The Bottom (4 page)

A former state senator, guy named Wat Chenault, is fronting for a bunch of bright-eyed hustlers who claim they’ll grow the tax base and make “shabby” Shockoe Bottom shine like a diamond. Chenault actually used that word, “shabby.” It didn’t sit well with people, myself included, who think the Bottom’s adequate for our entertainment purposes. For those a couple or three decades younger than me, it’s a pretty cool place, if you don’t look at it too hard in the daylight. And most of us are pretty sure Chenault and his gang are only interested in growing their own personal economies.

Chenault and I have some history, going back to my first stint as night cops reporter, back in the early eighties. When the recent plan to bring big boxes to the Bottom first hit, complete with a breathless story by one of our business writers and artist’s renderings that included everything except goddamned unicorns and baby pandas, I revisted some of Wat Chenault’s somewhat soiled history. I know most of it by heart, because I was there.

The story (“Developer once center/of legislative scandal”) has led to threats of litigation, against me and the paper. This bothers the suits a lot. Lawyers are expensive.

Andi is mixing something I would never drink and costs about what six Millers run me at happy hour.

She doesn’t see me at first, and I use the time to be parent voyeur, watching my first-and-only born keep up two different conversations while she mixes one drink and takes another order. I have spent much time in close proximity to bartenders over the years, and I’m not just being a proud dad when I say they don’t get paid nearly enough.

“What are you doing here?” she says, overjoyed no doubt to see her dear old dad. I might have noted that, with her occupation and my habits, it had to happen.

I order a beer and explain that I was worried about whether the cops had been bothering her.

“Yeah,” she says, “they came around to my place this morning, and one came by tonight. They’re bothering the hell out of the customers. I can’t tell them what I don’t know, though. I never saw the dude, or if I did, I don’t remember. There were about a million people in here Wednesday night.”

“Do they know you’re my daughter?”

“Oh, yeah. The one tonight, he actually asked me if I was Willie Black’s daughter. I admitted that I was.”

“Fat guy with red hair and a bad comb-over?”

“Yeah.”

Gillespie might have noticed the physical resemblance between my daughter and me. I don’t blame Andi for telling the truth, but I’m sure I’ll be getting a call from one of Gillespie’s superiors, maybe the chief himself, soon.

I check my phone when I leave half an hour later. Sure enough, there’s a text message from Chief Jones. “Call me, now.” The chief is apparently economizing. Nowhere close to 140 characters.

I turn my phone off and head back to the office. I’ll let L.D. Jones read the morning paper before I call him back, by which time he probably won’t want to speak to me anyhow.

CHAPTER THREE

X

Saturday

I
have a lunch date with Cindy Peroni, which is, I hope, a step in the right direction.

We haven’t seen much of each other since the unfortunate events of last year, when I managed to drink myself out of one of the best things to happen in my hapless life in some time. Cindy, little sister of my old Hill buddy Andy Peroni, decided she had enjoyed about as much of me as she could stand after a particularly unpleasant episode in which I punched a guy whose hand, I thought, was roaming a bit too far south on her lovely body. I made a bad situation infinitely worse by then calling her a very bad name. She knows I didn’t mean it, but, like she said, life’s too short. She’s already been divorced from one loser. After a while, it starts to look like a trend.

But I’m trying to make a comeback. I’m easing up on the booze. I’m not smoking as much. I’ve sent flowers. I have wooed Cindy Peroni with more fervor than I may have exhibited toward any of my three ex-wives. I’ve even employed the services of my friend and her brother, for how much good that will do.

Maybe I’m just trying to make up for past transgressions. Maybe I’m getting too old and creaky to be the flaming asshole I once was.

Finally she agreed to meet me at The Strawberry Street Café, a nice, neutral place at a nice, neutral time, one
P.M.

STRAWBERRY STREET IS packed when we arrive, separately. (Her choice, obviously.) It must be free lunch day, the way they’re lined up outside. We wait twenty minutes, surrounded by strangers, and get a table flanked on one side by a group of six who seem to all be hard of hearing and on the other by a family with three small children.

Questions are repeated. Answers are repeated. Finally we finish our meal, get a check, and leave without settling anything.

