The Bottom (3 page)

The third one occurred almost exactly a year after the first one and six months after the second one, back in March. This time the body was found at the entrance to the Church Hill tunnel. Everybody who grew up in Richmond or has lived there any time at all knows about the tunnel. For some reason, the C&O built a train tunnel under Church Hill after the Civil War. One day in 1925, it collapsed, burying four workers, a locomotive and some flat cars. Neither the train nor the workers have been recovered or ever will be. They are sealed forever beneath one of the city’s most historic neighborhoods, somewhere below where Patrick Henry gave his “Give me liberty or give me death” speech.

Lorrie Estrada might not have appreciated the history, even if she was still alive when she was brought there to die. She was a third-year student at VCU. She’d grown up in Fairfax County and was in some sort of high-tech premed major that seemed to assure her future success.

Her parents and her friends said she didn’t drink, and she didn’t date very often. The last time anyone saw her, she was between her apartment on Grove and the VCU library.

She had the Tweety Bird tattoo. She had the same kind of damage as the other two. This time the danger alert went up and it stayed up. Even now, six months later, even before the fourth victim showed up in the Main Street Station anteroom, there is a sense of fear. Just two months ago, a female student at Virginia Union shot a guy in the leg because she thought he was stalking her. Turns out he was just walking the same route as she was, but you can’t be too careful.

There are barely 200,000 people living in the city, hub of a metropolitan area of about 1.3 million. When three young women die horribly at the hands of the same unknown stranger in the space of a year, it seems like a very small place. You start seeing demons everywhere.

And now there are four.

Jessica Caldwell was just fourteen years old. She had run away from home the week before, and her parents hadn’t been able to arouse much interest in finding her. Despite her mother’s tearful declaration that she was a good girl, she had had some problems, mostly with drugs and rebellion. She might have turned up in some shelter, been reclaimed by her parents and gone on to live a long happy life. Instead she is the latest trophy in some murdering bastard’s game.

REJUVENATED BY A good night’s sleep, a tasty lunch of leftover meatloaf and my two-Camel walk to the paper, I’m in the newsroom by two, reading this morning’s breathless headline: Tweety Bird Killer strikes again. They had to cut a couple of grafs to make it fit. No problem. I’ll just work them into tomorrow’s story. I have a feeling I’ll be writing this one for a while.

Wheelie comes up behind me.

“How’s it going? Anything new?”

“Not much. The cops are crapping themselves. They still don’t have a clue.”

“This guy must be pretty good.”

“Yeah. Practice makes perfect.”

Wheelie winces, and I immediately feel like an asshole. I truly am not hard-bitten or soulless enough to see anything even remotely humorous in the deaths of four innocents. Hell, nobody deserves to die like that, not even the guilty. It’s just the business I’m in. This is my second stint on night cops, and if what I cover is any indication, the human race is getting nastier by the year. Sometimes sick humor is all the salve you’ve got.

“Sorry,” I say. Wheelie looks surprised. He is not used to hearing me apologize, even if I should once in a while.

“I’ve got a meeting with the suits,” he says. “I’ll check with you when I get back, in two hours if I’m lucky.”

I remind him that he is a suit now. He gives me a dirty look, then glances at his watch, says “shit,” and scurries for the elevator.

Wheelie’s a busy man these days. He’s filling two seats, at least until corporate finds a replacement for Grubby.

Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention: Grubby’s dead.

The publisher and I had our problems, but, like those four girls, Grubby didn’t deserve the demise he met.

Death by Segway. Good lord.

Why do we even have Segways? They seem worthless as a broke-dick dog to me, equally useless on streets and sidewalks, to say nothing of being just a tad dangerous. I vaguely remember them being foisted upon us as the biggest thing since dental floss, but I have not seen the light. When the company CEO drove one off a cliff and got his ass killed three years ago, that kind of sealed the deal for me. When I see a cop or some other public servant riding one of them because he has to, I can read the little thought balloon over his head: “I look like an asshole.” Maybe it’s a West Coast thing. I don’t know. I just know we’re shy a publisher right now because of them.

Chip Grooms saw the whole thing. James H. Grubbs himself was the one who told Wheelie to be sure we had a photographer on the scene, and Grooms drew the short straw.

