X. Atkins - Richmond Noir

Like Jackson, he wanted to play Twenty Questions, but I wasn’t saying anything until we got up there. Gillespie was panting just from climbing up the front steps, the wind nipping at our heels. I was thankful the elevator was working.

When we stepped out on twelve, I finally told him what I was thinking, and about what I’d seen from his car. “You won’t need it,” I said as he reached for his Glock.

“Let me be the judge of that.”

I led him through to the hallway where the service elevator was, and he actually seemed surprised to see there was a back door, which I unlocked with Taylor’s key.

“I hope you haven’t been snooping in here, compromising a crime scene,” Gillespie said.

I didn’t grace him with an answer.

It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so sad. The Nabs were still on the kitchen counter, and you could follow the trail of orange into the utility room. It used to be a maid’s room, back when everybody at the Prestwould had live-in help. Taylor had used it mostly for storage. Where the maid’s postage-stamp toilet had been, there was now a closet.

I walked over to the closet and opened the door. The ladder was still there, the way I remembered it the time Taylor showed me.

“How the hell am I supposed to get through that?” Gillespie asked me, looking up at the two-by-two covering.

“Don’t worry your fat butt. There’s an easier way.”

I led him back through the kitchen door, then another that led to the back stairwell. We climbed it and came to the locked door leading to the roof, Gillespie breathing hard. The building manager always had the key, and I had tipped him pretty well at Christmas. When I’d stopped by to see him earlier that afternoon, he remembered my generosity.

“Thirteenth floor,” I said as I worked the key. The terrace. That’s what they called it whenever somebody, usually a newcomer, would have the bright idea of putting a swimming pool or a garden up there. The old-timers would have to explain to the sap about the cost involved, plus damage to a roof that already leaked like a sieve whenever we had a tropical storm.

“Remember,” I told Gillespie, “no gunplay.” He grunted and I pushed the door open.

You could see why anyone would’ve wanted a garden or something up there. Under the full moon, the downtown buildings were outlined in lights for the holidays. Richmond may have showed its age spots and wrinkles in the sunshine, but the old girl looked good at night in December. Directly below and across West Franklin, Monroe Park’s lights winked up at us. It would have been a pretty place to have a bourbon or two on a summer night and put the day in a sleeper hold.

I wasn’t much in the mood for sightseeing, though. For one thing, it was cold as a gravedigger’s ass.

We tiptoed across the roof like it was a minefield. I couldn’t swear we wouldn’t hit a soft spot and fall through. Gillespie had his flashlight, and I glimpsed the rectangular shape I’d remembered, off to the east side. It was a kind of half-assed tool shed, built for who the hell knows what. A sliver of light, which I’d seen ten minutes ago from Gillespie’s car, leaked out of it.

We were walking on a bed of loose rocks and couldn’t have slipped up on a deaf man. We weren’t more than five feet from the shed when the door opened suddenly. I heard Gillespie grunt and jump.

Jordie Randolph had never been a beauty. I’ve seen pictures. Now, she couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds, and her eyes were like a couple of holes somebody had burned into a silk tablecloth. She was in the same shabby bathrobe that had been her preferred garb around the Prestwould. The black wig was slightly askew. She’d tried, for some reason, to put on lipstick in the recent past, with unfortunate results. Under better circumstances, it might have been comical.

She didn’t say a word, didn’t seem even to recognize me.

I said, “Jordie—”

“Put your hands in the air! Get down on the ground! Now!” Gillespie was kneeling as he shouted. He had dropped the flashlight and held his Glock with both hands, the way he’d been taught. In the moonlight, I could see that he was shaking.

I think I said, “Gillespie, don’t,” believing I could convince him that an addled eighty-year-old woman armed with a pack of Nabs didn’t need the full monty.

Jordie looked from Gillespie to me and back again. She didn’t seem at all fazed by the Glock.

“It’s okay, Jordie,” I said, holding my palms up, approaching her an inch at a time with all the caution I would have given a wild, cornered animal. “It’s okay. We just want to help you.”

She did something peculiar then. At first I thought she was crying, but then I realized otherwise. Jordie was not prone to laugh, or even smile, but she was laughing now. When she spoke — “Mac’s dead” — she sounded as sane as I’d ever heard her. “He’s dead.” She wiped her nose and tried to quell a giggle.

I glanced at Gillespie, whose shake had subsided.

“Put your hands in the air!” he repeated.

Before I could do any more brilliant negotiating, Jordie sealed the deal. She raised both hands in the air as instructed, still holding the Nabs. Then she turned her back to us. She was two steps from the side of the building. As a cold gust of wind hit us from the north, she started moving.

Nobody said anything else.

She took three steps, spreading her upraised arms like she thought she might just float down. Before I had time to move, she was, as Gillespie had requested, on the ground. More specifically, she was splattered on top of Bert Campbell’s Cadillac DeVille in the parking lot below, a dark spot we could barely make out, with little lines trickling from it.

“You stupid son of a bitch!” I screamed at Gillespie, and for a moment thought he was going to shoot me. I’m pretty sure I took a swing at him. I must have missed.

“She might’ve been armed,” was what he kept saying, all the way down the elevator.

The next morning, I woke late from a very bad dream. I’d given Jackson his write-through for the metro, then set a personal record by eschewing Penny Lane’s alcoholic charms two nights in a row. When I picked up the paper outside my door, I saw the picture of Jordie Randolph splayed across the top of the Cadillac. It took up five columns. The headline read: KILLER’S REMORSE? They had to put the question mark on the end because at that point they could only assume.

It wouldn’t take long, though, for one of Gillespie’s sharp-eyed associates to find the gun, half-buried in the rocks on the Prestwould’s rooftop, like I figured they would.

One call to the New Horizons Adult Home the morning after Mac Constantine’s murder was all it’d taken to find out that Jordie had disappeared two days earlier. By the time they got around to calling her next-of-kin nephew, he wasn’t up to answering the phone, being dead at the time. New Horizons wasn’t much on doing follow-up calls, apparently.

What I figure is this: Jordie still had her keys to the apartment. She came back and got in through the basement door, something the building’s surveillance tape would show as soon as somebody bothered to look at it.

Maybe Constantine wasn’t there when she entered the apartment. Maybe he came home later and she hid. I’m thinking he misjudged his aunt. He probably thought that because she was seriously deranged she also was retarded. But I knew Jordie was able to use a gun. Taylor told me once that their father had taken both girls to firing ranges when they were in their teens and made sure they knew how to shoot. Taylor had kept a gun around the apartment, and one time, years ago, Jordie supposedly got hold of it and threatened to shoot herself over some imagined wrong. Taylor talked her out of it.