CHAPTER EIGHT

Monday, September 9

My second consecutive “off” day turns out to be no less restful than the first.

Cindy’s out molding young minds, and the thought of spending a few hours alone with Butterball, my step-cat who lives up to her name more and more by the day, seems less than appealing. So, after a couple of cups of coffee, I vacate the premises.

It’s a fine late-summer day, not too hot or too cold for me to walk across Monroe Park and then over the Downtown Expressway to Oregon Hill, a two-Camel walk.

Peggy and Awesome Dude are watching one of the shopping channels. They’re biding their time until The Price Is Right, the high point of their morning educational stimulation, comes on.

There is no use in pointing out to my mother and her live-in friend that they probably are losing brain cells watching this crap. I suppose it is more entertaining if you’re stoned.

I did mention my concerns once.

“Hard words,” Peggy replied, not taking her eyes off some idiot in a clown suit having an orgasm over being chosen to make a fool of herself in front of millions, “from a man who spends perfectly good Sunday afternoons watching the Washington Redskins.”

Touché.

Awesome wants to know the latest about “that guy you were supposed to of killed.”

I tell them enough to assuage their fears that I might be spending the rest of my life in prison, not mentioning that I still don’t have the official clean bill of health from L.D. Jones’s stalwart posse.

“Well,” Awesome says, “just be sure you got a good lawyer. I seen this guy the other day on Law and Order …”

The only way to really engage in a long, meaningful conversation with the Dude is to take a couple of tokes, and I’ve got things I’d like to do this morning that require having my meager wits about me.

Peggy catches me up on the latest news about my daughter and grandson. Andi and Walter see my old mom more than they see me, which is my bad as much as theirs.

When the formerly fat host comes blasting onto the screen urging us all to “come on down,” it’s time to leave.

This seems like a good morning to make another visit to the general vicinity of Jordan’s Branch to see if I can engage any of Stick Davis’s former neighbors. I walk back to the Prestwould, get in the venerable Honda, and head west.

Taking a right off Patterson onto Glenburnie, I drive past the church and take another right on Stokes Lane. I see the modest one-story house Stick was renting up ahead on the left. It no long appears to be an active crime scene.

What I’d like to know is whether any of Stick’s neighbors can tell me anything about him. In the time we spent together working on the book, I don’t recall him mentioning any of them, and no one came by while I was there.

I see a rather substantial black lady watching me through her screen door in the house beside Stick’s. I go over and introduce myself.

Mrs. Woolfolk doesn’t seem to want to talk to me at first, but when she realizes I’m a harmless reporter, she opens up a little.

“You got to be careful around here,” she says. “I’m part of the neighborhood watch.”

Yeah, the fact that guys like Jerome Sheets might just wander through your neighborhood looking for an unlocked door should make people more watchful.

“No, he didn’t have nothing much to say,” the lady tells me when I ask about Stick. “He just kept to himself. Didn’t hurt nobody. Sure didn’t deserve what he got.”

Before I leave to go knock on some more doors, I ask her if she knew anything about the break-in.

“No,” she says, “but there was them other guys, the ones that must of come later.”

I stop.

“Other guys?”

“The paper said that boy broke into the house on a Saturday night, but this was on Sunday. I know because I was getting ready to go to Sunday night services.”

What Mrs. Woolfolk says she saw was a couple of guys parking in front of Stick’s house.

“They went in, and then they come out again, and they had some stuff. They come in with like a grocery bag, but it looked empty, and it was full when they come out.”

“Like maybe notebooks?”

“I couldn’t tell. It was in that bag.”

I ask her if she had told the police about the men.

“No. I figured they was friends or something. And the police didn’t never talk to me,” she says. “And it didn’t seem to matter much at the time. But now, thinking about them going in there and him already dead, it does seem peculiar.”

To say the least.

I guess that, once the police got their man, or boy, the hapless Jerome Sheets, they didn’t much care about canvassing the neighborhood.

Mrs. Woolfolk doesn’t remember much about what the two guys looked like.

“Just a couple of kind of mean-looking white boys. They was either bald or had shaved their heads. And, oh, I think one of them had a tattoo on his forehead.”

“His forehead?”

“Yeah. I couldn’t make it out, but I’m pretty sure that’s what it was.”

They were driving “some kind of dark-colored van.”

When I’ve milked Mrs. Woolfolk dry, I thank her.

On my way out, she says, “You know, you look familiar. Did you ever know a fella named Richard Slade?”

We’re cousins, I tell her.

“My land. Well, I thought so. I went to school with him. That was terrible, what they did, sending him to prison for something he didn’t do. And then trying to put him back in again.”

There’s no sense in my mentioning my role in once saving Richard Slade’s ass. I have that fancy three-dollar Virginia Press Association award for my role in it. Reward enough for anyone.

I HAVE an address for Terri McAllister. Having no better way to piss away an off day, I stop by unannounced.

