CHAPTER SEVEN

Sunday, September 8

Some of the waitresses at Joe’s have more patience than others. The one today is not inclined to suffer fools gladly if at all.

R.P. McGonnigal insists on interrogating her about the biscuits.

“Are they really fluffy today?” he asks.

We’ve already been here forty-five minutes and have put her off once on ordering anything more nourishing than cheap Bloody Marys.

She seems undisposed to cheerfully put up with such nonsense. She stares at him for a moment, pencil and pad in hand.

“They’re about as fluffy as they ever are,” she answers at last. It is a fair assessment. The biscuits at Joe’s, while second to none in their bulk, tend to be a bit on the chewy side.

“They are biscuits with substance,” Andy Peroni once said in an apt and kind defense.

It is obvious that the next thing the waitress wants to hear from R.P. is his order.

Not to be.

“Do you think,” R.P. presses on, “you could ask the cook to make me one that’s especially fluffy. I’m really in the mood for something fluffy today.”

She puts the pencil and pad back in her pocket.

“I’ll check back later,” she says between clenched teeth as she walks away.

“God damn, R.P.,” Cindy says, “I’m getting hungry. Stop fucking with the waitress.”

R.P.’s friend, a guy who’s a nurse over at VCU Hospitals and hasn’t been here before, asks him what’s the deal with fluffy biscuits.

“You can get a fluffy biscuit at Hardee’s, for shit’s sake.”

“Ah,” R.P. says, “but you can’t get this kind of ambience.”

Abe walks over and has a few words with the aggrieved waitress.

“She’ll be back in a minute,” he informs us when he returns. “She’d like to take our orders then.”

“What did you say to her?” Andy Peroni’s wife asks. Ms. Peroni, the former Grace Biggers of the Cherry Street Biggerses, sits next to her husband. She is making a rare appearance at our Sunday morning brunch fest. She and Andy have split and gotten back together at least three times. Cindy, being Andy’s sister, is not one of her biggest fans. We have managed to seat them outside clawing reach.

Abe shrugs.

“I just told her the guy asking about the biscuits wasn’t quite right, and she shouldn’t pay him any attention.”

R.P. takes umbrage at this, but when our schoolmarm of a waitress comes back, he meekly orders the same damn thing he’s been ordering for twenty years, including a biscuit that most certainly won’t be specially prepared for him, unless the waitress spits on it.

R.P., Andy, Mrs. Andy, and R.P.’s friend all want to know the latest on Stick Davis.

“It’s kind of exciting,” Andy says, “sitting next to a suspected murderer.”

“He’s killed before, and he might kill again,” Cindy says to her brother.

I tell them most of what I know. They wouldn’t have to ask me if they’d read the paper, which I suspect none of them are doing these days.

“So this black kid, you think he maybe didn’t do it?” R.P.’s friend asks. “Seems like him doing the deed takes the heat off you.”

Yeah, I explain, but if he’s actually not guilty, convicting him would kind of suck.

“How about the fella that paid for the funeral? Charles something? He came all the way up here from the islands for the funeral. What’s his story?”

“Well, Stick was his employee,” R.P. says. “Maybe he just felt bad about him getting killed.”

Cindy stares at him.

“You did know Stick, right?” she asks.

He nods his head. He, Abe, Andy, and Mrs. Andy remember Stick from the old days, when they got to know him through me, and Cindy’s heard all the stories.

“Well, everybody’s got somebody that cares about them,” R.P. says.

“Allegedly,” Cindy amends.

“What was he doing down there all that time?” Abe asks. Even though he lives with me and Cindy, we haven’t talked much about Stick’s book. I didn’t want to talk about it until it was done, and Abe isn’t much for interrogating.

I tell them what I know from what the deceased revealed to me, leaving out some of the spicier and perhaps felonious escapades.

“And he didn’t leave any notes or anything?”

So I tell them about the missing notebooks.

“Man,” Andy says, “this shit is getting deep.”

My old Oregon Hill buds are in agreement that it doesn’t make any sense that the kid who stole Stick’s watch and other items of value would have absconded with a bunch of notebooks.

“Must be some good shit in there,” says Grace Peroni. “I mean, worth killing for, you know?”

Maybe, I concede.

I agree with them that it would be a good idea to have a further conversation with Whit Charles.

“How was the biscuit?” Andy asks R.P. as we’re getting ready to leave about an hour after the waitress wished us to do so.

R.P. says it definitely was not fluffy.

ABE IS going over to Stella Stellar’s apartment, where he’ll probably spend the afternoon and perhaps the night. She and the redoubtable Goldfish Crackers are back from a tour, if gigs in Danville, Wytheville, and some place in east Tennessee can be called a tour.

