CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Sunday, September 22

Who killed Stick Davis?

Maybe it’s a moot point now, although L.D. Jones and his crack police force would like to clear it off the books, I’m sure.

It’s a safe bet that the killer or killers were among the nine miscreants who died last Monday at Whit Charles’s house in Louisa County. Randall Heil said as much, and a fifth-grader could’ve figured it out even without that. Maybe DNA or other cop magic will tell us who specifically did the deed.

The commonwealth’s attorney must be relieved. No living perps means no trials.

The murders of Charles and his buddy Gino are equally solvable. Their killers are six feet under or at least on an autopsy table. Heil didn’t make much effort to hide the Purifiers’ role in the carnage.

Elsewhere the courts will be settling the hash of a few Purifiers for quite some time. The busts that went on all week put a dozen suspected terrorists in jails around the country. Randall Heil kept very good records of who his associates were, and they were from all over. California.

Idaho. Texas. Oregon. Indiana. For a resident of the former capital of the Confederacy, there is always guilty pleasure in seeing that all the racist Neanderthals don’t live in the South.

AS FOR Stick’s mindset and motive, I have a better idea than I did a few days ago.

I went back and reread the half a manuscript I’d finished before I was deprived of the rest of my fifty-thousand-dollar fee and my subject was deprived of his life.

It’s no fun reading what you’ve already written, and it can be a fool’s errand. You never catch your own mistakes, and you’re not excited about going back over what you already know. God bless copy editors.

Going back over Stick’s memoirs, though, I remembered something.

In all the shitstorm that followed my finding Stick’s body, I had forgotten about something he told me. It didn’t seem pertinent to anything I’d written so far, but I wrote it down anyhow.

When he was talking about his life down in the islands one night, he digressed. He said something that he might have later told me to remove from the memoir, if we’d gotten that far.

“Something big is coming,” he said, according to my hen-scratch notes. “When it happens, a lot of people are going to be surprised. They might start having a different perspective on Randolph Giles Davis. They might think he wasn’t such a bad dude after all.”

He referred to himself in the third person a lot.

At the time, I thought it was just Stick being a gasbag. But, neurotic note-taker that I am, I wrote it down anyhow.

Stick was often about as clear as an Afton Mountain fogbank. There was always the feeling, as the project plodded along, that my old drinking partner was jerking my chain a little. But, hell, the first check hadn’t bounced.

I remember asking him if he could give me a little more to work with than that throwaway comment, such as what the fuck “something” was.

“In good time,” I remember him saying, blowing a smoke ring and winking. I left it at that.

So I am left to conjecture. If he had just said something big was going to happen, I’d have written him off as a careless, thoughtless bastard who was willing to play games with people’s lives.

But he said that what happened might make the world think he wasn’t the complete broke-dick that logic told us he was.

And it jibes with what the late Whit Charles said when he was filling me in on Stick’s island days.

Having been given the benefit of the doubt on many occasions, I am willing to repackage one of those gifts and cut Stick Davis some slack.

Maybe he was trying to play both ends against the middle, playing footsy with some bad dudes but still planning to rain on their fireworks before things went too far. And getting a nice book deal out of it.

To plagiarize what little I remember of Shakespeare, it’s possible Stick was trying to do a good deed in a naughty world.

At any rate, that’s what I’m telling our shrinking readership in the appallingly subjective piece that ran on A1 this morning. If Stick wasn’t a hero, I’d like our readers to believe he wanted to be one.

THE CROWD at Joe’s back table this morning is larger than usual, to the delight of our server. R.P. and Brooklyn are there, along with Cindy and me, Abe and Stella Stellar, Andy Peroni and his missus, and, all the way from Ohio, Francis Xavier “Goat” Johnson.

“Man,” Goat said as he sucked down his second cheap Bloody Mary, “you’ve got more lives than a cat.”

Everybody wants to talk about Stick Davis. They’ve all read this morning’s story. The ones who knew him tend to pooh-pooh the idea that the Stickster had it in him to do something heroic.

I point out that, without him, the Rotunda would be but a fond memory, and that the University of Virginia would be without some of its best and brightest.

“Yeah,” Andy said, “but he had to get his ass killed for that to happen, and except for him saying that he was going to do something that might make people reconsider his status as an asshole, we don’t know that he wasn’t the same old Stick.”

“Aw, nobody’s all bad,” R.P. put in. “I remember one time, back probably thirty-five years ago, him and me were at the 7-Eleven, at the checkout, and I was buying a case of Old Milwaukee. I was like half a dollar short. And Stick, who didn’t even know me except through Willie, covered me.”

We are all silent for a few seconds.

Finally, Stella, fresh off her tour of Virginia’s hinterlands, says, “Goddamn. That’s the best you can come up with? This guy really was an asshole.”

