by Howard Owen
“Who wants to know?”
“Just askin’.”
Richmond can be a really small town.
I tell Sarah that I’m going to see if I can get in touch with the man of the hour himself.
With a little help from my ex-wife and her ambulance-chasing partner, it could happen.
The secretary at what is now Green and Ellis says Ms. Ellis is busy but will call me right back, if I’d like to leave a message. I know “right back” could be hours that I don’t have. I tell the secretary that Ms. Ellis’s ex-husband says there’s been a fire in the unit she’s been renting him.
Hey, it could happen. It’s an old building, and I try not to smoke indoors any more than is absolutely necessary.
Kate is on the phone in about ten seconds.
“What?” she says. “How bad is it? Did you call the insurance guy?”
I was kind of hoping she would ask me if I was OK. Considering that I’ve just lied like a dog to get her attention, though, I suppose I deserve to have my feelings hurt.
When I explain my little subterfuge, she seems unhappy.
“Bastard! You got me to ring off a call from a client for this?”
Kate seems a little stressed lately. Marcus Green has made her a partner to keep her from leaving. I know she’s putting in some long hours and not getting rich doing it. Grace is now close to two years old, and I don’t think my ex has ever really taken any serious child-rearing time off, although she does have some help. She and Mr. Ellis, who also is a lawyer and makes much better money than Kate does, have done something I never thought anyone I knew personally would do: They have hired an au pair. She’s from Sweden, I think. I saw her once, and I hope Greg doesn’t become too fond of little Gisella or whatever the hell her name is. She looked like a man could become very fond of her.
“Au, what a pair,” was Andy Peroni’s text to me the next day after he and I ran into the Ellis family and the help at a street festival a couple of months ago. I don’t think he was talking about Kate and Greg.
When my ex left Bartley, Bowman and Bush for the less-lucrative offices of Marcus Green, she did it for all the right reasons. Marcus, who has been called an ambulance chaser (because he chases ambulances) and much, much worse, does occasionally find himself on the side of the angels. He says it’s good publicity to win one for the little guy once in a while. It gets him some business from the big crooks, who have big checkbooks.
I’m calling Kate and, by extension, Marcus because Sam McNish is just the kind of no-hoper who piques Marcus’s interest. He can be assured of seeing his bronze dome in our paper a few times if he decides he wants to be Sam McNish’s lawyer. Marcus is not averse to publicity. His TV ad is a hoot. He’s up there giving it his best pit-bull-from-the-’hood scowl, and some hired voice that sounds like Shaft with a hangover says, “When it’s time to get mean, you better call Green.”
“I heard McNish had been arrested,” Kate says, once she has calmed down and realized there might be a good reason I’ve interrupted her busy workday. “Jeez. I’ve been reading about him for years. People are going to go batshit over this one.”
Which is why, I tell her, that I’m sure Marcus Green will want to be standing in line at the city jail waiting to offer his services to this poor unfortunate.
“And maybe you can get a little face time with the suspect yourself,” she says, ever the cynic.
I inform her that I’ve talked to Mr. McNish in the last forty-eight hours.
“I’m just trying to do a good deed in a naughty world.”
She snorts.
“Marcus will be back here about one. Maybe you ought to come by and talk to us then.”
I promise her I’ll do that.
“Willie,” she says, “that thing about a fire: You aren’t smoking in my unit are you? If you are, I swear I’ll throw you and Abe out on the street.”
“Perish the thought.”
“Which thought? That you’d smoke indoors or that I’d kick your ass out?”
I assure Kate that I am not ruining the resale value of her property. Being the honest sort, I cross my fingers when I say it. Hell, if I smoked indoors more than once every blue moon, she’d be able to smell it when she comes by, usually when she knows I’m not there. It isn’t that my ex doesn’t want to be around me. We’ve even had a nice day or two together since the split. She just likes to be able to snoop unimpeded.
I ask her if she’d like to take me to lunch. She says she’s going to run home between twelve and one to spend a little quality time with her daughter.
