by Howard Owen
“Nothin’,” he says. “Just asking.”
Bullshit, I’m thinking. But if Gillespie’s heard something, Peachy Love will hear it soon, I’m sure. And then I’ll hear it.
I walk over to where Sarah is standing. She looks a little shaky.
“Did you see him?” I asked her.
She nods.
Sarah subs on night cops often enough that she’s been exposed to a few dead bodies. She’s pretty blasé about stiffs these days. This one seems to have gotten to her a little, though.
“He was so small,” she says. “He looked like he’d shrunk or something.”
There was something else, she said.
“He was wrapped in a bedspread or something like that, but he looked like he was naked, underneath.”
They’re taking the body away by the time I go to take a look. I’m not supposed to, but sometimes it’s better to ask forgiveness than seek permission. A quick peek before a young cop tells me to get the hell out shows me a shriveled little boy, all gray and ravaged by six days in the water. The dark stain all over the spread comes, I’m pretty sure, from bleeding out. There’s no reason to look, but sometimes it’s good to get a refresher in just how bad humans can be to each other.
“When it stops getting to you,” I tell Sarah, “it’s time to quit.”
She nods and heads toward the chief, hoping for a statement.
The chief answers questions from the three TV reporters and Sarah.
“Are you treating it as a homicide?” one of the video hairpieces yells out.
The chief says they aren’t treating it as anything yet. It is an ongoing investigation, which is L.D.’s answer to everything when he doesn’t know anything else.
I don’t believe the TV folks got here in time to get a look at the body.
I sidle up to the chief as he goes back to his car.
“That was blood all over that spread, wasn’t it?” I ask him. “And he was naked underneath it.”
He starts to give me some bullshit answer, then just nods his head.
“But you can’t quote me on that.”
I tell him that if he doesn’t say anything, I can’t quote him. I can just state the fact with no attribution.
“No what?”
“I won’t quote you. I won’t even say it was a police source.”
“You got an answer for everything, don’t you?”
I tell him that if I did, I wouldn’t be working the damn night cops beat.
He actually laughs and tells me he better not see his goddamn name in our goddamn newspaper anywhere near a quote mark.
SARAH WRITES the story. And I’ve got one more homicide, I’m pretty sure, to add to our yearly list.
CHAPTER TWO
Saturday
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. The guy standing in the median at the first stoplight off the I-95 exit ramp is wearing a Santa Claus hat he must have found in somebody’s trash bin. The cardboard sign he’s holding reads “Will work for bear.” I’m hoping he means beer.
I went back to the scene of our latest heinous crime this morning. There isn’t much to see, just a crime tape still up, for some damn reason, around where they dragged the boy’s body out. I thought it would be good to get a little background. Tug at the readers’ hearts, or at least give them a chance to wonder out loud over breakfast what makes “those people” do things like that. It’s always good to humanize the end-of-the-year murder recap. We don’t have as many homicides as we did when crack was king, but we do well enough to keep the suburbanites from coming into town after dark. Even with our reduced carnage, I don’t have enough time to focus on every drug-related dirt nap on my plate. This, though, was ridiculous enough to make me go the extra mile. Artesian Cole was, by all accounts, a great kid, good student who did everything right. It kills me how much more likely it is that something like this will happen to a good black kid than a good white kid.
The morning was not without event. I was standing there, slightly hung over and sucking on a Camel, getting the death stare from some jerk jogging by, like I might give Bryan Park cancer, when I saw them walking more or less in my direction.
The large, well-structured black woman was being helped along by a man whom she towered over. If she stumbled, she would have crushed him to death.
They got maybe twenty feet away when I recognized the guy, so I knew who the woman must be.
“Shorty,” I said, and he jumped a little. He let go of the woman, who I knew had to be his sister.
“You’re that guy from the paper,” she said.
I confirmed that and noted that I was surprised to see Shorty out walking around. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing and hurt his feelings, in case the gun was loaded this time.
