Grace

by Howard Owen

  “What I do know,” I tell McNish, “is that I doubt a god who only gets my business because I’m afraid of hell and damnation would look all that kindly on a sinner like me who was just playing the odds. And a god that only wanted me to crawl in terror wouldn’t be a god I’d want to be associated with.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like that,” McNish says. “If your love is unrequited, you don’t act out of, as you say, ‘terror.’ “

  Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe I’m not the unrequited love type. Maybe, despite being married three times, I’m afraid of that kind of commitment.

  At any rate, I promise Sam McNish that I will make it to one of his Sunday services when he resurrects Grace of God, which I have no doubt he will.

  What the hell. It can’t be worse than the sermons I suffered through as a kid. And at least, whether I agree with him or not, this guy walks the damn walk.

  Peggy asks me if I want some lunch, which seems to be a couple of delivery pizzas. I kiss my old mom good-bye and tell her I’ll have to take a rain check. I have one more interview on my dance card.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I’ve been in the lobby twenty minutes, chatting with the guard, when I see Big Boy Sunday’s Explorer roll up outside. His driver parks in the handicapped space out front. The guard gets up to make him move. I tell him I’ll take care of it.

  I go outside and ask if they can park on the other side of the street, suggesting it might avoid some kind of incident, such as Big Boy’s seventeen-year-old knucklehead chauffeur pulling heat on our superannuated protector.

  “The excitement might kill the old man,” I tell Big Boy, who grunts and tells the kid to move it.

  “Be back in half an hour,” he tells him. “Go on.”

  The kid gives me the stink-eye but does as he’s told.

  Instead of having a chat in our lobby, where Feldman is likely to appear at any minute and want to join the conversation, I guide the big man over to the elevators. The guard is looking very uneasy. If anybody ever looked out of place, it’s Big Boy Sunday in the Prestwould. I give the guard the “OK” sign.

  “Where we goin’?”

  “Up to my place.”

  “You live here? Shit. What’d you do, win the fucking lottery?”

  “It’s a long story. I’m renting.”

  We get off at six. Our neighbors, the Garlands, are out of town, and Custalow is at work, somewhere down in the basement.

  “Nice view,” he says, looking out across Monroe Park at the cathedral. He asks me how much a place like mine costs. When I tell him, he says that doesn’t sound like much. Then I tell him about the four-figure condo fee.

  He whistles and allows that he’ll stay where he is for the time being.

  I ask him if he wants a beer. Maybe I should have made a little light lunch. My manners are showing.

  He declines and looks at his watch.

  “So,” he says, “what’d you get me up here for? Better make it quick. My boy is going to expect me out there in, uh, twenty-five minutes.”

  Time to cut to the chase.

  “I told you I found something when I was in Alderman’s place.”

  I walk over to the mantel and pick it up. I hand it to him.

  He looks at the gum wrapper.

  “Teaberry,” I say, stating the obvious. “Nobody I know chews that crap, except you.”

  “So what?”

  “Nothing much, except there it was, lying on the floor there next to the trash basket, like somebody aimed and missed. I guess the cops didn’t think it was important. And, to cap it off, there was a piece of gum inside. I saved that though. It’s in safe hands.”

  Big Boy sits down. He’s got the gum wrapper in one of his big paws.

  “So, you shakin’ me down, or what?”

  I tell him I don’t roll that way.

  “I just want to know what the hell happened,” I tell him. “From all the interest you’ve had in this mess, and from that gum wrapper, and from knowing your reputation, and from knowing Artesian’s momma is your woman, I’m doing a little deducing.”

  I have considered my options. The one that would not have labeled me a potential suicide would have been to go to the police. That gum might be DNA-able, and Big Boy Sunday is more than capable of doing what was done to James Alderman.

  But I’m not quite ready to turn this over to L.D. Jones, whose minions somehow missed it in the first place. This one is mine.