SO I use the two hours before my meeting with Green and Ellis to go over to Oregon Hill and check on my daughter and grandson.
I haven’t been around small children in a while, or at least ones in which I have a vested interest. For much of Andi’s young life, I was working at being a full-time fool, letting her mother and the guy who stepped in when I abandoned them do the heavy lifting. Some things can never be undone, but you have to try.
Andi has circles under her eyes. She says she has to be at work in a couple of hours, and she was just catching a catnap when I called. Suddenly, she starts crying.
“I want to do this,” she says. “I want to keep working. I want to get my damn degree. I don’t want to be a dependent of Quip or his family. But some days it’s kind of rough.”
Little William has been a bit colicky, and I gather Andi was up much of the night with him.
I do the only thing I can think to do that might be of help.
“Lie down,” I tell her. “If the baby wakes up, I’ll take care of him.”
And she lets me. She stretches out on Peggy’s moth-eaten couch with her feet in my lap and is asleep in about thirty seconds. Watching my grandson in his innocent slumber while my daughter catches the only rest she’ll have for the next eight hours is a gift I never deserved.
On the way to the Green and Ellis office, I stop and buy a Powerball ticket. It’s probably my best gambit for being able to ever take care of Andi and William financially.
I arrive about one thirty. The great man himself greets me. Marcus Green has added an earring to his general appearance of black fury, rectitude, and hipness. With his shiny, shaved head, he looks like an African American Mister Clean.
“So, you want me to do your work for you again?” Marcus asks.
I remind him of how lucky he is to be in my good graces. Some of his most attention-getting cases in the last few years emanated from me.
“Yeah, but how come I never make any money off of them? You act like I’m goddamn Ellis Island or something, and you keep bringing me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.”
“Hell, you know you crave publicity even more than you do money. You’d rather be on TV than eat a Ruth’s Chris steak.”
He frowns the frown he saves for hostile witnesses, and then the weather changes in an instant, the way it does with Marcus, and he breaks out in that loud, booming laugh of his.
“Willie, I can never bullshit a bullshitter.”
Kate, standing to one side, just shakes her head. She wondered often, when we shared sleeping space, why men seem to have to do this dance before they get down to business.
“It’s like you’re dogs,” she said one time, “and you have to growl a little, sniff each other’s butts first.”
I told her it wasn’t the first time I’d been called a dog, and that I’d sniff her butt if she liked.
I tell Marcus what I know about Sam McNish, and most of what I’ve learned from L.D. Jones and Peachy Love.
“He sounds like a pretty good suspect to me,” Marcus says.
“Yeah, but all he’s done his whole adult life is try to make the world a better place. I just can’t see him molesting and murdering one of his kids.”
“He wouldn’t be the first holy man to succumb to the devil. Sometimes these guys are just trying to stave off their own personal Satan by doing good works.”
I conced
e that I have little use for what I know of religion and emphasize that this should make my judgment of McNish more credible.
“I could be wrong, but there is nothing in Sam McNish’s background that causes this to make sense.”
Marcus sighs and says he’ll pay a visit to McNish, if he’s willing to see him.
“I don’t know why I let you talk me into shit like this,” he adds as he escorts me out.
I make it clear that I’d like to be there when and if that conversation occurs.
“Let me see him first,” Green says. “You all can have your good-old-boy Oregon Hill reunion after I set something up. Don’t worry. I’ll drop your name.”
Not the best of outcomes. I’d rather be there from the start, but I doubt Marcus will screw me any worse than our chief of police has. How did this turn into Fuck Willie Day?
AT THE office, I go into our electronic archives. I’d still like to go back to maybe 1985 and strangle the Internet in its infancy. At the same time, I would kill whoever decided giving news away free via computer made sense.
I must admit, though, some things about computer hell are an improvement. I can sit at my desk and access just about anything we’ve written in the last quarter century.
