by Howard Owen
She laughs. She loves it when I use what she calls “old folks” words like “persnickety.” At least, she pretends to.
“Oh, one other thing,” she says. “Mark’s doing a story on the Ducharme case. Wheelie told him to do it. Police side and all.”
Sarah is dating Mark Baer these days. The noble part of me says that’s a good thing. Play with kids your own age. The other, south-of-the-belt part says: Good God. Baer is an avowed metrosexual, like most of the younger guys in the newsroom. I don’t get exactly what that means. From what I see, it entails an ability to neuter yourself in a work situation, carry a man purse and treat women like buddies with tits, people you have some laughs with, maybe hook up with later. Maybe get married to someday, after an eighteen-month engagement, with the understanding that nothing lasts forever.
What the hell do I know? With my track record, going metrosexual probably would be a step in the right direction.
“Anything about me?” I ask Sarah.
“Oh, yeah. They fired you right off. First one.”
When I was twenty-three, I was pretty flip about my job. I told more than one editor to just can my ass if he didn’t like what I was doing.
Sarah doesn’t understand the golden handcuffs. You work somewhere, keep getting the raises, keep painting yourself into a smaller and smaller box, get comfortable, and suddenly you wake up one day and realize you’d be truly fucked without the job you don’t even like that much anymore.
“No, really.”
Sarah sighs.
“Chill, Willie. We haven’t heard anything yet. Wait a minute. There’s something going on. Just a sec. . . . Holy shit. That bitch from HR, the one that you can never get on the phone? She and a guard are over at Jackson’s desk. They’re getting his coat and his briefcase. . . . They’re leaving.”
Jackson. Son of a bitch. Jackson never won a Pulitzer, but he would’ve stepped in front of a bus for the goddamn paper.
I tell Sarah I’ll come by tomorrow and see if my ID badge still gets me in the building.
“I’m sure you’ll be fine,” she tells me, in a voice that conveys she’s not sure at all. Neither am I.
“What airport?” she asks.
“What?”
“You said, ‘Black, airport.’ What airport?”
I tell her it’s a surprise. Sarah can keep a secret, but just in case, I’m pleading the Fifth. They’ll find out at the paper when I turn in my expense form.
I call the only person I know in the greater Boston area and get Chandler Holmquist’s voice mail. My second wife is out of the newspaper game these days. She always did have a knack for dumping a losing hand just in time. These days, she’s working for a state senator who has higher ambitions.
When I’m ten seconds into my spiel, and she’s recognized me and decided I’m answer-worthy, she picks up.
“Willie,” she says. “Where the hell are you?”
I tell her I’m at Logan. I can hear the keys clicking in the background and know I’ve got maybe one-quarter of her attention.
“Well, you should have called. We need to catch up.”
Sometime, maybe, but not now. I guess you’d say I’m sub-consciously avoiding the possibility of a real sit-down with Chandler.
“How’s Ned?”
“Neal. You always do that. He’s fine. We’re fine. We’re thinking about having a baby.” They’ve been thinking about that for years, apparently trying to figure out how it’s done. “How’s, uh, Andi?”
I’m trying to keep it light. This is just a check-in call to assure me that it isn’t possible to have somebody you once gave up the world for disappear from your life like a deleted file. But I’ve had a couple of Sam Adamses.
“It’s hard to believe we spent a couple of years in the same bed,” I say, and the clicking stops.
“Well,” she says at last, “we didn’t spend much time talking.”
It’s a quick call. I have forty minutes, so I order another.
I try to call the apartment, afraid of what I’ll hear from Custalow. There’s no answer.
The sun’s setting when we land at Byrd Field, which some insist on calling Richmond International, I guess because you can eventually get out of the country from here, if you change planes at least once.
Back at the Prestwould, I look up from the parking lot. The lights are on, and I can see Custalow. He’s standing by the living room window, looking out. At least he hasn’t left or been thrown out of the building yet.
I let myself in, and he’s still there, at the end of our thirtyfoot foyer. He doesn’t turn around.
“So,” I say, broaching the subject, “are you still employed?”
He looks around, seems kind of surprised I’d ask such a question.
“Employed? Oh, yeah. No problem.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Tuesday
The only calls on the answering machine last night were from Mark Baer and Sandy McCool.
Baer wanted some information I wouldn’t have given him anyhow. In my absence, he did a story for today’s paper in which the police categorically deny that they might possibly have the wrong guy.
“We are certain that we have gotten a violent and dangerous criminal off our streets,” Chief Jones is quoted as saying. “Lieutenant Shiflett is to be commended for his fine work.”
Commend my ass.
Then there was the other call. Sandy McCool is Grubby’s secretary, or administrative officer, or whatever the hell you call them these days. She’s been at the paper for almost forty years, came there straight out of high school. Grubby is her third publisher. She’s a pro. We’ve had a drink or three together. Even shitfaced, she doesn’t talk out of school.
Her voice, neutral as a good referee, told me that I have an appointment with Grubby in his office at nine thirty.
So, I did some tossing and turning.