  Of course, I also could have just pretended I never saw that Teaberry gum wrapper. As with going to the cops, it would have improved my chances of making it to retirement.

  But, dammit, I want to know what happened. And I don’t want to get it secondhand, from some police report or through the back door via Peachy Love. This is my story. I’m betting that the fact that I’ve sent those two letters will be enough insurance to get me through this in one piece.

  Plus, as Big Boy and I both know, some people just naturally fall into the “Needed Killing” category.

  “Just tell me what happened.”

  Big Boy looks at his watch again. He sighs. Then he calls his driver and tells him to go get something to eat, that he’ll call him when he wants him.

  “Go by KFC,” he says. “Get a bucket. Extra crispy.”

  Always thinking about the food. I knew I should have done the light lunch.

  I sit down next to Big Boy.

  “If I was going to the police, I’d have done that already.”

  He nods.

  “But there ain’t no way you’re going to get something for your paper out of this, unless somebody hauls me off to jail.”

  It’s hard to explain that I just want to know. This one’s gotten under my skin, and I want answers. I want the final piece of the puzzle.

  “They’re goin’ to pin it all on Alderman anyhow,” Big Boy says. “They got the bodies. What do you care who put him down?”

  “And can they tie Artesian Cole’s murder to Alderman?”

  He gives me a long, withering look.

  “The people that need to know, they know.”

  I tell him I’m not wearing a tape recorder and I’m not toting a note pad. I tell him it’s not for attribution.

  What I’m betting is that Big Boy Sunday got a lot of information out of James Alderman before he put him out of his misery. That’s what I’m after.

  “Shit, you can’t tell this story without somebody knowing who you talked to.”

  I assure him that I can. I also assure him that I have never revealed a source and never will, even if I have to go to jail.

  He looks at me.

  “Yeah, you’d last about ten minutes in jail,” he says.

  I tell him I’ve been there before. Sure, it was only for a couple of days, and the subject was a state official taking a bribe, not a spectacular murder. But I didn’t blink, and the prosecutor knew I wasn’t going to.

  Finally he puts his big, pink palms up.

  “You think you know shit,” he says, “but you don’t.”

  He gets up and wanders over by the gas-log fireplace, backing his oversized butt up to it.

  “You know who else chews Teaberry gum?” he asks. “Shorty Cole, that’s who.

  “He started chewing it just because I did, I suppose. Your mouth’s open, Willie. You ought to close it before you catch flies.”

  I do as he suggests. As is so often the case, I am not as smart as I think I am.

  “So tell me.”

  And so he does.

  Big Boy might have put more resources into finding out what happened to Artesian than the police did.

  “I know people,” he says. “Some of them are out there on the street, and they don’t miss much. I had my boys snoop around, and they found a fella that the cops never found. One that doesn’t like to talk to cops even when they do find him.

  “This fella saw something. He said he saw a black boy get into a big-ass car, over there just off Broad, about the time the boy would have
been leaving that place on Grace, headed home. Said the car was old as shit, like an antique. But this fella, he knows cars, used to work for a used-car dealer. He said it was a Ford Galaxie, burgundy and white. I thought it couldn’t be. Hell, they quit making them in the 1970s. But the fella was sure.”

  I know, because I saw it, that there was a Ford Galaxie parked in James Alderman’s garage. Burgundy and white. It was easy enough for Big Boy, with his official and unofficial connections, to trace an antique car to Seminary Avenue. It was easy enough to discover Alderman’s connection to Children of God.

  “I was going to bring the wrath of God down on his sorry-ass head,” Big Boy says, “but Shorty beat me to it.”

  He had made the mistake of telling the boy’s uncle what he found. That was on the Thursday after Artesian’s body surfaced.

  “But I swear to you, I was going to do it by the book. I don’t need that kind of attention. I figured I had enough information that I could pass it on to the police. I got a few friends down there. And then I’d let them take care of James Alderman. I figured he’d suffer more from being exposed for what he was and having to spend the rest of his life in prison than he would have suffered from somebody torturing him to death.”

