The Bottom

by Howard Owen

  I silently wonder whether Quip knows that his soon-to-be son’s great-grandfather was African American. In Quip’s world, that might be enough to quash any hopes of bringing my grandson up in West End affluence, although the blue bloods, or at least the ones who can see the multihued future, are getting more open-minded.

  I assure her that, as the mother, she is holding all the high cards. I do worry about Quip, though. If money talks, his father’s assets could put on quite a damn filibuster.

  I promise her that I’ll see what I can do. I further promise that I will do that without busting young Quip’s skull. It is a promise I hope I can keep.

  I check in on Peggy, who seems to be a little better, mental health-wise.

  I should chastise her for advising her granddaughter to forgo marrying a rich man who can afford to double-team her upcoming baby with nannies.

  I’m not sure, though, that Peggy isn’t right.

  After all, look how well I turned out.

  L.D. JONES IS in his office. He’s busy, his secretary says, after she’s told him who’s calling. When I tell her that I’m there to ask about the silver dollars, he gets un-busy.

  “You better not be bullshitting me,” he says. I produce a copy of the letter. He reads it. I can see his lips moving.

  “Why,” he asks me, slamming the letter down on his desk, “are you causing me so much trouble?”

  “I didn’t write the letter. I didn’t ask anybody to send me a letter. I don’t even know why whoever sent it sent it to me.”

  “They did it because you’re the nosiest son of a bitch in Richmond! Why the hell wouldn’t they send it to you? Short of hiring a skywriter, how could they get the word out any better?”

  “All I need to know from you is if it’s true. Did those girls have silver dollars on them?”

  The chief says he can’t tell me that. I tell him that I don’t intend to run this particular bit of information right now, but that I am retaining my right to do so at a later date. But if I don’t get confirmation from him, I will put something in the paper about it tomorrow. I don’t mention the fact that Kate and the publicity-addicted Marcus Green soon also will be made aware of the letter’s presence.

  “Just nod if it’s true,” I say, making it easy on our beleaguered chief.

  He glares, and then he nods.

  I also ask L.D. if he doesn’t think that this might, just maybe, sprinkle a light dusting of doubt on Ronnie Sax’s guilt.

  “Until we have something more convincing to go on than the pencil-scratching of some anonymous jerk, nothing’s changed,” the chief says.

  I tell L.D. he can keep the letter. He thanks me for nothing. You’d think the police would be more appreciative of helpful tips from civilians.

  I DO PAY a visit to Marcus Green’s office. Kate has a playpen set up in her space. In the playpen is Grace, her six-month-old bundle of joy. I wonder if whatever bar or eatery Andi’s working at half a year from now will be so child-friendly.

  Marcus comes out of his office. He frowns toward the playpen where Grace is on all fours, gurgling and looking up at us like we’re the most amazing things she’s ever seen. I can tell that Marcus has had to decide between bending the rules and keeping the best lawyer he’s ever going to get for what he’s paying. Still he can’t resist kneeling and letting Grace wrap her tiny hand around his finger.

  They react favorably to the letter.

  Kate starts to ask me why I didn’t share this with her earlier. I cut her off by telling her to look at the postmark. Mailed two days ago.

  “It just came in yesterday. I rushed right over.”

  Kate notes that one day later isn’t rushing, but she’s somewhat appeased.

  “Damn,” Marcus says. “Maybe the little bastard didn’t do it.”

  “You mean you ever doubted your client’s innocence?”

  Marcus’s facial expression silently asks me if I was born yesterday.

  “And this crap about the silver dollars? That’s true?”

  I assure him that it is.

  He and Kate both thank me for the good news.

  I tell them I’m not going to write about it, at least not right now. However, I’m sure Marcus will use it to make his case for bail for Ronnie Sax.

  IT IS HARD to keep a secret in a newsroom, even one as decimated as ours. By the time I show up for work, the usual air of upheaval is in the wind: clusters of people speaking in muted tones, glancing occasionally at Wheelie’s office, where two men in suits sit with their backs to us.

