The Bottom (23 page)

“Looks like a damned slaughterhouse in there,” I hear one cop say.

One of the detectives, a guy I’ve known since my first gig on the night cops beat, asks me if I’m sure it wasn’t me who shot Sax. I told him that I’d done all my damage with a knife.

“Didn’t see no knife,” the detective says. I tell him Kusack might still be wearing it.

I ask him if I get a reward. He tells me not to go anywhere. I tell him I wouldn’t dream of it.

When the cops aren’t looking, I manage to slip inside the tape and fall in step with Gillespie. I tell Cindy I’ll be right back. Gillespie starts to tell me to get the hell out of there. I tell him I’ve got too much invested in this to go back now, that if he wants to tase me, it won’t be the first time today. Hell, if he wants to shoot at me, he won’t break a cherry there, either, as long as he doesn’t hit anything. He shrugs and tries to ignore me. With a couple of pints of Cordell Kusack’s blood on me, maybe he thinks I’ve earned the right to be here.

It’s kind of a madhouse near and inside that plywood door. An ambulance has arrived to take Ronnie Sax’s body away. L.D. Jones is shaking his head.

I’m out on the edge of the clusterfuck, close to the river. There’s a concrete pier jutting out into the James, and I step out there to enjoy my first Camel of the evening. My hands are shaking a little. I’m sure a little nicotine will knock that right up.

With all the hubbub, I don’t guess anybody else hears the voice. I look around and finally locate the speaker. It’s the same old guy that’s been across the river, probably all day, hoping for a catfish.

I move as close to the edge of the pier as I can, and I finally make out what he’s saying.

“He went thataway,” the man is saying. “He went downstream.”

That’s when I look down and see Cordell Kusack’s gun, lying five feet away from me on the concrete. Beside it is the knife. When the first cop sees what’s stuck to it, he turns to one side before he throws up.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

X

Monday

I
have some serious comp time coming.

I feel within my rights to count Saturday as a workday, since I spent a large part of it tied up in a Shockoe Bottom warehouse, waiting to be tortured to death for being a nosyass reporter. And I did get back to the office in time to write a stop-the-presses piece for Sunday’s paper. They never found my car keys, but L.D. Jones was so thrilled at the prospect of informing the city that it was shy a psychopath or two that he gave me a ride in his own, personal car.

I’m counting yesterday as an eight-hour day, too. They let me kill a few trees explaining, as best I could, the whole sorry saga of the brothers Kusack and Sax. I doubt if it makes the parents of Kelli Jonas, Chanelle Williams, Lorrie Estrada and Jessica Caldwell feel a damn bit better, but the shrinks are always talking about closure, so maybe that’s something.

The photo chief wanted to get a shot of my new, unwanted tattoo. After fighting it all the way up to Wheelie, I agreed. I hang people’s dirty underwear on the public clothesline all the time. I guess I’m in no position to shun the spotlight. When I said something about “not pulling a Garbo,” Sarah Goodnight asked me to translate that from old folks into English. The kids they send us these days.

They found the body of poor Mary Kate Kusack Brown, as I feared they would. She was apparently shot dead by her dear brother just inside her front door. Her daughters found the body when they got home from a sleepover.

Mary Kate and Ronnie seem to have been under the spell of their brother––a spell of pure evil. They thought they had escaped it, but it found them, and they were either too intimidated or too weak to resist. In Ronnie’s case, it didn’t help that he already had a sweet tooth for the kind of sexual misbehavior that can earn you a long sentence even if you don’t kill anyone. Maybe big brother nurtured that particular kink when they were still kids. Who knows? And there’s no one around to tell us––at least not right now.

Sunday and Monday are my usual days off, but today there’s more to write. We’re still trying to retrace Kusack’s steps and figure out how this maniac was able to live off the grid for years while he’s supposed to be a parolee up in Ohio. Turns out somebody up there had him marked as “presumed dead,” probably because they were too damn lazy to track him down. Out of state, out of mind.

Wheelie said someone else could jump in and pick up the ball if I wanted some time off. I told him I’d give this story up when they tear it from my cold, dead, nicotine-stained hands.

FEAR HANGS OVER the newsroom today like cigarette smoke once did. Newsrooms are marginally healthier, but the business still needs a quintuple bypass, and we’re having chest pains.

