The Kudzu Kid

by Darrell Laurant

  “How much are apartments around here?” Fogarty asked Daniel, who still stood contemplating the chaos of what he called “the old paper room.”

  “Well, they aren’t bad when you can find them,” the publisher replied. “The problem is finding them. There aren’t a whole lot of people who actually live in Jefferson Springs, per se. Most folks are farmers, or build homes outside of town. We’ve got two little apartment complexes, but I’m not sure how full they are. We’ve got a small motel.”

  “I’ll check it out,” Fogarty said, “but I’m gonna be spending so much time at this office that I might as well live here.”

  He was joking, but it triggered an idea with Daniel. Within minutes, he and Fogarty were aboard the groaning freight elevator in the back of the building, headed up to the third floor.

  “You’re kidding,” was Fogarty’s first reaction.

  But the more he thought about it, the more sense it made. One large advantage was that Daniel wouldn’t charge him rent. He could retreat to his lair late at night and bring the elevator up with him, and no one could bother him. It would be like living in a tree house.

  “I could have somebody come in and clear out most of this junk,” Daniel said, “and maybe we could do something about the dust.”

  “That would be nice.”

  Among the debris—everything from an old label-stamping machine to a coat rack with dozens of empty coat hangers—Fogarty saw an abandoned couch and a couple of disemboweled chairs with the stuffing leaking out of them. He could use the bathroom downstairs, and he always ate out, anyway.

  “I can find you a cot,” Daniel said, “and I think we may be able to rig up some kind of shower for you on the second floor. There’s a couple of space heaters for when it gets cold. That is, if you’re sure this isn’t too, uh, unconventional for you.”

  Fogarty was still looking around, fighting a strong impulse to sneeze. He saw a ladder protruding through a trapdoor in the ceiling, and asked Daniel about it.

  “You can go up on the roof,” Daniel said. “Since this county is pretty flat, it gives you a decent view. Really, though, Zoe is the only person who ever does that. She goes up there to write.”

  “Ever had any problems with the freight elevator?”

  “Not so far. And if you get stuck, we’ll just call Will, the tree man, to bring his cherry picker over.”

  Fogarty laughed, remembering what his only girlfriend back in New Jersey had told him just before breaking off their brief relationship.

  “If you love the goddamn newspaper so much,” she fumed, “why don’t you just go over there and live? Just put a cot in the goddamn office, right next to your desk!”

  Good idea, he thought.

  “If I can get past my dust allergies, it just might work,” he told Daniel. “I’ll take it.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE LAW

  The odors and rhythms of breakfast filled the big country kitchen with the island in the middle, bringing forth pork sausage and scrambled eggs and hash browns and something called grits.

  “Grease is a way of life around here,” Sarah Daniel said as she refilled Fogarty’s coffee cup.

  Fogarty was getting a warm feeling, in spite of himself. What passed for a kitchen at his recently vacated apartment had been nothing more than a wide spot in the hall leading to the front door, and his usual breakfast was a fast-food biscuit on the way to work. Except for the grits, of which he was wary, the bounty spread out before him transported him back to his childhood.

  Tucker Daniel had invited Fogarty to spend the week at his home while the upstairs quarters at the Echo office were readied. As expected, Sarah had to be talked into it hosting the young visitor.

  “Tucker,” she said, “I don’t have time to run a bed and breakfast right now. I’ve got the Kaleidoscope Art Show in Lynchburg to get ready for.”

  “He won’t be in the way,” Tucker said, feeling as though he was asking his mother for a puppy.

  Sarah had that effect on people. Tall, gracious and ash blonde, she had long ago perfected the subtle intimidation skills of the well-bred Southern belle. Her smile was like a sunny December day viewed from inside—the warmth was an illusion.

  Still, Tucker’s argument was unassailable. His new editor really had nowhere else to go, not for just a week. Besides, he told Sarah, having Fogarty briefly in residence would help them to get to know him.

  That process began with breakfast.