  “Who is it this time?” I ask Sally.

  “Goddamned Friedman.”

  “Friedman? No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  We’ve been aware for some time that we might be sold. What once was a family paper became a chain, even before I signed on. That old feeling that we were protected retainers of our familial guardians, safe from the ravages of corporate America, took wing a long time ago, along with pensions, matching 401(k) funds, and job security.

  And then, some genius upstairs thought it would be a good idea to buy six more newspapers in various parts of the South with borrowed money. In 2007. Just before the crash. If you took out a home mortgage about that time with 10 percent down, you might be able to guess what happened.

  Long story short, the bank has us by the short ones. And corporate keeps throwing pieces of our enterprise overboard, hoping what’s left of our tempest-tossed vessel eventually will be light enough to float again. One of the pieces being prepped for cement overshoes is our paper. At least three other chains have had people snooping around here, kicking the tires.

  But Friedman? Jesus. Those guys have ruined four good newspapers that I know of. They never saw a newsroom they couldn’t shrink. The rule of thumb for the print peons always has been one of us for every 1,000 circulation. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: Every time circulation drops another grand because we’re more or less giving it away online, a reporter, photographer, designer or editor bites the dust. (HR seems immune from this somehow.) The paper gets a little thinner, and more people drop their subscriptions, so we cut more, ad nauseam.

  “The perfect paper,” Enos Jackson once said after a few bourbons, “would be one staffer and one reader. Hardly any overhead at all.”

  We’re headed that way, and if Friedman buys us, that will grease the skids. One of their papers, in a college town two states away, made a deal with the journalism department to let their kids cover city council and the school board as part of their course. Will work for grades. Great experience for the kids. Not so great for the readers.

  I’m not presenting myself as a knight in shining armor, giving all for the public good. Like so many of my coworkers, I’m just a busybody who loves getting paid to snoop. Most of our readers, I’d just as soon not break bread with them. But if we don’t keep an eye on the thieves and idiots, who the hell will?

  “You’ll miss us when we’re gone,” I heard Jackson say one time when he was being lambasted by an unhappy reader. Then Jackson laughed and hung up.

  I asked him what was so funny.

  Jackson looked over at me.

  “He said he’d like to have the opportunity.”

  WAT CHENAULT HAS me in a quandary. I would dearly love to cut his legs out from under him. If I do, though, I might not be able to dig deep enough to really get to the cesspool bottom of all this. I’m not feeling good about Ms. Leigh Adkins.

  I have a couple of hours to do a little digging. If this gets back to Chenault, I might be hollowing out a nice little professional grave for myself.

  I catch Johnny Grimes by phone before nine, which is always good. After nine, Johnny’s not much good for information. By ten, he has trouble speaking in coherent sentences.

  He was a great reporter for us once upon a time. We nominated him for Pulitzers twice, and he was a finalist once, but after the New York Fucking Times got through giving itself three or four and the Washington Post got a couple and they threw
the obligatory one to some dog-ass weekly that caught the mayor screwing a goat, there weren’t any left for Johnny Grimes.

  He and I used to drink together. When people tell me I have a drinking problem, I tell them they should have seen Johnny Grimes.

  Johnny lost control of the bottle sometime in his thirties, when I was still a pup and viewed him as the epitome of what the hard-boiled newsman should be. Perhaps I can attribute some of my missteps to the fact that I didn’t choose the right role models. Johnny missed assignments, once passed out during a city council meeting and was known to fall asleep at his desk. The managing editor finally got so mad at him that he sent him to sports, where bad quickly became worse, abetted by professional drinkers like Bootie Carmichael. Yeah, I was there too, buying rounds and listening to the stories.

  They finally let him go, and we assumed he’d turn up in an obit. We tried to keep in touch with him, and he disappeared for a time, taking a job out in Montana, where sobriety standards apparently are a bit less restrictive.

