The Bottom

by Howard Owen

  While we were lying there in the dark, both of us smoking in bed, she told me the thing I now know that Sax’s lawyers don’t.

  When the cops were perusing the photographer’s digital porn collection, a face stood out to one of them.

  “Turns out,” Peachy said, “it was the girl at the station.”

  “The Caldwell girl.”

  “Yep. There she was, her or her identical twin, wearing her birthday suit and smiling for the camera and sucking on a pacifier with a stuffed toy between her legs. Trying to look even younger, I guess.”

  Peachy didn’t have to remind me that I didn’t get that information from her. I thanked her profusely for it. I didn’t mention, for some reason, that I might be talking with Mr. Sax within a couple of hours after I left her warm and welcoming bed. No sense in telling everything.

  “Come back anytime,” she said as she turned off the porch light and I slipped out the door at four thirty. I said I would. I really meant it.

  MARCUS GREEN SHOWS up at 7:05. He’s dressed to the nines, as always. Marcus might sleep in a three-piece suit. He glances at my jeans and pullover sweater and remarks that it’s too bad I didn’t have time to dress.

  I advise him to screw himself.

  Kate looks lovely, even if you disregard the fact that she’s recently given birth. She might weigh less than she did before she got knocked up. Her jeans make a much better impression than mine and elicit no comment from Marcus.

  “So,” I ask them, “do you have to blindfold me first?”

  Marcus doesn’t answer, just walks toward his Yukon with us following.

  He heads down Franklin Street and around the capitol, and I deduce that we’re headed for the Bottom.

  It never looks that great in daylight, since many of its finer establishments closed only a few hours ago and won’t open again until the afternoon. The broken beer bottles glint in the morning sun like cheap costume jewelry.

  Marcus turns left, and we go one block up and two blocks over, finally stopping at one of the many old brick buildings that are being repurposed as overpriced housing. This one probably sat for twenty years before someone saw its potential as something other than a source for old bricks and timbers.

  We walk inside one of the buildings and go up to the second floor, where Green knocks four times, then twice. The door opens a crack. We walk inside, and there’s our man, Ronnie Sax.

  Sax doesn’t look like he’s slept much. He smells like he hasn’t showered in the last day either.

  Green asks him whose place this is, and Sax says it belongs to a friend who’s out of town.

  “I need you to help me,” he says.

  “Well, that depends on whether you’re guilty or not,” Marcus says. Actually it depends on whether he thinks he can get Ronnie Sax off and garner some free publicity in the process.

  “I ain’t guilty of nothing. The cops’ve had it in for me a long time.”

  He turns to me.

  “You know what I told you,” he says. “My sister will vouch for me. She knows where I was that night.”

  It’s probably time to drop a little truth bomb on Mr. Sax.

  I tell him, along with Marcus and Kate, what I know, without divulging how I know it, about the images the cops have of the late Jessica Caldwell.

  “They’re pretty sure they have you nailed for taking pictures of an underage girl, Ronnie, right before somebody raped and murdered her.”

  “Goddamn,” he says after a slight pause. “That was her? Well, maybe I did take pictures of her. But that doesn’t mean I killed her, does it?”

  I note that, if they were to list everyone in the city of Richmond, he might be Number One on the “most likely” list.

  Kate glares at me. Once again I’m guilty of not sharing. Well, hell, I only found it out myself a few hours ago.

  “You’ve got to come clean with us,” Marcus says. “I am not going into court looking like a fool. What kind of crap are you trying to hand me?”

  I’m about ready to call it a day myself. I’m thinking about a tall tree and a thick rope.

  “No. Wait,” Sax says as Green starts heading back toward the door we just entered. “I’ve took pictures of a lot of girls. But there’s no way I killed anybody. And my sister will tell you I was at her house the night it happened.”

  I observe that his sister seems to be one of the few people in the greater Richmond area who believes he’s not a serial killer. I further note that sisters have been known to lie to save their brothers’ asses. Marcus frowns. He doesn’t like it that I seem to be steering the conversation. Marcus likes to be behind the wheel.