  “Tell us about your job up in New Jersey,” Sarah asked her guest after he had finished his first helping of food and slurped down a cup of coffee. “And please try the grits.”

  Fogarty smiled weakly and raked some of them onto his plate.

  “I covered local government, mostly,” he said. “Kind of like Tucker has been doing here. Meetings, elections, that whole cycle.”

  Sarah’s initial attempt at polite curiosity immediately faded—in her time in Randolph County, she had seen and heard about far too many meetings—so Fogarty added, “Of course, it was a lot different up there.”

  A pause for another gulp of coffee. Sarah seemed interested again.

  “Different?” she asked.

  “Really political. The elections up there were nasty. Plus, a lot of the people who got elected or appointed were crooks, and that’s not counting the occasional mob guy lurking in the background.”

  “You mean, like the Mafia?”

  Sarah looked for an instant as if she had just seen a spider crawl across the tablecloth.

  “Oh yeah. Guys with vowels on the end of their names. Guys with nicknames like Joey Fats. These were people the cops never could seem to touch.”

  “And did you write about these people? It sounds like something out of a TV show.”

  “Well, it wasn’t as exciting as all that,” Fogarty said, backsliding briefly into modesty. “A lot of it was just frustrating, working the public records to try and get something on somebody and make it stick. Ever spend eight hours looking at microfilm, Mrs. Daniel? That’s worth about four Excedrins.”

  He waved a piece of toast in his non-eating hand as he continued.

  “I’ll tell you, though—the best feeling in the world is after you do all the boring stuff, spend all those hours in courthouses staring at all those little numbers, and then something just jumps out at you. That’s when you say, ‘I got you by the balls, scumbag!’ There’s nothing like it.”

  “I’m sure,” Sarah said coolly.

  Her pale blue eyes had narrowed into an expression of distaste, and Fogarty realized he had somehow transported himself back to New Jersey.

  “Sorry about that,” he said, not sounding sorry at all. “We talk a little differently up north, and it may take a while to get the Jersey out of me. If I say anything like that again, just reach over and smack me.”

  His newspaper had been awarded a Pulitzer Prize a decade earlier, he said, for almost singlehandedly achieving the indictment of a local mayor.

  “Here’s the funny part, though,” Fogarty said. “After all that, after they made such a big deal out of us getting that award, the jury acquits the guy and he walks. That’s the way it works up there. Somebody got bought off.”

  His tongue loosened by caffeine, Fogarty had turned the Daniels’ breakfast table into a stage. He couldn’t help himself.

  “That reminds me, Tucker,” he said. “I’ve got a few award plaques I won at the last paper. Do you think I should put them up in my office? Would that give me more credibility here, or would people just think I was bragging on myself.”

  “Up to you,” the publisher said.

  An awkward silence settled in.

  “Eddie had his car vandalized over the last story he wrote,” Tucker said finally, looking over at his wife.

  “Cinderblock through my windshield,” Fogarty mumbled, his mouth full of home-fried potatoes. “I drove it to work like that, and when I got there I had all this glass in my hair.”

  “Around here,” Sarah Dan
iel said, “they’ll just stop talking to you if they’re mad at you. Tucker can tell you about that.”

  “Sometimes,” the publisher said, “I think I’d prefer a cinderblock.”

  Sarah had been studying Fogarty across the table. He was a pleasant-looking young man, maybe in his late twenties, short and wiry with curly dark hair. Obviously arrogant, but not without charm.

  “Tell me, Eddie,” she said. “Are you leaving anybody behind to come down here?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Never had time for one,” he said. “Married to my job.”

  Tucker Daniel’s coffee cup halted halfway to his lips.

  “Didn’t you tell me your girlfriend in New Jersey had been threatened?” he asked Fogarty.

  Another long pause. You’ve got to stop talking so much, Fogarty thought to himself.

  “She wasn’t really a girlfriend,” he finally replied. “More like a close friend who happened to be a girl. Uh, woman.”

