by Howard Owen
“So where were you yesterday? I thought maybe Marcus was on his own.”
She sighs and lowers her voice.
“BB&B is not too happy with me right now,” she says. “I think somebody above my pay grade doesn’t want me to get involved.”
I note that this is quite possible. People trying to help Richard Slade seem to be running into a lot of stone walls, mostly hidden behind boxwoods, covered with ivy and smelling like old money when you smash into them face-first.
“They suspended you?” she says. “How can they do that?”
I remind her that they can do any damn thing they want, just like BB&B can.
“Anyhow,” she says, “I’m still working with Marcus, pro bono. I can’t even talk about Richard Slade around here.”
“Which is why I can barely hear you right now.”
“Right.”
I tell her about my little slipup with the receptionist, since I’m sure she’ll hear about it anyhow.
“Funny,” she says, but she doesn’t sound amused. “Willie, that ship has already left the dock.”
I want to mention that it made landfall briefly in Willieland a couple of days ago, but that would be tacky.
I have a couple of beers with Custalow back at the old home place, explaining my employment situation yet again.
He advises me to watch my ass. Neither one of us can afford to rent this place on one salary, at least not for long.
I ask him if he thinks I should drop Richard Slade like the hot potato he is.
He stops with a sandwich inches from his mouth.
“Hell, no. Not unless you think he did it. Remember the WWSD Oath.”
Despite the fact that Custalow has been living with me for a while, and despite the fact that I see McGonnigal and Andy Peroni every once in a while, the oath hasn’t come up in a long time, until now. I’d almost forgotten it.
When we were shit-kicking kids on the Hill, we saw too many Steve McQueen movies where right and wrong glowed like neon signs even a blind man could see.
Right after we watched The Great Escape on Peggy’s TV late one Friday night, Goat Johnson, always the romantic, said we ought to make some kind of pact, an oath, to always do the right thing, no matter how much trouble it caused us. So we invented the WWSD Oath: What Would Steve Do?
It was laughable, because we were pretty good at doing the wrong thing. What the oath seemed to mean to us, looking back on it, was that we’d never let the threat of a major ass-kicking keep us from defending our screwed-up version of honor and virtue.
The next day, we broke a Rolling Rock bottle out back of the Chuck Wagon. The ceremony involved blood and spit. Then Goat broke it into smaller pieces, and we each put one in our pocket—jagged, green and dangerous, a constant reminder.
I found mine a couple of years ago in the back of my sock drawer. I didn’t throw it away, but I’m not carrying it in my pocket, either.
If one of us was skipping school and asked one of the others to skip with him, you did it, because he was your friend. If a bunch of kids from some other self-styled gang wanted to try to beat the crap out of us, we were at their service. It would be wrong to back down. If, when we got our licenses, we passed somebody on the road with the hood up, we stopped to help, even if the sight of three or four Hill boys climbing out of a beat-up jalopy usually scared the shit out of the stranded driver.
We’ve all broken quite a few oaths and screwed up in our various ways, but it’s damn touching that Custalow remembers the oath and cares enough to remind me of it.
“Yeah,” I say, as the sandwich continues its path to his mouth. “The oath. Right.”
I don’t feel like watching reruns, and I did promise Sarah Goodnight that I’d give her some guidance her first night on night cops. Custalow says reruns are fine with him.
I drop by the paper for an hour that turns into three. Sarah Goodnight needs to be officially introduced to whoever’s at the precinct. When we get there, I’m glad to see Gillespie’s red, shiny face, because I think I can count on him to keep an eye on her. He doesn’t owe me any favors, but, Gillespie never knows when he’s going to need one from me.
And then, against all odds, there is a dirt nap, down in Shockoe Bottom. Usually, those happen when all the bars close and the serious drunks spill out onto East Main. But this one happened at a little after ten, just as I was about to head down to Penny Lane and give the economy a shot in the arm.
She handled it like a pro. I tried not to hover, reminded not for the first time that she’s only two or three years older than Andi. The age-inappropriate thing has never stopped me before, but when she asked me, on the way back to the paper, if I’d like to have a nightcap after she got off work, I surprised myself by begging off. Maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe it was the way she said “nightcap,” like some little kid who’d picked up the phrase from an old black-and-white movie.
Maybe it was the goddamn oath.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Saturday
Job One today is finding Bump Freeman. Richard Slade wasn’t quite sure which house is Freeman’s present abode, and it isn’t like I can pick up the damn phone and call Slade at the city lockup right now. So, off to the East End.
Nobody who lives there and doesn’t know me is going to give me the time of day, which is nine thirty A.M. when I park the car out front and knock on Philomena Slade’s front door.
It takes a little back-and-forth for her to decide that I might still be trying to help her son.
“So, are you on it or off it?” she asks me, with her arms crossed, standing like a bouncer behind her screen door.
“I’ve always been on it, Philomena.”
“So who was that white boy you brought around here yesterday?”
I explain to her, as honestly as I can, about being taken off the story. She grills me awhile longer.
Then she sighs and finally opens the door.
“You’re like one of those double agents,” she says. “You playing both sides against the middle.”
