The Bottom

by Howard Owen

  “He’s gone,” she says.

  Doesn’t take a genius to figure out who “he” is.

  The police, who had planned to call a press conference this morning announcing the arrest of a “person of interest” in the Tweety Bird murders, should have kept Ronnie Sax when they had the chance. When they popped around before six, planning to haul Sax away in his pajamas, he was, as Peachy Love said, long gone. Flown the coop. Tweety Bird takes wing.

  It’s eight thirty already, and I wonder what kind of damage control is going on. The chief must be needing adult diapers by now.

  When I call headquarters, I’m told Chief Jones isn’t in, won’t be in and, it is understood, wouldn’t piss on me if I were on fire even if he were, by some miracle, in. When I explain that I already know their prime suspect, left unattended overnight, is on the lam, and I further explain that all our readers who have iPhones or iPads also will know that shortly, there is quiet on the other end of the line.

  I am promised a callback.

  Not fifteen minutes later, I hear the blues-based ringtone on my phone. I am expecting some midlevel functionary giving me the latest self-serving comments from our highest-paid law-enforcement entity.

  Instead it’s L.D. Jones himself.

  He probably was already pretty unhappy before he got the news that the entire metropolitan area, plus anyone who cared in the entire blogosphere, soon would know about his department’s latest screwup. He’s somewhere on the other side of sore pissed now.

  “Black, goddamnit, you can’t print that shit,” he says by way of greeting. “It’s unsubstantiated.”

  I tell him I’ll take my chances.

  “Where are you getting that crap from?”

  I could just tell him it’s none of his fucking business, but that might start him sniffing around possible leaks, including one staffer in particular who used to be a reporter.

  So I make something up. I tell him that a woman I met yesterday at poolside, whose name I don’t know, called me and told me she talked to someone who saw Sax leaving sometime in the middle of the night. I had left her my card and asked her to call me if she saw anything unusual concerning Mr. Sax. Miraculously she did.

  “And,” I go on, “knowing how proactive your department is, I just guessed you were going to arrest him today. Seems like I was right.”

  He doesn’t know whether I’m being a wiseass about the “proactive” part.

  “You don’t know what we planned for today,” he says. “You don’t know your ass from first base.”

  “Well, I’ll bet you a twenty that there was going to be a press conference called for this morning.”

  There is silence on the other end, followed by a sigh. I know that sigh. The chief is ready to switch gears and deal.

  “Look, Willie,” he says, changing over to first-name basis, going for a mix of friendliness and condescension, “this is off the record, but if you just wait a few hours, I’m sure we’ll have this bastard all locked up. We know where he went. We’re closing in on him even as we speak.”

  Like hell you are, I’m thinking but not saying. Finally, tiptoeing along that often-trod tightrope between what the police want and what our readers expect, I compromise. I’ll post something about Sax apparently skipping town. No point in concealing his name, since it’s in the story I wrote for this morning’s paper. But I will write that there was nothing in Mr. Sax’s background to indicate that he should have been locked up posthaste, so he was released. And, I’ll add, when the cops got a look at his computer, they became much more interested in him and sent a SWAT team around to arrest him, by which time he had, of course, fled. I won’t, in other words, write that our police are blithering idiots. The readers can infer.

  “You did find something interesting in that computer, I’m assuming. Just keep quiet if I’m right.”

  Another sigh, but nothing else.

  I tell the chief I’ll even quote him as saying that the cops are sure they will have Sax in custody in a few hours.

  L.D. Jones isn’t happy with that, but he’s happier than he would have been with my original plan, which was to spell out line by line just how easily our defenders let Sax slip away. He knows that I am cutting him a deal, and that I expect something in return.

  “When you catch him,” I say, letting the other shoe fall, “would you do me a favor and give me a heads-up?”

  “Sure,” he says. He sounds like he’s saying it with his teeth clenched. I am sure that making a deal with the devil, meaning me, is taking a toll on the chief’s molars.

