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“This says I do.”

Obviously, they’ve questioned Ronnie already and have let him go, for now. But they’re going on a little search party. I am sure Ronnie Sax’s computer will be leaving the premises shortly.

“I already told you where I was,” he says. “My sister will vouch for me.”

“No doubt,” one of the other cops says.

When I approach, one of them moves to intercept me. I tell them I’m a friend of Ronnie’s, hoping the fetching lass behind me doesn’t now think I’m not trustworthy.

“You’re that asshole from the paper,” the oldest of the three, and the guy in charge, says. I’ve seen him around, and I’m pretty sure he knows just what a pain in the butt I’ve been to Richmond’s finest in the recent past.

Yeah, I confess, that’s me.

Ronnie tells me to fuck off, but then he makes the connection.

“Willie Black!” he says, suddenly glad to see anyone who might not think he’s a psychopath.

RONNIE SAX HAS an overbite and bad teeth. He’s short, about five foot seven I’m guessing, and he’s got this wheezy kind of laugh that generally adds to the creepiness. All I can think is he must be paying well to get women to let him take pictures of their lady parts.

I’m remembering something now. Once, a thousand years ago, the paper decided that everybody, even the statehouse reporters, of which I was one, had to produce x-number of feature stories. I think it was one a month.

Anyhow I saw that our last surviving local porn theater was having a real live porn star on the premises to autograph stuff and show her tits. I chose that for my puff piece of the month. They assigned Sax to go with me.

The woman looked like she was forty and was, according to her extensive résumé, twenty-six. She was pleasant enough, although most of what she said was later paraphrased.

“Jesus,” Enos Jackson, my old editor, told me when he read the very rough draft. “You can’t say ‘pussy’ in the paper.”

But I remember Sax taking an inordinate amount of interest in her and asking her questions that were inappropriate even by my low standards.

Sax left before I did. When he was gone, the porn star said, “Who was that guy? He gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

Hearing this, from a woman who made a living doing things in front of a camera that at least two of my three wives would never do in a dark room with their husband, made an impression.

“I don’t know what these bastards are talking about,” Ronnie says, as one of the bastards gives him what could only be described as a baleful look. “They’ve had it in for me ever since that thing back in 1992. That was twenty-one damn years ago.”

I assure Ronnie that it’ll all be straightened out soon.

“Well, it damn well better be,” he says. “These assholes have ruined my reputation. I’m gonna sue.”

He yells after the cop who’s carrying out his computer.

“Hey, be careful with that. I got some valuable stuff in there.”

“I bet,” the cop says and warns Ronnie not to plan any big trips anytime soon.

According to Ronnie Sax, he had dinner with his sister and her kids on Wednesday night and didn’t leave until after eleven. He also says he had a photo shoot on Thursday morning, across town.

“I’ve got witnesses,” he says.

He asks me if I know a good lawyer. In exchange for a few more minutes gleaning some more background and quotes from Sax, I tell him he ought to contact Marcus Green. Marcus, with the aid of Kate Ellis, my third ex-wife, will be indebted to me, although he’d probably be looking up Ronnie Sax anyhow as soon as this breaks on the six o’clock news tonight. Marcus loves publicity more than a beagle loves bacon.

The background stuff is important: I want to be able to call the cops and tell them that I’ve had a long interview with Mr. Sax myself, and that he claims he had nothing to do with any of this and is going to sue them. Maybe then, after they get tired of threatening me for interfering with a police investigation, they’ll tell me what they’ve got, or at least give me some bullshit quote, just so the story in tomorrow morning’s paper doesn’t look so one-sided.

I leave Ronnie Sax and head back to catch the second half of the four o’clock NFL game.

“Skins lost,” Custalow informs me. Stop the presses.

I open a beer and get out the laptop. Until they start letting me drink openly in the office, I prefer to send stories I write on my off days from the comfort of my own rented abode.

I step into the other room and call Peachy, who tells me who the lead detective is on this case. Fella named Lombardo who I don’t know that well. She gives me his number.

Lombardo knows who I am, which doesn’t help us get off to a good start. Things go downhill when he learns that I’ve already interviewed Ronnie Sax.

