CHAPTER NINE

Tuesday, September 10

For the first time since I found Stick Davis’s body, I take a look at the half-done manuscript I’ve saved on my home computer screen. It’s quiet in our apartment, with Cindy off to school and Butterball taking her post-breakfast nap, which will last until the next feeding time. Lying there basking in the sun coming in the living-room windows, the animal almost looks like acceptable company.

Stick’s biography isn’t the most boring thing I’ve ever written or read, with plenty of salacious and/or criminal content. However, as it reads now, it wasn’t going to make Stick much, if any, money or win me the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

Was Stick feeding me a line about holy-shit secrets to come? I wonder if I’ll ever know.

There is one thing, though, that gets my attention. I didn’t pay it much mind when he mentioned it. I find it where I stuck it, halfway through the seventh chapter.

“There were guys down there,” I quote him as saying, “who were kind of scary. Some of the things they told me made me realize that all the nuts aren’t back in the States. Some of them went south.”

And that’s it. His narrative moves on to his latest underage island girl conquest. He said he’d talk about the aforementioned nuts later.

I speed-read the deathless prose I wrote before Stick left us and don’t learn anything else, except maybe I shouldn’t quit the day job to write books. I’m better at the stuff you line your birdcage with the next morning.

I’m on my third cup of coffee when my phone rings.

It’s Terri McAllister.

“I remembered something,” she says. “It might not be anything, but I thought you’d want to know.”

What Terri remembered is an iPad.

“I thought about what you said about the missing notebooks, and it made me think. Stick had an iPad. He had it with him last time I saw him, and he was always writing shit on it. And you said there wasn’t anything like that when you went back and looked later?”

I answer in the negative. Now that Terri mentions it, I do remember seeing it there on the table once or twice. I even saw Stick pick it up once and tap something into it.

“Like I said, it might not be nothing, but you asked me to call you if I remembered anything.”

I thank her profusely and promise to take her to dinner soon, somewhere better than that greasy spoon where she works.

“Aw, cut the bullshit,” Terri says. “I just thought this might help.”

I call L.D. Jones’s office. After being frozen out by his unhelpful aide, despite my assertion that I have a hot tip about the Stick Davis murder, I give up and do something I try not to do if I can help it. I text Peachy Love and ask her to call me when and if she can do it without drawing suspicion.

Five minutes later, she calls me.

“This better be good,” my former journalism compatriot and present police flack says. “The chief is watching my ass lately, like he thinks I might be consorting with the enemy.”

She’s stepped out of the building for a minute. I assure her that I’d never call her or text her at work if it wasn’t a big deal.

“No,” she says when I ask, “I never heard anybody say anything about finding an iPad or anything like that. Doesn’t sound like something we’d try to keep secret. I know they seized his desk-top computer, but they didn’t find anything interesting on it, from what I hear.”

I thank her and let her get back inside. As with Terri McAllister, I tell her that I owe her one. Like Terri, she tells me to cut the bullshit. I guess I need to work on my sincerity.

So Stick had an iPad and it wasn’t there when the cops and I snooped around later. Hell, lots of people have iPads. There isn’t any real reason to think that he had stored stuff away on his that he didn’t want anyone to see.

Still, the fact that he had one, and neither the cops nor I saw it, makes me wonder. Maybe the guys who came by for a “visit” that Sunday took it.

But another thought occurs to me. It seems like an iPad might be just the kind of thing a small-time dickhead kid crook might snatch while he was robbing a dead man’s house.

I think about getting Jerome Sheets’s mother’s address, either from the cops or Big Boy Sunday, but then I have a better idea.

Marcus Green answers his own phone. I cut to the chase and ask him if his junior felon client mentioned anything to him about picking up an iPad while he was rummaging through Stick’s apartment.

“Nah. I think when they caught him they got everything he took. Why?”

I tell Marcus about the iPad. I point out to him that, if the boy did take the iPad and has it cached away at his momma’s or somewhere else, it might be good if he told us, since there might be something on there that could get his ass out of the major crack it’s in right now.

