Richmond Noir (19 page)
He was unable to interpret the English fast enough, only picking out words here and there:
mother, dumbest, cunt, ugly
. He felt unsure and unwanted and as if a door to a very comfortable room was being closed before him. The stranger stared, shook his head purposefully, and finally pulled away.
The shadow cast, his mood soured, Marco pulled to the shoulder of the road and sat quietly. The rearview mirror had been affixed to the front window by glue and wire. But the heat, which made dreamy lines rise from the asphalt, had melted the adhesive, so that the mirror had started to come off, and was attached only by a thin, naked wire. So now the wind pushed the mirror back and forth like a pendulum. In it, Marco saw flashes of his face, seesawing so as to make him slightly nauseous.
It was olive-skinned with slim features. His hair was the color of assorted, processed tobacco and his eyes were doleful but prying. His mouth was tight and dry, as if his face was in pincers. He viewed the reflection in the mirror, and was disappointed that this new country had done nothing for his appearance. He frowned at its smooth, unblemished contours, wishing a scar or some other mark of distinction might emerge, thinking America at least owed him that. He felt that in this nation of so many, he might never be able to distinguish himself. And surely not with a face so plain it was rendered blank.
He started the car again. He drove seventy miles an hour for as long as it took both sides of a Sam Cooke album to play on CD. At the sight of a sign that read,
Middletown
, he turned off the highway and went to the first bar he saw. It was just before noon but already raucous inside—tight, big-hair riffs came from the juke box, while boys in baseball caps raised hell and screamed in shorthand. A girl sat alone at the bar. She was his type—destitute—so he crawled over and asked if she liked the vodka.
“That and anything else,” she said, so he ordered two, and two again, and it didn’t stop until his vision was so blurred it was like seeing the world through tears.
When they got to the hotel she silently disrobed. He offered her his white bag, and she unfurled a line long and thin as a snow corn. She took the scraps and applied them to her gums, which made her wince, then blush.
Twelve hours later they hadn’t slept. Unaccustomed to attention, she was talkative. He learned that a perm couldn’t tame her hair and she liked waterfalls. She’d traveled. Done a tour of Texas, where her ex lived. Farthest she’d ever been from home. Sick on the plane. In a monotone voice she listed cities visited like exotic but affordable items from the market: Plano, Dallas, Argyle, Cee Vee. He pretended to be impressed, widening his eyes each time a name left her lips. But all he was thinking of was if she would lay him again, and if not, what he might do to keep her quiet.
She said they had a bond, but the bond wasn’t forever, because when the coke ran out so did she. Her possessions looked like trash, but she put them in her purse anyway, and then shuffled out, scrubbing her nose. She left the door open, letting a ruler-straight line of light into the room.
Feeling unclean, he showered, and when he returned there was less money in his wallet than there used to be. Inwardly he shrugged his shoulders: so life would be as life was. This land did not want him but he wanted it, could already taste a new existence. He slept like the dead and promised himself that he would cross the Mason-Dixon the next day.
He woke up wet from the heat. Sometime in the night the air conditioner had given out. The hotel robe was thinner than a paper napkin, but he wore it anyway. He put on a ragged pair of sandals too, and came out of his room looking like a forlorn Jesus, all disciples up and gone, no one but he and the Bible out here in a forgotten-about America, lost counties abutted by lost counties, weak radio signals, shabby concrete, and long highways, the very end of some backwoods called Earth. He wanted to say a prayer but could think of none.
He went out to the car, tiptoeing on the hot asphalt. The key entered the trunk’s lock, pricked the spring, and he heard the satisfying pop. It yawned open, revealing three gray suitcases. One would be innocuous, but three, lined so neatly, sitting so idly—made him think of gravestones in an abandoned field. He staggered back—awed yet again by his smallness and the sheer stupidity of his task. It had sent him north, south, and sideways. They told him to never go in a straight line, to never give the appearance of making sense, to always take the circuitous route of a phantom or an idiot.
He cleaned up in the shower, then returned to his car and drove the speed limit forever. Delaware looked no different to his eyes than Pennsylvania had, and Maryland was but a field of grass. To Virginia then, with a red cardinal on its welcome sign, and the instant and confused surety that he was no longer North.
The buildings were suddenly squatter. There were advertisements for grits, pancakes, and cobblers. A hotel offered rooms for twelve dollars a night. Pines crowded oaks out of the landscape and hawks flew in wide arcs over the crown of his thinning head.