  Daniel decided to let it slide. At this point, what difference did it make?

  Sarah had made up her mind about her husband’s new editor—she didn’t like him. She didn’t like his cockiness, his language, or his vacant stare when Tucker had pointed out some of her paintings on the kitchen walls. But then, as he and Tucker stood up to leave, Fogarty smiled again and said: “Can I help you with the dishes? I feel like I ought to pay you back for that meal.”

  “The best way you can pay me back,” Sarah said, “is to try and finish the grits next time. Just go on out and wallow in Randolph County culture. I bet we’ll have you saying y’all in less than a month.”

  “Don’t count on it, y’all,” Fogarty said as he followed Garland out the door.

  In his wake, Sarah Daniel sat puzzled again. Outside, she heard the awakening cough of their Blazer as Tucker launched his new editor on a maiden voyage.

  Daniel told Fogarty to spend the first few days looking through some back issues of the paper.

  “Go meet some people, try to get to know the area. I’ll be showing you around some, and you can tag along with me to the supervisors’ meeting Tuesday night.”

  Fogarty flinched at the words “tag along,” but he kept quiet.

  “What did you mean when you said the sheriff was okay to deal with if you played by his rules?” Fogarty asked as they headed over to Inge’s office.

  “He likes to control his information,” Daniel replied. “For the most part, his deputies won’t talk to us unless they clear it with him. The dispatchers say even less.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Fogarty said. “Whaddya mean, his information? It’s everybody’s information. Why do you let him get away with that?”

  “Because it’s his department,” Daniel said evenly, “and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. Besides, he does us a lot of favors. Sometimes, he gives us things before he gives them to the Times-Dispatch or the Lynchburg paper—that is, when anything happens here that might interest them.”

  “And sometimes, he doesn’t, I’ll bet,” Fogarty said.

  Daniel nodded.

  “Sometimes, he doesn’t. But not often. And I want you just to sit there and let me do most of the talking. You don’t want to alienate this guy on your first day, believe me.”

  In the world of the Jersey Progress, it had been the reporters versus everyone in authority. Fogarty wasn’t sure what side of that line Tucker Daniel would come down on.

  The sheriff’s office was in a low-slung building sandwiched between a tire store and the Southern States Farm Cooperative. A sign on the front door said Jail Around Back, and a poster hanging over the soda machine warned Wear Blaze Orange. The deputies and dispatchers all wore brown uniforms with tan patches, not too different from jailers up in Jersey.

  Yet while the exterior of the building was an architectural grimace of concrete and pre-fab metal—built more to fit the Randolph County budget than to please anyone’s sense of ascetics—the interior was paneled warmly in pine and fragrant with the smell of fresh-brewed coffee.

  “Let me get you a cup,” Inge said, rising heavily from his chair to meet them.

  Fogarty groaned inwardly, having just consumed half a pot over breakfast at the Daniels.

  As Tucker had said, Inge seemed very much the classic Southern sheriff—the khaki-encased belly lapping over his belt, the moon face sitting atop broad shoulders with little intervening neck, the voice as deep and richly Southern as sorghum. In his youth, Inge had been an All-District tackle for the Randolph County High School Wildcats and capable of working twelve hours a summer day on his daddy’s tobacco farm. Now, even the ten steps from his desk to the coffee urn seemed to be an effort.

  Your fat ass is gonna be mine, Fogarty thought as he watched the sheriff return to them with a paper cup in each meaty hand.

  Inge was no rube. He was an active member of the National Sheriff’s Association; a relentless lobbying group that sent him several faxes a week, and always attended its national convention—last year, Las Vegas; this year, Branson, Missouri. He tried to stay up with the latest law enforcement technology, and had managed to pry enough money loose from the state for new radios and a computerized dispatching system. The board of supervisors knew him as a formidable opponent at budget time.

  Sheriffs in Virginia were elected, and W. W. Inge was a politician. Fogarty could feel himself being stroked and manipulated as soon as Inge sat down across from him.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Fogarty asked, pointing to a bushy green plant on Inge’s windowsill.

