Richmond Noir

by Andrew Blossom

  The new broom was being wielded by Hanford. Hanford the Hangman, they called him. Probably still do. He’s a forty-something ex-jarhead and seems to be under the mistaken belief that he stormed Iwo Jima. They’d brought him in from some place where grace is considered a liability. He’s the kind of stiff who’s necessary so the guys at the top, the real money, don’t have to get their hands dirty with firings and demotions and such. He’d been there a month when Jackson called me aside and told me, off the record, that Hanford had informed all the department heads that he wanted them to “work ’em till they drop.”

  Maybe Hanford thought I was too old, although he put me on a beat that would wear even a young guy down. Maybe he’s prejudiced against smokers. Or so-called heavy drinkers.

  Maybe it was because I flat out refused to slip into our former lieutenant governor’s hospital room and get a damn deathbed story from a poor sap who was dying of AIDS. Who can say?

  At any rate, Jackson called me in to tell me there was a reorganization. Night cops. The night police beat.

  “I do it to you,” he told me, not quite looking at me with those tired, bloodshot eyes, “or he does it to you, after he fires me.” I appreciated his honesty. And I figured Jackson would probably be gone before me. He made more money. Everybody around that sinking ship knew the bottom line. The publisher’s favorite saying was, “It is what it is,” code for, Shut up and keep rearranging those deck chairs …

  So, it was a Friday night. We knew it was Pearl Harbor Day because, in a private e-mail sent to everyone who worked at the paper, from receptionists to pressmen, Hanford reamed out the poor night guy who’d failed to run a story on A1 to that effect.

  Around 10:30 I heard, over the cop radio, turned up just loud enough so it didn’t disturb the copy desk watching an NBA game on one of the overhead TVs, that there’d been a shooting at 612 West Franklin.

  I stopped playing solitaire on the computer.

  “Isn’t that your … ?” Sally Velez asked me from the metro desk.

  “Yeah,” I said, and was on the elevator in about a minute.

  612 West Franklin is the Prestwould, where I was living. It hovers over Monroe Park like a dark angel, casting its twelve-story shadow across the college kids and the homeless. They’d brought a guy down from New York City in the late ’20s to build it. Guess they had what you’d call delusions of grandeur. They finished it just in time for the Great Depression to punch in and end that kind of fairy-tale building. But it’s something. The sick puppy who had the unit across from mine, halfway up, said that if the 9/11 bastards had flown those planes into the Prestwould, they’d have just bounced off and killed a bunch of bums in the park.

  The place has a lot of characters in it, but mostly of the midnight-and-magnolias Old Richmond type. The majority of them, to my knowledge, do not pack heat.

  I was there in ten minutes. The night photo guy was out covering a fatality on the interstate, so I’d grabbed one of those moron cameras even reporters can use. They’d trained me how to use it the previous week. There wasn’t much crime-scene photography at the legislature, although maybe there should have been.

  I saw Gillespie as soon as I got out of the beat-up company Citation and put out the Camel I wasn’t supposed to be smoking in it. He was leaning his fat butt against the patrol car. He’d been a young cop when I was on my first tour as police reporter, more than twenty-five years ago. He recognized me.

  “Black,” he said. It wasn’t a greeting, just a confirmation. “I heard they kicked your ass back to the curb. You’ve put on weight.”

  I mentioned that he seemed to have cornered the Krispy Kreme market.

  He gave me the finger, but otherwise didn’t seem to take offense as we braced ourselves against the wind.

  “What happened?” I looked up the side of the building. Most of the lights were out. The residents of the Prestwould were so used to sirens screaming by on Belvidere and Franklin that most of them wouldn’t know what had happened until morning. Only the twelfth floor, the Randolph unit, was lit.

  “We got a call from the night security guy,” Gillespie said. “He got a call from some guy on eleven, saying he’d heard gunshots up above him.”