“How the fuck did you know about that?” Obviously the cops who took Sax’s computer didn’t tell Lombardo I was there.

“Can I quote you? It’d make my boss happy to know I’m doing such a good job. He might even give me a raise.”

Lombardo sputters a little. When he knows I’m serious about writing what Sax has told me, he finally calms down and gives me a passable quote about “ongoing investigation” and all that crap. He does confirm, though, that they’re going over Sax’s electronic records with the proverbial fine-tooth comb.

“You know, Black,” he says before we part ways, “you’re going to stick that big nose of yours where it doesn’t belong one time too many and get it shot off one of these days.”

I wish him a good evening.

I file the story, then put it onto our website. Someone else will put it into yet a third place, our tablet site, for which we are getting a few of our former readers to pay a very small amount. Print journalism, from where I sit, is trading dollars for dimes.

I go to bed early enough that Custalow asks me if I’m feeling well.

It’s a fitful sleep. I keep thinking about Ronnie Sax, and about those girls. I haven’t had a lot of interaction with psychopaths and sadists, but Mr. Sax had me fooled. I always thought of him, if I thought of him at all, as feckless and weak.

I didn’t have Ronnie Sax pegged as pure evil, until now.

CHAPTER SIX

X

Monday

P
eachy Love’s call comes while I’m shaving.

“He’s gone,” she says.

Doesn’t take a genius to figure out who “he” is.

The police, who had planned to call a press conference this morning announcing the arrest of a “person of interest” in the Tweety Bird murders, should have kept Ronnie Sax when they had the chance. When they popped around before six, planning to haul Sax away in his pajamas, he was, as Peachy Love said, long gone. Flown the coop. Tweety Bird takes wing.

It’s eight thirty already, and I wonder what kind of damage control is going on. The chief must be needing adult diapers by now.

When I call headquarters, I’m told Chief Jones isn’t in, won’t be in and, it is understood, wouldn’t piss on me if I were on fire even if he were, by some miracle, in. When I explain that I already know their prime suspect, left unattended overnight, is on the lam, and I further explain that all our readers who have iPhones or iPads also will know that shortly, there is quiet on the other end of the line.

I am promised a callback.

Not fifteen minutes later, I hear the blues-based ringtone on my phone. I am expecting some midlevel functionary giving me the latest self-serving comments from our highest-paid law-enforcement entity.

Instead it’s L.D. Jones himself.

He probably was already pretty unhappy before he got the news that the entire metropolitan area, plus anyone who cared in the entire blogosphere, soon would know about his department’s latest screwup. He’s somewhere on the other side of sore pissed now.

“Black, goddamnit, you can’t print that shit,” he says by way of greeting. “It’s unsubstantiated.”

I tell him I’ll take my chances.

“Where are you getting that crap from?”

I could just tell him it’s none of his fucking business, but that might start him sniffing around possible leaks, including one staffer in particular who used to be a reporter.

So I make something up. I tell him that a woman I met yesterday at poolside, whose name I don’t know, called me and told me she talked to someone who saw Sax leaving sometime in the middle of the night. I had left her my card and asked her to call me if she saw anything unusual concerning Mr. Sax. Miraculously she did.

“And,” I go on, “knowing how proactive your department is, I just guessed you were going to arrest him today. Seems like I was right.”

He doesn’t know whether I’m being a wiseass about the “proactive” part.

“You don’t know what we planned for today,” he says. “You don’t know your ass from first base.”

“Well, I’ll bet you a twenty that there was going to be a press conference called for this morning.”

There is silence on the other end, followed by a sigh. I know that sigh. The chief is ready to switch gears and deal.

“Look, Willie,” he says, changing over to first-name basis, going for a mix of friendliness and condescension, “this is off the record, but if you just wait a few hours, I’m sure we’ll have this bastard all locked up. We know where he went. We’re closing in on him even as we speak.”

