I know that Big Boy Sunday has connections inside the lockup to ensure that nothing really unseemly happens to his charge.

“I didn’t do nothing,” he says when we get finally get down to the who, what, when, etc., of last Saturday night. “The door was open, and I just came in. I didn’t break in or nothin’.”

He tells us what he told Big Boy: Stick Davis was dead when he got there.

“Kind of freaked me out, the dude just lying there on the floor.”

Not freaked out enough to keep Jerome from ransacking the place.

“You took the watch off a dead man’s wrist?” I ask.

He looks at me like I’m crazy.

“He wasn’t going to be usin’ it no more,” he explains.

Marcus just shakes his head. He and I know that his young client is facing some serious time, although Marcus has been known to work wonders with juries. The only thing hanging in the balance now is whether Jerome also killed Stick.

“I don’t even have no gun,” he wails. “Mr. Sunday, he don’t allow that. Said I was too young.”

Well, the cops haven’t found one yet, not at Jerome’s momma’s house or anywhere else.

“Did you see any notebooks on his desk? They would have been red, like school notebooks.”

He gives me a withering look.

“What the fuck I want to do with notebooks?”

Marcus tells me to go wait in the car so he can have a private chat with his new client.

When he comes back, he doesn’t look confident.

“Says he didn’t do it, but he admits he was in the house. Maybe the cops can pinpoint when exactly the man was killed.

“Other than that, they got the stuff he stole, they got the fingerprints. Big Boy’s gonna owe me major if I get the little bastard out of this.”

Then he looks over at me.

“What was all that shit about the notebooks?”

So I tell him what I didn’t find.

“They let you in to snoop around?”

Quid pro quo, I explain.

“Well, damn,” Marcus says. “That would be something, I suppose, if we could show that somebody took those notebooks. If we could prove that somebody else was there …

“But then we only have your word for it, and you’re a suspect too.”

I tell Marcus he’s a brave man to be driving a suspected murderer around Richmond.

THE GOODBYE party for Stick goes about as well as you’d expect for a memorial service in an Irish bar.

His brother had set it up for three in the afternoon, but many of the attendees seem to have arrived early and thirsty. I arranged with Sally to show up an hour or so late for work, and by the time I get to O’Toole’s at a quarter ’til three, the place is rocking, as eternal farewell parties go.

I see a “throuple” of acquaintances from my days of running with Stick. None of them had any idea he was even back in town, but apparently somebody still reads the obit pages in our paper. Hell, I hope so. They’re our main source of revenue.

There are several other people there whom I don’t recognize, either friends of the deceased or kibitzers taking advantage of the snack food that I guess brother Snake sprung for, with Whit Charles’s money.

A few of us exchange stories about the departed, most of which further shine his reputation as a charming asshole, with the emphasis on the noun.

“Remember the time he borrowed Freddie’s car and said he’d have it back in a while …” one guy says.

“… and he drove it to Daytona Beach,” another mourner jumps in. “Said he just had an urge to go to the beach.”

“And when Freddie finally got the car back two days later, he asked Stick why the hell he didn’t just go down to Virginia Beach or the Outer Banks …”

“And Stick says he liked the sand better at Daytona.”

Hilarity breaks out. I think I see Freddie in the crowd. He’s the one who isn’t laughing.

Snake is working the crowd, many of whom seem to be his friends rather than his late brother’s.

Terri McAllister is there, and so is a woman of indeterminate age who claims that Stick was the love of her life before he mysteriously disappeared more than a decade ago. She says she remembers me in a way that makes me suddenly see an old friend across the room and leave her company.

“We was going to get married,” she wails at one point as the stories about Stick quickly devolve into the R-rated area.

“In your fuckin’ dreams,” I hear Terri mutter.

I don’t get much insight from the mourners, who are actually pumping me for knowledge, since they know I was the last one who admits to seeing him alive.

The man I’m waiting for shows up half an hour after I do.

Whit Charles looks pretty much like the pictures I found of him in the electronic archives. He’s aged some. I know he’s seventy-seven years old, and the photos I’ve seen are from at least fifteen years ago.

He’s better dressed than most of the rest of the mob here. He and I are the only ones wearing ties. He looks like he’s at least six four, and he has the wide face and square jaw of a former athlete. He has all his hair, or at least somebody’s, and it’s as white as a Klan rally. The hair and the glasses and an impressive tan are about the only things that seem to have changed over the last few years. His mouth is kind of turned down at the corners like his default mode is “pissed.”

He looks more like a hit man than a lawyer.

Snake, who apparently only knows him via telephone from the Caribbean, goes over and shakes Charles’s hand in what, for Snake, must be an unusually obsequious manner.

I slip away from another story about the deceased.

“Mr. Charles,” I say as Snake is continuing to offer his undying gratitude to the man who paid for his brother’s cremation and is also funding this little get-together.

He wheels around and gives me a stare that would cause lesser men to flinch.

“Who the fuck are you?” he inquires.

I explain that I’m the guy who found Stick’s body.

