by Howard Owen
We chat about this and that, testing the water. Eventually, between the onion soup and the duck breast, we fall back into a semblance of the easy bond we had before one of my more spectacularly appalling drunken binges screwed it up.
We’re seated at right angles from each other. When I reach down and squeeze her left hand, she squeezes back for a couple of seconds before retreating and gracing me with those extremely kissable dimples.
“So,” she says as we tuck into our main courses, “Ronnie Sax is free.”
I note that his sister must be doing the happy dance.
Cindy surprises me by frowning and not saying anything for a few seconds.
Like a good reporter, I wait for it.
“You would think so,” Cindy says.
I wait some more. Finally she can’t help it.
“OK. I called her this afternoon. You know, to congratulate her and all. And you know what she said?”
I shake my head.
“She said that she hoped she had done the right thing. I asked her what she was talking about, and she said that there was more to it than she had let on, but she couldn’t tell me. But I thought she wanted to.”
Cindy said that when she pressed Ronnie’s sister for more enlightenment, she said she had to go, that she had a call on the other line. When Cindy tried to call her back, the phone went to voice mail.
“So I don’t know.”
Me either, I tell her. I do lay out the basics of my suspicions about Wat Chenault, though. I probably shouldn’t tell anybody else, even Cindy, about this right now. Maybe I’m just trying to impress her. I swear her to secrecy.
“You think he could be the Tweety Bird Killer?” She lowers her voice and leans close enough to me that I can smell her perfume, which I can’t identify but would like to make mandatory for all women.
“I don’t know what I think. I’m just trying to make sure we’ve got it right.”
I walk her to her car after we share a strawberry rhubarb cobbler. (“Share” meaning she took a bite to be polite.) We do exchange a real kiss then.
“Oh, Willie,” she says. “Why do the men in my life have to be such fuck-ups?”
I offer the opinion that fuck-ups probably are in the majority, and that maybe she should just settle for one who makes her happy most of the time and is capable of change.
She looks up at me. Her eyes are shining a little more than usual.
“And are you capable of change?”
I tell her there’s no telling what a good woman could make of me.
“And you think I’m a good woman?”
It’s time for the heavy artillery. I get down on one knee, right there on Franklin Street. Diners inside can see me if they choose to look. I tell her that she’s the finest woman I’ve known (no sense in holding back now), and that I do truly believe in the gospel of hope, which says all things are possible.
“Possible, if not probable,” she says. She smiles. I think she’s relieved that I didn’t reach into my pocket for a ring while I was down there.
I ask her if she’s doing anything tomorrow night. She says she isn’t, then stops.
“Damn,” she says. “I promised two of my girlfriends that we’d go to Lulu’s tomorrow night and listen to some music. You know, girls’ night out and all that crap.”
She seems genuinely sorry that she’s busy.
“But I don’t think I have anything doing Saturday,” she says, and I tell her she does now.
We have another kiss for the road. I’m tempted to ask her if she’d like to come to my place for a drink, which we both would know was code for some doubles push-ups. I stop short. Our relationship now is a feral cat on the edge of the yard, likely to scatter and run at the least provocation.
I’M ONLY HALF an hour late getting back to the paper. I apologize to Chuck Apple. I definitely owe him a pint.
Nothing’s going on, murder-wise. My phone is blinking. The first message consists of Peggy calling to tell me a joke Awesome told her. I don’t believe most people’s mothers tell them scatological jokes, but she’s the only mother I’ve had, so I don’t know for sure. I’m just glad she’s capable of sharing a laugh.
The next two messages are from more dissatisfied customers calling me bad names and blaming me for the police letting Ronnie Sax loose.
I delete those halfway through. They were starting to get repetitious. One guy calls me an asshole four times in fortyfive seconds. No synonyms, buddy?
The fourth call, though, gets my attention.
“Way to go, dumbass,” the voice, which I don’t recognize, says. “You really don’t know which end is up, do you?”
I hear the guy laugh, then he goes on.
“Know what I think? I think it’s Tweety Bird hunting season again.”
And then he hangs up.
I’m at least smart enough not to erase it. We don’t have caller ID on the newsroom phones. Some of our best stories come from anonymous tips, and how can you be anonymous if I have your phone number?
Numbers can be traced, though, if the caller’s careless. I somehow don’t think this guy’s careless.
It’s after nine when I phone L.D. Jones’s private number, the one he gave me earlier today. He assures me he will have someone working on it within the hour.
“You going to write something for the paper about that?” Sally Velez asks as soon as I hang up. She’s the only one within earshot of my conversation.
I explain my deal with the chief. I can tell Sally this. She understands, like Wheelie probably couldn’t, that the truth sometimes has to age a little bit.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
X
Friday
The number, as I suspected, is untraceable. The guy, whoever he is, probably bought one of those cheap-ass phones you use and throw away.
Well, I’m pretty sure the voice I heard didn’t belong to Ronnie Sax. I’m equally positive it wasn’t Wat Chenault.
The city is back in full-scale panic mode. Most of the citizenry is sure an unknown psychopathic killer is out there, hiding in the tall weeds and waiting to strike again. The rest think the police, with the help of me and the paper, have turned the real killer loose.
