The Bottom (14 page)

It’s mostly bullshit, of course, but it will get the word out. Hell, my paper might even be able to run with it now, leading off with “as reported in the
Scimitar
,” of course. Those words will make Wheelie choke on his coffee, but being the second-hand bearer of bad news doesn’t have the same legal peril as going first would.

I have convinced Earl Pemberton-Wise that the better good is being served by letting the city in general know that there probably is a slave graveyard down there in the Bottom, where Wat Chenault wants to build Top of the Bottom, and that some fat redneck came in and did a cover-up.

Earl calls his designated reporter in and explains what we’re doing. The reporter is more than a little suspicious, but who wants to turn down a story that everybody else is going to pick up?

This is not my finest hour in journalism, but I’m determined that this story will see the light of day. I’m equally determined not to lose my job for turning the spotlight on it if I can help it.

“Willie,” Earl says to me after telling his page designer to tear up A1, “you’re sure about this, right?”

“I’m sure there’s a slave graveyard down there. I’m sure somebody dug up part of it with a bulldozer. I’m sure somebody who looks a lot like Wat Chenault had the evidence hauled away somewhere.”

He sighs.

“Hell,” he says, “truth doesn’t always come in a neat little package, does it?”

I tell him that he has to keep my name out of it.

“Well,” he says, slapping me on the back, “you can always come to work for an honest newspaper.”

I convince Earl, before I leave, that the ability to pay my rent and buy food, cigarettes and beer is no laughing matter.

I’m at work half an hour late. Sally Velez mentions this, and I tell her that I’ve already put in about three good hours in the name of journalism today. I don’t mention that our paper isn’t going to be the immediate beneficiary of said journalism.

SARAH HASN’T BEEN able to come up with any more information on Leigh Adkins.

“I’ve looked just about everywhere I know to look,” she says. “Nobody seems to know anything about her since she disappeared.”

I’ve done some checking on my own, with equally unsuccessful results. Every source I have on the local and state levels has no trace of Ms. Adkins, and nobody’s been looking for her in a very long while.

Johnny Grimes gave me the name of one retired cop in his town who might know more than he does about Wat Chenault’s past misdeeds. I catch the guy at home late in the afternoon, but when I start asking him about Wat Chenault, he gets a little antsy. When I push the issue, he tells me to screw myself before he hangs up.

I’m hoping my conversation doesn’t get back to Chenault. If it does, though, I have one thing in my favor. I was smart enough to give the ex-cop a fake name and tell him I was from the Norfolk paper.

I am not, evidence notwithstanding, a complete idiot. I’m just hoping the old guy doesn’t think to check his phone records.

A COUPLE OF shootings, one a fatality and the other a near miss, spoil my evening. To be honest, though, sitting at the desk playing solitaire and bullshitting with the remnants of our copy desk makes me yearn for some excuse to get out of the office.

On the way back from the fatal shooting, I stop by Havana 59 and see Andi. She looks tired. When I mention that, she takes offense. Now she looks tired and cranky.

If she were to marry Thomas Jefferson Blandford V, I’m pretty sure she could afford to quit this crap, at least until the baby’s born.

I respect her for her backbone, but my heart is heavy and I wish I could win the lottery.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

X

Sunday

I
t doesn’t take long for the story I planted to take full effect. Not many people read the
Scimitar
. Even fewer get it by home delivery on Sundays. And the leadership of our paper is so far removed from the African American community that a rare newsworthy story in the Sunday morning edition usually wouldn’t reach their tone-deaf ears until Monday or Tuesday.

This one, though, grows legs. Earl Pemberton-Wise was smart enough to tip off the local TV stations. With their bare-bones staffs even more emaciated on Sundays, the good-hair folks were happy enough to read this tidbit out of Earl’s paper to their viewers. Earl didn’t tell them about it in time for what passes as TV news on Sunday morning around here, but three of the stations were awake enough to put it on their websites. Apparently, somebody looks at those things, because I am still enjoying my morning coffee, pondering whether to grace KubaKuba or Millie’s with my brunching presence, when the phone rings.

“Did you know anything about this?” Wheelie asks.

