The Bottom (2 page)

I ask JoJo if he might have taken a break or two during the evening.

“Thass allowed,” he says. “They let you take bathroom breaks and such.”

I note that, if I had his job, with all this excitement— a train coming through every six hours or so—I might be tempted to slip out for maybe half an hour or so.

“You can’t prove that,” he says, frowning.

“Well, if we can pinpoint time of death, maybe we can do something with that. Say the coroner says it was, oh, 9:37
P.M.
And we start asking you how it was that somebody could take somebody into that side room, strangle her and leave while you were taking a piss. How long does it take you to take a piss, JoJo?”

This is all bullshit. I’m betting JoJo doesn’t know yet that the girl probably was already dead when the bastard dumped her in here. No signs of muss or fuss. Just a quiet little body, asleep forever in her bedroll.

JoJo is thinking, probably about how he can give the police—of which he believes I am one, for some reason–– enough information to get me off his back and still save his job. It won’t be easy, especially if JoJo is on the same Einstein level as the part-time VCU students we usually pay to “guard” the Prestwould.

“OK,” he says, palms out, “it’s like this. I got a call. It was this girl, sweet-sounding thing. She said she was a bartender over at Havana 59, and that a guy just left her twenty dollars and my phone number. She knew my name and everything. Told her he was my friend, she said, and wanted to treat me to a couple of drinks. But I had to come over right then.”

“So you went.”

“Hey, there wasn’t anything going on here, man. It was dead as it is right now.”

“What time?”

“It was after nine. I went over, and the bartender, same one I talked to, she said the guy had left the money for me, said the drinks were on him. I swear, I wasn’t gone but half an hour.”

I figure it took JoJo more than half an hour to drink up that twenty dollars of mojitos. When pressed, he says he’s sure he was back by ten. And, no, he doesn’t remember the girl’s name.

He describes her. White girl, blonde hair, kind of long face. And, oh yeah, a tattoo on the back of her right hand. It was a Washington Redskins logo.

There are plenty of bartender-waitresses in Richmond with blonde hair. Many have long faces, no doubt. But the only one I know of who has both those attributes and a Red-skins logo imbedded, for some damned reason, on the back of her right hand is my daughter.

I thank JoJo, who doesn’t thank me back. I tell him I’m sure there will be more questions, which doesn’t seem to make him happy.

As I am leaving the station, I see what is obviously a plain-clothes car pulling up to conduct the interview JoJo thinks already has been conducted. The chief will no doubt drop his opinion of me to the subfreezing level when the cops find out I’ve already interviewed the guard and let him think I was one of our city’s finest. Well, I don’t think there’s a crime against keeping your mouth shut.

Andi is still working, despite being three months pregnant. She’s not showing enough to notice yet. And, when I call her, she says that she is, indeed, working at Havana 59, has been for the past two months. I probably should have known that, but it’s hard to keep track. Andi’s worked at a couple of dozen places around town since she started her long march toward what I fervently hope is a college degree. She and Thomas Jefferson Blandford V are not married, nor do they intend to be, it seems. That, Andi says, is her call.

Oh, yes. Andi is living with my mother, who can tell her all she needs to know about the joys of single parenthood.

She has to leave for work in an hour. I tell her not to leave until I get there.

“Is this important?” she says. “I can’t afford to be late again.”

I assure her it is, indeed, important.

I HAVE TIME to run by Peggy’s before Andi and I both go on the clock.

Peggy’s seen better days. It’s been more than a year since the one decent male companion she’s had in the last half-century left us. Les Hacker, God bless him, kept my dope-addled mom in the general vicinity of happiness for a long time. It is her regret and mine that she never really had time to pay him back. He already was sinking into dementia when one of my nuttier Prestwould neighbors shot him and put him on the fast track to whatever reward awaits a man who put everybody before himself. I have no doubt that, if Finlay Rand hadn’t shot Les, Peggy would have taken care of him, without ever giving it a damned thought, until he’d soiled his last adult diaper. Rand, I’m happy to say, is still alive in a prison hospital, paralyzed but not brain-damaged enough not to know how much better he’d be dead, if somebody cared enough to pull the plug.

