Grace

by Howard Owen

  I explain that we’re just acting on a story we heard, that might or might not be true. I mention that what I’m trying to find could be embarrassing to the department.

  I hear him cough and spit.

  I ask him if we can talk, maybe at Penny Lane.

  “Nah,” he says. “I’ll meet you at the pool hall. The one on Sixth Street, right around the corner.”

  Sounds good to me.

  “What we’re talking about,” he says, “it’s got to be off the record, right?”

  I tell him anything I use will be not for attribution. I’ll use it, but I won’t say who said it.

  “OK,” he says. “But you better not screw me on this. I don’t think I’m supposed to be talking to anybody about anything these days. Don’t want to mess up my pension.”

  We agree to meet at three. Alderman’s funeral is at one. I call and leave a message to let Sally Velez know I’ll be a little late coming in today.

  I’M SUPPOSED to meet McGonnigal and Andy Peroni for coffee over at the place on Main at ten. I get there a few minutes late.

  Normally this would be a treat. Not today. Not after the breaking off of relations with Cindy. I’m half ashamed for what I did, and I’m a little pissed at Andy for not somehow pleading my case more eloquently, as I lay passed out on that Williamsburg Lodge bed with puke drying on my shirt.

  I asked Andy if he still wanted to meet today. Custalow couldn’t get away from his duties at the Prestwould. Maybe we could reschedule? Like maybe 2017?

  “Now more than ever,” Andy says. “Friends don’t let friends weasel out of social events just because they fucked up.”

  Well, at least he didn’t say we “need to talk.” Please, God, don’t make this an intervention.

  When I get there, there is, as expected, no mercy.

  “I understand they’re thinking about putting a historical marker in the Regency Room,” McGonnigal says before I’ve even gotten my coffee. “ ‘ On this spot, on December 14, 2014, Willie Mays Black suffered a one-round knockout, the most decisive setback of his pugilistic career.’ Nice shiner, by the way.”

  One thing I can say for my oldest friends: With the exception of Custalow, who tries to never speak ill of anyone, they don’t pull their punches. Fuck-ups don’t fester among my Oregon Hill pals. They are trotted out into the sunlight in all their shining glory, over and over. I’m just glad Goat Johnson isn’t here to triple-team me.

  I remind McGonnigal of a few of his more egregious sins. Unlike him, I have never driven home after a hearty night of partying, walked into the house, gone to sleep, and realized the next morning that the car was out of gas because no one bothered to turn off the ignition the night before.

  I remind Andy of the time his then-girlfriend called his home number rather than his cell number by mistake and left a two-minute phone sex message, which was instrumental in Andy’s wife at the time throwing him out of the house for a couple of weeks and later sending him a phone sex message of her own, apparently while in the throes of extramarital bliss.

  “Yeah,” Andy says, “she’s never told me who it was, either.”

  “Well,” R.P. says, “I think you can rule me out. I’d already switched sides by then.”

  “Wasn’t me,” I add. “That only leaves about one hundred thousand other guys in the city, plus a few hundred thousand in the suburbs. I’m sure you’ll figure it out eventually.”

  We continue to play “how low can you go?” for a few minutes more, getting the occasional strange glance from the hipsters and college kids around us. Fuck ’em. We’ve been having coffee and telling stories on each other since before a lot of these assholes were born. This is our side of town, and we don’t lower our voices for anybody.

  I ask Andy, on the way out, if he thinks there’s any way I haven’t permanently screwed the pooch with Cindy.

  “I don’t know, Willie. She was pretty upset. I’ve seen her get pissed off lots of times. She’ll throw a tantrum and then she’ll be over it. The sun comes out.

  “This was different, though. She just seemed sad.”

  There’s a lot of that going around. If I stop and think about how bad I’ve messed up, I might have to go somewhere dark and sedate myself.

  “Do you think I should call her?”

  Andy stops in front of his car and faces me.

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know. Goddammit, Willie, there is nothing I’d rather see than you and my baby sister walking down the aisle someday, even if you’re so old you need a walker. But she’s a little leery right now, not quite sure what she’s signed on for, you know?”

