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.
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.