by Howard Owen
Finally she said the magic words.
“You’re fired. When I get back, I’ll make it official.”
And she hung up.
Having no desire to talk to her anymore, I didn’t call back. Instead I called Wheelie and told him what had transpired.
“One thing, though, that you can do for me,” I told him.
“What?”
“Pretend I’m not fired, at least until she gets back. After all, she said she’d make it official then.”
“But what if she tells me, flat out, to have you escorted out of the building?”
“Avoid her phone calls, Wheelie. You’ve got some vacation coming. Get out of town until Wednesday, and I guarantee you it’ll be worth your while.”
I expressed some disappointment that our publisher has reached new depths in suppressing the news.
There’s a pause, then Wheelie said, “There’s something you need to know, Willie. But it didn’t come from me.”
Wait for it.
“There’s a group interested in buying the paper.”
No surprise there. We’ve had people sniffing around here for the last year and a half, but nothing’s come of it so far.
“These guys are pretty serious, but here’s the capper, and you have to keep it under your hat.”
I took the vow of silence.
“One of the partners in this holding company is Lee Alderman. James Alderman’s brother.”
The veil was lifted. Some money-grubbing holding company wants to buy us, and I’m in the process of taking a very large crap on the brother of one of the partners.
“I wish somebody had told me,” I said.
“Would it have made any difference?”
Probably not, but at least I’d have had more of a storm warning.
At any rate, Wheelie promised to make himself scarce for a couple of days, turn off the cell phone and hide. I’m betting that Dominick won’t get someone below Wheelie to do the deed and will wait until she gets home. She probably would prefer dropping the blade herself anyhow.
SO I have miles to go if I want to keep this Christmas even marginally merry for me and my loved ones. I have to pin the tail on the donkey before my publisher gets back. Even that might not be enough, but you have to try.
Which is why I’m sitting here now as the last remnants of heat seep out of my Honda. I have to act now or make myself more suspicious than I, and my ancient chariot, already are in this well-tended neighborhood.
Fortunately I’m in a community of churchgoers. It being the Sunday morning before Christmas, the place seems pretty dead.
I’m not bursting with good ideas. What McNish said, though, does pique my interest. I do have an inspiration about what to do when I get inside Chez Alderman, assuming I don’t get caught for breaking and entering. The fact that the accused seems so sure about his hunch the day after so vigorously defending Alderman gives me some comfort that this is not a fool’s errand.
A lot of these blocks have alleyways bisecting them, leading to garages. It’s a relatively easy way for someone to slip into someone else’s house without being seen from the street. Alderman’s place, in particular, has a nice stand of boxwoods around the back fence that must be a burglar’s delight.
I walk down the alleyway until I come to the back of Alderman’s house. There is a gate leading into a yard that’s covered with oak and sycamore leaves. I manage to flip open the latch with nothing more than a stick. Until recently, people along Seminary felt pretty safe, I’m guessing.
Coming up on the back porch elevates me enough to expose me to anyone looking directly across from the house that backs up to the alley on the other side, but I don’t see any cars in the driveway. I press on.
There is crime tape around the back door, but when I try the handle, it turns. For all I know, this is the way the killer entered last week and nobody ever bothered to lock it again.
Inside, the place smells musty, like the old man’s house it was. There’s another smell underneath that, something I can’t put my finger on but suspect involves the prelude to a violent death.
With the blinds drawn, it’s almost too dark to see. I take a chance and turn on a light. In the living room, there’s a rug that looks more expensive than my car, but the stain that has soaked a good two square feet of it is probably going to devalue it somewhat. This is where James Alderman spent his last moments, and I don’t think they were happy ones.
Something else catches my eye, lying on the floor next to the kitchen trash can. I pick it up and put it in my pocket.
It doesn’t take me long to find the china hutch, a magnificent piece of furniture made out of some kind of dark wood. Like the boxwoods outside, it smells of money and elegance to a guy from Oregon Hill, where the furniture was mostly pine or plastic and shrubbery was whatever would grow.
Since I obviously don’t have access to James Alderman’s key ring, I have to do a little B&E. Since I’ve already broken into his house, cracking a pane in the hutch probably won’t add much to my damn sentence.
So I reach inside, cutting myself slightly on the broken glass, and open it. The gravy boat is right where McNish said it would be, on the bottom shelf. And, as advertised, there’s a piece of wood underneath that slides out and exposes what looks like a very old key.
But what’s it for? And why did Alderman tell McNish about it? And what the hell am I supposed to do with it?
I have a general idea. The house has a basement, like most of the places along here. The door, down at the end of a long hallway, is open. I am glad that there is a light switch at the top of the stairs. This place is giving me the damn creeps. It’s starting to remind me of the haunted house we kids used to go to on Halloween. The stairs creak, and I wonder when the unseen hand is going to grab me and make me crap myself.
My eyes gradually adjust to the dim light at the bottom. I look around but don’t see anything that you wouldn’t see in most basements—discarded furniture, suitcases, all kinds of memorabilia, the kind of stuff the survivors wind up giving to the Salvation Army just to haul it away.