I remember Shorty Cole mentioning other kids going missing. I type in a few keywords and, after a couple of hours of hit-and-miss, I have come up with the names of four other black kids, all boys, from the late Artesian Cole’s side of town who seem to have disappeared.
One of them, who was twelve at the time, went missing five years ago. Another one, a fourteen-year-old, vanished four years before that. If they or their bodies ever turned up, this information didn’t make it into our electronic archives. The other two went back further. One was from 1999, the other from 1994, twenty years ago.
I check one other thing and confirm that McNish didn’t get the after-school program going until 2010, a year after the fourth boy vanished. It could mean nothing. The cases could be unrelated. I’m having a hard time, though, accepting the fact that Sam McNish has been dispatching little black boys for more than two decades.
It is hard not to notice, however, that the first boy disappeared the same year McNish bought his house.
I WENT back to my desk to write my story. I have precious little new information, but I am free to report what I already knew but didn’t put in print because I was working under the faulty belief that our chief of police could be trusted.
I write about the chief’s private chat with me on Saturday, mentioning that an unnamed person at Grace of God had made some incriminating statements about McNish. I hold back, for now, on writing that there were four other unsolved disappearances of kids who fit Artesian Cole’s general description over the past two decades.
I fully expect to get a call from the chief tomorrow. He’ll be yelling at me for going back on my word while I’m yelling at him for shafting me. Then we’ll hang up on each other, and the next time one of us needs to use the other one, we’ll reconnect.
We both want justice, but both of us would like to keep our jobs. Sometimes, our methods are at cross-purposes.
CHAPTER FIVE
Tuesday
Sarah called me last night to tell me she had gotten in touch with the worker who gave the cops all the juicy tidbits about Sam McNish. She got a pretty good lead from Cindy, who still knew some of the volunteers and semipaid workers there. One of them told Cindy who it almost certainly was, and she told Sarah.
Her name is Stella Barnes. She’s been a teacher’s aide and administrative assistant at Grace of God for about eight years.
Sarah got her address, a place on the western edge of the city, and paid her a visit.
“She didn’t really want to talk to me,” Sarah said, “but when she realized we knew pretty much everything the police knew, she let me in.”
Stella Barnes more or less corroborated what she had volunteered to the police, the same information that worked its way up to L.D. Jones and over to me.
She saw McNish coming out of one of the bathrooms one day last summer with the boy, Artesian Cole, in tow and looking kind of upset. She thought it was suspicious. And she knew that McNish had given the kid rides home on occasion.
“I don’t know, though, Willie. She seemed kind of sketchy. And she must have had like eight cats there. I don’t trust anybody with that many cats.”
I observed that having that many cats might make you a little weird, but it doesn’t make you a liar.
“Still, she did seem a little jumpy.”
“Was she on the record?”
“Oh, yeah. She never asked not to be. It’s funny, she said she and McNish were close at one time, but that he had kind of changed.”
I noted that she probably could hang some kind of half-assed story just on those two allegations. She said she’d rather wait a day or two.
I reminded her that Wheelie’s hot breath is on the back of our necks. He wants some red meat.
“Oh, Wheelie,” she said. “He’ll wait.”
Ah, the confidence of youth.
“By the way,” she said, before she hung up, “I liked your honey. She seemed nice. She kind of reminds me of my mom.”
I could have gone all night without hearing that.
“So, do I remind you of your dad?”
“Ewww. That’s really sick.”
TODAY, MY first order of business is paying a visit to the boy’s mother. I was able to get Shorty Cole’s number from someone in HR who owes me a favor, and he put me in touch with his sister.
Shorty asks me if I know of any jobs. I tell him I’ll check around. Andi’s worked in about half the restaurants and bars in town. Maybe she’ll have a line on something. Shorty might make a good bouncer, if they can get past that one unfortunate incident in our lobby last Friday. It’ll keep him until he either does or doesn’t have to go to jail.
“Could use some Christmas money,” Shorty says.
I promise I’ll check and call him back.
