The Bottom (17 page)

I wait for it.

“Just be sure,” he tells me, actually putting his finger in my face, “that you nail the son of a bitch. Whatever you’re sniffing after, you better nail him so good that his lawyers can’t touch us.”

“Does that mean I’m back on the Wat Chenault beat?”

“Not officially. I think Chenault suspects you’re somehow behind this. You’ll pass whatever you know on to Sarah Goodnight. It’ll be her byline on it.”

Well, that’s something. And I appreciate Wheelie putting the news ahead of his butt for a change. I once suggested, in an ill-advised burst of frustration, that he grow a pair.

Maybe he has. With the paper in imminent danger of being sold to the Friedman chain or one of its soulless contemporaries, maybe Wheelie’s feeling he doesn’t have much to lose. If we’re looking at a scenario where our already diminished staff is cut in half to make the stockholders happy, then we might as well make some good journalism before the ax falls.

I PICK UP Peggy, who seems almost straight today, and we head out to Philomena’s. I’ve been promising to take her to visit my late father’s cousin. Andi asks to come along.

I ask Peggy, on the way over, how she’s doing.

“Hanging in there,” is her tepid response. Andi reaches up from the backseat and rubs her shoulder.

It does seem to lift her spirits to be with Philomena, though. It warms my jaded heart to see the two of them embrace. Peggy and I didn’t have a whole lot of family when I was growing up on the Hill. Most of her kin more or less disowned her for having a child with a black man. And his family wasn’t a factor, since she never married Artie Lee, who wrapped his car around a very large tree before I was out of diapers.

Andi seems to fit right in, though, fascinated still to discover family she never knew she had until recently.

Richard comes home for lunch. He’s working as a mechanic, at a shop four blocks away. There was some kind of automotive mechanic program at one of the prisons where he spent most of his adult life, and he took advantage of it, in the unlikely event that he someday might need to find a job.

“That was good, what you did for Momma and Miss Sophia,” he says.

I tell him that I didn’t do much. It was the
Scimitar
that forced us to write about it.

He gives me a look that tells me he maybe knows more about that episode than my publisher does. News travels fast, often without the aid of trained professional journalists. “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” somehow pops into my head.

“However it happened,” Richard says, “we appreciate it.”

He asks me if my car needs a tune-up. Probably, I tell him. All I know about cars is to change the oil every six thousand miles or so, empty the ashtray every now and then, and get it inspected once a year.

He tells me to bring it by and he’ll let me know what needs fixing.

“Might even be able to do it myself,” he says.

I promise him I will bring back my old Honda. It would be rude to do otherwise.

Peggy’s in such fine spirits that, when it’s time for me to go to work, Philomena says she’ll drive her and Andi home when they’re through visiting. I suppose Awesome Dude will have to dine alone tonight.

Thinking about the Dude makes my pinball brain bounce onto something else, something my peripatetic friend told me about the night Kelli Jonas was murdered. I can’t quite get my mind around what’s bothering me about it. It’s like an itch in that little spot in the middle of your back that you can’t quite reach.

IT’S A QUIET night back at the paper. I have time to do a little digging. Sarah’s writing something tomorrow about Top of the Bottom being halted, but I’m giving L.D. Jones a much-undeserved break and not writing about the letter left on my windshield yesterday. On the off chance that the cops can make something out of this, I’ll give our boys in blue a couple of days.

I don’t want to give Johnny Grimes another call, since there’s a pretty good chance he told Chenault about the last one. There are a couple of things I’d like to know, though, while Sarah tries to find Leigh Adkins.

R.P. McGonnigal has a friend—steady boyfriend, actually— who is a private detective. I don’t intend to put him on the trail of Wat Chenault’s long-ago underage sex toy. There is something else, though, that I have in mind.

I’ve met the guy a couple of times. I think that he and R.P. might get married, if that ever becomes a possibility in our benighted commonwealth. We’ve joked about it, about the sheer goofiness of Abe, Andy, Goat and me standing there in tuxes while our old friend marries another man. For four Oregon Hill rednecks, we’re pretty progressive, at least where our friends are concerned.

“If it makes R.P. happy,” Custalow said, “it makes me happy.”