The key in my left hand is looking pretty useless. There was no keyhole to the door leading down here. Whatever Alderman meant about looking down doesn’t seem to apply here.
But then I spot something, peeking out maybe a foot over the top of a large dresser that sits behind several boxes of God-knows-what. I look around and realize that the basement isn’t nearly as large as the entire first floor area above it. What I see is the top of a door.
It takes me ten minutes to move the boxes out of the way and then wrestle the dresser, which apparently is loaded with ball bearings, out of the way.
Behind it is the door. It has a keyhole.
It’s locked, of course. When I try the key, it doesn’t work at first either. I jiggle it this way and that and am about to give up when, finally, I hold my mouth just right and the key turns. And the door opens.
It is dark and dank. It smells of wet clay, because there’s only a dirt floor back here. I realize that I should have brought a flashlight, since I can’t see shit, no matter how long I stand there. So I go back upstairs and eventually find one. Its weak-ass light makes me fear that its batteries haven’t been changed lately.
But it’ll have to do.
Looking around the finished part of the basement, I see a shovel. It seems odd that it would be here, rather than, say, in a tool shed. Out of some instinct, I take it with me into the dark. Hell, if nothing else, maybe I can use it to beat back the rats. This place is not growing on me.
I go forward, a step at a time, the shovel in one hand and the flashlight in the other. I have only about a foot of headroom. There doesn’t seem to be much down here except dirt.
But then I trip. I’m on my hands and knees, with goose bumps all over, tasting Virginia clay. I find the flashlight and shine it on what tripped me. Just more dirt, except it’s raised a few inches. Just enough to trip someone who’s stumbling around in the dark.
I shine the light farther down, toward the back wall. There are at least half a dozen of those bumps, in a neat little row.
The heat pump comes on, the bump and roar making me jump high enough to hit my head on a beam. I take deep breaths until I can’t hear my heart thumping anymore.
I look down at my hand and realize I am holding the shovel. It’s as if I knew what I was here for.
I start to dig.
The shovel hits nothing but thick, stubborn earth for the first fifteen minutes or so. Then I hit something that clanks against the metal. I don’t really want to see what I’ve dug up, but that’s what I’m down here for. The flashlight batteries seem to be fading, but when I shine the weak yellow light down into the small pit I’ve dug, I see something off-white. I get as low as I can, with one leg in the pit and the other kneeling at ground level, and I brush away the dirt with my free hand.
There’s no denying what I’m touching anymore. The skull belonged to a human being.
A rustling in the near distance might be rats or my imagination. Whichever, I’m out of that hole in about two seconds. I don’t spend more than a minute getting out of the late James Alderman’s house. This time, I don’t really give a damn who sees me.
I’M BACK home at the Prestwould by twelve thirty or so, just as our building’s churchgoers are returning home for Sunday dinner or getting ready to head back out for brunch. A flock of them are standing in front of the building chatting when I walk up.
Feldman, who’s Jewish but just naturally shows up anywhere there might be gossip, remarks that I look like I’ve had a hard morning.
I tell him that he really doesn’t want to know.
Custalow is watching the NFL pregame show. He is getting ready to dig into a delivery pizza. He is kind enough to offer me a slice and not ask me why I look like I’ve been digging ditches. He says I got a call from someone who said I’d know who it was and left a number. I recognize the publisher’s cell phone from earlier.
“She was pretty rude,” Custalow says.
Fuck her, I explain.
If Rita Dominick wants to chew on my ass a little more, she’s going to have to come back here and do it in person.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Monday
Yesterday might have been, on paper, the shortest day of the year. From my perspective, it was just a bit long.
After I got cleaned up, I called Cindy to tell her that I could be late for our much-anticipated (by me, at least) makeup date this evening. The silence that followed compelled me to swear her to secrecy and tell her what exactly might be occupying me for the next few hours.
“Jesus, Willie,” she said. “You really do know how to mess up Christmas.”
After that, it seemed only decent that I call L.D. Jones and give him the happy news. I also informed him that our online audience would be reading about it in a couple of hours. “Human remains found at home of murdered theologian” might even get the restless and horny to turn away from their favorite porn sites for a while.
“You can’t write that shit,” L.D. said. He was actually, from the sound of it, sputtering. “You can’t tell people there were human remains there. How can you be sure, goddammit?”
I admonished him not to take the Lord’s name in vain, and I told him that I would stake what paltry reputation I have on the fact that it was indeed a human skull I found about two feet below the dirt floor in James Alderman’s basement.
You can’t run stuff like that in the paper, where we still insist on pesky stuff like proven facts. Our website, though, seems to have a slightly lower standard. As much as I bitch about giving the news away online, it is a great place to tell what you know but can’t prove.
I’d never post this, I told the chief, if I wasn’t absolutely, positively sure.
He asked me how I got in. I told him I let myself in.