A few hours in and he neared Richmond. He got flustered though, and when 95 and 64 split, he choked. The simplest decisions flummoxed him, and at the last minute he went west on 64. Then came the sense of stupidity that follows such an error. He called himself horrible things. Impatient, he got off the highway. He followed the Broad Street exit and proceeded to drive in circles. Finally he parked his car, preferring to use his feet.
Walking, he came upon a restaurant called Dune, standing two stories tall. Its first-floor windows were closed to the heat, blacked out by plantation shutters. The second floor had French doors that opened onto a short patio, with a sturdy guardrail protecting the diners. He sensed something closed about it: colloquial, clubby, but full of black sheep. He decided that it might be a pleasant place to lunch.
But instead of lunch he had five vodkas with tonic water. The day was clear and the view from the second floor laid the town out like a canvas. He was confused by the sprawl’s repetitiveness, how, in an effort to be neat, people could make things ugly.
He settled into his seat. He settled into the voice of his waitress because it too was a place—a lazy hammock in the sun. The hours passed with his eyes closed not in sleep but in something like mental dawdling.
He felt an angel touch his shoulder and tell him the restaurant closed between lunch and dinner, and so he was asked to leave so that they might clean up. The pretty waitress chatted to him amiably, said she wished he could stay. He heard her but didn’t hear her, for they spoke differently down here, vowels stretched like rubber, the pitch nasal and too sweet.
He left Dune and got into his car. Stationary, he turned the dial and fished out a college radio station. The song was one of the Stevie Wonder numbers from back when he was called “Little Stevie.” The crackle of an old record like fat in a pan. The instruments made noise first and the singers followed. The tune featured gospel-style call and response.
Little Stevie lets go an outrageous howl that sends the piano jumping
. The engine turned over and purred. He put the car in reverse and swung it to the left real easy. He started to navigate his way through the parking lot.
The call comes like it deserves an answer; the singer pleads for assurances
. He edged forward at a slow pace and the gravel went crunch underneath. He pulled into the long line waiting to leave the lot. Shifting the vehicle into neutral, he hopped out and rolled the canvas top down. The interior was flooded with light. He pushed the car forward.
The response comes: six women, six women with thighs like hams sing a chorus
. Finally at the front of the line, he turned his head left to address the attendant. A lanky boy with pimples and a bowl haircut told him that it was five dollars. He went to his wallet and handed over the first thing that his fingers found, producing an enormous tip. He wanted to congratulate himself for this, for having made this kid’s day.
The song slows now, not with an abrupt bang but with one of those old-school Detroit fades
. Turning right out of the lot, he gathered speed as he crossed over Glenside. The outdoors was all around him. With few cars on the street he felt alone. Then something timidly pulled out on his right-hand side. His foot just could not find the brake, and then the sound of metal going through itself. He had crushed her.
The road is closed and the cops’ lights blaze brightly. Shrill whistles direct traffic elsewhere. The ticket boy says the man slurred, “Good afternoon,” and the Italian is rabid and gesticulating wildly. He is sweating and looks like a tortured, bleeding child. A helicopter makes awful noise overhead. A man with aviator shades looks down and tells the city how to crawl around the accident. There are so many people crying that it is like a wake. But the woman is newly dead and her body is still warm. Three newspapermen drive up in town cars and all smoke cigarettes in the same deliberate way. And the corner of East Broad and Willow Lawn has now become the city center.
In his office miles away, Harry dreams of making love to his secretary, which he has lately had the pleasure of doing. She peeks her head through the door and raises an eyebrow. She’s too young, and her come-hither gestures are unschooled, sophomoric. But she gently rubs her calf against the door and Harry feels like he is breathing pure air, like everything and everyone outside this room is as dour and sluggish as church. She has long bangs and a porcelain face. Her lips are red and easy. But she hasn’t come here to give him satisfaction. She says in a voice that is mock professional that he should go to the newsroom right away, that there is something coming off the wires that needs to make the 6 o’clock feed.
Harry walks over to the wires and sees what is there. There is one scroll of paper, bright yellow. The ink is applied by a machine that runs back and forth over the paper like a cross-cut saw. The effect is that these stories come in line by line, inadvertently making revelations tortuous, overly long. He sees that there has been a car crash. A man and a woman, and the woman is dead. An idea begins to form but tears start to swell in his eyes like blisters and the water washes the page. It is very sunny outside and he suddenly becomes aware of the immense noise of the tiny newsroom. His neck cranes and he looks toward heaven, but all he sees is a coffee-stained ceiling.