  And then, one day, he resurfaced, at the Southside Herald. It’s a weekly with about 5,000 circulation and a staff to match. But Johnny’s done well there. They tend to overlook the bottle in his desk, because he’s far and away the best journalist they’ve ever had.

  “Willie!” he says, shouting into the phone. I can hear a ball game going in the background. “What can I do you for?”

  I explain that I need some off-the-record information on a certain real-estate developer. I don’t show all my cards, but I do mention that we’re being sued after reviving some of Mr. Chenault’s sordid history.

  “Were there any other incidents like that, maybe stuff you’ve heard?”

  I can hear ice cubes clinking.

  “He’s not exactly been what you’d call a saint,” Johnny says at last. “There’s always talk. Town’s so damn small you can’t fart without somebody smelling it.”

  “But this would be about girls, probably way below the age of consent.”

  Johnny tells me about a hushed-up problem with a female student at the local high school where Chenault was helping coach the girls soccer team “that happened before my time here.” Why anyone would let Wat Chenault coach a girls’ anything team is beyond me.

  “And there were rumors that shit like that is what made Mrs. Chenault leave him. But nobody ever brought charges.”

  “Did any of that involve violence?”

  “Not that I know of. But Wat’s definitely capable. You really don’t want to cross him.”

  Too late for that.

  I get a couple of names. We talk about old times, the way we want to remember them.

  “Remember the corn kernels?” Johnny asks. He doesn’t have to say anything more, but we take turns telling the story to each other anyhow.

  One of our corporate masters, an old Virginia type with more manners than brains, got busted for baiting by the game department. He had spread corn kernels all over an open field the night before he and a bunch of his buddies were going to gather and shoot some doves. The wildlife folks don’t consider that to be fair play. The asshole managed to get himself on B2 in Sunday’s paper, complete with a mug shot.

  On Monday morning, the guy comes into the lobby downstairs and finds kernels of corn leading from the front door to the elevator. He gets off on the top floor, and the trail continues, right to his office. Everyone knew Johnny had done it, but nobody could prove it, and he was still enough of an asset that nobody really wanted to.

  Johnny and I laugh a little, but I already can sense the sun of sobriety starting to set on my old compatriot.

  He asks me to share with him “in case the publisher down here has the balls to let us print anything about it.”

  I promise Johnny I’ll pay him back. He tells me to come down and help him kill a bottle sometime.

  I tell him I will, but we both know I’m lying.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  X

  Saturday

  I spend a couple of hours over at Ronnie Sax’s apartment complex on Tobacco Row. I have an appointment to talk with his alibiing sister tomorrow, but I wanted to get some insight from people who aren’t related to him and haven’t maybe been lying lately to cover his ass.

  Everyone’s a little skittish. At first, none of them want to talk about their former neighbor. The cops have already been through, getting any shred of information they can. The residents probably are a little interview-weary.

  Finally, though, a couple of guys who live in the apartment below his who are bringing in their groceries let me ask them some questions. They tell me that Sax did occasionally bring women to his unit, “or more like girls, actually.”

  “He seemed to like them young,” one of them tells me. “But, you know, he was a good neighbor. Never made a lot of noise. I can’t believe he killed those girls.”

  About all it takes, apparently, to be a good neighbor around here is to keep the music down.

  Neither of them, nor any of the other people I finally manage to waylay, have ever seen Sax go even a little bit postal.

  “He was kinda weird, though,” one girl said a few minutes later. “He had this funny laugh, kind of, like, braying.” She gives a pretty good imitation.

  “Whatever he did,” she says, “he probably didn’t do it here. Too many people.”

  “Did he ever talk about having another place somewhere?”

  The girl says she’s heard he has the studio, but I know the cops have combed that thoroughly by now.

  “I talked to him a couple of months ago, at a pool party, and I think he mentioned something about going over to a friend’s place, but I can’t remember where. Never saw him with anybody else around here, except the girls, of course.” She gives a little shiver, probably for effect, and excuses herself.