I reach by habit for my habit, the Camels in my coat pocket. Cindy squelches a smile when she sees me stop and pretend I’ve totally given up tobacco.

“Go ahead,” she says. “One more won’t kill you. I mean, they all will, in their totality, but this one won’t take more than another ten seconds off your life.”

I’m scrambling for something to say that might bring global warming to the Ice Age I’ve made of our relationship. We can finally talk here, as I walk her back to her car.

“If every Camel I smoked took ten seconds off my life and, at the same time, gave me ten more seconds with you, I’d be up to four packs a day.”

Obviously touched, she says, “You always could bullshit, Willie.”

But it does cause at least a temporary thaw. I am able to give her further assurances that I am getting better with age, turning into fine wine instead of vinegar.

“I hardly ever drink anymore, and I’ve cut way back on the Camels.”

Of course, this means two drinks a day instead of six and maybe six cigarettes instead of a pack.

She gives me an uncensored smile.

“Yeah, Andy said you weren’t much fun anymore.”

“Try me.”

She looks at me and then looks away.

“Maybe. Let me think on it.”

I resist the urge to tell her we’re not getting any younger. Maybe I am growing brain cells in my old age.

We shoot the breeze awhile, her leaning on her car and me facing her. When she looks at her watch and says she has to be somewhere, I lean forward to kiss her. She lets me.

I DON’T HAVE to be at the paper for another hour, so I make a run by Peggy’s. It’s a nice day. It feels like fall even though the equinox is still a week away. Driving through Oregon Hill, I can hear televisions blaring through open windows, most tuned in to the Virginia Tech football game. At my mother’s house, she, Andi and Awesome are all sitting on the porch, watching the world go by from their blue-collar perch.

They bring out another chair for me. Peggy is surreptitiously sharing a joint with Awesome, setting it on the edge of an ashtray with one hand and waving with the other as a cop car rolls by. She won’t let Andi smoke anything now, thank God, until the baby comes. I politely decline, noting that I have to go to work and find it hard to make my fingers hit the right keys when I’m stoned.

“Suit yourself,” my mother says, shrugging. “More for me.”

I’m glad Andi’s living here. I think it helps her as much as it does Peggy. With her cold-footed ex-boyfriend more or less out of the picture, and with her determined she’s going to have this kid, come hell or high water, what better mentor could she have than Peggy Black, who raised her bouncing, mixed-race boy in bone-white Oregon Hill without anything like the family support group Andi has? Andi’s mother, Jeanette Stone (once Black) Walker, sees her a couple of times a week and is probably more excited than Peggy at the prospect of being a grandmother. And Thomas Jefferson Blandford V will, if nothing else, be good for the kind of child support my mother never saw.

As for Peggy, she’s still reeling (as am I) over the loss of Les Hacker. She needs somebody to love and nurture. She’s done it for me, for any number of worthless husbands and “uncles” who used to plague us and then leave or get thrown out, and she certainly did it for Les. Now, in her hour of need, she has Andi.

We get about forty minutes of quality time before I have to go punch the clock. Literally. The suits have put in this system by which we have to punch in and out, like we’re working at the sawmill. It did no good, Sally Velez told me, to explain to them that reporters have weird hours, often off company property. It did no good to tell them that any good reporter will work far beyond the forty (or, in our case, thirty-seven and a half) hours for which we’re paid.

So, it’s up to people like Sally to spend time they might have spent doing actual journalism “fixing” the hours to make it look as if we’re really in the office when we’re out covering actual news. And the unintended (but fully expected, for anyone with shit for brains) consequence is that more and more editors, reporters, and photographers are working to the clock instead of working until it’s done. A couple of times, copy editors have walked out on a Friday or Saturday night before everything was edited, because their workweeks were officially over. People will live down to your expectations, I want to tell whatever genius came up with this system.

As I walk off the porch, Awesome falls into step with me. This is unusual. The Dude is as friendly and generous as he is feckless, but he usually isn’t what you’d call gregarious.

I wait for it. Finally he speaks.

“You know that fella, that Tweety Bird guy?”

I let him finish.

“I might of seen him.”