Harry gnaws his fingers, says the name of God, and all at once realizes his dirty, fitful prayers have been answered.
But ere we had sailed a league our shippe grounding, gave us once more libertie to summon them to a parlie. Where we found them all so stranglie amazed with this poore simple assault as they submitted themselves upon anie tearmes to the Presidents mercie: who presentlie put by the heeles 6 or 7 of the chiefe offenders. The rest he seated gallantlie at Powhatan in their Salvage fort, they built and pretilie fortified with poles and barkes of trees sufficient to have defended them from all the Salvages in Virginia, drie houses for lodgings, 300 acres of grounde readie to plant; and no place so strong, so pleasant and delightful in Virginia, for which we called it Nonsuch
.
—John Smith, on the first English settlement at Richmond
J
ackson is what you’d call a lackey. He’d been at the paper longer than I had, and he wanted to stay there, which was a problem, because Jackson and I were part of what the new broom apparently meant to sweep clean. We were the Old Guard, and experience wouldn’t get you a cup of coffee around here.
Jackson and I, we’d drunk plenty together, hung out. He’d gone to two of my weddings. But if he had one butt to hang out to dry, and it was mine or his … You get the picture.
I’d been covering the legislature for the last fifteen years. It was a sweet deal, with nobody really watching over me down at the Capitol. More was known than was ever reported. I always thought some of those country boys got themselves elected just so they could come to Richmond and party. And what was said and done at the parties, it was understood, stayed at the parties.
The new broom was being wielded by Hanford. Hanford the Hangman, they called him. Probably still do. He’s a forty-something ex-jarhead and seems to be under the mistaken belief that he stormed Iwo Jima. They’d brought him in from some place where grace is considered a liability. He’s the kind of stiff who’s necessary so the guys at the top, the real money, don’t have to get their hands dirty with firings and demotions and such. He’d been there a month when Jackson called me aside and told me, off the record, that Hanford had informed all the department heads that he wanted them to “work ’em till they drop.”
Maybe Hanford thought I was too old, although he put me on a beat that would wear even a young guy down. Maybe he’s prejudiced against smokers. Or so-called heavy drinkers.
Maybe it was because I flat out refused to slip into our former lieutenant governor’s hospital room and get a damn deathbed story from a poor sap who was dying of AIDS. Who can say?
At any rate, Jackson called me in to tell me there was a reorganization. Night cops. The night police beat.
“I do it to you,” he told me, not quite looking at me with those tired, bloodshot eyes, “or he does it to you, after he fires me.” I appreciated his honesty. And I figured Jackson would probably be gone before me. He made more money. Everybody around that sinking ship knew the bottom line. The publisher’s favorite saying was, “It is what it is,” code for,
Shut up and keep rearranging those deck chairs …
So, it was a Friday night. We knew it was Pearl Harbor Day because, in a private e-mail sent to everyone who worked at the paper, from receptionists to pressmen, Hanford reamed out the poor night guy who’d failed to run a story on A1 to that effect.
Around 10:30 I heard, over the cop radio, turned up just loud enough so it didn’t disturb the copy desk watching an NBA game on one of the overhead TVs, that there’d been a shooting at 612 West Franklin.
I stopped playing solitaire on the computer.
“Isn’t that your … ?” Sally Velez asked me from the metro desk.
“Yeah,” I said, and was on the elevator in about a minute.
612 West Franklin is the Prestwould, where I was living. It hovers over Monroe Park like a dark angel, casting its twelve-story shadow across the college kids and the homeless. They’d brought a guy down from New York City in the late ’20s to build it. Guess they had what you’d call delusions of grandeur. They finished it just in time for the Great Depression to punch in and end that kind of fairy-tale building. But it’s something. The sick puppy who had the unit across from mine, halfway up, said that if the 9/11 bastards had flown those planes into the Prestwould, they’d have just bounced off and killed a bunch of bums in the park.
The place has a lot of characters in it, but mostly of the midnight-and-magnolias Old Richmond type. The majority of them, to my knowledge, do not pack heat.
I was there in ten minutes. The night photo guy was out covering a fatality on the interstate, so I’d grabbed one of those moron cameras even reporters can use. They’d trained me how to use it the previous week. There wasn’t much crime-scene photography at the legislature, although maybe there should have been.