“I didn’t know,” Peggy said at the funeral, “that there were men like Les Hacker until I met him.”

Without Les, Peggy is pretty much dependent on (a) weed and (b) Awesome Dude. I’m not sure which is the least beneficial to her. I kid Peggy that we should be looking for a retirement home for her in Colorado, where she will never have to worry about being busted, but I’m pretty sure no cop working Oregon Hill is going to try to bust Peggy Black for the ounce or so she keeps around the house. She’s probably already baked whatever brain cells the evil weed can take from her, so what’s the harm?

Awesome lives in her English basement when it’s too cold to hang out in his natural habitat, the great outdoors. Awesome is getting older, and the temperature at which he prefers to take his butt indoors at night seems to have risen a bit. He’s certainly not much help. Peggy has to depend on me and some of my old Hill buddies to fix the roof when it leaks or to work on her car, because no one in his right mind would put Awesome on a ladder or let him mess with any kind of machinery. Still he doesn’t do any harm as long as he doesn’t burn down the house. He uses some of his disability money to help with the rent and the dope.

It surprised me when Andi moved in. It seems that the idea of fatherhood took some of the romance out of the relationship from Mr. Blandford’s perspective. Andi said he did offer to marry her, much in the same sense as the guy who smashes into your car offers to pay for damages. Not, in other words, with a glad heart.

“It turns out he was an asshole,” was Andi’s assessment. I never met the father of my percolating grandchild, but I’m willing to accept Andi’s evaluation. I kind of wish he’d been a little more of one, so I could kick the shit out of him or at least have the satisfaction of having tried.

Andi has been a godsend, I must admit. She’s the daughter Peggy never had, and Andi seems to find Peggy more amusing that I did when I was her age. Maybe sense of humor skips a generation, or maybe it’s just less embarrassing to have your grandmother leave the house wearing unmatched shoes than it is when it’s your mother.

When Andi moved in, Peggy had pretty much retreated to her own private emotional cave. Even Awesome Dude noticed it.

“Dude,” he said, when he called me a couple of months ago, “Peggy just ain’t her old self. She doesn’t even stay high but about half the time.”

My mother’s average high-ness is still below her traditional level. She worries about second-hand smoke. Can’t have her first great-grandchild popping out with a case of the munchies. But her mood has perked up considerably. Maybe it really does take a village, like Hillary said, and this one even has, in Mr. Dude, its own village idiot.

I kiss Peggy and then take Andi to the kitchen, where we can talk. With me out of the living room, I can hear Peggy switch the channel back to Fox News, which I have assured her will rot her brain faster than pot ever could. The idea that my grandchild might be absorbing anything at all from Rush Limbaugh is hard to endure. Andi always gets her to switch to something more edifying, like
Duck Dynasty
, when she’s in the room.

I tell Andi about the call. She confirms that she made it.

“Omigod,” she says. “That black guy was from the train station? And he was supposed to be there when that girl was killed?”

“When she was dumped, anyhow. What about the other guy? The one who gave you the twenty.”

“I don’t know.”

“What did he look like?”

Andi shakes her head.

“I never saw him.”

How, I ask my flesh and blood, can that be?

“I got this call, on my cell. The guy said there was an envelope under the napkin at the bar. I looked, and there was a napkin somebody had taken from a table and set there. There were two twenties and a note. The guy said one twenty was for me and the other one was for drinks for this guy I was supposed to call. Said he was an old friend. The message was on a piece of paper. Which, no, I don’t have. I threw it away.”

Mr. Williams was more than glad to slip away from his boring job and have a drink or two on somebody else’s dime.

“He asked me who was treating him, but, like I said, I don’t know.”

I tell her that the cops probably will be asking her the same questions sometime soon.

“Shit,” Andi says. “I’ll probably lose my job.”

None of this is your fault, I assure her after encouraging her to see if she can dredge up anything from her memory.

“That’s not it,” she says, wiping away a tear. “We’re supposed to share our tips.”

I tell her that the twenty somebody slipped her to ensure that JoJo Williams would abandon his post for a while probably doesn’t qualify as a tip.

