by Howard Owen
Grace was more blue-collar than yuppie back then. Now, witness Baer’s piece, there are many come-heres who wish McNish and his church would just go away. Hell, they’ll probably use Artesian Cole’s murder to restate their case about Grace of God being a crime magnet.
The doorbell is merely ornamental. I knock twice and wait. Finally Sam McNish appears.
He’s apparently sparing with his smiles, not wishing to squander one on me. He’s maybe five eleven, looks like he might weigh 140 pounds if he was wearing lead weights. He’s got red hair that hasn’t seen a comb lately and a scraggly-ass hipster beard. He has an earring in his left ear.
“Yeah,” he says, “you must be the guy from the paper.”
He turns and walks back into the house. I follow.
There’s a big hallway leading back to what Kate would call a great room. The other rooms I pass along the way seem to have been converted into makeshift classrooms. There’s a staircase leading no doubt to more rooms upstairs and another one going down to the basement. The place is huge.
The great room actually is pretty great, spreading across the back side of the place with a kitchen and dining room on one side and a living room on the other. Attached to the back is a big-ass deck. If the whole place weren’t furnished with stuff Goodwill wouldn’t take, it would be pretty impressive.
I note that this seems like a lot of house for one guy. I’m pretty sure McNish doesn’t have a wife or live-in girlfriend.
“Well, it’s a little more than just a house.”
He flops down on an easy chair that doesn’t look like it would stand much flopping. I opt for the beanbag, hoping I can get out of it later. Immediately one of the apparently large array of cats prowling the place attaches itself to me, no doubt sensing that I am allergic. I am convinced that cats aren’t looking for affection so much as they are trying to find someone to annoy.
I ask him how this all got started. I pretty much know, but a little chitchat might make things go better.
He reaches over and turns on a tape recorder.
“I had a bad experience with the last reporter who came here,” he says. “I’m pretty sure he misquoted me.”
I don’t like goddamn tape recorders. I don’t use one, mainly because I went to the trouble to take a shorthand course thirty-two years ago. But I can’t swear that I’ll have every “a,” “and” and “the” exactly the way my subject says them, and I don’t want somebody coming back later and calling me on it if I use the wrong adjective. Hell, shorthand puts me ahead of most reporters. If you want a laugh, find some ballgame that several papers covered and go online the next day to check each sportswriter’s version of the players’ quotes. As Bootie Carmichael once told a managing editor after Bootie had badly mangled a player’s quote after an ACC basketball tournament game, “I’m just trying to get the gist of what he said, Boss.” Bootie always calls his superiors “Boss” when they ride his ass, because “Boss” spelled backward is doubleSOB, and that’s two of ’em.
Since Bootie had left a “not” out of a quote about “taking Duke lightly,” he had a pretty weak case.
I can get a quote right, but I’m not perfect. Still, I need this interview, so it’s time to bend over and take it, tape recorder and all.
Once we get the damn ground rules straight, Sam McNish tells me his story.
He was still in Union Seminary, where he went after Princeton, when his mother died.
“She was pretty unhappy that I didn’t go to law school,” he says, “but she knew I was doing what I was called to do.”
She left him more money than he expected. Her West End parents did not completely leave her out of their wills, maybe out of guilt, and she passed it on.
“I was almost finished at Union, and I already knew I wanted to do something other than preach on Sunday mornings, visit the sick, and fight the deacons over what color robes the choir should wear.”
One day, walking around the city, he saw this big place on West Grace.
“I couldn’t afford it today,” he says, “but back then, places here were a steal, relatively speaking.”
It took much of his inheritance, but he bought it, fixed it up, and started Grace of God. He’s been here almost twenty years now.
“At first, the neighbors were OK with it. But then we got a bunch of people who came in with money and expected this place to be Mayberry.”
It isn’t exactly Mayberry now, and it damn sure wasn’t back then. It was a block off Broad, giving the hookers easy access to the bus lines and their Fan clientele.
I still remember one City Council meeting a few years after Grace of God opened. The neighborhood was already trying to push the ladies and their pimps somewhere else by making West Grace semi-inaccessible.
An African American councilman who did not suffer fools or NIMBYs gladly asked one aggrieved homeowner, “Where do you think they go when you run ’em out of your neighborhood? Do you think they find Jesus?”
“Yeah,” McNish says, doling out a small smile. “I remember that.”
Things have progressed nicely enough, I think, to dispense with the off-speed stuff and bring the heat.
“So,” I ask him, “why would somebody with a Princeton degree do this? I mean, you could be making real money.”
He doesn’t answer right away, like he’s thinking about it. Maybe he hasn’t had to explain his life recently.
“It was my fourth year at Princeton, early December,” he says. “I was in a coffee shop right there on Nassau Street, right off campus. I was studying for some big exam, I don’t even remember which one now. It isn’t important. It wasn’t important then. I just thought it was.
“I’d been up about twenty-four hours, and I was feeling a little froggy. Suddenly this beaten-down old man is standing right in front of me, actually blocking the light. He asked me for some spare change. I was pissed. I told him to get the hell out of there before I had him arrested, really went off on him for breaking my concentration. I’ll never forget the look on his face when he walked away, like he was a dog you’d just kicked. I almost called him back. But I didn’t.”