The detective’s name is, I swear, Sam Spadewell. Well, actually, I think his real first name is Robert or Ronald or something like that, but if you’re a PI and your last name’s Spadewell, how can you resist?

Sam is amenable to what I’m proposing. When we get around to talking about money, he says don’t worry about it, that we’ll work something out later.

He tells me a story.

“When I was like twenty-five or so, a friend and me, we got caught on a morals charge. You know, like doing it in the park. The cops loved to catch you, back then.

“We weren’t hurting anybody. Nobody saw us except this nosy-ass cop that spent all his shift just trying to bust us.”

It wouldn’t have risen above a brief on B5, but this one state senator from Southside decided to go on a crusade against gays “defiling our public parks.”

He made such a fuss about it that the city wound up prosecuting Sam and his friend.

“We got six friggin’ months in jail,” he says. “And I don’t have to tell you who the fat fuck in the legislature was. I’ve been waiting.”

Sometimes, I’m thinking, your turkeys do come home to roost.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

X

Wednesday

I
go over to the jail with Kate and Marcus. They’re up to date on the second note now.

Ronnie Sax is informed that somebody has sent a second letter in an effort to get him out of jail.

“Well, whoever it is, I appreciate it,” he says. He doesn’t seem nearly as surprised at having a benefactor as I think he should be. That wheezy laugh of his is just a cough now. I don’t think incarceration is agreeing with Ronnie.

“Who could’ve sent this?” Marcus asks.

Sax shrugs.

“Hell if I know. It might be good to start with the fucker who killed those girls, but I guess the cops are too damned lazy to get off theirs butts and find out. Or maybe you could.”

Kate reminds him that we’re about the only people on the planet right now who actually are trying to spring him. The replies we’ve gotten online about the case are along the lines of “Fuck him. Kill him now.” I mention to him that he is not exactly the people’s choice at the present time.

“Yeah,” he says. “One of the cops showed me what they were writing about me. Damn, these people don’t even know me.”

I’m thinking that the fewer people really get to know Ronnie Sax, the better off he is.

Still we don’t kill people just because they deserve it on general principles. If they did that, the newsroom would be even thinner than it is now. You’ve got to actually do the deed. As much as I dislike Ronnie Sax, I am not 100 percent sure he did the deed.

WHOEVER WANTS SAX sprung isn’t kidding around.

The mail carrier comes just before I leave for work. One of the cool things about the Prestwould is the mail. They drop it through a slot in the front door of my unit, like something out of a 1930s movie, which makes sense, seeing as how the place was built in 1929. My bounty consists of the cable bill, the electricity bill, and a small envelope without a return address.

“Dear Asshole,” the note begins, so I’m already pretty sure it isn’t an invitation from some broker wanting to treat me to dinner in exchange for access to my vast savings, of which there aren’t any. “Are you stupid? What part of ‘you’ve got the wrong guy’ don’t you understand? Do I really have to send another Tweety Bird to the morgue to convince you? I’m getting a little hungry anyhow. How’s that lovely daughter of yours, by the way? She’s got a nice ass.”

I resist the urge to crumple it up and throw it away. I’m still standing at the front door, so I punch it instead. It’s solid metal, so that makes me feel much better.

I call Peggy’s and speak with Andi. I emphasize, without reading her the note, that she should definitely not leave the house unchaperoned.

“You’re starting to scare me,” she says, and I tell her that that is my intention.

Andi tells me that the inestimable Quip Blandford called last night, all remorse and good intentions. He says he wants to at least “be friends,” which is not a lot to offer, I guess, to the mother of your child. But I’m being unkind. Quip is apparently willing to do what we used to call the honorable thing, back when things were honorable.

I ask, with trepidation, how things stand now between her and her baby daddy. She worries me when she says that she isn’t sure, but I understand. Maybe life with Thomas Jefferson Blandford V wouldn’t be heaven on earth, but I doubt if Andi would ever have to tend bar or wait tables again.

I hang up and call L.D. Jones to tell him the third time is a charm. Now we have to go with the story. I can write this one, since it doesn’t have anything—at least, not for now—to do with Wat Chenault.

“You can’t do that,” he says. “It’s going to bust this thing wide open.”

I remind him that I’ve given him a head start, but I don’t see anybody behind bars yet.

