CHAPTER TEN

Wednesday, September 11

After I got back yesterday afternoon, only an hour late for my turn in the night cops barrel, there was an e-mail waiting for me, titled: From Mark.

I assumed that meant Mark Baer, who used to work here before he went rogue and became a flack for a woman who almost became a member of the United States House of Representatives and is lucky not to be in jail at present.

Felicia Delmonico won the election to represent our local congressional district. She also was (a) shown to be ass-deep in an effort to keep some ill-gotten gains hidden and (b) almost killed. The former fact led to the lily-pure members of the House opting not to seat her.

She never got to move to DC, but (a) I understand she’s recovering well from being shot by the son of her late husband, Teddy, (b) she’s probably going to get away with probation and community service when her fraud case finally comes to trial, (c) she did not, as some suspected, kill said husband, and (d) she has, so far, been able to hang on to the three-million-dollar life-insurance policy Teddy left for her.

Felicia is a survivor—crooked as a blacksnake, but a survivor.

Poor Baer, though, didn’t have anything on which to fall back except an otherwise decent résumé besmirched by the fact that he was caught working for the person whose campaign he was supposed to be covering for our newspaper.

I didn’t really want to talk to him, but I knew he’d keep bugging me until I did.

He thanked me for getting back with him. As any fool could have foreseen, he was angling to retrace that one-way street he chose and become a journalistic virgin again.

“I really thought she was on the side of the angels,” he said. It is hard to believe that anyone who knew Felicia would have been that naive. For the Democrats, she was a means to an end, and when it turned out they didn’t need her for a House majority, they set her adrift. Baer was, of course, consigned to a leaky lifeboat with one oar.

“Do you think you could talk to someone there?” he asked. It pained me to hear Baer whine. He could be an asshole and a sneak, but he had always seemed self-sufficient.

I suggested he talk to Sarah. After all, they did “see” each other once upon a time and cut their teeth together here as cub reporters.

A sigh.

“Already did.”

I did the thing you do when you don’t want to tell the hopeless how hopeless they are. I said he could use me as a reference. I said I’d keep my ears open, knowing full well that I won’t hear much that will help Baer.

I asked him if he had been in touch with Ms. Delmonico since the debacle of last year.

“A couple of times. I don’t know what she’s going to do next, but she said she wasn’t looking forward to serving free meals to bums or picking up litter. Oh, and she said to give her a call sometime.”

Like that’s going to happen, I thought but didn’t say. I possibly saved Felicia Delmonico’s life last fall, but she isn’t calling to thank me. Felicia only calls when she needs something, and it occurred to me that anything I might do to help Felicia probably was going to be a detriment to humanity.

I wished Baer the best and pretty much meant it.

When I mentioned my call to Sarah later that evening, she rolled her eyes.

“Come on,” I implored her, giving her my best puppy-dog look. “Don’t you think you could help an old buddy, you know, for old times’ sake?”

She told me to stuff it.

“Old times here,” she said as she closed her office door, “are definitely forgotten.”

Sarah, like most journalists high enough up the food chain to be making employment decisions, is in the business of subtracting jobs, not adding them.

THIS MORNING, my first item of business is to drop in on my favorite lawyer. After getting a dose of Whit Charles yesterday, Marcus Green seems almost like an upstanding citizen. To my knowledge, he’s never become a client’s custodian and then stolen their life savings.

Kate is in the office when I drop by. She asks me when I’m going to send the check for last month’s rent.

I do look at my bank statement online occasionally. It’s easier than actually writing the amount down each time I send a check, so I know she’s bullshitting.

“We’ve decided to stop paying rent,” I tell her. “We’re going to be squatters. Saves a lot of money. And if you try to kick us out, I’ll start smoking indoors again.”

“Aw, crap, Willie,” Kate says. “I never could jerk your chain.”

That’s debatable, but it’s nice to be on such jocular terms with at least one of my three exes.

She says Marcus is running late. I ask about Grace, her daughter by her now-deceased second husband.

I suggest that a play date might be nice.

“Willie,” she says, “we’re past that now.”

I quickly explain that I’m talking about having a get-together for Grace, who’s in first grade now, and my grandson.

Kate grins.

“Gotcha.”

Then she adds, “I don’t know, Willie. I don’t know if she’s into younger men.”

He’s a charmer, I assert.

“Just like his granddad,” Kate says.

Hopefully, I add, not just like him.

Kate doesn’t disagree.

Marcus comes in while we’re talking. As Kate’s third and present husband, he might be concerned about my sitting on the edge of his wife’s desk, but he doesn’t look worried in the least. Maybe, God forbid, I have aged into the lamentable state of “harmless.”

“I tried to call you,” he says, “but you didn’t answer.”

Probably didn’t hear it, I say, pointing to my ear.

“Well,” Marcus says, “I think we might have shaken something loose on that thing we talked about yesterday.”

I was hoping for as much.