He pushes his glasses up on his face.

“So you’re the one. The ghostwriter. Hell, ghostwriter for a ghost, I guess.”

I don’t know how he knows that. Maybe he reads our newspaper online.

I explain the setup. I tell him that I was about halfway through the first draft when Stick was called home to Jesus.

“Hmmph,” says Whit Charles. “And they think some black kid killed him? Although I hear they still haven’t taken you off the suspect list.”

I tell him that I have doubts about Jerome Sheets being Stick Davis’s murderer.

“So that just leaves you,” he says.

“Bullshit,” I explain.

He looks at me for a couple of seconds hard enough that I think he might want to kick my ass.

Then he almost smiles.

“I seriously doubt that you are Stick’s murderer,” he says. “You don’t seem like the type. I’m pretty good at first impressions.”

“So who do you think did it?”

He doesn’t answer at first, just looks off across the room, where it appears that one of the mourners is trying to hit on Terri McAllister, who doesn’t seem to be telling him to get lost.

“I have some ideas,” Charles says at last.

When I ask him for enlightenment, he looks at me again, like he’s taking my measure.

“Give me your card,” he says.

I dig into my wallet and can’t find any. They gave us a couple of hundred each at the paper last year, but I seem to have run out. I borrow a pen and write down my cell number.

He looks at the number, then looks at me again.

“Maybe we can talk,” he says. Then he turns away, headed toward the bar. End of conversation.

I hang around for a few more minutes and then leave for the office.

NEVER A dull moment at the house o’ words.

When I get in at four thirty, there’s a new rumor flying around.

Word has somehow gotten out that we soon will stop publishing on Tuesdays.

Well, that’s as good a day as any. You don’t want to piss off our sports enthusiasts by not having the NFL stuff in the paper Monday morning, and by Wednesday, our meager staff is already producing enough copy that we don’t have to strip the wire services for content.

“Any idea whether this is bullshit or not?” I ask Sally.

She shrugs.

“Chip Grooms said he heard it from somebody he knows in advertising, and they heard it from somebody on the suits’ floor.”

The idea is not a new one, here or elsewhere. Better papers than ours have cut back to less than a seven-day schedule. Hell, some of them have gone from seven to zero days a week. Last thing I read said there are about 1,400 cities and towns around the country that have lost their newspapers in the past fifteen years. Pittsburgh has gone to five days a week. New Orleans. Birmingham. Mobile. The vultures are gathering.

Of course, there’s always the Internet. I’m sure that if the rumors are true, I’ll still be expected to post something about Monday night’s mayhem online ASAP.

Nobody seems to much care that the watchdogs are being put on a very short leash. I’d be the first to admit that print journalism is not without its scoundrels and slackers, but I covered state politics for quite some time, and the politicians put our asses to shame. If we don’t keep an eye on them, who the fuck will?

Wheelie is in his office with the door closed. I see that Sarah has one of the chairs across from him.

It isn’t good manners, or good sense, to barge into your chief editor’s office without knocking, but I flunked charm school.

“Are we really going to six days a week?” I ask them both.

Wheelie looks anxious and annoyed.

“If and when we do,” he tells me, “you’ll be the first to know. Now shut the door. From the outside.”

I’ve made a living as a reporter by not taking “no” for an answer.

“I mean it,” I push on. “The whole newsroom’s talking about it.”

Actually, there are only about ten people in the newsroom, but they do seem to be agitated.

“I know that,” Wheelie says. “You think I’m deaf and blind?”

“Willie,” Sarah says, “we don’t know any more than you do. We’ve been trying to get up with B.S., but he’s out of town.”

Yeah, that’d be a good place for a publisher to be when the whole newsroom is in panic mode.

I don’t envy either Wheelie or Sarah, who are tasked with guiding us into oblivion and having to polish this turd for our readers. Maybe we’ll tell them we’re cutting back to save them some time in their busy week. They won’t have to waste ten minutes every Tuesday morning finding out what’s going on in our fair city. And think of the trees that won’t be cut down.

“Nothing’s going to happen anytime soon,” Wheelie says, but I can tell he’s about as sure of that as I am.

I wish them luck, for all of us. It’s one of those days when I kind of regret talking Sarah Goodnight into making the switch from reporter to editor.

THE CITY is amazingly quiet for a Saturday night.

There is a police report of gunshots in a Church Hill neighborhood, but it’s just some guy who locked himself out of his car and figured the best way to get in was with a pistol. They think he might have been drinking.

The cops have been catching shit for not nabbing a couple of gangs of kids who have been breaking into cars looking for loose change and whatever else the owners left inside. It turns out, according to one study a North Side neighborhood did, that the vast majority of “break-ins” did not require any breaking in at all. Car owners in our fair city are, it seems, a trusting lot. Most of the cars that were violated were not locked. A depressing number of them had items of value to fledgling criminals lying in plain sight.

“Jesus Christ,” Enos Jackson says, “who leaves a cell phone in the front seat with the door unlocked in the middle of the night? Do these idiots think they’re living in Mayberry?”