I wish him a good morning and ask for elucidation. I try very hard to sound both concerned and puzzled.

Wheelie is caught between a rock and hard place. He can’t exactly berate me for getting my ass beaten on a story from which I have been explicitly pulled. At the same time, he suspects that I somehow have had a hand in the latest unflattering chapter of the Wat Chenault saga finding daylight.

I remind Wheelie that I’ve been warned off anything involving our favorite developer and swear that I would never give aid and comfort to our enemy, the mighty
Scimitar
.

I hear him sigh.

“Well, I guess we’ve got to do something with it now. So help me, Willie, if I find out you are involved with this crap . . . Rita’s going to have a cow.”

No doubt. I suggest that perhaps he should have Sarah do our version. I’d kind of like to see my lovely protégée step back from the dark side, i.e., management. A good reporter is a terrible thing to waste.

Wheelie says he thinks our publisher has her working on something else.

“Like a puff piece on Wat Chenault?”

“We call them features, Willie.”

I explain to him that Sarah already knows some of what’s going on with Mr. Chenault and could hit the ground running.

“Plus, Baer would love to do a nice, frothy feature story.”

Baer probably would not, but he’ll do whatever they tell him to do. Plus, if Baer gets on Rita Dominick’s good side and winds up selling his soul . . . well, hell, he’s halfway there already.

“I’ll have to call Rita,” Wheelie says, “and see if we can switch.” He doesn’t sound like it’s going to be the high point of his morning. Our publisher doesn’t know about the
Scimitar
piece, or she’d have lit Wheelie up already. It’s funny how this place works. You’re encouraged to call everybody by his or her first name, but that doesn’t keep them from taking the chain saw to you. “Rita says you’re fired” hurts just as much as “Ms. Dominick says you’re fired.”

I do feel a teensy bit sorry for her, because she’ll be the one who has to call Wat Chenault and explain why we have to run the story, seeing as it’ll be on every TV station and website in Richmond by sundown. Then I think about her paycheck versus mine. She can handle it.

I MEET KATE and Marcus Green at Marcus’s office, which is starting to look more and more like Kate and Marcus’s office, what with the crib and baby mobile in the waiting area. I wonder if Greg Ellis, Kate’s most recent husband, is doing his share of the parental caregiving. The baby’s spending the afternoon with her doting maternal grandparents, who probably thank God every night that their daughter cut her losses, husband-wise, and traded up the second time around.

We’re going to talk with the lovely Ronnie Sax. I ride in the back and tell them as much as they need to know about Wat Chenault and the latest obstacle to his pet project. I stop short of letting them know who leaked the story.

“So you let the gotdamn
Scimitar
beat your ass?” Marcus says, obviously pleased. He pounds on the steering wheel and lets loose with that big booming laugh of his.

I tell him that we’ve been told to back off, for reasons he, as a registered ambulance chaser, can understand.

“Well, Wat Chenault is a racist pig asshole. I hope they put his butt in jail for this.”

I note that Chenault hasn’t been linked to anything just yet (at least until and if that bulldozer operator steps up and identifies him).

“I guess old Earl Pemberton-hyphen-Wise finally got himself a reporter who can find his ass with both hands,” Marcus says.

Kate is giving me the kind of look she used to employ when she suspected I wasn’t being completely honest with her, which was often. But she turns around and doesn’t say anything.

SAX SEEMS GLAD to see us. He’s been in here for five days now, and he looks like he’s enjoyed about all of it he can stand. He knows about the letter I got on Thursday, and he wants to know when we’re going to get him out of “this shithole.”

I want to tell him that I’m far from sure a shithole isn’t the best place for him, until we get more evidence to the contrary, but I’d like to not piss him off just yet. As always, I need information.

“Do you have any idea who might be trying to spring you?” I ask him. “Know any psychopaths that might have done this and let you take the fall and then enjoy laughing at us for arresting the wrong guy?”

Sax glares at me and tells me he doesn’t know any “goddamned psychopaths,” and notes that it seems like everybody in Richmond, “especially your fucking paper,” wants to put him away forever.

“They’ve got it in for me,” he adds.

