The Bottom

by Howard Owen

  I ask him what he wants.

  “What I want is for you to leave me the fuck alone. I haven’t seen that little bitch since all that mess happened, and I don’t need you stirring up shit that’s long since been of no interest to anyone but your nosy ass.”

  I ask him if he’s been writing any anonymous notes lately. I’m hoping that’ll get a rise out of him, even though it might also get my butt kicked, or worse. I’m pretty sure I can make enough noise and cause enough havoc here on Broad Street to keep Chenault and his goons from doing me serious bodily harm.

  He surprises me, though, by looking genuinely surprised.

  “What the fuck would I do that for?” he asks. I let the subject drop.

  Chenault shakes his head.

  “You’re a weird son of a bitch,” he says. “I can’t believe somebody hasn’t put you out of your misery yet.”

  We’re almost beyond the city limits, and I’m getting ready to do something drastic when Chenault tells the driver to turn around. The guy does an illegal U-turn. Five minutes later, we’re back at the Prestwould parking lot.

  We sit there for half a minute, me jammed between the other thug and Chenault.

  “You can go to the police with this,” the fat man says, “but we’ll all swear that you got in on your own accord, and that we just had a nice, friendly chat about why you’re messing around in my business.”

  He motions for the guy on my left to get out. I start to follow him. Chenault puts his meaty paw on my shoulder.

  “Last warning,” he says. “I’m not going to let my life get ruined by some pissant reporter.”

  I get out. Chenault rolls his window down when I walk to the other side, headed for the front door.

  “You better be nice to me,” he says. “After my lawyer gets through with you all, I might be your new boss.”

  He seems to find this amusing. I opt, for once, to shut up.

  BACK INSIDE, I realize I was supposed to pick up Cindy five minutes ago.

  I call, explaining that I’ve gotten a little tied up, and that I’ll be over in thirty minutes. Actually, it’ll be a good hour, by the time I shower and change.

  “I don’t know, Willie,” Cindy says. “Maybe we ought to just make it another time. I’ve got a paper to do anyhow.”

  I observe that it’s been some time since one of my dates begged off because of homework. Cindy’s about a semester from getting the degree that marriage and kids delayed.

  I don’t push it, though. Truth be told, I’m a little freaked out by my most recent close encounter with the fat man. I maybe need some time to digest all this.

  Cindy promises that my rain check will be honored.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  X

  Tuesday

  Sarah still doesn’t have any good news for me on the Leigh Adkins front.

  “I thought I’d found her,” she tells me when I stop in the office after breakfast. “There was this woman, same name, same age, up near Winchester. But when I called her, ‘she’ turned out to be a ‘he.’ Who the hell names their boy Leigh, anyhow?”

  I conjecture that maybe his parents were hoping for a girl.

  Sarah has used every source she can find, computer and otherwise, some in Virginia and some throughout the country. Nothing. She suggests that maybe I ought to hire a private detective. I tell her I don’t think Wheelie would sign off on that as a business expense, although he probably should.

  “Leigh Adkins has probably gotten married and has her husband’s name now,” Sarah says, “although she didn’t show up on any marriage licenses, at least in this part of the world. When I marry, I’m going to keep my name, at least on my bylines.”

  I tell her I think she’s right. There’s no sense in wasting all those years she’s spent building an identity. She looks to see if I’m jerking her chain. I assume a straight face and thank her for all her efforts. I also tell her about the second letter.

  “Damn, Willie. When are you going to write something about this?”

  I tell her that she’s doing the Wat Chenault beat for now.

  “I’m not so sure anybody’s going to be doing it after the story this morning.”

  “New publisher on the warpath?”

  “That is so politically incorrect. You probably want the Redskins to keep their name, too.”

  I tell her it doesn’t really matter much to me, and it matters less to Custalow, who actually has a horse in this race, being of the Pamunkey tribe. He just wants them to stop sucking on Sunday afternoons.

