by Howard Owen
She pauses for a few seconds. She has her back to me, pouring the Coke. I see her left hand clench into a fist, then relax.
“It just seemed like a good time to quit.”
She says she was a secretary for thirty-two years at Philip Morris, “long enough to pay for this place.”
After an appropriate amount of time, I get around to asking what I came to ask. At first, it looks like she’s just going to tell me to leave.
“Richard was here Friday night,” she says at last. “Some folks came over, but they were gone by ten, and Richard went to bed right after that. He’s used to going to bed early. He says he has trouble sleeping here, because it’s so quiet.”
Philomena says she went to bed right after the eleven o’clock news, and that Richard was asleep when she looked in on him at eleven thirty—in the bedroom she’d kept waiting for him to return to for the past twenty-eight years.
“Then, when I got up Saturday morning to fix breakfast, about seven, he was in here, watching that sports channel on the TV. You could tell that he’d just woke up.
“I told the police that, told ’em three times, but they believe what they want to believe.”
She’s chopping up some onions, getting supper ready for the boys, or maybe just for herself. She turns toward me and points with her hand, still holding an impressive chopping knife.
“He didn’t do it. He didn’t do it twenty-eight years ago, and he didn’t do it now.”
I’m not inclined to argue with anybody holding a knife that big, but I wonder. Is it possible that Richard Slade could have left the house, done the deed and come back before his mother got up? The shooting happened about a quarter past five. He would have had time.
I ask her about her car. There’s a ten-year-old Camry outside on the street, which must be hers.
“I keep the keys in my purse,” she says. “I keep my purse by my bedside table. I told the police that, too.”
Well, he could have jump-started it. Or, he could have just gotten somebody else to do the deed. Slade probably knew a character or two, from nearly three decades as a guest of the state, who could have done it for him. Or maybe it was just a cousin or a nephew. Maybe revenge takes a village, too.
Philomena shows me his room. There are trophies, from Little League baseball and pee-wee football, then a few from junior high and high school. She probably dusted them off every week, waiting.
“He was quite an athlete,” she says, “and he was full of himself, the way boys are. He was running with some boys that he shouldn’t of been running with. And I was always on him about his grades. But he was a good boy.
“He always told me not to worry, that he was going to go to college and make me proud.”
When they heard the news, later on Saturday, about Alicia Simpson’s murder, Philomena says Richard just “kind of wilted.”
“ ‘Oh, lord, Momma,’ he told me. ‘They gonna think I did it.’ ”
She says it was all she could do to keep him from running, right then.
“I told him, ‘You stay right here, and when they come asking questions, you and I both know where you were, and we’ll tell ’em.’
“And we did, like it did any good. They came for him on Sunday morning, just as we were getting ready to go to church. They took him away, and they stayed here and asked me the same damn—excuse me—the same questions over and over. And telling them the truth didn’t seem to matter.”
I ask her if she thinks Richard would like to talk to somebody from the newspaper, to give his side of the story.
“I don’t know. I’d have to ask Marcus Green.”
Well, I should have figured that one out. I can’t believe our premier bomb-throwing mouthpiece hasn’t already called a press conference of his own.
I tell her I’ll call Mr. Green myself.
At the door, she puts her hand around my wrist. She’s strong for such a wiry woman.
“You come back, now,” she says. “You’re family, even if you do work for that newspaper.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Tuesday
I’m fifteen minutes late. Caught unawares, before she can give me hell for making her wait, Kate is adorable. She’s seated facing the wall, with the left side of her face visible to me. She does that thing where she grips her lower lip with her teeth while she does something deathly important on the iPhone. A strand of her brownish-red hair hangs loose. She has started wearing reading glasses. Maybe she’s been wearing them awhile. Paying attention wasn’t one of my strong suits. She’s frowning a little. I used to put my hands on her forehead when she did that and smooth the frown lines out. Usually, I was the one who had put them there.
She doesn’t see me until I reach down and tuck the stray strand behind her ear. She jerks her head around and sees that it’s me, and the look turns from one of surprise to the kind you give a delinquent child who has met your expectations.
“I figured I’d better get here on time,” she says. “If I waited for you, they might have given our table away.”
Well, no. Not likely. Looking around Can Can, with its loose approximation of a Paris bistro, I see plenty of empty tables. In the Great Recession, some seem to have forgone moules frites.
Still, point taken. Yes, it is a sign of disrespect to always be the waitee instead of the waiter. But I’ve already been around to Marcus Green’s office and been told he’s in court and will be in about two. And then I stopped by Penny Lane for a quick pint, and then a photographer I used to work with before he got laid off dropped in, and we talked for another pint. Time slips away.
She puts away the iPhone.
“This Richard Slade case,” she says, never one for useless verbs. “Any sense in even having the trial before the hanging?”
Kate likes to play devil’s advocate. If you say the sun comes up in the east, she wants to discuss alternative possibilities.
“I am not,” she told me once, when we were arguing about global warming, “a yes woman.”
I tell her that they don’t really do hangings in Virginia anymore, even for black men who kill white women; but the odds seem to favor either a very long stay in a very bad place or an eventual enforced overdose of some very lethal chemicals.
