The Kudzu Kid

by Darrell Laurant

  Fogarty glanced around at the elongated interior of the restaurant, recognizing several of his fellow diners. This town, he thought, was far too small. Why couldn’t Regina have gotten her thrills somewhere else?

  “How long have you known about this?” he asked Zoe.

  “Everybody knows about it,” she said with a mischievous grin. “Except for you, and maybe Tucker.”

  Fogarty forced a smile.

  “Damn,” he said. “I thought Regina had the hots for me.”

  “You missed your chance.”

  All the rest of the afternoon, Fogarty pondered his options. He could take Regina off Town Council, but then what else would she cover? He had no desire to give her the supervisors, because that would condemn him to Town Council—long nights down by the railroad tracks, frequent breaks for passing trains and being put to sleep by windbags like Otho Mosby. He could ask her to stop seeing Otho, but how could he guarantee that would happen? And wasn’t her credibility already shredded?

  The next day, he asked Daniel if he could use his office.

  “I need something with a door I can close,” he said.

  He swung that door shut as soon as Regina walked in, and she cocked her head and stared at him like a curious squirrel, nervously brushing her hair out of her eyes. Her jaws worked on a wad of chewing gum, and he noticed—maybe for the first time—how much makeup she used.

  “I’m in some kind of trouble, aren’t I?” she said.

  “I wouldn’t call it trouble,” Fogarty said. “I’d call it a dilemma.”

  “A what?”

  Fogarty ignored her, drumming his fingers on Daniel’s desktop in time to Regina’s chewing.

  “I heard about you and Otho,” he said.

  She actually blushed, the color moving across her angular face like a shadow crossing the sidewalk. Still chewing, she said nothing.

  “I’m not any kind of prude,” Fogarty continued. “I don’t care what you do with your love life. I don’t care who you sleep with. Regina winced at that. But you can’t sleep with the people you’re writing about.”

  Regina looked genuinely confused.

  “Why not?”

  Fogarty struggled to frame a response that wouldn’t include the words objectivity or credibility, concepts probably beyond Regina’s limited experience.

  “Because if people know that you and Otho are seeing each other, they won’t believe anything you write about him.

  “Think about it, have you ever written anything bad about Otho?”

  “I don’t write anything bad about anybody,” Regina said, almost defiantly. “Why would I want to get people mad at me?”

  Fogarty’s sigh filled the room.

  “I’m going to have to let you go,” he told Regina. “This has gone too far.”

  She blinked, and for a moment he expected tears. But then she pushed out a wan smile in his direction, brushed her hair back again, and asked, “Do I get any severance pay?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, you can,” Fogarty said. “I’ll have to talk with Tucker, though.”

  Regina’s expression turned defiant again.

  “Otho’s wife is a bitch, you know,” she said as she stood up to leave.

  Daniel was waiting outside, and his eyes followed Regina as she walked slowly over to her desk.

  “I hope you’re not after my job next,” the publisher told Fogarty. “You can’t fire me—I outrank you.”

  It wasn’t an hour later that Fogarty’s phone rang.

  “I’m calling for Calvin Hamer,” the rich, black-accented voice said.

  “He’s not with us anymore,” Fogarty replied, still feeling queasy from his meeting with Regina.

  “Well, do you know where I can find him?”

  “I mean, he’s not with us anymore.”

  The caller caught his breath.

  “Oh.”

  “I’m Edward Fogarty, his replacement. Anything I can help you with?”

  The resulting pause seemed to last two minutes. Finally, just when Fogarty thought the connection had been lost, the voice returned, “Maybe. This is about Theo Moore, the dude who was murdered there?”

  “What about him?”

  “I know what went down with that, and I owe Mr. Hamer a favor.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  STORIES BIG AND SMALL

  Gradually but relentlessly, like the unquenchable green monster he had adopted as his pen name, The Kudzu Kid was taking over the Southside Echo.

  Not that there was any real opposition to this. Daniel had come to trust Fogarty’s legal instincts, and was spending more and more time back in Richmond. Moreover, he had actually begun to enjoy the controversy his new editor periodically stirred up from the muddy bottom of Randolph County, especially when that didn’t translate directly into cancelled subscriptions.

