Authors: Howard Owen
M
ONDAY
N
ormally, even if I weren’t on the world’s shortest sabbatical, I wouldn’t be here today. My days off, since I got busted back to night cops, are Sunday and Monday. My Saturday nights often don’t start until Sunday morning. But I try to make up for lost time.
Today, though, Ed Chenowith says he has some news for me. Ed once worked in the morgue, when we had one. Now, he’s a researcher in the newsroom. They let the whole library staff go, then hired Ed back, at two-thirds what he was making before, to, as he so eloquently puts it, “find shit.” He felt guilty about taking a job from the people who gutted his department, knowing the rest of his former associates were drawing unemployment or working at Walmart, but mortgage payments trump conscience every time. Ed’s good at what he does, though. He knows how to go deep, miles below the Google searches and Wikipedia biographies that pass for research among the reporting class these days.
It’s funny. We used to have to work the phones harder than a telemarketer on commission. That’s how you “found shit.” Now, most of it’s at our fingertips. The only problem, and I’ve seen it happen even with the talented Sarah Goodnight, is that younger reporters aren’t really communicating, getting to know their sources. Their sources are websites. I wonder often, sometimes out loud, if people younger than forty are losing the ability to communicate via eye contact and vocal chords.
And, of course, they wonder when antiques like me are going to stop boring them to death with stories about how it used to be before the earth’s crust cooled.
“How old are you, anyhow?” one smart-ass metrosexual asked me one day last month when I was fascinating myself by giving a brief, unsolicited history of pneumatic tubes.
Still young enough, I reminded him, to kick his ass. Unfortunately, he took my jovial riposte seriously, and I had some ’splainin’ to do to the HR folks, whose job it is to correct our antediluvian tendencies.
I’m surprised to see Sarah also in on a Monday. Since she’s covering for me until I finish with the Vees project, she should be doing something worthwhile today rather than working.
“Oh,” she says, sighing, “I still have to get that damn feature done, the one on the ninety-year-old identical twins.”
“Yeah, there might be a time element on that one.”
“They could go any minute,” she says. “I mean, ninety probably seems old even to you.”
When I give her a dirty look, I see the hint of a smile.
“It’s really cruel to torture old people,” I tell her.
“I know. But I just can’t help myself. It’s just too easy.”
Ed Chenowith is sitting in the little broom-closet office they’ve made for him. The library used to be on a separate floor. When they brought Ed back, it seemed easier to put him in the newsroom. But he wanted to be able to shut the door from time to time, because reporters were asking him to do everything but wipe their butts. The last straw was when Wheelie found out the sports guys were leaning on him to set up a program for their fantasy baseball league. So Wheelie took one of the old one-on-one interview rooms and stuck him in there. He can lock the door from the inside.
Ed’s not very chatty, but he and I get along well. I used to spool my own microfilm reels, which qualified me, compared to most of my compatriots, for the Nobel Prize for Not Being Aggressively Needy.
“That guy,” he says, “the one down in Florida? I think I found what you need.”
Joaquin “Jack” Velasquez, the 1964 Vees’ slick-fielding, banjo-hitting first baseman, was from Mexico. He returned there not too many years after his season in Richmond, where a .288 batting average and a nimble glove were not enough to offset a mere five home runs.
“He was somethin’ diggin’ balls out of the dirt,” Jumpin’ Jimmy Deacon said in his assessment of Velasquez. “But you know, good fielding first basemen, they’re like tall midgets.”
What Ed Chenowith has found is what is almost certainly the last chapter of our former first sacker’s checkered life.
Velasquez, according to the records Ed’s been able to locate, moved back to the States sometime in the early nineties.
He was arrested twice in the Fort Myers area, once for possession and once for possession with intent to distribute.
“He got sent back after he did twelve months in prison.
“But then, he must have come back again.”
This time, in 1996, Jack Velasquez wasn’t arrested. He was sliced and diced.
“They made the ID based on a tattoo,” Ed says, showing me the documentation. “Part of him, his torso apparently, washed up somewhere on the Gulf coast, and they found a tattoo of his Social Security number on his chest, from back when he was playing ball here, I guess. They never found the rest, but they were pretty sure it was Velasquez.”
