The Bottom (12 page)

“I know you and the Slades are family, sort of,” he says, chuckling. God, I want to ram his teeth down his fat-ass throat, “but sometimes, you just have to look out for yourself.”

I hang up without exchanging further pleasantries, and he doesn’t call back.

There is now just about zero chance that Philomena Slade’s side of the story won’t see the light of day. The only question is how.

I walk over and ask Sarah Goodnight if she’s had any luck tracking down the missing Leigh Adkins.

“I haven’t had much time, Willie,” she says. “Wheelie’s got me working on a three-part series on the economic advantages of developing the Bottom. I think it’s bullshit, but they do have some impressive numbers.”

Numbers. You can lead your average journalist off a cliff with numbers. We’re all liberal arts majors, and most of us don’t know how many millions in a billion. I’m sure Chenault has some experts working on Sarah. Before you know it, they have you believing that every nineteen-dollar blouse you buy at Walmart brings $200 into the community.

I tell Sarah to be careful, that numbers do lie.

“I know,” she says, giving me a look that tells me I’ve slipped into preachy parent mode, something nobody wants. “I’m not an idiot.”

I can’t resist.

“How many millions in a billion?”

She asks me what that’s got to do with anything. I thank her for any help she can provide and walk away.

An hour later, she comes by. She’s checked every online source she can find. There’s no sign of Leigh Adkins anywhere.

“Of course,” she says, “she could’ve gotten married, changed her name, whatever. I’ll keep checking. Maybe she doesn’t want her mother to find her.”

I concede that this is possible. I don’t think it’s probable, but the improbable happens all the time.

I ask Sarah if she thinks Wheelie would be amenable to a sidebar to the first part of her series, one from the point of view of African Americans who don’t think paving over their slave ancestors’ graves would be such a good idea.

She’s quiet for a minute.

“I don’t know, Willie. Wheelie says we’ve written too much already about that side of the story. He wants this one to be about ‘positive’ stuff.”

I tell her that positive is in the eye of the beholder. I, for instance, am positive that Wat Chenault is a grade-A asshole whose full story needs to be told.

I am worried about Sarah. I know our new publisher had a chat with her a couple of days ago. Sarah said Ms. Dominick told her she had a great future in this business, and that she ought to go to school at night and get her MBA.

I did not outright discourage this, and only mentioned the newspaper people we knew who had done this, and what became of them, soul-wise.

“I know, Willie,” she said. “I know. But what am I supposed to do? I love newspapers. I want to be here when they come roaring back. I want to be part of the solution.”

That sounds like publisher talk to me, but who am I to argue? Am I going to be able to step in when Sarah Goodnight gets laid off just because the fourth-floor bonuses aren’t high enough this quarter? Hell, I can barely look out for myself.

“Oh, yeah,” she says as she starts to walk away. “It’s a thousand.”

“Excuse me?”

“Millions in a billion. There are a thousand of them.”

Maybe there’s hope after all. Nah, she probably just Googled it.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

X

Friday

A
ndi is sitting on the porch outside when I get to Peggy’s place. She looks like she’s been crying.

She phoned me this morning. My daughter doesn’t call very often. When she does, she has my attention.

“It’s about Quip,” she said. I told her I’d be there in a flash, as soon as I woke up and grabbed some clothes.

I walk up onto the porch and sit in the chair beside Andi’s. I find we do better heart-to-hearts if we’re not looking at each other, for some reason.

I wait.

“He wants me to marry him,” she says at last.

Silly me. I think that’s good news. No, it turns out. That’s bad. Congratulations do not appear to be in order.

“I don’t want to marry him,” Andi says. “He says he wants to give our baby a name.”

“He’ll have a name. They won’t let you leave the hospital if he doesn’t have a name.”

I don’t know if that’s true or not. I do know that, as opposed to 1960, when I was born
sans
dad, there isn’t much downside to not having a proud papa around. Must be hell on the cigar business.

I’m no fan of Thomas Jefferson Blandford V, but I note to Andi that there must have been something appealing about the young man, since she chose to live with him for a couple of years.

“He’s OK,” my daughter says. “But he’s not responsible. He won’t be good at parenting. I just know it.

