The Bottom (6 page)

My estimation of Chenault’s IQ just dropped below freezing. Like a lot of guys who aren’t totally, completely sure of their power, Wheelie does not relish having his manhood challenged in front of others. In the past, I have made the same mistake Wat Chenault’s just made.

Wheelie stands up. He isn’t up to eggplant, but he’s a nice shade of pink.

Chenault begins to haul his considerable avoirdupois out of his chair, not sure what’s going on.

“I think our conversation is over, Mr. Chenault,” Wheelie says. “We have our newspaper to run, and you have your priorities. We will run a correction on A1. We will, if you desire, do a nice story on your, er, comeback. Beyond that, I can promise you nothing.”

“You will be hearing from my lawyer,” Chenault says. I step out into the hallway so he can get past. He barely squeezes through the door.

“I expect we will,” Wheelie says with a sigh. He doesn’t bother to say good-bye or walk Chenault to the elevator. When our ex-senator walks past me, he stops for a second while he fishes a cigar out of his coat pocket, one he’s probably going to light up on the elevator of our no-smoking building.

“You and I,” he says, lowering his voice again and wagging the stogie at me, “we aren’t through yet.”

I walk back into the office to congratulate Wheelie for doing the exact thing Wat Chenault wanted him to do: show some cojones. My boss doesn’t look nearly as satisfied as I would have been in his shoes.

“Damn, Willie,” he says, “the suits are going to have my butt when this gets out. Maybe we ought to back off a little.”

“Stay the course, Chief,” I tell him. “You can’t let that fat fuck push you around.” I can tell that he likes it that I call him “Chief.” Sounds a little more John Wayne than “Wheelie.”

“Easy for you to say,” he mutters. He’s right. I’ve been nearly fired so many times, in addition to being demoted back to night cops, that they pretty much expect me to screw up. They expect better things from Wheelie. The difference between him and me? Wheelie still thinks he has a capital-C career. I’m just trying to keep drawing a paycheck for doing what I like: Sticking my big honker into other people’s business until the bullshit is dispersed.

I leave.

I know Wheelie is troubled. If he’s on the same side as me, he knows something must be terribly wrong.

I CHECK WITH Peachy Love, calling her on her private cell rather than her phone at headquarters, and find out that either the police have no new information on the latest Tweety Bird murder or—more likely—they don’t choose to share their information with me.

I don’t press Peachy on it. I don’t want to impose on the good nature of my old friend, former colleague, and sometime playmate. Peachy was a good night cops reporter herself before she decided she’d rather work with the police than follow them around with a notepad and a digital camera. She often feeds me information that a good media-relations person really should keep to herself, but she and I know she has to pick her spots. If something’s in the works, Peachy probably will find a way to let me know. Stonewalling me on the day-to-day stuff is how she keeps her credibility.

“Don’t leave me in the dark, Peachy.”

“Have I ever?”

AT ELEVEN THIRTY, when I’m about to call it a night and make an appearance at Penny Lane in time for a beer or three, we get word of a shooting, and I’m scrambling down to the Bottom. When I get there, I suss out the sad but too-familiar story. A party celebrating a birthday was stumbling out of one of our finer establishments just as another group, celebrating Saturday, emerged from the one next door. Somebody bumped somebody, maybe scuffed his shoe. Words were spoken. The testosterone kicked in. At least one of the participants had a gun. And someone’s nineteen-year-old, underage drinking son is in the VCU Medical Center, clinging to a life that ought to have been good for another sixty years.

The gut-shot boy’s friends are still there, leaning against cars, scared and pissed off.

“If I’d had a gun,” one of them says, his eyes red, “I’d of shot the son of a bitch.”

It is our answer to everything. The shooter, already caught and locked up, has a right to carry a people-popping firearm. All hail the Second Amendment. And since he has one, the kid who might have a confrontation with him outside some bar has to have one, too. A gun for a gun. Old Testament meets the Wild West.

When I was a kid, back in the day, we had fights in Oregon Hill all the time. I’d had my nose broken twice by the time I was fifteen. Almost all of the fights involved fists, so much so that the Hill has turned out more than its share of boxers over the decades. It was considered the street equivalent of going nuclear if one of you pulled a knife.

