The Bottom

by Howard Owen

  It surprised me when Andi moved in. It seems that the idea of fatherhood took some of the romance out of the relationship from Mr. Blandford’s perspective. Andi said he did offer to marry her, much in the same sense as the guy who smashes into your car offers to pay for damages. Not, in other words, with a glad heart.

  “It turns out he was an asshole,” was Andi’s assessment. I never met the father of my percolating grandchild, but I’m willing to accept Andi’s evaluation. I kind of wish he’d been a little more of one, so I could kick the shit out of him or at least have the satisfaction of having tried.

  Andi has been a godsend, I must admit. She’s the daughter Peggy never had, and Andi seems to find Peggy more amusing that I did when I was her age. Maybe sense of humor skips a generation, or maybe it’s just less embarrassing to have your grandmother leave the house wearing unmatched shoes than it is when it’s your mother.

  When Andi moved in, Peggy had pretty much retreated to her own private emotional cave. Even Awesome Dude noticed it.

  “Dude,” he said, when he called me a couple of months ago, “Peggy just ain’t her old self. She doesn’t even stay high but about half the time.”

  My mother’s average high-ness is still below her traditional level. She worries about second-hand smoke. Can’t have her first great-grandchild popping out with a case of the munchies. But her mood has perked up considerably. Maybe it really does take a village, like Hillary said, and this one even has, in Mr. Dude, its own village idiot.

  I kiss Peggy and then take Andi to the kitchen, where we can talk. With me out of the living room, I can hear Peggy switch the channel back to Fox News, which I have assured her will rot her brain faster than pot ever could. The idea that my grandchild might be absorbing anything at all from Rush Limbaugh is hard to endure. Andi always gets her to switch to something more edifying, like Duck Dynasty, when she’s in the room.

  I tell Andi about the call. She confirms that she made it.

  “Omigod,” she says. “That black guy was from the train station? And he was supposed to be there when that girl was killed?”

  “When she was dumped, anyhow. What about the other guy? The one who gave you the twenty.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did he look like?”

  Andi shakes her head.

  “I never saw him.”

  How, I ask my flesh and blood, can that be?

  “I got this call, on my cell. The guy said there was an envelope under the napkin at the bar. I looked, and there was a napkin somebody had taken from a table and set there. There were two twenties and a note. The guy said one twenty was for me and the other one was for drinks for this guy I was supposed to call. Said he was an old friend. The message was on a piece of paper. Which, no, I don’t have. I threw it away.”

  Mr. Williams was more than glad to slip away from his boring job and have a drink or two on somebody else’s dime.

  “He asked me who was treating him, but, like I said, I don’t know.”

  I tell her that the cops probably will be asking her the same questions sometime soon.

  “Shit,” Andi says. “I’ll probably lose my job.”

  None of this is your fault, I assure her after encouraging her to see if she can dredge up anything from her memory.

  “That’s not it,” she says, wiping away a tear. “We’re supposed to share our tips.”

  I tell her that the twenty somebody slipped her to ensure that JoJo Williams would abandon his post for a while probably doesn’t qualify as a tip.

  “Besides,” I add, “there are plenty of places that would hire you in a minute.”

  Hell, most of them already have, at least once.

  CHAPTER TWO

  X

  Friday

  Four murders in eighteen months are definitely enough to light a fire under our plucky chief of police and his minions. Chains are being yanked.

  JoJo Williams, who no doubt is already out of a job, talked to the real police and told them more or less the same story he told me. When the detective who interviewed JoJo found out that the guard thought he’d already talked with the cops, I am told by Peachy Love—my eyes and ears in the world of law enforcement—Chief Jones took my name in vain again. Lucky guess. He’d like to nail me for obstruction of justice or felony pain-in-the-ass, but there’s no law I know of against interviewing potential witnesses. How was I to know that JoJo would think I was cop? I am so misunderstood.