McNish gets up and walks around, stopping to stroke the cat that has finally gotten the message and left me the hell alone.
“They found him the next day. He had crawled into an alley to get out of the wind, I guess, and he just froze to death there, not a block from where I blew him off.”
McNish stops and looks not so much at me as through me.
“I might have saved him, maybe taken him to a shelter, given him one of my fine sweaters, even given him a place to stay for a night.”
I’m thinking that plenty of people would have felt like shit after something like that, for about a day. Then must of us would have shaken it off, justified ourselves to ourselves somehow, and gone on our way.
Sam McNish obviously isn’t wired that way though. More than a quarter of a century later, it’s still bugging him.
“I’d gone to church, as a kid and even at Princeton. I’d studied other religions. But the whole idea that the homeless guy panhandling you or the abused kid on the corner is actually Jesus hadn’t hit me before. When you turn your back, you’re turning your back on Jesus.”
He finished his time at Princeton, but from the day they found that bum’s body, McNish apparently hasn’t wavered from the path he set for himself. What he finally settled on, back in his hometown, was a church that offered something more tangible than pie-in-the-sky rewards, and that eventually evolved into the after-school tutoring that he and whoever else he can get to work for next to nothing are providing. They are getting by mostly on donations, although McNish does conduct actual services on Sundays and, I presume, passes the collection plate around.
I don’t envy him. Saving the world is too much heavy lifting for me. Saving Willie is usually too much.
It’s the wrong time to mention to McNish that I’ve never really bought in to the whole walking-on-water thing, although turning water int
o wine would be a nice trick. Even a hell-bound Christ-denier like myself, though, can spare a little admiration for somebody who gets up every morning determined to make the world a better place.
I’ve interviewed my share of bullshit artists posing as men of God over the years. Sam McNish doesn’t feel like one of those.
I ask him about the last time he saw Artesian Cole.
“Last Monday,” he says. “I was supposed to give him a ride home.”
“What happened?”
“The car wouldn’t start,” he says. “I’m not too good with cars. I had it towed in the next day.
“At some point, while I was trying to get it started, Artesian said he’d just take the bus instead. He didn’t want to wait. I’m sure he was afraid his mother would worry. And so he left, headed for the bus stop. And that was the last I saw of him.”
The other kids in McNish’s after-school tutoring program had all left by then. When I ask Sam if anyone else saw Artesian leave, he looks at me kind of strange.
“Why would you ask something like that?”
I don’t answer.
The nickel drops.
“Oh,” he says.
He doesn’t say anything for what seems like a minute. I don’t either.
“Probably not,” he says at last. “He went out the side gate. He would have walked down Robinson and then over to Broad to catch the No. 6 bus. Maybe somebody saw him there.”
I don’t think so but don’t say it. If somebody had seen the kid, L.D. Jones might not be asking the questions he’s asking.
“Look,” McNish says, “the police have already talked to me about this. They know what I know.”
I don’t bother telling the reverend that he probably will be talking to Richmond’s finest again in the near future.
CHAPTER FOUR
Monday
I didn’t get my interview with Sam McNish a minute too soon.
Custalow wakes me up before seven, something he knows not to do unless the place is on fire. I’m getting ready to head for the stairs, leaving my neighbors to fend for themselves, when my old friend informs me that things aren’t quite that dire—unless you happen to be Sam McNish.
L.D. Jones, in his finest grandstanding form, has screwed me. He had to have known on Saturday that McNish’s arrest was imminent. So he milked me for what he could get and then dropped the hammer as far from my deadline as possible. The early TV news, which normally leads with a story the video folk snatched off some website or are reading straight out of our paper, got the jump on this one. They have video of McNish, looking even scragglier than he did yesterday afternoon, being led out of Grace of God in handcuffs. The chief called the TV stations, obviously, but must have lost my phone number, the same one he called less than two days ago looking for information.
He has no comment for the masses, other than to say it’s an “ongoing investigation,” but the good-hair genius in front of the camera, like everyone else in Richmond who can read, knows that the late Artesian Cole attended McNish’s tutoring sessions and was last seen there. Sarah got that into the follow-up story she did. The headline above the video reads, “Controversial minister arrested in boy’s murder.”
They even get a nice sound bite from one of the neighbors.
“I always thought there was something wrong over there,” the guy in bathrobe and pajamas says. “You know, all those kids hanging around all the time and all.”
And the TV guy tells us about all the complaints police have had about Grace of God over the years, mostly for excessive noise or trespassing. He fails to tell us that McNish has never been arrested for anything except for an act of civil disobedience, and that was in a failed effort to convince our idiot-in-chief that going to war in Iraq in 2003 was the perfect confluence of dumb and evil. If you disobey authority and you’re right, shouldn’t they expunge it from your record?
There’s nothing to do about it except get up, get dressed, and turn an “off” day into an “on.”
