The Kudzu Kid

by Darrell Laurant

  “How did you know?” Fogarty asked, surprised.

  “Jersey plates,” the man said. “You’d better get those switched—sooner or later, the local law is going to have something to say about it.”

  They already had, but something in Fogarty resisted the change. Looking at those ugly yellow license tags always connected him back to a happier time.

  The man’s name was Albert Sessoms, and Fogarty felt his pulse quicken as he walked with him over to an empty set of bleachers overlooking a vacant field. Would this turn out to be a scandal in county government? A case of police brutality against the sheriff’s department? Maybe a new candidate for the thus-far boring countywide elections in November?

  “I just don’t want my name used in this,” said Sessoms as he settled heavily onto the second row of aluminum bleachers.

  He had close-cropped hair and a noticeable belly and looked like a former athlete gone to seed. He seemed very serious about something.

  “Let’s hear what you have to say first,” Fogarty said. “Then we can talk about that.”

  Sessoms sighed and looked even more worried.

  “This isn’t 60 Minutes, Mr. Sessoms,” Fogarty said with a hint of annoyance. “Just tell me.”

  Even with the sun down, it was hot in the park, and Fogarty already acquired two fresh mosquito bites. He had a cold six-pack waiting back at the office.

  “Okay,” Sessoms said finally. “You know that black kid that’s starting at quarterback for the high school team? Ernest Dixon?”

  Fogarty nodded. “Dixon; the son of a county supervisor and local minister.”

  Drugs, maybe? This could be good.

  “My son Kyle should be starting instead of him. He’s a much better player.”

  A mosquito whined just above them, selecting its victim. A collective shout belched forth from the distant softball field in response to a close play at the plate.

  “That’s it?” Fogarty said finally. “That’s the story?”

  “No,” Sessoms said. “The reason Kyle isn’t starting is because Coach Randy Akers has the hots for Kyle’s girlfriend, Betsy. She’s fifteen. Randy’s hoping that if Kyle is only second-string, Betsy will lose interest in him.”

  Fogarty’s interest stirred again. Maybe Akers messed around with this girl. He wasn’t sure what the laws were in Virginia, but fifteen was jailbait anywhere.

  “Who told you about this, Mr. Sessoms?” he asked.

  “Kyle did. I asked Betsy about it one time, and she got all huffy and said she’d never even talked to Coach Akers.”

  “So why do you think this is going on?”

  “Because it’s the only way I can figure that Ernest Dixon can be starting ahead of my boy. I’m not a racist, Mr. Fogarty, but everybody knows black kids can’t play quarterback. They just can’t think quickly enough.”

  Fogarty struggled briefly with his temper, finally managing to keep his voice level.

  “Help me out, Mr. Sessoms,” he said. “I just can’t see the story here.”

  “Favoritism. Ever since the ‘60s, the blacks have been getting more than their share around here. They’re catered to. This is just another example. You could interview my son—course, I wouldn’t want you to use his name, either.”

  “Have you ever heard of libel, Mr. Sessoms?” Fogarty asked as he got up to leave.

  He did make a mental note to ask Whitt Scruggs about Coach Akers the next day, as if that would do any good. Whitt didn’t show up, as usual, which was how Fogarty happened to return from lunch at Hardee’s to find a large dead fish lying on his desk. The fish might have been silver once, but its color had dulled to a ghastly posthumous gray with faint pinstripes. Fish juice had seeped out onto the desk top, and one blank fish eye was gazing up at Fogarty reproachfully.

  Face reddening, Fogarty stormed into the outer lobby.

  “Brenda, there’s a goddamned fish on my desk!” he shouted. “Why is there a fish on my desk?”

  Brenda looked alarmed and drew back, as if he might punch her.

  “That’s Jesse Lewis’ striped bass, from down at Kerr Reservoir,” she said. “He came in looking for Whitt to take a picture of it, but Whitt wasn’t here, so I referred him to you. But, uh, you wasn’t here, either, so Jesse said he was going over to the auto parts store until you got back.”