  I POST THE story online and then head down to the office, forfeiting yet another day off for the love of my sorry-ass job. Hell, I didn’t have anything to do anyhow except maybe stop by and see Peggy.

  I’ve already gotten a text message from Sally Velez. She’s seen the story online and wants to know what I’m going to do for the “real paper.”

  The newsroom is pretty animated for eleven A.M. It almost seems like old times. One consequence of cutting people’s hours from forty to thirty-seven and a half is that (a) people are working to the clock and (b) they tend to pile up hours early in the week and are mostly gone by Friday afternoon. So we’re pretty bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on Monday mornings.

  Sally calls me over and asks me what else I’ve got.

  “Nothing I can write right now.”

  “Damn, Willie, that means you’re holding out on me.”

  “Sorry. When we can print it, I’ll write it.”

  She advises me that I’d better tell her what’s going on, whether it gets in tomorrow morning’s paper or not. She mentions that my testicles are in peril if I don’t start talking.

  So I tell her that the cops had him down there for at least four hours yesterday in interrogation, and that Sax said there wasn’t any lawyer there. By the time the dumbass asked for one, they were ready to send him home anyhow. My guess is that they just screwed up, thought they could come back and arrest him later.

  “And they found something on his computer?”

  “My reliable source says so.”

  She leans close and whispers it.

  “Peachy?”

  Nobody’s supposed to know that Peachy Love and I have contact beyond press conferences. As far as I can tell, Sally’s the only one in the newsroom who is aware of the source that has made my second turn at night cops reporter occasionally satisfying. And Sally can keep a secret.

  I shake my head.

  “Higher?”

  I tap her desk twice and walk away.

  I can pull my punches and still give the readers enough to keep any more of them from canceling their subscriptions.

  Sarah Goodnight is making herself some hot tea when I go into the break room. I ask her how the story on fearful young women in the city is coming along.

  “Lot of jumpy out there,” Sarah says, taking a sip as I pour some of our office sludge into my cup, which is older than she is. “Probably wouldn’t have been a good idea to send a guy on this one. Might have gotten his ass pepper-sprayed.”

  It cracks me up and kind of breaks me up to see our young reporters work so hard to be tough and cynical. Dropping subjects and verbs from the front of sentences and speaking out of the corner of your mouth is part of it. It is almost a form of self-mutilation, and I think the young women do it more than the men do, probably because they’re afraid we won’t think they’re tough enough if they hang on to a shard of their innocence. Maybe it will change when women rule the newsroom. Looking around at who does the work around here, I think that day ought to get here about Thursday.

  Sarah will have a story for tomorrow on the Tweety Bird scare.

  “You know what’s really sick?” she asks me as we walk back to her desk. “Somebody’s hawking Tweety Bird T-shirts over on Grace Street, right next to the VCU campus. And they’re selling. Here, I bought one. Thought I’d turn it in as a business expense.”

  She takes the tee from her desk and hands it to me. On th
e front is a wide-eyed, vaguely feminine Tweety Bird. Underneath is the old cartoon line: “I tawt I taw a puddy tat.”

  I can tell that Sarah thinks this will make me laugh, or at least smile. When I tell her that I visited the late Kelli Jonas’s parents two days ago, she puts the shirt away.

  “Yeah,” she says, giving me a rueful smile, “we are a bunch of assholes, aren’t we?”

  I don’t know if she means the whole human race or just newspaper people, but in either case, I’m in no mood to argue the point.

  WHILE I’M WORKING on my story, Wheelie comes down. He moves into the open space in the middle of the newsroom, a vast prairie sprouting tumbleweeds where now-departed reporters and editors labored not too long ago.

  He begs our attention. When we gather around, he introduces the rather attractive, late-forties vintage woman at his side.

  After a few mumbled introductory pleasantries about doing more with less, during which I am afraid Enos Jackson or one of the other hard-ridden veteran editors is going to attack him with a pica pole, he introduces our new publisher.