  Many of Fogarty’s readers still professed to be put off by this rude Northerner, but he had made significant inroads by willingly placing his head inside a target and his body on a dunking stool. At least Randolph Countians now knew that he, like Calvin Hamer before him, possessed a sense of humor.

  With the help of Zoe and Annie Thompson and the apathy of Daniel, which Fogarty put his stamp on the way the Echo looked. A disciple of modular layout, he began herding the myriad small stories into modular corrals—church stories into Church News,” school-related items into From the Schools, everything else into Community Briefs.

  He failed, repeatedly, to gain permission to banish what Daniel laughingly called The Four Fates—the cranky middle-aged women who served as correspondents for the communities of Bonifay, Sandy Level, Poplar View and Conway. But he was given more power to edit their epistles, which often mean chopping them almost in half.

  Fogarty’s own column ran on the second page every week. His first problem was the predictable fallout he received from speaking his mind. Then, when his outspokenness had been acknowledged and grudgingly accepted, he had to contend with a wave of phone calls from local people with axes to grind. If they were going to have an attack dog for an editor, they apparently reasoned, why not sic him on everyone and everything that annoyed them?

  Fogarty’s favorite call came from a rather tongue-tied older man who solemnly informed him: “I want to tell you about something, but I have to remain unanimous.”

  Among the big stories he was offered came complaints about the condition of neighbors’ yards; children whose teachers didn’t like them; the selection of songs on the local country station, WTOB; and a plague of unleashed dogs. Some of these even found their way into the paper.

  In one sense, it was a relief not to have to edit the flabby copy turned in by Whitt and Regina. On the other hand, Fogarty’s own workload had increased exponentially. His only salvation was the fact that the various governmental bodies in Randolph County all met at different times. Otherwise, as he only half-jokingly said to Daniel one day, he would have to look into the possibility of cloning.

  It got so bad that even Daniel offered to attend a school board meeting for him one night, and Zoe—accustomed to sleeping past noon—shocked him by making the pre-dawn run to the print shop in South Boston two weeks in a row.

  When Fogarty expressed doubt that Zoe could handle the physical labor of loading the trailer, she snapped, “Hey, I used to work on a tobacco farm. You want to arm wrestle, right here and now? I’ll embarrass your scrawny butt.”

  Fogarty hastily declined the challenge.

  From the standpoint of social connection, he and Zoe continued to circle each other as warily as two stray cats. Zoe still made frequent trips back to Richmond to reconnect with her old friends, and had a brief romance with one of them. She even went to a few Dead shows, only to face the discouraging reality that she was getting a bit old for the decadent parking lot scene.

  As for Fogarty, it was almost a relief not to have time for an outside life. The only people with whom he ever interacted without a notebook in his hand were Randolph County High School prin
cipal Bill Kirkland, a native of Upstate New York, and Randy Akers, the football coach, who was twenty-nine and a bachelor.

  In-house socializing, Zoe notwithstanding, was pretty much a lost cause. Annie Thompson was married with small children, Brenda Peel was dense and wanted too badly to be married, he never felt comfortable around Daniel, and Claude Kizer, even on the rare occasions when he visited the office, seemed sucked dry of personality. Plus, Fogarty was too annoyed with the dismal quality and tedious predictability of Claude’s work to ever feel friendly toward him, although he was thankful that he at least handled most of the darkroom duties.

  Fogarty did have one rather strange encounter with Gene Kidd. It was late on a Wednesday afternoon, the newspapers had already been delivered to the post office, and Gene suddenly re-appeared from the cluttered depths of the newspaper storeroom and said, “I’d kinda like to see your apartment up there. I used to go up there myself from time to time.”

  It didn’t occur to Fogarty until they were already on the elevator that Gene might be gay. He had to wonder about a guy who wore a ponytail in Jefferson Springs. But as it turned out, his guest had another vice.

  “I get the feeling you might enjoy a taste now and then,” said Kidd after he’d walked around the third floor awhile, looking at nothing in particular.

