Grace

by Howard Owen

  “When I’d hear the kids talking about ‘Frosty,’ I’d wonder, was that Frosty?

  “But he never showed up again, except when he’d get elected to something or other or get some big award. So I thought, that can’t be the guy.

  “Now, I don’t know. I’m just glad he’s gone, I guess.” There is one more question that needs answering.

  “Are you absolutely sure that the guy who tried to grab you was James Alderman?”

  He looks me square in the eye and takes his sore feet off the ottoman.

  “As sure as I’m sittin’ here.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Friday

  I called Kate last night. It didn’t seem that late to me, sometime shortly after nine. As I was informed, though, it was late for a mother with a nearly two-year-old who has her mom’s energy level and a newfound vocabulary that reportedly consists mostly of “No.”

  She accepted my apologies after she completely woke up though. I told her it was time to put a little more heat on the police, encouraging them to reconsider holding Sam McNish for one or multiple murders of young boys. I explained why.

  “Holy shit!” she said, and I could hear bedsprings squeaking and Mr. Ellis groaning in the background. Apparently, when the kid goes down at Chez Ellis, everybody goes down. I vaguely remember those nights, before I deserted Jeanette and Andi.

  I make it clear to Kate that neither she nor Marcus Green will ever know the source of my information. All she needs to know is that it’s accurate. Somehow, I told her, we have to convince L.D. Jones that he probably is barking up the wrong tree. I mention that I might be able to nudge him a little on that front as well.

  “Maybe we can at least convince a judge to set bail, if the chief expresses some doubts.”

  “Persuade.”

  “What?”

  “You persuade somebody to do something. You convince somebody of something.”

  Maybe it wasn’t exactly the right time for a language usage lesson, but, goddamn, she’s a lawyer. She advised me to have sex with myself and said she’d call me in the morning.

  AND SO she does. At six thirty.

  “Hey,” she says, all bright and chirpy, “I’m wide awake. Been up for an hour. Grace is an early riser. I hope you weren’t still sleeping.”

  Touché.

  She suggests that we get in touch with the chief as soon as possible. I tell her to let me handle it. I know L.D. gets in his office by eight thirty. That’ll give me an hour or so to sleep.

  At 8:35, I call. It is a positive sign that I am transferred to the chief right away. After yesterday’s conversation, I apparently have his ear.

  I explain that I can, if necessary, produce rather compelling evidence that the boy who identified James Alderman all those years ago was bought off. I explain that I have found the boy, now a grown man. I don’t have to explain that I know L.D. was there when all this was going down, and how big a turd this could leave at his doorstep.

  “Bullshit,” he says, but I can tell from the tone of his voice that he knows he’s got trouble.

  He wants a name. I tell him that isn’t possible. I figure that nothing the present Ray-Ray Soles did under duress from his mother twenty years ago is actionable at this point, but I did promise.

  I tell him that I’m sure Sam McNish’s lawyers will be contacting him later today, urging him to rethink his prime suspect in Artesian Cole’s murder.

  He turns almost plaintive on me, something L.D. Jones does approximately every time they have frost in hell.

  “Why are you doing this?” he asks. “Maybe we do need to take another look at this, but you can’t think James Alderman had something to do with that boy’s death.”

  I tell him that I don’t know what to think right now. I ask him if he has any more leads on who might have dispatched Alderman.

  He tells me it’s an ongoing investigation. Some things never change.

  I HAVE a rare Friday night off. Not really my choice. The only halfway generous perk for the newsroom anymore is vacation time. They haven’t slashed that, probably because it doesn’t hurt the bottom line. I still have four weeks a year. Unfortunately, it’s more than I can use with good conscience. With the shrinking staff, taking a day off just means somebody else has to work twice as hard. But, faced with the prospect of giving away vacation time—it doesn’t carry over—and given the opportunity to be there when my grandson gets his first googly-eyed gander at the Christmas lights at the Botanical Gardens, I stick poor Chuck Apple with Friday night cops. I’ll make it up to him.

