Scuffletown, p.14
Scuffletown, page 14
There are a couple of things on my plate that even the joys of an Easter family get-together can’t override.
First, there’s that cell phone number. I thought it rang a bell. When I got home from work last night, not even stopping off at Penny Lane for liquid nourishment, I checked to see if my memory served me well.
For once, it did. Which is why I have to talk to Abe Custalow as soon as possible. I texted Marcus Green before we left for church this morning. When I turned the cell phone back on afterward, he texted that he had no reason to see Abe again, since he seems determined to do everything possible to convict himself.
Leaving Peggy’s, I call Marcus to let him know I’ve found something that might change his mind.
“Well, what the hell does that mean?” he says when I tell him what I’ve learned. “I mean, the man hasn’t done squat to save himself. Did you ever think that he might just be guilty?”
I point out the obvious connection, one that can’t just be coincidence.
He sighs.
“Yeah, you’re right. But what good does it do us if the son of a bitch won’t lift a finger in his own defense?”
“Think how good you’ll look,” I reply. “You’ve not only saved an innocent man, you’ve saved one that didn’t even want to be saved.”
“Yeah, that’d be a first. But this still looks like a waste of my valuable skills. I’ve got two other cases coming up soon, with clients who actually pay. I don’t have time to piss in the wind.”
I assure him that he’ll be pissing with the wind behind him.
“Another thing,” he says. “I read the story that Baer guy had on A1 this morning, and I didn’t see anything about any damn telephone number in there.”
I tell him that Baer doesn’t know everything there is to know.
“You’re not even supposed to be working this story,” Green says. “Don’t you have something more useful to do with your time?”
Finally I persuade him to give it one more shot.
“I’ll see if I can get in to talk to him tomorrow,” Marcus says. “Come by my office at nine.”
He hangs up.
Once we’re back at the Prestwould, I tackle Item Number Two. I make another call. I have a friend at VCU Hospital, the big teaching hospital that I’m betting is the one the guy yesterday was referring to when he told me about James Whaley’s mother.
Susan Kibbell was a couple of years behind me in school. I dated her a few times. We’ve stayed in touch. She’s high enough up in the hospital’s nursing hierarchy now that I think I can depend on her to carefully skirt the HIPAA rules on my behalf.
I catch her on her cell and tell her I’m looking for a patient whose last name is Whaley and is from Hanover County. I am hoping that James Whaley and his mother somehow have the same last name.
“You know I could get in a whole world of shit over this,” she says, but she and I both know that no one will ever find out how I came to pay a visit to a lady I’ve never met. And so she calls back in a few minutes with the room number.
“She must be pretty sick, if she’s in there,” Susan says. “Probably the big C.”
I thank her and promise, as I have before, that her fingerprints will not be on any of this.
I’m headed out the door when Cindy comes out of the bathroom.
“Don’t you ever take a day off?” she asks.
I tell her it’s about Abe. She asks me if I’d like for her to come along. Not this time, I tell her.
“This could take awhile.”
I DON’T have too much trouble parking. Most of the Easter Sunday visitors are going while I’m coming.
So many people avoid going to the VCU hospital because it’s kind of daunting. You might spend twenty minutes trying to find a parking space in the deck, then take an odiferous elevator ride to the maze itself, where you’ll need professional help to find the person you’re looking for.
“If I get sick,” Peggy told me, “don’t take me to that place. Nobody’ll ever come visit me.”
What they do, which is a tad more important than having friends visit you, is save your damn life. I’ve seen too many people opt for one of the county hospitals, then show up at VCU when everything else has failed.
So I figure that if Phyllis Whaley is here, things must be pretty serious.
I find her room, in a wing where the nurse-to-patient ratio is high enough that I know Susan Kibbell was right. James Whaley’s mother, assuming the only Whaley on the patient list is his mother, must not be doing well at all.
I knock tentatively on the half-open door, then slip inside. The TV’s on 60 Minutes in the dimly lit room. The woman lying in the bed looks my way.
“Mrs. Whaley?” I ask.
“Are you from the business office?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“They was in earlier, asking me how I was goin’ to pay for this. I told them I don’t have no idea.”
She might have been a pretty woman at one time, but the cancer has done its dirty work. Her hair’s mostly fallen out. Her skin has a waxy sheen, and she looks like she’s been on a diet she didn’t plan to be on. Her voice is thin and strained.
I move closer to the bed.
“You’re James’s mother, aren’t you?”
She nods her head.
“He was in earlier, but he had to go somewhere. He said he was coming back tomorrow. Are you one of his friends?”
I lie and tell her that he and I used to work together.
“Jimmy’s had some tough times,” his mother says, “but he’s going to pull through it. He’s getting some help now.”
I nod and act as if I know what the hell she’s talking about.
“I’d like to see Jimmy,” I tell her. “When do you think I might be able to catch him tomorrow?”
“Oh,” she says, tugging on the sheets and wheezing, “he usually comes around late in the morning sometime. He brings me something from McDonald’s. Can’t bear to tell him that I can’t stand the sight of food right now.”