“Oh,” he said, “it wasn’t no thing. We made the bail. Don’t guess I’ll be working at the paper no more though.”
I nodded, full of heartfelt sympathy. Holding the publisher hostage probably will necessitate a job search for Shorty Cole, assuming he doesn’t become a guest of the state soon. I told him that I’d be glad to give him a reference.
“It just makes me so damn mad,” he said. “Didn’t seem like nothing was being done. So I decided to get their attention.
“Oh,” he added, realizing he’d forgotten his manners, “this here is Laquinta.”
I expressed my condolences.
“I just wanted to see where they found him,” she said. “Who in the world would want to do that to ‘Tesian? Oh my Lord, he was my pride and joy.”
She moved toward the water, and I was afraid she was going to throw herself in. Neither Shorty nor I, nor both of us, could have lugged her out.
But she stopped at the edge and started crying. Her wailing was such that a flock of geese on the other side decided to crap elsewhere. Who could blame her?
A good man would have left them to their grief, but I’m a reporter.
When she regained a little of her composure, I asked her if she had any idea at all who would have wanted to hurt her son.
She shook her head.
“He went to that Grace of God place after school every day, and he had to either get a ride or catch the bus back home, but nobody had ever bothered him. And that Mr. McNish treated him just like he was his son.”
“We got to go, Laquinta,” Shorty told her. “We got to make the arrangements.”
She didn’t seem like she wanted to leave there, ever, just stay where her son’s body was brought up. Next stop would be the undertaker’s, and she would know, even more than she did already, that nothing was ever going to be the same.
I STOP at the Good Luck “convenience” store just past the light to buy cigarettes and a lottery ticket from a guy apparently trying to learn English by watching ESPN. The cigarettes no doubt will give me a lot more comfort than the scratch-off. The other people in here buying tickets are the ones that make the better classes call the lottery a tax on the stupid. Really, though, if you’re having to buy your beers one at a time in a paper sack, Power Ball is about the only 401(k) plan you’ve got.
I heard a guy one time, in the act of not minding his business, tell a bedraggled old coot who’d just bought twenty bucks worth of MegaMillions tickets that his odds of winning were like forty-five million to one.
The old guy squinted up at his self-appointed investment advisor and said, “Son, my whole life has been forty-five million to one. This has got as good a chance of coming in as anything else.”
Then he suggested that the guy go fuck himself. We all applauded. I gave the old guy five bucks and told him to go for the gold.
WHAT I want to do now is talk to Sam McNish.
I go back to the Prestwould and my sixth-floor abode. I’m still renting from Kate, my third ex-wife. We get along fine, now that we don’t have to lie to each other about where we were last night.
I’m a little out of place among the essence of the kind of old Richmond where someone might actually ask you, “Who are y
our people?” Somebody did that to me once, at a cocktail party. I told her she really didn’t want to know. But I genuinely like my neighbors here, and they tolerate me well enough.
Abe Custalow, to whom I’m subletting the second bedroom, is taking the afternoon off from his job as the Prestwould’s maintenance man and has his ample frame hunkered down watching a little college football. I have a rare and blessed Saturday off, the better to take the lovely Cindy Peroni to dinner tonight. The couple of hours I spent tramping around Bryan Park on a nonworking day are my early Christmas gift to the paper.
“So what’s the latest with that boy?” Abe asks.
I tell him there’s nothing much new.
“I see he was one of Sam McNish’s kids.”
“Yeah,” I tell him, scooping up some avocado dip with a tortilla chip and almost not spilling any on the carpet. “Funny how a guy from the Hill became our very own Mother Teresa.” Custalow frowns.
“Yeah,” I say. “You’re right. I’m a cynical bastard. It’s just that I never really bought into any of that Jesus stuff.”
“I don’t think Jesus had much to do with it. I think he just wanted to do good.”
I call the Grace of God number, but no one answers. I don’t leave a message. Maybe I can catch him tomorrow.