  “What do you mean, exactly?” Fogarty said.

  Gene nonchalantly produced a plastic baggie of pot and some rolling papers from his hip pocket, sat down on Fogarty’s battered couch and twirled a thick joint into existence with astonishing speed.

  Fogarty hesitated for only a second.

  He couldn’t imagine who Gene’s connection might be in such a backwater place, but the weed was potent. They wound up climbing up to the roof and sitting there on a blanket for nearly an hour, not saying anything, just staring out over the lights of the town and the darkening gulf beyond. Finally, Gene stood up, with some difficulty, and said “Well, I’d best be moving along,” and climbed back down the ladder.

  Fogarty just sat there for a moment, too stoned to move, until a disquieting thought struck him. Thrusting his head down through the hole in the roof, and nearly toppling forward through the opening in the process, he yelled, “Don’t forget to send the elevator back up!”

  A few days later, Zoe sidled over to him and said, “I understand you and Gene shared a little quality time the other night.”

  But Gene never approached him again, and Fogarty was afraid to ask.

  His lunches with Randy Akers were generally upbeat, because the Wildcat football team was rolling like a combine over the teams on its schedule. After the opening victory over William Campbell, Randolph County had soundly defeated Central Lunenburg, Buckingham and Amelia. Ernest Dixon was skillfully engineering and Tyrone Fuqua was attracting college scouts the way a big dog attracts ticks.

  The high point of Fogarty’s brief tenure at the Southside Echo, however, involved Sheriff Inge. Ever since the night his personal space had been so rudely invaded, the sheriff had little to do with Fogarty. The initial news blackout did lighten over time, because Inge was smart enough to realize that the Echo could occasionally prove useful to him. He even got to the point where he would return Fogarty’s phone calls, although those conversations were always terse and unpleasant. Still, the gulf between them remained.

  That changed the night Fogarty got the call about Theo Moore.

  As it turned out, Moore’s demise didn’t revolve around drugs, after all—not directly. Rather, the young man had learned that an old Richmond girlfriend, Cilla Moss, had fallen under the influence of a notorious Church Hill pimp, B. T. “Big Trouble”, Dawkins.

  “Theo still had it bad for Cilla,” Fogarty’s caller had told him, “and he was just sick to find out she was hooked on crack and a ho, too, ‘specially for the likes of B. T. So he got one of his friends, Lamond, to pose as a john and get Cilla to go off with him. Then, after she got into Lamond’s car, Theo popped up in the back seat and they kidnapped the bitch.”

  “They took her to drug rehab, checked her in, and got her cleaned up. B. T. didn’t take that too well, ‘cause Cilla was one of his best moneymakers. Plus, he was scared Theo was gonna rat him out to the cops.”

  So Dawkins dispatched two of his acquaintances to scare some sense into Theo Moore.

  “They really wasn’t gonna kill him,” the caller continued, “but when they got him out in the country somewhere, one of B. T.’s thugs, Eugene, had to piss, so they pulled down a side road into some field. Eugene got out to do his business, and Theo pretended to be asleep. The other goon, Wardell, had been up all night, and he started to doze off, too. Theo got the door open and starting haulin’ ass through this cornfield. Wardell chased him and capped him.”

  “Now,” he said, “Cilla’s back on the street, with a few more bruises on her where the sun don’t shine, courtesy of Mr. B. T. She stayed off the pipe for about, like, five minutes. The whole thing was so fucked up. Nothing got solved, and Theo got killed. He was a good person, Mr. Fogarty, and he really loved that girl. Damned if I know why.”

  “Why did you call us?”

  “’Cause back about twenty years ago, my daddy got himself in trouble out your way and got thrown in jail for something he didn’t do. It was a nigger thing, the rednecks just pinned it on him because he happened to be passing through.”

  “Calvin Hamer got into it, and wrote about it, and they wound up setting Daddy free. That took guts, and Daddy always wanted to pay Mr. Hamer back. I figured getting this story from me would sort of do that, even though he’s gone.”