I call Peachy Love at police headquarters, something I’ve been told not to do. She calls me back ten minutes later. I can hear the wind whistling in the background and figure she’s taking a smoke break so she won’t be detected conspiring with a reporter. I appreciate that. Peachy will be job-hunting if L.D. Jones or anyone else in blue finds out that she still has connections with the ink-stained wretches.
“What the hell are you doing calling me at work?” is the way she greets her old friend.
I explain my situation. I can’t figure out why the chief decided to pounce on Sam McNish in the middle of the night, less than two days after he’d indicated to me that he was taking a more subtle approach. Hell, this was about as subtle as a hand grenade.
“What I hear,” Peachy says, lowering her voice so that I can barely make out what she’s saying, “is that they got a hot tip from some volunteer or someone else who worked there. Like they were afraid the guy was gonna skip town.”
“Yeah, I know about the volunteer.”
I don’t mention that the chief himself gave me that morsel, then told me I couldn’t swallow it. Off the record, my ass.
“But whoever it was, she apparently called L.D. back yesterday and told him about the skipping-town part.”
I tell her about my talk with McNish.
“He didn’t seem like he was going to skip anything then. Hell, who would have fed all his damn cats?”
“Nevertheless, that’s what I hear. Plus I hear there was drugs involved.”
OK, maybe so. My nose is finely tuned to the scent of marijuana, if that’s all we’re talking about here. I did pick up a whiff of cannabis yesterday. God knows I’ve smelled enough of it growing up with Peggy. But, really, who gives a fuck? It’ll probably be legal here in five years.
“And,” Peachy goes on, “they seized his computer, so I’m sure they’re going to town on it right now.”
I want to know more, but Peachy says “shit,” and hangs up, which probably means there was a cop or two coming her way on the street.
I give L.D. a call, too, just to thank him for hosing me. His secretary says she’ll take a message. She sounds cheerful.
The newsroom, when I get there, is humming pretty good for a Monday morning. Word has gotten out about McNish’s arrest.
Everybody’s up in arms about the new health care plan our corporate masters have foisted off on us. It is, for about the thirtieth year in a row, shittier than the one the year before. This time, I think they want us to perform our own surgeries.
“It’s the Virginia way,” I hear Enos Jackson say to the kid intern who’s working part-time on the copy desk. “We hated the plan we had last year, but this one makes us nostalgic for the good old days.”
He starts softly singing “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” our politically incorrect former state song.
The kid doesn’t give a damn. He doesn’t get health insurance and he doesn’t need it.
We have a lot of kids these days. They work cheap with no benefits, and institutional memory’s a luxury we just can’t afford anymore, like bureaus, raises, and an editorial cartoonist. We have a neon “for sale” sign on our masthead, but nobody seems much interested in buying. And, from all I’ve heard elsewhere, we might be better off with the devil we know.
Wheelie spots me before I can get away. Mal Wheelwright, I realize as he comes closer, needs to get to the Y once in a while. All the stress of twenty-first-century print journalism makes some people lose weight. It seems to have had the opposite effect on our managing editor, who appears to have donut crumbs around his mouth.
“Thanks for coming in,” he says. I appreciate that he knows this is one of my precious days off. “Did you know any of this was in the works?”
I tell him that a source let me know the cops were suspicious of McNish. I tell him that another source said he was considered a flight risk for some reason.
“Jesus, Willie. Does any of this ever get into the paper?”
I kno
w Wheelie’s upset. Nobody likes to get beaten on a hard news story by TV. It’s like having a five-year-old whip your butt. I remind him, though, of my track record and the fact that nothing anyone told me made me think the police would act this fast.
“Yeah,” Wheelie says, nodding his head. He seems to accept the fact that I have pulled his bacon from the fire a time or two. “Well, we need something strong for tomorrow.”
I mention that I did have an exclusive interview with Sam McNish yesterday.
“Yesterday? Yesterday? Why didn’t we have something in the paper this morning?”
Because, I explain, the interview was background for something I didn’t see being a story for another day or two at least.
“Who knew McNish would be in jail this morning?”
Wheelie gives me the evil eye.
“I was hoping,” he says, “that you would have.”
That’s just not right. I bite my tongue, though, and when he tells me he wants me to get Sarah Goodnight and see what we can “shake out of the tree” for tomorrow’s editions (and, of course, our insatiable leech website), I don’t object. I know Wheelie’s getting heat from his corporate mistress, Rita Dominick. I tell him not to worry. He doesn’t seem to be heeding my advice.
Sarah’s poring over the eighty-six pages of six-point-type bullshit the representative of the new health plan gave us.
“Jeez, Willie. I don’t think any of my doctors are on this plan.”
“What do you need, besides a pediatrician?”
She gives me the finger.
We talk about how we are going to go about putting our newspaper where it should be, the lead dog in the chase for truth and justice. It isn’t much fun getting scooped by TV. I mention the unnamed secretary or go-fer or whatever who seems sure Sam McNish is a bad man or at least wants the police to think so.
“I’ll snoop around,” Sarah says. “I know somebody who works there.”
I give her Cindy Peroni’s number and suggest that she might have some leads, too, having been a volunteer there for a while.
“Is that your squeeze?”