Yeah, odds are you wouldn’t tattoo somebody else’s SSN on your body. Putting your own number there also seems counterintuitive, though. I mean, you couldn’t remember it?
“So, did anybody ever get arrested for impersonating a butcher?”
Ed shrugs.
“Apparently not. There didn’t seem to be a lot of follow-up, from what I can find.”
I tell Ed he’s found plenty and promise to buy him a drink sometime.
“I could use it,” he says, then goes on to vent a little about Mark Baer.
“The son of a bitch,” he says, lowering his voice, “wants me to go county by county, locality by locality, through the whole state and get numbers on all the people who were arrested for going more than ninety miles an hour last year. I think he’s trying to win the Pulitzer for highway safety coverage.”
I can relate. Baer used to ask me, every time he went anywhere on company business, how to fill out an expense form. Again, aggressive neediness.
So, I’m thinking maybe Velasquez decided to become a drug entrepreneur, and maybe he ran into some guys who had their MBAs in evil. Poor Jack Velasquez. Good field, no hit, no brain.
And then there were two. Les and Buck McRae, whom I’m going down to North Carolina to see tomorrow.
Time to talk to the chief.
I call Peachy Love, police flack and former reporter, and ask her what my chances are of talking with our police chief, Larry Doby Jones, sometime today.
“I don’t know,” she says, but I tell her that I have some evidence that Raymond Gatewood might not be Les’s shooter.
“Oh,” Peachy says, “he’s not going to want to hear that. He hates that shit.”
Well, I can sympathize. The leader of Richmond’s finest loves to call press conferences to announce the department’s latest nab, and sometimes he calls them a wee bit too early, which leads to an egg facial.
Still, the truth will out. Or it will if you give it a little help.
“Tell him I’m getting ready to write a story about how Gatewood couldn’t have done it.”
That’s a bit of a stretch, but it gets Peachy’s attention.
“OK. Let me run it by him. Damn, Willie. You don’t give us much of a break over here, do you?”
I remind her of how it was, and is, on the other side, something she experienced as our first African-American female cops reporter. Her memory just needs a little jogging.
“Message received,” she says, “but it’s still not going to sit well with the chief.”
I remind her that it’s not my job to please L. D. Jones. I also ask her if she can check and see who, if anyone, Gatewood has called while he’s been locked up. She asks me why and I say I can’t tell her, other than it’s not for publication in the newspaper.
“Anyhow,” she says, lowering her voice and shifting gears, “when are you going to stop by for a little nip? Haven’t seen you in a while.”
Peachy Love is a fine woman, and we’ve shared the sheets on occasion. We probably will again, if Mr. Johnson is willing, but not right now. I tell her I’m seeing someone at the moment.
“Seeing someone? Like going steady? Are you going to ask her to the prom?”
“You seem amused.”
“Well, I’m just goin’ on history here.”
I’m reminded of what Jumpin’ Jimmy Deacon said the other night, when we were watching the Squirrels’ home opener. The Curve had a leadoff hitter who managed to get himself picked off first base twice in one three-inning stretch.
Jimmy, ever the philosopher, shook his head.
“Those that’s too dumb for history are condemned to repeat themselves,” he said.
Yeah, I know what Peachy’s talking about. I do sometimes wonder if I’m condemned to repeat myself.
Still, as Peggy once said when the fifth or sixth surrogate parent of my action-packed childhood had moved in and then moved on, “You’ve got to try or die.”
Peachy calls me back thirty minutes later and says the chief will see me in an hour.
At two, I’m waiting in Jones’s outer office. I think about how well we used to get along. We could have a drink or two, commiserate over lost wives and mourn simpler times.
Fate, though, has intervened. Because I’ve been involved in freeing a couple of people the Richmond police had already trotted before the cameras as “case closed,” things are a little testier these days.
When I’m ushered in, he doesn’t get up, doesn’t even speak to me. After I’ve helped myself to the only chair in the room his butt’s not occupying, he finally seems to notice my presence.
“What do you want?”
I explain, as succinctly as I can, about all those dead ex-ballplayers, taken before their time in a variety of manners, some mildly suspicious. I don’t mention the threatening phone call Finlay Rand got. I’ll wait for Peachy to check that one out, plus I want to talk to Gatewood himself.