  Nobody had really lived in that apartment since Taylor Randolph died in October. Far as anyone knew, her nephew, Mac Constantine, was her only living family, other than her sister Jordan, who the nephew had moved into an adult group home. Said it wouldn’t be safe for Aunt Jordie to be there by herself. He was a jerk, but maybe he was right. The nephew inherited the unit, and he stayed there sometimes. I’d been to one of his parties. I figured he would put it up for sale or just move in permanently, if he could afford to. The Randolphs were Commonwealth Club from way back, knew all the right people, but I knew Taylor had been hard-pressed to pay a four-figure condo fee, assessments, and seven grand a year in property taxes.

  I’m renting, thank God.

  When they went up, Gillespie and the other two cops, they found the door cracked. Inside, they found the nephew. It was a mess, Gillespie said, and when they let me up, I could see that the carpet looked like somebody had spilled a gallon of cheap Pinot Noir all over it. Pieces of indeterminate matter that probably used to be part of Mac Constantine’s brains speckled the rug and white walls. What was left of his head was, like the rest of him, under a sheet that was getting stained from beneath.

  “You don’t wanna see,” Gillespie said before I even asked.

  “So where … ?”

  “We figure the service elevator. Didn’t take the main one, or the guard would have seen him come out. Down there, up the stairs, out the back door. He must have took the gun with him.”

  I walked through the rest of the unit. A lot of Taylor’s clothes were still in the closets. A half-empty bottle of Coke sat on the kitchen counter alongside the remains of a half-eaten pack of cheese Nabs.

  I got the basics and was back at the paper in another twenty minutes, in time to get something in for the city edition. They even used one of the photos I took.

  “Good job,” Sally Velez said to me. “You might have a future in this business.” I gave her the same one-finger salute Gillespie had given me.

  I skipped the usual round or three at Penny Lane. Something was bothering me. It was like that piece of meat you realizeis wedged between your molars after you’ve eaten a good steak. You know you can’t stop until you find a toothpick.

  Next day, I took my morning stroll through the Fan. People were out walking their dogs, raking leaves, doing all the crap people do. Kate and I’d had a town house over near the river, and we’d spend Saturday mornings like that, more or less.

  Kate was my most recent wife. She was the one who’d wanted to move to the Prestwould. Said she’d seen it all her life and always imagined what it would be like to live there. We’d only been married eight months when we stumbled on a rare rental unit and did the deed.

  I’m not sure Kate understood what she was getting into, marrying me. What might have seemed at least regionally exotic—hearing my stories of state senators acting badly, going to cocktail parties where the governor called me by my first name (he knew the janitors’ first names too)—soon just became a pain in the ass. So did those long nights waiting for me. And then not waiting for me.

  I could’ve drunk less, I’m sure. There were times when it would have been hard to have drunk more, and she wasn’t the only one that was guilty of tippy-toeing outside the sacred bonds. Like our charming city’s teenage drug desperadoes, who seem to believe that thinking might hamper their nerve or their aim, I have been known to not properly consider the consequences of my actions.

  Because she’s a lawyer headed for partner and I’m a half-assed, broken-down political writer turned night-cops reporter, she hasn’t been busting my chops. I don’t even think she hates me. Maybe she just sees me as a youthful indiscretion, something she can learn from and get over.

  She surprised me by moving out of the Prestwould herself inste
ad of telling me to. Said the place was pretty much ruined for her. It isn’t exactly growing on me either, but it’s a roof, at least until I can’t make rent anymore.

  The ten-incher I did on Mac Constantine’s murder was on A1. Couple of black guys get gunned down in the East End and it’s B6, maybe B1 if it’s a slow news day. But Mac Constantine was rich and white. Since Taylor Randolph was descended from two presidents, I suppose Mac was too. And he had been on the city council.

  At the end of my daily constitutional, I waded my way through the TV trucks and a couple of dozen reporters and cameramen who weren’t allowed inside the Prestwould. They were waylaying every elderly citizen who tried to get past them and into the building. Good thing we have security guards. A couple of the TV folk, trying to save their well-tended hair from the wind that was bringing in the season’s first real cold front, recognized me and begged to be let inside. I made sure the door closed all the way.