I want to tell her that I’ve been doing that my whole life, and making a pretty good living at it.
“Someday,” she says, her hands on her hips, “you’ve got to pick one team or the other.”
She tells me that Bump is living with his aunt, two blocks up the street on the other side. She gives me the house number.
“He wouldn’t look me in the eye for twenty years after Richard went away,” she says. “That boy has always been trouble. I think he was the one that got Richard and them to go to that white folks’ swimming hole that night.”
I thank her and start to leave.
“Wait a minute.”
I turn, and she’s putting on her overcoat.
“If they don’t know you, they’re not going to tell you anything.”
I thank her. She gives me a hard stare.
“It isn’t for you. It’s for Richard.”
The neighborhood goes downhill at a fairly steady pace between Philomena’s place and our destination. Bump Freeman’s aunt’s house is in the middle of the block, better kept-up than most of the ones around it. A couple of them look like they’re abandoned, waiting to be homesteaded by dealers or our fair city’s growing homeless population.
The sight of a presumed white guy, even accompanied by one of the neighborhood’s more solid citizens, apparently is enough to raise the alarm. A lady who appears to be about Philomena’s age finally opens the door a crack and asks, none too friendly, “What you want?”
I start to talk, but then my guide steps up and does the heavy lifting for me, explaining that we just want to find out whether Bump can vouch for her son’s comings and goings the week before, in the hours before Alicia Simpson’s brains were splattered all over her nice new car.
“Bump hasn’t done nothin.’ He’s been straight for almost two years,” the woman starts to protest. Philomena says she knows that’s true, but that Richard and Bump had a beer together down by the city d
ocks, and it might help Richard if he could prove where he was.
“Bump didn’t do nothin’, ” she says. “He just said he wanted to see Richard, talk to him, maybe be friends again.”
Here, I step in, playing the moderately bad cop. I explain to Bump’s aunt that I’m not a policeman, that I’m from the newspaper, and that I’m Richard Slade’s cousin. She is on the verge of dismissing this as bullshit. She looks at Philomena, who nods her head.
“We intend to get to the bottom of this. I’m just trying to help Richard,” I tell her. “And if you want to keep your nephew out of trouble, you’d be smart to help us. It’ll be better if he tells me instead of having the cops come knocking, which they will pretty soon.”
Actually, I can’t believe the police haven’t been here already.
She considers this and then goes down a long, narrow hallway that I presume leads to Bump Freeman’s bed.
He comes out a few minutes later, rubbing his eyes, wearing pajama bottoms and a long-sleeved T-shirt. Assuming that he didn’t come straight home from his shift, he’s probably had only a few hours of sleep.
He nods at Philomena, who doesn’t nod back, then looks at me.
“What you want?”
I tell him what everybody already knows, that Richard Slade is down in the city jail, accused of killing Alicia Simpson, and that he might be Richard’s alibi.
“He didn’t do nothing to that girl,” Bump says as his aunt brings the cup of coffee that so far has not been offered to Philomena or me. I don’t know whether he means back then or last week. Both Richard’s mother and I have sense enough to let Bump talk.
I go through the whole chain of events, as told to us by Richard. They left for the docks at two, stopped by the convenience store about three thirty, back to Philomena’s by four thirty. His story and Slade’s are similar enough to be believable, considering that they almost certainly haven’t talked in the last week—unless, of course, they plotted the whole thing out ahead of time.
“Well,” I say, when he’s done, “how do you know he ‘didn’t do nothing to that girl’?”
Bump stares at me, wondering if I’m making fun of him or not.
“He wouldn’t,” Bump finally says. “He was goin’ on about how he had to forgive, for his peace of mind. He found Jesus or some such shit, when he was locked up. Me, I’d’ve cut the bitch up for bait . . .”
He stops and offers his apologies to his aunt and Philomena.
“And you didn’t see him after four thirty?”
“No. I did call, though.”
I’m thinking he tried to call later that day, like after the sun came up.
“When?”
He scratches and yawns.
“About half an hour later, I reckon.”
“Like about five? Five a.m?”
He looks at me like I’m stupid.
“Yeah, A.M. The one in the morning.”
“Why?”
“He left his cap in the car. I wanted to let him know.”
“And he answered the phone?”
The look again.
“Yeah. But he sounded like he was about half asleep already. Said something about comin’ by to pick it up sometime, but he never did.”
“And you’re pretty sure it was about five A.M.”
“Yeah. It might of been five minutes one way or the other, but I remember lookin’ at the clock when I came in, just a little after four thirty. I made myself a sandwich, and then I went to the bathroom, and then I called him.”
I ask Bump for his phone number. He doesn’t give it to me, but his aunt does.
I thank them both for their help.
“I ain’t been much help to ol’ Richard,” he says, looking toward Philomena, who doesn’t say anything.
We walk back. I ask Philomena if I can come inside for a minute, to check something.
I go to the phone and use the feature that shows who’s called lately. Working back through several numbers I don’t know, I finally come up with the one Bump Freeman’s aunt just gave me.