“Plus, I don’t love him.”

It kind of warms my heart to hear my flinty, hard-as-nails daughter talk of love, even in the negative. It takes willpower, though, to keep from asking her if she couldn’t at least give it a try. Surely Peggy has given her a primer on the hard road facing a single mother, even in this enlightened century. Surely even a feckless Quip Blandford would be better than nothing at all.

I ask about this.

“Peggy said I’d be better off on my own than with somebody I didn’t really care about. Some ‘scumbag,’ I think is how she put it.”

Great, I’m thinking. Thanks, Mom. Guess you figure on having your granddaughter and great-grandson as permanent houseguests.

I ask Andi what Quip said when she turned down his chance at three o’clock feedings and dirty diapers.

“He got mad. He said he was going to make sure he was part of his baby’s life, even if he had to hire a lawyer to do it.”

I am sure young Quip, or rather his well-heeled daddy, can afford all the lawyers it would take. I make a mental note to talk to the little shithead, something Andi makes me promise not to do.

“If you beat him up,” she says, “I’ll kill you.”

“So why am I here?”

“I dunno,” she says, actually extending one of her hands in my direction. Normally, daughterly shows of affection by Andi are about as common as my ordering a club soda at Penny Lane. “I guess I just wanted to talk about it with you.”

I am proud of her, actually, for being the strong woman she’s growing up to be. She knows what she wants. She isn’t afraid of taking the rocky road of single parenthood to get there. And she’s smart enough to know a bad husband could be worse than no husband at all. Still I’m not sure she knows what she’s signing on for.

Maybe, I suggest, the three of us could talk.

“It won’t work,” Andi says. “He thinks I’ll be raising the baby in some slum. He said he didn’t want his son to be raised like white trash.”

I silently wonder whether Quip knows that his soon-to-be son’s great-grandfather was African American. In Quip’s world, that might be enough to quash any hopes of bringing my grandson up in West End affluence, although the blue bloods, or at least the ones who can see the multihued future, are getting more open-minded.

I assure her that, as the mother, she is holding all the high cards. I do worry about Quip, though. If money talks, his father’s assets could put on quite a damn filibuster.

I promise her that I’ll see what I can do. I further promise that I will do that without busting young Quip’s skull. It is a promise I hope I can keep.

I check in on Peggy, who seems to be a little better, mental health-wise.

I should chastise her for advising her granddaughter to forgo marrying a rich man who can afford to double-team her upcoming baby with nannies.

I’m not sure, though, that Peggy isn’t right.

After all, look how well I turned out.

L.D. JONES IS in his office. He’s busy, his secretary says, after she’s told him who’s calling. When I tell her that I’m there to ask about the silver dollars, he gets un-busy.

“You better not be bullshitting me,” he says. I produce a copy of the letter. He reads it. I can see his lips moving.

“Why,” he asks me, slamming the letter down on his desk, “are you causing me so much trouble?”

“I didn’t write the letter. I didn’t ask anybody to send me a letter. I don’t even know why whoever sent it sent it to me.”

“They did it because you’re the nosiest son of a bitch in Richmond! Why the hell wouldn’t they send it to you? Short of hiring a skywriter, how could they get the word out any better?”

“All I need to know from you is if it’s true. Did those girls have silver dollars on them?”

The chief says he can’t tell me that. I tell him that I don’t intend to run this particular bit of information right now, but that I am retaining my right to do so at a later date. But if I don’t get confirmation from him, I will put something in the paper about it tomorrow. I don’t mention the fact that Kate and the publicity-addicted Marcus Green soon also will be made aware of the letter’s presence.

“Just nod if it’s true,” I say, making it easy on our beleaguered chief.

He glares, and then he nods.

I also ask L.D. if he doesn’t think that this might, just maybe, sprinkle a light dusting of doubt on Ronnie Sax’s guilt.

“Until we have something more convincing to go on than the pencil-scratching of some anonymous jerk, nothing’s changed,” the chief says.

I tell L.D. he can keep the letter. He thanks me for nothing. You’d think the police would be more appreciative of helpful tips from civilians.