“Well,” I chip in when the laughter subsides, “I never caught him cheating at poker.”

“If he ever knocked a girl up,” said Andy, “I never heard about it.”

“Damn,” Stella says, “I can’t believe his ass hasn’t been nominated for sainthood.”

In the end, we’ll all agree that, when it comes to Stick Davis, we should try to believe the best and, if not speak kindly of the dead, at least not speak ill.

I’VE DECIDED, with the blessing of almost no one at the paper, to do my best to finish, or at least rewrite, Stick’s autobiography. It’ll be a challenge, for a guy who is used to writing what needs to be written in a hurry and then moving on to the next homicide. But, what the hell, I’ve got half a book already. And maybe somebody will pay me to finish it, now that Stick has achieved at least temporary notoriety.

Hell, I could use the money, since the Chipster continues to try to wheedle his mom into investing a chunk of her nest egg in his future as a restaurateur. Maybe someday we’ll find out what Stick did with the rest of the money he stole from Whit Charles.

Since Stick himself is not around to tell us how he intended for his story to end, I’ll have to switch to the third person, my preference as a habitual journalist anyway. And Stick won’t be looking over my shoulder on this one. At least, I hope not.

Benson Stine, our publisher, does not want me wasting valuable time when I could be covering double homicides instead of writing a book. When I gave him the option of dropping the subject or turning in the boatload of overtime I’ve meticulously logged while covering this whole affair, his objections seem to drift away like dust in the wind.

“Well,” he said after we talked about it, rather loudly, in his office the other day, “just be sure you give the paper the full forty hours we pay you for.”

I told him that if I cut my workweek short at forty hours, somebody else would have to cover Saturday night’s felonious festivities in our fair city.

Sally Velez and Wheelie just think I’m pissing in the wind.

“Who’s going to give a shit about a guy like that?” Sally inquires.

Wheelie wonders how I’m going to make it work, since nobody really knows what was in Stick Davis’s mind toward the end.

Sarah, bless her heart, told me to go for it.

“Hell,” she said, “half the quote-unquote nonfiction stuff I read has a big dollop of bullshit in it. Write what he said and then write what you think he meant, and you’ll be all right. You’ll be his interpreter.”

She also says that she and Jack are definitely getting another dog.

“With that fucking Gates in jail for, I hope, the rest of his natural life, our next pup ought to be safe.”

I mention that perhaps she should get a cat instead. You don’t have to walk them, and they’ve made great strides with litter boxes.

I tell her I know where she can get one for free.

I MAKE what probably won’t be my last trip to Westwood.

The landlord let Terri McAllister and me come over and make a pass at whatever Stick left behind. Snake said he couldn’t care less about it unless we found some money there.

It was a furnished apartment, so it’s mostly clothes and books that are left. I take any papers I can find that seem even remotely relevant to the book, since I don’t have the notebooks. Terri wants one of his flannel shirts, one I’d seen him wear many times.

She holds it up to her face.

“Still smells like him,” she says. Tough broad that she is, I think she might be on the verge of a tear or two.

When we’re leaving and the landlord is locking up behind me, I see a familiar face scowling at us one house down.

Mrs. Woolfolk doesn’t remember me at first, maybe thinks I’m just another cop digging into the murder next door. When I jog her memory, she lets down her guard a bit.

“Yes, I remember you,” she says. “My goodness, that was some story. You never know about folks. He seemed like such a nice man. Well, maybe not so much nice but, you know, harmless.”

I reiterate what I’ve written in the paper. It’s possible Stick meant well.

“Could be,” she says. “One good thing came out of it, though, other than not having the Rotunda turned into a brick pile.”

“What’s that?”

“Folks are talking about Jordan’s Branch again. The younger ones, the ones whose parents moved out to the suburbs long ago, they didn’t even know about it.”

It turns out that there’s a move afoot now to get the city to bring Jordan’s Branch back to the surface again, which I guess would require having water running down the median strip of Staples Mill Road.

“A lot of folks were baptized there,” Mrs. Woolfolk says. “It had a lot of meaning in the black community. And back in the day, before the city graced us with the city services we were paying taxes for, there was a spring there where people got their water. We’ve been talking to our councilman about turning it into a real creek again.”

She waves to a neighbor.

“They say they don’t know what they might find if they start trying to bring that creek back to life. Might be anything down there.”

I wish Mrs. Woolfolk all the luck in the world. Hell, it wouldn’t be the worst use of city funds I’ve seen. If I weren’t an unbiased journalist, I’d sign a petition to get it done.

I LIGHT a Camel and think of Mrs. Woolfolk and Jordan’s Branch.

She’s right. You don’t know what you’ll find when you start digging.