Grace Read online

  OTHER NOVELS BY HOWARD OWEN

  Littlejohn

  Fat Lightning

  Answers to Lucky

  The Measured Man

  Harry and Ruth

  The Rail

  Turn Signal

  Rock of Ages

  The Reckoning

  WILLIE BLACK SERIES

  Oregon Hill

  The Philadelphia Quarry

  Parker Field

  The Bottom

  A WILLIE BLACK MYSTERY

  GRACE

  HOWARD OWEN

  Copyright © 2016 by Howard Owen

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

  4170 Noyac Road

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

  www.thepermanentpress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Owen, Howard, author.

  Grace : a Willie Black mystery / Howard Owen.

  Sag Harbor, NY : Permanent Press, [2016]

  Series: Willie Black mystery

  ISBN 978-1-57962-434-7

  eISBN 978-1-57962-513-9

  1. Missing children—Investigation—Fiction. 2. African American boys—Fiction. 3. Mystery fiction.

  PS3565.W552 G73 2016

  813’.54—dc23

  2016022816

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Karen, as always

  CHAPTER ONE

  Friday, December 5

  The security guard is drunk.

  We don’t let the police academy dropouts who protect us from our readers have actual firearms, but this one seems to have gone all BYOG on us. He’s waving it around in the lobby, more or less daring Rita Dominick to fuck with him.

  She’s not backing down, for which, don’t get me wrong, I respect her, but you’ve got to pick your spots. We’re watching from the relative safety of the stairwell down the hall. The guard is weaving a little. Later the cops will find the empty pint of Ten High in his car.

  “Maybe we ought to rush him,” Mal Wheelwright says. Sally Velez, Handley Pace, and I turn and stare at Wheelie.

  He shrugs.

  “Just a thought.”

  Our publisher is maybe ten feet from the guard, seemingly intent on doing it the way she’s seen it done in TV cop dramas.

  “Come on,” she says. “Give me the gun. You know you don’t want to shoot me.”

  He damn well seems like he wants to shoot her. I remember the white college boy down in the Bottom, must have been two years ago about this time, who got accosted by two black kids still young enough to qualify for the juvenile court system but toting big-boy guns. The college guy was with two friends who had more sense than he did. When he stood his ground, holding nothing but his dick, and told them to go fuck themselves, the two boys allegedly just looked at each other like, “You want this one?” And then the smaller one, who turned out to be just shy of his twelfth birthday, blew a great big hole right through Mr. Go-Fuck-Yourself’s nice leather jacket. Some people haven’t been watching the cop dramas on TV, I want to tell Ms. Dominick. Some of them have been living their own dramas, and when in doubt, they just shoot your ass.

  “I want some justice,” he’s already said three times. “They killed ‘Tesian, and you all don’t even care.”

  Outside, three police cars have rolled up, but nobody’s in any great hurry to get in harm’s way. The cops know a little more about self-preservation than Rita Dominick does. A crowd has gathered across the street.

  We’re all a little stunned. We figured that, the first time somebody came after one of us with a lethal weapon, they’d be gunning for the editorial department. I almost feel like pointing the security guard in the right direction.

  We find out later that the guard, whose name is Belman Cole but who goes by Shorty, got our publisher’s undivided attention by calling her in her top-floor office and telling her there was someone to see her downstairs. We came down because one of the secretaries, all of whom have now fled, called Wheelie after the guard pulled his piece. She told him there was a hostage crisis in the lobby. She said she thought Shorty had been drinking. Sally and I were in Wheelie’s office, so we followed along. Handley Pace was coming back from a photo assignment when all hell broke loose, so he ran for the stairs to join our now-cowering party.

  We wait in place, us by the stairwell, the cops outside the door now trying to get the guard to talk to them. Ms. Dominick finally seems aware of how close she is to being our second publisher in the last couple of years to meet Jesus early.

  “What do you want?” our publisher asks again. I detect a hint of shakiness in her voice. She gets the same answer as she did before.

  And then the penny drops. ’Tesian is Artesian. Got to be. Artesian Cole. The East End kid who’s been missing.

  I run back upstairs. Sarah Goodnight is looking out the window along with the rest of the newsroom. They’ve been told not to go near the lobby.

  “The boy you’re doing the story on,” I say, out of breath from my little sprint. “I think we’ve got a relative of his downstairs.”

  She walks down with me and I fill her in. When we get to the first floor, she walks out before I can stop her.

  “Sir?” she says to the guard, who turns toward her, still waving his big-ass gun. “You’re here about Artesian?”

  I dive and knock her to the ground. In the commotion, Rita Dominick finally does something smart and puts great distance between her and the guard just as the cops make their move. They wrestle the man to the ground. His gun, a .45, goes skittering across the marble floor, stopping beside the spot where I have Sarah pinned.

  “Have you lost your fucking mind?” Sarah inquires as I roll off her.

  I ask her the same question, then help her up and explain that I like her better without a big hole in the middle of her chest.

  “Like being on the floor would have made it harder for him to shoot me?”

  “Well,” I explain, “that’s how they do it on TV.”

