by Howard Owen
Now, though, I think I’ll just let this one ride a little bit.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
X
Saturday
That thing that has been rattling around in my brain has been driving me nuts. It’s like when you try to think of some movie you used to love or an old girlfriend whose name has slipped just beyond your field of memory.
Sometimes it’s best to just let it be. It will eventually come to you. My memory is like my Honda’s semiworthless radio. It emits a lot of static, but once in a while it picks up a clear signal just when I least expect it.
And so it was that, lying in bed this morning, I had my epiphany.
Last night was only a two-beer evening at Penny Lane after work. This relatively healthful development along with the buzz I got from what I remembered has me up and at ’em a little after eight. I get a couple of Saturdays off per year, and this is one of them. So might as well make the most of it.
I go over to Peggy’s, being very careful to knock and announce my presence. My mother offers me coffee. Andi asks me when it’s going to be safe to work again, since her employer doesn’t seem eager to pay her to stay home, death threat or no death threat. And then there’s the school thing. If she can pass the three courses she’s taking this semester, she will be perhaps one semester away from the Promised Land of graduation, although, with a baby on board, that semester might have to wait. Her professors have been understanding, but she’s afraid of falling behind.
Awesome Dude is on one of his walkabouts. Peggy gives me a general idea of where he might be. I promise to drop by later for a more extensive visit. I wonder again about the effect of second-hand reefer smoke on fetuses.
“Be sure you have the safety on that thing,” I tell her, pointing to the pistol on the kitchen counter.
“Of course I will,” she says. “I’m not an idiot.” As she says this, she reaches over and puts the safety on.
AFTER TWENTY MINUTES of scouring Oregon Hill, as I’m passing the river overlook for the second time, I spot him down below me. He seems to be taking in the view. I know that sometimes Awesome just needs to be by himself. I can relate.
He’s sitting there on the ground, leaning forward with his head down. He gives a grunt and jerks up when I approach. I think I woke him up.
“Dude,” he says. “Don’t be sneaking up on me like that.”
At least Awesome, unlike Peggy, is not armed. I apologize for interrupting his solitude.
I settle down beside him, and we both watch the James flow by for a couple of minutes. Some kayakers far below us are risking their lives for no good reason.
“Do you remember when you told me about the guy you saw, the night the Jonas girl was killed?”
It’s been two weeks since he told me about it. Two weeks is a very long time for Awesome Dude’s skittery memory. I try to bring him up to speed.
Finally he and I are, if not on the same page, at least in the same book.
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “That girl down at the beach. Yeah. You didn’t tell anybody about that, did you? Still feel bad about not saying nothing.”
I ask him again about what he told me.
“There was a sound you said you heard there.”
He doesn’t seem to remember that.
“Was it like this?”
The sound works on him like an electric jolt.
“Shit! Yeah, damn! That was it. That was it. That’s what I heard.”
ON THE WAY back to my car, I call L.D. Jones’s home number. I tell him why he and his troops ought to try really hard to reincarcerate Ronnie Sax. He understandably wants a little more information. I give it to him. After he curses me for doing what I promised I would, telling our readers about the latest communication with the killer, we eventually settle into a conversation modulated enough that I don’t have to hold the phone three inches from my ear.
“That’s sketchy as hell,” he says. I further explain why my alternative theory about the Tweety Bird killings went south with the discovery of the quite alive-and-well Leigh Adkins.
I know the police have been turning Greater Richmond upside down, trying to find the bastard who’s doing this, and nothing’s turned up. Now they’ll be back looking for Sax. Nobody at his apartment complex had set eyes on him as of last night.
“It was all your bullshit that made us release him in the first place,” Jones says. “You and that damn Marcus Green and your wife.”
I concede that this is true. My heart is heavy. I always try to be the dispassionate observer. I wonder if my genuine dislike for Wat Chenault has clouded my objectivity.
I apologize to the chief. He seems taken aback, having never heard me apologize before.
“Well,” he says, “don’t kill yourself over it. We’re on this.”
I truly hope they are. I have never wanted to see anybody fry as much as I do Ronnie Sax right now.
When I get back to my car, there’s a ticket there. I never saw the no-parking sign. I doubt if L.D. Jones is going to fix this one for me.
AFTER A QUICK breakfast at Joe’s, I call Cindy Peroni.
When I explain, in broad terms, what I want to do, she says she was afraid I was calling with some half-ass excuse for reneging on our date tonight. I assure her that a case of Ebola couldn’t keep me away.
“That’s comforting, in an insane kind of way.”
“I really need to talk to her. I thought you might be able to break the ice.”
Cindy sighs.
“I have a hair appointment at two. Let me see what I can do.”
I give her her script.
“You want me to threaten her?”
“I just want you to tell her how it is.”
Cindy calls back fifteen minutes later.
“OK. I told her what you said. I think it scared her. We can meet her at her house in an hour.”
WE ARRIVE AT Mary Kate Brown’s house at eleven forty-five. At first I don’t think she’s going to answer the door. Finally, though, it opens.