“Yeah,” Marcus says. “I have to talk to the dummy this afternoon about his defense, such as it is. I’ll find out what I can. So you say the cops don’t have it?”

“That’s what my source tells me.”

“Well,” he says, “Peachy ought to know.”

I wonder how Marcus knows about Peachy and hope he’s in a minority of one.

After that, I call Whit Charles, hoping that he might be willing and able to tell me anything else about whatever he hinted at on Sunday.

I leave a message, and he calls me back five minutes later.

I read him the one paragraph in the manuscript where Stick alluded to “scary guys” from the States who went “down south.”

He’s silent for a few seconds.

“Yeah,” he says finally, “that sounds about right.”

There’s a pause. I hear him clear his throat.

“We need to talk somewhere else. Somewhere private.”

I ask him if he thinks his phone’s tapped or something. He just tells me that he’ll call me back later. Then he hangs up.

ANDI GIVES me a call. She has a day off today and asks if I want to meet her for coffee. William’s in kindergarten, Walter’s at work.

“Just us.”

I’ve had my day’s worth of caffeine already but don’t want to pass up a chance to spend some time, quality or otherwise, with my only offspring.

We meet at one of the coffee shops in Carytown. Andi lives pretty close to a Starbucks but wants to support local businesses, plus they skin you a little less thoroughly for a cup of java than Fourbucks does.

Andi has put on a pound or two but is still definitely ahead of the curve for a thirty-year-old with a kid. Her hair’s copper-colored these days. She seems to be thriving, happy with her roles as mother, wife, and social worker.

“So,” she says, “are you in the clear now?”

I give her the Cliff’s Notes version of the Stick Davis affair as it stands so far.

She says she’d really like me to get to know her Walter better. I tell her that he’s aces in my book because he’s good to her.

“About time somebody treated you like you deserve.”

She seems to know that I’m talking about my history as a piss-poor father.

“Ah,” she says, waving my words away, “you did the best you could.”

Not true, but sometimes it’s best to just shut up.

After we’ve hogged the place for an hour or so, no doubt depriving a fledgling novelist of a nook in which to park his ass for half a day with his muse, my phone buzzes.

It’s Whit Charles.

He sounds like he’s in a car somewhere.

“Do you know where Zion Crossroads is off I-64?” he asks.

I know the exit, I assure him.

“You need to get out here,” he says. He gives me directions to a place that’s a couple of turns off the interstate and says I should drive there as quick as I can.

“Where am I going?” I ask.

“Just get here. Now.”

I kiss Andi goodbye, glad Charles didn’t call any sooner.

“Tell Walter we’ll have a few beers together sometime soon,” I tell her. She acts like she believes me.

I have to call Sally Velez and tell her I’m going to be late today and explain why.

“I hope to hell you get a damn story out of this eventually,” she says, adding, “And you might want to be careful, for a change.”

I promise that I will try.

THE HOUSE Charles directed me toward necessitates going south off the Zion Crossroads exit, then east, then north again, passing under the interstate. The last turn takes me up one of those Virginia country roads that need to be about ten feet wider. A guy in a pickup almost runs my aged Honda into the trees wheeling around a curve.

And then I see the house. It’s brick, two stories, with four columns in front like it’s Monticello or something. It sits on a little rise with lots of cleared but fallow land around it. There’s a black Denali sitting in the circular driveway in front.

I park in the shade of the behemoth. Whit Charles is standing on the porch overlooking all that land. Gino is leaning against one of the columns, about forty feet away.

Charles has a Budweiser in his hand as he turns toward me. He offers me one when I walk up the steps.

“The old home place,” he says, taking a sip and looking around. “Ain’t it a beauty?”

It once was impressive enough to have merited a name: Rosewood.

Charles insists that all this will be off the record, just like our last meeting. I dig my heels in a little, because the man seems to be holding a considerably weaker hand than he did last time. He appears to want something from me, so, tit for tat. I tell him that it will be fair game but not for attribution, and that his name won’t appear in what I write, if I write it.

He bitches a little but finally agrees. Then he gives me a quick history, something about his great-grandfather, whose name was Rose, buying it with money he won in a poker game, and how now the place is more or less abandoned.