  Big Boy makes a noise that sounds like a chuckle.

  “Although, I must admit, Shorty did a pretty good job.”

  I ask him if he or Shorty knew about the other boys.

  “Hell, no, at least not right then. I knew about how the kids would talk about Frosty this and Frosty that, but I didn’t know for sure if there was a real Frosty. Even when it popped up again after Artesian was killed, I wasn’t sure there was a connection. Kids disappear sometimes, where I live. All Shorty was there for was to get payback for Artesian.”

  SO SHORTY Cole found out who almost surely raped and murdered his nephew the Thursday after it happened.

  According to Big Boy, Shorty didn’t go ballistic.

  “If he’d of said he was goin’ over there and carve him up, I’d of stopped him. Like I said, don’t need that kind of trouble, and the courts would have hurt him more than Shorty did.”

  Shorty Cole told Big Boy all about it the same day they found the body.

  The day before, he had slipped into James Alderman’s residence while the old man was at his gym.

  “I didn’t know Shorty had it in him,” Big Boy says. “But if you get mad enough, I s’pose all bets are off. I wasn’t happy he did it, but he was entitled.”

  He said Artesian’s uncle still had blood on his clothes when he came by Big Boy’s house to tell him what he’d done.

  Considering that Shorty was upset enough about his nephew’s disappearance to brandish a gun at our publisher, I guess I could have seen this coming.

  Shorty told Big Boy it was pretty easy. Pretty easy, I’m thinking, if you don’t mind butchering another human being.

  He tied Alderman up and started working on him.

  “He said he didn’t cut anything off until he got the man to confess. Shorty has a strong sense of right and wrong. But he said it didn’t take long. And then Shorty started whacking away.”

  Alderman told Shorty about picking up the boy, and about strangling him later and then putting him in a sack and driving that same Galaxie over to the park after dark and dumping him in the lake. He said it was pure luck that he happened to be driving along that street at the same time Artesian was walking toward the bus stop. Since the boy knew him, it was easy enough to get him into the car. And it was easy to convince him to take a short side trip to Alderman’s house to help his soon-to-be murderer move a piece of furniture.

  Admitting he’d sexually molested the boy took a little more persuasion, but Alderman finally owned up to that too.

  Shorty asked him the sixty-four thousand dollar question: Why? Alderman apparently couldn’t give him a satisfactory answer, even after Shorty had cut off the first of his thumbs.

  “Shorty said he said it was just something he had to do. He said he never did it unless opportunity knocked. I guess he was talking about those other boys.

  “Shorty said he actually grinned at him and said the devil made him do it. Said it spooked him out.”

  I ask Big Boy if Laquinta knows what her brother did.

  “I expect she does. But we’ll all be better off if we never talk about it. It’s not like she can take out no ad in the paper: ‘Congratulations to my brother, Belman Cole, for avenging my son’s death.’”

  I’ll have to pass this information on to McNish some day, when I’m confident I can trust him to keep it to himself.

  “I asked him if he made sure he didn’t leave any fingerprints or anything. He said he didn’t, but if he was dumb enough to throw that gum wrapper at the trash can, and miss the son of a bitch at that, I guess anything’s possible.

  “But you know what he said? He said if he did life in prison, it’d still be worth it.”

  There are so many things I want to ask Shorty Cole and Alderman. Cole’s the only one who got to interrogate the son of a bitch. For now, I’ll have to get my information secondhand.

  “Why did Alderman dump Artesian in the lake? Why didn’t he just bury him like the others?”

  “Well, you got to remember, Shorty didn’t know about no ‘others.’ But you were down there. I read your story. Sounded like that little basement graveyard was pretty crowded.

  “I think the son of a bitch just flat ran out of room.”

  Big Boy looks over at me.

  “Well, Willie. Now you know what you know. The question is: What are you going to do with it?”