Ronnie Sax’s sister looks like she hasn’t been sleeping well. What I’m going to tell her isn’t going to cure her insomnia. I really don’t give a shit, at this point.
“You said some bad things to me,” she says, casting an accusing look at Cindy. I’m thinking this friendship is on life support.
“She was just passing it on,” I tell Ms. Brown. “She just told you what I told her to say. And, yes, I do think you’re about this close to some big-time obstruction of justice.”
She shakes her head.
“All right. What do you want to know?”
I explain about having found a witness who will swear he heard a camera whirr in the near aftermath of Kellie Jonas’s murder down by the river. I oversell Awesome Dude’s reliability as a witness. I explain my suspicions about the disappearance of Wat Chenault’s one-time underage sex toy and how those suspicions were put to rest only yesterday.
“There isn’t much else to think,” I tell her in conclusion, “other than that the cops had the right guy all along.”
She reaches for coffee. She hasn’t offered us any. Her hand shakes.
“So why don’t you go to the police?”
I explain that I have, and that they soon will be tearing our fair city apart brick by historic brick looking for her brother, but that she could help a lot by telling me just what parts of that bullshit story about Ronnie Sax’s alibi the night of the last murder don’t jibe with the hard, cold truth.
Yes, I could have passed this on to L.D. Jones. Part of me, though, wants to do it myself. Call me an egotistical bastard, but I’ve been chasing this story in circles, and I want some resolution. Plus I do have a little credibility with Mary Kate Kusack Brown. Just the fact that I’m not the police might help.
“OK,” she says. “Ronnie got here a little later than I said, maybe eight thirty. But he didn’t leave. I told the truth about that part.”
I note that the detectives say the body was dumped down at
the train station around nine thirty, based on when the now-unemployed night security guy went over to Havana 59 for his free drinks.
Ms. Brown nods her head. At first she doesn’t offer any enlightenment. I wait.
Finally she gets up and starts pacing.
“I knew it,” she says. “I knew it was going to be trouble. Ronnie, he isn’t really a bad man. But he’s easily led.”
She doesn’t elucidate. Finally, I ask.
“Led by who?”
She sits down again.
“Mr. Black,” she says, “let me tell you about my brother.”
I start to tell her that I know quite a bit about her brother already.
She stops me.
“No. My other brother.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
X
“Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?”
I appreciate Cindy’s concern. And no, I’m not sure I’m doing either the right or the smart thing. But what Ronnie Sax’s sister has told me makes me relatively certain that I finally know what the hell I’m doing. Better late than never.
I drop Cindy off at her house and thank her again for interceding with Mary Kate.
“It’s no big deal,” she says. “She must not have been that good of a friend anyhow. I can’t believe she wasn’t truthful with me.”
I note that people will go a long way to protect their families, further than they should. Then I promise that I’ll be back to pick her up at seven.
“You better be,” she says. “I’m not wasting a hundred bucks on a hair appointment for nothing.”
I STOP BY the Prestwould. Clara Westbrook meets me in the lobby, dressed to the nines and headed out. I hope, but doubt, that I will be so well turned-out if I ever hit eighty.
“Do you all know anything else about that monster?” she asks me.
I tell her that I hope to have news soon.
“Well, I certainly hope so,” she says. “If the police don’t catch him soon, I’m going to have to go down to Green Top and buy a gun. A girl’s got to have some protection.”
UP ON THE sixth floor, I make a sandwich and ponder my next move. I could call the cops, or I could go down to the Bottom by myself and see if Ronnie Sax’s sister told the truth. Custalow would want to come along, but he’s out on a deep-sea fishing excursion today with R.P. McGonnigal and a couple of other guys. I might be there myself if I liked puking and the risk of drowning a little more than I do.
What Mary Kate told me makes me think it’ll be OK to just make a run to the building and check it out. Then if there’s nobody there, I’ll give L.D. Jones a call and make his day.
It’s a beautiful Saturday afternoon. I catch the University of Virginia football game on the radio as I head east. The Wahoos are winning, but it’s early.
Back when Richmond was riding high, all these warehouse buildings down along the James were hubs of commerce, built along the same stretch of river where, a few generations earlier, Africans disembarked at the end of one nightmare and the beginning of another. But that was before my time. By the time I was growing up, this was all a dead zone, enormous brick buildings waiting to be torn down.
Richmond is lucky, though. It didn’t become a southern boomtown where the developers tore everything down. Around here, we’d rather sit and talk about the old days while we watch places like Tobacco Row eventually crumble into the river of their own volition.
Except this time they didn’t. These buildings were made pretty well, I guess, not like the half-ass stuff that gets thrown together today. (Yeah, I pine for the old shit, too. So shoot me.) Eventually somebody needed more apartment space, and when developers started turning some of the warehouse buildings into apartments, the young hipsters were all over it, along with creeps like Ronnie Sax.
The building I’m looking for is one that hasn’t made the transition yet from rat motel to luxury apartments. It’ll come eventually, I’m sure, although, looking at the place, I wonder how.
I recheck the directions. Yeah, this is it. It’s down near where the street alongside the river dead-ends. This is where Mary Kate said I could find Cordell Kusack. She begged me not to tell him who gave me his address. He apparently does not take well to betrayal.