He sighs and asks me to read this one to him. When I finish, he says, “Jesus Christ. Do you want us to have somebody keep an eye on your mom’s place?”

I tell him that maybe that would be a good idea. Maybe L.D. Jones has a heart after all. But I wonder if I shouldn’t just move Peggy, Andi and, yes, Awesome Dude in with Custalow and me. I hope Peggy knows how to use that damn pistol.

Then, I call Marcus and let him and Kate know about Letter Number Three.

“They’ve got to release that son of a bitch now,” Marcus says. I’m not so sure they have to do anything, but the heat’s on, for sure.

IN THE NEWSROOM, it’s business as usual.

Baer’s puff piece on Chenault is running tomorrow. Meanwhile, Sarah is working the traps still, looking for Leigh Adkins. And she’s been doing some digging on her own, so to speak. She’s found another worker down in the Bottom who’ll back up the story I planted in the
Scimitar
.

“I think Wheelie’s going to let us run it,” she says. I’m starting to think that Wheelie really is becoming testicularly enhanced. No way he’s run this one past our new publisher first. With all the rumors of our impending sale, I guess we’re all kind of getting into what Enos Jackson calls NTL mode. Nothing To Lose.

“We’re going to run good Wat, bad Wat, the same day?”

“I don’t know, but that Baer piece has been ready for two days. Maybe Wheelie figures one will balance out the other.

I, for one, don’t think there is a good Wat Chenault, but maybe this will lop a few hundred thousand off the damages.

Wheelie’s in his office. I walk in and shut the door. I’ve never seen Wheelie drink hard liquor, but he has this red Solo cup in his hand, and I’m pretty sure the clear stuff inside isn’t water.

I bring him up to date about the letters. Wheelie isn’t drunk, but he’s a little looser than usual. I’m thinking he should imbibe more often.

“You got three of them?” he says. I explain, before he can ask, that I’ve been holding out to give the cops a chance to nab whomever it is.

“Now, though, it’s time to write something.”

“Are you going to mention your daughter?”

I’ve thought about that.

“No, I’m just going to say that he has made threats against a specific individual, who is getting police protection.”

“It’s gonna make the cops look kind of silly.”

I tell him that isn’t my intention, but I’ve given them all the leeway an honest journalist can afford to give a police department. Time to get out the ink and newsprint and let the populace know why they usually have the trial before the hanging.

As I leave to write my story, I feel obliged to ask him if he’s really going to run another Wat Chenault story tomorrow.

“Bet your ass,” he says. “We’re going to get sued, we might as well go for the big bucks.”

Wheelie’s laugh isn’t as grating as Ronnie Sax’s. It’s actually kind of pleasant. It is the laugh of someone who has crossed that line beyond which you’re going to do what ought to be done, and you don’t really give a shit what happens next.

It is a line with which I am familiar. I perhaps should tell Wheelie that virtue, while it feels as good as a shot of quality vodka, can give you an awful hangover.

“You really ought to let your editors know, once in a while, what the hell you’re doing,” Wheelie says as I shut the door. He’s right, but sometimes it just muddies things up if everybody knows everything. I’m more of a need-to-know kind of guy.

So tomorrow’s paper might be worth seventy-five cents after all.

We’re going to have a story on A1 that says a certain reporter has gotten three notes in the last week from an unincarcerated individual who claims that he, not Ronnie Sax, is the Tweety Bird Killer.

We’re going to have another story on A1, a fluffy, feel-good feature by Mark Baer on Wat Chenault.

And the icing on top, we’re going to run Sarah’s story on B1 offering more evidence that the minions of the upstanding Mr. Chenault have been covering up, literally, the remains of long-dead slaves because they’re getting in the way of his real-estate scheme.

People with enough attention span to remember Baer’s puff piece while they’re reading Sarah’s story might think there’s some kind of disconnect here.

Me, I’m just trying to connect all the dots.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

X

Thursday

S
ally Velez phones, waking me up to tell me that Ronnie Sax is now, at least for the time being, a free man.

She got a call from someone she knows down at police headquarters. I wonder if it’s Peachy Love and feel a twinge of jealousy. Is Peachy cheating on me, spreading some of that good information to somebody else? I doubt it. Peachy’s pretty careful. She knows being the source for even one journalist is tricky enough. She’s not the promiscuous type.