Grace

by Howard Owen

  He also mentions that all my contentions don’t explain how the hell James Alderman turned up extremely dead a few days later. That’s the one that will have the mayor and city council really lighting a fire under his ass until somebody gets arrested.

  “The thing is, Willie,” L.D. says, quieter now, “you don’t have a case. We have cases. You have stories. There’s a difference. Let us handle the cases and you write the stories.”

  I have one more request from the chief.

  “Would it be possible to find out anything about that boy who accused Alderman of trying to kidnap him? I’d like to talk to him if he’s still around.”

  “You’re not going to give up, are you?”

  The chief sighs and says he doubts that it is possible to find what I’m looking for. The way he says it, I’m thinking that even if it were possible, it wouldn’t be possible.

  But he says he’ll look into it.

  I ask him if his new chair gives blow jobs.

  He doesn’t say good-bye when I leave.

  I check my watch. It’s a quarter past four. If I weren’t a total fuckup, I’d probably be getting back home with Cindy Peroni about now after a nice breakfast and maybe a tour of Jamestown. We’d be easing into a nice, lazy afternoon of thank-you sex.

  In the passenger’s seat of my Honda, I see something sparkle. It’s one of Cindy’s earrings.

  I wonder if I’ll ever be able to give it back to her in person.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Tuesday

  Custalow was through with his custodial duties by the time I got back to the condo yesterday. I was determined to give Penny Lane or anywhere else with a license to serve alcohol a wide berth. He didn’t say anything about my Williamsburg mishap, but I could tell he’d heard.

  “Go ahead,” I said during a commercial while we watched a Law and Order episode that was rerunning for the umpteenth time. “Say it.”

  “What?”

  “What you’re thinking, dammit.”

  He set down his beer. Abe is a bear; the Miller looks like a pony bottle in his big, work-scarred hands.

  “Willie, you got me off the street. I’ll never say anything bad about you, man.”

  “I can take it.”

  So he said it.

  “You aren’t going to have it any better than Cindy Peroni. Even when you’re sober, she’s out of your league. If there ever was an incentive to not screw up, she’d be it.”

  I agreed with him. And I appreciated the fact that he didn’t suggest that I need help. Some things are obvious.

  Custalow’s a keeper. More than one Prestwouldian has thanked me for bringing him in from the cold. He earns his keep by being the best custodian our tired-ass building has ever had. And he helps me stay under shelter myself. Kate’s not letting me live here for free, and she’s raised the rent on me once already.

  “By the way,” he said when I got up to fetch myself a cold hot dog, “if you’re done with her, do you mind if I give her a call?”

  Custalow pretty much never smiles. You have to know when he’s kidding.

  TODAY, SARAH has the latest on McNish and Grace of God. It isn’t good. The big house on West Grace has been vandalized. Somebody spray-painted it and tried to start a fire inside that fortunately went out on its own before it could spread.

  Children of God is, for all intents and purposes, dead, along with the church McNish built from nothing. Sarah talked with a couple of mothers who brought their sons by after school, hoping that somehow the mentoring program was still breathing. There was a sign on the door saying that classes were suspended “for the foreseeable future.” And then, sometime after dark, the vandals struck. A kindly neighbor said the church had always been a bad idea, that the neighborhood had tried to get it shut down for years.

  “It’s not like those kids don’t have schools already that we’re paying taxes for,” is the way he put it.

  I’ve been to some of the schools on the poor side of town. If the guy who was quoted ever visited one of those understaffed facilities full of asbestos, mold, and kids who were raised by wolves, he’d be thanking God for the kind of deal McNish was running.

  Sarah tracked down one of the assistants at the school. The aide wouldn’t talk on the record. Not for attribution, she said that pretty much all the funding for the church and school had dried up, and that people who worked there were getting death threats.

  She also said, under cover of anonymity, that she would bet her life savings that Sam McNish was innocent. Hell, maybe if I were getting death threats, I’d go underground too.

  I call Sarah and tell her what I’ve learned about the late Mr. Alderman and the mystery child from more than two decades ago.

  “Holy crap. Do you think the cops would have any records?”

  “None that they’re going to bust a gut to find for me. But I might be able to back-door it.”

  “Your ‘unnamed source’?”

  I nod my head. It unnerves me a little that Sally Velez, my editor, knows about Peachy Love. I sure as hell don’t want anyone else knowing, or even thinking hard about it.

  I have to do a piece leading up to the Alderman funeral tomorrow, which promises to be standing room only. After I get through praising him, though, and before I put on my night cops hat, I will be looking for some material that might not go in the authorized biography.

  AS LUCK would have it, Peachy Love is taking the week off to get ready for Christmas. I call her home number. She asks me where the hell I’ve been, and I tell her the usual lie about being busy as hell, was planning to call her, blah, blah, blah. I know that if I go over to her place right now, I’ll wind up letting Little Willie take charge. He’s already whispering to me, “Cindy’s left you, man. Let’s go for the gusto.”

  But something, either hope or conscience, makes me tell Peachy I’m stuck at work and can’t come over right now.

  I do, though, need a favor.

  I explain about the story Clara Westbrook told me, and about the kind of help I need.