Actually it isn’t exactly an address. It’s just a building waiting for better days. Apparently Mr. Kusack has been homesteading.
I am not, evidence to the contrary, a complete idiot. I call L.D. Jones’s number and am told he’s at a Virginia Union football game. When I tell his aide what I’m calling about, she’s obviously been told that, for once, I’m at the top of the priority list. She gives me the chief’s cell number. I reach L.D. Over all the stadium noise, I tell him to meet me at a grocery store parking lot not a mile from Kusack’s alleged abode. I tell him to bring lots of armed folks with him. I could have told him the address, but I thought maybe it would be good if the cops didn’t descend on the hideout like the cavalry, with sirens wailing and lights blazing. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Mary Kate hasn’t been here, but Ronnie has told her about it. Like her, he’s sworn to secrecy by his big brother. He told his sister that there is a panel of plywood covering an opening on the side of the building facing the river. I sit in my car for maybe two minutes, looking for anything resembling life. The building is four stories high. About half the windows have been knocked out. I’m well beyond the next occupied space, maybe half a mile east of Ronnie Sax’s apartment. The river is big down here. It’s reflecting gold as the afternoon light hits it. You wouldn’t willingly swim in it, but it is pretty to look at. Across the way, somebody desperate for food is fishing for carp or catfish. It’s so peaceful I’d like to take a nap with the sun beaming in through my cracked windshield.
I start the car, ready to make a U-turn back to the grocery store where Richmond’s finest soon will be converging like ants at a picnic.
“What the fuck do you want?”
I almost crap my pants. Whoever has what feels like a gun pressed against the back of my head came out of nowhere.
He repeats the question, with a little more enthusiasm and a rap upside my head with his free hand. I do a quick assessment and realize that I am at least 200 yards from other human beings. The guy with the cane pole across the river is probably the closest thing to help I could hope to rouse by screaming. I can’t believe it. It’s two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of a decent-sized city, and I am alone, except for the guy with what I am now sure is a big-ass gun.
I start to explain that I’m just a guy out for a drive, enjoying the scenery.
He laughs, more or less, then reaches in, cuts the ignition and takes my keys.
“Yeah, I bet you are. I bet there’s no chance you’re that nosy-ass reporter my sister told me scared her into telling him about me. Yeah, no chance at all.”
I guess that, for Mary Kate, blood turned out to be thicker than my promise not to drag her into this if her older brother turned out to be the monster I suspected he was. Or maybe she was just scared. Either way, I’m fucked.
Before I can deny my identity, he clips me pretty good with the gun.
“C’m’ere, asshole,” I hear him tell somebody else. “Help me with these cuffs.”
I hear the rear right-side door open. As I feel my hands being pulled behind me, I get a glimpse of my assailant’s partner in the rearview mirror.
“Imagine meeting you here,” I say as Ronnie Sax snaps the handcuffs behind me.
Ronnie gives that wheezy little laugh, which in some ways is scarier than his big brother and his big pistol.
They manage to get me out of the seat and over to the passenger’s side, damn near separating my shoulder in the process. Ronnie hops back into the backseat and Cord Kusack gets behind the wheel.
He is able to maneuver the car down the side of the hill and into the small space between the warehouse and the river. I wonder if the guy across the way will notice and call the cops. When I glance over there, he look
s like he’s napping in his Kmart lawn chair.
I turn and get my first good look at Cord Kusack. What I see does not inspire confidence. While brother, Ronnie, mostly comes across as a perv who likes to mess with little girls, Cord is more along the lines of something out of the latest chainsaw movie.
For one thing, he’s got to be eight inches taller than Ronnie, at least six seven, and I’d guess he goes about 280. He looks like a goddamn NFL defensive tackle, only scarier. His hair has either turned white or been bleached. It’s standing more or less straight up. He has snakes tattooed on each side of his neck and a tuft of white soul patch on his chin that looks like somebody stuck a cotton ball there. His eyes are what get your attention, though. Or I guess you should say “eye.”
The left one seems to be fixing me with a perpetual laser stare. The right one isn’t there. Well, I mean, something’s there, kind of milky and glassed over, floating there like a dead planet.
He must have noticed me staring.
“You like that?” he says as he orders Ronnie to pull nails out of the piece of plywood over the doorway and then pushes me inside. “Son of a bitch up at Lucasville did it with a razor blade. I’ll show you how he did it a little later.”
He laughs, his baritone and Ronnie’s tenor harmonizing.
I can hear sirens in the distance, but they’ll be waiting for me in that parking lot I can’t get to. I tell my captors that I’ve called the police.
“Well,” Cord says, “maybe you did. But I doubt it. If you did, we’ll all go down together.”
He laughs again, and they undo the handcuffs and throw me onto a floor that is partly decaying wood, partly dirt.
I could make a run for the opening where we came in, but Big Brother grabs me and puts a dog collar around my neck, then ties the rope connected to it to a post.
“There now,” he says, “we’ll have to gag you later, so nobody hears you, when we start going to work on you, but we won’t do that just yet as long as you’re good.”