  “You betcha,” the sheriff said. “Confiscated from a field over by Poplar View.”

  He grinned at Fogarty.

  “Don’t you write about it, though,” he said. “It’s just for show, like that moonshine still we’ve got in the basement.”

  They chatted for a few minutes, Inge telling Fogarty how much he had thought of Calvin Hamer and reassuring him that there was, indeed, crime in Randolph County.

  “Nobody’s immune anymore,” he said. “Drugs are here, now—not just reefer, but crack cocaine—and we’ve found it in the schools. We’ll investigate a break-in these days, and the odds are fifty-fifty that its drug related.”

  He shook his big head sorrowfully.

  “Tucker told me that if you’re murdered here, it’ll be by someone who loves you,” Fogarty said.

  Inge’s muscular chuckle filled the office.

  “Well, you know, any more that’s not always true. We’re not that far from Richmond, and we’ve had a couple of cases of bodies being dumped here from other places. I’ll tell you, Andy, it really pisses me off when that happens. I take it personally.”

  “That’s Eddie,” Fogarty said.

  “Sorry,” Inge said with another chuckle. “Don’t worry—we’ll get to know each other real well before we’re through.”

  Fogarty looked over at Daniel, who seemed to be thinking about something else. So much for the publisher doing all the talking

  “I just got here,” Fogarty said, “and I don’t really know how things work, but I’m curious—how come you won’t let your deputies talk to us?”

  Inge’s fleshy face registered nothing. Instead of answering Fogarty directly, he turned toward Daniel.

  “Tucker, can I be candid with this young man?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Daniel said, looking back at Fogarty. “Can he?”

  Fogarty spread his hands, palms up.

  “No notebook,” he said. “I just want to know how the system operates.”

  “Well,” Inge drawled, “I wouldn’t want this to go beyond this room, but a couple of the boys I’ve got working for me aren’t exactly what you’d call Rhodes scholars. Don’t get me wrong—they’re good boys, and they’d run through a wall for me, but sometimes they tend to, uh, misinterpret a situation. Or they run off at the mouth a little.

  “One time, one of them gave a reporter from Danville the name of a fe
llow we were looking at as a suspect in an armed robbery. The problem was, we didn’t want that fellow to know he was a suspect. That was three years ago, and we’re still looking for him. After that, I decided that everything needed to go through me.”

  “What if something happens late on a Tuesday and we want to get it in this week’s paper?” Fogarty asked.

  Inge smiled reassuringly.

  “Well, then, you can take advantage of my Tuesday night special,” he said. “I tell my wife I might be getting calls late that night, and y’all have my home phone number. I take care of my friends at the Echo—I’m not gonna let y’all get beat by some other newspaper or TV.

  “Especially TV. Those folks just don’t know how to conduct business in a civil manner.”

  “How about other nights?” Fogarty wanted to know.

  “There’s nothing that can’t wait until morning,” Inge said.

  Back at the Progress, Fogarty remembered, the police reporters would periodically call the night dispatchers to see if anything was happening.

  “Do we do that?” Fogarty asked Daniel.

  “You can,” Inge interjected, “but it won’t help you very much. They’re just going to tell you nothin’s goin’ on.”

  “So they lie to us?” Fogarty asked.

  Daniel stiffened at that, but the sheriff merely chuckled again.

  “Only once in a while,” he said, after tossing a sideways smile in Daniel’s direction. “Most of the time, there really isn’t anything going on. But you’ll never know, unless you get a press release from me. Of course, you’ve got your own police scanner.”

  “So you’re sort of like the sheriff and spokesman, all in one,” Fogarty said.

  “You got it,” Inge replied. “I’d like to think we can help each other, but I don’t want my people having to deal with a lot of press. The buck stops at this desk.”

  “Unless you’re not at it,” Fogarty shot back.

  Outside in the Blazer, Daniel looked at Fogarty with disbelief.