Grace

by Howard Owen

  The bottom line, when he’s done: He can’t prove he didn’t kill Artesian Cole.

  “But not to worry,” Marcus tells him. “We don’t have to prove you didn’t do it. They have to prove you did.”

  “I never would hurt any of my students. Never. I loved Artesian.”

  It is suggested that, as pure as his thoughts are, McNish might not want to use that word to describe his feelings for a ten-year-old boy he’s suspected of murdering.

  He shakes his head.

  “This is a sick world,” he says.

  “I hear that,” Marcus tells him.

  I cut in and ask McNish about Stella Barnes.

  “She has some kind of incriminating things to say about you.”

  I mention the bathroom incident and the rides home.

  “Of course I took him home. I was going to the day he . . . the day he died. And the bathroom thing. Good lord, she must be talking about the time Artesian had an accident. He is––he was—a smart kid, but he had this kind of, uh, bladder problem. He wet his pants. He was embarrassed. I helped him clean up and told him it was OK, that he was OK.”

  He looks around at the three of us.

  “Is this what this is all about? Coming out of the bathroom with the boy? Giving him rides home?”

  I ask him the question this has all been leading up to.

  “Were you, uh, seeing this Barnes woman? Because I heard you were.”

  I can feel Kate’s eyes boring a hole in the back of my head. She hates surprises.

  He is quiet for a moment.

  “Yeah,” he says finally. “We spent some time together.”

  “But not anymore?”

  “She’s a nice lady. But I think she thought there was some future in us, and there wasn’t.”

  “Why not?” Kate asks.

  He looks her in the eye.

  “I am married,” he says. “I am married to my church and its mission. I don’t think Stella could get her mind around that.”

  “Well,” I say, “from what I heard, you found time to spend a few nights at her place, married to the church or not.”

  He drops his head.

  “I was weak,” he says.

  No, I want to say, you were human.

  “Do you think she went to the cops out of spite?” I ask him.

  He shakes his head.

  “No, I can’t believe she’d do that. She was hurt when I told her we shouldn’t go on seeing each other, but she’s not a spiteful person.”

  When I mention that Ms. Barnes told the police she was afraid he might skip town, he seems completely befuddled.

  “There is another thing,” Marcus says. “I have it on good authority that they found some dope at your place. And that they found porn on your computer.”

  Now it’s my turn to be surprised. Marcus actually has a source in the police department I don’t know about.

  McNish doesn’t seem surprised.

  “They probably found about half an ounce of marijuana,” he says. “I like to take a toke now and then. Is that a crime?”

  Well, yeah it is, I tell him, unless we’ve been colonized by Colorado.

  I mention the beer some of his more prudish staffers have noticed on his breath.

  “I go over to the Village sometimes for lunch,” he says. “And yes, sometimes I have a beer.”

  “And the porn?” Kate asks.

  He shakes his head.

  “Like just about every other adult human being, I have looked at porn. But I can assure you that there is nothing on there involving children.”

  He puts his head in his hands.

  “But they’ll put all this stuff together, and it will be the end of Grace of God. All our donors will drop us. Then what’s going to happen to all those kids?”

  Marcus correctly points out that we need to focus on saving Sam McNish’s ass first and then worry about his church.

  He does not seem comforted by this.

  Marcus tells him to buck up, that he’s in good hands.

  “Are they treating you well?” he asks.

  “Oh, sure. Two of my former students and a couple of kids’ family members are in here. They kind of look after me, protect me from the ones that don’t know me.”

  From the ones, he means, who think he’s a child molester and murderer and would like to give him a little turnabout.

  We leave him with promises we might not be able to keep. Kate and Marcus are committed now; he’s their client. Me, I’m a nosy bastard, to use L.D. Jones’s word, who doesn’t believe anything until he’s seen some proof.

  I GET some good news from Andi when I call. Somebody at one of the places in the Bottom is going to hire Shorty. Andi worked at the place for a while, but it was too rough. She has seen a few beer bottles broken over a few heads, but this place did not meet her standards.