Over coffee, I check my office phone from home and discover I have twenty-seven messages. Nothing would make me happier than to erase them all and save my ears. Like most easy things, though, that’s not always the smartest strategy.
Once, in my impetuous youth, I zapped all my phone messages after a week’s vacation. Three days later, one of our state legislators rather spectacularly flipped from the Democrats to the Republicans, who made him a better offer. He gave the story to one of the TV stations. After being asked by our managing editor how I managed to get my ass handed to me by the talking heads, I called the guy. I was sorely pissed. I thought I had built a warm, caring relationship, based on my willingness not to print half of what I knew about him in exchange for certain tidbits.
“Hoss, I called you four days ago,” he said. “The message said you were on vacation, so I held off until you got back. Hell, man, you snooze, you lose.”
So I try not to snooze.
Most of the calls on my answering machine are just more of the same—angry fathers wanting to know what kind of an asshole would have a hand in turning a killer loose. About twenty seconds is enough for most of those before hitting the delete button.
But, eight calls into my thankless task, I’m glad that I did the hard thing, even if the message I get isn’t exactly what I was expecting to hear.
“Mr. Black?” the voice says. “I understand you’ve been trying to find me. I used to be Leigh Adkins.”
She leaves a number. If she isn’t there when I call, she says someone can go find her. She says to ask for Piety.
THE FARM ISN’T that far out of Richmond. It takes me way less than an hour to get there. Being a city boy who didn’t get out much until he was eighteen, I’m still amazed at how damned fast you hit open country when you le
ave Richmond. You go from corner bars to kudzu in about ten minutes. The place I’m looking for is a dozen or so miles off the interstate, so close to the Blue Ridge that you can see the mountains in the distance on a clear day like this.
THE GIRL WHO answered when I called the number the former Leigh Adkins gave me sounded somewhat blissed out, sort of like Peggy most mornings.
“Piety? Oh, yeah. Piety. Yeah. Wow. Just a minute.”
After five minutes, another voice, a male one sounding somewhat more connected to solid ground, came on the line.
“What do you want with Piety?”
I explained that she had left me her number and asked me to call. I gave him my name. He set the phone down without further comment. I could hear sounds through the abandoned receiver. I think I heard a rooster crow.
After another five minutes, I hear a tentative voice:
“Hello?”
I explained, again, that I was trying to reach Piety.
“This is she.”
She confirmed to me that she was the former Leigh Adkins. I asked if I could talk with her.
“We are talking.”
“No. In person.”
She was quiet for a moment, then said, “OK, I guess, if I can get permission. But you have to promise me something.”
What I had to promise was that I would not tell anyone where she was or anything else about her.
“I heard that maybe they thought I was dead. I’m not. At least, my body’s not dead. But Leigh Adkins, she’s, like, long gone.”
I assured her that my sole desire was to determine that Leigh Adkins, or whomever Leigh Adkins has morphed into, was still among the living and had not met with foul play.
She laughed, a little harder than what the situation called for.
“Foul play,” she said. “That’s funny. Mr. Black, I’ve met with lots of foul play. It just didn’t kill me.”
I mention that, while it’s none of my business, her mother seemed anxious about her whereabouts.
“Well, you’re right, Mr. Black. It is none of your business. But, if you want to reassure yourself that I’m alive, come on out. But I expect you to keep your promise.”
I assure her that whatever secrets she has, they’re safe with me. She seems too trusting, considering that we haven’t ever met. Maybe being out of what we call civilization for more than a decade does that to you.
THE COMMUNE HAS been there for some time, out in an area full of cattle farms, rich come-heres doing the ego winery thing, and the occasional rebel flag. We used to write about it once in a while, but now it’s nothing exotic, just part of the scenery.
There’s not much to tell you you’re there. I go by the entrance, off a poorly maintained county road, twice before I find it, just a half-hidden big-ass mailbox with “Solace” hand-painted on it. The rut road runs through half-abandoned fields and well-tended gardens, the latter being worked by an assortment of skinny people reliving the sixties.
The main house, which looks like it predates the Civil War, is more than a mile off the road. It’s flanked by several modular units more or less imitating actual houses.
When I get out, I am besieged by a menagerie of dogs. Like their presumptive owners, they seem harmless. Chickens and goats wander in the background.
A young woman wearing a straw hat and overalls walks toward me.
“Hi,” she says. “I’m Piety.”
She did get permission to talk with me, although we chat in the presence of a scowling man-boy whom I’d like to bitch-slap as soon as I have what I need.
We drink something that passes for tea, and she tells me the story of her life. The man-boy, not all bad, offers me a toke from a full-figured doobie. I decline.
Leigh Adkins was not, it soon becomes clear, very happy with her life in her small Southside town. She says she’d run with a rough crowd, and that her early experiences with intimacy included some unwanted attention from a couple of her mother’s boyfriends.
“When I complained to her, she just said you’ve got to go along to get along. ‘Go along to get along.’ She said it just like that.”
Piety gives a short laugh, dry as a martini.