Marcus says he put the strong arm on his young client, and it wasn’t that hard to get Jerome to confess that there was indeed an iPad among the possessions in Stick Davis’s apartment when Jerome was ransacking it, and that he took it.

“I assured him that there wasn’t going to be any downside to it, that if anything it might get him a few steps farther away from a future lethal injection. That seemed to get his attention.”

The iPad is at his mother’s house.

Marcus is happy to have me go with him over to Jerome’s mom’s place to retrieve the ill-gotten gains.

“Might need backup,” he says as we’re heading north toward Barton Heights. “The kid says his mother is a bit on the badass side. Hell, being one of Big Boy Sunday’s stable, I wouldn’t doubt it. Said she might not want to let us in. She’s apparently got a problem with people in suits, even if they’re of the African American persuasion.”

He looks over at me.

“This Jerome,” he says, “he’s Big Boy’s son, isn’t he?”

I tell Marcus that this seems obvious to me. Hence the interest on the part of my favorite felon.

“Big Boy’s called me twice,” he says. “He acts like it’ll be my fault if we don’t get him out of this. I’ve explained that the best we can hope for is that he goes down for entering a dead man’s house and stealing his stuff. But he’d be tried as a juvenile.”

“Well, you cashed the check, right?”

Marcus harrumphs and drives on.

“Let me make a call,” I say.

Big Boy Sunday is between meals apparently. I explain the potential problem to him.

“So he stashed away the iPad? Damn, did he think he was going to get out of jail and sell it to somebody? What the fuck’s wrong with that boy?”

He agrees that it would be best if he gave Jerome’s mom a call to let her know we’re coming.

“You’re going to get him out of this, though, right, Willie?”

I explain, as politely as I can, that what’s on the iPad could go a long way toward ensuring that Jerome doesn’t spend much of his remaining life in jail.

“Well,” Big Boy says, dragging the word out over three syllables, “I s’pose that’s something.”

We park in front of the Sheets residence. It’s a nice-looking two-story brick house on what, in the light of day, seems like a peaceful-enough street. I’ve been on this block, though, on nights when the peace had been disturbed big-time.

Ms. Sheets, who goes by Shakira, doesn’t really want to let us in, but it’s obvious that she’s been given her marching orders from Big Boy. Marcus explains that we’re here to retrieve something that might help her son’s case.

The door is opened, grudgingly.

She’s a large woman, the way Big Boy says he likes ’em.

Shakira turns to Marcus, whom she’s met only once.

“You’re that lawyer,” she says, getting very close to his face. “Why you haven’t got my Jerome out of jail yet?”

Marcus backs up a step and tries to explain that it isn’t that easy getting somebody sprung when there’s a dead body involved.

“Jerome ain’t killed nobody,” she exclaims. “They just setting his ass up.”

Then she looks over at me.

“Who the fuck is this?”

Just a reporter looking for the truth, I explain.

“Well,” she says, turning her glare on me, “you come to the right place. I can give you all the truth you can eat, Mr. Reporter. And the truth is, I don’t need some jumped-up Nee-gro lawyer and whatever the fuck you are coming snooping around here.”

Marcus, who can make an unfriendly witness wet his pants in court, seems strangely cowed by Shakira. But he finally gets the point across. Young Jerome took an iPad when he was burglarizing Stick Davis’s place, and the cops found no sign of it.

“It could help exonerate him,” I offer.

“Exonerate.” She repeats it like I’ve started speaking Chinese. “Yeah, it could exonerate his ass right to prison.”

“If I thought that,” Marcus says, “would I be here looking for it? I’m his lawyer, Ms. Sheets. I’m the one trying to get him off.”

Shakira chews on that for a moment and finally seems to buy it.

What Jerome told Marcus was that the iPad is in his bedroom, hidden between his mattress and box springs.

On the way back to her son’s bedroom, I ask Shakira if Jerome is her only child.

She points to a picture hanging on the wall. There’s Jerome, all dressed up for church, with two other children, his younger brother and sister.

“He’s a good boy,” Shakira says. I bite my tongue.

It takes us all of a minute to find the iPad.

“The police never searched here?” I ask.

She snorts.

“The po-po turned the place upside down. Got me out of bed in the middle of the night. Don’t guess they looked hard enough.”

Marcus thanks Ms. Sheets for her time and tells her that she’s done her son a favor by letting us take the iPad.

“You’re not gonna give it to the police, are you?”

We assure her that we are not, at least for now, although I’m certain that L.D. Jones and his minions would love to get a look at it.

Tough shit, L.D. Finders keepers. If we dig up something worth reporting to the city’s finest, we’ll let the chief in on it then. Or maybe I’ll let him read it in the paper.

Back in the car, I ask Marcus why he turned into such a pussycat in the face of Shakira Sheets.

He gives me his best baleful stare and tells me he can still kick my ass.

“But you acted like you were afraid she was gonna kick yours.”

He drives away from the curb and doesn’t answer right away.

Finally, he says, “She reminds me of my momma.”

