The Bottom

by Howard Owen

  “I called twice, but nobody answered, just got voice mail,” he says. “They haven’t called back yet.”

  There’s nothing much going on in the newsroom. Most of Baer’s compatriots ran out of hours sometime yesterday afternoon.

  There are no dirt naps in my in-box yet, so I make an offer.

  “How about if I drive by there?”

  Baer surprises me by accepting my offer.

  “I’m up to my ass, got two more stories to write. I’d appreciate it.”

  I tell Sally I’ll be back in a while and to call my cell if mayhem erupts before sundown.

  “Be sure and clock out,” she says. Her hours are long since up, too, I’m thinking.

  Between there and the front door, I forget, as usual.

  The Jonases haven’t moved since their daughter’s murder. They live where they always have, in a western Henrico suburb that still has some life left before the renters start moving in, but it has seen better days. The new mall at Short Pump drew the developers and suburbanites west with it. The burbs keep moving west, and if you don’t change houses every few years, you wake up one day and find that the nice little strip mall half a mile away now houses a nail salon, a judo studio, a payday loan operation and a bunch of For Lease signs.

  Nobody answers when I knock, but I hear a lawn mower. I walk around to the side yard and there’s a man, about my age, working his way around the Bradford pears with a push mower.

  He cuts the mower when I make my presence known. When I tell him I’m from the newspaper, he doesn’t immediately order me off the property.

  “You want to talk about Kelli.” It’s not a question, but I answer anyhow.

  “It’s been eighteen months,” I say, stating the obvious, “and we thought we ought to check back, see how you’re handling it and all.”

  He takes off his ball cap and wipes the sweat from his brow. He’s going bald on top, and when he takes off his sunglasses, his eyes are those of a man who isn’t sleeping anything like the full eight hours. He looks like somebody who went from fifty years old to sixty in about a week.

  “ ‘Handling it,’ ” he says, and lets out something that sounds like a laugh, only without the humor. “Man, you don’t handle this. My wife will never get over this. I will never get over this. I come inside sometimes and Cathy will be sitting in Kelli’s room, going through her stuff, like she can figure this all out somehow, like she can find something there that will make it stop hurting.

  “She was our only child. We are childless now. And they can’t even catch the bastard.”

  Mr. Jonas says the police do check by once in a while, but nothing they tell him makes him think they’re anywhere close to catching his daughter’s killer.

  “They might as well have just broken into our house and killed us all,” he says. “And your paper just moves on to somebody else’s nightmare.”

  There really isn’t anything else he can tell me that the cops and our readers don’t already know. When I ask if I can take a picture of him or him and his wife with my nifty new iPhone camera, he finally tells me to get off the property.

  Back in the car, I think about Andi. I almost told the grieving father I had a daughter about Kelli’s age but then realized how truly hurtful and stupid that would be.

  It would be beyond trite to tell Mr. Jonas I can feel his pain. But in a small way, I can. I want Mr. Tweety Bird drawn and fucking quartered, with all the parents of the dead girls present. Still if I put my pinkie toe into one of the Jonases’s shoes, I know it wouldn’t do a damn bit of good.

  I’d like to do it, though. Some people just need to die.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  X

  My phone rings as I’m pulling back on the street. I have been conned into buying an iPhone, and it’s about three times as worthless as my old fliptop, which spent its last year held together by duct tape. The iPhone’s great for getting e-mail and texting and taking pictures and looking up the halftime score to the Virginia-Carolina game. As a phone, it’s worthless as tits on a bull. I have to swerve to the curb in order to achieve the manual dexterity to answer the damn thing.

  “Where are you?”

  Wheelie sounds somewhat frantic. I tell him what I’m doing.

  “Well, you need to get your ass back here. Wat Chenault’s in my office.”

  Shit.

  “Do we want to talk to him?”

  “We want to not get sued, I’m pretty sure about that.”

  I tell Wheelie I’ll be there in ten minutes. It’s probably fifteen, but Wheelie can wait, and fuck Wat Chenault.

  “Don’t do anything to make this worse,” our editor warns me.

  I tell him I won’t, but my fingers are crossed.

  Poor Wheelie. He came down here from Providence full of hope and promise, aiming to win us a Pulitzer. With his staff shrunk considerably by the Great Recession and some incredibly bad business decisions by the Suits Who Never Suffer, he’s had a hard time just keeping our nose above water. The bleeding has gone from ruptured aorta status to a slow drip, but it can’t be any fun being Wheelie these days. And now, with Grubby gone and no plans to hire a new publisher, he’s farther into the heart of corporate darkness than he ever thought he’d have to venture. But, hey, he didn’t turn down the extra money.

