The Bottom (13 page)

I catch Johnny Grimes by phone before nine, which is always good. After nine, Johnny’s not much good for information. By ten, he has trouble speaking in coherent sentences.

He was a great reporter for us once upon a time. We nominated him for Pulitzers twice, and he was a finalist once, but after the
New York
Fucking
Times
got through giving itself three or four and the
Washington Post
got a couple and they threw the obligatory one to some dog-ass weekly that caught the mayor screwing a goat, there weren’t any left for Johnny Grimes.

He and I used to drink together. When people tell me I have a drinking problem, I tell them they should have seen Johnny Grimes.

Johnny lost control of the bottle sometime in his thirties, when I was still a pup and viewed him as the epitome of what the hard-boiled newsman should be. Perhaps I can attribute some of my missteps to the fact that I didn’t choose the right role models. Johnny missed assignments, once passed out during a city council meeting and was known to fall asleep at his desk. The managing editor finally got so mad at him that he sent him to sports, where bad quickly became worse, abetted by professional drinkers like Bootie Carmichael. Yeah, I was there too, buying rounds and listening to the stories.

They finally let him go, and we assumed he’d turn up in an obit. We tried to keep in touch with him, and he disappeared for a time, taking a job out in Montana, where sobriety standards apparently are a bit less restrictive.

And then, one day, he resurfaced, at the Southside Herald. It’s a weekly with about 5,000 circulation and a staff to match. But Johnny’s done well there. They tend to overlook the bottle in his desk, because he’s far and away the best journalist they’ve ever had.

“Willie!” he says, shouting into the phone. I can hear a ball game going in the background. “What can I do you for?”

I explain that I need some off-the-record information on a certain real-estate developer. I don’t show all my cards, but I do mention that we’re being sued after reviving some of Mr. Chenault’s sordid history.

“Were there any other incidents like that, maybe stuff you’ve heard?”

I can hear ice cubes clinking.

“He’s not exactly been what you’d call a saint,” Johnny says at last. “There’s always talk. Town’s so damn small you can’t fart without somebody smelling it.”

“But this would be about girls, probably way below the age of consent.”

Johnny tells me about a hushed-up problem with a female student at the local high school where Chenault was helping coach the girls soccer team “that happened before my time here.” Why anyone would let Wat Chenault coach a girls’ anything team is beyond me.

“And there were rumors that shit like that is what made Mrs. Chenault leave him. But nobody ever brought charges.”

“Did any of that involve violence?”

“Not that I know of. But Wat’s definitely capable. You really don’t want to cross him.”

Too late for that.

I get a couple of names. We talk about old times, the way we want to remember them.

“Remember the corn kernels?” Johnny asks. He doesn’t have to say anything more, but we take turns telling the story to each other anyhow.

One of our corporate masters, an old Virginia type with more manners than brains, got busted for baiting by the game department. He had spread corn kernels all over an open field the night before he and a bunch of his buddies were going to gather and shoot some doves. The wildlife folks don’t consider that to be fair play. The asshole managed to get himself on B2 in Sunday’s paper, complete with a mug shot.

On Monday morning, the guy comes into the lobby downstairs and finds kernels of corn leading from the front door to the elevator. He gets off on the top floor, and the trail continues, right to his office. Everyone knew Johnny had done it, but nobody could prove it, and he was still enough of an asset that nobody really wanted to.

Johnny and I laugh a little, but I already can sense the sun of sobriety starting to set on my old compatriot.

He asks me to share with him “in case the publisher down here has the balls to let us print anything about it.”

I promise Johnny I’ll pay him back. He tells me to come down and help him kill a bottle sometime.

I tell him I will, but we both know I’m lying.

CHAPTER TWELVE

X

Saturday

I
spend a couple of hours over at Ronnie Sax’s apartment complex on Tobacco Row. I have an appointment to talk with his alibiing sister tomorrow, but I wanted to get some insight from people who aren’t related to him and haven’t maybe been lying lately to cover his ass.

Everyone’s a little skittish. At first, none of them want to talk about their former neighbor. The cops have already been through, getting any shred of information they can. The residents probably are a little interview-weary.