The blessed lull in serious crime gives me time to ponder the demise of my old buddy Stick.

Ballistic reports and common sense make it clear that he did not kill himself. Nobody shoots themselves half a dozen times, including twice in the head. That would hurt. Plus, the Stick I knew was way too selfish to have ever done something like that.

I can testify with certainty that I myself did not do the deed, even if L.D. Jones and his crack squad of chain-jerkers haven’t officially removed me from the suspect list. What the hell? I was going to kill somebody who was going to give me another forty-five grand if he lived long enough to tell me the whole story?

Jerome Sheets, everybody’s leading candidate, could have done the deed. He was there. He stole stuff, even Stick’s treasured watch. But something just doesn’t smell right about that. For one thing, Big Boy Sunday might have led me astray a time or two, but I sense that he’s not lying about this, even if the kid is one of his fuck buddies’ sons.

It has been my unhappy fate to talk with lots of accused felons over the years, and I think I have a pretty good nose for this kind of thing. I don’t believe Jerome Sheets is capable of doing such a dastardly deed. He tried to come off as a playah while squiring Big Boy around the city, but the kid I saw in that jail cell today seemed like a small-timer who might one day grow into a stone-cold killer but hadn’t nearly gotten there yet, although a few years as a guest of the state might move him in that direction.

So, I ask myself, if Jerome didn’t kill Stick, who the fuck did?

I can’t remember anything Stick said that might have indicated he was on somebody’s to-kill list, although he was worried about something or someone. Maybe he just irritated somebody to the point of homicide.

But then I do remember something.

Strange how the mind works. You sit down and grit your teeth and try to think real hard, and the answer won’t come. Then you take off your thinking cap, and it comes to you. Works for the Sunday New York Times crossword, and it works regarding Stick Davis too.

It hits me as I go to get a cup of newsroom coffee.

There was a night, early into my collaboration with Stick, when he brought out a bottle of bourbon. Strangely the Stickster didn’t appear to be much of a drinker anymore, but this night—it must have been a Monday—he and I got into a bottle of booze and damn near killed the thing.

And as I was leaving, he told me something, something I’d since forgotten about, partly because I was drunk and partly because it didn’t seem to mean anything at the time.

Stick was seeing me to the door when he stopped me and put his hand on my shoulder.

“Willie,” he said, “if anything ever happens to me, you need to remember one thing: Remember the à la mode.”

À la mode, not Alamo.

I thought a second or three, and then I knew what he meant.

We’d been in a joint over in the Devil’s Triangle one long-ago evening, probably twenty years ago, when Stick, after a hard night of drinking, decided he wanted some dessert. Apple pie à la mode.

The waiter brought the pie out, sans ice cream. Stick made a big fuss about it.

He started berating the waiter.

“Dumbass,” he said to the kid, “don’t you know à la mode means with ice cream?”

Then Stick stood up and started waving his arms and yelling, “Remember the à la mode! Remember the à la mode!” And all the rest of the drunks picked up on it and started yelling too.

After that, whenever Stick had the least provocation, usually after a drink or six, he’d start yelling it to the bafflement of everyone around him.

So to humor my host that Monday night a few months ago, I told him I’d be sure to remember the à la mode.

Then he pinched down on my shoulder, causing me a surprising amount of pain.

“No shit,” Stick said. “Remember. And don’t forget that fuckin’ horse either.”

That one threw me.

“Charlestown? Forty to one?” he asked me as I slapped his hand away. He seemed incredulous that I could forget.

Then it came to me. He and I and another drunk went up to Charlestown, West Virginia, one night to play the ponies. We were down to twenty bucks among us when Stick found a hopeless long shot in the sixth race. He liked the horse because of its name: Bumpass.

“I used to date a girl from Bumpass,” he told us. “Love of my life for about a month. I tell you, it’s a sign.”

Well, we hadn’t been doing so damn well using logic, so we figured, what the hell. Win or lose, we had enough gas to get back to Richmond. So we put it all on Bumpass.

And the damn horse won. Eight hundred bucks was a lot of cash for us in those days, although I can’t really tell you where it all went.

“Bumpass,” he said, pronouncing it the way the natives do: BUMP-us. He made me repeat the name.

“Don’t forget Bumpass either,” he instructed me as I walked away in search of my car.

We never talked about either of those ridiculous artifacts from our checkered past again, but now they come back to me, even if I have no earthly idea what, if anything, Stick was talking about.

“Shouldn’t you be writing something?” Sally asks. “You’re just staring into space. Surely there’s a dead body somewhere out there waiting to be memorialized.”

I remind her that I’ve already done something for tomorrow’s paper playing off Stick’s sendoff at O’Toole’s. The piece maybe was a little less reverent than your average eulogy, but consider the source and the setting.

“I’ve got nothing,” I inform my most immediate editor.

Two games of solitaire later, I call it a night, still thinking about ice cream and an overachieving horse.