I saw Gillespie as soon as I got out of the beat-up company Citation and put out the Camel I wasn’t supposed to be smoking in it. He was leaning his fat butt against the patrol car. He’d been a young cop when I was on my first tour as police reporter, more than twenty-five years ago. He recognized me.
“Black,” he said. It wasn’t a greeting, just a confirmation. “I heard they kicked your ass back to the curb. You’ve put on weight.”
I mentioned that he seemed to have cornered the Krispy Kreme market.
He gave me the finger, but otherwise didn’t seem to take offense as we braced ourselves against the wind.
“What happened?” I looked up the side of the building. Most of the lights were out. The residents of the Prestwould were so used to sirens screaming by on Belvidere and Franklin that most of them wouldn’t know what had happened until morning. Only the twelfth floor, the Randolph unit, was lit.
“We got a call from the night security guy,” Gillespie said. “He got a call from some guy on eleven, saying he’d heard gunshots up above him.”
Nobody had really lived in that apartment since Taylor Randolph died in October. Far as anyone knew, her nephew, Mac Constantine, was her only living family, other than her sister Jordan, who the nephew had moved into an adult group home. Said it wouldn’t be safe for Aunt Jordie to be there by herself. He was a jerk, but maybe he was right. The nephew inherited the unit, and he stayed there sometimes. I’d been to one of his parties. I figured he would put it up for sale or just move in permanently, if he could afford to. The Randolphs were Commonwealth Club from way back, knew all the right people, but I knew Taylor had been hard-pressed to pay a four-figure condo fee, assessments, and seven grand a year in property taxes.
I’m renting, thank God.
When they went up, Gillespie and the other two cops, they found the door cracked. Inside, they found the nephew. It was a mess, Gillespie said, and when they let me up, I could see that the carpet looked like somebody had spilled a gallon of cheap Pinot Noir all over it. Pieces of indeterminate matter that probably used to be part of Mac Constantine’s brains speckled the rug and white walls. What was left of his head was, like the rest of him, under a sheet that was getting stained from beneath.
“You don’t wanna see,” Gillespie said before I even asked.
“So where … ?”
“We figure the service elevator. Didn’t take the main one, or the guard would have seen him come out. Down there, up the stairs, out the back door. He must have took the gun with him.”
I walked through the rest of the unit. A lot of Taylor’s clothes were still in the closets. A half-empty bottle of Coke sat on the kitchen counter alongside the remains of a half-eaten pack of cheese Nabs.
I got the basics and was back at the paper in another twenty minutes, in time to get something in for the city edition. They even used one of the photos I took.
“Good job,” Sally Velez said to me. “You might have a future in this business.” I gave her the same one-finger salute Gillespie had given me.
I skipped the usual round or three at Penny Lane. Something was bothering me. It was like that piece of meat you realizeis wedged between your molars after you’ve eaten a good steak. You know you can’t stop until you find a toothpick.
Next day, I took my morning stroll through the Fan. People were out walking their dogs, raking leaves, doing all the crap people do. Kate and I’d had a town house over near the river, and we’d spend Saturday mornings like that, more or less.
Kate was my most recent wife. She was the one who’d wanted to move to the Prestwould. Said she’d seen it all her life and always imagined what it would be like to live there. We’d only been married eight months when we stumbled on a rare rental unit and did the deed.
I’m not sure Kate understood what she was getting into, marrying me. What might have seemed at least regionally exotic—hearing my stories of state senators acting badly, going to cocktail parties where the governor called me by my first name (he knew the janitors’ first names too)—soon just became a pain in the ass. So did those long nights waiting for me. And then not waiting for me.
I could’ve drunk less, I’m sure. There were times when it would have been hard to have drunk more, and she wasn’t the only one that was guilty of tippy-toeing outside the sacred bonds. Like our charming city’s teenage drug desperadoes, who seem to believe that thinking might hamper their nerve or their aim, I have been known to not properly consider the consequences of my actions.
Because she’s a lawyer headed for partner and I’m a half-assed, broken-down political writer turned night-cops reporter, she hasn’t been busting my chops. I don’t even think she hates me. Maybe she just sees me as a youthful indiscretion, something she can learn from and get over.
She surprised me by moving out of the Prestwould herself instead of telling me to. Said the place was pretty much ruined for her. It isn’t exactly growing on me either, but it’s a roof, at least until I can’t make rent anymore.
