The Kudzu Kid Read online

  THE KUDZU KID

  DARRELL LAURANT

  VIRGINIA BEACH

  CAPE CHARLES

  The Kudzu Kid

  by Darrell Laurant

  © Copyright 2014 Darrell Laurant

  ISBN 978-1-940192-65-9

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other – except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters are both actual and fictitious. With the exception of verified historical events and persons, all incidents, descriptions, dialogue and opinions expressed are the products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  Published by

  210 60th Street

  Virginia Beach, VA 23451

  212-574-7939

  www.koehlerbooks.com

  To my wife Gail, who kept saying:

  “Why don’t you go ahead and finish that novel?”

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  THE MESS LEFT BEHIND

  CHAPTER ONE

  JEFFERSON SPRINGS

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE MAYTAG MAN

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE PENTHOUSE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE LAW

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ARCHIE, BUDDHA AND SUGAR

  CHAPTER SIX

  HOG HEAVEN

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ZOE

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PURGATORY

  CHAPTER NINE

  EDDIE

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE ORANGE LIFE

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  EDITOR IN THE FIRST PERSON

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE DEAD MAN

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ALIENATION

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  MAKING SAUSAGE

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  FEEDBACK

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  BUTTING HEADS

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  COMPLICATIONS

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  STORIES BIG AND SMALL

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  TOXICS AND TOBACCO

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  LEAKS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  HITTING THE FAN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  A FOOTBALL SEASON UNDONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  INSULTING STONEWALL

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  ZOE CROSSES OVER

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHRISTMAS IN NOWHERE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  BLACK RANDOLPH

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  SWEET SIXTEEN IN GANGLAND

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  URBAN MURDER, SMALL TOWN JUSTICE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  MENTORING ZOE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  THE PITCH

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  THE SNITCH

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  FISHING

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  THE GOOD STUFF

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  BATTLE PLANS

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  DOWN TO FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  THE TIDE TURNS

  CHAPTER THRTY-EIGHT

  THE MAYTAG MAN COMES SOUTH

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  THREATS

  CHAPTER FORTY

  REBEL TO THE RESCUE

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  THE MESS LEFT BEHIND

  On his final trip to the Jersey Progress, the place where he had once spent the majority of each day, Eddie Fogarty filled a cardboard box with a few files, a half-dozen cheap awards plaques, a folder hastily stuffed with article clippings and a bright red coffee mug that proclaimed I’m Here to Kick Ass and Take Names.

  He left behind a mounded pile of faxes and torn-out notebook pages and old newspapers, and a few pink telephone message slips peeking out like wildflowers among weeds. Several Doonesbury cartoons, faded to the color of straw, were pinned to the walls of the cubicle, along with a sheet of paper on which he had defiantly scrawled, Bite me!

  And there it sat, until one day an office prankster got some yellow Crime Scene—Do Not Disturb tape from a cop friend and draped it over the desk.

  Managing editor Pat Donnelly, normally a loud appreciator of office jokes, didn’t see the humor this time.

  “Shit, what he did was a crime,” Donnelly huffed as he walked past Fogarty’s old desk. So mythically prickly had Fogarty become that some of his co-workers made it a point to be out of the office on the day he returned to pick up his final paycheck.

  “It would be just like him to walk in here with an AK-47,” one of them said.

  But Donnelly knew his protégé well enough to realize that Fogarty’s hostile exterior was mostly show; small consolation now.

  Viewing the remnants of a once-shiny newspaper career, Donnelly also felt a profound—if slightly guilty—sense of relief. His own job as second in command of the Jersey Progress newsroom had hung briefly by a thread.

  The irony was that Donnelly, who made a virtue of trusting no one, had almost been brought down by trusting one person too much.

  Actually, what he had unwisely trusted was Eddie Fogarty’s own instinct for self-preservation. Never, in his darkest nightmare, did Donnelly expect Fogarty to set himself up the way he did.

  Donnelly had pleaded with Fogarty to give him the name of the sources who had tied Marty Ventura—a boulder of stability in county government; a national finalist for Big Buddy of the Year, for God’s sake—to the bottom feeders of the local underworld.

  “I can’t do that, Pat,” Fogarty had told him. “The names get out, these guys are dead meat.”

  “I’m not asking you to print the names,” Donnelly replied. “I just want to meet them, so I can feel better in my own mind that they’re flesh and blood people. Or let me talk to them on the phone.”

  “Nope,” Fogarty said firmly. “If anyone but me contacts them, they’ll bolt. They’re scared shitless, as it is.”

  “Scared of Marty Ventura?” Donnelly asked, incredulously.

  “You betcha.”

  “Then just tell me. I promise I won’t try to contact them.”

  “Sorry, Pat,” Fogarty replied. “I can’t trust anybody on this, not even you.”

  Donnelly remembered the thoughts whirling through his mind like the blades of a ceiling fan.