It takes more balls than most of our young studs possess to cut somebody to death. It gets a little messy. And it’s damn near impossible to beat somebody to death with your fists.

Whoever is perpetuating our street-level arms race, I’m thinking there’s a toasty little corner of hell that has their names all over it.

I’M ABLE TO get the folks at Havana 59 to let me sit at a table with my beer and e-mail my story back on my laptop. I mishit the tiny little keys about every fourth time. Still it’s better than driving all the way back to the paper. I look up after I’ve sent my story, and there’s Andi, behind the bar. I didn’t think she was working tonight.

She’s off at one, so we have time to talk for a couple of minutes before she drives back to Peggy’s and I go back to my humble abode.

“The cops were by again,” she says. “They showed me a couple of pictures, wanted to know if I’d seen either one of them. But I wasn’t able to help them.”

“Sounds like they might be on somebody’s trail.”

“I don’t know. I’ll leave that cops-and-robbers stuff to you.”

I tell her to get off her feet. She needs her rest.

“Jeez, Dad. I’m pregnant. I’m not an invalid.”

Ah, youth. Even as kids not much younger than she is are being murdered by lunatics and shooting holes in each other, Andi thinks nothing bad could possibly happen to her.

Why worry?

That’s what fathers are for.

CHAPTER FIVE

X

Sunday

A
be and I are watching the Redskins lose when Peachy calls.

“Do you know a guy named Ronnie Sax?”

I do.

Ronnie Sax was before Peachy’s short time as an honest journalist. He was a good photographer, but kind of squirrelly, or am I being redundant? He came to the paper as Ron Kusack. Two or three years later, he let it be known that he was Ronnie Sax. I guess he thought it would stand him better in his later career as a famous photojournalist, which never developed, pardon the pun. Or maybe he just thought— mistakenly—that it would make him a Cool Dude.

He’s done a lot of freelancing of different sorts since he and the paper parted company. I run across a photo he’s taken from time to time in Richmond’s weekly entertainment magazine or one of the other rags trying to make a living off ink and paper. Last year he was shooting a wedding I got dragged to.

It’s all starting to come back to me now.

Ronnie was not trustworthy. He was suspected a couple of times of staging “spontaneous” photos. Back then before the hanging judges of human resources started calling the shots, you could take somebody like Sax, a guy who had talent enough for you to overlook his less savory qualities, and give him a stern talking-to, off the books, and let it go at that. Turns out we should have just fired his ass.

Even in those lenient days, many of us were not sure that Ronnie hadn’t already used up all the strikes a budding photojournalist should have.

Strike three, though, was a doozy.

It turns out that Ronnie Sax was doing a bit of freelancing while he was still drawing a paycheck from the paper. And some of his freelancing, a rather lucrative part of it, was porn.

The end came soon after a well-endowed West End couple discovered that their darling daughter, a sophomore at the University of Richmond who also was well-endowed, was featured rather prominently in a movie they had rented to add a little zest to their love life. Confronted, she finally and tearfully told all. Ronnie Sax, it turns out, had managed to talk her into doing a couple of “glamour” shoots—part of glamour, apparently, being buck naked in a gynecological pose. He had then introduced her to a friend who was in the porn business, and little Susan was soon stashing away some considerable bucks that she didn’t even need in exchange for doing the nasty in front of a camera crew. It wasn’t too hard to figure out that it was a local production. I saw one of their classics—purely for research, of course. The girl went by the stage name of Renee Wett, and the title was
Renee Ravages Richmond.
Kind of derivative, but the scene at the foot of the Lee Monument was pretty gripping.

As the father of a daughter, I think now that, in a similar situation, I might have shot Ronnie Sax. No one did, but we all knew the guy had to go. They raided his apartment and found lots of incriminating evidence. What they seized involved girls who were “legal,” although in some cases barely so.

“Jesus,” Peachy says, “I think I do remember somebody telling me about that guy. Well, it seems as if he still has a knack for snatch shots.”