  “Brenda, I want to institute a new policy,” Fogarty said. “Anybody comes in here with a fish, they leave with a fish.”

  She nodded miserably, on the verge of tears.

  Jesse Lewis wandered back in, twenty minutes later.

  “Good, you’re here,” he said to Fogarty. “I want a picture taken of this fish.”

  “Why?” Fogarty asked, feeling a meanness seeping into him. “Is it a record of some kind?”

  “Don’t think so,” Jesse said, looking confused. “But y’all always put fish pictures in the paper.”

  “Not anymore,” Fogarty said. “As of today, no more fish pictures, unless you can prove it’s a state record. No, make that a world record.”

  He liked the sound of that. Jesse Lewis glared at him, grabbed the dead bass by the gills, and marched out.

  That felt good, Fogarty thought as he wiped his desktop with a paper towel. He was sick and tired of being nice to everybody, of tiptoeing around people who irked him, of trying to fit in. It was too much like high school. The act of actually making a decision was exhilarating.

  “Eddie, we’ve always taken fish pictures,” Tucker Daniel said an hour later, just after Jessie Lewis had called to cancel his subscription.

  Fogarty refused the publisher’s offer of a chair and stood in front of Daniel’s desk.

  “Tucker,” he began, “am I an editor, or am I some kind of clerk? What happened to ‘Run things as you see fit?’ It pisses me off when some guy walks in off the street and demands that I put a picture of his stupid fish in my newspaper. This isn’t fast food we’re making here, and the customer is not always right! If I don’t even have the authority to tell that guy to take a hike, why is that nameplate on my desk?”

  Daniel started to reply, then smiled.

  “Listen to you,” he said. “Did you hear what you just said? ‘My newspaper.’”

  Oh, Christ, Fogarty thought, looking embarrassed.

  “Yeah, well, no more fish,” he said. “Or I’m out of here.”

  Maybe it had begun to seem like his newspaper, but it certainly wasn’t his town. Fogarty would have given half his paycheck if he could have put Katzke’s bar on a flatbed and trucked it down to Randolph County.

  Fogarty had taken the job for two-thirds of what he was making with the Progress. Still, Tucker wasn’t charging him rent, the Mazda was paid for, and he actually had more money than he needed. And nothing to spend it on.

  As always, he filled his days and nights with work. He read every back issue of the Echo from the last five years, trying to get some clues for how local government really functioned. He continued his personal quest to meet every significant person in the county, and he struggled to breathe life and logic into the limp copy of Whitt and Regina.

  He knew in his gut that no one really cared—not Daniel, not Whitt and Regina, certainly not the nearly everybody who supposedly read the paper. The only community feedback thus far had been relayed by Whitt, who told him, “A lot of people are really mad about no fish pictures.”

  In New Jersey, Fogarty had his outlets. He had Katzke’s and several other places like it; he might occasionally watch the Phillies or the 76ers play, or listen to a blues band at a club. Up there, he was just another faceless byline in a suburban newspaper, able to go anywhere without being recognized. Randolph County was very different, in so many ways.

  Just thinking about the choices for nightlife around Jefferson Springs made Fogarty depressed.

  There was The Chicken Coop, generally referred to as “The Coop,” which was boisterous and redneck and probably filled with people who planned to have their fish photographed that summer. Th
ere was Mr. G’s, a dilapidated restaurant/bar that served the town’s small black population and was rumored to stay open past four in the morning for its regulars. There was Artie, the local bootlegger. And there was the Quik-Mart, with beer to go.

  There were no chain hotels in Randolph County, because the area wasn’t served by an interstate highway. Even a Holiday Inn lounge, with its traveling salesmen and divorcees, would have been an oasis for Fogarty—and once or twice, he drove forty-five minutes east on I-95 to find one.

  Fogarty didn’t have a drinking problem in the usual sense—or so he thought. He could go for days—weeks, sometimes—without even a taste of alcohol. The problem was, he often had trouble stopping once he started, especially when he had an audience.