Like hell you are, I’m thinking but not saying. Finally, tiptoeing along that often-trod tightrope between what the police want and what our readers expect, I compromise. I’ll post something about Sax apparently skipping town. No point in concealing his name, since it’s in the story I wrote for this morning’s paper. But I will write that there was nothing in Mr. Sax’s background to indicate that he should have been locked up posthaste, so he was released. And, I’ll add, when the cops got a look at his computer, they became much more interested in him and sent a SWAT team around to arrest him, by which time he had, of course, fled. I won’t, in other words, write that our police are blithering idiots. The readers can infer.

“You did find something interesting in that computer, I’m assuming. Just keep quiet if I’m right.”

Another sigh, but nothing else.

I tell the chief I’ll even quote him as saying that the cops are sure they will have Sax in custody in a few hours.

L.D. Jones isn’t happy with that, but he’s happier than he would have been with my original plan, which was to spell out line by line just how easily our defenders let Sax slip away. He knows that I am cutting him a deal, and that I expect something in return.

“When you catch him,” I say, letting the other shoe fall, “would you do me a favor and give me a heads-up?”

“Sure,” he says. He sounds like he’s saying it with his teeth clenched. I am sure that making a deal with the devil, meaning me, is taking a toll on the chief’s molars.

I POST THE story online and then head down to the office, forfeiting yet another day off for the love of my sorry-ass job. Hell, I didn’t have anything to do anyhow except maybe stop by and see Peggy.

I’ve already gotten a text message from Sally Velez. She’s seen the story online and wants to know what I’m going to do for the “real paper.”

The newsroom is pretty animated for eleven
A.M.
It almost seems like old times. One consequence of cutting people’s hours from forty to thirty-seven and a half is that (a) people are working to the clock and (b) they tend to pile up hours early in the week and are mostly gone by Friday afternoon. So we’re pretty bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on Monday mornings.

Sally calls me over and asks me what else I’ve got.

“Nothing I can write right now.”

“Damn, Willie, that means you’re holding out on me.”

“Sorry. When we can print it, I’ll write it.”

She advises me that I’d better tell her what’s going on, whether it gets in tomorrow morning’s paper or not. She mentions that my testicles are in peril if I don’t start talking.

So I tell her that the cops had him down there for at least four hours yesterday in interrogation, and that Sax said there wasn’t any lawyer there. By the time the dumbass asked for one, they were ready to send him home anyhow. My guess is that they just screwed up, thought they could come back and arrest him later.

“And they found something on his computer?”

“My reliable source says so.”

She leans close and whispers it.

“Peachy?”

Nobody’s supposed to know that Peachy Love and I have contact beyond press conferences. As far as I can tell, Sally’s the only one in the newsroom who is aware of the source that has made my second turn at night cops reporter occasionally satisfying. And Sally can keep a secret.

I shake my head.

“Higher?”

I tap her desk twice and walk away.

I can pull my punches and still give the readers enough to keep any more of them from canceling their subscriptions.

Sarah Goodnight is making herself some hot tea when I go into the break room. I ask her how the story on fearful young women in the city is coming along.

“Lot of jumpy out there,” Sarah says, taking a sip as I pour some of our office sludge into my cup, which is older than she is. “Probably wouldn’t have been a good idea to send a guy on this one. Might have gotten his ass pepper-sprayed.”

It cracks me up and kind of breaks me up to see our young reporters work so hard to be tough and cynical. Dropping subjects and verbs from the front of sentences and speaking out of the corner of your mouth is part of it. It is almost a form of self-mutilation, and I think the young women do it more than the men do, probably because they’re afraid we won’t think they’re tough enough if they hang on to a shard of their innocence. Maybe it will change when women rule the newsroom. Looking around at who does the work around here, I think that day ought to get here about Thursday.

Sarah will have a story for tomorrow on the Tweety Bird scare.

“You know what’s really sick?” she asks me as we walk back to her desk. “Somebody’s hawking Tweety Bird T-shirts over on Grace Street, right next to the VCU campus. And they’re selling. Here, I bought one. Thought I’d turn it in as a business expense.”

She takes the tee from her desk and hands it to me. On the front is a wide-eyed, vaguely feminine Tweety Bird. Underneath is the old cartoon line: “I tawt I taw a puddy tat.”