The Bottom Read online

  OTHER NOVELS BY HOWARD OWEN

  Littlejohn

  Fat Lightning

  Answers to Lucky

  The Measured Man

  Harry & Ruth

  The Rail

  Turn Signal

  Rock of Ages

  The Reckoning

  Oregon Hill

  The Philadelphia Quarry

  Parker Field

  THE PERMANENT PRESS

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

  Copyright © 2015 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—

  The bottom / by Howard Owen.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-57962-392-0

  eISBN 978-1-57962-425-5

  I. Title.

  PS3565.W552B68 2015

  813'.54—dc232015013684

  Printed in the United States of America

  As always, to Karen

  CHAPTER ONE

  X

  Thursday, September 12, 2013

  Main Street Station doesn’t get used much, at least not by Amtrak passengers. You can see it, in its neglected splendor, when you’re driving through Richmond on––God help you––I-95. It’s more symbolic than anything else, a reminder that we once gave a damn about rail service and could afford public buildings you could brag about. A couple of trains coming from Newport News headed north, a couple more going back––most days, that’s it. All the rest of the traffic goes through a station out in the suburbs that reminds me of a Greyhound terminal. In a city that has not one but two drop-dead gorgeous passenger depots, one of them has been turned into a science museum and the other, the one I’m standing in here, doesn’t have enough traffic to keep dogs from sleeping on the tracks.

  The last train got in at six thirty last night, give or take an hour or two, but what are the odds that one of the passengers was hanging out in the little side room where they discovered her? Even if he had seen the kid all bundled up in a bedroll, he might have figured she was just one more tiredass runaway looking for a place to sleep.

  Somebody finally found her about eight forty-five this morning. A family, headed up to New York City, wandered into the little room. The father said he tried to rouse the girl inside the bedroll and then realized she was dead.

  NOBODY IN THE newsroom ever seems the least bit concerned that I don’t get to sleep until sometime after two, and that’s on nights when I don’t heed the siren song of Penny Lane Pub or some lonely staffer who has a bottle too big for one person to finish alone.

  Last night being a Wednesday, and me trying to be a better person these days, I’d had probably seven hours of shut-eye—almost enough—when Sally Velez gave me my wake-up call.

  “You sound like you just got out of bed,” she said.

  I told her I had to get out of bed to answer the goddamned phone.

  “Well,” she said, “as long as you’re up, you might as well get dressed. Looks like that creep has struck again.”

  OK. She had my attention. I didn’t have to ask which creep.

  “Where?”

  “The train station.”

  “Which one?”

  “Main Street.”

  “Tweety Bird?”

  “Yeah.”

  I told her I’d be there in twenty minutes, which was optimistic. Later when I’m fully awake, I’ll thank Sally, who could have gone to Baer or another pup, any of whom would love to do this one. Sally and I have some history, and she knows I’ve been on this story from the start, since the first girl’s body showed up. Because I’m night cops and sin loves the dark, I have been involved from the beginning. One run-away or homeless girl turns up dead in our fair city and it rates B1, especially if she’s white. Another one ups the ante to A1, whatever the victim’s color, especially if the needle points to “serial killer.” A third one and you see a noticeable rise in the sale of guns and pepper spray. And now it looks like we have four of a kind, a hot hand if you’re trying to sell newspapers. And we are always—with middling results—trying to sell newspapers.

  Well, some of us are trying harder than others. The big dogs, the ones who still get bonuses, mostly for laying people off, definitely want to see better sales. I just want to get a story and sink my teeth into it like a pit bull with anger issues. Sometimes that results in a few papers being bought and read, putting me, if only briefly, on the same page with the suits. This harmonic convergence usually doesn’t last long.

  This one, though, makes me lose that much-hyped journalistic objectivity. It pisses me off.

  They had already removed the body by the time I got here. I’m able to persuade Gillespie, one of the few cops who actually speak to me these days, to tell me what he knows.

  He says the girl didn’t look like she was any more than fourteen or fifteen. He said that, when they unzipped the bag so they could see something other than the top of her head, they saw that she had been strangled. Gillespie said he wasn’t sure, but that it looked like she’d been “messed with.” It’s almost charming to hear the fat, sweating Gillespie pull his punches. He means she probably was raped. Why not? The other three were, multiple times and in various orifices. All the animals around here aren’t in the Maymont Park zoo.

  “Her hair was all dirty and matted,” he says. “She couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. Probably hadn’t eaten in a week.”

  Having been a sort of underdog myself, I really hate this shit. Growing up on the Hill, you had bullies who terrorized anybody or anything smaller or weaker than they were. I probably got in more fights butting into other people’s problems along those lines than I did trying to take care of my own self.

  Plus I think about Andi, who ran away a couple of times when she was playing troubled teen, before I did much to honor the title of father. That could have been her lying on a couch in a waiting room at Main Street Station, waiting half a day or so for somebody to know she’s dead.

  “When they catch the son of a bitch,” Gillespie says, “I hope they’ll let me come watch when they pull the switch.”