  They have the guy handcuffed, so it seems like a good time to step up to the plate. They also find out that the gun is not loaded.

  “Excuse me,” I say as I try to get near him. One of Richmond’s finest tells me to step back, but I get the guard’s attention.

  “You were asking about Artesian? Artesian Cole?”

  The guy just glares at me. He’s being hauled away when he starts talking.

  “You all don’t care nothin’ about ’Tesian,” the guard says. He’s in tears. “He been missing a week, and you all ain’t wrote diddly about him. I asked that reporter, the one that did the story on him being missing, and he hung up on me.”

  Yeah, that would be Baer. Mark Baer did the original story, six days ago, about the boy going missing. It was B1 for a day and then disappeared as the cops failed to make any headway in Artesian Cole’s disappearance. Sarah has been assigned to do some kind of follow, but obviously nothing’s been written yet, hence the little performance this afternoon.

  Hell, it was the East End. Kids disappear on the poor side of town. Shit happens. Families there usually don’t have the clout to get the publisher’s attention. Sometimes, it takes a gun.

  Baer is not famous for treating callers with respect. Trouble with that is, if you blow people off enough, one of them will get a lethal weapon and try to teach you some manners, which is what Shorty Cole, who turns out to be the missing boy’s uncle, did today. And, as in this case, they hardly ever go after the right person. While many of us, in the last year, have fantasized about Rita Dominick’s demise, it hardly seems fair that our new p
ublisher almost earned a toe tag because of Mark Baer’s dickishness.

  Now that the newsroom people are free to come down, two dozen or so filter in to find out what they missed. It’s three o’clock. This whole thing took maybe twenty minutes. Seemed a lot longer.

  I’m surprised that the rest of the staff didn’t come down. And then I realize that this is the staff, or the part of it that’s still here on Friday afternoon. Maybe ten years ago we’d have put a reporter on the case of a missing ten-year-old black kid from Gilpin Court. Maybe.

  Our publisher, looking like the events of the recent past have drained all the tanning-salon glow off her, walks up to me. She’s standing beside me, looking off into the distance.

  “That was pretty gutsy,” she says, quiet enough that no one else hears her, “jumping in there to try to save Sarah.”

  She pauses.

  “What I want to know is, were you just going to let him shoot me?”

  I hesitate.

  “Well, the gun wasn’t loaded.”

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “I don’t hold it against you. I hold a lot against you, but not that. One of these days, I’m going to get my ass killed by not knowing when to back down.”

  We’ve had our ups and down, Ms. Dominick and I. She would have fired me last year for disobedience if I hadn’t pulled a trump card and maybe entertained our readers for a few days with my too-first-person account of the demise of a serial killer. She’d probably pop a bottle of champagne if she could get rid of me without hurting “the product,” which is what she calls our once-proud newspaper. Put it this way: I haven’t built up a lot of goodwill points with our publisher, but I do respect her for facing down a guy with a gun. She’s got balls.

  Sarah comes over, now that the drama has washed over her.

  “Thank you. I’m an asshole,” she says.

  I tell her not to talk dirty.

  “Maybe I can find a way to show my gratitude for your chivalrous gesture,” she says, either a smile or a smirk trying to break through.

  “I told you not to talk dirty.”

  I have time to run by Laurel Street before punching in for the fun and games that is night cops. This is my second tenure as our paper’s after-dark police reporter. If you don’t fuck up, you only have to do it once. I am fifty-four years old, which is middle-aged only if you are very optimistic, and this crap does get old sometimes, but my options are somewhat limited.

  I find a place almost in front of my mother’s modest abode on Laurel Street. Growing up in various places in Oregon Hill, sometimes I had a stepfather or some other form of surrogate “dad” for a while. Usually, though, I was luckier, and it was just me and Peggy.

  At seventy-two, Peggy Black is living proof that marijuana won’t necessarily kill you. She is trying to cut back now that my darling Andi is living with her, along with the newest member of the family, my grandson, the handsome and brilliant William Jefferson Black, now six months old. They named him partially after me, sort of. They didn’t go for Willie Mays Black, which is a blessing. Jefferson is a family name. The Blandfords, of whom the baby’s father, Thomas Jefferson Blandford V, aka Quip, is a dues-paying member, go for family names, even if they do have to borrow them from famous Virginians.

  And, of course, you have Awesome Dude, who came in out of the cold and never left. Since Peggy lost Les Hacker to a better world, it’s been a comfort to her to have the addled, but well-meaning Dude around.

  “I just heard about that crazy shit at the paper,” Peggy says by way of greeting. I wonder what kind of vocabulary my grandson is going to have. “Why didn’t you call us?”

  I am pleased to smell only a hint of weed in the air.

  Andi is getting ready for her latest job, tending bar at one of the places that are springing up on a part of West Broad that was somewhat uninhabited in the near past. My daughter looks a little haggard, but no more so than any other single mother. Maybe less than most. Peggy and the Dude seem to be capable of caring for an infant, against all previous indications. I even come over once in a while (well, a lot) to help out.

  I kiss Andi and ask her if she’s getting her monthly checks from young Quip.