“Besides,” I add, “there are plenty of places that would hire you in a minute.”

Hell, most of them already have, at least once.

CHAPTER TWO

X

Friday

F
our murders in eighteen months are definitely enough to light a fire under our plucky chief of police and his minions. Chains are being yanked.

JoJo Williams, who no doubt is already out of a job, talked to the real police and told them more or less the same story he told me. When the detective who interviewed JoJo found out that the guard thought he’d already talked with the cops, I am told by Peachy Love—my eyes and ears in the world of law enforcement—Chief Jones took my name in vain again. Lucky guess. He’d like to nail me for obstruction of justice or felony pain-in-the-ass, but there’s no law I know of against interviewing potential witnesses. How was I to know that JoJo would think I was cop? I am so misunderstood.

And they’ve already interviewed Andi, who also told them what she told me. What she didn’t tell them, per my instructions, is that she’s my daughter. A wise officer might have wondered, but I guess Black’s a fairly common name. It’ll get out eventually, but, as I told my daughter, there’s no sense in just giving information away. Let ’em work for it. It’ll be good for them.

And so the city is in lockdown mode. Making it more worrisome is that there isn’t any particular element that can wipe its brow and say, “Thank God that couldn’t happen here.” The killer has been rather democratic.

The first one was found lying in the dirt at Texas Beach, back in March of 2012. Her body had been thrown into some bushes. Nobody but the homeless goes down to the river that time of year, and she’d been dead a couple of days before they found her.

Her name was Kelli Jonas. She was a twenty-year-old white girl who had gotten an associate’s degree in dental hygiene and had just started working for a dentist in the West End.

The night she disappeared, she had been underage drinking with some friends at a bar on West Main, and her friends said she left by herself. She never made it home, or at least she never got as far as unlocking her front door. Her keys were still in the purse they found floating in a little pool of water at the river’s edge.

When they found her, she had been raped, and she had definitely been murdered. Her throat was cut. She had bled to death there beside the James. It appeared that she had several stab wounds before she was allowed to die. She’d been bound and gagged, but, that time of year, it’s doubtful that anyone could have heard her even if she’d been allowed to scream.

For a while it was big news. She came from a solid middle-class family out in Henrico, and white and middle class will always get you better play in our paper than poor and black. About the only clue the cops could dredge up was some partially obscured boot prints. They never even found the knife.

Then we, and our readers, got distracted with other things, as we often do, and Kelli Jonas got consigned to that nether world where the cops are still trying, kind of, and we come back once a year and do an update, reopening the family’s wounds for no good purpose.

The second one showed up six months later, in September. Chanelle Williams was a seventeen-year-old girl from the East End. She stopped going to school when she was fifteen and was involved with some people who seemed to think her best career choices were either prostitute or drug runner.

Whoever did it dumped her much abused body in the Kanawha Canal, or rather in one of the boats that take tourists along our belated attempt to—like every other city in America with a river, creek or sewage lagoon—emulate San Antonio’s River Walk. One of the workmen found it the next morning. As with Kelli Jonas, she’d been dead for at least a day.

She wasn’t in very good shape. For a while, it was assumed that she had been done in by one of her felonious mentors. And, being African American, the dudgeon level didn’t run quite so high, at least among white Richmonders.

But then one of the cops noticed the tattoo. It was on her right ankle, not more than three inches high. It appeared to have been done in the last day or two, but that wasn’t the big news. The big news was that it was a Tweety Bird, like in the old cartoons. It was the same tattoo, in the same place, as the one they found on Kelli Jonas.

After the police determined, to the best of their limited capacities, that none of the characters connected to Chanelle Williams had any link to Kelli Jonas, they, our newspaper and the rest of the town came to the conclusion that we had a nondiscriminatory, psychopathic nut on our hands.

Young women loaded up on Mace and traveled in packs. But eventually, you get careless, and the young do believe they will live for damn ever. Every time I’d confront Andi with the hard, cold fact that somebody had raped, butchered and murdered two girls her age, she would assure me she could take care of herself.