  When I get to the newsroom, one Camel later, I go up to the fourth floor, where Wheelie hangs his coat these days, only wandering down to the newsroom on most days for the ten A.M. and three P.M. meetings.

  I see the back of Wat Chenault’s head and, across the desk, Wheelie’s earnest face nodding in agreement to something— probably something he shouldn’t be agreeing to.

  Wheelie motions for me to come in.

  “I guess you know Willie Black,” he says.

  Wat Chenault gives me the once-over and says, “I expect I do.”

  Chenault was a football player in college. He was a wide receiver, but nowadays the main thing that’s wide is his ass. He looks like one of those lard-butt middle guards you see in the NFL games, the ones who stop the running attack by just throwing their fat guts into the middle of the action like sumo wrestlers and letting the runners bounce off them. Christ, he must weigh 350 pounds. His face is as wide as it is high, with little piggy eyes peeking out from under bushy gray eyebrows. He’s wearing a UVA polo shirt with orange horizontal stripes, as if he searched long and hard in his closet for the one thing that could make him look more obese than he already is.

  He is a homegrown product, as Virginia as blue crabs and massive resistance. He grew up in one of those sleepy towns down in peanut country, about as Heart of Dixie as anywhere in the commonwealth. After college he was a natural choice to be a state politician, with his jock creds, family money and old-boy ties. He got elected the first time despite having falsely claimed that he played for the Washington Redskins. In reality, the team used Wat for a tackling dummy for a couple of weeks in August before sending him back to the Southside. He could slap you on the back and make you feel like he gave a shit. And the ex-jock thing, even if he did gild the lily, didn’t hurt.

  He was the kind of guy who you always knew could be counted on to tell a racist joke, if he knew only “his” people were listening. I have to admit that he did not endear himself to me in my days covering the legislature when I heard, third-hand, that he had taken to referring to me, after a few bourbon-and-waters, as “Woodshed Willie,” his humorous reference to my mixed-race heritage.

  He advanced from the House of Delegates to the State Senate, and he was considering a run at attorney general, gateway to the governor’s mansion, back in 2001 when his political career went farther south than an Antarctic expedition.

  The girl he was caught with was fourteen years old. I still remembered her name when I reintroduced our readers to the story: Leigh Adkins. He swore she said she was eighteen, and maybe she did. But when you’re a forty-six-year-old state senator and you slip a girl who “says” she’s eighteen into your room at a boutique h
otel favored by the pols, you might expect somebody to talk. One of our young lions got a tip from a friend who ran the night desk there. He borrowed a camera from photo, took a seat near the elevator, unscrewed the nearest lightbulb, and waited five hours in the twilight before Ms. Adkins, accompanied by the senator and looking somewhat used, came around the corner.

  He managed to take the picture and run down the stairs before Wat Chenault could catch him. Even then, Wat wasn’t doing a real fast forty-yard dash. The picture pretty much told the story, but we managed to track down Leigh Adkins. Actually I was the one who got a call from her sister, who was somewhat pissed. Leigh was, it turned out, one of Chenault’s constituents and a former babysitter of his. The sister had an apartment in Bon Air. She worked down at the Capitol and took little Leigh in one day to see the sausage being made. They visited the office of her old employer, the senator, and the girl must have been overcome by the aphrodisiac of power. The sister somehow let him take her to a party, which turned into a rather intimate gathering at the boutique hotel, where Wat presumably showed her the sausage.

  The young buck and I had a dual byline. He’s at the Los Angeles Times now, so I was left to be Mr. Institutional Memory and remind our readers of just what a scumbag Wat Chenault was if not is.

  It kind of drove a stake through Chenault’s political career. He was lucky to avoid jail. A good lawyer can get you out of just about anything. He pleaded contributing to the delinquency of a minor or some such bullshit, but other stories of Wat’s misdeeds between the sheets with the younger set started drifting into the public domain, and he chose not to run for reelection. He retreated to his family’s lumber business, got into home building and then development. Everything that goes around comes around, and here’s Wat Chenault, twelve years later, trying to turn the blighted Bottom into an urban paradise and, coincidentally, make a nice little bundle for himself on the side.

  “Like I was saying,” Chenault says, turning his massive self back toward Wheelie and forgoing the opportunity to reminisce about the good old days with me, “I’m not looking for revenge here, but when you write things about me that damage me financially . . .”

  “How about if they’re true?”

  Wheelie frowns. I should just keep my damn mouth shut, but diplomacy has never been my strong suit.