I called Jackson, who was home, same as he always is when he isn’t at work. Not much to say. “I know how you feel.” “Things’ll look better in the morning.” “You’ve got a lot of good years to give somebody.” You lie through your teeth, and the guy you’re talking to pretends he doesn’t know you’re lying. Otherwise, it gets awkward.
The only thing that makes the sun break through the clouds at all this morning is Custalow, who is redeemed.
He’d had a pretty good idea for some time. There weren’t that many people it could have been. There are about seventy residents, none of whom seemed like good candidates to steal from each other. Even the handful of wild and crazy young renters are mostly med students. They aren’t prone to burglary. Then you have the guards, but you can look at the tape and see when and if they leave the lobby. Marcia the manager absolved them some time ago.
Custalow knew he didn’t do it, and that left only one logical suspect.
The Prestwould’s basement is a rabbit warren of tired, dirty rooms nobody uses. There are doors off of doors, some housing the boiler and the washer-dryers, some used for the residents’ storage, some chock-full of large and small pieces of wood and metal that must have had a purpose at one time.
A year ago, on the first cleanup day we’d had down there in anyone’s memory, Marcia found a couple of rooms nobody even knew about.
Custalow wasn’t keen on claiming some of this dingy space for himself.
“What the hell for?” he asked one night when he told me how Susan Sheets had about three rooms full of crap, mostly things residents were going to throw away and were happy to give to Susan. Made ’em feel good. Noblesse oblige and all that shit. “I don’t have anything I can’t store in one closet. Don’t want anything else.”
Susan was, to put it mildly, a pack rat. At the cleanup, they found a motley assortment of things—toasters, old TVs, armchairs with only one leg missing, broken VCRs. They even found a damn Betamax.
Marcia told her to start hauling some of the crap away. She did, for a while, until Marcia got distracted by something else and stopped checking.
<
br /> Custalow told me six weeks ago that she was filling the rooms up again, the residents being unable to curb their urge to give away useless items.
Abe said—when he spun it all out for me last night—that he almost always left before Susan, who would claim that she had one or two more little chores to do before she went home.
One morning a few weeks ago, he woke up at three A.M. and couldn’t get back to sleep, so he went for a walk. He cut through the alley that runs behind the Prestwould. There, parked in a dark, distant corner of the lot, was Susan’s beat-up Datsun. Her workday didn’t start for almost five hours.
“I didn’t say anything to her about it, but at work that day, I did notice she had the same clothes on as she’d had the day before. She might have washed up in the sink in the laundry room.”
It wasn’t relevant until jewelry started disappearing. Last week, Abe started checking. Every night, he’d go downstairs after quitting time and see if Susan Sheets’ car was there. The first three nights, she eventually left, usually within an hour.
Finally, in the nick of time, he got lucky.
On Friday night at seven thirty, her car was still there. He got into his own piece-of-crap car, a very used Corolla he bought to get him at least as far as the grocery store, and he waited.
“I didn’t know what I was going to do,” he said. “Go in there and try to find her, I guess.”
While he was deciding, a Buick Century older than the Corolla turned into the lot and parked not far from Susan’s car. A guy got out.
“I was probably a hundred feet away, but this guy just looked like trouble. He had that been-to-prison look. He kept glancing over his shoulder, and he kind of scurried along, like he was up to no good.”
Susan Sheets’ boyfriend went down the steps to where a back door leads from the alley to the basement, unseen by anyone but Custalow. He seemed to make a call on his cell phone. The door opened, and he went inside.
Custalow said he got the car’s license number, and then he walked back to the front of the building, went upstairs and waited. He could barely make out the Century and Susan’s Datsun from the sixth floor. When, after an hour, they were still there, he made his move.
He took the elevator to the lobby and then walked down a flight of stairs to the basement.
Abe Custalow is light on his feet for a big man. He was always good at dances and fistfights. It probably wasn’t that hard for him to sneak up on them.
He said he thought he had a good idea what he was going to find.
A rhythmic, familiar sound led him to one of the rooms where Susan kept her stash of junk. The door was cracked slightly. Inside, beyond all of Susan’s worthless cache, he saw a sliver of light, thin as a razor blade, coming from what looked like a closet. Custalow remembered the door having a lock on it when he’d last been there.
He said they seemed to be wrestling the bear at the time and were slightly distracted. He tiptoed out.
Abe must have been exhausted on Saturday after playing detective, and then having to wake up and take care of me after my little nunchuck adventure.
He called Marcia on her cell phone Saturday morning, before I got up. She was out of town and wouldn’t be back until Sunday night, but she promised to be in on Monday morning an hour before Susan got there.
“I was pretty sure what I was going to find,” he said, “but she needed to be there when I broke the lock.”
He used a hammer on it, with Marcia watching. She was nervous, Abe said, afraid she was taking part in a robbery. But the room did belong to the Prestwould, and there weren’t supposed to be any locks.
When they got inside, there was a bed in there from God knows when. Might have been there for decades. And there were cabinets and desks. The “closet” was actually about twelve by twelve, Custalow said.
He broke into two desks before he found what he was looking for—a rather impressive collection of jewelry.
