by Howard Owen
The really crazy part is that nothing like this can stay secret long in a city this size. The neighbor tells ten other neighbors, who tell ten of their friends each, and so on. By the time our watered-down version of James Alderman’s demise lands on their doorsteps tomorrow morning, even our gray West End constituency will be saying, “Duh. I read what really happened online. Are those guys at the paper asleep?” And that’s discounting the very real chance that all the TV stations will have it on the eleven o’clock news. The TV guys don’t worry too much about sensitivity.
A couple of shootings with no dirt naps involved comprise the rest of my night. I have time for a few hands of solitaire on the computer. A couple of the guys on the copy desk and I are even able to slip over to Penny Lane. I’m no foodie, but my advice on British grub is: Focus on the beer.
We do that. Two Harps later, I’m back across the street, waiting for something to happen and hoping nothing does.
I’m going through my notes on what are now known as the McNish murders and thinking more about Frosty than about James Alderman, I guess because everyone else seems more focused on the latter, per marching orders from our publisher.
About ten, I decide to give Cindy a call.
She answers on the third ring.
“I’m surprised you’re not out on the town,” I tell her.
“How do you know I’m not? Just a sec. Stop that, Lance! Get your hand out of there. People are watching.”
“Lance? Really? You know, I can hear your TV in the background. Masterpiece Theater, am I right?”
“Busted. I’m saving all my energy for tomorrow. A girl can’t go out on the town every night.”
It is a problem, my work schedule. When you get off work at one a.m. five nights a week, about the only options are to go home, go to a bar and speed-drink, or go crawl in bed with Cindy. The third option is one I’m becoming very fond of, and I do have a key now, but nobody wants to be awakened on a regular basis in the middle of the night by a reporter’s cold feet. Cindy has a part-time job and classes at VCU, so I try to time my post-midnight visits to coincide with days where she doesn’t have to set the alarm clock.
And I know Cindy doesn’t sit home waiting for me all those nights. She might even find a pleasing young man, one with a dependable career and sane work hours, on one of those nights. Who could blame her?
We talk a bit about her day and mine. I fill her in on what I know but can’t print about the Alderman murder. She seems to agree with our publisher that dismembered body parts are not what she wants with her sausage and eggs.
“That’s really amazing, though. I mean the coincidence.”
“Coincidence?”
“Yeah. About James Alderman. Happening just, what, eight days after that boy’s body was found.”
“You’re speaking in riddles.”
“Oh,” she says after a pause, “I thought you knew. About Alderman and the Children of God program. He was a mentor there when I was there, and I’m pretty sure he’s still connected. I can’t believe you didn’t know that. What kind of reporter are you, anyhow?”
Indeed.
CHAPTER TEN
Sunday
To the surprise of no one with any sense, the TV stations did suss out the particulars of James Alderman’s death, although not in time for the late-night news. But it was all over their websites by the time I woke up and checked. To make matters more galling, if that’s possible, our Internet geeks rewrote the TV stations’ versions, which were somewhat misinformed, and put that crap on our site, under my damn byline.
Gillespie isn’t the only one out there who either saw or heard about the body, and everybody loves to have access to and dish out information nobody else has. Hell, that’s why I’m a newspaperman.
So I have to call our web guru, who’s all of twenty-five, blister his ears for a bit, and then send him the details I tried to put in the Sunday paper. He seems neither chastened nor grateful.
It not only looks like we’ve been beaten by every TV station in town; now a sane person would assume that the paper also got scooped by our online “product,” whose producers are in reality good for nothing more than rewriting (and usually butchering) what the actual reporters gather out here in the real world.
I give Kate a call. I can hear Grace singing in the background. It stuns me to realize my ex-wife’s daughter is now talking. I wish time would slow the hell down.
I give her the news that James Alderman had links to Sam McNish and the Children of God program.
Her response is somewhat emphatic.
“Is that the same mouth you kiss Grace goodnight with?” I ask.
She tells me to fuck off.
“The guy that was murdered? He worked with McNish? Why the hell didn’t he tell us?”
I remind her that James Alderman was somewhat of a nonplayer in current events, just a city icon, until the unfortunate events of yesterday.
“Well,” she says, “I definitely have some questions for Mr. McNish.”
I gather from her tone that those questions might not wait until the start of the business week.
I tell her I’ll check back tomorrow when Cindy and I return from Williamsburg.
“Williamsburg, huh? Must be serious, if she’s gotten you to do that Colonial crap. Hell, you never took me there.”
I remind her that she, like me at that time, would have preferred to eat a broken Budweiser bottle. She concedes that I’m right, and that she and Mr. Ellis probably will go themselves one day next week, to please Gracie.
“We’ve changed,” I observe.
“Yes. Maybe for the better?”
I’M SUPPOSED to pick Cindy up at ten forty-five. Then, before we leave for Williamsburg, I am doing something I would only do for someone for whom I care a great deal.
I am going to church.
Cindy’s not a regular, she assures me, but it’s eleven days until Christmas, and she thinks she ought to go. When I suggest that Santa Claus probably will fill her stocking whether she sings hymns on Sunday or not, she just says that it would mean a lot to her if I came with her. She said it in a way that made me think it would also mean a lot if I didn’t.