  There are still four days I’ll never get to use, unless Rita Dominick fires me before New Year’s. The idea of giving up vacation time to the SOBs who make me punch in like a mill hand every day is almost too much to bear.

  And yet, here I am, up and at ’em, working on my day off anyhow. And not just working, but working on a story that our esteemed publisher has told me to back the fuck away from.

  It is a wonderful thing, I am told, to love your job. It would be more wonderful if it loved me back.

  MARCUS GREEN arranges to talk with his client at eleven. I am invited to come along. Since whatever chance McNish has of being home for Christmas is mostly the result of what I’ve dug up, this seems reasonable.

  Marcus drives Kate and me by Grace of God. The place is shut down. It would be anyhow, for the holidays, but this looks permanent. The graffiti is unoriginal and depressing. It appears that one of the windows has been broken out.

  “I wonder if he’ll ever get this thing back running again,” Marcus says, “even if I do manage to get his ass off. Which I will.”

  I admit that it looks doubtful for Grace of God. The neighbors are trying to make sure the kids’ after-school program never sees the light of day again. Their councilman is working hard to make sure the next owners of the rambling structure where Sam McNish was trying to save the world will be Lexus-driving yuppies, twenty- or thirty-somethings with plenty of money and no kids yet or people my age moving back into the city now that their offspring are out of school. Cool restaurants and hot nightlife are relatively easy for a city to bring in. Better schools? Good luck. The white folks took their kids and money to the suburbs long ago, and now they tsk-tsk and wonder why “those people” can’t have good schools like the ones little Jacob and Elizabeth go to.

  “Racist bastards,” Marcus mutters, shocking me. He rarely lets his feelings surface on issues of color.

  I remind him that Marcus Jr. is ensconced in one of the tonier high schools out in the ’burbs, a mile or so from the palatial estate Green was able to buy after becoming the city’s best get-out-of-jail lawyer.

  “Hey,” he says, “white flight isn’t just for white people anymore. It ain’t about color anymore. What’s my last name?”

  OK. I’ll play straight man.

  “Green.”

  He nods his head.

  “Yeah. Green. That’s the color.”

  McNish seems serene. He has told me he does yoga. I wonder if that’s sacrilege for a Presbyterian. Hell, if it can make a man in the Richmond city jail appear as at peace as he does now, maybe I need to buy myself a mat.

  “There could be good news,” Kate tells him. He nods and waits for it. She turns to me.

  I explain that, while no one has been able to find anything that would absolve him of Artesian Cole’s murder, no one has been able to find anything else that would pin it to him either, other than the word of a woman who seems to have been scorned by him.

  And then I go into what I have found out about James Alderman.

  For the first time, McNish seems disturbed.

  “That is impossible,” he says, leaning forward, jogged out of his personal nirvana. “You can’t be thinking James Alderman had anything to do with any of this. He’s the reason I chose the path I chose. The man is as close to a saint as you can get.”

  Nevertheless, I explain, the great man did apparently once try to abduct a young boy. Why, I ask McNish, woul
d that boy, now grown, be willing to say that his original accusation of Alderman was accurate unless it was?

  He shakes his head.

  “I don’t know. But even if he did do something like that all those years ago, what does that have to do with now?”

  “You said he had spent time helping mentor the boys.”

  “Of course. But so did a lot of others.”

  I point out that none of the other mentors have, to our knowledge, ever been accused of attempting to abduct a young boy.

  “We know you didn’t do this,” Kate says. “Can you give us any kind of information that might possibly point to James Alderman?”

  He sits up straight in his chair. He looks like a kid who has just been given the goods about Santa Claus.

  “This is wrong,” he says. “If I had to go to prison for the rest of my life for a crime I didn’t commit, I would never try to accuse James Alderman.”

  He won’t budge. We are somewhat stunned, leaving the jail. We thought we were giving Sam McNish an early Christmas present, but he thinks we’ve left a steaming pile of crap on his doorstep.