You make it easy, I want to tell him. I do point out that about the only people around who might possibly be interested in his seeing daylight again are a handful of folks (me, maybe Sarah) at my “fucking paper.”

“Well,” he says, “I hope you do something quick. I don’t like the way these guys are looking at me.”

Yeah, I’m thinking, guys who molest and murder girls and young women probably have a pretty full social life behind bars.

He claims not to know who his silent Good Samaritan is, and he’s sticking with his claim that his sister can attest to his whereabouts that Wednesday night.

On the way back to Marcus’s Yukon, I decide it’s time to let Kate and Marcus know about my nagging suspicions about Chenault. They seem like they might be on the verge of just bailing on Ronnie Sax, and who could blame them? But the truth is a slippery bastard sometimes, and I want to make sure we’ve got it wrestled to the ground before we throw the world’s most guilty-seeming slimebag to the wolves.

Marcus is silent as I recount my concerns about Chenault, especially our so-far unsuccessful efforts to find the girl who helped ruin his political career twelve years ago. I mention that Chenault, with an office nearby, where he’s masterminding his development deal, has been around long enough to do everything that Ronnie Sax is accused of doing.

Kate is less silent, trying to jump in two or three times to ask me why the hell I didn’t tell them about this already.

I hold her off until I’ve finished laying it out for them.

“You’re crazy,” my ex-wife says when she can finally get a word in edgewise. “You think this guy’s been killing girls and young women for twelve years, and he’s never been arrested for anything?”

I offer that maybe he hasn’t been a serial killer for twelve years, that maybe he just took some kind of turn for the worse the last few years. But, I add, the killings over the last eighteen months do coincide with Chenault’s moving his business to the Bottom. He even has an apartment in one of those expensive high-rises overlooking the river downtown, not five minutes away.

“Willie,” Marcus says, “are you sure you aren’t just going after this guy for personal reasons? I mean, I know he’s suing your butt, and I’ve heard that crap about what he used to call you when you were covering the General Assembly.”

I assure Marcus and Kate that I am not holding some kind of grudge against the pig-eyed sack of shit, and that if I were going to decide who killed those girls on the basis of personality, I might actually rather spend time with Wat Chenault than Ronnie Sax. I don’t like either one of the sons of bitches, but that isn’t what this is about.

I mention the rumors, via Johnny Grimes, in the South-side town where Chenault lives when he’s not trying to rape Richmond’s landscape and history.

“And, there’s the letter.”

“He could’ve had somebody write it for him,” Kate says.

“Somebody that knew about the silver dollars.”

“He could have told them that.”

I observe that, whoever it is, he or she is certainly going out of the way to get involved in a major and heinous crime.

“Who cares that much about Ronnie Sax?”

They concede that this would be a small universe. His sister?

“Have you talked to the sister?” I ask Marcus.

“No. We plan to talk with her tomorrow.”

“Don’t bother. I’m meeting her tonight.”

Actually it was a ruse to get myself in the same room with Cindy Peroni. I asked Cindy to set up a meeting of the three of us, at Cindy’s place. I haven’t set foot inside there since I scotched (bourbon-ed, actually) the best chance I’ve had in some time to spend the rest of my life with a good woman.

Marcus isn’t happy. He accuses me of hindering his investigation. I tell him that, without me, he doesn’t have much of an “investigation.”

“I’m just an honest reporter, trying to get a story,” I tell them. “If you’re good, I’ll share it with you.”

Marcus threatens to take me to Gilpin Court and feed me to the drug dealers. I laugh and tell him they’d have his Yukon stripped for parts before he could get out of there. Marcus, because he’s more African American than me (on the outside, anyhow), loves to go all ’hood on me. I like to remind him that he grew up in the suburbs and now resides in stately splendor at a place on River Road with a post-racial lawn jockey out front.

“Well,” he says, “just don’t do anything to screw up my case.”

He drops me at the Prestwould. I grab a bite and a beer, check in on the Redskins, who are in the process of breaking Custalow’s heart again, and then head out.

Sarah calls on my cell.

“Thanks a lot,” she says.

I tell her she’s welcome. She is not pleased as punch to be assigned cleanup duty, telling our readers what most of them already will know about those bones in the Bottom.