This has my attention. Awesome sees a lot and remembers an amazing amount for a lifetime stoner.

“When?”

Awesome is often flummoxed by “when.” Not this time.

“It was last year, about when they found that girl, found her body, over by Texas Beach.”

I know that Awesome, who was at least partially homeless until Peggy and Les took him in, likes to stay in touch with his old, less fortunate acquaintances, sometimes taking them food and clothing, usually compliments of Peggy. In good weather, Texas Beach is one of his stops.

“It was, like, warm that day, so I went over there with some clothes and shit. And this fella, Red, had some pretty good weed, and we got to drinking and, first thing you know, it’s dark, and I just stayed.”

They were camped in the bushes down by the river, and it had turned cold as a gravedigger’s ass, Awesome says.

“There wadn’t nobody much else there,” he says. He was lying in the dark, thinking about the warmth of Peggy’s English basement, when he heard a scream.

“I was scared, Willie. There’s some bad dudes down there sometimes.”

He says he crawled up the hill a little and stumbled onto a path, another way to the river farther downstream.

“I can see good at night,” Awesome says, “but it was dark as hell. I heard another couple of sounds, like maybe an animal or something, and then some little ‘whirr-whirr’ kind of sounds. And then I heard the bushes rustling, and I laid real still.

“Dude, he walked right by me. He couldn’t of been ten feet away. I just about shit myself. And then he was gone.”

I ask him what he did then.

“Soon as I felt safe, I got the fuck out of there.”

He knows the night it happened for a good reason. Two days later, the searchers found Kelli Jonas’s abused body around the place where that path would have met the James River.

“I never went back there,” he says. “I run into Red a few months later, and he said the cops was all over him for a while, along with everybody else down there. He said he didn’t tell ’em about me, which I appreciated.

“I know I shoulda gone to the cops, or told somebody, but I was scared. I didn’t want nothing to do with any of that mess. The cops got it in for me anyhow.”

The police did have a tendency, in Awesome’s more feral days, of homing in on him. He’s spent a few weeks in jail over the course of his troubled, drug-addled life.

“I thought they’d catch the son of a bitch,” he says. We’re standing by my car now, me smoking a Camel and the Dude talking.

“But they never did, and he keeps doin’ it. I want it to stop, Willie, but they’ll think I did it if I tell them now.”

I ask Awesome if he remembers anything about the man.

“It was dark as shit. Couldn’t hardly see my hand in front of my face. All I remember is seeing his feet when he walked by, not hurrying, like he was out on a damn picnic.”

I don’t know where, if anywhere, this is all leading. They already found footprints.

I tell the Dude to let me know if he remembers anything else.

“You ain’t gonna tell the cops I was there, are you, Willie?”

The look of desperation fades when I tell him I won’t.

“I just want to help,” he says.

TALKING ABOUT THE Kelli Jonas case makes me wonder if Mark Baer’s gotten around to calling her parents yet.

At the office, I see that Baer’s spending his Saturday at his desk. For all his butt-kissing and ladder-climbing efforts, I have to admit that Baer does work. I am sure that the meter has already run out on his time-clock week.

“I called twice, but nobody answered, just got voice mail,” he says. “They haven’t called back yet.”

There’s nothing much going on in the newsroom. Most of Baer’s compatriots ran out of hours sometime yesterday afternoon.

There are no dirt naps in my in-box yet, so I make an offer.

“How about if I drive by there?”

Baer surprises me by accepting my offer.

“I’m up to my ass, got two more stories to write. I’d appreciate it.”

I tell Sally I’ll be back in a while and to call my cell if mayhem erupts before sundown.

“Be sure and clock out,” she says. Her hours are long since up, too, I’m thinking.

Between there and the front door, I forget, as usual.

The Jonases haven’t moved since their daughter’s murder. They live where they always have, in a western Henrico suburb that still has some life left before the renters start moving in, but it has seen better days. The new mall at Short Pump drew the developers and suburbanites west with it. The burbs keep moving west, and if you don’t change houses every few years, you wake up one day and find that the nice little strip mall half a mile away now houses a nail salon, a judo studio, a payday loan operation and a bunch of For Lease signs.