by Howard Owen
Cindy, who had one Scotch and soda back at happy hour, orders another just to stay in the same orbit as me, because the only thing worse than being with a drunk is being sober while you’re with a drunk.
Then, we order a nice malbec with dinner and finish that. Well, mostly, I finish it. And then I order another one. I guess I don’t notice that I’m drinking almost all of that one, or that Cindy isn’t talking very much if at all.
When I order a Cognac with my dessert instead of following Cindy’s example and switching to coffee, she puts her napkin down on the table and stands up.
“I’ll be back in the room,” she says.
I put my hand on her arm, hoping to persuade her to stay. She tells me to let go. I don’t, still thinking I can charm her. I’m feeling pretty damn charming by now.
And then this guy at the next table asks her if she needs any help. I tell him that if we need his fucking help, we’ll ask for it. He says something equally rude back at me, and I take a swing at him. From the shiner that greets me in the mirror when I come to the next morning, he must have given me more or less what I deserved.
They get me out of the Regency Room and on my way as quickly as possible. Just when I think things can’t get any worse, I hear some guy a few tables over say, “Isn’t that Willie Black, that reporter from Richmond?”
You help an old lady across the street and nobody notices, but just try duking it out with some tourist in a good restaurant fifty miles from home and you’re a celebrity.
I don’t remember how I got back to the room, although the dirt on my pants, mixed with the vomit, tells me it was not a smooth voyage.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Monday
The sun wakes me up. The clock reads nine fifteen. Cindy is gone.
Who the hell could blame her?
As it turns out, she called her brother, my old pal Andy Peroni, sometime after I passed out last night. He came and got her. I found all this out from Andy when he called my cell phone about ten this morning. He assured me that he and Cindy made sure I was breathing before they left. I guess I should be grateful for that. Cindy doesn’t want me dead. She just wants me out of her damn life.
I have screwed up before. I’m a heavy favorite to screw up again. This time, though, the price is steep. After an unfortunate incident at O’Toole’s last year, I was afraid I had lost the best thing that had happened to me in a long time. I worked hard to get Cindy Peroni back. And now I’ve blown it again.
“I don’t know, man,” Andy says when I get up the nerve to ask him the lay of the land regarding his sister. “Damn, Willie. You could fuck up Christmas.”
It was always just a saying, an expression that meant you were capable of ruining just about anything. With Our Lord’s birthday now ten days away, it sounds pretty literal.
“Maybe,” he adds, “you ought to get some help. I can put you in touch with some people.”
I tell him I’ll sleep on it, but after I hang up, I just toss and turn, then finally get up and face the cold, cruel day. It is hard to imagine calling Cindy. It is harder to imagine her not hanging up. She told me last year that she wasn’t going to let me put frown wrinkles on her pretty face, that she’d leave me first. Forewarned is fucked.
When I check out, the guy at the front desk seems to avoid eye contact, as if all Williamsburg knows about my one-round bout in the Regency Room.
Work might not make you free, but it will let you put a temporary mental slipcover over some of your more shameful moments. So I call Kate to see when I might have a few words with a man who has bigger problems than I do.
“I think you can see him pretty much anytime. When are you coming back? Did you have a good time in Williamsburg?”
“Not exactly.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
Kate kind of knows the kind of “not exactly” good time Willie Black can have. She’s been along for a few of them.
MCNISH IS ushered in half an hour after I get back, about one thirty. I have sunk so low that a man arrested for allegedly raping and murdering a schoolboy has to ask me if I’m OK.
He seems to be in fine spirits, all things considered. The only thing that concerns him is James Alderman.
“Who in the world would kill him? All he ever did was work to make the world better.”
I note that the world is full of injustice. Sometimes people even get arrested for crimes they didn’t commit.
He waves his hands as if batting away the notion that his petty troubles could hold a light to the murder of James Alderman.
“This will all straighten itself out,” he says. “The truth will out.”
Sometimes, I suggest, the truth needs a little help.
“Tell me about James Alderman.”
When he hesitates, I explain that I am supposed to write something about the deceased for Tuesday’s paper, which is true. However, I also am trying to figure out how his death might connect with the Cole boy’s murder. As I said, I believe that coincidences are the exception.
McNish goes on for twenty minutes about how Alderman helped him find his way when he was a young Ivy League grad at that fork between the high road and the one that makes you rich.
“He took me around to some of the poorer neighborhoods and showed me how unjust the world was. I thought we had it rough growing up in Oregon Hill, Willie, but some of these kids, they were starting at such a disadvantage that it was hard to see how they could ever catch up.
“And it’s still like that, for some of them.”
Alderman was his mentor while McNish was in divinity school. He says that he always knew, through the years, that he could go to James Alderman whenever he was having a crisis of faith, or even something as mundane as a crisis of cash.
“He paid our heating bills two different times when we were short. And he insisted that we not pay him back.
“My dad wasn’t around, so I guess you could say James Alderman was a father figure. But not just for me. He was there for a lot of others too.”
I ask him if Alderman had ever had any contact with Artesian Cole.
He seems surprised by the question.
