by Howard Owen
L.D. is coming out of 200 West Grace and walks with me the rest of the way. We talk about the weather and U.Va. basketball and my smoking until we get inside to a back booth. It takes awhile. The chief likes to speak to his peeps, many of whom seem to still be patrons of Perly’s despite its pork-free reincarnation.
He’s ordered late lunch and I’ve ordered a Miller before he cuts to the chase.
“What do you know about this guy McNish?” he asks. “I mean, he grew up on the Hill, right?”
I tell L.D. that I know a little about him, but that he’s a good bit younger than me. I tell him that, as far as I know, he’s on the side of the angels. I ask him why he wants to know.
He gets all official on me, starts the usual bullshit about ongoing investigations and such.
I stop him.
“L.D., it’s just me. You know I’m not going to print anything you say if it’s off the record. But you’ve gotta shed a little light here. I don’t like being in the dark. Little help, L.D.”
He sighs and tells me what a pain in the ass I am.
“OK,” he says, lowering his voice a little even though the booth next to ours is empty and the noise level in the place makes me have to lean halfway across the table to hear him. “Off the record, and I do mean off the record. He might have been the last person to see that boy alive.”
He is, of course, talking about Artesian Cole.
“You mean, other than the asshole who killed him.”
He looks at me.
“I mean what I mean. Now, can you tell me something about Samuel Jackson McNish?”
I tell the chief that I didn’t even know that was his full name. Then I give him as much background as I care to.
“And he’s never done anything that might indicate that he might, uh . . .”
“Murder one of the kids he’s trying to help? Yeah, right.”
I might be sneering a little when I say it.
The chief comes about halfway across the table, the better to make his point.
“Let me tell you something. You don’t know shit. You see some dead bodies out there at night once in a while, and you think you know evil. You don’t. I have seen it all. Last month, some crackhead mother on the South Side sold her little girl. Yeah, that’s right. Sold her. Nine fuckin’ years old. We’re pretty sure that’s what happened, because that’s what the mother of the year’s aunt told us when we found the skank dead in an old boarded-up house over in Dogtown. We still haven’t found the girl. We might never find her.”
He’s resting his elbows on the table. I don’t bother to mention the ketchup on his sleeve.
“That boy,” he says, “it looks like he might have been abused, before he was killed.”
I ask him the question I already pretty much know the answer to. When a body shows up dead and naked, you assume certain things.
“Sexually?”
He stares at me and nods.
“So don’t get all wiseass on me. I didn’t have to go to college to be an expert on the human condition. And the human condition is pretty damn sorry. I expect the worst until I’m shown otherwise.”
It’s as long a speech as I’ve ever heard L.D. give. My old basketball buddy and present antagonist is definitely all in on this one.
I promise him that I will check around, not mentioning that I am having dinner and maybe, if I’m lucky, breakfast with one of Sam McNish’s former classmates.
He nods and motions for the check. I don’t resist. My tax dollars at work.
“There must be something,” I tell him. “There’s something you’re not telling me. Take me to the mountaintop, L.D.”
He hesitates before he speaks.
“Again,” he says, “off the record. Double off the record.”
Another pause.
“There was a teacher’s aide or some such shit at that Children of God place. She saw something.”
“Something.”
“She said he gave the boy rides home sometimes.”
That seems innocent enough, I offer.
“She saw him and the boy coming out of the bathroom together one time. She said the boy looked upset, and when she asked if he was OK, McNish said the boy was fine, like he didn’t want to talk about it.”
“That doesn’t sound like much.”
L.D. sighs.
“It’s all we got.”
CINDY WANTED to go to one of the new places that keep popping up around here. If all the gastronomic palaces are as great as our restaurant critic says they are, I asked her once, how come most of them are gone in three years and Joe’s and the Robin Inn are still here.
Cindy noted that there’s always a market for a place where nine bucks will get you enough spaghetti for lunch and dinner, but sometimes people want a little swish.
Not me. But here we are. There are a lot of things with arugula and beets and carrots in them, and lots of items I only assume are food, but not so much red meat. We’re supposed to share. How, I ask Cindy as she tries to divide a chicken thigh, is this different from a buffet, except it costs more?
Cindy has a sense of humor, which is what saves me. She thinks it’s funny when I ask the waiter if the kale is free-range. Some of my other love interests have not been so tolerant of my irrepressible wit.
She is looking extremely fine tonight. It’s worth making her smile to see those dimples. Her dark hair frames her face perfectly. Her eyes, those mischievous bedroom eyes, make me wonder how her former husband could have been asshole enough to let her get away. Unlike me, she is in exceptional shape. I can’t believe she’s forty-eight years old. Looking in the mirror in the men’s room, however, it is very easy for me to believe I’m fifty-four. Hell, I have the looks and stamina of a man of sixty. Maybe 2015 will be the year I run the Monument Avenue 10K. I mentioned that possibility to Cindy last week.
She snorted.
“You crack me up,” she said. “Oh, wait. You’re serious?”
I told her not really.
“You know,” she said, “they won’t let you smoke during the race.”