  “Well,” Sax says, “I just thank God she’ll come through for me.”

  “If this goes to court, and she swears that, and it turns out not to be true,” Kate says, “that would be perjury. She could go to prison for that.”

  Sax actually grins, showing his crooked teeth, and gives off that weird, kind of spooky, little laugh, like a rusty hinge squeaking.

  “She’ll back me up,” he says. “She loves me.”

  I am troubled, and I can see that the two lawyers are, too. We are all figuring the odds. Guy takes nasty pictures of girls and two of them wind up raped and murdered. He doesn’t have a record of violence, and he has, for the time being, an alibi. Still I’m starting to think Ronnie Sax might be a good deal less harmless than I was thinking he was.

  “Is there some way your sister can prove you were there?” Marcus asks him.

  “I’m not sure,” he says. “Maybe one of the neighbors saw my car?”

  Then he snaps his fingers.

  “Yeah! We were out on the back porch, talking. Mary Kate was talking with her next-door neighbors, and she told them she had family visiting. I said hi to them.”

  I ask if the neighbors saw him.

  “I don’t think so. There was just one little lamplight out there. But they heard me.”

  “Well,” Marcus says. “That’s something.”

  Ronnie Sax can’t account for his comings and goings in the other three Tweety Bird murders, but Marcus says he’s not too concerned about that. He just has to establish that Sax was otherwise engaged when little Jessica Caldwell met her demise.

  I think all three of us are feeling like we should leave and wash our hands to get the crud of Ronnie Sax off us. Child pornography isn’t what you want to list among your hobbies if you’re already suspected of murdering young women.

  Marcus Green seems to be thinking.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he says finally. “If you turn your sorry ass in, today, I won’t call the cops, and I’ll be your attorney.”

  Both Kate and I look at Marcus as if he’s lost his mind.

  He looks at us and shrugs.

  “What the hell,” Marcus says. “I’m bored. I always thought I could win just about anything. This’ll prove it.”

  He turns toward Ronnie Sax.

  “And, if I lose, nobody will think the worse of me as a lawyer. Perry Damn Mason would have a hard time getting you past a jury.”

  Sax doesn’t like it, but his choices are limited. I imagine he can hear the figurative bloodhounds. The cops are bound to be close behind. Whatever friend this joint belongs to, they’ll be checking out all of Ronnie Sax’s friends soon, and the jig will truly be up.

  He makes the call.

  The cops are there in less than ten minutes. They are not thrilled to see Marcus Green already on the case. L.D. Jones himself arrives two minutes after the first squad cars. He doesn’t acknowledge either Green or myself. I suppose L.D. is happy he’s able to call that little press conference he meant to hold yesterday morning.

  It’s not yet nine A.M., and I already have my story for tomorrow.

  As we’re leaving, Marcus turns to me.

  “You aren’t going to write that crap about the pictures of the Caldwell girl, are you?”

  I tell him I haven’t decided yet. He threatens to make me walk back up the hill to the office
. I tell him that’s one guaranteed way to make sure I tell all. Actually the cops will probably drop that information on everybody with a TV set or Internet access pretty soon.

  The sweat stains on Marcus Green’s perfectly ironed blue shirt tell me how conflicted His Glibness is about taking this case on. Marcus might not have much of a conscience, but he does hate to lose.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  X

  It always concerns me when our doughty police department is absolutely, positively cocksure they have their man. Call me a cynic, but at least three times in the last four years, our finest have been ready to throw away the proverbial key, only to be proven embarrassingly, spectacularly wrong. I would be falsely modest if I didn’t take at least a pinch of credit for being justice’s handmaiden. I still get an occasional note from Martin Fell. Robert Gatewood doesn’t write or call, seeing me for the self-serving newspaper jackal that I am, knowing that his freedom was just a way to get my byline on A1. Richard Slade is another matter. We are long-lost cousins, after all. We’ve had a beer or two in the last year. And because his mother, Philomena, has a hand in the effort to stop Wat Chenault from turning slave burial grounds into a Walmart parking lot, she wants to talk to me, too. She thinks that our blood is thicker than printers’ ink and that she can play the race and family card. She thinks she can get me to use my meager talents for good instead of, as usual, serving myself. My thought is that, if I play my cards right, I can finesse a two-fer.