I help her find the remote control for the TV that’s tangled in the covers. When a nurse comes in to give her something for pain, I use the excuse to make my exit, promising to return tomorrow.
“Don’t tell Jimmy I’m coming,” I say. “I’d like to surprise him.”
I don’t think there’s much reason to believe Phyllis Whaley will have the presence of mind to remember me to James anyhow.
Do I feel guilty about using a dying woman to get at a story? If it was just a story, I would. But it’s more. It’s Abe.
WHEN I get back, I tell Cindy about the phone number.
“You need to get in touch with the police about that,” she says.
I tell her that I’m planning to meet with L.D. tomorrow. I don’t promise that I’ll tell him about the phone number, though, not until I get some answers myself. I don’t need the chief having another reason to think Custalow is a murderer.
It occurs to me, as we’re sitting in front of the TV and unwinding, that there’s another individual whom I should contact.
Stella Stellar, aka Carla Jean Crump, answers on the third ring.
She says she’s been meaning to call me.
“They won’t let me see him,” she says. “I wonder if you could help me get in there.”
I’m pretty sure Marcus Green isn’t going to want another party tagging along tomorrow when he talks with Abe again, so I lie and say I’m not sure, but I’ll see what I can do.
I tell her that I’m still positive Abe didn’t kill anybody, well, not in the last thirteen years anyhow.
“But I wanted to ask you something. Have you ever heard of a man named James Whaley?”
She’s quiet for a few seconds.
“No, I don’t think I ever heard that name. I mean, Abe didn’t have a lot of folks he hung out with. You and that Oregon Hill gang was about it, other than me. James Whaley? Nah, I don’t think I know that one. Why?”
I give her as little as I can get away with. Whaley was a guy, I tell her, who knew Ernest Bates and had some bad dealings with him.
“The guy Abe’s supposed to have killed? Well, hell. Why aren’t the cops on this?”
I lie again and say they probably are, that we’re all trying to get to the bottom of it.
She says that, if she thinks of anything else that might help, she’ll give me a call.
I ask her how it’s been going.
“You wouldn’t believe this crap,” she says.
It turns out that the Goldfish Crackers got invited to do a gig at a private club somewhere down near Suffolk on Friday night.
“It paid big money. We were all excited. Until we got there.”
I wait for the punch line.
“It was a damn nudist club,” she says. “Everybody, I mean everybody, was buck naked. And let me tell you, there’s a hell of a lot of people that ought to keep their clothes on.”
Stella says they tried to get the band to don their birthday suits too.
“The drummer and the bass player acted like they were goin’ to do it, but I told them that, if I was the only person in that clubhouse with their clothes on, I was leaving. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to strip in front of a bunch of strangers. I mean, you got to have some standards. Plus, it was kind of cold in there.”
I applaud her scruples. I mention that she probably would have improved the general quality of the nudity if she had joined in. I think she took it as a compliment.
“Sometimes,” she says, “I think my musical star is a burned-out light bulb.”
I tell her she ought to write a song about it.
“Well, anyhow, we did get paid,” she says. Then she adds, “If you talk to Abe, tell him I’m here for him. Tell him I know he didn’t do it.”
We all know that, I tell her.
Lying in bed later, though, with Cindy snoring gently beside me, those old devil doubts start to worm their way into the consciousness I’m trying to lose. I am seriously short on information, and I mean for that to change.
Tomorrow, Custalow is going to have to tell me something that eases my burgeoning uneasiness. And James Whaley, whoever the hell he is, is going to give me some damn answers, assuming I can catch him.
The chief and I, we have to have a talk too.
Monday is one of my precious two days off the night cops beat. I plan to use it well.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Monday
Marcus is late.
I’m standing outside his office after walking over from the Prestwould, when he drives up shortly after nine. To my surprise, Kate—his partner and my third ex-wife—gets out of the passenger’s side.
She mutters something about car trouble and quickly lets herself in Green and Ellis’s front door.
I try to hide my amusement.
“Anything I should know about?” I ask, innocence incarnate.
“I forgot that you were going to be here this morning,” he says, shaking his head.
I assure him that the days of my caring about Kate’s social life ended the day she left, going on a decade now. One wife is enough to keeps tabs on. I mean, I care about Kate. When her second husband died because a maniac crashed a plane into a bar at happy hour more than a year ago, I was there for her, maybe a little more “there” than Cindy would have preferred. But that ship, I assure Marcus, sailed so long ago you can’t even see it on the horizon.
“Good to know,” he says, and we leave it at that.
He’s already checked and gotten permission to talk with his client today.
On the way over to the jail, I rehash what I’ve found out. “You think he’ll talk about it? Jesus, it sounds like he’s guilty as sin, with that phone number and all.”
It would sound that way, I agree, if I didn’t know Abe.
“Do I have to remind you again that he’s already been convicted of killing one man?”
