Grace

by Howard Owen

  “Come by after two,” is all he says as he scurries away.

  SOME THINGS can’t be put off forever.

  Today’s the day I put on my big boy pants and seek Cindy Peroni’s forgiveness. The worst scenario, I think, will be if she forgives me but tells me I’m just too much damn trouble. That’ll mean that the L-word, the one we’ve both said to each other on occasion, is out of the picture. You’re either in it or you’re not.

  If she’s only furious with me, I might have a chance. Right now, I’d be glad to let her club me with a nine iron just to know she cares.

  I make the call at eleven thirty, half hoping she’ll be out Christmas shopping. She’s finished her classes for the semester, and her part-time job is mostly nights.

  She answers. I almost hang up. Despite grinding my teeth over this since Monday, I can’t think of a damn thing to say.

  “Um, hi, it’s me. The asshole.”

  She is silent for a few long seconds.

  “Hello, Willie.”

  I strain in vain to hear anything resembling warmth.

  I tell her how sorry I am, in both senses: regretful as hell and worthless as a broke-dick dog. I explain how ashamed I am, how I never in a million years meant for last Sunday’s disaster to happen. I explain that I would rather take poison, or even go to the ballet, than hurt her.

  There’s no sound coming from the other end of the line, and I am concerned for a second that she has quietly hung up the phone. But I hear breathing. She’s waiting me out, doing what I do when I want a subject to spill his guts. Damn, I taught her that.

  She lets me finish making my case.

  “I know I don’t deserve anything, and I know you’ve told me before what the consequences are, so I can’t do anything but beg you. Please forgive me. Please take me back.”

  I hear her snort.

  “You son of a bitch,” she says for openers, then spends the next couple of minutes telling me exactly how many fathoms lower than whale shit I am. Now it’s time for me to shut up.

  “I hate you,” she says, winding up.

  It’s crunch time.

  “But do you love me?”

  She doesn’t answer right away. I am outside, in the parking lot beside the Prestwould. I throw down the Camel I’m holding in my left hand and cross my fingers.

  “I don’t know,” she says at last. “Oh, hell, I can’t lie. I do. But that just makes it worse.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “You’re going to have to give me some time, Willie. I appreciate that you didn’t promise it’ll never happen again. It will, unless you get some help or just grow the hell up.

  “It’s just a question of whether I can put up with a drunk who is liable to ruin everything on a moment’s notice.”

  “A guy who could fuck up Christmas.”

  “Yeah. That guy.”

  I note that, in my defense, I’m not drunk all the time. We both knew men and women, in Oregon Hill, who started drinking when they woke up and stopped when they passed out. I was luckier than many. Peggy’s mind-altering substance of choice only made her mellow and a little goofy.

  “Is it OK if I call you in a few days?”

  She says maybe, but then she says it’d be better if she calls me.

  “I promise I won’t leave you hanging,” she says, “but I sure as hell can’t swear that you’re going to like the answer.”

  It’s all I can hope for and more than I deserve.

  THE LONG-AGO boy’s name isn’t listed in the white pages. It’s not on switchboard.com or anywhere else I look. Hell, maybe he’s dead.

  I make a call to Philomena Slade, because Philomena seems to know everybody. She is pretty much one degree of separation from any African American in the greater Richmond area.

  I tell her I’m trying to find a man named Alston Barefoot, who would be about thirty-two now, if I’m doing the math right.

  “What do you want to talk to him for?” she asks me. Even if I am family, she has a fact-based suspicion of anybody wearing a tie who’s looking for a black man. I’m not a bill collector and I’m not serving a warrant, but my being a journalist is enough to make my cousin suspicious.

  I tell her that he might have some information that could help solve Artesian Cole’s murder.

  Appeased, she spills it.

  “Lord have mercy,” she says. “I think I knew who he is. I believe I went to school with his momma. They’re good people. Surely to goodness he isn’t involved in this mess.”

  I assure Momma Phil that Alston Barefoot isn’t guilty of anything other than maybe not telling the truth twenty years ago.

  Philomena doesn’t know where Alston Barefoot’s mother lives now, but she’s pretty sure she’s around Richmond somewhere.

  “Can you find out where her son lives?”

  She hesitates. I hate to ask her, but the chances of this guy’s mother giving some stranger her son’s address are about the same as the Redskins winning next year’s Super Bowl. Maybe she’ll grant special dispensation to an old schoolmate.

  Finally she says she’ll see what she can do. I assure her that nothing bad is going to happen to Mr. Barefoot, wherever he is.

  TO SAY that L.D. Jones is not happy to see me would be a gross understatement. It is obvious that he’s receiving me because he’s got no damn choice.

  “I don’t have much time,” he says, glancing at his watch. “I’ve gotta be somewhere in fifteen minutes. Say what you come to say.”

  The chief looks a tad frazzled. He’s got one man locked up for murdering a kid and is feeling the heat to tack every missing African American boy over the last two decades to Sam McNish’s hapless carcass. In the meantime, his doughty forces haven’t made much progress in figuring out who slaughtered one of the city’s most beloved citizens.