Some of the swag would be identified by the Barrons and Maddie Blank, and they’re still trying to find out who the rest of it belongs to. Among my neighbors here are more than a few of the careless rich, who sometimes don’t miss a four-figure brooch or a diamond doodad.
When Susan came in, she denied everything and was able to muster up a temporary ruse of righteous indignation. But then Custalow grabbed the key ring she was still holding in her hand and said he’d bet that one of the keys on it would fit that lock he’d just busted. And he pointed out that neither he nor Marcia had touched anything in the room except the outside of the two desks, leaving the rest for the police to fingerprint.
Marcia called the cops, and by ten o’clock, Susan was in custody.
“What if you’d been wrong?” I asked Custalow. In addition to losing his job, he’d probably have been arrested for breaking and entering, thus earning himself Strike Two from our state penal system, which sometimes only gives you two strikes.
“I didn’t have much to lose,” he said, “and I was pretty sure I was right.”
I don’t think Susan Sheets is a bad person, all things being equal. But she was driving a rusted-out Datsun thirty miles each way to a job that didn’t pay much, living with her mother and trying to raise two fatherless kids. And she apparently was a scumbag magnet.
The boyfriend, she claimed yesterday morning, made her do it. “Made” is a relative term. In this case, the best guess is that it meant he threatened to stop being nice to her, and Susan didn’t look like she’d been on the receiving end of a whole lot of nice.
The guy had a pretty long record, the kind that makes everybody ask, “How the hell did that asshole get out?” But they do, and he did.
Susan was malleable enough to let the scumbag screw her in their basement love nest and then have the run of the building. She probably told him who was out of town, and he had some experience getting past locked doors. He had the record to prove it. I believe her claim that she didn’t do the actual stealing herself, but I wonder if a judge will, or if it will even matter.
They had pawned a lot of it, but I guess they were waiting for things to cool down a little before selling the rest. It might have been smart to move it away from the building it was stolen from, but sometimes I think the only thing separating us from total anarchy is the general imbecility of the criminal class.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked Custalow after he was through.
“You remember Coach Epps?” he asked me.
Who could forget Coach Epps, who tortured and terrorized us through our high school football careers? He was ex-VMI, a former Marine who spent a year in the jungle during the Vietnam War, a chain smoker and creative curser.
“Remember what he said, about telling what you were going to do?”
I knew, but he said it anyhow.
“ ‘Don’t tell me what you’re going to do,’ is what he always told us. ‘Tell me what you did.’ ” Actually, I think Epps used the word “fucking” at least twice in that oft-repeated aphorism.
It occurred to me that a little bit of Coach Epps was living inside me, too.
It’s a problem, being a journalist, if you hold back information. Spilling our guts is what we get paid to do.
Sometimes, though, you can make out better holding something back, stashing it away in your self-interest savings account.
Today could be one of those times.
I make a call to Glenn and Jeanette’s to make sure Andi’s OK, and assure them and her that I’m going to straighten this out soon. Then I get dressed and prepare to meet my publisher.
I go to my desk first. I log on, and someone’s already sent a list of the nine people who’ve gotten the ax so far. Jackson told me eight of them earlier.
I write what I came here to write and print it out. I take whatever I really want to keep (damn near nothing). I didn’t bring my beat-up satchel with me, and I leave my sports jacket on. If I’m ushered out of the building, I don’t want some HR asshole to inform the whole newsroom of my demise by pickin
g up my stuff, the way they did with Jackson.
Then, I ascend to the fourth floor.
It’s kind of a ghost town up here. Tumbleweeds blowing down the hallway. When they built the new building about a decade ago, they were counting on growth, not shrinkage. They could rent out this whole floor and move everyone who’s left up here down to share the third floor with what’s left of advertising; but I’m sure some corporate MBA asshole somewhere decided that wouldn’t look good.
I walk into the anteroom, where Sandy McCool sits like a guard between Grubby Grubbs and the outside world.
“Willie,” she says, smiling professionally. “Mr. Grubbs is waiting for you. Please go on back.”
Somehow, “Mr. Grubbs” sounds more unnatural coming from her than it does when I say it. Sandy had a son in high school by the time Grubby came here as an intern.
I ask her about her family, and she says something neutral. I try to make eye contact and fail. This does not bode well.
The weather report worsens to 100 percent chance of termination when I see that Grubby’s not alone. Sitting in the other chair facing his desk is Leon from HR. Leon’s only college degree is one he got mostly from correspondence courses, but he’s not the one with his head on the block, so who am I to sneer?
Grubby stands up, so Leon does too. They both seem intent on shaking hands with me. Me, not so much. I sit down, they retrieve their hands and sit down, too.
You’re making it easy for me, Grubby’s eyes seem to say.
“Willie,” he begins, “we’ve made some personnel decisions around here. I’m sure you’ve heard about some of them already.”
“We’re adding to staff?”
He doesn’t bother replying. Leon is shuffling the papers that spell out the terms of my departure.
“We’ve been having some bottom line problems,” he continues. “We’re having to consolidate some positions and . . . eliminate others.”
I wait for it.
“We have no problem with your performance, but we’ve decided to go in another direction.”