  When I got up to the twelfth floor, I saw they’d padlocked the door and sealed it off with yellow crime tape. As I went through the door separating the lobby from the back stairs and turned a corner, though, I saw that Gillespie was the same fiend for detail he’d always been. The back door, the one that opened into Taylor Randolph’s kitchen, was untouched, even though they must have gone out that way the night before to check on the service elevator I was standing alongside. The door was locked, but Taylor had entrusted me with a key. I think she’d given one to half a dozen other residents, just in case she needed help. She worried a lot, about her health and about Jordie.

  Jordie wasn’t quite right. One day, after I’d helped move some furniture, Taylor told me, over Scotch, cheese, and crackers, that she was afraid of what might happen to her sister if she, Taylor, went first. She didn’t expect that, but she was still worried. Her nephew and heir had promised to take care of Jordie, but Taylor frowned when she said it.

  Jordie was pretty much given the run of the Prestwould. She was close to eighty, I guess, about five years older than Taylor. They both had snow-white hair, although Jordie was fond of wearing a black wig that scared small children. Both seemed like they’d live to be a hundred. You never knew when you might suddenly run into Jordie, riding the elevator or walking from room to room in the basement, sometimes talking to herself, sometimes perfectly sane. The sisters had never married, and everyone said Taylor gave up everything to take care of Jordie, who’d started hearing those little voices when she was still in her teens. A combination of pills, Taylor, money, and an occasional visit to rest at Tucker’s had kept her among the uninstitutionalized. At least until Taylor’s heart suddenly gave out one Sunday morning.

  I wasn’t there when they took Jordie away, and was glad I wasn’t, from what I heard. Jordie did not go gently into that good night of the adult home. Mac Constantine reportedly said that it was the only solution, that he wouldn’t be able to take care of her, not even if he moved in with her. Evidently, Taylor hadn’t made her wishes specific enough in her will to ensure that one of the last two surviving members of her old and tapped-out family did right by the other.

  Jordie was, to say it plain, thrown out like bad meat.

  I let myself in through the back door. Everything was pretty much the way it had been left the night before, including Mac Constantine’s blood on the Turkish carpet, a dark brown Rorschach blot no rug cleaner was ever going to remove. The radiator was doing its usual version of the Anvil Chorus and filling the room with heat that smelled like rusty metal.

  It didn’t take long to confirm what I thought I’d seen the night before. Take a few memories, stir in a flash of color you glimpse from the corner of your eye, add one phone call. I guess you couldn’t really fault Gillespie, sap that he is, for not knowing what he couldn’t have known. Although I’d have plenty to blame him for later.

  When I got to work, Jackson wanted to know where the hell I’d been and what was I doing about the Mac Constantine murder. It was all over TV, perfect for the good-hair people to get all breathless about, even if they didn’t know shit.

  I’d checked in with Gillespie and confirmed that the cops were grilling just about anybody who’d gone to one of Mac Constantine’s parties. They’d been the talk of the Prestwould since he’d started staying there on occasion. There were some good leads, although so far everyone seemed to have a solid alibi. Constantine was a collector. What he collected was enemies. There had been a couple of fights, because that’s what Constantine apparently did when he had too much to drink. Hell, that’s why he wasn’t on city council anymore. Nobody who watched council meetings on public access TV would ever forget the night he came straight to a meeting from the lounge at the Jefferson Hotel and wound up duking it out with one of his constituents. The constituent, who’d had truth on his side, had accused Constantine of being the hired boy of a developer trying to turn a block of Jackson Ward into high-rise condos.

  “I’ll have something for the first edition,” I told Jackson, then advised him I might have something better for the metro. When he asked me what, I told him to wait for it. “You know,” he said, “it’s crap like that, knowing stuff and not writing it, that got your ass put on the police beat.” If it hadn’t been that, I told him, it would have been something else. And walked back to my desk.