  Chenault’s neck turns a spectacular color of purple, somewhere around eggplant. He swivels sharply in my direction and looks like he wants to jump out of that seat and throw a block, driving me through the plate-glass window and into the hallway. I take half a step back, but it’s probably too much trouble for him to get his ass up.

  He lets go of the chair arms and turns back to Wheelie.

  “You all have been malicious. There wasn’t any reason to bring up my youthful indiscretions.”

  I bite my tongue hard on “youthful indiscretions.” The only thing “youthful” about Wat Chenault’s indiscretion was the barely teenage girl he was sweating on in that hotel room.

  “What’s that got to do with the Top of the Bottom project?” he says.

  That’s what they’re calling it: Top of the Bottom. “Mixed-use” is the magic term they’re using these days. Somehow they hope to get the Targets and Best Buys, maybe even, praise God, a Walmart, to come to a part of the city that wasn’t even full-time habitable until they built the floodwall to keep out the James River back in 1995.

  They’ll fill the rest of the space with overpriced rental properties for the ones too young or too old to have school-aged children at home. The city is a lot of things, many of them good. It is not anybody’s idea of an educational mecca. The kids turn six and you can’t go the freight for private school, it’s time for what Chuck Apple, my stand-in on night cops, calls a Helen Keller Colonial in Chesterfield County.

  “Hell,” Chuck said when I asked for enlightenment, “old Helen could find her way around any one of them once she’d been in one. Every one of ’em’s exactly alike.”

  Wheelie tries to explain that what he did in disinterring the past is fair game.

  “We never accused you of doing something you didn’t do.”

  “Ah,” he says, and I know that, in Chenault’s mind at least, he’s got us. “You wrote that I was a felon. What I pleaded to wasn’t no damn felony. It was a misdemeanor. You called me a felon!”

  My heart does a little tom-tom number. I don’t remember calling him a felon, even if he is one. He just hired a good enough lawyer to get what started out as a felony watered down.

  Then he hauls a copy of our A section out of his briefcase.

  “How about this?” he says, and I breathe easier, although this won’t make Wheelie’s load any lighter. He’s circled a sentence on our editorial page from two weeks ago. I never read the damn editorials. Looking over Chenault’s massive shoulder, I can see that our first-floor thinking class wrote: “Mr. Chenault has come far since his unfortunate and felonious fall from grace, but we question the wisdom of his project.” (They call ’em “Mr.” and “Mrs.” and sometimes even “Ms.” in editorials, no matter how big an SOB they are. They might wish you to burn in hell, but they’ll never disrespect your title.)

  Jesus. For once editorial and I are on the same page, and somehow they managed to fuck it up. If only we had copy editors. Those mossbacks of my youth, whom I despised for their persnickety arrogance but also because they were almost always right, never would have let that one get through. Somebody in editorial didn’t do due diligence.

  Wheelie does the hummina-hummina and then says we’ll certainly run a retraction. I’m pretty sure that isn’t going to be enough for Wat Chenault, who must have a pretty good hard-on for us for helping him ruin his political career all those years ago.

  When our large guest isn’t appeased, Wheelie counters by offering a correction on A1. Fuck it, I want to tell my editor and erstwhile publisher. You and I both knew what Chenault wants. And it’s a damn sight more than a little groveling on the front page.

  The fat man does not disappoint.

  “What I want,” he says, drumming his thick right forefinger on the desk for emphasis and lowering his voice like he thinks the walls might be bugged, “is for you all to leave me the fuck alone.”

  He means, of course, turn a blind eye to Top of the Bottom, even come out foursquare in favor of the thing we were against the day before.

  To Wheelie’s credit, he doesn’t cave instantly. He says we could certainly do a feature on Chenault. It’s understood that this would be a puff piece, one of those “Catching up with . . .” pieces our features department does from time to time on somebody who used to be somebody. I’m thinking that, if I were Wat Chenault, I might not exactly want people catching up with me.

  Chenault shakes his head.

  “Not good enough, Wheelie.”

  “Even if we did, uh, back off our opposition to your project, Mr. Chenault, we can’t tell the editorial department what to do.”

  Shit, Wheelie, I’m thinking, don’t call him Mr. Chenault when he’s calling you by your nickname. Don’t cede ground you don’t have to. Makes you look like a little boy called to the principal’s office.

  Chenault isn’t buying what Wheelie’s selling.

  “Hell, man,” he says, raising his voice enough that Sandy McCool, the administrative assistant, can probably hear him through the walls, “you’re the goddamned publisher. Show some balls.”

  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.