  But, yes, Ms. Dominick is not happy today. She had to approve us rewriting the story that the Scimitar, with a little help from their friend, ran on Sunday. But she’s already been on the phone with Chenault’s lawyer. I learned that from Sandy McCool, who gets paid less and does more work than anyone else on the fourth floor since they got rid of half the administrative assistants/secretaries up there. I haven’t noticed any shortage of executives yet. Some of the poor bastards probably have had to learn to make their own coffee.

  I promise Sarah that we’re soon going to write something about this whole mess. Patience, I remind her, is a virtue.

  “Getting our asses beat by the Scimitar isn’t,” she reminds me.

  I assure her that the Scimitar won’t be scooping us anymore.

  “Not unless somebody feeds them another story,” she says as she walks away.

  Wheelie catches me before I can escape. I’m supposed to take Peggy out for a visit with Philomena sometime before I come to work for real. I ask Wheelie if it can wait. He assures me it can’t.

  He leads me up to the fourth floor. Sandy McCool offers a perfunctory nod and asks me how I’m doing, as if I didn’t just call her a couple of hours ago. Sandy gives nothing away, which is why she’s still here. People with brains—and some of the suits do have brains—know Sandy has information that she would never divulge, unless someone did something to piss her off, like, say, firing her.

  Rita Dominick has put her stamp on the late James Grubbs’s office. All Grubby’s diplomas and Chamber of Commerce and Better Business Bureau awards, along with the one Virginia Press Association plaque he scored back when he was an honest journalist, are gone. In their stead are the sundry advertising plaudits our new boss has snagged over the years, along with three diplomas and pictures of her kids, and husband, who looks a little beaten-down. Two of the diplomas are the kind of graduate degrees you get by taking courses at night and on weekends in lieu of more rewarding hobbies like drinking and smoking. The third, her undergraduate one, causes me to do a double take. Did our new publisher really get her degree from one of those fly-by-night colleges you see advertised on TV, the ones that used to make their pitches on matchbook covers? I see her, out of the corner of my eye. She has a “you wanna make something of it?” look. No, I do not. I suck in a smirk and pretend that I think the University of Western New England is a laudable place (if, indeed it has a corporeal life) at which to improve one’s mind.

  “We’re in a bind,” Rita Dominick says by way of breaking the ice, which feels deep enough to drive an eighteenwheeler over.

  She tells us about her chat with Wat Chenault’s lawyer. No newspaper these days can afford to pay to defend a lawsuit, let alone lose one. It’s why we’re so chickenshit, or at least now we have an excuse.

  “We didn’t have any choice,” Wheelie begins. “The Scimitar . . .”

  Dominick cuts him off. We all know she approved our rewrite of the story about Chenault’s goons, and maybe Chenault himself, conspiring to conceal the fact that they unearthed human remains in the Bottom. She needs something else to pin on us, or at least one of us, if she’s going to pass the buck down to the little folk.

  “Chenault’s lawyer says he has reason to believe that somebody from our paper gave that story to the Scimitar.” When she says “somebody,” she looks at me.

  “The best I can gather,” our publisher goes on, “the one person here who was most interested in our not dr
opping our investigation into Mr. Chenault was you.”

  I can lie with the best of them. I extol the journalistic capabilities of the Scimitar’s fine staff. Given truth serum, I would opine that most of them couldn’t find their asses with both hands.

  And, speaking of truth serum, Ms. Dominick then turns the burner on this conversation up a notch.

  “Do you swear that you didn’t leak that story to the Scimitar’s staff?”

  I swear that I did not. (Hell, I didn’t leak it to the staff. I told Earl Pemberton-Wise, and he told his reporter to interview me about it.)

  “Are you willing to take a lie detector test?”

  It’s time for a little moral indignation. I can do that, even when I’m in the wrong. It’s a gift.

  “Hell, no,” I tell her. “I won’t take a lie detector test for you or anybody else. If you don’t trust me, you ought to just fire my ass right now. Damn! I can’t believe this.”

