Richmond Noir (20 page)
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.
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.
We were walking on a bed of loose rocks and couldn’t have slipped up on a deaf man. We weren’t more than five feet from the shed when the door opened suddenly. I heard Gillespie grunt and jump.
Jordie Randolph had never been a beauty. I’ve seen pictures. Now, she couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds, and her eyes were like a couple of holes somebody had burned into a silk tablecloth. She was in the same shabby bathrobe that had been her preferred garb around the Prestwould. The black wig was slightly askew. She’d tried, for some reason, to put on lipstick in the recent past, with unfortunate results. Under better circumstances, it might have been comical.
She didn’t say a word, didn’t seem even to recognize me.
I said, “Jordie—”
“Put your hands in the air! Get down on the ground! Now!” Gillespie was kneeling as he shouted. He had dropped the flashlight and held his Glock with both hands, the way he’d been taught. In the moonlight, I could see that he was shaking.
I think I said, “Gillespie, don’t,” believing I could convince him that an addled eighty-year-old woman armed with a pack of Nabs didn’t need the full monty.
Jordie looked from Gillespie to me and back again. She didn’t seem at all fazed by the Glock.
“It’s okay, Jordie,” I said, holding my palms up, approaching her an inch at a time with all the caution I would have given a wild, cornered animal. “It’s okay. We just want to help you.”
She did something peculiar then. At first I thought she was crying, but then I realized otherwise. Jordie was not prone to laugh, or even smile, but she was laughing now. When she spoke—“Mac’s dead”—she sounded as sane as I’d ever heard her. “He’s dead.” She wiped her nose and tried to quell a giggle.
I glanced at Gillespie, whose shake had subsided.
“Put your hands in the air!” he repeated.
Before I could do any more brilliant negotiating, Jordie sealed the deal. She raised both hands in the air as instructed, still holding the Nabs. Then she turned her back to us. She was two steps from the side of the building. As a cold gust of wind hit us from the north, she started moving.
Nobody said anything else.
She took three steps, spreading her upraised arms like she thought she might just float down. Before I had time to move, she was, as Gillespie had requested, on the ground. More specifically, she was splattered on top of Bert Campbell’s Cadillac DeVille in the parking lot below, a dark spot we could barely make out, with little lines trickling from it.
“You stupid son of a bitch!” I screamed at Gillespie, and for a moment thought he was going to shoot me. I’m pretty sure I took a swing at him. I must have missed.
“She might’ve been armed,” was what he kept saying, all the way down the elevator.
The next morning, I woke late from a very bad dream. I’d given Jackson his write-through for the metro, then set a personal record by eschewing Penny Lane’s alcoholic charms two nights in a row. When I picked up the paper outside my door, I saw the picture of Jordie Randolph splayed across the top of the Cadillac. It took up five columns. The headline read:
KILLER’S REMORSE?
They had to put the question mark on the end because at that point they could only assume.
It wouldn’t take long, though, for one of Gillespie’s sharp-eyed associates to find the gun, half-buried in the rocks on the Prestwould’s rooftop, like I figured they would.
One call to the New Horizons Adult Home the morning after Mac Constantine’s murder was all it’d taken to find out that Jordie had disappeared two days earlier. By the time they got around to calling her next-of-kin nephew, he wasn’t up to answering the phone, being dead at the time. New Horizons wasn’t much on doing follow-up calls, apparently.
What I figure is this: Jordie still had her keys to the apartment. She came back and got in through the basement door, something the building’s surveillance tape would show as soon as somebody bothered to look at it.
Maybe Constantine wasn’t there when she entered the apartment. Maybe he came home later and she hid. I’m thinking he misjudged his aunt. He probably thought that because she was seriously deranged she also was retarded. But I knew Jordie was able to use a gun. Taylor told me once that their father had taken both girls to firing ranges when they were in their teens and made sure they knew how to shoot. Taylor had kept a gun around the apartment, and one time, years ago, Jordie supposedly got hold of it and threatened to shoot herself over some imagined wrong. Taylor talked her out of it.
Everyone knew Mac Constantine carried a pistol. The one party I’d been to at his Prestwould unit, I was appalled to see that he left it sitting on the kitchen table, like it somehow showed what a tough guy he was. He was just the kind of moron to leave it loaded too.
Maybe Jordie hid in the maid’s room when she heard the door open that night. Maybe she had the gun already. Maybe, when Mac Constantine turned around and saw her, just before he ruined Taylor’s rug with his brains, he didn’t take her seriously. Maybe he laughed.
It was the Nabs that had tipped me off.
When I saw those orange crumbs on the floor and that half-eaten pack sitting on the kitchen counter, I knew Jordie had been there. It was the only thing she seemed to care about eating much of the time, and Taylor kept boxes of them around. It wasn’t like a healthy diet was Jordie Randolph’s biggest worry. And it wasn’t like Mac Constantine to be munching on Nabs. He was more of a foie gras kind of guy.