  So I lay it out for him. I hate making L.D.’s day a little longer than it is already, but sometimes you have to hit him upside the head with a two-by-four to get his attention. And, like many of the powerful individuals I have to deal with on a professional basis, he would rather undergo a colonoscopy without anesthesia than admit that he’s wrong.

  If it is possible for a man of the chief’s hue to turn red, he has done so.

  “Where,” he asks me, “did you get that shit?”

  “You know I can’t tell you who told me, but you know I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t believe it.”

  “Bullshit. You just want something to print. You don’t care who you hurt.”

  I try to reassure L.D. that I’m not out to get him, that I don’t even plan to run his name. After a lot of harsh words on his part and placating ones on mine, his temperature lowers to a slow simmer.

  “I just need a little confirmation,” I tell him. “That’s all.”

  He scratches his head, which is almost as bald as mine. He sighs.

  “It was a long time ago,” the chief says.

  L.D. JONES was just three years on the force when Alston Barefoot and his mother sat down with him and two other cops and told them that he had been mistaken in identifying James Alderman as the man who tried to drag him into his car.

  “He acted like he didn’t really want to be there, and his mother kept after him, like ‘Go on, go on.’

  “We didn’t think much of the whole thing. It seemed like the kid was a puppet, you know, with Momma pulling the strings.”

  But young Alston continued to recant his earlier identification. Even the threat of jail for making a false accusation didn’t sway him.

  “We still wanted to go after it,” the chief says. “But then my lieutenant, a big old mean redneck named Creed, called me in. He told me that if I wanted a career in law enforcement, I’d be advised to believe the boy and go on about my business.

  “And so I did.”

  The boy wasn’t able to identify anybody else, either, and the alleged crime fell into a black hole.

  I wonder out loud if any of this rang a bell when Alderman was recently butchered.
<
br />   He hesitates, then nods his head.

  “Yeah. But that was a one-and-done. If the man did anything wrong twenty years ago, he wasn’t convicted. And he sure as hell hasn’t been convicted of anything since then, if you ignore a speeding ticket twelve years ago.”

  “So you did check up.”

  He glares at me.

  “I’m not an idiot. I always check up. I just don’t call your ass every time I do.”

  Fair enough. But something else occurs to me.

  “L.D, I know you can’t tell me, but if there’s anybody out there now leaning on you to back off the late Mr. Alderman, I’m going to make it easy on you. I’m going to get up and leave now. If you’re getting heat from higher up, don’t say anything.”

  A variation of an old Woodward and Bernstein trick, although it kind of backfired on them. Still, I’ve used it to good advantage more than once.

  I get up, turn, and head toward the door. I even hesitate for a couple of seconds before walking out. The chief doesn’t say a word.

  THERE ARE maybe thirty people in the newsroom when I get back, a pretty good turnout for a Thursday afternoon. I see half a dozen of my coworkers standing by a table halfway across the room. They seem amused.

  The building was rebuilt from the ground up a few years before people stopped reading newspapers, and they left room for about three times the staff we have now. The table, which I see holds a fake, butt-ugly Christmas tree, is a good twenty feet from the nearest desk. Lots of wide-open spaces in print journalism these days.

  As I get closer, I see that the tree has been decorated, after a fashion. There are a couple of dozen plastic cards taped to the faux tree. They are all twenty-five-dollar gift certificates to Food Lion. Chuck Apple explains that they’re going to take them all down and give them to the needy on Christmas Eve. For now, they are making a statement to whoever signs the checks. The statement begins with “fuck” and ends with “you.”

  I am sure that Rita Dominick is not going to be pleased, but she probably doesn’t want to be seen as the kind of publisher who can’t take a little joke. That’s my guess, because otherwise she’d have already ordered Wheelie to take it down.

  There’s an e-mail waiting for me when I get back to my desk. It is from the aforementioned Ms. Dominick. It is tightly written: See Me.

  I am assuming that she is not calling me to the suit floor to give me a raise. I give Sandy McCool my best “what the fuck?” look as I head for the top lady’s office. Sandy gives me her best “hell if I know” shrug.

  The publisher is on the phone and nods for me to take a seat. She is all sweetness and light, laughing at some off-color remark and cooing, “Now, Scott, you know you shouldn’t be saying things like that. I could bring you up for sexual harassment.” Must be an advertiser. I am convinced that Rita Dominick would perform oral sex on anybody who was willing to buy a full-page ad at full price. Hell, she probably already has. The way things are going, the whole newsroom might need kneepads soon.

  As soon as she hangs up, the sweetness and light are replaced by a decidedly sour darkness.

  “I hear you’re looking into James Alderman,” she says.

  I tell her that is my present assignment.

  “You know what I mean,” she says. “You’re digging into things that happened, what, twenty years ago? Things that never led to criminal charges.”

  Amazing. Goddamn L.D. must have called somebody up his own personal food chain, who must have called the publisher. Is this a small town or what?

  “Let me follow this up. I’m close to getting . . .”

  “You’re close to getting fired. Anything you write about James Alderman damn well better be a nomination for sainthood.”