  I nod my head and thank my old friend. Not much else to do. Maybe I’ll try to call her tomorrow. “Try” as in try to get up the nerve.

  THEY’VE AGREED to have the services at Saint Paul’s, Alderman’s career worshipping a Presbyterian god notwithstanding. So many of his social and clerical friends and associates are Episcopalian, and Saint Paul’s is where the really big wheels get their going-away parties.

  The place is packed, as I knew it would be. I park three blocks away on Grace and hope I’ve put enough time on the meter.

  James Alderman didn’t have any family to speak of, it appears. He has a brother, a few years younger, who is supposed to be some kind of old-money mover and shaker. A couple of cousins, one of them quite elderly, also are in attendance. But he seemed to have touched just about every part of the city. The university and civic leaders and a variety of church-related people are among the throng. I recognize a couple of former mayors and half a dozen city council members, past and present.

  The service is serviceable, but I can’t help wishing that they could have done it at one of the African American churches, or at least imported the choir from one of them. I can still remember the funeral, last year, of Philomena’s younger brother. The guy dropped dead from a heart attack at sixty-two. He ran a car-repair shop and probably had a high school education, but the funeral went over two hours and was highlighted by the kind of wailing and gnashing of teeth that I hope will be in evidence when I shuffle off.

  Of course, if the Episcopalians had that kind of service, I’d never be able to make my three o’clock appointment with Gunner Gunderson.

  The minister says all the right things, although without enough heat to warm up this bleak December day. I see Clara Westbrook and a couple of other Prestwouldians among the attendees.

  I get a few quotes from some of the notables to go with my story for tomorrow’s paper. By 2:40, I’m on the street, getting in a quick smoke before I get back to my car. When I get there, of course, there’s a ticket on it. My goddamn third one this month. Apparently the meter maids don’t have a bereavement policy.

  There is a silver lining in the crap storm though. In a small bit of serendipity, I’ve parked so far west of Saint Paul’s that it’s easy to walk from the car to Sixth Street. I am able to persuade the guy in the half-ass convenience store to grudgingly give me two dollars in change so my ticket doesn’t have a buddy by the time I get back. I’ve probably bought a couple of thousand dollars in cigarettes off this guy, but today I’m a stranger. Maybe it’s the tie.

  They’ve just opened the pool hall here. It takes up a space on the ground floor of the John Marshall’s back side. The hotel’s rebirth gives me hope for our hard-pressed city. It was a grand old place for decades, gradually slipping into squalor toward the end. The state press association had its annual awards banquets there every couple of years or so. Half the newspaper people in the state would come, since being a print journalist at awards time is like being on a youth soccer team. Everybody gets a damn trophy.

  In my earlier days at the paper, they’d spring for free rooms here on snow nights. Any staffers who didn’t feel safe driving home in a blizzard got to stay at the John Marshall and charge their meals. And blizzards were interpreted very loosely—anything over five inches usually did the trick. More than once, a bunch of us would stay up half the night, playing poker
and drinking the cheap booze we’d stocked up on at the ABC store next to the paper. We’d order room service, then manage to get breakfast and lunch on the tab before we came back to work the next afternoon. These days, if you don’t feel safe driving home, you need to bring a sleeping bag. That newsroom floor is pretty hard.

  Then, sometime in the late eighties, when cities were on life-support, it closed. Every three or four years, somebody with a big hat and damn few cattle would announce a plan to bring it back. They’d make a little noise, show everyone a lot of pretty “artist’s renderings,” and then disappear.

  Finally somebody walked the walk. Instead of imploding the place and building another damn parking deck, we’ve saved something worth saving.

  I’m a couple of minutes late. I spot Gunderson immediately, at one of the back tables next to Franklin Street. Other than the blond hair turning gray, he doesn’t seem to have changed much. The guy at the front counter says Gunner told him I’d be paying, so I guess I am.