After she did it, she probably panicked and retreated to the utility room and then, later, up the ladder in the closet to the tool shed on the roof. One time, the first couple of months Kate and I lived there, she’d disappeared for two days, and that’s where they found her, living on Nabs and rainwater.
Next morning, Hanford sent word down, via Jackson, that he wanted a tick-tock piece a.s.a.p., telling everything from the history of the Randolphs to Mac Constantine’s demise, which he saw as the final chapter in another fucked-up Southern family’s spiral to oblivion. He actually used that phrase, which was pretty poetic for Hanford. I saw it as a major invasion of privacy. And the last straw. I went to the fourth floor and told Hanford this, suggesting also that he commit an act of self-gratification. He seemed happy that he didn’t have to fire me. That afternoon I walked over to police headquarters and tried to get Gillespie back walking a beat. They listened politely for a while, then not so politely showed me the door. Jordie Randolph didn’t deserve to have it end the way it did, but you don’t always get what you deserve. Gillespie sure didn’t.
Back home in the Prestwould, I called Kate for the first time since she left.
“What are you going to do?” she asked me after the requisite pregnant pause. She sounded worried. I really don’t think she hates me.
“I haven’t decided,” I told her, as honest as I could be. “I’m not sweating it though. A guy like me, I’ve got plenty of options.”
T
he Raggedy Ann was almost as tall as Tug, who looked not at the doll but at the hand of the man who had flung it on the couch. The man—Mr. Not, as Tug always referred to him, silently—reached up to pat an imaginary loose strand on his head, then looked around the room, as if to survey his property.
“Where’d you find that?” said Tug’s mother Velma. “And what’s that smell? Ray Harold, I thought you hated Tug having Marguerite. Now you bring him home
another
doll?”
“Oh, Vee, quit yapping. I got it at a toy shop over on Broad Street. The owner sprays everything to keep it fresh.” Ray Harold tore at the plastic bag the doll was wrapped in. When he had liberated the thing, he smiled a small, mean smile and thrust the doll at the boy.
“Go ahead, take it, Harold. I told you if you acted like a sissy, I’d treat you like one. You’re nine years old. Stop peeing in your bed and maybe I’ll buy you something for big boys.” Ray Harold bent down and stared into Tug’s eyes. The boy stiffened like a miniature soldier at the sour smell of liquor on Mr. Not’s breath, but he picked up Raggedy Ann from the couch.
“Thank you,” said Tug.
“Thank you,
Uncle Ray
,” corrected Velma. “Where’re your manners?”
“Thank you … Mr. Vermeer,” said Tug.
Ray Harold snorted in disgust. “Vee, pour me a drink. I need to sit down and catch my breath. Regina was at it again tonight, threatening to come over here and break all the windows.”
“Why don’t that woman take care of her own household and quit trying to interfere in mine?” said Velma while she poured her longtime lover a glass of Johnnie Walker. “Tug, this is grown folks’ talk. Take your doll to your room. You can watch that new Batman movie I bought you.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Tug dragged Raggedy Ann by its stitched foot along the hardwood floor. He propped it in a child-size chair in the farthest corner of his bedroom, then inserted
The Dark Knight
into his DVD player and undressed for bed. He kept the sound low, so he could listen to the voices at the other end of the hall. Whenever Mr. Not came around, it was always the same routine.
Tug, go play. Tug, go to your room. Tug, go downstairs. Tug, go next door
. His mother had wanted him to call his godfather Uncle Ray, but Tug refused to call him anything to his face when he could get away with it, and when he couldn’t, he called him Mr. Vermeer. The name sounded to Tug like a cat howling to be let in at night.
Vermeer
. He thought it suited the man whose very presence in the house on East Leigh Street spoke
no
and
not
.
Ordinarily, Tug would become engrossed quickly in a movie, but he couldn’t concentrate with Mr. Not there. He never knew what was going to happen. Mr. Not changed the way his mother acted. When she wasn’t at work in the dining room office downstairs, she spent time doing things with Tug, playing checkers, playing cards, reading to him, taking him skateboarding. But whenever Mr. Not was in the house, her voice changed from being calm and almost musical to sounding whiny and high-pitched. Sometimes, when Mr. Not was around, she even called Tug “Harold,” despite the fact that she’d given him the nickname herself.
“Shhh,” Tug said to Marguerite. She was a bisque brown porcelain doll in a gingham dress, and he held her close to his chest and tiptoed to his hiding place behind the window drapery on the second-floor landing, midway down the hall from his bedroom. It was an excellent place to listen to his mother and Mr. Not …
Velma went to the refrigerator, removed a can of beer, and sat down at the kitchen table.