LIKE ANYONE from Oregon Hill, I’ve heard the Sam McNish story so many times I practically know all the words. What I didn’t know already, Cindy filled me in on when we started dating, going steady, hooking up, whatever the hell you call it these days.
He was, by all accounts, a nerdy little kid, brought up like yours truly by a single mother. Like me, he was an only child. Supposedly, his mother was some kind of West End society girl who fell in love or lust with a Hill boy who took her home, gave her his somewhat dubious name, and then left her. For some reason, maybe because she wasn’t welcome anymore among the “Who are your people?” crowd, she didn’t go back to the land of boxwoods and trust-fund babies. Like Peggy, she staked her outsider’s claim on the Hill. She stayed. She was, by all accounts, determined that her one and only was not going to be some kind of juvenile delinquent, the norm on Oregon Hill. Studying was not optional in the McNish household.
Little Sam skipped the third and sixth grades and graduated from John Marshall High School as valedictorian when he was barely sixteen. He got a full scholarship to Princeton, and most folks on the Hill probably figured he’d seen about the last he wanted to see of Richmond as he headed north on the Amtrak.
Like any smart, undersized kid where we grew up, he reportedly got picked on a lot, for a while. The story they like to tell is about how he got even with Brady Stoneburner and stopped being fucked with.
Brady was a year older than Sam and, by all accounts, about a foot taller by the time they were in junior high. Brady, no genius apparently, had kind of balanced things out by repeating a grade to make up for one of the ones Sam skipped. The upshot was that Brady, a year older, was in sixth grade when Sam was in eighth.
Maybe this gave Brady Stoneburner feelings of inadequacy. Whatever, he decided to take it out on Sam McNish. He reportedly would come up behind him and knock his books out of his hands, or give him a friendly slap upside the head, or maybe just taunt him a bit, hoping that the smaller boy would make his day and give Brady an excuse to beat the crap out of him. But Sam didn’t do anything, just took it.
One day, though, he took control of the situation. The way they tell the story, Brady was at his locker, probably trying to remember the combination, when Sam came up behind him.
“Hey, Brady,” he said, “I got something for you.”
Stoneburner turned around and came face to face with a rather healthy snake. It wasn’t poisonous, most agree, just a good-sized rat snake young Sam had managed to sneak into Binford. Unknown to most of his classmates, Sam McNish had become quite fond of reptiles and didn’t seem at all scared of them.
The same could not be said for his nemesis. Stoneburner is alleged to have actually managed to climb his locker and was found by the assistant principal sitting atop it with his legs drawn up. He was crying.
Before the assistant principal got there, Sam calmly explained to Brady that if he wasn’t shown a little more respect in the future, he couldn’t be responsible for what might or might not pop out of Brady’s locker the next time he opened it.
“In other words,” he said, according to Cindy, “don’t fuck with me.”
No one had ever heard Sam McNish cuss before. It made almost as much of an impression as the snake did.
A couple of idle threats by Brady Stoneburner followed, until the day Sam put the cobra in his chair. It wasn’t real, of course, just a doodad they were selling at the Virginia Museum to cash in on some kind of Egyptian exhibit there. It was spring-loaded so that any little movement would make the cobra’s head pop up like a jack-in-the-box nightmare.
That morning in English class, Brady came in, still no doubt with some of his strut intact. When he got to his desk and jostled it a little as he threw his books down, the cobra popped up, and Brady Stoneburner wet his pants. The rest of the class knew the fake snake was there, and the merriment was reportedly widespread. Attached to the snake’s head was a note that read: “I told you once.”
It is said that Sam got a couple of days’ suspension for bringing a real snake to school and no time at all for the artificial one. Cindy said she figured the teachers and principal were as tired of Brady Stoneburner as Sam McNish was.