“You own this?” I ask as I light up a Camel, ignoring my host’s judgmental frown.

“Yes. After all that unfortunate mess from my guardian days, I was able to hang on to it. Can’t do shit with it though.”

He takes me inside, explaining as we go how much it would cost to replace the roof, repoint the bricks, put in new windows, replace the flooring, put in central heat, etc., etc., etc. As he talks, a pigeon flies above us, headed back to its nest in one of the dining-room chandeliers.

“Easier to tear it down and start over,” he says.

“Why,” I ask, “are we here?”

“Because,” he says, “they don’t know about this place. At least, I hope they don’t.”

I wait for something other than pigeon shit to descend on me.

“They,” it turns out, are the kind of goons who think folks who aren’t of the Caucasian persuasion should find some other planet.

“You remember that shit in Charlottesville, right?” Charles asks as he looks up balefully at his bird-nest chandelier.

If he’d been living here in 2017, he wouldn’t even ask that question. Who the hell doesn’t remember? We’d like to forget, but it’s only been a little over two years since the Unite the White rally there that left a young woman and two state cops dead and maybe our state’s most liberal city wondering what the fuck happened.

Some of the racist assholes are in jail, and some went back into whatever hole they crawled out of. A few of them, though, apparently decided to retreat and wait for a better, or worse, day. They must have had passports, because they went south.

“Virgin Gorda’s pretty laid-back,” Charles says. “It’s not a bad place to go if you’ve become persona non grata in more, um, civilized climes.”

It would be impolite to mention that Whit Charles should know about having to find a new address. His plan is to get back to the British West Indies pretty soon, before family members of some of his former clients know he’s here.

Somehow, he says, Stick got involved with these bastards.

“He might have known one of them when he lived in Richmond. At least a couple of them are from Virginia. I know that much.”

I’m surprised. Stick Davis was a lot of things when I knew him. He was lazy, a drunk, and world-class inconsiderate. “Racist” was not a box I would have checked. I mean, hell, one of the few people in Richmond who put up with him almost to the end was yours truly, and who did he pick to write his damn memoirs?

“Hell, I really don’t think he was ever into all that neo-Nazi shit,” Charles says. “He probably just ran into some guys from back home, and they kind of took him in. I’m afraid Stick was what you’d call morally ambiguous.”

When Stick found out just how screwed up his new friends were, though, Charles says, he apparently decided to do something about it.

“Stick was in over his head,” is the way he describes the situation.

“When he came back to the States, he didn’t just take my hundred grand with him. That wouldn’t have gotten him killed. It was the plans that got him whacked.”

“The plans?”

Charles looks down at Gino, who’s just out of earshot.

“The plans to blow up something. Something big. Back here in Virginia. Sometime soon.”

I ask him to repeat what he said.

My hearing isn’t as good as it once was. It suffered a drastic downhill turn last year when a would-be assassin just missed giving me a bullet lobotomy. Sometimes somebody says something so crazy that I’m sure I misheard.

Charles says it again.

“When? Why?”

I’ve missed “who,” “what,” and “where,” but Whit can see that he has my attention.

“I don’t know all the details,” he says. “If I did, maybe we wouldn’t be talking here. I’m guessing that they’re still pissed about all that mess back in 2017. Maybe wanting to get some payback.”

They’re pissed? The whole state of Virginia, or at least the great majority of us, would like to kick the shit out of those lunatics for giving the Old Dominion a shiner. You can’t have a discussion about skinheads anywhere on the planet without some footage from that godforsaken day. You’d think Charlottesville, aka Berkeley east, was some kind of incubator for Nazis.

If you know all this shit, I ask Charles, why don’t you go to the police?

He slaps a yellow jacket away.

“I’m not exactly clean,” he says. “I don’t mean that I’m involved in any of this crap, but I do have some, ah, unfortunate history up here. I’d just as soon not get involved with the authorities if I can help it.”

So, I ask, why the fuck are you here?

“You might not believe it, but I am on the side of the angels on this one. What these guys are planning, I think it will do so much harm that somebody has to do something.”