  Peachy’s a little uneasy with the whole thing.

  “Damn, Willie. You don’t want to go digging up crap that probably doesn’t matter. It probably was a bunch of bullshit back then. The boy took back his story, right?”

  “That’s what they tell me. But I wonder if he did it out of the goodness of his heart.”

  “Well, I doubt there’d be anything on file about that. Some of the files got lost last time we moved. And with somebody as big as that Alderman guy, I wouldn’t be surprised if those files didn’t burn themselves up anyhow.”

  She pauses.

  “But I could check around. If I can find a cop that was working back then, maybe somebody would know something.”

  Thank God for Peachy Love. We are losing so many of our best and brightest reporters these days because they look around one day and say, “Holy shit! I’m thirty-two years old and I can’t afford to rent a place that doesn’t come with cockroaches.”

  And so they take jobs as flacks. They go to work for universities or charitable societies or businesses, all of which, at one time or another, need somebody who’s good at spinning lies so they look like facts. Who better to hide the truth than someone who was trained to dig it out?

  I don’t blame them for leaving. If you go to work for one of the really bad ones, maybe a tobacco company or a big utility, you can literally double your salary. You just have to take all the mirrors out of your house. Hell, I might have left already, but who wants a middle-aged “media specialist” who drinks and smokes and isn’t either circumspect or pretty. Newspapers have made “journalist” such an unrewarding occupation that their staffs consist mostly of old farts like me, stuck here like polar bears on a melting ice floe, and the kids. I wonder how much longer Sarah Goodnight will stick around.

  But Peachy jumped ship before newspapers stopped giving raises. She simply thought it would be fun to work with cops all day, for some damn reason. And when she left the newsroom, sh
e didn’t leave her ethics behind. Oh, she does a good job of keeping the public informed, and she does a serviceable job of not keeping the public informed when L.D. Jones doesn’t think the taxpayers need to know. But Peachy is smart, and honest. She knows when something needs to be leaked, for the good of the city if not the chief’s peace of mind. That’s where I come in. I hope L.D. never figures out who the mole is. I, Peachy, and the city of Richmond will be poorer for it if that happens.

  I know she’ll let me know who might help me find that long-ago kid and who’ll tell me something he doesn’t want the chief to know he told me.

  I call my favorite florist and have him send a dozen longstemmed red roses to Peachy Love from “her secret admirer.”

  I think about calling Cindy, but I lose my nerve.

  IT’S A typical Tuesday night. A guy wearing a Salvation Army uniform got his ass kicked about eight when he set up shop in front of a store on Broad Street. Some of the locals got suspicious, because they’d never seen a Salvation Army guy there before, especially at night, and he seemed to be using a set of keys instead of a bell to invoke the Christmas spirit. Somebody checks it out—hell, they have a command center over on Grace, not three blocks from where the guy was standing—and they find out that he’s a freelancer who figured a way to make a little extra Christmas money appealing to people’s goodwill. A couple of shop owners beat the crap out of him, and now he wants to file charges for assault and robbery.

  “Robbery?” Ray Long said over on the copy desk. “Jesus Christ. It’s like killing your parents and asking for mercy because you’re an orphan.”

  Well, times are tough, no matter what the president says. Lots of people are going beyond the pale to afford that extra toy or pint. Every stoplight you hit has a hard-luck case staring you down, begging for dollars. I actually gave one of them two bucks today. He had sign that read “Crowdsourcing for me.” He looked healthier than I do—yeah, a low bar—but I did appreciate the creativity, and he made me laugh. Plus, he spelled “crowdsourcing” right. And he didn’t put “God Bless” on the bottom of the sign. Extra points for that.

  There were two shootings on the South Side, both of them about drugs, neither of them fatal. The shootings made the briefs. We put the bogus Salvation Army guy in a box on B1. A little seasonal levity, as Enos Jackson said.

  Then, about eleven fifteen, I get a call. It’s Peachy.

  “I think I might have something,” she says.

  There was a cop who just retired, she tells me. He wasn’t happy about his “retirement,” which came a couple of months after a teenage kid in his custody somehow managed to beat himself severely about the head and shoulders. On the heels of some other unfortunate incidents elsewhere involving our men in blue, in addition to Walker Gunderson’s somewhat tainted history, it was in everyone’s best interests if Gunderson left the force. Offered the chance to plea to something that only put him on probation, he reluctantly agreed that it was time to go.

  “Gunner Gunderson?”

  “The same.”

  Yeah, we wrote something at the time, maybe four months ago, about the kid’s family raising hell. They felt that their son, no paragon of virtue, probably didn’t deserve a pretrial beatdown by the guy who arrested him. The police department stonewalled us. Even Peachy kept quiet on that one. But I had the impression there was some kind of settlement, and Gunner Gunderson quietly disappeared.

  I knew him slightly from my first stint on night cops, back in the eighties. He always reminded me of a Nazi extra in a World War II movie, with that short blond hair and square face. He didn’t take a lot of crap from suspected criminals back then. I guess he didn’t mellow with age.

  “He was pretty pissed, said they threw him under the bus,” Peachy says. “I think if anybody would be willing to tell you something just because the chief didn’t want him to, it would be Gunderson.”