A man answers at Laquinta’s house. He doesn’t seem that thrilled to talk to me, even after I convince him I’m not a damn bill collector. Journalists aren’t much farther up the totem pole, just above lawyers, as I’m fond of reminding Marcus Green.
Finally, though, he lets me talk to Artesian’s mother. She tells me that the funeral is tomorrow, and the house is full of relatives, some all the way from New Jersey.
I’m about to tell her that I’ll call back in a couple of days. The funeral has, as the kids say, gone viral. They’ve had to move it to the Arthur Ashe Center, and several black ministers are coming to bemoan the fate of young black men. My timing’s not so great.
But she surprises me, the way people do.
“You can come over if you like,” she says. “I’d like to talk about Artesian, what a good boy he was.”
She seems to be choking back tears. I’m feeling a little lump myself.
I clear my throat and ask her if an hour or so from now will be OK, and she hesitates for a couple of seconds and then says it will be. I am sure that I will be about as welcome as a fart in a phone booth by the mourning party. Maybe being part African American will help. In the deck of race cards, mine is probably a two of clubs.
Laquinta Cole and her two remaining children live down the back side of Church Hill, where whites dared not tread until the recent past. Everybody’s so giddy about Richmond’s “gentrification,” but if you’re the original settlers instead of the new Renovation Hardware/Williams-Sonoma gentry, I’m not sure the rising tide is lifting your ass off the bottom. It might not get you anything but higher property taxes.
The house is at the other end of Grace, the same street where I and my fellow journalists ply our trade. It’s a different kind of Grace, though, and it’s not like the Grace where Sam McNish has set up his Jesus shop.
Grace Street wanders through the wilds of our fair city, lost, found, then lost again. Like Richmond itself, it does not run in a straight and unbroken line
.
When I was a young reporter, about all I knew of Grace Street was the section that went by the paper and the part near VCU, most specifically where it led to the Village Café and the bars where they hosed the floor down at two a.m. every day.
Covering night cops not once but twice in my checkered career, I eventually came to know Grace better than most.
It can be a tad hardscrabble, passing near some of the city’s toniest addresses but not quite there, like a rich man’s star-crossed cousin or a beauty queen’s plain sister. It has its bright spots, though, and the city’s history is laid out along its chopped-up route.
It does have its quirks. For one thing, it keeps disappearing.
It starts at Chimborazo Park, not far from where I’m going today, as East Grace. It wraps around the park, going past a historical marker commemorating a seventeenth-century Indian battle (the white folks got one band of Indians to help them wipe out another one). From all appearances, it is a good place to smoke dope and screw. There’s cobblestone on the streets here, either due to preservation or neglect. There are potholes that could swallow a Smart car.
And then, a block farther west, it dead-ends to accommodate a kiddie park.
You’ll find it again a little higher up on Church Hill, where you can look down Twenty-Ninth and see the Confederate memorial at Libby Hill Park. It goes past Saint John’s Church—Patrick Henry, give me liberty and all that crap—and some of Richmond’s oldest homes, overlooking the river and a couple of my favorite eating and drinking establishments.
It disappears again at the edge of Shockoe Valley, by the old religious retreat with its view of downtown on the other side of I-95.
It picks up again for one short block on the west side of the interstate, and then it gives way to Capitol Square. To find it again, you go around the capitol, where the government of a rebel country resided for four years, a country in which my future mother’s people sought to keep my future father’s people enslaved. History cuts pretty deep here, so we try to skip over the uncomfortable parts.
Past the capitol, Grace is resurrected at Ninth Street and heads west past a federal courthouse and some places where you can soak in some culture if you like that sort of thing. Grace has been prettied up quite a bit in the last thirty years. Even the part around the newspaper looks better than it used to while preserving at least a hint of its so-called eclectic nature. You can go to church at Centenary Methodist or take in the cross-dressing brunch at Godfrey’s on a Sunday morning. If you time it right, you can do both.