If I was expecting L. D. to jump up and pin a citizen-helper award on me or make me an honorary member of the Richmond police department, I am bitterly disappointed.
“So what?” is Chief Jones’s assessment of my accumulated knowledge. “So a bunch of old ballplayers died. Some of them were close to a natural death anyhow. Didn’t one of them have a heart attack? And the one out hiking, he could’ve had one, too.”
I mention the scorecards that several of the survivors remembered, with some of the numbers marked out.
“There’s nothing left but the 2 and the 9,” I tell him, “and somebody tried to kill Les Hacker.”
“Who gives a shit?” Jones says. “You probably planted the idea of those numbers in their minds. Power of suggestion. I mean, c’mon. Some old baseball players died, some of them more than twenty years apart, and then somebody shot this Hacker guy. And we’ve got a nut case in lockup, guy with a record long as my dick, who was wearing the same jacket as the guy who did the shooting. And he had the key to the apartment he used in the coat pocket.”
“He never shot anybody before, outside of Sandland.”
L. D. shrugs.
“First time for everything. And he’s killed plenty of people, I hear.”
He stands, which I suppose is my cue to get the fuck out of there.
“You know,” the chief says, “I feel kind of bad about it. I mean, he’s obviously had his head messed with a little, over there doing his duty, killing Al Qaedas and shit, but we can’t have a man just going around shooting the citizens.”
He offers his hand, and I take it.
“I still think you’ve got the wrong guy,” I tell him.
“Well,” he says, “then show me the right guy. Don’t come in here with some kind of Perry Mason bullshit. It’s been my experience that the most logical answer is the right one. And Raymond Gatewood is the answer.”
Not much else to say. I don’t really blame L. D. His detectives came up with the obvious perp, and he’s backing them up. Unfortunately, I think he is, not for the first time, putting his money on a losing horse.
B
ACK
AT
the car, I call Marcus Green’s office. To my surprise, the great man himself answers.
“Things must be tough,” I tell him. “Did you have to lay off your secretary?”
“They’re called office managers. And I can still buy your ass and make you my lawn jockey. Kelly’s taking a half day off.”
“I wanted to talk about your client.”
“Gatewood? What do you want to do, strangle him? Kate said the guy he allegedly shot was part of your, er, extended family.”
I explain that I might have some information that could prove beneficial. I try to give Marcus the benefit of the doubt. He’s irritating as hell, but some people, for some reason, say the same thing about me. And despite the fact that he’s got more than a little ambulance chaser in his blood, he’s been known to defend the little guy. That’s why Kate quit her job with an established law firm that has a money pit in the basement to work for or with him. And Marcus Green is no racist. Hell, Raymond Gatewood looks like the skinhead poster boy. Marcus’s last name sums up his allegiance, colorwise. And he’s smart enough to know you can’t buy the kind of publicity you get when you play the white (or in Marcus’s case, black) knight riding in to save the innocent victim. Pro bono, my ass.
All of Marcus’s clients haven’t been innocent, and I suspect he’s gotten more than a few guilty ones off. But that just makes him more attractive to the well-heeled criminal class.
Yes, I tell him, Les Hacker is my mother’s special friend, but that’s not why I want to talk to Gatewood.
“I’m not even sure he’s the shooter.”
“Hell, the only people who are sure he’s the shooter are the city cops.”
I tell him that I’m working on more than a hunch.
“Tell me more,” Green says.
“On the way to talk to your client, I’ll fill you in. Pick me up at Perly’s in an hour.”
“Hour and a half,” he says. “I’ll bring your ex-wife along, too.”
“Which one?”
Marcus’s laugh, rich as mahogany, is almost enough to make him worth knowing.
I have time for a couple of Camels, a burger and fries and two Millers. I’m having the last one on the street when Marcus rolls up, five minutes late.
“Your driver off, too?” I ask, nodding to Kate in the front seat beside him.
“Yeah. You want a job? I hear you’re taking a little time off.”
“Just until I finish doing your job for you.”
“You go to law school while I wasn’t looking?”
I explain that I’ve figured out that his client almost certainly didn’t try to kill Les. And then I explain, chapter and verse, what I’ve learned. I also tell them how little respect my theory has been given by L. D. Jones.