  Her name is Rita Dominick. She is a blonde, at least for the moment. She has one of those cuts like that woman on House of Cards. It must be the in thing. Sally said she saw a fat, unattractive woman come into the hair salon, pull out the woman’s picture and tell the stylist, “Make me look like that.”

  Rita Dominick is wearing a red dress that is stylish and does what it is supposed to do: exude the sense that she could kill you in bed or just rip your head off and crap down your neck for fun. I’m guessing she does either yoga or judo and stays away from saturated fats. She was the head of advertising at the only paper in our chain that’s larger than us. She’s married with two kids, for whom I feel sorry, for some reason.

  I’m sure Wheelie’s relieved to get back in the newsroom. He’d never been that close to the brimstone before. Ms. Dominick (“Call me Rita”) speaks to us about our exciting future. She talks about turning the corner. The only corners we’ve turned lately have brought us face-to-face with joblessness or salary cuts, so we’re a little skeptical. We’re pretty much over corners.

  I glance at Baer. His head is going up and down like one of those bobblehead dolls they sell at the ballpark. He’s eating it up. Another place to put his brownish schnoz.

  It just goes to show you. Things can always be worse. You can have a publisher like the late James H. Grubbs, who used his considerable clout to get rid of a large chunk of his former friends and mentors, only to wake up one fine September morning and find out that you are now in the clutches of advertising. Jesus Christ.

  Wheelie brings her around and introduces her to as many of us as can’t find somewhere else to be. I look up, and she’s standing there, looking down at me.

  “And this,” Wheelie says, a half smile, half grimace on his face indicating to me they’ve already had a discussion about my merits and demerits, “is Willie Black.”

  “Ah, yes,” my new publisher says, “the famous Willie Black.”

  It doesn’t sound like a compliment.

  I GET A call as I’m finishing up my story on Ronnie Sax taking it on the lam.

  It’s Kate. I ask her how the new baby’s doing, but she talks over me.

  “Willie,” she says “we just got a call. From Ronnie Sax. He wants to talk to you. To us. You and Marcus and me.”

  Sax took my advice. He called Marcus Green’s firm first thing this morning, from a cell phone at an undisclosed location.

  “He told us he didn’t do any of this,” Kate says, “but he’s afraid once they get him in jail, it’s going to be a fait accompli.”

  “He said ‘fait accompli’?”

  “He said they were going to railroad his ass.”

  I ask Kate if she and Marcus are going to give me a finder’s fee for this one.

  She has to speak up over a baby yowling in the background.

  “I don’t know what you’ve found. From what I’m seeing, he’s as good a suspect as any right now. He was living in the Bottom, he has a record and he has a penchant for porn.”

  I concede that I can’t vouch for Ronnie Sax, but I tell her that I wanted to throw a little business Marcus’s way, knowing that he would rather be on TV than eat a prime rib at Morton’s.

  I ask her if she doesn’t want to go and comfort her bouncing baby girl, who sounds as if she has a safety pin stuck in her butt.

  “Greg!” I hear my ex-wife and landlady shout. “Grace has got a diaper full!”

  Nothing like a little bundle of joy to add some romance to young lovers’ lives. Kate was a lot of fun, and I still love her, in my half-ass fashion, but I’m wondering if she is going to find total fulfillment in motherhood.

  “He didn’t tell you where he is?”

  “We’re supposed to meet him. I can’t tell you where, but come here in the morning at seven and we’ll take you there.”

  I wonder out loud if she and Marcus Green aren’t skating on thin legal ice.

  She says she’s considered that. I know Marcus likes to blast right through those warning signs, the ones that say, “Caution: Disbarment Ahead.” He’s come close a couple of times. But Kate likes to play by the rules.

  “Marcus says we’re OK,” she tells me, lowering her voice as if she doesn’t want Mr. Ellis to hear. “He says we’re just going to have a meeting with our client, to try and get him to turn himself in.”