Charles asks me to have a seat.

“I’m going to tell you as much of the story as I know,” he says. “I’m going to tell you why I brought Gino up here with me for protection, and why we’re meeting out here in God’s country where I don’t think they can find me.”

Sometime after Stick came back home with a bunch of Whit Charles’s money, Charles got a note from his former jack-of-all-trades.

The note apologized for what Stick referred to as “the loan” and went on to say that he was working on “something big” involving a group called Purity.

“That was the name of that bunch of thugs he got involved with down there. He said he was afraid of what they were planning, and that he aimed to stop it.”

I ask the obvious question: Why the hell didn’t Stick go to the cops when he came back up here.

Charles shakes his head.

“I don’t know. But he did say something about writing a book about it. I suppose that’s where you came in.

“He made one point, though, in the letter. He said he was going to make a big score on this book, he called it an exposé, and also blow the whistle on them in time to stop it from happening. I had the sense that he knew the place and the time, and that he was just biding his time.”

He offers me another Bud. I’m a Miller man, but free beer’s free beer.

I take the conversation back to why we’re out here within eyesight of the middle of nowhere.

“We couldn’t talk about this a little closer to Richmond?”

“I had a call this morning. It was from one of those burner phones. Whoever it was had the distinct impression that I knew more than I do. He promised that some rather unpleasant things would happen to me if I didn’t cooperate and then get the hell out of Virginia.

“The one I talked to didn’t seem to believe me when I told him I didn’t know anything. These guys know where I’m staying, and they’re serious as a heart attack.”

Putting two and two together, it occurs to me that whoever killed Stick Davis didn’t get what he was looking for, and that he or they would go to rather extreme measures to obtain it.

“I don’t know any more than that,” Charles says. “I’ve made an anonymous call to the FBI, but they didn’t seem to take me too seriously. All I know is the name of the group and that something bad is being planned somewhere in Virginia. Not a hell of a lot to go on.”

Charles is planning to head back to Virgin Gorda in a couple of days “but I might not be staying there for long. There’s other islands, and these lunatics kind of scare me. There was a rumor down there that they took some guy out on a boat, some guy they were afraid was going to rat them out, cut him up, and fed him to the sharks while he was still alive.”

The man looks rattled. Considering that he’s apparently been something of a criminal himself in recent years, that gets my attention. He does not appear to be the kind of man who scares easily.

He turns to me.

“If I were you,” he says, “I’d watch my ass. These guys know who you are.”

Yeah, that’s occurred to me. If they can read and have access to newspapers or TV, they know who found Stick’s body. Maybe they think that I dug up what they weren’t able to. Makes sense. I mean, what kind of an asshole has somebody write his memoirs and won’t tell him upfront the big secret that’s going to make the book a best seller?

Of course, these clowns seem convinced that Whit Charles has been made privy to that information too.

I tell him that what I’ve written of Stick’s life thus far doesn’t exactly paint him as a paragon of virtue. Lots of vignettes about drugs and underage girls.

Your name, I say, is mentioned often.

Charles winces.

“Yeah, I figured when I heard what he was doing, I kind of knew there’d be some shit in there that might be uncomfortable for me. Stick was a little too loose of lip, even if he did a lot of good work for me. And I guess those loose lips are what sunk him.

“But that island shit, none of it can be proved, and I sure as hell wouldn’t have had him killed over it.”

Nevertheless, I put in, I guess you have more than one reason to maybe find another island.

He doesn’t deny that.

“Why,” I ask when it appears we’re winding up, “are you telling me all this?”

He looks at me.

“Because you might be able to get to the bottom of this, or at least get the FBI or somebody involved. You might think I’m the stereotype of a scumbag lawyer, but whatever is going down, I don’t want it to happen. There are limits to my depravity. Maybe you can do what I can’t.”

Charles takes one last swig, crushes the empty beer can, and drops it on the floor.

“Two more days,” Charles says. “That’s all the time I need to take care of a couple of things, and then I’m out of here.”

He looks me in the eye.

“You don’t want to buy a house, do you?”