  “I don’t know,” Marcus says. “He’s got his head up his ass so far I’m not sure we can extract it.”

  “He’s loyal,” I say. “He’s got faith. He believes. In James Alderman.”

  Unfortunately, as we all know but don’t say, faith doesn’t have a lot of respect for facts.

  Marcus shrugs his shoulders.

  “Well, I guess we’re gonna have to save his skinny ass in spite of himself.”

  KATE AND Marcus drop me off at Perly’s, where I am becoming fond, somehow, of the hot dog with a schmear of chopped chicken liver. A couple of other reporters are there, and it turns into a two-beer lunch.

  It’s a decent afternoon, considering we’re two days shy of the shortest day of the year. The walk back to the Prestwould promises to be pleasant.

  It becomes somewhat less so when a big-ass Explorer with tinted windows pulls up and a couple of guys I recognize from my last visit with Big Boy Sunday hop out and usher me inside.

  It happens so fast. I am within eyesight of the police station on Grace, and there are people, albeit most of them homeless, loitering in the same block, hoping kind strangers will treat them to a pint. But before I can run or yell for help, I’m inside the car.

  “You couldn’t just call?” I ask Big Boy as he wipes ketchup from his mouth. I’m in the middle of the backseat, wedged between him and one of the teenage mentee gangbangers who pushed me in here.

  “Just wanted to see how you were coming along,” he says, “with the reverend and all.”

  I give him the short version, being sure to leave off the names, mentioning only Alderman. I’m hoping he doesn’t insist on names. Big Boy and his minions could do me a lot more damage than a few days in jail for refusing to divulge a source.

  “Alderman. Huh. So maybe this dude that they’re about to put up a statue of on Monument Avenue, maybe he’s behind some of this?”

  I tell Big Boy that I don’t know.

  “I’m pretty sure, though, that McNish is innocent.”

  Big Boy nods his head.

  “Thass good. You on the right track now.”

  “What do you mean, right track. Do you know something I ought to know?”

  “When I think you ought to know something else, I’ll make sure you know it. But what about Alderman? Any idea who carved his ass up?”

  I confess ignorance. The conversation is making me a little uneasy, as is the fact that we’re over in Big Boy’s territory now, blocks from anything the gentrifiers are casting their eyes on as yet.

  Big Boy scratches his gray, neatly trimmed beard and clears his throat.

  “I want to thank you again for kind of looking out for Shorty,” he says. “He says they’re treating him right at that club. Says he could get full health insurance if he lasts a year, won’t have to depend on Obamacare to save his ass.”

  I’m sure this is not all about Big Boy’s undying gratitude. I wait for it.

  “The thing is,” he says, “if what you suspect about James Alderman is true, don’t you think it’s appropriate that somebody turn loose a mess of Old Testament justice on him?”

  I allow that this could be, but the police aren’t going to let go of this one ever. The outrage over one James Alderman being butchered outweighs the black community’s outrage over the long-missing boys.

  “Yeah,” he says, “I hear that. You’re in kind of a bind, Willie. You’ve gotta prove the man ain’t no saint. I expect you’ll feel some heat on your butt trying to write something about that.”

  You don’t even know, I tell him.

  Big Boy eventually, to my relief, has his driver turn around and head back south of the interstate. When they stop to let me off on the same block where I was grabbed, maybe thirty minutes ago, he has one piece of advice.

  “McNish is a good man. He’s been there for us for years. I don’t for a minute believe he did anything to those kids. I hope you don’t mind me getting a little personally involved here.

  “That other guy, Alderman? I’d be happy as a pig in shit if you got the goods on him, since it seems like the police ain’t exactly on top of it. But as to who killed the man, I’d appreciate it if you would just leave that one to the cops. Eye for an eye and all that. You get me?”

  He puts one of his big, beefy paws on my right arm and squeezes to make his point. As I’m getting out, the kid who grabbed me looks me in the eye and puts his hand behind his back, like a guy with heat tucked in his waistband might do.