It turns out that the Friedman chain’s vultures have been circling again. Sally Velez says two of their hired guns were around this weekend, kicking the tires. It was all hush-hush, but somebody got the mystery men’s license plate number, and within a couple of hours everyone knew who they were. Never try to keep a secret from a journalist, especially if his or her livelihood is involved. That really inspires us.

“I hear they came into the newsroom of that paper they bought down in Carolina and told everybody to turn in their resignations, and they would decide who to keep,” Enos Jackson said. “It took ’em about a week to clean house.”

I worry about Enos. He’s only here because of a deal I worked out three years ago with our now-late publisher. I doubt if that free pass has conveyed from James “Grubby” Grubbs to our new publisher. Enos doesn’t know about the deal. No sense in worrying him now. Things could always be worse. One of the other state papers got bought by an investment group last year, whose only reason for existence was to turn a short-turn profit for their investors by buying distressed properties (newspapers) cheap, improving the bottom line by cutting expenses and selling high. Reporters and editors fall under the category of expenses. Within six months, half the newsroom was gone.

Speaking of our new publisher, Ms. “Call me Rita” Dominick phones down to request the honor of my presence. I don’t know whether she’s going to give me a raise or fire me for my role in besmirching the fine reputation of Wat Chenault. I ask her if we can meet at three, because I have to finish a story and then be out of the office for a bit for a very important meeting.

“Can’t you cancel the interview?” she asks me.

I tell her that, if things go well, she will be glad I went to this particular meeting.

“I’d like a few more details.”

“I can’t give them to you right now. I’m sworn to secrecy.”

She doesn’t seem to exactly believe me. Trust is such a fragile thing.

She sighs. Clearly I exasperate her. I have that effect on publishers.

“Well,” she says, “you’d better be here at three. Your presence might determine whether you still have a job.”

Bullshit, I’m thinking. I’ve just given you the best story this rag’s going to have all year. And by the time the big hand’s on twelve and the little hand’s at three, you’re not going to have to worry about Wat Chenault.

I called him yesterday. I didn’t tell him everything I knew, just dropped one name that I was sure would make him swallow his bile and make room for me in his busy, busy schedule.

WE MEET AT his office at one thirty. Sitting in the outer sanctum, I’m pretty sure I recognize one of the goons who accompanied us the day Wat took me for that ride around Richmond. I nod. He scowls.

Things are not going well for Top of the Bottom. The story I bequeathed to the
Scimitar
, the subsequent ones in our paper, and those pesky bones of former slaves that interested parties continue to dig up seem to have turned the tide against Chenault’s project. Even the mayor, who had been acting like Wat’s junior partner, is starting to back off. Reelection isn’t that far away.

And so, between all that potential money flying out the window and Chenault’s knowing that I went way out of my way to try to prove he was the Tweety Bird Killer, he has some legitimate reasons to hold a grudge.

I wait fifteen minutes. Finally Chenault’s secretary ushers me in. The fat man’s office wall does not disappoint. There’s a deer head mounted on it. Beside that is a Confederate battle flag. Wat is sitting in his leather chair, smoking a cigar and glowering at me. He doesn’t offer me a seat, but there are two chairs facing him, and the suit, who turns out to be his mouthpiece, is in the other one. I sit.

“What the hell do you want?” he asks.

“I think you know,” I tell him. “I want you to drop the lawsuit.”

The lawyer laughs. Chenault doesn’t. He’s obviously not told his hired boy the name I relayed to Wat yesterday, and what it means.

“I’ll have your ass,” the fat man says, setting the cigar down carefully on the lip of an ashtray.

I nod toward the lawyer.

“Tell him why you won’t.”

Chenault is silent.

When I start to speak, he holds up one pink palm.

“OK, OK, no sense in letting this get out of hand. I doubt you have enough, uh, information to cause me any serious harm.”

He’s fishing. I’m not biting.

The expression on the lawyer’s face indicates he thinks he and Wat need to talk. He doesn’t know yet why his client’s boot heel isn’t on my neck anymore.

“Look,” I tell them, “I don’t have time for this. I’ve got an important meeting at three.”

I turn to the lawyer.

