Grace

by Howard Owen

  “Because he was white?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But he wasn’t ever caught or anything?”

  Philomena shakes her head.

  “I’m sure not. I don’t even know if he was real. Most of us kind of thought the kids were making it up, the way kids do. But they still tell that story. I know I’ve heard some parents try to scare their kids with it, like ‘If you don’t straighten up and fly right, Frosty gonna get you.’ ”

  She says she’s sure people mentioned it to the police “but that didn’t go anywhere.”

  I suggest that she might ought to threaten to sic Frosty on Jamal and Jeroy.

  Philomena snorts.

  “Frosty would be begging for mercy. Ain’t nothin’ scares those two.”

  She takes her leave. The boys seem bent on throwing each other into the fountain nearest us.

  On the way out to talk with Stella Barnes, I mull over Momma Phil’s little bombshell. How have we gotten so out of touch with our readers? Nobody, in all the ranting about Sam McNish and all those missing kids, ever mentioned “Frosty,” or at least not in my earshot.

  I call Sarah and ask her. She’s never heard anyone she’s interviewed mention that name either.

  I FIND the Barnes residence with the help of a city map. It’s a brick rancher on one of the segments of Grace Street out beyond Libbie, almost all the way to the Henrico County line. There are pines around the house and a few oaks. Nobody has done much if any raking this fall, and the roof is missing a few shingles. I know Ms. Barnes is divorced, and it doesn’t look like she’s much into yard work.

  I knock twice and think she’s stiffed me, but then I hear someone pushing back a deadbolt, and the door opens.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “The neighborhood’s gone down a little. I’ve got to be careful.”

  Maybe not that careful, I’m thinking. Looks like a decent suburban street to me, if a little on the geriatric side. I’m guessing the house I’m in was built in the sixties. It’s a hell of a lot more substantial than any of the places we lived in on the Hill, that’s for damn sure.

  Stella Barnes is forty-six, according to what Cindy found out. She looks like she tried to give Father Time the slip about ten years ago, with only middling results. The blond hair has had some help, and I’m not sure her boobs haven’t as well. The last person I saw with this much makeup and eye shadow was a cross-dresser. And her skirt is a wee bit short for a slightly overweight lady of a certain age on a Thursday afternoon. I’m struggling to keep my eyes above shoulder level. Don’t look, my big brain tells me. Do not look. Focus on the picture of Jesus, as blond as Ms. Barnes, hanging over the couch.

  Over coffee, I get through the pleasantries and ask her about Sam McNish.

  She goes on a bit about what a blessing “Sam” was to the city, using the past tense. But she manages to work in a few caveats.

  “He did like to have a drink now and then,” she says, “and I don’t like to tell tales, but they said he used drugs.”

  I assume she’s saying he smoked marijuana.

  “But I don’t think he used it around the kids. I certainly hope not.”

  We walk through what she’s told the cops and Sarah already, but I want to hear it for myself, and she seems happy enough to oblige. When she uncrosses and recrosses her legs, I focus on Jesus.

  She “isn’t sure” if anything happened on the day she saw McNish coming out of the bathroom with Artesian Cole. She makes reference to thinking Sam “isn’t like that,” but says she felt it was her duty to tell the police everything she knows.

  “It’s like with those priests,” she says. “They did all those bad things for years, and nobody stopped them.”

  When I have the story, pretty much the same way she told it before, I get to the part of the interview where sometimes the subject tells you to get the hell out before she calls the cops.

  “I have heard,” I begin, “that you might have been romantically involved with Sam McNish at one time.”

  She sets her cup down, and I think that I’m about to get my eviction notice.

  “No,” she says after a pause. “I mean, we might have had lunch or dinner a time or two, but we were just friends. To tell you the truth, I never saw him in a romantic way.”

  Maybe so, but that’s not the way Cindy’s friend who was still working there as of last week saw it, and McNish has already more or less admitted to sleeping with her. It has been my experience that phrases like “in all honesty” or “frankly” or “to tell you the truth” can be code for “I’m about to tell a whopper.”

  I ask her why she told the police that McNish might be a threat to skip town before he was arrested.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He just seemed a little jumpy, you know. And if he did what they think he did, wouldn’t he run for it?”

  We chat for another ten minutes or so, with Ms. Barnes going on about what a crime-ridden city Richmond is (murders and most other felonies are way down) and how it’s dying (the population’s been up every year since the turn of the century). I just nod my head. Unlike Sam McNish, I’ve never been one for trying to convert nonbelievers.

  On the way out, she says she hopes to see me again. She gives my hand a little squeeze as I start backing away.

  I hear the deadbolt click as I make my way to my Honda, where a pack of Camels is calling my name.

  ON THE way in, I get a call. It’s Kate.

  “They had to put him in protective custody,” she says, cutting to the chase.

  Yeah, even guys in jail don’t like child-molesting murderers. Could’ve seen that one coming, even if McNish did think the inmates who knew him had his back. L.D. should have put him in solitary when he first went in.

  I ask Kate if she thinks we (meaning I) could talk with our favorite man of God again soon.

  “Marcus and I are talking to him tomorrow, but I don’t know if he’d be willing to have a reporter there too.”