  I go by the apartment where Sax turned himself in four days ago. The guy who lives there is back. He said he didn’t even know Sax was there. He had been out of town on business for two weeks and didn’t know about any of this until he got home and found his place tossed and a couple of cops in an unmarked car waiting to give him a welcome-home party.

  “They handcuffed my ass,” he says. “I told them I’d just got back into town, but it took them half an hour to believe me.”

  Sax, it turned out, had been a casual acquaintance of the guy and knew in which flowerpot he hid his house key.

  “If they don’t fry him,” the guy says, “I want a piece of him.”

  No, the guy didn’t know anyone who could qualify as a friend of Ronnie Sax.

  “He might’ve said I was one,” he says as he leads me out, “but if I ever was, I sure as hell ain’t now.”

  MY DANCE CARD’S pretty full today. I got a call yesterday from Philomena and promised I’d meet with her and a friend. I have just enough time to go by Buzz and Ned’s for some ’cue, run over to the Bottom and get back to the paper by three. I am praying for a quiet night. Tomorrow’s the first day of fall, but it still feels like summer, and the higher the temperature, the more likely our gun-toting citizenry is to get all itchy and start plugging each other.

  I’m still picking pieces of pulled pork out of my teeth when I find a parking space back behind the Farmers’ Market. Philomena and her friend are waiting for me at the market. We find a bench.

  “Sophia knows something you ought to be aware of,” my cousin says, all business as usual.

  The woman appears to be about Philomena’s age. I can imagine her offering Momma Phil comfort in those twentyeight long years when Richard was falsely imprisoned.

  “My nephew, he saw it,” Sophia says. “They dug up something down there. It was bones.”

  I am all ears and no mouth. It turns out that Sophia’s nephew is in construction. He was driving a bulldozer, doing some preliminary clearing not far from where we’re sitting, in the acreage where Top of the Bottom either will or won’t be built.

  The nephew saw something. He got off his bulldozer, the way he told it to his aun
t, and there were bones there.

  “He called his supervisor over, and he said the supervisor called somebody, and this big, rough-looking fella was there in maybe fifteen minutes. He told them to cover it up and knock off for the day.

  “When my nephew came back the next day, he said it looked like somebody had dug up every bit of dirt in that place, down maybe ten feet, and then brought more dirt back in to fill.”

  The “big, rough-looking fella” sounds, from Sophia’s second-hand description, a lot like my favorite former state senator. The nephew said he looked kind of like a toad frog in a suit.

  “You know what those bones were,” Philomena says. I have a pretty good idea. They supposedly gave slaves such half-ass burials as they were accorded somewhere down here in the Bottom. The historians and archaeologists have never found the exact spot. Maybe some guy with a bulldozer did.

  I ask, knowing the answer already, why the nephew didn’t tell somebody else about it.

  “He needs that job,” Sophia says. “He didn’t work for a couple of years after all the construction dried up. His boss told him he’d never work a day again around here if he told anybody.”

  “He told you.”

  She looks insulted.

  “I’m family,” she says. “Of course he told me.”

  I hazard a guess that he’s not likely to repeat that story to anybody who isn’t family.

  “Maybe not,” Sophia says “but now you know. You can do something about it. Just don’t mention my nephew.”

  That’s how it goes for your basic buttinsky newsmonger. Everybody has a story, but nobody wants to step up to the plate and be quoted. Not that I blame the nephew. My job is to figure out how, without getting an honest laborer fired, to tell the world that Wat Chenault is covering up the fact that he is, as the preservationists feared, desecrating a slave graveyard.

  Hell, if I put this one out there, the nephew and I both will be out of jobs. Maybe we can start a business together, muckraking and backhoeing or some such shit.

  But, where there’s a Willie, there’s a way.

  DRIVING BACK TO the paper, I suck on a Camel and try to figure out my next move. I am becoming more and more suspicious of Mr. Chenault, and my suspicions are ranging beyond the area of real-estate scumbaggery and into more serious matters. I’m wondering who sent that letter after Ronnie Sax was locked up, and why.