“I don’t want to embarrass your client,” I tell him, “and cost you a big fee, in addition to maybe sending his fat ass to Greensville for a few years, but you need to know some stuff, counselor.”

Actually I don’t really give a damn whether Wat Chenault goes to prison or not. I just want to break even on this one.

DESPITE HIS DUMBASS
nom de sleuth
, Sam Spadewell is not a complete idiot. At least he wasn’t on this occasion.

You’d think Chenault would have learned something from the incident that cost him his political career, but old habits die hard.

It took Spadewell less than a week hanging out at the high-end place Wat was renting overlooking the river to come up with the photographs and audio.

The audio, from a wire Spadewell planted, was especially juicy. When I played a bit of it, the lawyer reached up and rubbed his temple, like he needed a Tylenol.

He was a gamer, though.

“That won’t hold up in court,” he said.

Of course it won’t. But as I explained to him and my old buddy Wat, it wouldn’t really have to. After the girl was confronted with the tape, in the flophouse where she and a couple of other runaways were staying, making a living any way they could, she was surprisingly compliant in explaining, gory chapter and verse, what she and “Mr. Walker” had been up to. Maybe she just wanted to do the right thing. Maybe it was Spadewell assuring her that she was going to face prostitution and drug charges if she didn’t help us out.

I can tell the lawyer hates to ask the question:

“How old?”

“Fourteen.”

“That’s not possible,” Chenault blurts out. “She swore to me she was seventeen . . .”

He stops, perhaps realizing that seventeen is not quite old enough for legal sticklers, either. Or maybe he can hear himself and knows how goddamn stupid he sounds.

“I wasn’t hurting anybody,” he says, almost whining. I want to slap him.

I’m not exactly on a moral pedestal here. I’ve arranged, through a woman Peachy Love knows in human services, to get this little girl lined up with the kind of help that might make it easier for her to find a life that doesn’t include blowing fifty-eight-year-old pedophiles. A better man might have just gone to the cops (for the moment, L.D. Jones owes me a little attention) and sent Wat Chenault to a place where they might do to him what he had been doing to that girl.

But I’m not sure Chenault couldn’t wiggle his way out of it, with his money and connections. And I want that lawsuit to disappear. I’ve also made it clear to Wat that if anything untoward happens to me in the next twenty years, there are people who will quickly tell the police who Suspect Number One is.

By the time I leave the fat man’s office, we seem to be on the same page. I don’t bother nodding at the goon on the way out.

THEY FOUND MOST of Cordell Kusack. Dead or alive, he washed up onshore at an island in the James a couple of miles downriver. By the time a couple of fishermen saw his body and called 9-1-1, the animals had had a go at him. I hope he wasn’t dead yet when this happened, but you can’t have everything.

I’m almost sorry it ended this way. This state is more trigger-happy than most when it comes to the ultimate penalty, and I wouldn’t have minded Kusack being officially administered a smidgen of the pain he caused those girls. I wouldn’t have minded watching.

This way, though, at least their parents can rest easy knowing that justice, weak consolation prize that it is, has been served without having the whole nightmare played out again in a courtroom.

How do I feel about driving a knife through another human being’s eye socket? I’ve been in plenty of fights, when I was younger, but I had never done this kind of damage. With a knife, you have a lot more buy-in than you do with a gun. I won’t get the sight, sound and feel of it out of my head anytime soon.

But regrets? Not a damn one.

RITA DOMINICK IS waiting for me. Sandy McCool seems to know that I’m five minutes late and seems concerned for my future employment. She doesn’t say anything; I can just see it in her usually inscrutable face.

I wink at her and open the door to the publisher’s office, walking in unannounced.

Dominick is on the phone and makes me wait a good five minutes more, probably just to show me who’s boss.

“So,” she says as she puts the phone down, “you finally made it back, I see.”

I ask her if there’s a problem.

“Problem? No, there’s no problem. Maybe you think you’re out of the woods because of that story you stumbled into.”

She has some kind of ball in her hand, the kind you use to relieve stress, in lieu of throwing a paperweight at a reporter.

“Do you know how much Wat Chenault is going to sue us for? This lawsuit by itself could be enough to keep . . . well, to make us a lot less attractive.”