Cindy and I get back a little after one. We’re walking into the lobby when my cell phone vibrates in my pocket. I check the number. Big Boy Sunday.

“What’s going on, Willie?”

I assume he’s inquiring about the status of Jerome Sheets.

I fill him in on the visit Marcus and I paid to the kid yesterday, noting that Jerome seemed to be a little out of his element in the lockup.

“Well,” Big Boy says, “I got some folks there looking out for him.”

The man has connections on both sides of the bars. I don’t really want to know which cops are beholden to him.

“What’d you think?” he asks.

“About what?”

“About whether you think my boy’s a killer or not.”

I tell Big Boy that I’ve been fooled more than once on that score. Hell, everybody says they’re innocent until it’s proved that they’re not.

“But, no, he didn’t seem like the kind of kid who’d shoot somebody seven or eight times over a watch.”

“Thass what I’ve been telling you,” he says. “You think that lawyer, that Marcus Green, can get him off?”

I explain that Jerome surely will be doing some time for stealing a dead man’s possessions, but that if anybody can get him free of a murder rap, it’s Marcus.

“Maybe he can get him sentenced as a juvie,” Big Boy says. “The boy ain’t but seventeen.”

It is possible, I concede.

“His momma’s been on my ass about this. She wants the boy home.”

Big Boy probably has been a driving force in the boy’s life, no doubt introducing him to a world where people steal dead men’s stuff. I resist mentioning that to him.

I am puzzled, though, at the big man’s interest in Jerome. Hell, he must see one of his junior henchmen sent up for this and that on occasion.

I ask Big Boy how long he and Jerome’s mother have been friendly with each other.

He hesitates, then says he reckons about twenty years.

“That’s a long time. Long enough to see a kid grow up.”

“Willie,” he says, “you don’t need to know every damn thing. Just make sure that lawyer gets the boy off.”

I’m thinking that maybe Marcus Green ought to know whose kid he’s representing. It might inspire him to try harder.

I’VE JUST dozed off watching the Redskins-Eagles game when the phone interrupts my Sunday peace again.

“We need to talk.”

I don’t recognize the voice and am getting ready to hang up when he says, “You’re that nosy-ass reporter, right? The one from the memorial for Stick?”

I mute the TV and motion for Cindy to bring me a notepad and a pen.

“Mr. Charles, I presume.”

“I’d just as soon you didn’t say my name.”

“You said we need to talk.”

“Yeah,” my caller replies. “You think you know what’s what, but you don’t. I’d like to set the record straight.”

I ask if he’d like to drop by the Prestwould and discuss it further.

He laughs and says he doesn’t think so.

“I’d rather we met somewhere, let’s say neutral. And it has to be off the record, at least for now.”

You take your leads where you can get ’em. When he suggests a commuter parking lot halfway to Charlottesville, how can I refuse?

“No recording devices,” Charles stipulates. “And no damn photos either. This is background.”

So I make myself a quick cup of coffee on the new gadget Cindy convinced me we really needed, a machine so simple even I can usually operate it. I tell my beloved I’m off to a secret meeting.

“Male or female?” she inquires.

I tell her I’ll be back soon.

On the way out on I-64, I ponder just what the fuck Whit Charles might want to tell me. I know he’s a lawyer. I know he is, by all accounts, a shady lawyer, one who might have done time if he wasn’t by profession an expert in gaming the system. Those electronic news clippings from his days “managing” his clients’ money attest to that.

From what I’ve learned ghostwriting the first half of Stick Davis’s biography, I suspect Charles didn’t suddenly find Jesus after he beat a hasty retreat to the Caribbean.

And I wonder if the second part of Stick’s story, the part in those lost notebooks, didn’t present a very real threat to his employer.

So why pay for Stick’s burial expenses and come to the wake? And how did he even know he was dead?

The commuter parking lot is nearly empty, this being a Sunday. I see a big-ass Denali sitting at the far end of the lot. Its driver blinks the lights.

The thing’s so huge I might need a footstool to get inside. I’m reminded of Cindy’s remark once, when one of these gas gluttons was blotting out the sun next to us at a stoplight.

“Jesus,” she said, “the assholes who make these things would probably like to turn Denali into an oil refinery.”

Charles is sitting behind the wheel. The air conditioning is on high.

“Before you get in,” he says, stopping me at the door, “Gino wants to make sure you’re not recording this.”

And then I see that there’s another guy in the Denali. Gino, who looks to be a native of the islands, slides out of the back seat, hops to the pavement, and asks me to spread my arms.