  “I’d like to meet with you,” Fogarty said, trying to keep his voice from cracking the way it always did when he got excited. “Any way I could set this up?”

  “That’s easy,” the caller said. “I’m in a phone booth just up the street from you.”

  And so Fogarty found himself on W. W. Inge’s doorstep once again. This time, he called first, and he brought along Lamond Morgan, the friend who helped Theo Moore kidnap his old girlfriend and was now putting himself on the line.

  “This is bad,” Morgan told the sheriff. “Wardell and Eugene are looking to take me out, too, now that Theo’s dead. I can’t stay in Richmond.”

  “You know that for sure?” asked Inge, ever the pragmatist.

  “Eugene left a message on my voice mail, and I recorded it.”

  “Saying what?” Inge asked.

  “Saying, ‘you’re dead, motherfucker.”

  “And…?

  “B. T.’s been spreading the word about what happened. And I think if you caught Eugene by surprise, you’d find he’s been carrying around Theo’s wallet and he’s wearing Theo’s watch. He liked it better than his, so he took it when they dumped the body. It’s even got Theo’s initials on it. If you can ever get Cilla straight again, I think she’d talk. She hates B. T, but she’s scared of him. Everybody is.”

  “You, too?”

  “Keep those dudes off my ass,” Lamond told Inge, “and I’ll do anything you want.”

  “How do you know so much about what happened to Theo?” Inge asked.

  “Because I was in that car, too. When Theo jumped out, I booked it in the opposite direction. But I looked back and saw Wardell pull the trigger.”

  Inge’s broad face was cracked almost in half by a slow-spreading grin.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  TOXICS AND TOBACCO

  Look at this, for Chrissake! Page three.”

  George Capanis tossed the front section of the Newark Star-Ledger in the general direction of Javier Diaz, who reached up from his slouch to catch and crumple it.

  “What?” Diaz said, peering at the newspaper as if it were written in an alien language—which, to some degree, it was.

  “Page three. Where it says ‘Turnpike incident puzzles authorities.’”

  A smile played across Diaz’ dark face.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, “that incident.”

  “Are you some kind of moron?”
Capanis asked. “What, did you just take the tanker out on the turnpike and dump all that shit out on the road?”

  “Something like that. Hey, it was raining.”

  “What was in the tanker?

  “Damned if I know. I’m not no fucking chemist. They pumped it in there and told me to get rid of it. They didn’t tell me how.”

  “You’re just lucky they didn’t make your plates. Don’t pull that crap again.”

  “Hey, fine, chief. I was just doing my job. And how could they make my plates? You took care of that, huh?”

  The night before Javier had a date lined up, got the call from Steber Chemical just before he was supposed to go home, and didn’t feel like taking his load forty-five miles to dump it illegally in South Jersey. So he eased to a stop in the Steber parking lot, reached behind his seat and pulled out his invention, a long metal rod with a wrench welded to the end. It was a way of draining a tanker without being splashed—and in Javier’s experience, what was in it was never good.

  Javier had felt warm water sluicing down his collar as he squatted in the rain, in the dark, and slid the rod under the body of the tanker. Cursing softly, he probed and poked until he felt the wrench close and lock around a large nut.

  “Lefty loosey, righty tighty,” he muttered.

  After a moment of hard pressure, the nut grudgingly gave way and turned left, and Javier heard the spatter of liquid on the asphalt. Like the truck was pissing, he thought.

  The Turnpike entrance was only a mile away. The lettering on the side of the tanker matched the registration on its New Jersey plates, all based on a dead end, a non-company. But it existed in the state’s computer, because George Capanis had a very good friend in the department of motor vehicles.

  A businessman named Harold Farrar was listening to a book on tape, lost in his thoughts, as his Grand Am plowed through a wall of gray water to pass Javier’s truck a few miles down the road. The truck was only a vague conical shape in Farrar’s peripheral vision as he slid past it, and it took several more miles before the Grand Am’s windshield wipers began to fail. Farrar pulled over on the gleaming wet gravel of the shoulder and got out to look, holding a briefcase over his head, not seeing Javier’s truck reappear behind him and continue south.