  Do the right thing or make our readers spit their cornflakes? Please, don’t make me choose.

  At any rate, she called and wants to meet with me on Thursday. I promised to bring along our link, Peggy, whose hookup with an African American saxophone player lo those many years ago means the paper gets to trot me out as that most treasured of newsroom assets: a minority. I might look Greek or Italian to you, but to the folks who count that sort of thing, Willie Mays Black is as African American as his namesake.

  In the meantime, there’s a story to write (after first, of course, giving the gist of it away for free to our freeloaders in the ether).

  Being able to write a first-person account of Ronnie Sax’s surrender and (most of) the events leading up to it will definitely put me on A1. I probably can ride this horse for the foreseeable future. Arrest made in serial slayings/Reporter was there when photographer surrendered.

  Wheelie asks me if we have to mention that Sax used to work for the paper, but he knows the answer to that one. I suspect that he already is getting marching orders from Ms. “Call Me Rita” Dominick, whose background in advertising makes her less squeamish than she should be about holding the paper to a lower standard than the one to which we hold everyone else. Once she’s been here a week or two, she’ll probably take the gloves off and start giving orders instead of trying the subtle approach.

  “OK,” Wheelie says with a sigh, “but can you not lead the story with it?”

  Fair enough. I don’t mention that Sax is an alumnus until the ninth graf.

  I’m still somewhere on the other side of skeptical about Mary Kate Kusack Brown and have her on my short list of people to interview.

  Sarah stops by to congratulate me. Wheelie wants her to go back and do stories on how relieved the female populace of Richmond is.

  I tell her I just hope they have the right guy.

  “Is there any reason to think they don’t?”

  “Nothing but the police department’s sterling track record.”

  “Well,” she says, “this one looks like a slam dunk.”

  How many times, I ask her, have you seen a slam dunk bounce off the rim? Then I tell her to stop using sports metaphors. She asks me what a “track record” is, then. I tell her that’s different.

  I intend to go home and take a nap. I’m supposed to be in for real in a couple of hours. Before I can get away, though, the phone rings. It’s an internal ring. Like a fool, I answer it.

  It’s Wheelie. He wants to see me. I ask him if it can wait. He says it can’t.

  He’s still packing up the crap he hauled up to the executive floor. Ms. Dominick already has moved some of her stuff in. The place looks a little crowded.

  Wheelie doesn’t ask me to sit, so I’m optimistic that this will be a short conversation.

  “We got the papers this morning,” he says. “Wat Chenault is definitely suing us.”

  Well, I tell Wheelie, suing and getting aren’t the same thing. This doesn’t seem to mollify him.

  “I just wanted you to know, so maybe we can go easy on Top of the Bottom.”

  I don’t think it would be a good idea to tell Wheelie just yet that I’m meeting with Philomena and Richard Slade day after tomorrow. It would just worry him.

  I remain as noncommittal as I can.

  “We especially don’t see any reason to rehash all that stuff with the girl. That’s ancient history.”

  OK, he’s probably right about that. One time reminding our readers that Wat Chenault got caught doing the nasty with a teenager probably is enough.

  By the time our chat is over and I’m back downstairs, that two hours has shrunk to an hour and a half. Fuck it. Might as well stay here. I miss the days when I could get by on five hours of shut-eye. Back then, “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” was a life plan instead of a song. “I’ll Sleep When I’m Old” is more like it, and I’m feeling ancient today.

  But Wheelie’s got my brain moving in an unforeseen direction.

  It’s a slow night, and I do some checking in the electronic morgue. The person I’m looking for would be in her late twenties by now. Wheelie will crap his pants if he knows I’m sniffing along this trail, but it’s really just a shot in the dark. Probably won’t lead anywhere.