  Actually, they use lethal injection now, I remind my fat, flat-footed friend, but I’d like to be there with you.

  We’re standing in a corner of the huge station. There’s nobody here except a dozen or so cops and me, although the TV stations soon will come baying like deranged beagles. The only thing that keeps print journalists from shame sometimes is the knowledge that, no matter how mindlessly we might exploit other people’s suffering, TV will not be outdone. Right after the second body turned up, one of the local stations starting dubbing the killer the Vampire Slayer. Its lack of originality was topped only by its inaccuracy. The first girl lost a lot of blood, but there was never any sign that Dracula had been reincarnated in Richmond. One of the other stations did what they called a reenactment of the murder, supposedly to show young women how to fend off psychopaths. In the reenactment, the victim wins. If only.

  Chief Jones arrives with great flourish. I swear to God, he now has his own bodyguard, at city expense. Supposedly he heard that the mayor had a full staff of goons to protect him from the taxpayers and thought he ought to have at least one. And people wonder why city taxes are so high.

  I’m not officially, or unofficially, supposed to be here. Gillespie didn’t want to let me in, but I persuaded him to relent, pointing out that my next epistle to the readers won’t
hit the streets for about twenty hours. The chief is not of such a charitable nature. He’s probably feeling some warmth on his backside as the fourth victim takes her place at the city morgue. The chief is pretty insistent that I leave, making his feelings known in a voice that makes me glad I don’t have a hangover.

  “Chill, L.D.,” I tell him. “I’m not even on the clock. Just a concerned citizen.”

  My using his first name, instead of eliciting some bonhomie from those long-ago days when we would have a beer or two or shoot some hoops, just seems to make him madder. Most of the recent history Larry Doby Jones and I share might not give the chief a warm, fuzzy feeling. He has been known to ride a bad arrest all the way to the bottom. I have been known to point this out in our newspaper. I’m afraid there is a chill in our relationship.

  He has another cop escort me from the station as the bodyguard glowers. I look back to see him searing Gillespie’s pink ears. My name, I fear, is being taken in vain.

  BACK AT THE paper, I stop by Sally’s desk and thank her for thinking of me. She grunts her acknowledgment.

  Nothing much is happening yet in the newsroom. It’s so quiet I have trouble concentrating. Even in the late afternoon, with deadlines approaching, things are a lot quieter than they used to be. The surviving reporters and editors occupy only a fraction of what once was a humming, mildly competitive daily newspaper. We are bunched together, much as a herd of zebras might close ranks as the lions close in. This time of the morning, though, the only place quieter than this probably is the Main Street Station.

  “Same kind of shit?” Sally asks.

  “Looks like it. Strangulation. Seems to be a runaway, at least according to Gillespie. No identification.”

  “Raped?”

  “Probably.”

  “God damn it.”

  “Yeah.”

  I dash off a few paragraphs for our readers in the ether, who seem strangely resistant to pay for what we’ve been giving them for free since before some of them learned to read. We do have a “pay wall” now, which means we give you an appetizer and then charge a little if you go for the full, five-course meal. Sadly many of our readers seem more than happy to just nosh a little and move on. They can’t keep themselves from wasting money on porn sites and anything Amazon sells, but when it comes to the local news, their self-restraint is remarkable. My suggestion that we join ’em and start running beaver shots on Page 2 has so far been rebuffed.

  I leave, fully awake now but not getting paid for another five hours or so. I’ll write the story for the print edition when I come in officially. I’ll even read that one first before I send it.

  The day’s first Camel jump-starts my brain cells. I ought to go back and take a nap. My roomie, Custalow, should be at work by now. He’s the hired help, striving to make the Prestwould where we live even more worthy of its four-digit monthly condo fee.

  But I’m curious. Very curious, it has been suggested. I want to know just how the hell a dead girl gets transported into even a train station as sleepy as this one without anyone noticing.

  I am right in assuming that, by the time I get back, the police will be gone. I also am right in assuming that they haven’t yet interviewed the guard who was supposed to be on duty from noon to nine P.M. yesterday. When I walk into the lobby, a young, overweight black guy is standing by his desk. It looks like a couple of his buddies are keeping him company, probably wanting to share this moment of gruesome excitement in what otherwise must be the world’s most boring job.

  His name badge says “Williams,” so I call him Mr. Williams, even though he’s about half my age. I tell him I have a few more questions about the dead body that somehow materialized just outside the lobby, on his watch. I somehow forget to mention that I’m asking on behalf of our shrinking readership rather than the police.

  Mr. Williams’s buddies move away a little. They, like him, must be under the mistaken impression that I’m a cop.

  “Later, JoJo,” one of them calls.

  I ask JoJo, with whom I now assume a first-name familiarity, if he can remember anything unusual that might have happened during his shift yesterday.

  “Man” he says, “I didn’t know nothing—anything—about any of this until Cheryl called me this morning. I swear I didn’t see anything.”

  I ask JoJo if he might have taken a break or two during the evening.

  “Thass allowed,” he says. “They let you take bathroom breaks and such.”