I ask if he’s from TSA. He doesn’t speak and doesn’t smile, just pats me down, takes my cell phone and then nods up at his boss. If I patted him down, I’d lay odds he’d be a lot better armed than me.

“Don’t worry,” the lawyer says. “Gino won’t hurt you. I just want a witness to all this, and no record of it. Insurance, if you will.”

I lie and tell him that my wife knows where I am and who I’m meeting. My insurance.

Gino, it turns out, is an Italian by birth who decided for whatever reasons to spend the rest of his life in the islands.

“What do you want to know?” Charles asks me.

There’s no sense in pussyfooting around. I’m out here in a deserted parking lot with a guy who’s been known to at least bend the rules.

“Did you kill Stick Davis, or have him killed?”

He is taken aback for a moment, and then he laughs, as does his back-seat buddy.

“Yeah,” he says. “I thought you might be thinking along those lines. That’s the main reason I wanted you out here. To straighten things out.”

I wait for more. I figure that Charles, a trained ambulance chaser, knows the value of silence when trying to get a witness or interviewee to open up, but he obviously has something to tell me.

“OK,” he says at last, “here’s how it is.”

And he tells me more about Stick Davis’s decade in Virgin Gorda than Stick himself ever did. Assuming, of course, that he’s telling the truth.

“Stick was quite a character,” he says. “He wasn’t a half-bad cook, and he was willing to do whatever needed to be done.”

From what Stick hinted, I had been pretty sure “whatever” involved something dicier than whipping up an omelet at midnight.

There were, Charles says, some “shipments” that needed to be picked up and delivered. He explains that the island doesn’t have a big town of any sort “just a lot of coves and little harbors.”

“I think Stick found his niche down there,” Charles says. “As you might know, he was not a man of tedious moral restrictions. He knew how the world works.”

He says that he was genuinely sorry when Stick left the islands “in rather a hurry” and that he was somewhat devastated to find out about his “untimely demise.”

I ask him how he knew all about that.

Charles takes his glasses off and wipes them on his shirt.

“Oh,” he says, “I keep an eye on things. I wanted to know what was going on with Mr. Davis. At some point, he and I were going to have to have a meeting.”

And then he tells me the real reason he had kept such an interest in Stick after he left Virgin Gorda.

“There was a safe,” he begins.

The safe contained quite a bit of currency that wasn’t ever going to show up on anybody’s tax returns. Stick managed to get the combination.

“It was stupid of me, really,” Charles says. “I had a security camera in the room where the safe was. All someone, and it had to have been Stick, had to do was look at the video later. When I opened the safe, I suppose the camera recorded my movements.”

Stick Davis was already back in the States by the time Whit Charles realized his stash was about one hundred thousand dollars short.

“I knew he’d been taking a little here and there, maybe selling some of the product on his own, but it was small potatoes, although I guess it added up over time.

“The thing is, Mr. Black, the islands are not a place for the pure of heart. A little larceny is what you expect instead of income taxes down there. And it’s a lot less expensive.”

I hear Gino chuckle.

“But the theft from my safe offended me. I had treated Stick like a son. Well, like a red-headed stepson, but still, it was unkind of him, don’t you think?”

I nod.

“I never intended to do him any real harm, and I never did,” Charles goes on, “but I made it clear to him that 1 knew where he was and what he had done. He knew he couldn’t escape me, and he promised that someday soon he would return to the island and repay me.”

I note that, to an impartial observer, he still looks like a prime candidate for the murder of Stick Davis.

“As do you, Mr. Black. I understand he had promised you another, what, forty-five thousand when this book was finished. My forty-five thousand, by the way.”

It would be rude and dumb of me to tell him that, considering our comparative histories, he’s more likely to have shot somebody a few times over monetary differences than I am.

I ask the most obvious question.

“If you didn’t kill him, and I didn’t kill him, and that kid in the city lockup didn’t do it, then who did?”

Charles clears his throat.

“I have a theory,” he says.

Tell me, I implore.

“All in good time, Mr. Black. All in good time.”

We’re both silent for a moment.

“By the way,” he continues, “you didn’t happen to take anything from the scene of the crime, did you?”

I assure him that I did not, that I was under the watchful eye of Richmond’s finest when I was allowed in.

“Yes,” he says, “but no one was watching when you found him dead, were they?”

I know where he’s going with this. He has to know that Stick had something of value in his study, something that wasn’t there later.

“I knew he had some notebooks,” I tell Charles, “but they weren’t there when I was let back in. And the kid who’s in jail most likely didn’t take them. Why would he?”

“That’s a shame,” he says. “I don’t think it will shock you to learn that whoever took those notebooks probably took poor Mr. Davis’s life as well.”