WE GO back to the offices of Green and Ellis. I want to take a look right away, but when we try to access the iPad, it’s locked, and we obviously don’t know the password.

I have the log-on and password for Stick’s computer, the one the cops have. I got a glimpse of it one night when Stick was logging on. He didn’t seem to have any problem with my knowing it.

But for whatever reason, Stick has a different log-on and password for the damn iPad, and I don’t have that one. It could be in some file on the desktop, but the cops have it, and I doubt if I could induce Peachy to somehow get me access. Plus, I don’t want her to know, for her own sake, that I’ve got something the police would love to get their paws on.

I persuade Marcus to let me take the thing home with me by telling him that I might have a couple of ideas of what the password might be.

He shrugs.

“Might as well. I don’t have a clue. But we need to get it to the cops, soon.”

I go back by the Prestwould long enough to stash it. I have an idea that might or might not be full of shit. I’ll play around with that iPad tomorrow and see if I’m right.

I WASTE the rest of the morning or early afternoon waiting for the bandits at my favorite garage to get through inspecting the Honda. Virginia, either to make the highways safer or to line the pockets of mechanics, dictates that we have to get our vehicles inspected once a year.

With the Honda, it’s always something. Hell, the damn thing has almost two hundred thousand miles on it.

This time, it’s the brakes.

“How much,” I ask the young guy who gives me the bad news like a doctor telling you you’ve got Stage 4 cancer, “would you take to just put the damn sticker on and look the other way?”

He seems offended.

Two hours later and a few hundred dollars lighter, the Accord and I make our escape.

I stop at a burger joint on the way in and get to the paper not long after I was supposed to be there.

When I report for duty, I see Wheelie, Sarah, and Benson Stine, our present publisher, in what appears to be serious conversation in Wheelie’s office. I know it’s serious because Wheelie is doing that thing he does when he’s presented with a plate-load of crap. He grips the arms of his chair tight, as if to prevent himself from flying over the desk and strangling someone. So far, Wheelie has held tight.

The office, as with the rest of the editors’ digs, is enclosed by glass, so the whole newsroom can see that something’s happening here, but since none of us are lipreaders, what it is ain’t exactly clear.

“Probably trying to decide whether to give us 5 percent or 10 percent raises next year,” Sally Velez says. No one even bothers to laugh.

When their little confab breaks up, I wait half an hour and then mosey over to Sarah’s small office.

“Don’t even ask me, Willie,” she says when she sees me standing in the door.

IT’S A quiet afternoon and evening, until it isn’t.

About eight, I get a call. It’s my accountant, who normally only calls in April to give me bad news.

He lives in a posh neighborhood out off Three Chop Road, close to the University of Richmond. He seems excited to be giving me a hot news tip. Hell, the guy probably needs a little excitement.

“There’s something going on out here, Willie,” he says. “All hell’s breaking loose.”

I ask him to be more specific.

He says that about half the cop cars and ambulances in the city seem to have converged on a house in the next block.

“Somebody said they found a couple of dead bodies,” he adds.

That gets my attention.

He’s outside, and I can hear the cacophony of sirens in the background.

He’s in a neighborhood where nobody dies. They just move to Westminster Canterbury. After paying about 10K a month for “assisted living” bed and board, they eventually die there if they don’t run out of money first.

“This can’t be good for real-estate values,” I observe.

“Damn, Willie,” my accountant says, “that’s cold.”

I’m on my way in five minutes. I can’t tell a damn bit of difference in the brakes.

There are six police and other emergency vehicles on the tight little street, which I’m sure doesn’t see a lot of action unless UR has a home football or basketball game. Neighbors are standing in their yards.

I park as close as I can. Call it intuition, but the hairs on my arms are standing up.

And then I see the Black Denali parked in the driveway.

The house is a big-ass brick Tudor monstrosity, probably the property of some old ambulance-chasing buddy of Whit Charles.

No one else from the news media is here yet, but I know they’ll be hot on my heels. The TV folk will have something on the eleven o’clock news that their viewers don’t already know about for a change.

Among the uniforms standing in the chill and watching the red, blue, and yellow blinking lights reflect off the house’s windows is my old buddy Gillespie.

He greets me warmly.

“What the fuck,” he asks, “are you doing here?”

I don’t bother with the obvious answer.

“Two bodies?” I ask.

He looks around like he thinks L.D. Jones might be watching. He nods.

Gillespie hasn’t been in the house. He says the cops got a call a couple of hours ago, from a neighbor who thought he heard gunshots from inside.

I walk across the well-tended lawn. Just as I’m getting close to the front door, it opens. Four EMTs come out carrying a covered stretcher. And then four more come out with a second one. They don’t seem to be in a hurry.

Then L.D. comes through the door. I catch up with the chief as he hits the brick walkway.

He greets me much as Gillespie did earlier.

“Do you know who they are?” I ask him.

He tells me it’s none of my fucking business who they are, and to stop interfering with police business.

“Would you like me to tell you?” I ask.