  I note that, if I had his job, with all this excitement— a train coming through every six hours or so—I might be tempted to slip out for maybe half an hour or so.

  “You can’t prove that,” he says, frowning.

  “Well, if we can pinpoint time of death, maybe we can do something with that. Say the coroner says it was, oh, 9:37 P.M. And we start asking you how it was that somebody could take somebody into that side room, strangle her and leave while you were taking a piss. How long does it take you to take a piss, JoJo?”

  This is all bullshit. I’m betting JoJo doesn’t know yet that the girl probably was already dead when the bastard dumped her in here. No signs of muss or fuss. Just a quiet little body, asleep forever in her bedroll.

  JoJo is thinking, probably about how he can give the police—of which he believes I am one, for some reason–– enough information to get me off his back and still save his job. It won’t be easy, especially if JoJo is on the same Einstein level as the part-time VCU students we usually pay to “guard” the Prestwould.

  “OK,” he says, palms out, “it’s like this. I got a call. It was this girl, sweet-sounding thing. She said she was a bartender over at Havana 59, and that a guy just left her twenty dollars and my phone number. She knew my name and everything. Told her he was my friend, she said, and wanted to treat me to a couple of drinks. But I had to come over right then.”

  “So you went.”

  “Hey, there wasn’t anything going on here, man. It was dead as it is right now.”

  “What time?”

  “It was after nine. I went over, and the bartender, same one I talked to, she said the guy had left the money for me, said the drinks were on him. I swear, I wasn’t gone but half an hour.”

  I figure it took JoJo more than half an hour to drink up that twenty dollars of mojitos. When pressed, he says he’s sure he was back by ten. And, no, he doesn’t remember the girl’s name.

  He describes her. White girl, blonde hair, kind of long face. And, oh yeah, a tattoo on the back of her right hand. It was a Washington Redskins logo.

  There are plenty of bartender-waitresses in Richmond with blonde hair. Many have long faces, no doubt. But the only one I know of who has both those attributes and a Red-skins logo imbedded, for some damned reason, on the back of her right hand is my daughter.

  I thank JoJo, who doesn’t thank me back. I tell him I’m sure there will be more questions, which doesn’t seem to make him happy.

  As I am leaving the station, I see what is obviously a plain-clothes car pulling up to conduct the interview JoJo thinks already has been conducted. The chief will no doubt drop his opinion of me to the subfreezing level when the cops find out I’ve already interviewed the guard and let him think I was one of our city’s finest. Well, I don’t think there’s a crime against keeping your mouth shut.

  Andi is still working, despite being three months pregnant. She’s not showing enough to notice yet. And, when I call her, she says that she is, indeed, working at Havana 59, has been for the past two months. I probably should have known that, but it’s hard to keep track. Andi’s worked at a couple of dozen places around town since she started her long march toward what I fervently hope is a college degree. She and Thomas Jefferson Blandford V are not married, nor do they intend to be, it seems. That, Andi says, is her call.

  Oh, yes. Andi is living with my mother, who can tell her all she needs to know about the joys of single parenthood.

  She has to leave for work in an hour. I tell her not to leave until I
get there.

  “Is this important?” she says. “I can’t afford to be late again.”

  I assure her it is, indeed, important.

  I HAVE TIME to run by Peggy’s before Andi and I both go on the clock.

  Peggy’s seen better days. It’s been more than a year since the one decent male companion she’s had in the last half-century left us. Les Hacker, God bless him, kept my dope-addled mom in the general vicinity of happiness for a long time. It is her regret and mine that she never really had time to pay him back. He already was sinking into dementia when one of my nuttier Prestwould neighbors shot him and put him on the fast track to whatever reward awaits a man who put everybody before himself. I have no doubt that, if Finlay Rand hadn’t shot Les, Peggy would have taken care of him, without ever giving it a damned thought, until he’d soiled his last adult diaper. Rand, I’m happy to say, is still alive in a prison hospital, paralyzed but not brain-damaged enough not to know how much better he’d be dead, if somebody cared enough to pull the plug.

  “I didn’t know,” Peggy said at the funeral, “that there were men like Les Hacker until I met him.”

  Without Les, Peggy is pretty much dependent on (a) weed and (b) Awesome Dude. I’m not sure which is the least beneficial to her. I kid Peggy that we should be looking for a retirement home for her in Colorado, where she will never have to worry about being busted, but I’m pretty sure no cop working Oregon Hill is going to try to bust Peggy Black for the ounce or so she keeps around the house. She’s probably already baked whatever brain cells the evil weed can take from her, so what’s the harm?

  Awesome lives in her English basement when it’s too cold to hang out in his natural habitat, the great outdoors. Awesome is getting older, and the temperature at which he prefers to take his butt indoors at night seems to have risen a bit. He’s certainly not much help. Peggy has to depend on me and some of my old Hill buddies to fix the roof when it leaks or to work on her car, because no one in his right mind would put Awesome on a ladder or let him mess with any kind of machinery. Still he doesn’t do any harm as long as he doesn’t burn down the house. He uses some of his disability money to help with the rent and the dope.