  And they’ve already interviewed Andi, who also told them what she told me. What she didn’t tell them, per my instructions, is that she’s my daughter. A wise officer might have wondered, but I guess Black’s a fairly common name. It’ll get out eventually, but, as I told my daughter, there’s no sense in just giving information away. Let ’em work for it. It’ll be good for them.

  And so the city is in lockdown mode. Making it more worrisome is that there isn’t any particular element that can wipe its brow and say, “Thank God that couldn’t happen here.” The killer has been rather democratic.

  The first one was found lying in the dirt at Texas Beach, back in March of 2012. Her body had been thrown into some bushes. Nobody but the homeless goes down to the river that time of year, and she’d been dead a couple of days before they found her.

  Her name was Kelli Jonas. She was a twenty-year-old white girl who had gotten an associate’s degree in dental hygiene and had just started working for a dentist in the West End.

  The night she disappeared, she had been underage drinking with some friends at a bar on West Main, and her friends said she left by herself. She never made it home, or at least she never got as far as unlocking her front door. Her keys were still in the purse they found floating in a little pool of water at the river’s edge.

  When they found her, she had been raped, and she had definitely been murdered. Her throat was cut. She had bled to death there beside the James. It appeared that she had several stab wounds before she was allowed to die. She’d been bound and gagged, but, that time of year, it’s doubtful that anyone could have heard her even if she’d been allowed to scream.

  For a while it was big news. She came from a solid middle-class family out in Henrico, and white and middle class will always get you better play in our paper than poor and black. About the only clue the cops could dredge up was some partially obscured boot prints. They never even found the knife.

  Then we, and our readers, got distracted with other things, as we often do, and Kelli Jonas got consigned to that nether world where the cops are still trying, kind of, and we come back once a year and do an update, reopening the family’s wounds for no good purpose.

  The second one showed up six months later, in September. Chanelle Williams was a seventeen-year-old girl from the East End. She stopped going to school when she was fifteen and was involved with some people who seemed to think her best career choices were either prostitute or drug runner.

  Whoever did it dumped her much abused body in the Kanawha Canal, or rather in one of the boats that take tourists along our belated attempt to—like every other city in America with a river, creek or sewage lagoon—emulate San Antonio’s River Walk. One of the workmen found it the next morning. As with Kelli Jonas, she’d been dead for at least a day.

  She wasn’t in very good shape. For a while, it was assumed that she had been done in by one of her felonious mentors. And, being African American, the dudgeon level didn’t run quite so high, at least among white Richmonders.

  But then one of the cops noticed the tattoo. It was on her right ankle, not more than three inches high. It appeared to have been done in the last day or two, but that wasn’t the big news. The big news was that it was a Tweety Bird, like in the old cartoons. It was the same tattoo, in the same place, as the one they found on Kelli Jonas.

  After the police determined, to the best of their limited capacities, that none of the characters connected to Chanelle Williams had any link to Kelli Jonas, they, our newspaper and the rest of the town
came to the conclusion that we had a nondiscriminatory, psychopathic nut on our hands.

  Young women loaded up on Mace and traveled in packs. But eventually, you get careless, and the young do believe they will live for damn ever. Every time I’d confront Andi with the hard, cold fact that somebody had raped, butchered and murdered two girls her age, she would assure me she could take care of herself.

  The third one occurred almost exactly a year after the first one and six months after the second one, back in March. This time the body was found at the entrance to the Church Hill tunnel. Everybody who grew up in Richmond or has lived there any time at all knows about the tunnel. For some reason, the C&O built a train tunnel under Church Hill after the Civil War. One day in 1925, it collapsed, burying four workers, a locomotive and some flat cars. Neither the train nor the workers have been recovered or ever will be. They are sealed forever beneath one of the city’s most historic neighborhoods, somewhere below where Patrick Henry gave his “Give me liberty or give me death” speech.

  Lorrie Estrada might not have appreciated the history, even if she was still alive when she was brought there to die. She was a third-year student at VCU. She’d grown up in Fairfax County and was in some sort of high-tech premed major that seemed to assure her future success.