“We’ve been over that already.”
Marcus sighs.
“You’re asking me to suspend a whole shitload of disbelief.”
“Just stick with it a little longer. I know there’s some reason for all this. Abe Custalow did not stab a man to death. He couldn’t have.”
“Well, you’re the only SOB in the city of Richmond that thinks that.”
When Abe is brought to us, he looks like he’s lost five pounds since I last saw him. He says the food’s not so good.
“Could use a plate of spaghetti Albert,” he says, referencing his favorite sustenance at Joe’s.
When we get you out of here, I tell him, we’ll get you spaghetti Albert until your damn gut explodes.
He just shakes his head, like the idea of getting outside again is a pipe dream.
“Marcus wants to help you,” I tell him. “But you have to give us something.”
“There’s nothing to give,” he says. “Leave it alone, Willie. Some things can’t be helped.”
And so I reach into my pocket and pull out that Post-it Note.
“I found this on the floor in your bedroom. It must have fallen off the dresser. Can you tell me anything about the number on here?”
He doesn’t act like he even wants to look at the note. When he does, I can see him wince, just a little. You’d barely notice it if you weren’t looking for it.
“Whose phone number is that?”
He shrugs his big shoulders.
“Well,” I tell him, “I happen to know who it belongs to, because I have recently come across that same number, out in Hanover County.”
He looks at me, his eyes getting a little wider.
“That number is the cell phone number of a man named James Whaley. I need to know, Abe, who the hell is James Whaley? And while you’re at it, can you tell me anything about Phyllis Whaley, his mother?”
He slams his fists into the table between us. Marcus and I jump a little.
“I’ve already told you, Willie. Stay out of this. This isn’t any of your business.”
“I’m going to find out, Abe, with your help or not. I don’t really give a damn what you want or don’t want right now. I’m not going to let you hang yourself over whatever the hell happened that night.”
He shakes his head.
“I know you’re trying to help, Willie. I appreciate that. But there isn’t any help for this. Let it alone. For God’s sake, let it alone.”
“No.”
Marcus tries to talk sense into his thick skull, but Abe just turns his head. He calls for a guard, says he’s ready to go back to his cell.
On the way out, I tell Marcus that he’s done all he can, that I appreciate him humoring me so far and I wouldn’t blame him if he never set eyes on Abe Custalow again.
He surprises me.
“No,” he says, “there’s something wrong here. I can feel it. Most guys in that spot, they lie like a dog to paint themselves as innocent. I think this idiot is lying to make himself look guilty. Don’t see that very often.
“I think I’ll stick around awhile and see what happens next. I could use some entertainment. Those other two cases, I can get them off because (a) I’m a damn good lawyer, and (b) they’re working their asses off, or probably lying their asses off, to help me achieve that goal. This one, though, this is a challenge. I like a challenge.”
He tells me to let him know what if anything I can find out from James Whaley.
I tell him that’s my next stop.
IT TAKES me half an hour to get a parking space on the deck. Then I get lost again trying to find Phyllis Whaley’s room.
The young guy sitting at her bedside looks up when I enter, just after noon.
“Hello,” I say to Phyllis. “I’m the guy who stopped last night.”
I turn toward her other guest.
“And you must be James.”
He is a skinny kid, appears to be about twenty-five with a tan that doesn’t look like it had anything to do with the sun. He’s wearing a Virginia Tech T-shirt and jeans. He has a broad nose and wide-set eyes. He looks like he’s still growing into whoever he’ll eventually be.
He also doesn’t look like he’s been sleeping all that well lately.
He glares at me from the chair beside his mother’s bed.
“I don’t know you. What are you doing here?”
“Well, I do kind of know you. Can we talk for a minute?”
His mother is lying in bed, looking more frail than yesterday if that’s possible, a barely touched quarter-pounder and fries in front of her, the healthier hospital grub pushed to one side.
James Whaley moves toward me in what might be considered a threatening manner.
“I need you to leave,” he says. “Can’t you see my mother’s sick? What the hell are you, a bill collector?”
I lean closer to him, close enough that his mother, five feet away with the television on, can’t hear me when I half whisper, “No. I’m a friend of Abe Custalow.”
He doesn’t say anything at first.
Then, in a quiet voice, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t come around here worrying Momma.”
“Then come out in the hall for a minute.”
His fists are clenched tight, and for a moment I’m afraid he might take a poke at me.
Then he unclenches and lets out a breath. He turns toward his mother and tells her he’ll be right back.
“You eat those fries now,” he says as he’s leaving. “You got to put some weight on.”
I lead him down to the visitors’ lounge. There is one old man half dozing on one side of the room, with its view of the parking lot. I direct James Whaley down to the other end.
“What do you want?” he asks me when we sit, facing each other, a few inches apart.
“I want Abe Custalow out of jail for a crime he didn’t commit.”
He frowns and looks down.
“I told you, I don’t know any Abe Custalow.”
“Then why was your phone number on a scrap of note paper on his dresser?”