Finally, though, a couple of guys who live in the apartment below his who are bringing in their groceries let me ask them some questions. They tell me that Sax did occasionally bring women to his unit, “or more like girls, actually.”

“He seemed to like them young,” one of them tells me. “But, you know, he was a good neighbor. Never made a lot of noise. I can’t believe he killed those girls.”

About all it takes, apparently, to be a good neighbor around here is to keep the music down.

Neither of them, nor any of the other people I finally manage to waylay, have ever seen Sax go even a little bit postal.

“He was kinda weird, though,” one girl said a few minutes later. “He had this funny laugh, kind of, like, braying.” She gives a pretty good imitation.

“Whatever he did,” she says, “he probably didn’t do it here. Too many people.”

“Did he ever talk about having another place somewhere?”

The girl says she’s heard he has the studio, but I know the cops have combed that thoroughly by now.

“I talked to him a couple of months ago, at a pool party, and I think he mentioned something about going over to a friend’s place, but I can’t remember where. Never saw him with anybody else around here, except the girls, of course.” She gives a little shiver, probably for effect, and excuses herself.

I go by the apartment where Sax turned himself in four days ago. The guy who lives there is back. He said he didn’t even know Sax was there. He had been out of town on business for two weeks and didn’t know about any of this until he got home and found his place tossed and a couple of cops in an unmarked car waiting to give him a welcome-home party.

“They handcuffed my ass,” he says. “I told them I’d just got back into town, but it took them half an hour to believe me.”

Sax, it turned out, had been a casual acquaintance of the guy and knew in which flowerpot he hid his house key.

“If they don’t fry him,” the guy says, “I want a piece of him.”

No, the guy didn’t know anyone who could qualify as a friend of Ronnie Sax.

“He might’ve said I was one,” he says as he leads me out, “but if I ever was, I sure as hell ain’t now.”

MY DANCE CARD’S pretty full today. I got a call yesterday from Philomena and promised I’d meet with her and a friend. I have just enough time to go by Buzz and Ned’s for some ’cue, run over to the Bottom and get back to the paper by three. I am praying for a quiet night. Tomorrow’s the first day of fall, but it still feels like summer, and the higher the temperature, the more likely our gun-toting citizenry is to get all itchy and start plugging each other.

I’m still picking pieces of pulled pork out of my teeth when I find a parking space back behind the Farmers’ Market. Philomena and her friend are waiting for me at the market. We find a bench.

“Sophia knows something you ought to be aware of,” my cousin says, all business as usual.

The woman appears to be about Philomena’s age. I can imagine her offering Momma Phil comfort in those twentyeight long years when Richard was falsely imprisoned.

“My nephew, he saw it,” Sophia says. “They dug up something down there. It was bones.”

I am all ears and no mouth. It turns out that Sophia’s nephew is in construction. He was driving a bulldozer, doing some preliminary clearing not far from where we’re sitting, in the acreage where Top of the Bottom either will or won’t be built.

The nephew saw something. He got off his bulldozer, the way he told it to his aunt, and there were bones there.

“He called his supervisor over, and he said the supervisor called somebody, and this big, rough-looking fella was there in maybe fifteen minutes. He told them to cover it up and knock off for the day.

“When my nephew came back the next day, he said it looked like somebody had dug up every bit of dirt in that place, down maybe ten feet, and then brought more dirt back in to fill.”

The “big, rough-looking fella” sounds, from Sophia’s second-hand description, a lot like my favorite former state senator. The nephew said he looked kind of like a toad frog in a suit.

“You know what those bones were,” Philomena says. I have a pretty good idea. They supposedly gave slaves such half-ass burials as they were accorded somewhere down here in the Bottom. The historians and archaeologists have never found the exact spot. Maybe some guy with a bulldozer did.

I ask, knowing the answer already, why the nephew didn’t tell somebody else about it.

“He needs that job,” Sophia says. “He didn’t work for a couple of years after all the construction dried up. His boss told him he’d never work a day again around here if he told anybody.”