  “They could use a little muscle,” she tells me. “A lot of muscle, actually. The last security guy they hired got beat up in the parking lot after work last week by a couple of guys he bounced.”

  Well, guys who hold the publisher hostage in the lobby can’t be choosers. This is a paying job. It even has a few benefits. Considering the last security guy’s plight, I guess benefits are a good thing.

  She gives me the manager’s number. I call Shorty. He answers and I pass the information along to him.

  “That’s a rough place,” he says, then remembers his manners. “But thank you, man. I appreciate it.”

  I tell him I appreciate him not shooting our publisher. I more or less mean it. Whoever follows Rita Dominick will be more of the same, so what the fuck?

  “Aw, man,” Shorty says. “The thing wasn’t even loaded,”

  It is always good to do your fellow man a good deed, especially when you don’t have to knock your ass out beyond making a phone call to do it. Look to your laurels, Mother Teresa.

  LUNCH, TWO Millers, and a couple of Camels later, I’m at the office. I feel like I’ve already done a day’s work, and I’m just punching in. When I was twenty-five, I could do this shit standing on my head. Now I’m just wishing for a peaceful, crime-free evening, although experience has taught me that, the more I need a night like that, the less likely I am to get it. I will never forget that god-awful New Year’s Day a decade or so ago when I drew the short straw and had to work the holiday, back before I was sentenced to my second term as full-time night cops guy. I wasn’t hung over, because you have to sober up first for that, but I had slept two hours and was praying for a quiet, short shift.

  Instead, it was one of the saddest days in our city’s oft-troubled history. A whole family—mom, dad and their two young daughters—was slaughtered in their home on the first day of the year by a couple of ex-cons who had no reason to do what they did other than pure, damn evil. I remember throwing up in the shrubbery after visiting the scene, sick on something other than booze for a change. That’s what you get when you wish for a quiet day.

  This one promises to be true to form. There’s an e-mail from the lovely Ms. Dominick. “See me,” it says. She is as parsimonious with words as she is with raises.

  I assume she means at her place, not mine, so I take the elevator up to suit land. Sandy McCool, our longtime administrative aide, tells me the publisher is on the phone but should be off soon.

  I ask Sandy how it’s going. We’ve known each other a long time, and I know she’s about the only person on this particular floor who won’t bullshit me.

  Sandy just rolls her eyes and tells me not to ask.

  Uh-oh. That’s a little worrisome. We haven’t done layoffs for a while. I know the suits miss that. Like sharks, they get turned on by blood in the water. What they do mostly now is through attrition. I imagine the folks up here, when they meet at the Commonwealth Club after work for bourbon-and-waters, do high-fives every time a veteran employee who has had the nerve to build up to a pretty good salary over the decades retires or takes a PR job. Or, better yet, dies.

  Soon Ms. Dominick
is off the phone, and I am summoned in.

  “Wheelie told me you sat on some of this stuff about the Cole boy,” she says by way of greeting.

  Thanks Wheelie. When confronted by our tiger shark of a temporary publisher, he probably panicked and nudged me off the boat as chum. I don’t really blame him though. Wheelie’s caught in the middle.

  Fine, I tell her. And how are you?

  “Cut the crap,” she says, doing her best imitation of some cigar-chomping newspaper publisher in a 1930s movie, sans the cigar. “I know you know a hell of a lot more than what you choose to share with our audience. I just want you to know that this has got to stop. If I ever hear about you holding back information again, you’re done.”

  “When I have a story, it will be in the paper,” I tell her. “When a source tells me it’s off the record, I’ll honor that source, unless he burns me.”

  I am somewhat emboldened by the knowledge that, like winter and bad haircuts, Rita Dominick won’t be with us forever. She’s just marking time until the real suits sell our asses down the river to some chain that will make us yearn for the good old days. Right now, we’re only enduring the death of a thousand budget cuts instead of an ISIS-worthy beheading.