  “Tell me again why this is such a big deal?” he asked Fogarty.

  It was a game they played all the time, Donnelly adopting the role of a dim-witted Progress reader, probing Fogarty for the hook, the “so-what?” He became the annoying, dense presence on the next barstool, mumbling: “Who gives a rat’s ass?”

  In this case, Donnelly honestly had questions of his own. Marty Ventura was the county’s operations director, not an elected official. His job might offer occasional opportunities for graft, but nothing on a scale that would be worth the Progress risking the wrath of Nelson Rascoe, the fearsome county attorney.

  “The DA’s office has already started an investigation of our Big Buddy,” Fogarty said, “and the FBI won’t be far behind. The sources I’ve got are just like window dressing, a way of taking the story a little farther.”

  “An investigation of what?”

  “Whether Marty is mobbed up.”

  “Which your sources say he is? And they have proof of that?

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Fogarty
went on to explain that he had inside information about how Ventura had manipulated the bidding on the Northwest Expressway project so that the job went to the Noudi Construction Company, a firm Fogarty had always heard was “connected.”

  Donnelly whistled softly. Even for Fogarty, this was scary and uncharted territory.

  Bureaucrats were lunchmeat for the Progress’ lead investigative reporter. He knew every pissed-off public employee and how to push their buttons. He knew how to work court records and public transactions, always bought small Christmas presents for the clerks in the county offices to keep them chatty. He cozied up to Jim Holloran, the county executive, even though he considered Holloran to be incompetent and dull. Fogarty swam in the murky waters of local government like a pilot fish, latching on to whoever served his purpose.

  But the Jersey Progress didn’t cover the mob—at least, not in the same way it covered Jim Holloran and his underlings. If some underworld figure was indicted or brought to trial that was fair game and the paper reported on it. But not even Pat Donnelly would expect any of his reporters to go snooping around in the shadowy affairs of mob-connected hoodlums. That was only in the movies.

  After all, the Freedom of Information Act didn’t apply in this dark parallel universe. These people didn’t send out press releases. They didn’t return phone calls.

  Given all this, the possibility of shining the harsh light of the Jersey Progress on an intersection between local government and organized crime was both intimidating and exciting to Donnelly. Marty Ventura might be just the beginning.

  It had been over a decade since the Progress had won any significant national awards. That’s one of the reasons Donnelly had been brought in. That’s why a special position had been created for Eddie Fogarty. And Fogarty’s Ventura story, while riddled with “just trust me” gaps in information, sounded like a wall full of plaques waiting to happen.

  “Do we know all this for sure?” Donnelly finally asked Fogarty. “I mean for goddamn, beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt sure?”

  “Yup.”

  “Do we have proof of this on paper, something we could wave if they come after us?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Donnelly leaned forward and frowned.

  “How do we know that these sources of yours are going to hang in there when the shit hits the fan?” he asked. “I mean, if they don’t want to meet me now, what makes you think they won’t bail on us later?”

  “Because they have an axe to grind with Marty Ventura, and they know it’s a lot safer to have us go after him than to do it themselves.”

  Donnelly finally sighed in a way that let Fogarty know he had decided to go along.

  “One thing I don’t get, though,” the managing editor said. “How does Ventura see any benefit from fixing the bid on the Expressway thing? Remember how everyone was talking about what a low bid it was?”

  “I don’t know,” Fogarty said. “But I’m going to find out.”

  This was the conversation Donnelly threw up in his defense when his boss, Executive Editor Max Engler, called him into his office, then growled and chewed on him.

  “I never knew Fogarty to lie,” Donnelly told his boss. “Never.”

  Engler held up his hand.

  “You sit right there,” he said, as if talking to an unruly teenager. “I’ll go talk to Walter.”

  It was probably the longest ten minutes of Donnelly’s life. Like Fogarty, he was strung out on the adrenalin of daily newspaper life, drunk on the power of deciding what one hundred and twenty thousand readers would see above the fold the next morning. A former high school basketball player, Donnelly was big and rough and profane, yet he could pore over copy and words with the subtlety of a diamond cutter. He was very good at his job, and he had no idea what he would do if it were taken away from him.

  Finally, Engler returned from the office of publisher Walter Christmas and sat down silently in his desk chair, milking the moment. Then he locked eyes with Donnelly and held up his index finger.

  “Congratulations,” he said. “You get one more chance.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  JEFFERSON SPRINGS

  Tucker Daniel squinted at Eddie Fogarty over the top of his reading glasses and sighed.

  “You’ve got all these awards,” he said.

  It sounded more like an accusation than a compliment. Shifting nervously in his padded chair, Fogarty just nodded.

  “That makes me wonder, to be honest with you,” Daniel continued. “Why would someone with your background want to work in a place like this?”

  Fogarty had been asking himself the same question ever since he had left the familiar embrace of I-95 and headed west across Southside Virginia to Jefferson Springs.