“I’m going to arrest your ass,” he said. “Breaking and entering. Adulterating a crime scene.”
“Adulterating?”
“Even if what you saw was bones, how can you link that to those missing kids?”
I pointed out that my report would say nothing that would link the skull I found to any of the boys whose disappearances surfaced in the wake of Artesian Cole’s murder.
“Well, people will draw that conclusion.”
Yeah, I thought. The ones with half a brain will.
“You shouldn’t have been there,” L.D. says. “You should have called the police if you suspected something.”
I reminded him that I had expressed my concerns already, and all it got me was a bitching out by my publisher after some unknown person tipped her off that I was snooping around Alderman.
He sighs.
“Alderman. Goddamn.”
“Do you want to know where to dig?”
He was silent. Finally, he said yes, much in the manner that I imagine Socrates accepted his hemlock.
After I told him what he needed to know, he hung up without saying good-bye.
It went pretty fast after that.
I had convinced our web masters that we had to put this up right then, and put it up where it would be the first thing freeloaders saw when they went to our site. It didn’t take long to write what I’d discovered so far. One body discovered, with indications of other graves alongside it. I figured, correctly, that the TV stations would be all over it, even though the only place housing fewer journalists on a Sunday afternoon than a daily newspaper is a TV studio. Fine with me. When the good-hair people poach a story like this, with no substantiation behind it other than one newspaper reporter’s eyeballs, they always attribute the source, to cover their butts in case we’re wrong.
By the time I got back over to Seminary, the place was a crime scene on steroids. Half the force seemed to be there. I could only get as far as the curb before I was stopped. It didn’t seem wise to explain that I was the guy who broke in earlier and found the remains. As soon as L.D. gets far enough ahead of the news to think about it, he’ll be looking to arrest me anyhow.
All four local stations were already there. Bleary-eyed cameramen and “personalities” who hadn’t had time to mousse their hair were scurrying about like deranged squirrels, trying to find somebody who knew something and breathlessly telling their listeners what I’d told them on our website. They know me, and I was hounded more than the cops. I told one kid reporter that they thought they’d found Jimmy Hoffa. It was obvious the kid didn’t know who the hell Jimmy Hoffa was. I got to say “no comment” a lot, as well as my favorite: “You can read about it in the paper tomorrow.”
Gillespie was avoiding me, apparently not ready to repay me for all those donuts with some news I could use. The other cops, even if they didn’t dislike me personally, knew the chief would skin them if they were seen in my company.
But I saw four people from the coroner’s office come and go, and guys with hazmat suits were in and out for the next two hours, apparently afraid of catching cooties from the long-since dead.
My luck turned, though, when I saw Peachy Love. Even the media relations folks were scrambled for this one, which was going to take a lot of spinning, especially if it became known that L.D. Jones was there the day James Alderman was exonerated for cash two decades ago.
I didn’t try to get close to Peachy, or even acknowledge that we knew each other. She’s one source I definitely do not want to burn. I have, though, learned how to text. I let Peachy know I’d be calling her later. No response. I was crossing my fingers that she would answer though.
The chief did have to give a press conference, since every news outlet in town was following him around. He said that there was evidence of what appeared to be human remains inside, being sure to add that the earlier web report was “reckless and inaccurate,” and that there would be more information as the investigation progressed.
Asked why the bodies weren’t found during the fine-tooth-comb search the police did earlier, he said there was a hidden room. It sounded
pretty lame, and L.D. looked like he needed either bourbon or Pepto Bismol.
They asked him if the bodies had any connection to Artesian Cole’s death or the other boys from the past who went missing. He had no comment.
It was dark by the time the crime scene started getting depopulated. I had already told Sally Velez what we had, in case she wasn’t monitoring the website.
Sally knew we were supposed to handle Alderman with kid gloves. With the cops acknowledging that human remains were found, though, all bets were off.
“I can’t seem to find Wheelie,” she said, “but we’re going to go with it. Hell, it’s been on every local station already.”
Good old Wheelie. Stay low awhile longer, Boss.
I’d been feeding the web when I had time.
Back at the office, I called Peachy. She answered, and she didn’t hang up when I told her who it was.
She told me enough. They found at least six sets of human remains, pretty much intact. They appeared to be those of juvenile males, and they’d been buried for some years. She sounded pretty shook up. I promised her, as always, that waterboarding couldn’t make me reveal my source.
What Peachy told me was enough to meet the newspaper’s (well, at least my) standards. I told Sally what I knew, without telling her who gave it to me. She didn’t have to ask. I also told her about my tenuous employment situation. If Rita Dominick didn’t like what would be leading today’s paper, I added, maybe she could hire me again just so she could have the thrill of firing me twice.
“Well,” Sally said, “I just hope she doesn’t come after me too. I’ve still got some good years left, unlike you. I don’t want to spend them freelance editing.”
“You don’t know anything,” I told her. “I didn’t tell you I was technically fired, and Wheelie sure as hell didn’t.”