She lives in a place near the Downtown Expressway, a little north of Carytown. When she answers the door, she seems less than thrilled to see me.

“I got to be at work in forty-five minutes,” she says.

I assure her that I won’t take up that much of her time.

She opens the screen door. I start to squash out my smoke. She says, “Hell, don’t worry about that. You could probably get cancer from licking the damn walls in here.”

She doesn’t ask me to sit, and she doesn’t either, making it clear that the clock is ticking.

I tell her what Stick’s next-door neighbor told me about the two men who “visited” his place, apparently more than a day after his demise.

“Did you ever hear him say anything about any problems, about anybody that was, um, unhappy with him about anything?”

She laughs, with damn little humor.

“You asked me about that the other day. Stick probably made a lot of people unhappy, from some of the stories they were telling at O’Toole’s. But I don’t know that he had made anybody mad enough to kill him.”

“Did he ever seem like he was worried, like he was looking over his shoulder or something?”

She looks at her watch and sighs.

“Not that I can recall. He was a little jumpy, but I figured that was just him. You didn’t want to slip up on him all of a sudden. Sometimes I’d accidentally wake him up, and he’d go all Kung-Fu until he realized it was just me. So somebody came in after he was killed, and they just left and took something of his?”

“That’s what the lady said it looked like.”

I mention the notebooks that I couldn’t find.

“Damn,” says Terri McAllister, putting out her cigarette in the sink. “Sounds like ol’ Stick was keeping a few secrets from me.”

Welcome to the club, I tell her.

She promises to call me if she thinks of anything else.

NEXT STOP is police headquarters.

L.D. Jones is delighted to spare me a few minutes. Kidding. But when I relay the message through his pit-bull administrative aide that I have information about the Stick Davis case, I am granted a brief audience.

“Why,” the chief asks, “are you bothering me? You ought to be glad we found someone who’s a more likely suspect than you.”

I assure L.D. that I do not relish crapping on his parade, but that I have information I’m sure he’ll want me to share.

“Just doing my civic duty.”

The chief makes a rude sound. When I tell him about Mrs. Woolfolk and the visitors the late Stick had between Jerome’s visit and my discovering his corpse, he tries not to appear interested.

“I’m sure your detectives must have interviewed her,” I add, “her living right next door and all, but I guess the lady has a bad memory, because she doesn’t recall talking to the police.”

L.D. shakes his head.

“She might have been mistaken about the day,” he says finally, hopefully.

I burst his bubble by telling him how the lady knew they came by on Sunday.

“Well,” the chief says, “who knows what they wanted? But we’ve still got the killer locked up here. He broke in, walked in, whatever, on Saturday and when we catch him, he tells us right off that there was a dead guy there but he didn’t kill him, just worked around him. You believe that, and I’ve some land just off Virginia Beach I’d like to sell you.”

I suggest that the men who dropped by late Sunday afternoon might have had a horse in this race.

“Like what?”

If I knew that, I tell L.D., I’d have a lot better idea why my old buddy Stick’s ashes are sitting in a box in his brother’s living room.

“I’m just saying,” I add, “that there’s something going on here that goes beyond some dickhead kid killing a guy in a robbery gone bad.”

I haven’t brought Whit Charles’s name into my conversations with the chief, at least not yet. No sense in muddying the waters. Especially since Gino knows where I live.

I’m not inclined to think Charles murdered his former employee. He’s probably committed plenty of offenses worthy of incarceration, but there’s something else going on here, Stick-wise, and if I bide my time a bit, Mr. Charles might show me the light.

“You know what your problem is?” the chief asks, and proceeds to tell me. “You’ve got too much imagination.”

And you don’t have enough, the thought balloon over my head reads. Hell, I know that Occam and his fucking razor are usually right, that the simplest answer is the right one, but for our city’s finest, the original simple answer to who killed Stick Davis was yours truly. Is it possible that the cops have whiffed on this second “simple answer” as well?

AFTER A late, two-beer lunch at Perly’s, I stop by the office. Might as well completely butcher my day off, and Cindy won’t be home for another couple of hours at least.

I want to check in with Sarah, to see if the bastard who killed her dog has been caught yet. When I walk into the newsroom, though, it’s obvious that my boss and former protégé is not the only one having issues today.

I smell layoffs.

I catch a whiff of panic when I step off the elevator. You come to recognize it after it’s happened five or six times, which it has with our ill-used staff over the past few years.

People are gathered in little clusters, speaking low, trying not to draw attention to themselves. A young photographer breaks the silence by loudly stating the obvious: “This sucks.”

I walk into Sarah’s office.

“Who?”

She motions for me to shut the door, although it’s obvious that whatever bad news she possesses is already public knowledge.

It has occurred to me, as it always does at times like this, that this time the “who?” might be me. God knows I’ve made enough enemies. And my salary, just enough to pay the rent, groceries, cigarettes, and beer, with a little left to put into the 401(k), is huge compared with what newbies like Leighton Byrd and Callie Ann Boatwright are making.