“No, I don’t think so,” he says. “At least, not any more than with any of the other boys.”
He explains that Alderman did come to Grace of God once a week to talk with the boys about spiritual matters.
“These kids, they have bigger problems than learning the Old and New Testaments, but we do try to bring a little religion into their studies once in a while.”
He manages to dredge up a smile.
“After all, we are a church.”
I ask if Alderman was there the day the boy disappeared. He thinks for a moment and then says he’s sure he wasn’t.
“You think there’s some connection between these two murders.”
It’s a statement, not a question.
I tell him I don’t know, which is the truth.
“I can’t see it,” he says. “If there’s anybody in the world that was more blameless than Artesian Cole, it was James Alderman. There can’t be a person in this world so depraved he would do something like that to those two people.”
I know McNish has seen a lot, but a few weeks on the night cops beat might temper his belief in the goodness of human nature.
It occurs to me, as we talk, that I’m as sure of Sam McNish’s innocence as I am that the sun rises in the east. He’s shown no interest in his own well-being, no anger at being thrown in jail and accused of about the worst damn thing you could accuse a person of. His belief that “truth will out” strikes me as both charming and almost fatally naive.
He seems more concerned with my dissolute state than with his own future.
“You ought to take better care of yourself,” he says as I’m leaving.
“Yeah, I get that a lot.”
I’M GLAD Custalow isn’t in when I get back to the Prestwould. My other buds from Oregon Hill gossip like schoolgirls. I’m sure that my sublessee already has been in
formed about my misadventure in Williamsburg. He won’t lecture me. Hell, Abe was living in the park when I found him. But he does have a way of making you feel you have fallen short. He doesn’t have to say a word, just gives you that once-over look and a shake of the head, and I’m not quite up to that right now.
I am allegedly off today, but it’s probably better if I keep busy.
So I take a quick shower, doing my best to avoid any mirrors, and head back out.
Leaving the Prestwould involves going through our ornate, Oriental-carpeted lobby, which can be a quiet, peaceful interlude before hitting the mean streets. Or it can be like it is today.
Since I slinked up to my unit two hours ago, bedlam has descended on the lobby. I had forgotten that this is the day we’ve all been invited by the social committee to put up the Christmas tree, which is a monster. I don’t know how they got it in the front door. A dozen residents are, with varying degrees of competency, decorating the tree. The Prestwould is one of the few places in Richmond where being fifty-four years old makes you a youngster. And, since the tree is being put up in the middle of the afternoon, when most of the unretired Prestwouldians are at work, the average age of the party now attacking our yule tree is trending octogenarian.
Feldman, Mr. McGrumpy, is on a ladder, apparently angling for a lawsuit. Two women in their early eighties are trying to hold the ladder steady while Feldman, who must be about five foot four by now, reaches as far as his superannuated arms can stretch. He has a star in his hand.
Watching him teeter up there is more than I can stand. Finally, I coax him down and put the damn star on myself, to great applause from the ladies and a scowl from McGrumpy, who protests that he could have done it.
“You look like hell,” he says. I tell him I’ll be better tomorrow, the implication being that he won’t.
I turn and am about to head out the door when I almost run into Clara Westbrook.
The Prestwould’s grande dame is offering me a cup of eggnog, which she assures me is spiked to full adult strength. Normally, that would be enough to keep me around for a few minutes. Today, I beg off, telling Clara that I’ve already consumed my weekly limit of booze.
Clara is one of our building’s prize possessions. She organizes the parties, gives sage advice only when asked, and has never, in my memory, told the same story twice. If I ever get to my ninth decade, I want to be Clara Westbrook.
Among her many positive attributes: She knows pretty much everyone in town.
“I can’t get over Jimmy Alderman,” she says, shaking her head.
It takes me a moment to make the connection.
“James Alderman?”
“Yes. I guess he’s been James for quite a while,” she says. “But he’ll always be Jimmy to me.”
Part of being a good reporter is knowing when to rearrange your plans. I had my mind set on confronting L.D. Jones and forcing him to listen to my heartfelt belief that he has an innocent man in his lockup. Sometimes, though, it’s better to turn off the engine, shut the fuck up, and listen.
I lead Clara over to a couple of chairs halfway down the lobby from where McGrumpy is again trying to kill himself with the aid of a ladder.
“You’ve known James Alderman a long time?”
She laughs.
“I’ve known a lot of people a long time, Willie. I’ve had a long time to know people.”
She tells me about how they ran in the same circles, although she was several years older. She said she runs into him from time to time, or did at least. They belonged to some of the same clubs.
I ask her if Alderman had ever had any kind of problems.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Did he drink? Did he have anybody he owed money to? Any enemies?”
Clara frowns.
“It isn’t good to speak ill of the dead, Willie.”
I tell her about my concerns over Artesian Cole and James Alderman, both with connections to Grace of God and the Children of God program, being dispatched in such awful fashion within a few days of each other.
Clara is quiet for a few seconds.
“I probably shouldn’t repeat this,” she says, breaking the silence.
If people didn’t repeat what they shouldn’t, where would your good, faithful journalist be?
She starts telling me about something that happened twenty years ago. As always with Clara, this is a story I have not heard before.