Somebody gave the cops a tip. It turns out that Ronnie Sax is living in an apartment in one of the converted warehouses down in the Bottom. He’s been living there for about two years. And he bragged to a few of his neighbors that he had some “hot chicks” in for photo shoots. He even showed them some of the pictures. At least one of the neighbors was concerned enough about Ronnie’s hobby, and that neighbor called the police. He said he thought one of the naked ladies bore a striking resemblance to Kelli Jonas, Tweety Bird Victim Number One.

“They brought him in for questioning this morning,” Peachy tells me. “I don’t think they can hold him, but they’re pretty excited over this one.”

No doubt they are. Chief L.D. Jones would love to close this particular file. The mayor gave a statement yesterday. It didn’t exactly encourage the chief to start sending out résumés if a perp wasn’t produced posthaste, but you could kind of see where the buck was going to stop—right in the chief’s ample lap.

I thank Peachy and ask her to keep me posted. I promise to come around for a drink sometime soon. Encouraged to be more specific, I give a weasel answer.

“What the fuck,” she says. “Are you swearing off chocolate?”

Straddling the racial lines that divide our lovely city even at this late date, I face different expectations from various constituencies. It seems clear to me that Peachy Love thinks I’m going Oreo on her, although it’s more like bronze on the outside and white on the inside in my case.

At any rate, I assure my old friend and reliable source that this is not the case and that I am, as always, an equal opportunity fornicator.

“Couldn’t prove it by me,” she says. I detect a note of huffiness in her voice. I promise to come by sometime soon.

Truth is, I really do want it to work with Cindy Peroni, and I imagine that Cindy, while generous to a fault, probably isn’t too cool on the subject of sharing. Of course I still haven’t earned a second chance from the lovely Cindy. I’m working on that.

I figure the cops won’t keep Ronnie Sax long unless he breaks down and admits he’s a serial killer.

It doesn’t take much—just a look at switchboard.com—to find Ronnie’s address.

ABE HASN’T MOVED since I went into the den to take Peachy’s call. He looks exasperated.

“Skins suck,” is all the information I need.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON IN the Bottom is quiet. A few people are wandering out of their late brunches at Millie’s or Poe’s Pub. Farther down the river, they’ll be sipping wine and contemplating the river at the newer places that have sprung up along with overpriced condos along the James.

I find Sax’s apartment. No one answers when I knock, and I can’t hear anything inside that might indicate anyone’s there.

There’s a pool outside, not far from the apartment. It’s still warm enough to sit there and soak up some rays. I decide to wait. No one’s checking IDs, although my age might hint to an observant person that I am a little outside the age range of most of the residents.

There are only two other people poolside. Then a young woman sits down two deck chairs from me. She takes off her robe. She’s wearing a string bikini. I try not to stare.

After a few quiet moments, she turns to me.

“Do you live here?”

I tell her that I am an acquaintance of Ronnie Sax’s and was supposed to meet him at his apartment.

“But it looks like he’s been detained.”

The girl gives me the stink-eye.

“Yeah,” she says. “He’s been detained, all right. The cops came by around eight. Woke my ass up. Do you know what that’s all about?”

I confess that I am a reporter. I don’t tell her that Ronnie Sax might be the reason half the women in Richmond are packing heat and the other half are carrying mace. No sense in getting everybody’s knickers in a knot. I just tell her that I got a tip and am checking it out.

She’s a smart girl, though.

“Ohmigod,” she says, bringing her right hand up to her ample cleavage. “It’s that Tweety Bird thing, isn’t it? Damn. I knew there was something wrong with that dude.”

She’s heard the second-hand reports that he was doing some clothing-optional photo shoots in his apartment. I don’t say it, but I’m surprised he hasn’t approached Miss Buns here. Maybe she’s too old for him, probably pushing thirty.

I emphasize that they are just questioning Sax.

“But, you’re not, like, a friend or something?” she asks. She seems to be inching her chair a little farther from me.

I assure her I am not, although Ronnie Sax and I did work together, long ago, at the newspaper.

I ask her if she has any idea where he might have been last Wednesday night or Thursday morning. She says she doesn’t.

A few minutes later, there’s a commotion behind us. I turn to see three policemen escorting Ronnie Sax back to his apartment.

“You got no right to search,” he says. One of the cops flashes a warrant in front of him.