  I don’t like getting interrupted. I don’t like money-grubbing assholes turning journalists into whores who do the bidding of the comfortable. It is obvious to me that Alderman, despite the lack of heartfelt emotion at his funeral services, has some strong advocates. Or maybe it’s just that the movers and shakers don’t want the embarrassment of having one of their own pulled down off the pedestal.

  Still, if I have any hope of finding out if my hunch is true, I do have to avoid the annoyance of being fired. I can’t afford to buy my own printing press.

  She lectures me a bit more on the inappropriateness of disrespecting the dead. I promise, with fingers firmly crossed inside my pants pocket, to be a good boy and play nice.

  Rita Dominick can kiss my ass if she thinks I’m backing off this one.

  “And you’re probably behind that goddamn Christmas tree too,” she says as I exit.

  I don’t disabuse her.

  WHEN I get back downstairs, properly chastened, there are no homicides to merit my attention. I’m playing solitaire on my computer when Philomena Slade calls.

  She tells me why I couldn’t find Alston Barefoot.

  “His momma died a couple of years ago,” Philomena says. “Another girl we went to school with told me. She’d moved to Newport News. I expect that’s why I didn’t know about it. They must of not put an obituary in the paper, or I would of seen it.”

  This doesn’t sound promising, but she adds, “Her sister, though, she was a couple of years ahead of me in school, she was able to tell me what you wanted.”

  It turns out that Alston Barefoot is neither these days. At some point after his encounter with James Alderman, he took his stepfather’s last name, and he started calling himself by his middle name. Ray Soles. Ray-Ray to his friends, my cousin tells me.

  I’m wondering whether I can track down Mr. Soles. Philomena saves me the trouble. She reads off an address over on the North Side, east of Chamberlayne and not too far from where the late James Alderman lived and died.

  I thank her profusely and promise to drop by and give her a big kiss at the next opportunity.

  “Just remember what you promised,” she says. “Nothing bad better happen to that boy.”

  I promise again. I don’t want Ray-Ray Soles. I want information.

  Sally gives me permission to leave my post for a couple of hours, with the caveat that she will call me if any of our citizens do notable harm to each other. She doesn’t even have to be told to cover for me in case our publisher wants to know where the night cops reporter is. She knows I wouldn’t slip away just to have a couple of beers. Well, probably not.

  I find the address, off North Avenue in Highland Park. It’s six o’clock, already long past dark, by the time I get there. Philomena told me he’s a mailman.

  A light is on in what looks like the living room. I stub my Camel, go to the door, and knock, hoping I don’t look too much like a bill collector.

  I see someone peek out through the curtains. I wait. I think for a while nobody’s going to answer the door—a reasonable reaction in this neighborhood when somebody you don’t know comes knocking after sundown.

  Then it opens with the chain still attached.

  “What you want?” a voice on the other side asks.

  I explain as quickly and unthreateningly as I can that I am from the newspaper and that James Alderman’s murder unearthed some records about an accusation made against him two decades ago. He starts to slam the door shut. I wedge my size twelve into the opening and try to convince him that he is in no danger of being prosecuted, or even identified.

  “I’m not the police,” I explain. “I’m just a guy whose boss wants him to try and find out what happened back then. Help a brother out.”

  “Brother” is a shameless stretch, but maybe he can see that we are at least nominally linked by race. Or maybe the truth, as persistent as water in finding a weak spot, has been pent up for too long.

  He opens the door. I make the same promise I seem to have been making all day today: No names. I just need information.

  “Dammit,” he says, when we’re seated on the Naugahyde couch, “I knew, when I saw that that man got killed, I knew this was going to come back.”

  And so, Ray-Ray Soles, thirty-two and d
ivorced, with two kids living with his ex-wife, his feet aching from delivering Christmas shit all day long, puts his sore tootsies on the ottoman and tells me what really happened twenty years ago.

  “I came home from school two days after I identified the guy, and my momma was sitting in the living room. I knew something was wrong, because she never waited for me like that. Normally, she’d have been scrambling around, getting ready for work. She was working in maintenance over at MCV, the hospital, and she was on the late shift.

  “I was afraid something had happened to my stepfather.”

  It was less dire and more complicated, though. A man, “some white guy, she didn’t even know what he looked like; they all kind of looked alike to her,” had come calling while her son was at school.

  He had in his possession a check for ten thousand dollars, made out to her.

  “My memory was it looked like it was from some corporation or something. Didn’t really matter. It was ten thousand dollars.”

  The tradeoff, of course, was retroactive amnesia. The future Ray-Ray Soles was supposed to tell the police he had made a mistake. The man he identified as his would-be assailant wasn’t the man after all.

  Soles shakes his head.

  “It didn’t even matter that much to me at the time. Ten thousand paid off the mortgage. It let Momma take a job making a little less money but working day hours.”

  He points to a photograph of his mother, framed over the TV set.

  “But it bothered her every day. She knew it wasn’t right. But people that are always ‘doing the right thing’ don’t understand how hard it is to do right when you can’t pay the bills.”

  He sighs.

  “And, yeah, it bothers me, too, now that I can think about it. What if this had something to do with those other boys disappearing? I mean, when a kid would turn up missing, I’d read about it and wonder.