The Bottom (16 page)

I assure her that, between her mother and stepfather and me, we can take care of her until we get to the bottom of this. I also assure her that this isn’t going to take long. I’m not so positive about that, but I like to paint a cheery picture.

“If that bastard comes around here,” Peggy says, “he’s gonna get some of this.”

She pulls a pistol from the silverware drawer and waves it around a little. Great, my dope-delirious mother is also now armed.

“Where did you get that thing?”

“It belonged to Les,” she says as I turn the barrel away from Andi and me. “He said I might need it someday.”

I ask her if she knows how to shoot it.

“I had a pistol all the time you were growing up. Just got rid of it a few years ago.”

I am amazed. I ask her why I never knew this.

“I never had to use it,” she says. “With a couple of my boyfriends and my second husband, I was tempted, but I resisted the urge.”

She laughs, and I realize it’s the first time I’ve heard my mother laugh since Les died. A small thing, but it does seem like a step toward the sunlight.

I tell Andi I’ll go by Havana 59 and tell them the news.

“No, you won’t,” she says. “What do you think I am, ten years old?”

She pauses and sighs.

“I’ll tell them myself.”

I FINALLY FIND the tunnel entrance. It looks even more overgrown than it was all those years ago. It looks completely impenetrable now. I manage to get filthy walking and crawling through the mud. They still have the crime scene tape up, and it doesn’t look like anybody’s been back in the last six months. I can’t even figure how somebody got a body up here. Maybe he made her walk up and then raped and killed her.

By the time I get back down to where my car is, it’s starting to get dark. The wind or something is making a whistling noise, coming out of the mouth of the cave. I am pretty sure Goat Johnson is wrong about us spending the night here. I don’t think we had balls enough.

ONE GOOD THING to come out of last night’s meeting with Sax’s sister is that I do have another date with the lovely Cindi Peroni tonight.

When I get back, though, intent on taking a quick shower and making myself as presentable as is possible for a fifty-three-year-old bald man who needs to lose weight, my plans get hijacked. Literally.

As I lock the car, I feel something hard push into my back.

“Get in,” a voice says. It doesn’t sound like a request.

I’m pushed into the backseat of a van I didn’t notice before. The doors lock. Seated beside me, taking up way too much space, is the guy who obviously orchestrated this meeting.

The one with either a very hard finger or a gun gets in, too, and I’m wedged in the middle. Another guy, the driver, takes off.

“I understand,” Wat Chenault says, “you’ve been asking some people about me.”

I try to talk my way out of it, explaining that we’re just doing a story on Top of the Bottom because our rival, the mighty
Scimitar
, beat us to it and now we have to catch up.

Chenault interrupts me midbullshit.

“Shut up,” he says. “I’m not talking about the damn colored graves, although I’d surely like to know how that ghetto rag got it. Maybe you people have your own old boy system.”

He smirks at me. I promise myself I will hit him when I can do it without getting shot.

“No, I’ll let my lawyer handle all that. Just more proof of how you all are out to get me. What I want to talk about is that Adkins girl.”

I’m not stunned. Maybe Johnny Grimes tipped him off. Maybe Sarah gave somebody too much information while she was searching. Whatever, there isn’t much use in denying that I’m trying to find a girl who went missing more than a decade ago, after she helped ruin Wat Chenault’s political career.

I ask him what he wants.

“What I want is for you to leave me the fuck alone. I haven’t seen that little bitch since all that mess happened, and I don’t need you stirring up shit that’s long since been of no interest to anyone but your nosy ass.”

I ask him if he’s been writing any anonymous notes lately. I’m hoping that’ll get a rise out of him, even though it might also get my butt kicked, or worse. I’m pretty sure I can make enough noise and cause enough havoc here on Broad Street to keep Chenault and his goons from doing me serious bodily harm.

He surprises me, though, by looking genuinely surprised.

“What the fuck would I do that for?” he asks. I let the subject drop.

Chenault shakes his head.

“You’re a weird son of a bitch,” he says. “I can’t believe somebody hasn’t put you out of your misery yet.”