It was supposed to be a “bonding” experience. Grubby organized it. The idea was to get city and county officials together (along with area big shots, a group into which Grubby self-qualified himself) to do something “fun.” The hope was that the city and county people, whose cooperation skills are on the Sunni-Shiite level, would have a Kumbaya moment and realize we all really can get along. As if. In a state where cities aren’t part of counties and can’t annex any of that Yuppie-rich suburban land, localities don’t have to get along. And so they don’t, enthusiastically.

In the end, the only bonding that got done was Grubby bonding with the GRTC Number Eleven bus on its way from the Capitol to Mosby Court.

They did it down in Shockoe Bottom. Grooms said he overheard the instructions the Segway master gave beforehand to the assembled officials. They could have stressed the danger a little more clearly, he told us, but where’s the fun in that?

The big thing the Segway guy emphasized (and maybe Grubby didn’t hear it because he was busy trying to be our region’s catalyst, maybe breaking up a fistfight between a county commissioner and a city councilwoman) was the part about getting on and off the contraptions.

You have to do your dismount by grabbing the vertical bar with both hands. If you only hold it with one hand and hold on to the handlebar with the other, as conditioning and common sense might indicate you should, and then you put one foot on the ground, the thing behaves more or less like a bucking bronco, dragging you around in circles until you fall free or just fall.

Grubby, who employed the proscribed one-foot-at-a-time method, just fell. It was, Grooms said, kind of like those deals where the captain gets thrown overboard and the unmanned boat does endless 360s, coming back to the same spot to terrorize the poor sap floundering in the water.

Grubby was run over by his own Segway. That wasn’t the bad part, though. In an effort to get out of the way of the relentless whirling dervish, he rolled out into Main Street just as Number Eleven was making its half-hourly appearance.

If the bus had only been on time, Grubby would still be with us, Mark Baer observed.

“What,” Enos Jackson wondered, “are the odds of a city bus being on time?”

It wasn’t pretty. I am fairly sure that Grubby’s untimely demise won’t make the city and county folks work together any better than they did before, even though everyone said all the right things afterward.

Grubby was not a bad man. He never fired me, despite the many opportunities I gave him. My main sorrow is that he devoted all that brainpower to the gods of corporate skull-duggery instead of remaining an honest newspaperman, which is what he used to be.

It turned out Grubby had very little family, just a mother out in the Midwest somewhere. As is our wont in Virginia, we probably will erect a historical marker somewhere, perhaps not mentioning the Segway incident.

And so Wheelie, who admits he is “not cut out for this kind of shit,” is now thrust into the role. Well, not thrust. He could have said no, but Wheelie, though he’s still a newspaperman, worries me sometimes. He could be turned, I think, if the paycheck was big enough. Most of us could.

Somebody suggested that we form a “team” to go full-bore into the Tweety Bird killings. Upon further review, though, we realized that we don’t really have enough “players” any more to form a team. With all the layoffs, cut hours, furloughs and such, we’re about a shortstop and a center fielder shy.

I have been told, though, that Mark Baer and Sarah Goodnight will be contributing to the effort, when they can find time away from their regular beats, which take up all the forty hours they get paid for and then some.

Baer and Sarah come by to see what they can do. There’s plenty, but I’ve got to bring them up to speed. It seems to be up to me, being older than both of them combined, to be the leader of our team lite, and I am not exactly the greatest choice for that role. I’ve known lots of reporters over the years who decided at some point that they’d rather be assholes than work for one. Some of them have become my bosses. All I want to do, all I’ve ever wanted to do, is wrestle the news to the ground, tie it in a nice bundle, and get it printed on A1 with my name on it.

Frankly some make the switch because they wake up one day and realize they aren’t cut out for chasing that breaking-news ball five million times, all the way to retirement. They run out of adrenaline, or they just want a life.

Sarah still thinks she is cut out for it. I probably should try to steer her in other directions. I have seen what happens when you list “reporter” as your occupation for more than three decades and really give a shit. I see the evidence every morning when I shave.