  I wish the publisher a nice day and walk out, rather rudely I guess, because she seems to have something else to say. Fuck it, I can always get one of those state jobs where you use a lifetime of truth-gathering skills to hide the truth.

  I don’t think she’ll fire me. I’m not all that expensive, and who else is going to do this crap? It would be good, though, if I were to produce something that could serve as a Band-Aid on the massive hemorrhage that afflicts our print circulation. That might get Rita Dominick off my back for a few days at least.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Thursday

  Sarah has a story in today’s paper on the other Grace of God workers, with a special focus on Stella Barnes. The picture they paint of Sam McNish is hardly flattering, but it doesn’t exactly scream “serial killer” either. Yeah, he’s been known to have a beer or two at lunch. They did find some porn on his computer, but it wasn’t of the felonious type. I got Peachy Love to give the names of a couple of the sites. Hell, I recognized them. I used to worry about Kate catching me occasionally taking a peek, until I caught her doing the same thing one day.

  “I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about,” she said.

  Yeah, I told her. Me too.

  The general consensus in Sarah’s story, though, is that McNish is a good man who has a few minor vices. And the black parents who talked about the ministry had almost nothing but good things to say about Grace of God. There were a couple who said McNish might have been a little too affectionate, looking back on it, but that was about it.

  I’ve arranged a meeting myself with Ms. Barnes this afternoon. Yeah, I know Sarah has talked to her already, but I’ll risk hurting her feelings to get my own personal read. I got Cindy to intercede for me, but Stella Barnes might have said yes anyhow. She seems, unlike most Americans, amenable to talking to the press.

  My story today is your basic kid’s funeral tearjerker.

  Don’t get me wrong. There are some stories for which tears are the logical response, and this is surely one of them. I put a few grafs in about the crowd at the Ashe Center being somewhat worked up over the fact that Artesian Cole seems to be the fifth young black male to have disappeared without a trace in the last twenty years or so. Unlike the aforementioned parents, they mostly have no residue of goodwill for a white man suspected of killing African American kids. I note that there is nothing to link these other boys to Grace of God or Sam McNish.

  It is never a good idea, in my opinion, to look at the comments that trail your story on the website like toilet paper stuck to your shoe.

  “Did you read that shit?” Sarah asks me.

  I tell her that I didn’t, not wanting to encourage her. Reading the kind of opinions that turn up on our site, especially with a story as close to the bone as this one, will make you want to write the human race out of your will.

  But I couldn’t help myself. I guess it’s like porn. You know you shouldn’t look, but something pulls you in, and before you know it, you’re forty-five minutes into living, breathing proof that human beings are a malignancy on our planet. If there is a God, I find myself thinking, why the hell are we still here? Isn’t it about time for another flood?

  The yappers are more or less divided into two equally reprehensible groups, both earnestly involved in their life’s work: judging and affixing blame while assiduously eschewing spell check.

  First, there is the Kill the Preacher party.

  Hang him! Hippacrit! Burn him alive!

  Man of God, my ass. They out to nail him to a cross. Do to him what he done to that boy!!

  I knew that fagot was up to no good.

  And then there is the Blame Momma contingent, for which there should be an especially toasty little corner of hell reserved:

  What kind of woman would leave her son alone with a animal like that?

  Those people are never going to get there act together until they learn good parenting.

  Fat welfair bitch. I bet she was pimping him out.

  We do have some standards, believe it or not. By the time I go online again an hour later, our masters of the ether have taken the comments down.

  I have time to kill before I interview Stella Barnes. So, it being two weeks before Christmas, I do something that’s almost as pleasurable as sticking needles in my eyeballs. I go to the mall.

  I’m a city guy. If the Thalhimer’s and Miller & Rhoads department stores were still downtown, I might never cross the line into the county. But of course they’re long gone, the buildings given over to the arts and urban housing, so the man looking for gifts for his mother, daughter, grandson, and sweetie must sometimes bite the damn bullet.