  I remind her that I’ve already talked to him twice, once with them and once, when McNish was a free man, without them. When I tell her about my conversation with Stella Barnes, she says she’ll see what she can do.

  “If I’m going to share information with you, I expect some cooperation,” I tell her, further reminding her that I’m the one who got Marcus Green and her involved in this case to begin with.

  I hear a snort.

  “You share what you want to share.”

  We’re talking as much about dead marriages as we are about the present situation.

  “Let me speak to Marcus,” she says.

  “Hell, you’re supposed to be his damn partner, not his secretary.”

  A pause.

  “OK. OK. Be at the office at noon. Don’t be late.”

  That’s more like it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Friday

  I meet Kate and Marcus at their offices at noon, as directed, after a late, pork-free breakfast at Perly’s.

  “So you think this Barnes woman had a little issue with my––with our client?” Marcus says as we head out the door.

  He already knows that there was a little horizontal tango between them. Not much I can add, but I tell him that I really want to ask McNish a few questions I didn’t think of the other day.

  I tell him anything’s possible, but I’d like to hear McNish’s side of the story at least.

  Jails, like nature, abhor a vacuum. Even though the serious crime rate in our city is down, the local hoosegow is still overcrowded. It’s always easy enough to catch some knucklehead with an ounce of pot or a small amount of some other illegal substance, and all those cops and courts have to have something to do. Otherwise, the politicians, always eager to please the citizenry by cutting taxes, might start trimming the law-enforcement fat.

  So the lockup is more or less busting at the seams. I’m glad, as we make our way to the interview room, that they have separated McNish from his fellow inmates, some of whom are a tad rude. Assuming, o
f course, that he didn’t rape and murder a kid or five, in which case, fuck him.

  Most middle-class white guys who’ve spent the workweek in jail look a little worse for the wear. McNish doesn’t. I mean, he didn’t look all that spiffy when I interviewed him last week, so maybe he only had so far to sink, but he looks, well, at peace—not an easy thing to do for a guy who has just been separated from his compatriots in order to keep them from killing him.

  His main concern seems to be that the jail isn’t exactly knocking itself out to give him something a vegan can eat. As Andi would say, Quelle surprise. From what I’ve heard about the food here, he’s lucky his protein isn’t still moving.

  Marcus asks McNish about Stella Barnes.

  “I’ve already told you everything I know,” he says. “She was a good worker who I saw a couple of times socially. She wouldn’t have had any kind of grudge against me.”

  I contribute that it doesn’t exactly look that way to me.

  “What do you mean?”

  I recount the high points of my visit with Ms. Barnes today.

  “Passive aggressive isn’t exactly my area of expertise,” I tell him, “but there was a lot of ‘he’s a great guy, but . . .’ out there today.”

  “You shouldn’t have bothered her.”

  Kate cuts in.

  “He’s trying to save your life, for Christ’s sake.”

  McNish gives the slightest hint of a smile.

  “My life already is saved, for Christ’s sake.”

  Kate, Marcus, and I all look at one another. Is this guy, I want to ask, for fucking real?

  “Look,” Marcus says, “we’re not here to worry about your immortal soul, but think how much harm can be done down here on planet Earth if your Children of God thing gets bulldozed, which I guarantee you is about to happen if we don’t prove you’re not a monster who kills kids.”

  McNish frowns.

  “I just can’t believe all this,” he says. “I’ve already told you, and told the police, what happened that day. There’s nothing else to say.”

  “Somebody must have seen that kid somewhere before he got snatched,” Kate says. “He didn’t just disappear.”

  Maybe, but I’m thinking that it’s not that far from Grace of God to the bus stop, and the boy might have only gone a block before somebody grabbed him. Still, it does look like he would have made some noise when he was being kidnapped.

  Kate is going to haunt Artesian’s route from McNish’s place to the bus stop on Broad, in hopes of finding someone who saw something, anything. We assumed L.D. Jones’s minions are doing the same, but L.D. has a tendency, once he has the most likely suspect behind bars, to go a little light on alternative theories. It is not one of his better qualities.

  As we’re leaving, McNish makes a strange request.

  “I want to talk to him,” he says, pointing at yours truly.

  “Hell,” Marcus says, “he’s not even a lawyer.”

  McNish nods his head.

  “Exactly. No offense.”

  So Marcus and Kate leave me alone with the inmate. The look Kate gives me says, plain as spoken English, that I’d better not be holding out.

  I’m wondering, why me? McNish answers without my having to ask.

  “You didn’t run any of that stuff from our interview until they’d already arrested me. You seem trustworthy, as journalists go.”

  Yep. I’m a tall midget.

  “Plus,” he says, “you’re from the Hill. And maybe I can save your soul.”

  Well, I haven’t heard that one in a while. Most people gave up on my soul a long time ago.

  “We’d better worry about saving your ass right now,” I remind him. It strikes me as funny that a guy who dropped Oregon Hill like bad meat a long time ago would put any stock in our shared provenance.

  “So,” I ask. “What’s on your mind?”

  It takes him a few seconds to answer.