  I look toward Wheelie, who looks a little pale, then get up and start to leave. I’m bluffing with a pair of threes right now, but I’m not a bad poker player.

  “Wait,” our publisher says. “Come back here. I don’t mean to impugn your honesty. But if somebody did leak that story, his head is going to roll. And I will find out, eventually.”

  Maybe she will and maybe she won’t. It does seem, though, that I’d better come up with some goods on the upstanding Mr. Chenault very soon. At least, city officials are now crawling out of bed with Top of the Bottom, which the mayor has been wholeheartedly approving up to this point. In a city where half the population is African American, some of whose ancestors might be moldering beneath Wat Chenault’s little scheme, it is time to tread lightly. All construction on the project is halted until, as the mayor so elegantly put it, “we can get to the bottom of this.”

  I can see why Chenault would like to take a pound or two of flesh off us. He hasn’t even bothered to file papers against the Scimitar, I’m sure. Other than office supplies, I doubt there’s much for him to squeeze out of that noble news organ.

  Wheelie and I leave. We’re on the elevator when my managing editor, not usually given to the theatrical gesture, stops the car between floors.

  “I know who leaked that story,” he tells me. “I have a few contacts, too, you know. Did you really think that wouldn’t get out?”

  It’s no use pretending. Wheelie knows, and if he wanted me fired, he’d have settled my hash back in the publisher’s office.

  I wait for it.

  “Just be sure,” he tells me, actually putting his finger in my face, “that you nail the son of a bitch. Whatever you’re sniffing after, you better nail him so good that his lawyers can’t touch us.”

  “Does that mean I’m back on the Wat Chenault beat?”

  “Not officially. I think Chenault suspects you’re somehow behind this. You’ll pass whatever you know on to Sarah Goodnight. It’ll be her byline on it.”

  Well, that’s something. And I appreciate Wheelie putting the news ahead of his butt for a change. I once suggested, in an ill-advised burst of frustration, that he grow a pair.

  Maybe he has. With the paper in imminent danger of being sold to the Friedman chain or one of its soulless contemporaries, maybe Wheelie’s feeling he doesn’t have much to lose. If we’re looking at a scenario where our already diminished staff is cut in half to make the stockholders happy, then we might as well make some good journalism before the ax falls.

  I PICK UP Peggy, who seems almost straight today, and we head out to Philomena’s. I’ve been promising to take her to visit my late father’s cousin. Andi asks to come along.

  I ask Peggy, on the way over, how she’s doing.

  “Hanging in there,” is her tepid response. Andi reaches up from the backseat and rubs her shoulder.

  It does seem to lift her spirits to be with Philomena, though. It warms my jaded heart to see the two of them embrace. Peggy and I didn’t have a whole lot of family when I was growing up on the Hill. Most of her kin more or less disowned her for having a child with a black man. And his family wasn’t a factor, since she never married Artie Lee, who wrapped his car around a very large tree before I was out of diapers.

  Andi seems to fit right in, though, fascinated still to discover family she never knew she had until recently.

  Richard comes home for lunch. He’s working as a mechanic, at a shop four blocks away. There was some kind of automotive mechanic program at one of the prisons where he spent most of his adult life, and he took advantage of it, in the unlikely event that he someday might need to find a job.

  “That was good, what you did for Momma and Miss Sophia,” he says.

  I tell him that I didn’t do much. It was the Scimitar that forced us to write about it.

  He gives me a look that tells me he maybe knows more about that episode than my publisher does. News travels fast, often without the aid of trained professional journalists. “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” somehow pops into my head.

  “However it happened,” Richard says, “we appreciate it.”

  He asks me if my car needs a tune-up. Probably, I tell him. All I know about cars is to change the oil every six thousand miles or so, empty the ashtray every now and then, and get it inspected once a year.

  He tells me to bring it by and he’ll let me know what needs fixing.

  “Might even be able to do it myself,” he says.

  I promise him I will bring back my old Honda. It would be rude to do otherwise.