  All I want to know is whether a certain young woman is still among the living.

  WHEN SARAH COMES back from interviewing potential victims, I walk over to her desk.

  “How would you like to do a little scavenger hunt?” I ask her.

  She says her plate is pretty full. She knows, though, that I wouldn’t intentionally waste her time. She says she thinks she can find a spot over on the side, beside the broccoli.

  What I want to know, I tell her, is the whereabouts of one Leigh Adkins. Sarah’s smart. She remembers the name right away.

  “She’s probably living a normal life somewhere,” I tell her, “but I’d just like to know.”

  Sarah’s better at database searches and other tricks of the trade that they didn’t teach when I was learning journalism.

  “Is that all?”

  No, I tell her. I also would like to know if one Wat Chenault has had any other unsavory experiences with young girls.

  “And, it’s got to be just between us.” I explain about the lawsuit.

  “Yeah, I can see where you might want to keep that one under your hat, and maybe hand the ball to somebody else. Shit. I did the sports thing again, didn’t I?”

  “No harm, no foul.”

  I’ve made her laugh. It’s always a pleasure to make a pretty woman laugh, as long as it’s not at you.

  SINCE I’M SUPPOSED to back off Wat Chenault, that’s exactly where my perverse desire to piss people off takes me. I do some reading. Chenault’s people gave us a proposal for their plans for the Bottom, and for the first time I go over it line by line instead of speed-reading it. From what I’m reading, I think I might be the first person in the newsroom to actually parse this crap.

  There are a lot of ifs and maybes in the Top of the Bottom scheme. There are grandiose plans involving boutiquey shops and mixed-use housing, a bow to building some kind of museum to honor the slaves who are buried in the Bottom. There’s even my favorite bullshit vehicle of all, the artist’s rendering. In the rendering, happy people of all races are wandering blissfully and peacefully through pedestrian streets lined with brightly colored shops where smiling merchants are handing out balloons and free food samples. There’s a Ferris wheel in the background, next to the slavery museum. About the only th
ing missing is a goddamned unicorn.

  What there’s not a lot of, though, are hard, cold promises. Reading carefully, you can see that none of this has to be the way it’s spelled out if the power that be, Wat Chenault, doesn’t think he’s making enough money. The phrase “economically viable” appears three times. And I’ve seen how easy it is for some sharpster to come to town, get sixty condominiums, a parking deck and a fitness center approved, only to come back three years later, pleading poverty, and get it zoned down to 120 apartments with no off-street parking. And, too often, the old building that was going to be converted turns out not to be “economically feasible,” and here come the bulldozers. Even if you don’t have Wat Chenault’s connections, it ain’t that hard.

  Some of the best things Richmond has going for it are the preservationists. The mossbacks who want the Civil War to be best-two-out-of-three are the same ones who have resisted tearing down beautiful but old and abandoned buildings. What once was decrepit can one day become charming. And yet, there is always somebody with money and/or influence who wants to bring in the wrecking ball.

  So I’m thinking it is going to be very hard to stay away from Wat Chenault while all this is going on.

  I’ve got Sarah trying to find Leigh Adkins, but I decide to take a whack at it. I don’t get much beyond Google when it comes to armchair sleuthing, but in this case, that’s all it takes.

  The story I find never made our paper. There wasn’t much to it, really.

  One of the little Southside weeklies went high-tech and had its stories scanned for the last forty years or so. When I search for Ms. Adkins, I find out that there are a lot of Leigh Adkinses out there. But when I cut it down to her name and her hometown, only two stories pop up.

  The first one was of little Leigh being Junior Miss Peanut in a local beauty pageant. There she is, beaming and posing with Mr. Peanut. She looks like she’s about twelve. It looks like Mr. Peanut has his hand on her butt.

  The second one was dated July of 2002, less than a year after the sudden and spectacular end of Wat Chenault’s political career.