Parker Field (4 page)

Part of the exhibit is a video with paid talking heads trying to be fair and balanced, giving all sides. At one point, they ask you to press one of four buttons beside your chair, answering the burning question: What caused the Civil War?

Three boneheads from the South Side started arguing with the screen when it was revealed that the most common answer was, duh, “slavery.” They were pretty sure the answer was “states’ rights,” as in states’ rights to allow slavery. A few tourists from somewhere well north of the Potomac begged to differ, and it was on.

The museum folks obviously weren’t thrilled to talk about it, but the room was apparently pretty much trashed, and anybody else who was there at the time couldn’t have missed it. One of them called the paper last night, too late to get anything into today’s paper. Sarah went over there this morning and found a college boy from VCU working the desk who told her most of the details. Sarah’s getting good at persuading people to tell her things. She’s especially good at it when they’re of the opposite sex.

“I’d already checked with the police, and they arrested four of them, two from here, two from out of town.”

“Seems fair,” I offer.

“Think it’ll make A1?”

“Probably local front.”

I remind her that the tree-killing three-part series on the past, present and future of Richmond’s riverfront takes up two-thirds of the front page and three more pages inside. Having an A1 story beside it on a brawl at a riverfront museum might be a bit more irony than our publisher could take.

“Oh, yeah,” she says, rolling her lovely eyes. “Shit.”

Sarah still wants people to read what she writes. She’s twenty-six now and would like to be working at a larger paper somewhere. She has the brains and the A-personality for it. The fact that she’s attractive, funny and hot as hell won’t hurt her chances, either. I only hope there are some big-city dailies still breathing long enough for her to make a career out of this. Or, for her sake, maybe I don’t. Sarah ought to go to law school. Lawyers don’t do Saturdays and they don’t work for free.

“How’s your mother’s friend doing?”

Like the rest of the newsroom, Sarah knows my link to Thursday’s shooting.

She asks me what I know.

“Nothing so far,” I tell her. “But I think the cops are close to making some kind of announcement.”

“Yeah,” she says, going back to her story. “Gillespie said tomorrow.”

I talked to Gillespie yesterday, hoping he’d confirm or add to what Peachy told me. I’ve known him for thirty years. He had nothing. Like I said, Sarah’s getting good.

The rest of my shift is almost too smooth. There isn’t anything vaguely resembling a chance to leave the office on business, although I hop over on my dinner break to check on Les. Andi’s still there, but she’s about to leave with Peggy, who is showing her age after a day in the hospital.

I thank Andi for taking Peggy home. Les seems to be sleeping.

“The doctor didn’t say much,” Andi tells me. “He just said Les was 'hanging in there.’ ”

I just want to get Les home. He already looks like a different man, a husk of what he was three days ago. Les might have been losing it before the shooting, but a seventy-nine-year-old man who can still climb a ladder up to one of those Oregon Hill roofs, even if he’s driven by dementia and thinks he’s still running a roofing company, has a lot of juice. The Les before me looks like he’s been pitted and seeded.

It’s barely eleven thirty and I’m playing my last game of solitaire on the computer, ready to call it a night, when the phone rings.

I can barely hear Sarah’s voice. I finally determine that she and some of our coworkers are at Penny Lane and intend to be there until they are forced to leave.

“Come on over,” she yells into the phone. “They’re asking about you.”

I haven’t been to my favorite pub much lately. It’s part of the deal I’ve made with myself. No AA, but no Penny Lane, either, except on special occasions.

I try to demur, alluding to my need to go home, have some warm milk and low-fat cookies and go to bed.

“You’re not gettin’ old on me, are you, Willie?” Sarah says.

Well, Saturday night can be a special occasion.

Chapter Four    

S
UNDAY

S
arah Goodnight was right.

I am awakened by a call from Peggy, who tells me that someone from the police department called sometime before nine and gave her an update.

“They said the shots came from your building. They’re going to have something about it on the news, the guy said.”

I’m thinking it’s a good thing they didn’t come by Peggy’s to tell her in person. You probably could smell the dope five feet outside the front door.

“Did they say what floor?”

“I think they said the ninth. Oh, Willie. Who’d want to shoot Les?”

To my knowledge, no one in the Prestwould is packing. I tell her I’ll check into it.

I go to the newspaper’s website. Sure enough, the police must have sent over a press release in the last hour or so. “Police closing in on shooter,” is the headline put on it by the kid in charge of giving away free news.

The gist of it:

“Richmond Police Chief L. D. Jones said, that, based on forensic evidence gained over the last few days, it has been determined that the assailant fired one shot from a rifle from a window on the ninth floor of a dwelling at 612 West Franklin Street.”

Home sweet home.

I lean out the bedroom window and have my first Camel of the day, making sure that none of the smoke stays inside. Kate, my landlady and last ex, would approve.

I hear voices above me. When I look up, there’s the fat, sweaty face of Gillespie peering out a window three floors up. He looks down, sees me, and ducks his head back inside.

I swallow two aspirin with the coffee Custalow’s already made for me. The night, as nights often do, turned out to be longer than expected. Three hours after I’d expected to be sleeping the sleep of the just, I was just getting in. Four of us went back to Sarah’s place after Penny Lane kicked us out at closing time. Chip Grooms from photo and Becky Whitehouse, who covers prep sports, were there. They and Sarah might be seventy-five years old, combined.