  US 58 had been bad enough, offering disturbing glimpses of tin-topped shacks and forlorn gas station/convenience stores and, once, a Confederate flag lashed to the side of a doublewide trailer. The air conditioner in his 1983 Mazda roared, its fan turned up full-bore to ward off the crushing heat and humidity of early June.

  Every few miles, he passed a dead possum or groundhog pasted to the asphalt, swelling in the sun with its buzzing constellation of flies. The thick roadside vegetation; honeysuckle, chicory, sumac, and kudzu seemed vaguely threatening as if it might suddenly wash over the road in a choking green wave. Fogarty stared in amazement at one stretch of highway where the kudzu vines had completely overrun a utility pole and several oaks, turning them into shaggy, fantastically shaped leaf monsters.

  Then he left the main road and took the business route into Jefferson Springs. More kudzu; another dead possum. He was visually assaulted by the B&E Garage with its hundreds of abandoned cars and trucks, most of them rusted or partially cannibalized for parts. He saw the sign that proclaimed: Jefferson Springs’ Baptist Churches Welcome You. He passed the elementary school with its Drug Free School Zone sign, and the drab, dun-colored high school where the only sign of life was a faulty sprinkler lashing water across a small portion of sun-fried football field.

  Big Southern houses sailed past his window all along Main Street, most of them with neo-antebellum pillars supporting gracious porches, some with widow’s walks perched on pitched roofs. Magnolia trees rose from a few lawns, and several of the more elaborate houses had been converted into bed and breakfast inns.

  Fogarty hadn’t expected much from downtown Jefferson Springs, but it was a disappointment nonetheless. The focal point seemed to be the Randolph County courthouse; its facade faded to the dull yellow-gray color of old teeth. Next to the courthouse was a generic statue dedicated to Confederate War Dead, a young concrete rebel poised on his pedestal with a rifle and a broad-brimmed hat. Unfortunately for the rebel’s eternal dignity, the local birds had taken him over, and he was sorely in need of sandblasting.

  The town police station was back behind the courthouse, along with the town manager’s office. The rest of downtown provided a menagerie of self-consciously quaint shops, boarded-up storefronts, a Val-U-Rite discount store, an old railroad car converted into the Main Street Diner, a Goodwill store and the Chamber of Commerce headquarters, upstairs from a law office. There was a video store and a barbershop, but nothing resembling a New Jersey-style bar.

  With a few minutes still to kill, Fogarty had continued on through to the western edge of downtown and discovered the county office building, the sheriff’s office and a sad-looking industrial park.

  He had already seen the newspaper office. Broad-shouldered and ugly, the Southside Echo building loomed up like a tombstone alongside Main Street. The outside walls were some kind of flesh-colored spackling, and they were marred by mottled splashes of a color Fogarty couldn’t identify. It reminded him of the stains on an old mattress set out by the side of the road.

  The place had been a tobacco warehouse during the ‘40s and ‘50s, Fogarty would soon learn, and it had three levels. Only the bottom was in use now, although a succession of Echo publishers stored a variety of old furniture and junk on the top two flo
ors.

  The first floor was vast and gutted, occupied only by a few long tables in the middle, a row of offices along one side, and a reception area out front. There was enough wasted space in between to stage a touch football game.

  Why would someone like him want to work in a place like this? It was a reasonable question, one that obviously perplexed his interrogator. As always, Fogarty had an answer prepared.

  “I was the editor of my college newspaper,” he told Daniel “and that was sort of my first love. I like reporting, but I want to get more involved in making decisions. I want to have a say in how a paper looks and what’s in it. That’s important to me, and I guess I’ve got to start somewhere. There were too many people ahead of me at the Progress.”

  “Plus,” he added, forcing a grin, “I really liked your ad in Editor & Publisher. The only newspaper that gives a hoot about Randolph County. Good one.”

  Fogarty was beginning to ease back into his element. The interview was the basic building block of his profession—if you couldn’t perform there, you couldn’t perform on the printed page. The difference, in this case, was that Fogarty was receiving the questions instead of asking them.

  Yet he was still measuring Tucker Daniel, trying to match him with something in his internal file of personality types. Given just a few minutes with almost anyone, Fogarty could usually find his opening and squirm into it, adjusting to the level and tone of the conversation. He was equally at home swapping off-color jokes with union officials, talking polls with politicians or discussing the policies of the Pope with priests.

  “You should see the kid in action,” Pat Donnelly once said to another Jersey Progress editor after accompanying Fogarty on an interview. “He’s a goddamned chameleon.”

  “I think weasel would be a better word,” the other editor replied dryly.

  Fogarty told people what they wanted to hear, and they generally told him what he needed to hear. If they didn’t like how those confidences later leaped out at them from unforgiving newsprint that was their problem.

  “Hey, I’m just the messenger,” Fogarty would tell people who complained. “Don’t shoot the messenger.”