  “Oh yeah. He’s good at that. Him and his family would do a lot more, if I’d let them.”

  The Blandfords have been known to come by Peggy’s on occasion. One explanation would be that they want to spend quality time with their grandchild, even if he doesn’t share their last name. The reason I go with, though, is that they’re angling for some way to get William into the bosom of the Blandford household and give him the West End upbringing one springing from their loins so richly deserves.

  “They act like they smelled something bad when they come here,” Peggy says.

  Maybe, I suggest, it’s the dope. Maybe that’s a good reason to cut back a little, or a lot.

  “It’s got so bad I got to smoke in the backyard, like it was tobacco or something,” she says, casting aspersions on one of my vices.

  EVERYTHING RETURNS to normal, or what passes for newsroom normal on a Friday evening in the early twenty-first century. Most of the staff has left the building, having put in their thirty-seven and a half hours or maybe luxuriating at home on one of their unpaid “furlough” days.

  No new bodies have surfaced in the city. I’m working on a story about the murder rate in Richmond in 2014, leaving room to update for those last-minute Christmas homicides. Sarah is working on that story about Artesian Cole, now that his family has our attention, getting whatever noninformation she can from the police. I give Peachy Love a call at home, hoping to get some inkling of what, if anything, the police know about the boy’s disappearance.

  “Yeah,” she says, “I heard about all the to-do over there at the paper today. Made me sorry I opted for the quiet life of law enforcement.”

  Pechera Love used to be a reporter for us before she chose more dependable employment as a police flack.

  She asks me when I’m going to come by and see her. I’m pretty sure she means “see” in the Biblical sense. I tell her I have to get permission from my lady friend.

  “Well,” Peachy says, “I don’t want to mess up a good thing. It’s nice that you’re not afraid of commitment. Get right back on that horse.”

  Peachy is making a somewhat catty reference to my spotty—OK, piss-poor—record with matrimony. Hey, it takes two to make a divorce. I’ve just chosen poorly. Three times. I’m not sure that Cindy Peroni, a one-time loser herself, wants to take a chance on the fourth time being a charm. And I’m not sure I want to put her through the Willie Black experience. When people ask me, I just tell them we’re going steady.

  Peachy says she doesn’t know anything else about the case.

  “His mother said he was going to that tutoring program over on West Grace, CHOG or whatever.”

  Children of God. We already knew that. Sam McNish has been running that program for years. He’s one of Oregon Hill’s shining stars. We do a story on him every once in a while, on how he’s trying to save Richmond one kid at a time. He’s eight years younger than I am, and I don’t really know him, but I don’t trust anybody who works that hard at doing good. Call me a cynical newspaper bastard (take a number), but I’ve seen too many angels fall from heaven.

  “And that’s it? Nobody else saw him?”

  “Nobody that’s talking to us.”

  I ask her how hard the cops have been trying.

  I hear her sigh.

  “You know how hard, Willie. About as hard as you all have been pursuing it at the paper. Maybe that mess today will put it on the front burner.”

  Between my African American father and Peachy’s full-fledged membership in the minority world, we do know how it works. But it isn’t just about color. We’ve been known to discriminate against poor people of all creeds and colors.

  “Well,” I say, “call me if you know something. And I will get by sometime, I swear.”

  “Right,” Peachy says. “Soon as you ge
t that permission slip.”

  NOT MORE than an hour later, Peachy calls, interrupting my online solitaire.

  “They found him.”

  “Him or his body?”

  “His body.”

  Little Artesian Cole’s corpse bobbed to the surface in the lake over at Bryan Park, over by where they play Frisbee golf, the only sport I know that makes golf seem sensible by comparison. Apparently the body had been put in a sack, weighted down with bricks, but somehow it had worked loose.

  Sarah and I go hauling ass over there. At the scene, I spot Gillespie, one of the few cops who will speak to me. The fat bastard tells me, loud enough for his compatriots to hear, that it’s a crime scene and I need to step back.

  When we’re away from the swarm of law enforcement folks who have descended on the lake, he gives me a few crumbs, more or less out of the corner of his mouth. Larry Doby Jones, Richmond’s police chief, and I are in at least an uneasy truce at present, but Gillespie knows you don’t get points with the boss for cozying up to the man Jones has referred to in the presence of witnesses as “that big-nosed son of a newspaper bitch.”

  Artesian Cole was in the fifth grade. He was an honors student, which in some parts of our fair city does not qualify you for Mensa. But he was in McNish’s after-school program, and his mother told the cops that they thought they could get him into some kind of gifted program, maybe even get him in Governor’s School when he reached high-school age, which he never will.

  As we already knew, he never showed up at home after leaving McNish’s program on West Grace the day he disappeared.

  Gillespie pulls me farther out of the light. He wants some information from me for a change.

  “What do you know about that guy, McNish? He’s from the Hill, too, right?”

  “He’s eight years younger than me. I never knew him, just heard about him after I went to work for the paper. The home folks think he walks on water.”

  I ask him why he wants to know.

  Gillespie gets all evasive, the way he does when he actually knows something for a change.