Dinner goes well, with a minimum of sharing. A couple of obscenely expensive bourbons on the rocks and a bottle of a very passable Italian red help my digestion, although I’m afraid the bill is going to give me acid reflux.
We eventually get around to the subject of Sam McNish. I don’t mention the fact that L.D. Jones has taken an unhealthy interest in her old classmate.
“That thing with the boy was so sad,” she says. “I hope it won’t keep other kids from coming to that program. I hear he’s doing a lot of good.”
“It’s got to make people a little leery,” I offer.
“Well,” Cindy says, “there’s kids out there who are behind before they come out of the womb. I think Sam’s just trying to help them catch up.”
I ask her if she ever sees him.
“Yeah,” she says, “I have, although not lately. When my marriage went south, I volunteered over there for a while, until I started taking courses at VCU.”
I haven’t heard this before. I tell her that she continues to surprise me with all the nooks and crannies of her life.
“Oh,” she says, as the dimples reappear, “I think you’re pretty familiar with my nooks and crannies.”
I call for the check. I mention that it seems like a good time to go home for the evening.
“You want to call it a night?” she asks me.
“No. I just want to go home for the evening. Yours, I hope. Unless you want dessert.”
The dimples again.
“That’s all right. We can have dessert at my place.”
Cindy and I have had some ups and downs, the downs mostly my doing. But we’ve done the things couples do when the good outweighs the bad. We overlook each other’s faults. She overlooks my drinking and smoking and flirting. I overlook the fact that she is so adorable she can’t possibly put up with me for much longer.
CHAPTER THREE
Sunday
&n
bsp; “Willie,” Cindy says, punching me the way she does when she claims I’m snoring, “it’s your phone.”
I fish it out of my pants, which are lying balled up beside the bed.
“Sorry to, uh, wake you up,” Custalow says, “but we had that breakfast thing. Want me to go on and you catch up later?”
I forgot that I had promised R.P. McGonnigal and Andy Peroni that Custalow and I would join them at the Bamboo for an Oregon Hill catch-up.
Cindy seems amused at my efforts to wake up and get dressed simultaneously.
“Your pants aren’t zipped,” she points out as I get ready to leave. I reach down to kiss her.
“I’ve got morning mouth,” she says. She tries to turn away.
I tell her that’s because it’s morning and kiss her anyhow.
“So you’re meeting Andy for brunch?”
“We prefer to call it breakfast.”
“Well,” she says, dimples at full mast, “don’t tell him what a slut his sister is.”
“My lips are sealed.”
“Maybe they should be, until you brush your teeth.”
THE BELLS of Saint James a few blocks away are calling the Episcopalians home to ponder their sins—serving red wine in the water glass, failing to replace a divot, neglecting to RSVP—when I drive up. Custalow is waiting on the front steps of the Prestwould. A couple of my older neighbors are making their way carefully down to street level. They seem amused. My neighbors and I don’t exactly run in the same circles, but they don’t judge.
Custalow drives while I try Sam McNish’s number again.
This time, he answers.
I introduce myself, but more as an Oregon Hill boy than as a journalist. “Journalist” is not high on most people’s popularity lists. I even evoke his old classmate, telling him Cindy Peroni says hello.
“You do know it’s Sunday morning?”
Oh, yeah. Shit. It had not occurred to my heathen, still-asleep brain that Sam McNish does still have a ministry, in addition to his work with kids.
I apologize.
“You wouldn’t have caught me,” he says, “but I got one of the assistant pastors to do this morning’s service. It’s been a rough week.”
I start to sympathize with him when he cuts me off.
“I know who you are, by the way,” he says. “You work for that rag that did the hatchet job on me.”
I guess it was foolish of me to think he would have forgotten. It’s been three years since Mark Baer did that story. He interviewed just about everybody within a block of Grace of God, the big old rambling house where Sam McNish tries to save the world. Some would say he dwelled excessively on the neighbors’ complaints of noise, littering, and general rudeness. Some would say that the facts didn’t back up their fears that crime was on the rise. Some would say that Baer didn’t try hard enough to get both sides of the story. Some would say that his point of view was skewed by the fact that he himself lived a block away.
A lawsuit was threatened but never carried out. I think Sam McNish found out our lawyers were bigger than his. Baer was spoken to harshly about journalism ethics, if I may use an oxymoron. As is often the case, I would like to kick Baer’s ass.
So you can’t blame Sam McNish for holding a wee bit of a grudge against my employer, which continues its fine tradition, going clear back to antebellum days, of afflicting the afflicted.
I offer my apologies. I emphasize that I’m just another working stiff from the Hill, trying to earn a living. I mention, without lying, that I hold no affection for Mark Baer.
McNish carries on for a few minutes about my paper, going from his particular case to other injustices. I let him rave. Sometimes it’s best to listen.
When he finally stops for two seconds to catch his breath, I jump in.
“Look,” I tell him, “if you don’t want to talk to me, fine. But I’m on your side.”
I mention going out to the lake where they found Artesian Cole’s body. I mention meeting the boy’s mother and uncle out there, and how much I want somebody to suffer for this.