“I ran away. I didn’t ever want to go back there again.”
Things got a little rough, though. She says she was “rescued” by the good folks from Solace, who apparently wandered the streets of Richmond back then looking for people who needed saving. Might still be doing it for all I know.
“I was born again,” she says, then is quick to assure me that this doesn’t have anything to do with religion.
“This is my family now. We are all here together. We are one.”
A little girl comes wandering in, barefoot and smiling, wearing a dress made by an amateur.
“Come here, Sunshine.”
The little girl comes running to her. She’s maybe five. She jumps up on her mother’s lap.
I never know if Sunshine is the little girl’s name or just what Piety calls her. When the former Leigh Adkins shows me her old driver’s license, I’m assured that I have found her, and that she has found whatever she was looking for.
“Do you remember Wat Chenault?” I ask her.
She frowns for a minute, then brightens.
“Oh, the fat guy in Richmond. The one that got in so much trouble over me. Is he what this is all about? He isn’t trying to find me, is he?”
I tell her my suspicions. She gets a good laugh out of them.
“Oh, my goodness,” she says. “You’ve got to be kidding. He was one of the good ones. He never hit me or anything.”
The man-boy lets her walk with me out to my car, which is accumulating a fine patina of red Virginia clay.
“You know,” she says, as I’m about to leave, “I wouldn’t have done this five years ago. Let you know I was alive, I mean. I just wanted to disappear into the earth, be part of it, invisible.”
She says she did make one quick trip back to her hometown, incognito, for her big sister’s funeral.
“I wore a hat and sunglasses, and I stood across the road from where they buried her. I felt bad, but it wasn’t my life anymore.”
She turns and looks off across the field.
“Now, though, I don’t know. Maybe one day I’ll show my sorry excuse for a mother that she has a granddaughter.”
I mention that her mom probably wouldn’t live forever, adding some bullshit about forgiveness and regret.
“Oh, I know about forgiveness,” she says, fixing me with her bright blue eyes. “I can do forgiveness. I just don’t want to be part of all that. I just want to be clean.”
She sighs.
“Maybe someday I’ll reconnect,” she says. Then she grabs my right wrist, hard. She jabs two of her fingers into the soft underside of it. I wince.
“It’s just that I want to do it on my own terms. You understand?”
I nod, and she lets go.
On the way back to town, I call Sarah.
“You can call off the dogs,” I tell her. “Leigh Adkins is alive and well.”
“SO,” SARAH SAYS when I get back to the office, “we’re back to square one?”
I explain about Ms. Adkins, declining even to give Sarah her new name. After all the digging she’s done, she’s not too happy about that, but a promise is a promise.
We’re back in business on the Tweety Bird front. I write a story that will be ready to go unless pigs fly and our redoubtable police department finds this guy before deadline tonight.
We have a story, one way or the other. Just the fact that there’s still a killer on the loose is enough kindling to keep the fire going on a daily basis. But it will burn a little brighter if I can also report that this maniac is still bragging about what he’s going to do next. That ought to goose gun and ammo sales around here, like we’re not overarmed already. It’s so bad now that I’m afraid to give somebody the finger when they cut me off in traffic. A guy got shot doing that last week.
I check with Andi
to make sure she and my unborn grandson are sticking close to home. Peggy assures me that she will shoot anyone who comes near my daughter looking even vaguely dangerous. I plead my case for caution and make a mental note to announce myself loudly when I pay my next visit to my mother.
And Sarah has another story on Top of the Bottom. The African American community has gotten new life in its efforts to keep the bulldozers at bay, thanks to the Scimitar’s Willie-driven exposé and the stories that we’re oh-so-regretfully having to file just to keep up.
It’s such a hot topic now that even the lawsuit-phobic Rita Dominick has to stand back and let news take its course. Eventually I’m sure she will sniff me out and find out the real story, then lay Wat Chenault’s lawsuit in my in-basket as she gives me the pink slip. But, hell, we’re having fun, aren’t we?
While I wait for the clock to run out on L.D. Jones, I have time to give my favorite private eye a call. He’s given me his cell number.
I can barely keep from giggling when he answers in what he must think is a Bogart voice:
“Sam Spadewell.”
I explain to him that his services are no longer needed, that I have uncovered information that makes his sleuthing unnecessary. I haven’t explained to Mr. Spadewell what it is exactly that I have suspected our favorite real-estate developer of doing in his leisure time. He’s professional enough not to ask.
“Well,” he says, “I guess that’s that, then. I’ll send you a bill.”
I’m about to hang up when he says, “Don’t you want to know what I found out? Might as well. You’re payin’ for it.”
What the hell. I hoard free information all the time. I sure as hell want the crap I’m being dunned for. They’re never going to let me put this one on my expense account.
And so he tells me.
He assures me he’s got the stuff to prove it.
I compliment him on a job well done. He grunts and hangs up.
I was thinking about giving Wat Chenault a call, just to ease his mind enough so he won’t be sending his knee-breakers after me in the near future. He’s still going to sue our asses, but now maybe he won’t think I have a personal hard-on for him.