  “It’s a bell curve, Eddie, you understand what I’m saying?” one of his friends on the Daily Orange staff used to tell him. “You drink five beers and think, ‘Wow, if I feel this good after five beers, think how good I’ll feel after ten!’ But it doesn’t work like that. It’s a bell curve—you go over the top, and that’s when you wake up the next morning feeling like shit and trying to remember what you said to who. The trick is to get to just the right point and then maintain that the rest of the night. Buzz management, I call it.”

  Yet while Fogarty always laughed and conceded that buzz management made a lot of sense, he was never able to put it into practice. Somehow, drinking in moderation in public seemed an admission of weakness, like an aging golfer beginning to play from the front tees. Excess was part of his personality.

  But not in Randolph County. All he needed was to get pulled over by Deputy Spady coming back from an excursion to I-95 and blow a .20 on the breathalyzer. All he needed was for one of the Echo advertisers to come up to Daniel and say, “I saw your boy Fogarty out at The Coop last night, Tucker, and he was so drunk he could barely get out the door.”

  So he worked to the point of exhaustion, and then he’d buy a six-pack—or sometimes a twelve-pack—and take the freight elevator up to his room. That was his life.

  Daniel did brighten one of his days, though, with a suggestion.

  “You ought to write a column, Eddie, like Calvin did,” he told his editor over barbecue at Sugar’s. “People like that sort of thing.”

  Fogarty had always viewed columnists with disdain. He dealt with facts, not bullshit. Who was he to impose his opinions on anyone else? Who would care?

  Then again, he was feeling beaten down and intimidated by this strange place. Maybe a column would be a way of getting some of his anger out. Maybe he could even stir up a little reaction from this dead-fish town.

  “What would I call it?” he asked Daniel.

  “That’s up to you,” the publisher told him.

  A few days later, he was riding out with Regina to sit in on a school board meeting. As they drove along an empty stretch of highway between Hardee’s and the school administration building, Fogarty noticed a particularly formidable stand of kudzu, the rampaging tendrils having turned two big oak trees into fuzzy green statuary and sent advance scouts out along a telephone wire.

  “What’s with that stuff?” he asked.

  “It came from somewhere else, it’s really annoying, and it covers everything,” Regina said.

  Fogarty laughed.

  “Sounds like me,” he said.

  And that night, up on the roof, the idea for his column clicked into place. As soon as he developed a few ideas, he would become The Kudzu Kid.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE DEAD MAN

  Tonya Peeples didn’t report finding the body right away.

  She had been taking a shortcut back from her early morning shift at Hardee’s, following a thin path through an unkempt field, heading back to a collection of faded brick duplexes beyond the bypass.

  The highway curved up and above her as the path wound down into what Southside people called a bottom, and Tonya was thinking about how hot it was and how maybe she was going to fill her nephew’s little wading pool that afternoon and put it in the shade and just jackknife herself into it. Those idle thoughts were interrupted by a glimpse of something large and light-colored and strange.

  Mildly curious, she made her way toward the object through thigh-high weeds, and when she saw what it was, she screamed.

  There was a dead man in front of her—a black man, wearing a white t-shirt and dark pants, face down in a tangle of vines. The flies were already landing on his head and on the exposed skin of his arms. A dark stain covered almost a third of his shirt, and she could see another rusty splotch on the back of his head.

  “You sure he’s dead?” asked her older sister Vanessa after Tonya had run the rest of the way home.

  Tonya nodded, wide-eyed.

  “I want to see him,” Vanessa said, snatching up her infant son and following Tonya back down the path.

  They stood there together, marveling at the sight. A little braver with her sister there, Tonya inched over to the dead man in the vines and prodded him with her foot. The flies stirred slightly, but the man didn’t move.

  The way Sheriff Inge figured it when he arrived on the scene about forty minutes later, the dead man had been heaved down into the bottom from the side of the highway above. Climbing the slope with great difficulty because of his bulk, he found several splashes of dried blood that traced the body’s path.

  Scrambling back down to the corpse, he turned it partially over with his foot. The dead man’s eyes were half open, and there was a crust of dried blood around his mouth.

  “I guess he’s seen better days,” Henry Massenburg said.