  I like the place. I’ve been in a couple of times with Custalow, and once with Cindy, who has a pretty good touch with a pool cue. They don’t have flat-screen TVs, so it isn’t a sports bar with pool tables. They have banners with the likeness of people like Wimpy Lassiter on them. The place is about shooting pool, but it isn’t a joint where people sometimes use the cue sticks to beat the crap out of each other. I guess the high-end beer keeps the riffraff out. It’s the kind of place where guys with their own sticks in leather cases play by themselves next to couples on dates.

  I introduce myself.

  “I know who you are,” Gunderson says, the way you might say it to a child molester. He doesn’t bother to look up from the shot he’s about to miss. “You’re the guy that brought Shiflett down.”

  Yeah, I did. Five years ago. No apologies for that. A guy cuts a girl’s head off and mails it to her father, he probably needs nailing, even if he is a lieutenant.

  I tell him what I’m after. I mention the kind of hoo-ha that could erupt if what I suspect is true.

  “Get a stick,” he says, and we proceed to play a couple of games of eight ball. I order a five-dollar beer with a cute name that tastes about half as good as a Miller.

  I don’t push him. He knows what I want, and he’ll only give it to me if it suits him.

  About the time I’m losing the first game by sinking the cue ball along with the eight, he starts talking.

  “They wanted it to disappear,” he says, “so it disappeared.”

  He wasn’t the cop who responded when the kid’s mother called the police. But he was there when they went to Alderman’s house to question him.

  “Ordinarily, they’d have hauled his ass down to the station, tried to sweat it out of him,” Gunderson says. “But this guy, they gave him the velvet-glove treatment. He seemed nervous. I guess he knew that kid might be able to identify him. Hell, as I remember it, he didn’t live but four or five blocks away.”

  I rack ’em. Gunderson breaks and keeps talking.

  “The detective who showed the kid the pictures told us he picked out this guy Alderman right away.”

  He sinks two balls before he misses.

  “But they never did bring Alderman in.”

  I ask him when the kid changed his story.

  “It wasn’t long, maybe two or three days. In the meantime, we were told in no uncertain terms that this wasn’t going to get out, that we weren’t going to malign somebody who might be innocent.”

  He laughs, upsetting my concentration.

  “Like we gave a shit on a normal day.”

  I ask him if he was there when the kid recanted.

  “No, but I know somebody who was.”

  He goes silent, grinning and busting my chops, making me beg for it.

  “Who?”

  “The big dog. The lord high emperor of us all.”

  Jesus H. Christ. It’s possible. L.D. Jones would have been on the force about five years by then, still trying to make his bones.

  Gunderson insists that he knows for a fact that the chief was there, because he told Gunderson and a couple of other cops about it over beers.

  “He said the kid seemed like he was scared, and his mother did most of the talking. But even when they threatened to send his bony ass to jail for making false charges and wasting our fucking time, he stuck with the story. His mother was right there beside him, L.D. said, and she was more sure than the kid that he’d picked the wrong guy.

  “But there never was any right guy. Kid didn’t see anyone else who looked like he might have wanted to use him for his play toy.

  “So, it just died.”

  I drop the thirteen ball in the far corner pocket and then sink the twelve in the side, a ninety-degree shot I make about once a year. Gunderson calls me a lucky SOB, and he’s right, but I pretend it’s just business as usual.

  L.D. Jones has got some ’splainin’ to do. In the meantime, though, there is one piece of information that is going to make my time with the charming Gunner Gunderson worth it, even if I do get stuck with the bill for pool time and the beer.

  No sense in pussyfooting around it.

  “Do you know who the kid was?”

  Gunderson grins.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I figured you’d be asking that, sooner or later.”

  He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a piece of paper.

  “The cop who answered the call, he retired about six years ago, but I called him. He’s got a good memory. And he kept pretty good records, on his own. Said he was going to write one of them police books, like Onion Field, you know. But he never did. Shit, the guy couldn’t write his name.”

  I look at the name the other retired cop gave Gunderson, and the address. It’s twenty years old, but it’s a start.