“I understand,” McNish says, “that Mr. Cole created quite a scene down there at the newspaper. I guess I’m glad he didn’t shoot anybody.”
I note that the gun wasn’t loaded and evoke such merriment as I can from my subject by describing the look on our publisher’s face when she thought it was.
There is a slight thawing of the ice.
“I don’t think any of us are going to get over this for a while,” he says. “Artesian could have done great things with his life. Instead, this.”
Things finally reach a temperature where I feel it’s safe to ask McNish if it would be possible for me to stop by and talk with him, hinting that it would be good to give the public a more balanced picture of what Grace of God is about. I feel like an asshole, because I know that McNish, from my little chat with L.D. Jones, is a probable suspect in Artesian Cole’s murder. The main purpose in my talking with him today is to get there before the cops jump him and he becomes a little less accessible.
Still, I tell myself I’m doing the Lord’s work, just like Sam McNish. It’s just that the deity I bow to is truth, and an afternoon with McNish might allow me to lay a burnt offering at that great god’s feet.
We agree to meet at two thirty. I make a note to stop at two Bloody Marys.
MCGONNIGAL AND Peroni are waiting for us in a booth at the back of the Bamboo. They’ve been there twenty minutes, enough to get one drink up on Custalow and me.
“Rough night?” Andy asks with a grin.
I am noncommittal and order coffee.
The four of us grew up as friends, fighting and playing together. There were six of us then. Sammy Samms is gone from this Earth. Francis Xavier “Goat” Johnson is, against all possible odds, president of a small liberal arts college in Ohio and doesn’t get back that often.
We were a somewhat odd group on the Hill, which was white as the columns on a Southern Baptist church. Custalow is a Mattaponi, although he prefers “Indian.” I am, thanks to my long-lost daddy, one-half African American. We raised the social consciousness of more than one redneck with fists, bricks, and the occasional baseball bat. If they didn’t embrace us, they feared our asses, which sometimes is just as good.
The conversation gets around to restaurants that provide a bigger, better space for smokers than nonsmokers. This being Virginia, there usually is a way to ply your nicotine habit while you dine, but often you are relegated to the back of the bus, shunted into some small side room where your fellow inhalers huddle in a cancer fog.
Since Peroni and I are both still slaves to tobacco, the conversation is not merely academic. We come up with three eateries that seem not to equate smoking with Ebola.
“But what do you do if the rest of your party doesn’t smoke?” McGonnigal asks. “I mean, Tommy smokes, but he doesn’t make me inhale that shit. He just goes outside.”
Tommy is R.P.’s latest boyfriend. They are talking about tying the knot, now that they can do that in the state where they live and pay taxes.
“Yeah,” Peroni says, turning to me. “Cindy doesn’t let you take her to Camel City, I’m thinking.”
“We have mutually agreed that we’ll go for the nonsmoking.”
This draws a laugh.
We talk about the Redskins, who suck, and about the University of Virginia basketball team, which shows no signs of sucking just yet.
“Just wait, though,” Custalow says, “they’ll wake up and figure they’re U.Va. at some point.”
It’s part of the Virginia Way to expect the worst. A kind of good-natured cynicism covers the Old Dominion like a wet wool blanket. When exceptionalism pops up like a dandelion, we lop it off before it spreads.
Peroni brings up Artesian Cole and Sam McNish.
“That guy,” he says, “he’s high-hattin’ us. Somebody said they saw him the other day, went up, and told him he’d been a year behind him in high school, and McNish acted like the guy was sp
eaking Hindu. Just grunted something and kept walking.”
“He always was odd,” McGonnigal contributes. “He used to come to school with these sandwiches that had the crusts cut off. His mother would cut ’em off so little Sammy didn’t have to eat anything but that good Merita white bread.”
I note that this doesn’t negate the fact that he’s spent his adult life making no money and working seven days a week to help people.
“Well,” Peroni says, “it still doesn’t mean I have to like the son of a bitch.”
Our conversation bounces from one talking point to another, sometimes without one damn thing to connect one point to the next. First thing you know, I look at my watch and it’s two fifteen.
I get up to leave. The waitress must hate us. We hog one table for three hours and probably spent less than a hundred bucks.
“Come on,” Peroni says, “it’s only forty-five minutes to happy hour.”
“They have happy hour on Sunday?” McGonnigal says, somehow surprised by this. “Aw, that ain’t right.”
I drop Custalow off and head out to learn what I can about the aforementioned Mr. McNish.
GRACE OF God looks a lot like the other houses on West Grace. The sign out front is about all that gives it away. The front porch needs a paint job and doesn’t look quite level. It has not achieved the same level of gentrification as most of its neighbors.
I’ve learned enough from the files to know that McNish bought the place, probably for a song, back in the early nineties and started using it as a base for his ministry, helping people who needed a break any way he could. He founded Grace of God in 1995 but didn’t get his after-school program going until four years ago.
In the 1990s, West Grace was kind of the poor side of the Fan, our Victorian neighborhood that starts around the Prestwould and Monroe Park and fans out until it ends, ten blocks wide by that point, at Boulevard.