Yes, I tell him, the thought had occurred to me.

“I know you probably think it was me, with everything he probably told you, or at least hinted at, about our business relationship, but trust me, Mr. Black, there is something else going on here, something beyond you and me.”

“Trust me” is one of those phrases that activate my bullshit detector. People often say it, and other giveaways like “honestly” or “I’ll tell you the truth,” when they’re lying like dogs. However, sometimes “trust me” means trust me. I’ll go with face value for now.

I indicate that my ears are all his on the matter of who he thinks might have killed Stick Davis.

“Later,” Whit Charles says. “First, though, I have to check on something.”

When I ask him where he’s living during his brief return to the commonwealth, he says he has a place he’s staying in the West End. I ask him if he can be more specific.

“I could,” he says, “but I won’t.”

He leaves it at that and reiterates that our conversation never happened. I can only agree with him.

Gino, he explains, knows where I live.

BY THE time I get home, the Skins have lost another one.

“Maybe they should change their name,” Cindy suggests.

It has been suggested, I reply.

“By the way, that girl, Sarah, called. She said it was important.”

Cindy has some inkling that Sarah Goodnight and I might have done a sleepover long ago. Or maybe she is just hostile to attractive younger women in general. She certainly gives off that vibe when it comes to Sarah.

I remind her that “that girl” is one of my bosses.

“Whatever,” my beloved says.

Sarah is at home when I call.

“I’m sorry to disturb your day of rest,” she says. Her voice sounds a little shaky.

I tell her never mind, my day of rest has already been shot to hell.

“I’m kind of worried,” Sarah continues.

Sarah isn’t one to worry much, or at least to admit it if she does.

“Girls can’t be pussies,” she explained to me once.

“Tell me what’s wrong.”

What’s wrong is Luther Gates.

He owns a group of furniture stores around the state. It’s been a family business for three generations. It seems to be thriving, but Luther’s future is somewhat in doubt at present because he allegedly made a trip to Culpeper recently to meet a female he had met online.

There were, according to the story we ran last Wednesday, three problems. One, Luther is married. Two, the female told him she was thirteen years old. Three, “she” wasn’t a female but rather an enterprising state trooper who handcuffed him and took him away to jail when he showed up with candy and flowers.

Three strikes and you’re out. Or, in Luther’s case, maybe in the big house for quite some time.

He is free, somehow, on sizable bond, and from what Sarah is telling me, he probably shouldn’t be.

“He’s crazy,” she says. “He blames me for everything. He said I’ve ruined his life.”

As it turns out, Luther, upon being arrested and then released on bond, called the paper to beg us not to use his name. Chuck Apple, who was working the story, passed the buck up the ladder to Sarah, who was our adult supervision in the newsroom that day.

“I told him we would run whatever the police gave us, and he just went nuts. He said we were destroying him and his family. I told him that he seemed to have done that pretty much by himself. Maybe I was a little insensitive.”

I offer that little sensitivity should have been proffered to a fifty-something guy who was hoping to bang a middle-school girl he’d never met. Even with my sorry record, I’ve never since the age of twenty-one done the nasty with a woman who wasn’t old enough to vote.

“Anyhow, he said if his name was in the paper, he couldn’t be responsible for what happened.”

“Did you call the cops?” I ask.

No, she didn’t.

“I figured he was just having a panic attack and that he’d realize we weren’t his problem.”

The story ran, complete with a photo of Luther Gates doing the walk of shame with a cheap sports jacket over his head.

“And then Jack and I got back in town this afternoon from a weekend in the mountains, and there was Grover, lying in the backyard.”

She’s crying now. Grover is Sarah and her live-in fiancé’s beagle. Or, rather, was. The girl who fed him and walked him yesterday said he was fine when she left about eight last night.

“His throat was cut,” she says, between sobs. “Who the hell would do that?”

She knows though. There was a note on the coffee table.

“I warned you,” was all it said.

“He broke into our damn house, and he killed my dog. Oh, and he crapped on the carpet.”

Jack has called the cops already, but they haven’t gotten back to him yet. Sarah thought I might be able to find out something, like whether they’ve arrested the son of a bitch again.

I get up with L.D. Jones at home. He confirms what I kind of feared.

Luther Gates, alleged child molester and suspected dog murderer and carpet despoiler, is in the wind.

Sarah does not seem pleased by this news.

“Do you still have a gun?” I ask, fondly remembering the time she saved my ass by shooting a man intent on ending my stay on Earth.

“Oh, hell yeah.”

“So,” Cindy says when I come back into the living room, “tell me all about your day of rest.”