  Sounds a little dicey to me, but I tell her I’ll be there. After all, I’m only a journalist. We don’t have licenses. If we did, getting yours pulled would be about as devastating as being kicked out of AARP.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  X

  Tuesday

  I’m at Marcus Green’s office at 6:55. Kate seems surprised, perhaps because she’s never seen me arrive early for anything, including our wedding. This is one appointment, though, that I don’t want to miss. I am fairly certain that I have information that Ronnie Sax’s potential legal team does not possess.

  Richmond can be a small place, especially if you’ve lived here your whole life and have had dealings with everyone from the governor to guys like Awesome Dude.

  LAST NIGHT I got another call from Cindy Peroni. My hope was that Cindy was calling to tell me she could not live a minute longer without me. That didn’t happen, but she did that thing the reporter in me always hopes people will do. She told me something I didn’t know already.

  “I saw your story in the paper, about the Tweety Bird Killer, and I thought something sounded familiar.”

  It turns out that one of Cindy’s friends in the between-husbands set is Mary Kate Kusack Brown. Mary Kate is two years younger than her brother and, unlike him, never saw fit to change her last name until she got married.

  “When I saw that he’d changed his name from Kusack, I knew that was the brother she’d mentioned. I called her. She says she’s sure Ronnie didn’t do it. She says he wouldn’t hurt a fly. She says her girls are crazy about him. She thinks you all ought to leave him alone.”

  I asked her if she thought Mary Kate might be a tad concerned that her brother has a history of porn-related activities, or that whatever the police found on his computer was enough to send them scurrying back to his apartment, a few hours too late, to arrest him.

  I offered the opinion that he wouldn’t have been the uncle I’d have sent the girls to for a sleepover.

  “Well, Mary Kate says he’s a good uncle, and a good brother. She says he’s sowed his wild oats, but he’s past all that.”

  I told Cindy that I hope her friend’s sisterly intuition is right. If I had been telling her the truth, though, I’d have said I hope he’s the one and that they catch him fast. I want to get the son of a bitch who’s doing this off the streets. My meeting this morning might be a step in the right direction, although I wonder if I did the right thing in suggesting that he employ Marcus Green. Even if he is guilty, Marcus might get him off. Marcus could have sprung Judas Iscariot.

  “There’s o
ne other thing,” Cindy said, just as I was about to try and steer the conversation in a more romantic direction.

  “What?”

  “She says he was at her house that Thursday night. She said he didn’t leave until after eleven.”

  So I’m thinking Ronnie Sax at least has someone to back up his alibi, although I’ve seen more than enough relatives swear that their miscreant son/father/brother was having milk and cookies with them when all evidence put him at the scene of the crime.

  Before she hung up, I asked Cindy if she’d like to have dinner with me sometime.

  “Maybe,” she said, then told me she had another call coming in. I have not yet climbed back high enough in Ms. Peroni’s esteem to trump an incoming call. Tomorrow is another day.

  The information I have that Marcus and Kate don’t possess came from Peachy Love. It probably will soon be in the public domain.

  After my interrupted phone call with Cindy, I decided to drop in on Peachy. Maybe I was feeling a little miffed about my failure to get back in Cindy’s good graces. Maybe––stop the presses––I was horny.

  Peachy was home. It was one of those things where you tell yourself, I don’t really want to be bad, and if Peachy is out somewhere, it’ll be a sign that I should take Mr. Johnson home.

  “Well,” she said when she opened the door, glancing both ways to make sure nobody in a police car was nearby, “you did decide to cross the tracks, didn’t you?”

  We had a good time. We always have a good time. If I were smart, I’d probably try to be more than an occasional lover. But Peachy seems to want it that way, too. She has a guy. He works for the police up in DC, and she says maybe one day they’ll move in together. I asked her once if she loved him. She hesitated too long before she answered. It seems sometimes like nobody is ever going to get married again. I have mentioned this, gently I thought, to Andi, who reminded me that, between us, we’ve been married three times, which probably is enough for right now.

  At any rate, my occasional night with Peachy has to end before the sun comes up. If somebody recognizes me doing the walk of shame away from the police flack’s house, Peachy might be out of a job.