For some reason, Christians seem to associate Christmas with Christ. I can see very little evidence that the holiday and its namesake have much in common anymore. I can’t find much sign of a link at the mall, on TV, or anywhere else. I don’t expect it to be any different in Colonial Williamsburg. The money changers definitely seem to have the upper hand these days.
But what are you going to do? You’re going to put on your least-rumpled sport jacket, a little-used pair of dress pants, and some rarely shined shoes, and do what you have to do.
The church is out in the West End, not far off of West Grace, and I can’t help but compare this fine Baptist structure with Grace of God. The parishioners are almost all white and almost all dressed better than I am, which is saying almost nothing at all. God or someone seems to have blessed the church itself.
There’s a sanctuary that must seat at least six hundred, from my rough estimate. There are plush little pillows so our butts don’t suffer during the sermon. I think McNish’s place was using folding chairs. The choir looks radiant in its purple finery. The minister appears to be well-fed and pleased with himself, his congregation, and the whole damn world.
The church has a school connected to it, K through twelve. When Cindy points this out, I refer to it as a segregation academy, which is what a lot of these nonpublic schools started out as. Cindy replies, with a little flint in her tone, I might add, that there are lots of minority students there. Looking around the congregation, I think those minorities might be mostly the kind with two tiger parents prodding them to study harder and seize that full scholarship to MIT, or those whose parents do a lot of the work we “real” Americans would rather not soil our hands with. I don’t see evidence, in other words, of many people of my late father’s ethnic persuasion.
But the sermon is to
lerable and short, and I see that the church is looking for volunteers to go into the backwoods of Southwest Virginia to assist dentists and doctors who occasionally do a pilgrimage down there to help those whose retirement strategy is the lottery and who are on the DGS health plan—Don’t Get Sick.
As one who doesn’t do much for his fellow man beyond buying him a beer or slipping him a buck when he’s standing there staring at me in the intersection while I wait for the light to change, I do not have the high ground.
“So,” Cindy says as we’re walking back to my car, “that didn’t kill you, did it?”
“Not yet. Weren’t you afraid lightning would strike you, sitting next to me in church?”
“I like to live dangerously.”
On the way to Williamsburg, we make a quick detour to see Philomena and Richard Slade. Richard has put one of those damn blowup Christmas figures in his front yard, a Santa Claus whose maniacal grin is enough to scare the neighborhood kids. Next to it is another one, a nativity scene perhaps done at Philomena’s insistence. Richard has strung lights along the gutters on the front and sides of Momma Phil’s house, and in the living room there’s a Christmas tree so big that it’s scraping the ceiling. It’s like Richard is trying to make up for those twenty-eight years he spent wrongfully incarcerated. They probably didn’t have a lot of yuletide festivities in the big house.
We can’t stay but a minute; Williamsburg awaits. I have presents for Philomena and Richard, my links to my father’s darker side of the family. And it would have been suicide to come here without something for the boys, who have to be threatened with corporal punishment (“Don’t make me get a switch after you!”) to keep them from opening their gifts right damn now. And, of course, I got Chanelle a little something as well. Philomena has something for me too. She says this might be her son’s last Christmas living in her home. He seems to have found someone to share the rest of his so-far star-crossed life with, which comes about as close to quashing my inner Grinch as anything I’ve experienced so far this season.
Richard walks us back to the car. He seems to have something on his mind.
“I hear you’ve been talking to Big Boy,” he says.
I ask him how in the world he knows that.
He shrugs.
“Word gets around. It isn’t that big a town. Him and me, we know some of the same people.”
Richard says that Big Boy Sunday’s exploits made their way inside the gates at Greensville, where some of his soldiers wound up.
“He grew up right near here. He was just making his bones when I got sent away, but there was always stories. Inmates would talk about things Big Boy had done.
“They’d always laugh and say Big Boy was too smart to ever get caught for anything serious, never would do much time. They wouldn’t have talked about it, but we were all home boys, you know.”
I wonder what Richard’s driving at. He comes to the point.
“Thing is, he really is a bad dude. I know he’s got a special interest in that boy that got killed, and I know what he is capable of doing. I’m just saying, don’t get in a situation where you’re on his bad side. He has messed some people up.”
When I tell him that Big Boy seems to want me to find the real killer, and that he gives every impression of not believing that Sam McNish is it, Richard seems surprised.
“Well,” he says at last, “he’s got his reasons. Big Boy’s always got his reasons, and, believe me, what he wants and what you want might not be the same thing.”
I tell him he doesn’t have to sell me on the lethal potential of Big Boy Sunday. A guy who can scare people enough to kill for him and then go to prison without fingering him has my attention. I promise Richard that I will proceed with caution.
He claps me on the shoulder and says, “You do that, Willie. We don’t want anything to happen to you. You’re family.”
I thank him for that, and I really mean it. My involvement in a story two years ago would wind up making me a party to Richard Slade’s exoneration for the murder of the woman whose long-ago testimony short-circuited his life. It has brought me an unexpected gift: the gift of family.