  Message received.

  WALKING BACK to the Prestwould, I ponder my next move. What I know about James Alderman sheds new light, more like a spotlight, on the case of the missing boys. It should at least make L.D. Jones and his crack staff question their infallible wisdom in locking up McNish.

  But anything I write about Alderman will be done at my extreme peril. Nobody except maybe Big Boy Sunday and me seems to want to hear a discouraging word about the guy—not even the guy who’s in the lockup, facing the possibility of life in prison or execution for a crime I’m sure he didn’t commit. And what if Ray-Ray Soles was wrong? Just because he’s still sure he’s fingered the right guy twenty years ago doesn’t mean maybe he didn’t pick the wrong mug shot to begin with.

  Painting one of our town’s more saintly individuals as a possible monster is not only unhealthy to my career, but I could be wrong. It has happened. And, like doctors, I do subscribe to the “first, do no harm” rule.

  Further roiling my troubled waters is Big Boy’s “suggestion” that I not look too deeply into who killed Alderman. The conclusion is obvious, but I’d rather wait for the cops to figure this one out. If there’s one man in this town I don’t want thinking I’m out to get him, it’s Big Boy Sunday.

  Somehow I will make sure our readers know all or some of what I know. Figuring out how to make that happen and stay employed and alive is the trick.

  PEGGY, ANDI, and little William are waiting for me when I come by at five. It’s already dark, and it feels twenty degrees colder than it did this afternoon. Andi and I manage to wrestle the car seat into submission, and off we go.

  We drive by the park where Artesian Cole’s body was found. I take a quick detour, out of curiosity. We wrote in the paper this morning that a shrine of sorts had been erected there by the lake in his memory. Soon we find ourselves in a traffic jam. Others had the same idea, driving slowly past a live tree that’s been adorned with ornaments and photographs. As we get closer, I see that the photos are blowups, encased in protective plastic, of the five kids we know who disappeared and, with the exception of Artesian, never resurfaced.

  A gigantic star, almost as big as the tree, sits on a stand next to it. It’s glowing red, reflected in the water. I can hear a generator running somewhere. On the star is a sign with one word, also in red: Justice.

  Among the people standing in the cold and singing carols, I’m pretty
sure I spot Laquinta Cole. I wonder how many mothers of the other boys who went missing are there.

  I’m thinking that L.D. Jones needs to have a damn good alternative suspect before he releases Sam McNish. Those fifty people standing out here on a freezing December night aren’t going to settle for anything less. There won’t be any peace on earth if he lets the only viable suspect go.

  “If it was my boy,” I hear Peggy say in the darkness, “I’d be over at the courthouse, or the police station, or somewhere, every damn day until I got some answers.”

  It’ll come to that, I assure my mother, if somebody doesn’t tie up the loose ends soon.

  The lights are dazzling, even if William does fall asleep halfway through our trek into this winter wonderland that must be making the electric company rich. The look on his face when we first got out of the car, though, was worth my freezing my butt off. One little toothless smile makes my night.

  Of course, William has that same look of awe and delight when a dog comes up and licks his face.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Saturday

  I’ve never had so much information with so little opportunity to publish it. Promises have been made, identities have been sworn to secrecy, jobs (mine, to be exact) hang in peril. So much can’t be proved, yet every instinct I have tells me what I need to write is true.

  It won’t do much good to talk to Rita Dominick, for whom the best news stories are the ones that don’t rile the power structure. A career in advertising does that to you.

  There is one possible option. I know Wheelie likes to come in early on Saturdays and get some work done before staffers arrive and distract him by putting out the Sunday paper.

  I get there at nine, well rested and wondering if Penny Lane suffered much from my absence last night.

  As I had hoped, Mal Wheelwright is in his office.

  “Got a minute?” I ask. He seems a bit pained but says yes. He probably knows that it isn’t going to be anything like a minute, and that I’m not here to make his life any damn easier.