Other aspiring bullies kind of gave Sam a wide berth after that, Cindy said. Still, he didn’t have a lot of close friends. For one thing, he was two years younger than the rest of his classmates. He supposedly didn’t have a date until his senior year. But, the Brady Stoneburner incidents notwithstanding, he was reportedly a kind, considerate boy. He made a point of befriending the most friendless, including a couple of kids who had just enough Down syndrome to stay in the mainstream rather than being relegated to the short bus. His second date, the story goes, was to the senior prom. He brought a black girl from Carver who was just behind him in the class rankings and would go to Duke on a full scholarship. The general consensus was that they both did it just to jerk a few chains. Being half African American myself, I respect what it took to do that in Oregon Hill in 1982. Custalow and I had our share of Brady Stoneburners. We didn’t have Sam McNish’s imagination, though. Mostly, we just beat the shit out of them.
“We all respected him and admired him,” Cindy said. “But he wasn’t, you know, close to anybody much.”
With all this in his history, it was a surprise to many when he moved back to Richmond. The reason, too, was something of a jaw-dropper. He’d graduated with honors from Princeton and had been accepted to law school at Yale. Instead, he came back here to go to Union Presbyterian Seminary. With all that education and all those brains, he was going to be a preacher.
It was seen as kind of an insult to many who had cheered him from afar, holding him up to outsiders as proof that growing up on the Hill didn’t necessarily consign you to a life of manual labor or incarceration.
“He coulda been a senator or something,” I heard a guy say one time at the Chuckwagon over a beer or six.
“Well,” somebody else said, “he’s doing the Lord’s work.”
“Hell,” the guy said, “anybody can do the damn Lord’s work.” And then he had to apologize to the Baptist preacher who was sitting two seats down enjoying a cold one.
At any rate, he returned, and he never left again. The way he chose to employ his energy and brain cells is nobody’s business but his own. Not my cup of tea, but that’s just me. I’ve never been much of a churchgoer. Peggy tried to make a Christian out of me, but it kind of kills your want-to for religion when your only parent pushes you out the door in your Sunday best with a joint in her hand.
“You need to know that shit,” Peggy said. “It isn’t right for little kids not to go to church. You don’t want to go to hell, do you?”
But it was pl
ain to me, by the time I had reached the so-called age of reason, that Peggy wasn’t buying much of what the preacher was selling. She would point out the bad things that the deacons and elders were doing Monday through Saturday before putting on their “Jesus suits” on Sunday. Bottom line, I don’t think either Peggy or I have ever really swallowed the fact that you can be Adolf Hitler, or even the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, and undo a whole life of evil with a simple “my bad” on your death bed. It’s just too easy, and nothing in Peggy’s life, or mine growing up, caused us to think that you could believe in “easy.” Where we came from, about the only thing that really worked was “hard.”
I do credit Sam McNish with choosing to deal with the day-to-day, earthly needs of people as opposed to the harps-and-wings versus hellfire-and-brimstone tack many of my least favorite evangelists employ. Working with kids whose lives make mine and Custalow’s on the Hill seem like Leave it to Beaver is to be admired, whether it’s done by the church or the Mafia.
I try Sam McNish’s number one more time and get no answer.
Five minutes later, I get a call from L.D. Jones.
This is unusual, to say the least. Most times, my calls to our police chief go unreturned. He has not, in my memory, ever called me other than to chew me out for doing my job, which sometimes inevitably involves making our chief and his minions look less than capable.
“I need some information,” he says, by way of greeting.
I tell him that’s what he’s supposed to give me, not the other way around.
“Cut the bullshit,” L.D. replies. “Can you meet me somewhere in an hour or so?”
I am intrigued. We agree on the new Perly’s. I figured I have plenty of time. Cindy isn’t expecting me until six thirty at least.
It’s a ten-minute walk down Grace Street. Virginia Commonwealth University is creeping eastward from the Prestwould, but this part of Grace is still a little on the sketchy side, even with the police station perched halfway there.
I haven’t dined at Perly’s lately. Since it reopened, they don’t serve pork, which pretty much eliminates any kind of breakfast I might ever order. Still it’s nice what they’ve done to the place. I hear you can make sausage out of beef too. God, Cindy tried to slip some past my tonsils the other morning that was made out of soy.