As it turns out, Bump’s sense of time is pretty much dead on:
1/22/10. 5:01 A.M. 45 seconds.
I ask Philomena why Bump’s call didn’t wake her up. She tells me she unplugs the phone next to her bed before she goes to sleep.
“Too many drunks and salesmen calling.”
It isn’t much. Slade and Bump Freeman could have cooked all this up. Bump probably would have been on board for a little revenge, even though it wasn’t his ox being gored.
But Bump doesn’t seem like what you would call clever. And if Bump isn’t clever enough to be in cahoots with Richard Slade, then Slade was in his mother’s house at one minute after five, fourteen minutes before Alicia Parker Simpson met her demise. Even if he had run out the door, jumped in somebody’s car and driven like a bat out of hell, then slowed down just enough at that intersection to blow Alicia’s brains out, I’m not sure he could have done it in fourteen minutes.
“Did that thing with the phone help?” Momma Phil asks me.
I told her that it certainly doesn’t hurt.
I stop by the office. I seem to be putting in more hours working for free than I was when they were paying me.
There’s one message, from Susan Winston-Jones.
“Call me,” Bitsy says. “I just thought of something. About Alicia.”
I go into one of the assistant editors’ offices and shut the door. Bitsy answers on the third ring.
“Here’s the thing,” she says. “I’ve got this cellphone? But I don’t use it that often. My kids nag me about it. They’ve got iPhones and Bluetooths, Blueteeth, whatever. All kinds of crap that I don’t even know what they do. But I can’t seem to get in the habit of even taking my damn cellphone with me. Or checking my messages.”
Bitsy talks at a volume that indicates she doesn’t really believe a phone can carry her voice all the way across town unless she speaks into it very loudly. I hold the phone a couple of inches from my ear and wait silently for the payoff.
“Well,” she says, “I was going up to Fredericksburg yesterday, to see an old friend up there?—a friend of Alicia’s, too, actually. We all grew up in the same neighborhood. We used to . . . but I digress.”
Yes, I think, you do.
“So, for once, I thought to take the cellphone with me. And when I went to get it, where it had been charging for about ten days, for some reason I checked the calls missed.
“There were about a dozen, mostly from people who don’t know what a cellphone idiot I am. But there was one that got my attention right away. Guess who it was from?”
“Alicia.”
“How did you know that?”
“Lucky guess.” Why else would you be calling me to tell me about it?
“Well,” she says, “the phone said she called me on the nineteenth, the Friday before she died. She sounded kind of, I don’t know, weird, tired, something. Damn, why didn’t she just call me on my regular phone? I always check my messages on that. She knows—she knew—what a Luddite I am.”
I ask Bitsy what Alicia said, trying to head off another digression.
“She said she wanted me to know something, in case there was an emergency, in case something happened to her. She said she wasn’t really that worried, but I could tell from her voice that she was. She said if she wasn’t able to do it herself, that I should go to the bricks. I had to think for a minute, but then I knew.”
I ask for the English translation. She said when she and Alicia were kids, they used to play this game. Their houses were just down the street from each other, and each one had a brick patio out back. The girls would leave messages for one another at a designated spot under loose bricks on each other’s patio.
“I’d slip over there, after everyone went to bed, and leave her a note, or a little trinket, maybe a necklace or something. We eventually dug out little holes under the bricks. Then she’d go out when nobody was looking, move the bricks and retrieve it
. Then, she’d do the same thing for me. We thought we were little spies. Nobody knew about the loose bricks except us. We couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven, and we probably did it for a couple of years before we got too old for it.”
“So,” I say when Bitsy stops to take a breath, “she told you to go to the bricks.”
“My parents are still alive, and they still live where I grew up,” she says, now that she has her second wind. “I went over there this morning. They must have thought I was crazy, picking up those loose bricks and looking underneath them.”
“And?”
“Nothing. Nothing but the little empty space we’d dug out underneath where she would leave my ‘treasures,’ she called them.”
“So, dead end.”
“Yeah. Dead end. But she was worried about something, Mr. Black.”
“Willie.”
“Willie. She was talking about it like she expected something to happen to her.”
The Alicia Parker Simpson I remember, augmented with what I’ve heard, was quite capable of an overactive imagination, especially with the man she put behind bars for twenty-eight years recently released. But had Richard Slade made some kind of threat to her, maybe through an old acquaintance like Bump Freeman? I’m still trying to get my brain around the five A.M. phone call that Slade apparently took at his mother’s house.
My head hurts.
I look up at the clock in the conference room. It’s four thirty, and I’m long overdue for a smoke.
On the way to the elevator, I hear the opening bars of “Wooly Bully” and realize it’s coming from my pants. I pull out my cellphone and stare at it in mute wonder when I hear Sarah giggling twenty feet away, holding her own phone to her ear.
I remember that she borrowed my phone briefly last night to call the office when I was giving her the Night Cops 101 course, just long enough to change the ringtone.
I answer, just so Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs will shut the fuck up.
Somebody, I tell Sarah, needs a spanking.
On the way outside, before I can change the ringtone, it rings again.
“Give it a rest, Sarah,” I say before I’m interrupted.