  Peggy’s in such fine spirits that, when it’s time for me to go to work, Philomena says she’ll drive her and Andi home when they’re through visiting. I suppose Awesome Dude will have to dine alone tonight.

  Thinking about the Dude makes my pinball brain bounce onto something else, something my peripatetic friend told me about the night Kelli Jonas was murdered. I can’t quite get my mind around what’s bothering me about it. It’s like an itch in that little spot in the middle of your back that you can’t quite reach.

  IT’S A QUIET night back at the paper. I have time to do a little digging. Sarah’s writing something tomorrow about Top of the Bottom being halted, but I’m giving L.D. Jones a much-undeserved break and not writing about the letter left on my windshield yesterday. On the off chance that the cops can make something out of this, I’ll give our boys in blue a couple of days.

  I don’t want to give Johnny Grimes another call, since there’s a pretty good chance he told Chenault about the last one. There are a couple of things I’d like to know, though, while Sarah tries to find Leigh Adkins.

  R.P. McGonnigal has a friend—steady boyfriend, actually— who is a private detective. I don’t intend to put him on the trail of Wat Chenault’s long-ago underage sex toy. There is something else, though, that I have in mind.

  I’ve met the guy a couple of times. I think that he and R.P. might get married, if that ever becomes a possibility in our benighted commonwealth. We’ve joked about it, about the sheer goofiness of Abe, Andy, Goat and me standing there in tuxes while our old friend marries another man. For four Oregon Hill rednecks, we’re pretty progressive, at least where our friends are concerned.

  “If it makes R.P. happy,” Custalow said, “it makes me happy.”

  The detective’s name is, I swear, Sam Spadewell. Well, actually, I think his real first name is Robert or Ronald or something like that, but if you’re a PI and your last name’s Spadewell, how can you resist?

  Sam is amenable to what I’m proposing. When we get around to talking about money, he says don’t worry about it, that we’ll work something out later.

  He tells me a story.

  “When I was like twenty-five or so, a friend and me, we got caught on a morals charge. You know, like doing it in the park. The cops loved to catch you, back then.

  “We weren’t hurting anybody. Nobody saw us except this nosy-ass cop that spent all his shift just trying to bust us.”

  It wouldn’t have risen above a brief on B5, but this one s
tate senator from Southside decided to go on a crusade against gays “defiling our public parks.”

  He made such a fuss about it that the city wound up prosecuting Sam and his friend.

  “We got six friggin’ months in jail,” he says. “And I don’t have to tell you who the fat fuck in the legislature was. I’ve been waiting.”

  Sometimes, I’m thinking, your turkeys do come home to roost.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  X

  Wednesday

  I go over to the jail with Kate and Marcus. They’re up to date on the second note now.

  Ronnie Sax is informed that somebody has sent a second letter in an effort to get him out of jail.

  “Well, whoever it is, I appreciate it,” he says. He doesn’t seem nearly as surprised at having a benefactor as I think he should be. That wheezy laugh of his is just a cough now. I don’t think incarceration is agreeing with Ronnie.

  “Who could’ve sent this?” Marcus asks.

  Sax shrugs.

  “Hell if I know. It might be good to start with the fucker who killed those girls, but I guess the cops are too damned lazy to get off theirs butts and find out. Or maybe you could.”

  Kate reminds him that we’re about the only people on the planet right now who actually are trying to spring him. The replies we’ve gotten online about the case are along the lines of “Fuck him. Kill him now.” I mention to him that he is not exactly the people’s choice at the present time.

  “Yeah,” he says. “One of the cops showed me what they were writing about me. Damn, these people don’t even know me.”

  I’m thinking that the fewer people really get to know Ronnie Sax, the better off he is.

  Still we don’t kill people just because they deserve it on general principles. If they did that, the newsroom would be even thinner than it is now. You’ve got to actually do the deed. As much as I dislike Ronnie Sax, I am not 100 percent sure he did the deed.

  WHOEVER WANTS SAX sprung isn’t kidding around.