“But he seems so, I don’t know, so innocent.”
“You got that from watching on TV? They didn’t even get to tape him doing the perp walk.”
“I met him.”
“Where? When?”
She gives me a sly smile. As was often the case in our shared past, Kate’s ahead of me.
“Yesterday at the jail. I went with Marcus Green.”
Kate knew Marcus back in the day. I can’t remember now if I introduced him to her or if she knew him first. He’d been a good source, a quote machine, as long as you knew that he had his own agenda and it might not jibe with yours. I haven’t talked to him much since I went back on night cops, but he doesn’t seem to have changed much.
At any rate, we’ve all had a few drinks together over the years.
The Green connection probably explains then why Kate asked me to meet her for lunch today. Her calls to me usually are along the lines of “Why haven’t I gotten the rent check yet?” When she moved out, we reached an agreement. She pays the mortgage and I pay the rent. My ex-wife is my landlady.
“He said he was impressed with what I did in the Martin Fell case.”
I note that there wasn’t really any “case,” since the common-wealth’s attorney chose to free Mr. Fell long before it ever came to trial, mostly due to the efforts of yours truly.
“Still,” she says, “he liked how I took a chance. He said he liked anybody with balls enough to sass Bartley, Bowman and Bush and get away with it.”
“So,” I say, wishing I could smoke indoors, “you’re going to work with Marcus Green? I guess that had something to do with my lunch invitation.”
She graces me with a ten-watt smile.
“Could be. I just wanted to talk, about Richard Slade
and all. You know all the history.”
I fill her in. For some reason, I don’t tell her about my recent visit with Philomena Slade, but I do tell her Abe Custalow’s assessment.
“Well, Abe’s pretty astute,” Kate says. ‘Astute’ isn’t a word I usually associate with my old friend, ex-con and housemate, but it’s probably pretty apt.
She frowns. I resist the urge.
“The guy seems real,” she says, and I deduce that she’s talking about Slade. “I mean, there’s nothing about him that indicates he might have killed somebody for revenge. He just seemed, I don’t know, befuddled, like he couldn’t figure it all out.”
Kate’s munching on the “quiche de la semaine.” I ordered a cheeseburger with French fries, “although I guess you just call them ‘fries’ in here.” The waiter didn’t get the joke. Kate winced.
I tell her that I’m not willing to write Richard Slade out of the book of life just yet, either, even if the police think they’ve got this one tied up with a nice little bow on top.
“Maybe he got somebody else to do it for him,” I say as Kate directs me to wipe ketchup off my chin. “He could’ve orchestrated the whole thing and had it done while he was sleeping at his momma’s.”
“Anyhow,” she says. “I thought maybe we could work together, share information and all that.”
“That could work,” I tell her. It did last time. She got a gold star from BB&B. I got one of those three-dollar Virginia Press Association awards. Wheelie even nominated me for a Pulitzer, which is not so impressive when you realize that you can nominate the weekly school lunch menu listing for a Pulitzer, as long as the check doesn’t bounce.
“There’s something else,” I tell her, after we’ve chitchatted a bit and she’s insisted on picking up the tab.
She looks up from figuring out the tip.
“What?”
“I think the defendant is my second cousin.”
I explain my convoluted kinship with Richard Slade, mentioning Philomena without telling Kate I’ve seen her in the last twenty-four hours.
“Well,” she says, “you might ought to recuse yourself from the case.”
I remind her that I’m a newspaperman, not a lawyer. Plus, nobody at the paper knows, yet, that Slade and I share a couple of great-grandparents.
“So,” she says, “can we, you know, meet once in a while, compare notes and such?”
I nod. Why not?
We walk out together, but we’re parked in different directions.
I ask her how things are going with Mr. Ellis, her present husband.
“His name’s Greg. Everything’s fine. But thanks for asking. Headed in to work?”
I tell her I’m on my way to see Marcus Green.
Green’s office is on Franklin Street, close enough to the paper that I can use the company parking deck and walk there.
He is a lone wolf, no partners, just a couple of assistants, one of whom tells me that she will check and see if Mr. Green is in.
Soon, the door to his office opens and he comes bursting out like the place is on fire.
“Willie! How’s my favorite muckraker? Come on in!”
He slaps my back and gives me a man-hug.
Even if Marcus Green was going to shoot you, he’d treat you like you were his long lost brother. Even if you wanted to shoot him, he’d probably be able to jolly you out of it, if he was trying. The night-and-day aspect of his personality works well in the courtroom and elsewhere. He can make you want to be his best friend and, in the blink of an eye, cop that menacing, fuck-with-me attitude he uses on witnesses and others he wishes to bend to his will.
“Still got your penthouse apartment?”
I tell him that Kate is still my landlady.
He laughs. He has the kind of booming laugh that makes people want to tell him their funniest joke.
“I don’t think I’d like giving either one of my exes the option of kicking me to the curb. Although I do write them each a check every month.” He laughs again, then turns down the volume, goes all solemn on me.
“So, what’s this about?”
I tell him, like he doesn’t know already.