  Her parents and her friends said she didn’t drink, and she didn’t date very often. The last time anyone saw her, she was between her apartment on Grove and the VCU library.

  She had the Tweety Bird tattoo. She had the same kind of damage as the other two. This time the danger alert went up and it stayed up. Even now, six months later, even before the fourth victim showed up in the Main Street Station anteroom, there is a sense of fear. Just two months ago, a female student at Virginia Union shot a guy in the leg because she thought he was stalking her. Turns out he was just walking the same route as she was, but you can’t be too careful.

  There are barely 200,000 people living in the city, hub of a metropolitan area of about 1.3 million. When three young women die horribly at the hands of the same unknown stranger in the space of a year, it seems like a very small place. You start seeing demons everywhere.

  And now there are four.

  Jessica Caldwell was just fourteen years old. She had run away from home the week before, and her parents hadn’t been able to arouse much interest in finding her. Despite her mother’s tearful declaration that she was a good girl, she had had some problems, mostly with drugs and rebellion. She might have turned up in some shelter, been reclaimed by her parents and gone on to live a long happy life. Instead she is the latest trophy in some murdering bastard’s game.

  REJUVENATED BY A good night’s sleep, a tasty lunch of leftover meatloaf and my two-Camel walk to the paper, I’m in the newsroom by two, reading this morning’s breathless headline: Tweety Bird Killer strikes again. They had to cut a couple of grafs to make it fit. No problem. I’ll just work them into tomorrow’s story. I have a feeling I’ll be writing this one for a while.

  Wheelie comes up behind me.

  “How’s it going? Anything new?”

  “Not much. The cops are crapping themselves. They still don’t have a clue.”

  “This guy must be pretty good.”

  “Yeah. Practice makes perfect.”

  Wheelie winces, and I immediately feel like an asshole. I truly am not hard-bitten or soulless enough to see anything even remotely humorous in the deaths of four innocents. Hell, nobody deserves to die like that, not even the guilty. It’s just the business I’m in. This is my second stint on night cops, and if what I cover is any indication, the human race is getting nastier by the year. Sometimes sick humor is all the salve you’ve got.

  “Sorry,” I say. Wheelie looks surprised. He is not used to hearing me apologize, even if I should once in a while.

  “I’ve got a meeting with the suits,” he says. “I’ll check with you when I get back, in two hours if I’m lucky.”

  I remind him that he is a suit now. He gives me a dirty look, then glances at his watch, says “shit,” and scurries for the elevator.

  Wheelie’s a busy man these days. He’s filling two seats, at least until corporate finds a replacement for Grubby.

  Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention: Grubby’s dead.

  The publisher and I had our problems, but, like those four girls, Grubby didn’t deserve the demise he met.

  Death by Segway. Good lord.

  Why do we even have Segways? They seem worthless as a broke-dick dog to me, equally useless on streets and sidewalks, to say nothing of being just a tad dangerous. I vaguely remember them being foisted upon us as the biggest thing since dental floss, but I have not seen the light. When the company CEO drove one off a cliff and got his ass killed three years ago, that kind of sealed the deal for me. When I see a cop or some other public servant riding one of them because he has to, I can read the little thought balloon over his head: “I look like an asshole.” Maybe it’s a West Coast thing. I don’t know. I just know we’re shy a publisher right now because of them.

  Chip Grooms saw the whole thing. James H. Grubbs himself was the one who told Wheelie to be sure we had a photographer on the scene, and Grooms drew the short straw.

  It was supposed to be a “bonding” experience. Grubby organized it. The idea was to get city and county officials together (along with area big shots, a group into which Grubby self-qualified himself) to do something “fun.” The hope was that the city and county people, whose cooperation skills are on the Sunni-Shiite level, would have a Kumbaya moment and realize we all really can get along. As if. In a state where cities aren’t part of counties and can’t annex any of that Yuppie-rich suburban land, localities don’t have to get along. And so they don’t, enthusiastically.