I will never know the late Artie Lee, the father I never had. Maybe I like him better for not knowing him. Now, though, I at least have the vestiges of him in Philomena’s stories. And then there are the twins.
“Those boys,” Philomena said today after invoking the switch threat again. “They’re just like Artie Lee was when he was that age.”
WE CHECK in at the Williamsburg Lodge. The price is only tolerable if you consider the alternative.
“Look at it this way,” Cindy says, “we’re saving three hundred dollars a night by not staying at the inn.”
Great, I say. If we stay for a week, we’ll be more than two thousand bucks to the good.
We do all the touristy crap. We walk around the re-created Colonial town that half these dummies from Ohio or Arkansas think is the real thing.
A lot of them seem to have skipped history class too.
“Those Pilgrims,” I hear one fat guy from Up North tell his wife, “they really knew how to build shit.”
I’m freezing my butt off, the smoke from those outdoor fires is making me sneeze, and the shops are full of overpriced stuff that nobody needs. When I look over and see Cindy, though, she looks like a kid on Christmas morning. Time to quit whining and suck it up. We’ll call it Cindy Day.
Before dinner, I check in with Kate again.
She and Marcus have, as I figured, already been to the jail to have a Sunday chat with Sam McNish.
“He was surprised that we would care to know that Alderman worked there some,” Kate says. “He said Alderman was just doing what a lot of other people did: helping out with the mentoring. He’d known him since he was a student at Union Seminary. Said Alderman was like his mentor.”
McNish was, Kate says, extremely upset over Alderman’s death.
“He said something about bad things happening to good people, said he would pray for whoever was depraved enough to kill a good man like James Alderman.”
“But he didn’t think there could have been any connection between the Cole kid’s murder and Alderman’s?”
“He said he couldn’t imagine what it could be. Maybe he’s right.”
And maybe he’s not. We have a lot of murders in Richmond, but most of them are of the tragic but mundane variety. Husband kills wife. Drug buyer kills drug seller or vice versa. There’s usually a reason. Maybe you got your ass into a dangerous situation. Maybe you married the wrong guy. But when we have two killings of the seemingly blameless in this spectacular a fashion in this short a period of time, the smart money is not on coincidence.
“He wants to talk to you,” Kate says. She doesn’t seem very happy to be telling me that.
“When?”
“Whenever you can. Tomorrow, if you’re back from Ye Olde Williamsburg by then.”
“Why?”
“He seems to trust you, Willie. I don’t know, maybe it’s an Oregon Hill thing. Maybe he just doesn’t know you all that well.”
Sources, I want to tell my ex-wife and present landlady, could always trust me.
Wives? Now that was a different story.
WE HAVE dinner at the inn. Cindy goes for the lobster bisque and chateaubriand. I get the oysters Rockefeller and the crab cakes. You really can’t go wrong with crab cakes, as long as you don’t drift any farther south than the North Carolina state line. I think I had a pecan torte for dessert. I am not sure.
The trouble started right after we got back from our stroll and I checked in again with Kate.
I blame it on timing. We had a couple of hours to kill between a little horizontal in-room entertainment and our dinner reservation. I was feeling good. I was at the end of a truly virtuous day—church with my sweetie, bringing gifts to my cousins, springing for an expensive night at a joint where I really didn’t want to be in the first place.
When I start feeling good, some
times things start to go really bad.
WE GO to the lounge where we’re staying. It’s happy hour. Maybe I notice Cindy frowning a little as I have my second bourbon on the rocks. Usually, I drink the kind of stuff that can be watered down at no great loss in quality. If it tastes like crap, water can make it taste only half as much like crap. But this is a special occasion, a Knob Creek kind of occasion, and anybody who’d adulterate Knob Creek with water would put an ice cube in a good Bordeaux. The bartender is generous, and I start feeling even better. I get into a conversation with some guy who wants to talk about the Civil War. The Civil fucking War is usually a topic I find about as appealing as genital herpes. If you live in my neck of the woods, you get beaten to death with Waw of Nawthen Aggression, especially by the apologists who claim it was about states’ rights instead of keeping my direct ancestors in chains.
Now, though, chatting with this schmuck from Pennsylvania I just met, I find myself trying to defend the indefensible. I guess he just rubbed me the wrong way. He says something, as I recall, about the best thing that ever happened to the South was losing the Civil War, and I say something about how I’d rather be in jail in Richmond than mayor of whatever shithole, rusted-out, Polack icebox of a town he was from. It’s starting to get a bit tense, and I’m trying to order my third Knob Creek, when his wife pulls him away and Cindy does the same to me.
“Don’t do this,” I remember her saying to me.
But when you’re hot, you’re hot. By then, it’s time to go to dinner. Over somewhat strong protest, I have another KC before we order. But I’m still in what I feel is the Good Willie zone, the one where you’re the life of the party but not yet wearing the lampshade. Sure, I’d been a little loud, a little truculent back there at the bar, but I’m getting my second wind now. I assure Cindy that everything is going to be OK.
As is often the case, I am wrong.