  “Most of the people who were helping me at Children of God have left,” he says. “Maybe they’ve lost faith in me. It doesn’t matter what happens to me, but the church matters. I want you to help me get that faith back.”

  How in the hell, I ask him, am I supposed to do that.

  “I know you,” he says, “or at least I know what you do. Lawyers are good, but you’ve got a reputation for knocking down doors, getting to the bottom of things, so to speak.”

  I tell him that I think he’s overselling me a bit. A couple of lucky breaks on stories don’t make me Sam Spade.

  “Look,” McNish says, “I know I’m in some deep stuff here. I guess Stella Barnes was a little more upset than I imagined about my putting some distance between us, and she does have a tendency to read drama into situations where there really isn’t any. But somewhere out there, there’s got to be an answer. I don’t mind so much the wheel stopping on my number, but there’s the church.”

  He stands up. The guard looks our way.

  “And there’s another thing. Whoever did this might do it again, don’t you think?”

  Well, yeah, that’s a good reason to do a little digging.

  We talk awhile longer, drifting to our mutual acquaintance, Cindy Peroni.

  As I’m leaving, he calls my name.

  “Willie,” he says, “I’ll pray for you.”

  Normally it sets my teeth on edge when people say that. It implies a moral superiority. Granted, my moral superiors are legion, but nobody likes to have his nose rubbed in it.

  With McNish, though, it somehow doesn’t grate. Maybe because, no matter how much of a waste of time prayer is, McNish seems to mean it. A man who is on the cusp of being sent to either the death chamber or something worse appears to be worried about me. It’s kind of touching, in a weird kind of way.

  WHEN I check my messages, there’s one from Big Boy Sunday.

  “We got to talk.”

  I call back.

  I am greeted with “What?” Big Boy is obviously a little weak on his phone manners.

  “Oh, yeah,” he says when I identify myself. “I wanted to thank you for gettin’ Shorty on the payroll again. You must of pulled some strings.”

  Not many, I tell him. I note that the woman he seemed bent on shooting probably was going to be shot by somebody eventually anyway.

  He seems to think this is funny.

  “Yeah,” he says, “there’s some that just needs shooting.”

  He tells me to meet him at an address about a block east of the Magpie, over in a part of town that’s about ten years behind West Grace on the gentrification train.

  He’s sitting in the backseat of his big-ass SUV when I get there. Two young brothers trying to look tough are up front. They don’t frisk me, which probably speaks to the general perception that journalists are harmless away from the keyboard. One of them does jump out of the front and open the door for me. His scowl tells me this was not voluntary.

  Big Boy is munching on a barbecue sandwich from Hawk’s, which is making my stomach growl. He’s holding the sandwich in one hand and has an order of fries in his lap that looks so greasy it might eat a hole through the container. A movie concessions-size soda is squeezed into the cup holder. My kind of lunch. A little of the sauce has dripped on the Don Ho shirt that serves as a tablecloth for his upper body.

  “I appreciate your coming over here,” he says.

  I wait for him to get to it. He finishes off the ’cue in an amazingly short amount of time. He licks his fingers and inhales a couple of fries. Then he turns his attention to me.

  “This fella, this McNabb, McNish, whatever, is he going to take the rap for killing the boy?”

  “Unless they can come up with somebody that looks more guilty. He’s sure the leader in the clubhouse right now.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Big Boy says. “I want justice here. That boy, he was like a son to me.”

  Big Boy and Laquinta Cole have been together for most of Artesian’s life.

  “We didn’t exactly walk down no ais
le, or anything like that, but we been together now for going on eight years. The kids needed anything, Laquinta knew she could come to me.” Big Boy lets go with a burp that shakes the windows and probably scares the neighborhood dogs.

  “But,” he says, holding up a finger that’s bigger than my thumbs, “I want to make sure they got the right one, the one that really did kill Artesian. Don’t want nobody gettin’ away with it while an innocent man takes the fall.”

  I am touched that Big Boy is so concerned with the welfare of a white man who might or might not have raped and killed his surrogate son.

  I ask him if he has any reason to think that Sam McNish isn’t guilty.

  “I have my reasons to think he didn’t do it.”

  When I press him on what exactly the damn reasons might be, he just looks away and says, “It’s a feeling I got, is all. Just a feeling in my gut.”

  I ask him if he’s ever heard about Frosty. He doesn’t make the connection for a few seconds, and then he chuckles.

  “Everybody knows about Frosty,” he says, finishing off his fries and reaching for the soda. “At least everybody where I come from does. Didn’t anybody much take it seriously, even in my neighborhood. But people been talking about Frosty for years. The police might have looked into it at one time, but nobody ever found nothing.”

  So, I ask him, if there really is a Frosty, is it possible that he’s still out there, and that he’s the one who killed those kids? It’s a leap, of course, to assume they were killed, since nobody ever found the bodies of the first four.

  “Well,” Big Boy says, peeling a stick of Teaberry gum and popping it in his mouth, “the Lord has a way of taking care of things like that. Might not be in the here and now, but eventually.”

  For a guy who probably has dispatched a party or two himself and has no doubt supervised a shitload of other mortal departures, he seems a bit sanguine.