  I tell him I don’t know, but that whatever I do, it won’t have his or Shorty Cole’s name on it.

  He seems to take me at my word.

  “You got some trust points with me. The thing is, don’t waste ’em. I like you, Willie. I’d hate for anything to happen to you.

  “Plus,” he says, “you’re a brother, even if you are a tad on the pale side.”

  He makes a call and asks his driver if he’s picked up that chicken like he was supposed to. He tells me he can let himself out.

  It’s the most frustrating thing in the world for a newspaper reporter to have information this good and not be able to put it in print. It’s like winning the lottery, but you can’t tell anybody about it or spend the money.

  But there are some impediments to putting the truth in print.

  First, I imagine that if anything police-or courts-wise happened to Big Boy or Shorty because of something I wrote, I or my near and dear would somehow pay the price. Big Boy Sunday has, according to reliable sources, filleted bigger fish than me when they crossed him. Plus, I’ve promised to keep Big Boy and Shorty Cole out of it.

  The other thing is this: Murder is almost always a bad thing. Sitting on the kind of information I have now is almost always wrong.

  But there are exceptions. I think about those kids’ remains in James Alderman’s basement, and I think about what Artesian Cole went through.

  Maybe our feckless law enforcement personnel will finally figure it all out and arrest Shorty Cole for murder, just like maybe they eventually would have found that other basement room and all those graves.

  They won’t get any help from me on this one though.

  I think about what Huckleberry Finn said when he finally decided that, no matter what, he couldn’t turn Jim in.

  All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Wednesday

  I do have today off, which sort of makes up for yesterday.

  When I finally got to the paper, my head was buzzing from the stories I was going to write and the one I felt that I couldn’t. It was already three thirty. Sally Velez looked at the big clock on the wall, now draped in fake ivy. I told her I had a nice yuletide gift for our readers. I also told her that any dirt naps in our city might have to be covered by someone else.

  The piece on Sam McNish was relatively easy. After all, I had an exclusive, with the
interviewee’s blessing. I touched on his background. I regurgitated what we knew already about the circumstances that led to his arrest. And I think, in all modesty, that I did a damn good job of portraying a man with a big brain and a bigger heart who was still reeling at the way he was betrayed but was determined to soldier on.

  I wrote about his intention to keep Grace of God and Children of God going, at their present location or elsewhere.

  “Sam McNish has Ivy League credentials,” the story began. “He could have used them to become rich or famous or both. Instead, he chose to come back home and quietly make our little part of the world a better place. Now, he is coming to grips with the notion of pure evil. It is to his credit that encountering a devil has not made him think less of God.”

  I have McNish talking about how amazingly well he was treated by the other inmates during his time of unjust confinement. I shared snippets of the letters the kids and his flock sent him. I let him get on the soapbox a bit and rail about how many of his fellow prisoners were there for the kind of penny-ante drug crap that might get a white boy from the suburbs a few hours of community service and a stern talking-to.

  Quite frankly, I thought I captured his essence. But I’m my biggest fan, so maybe I’m a tad biased.

  I had to argue with McNish to get him to let me put a help box along with the story seeking donations to his ministry. I am hoping that the power of the press, which is now about equal to an aging hamster on a treadmill, can do some good.

  When she finished reading it, Sally said it was pretty sappy, but she had to brush something that might have been a tear out of her bloodshot, battle-hardened eyes.

  The second piece I banged out while Sally was tweaking the first one was a bit more personal, and a tad risky.

  I recounted for our readers my short, successful career as a cat burglar. I summed up all the reasons I had come to suspect James Alderman of being less than saintly, especially the part where McNish remembered that long-ago dinner with the accused. I did not mention L.D. Jones’s participation in the bought-and-paid-for whitewashing of Alderman’s attempted abduction of Ray-Ray Soles all those years ago. After all, L.D. didn’t know Ray-Ray and his mother had been bought off. I didn’t identify Ray-Ray either. I promised.