  She has his address. He’s living in one of the apartments they’ve hacked out of the old John Marshall Hotel downtown. Those things don’t come cheap, so I gather Gunner got to keep his pension.

  The John Marshall is across Franklin Street from Penny Lane, an easy nine-iron from my desk in the newsroom. I wonder if I might buy Gunderson a drink and mix business with pleasure. I tell Peachy I’ll call him tomorrow and promise to call her again soon too.

  Sometimes I feel bad for using Peachy. I’d feel worse if she didn’t have a regular boyfriend who stays over about as often as Peachy will let him. As is the case with so many human transactions, we use each other.

  I’M GETTING ready to call it a night, more than happy to head straight for my bed after a fourteen-hour day for which I’ll get paid for eight, when I get a call on my cell phone. It is always a good idea, with post-midnight calls where you don’t recognize the number, to let whoever’s on the other end leave a message.

  But I can’t help myself. Andi says it’s generational. My geezer peers and I consider it a mortal damn sin not to answer a ringing, beeping, or, in my case, blues-playing phone.

  I’m immediately sorry I did.

  “That you, Willie?”

  I recognize Big Boy Sunday’s voice. He sounds like he’s got his mouth full. Maybe he’s inhaling that “fourth meal” one of the fast-food chains keeps telling me we Americans need, seeing as how we’re so skinny and malnourished.

  I tell him that it is me, and that I’m just about to head out the door. I’m hoping he’ll get the hint. He doesn’t.

  “How’s it going?” he says. I’m pretty sure he’s not inquiring about my general well-being.

  I’m not about to tell Big Boy everything I know, unless one of his goons is holding an Uzi to my head. I tell him that I’m still digging, still trying to find some way to get McNish off the hook.

  “Sounds like they’re coming down pretty hard on the man, trying to set fire to his church and all.”

  I note that it seems like the neighbors never wanted Grace of God there in the first place.

  Big Boy laughs.

  “Yeah. It brings in the wrong element, know what I mean? How come you’re not writin’ anything about all this mess?”

  I explain that I’m kind of tied up with the other big murder we’re using to sell papers.

  “Oh, yeah. That guy.”

  It seems unlikely, but I ask.

  “You know him? Alderman?”

  He takes a few seconds to either finish off his bedtime snack or think.

  “I know of him,” he says at last.

  “Ever hear anything about him, I mean anything bad?”

  “Now why would I be privy to anything about a fine, upstanding man like that? I’m surprised at you, Willie. What are you implying?”

  I tell him that, if he does hear anything, I’d appreciate it if he’d pass it on.

  “Man,” Big Boy says, “you got a suspicious mind, Willie.”

  I tell him that I expect to be writing something about the McNish murder again sometime soon. This is somewhat wishful thinking. I am pretty sure that our publisher wants me to focus my attention on James Alderman for the foreseeable future. An e-mail from Wheelie earlier today reinforced that suspicion.

  “Well, I certainly hope so,” he says. “We want to see some justice around here.”

  If the legal system’s version of justice had been applied, I want to tell Big Boy, he’d have been a guest of the state a long time ago for more than just a couple of years. But some things are best left unsaid.

  Before he hangs up, he asks me a strange question.

  “Do you think the cops have given Alderman’s house a good going-over?”

  “No idea. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing. Just thought they’d be searching that place with a fine-tooth comb, him being such a big shot and all.”

  I tell Big Boy I’ll ask, but that I’m not getting a lot of cooperation from the authorities these days.

  “Well,” he says, “I know you’ll find a way, Willie. I’m counting on you.”

  It is
somewhat disturbing to me that I could be in danger of disappointing Big Boy Sunday, who seems used to getting his way.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Wednesday

  I wait until after nine to call Gunner Gunderson. Still, I have the impression I woke him up. It doesn’t seem to cut any ice with him that we might have spoken to each other once or twice a quarter-century ago.

  When I start asking about James Alderman, he informs me that since he isn’t a cop anymore, he really doesn’t give a rat’s ass about who gets killed and who doesn’t.

  “These people,” he says. “They want law and order, but they don’t want to do what it takes, you know?”

  I exude heartfelt sympathy. I concede that perhaps our newspaper was a little hard on him. We did have an editorial that took a strong stand on police brutality after his career-ending faux pas. When I point out that I don’t write the editorials, it didn’t fly. It seldom does.

  “All you bastards,” Gunderson says, “you’re all alike. You never get the cops’ side of the story.”

  I think I do, but now’s not the time to let pride fuck up a good source.

  When I’m finally able to get the gun turned toward the police department hierarchy rather than the paper, my prospects of having a sit-down get a little more promising.

  He rants a bit about what these other bastards, most especially Chief L.D. Jones, did to him. I make sympathetic noises and let him vent.

  When he stops to catch his breath, I get to the reason for my call.

  “There was a case, a long time ago, where I think the facts might have been covered up. It had to do with James Alderman. You were on the street back then. I thought you might know something about it.”

  He seems to take the bait, but he’s still just nibbling, wanting to know why I’m digging up crap from way back then.