  Everybody out here seems to be driving the kind of vehicles you’d want if you were dodging IEDs in Afghanistan. I can’t see the stoplights because the boat in front of me is so big it’s blocking out the sun. When I finally make it into the mall’s county-size parking lot, I’m a taxi ride away from most of the stores where I think adequate yuletide bounty might be purchased. Why can’t I just get everybody gift certificates, I asked Cindy. She didn’t say anything, just gave me The Look.

  Loaded with sizes and suggestions, I venture through the gates of hell into the mall itself. This is one of the newer ones, with a plaza or some such shit in the middle so that, if you are brain-damaged or very easily led, you can pretend you’re in a real town, where real stores line the streets and everybody doesn’t have to go to the goddamn mall to shop.

  How do you know the mall isn’t a real town? Well, if you’re a reporter, try doing a man-on-the-street piece there: Do you believe the economy’s getting better? What do you think of the Kardashians? That sort of shit. Before long, mall security will come up and escort you and the photographer outside, because it isn’t a public street. It’s a fucking mall, which seems to be like the Vatican, a little city-state that makes its own rules. You have to ask permission to talk to the happy shoppers.

  I manage to buy a grand total of three gifts before my interview. Two of them might not be the right things at all, seeing as how sadists make up women’s clothing sizes so that no man is ever exactly sure what he’s got. My only bright moment is when the girl in Victoria’s Secret asks me if I’d like them to gift-wrap the lust-inducing underwear I’m hoping Cindy will like, or at least model for me.

  No, thanks, I tell her. I’ll just wear them.

  On the way out, I see a familiar face. Three of them to be exact. Philomena Slade has her great-nephews in tow. Jamal and Jeroy, Chanelle’s twins, seem to be on a pre-Christmas high. Momma Phil, my first cousin once removed, looks exhausted as the boys romp around her. They seem to be in constant danger of knocking over the various seasonal crap the mall has put up, if not some hapless patron.

  “If you all don’t behave,�
� Philomena says after she greets me, “there ain’t going to be any Christmas.”

  The threat is toothless. The boys must be eight years old by now. They’re growing up on the side of town where Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, and the tooth fairy don’t last past the first grade. But they calm down a little anyhow. Their great-auntie still has some sway over them, even if they look like they’re only about two years from being as tall as she is.

  We talk about the topic that’s on everyone’s mind, especially in the black community.

  “That was awful about that Cole boy,” Philomena says. “He was two grades ahead of the twins in school. They said they didn’t know him, but all the kids spoke well of him. I’m so glad Jamal and Jeroy didn’t get involved in that mess. It just tears your heart out.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that my kin by my very late father were considering sending their kids to Sam McNish’s program.

  “I was thinking about it. Chanelle didn’t want any part of it. I was the one pushing it. Shows how much I know.”

  She stops long enough to reel in the boys, who seem ready to jump one of Santa’s elves.

  “I see you’re writing about it for the paper,” she says. “Do you think that McNish fella did this?”

  I tell her I have no idea, but that I’m hoping to learn more about it this afternoon.

  Nobody at the paper, myself included, has done much in terms of interviewing people in the East End about the disappearances. We got in touch with a couple of the parents whose children have disappeared over the last twenty years, but that’s about it.

  I ask Philomena why someone didn’t say something about these kids going missing over the years.

  “It isn’t like it happened in a year or two,” she says. “I’m not sure those four—five with the Cole boy—are all there is, either.”

  “There might be more?”

  Momma Phil sighs and chooses her words carefully. She is a thorough, patient woman, the kind of woman who waited twenty-eight years to see her son finally absolved of a crime he didn’t commit.

  “I don’t want to get you all chasing your tails about this,” she says finally, “but there has been stories for almost as long as I can remember. The kids would come home and tell their folks about some man, some white man, that would be hanging around, maybe offering somebody a ride, or in some alleyway. They even had a name for him. Frosty.”