We’re almost beyond the city limits, and I’m getting ready to do something drastic when Chenault tells the driver to turn around. The guy does an illegal U-turn. Five minutes later, we’re back at the Prestwould parking lot.

We sit there for half a minute, me jammed between the other thug and Chenault.

“You can go to the police with this,” the fat man says, “but we’ll all swear that you got in on your own accord, and that we just had a nice, friendly chat about why you’re messing around in my business.”

He motions for the guy on my left to get out. I start to follow him. Chenault puts his meaty paw on my shoulder.

“Last warning,” he says. “I’m not going to let my life get ruined by some pissant reporter.”

I get out. Chenault rolls his window down when I walk to the other side, headed for the front door.

“You better be nice to me,” he says. “After my lawyer gets through with you all, I might be your new boss.”

He seems to find this amusing. I opt, for once, to shut up.

BACK INSIDE, I realize I was supposed to pick up Cindy five minutes ago.

I call, explaining that I’ve gotten a little tied up, and that I’ll be over in thirty minutes. Actually, it’ll be a good hour, by the time I shower and change.

“I don’t know, Willie,” Cindy says. “Maybe we ought to just make it another time. I’ve got a paper to do anyhow.”

I observe that it’s been some time since one of my dates begged off because of homework. Cindy’s about a semester from getting the degree that marriage and kids delayed.

I don’t push it, though. Truth be told, I’m a little freaked out by my most recent close encounter with the fat man. I maybe need some time to digest all this.

Cindy promises that my rain check will be honored.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

X

Tuesday

S
arah still doesn’t have any good news for me on the Leigh Adkins front.

“I thought I’d found her,” she tells me when I stop in the office after breakfast. “There was this woman, same name, same age, up near Winchester. But when I called her, ‘she’ turned out to be a ‘he.’ Who the hell names their boy Leigh, anyhow?”

I conjecture that maybe his parents were hoping for a girl.

Sarah has used every source she can find, computer and otherwise, some in Virginia and some throughout the country. Nothing. She suggests that maybe I ought to hire a private detective. I tell her I don’t think Wheelie would sign off on that as a business expense, although he probably should.

“Leigh Adkins has probably gotten married and has her husband’s name now,” Sarah says, “although she didn’t show up on any marriage licenses, at least in this part of the world. When I marry, I’m going to keep my name, at least on my bylines.”

I tell her I think she’s right. There’s no sense in wasting all those years she’s spent building an identity. She looks to see if I’m jerking her chain. I assume a straight face and thank her for all her efforts. I also tell her about the second letter.

“Damn, Willie. When are you going to write something about this?”

I tell her that she’s doing the Wat Chenault beat for now.

“I’m not so sure anybody’s going to be doing it after the story this morning.”

“New publisher on the warpath?”

“That is so politically incorrect. You probably want the Redskins to keep their name, too.”

I tell her it doesn’t really matter much to me, and it matters less to Custalow, who actually has a horse in this race, being of the Pamunkey tribe. He just wants them to stop sucking on Sunday afternoons.

But, yes, Ms. Dominick is not happy today. She had to approve us rewriting the story that the
Scimitar
, with a little help from their friend, ran on Sunday. But she’s already been on the phone with Chenault’s lawyer. I learned that from Sandy McCool, who gets paid less and does more work than anyone else on the fourth floor since they got rid of half the administrative assistants/secretaries up there. I haven’t noticed any shortage of executives yet. Some of the poor bastards probably have had to learn to make their own coffee.

I promise Sarah that we’re soon going to write something about this whole mess. Patience, I remind her, is a virtue.

“Getting our asses beat by the
Scimitar
isn’t,” she reminds me.

I assure her that the
Scimitar
won’t be scooping us anymore.

“Not unless somebody feeds them another story,” she says as she walks away.

Wheelie catches me before I can escape. I’m supposed to take Peggy out for a visit with Philomena sometime before I come to work for real. I ask Wheelie if it can wait. He assures me it can’t.

He leads me up to the fourth floor. Sandy McCool offers a perfunctory nod and asks me how I’m doing, as if I didn’t just call her a couple of hours ago. Sandy gives nothing away, which is why she’s still here. People with brains—and some of the suits do have brains—know Sandy has information that she would never divulge, unless someone did something to piss her off, like, say, firing her.