Baer, he’s a different case. He still has dreams of working at the
Washington Post
or the
New York Times
someday, but reality might be setting in. I’ve seen him in Wheelie’s office a couple of times lately with the door shut. There’s always an editing job available, even in these lean and hungry times. He might be settling, as in settling for being an editor here as opposed to being a reporter here, just in case that
Post
thing doesn’t work out.

“I thought I could maybe try to track down some of the girls’ parents,” Baer says. “See how they’ve been dealing with all this.”

I tell him that sounds like a good idea. It’ll keep him out of my hair at least. I think, as the father of a twenty-three-year-old daughter, that I know how they’re dealing with it. But I’ll let Baer find that out for himself. He goes off to start making calls.

Sarah wants to talk to some of the girls and young women who might be in harm’s way. Sounds fine to me.

“Just be careful,” I tell her.

“I’m always careful,” she says. “And I bet you wouldn’t even be telling me that if I weren’t a woman.”

“When this SOB starts murdering young guys, I’ll even tell Baer to be careful.”

“Sorry. But I am really pissed about this. I hope they catch him and cut his balls off.”

She notices the look I give her.

“What?”

“Is that the same mouth you used to kiss your mommy and daddy good night with?”

“You are an idiot,” she says as she turns to leave, “and a hypocrite.”

Could be. She’s got just as much right to be a potty-mouth as I do.

The police aren’t talking about that mysterious visitor at Havana 59, the one who enlisted my daughter’s aid to lure the night watchman from the train station. They’re going to want to talk to everyone who’s ever drunk a mojito there, hoping to get some kind of lead on this thing. They need some kind of bone to throw the public, some indication that they are on the case. They think it will be much better, I believe, channeling the mind of Chief L.D. Jones, if they come up with some kind of bullshit artist’s sketch of the guy rather than just saying a mysterious stranger might be involved in the Tweety Bird murders.

Unfortunately for them, they won’t have that luxury.

The chief and his minions will read, in tomorrow’s paper, what they already know but haven’t seen fit to share with the public: Some guy at a bar made sure the night watchman at the train station left his post for thirty minutes or maybe an hour, and in that time, a dead girl’s body was delivered to the station.

I hope the cops don’t try to take it out on Andi. I don’t think there is a law against not telling the police your father is a journalist.

It might be worth calling the chief or one of his flacks to ask them to confirm what I already know about the stranger at Havana 59. The chief won’t confirm anything, though, just sputter something about an ongoing investigation. Much better to let him read about it in tomorrow morning’s paper and spit his cornflakes wondering if he has a snitch in his department. I have to make sure not to call Peachy Love on anything resembling a traceable line any time soon.

THERE ISN’T MUCH going on, considering it’s a warm Friday night. The city has undergone a renaissance in recent years, meaning that it has stopped losing population and shows signs of not becoming Detroit South. The downside of that is that a bunch of mostly white yuppies renting in what used to be abandoned tobacco warehouses down in the Bottom are now interacting with Richmond’s entrenched and often impoverished African American community. Sometimes when this happens, there are cultural misunderstandings. Some of the newly minted college grads with suburban upbringings don’t understand that, when a skinny fourteen-year-old kid points a gun at you and demands your wallet, it really doesn’t work to channel your inner John Wayne.

“Motherfucker tried to grab my gun,” I heard one kid say in court, on trial for malicious wounding. “I didn’t have no choice.”

Tonight, though, is quiet. After I write my story on Jessica Caldwell and the latest Tweety Bird murder, I slip out and take a quick drive down to the Bottom.

It’s only ten, too early for the party-hearty set and just about the time geezers my age are leaving the restaurants.

I find a parking space two blocks away from Havana 59, planning to drop in on Andi. On the north side of Franklin Street, the land is still waiting to be developed. I’m not sure it needs to be developed. There’s all kinds of hell being raised about a project to bring a Target or Walmart or some such shit in there. In addition to the fact that it would create a Grade Five clusterfuck along the exit and entrance to I-95, there’s our city’s constant companion: history. Seems that, underneath the dirt and concrete, between here and the rail-road tracks, an unknown number of former slaves are buried, no doubt in unmarked graves. This was pretty much Ground Zero for the early slave trade that stains our city like some indelible birthmark that all the face powder in the world can never hide.