“Do you think there’s a chance I might be able to talk with your client? His mother said I’d need to check with you.”
“You got Philomena to talk to you? Damn, Willie. You are a helluva reporter.”
I don’t tell him, just yet, about my trump card.
“Thanks, by the way, for letting her put my ass out in the middle of the East End the other day.”
Green shrugs.
“It was her call. She was somewhat upset with that racist rag you work for. I don’t blame her, actually.”
I wonder to myself what our editorial department has cooked up in the aftermath of Richard Slade’s arrest. I’m surprised there wasn’t something in this morning’s paper.
I ask him again about meeting with Slade.
He frowns and says he’ll consider it.
“Well,” I tell him, “you might as well have the whole family working with you. Me, you and Kate. The Mod Squad.”
“Ah. So you know about that. Well, I know she’s on the side of the angels. I’m not so sure about you. You’re more like the guy with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other one, both whispering in your ears.”
There doesn’t seem to be any way around it.
“My father and Philomena were first cousins.”
He absorbs this, never showing any sign of surprise. I would hate to play poker with Marcus Green. Actually, the thought of him at one of our Oregon Hill sessions with Custalow, McGonnigal, Andy Peroni and the rest is amusing.
“I always thought you were one of us,” Green says. “Something about the way you carry yourself, your hair, something.”
I doubt it, but if I can win the hand with this particular hole card, so be it.
“Let me see if my client is amenable to your request.”
I look him in the eye.
“He’ll be amenable if you tell him to be.”
Marcus Green gives me a look that could cut diamonds. Then he nods.
“Could be,” he says. “Could be. We’ll have to pray over that one.”
I put up with this bullshit because, for all his grandstanding and playacting, he has walked the walk, a burr in the power structure’s ass since he got out of law school. No name causes more consternation at the Commonwealth Club, where the white-haired great-grandsons of the Confederacy have their bourbon and water with a shot of bile.
He walks me to the door, then stops. He pins me with the look he usually saves for his final summations. His face is like a fist, hard and ready.
“Know this. Richard Slade did not kill that woman, no matter how much some people want it to be so.”
I nod. He dials The Look back a notch.
“Please give my regards to Kate,” he says, and I remind him that he’s likely to see her before I do.
The most mellifluous laugh in Richmond follows me out into the street.
I have time for a Camel between Marcus Green’s office and the paper. I’m a block away when my cellphone rings.
“Willie,” Sarah Goodnight says, “they’re at it again.”
My ID badge still works, although the guard at the front desk looks a little more alert, or at least awake, than usual.
As soon as I come out of the elevator, the tension hits me like a blast of sewer air. Rumors have been perching on our computer terminals like buzzards for weeks. Advertising is down. Circulation is down. Expenses aren’t down far enough. Today, it appears, is the day.
There’s a clot of people over by the features department, where some decidedly uncomfortable-looking human resources boy is watching Beth Reynolds clean out her desk. Jesus Christ, Beth Reynolds has been here longer than I have, and she does what nobody else in the newsroom wants to do. She deals with the brides and—God help her—the brides’ mothers. When they come parading in, determined that absolutely nothing is
going to screw up the social event of their lives, that they are not going to brook any sass from some newspaper flunky, Beth is on the receiving end, defusing them and at the same time preserving whatever dignity our poor tree-killing anachronism clings to. When we get the brides’ photos and IDs somehow mixed up, Beth is the one who catches the mistake and averts disaster. Three years ago, we managed to switch photos of a truck driver who’d just saved a woman’s life in a car fire with that of a very self-important bride. Before she was done, Beth had appeased not only the trucker but both the bride and her mother. If we sent Beth Reynolds to Washington, she could make the Republicans lie down with the Democrats.
And now, apparently, she’s gone. Another one bites the dust.
“There’s six that we know of,” Sally Velez says before she goes over to offer condolences to a fifty-seven-year-old woman who’s about to not have health insurance.
A photographer, a page designer, a copy editor, a sportswriter, Beth Reynolds and an assistant city editor. Chip, chip, chip.
“By the way,” Sally adds, “Wheelie wants to see you. He and Grubby.”
She sees me blanch.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “They’re not going to fire your ass. Not now, anyhow.”
“How do you know?” I figure I must be near the top of the managing editor’s and publisher’s shit lists.
“All the ones that have been axed so far, they got calls from upstairs this morning.”
I check my voice mail back at the apartment, then start breathing again. This place makes me crazy, but what else am I going to do? Media relations?
I walk past Enos Jackson, who looks a little pale. He’s already been brought back from the dead once, thanks to a little secret agreement between me and Grubby, and he doesn’t know that he is—unless Grubby himself gets hauled away—more or less golden.
“You’re next,” I tell him. He doesn’t seem to think it’s funny.
Up on the fourth floor, Sandy McCool looks a little flustered, at least compared with her usual unflappable self. When Pete Bocelli in sports did a face-down in the lunchroom two years ago, it was Sandy who had the defibrillator out and working its magic in about thirty seconds while everybody else was crapping their pants. She saved his fat-ass life, then went back and finished her sandwich.