  In the end, the only bonding that got done was Grubby bonding with the GRTC Number Eleven bus on its way from the Capitol to Mosby Court.

  They did it down in Shockoe Bottom. Grooms said he overheard the instructions the Segway master gave beforehand to the assembled officials. They could have stressed the danger a little more clearly, he told us, but where’s the fun in that?

  The big thing the Segway guy emphasized (and maybe Grubby didn’t hear it because he was busy trying to be our region’s catalyst, maybe breaking up a fistfight between a county commissioner and a city councilwoman) was the part about getting on and off the contraptions.

  You have to do your dismount by grabbing the vertical bar with both hands. If you only hold it with one hand and hold on to the handlebar with the other, as conditioning and common sense might indicate you should, and then you put one foot on the ground, the thing behaves more or less like a bucking bronco, dragging you around in circles until you fall free or just fall.

  Grubby, who employed the proscribed one-foot-at-a-time method, just fell. It was, Grooms said, kind of like those deals where the captain gets thrown overboard and the unmanned boat does endless 360s, coming back to the same spot to terrorize the poor sap floundering in the water.

  Grubby was run over by his own Segway. That wasn’t the bad part, though. In an effort to get out of the way of the relentless whirling dervish, he rolled out into Main Street just as Number Eleven was making its half-hourly appearance.

  If the bus had only been on time, Grubby would still be with us, Mark Baer observed.

  “What,” Enos Jackson wondered, “are the odds of a city bus being on time?”

  It wasn’t pretty. I am fairly sure that Grubby’s untimely demise won’t make the city and county folks work together any better than they did before, even though everyone said all the right things afterward.

  Grubby was not a bad man. He never fired me, despite the many opportunities I gave him. My main sorrow is that he devoted all that brainpower to the gods of corporate skull-duggery instead of remaining an honest newspaperman, which is what he used to be.

  It turned out Grubby had very little family, just a mother out in the Midwest somewhere. As is our wont in Virginia, we probably will erect a historical
marker somewhere, perhaps not mentioning the Segway incident.

  And so Wheelie, who admits he is “not cut out for this kind of shit,” is now thrust into the role. Well, not thrust. He could have said no, but Wheelie, though he’s still a newspaperman, worries me sometimes. He could be turned, I think, if the paycheck was big enough. Most of us could.

  Somebody suggested that we form a “team” to go full-bore into the Tweety Bird killings. Upon further review, though, we realized that we don’t really have enough “players” any more to form a team. With all the layoffs, cut hours, furloughs and such, we’re about a shortstop and a center fielder shy.

  I have been told, though, that Mark Baer and Sarah Goodnight will be contributing to the effort, when they can find time away from their regular beats, which take up all the forty hours they get paid for and then some.

  Baer and Sarah come by to see what they can do. There’s plenty, but I’ve got to bring them up to speed. It seems to be up to me, being older than both of them combined, to be the leader of our team lite, and I am not exactly the greatest choice for that role. I’ve known lots of reporters over the years who decided at some point that they’d rather be assholes than work for one. Some of them have become my bosses. All I want to do, all I’ve ever wanted to do, is wrestle the news to the ground, tie it in a nice bundle, and get it printed on A1 with my name on it.

  Frankly some make the switch because they wake up one day and realize they aren’t cut out for chasing that breaking-news ball five million times, all the way to retirement. They run out of adrenaline, or they just want a life.

  Sarah still thinks she is cut out for it. I probably should try to steer her in other directions. I have seen what happens when you list “reporter” as your occupation for more than three decades and really give a shit. I see the evidence every morning when I shave.

  Baer, he’s a different case. He still has dreams of working at the Washington Post or the New York Times someday, but reality might be setting in. I’ve seen him in Wheelie’s office a couple of times lately with the door shut. There’s always an editing job available, even in these lean and hungry times. He might be settling, as in settling for being an editor here as opposed to being a reporter here, just in case that Post thing doesn’t work out.