When I left, they were still going strong. Sarah walked me to the door.

“Should you be driving?” she asked me, standing close enough that I could smell her perfume. “Maybe you ought to stay over. You don’t need another DUI.”

I was tempted to agree. I have been known to be very agreeable, especially with younger female employees.

I asked her for a rain check. She’s barely older than Andi, my big brain whispered, but most of my big brain’s victories are short-lived. And Sarah and I do have a bit of history, God forgive me.

I
TAKE
the utility stairs up to the ninth floor. I have forgotten whose unit it is until I open the door onto the foyer the two units in this tower share and come face to face with a piece of art that looks like somebody did projectile vomiting on the canvas.

Finlay Rand.

He’s one of two art-and-antiques dealers living here. Most of what I know about Rand comes from Clara Westbrook, who makes it a point to know everybody and everything connected to the Prestwould.

“I like Finlay,” she told me once, after a couple of Scotches. “He doesn’t bother anybody, and that’s about all I ask of my neighbors.”

Rand is a confirmed bachelor, it seems, and Feldman, my nosy neighbor, conjectures that he might be a tad light in the loafers, but Clara said she knows for a fact that he has had overnight guests of the female persuasion.

“Besides,” she added, “what’s wrong with it if he does like men?”

Indeed, I said, and we toasted tolerance.

C
RIME TAPE
is across the open door to Rand’s apartment. I duck under it and am halfway down the hallway when one of the cops, who looks like he’s about nineteen, intercepts me.

“It’s OK,” I tell him. “I live here.”

“You’re …” he looks at his notes. “You’re Finlay Rand?”

No, I explain to him, as I walk him the rest of the way to the living room—which has the best view of Monroe Park—I live in the building, not this particular unit.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he says, grabbing my arm.

A voice booms out behind me.

“He of all people shouldn’t be here.”

I turn to see my favorite flatfoot coming out of the kitchen.

“This jerk’s a reporter,” Gillespie tells his young associate. “What the hell did you let him in for? You think this is an open house?”

I tell Gillespie to get the stick out of his ass, that I’m off duty, just trying to find out what happened. I remind him that Les is practically family.

“How did they figure it was the ninth floor?” I ask Gillespie.

“The angle. These guys can figure out that shit. Math majors.” He says it with the same tone he’d have used to say “pedophiles.”

A lieutenant comes up. He’s Gillespie’s boss even though he looks like he’s barely half his age, and he finds out I live in the building. He asks me if I know anything about Finlay Rand. I tell him that he’s an antiques dealer.

“Do you know if he knew the victim?”

“I doubt it. Les wasn’t much into antiques, unless maybe they were old baseball cards.”

I explain to the lieutenant my connection to Les Hacker.

“He’s a damn reporter,” Gillespie says.

I tell the lieutenant that it’s all off the record, that I’m just here because Les is family.

“I doubt if Finlay was the shooter,” I tell them.

“How come?” Gillespie asks.

“He’s on vacation. Won’t be back until Wednesday.”

Custalow told me. Rand asked maintenance to hold his mail until April 11. Said he was going to some place in the British West Indies for a month. Virgin Gorda, I think. Antiquing must be doing better than newspapers.

“Well,” the lieutenant says, “somebody apparently broke in. Whoever it was must’ve used a silencer, because nobody heard anything. And he left everything here. Winchester .30-30, spent shell, everything.”

I
WONDER
out loud why he didn’t shoot more than once, if he went to all that trouble.

“C’mere,” Gillespie says, beckoning me to the window.

He points down to the park.

“See that big oak tree there?”

I nod.

“Well, when the victim got shot, he rolled forward, and that tree was between him and the shooter. He couldn’t hit him, and we guess he didn’t feel like he had a lot of time to waste up here.”

“Les Hacker didn’t have an enemy in the world,” I tell them, “unless maybe it was some base runner he threw out trying to steal second in 1964.”

“Well,” the lieutenant says, “I’d say he had at least one, wouldn’t you?”

I am warned that all this is on the QT. I promise not to publish it, but I don’t promise not to tell Les and Peggy as much as I’ve been able to ferret out about this whole screwed-up affair.

I’m still there when the chief, L. D. Jones, shows up. His full name is Larry Doby Jones, named after the guy who was the first black player in the American League. Old farts like me, though, we still remember him from high school days as Long Distance Jones, second-team all-state guard from Maggie Walker. We go way back. These days, he looks like he’s smelled spoiled meat every time he sees me. My second time around as night cops reporter has led to some unfortunate conflicts of interest between the chief and me. L. D. wants to keep every single detail of every case buried deep until he can call a press conference and do the we-got-him victory lap. I just want to get the story in the damn paper before I see it in living color on TV.

I tried to explain this to L. D. once, a couple of years ago. I was still able to draw on a small account of good will from my first stint as night cops reporter, thirty years ago, when the chief and I were both young pups who still could kid each other about my late black father making the two of us one-and-a-half African Americans.

“Why should I give it to the damn newspaper first?” he said. “You all are a dinosaur. I might as well send it out by Pony Express.”

He seemed to think that was funny.