  To ease my pain a little at pay-up time, I sink the eight ball this time without scratching.

  “Don’t be a stranger,” I say to Gunderson as he leaves.

  He extends his middle finger by way of acknowledgment.

  I STOP by and ask Sally if she thinks I’ll be able to write off three beers and an hour of pool as a business expense. She urges me to try it. She says she’d like to watch.

  I write the funeral story. As those things go, I think it’s pretty good. Enos Jackson says I have a real future as an obit writer.

  Sarah has been working the McNish beat, but she’s not getting anywhere. Nobody seems to have seen Artesian Cole after he left Grace of God.

  I call her into one of the conference rooms and fill her in on what I’ve just learned from Gunderson.

  “Damn,” she says. “Willie, this is your story now. Whoever writes this one, though, there’s going to be a shit storm up in Suitville.”

  I assure her that I will need plenty of help, and I remind her that she was the one who ferreted out Stella Barnes.

  “You’ve got rights on this one,” I tell her. “Ask yourself, WWBD. What would Baer do?”

  Mark Baer, still hoping to climb above our humble rag and into his rightful place in the journalism pantheon, sometimes uses his coworkers’ heads for stepping-stones. He is on the bad side of some of said coworkers right now. He has lobbied to get his name added to an investigative reporting entry in the state press contest. Sarah and another reporter did 99 percent of the work. Baer, it turned out, gave Sarah a couple of phone numbers she needed. But when they hand out those résumé-enhancing two-dollar plaques, Baer’s will be just as big as Sarah’s.

  “Fuck Baer,” Sarah says. Since they are not dating anymore, I optimistically take this to be figurative rather than literal.

  I call Kate at home to see how McNish is doing. She says that she and Marcus have little hope of getting the judge to set bail, which means he can expect to be in the lockup for a bit longer.

  “Unless the cops find something they haven’t found already, like somebody who saw the boy that afternoon with somebody other than our client.”

  She asks me if I’m still on the story.

>   “Not officially.”

  “Which means you are.”

  “Now that James Alderman is underground, maybe they’ll let me get back on it.”

  I hear her sigh.

  “You’re not telling me everything, are you, Willie?”

  I can’t think of anything better to say, just before hanging up, than, “Did I ever?”

  SARAH’S MAIN contribution to tomorrow’s paper will be the revelation that the black community (with, it is hoped, a few white contributors) is planning a protest. Nothing radical like what went on in that town in Missouri when the unarmed black guy got aired out by the police, of course. Richmond is, as one of our veteran cynics says, a hotbed of rest, and they do have a pretty good excuse for a suspect down in the city lockup. But people concerned about perspective want to do something to let the police know that the disappearance of those young African American boys is just as worthy of justice as the murder of a James Alderman.

  L.D. Jones is no doubt feeling the heat. I almost feel sorry for him. Not sorry enough, however, to pass on confronting him about a meeting that did or didn’t take place two decades ago.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Thursday

  The demonstration doesn’t amount to much. We are assured that peace without justice is like barbecue without coleslaw. The rally is held in front of city hall and manages to tie up traffic on Broad Street for a while. The organizers were wise enough to invite all the TV stations, though, and they’ll have some nice footage for the noon and evening news. Clever camera angles can make the eighty or so attendees look like a few hundred. The mayor and the chief both assure their viewing audience that they will bring all their considerable powers to bear to ensure that the perpetrator of this heinous crime pays the price. The mayor pronounces it “hee-in-us.” L.D. looks tired. His bodyguard and the mayor’s protection stand behind them scowling.

  Sarah’s covering for us, but I go over anyhow, hoping to catch the chief for a brief chat afterward.

  His bodyguard tries to shoo me away, and he certainly has the arms to do it. When I talk over the goon, though, and tell L.D. I’ve spoken with someone about a certain meeting twenty years ago, a meeting that involved James Alderman, I know I’ve winged him from the way he breaks stride. We’re out of range of the TV folks. I hope the chief appreciates my discretion.