“Regina says she wants you and Harold out of this house by the end of the summer,” said Ray Harold, already on his third drink.
“I never asked to live here. I never did. I used to think you put me and Tug in this house because you loved me, but I now think it was just cheaper than paying rent on an apartment.” Velma popped the can’s top for punctuation.
“This house is the property of the Vermeer family. We have owned it—”
“For over fifty years,” finished Velma, wiping beer foam from her lip. “I know.” She glared at Ray Harold, then she laughed.
“The thing about you, Velma? You don’t have any class!”
“No, Ray Harold, I don’t. I wasn’t born the illegitimate great-great-grandson of a Confederate captain. I didn’t graduate from Hampton University. I didn’t grow up on Quality Row. And my grandfather didn’t work for Charles T. Russell, the famous black architect.” Velma sat down and faced him across the table. “I don’t have any class, but I do have you, may God have mercy on my soul!” She stood up again. “I’m tired and I’m going to bed. I want to take Tug skateboarding tomorrow, and later on I have some paperwork to do … for you!” She turned off the kitchen light and climbed the stairs to the master bedroom.
“For me,” said Ray Harold. “That’s right. The cancellation of that bid to renovate the Eggleston. And make sure you do it correctly.” He sighed and stared into the bottom of his empty glass.
“Don’t you worry about it. I always do,” replied Velma from the top of the stairs, dragging out the last three words to register her disgust.
Ray Harold was now climbing the stairs behind her. “Yes, you always do, you always do. But in return I let you live here in luxury. I paid for this house—”
“And now I’m paying for it.” Velma moved around her bedroom, finally settling at the vanity to wipe off her makeup.
“Don’t start that shit!” barked Ray Harold, stomping into the room.
“Start what? I don’t know how you treat Regina. I only know how you treat me. And sometimes it takes me months to recover from your brand of loving.” She rubbed her jaw as she checked her reflection in the mirror.
“Then why do you stay?” Strolling over to his mistress, he massaged her neck and shoulders with a gentleness that also declared his ownership.
“Good question.”
“Baby, let’s not fight. I’m going to go home soon and get this mess straightened out.”
“Uh-huh.”
Except for the rustle of sheets and some low groans of pleasure, things were quiet now. Tug guessed they had made up, so he tiptoed back to his room. He left the DVD playing and got into bed, holding his hand over Marguerite’s mouth to keep her from screaming out,
Go home, Mr. Not!
It took awhile before he fell asleep.
In his sleigh bed, Tug flew in living color. He was Mr. Spock looking down at a huge bright planet from his starship in space, a great wizard scanning a shining magic world below. He swooped down and surveyed blue pinetops and green grass that grew into a thick jungle right before his eyes. Then, as he floated in the quiet of dreamtime, clouds started to gather behind and above him, below him, all around him, and the air took on a strange smell with the sweetness of synthesized flowers. Uh oh! Was that a zig-zag? Was the Sandman near? The phone rang. Tug could see Mr. Not’s clown face and smeary smile when he talked. “Regina, I told you to stop calling here. I’ll see you when I get home.” Then Batman sat on Tug’s bed.
I see what I have to become to stop men like him
.
Tug woke to the feeling of a draft on his bottom. The odor of pee and sweat and sleep stuck in his nose. He got up and stripped the sheets from his bed.
When his mother met him coming out of his room, Tug didn’t bother telling her how the zig-zags had wrapped around his legs and squeezed his stomach until he had to land, and she didn’t ask him why he’d wet the bed again. She took the soggy sheets from him.
“Your breakfast is ready, Tug,” she said as she headed to the washing machine in the basement.
“Can we still go to the cemetery?” he called after her, afraid she might not allow him to go skateboarding in the parking lot anymore.
“I don’t see why not,” she answered, her voice calm and even.
Nearly every weekend in good weather, the two of them, and Marguerite, made the trip to the cemetery parking lot on 15th and Broad. Tug’s mother told him it was a sacred space where the ancestors slept below the streets.
“Will they ever wake up?” he’d asked her once.
“Not till Judgment Day, I expect, but they won’t hurt us. This place is special, because most all the people buried under here lived way back, during slavery. Gabriel the Blacksmith is buried here, and he led a slave revolt two hundred years ago. They caught him and hung him on the gallows, but he was a hero to the people.”
“We’re not slaves, Mommy.”
“No, Tug, we’re free, we’ve been free for over 140 years now.”
“Then why does Mr. Not try to own you?”
His mother opened her mouth, then shut it again. “Your godfather loves us, honey. If he seems a little gruff, that’s just his way. I love your … him, maybe too much,” she finally said.
“Gabriel was a blacksmith? Does that mean he worked in a forge, like the black god you showed me in that big book on Africa?” “Like Ogun,” said Tug’s mother, surprised he remembered their conversation about the Yoruba god.