“There was a boy who lived near Jimmy’s house, and he caused quite a stink when he claimed Jimmy tried to grab him and ‘do something’ to him.”
The kid, as Clara remembers it, was a young black boy, “maybe eleven or twelve years old.” He said he had been approached by James Alderman walking down the street near Alderman’s house. He said Alderman, whom he later identified through a picture, tried to pull him into his van, but that he fought him and ran away.
“Did the paper write anything about it?”
Clara looks at me like I just fell off the turnip truck.
“You didn’t just go writing something like that about James Alderman without checking it out,” she says. “The boy later retracted his claim. Jimmy Alderman said it was a misunderstanding, that the boy looked like he’d been beaten up in a fight, and he was trying to get him to the hospital.”
“Did the police check any of this out? Did the boy look like he’d been in a fight?”
“I don’t know, Willie. All I know is that everyone who heard about it knew the boy had to be lying.”
She tells me I’d have to be crazy to think that Alderman somehow had anything to do with those murdered kids.
I tell her she’s probably right. I’d love to talk to that kid though.
I GET a call from Shorty Cole. He can’t tell me how much this job as a bouncer means to him, although he’s sure as hell trying. As I walk down the street to my car, I tell him it’s nothing. Always glad to do my civic duty, as long as nothing more strenuous than a phone call is involved.
I ask him if he’s happy that the police have Artesian’s killer behind bars.
He hesitates a moment. Then he says, “I just hope they got the right one.”
Mostly, families of the victims of heinous crimes are more of the “kill ’em all and let God sort it out” persuasion. And yet, I have first Big Boy Sunday and now Shorty Cole expressing their concerns that the cops have locked up the wrong guy.
IT IS definitely time to get inside L.D. Jones’s ear, which won’t be easy. The chief would much rather talk than listen. And if forced to listen, he’d rather listen to almost anyone other than me.
It is no surprise, then, that I am stonewalled by L.D.’s secretary after she tells him who’s waiting to see him. I tell her I can wait. After half an hour, I tell her that the chief has two choices. He can either talk with me right now, or he can read something he probably doesn’t want to read in tomorrow’s paper.
He makes me cool my heels another fifteen minutes before I am ushered into the sanctum sanctorum.
The chief’s office has had an extreme makeover since my last visit. Carpet so new I can smell it. A fresh paint job. A fancy-ass chair that looks like it is capable of giving back massages and making coffee. There’s a seafaring print on the wall from an artist who is famous enough locally that even I recognize his work. It’s an odd choice. I’m pretty sure L.D. can’t swim and hates boats.
I comment that it looks like the police business is doing better than the newspaper business these days.
“This place hadn’t been renovated in ten years,” he says. “It was overdue.”
Not to be outdone, I tell him the newsroom staffers got new mousepads last week. I ask him if he still has his bodyguard.
L.D. is not in the mood for small talk, it seems.
“What the hell do you want?”
“You’re not going to like it,” I tell him.
“If it’s coming from you, that’s no big surprise.”
And so I lay it out, as succinctly as I
can:
•Stella Barnes, the woman who raised the alarm about Sam McNish, seems to be a scorned lover who had every reason to hold a grudge, even if she’s going all passive-aggressive about it right now.
•James Alderman, our other recent high-profile homicide, once was accused of trying to abduct a boy who was about Artesian Cole’s age, although charges were never filed.
•Alderman has worked as a mentor at Children of God.
•There is not one scintilla of hard evidence linking McNish to the crime.
•And, I just don’t think there is any way in hell that McNish is capable of doing what he is accused of doing. The basis for that one is gut instinct.
The chief is quiet for a moment. When the folks in Pompeii were suddenly wishing they had volcano insurance, it probably was a little like this.
“Jesus H. Fucking Christ!” he says when the eruption finally comes. “You’re crazier than I thought, and that’s going some. Let me get this straight. The woman who gave us what seems to be reliable information about McNish might have a motive for talking to us. The late Mr. Alderman once, long ago, was accused of attempted abduction, but the charges were never filed. We don’t have a smoking gun yet. And, cherry on top, you’ve got a feeling.”
He pauses to take a breath. I jump in and remind him that I’m not doing that bad on my hunches. I can name a few people who aren’t locked up right now because of my hunches.
He looks like he wants to hit me. The shitty mood I’m in today, I almost wish he’d come across that fancy-ass desk and give it a shot.
He takes a deep breath.
“You’re not going to print that crap, are you? I mean, even by your standards, you’ve got nothing to go on. All you’re going to do is embarrass a woman who did her civic duty and a dead guy everybody in the whole friggin’ town loved. I’m surprised they don’t have his damn statue up on Monument Avenue. And you’ll make yourself look like more of an asshole than usual.”
I have to admit that, no, I’m not going with it right now. That was just a bluff to get into the holy of holies and state my case. We might run something that casts a little doubt on McNish’s guilt, but I’m sure the suits would quash anything I wrote about an alleged attempted abduction two decades ago in which no charges were ever brought. Running something like that the day before Alderman’s funeral would make even me a little queasy.