The ten-incher I did on Mac Constantine’s murder was on A1. Couple of black guys get gunned down in the East End and it’s B6, maybe B1 if it’s a slow news day. But Mac Constantine was rich and white. Since Taylor Randolph was descended from two presidents, I suppose Mac was too. And he had been on the city council.
At the end of my daily constitutional, I waded my way through the TV trucks and a couple of dozen reporters and cameramen who weren’t allowed inside the Prestwould. They were waylaying every elderly citizen who tried to get past them and into the building. Good thing we have security guards. A couple of the TV folk, trying to save their well-tended hair from the wind that was bringing in the season’s first real cold front, recognized me and begged to be let inside. I made sure the door closed all the way.
When I got up to the twelfth floor, I saw they’d padlocked the door and sealed it off with yellow crime tape. As I went through the door separating the lobby from the back stairs and turned a corner, though, I saw that Gillespie was the same fiend for detail he’d always been. The back door, the one that opened into Taylor Randolph’s kitchen, was untouched, even though they must have gone out that way the night before to check on the service elevator I was standing alongside. The door was locked, but Taylor had entrusted me with a key. I think she’d given one to half a dozen other residents, just in case she needed help. She worried a lot, about her health and about Jordie.
Jordie wasn’t quite right. One day, after I’d helped move some furniture, Taylor told me, over Scotch, cheese, and crackers, that she was afraid of what might happen to her sister if she, Taylor, went first. She didn’t expect that, but she was still worried. Her nephew and heir had promised to take care of Jordie, but Taylor frowned when she said it.
Jordie was pretty much given the run of the Prestwould. She was close to eighty, I guess, about five years older than Taylor. They both had snow-white hair, although Jordie was fond of wearing a black wig that scared small children. Both seemed like they’d live to be a hundred. You never knew when you might suddenly run into Jordie, riding the elevator or walking from room to room in the basement, sometimes talking to herself, sometimes perfectly sane. The sisters had never married, and everyone said Taylor gave up everything to take care of Jordie, who’d started hearing those little voices when she was still in her teens. A combination of pills, Taylor, money, and an occasional visit to rest at Tucker’s had kept her among the uninstitutionalized. At least until Taylor’s heart suddenly gave out one Sunday morning.
I wasn’t there when they took Jordie away, and was glad I wasn’t, from what I heard. Jordie did not go gently into that good night of the adult home. Mac Constantine reportedly said that it was the only solution, that he wouldn’t be able to take care of her, not even if he moved in with her. Evidently, Taylor hadn’t made her wishes specific enough in her will to ensure that one of the last two surviving members of her old and tapped-out family did right by the other.
Jordie was, to say it plain, thrown out like bad meat.
I let myself in through the back door. Everything was pretty much the way it had been left the night before, including Mac Constantine’s blood on the Turkish carpet, a dark brown Rorschach blot no rug cleaner was ever going to remove. The radiator was doing its usual version of the Anvil Chorus and filling the room with heat that smelled like rusty metal.
It didn’t take long to confirm what I thought I’d seen the night before. Take a few memories, stir in a flash of color you glimpse from the corner of your eye, add one phone call. I guess you couldn’t really fault Gillespie, sap that he is, for not knowing what he couldn’t have known. Although I’d have plenty to blame him for later.
When I got to work, Jackson wanted to know where the hell I’d been and what was I doing about the Mac Constantine murder. It was all over TV, perfect for the good-hair people to get all breathless about, even if they didn’t know shit.
I’d checked in with Gillespie and confirmed that the cops were grilling just about anybody who’d gone to one of Mac Constantine’s parties. They’d been the talk of the Prestwould since he’d started staying there on occasion. There were some good leads, although so far everyone seemed to have a solid alibi. Constantine was a collector. What he collected was enemies. There had been a couple of fights, because that’s what Constantine apparently did when he had too much to drink. Hell, that’s why he wasn’t on city council anymore. Nobody who watched council meetings on public access TV would ever forget the night he came straight to a meeting from the lounge at the Jefferson Hotel and wound up duking it out with one of his constituents. The constituent, who’d had truth on his side, had accused Constantine of being the hired boy of a developer trying to turn a block of Jackson Ward into high-rise condos.
“I’ll have something for the first edition,” I told Jackson, then advised him I might have something better for the metro. When he asked me what, I told him to wait for it. “You know,” he said, “it’s crap like that, knowing stuff and not writing it, that got your ass put on the police beat.” If it hadn’t been that, I told him, it would have been something else. And walked back to my desk.