Rita Dominick has put her stamp on the late James Grubbs’s office. All Grubby’s diplomas and Chamber of Commerce and Better Business Bureau awards, along with the one Virginia Press Association plaque he scored back when he was an honest journalist, are gone. In their stead are the sundry advertising plaudits our new boss has snagged over the years, along with three diplomas and pictures of her kids, and husband, who looks a little beaten-down. Two of the diplomas are the kind of graduate degrees you get by taking courses at night and on weekends in lieu of more rewarding hobbies like drinking and smoking. The third, her undergraduate one, causes me to do a double take. Did our new publisher really get her degree from one of those fly-by-night colleges you see advertised on TV, the ones that used to make their pitches on matchbook covers? I see her, out of the corner of my eye. She has a “you wanna make something of it?” look. No, I do not. I suck in a smirk and pretend that I think the University of Western New England is a laudable place (if, indeed it has a corporeal life) at which to improve one’s mind.

“We’re in a bind,” Rita Dominick says by way of breaking the ice, which feels deep enough to drive an eighteenwheeler over.

She tells us about her chat with Wat Chenault’s lawyer. No newspaper these days can afford to pay to defend a lawsuit, let alone lose one. It’s why we’re so chickenshit, or at least now we have an excuse.

“We didn’t have any choice,” Wheelie begins. “The
Scimitar
. . .”

Dominick cuts him off. We all know she approved our rewrite of the story about Chenault’s goons, and maybe Chenault himself, conspiring to conceal the fact that they unearthed human remains in the Bottom. She needs something else to pin on us, or at least one of us, if she’s going to pass the buck down to the little folk.

“Chenault’s lawyer says he has reason to believe that somebody from our paper gave that story to the
Scimitar
.” When she says “somebody,” she looks at me.

“The best I can gather,” our publisher goes on, “the one person here who was most interested in our not dropping our investigation into Mr. Chenault was you.”

I can lie with the best of them. I extol the journalistic capabilities of the
Scimitar
’s fine staff. Given truth serum, I would opine that most of them couldn’t find their asses with both hands.

And, speaking of truth serum, Ms. Dominick then turns the burner on this conversation up a notch.

“Do you swear that you didn’t leak that story to the
Scimitar
’s staff?”

I swear that I did not. (Hell, I didn’t leak it to the staff. I told Earl Pemberton-Wise, and he told his reporter to interview me about it.)

“Are you willing to take a lie detector test?”

It’s time for a little moral indignation. I can do that, even when I’m in the wrong. It’s a gift.

“Hell, no,” I tell her. “I won’t take a lie detector test for you or anybody else. If you don’t trust me, you ought to just fire my ass right now. Damn! I can’t believe this.”

I look toward Wheelie, who looks a little pale, then get up and start to leave. I’m bluffing with a pair of threes right now, but I’m not a bad poker player.

“Wait,” our publisher says. “Come back here. I don’t mean to impugn your honesty. But if somebody did leak that story, his head is going to roll. And I will find out, eventually.”

Maybe she will and maybe she won’t. It does seem, though, that I’d better come up with some goods on the upstanding Mr. Chenault very soon. At least, city officials are now crawling out of bed with Top of the Bottom, which the mayor has been wholeheartedly approving up to this point. In a city where half the population is African American, some of whose ancestors might be moldering beneath Wat Chenault’s little scheme, it is time to tread lightly. All construction on the project is halted until, as the mayor so elegantly put it, “we can get to the bottom of this.”

I can see why Chenault would like to take a pound or two of flesh off us. He hasn’t even bothered to file papers against the
Scimitar
, I’m sure. Other than office supplies, I doubt there’s much for him to squeeze out of that noble news organ.

Wheelie and I leave. We’re on the elevator when my managing editor, not usually given to the theatrical gesture, stops the car between floors.

“I know who leaked that story,” he tells me. “I have a few contacts, too, you know. Did you really think that wouldn’t get out?”

It’s no use pretending. Wheelie knows, and if he wanted me fired, he’d have settled my hash back in the publisher’s office.