“Yeah, Ogun was a god and a ninja too.” Tug thought of the comics he read at night in bed with Marguerite by his side.
According to their usual Saturday routine, Tug helped his mother make the beds, dust, restack magazines, place books back on their shelves. He did it not simply because it meant they would get to the parking lot sooner, but also because he liked being in the house with nice furniture, clean linen. He enjoyed the rhythms of domesticity.
Skateboarding was the only outdoor activity Tug enjoyed. He looked forward to sailing over the concrete, arms out, knees bent, with open space and no cars to dodge, while his mother and Marguerite watched him fly. Somehow knowing that the parking lot was also a cemetery comforted him. His mother once told him that ever since he was three years old, he’d always had a special affinity for graveyards, turning to look and point whenever they passed one in a car. Now he imagined the graves as a city below the ground, with Gabriel Ogun presiding.
As they were finally preparing to leave for the parking lot, Tug heard the front door open and close. Mr. Not was back. He didn’t usually come around until nighttime.
“Vee, I have to talk to you. Regina threw my clothes and my good shoes outside this morning, and now she’s threatening to come over here and run you out of this house. Harold, go and play while I talk to your mama. And take your sissy doll with you.” Mr. Not grabbed Marguerite and flung her at the boy.
“Go on, it’s okay,” said Tug’s mother. “When we finish discussing business, I’ll take you to the parking lot. Okay?”
Tug backed out the door with his eyes fixed on Mr. Not.
He went and sat in the swing, humming to Marguerite and rubbing her back the way his mother sometimes affectionately rubbed his.
“Go ahead, Marguerite, you can hum too. I lost you last night when I hit the zig-zags. Next time, hold my hand tight, so the Sandman and the zig-zags won’t get us.” Tug had brought his skateboard and backpack with him, and now he rolled the board underfoot back and forth.
He continued to hum while he listened to the escalating discussion in the kitchen. Suddenly, his song was interrupted by the Raggedy Ann doll sailing out the back door, head first, landing in a heap on the ground. The doll had lost its green cap and lay there with legs splayed, its smiling face kissing the grass. Tug left the swing and walked past Raggedy Ann to see who had thrown it out. At first, he thought it was Glenda the Good Witch, but when she said his name he realized it had been his mother. With her silk dressing gown streaming behind her, she strode over to Tug and grabbed him by the hand. Tendrils of hair had come loose from her long ponytail.
“I’m going to bring you next door to Mrs. Richardson’s house, and you stay there until I come get you.”
“But you said you were going to take me skateboarding.”
“I am, I will, but just wait there until I come get you.”
Mrs. Richardson was accustomed to her friend and neighbor Velma Holloway sometimes arriving unannounced with her son. Tug’s mother told him to sit down in the family room, then walked with Mrs. Richardson into the kitchen. When they returned from their brief conference, his mother said, “You mind Mrs. Richardson. I’ll be back in a few minutes, then we’ll go to the parking lot. Let me go get my business straight. Thanks, Betty.”
Tug folded his arms and looked away when she tried to kiss his cheek. After she left, Mrs. Richardson inserted a DVD of Tug’s favorite movie,
The Wizard of Oz
. “Call me when it gets to the part with the lollipop kids. That cracks me up,” she said. Then she returned to the kitchen to finish chopping vegetables while listening to Smokey Robinson croon, “
Ooo baby, babeee … I did you wrong
,” on Power 92, oldies-but-goodies radio.
The witch’s feet shriveled up and disappeared under the house, but Tug wasn’t thrilled the way he usually was. “Marguerite, do you think Mr. Not’s going to make Mommy cry again?” He looked around for Marguerite, only to realize he’d left her and the skateboard by the swing.
Going out the side door, Tug ran from Mrs. Richardson’s yard directly into his own. There was no fence dividing the two row houses. He gently lifted Marguerite and patted her head.
“I didn’t mean to leave you. It’s just that Mommy was rushing me.” As he turned to go back the way he came, Tug heard raised voices from the second floor of his house.
With Marguerite in tow, he ran inside and crept up the carpeted stairs. He walked past the bathroom and glimpsed Mr. Not shaving at the mirror that hung over the sink. Then Tug rounded the corner and saw his mother sitting on her bed, arms crossed, smoking a cigarette. He took a few quiet steps back and watched as Mr. Not turned his head at odd angles, like a bird trying to see behind itself, as he delicately pressed blade to skin to get the last bit of stubble from his lower jaw. Silence had overtaken the bickering couple. Tug thought he heard the faint music of an ice cream truck, but didn’t run to his mother. He went and hid with Marguerite behind the long velvet drapes on the second-floor landing, where he could observe. He listened for something he could not know he was listening for, a prelude to a kind of dance. Velma’s shaking foot kept time …