I DO PAY a visit to Marcus Green’s office. Kate has a playpen set up in her space. In the playpen is Grace, her six-month-old bundle of joy. I wonder if whatever bar or eatery Andi’s working at half a year from now will be so child-friendly.

Marcus comes out of his office. He frowns toward the playpen where Grace is on all fours, gurgling and looking up at us like we’re the most amazing things she’s ever seen. I can tell that Marcus has had to decide between bending the rules and keeping the best lawyer he’s ever going to get for what he’s paying. Still he can’t resist kneeling and letting Grace wrap her tiny hand around his finger.

They react favorably to the letter.

Kate starts to ask me why I didn’t share this with her earlier. I cut her off by telling her to look at the postmark. Mailed two days ago.

“It just came in yesterday. I rushed right over.”

Kate notes that one day later isn’t rushing, but she’s somewhat appeased.

“Damn,” Marcus says. “Maybe the little bastard didn’t do it.”

“You mean you ever doubted your client’s innocence?”

Marcus’s facial expression silently asks me if I was born yesterday.

“And this crap about the silver dollars? That’s true?”

I assure him that it is.

He and Kate both thank me for the good news.

I tell them I’m not going to write about it, at least not right now. However, I’m sure Marcus will use it to make his case for bail for Ronnie Sax.

IT IS HARD to keep a secret in a newsroom, even one as decimated as ours. By the time I show up for work, the usual air of upheaval is in the wind: clusters of people speaking in muted tones, glancing occasionally at Wheelie’s office, where two men in suits sit with their backs to us.

“Who is it this time?” I ask Sally.

“Goddamned Friedman.”

“Friedman? No shit?”

“No shit.”

We’ve been aware for some time that we might be sold. What once was a family paper became a chain, even before I signed on. That old feeling that we were protected retainers of our familial guardians, safe from the ravages of corporate America, took wing a long time ago, along with pensions, matching 401(k) funds, and job security.

And then, some genius upstairs thought it would be a good idea to buy six more newspapers in various parts of the South with borrowed money. In 2007. Just before the crash. If you took out a home mortgage about that time with 10 percent down, you might be able to guess what happened.

Long story short, the bank has us by the short ones. And corporate keeps throwing pieces of our enterprise overboard, hoping what’s left of our tempest-tossed vessel eventually will be light enough to float again. One of the pieces being prepped for cement overshoes is our paper. At least three other chains have had people snooping around here, kicking the tires.

But Friedman? Jesus. Those guys have ruined four good newspapers that I know of. They never saw a newsroom they couldn’t shrink. The rule of thumb for the print peons always has been one of us for every 1,000 circulation. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: Every time circulation drops another grand because we’re more or less giving it away online, a reporter, photographer, designer or editor bites the dust. (HR seems immune from this somehow.) The paper gets a little thinner, and more people drop their subscriptions, so we cut more, ad nauseam.

“The perfect paper,” Enos Jackson once said after a few bourbons, “would be one staffer and one reader. Hardly any overhead at all.”

We’re headed that way, and if Friedman buys us, that will grease the skids. One of their papers, in a college town two states away, made a deal with the journalism department to let their kids cover city council and the school board as part of their course. Will work for grades. Great experience for the kids. Not so great for the readers.

I’m not presenting myself as a knight in shining armor, giving all for the public good. Like so many of my coworkers, I’m just a busybody who loves getting paid to snoop. Most of our readers, I’d just as soon not break bread with them. But if we don’t keep an eye on the thieves and idiots, who the hell will?

“You’ll miss us when we’re gone,” I heard Jackson say one time when he was being lambasted by an unhappy reader. Then Jackson laughed and hung up.

I asked him what was so funny.

Jackson looked over at me.

“He said he’d like to have the opportunity.”

WAT CHENAULT HAS me in a quandary. I would dearly love to cut his legs out from under him. If I do, though, I might not be able to dig deep enough to really get to the cesspool bottom of all this. I’m not feeling good about Ms. Leigh Adkins.

I have a couple of hours to do a little digging. If this gets back to Chenault, I might be hollowing out a nice little professional grave for myself.