X. Atkins - Richmond Noir

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.

The newsroom seems like it’s running on low power these days, and it isn’t just that you can’t make as much noise with a computer keyboard as you could with a typewriter, or that half the editors have wires coming from their ears so they can listen to music and not be bothered by such irritants as conversation. It’s more than that, more than the weak-ass lighting suitable to computer moles but not to actual life on planet Earth. The problem is, despite the directives that we should be a twenty-four-hour-a-day news source, there just aren’t as many bodies. Revenue is down, so expenses (meaning reporters and other such frivolities) have to be down too. Nobody admits to a hiring freeze, but there are icicles on the ceiling.

I saw Hanford hanging over the shoulder of one of the page designers. The headline read, WHO KILLED MAC CONSTANTINE? “Yeah,” Hanford said, slapping his thigh the way you would if somebody told you the funniest joke in the world. “Yeah. That’ll sell some damn papers.”

Maybe, I thought, you’ll have to rip that up before the night’s done.

The moon was rising pale as a frozen ghost over the Hotel John Marshall when Gillespie picked me up in front of the Times-Dispatch building. It was almost 9, and my first story, the one that would hold a spot until later, had already cleared customs with the copy desk.

“This,” said Gillespie, who didn’t even know what a clichéwas, “had better be good.” We turned on 4th Street and then west on Grace. At the Belvidere stoplight, I looked up and thought I saw what I was looking for, barely visible from down below. Gillespie parked his cruiser in the loading zone in front of the Prestwould, and we went in.