“He told you.”

She looks insulted.

“I’m family,” she says. “Of course he told me.”

I hazard a guess that he’s not likely to repeat that story to anybody who isn’t family.

“Maybe not,” Sophia says “but now you know. You can do something about it. Just don’t mention my nephew.”

That’s how it goes for your basic buttinsky newsmonger. Everybody has a story, but nobody wants to step up to the plate and be quoted. Not that I blame the nephew. My job is to figure out how, without getting an honest laborer fired, to tell the world that Wat Chenault is covering up the fact that he is, as the preservationists feared, desecrating a slave graveyard.

Hell, if I put this one out there, the nephew and I both will be out of jobs. Maybe we can start a business together, muckraking and backhoeing or some such shit.

But, where there’s a Willie, there’s a way.

DRIVING BACK TO the paper, I suck on a Camel and try to figure out my next move. I am becoming more and more suspicious of Mr. Chenault, and my suspicions are ranging beyond the area of real-estate scumbaggery and into more serious matters. I’m wondering who sent that letter after Ronnie Sax was locked up, and why.

It occurs to me that I should let this one ride. Maybe I can get either Sarah or Mark Baer to take up the fight, with me feeding them. I don’t think Sarah’s up for it right now, though. I am afraid she sees an office and a title in her future. And Baer is smart enough to know that the downside of this one probably outweighs the upside. Also, there’s the new regime. Even if Wheelie wanted to dabble in Pyrrhic victories, the new publisher is watching us like a hawk. Busting on a guy who’s already suing us? Hell, it probably would get red-flagged before it even got into the paper. They’ve kind of tightened up on the editing process since the Ray Long incident.

There really is only one solution: Feed it to the
Scimitar.

That’s really its name. The
Scimitar
is actually more like a dull, rusty blade, but it does have its following in the African American community, where our paper has a hard-earned reputation for bias. But we’re trying to be better. I’d say that, on the sensitivity calendar, we’re up to about 1993 now.

Earl Pemberton-Wise, the publisher, used to work for my paper. We were friends and still are, with the cautiousness that comes from being on opposite sides of the fence. Earl tries from time to time to get me to jump ship, trying to make me feel like a race traitor or an Uncle Tom. But when I mention the salary that I would require, he reminds me that he’s making about $10,000 less than that himself.

“Ah, the golden handcuffs,” he said to me the last time we had this discussion.

I told him it’s all I’ve ever known.

I SLIP INTO the
Scimitar
’s rented digs, four blocks from our paper. Earl is in his office, such as it is. A handful of reporters look at me with suspicion, probably regretting that their rag can’t afford security guards. I’m the closest thing to a white guy in their newsroom right now.

“Ready to come to work for a real paper?” Earl says.

I tell him I’m ready to give him something that’ll make people buy his Sunday birdcage liner for a change.

I spell it out to him. He’s dubious at first. He knows Chenault is already suing us.

I appeal to his pride, asking him if he’s going to let some fat white guy from the Southside get away with this crap because he’s too afraid to take him on.

“I’m not afraid of anybody in this goddamned town,” he says. “Wat Chenault can kiss my ass. The whole damn Commonwealth Club can kiss my ass.”

He walks around a bit, talking it out to me and himself.

“Hell, if he sues us, what’s he gonna get? And if it’s true, we’ve got nothing to worry about. I mean, he can’t prove malice, right?”

I nod my head, helping Earl—who is seeping malice right now—convince himself.

The plan is pretty simple. I feed a slightly fictionalized version of this information––given to me, leaving out the bulldozer driver and his aunt––to one of the
Scimitar
’s reporters, who writes the story under his byline. He isn’t likely to tell anybody it isn’t his story, since it’s probably the best one he’s ever going to get.

We have to do some fancy dancing. This story is going to be strong on “a source said,” with a lot of the ol’ innuendo. In the version that will appear in the
Scimitar
, a kid playing over there found some bones and told his parents about them. The parents have in turn contacted unnamed preservationists. And when the kid went back there, the place had been dug up and replaced with fill dirt.