  The newsroom seems like it’s running on low power these days, and it isn’t just that you can’t make as much noise with a computer keyboard as you could with a typewriter, or that half the editors have wires coming from their ears so they can listen to music and not be bothered by such irritants as conversation. It’s more than that, more than the weak-ass lighting suitable to computer moles but not to actual life on planet Earth. The problem is, despite the directives that we should be a twenty-four-hour-a-day news source, there just aren’t as many bodies. Revenue is down, so expenses (meaning reporters and other such frivolities) have to be down too. Nobody admits to a hiring freeze, but there are icicles on the ceiling.

  I saw Hanford hanging over the shoulder of one of the page designers. The headline read, WHO KILLED MAC CONSTANTINE? “Yeah,” Hanford said, slapping his thigh the way you would if somebody told you the funniest joke in the world. “Yeah. That’ll sell some damn papers.”

  Maybe, I thought, you’ll have to rip that up before the night’s done.

  The moon was rising pale as a frozen ghost over the Hotel John Marshall when Gillespie picked me up in front of the Times-Dispatch building. It was almost 9, and my first story, the one that would hold a spot until later, had already cleared customs with the copy desk.

  “This,” said Gillespie, who didn’t even know what a clichéwas, “had better be good.” We turned on 4th Street and then west on Grace. At the Belvidere stoplight, I looked up and thought I saw what I was looking for, barely visible from down below. Gillespie parked his cruiser in the loading zone in front of the Prestwould, and we went in.

  Like Jackson, he wanted to play Twenty Questions, but I wasn’t saying anything until we got up there. Gillespie was panting just from climbing up the front steps, the wind nipping at our heels. I was thankful the elevator was working.

  When we stepped out on twelve, I finally told him what I was thinking, and about what I’d seen from his car. “You won’t need it,” I said as he reached for his Glock.

  “Let me be the judge of that.”

  I led him through to the hallway where the service elevator was, and he actually seemed surprised to see there was a back door, which I unlocked with Taylor’s key.

  “I hope you haven’t been snooping in here, compromising a crime scene,” Gillespie said.

  I didn’t grace him with an answer.

  It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so sad. The Nabs were still on the kitchen counter, and you could follow the trail of orange into the utility room. It used to be a maid’s room, back when everybody at the Prestwould had live-in help. Taylor had used it mostly for storage. Where the maid’s postage-stamp toilet had been, there was now a closet.

&n
bsp; I walked over to the closet and opened the door. The ladder was still there, the way I remembered it the time Taylor showed me.

  “How the hell am I supposed to get through that?” Gillespie asked me, looking up at the two-by-two covering.

  “Don’t worry your fat butt. There’s an easier way.”

  I led him back through the kitchen door, then another that led to the back stairwell. We climbed it and came to the locked door leading to the roof, Gillespie breathing hard. The building manager always had the key, and I had tipped him pretty well at Christmas. When I’d stopped by to see him earlier that afternoon, he remembered my generosity.

  “Thirteenth floor,” I said as I worked the key. The terrace. That’s what they called it whenever somebody, usually a newcomer, would have the bright idea of putting a swimming pool or a garden up there. The old-timers would have to explain to the sap about the cost involved, plus damage to a roof that already leaked like a sieve whenever we had a tropical storm.

  “Remember,” I told Gillespie, “no gunplay.” He grunted and I pushed the door open.

  You could see why anyone would’ve wanted a garden or something up there. Under the full moon, the downtown buildings were outlined in lights for the holidays. Richmond may have showed its age spots and wrinkles in the sunshine, but the old girl looked good at night in December. Directly below and across West Franklin, Monroe Park’s lights winked up at us. It would have been a pretty place to have a bourbon or two on a summer night and put the day in a sleeper hold.

  I wasn’t much in the mood for sightseeing, though. For one thing, it was cold as a gravedigger’s ass.

  We tiptoed across the roof like it was a minefield. I couldn’t swear we wouldn’t hit a soft spot and fall through. Gillespie had his flashlight, and I glimpsed the rectangular shape I’d remembered, off to the east side. It was a kind of half-assed tool shed, built for who the hell knows what. A sliver of light, which I’d seen ten minutes ago from Gillespie’s car, leaked out of it.