When Sarah tells me about the assistant state editor, two reporters, and a photographer who no longer work here, I feel really badly for them but also realize that I have started breathing again. I am learning to live with survivor’s guilt.

She concurs with the kid photographer. This really does suck. Nobody can figure a way to get anyone under the age of forty to subscribe to a damn print newspaper, and nobody wants to pay shit for an online publication that they used to get for free. All the advertising we get is paid obits, going-away presents from the families of our dearly departed readers.

They’ve gotten rid of two guys in advertising, too, and a circulation manager.

“What have I gotten myself into?” Sarah mutters, loud enough for me to hear.

I assure her that, when and if her own judgment day comes, she has the chops and the résumé to land on her feet somewhere else.

“Like cranking out bullshit for a health-care company? Or maybe I could shill for Big Tobacco. In the meantime, I get to fuck up good people’s lives.”

She says that, just between me and her, she has been testing the waters with some of the online news sites.

“It’s the future, Willie,” she says.

Not for me, I assure her.

“Well,” she says, “no offense, but I’ve got a hell of a lot more future to worry about than you do.”

Ouch.

“Speaking of fucking up people’s lives,” I ask, “what about Luther Gates?”

“No change. The cops are looking for him, but they don’t know where he is. His soon-to-be-ex-wife says she hasn’t heard from him and doesn’t expect to.”

“You’re still armed?”

She gives me a tight little smile.

“Yeah. In my purse. The guards downstairs know about it, and so does B.S.”

“Well,” I say, speaking from experience, “you know how to use it. Just be careful.”

“I kind of wish the son of a bitch would confront me or something. Right now, I’m in the mood to shoot somebody. Especially after what he did to Grover.”

I tell her that, on the bright side, I might have a pretty good story for our flagging rag, but that it might take a couple more days to flesh out.

“Tell me,” she says. “Take my mind off all this shit.”

I follow her gaze out into the newsroom, where four compatriots are gathered around the assistant editor, a woman who has been here almost as long as I have, is divorced, and has a grown daughter with health issues living with her.

“Wheelie and I had to make the decisions,” Sarah says. “We had to have one less editor. If it wasn’t Ruth, the other possibility was Reed, the guy who has to take off every Tuesday for chemo.”

That does, I concur, suck.

I tell her most of what I know about Stick Davis’s possible assassin or assassins. Kid comes in to rob the place Saturday night and finds a dead body but doesn’t tell anyone. A couple of goons show up late Sunday afternoon and leave with a grocery bag full of something or other. I find Stick’s body on Monday and get put on the L.D. Jones Most Wanted list, soon to be supplanted by the feckless Jerome Sheets. I manage to get back inside for a quick look and I can’t find the one thing I really wanted to find: Stick’s notebooks.

Sarah sighs and shakes her head.

“You’ve written most of that already, except the part about the two guys on Sunday. Give me something new.”

And so I tell her about my little meeting with Whit Charles, without mentioning his name just yet.

“So this guy, he was Davis’s boss down there in, what, Virgin Gordo?”

“Gorda. Yeah.”

“And he thinks somebody else wanted Stick dead, somebody other than you and the kid? But what about this guy? From what you’re telling me, it seems like he had as good a reason as any to kill him.”

I tell her that I don’t believe he did it.

“Why not?”

“For one thing, he came back here for the memorial. He’s made himself pretty visible. He even paid the burial expenses. He met with me and told me, about Stick stealing his money and all.”

“And you can write this?”

Not just yet, I tell her. I did make some promises that professional standards and concern for my health make it essential that I keep.

“But he’s going to tell me more.”

“When?”

Soon, I tell her, not adding “I hope.”

I WALK over to one of the little clumps of my peers who are wishing good luck to a woman who is going to need it.

Wheelie, our top editor, has come down from a meeting with the suits and is walking over to offer his condolences, a brave gesture, I have to admit, from a man who helped choose her as our latest sacrifice to the gods of the Grimm Group, our corporate masters.

Ruth says nothing when he tells her what anyone with any guts or common decency would tell the person he’s just fired. He offers assurances that she was a fine editor who didn’t do anything wrong except be in this godforsaken business at the wrong time, that everything will somehow be all right. He promises to help her find another job at the tender age of fifty-seven and “land on her feet.”

Ruth and Wheelie and the rest of us, who are looking down and trying to will ourselves to disappear from this embarrassing scene, know it’s all bullshit, but Wheelie’s trying.

Ruth doesn’t curse him or spit in his face. She just looks at him, nods her head, turns, and walks toward the elevators.

Wheelie and I exchange glances. The others go their separate ways. Nobody says anything to Wheelie, probably for fear that any negative attention might put them at the top of our dwindling list of working journalists.

Our boss looks at me as he walks past.

“I need a drink,” says Wheelie, who doesn’t drink.