  “You know him?” Inge asked.

  Since Henry Massenburg was the only black deputy on the force, it was always assumed that he knew the identity of every African-American victim or criminal within fifty miles. He’d come to expect those questions, and he stared intently at the man in the vines.

  “Nope,” he said finally. “He’s new to me.”

  “You sure?” Inge said, his jaws working a piece of gum.

  “You know how it is,” Massenburg said with a grin. “We all look alike.”

  “Shut up, Henry,” the sheriff said amiably.

  As murder scenes go, this one wasn’t much. Inge had a strong feeling no weapon was going to show up, and the perp was probably a hundred miles away by now. The victim had almost certainly been killed somewhere else, since Henry Massenburg didn’t know him.

  Inge sighed deeply. It was only eleven in the morning, and he was already sweating.

  “I better call Richmond,” he told Massenburg. “This looks like an execution, and that probably means drugs, and that probably means Richmond. Remember the last body that got dumped on us, that fellow Anderson?”

  Massenburg nodded.

  “Let’s see if Richardson has anything,” Inge said as he started back up the path.

  As it turned out, Richmond homicide investigator J. D. Richardson had just received a flyer on a missing nineteen-year-old local citizen named Theo Moore. The descriptions seemed to match, although that would have to be more closely verified. Richardson was delighted—only rarely did things work out that well.

  “His mama’s gonna be upset,” the investigator told Inge. “Word from one of our vice people was that this kid had gotten in with a bad crowd, but Mama didn’t want to hear it.”

  “Dealer?” Inge asked.

  “According to his mama, he never went near the stuff. He was as close to an All-American boy as you can get up on Church Hill,” she said. “Of course, mamas can be a little prejudiced toward their offspring. You know that, Woodrow.”

  The conversation lasted maybe ten minutes—and by the time Inge hung up, he had unwittingly set in motion a chain of events that would conspire to ruin Eddie Fogarty’s day.

  Richardson saw the call from Inge as a mixed blessing—it meant he wouldn’t be getting off early that day, but it gave him some ammunition in his longstanding campaign to woo Channel 11 reporter Susan Barnes.

  “Go
t a murder for you, babe,” he told Susan when he called her. “Of course, this didn’t come from me.”

  Susan Barnes flinched involuntarily at the word “babe”—the feelings J. D. Richardson had for her were definitely not reciprocated—but smiled to herself at what followed.

  “The best thing,” Richardson continued, “is that nobody else is going to know about this. It was a Richmond kid, but the body turned up in Jefferson Springs. You know where that is?”

  “Randolph County?”

  “Yup. If I were you, Miss Barnes, I’d head on over there and ask for a Deputy Mundy—he’s the investigator on the case. I can’t tell you more than that.”

  The reporter swallowed hard.

  “Uh, thanks, Officer Richardson. I appreciate it.”

  “Enough to have dinner with me?”

  Susan Barnes hesitated long enough that the silence became painfully obvious. This was delicate—there was nothing like having a smitten source inside the police department, but she wasn’t prepared to pay too high a price for that privilege. Not with this guy, anyway.

  “Lunch,” she said finally. “Let’s make it lunch.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” Richardson said, managing to make even that simple pronouncement leaden with lust.

  Murders were hardly a landmark event in the former Capitol of the Confederacy, particularly with the city’s two major cocaine gangs providing corpses on a scale not seen there since the days of Ulysses S. Grant.

  Still, TV news was a game, and Susan Barnes liked to win. She was only a reporter, not yet an anchor, and this was her second job out of college. At the age of twenty-four, she was forced to lunge at every opportunity she saw, and whenever she could come up with something the other two stations didn’t have, another snippet of tape would add itself to her resume package.

  She thought about J. D. Richardson as she and a cameraman rode out to US 360 toward Jefferson Springs in the late afternoon. She thought about how she might squirm out of their lunch date—or, at the very least, find the most public place possible in which to have it. The sun was mounting a frontal assault on her designer sunglasses, and she realized she had less than two hours until the six o’clock news.