Richmond Noir Read online

  This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2010 Akashic Books

  Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple

  Richmond map by Sohrab Habibion

  ePUB ISBN 13: 978-1-936-07077-0

  ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-98-9

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2009922934

  All rights reserved

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  ALSO IN THE AKASHIC NOIR SERIES:

  Baltimore Noir, edited by Laura Lippman

  Bronx Noir, edited by S.J. Rozan

  Brooklyn Noir, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth

  edited by Tim McLoughlin & Thomas Adcock

  Chicago Noir, edited by Neal Pollack

  D.C. Noir, edited by George Pelecanos

  D.C. Noir 2:The Classics, edited by George Pelecanos

  Delhi Noir (India), edited by Hirsh Sawhney

  Detroit Noir, edited by E.J. Olsen & John C. Hocking

  Dublin Noir (Ireland), edited by Ken Bruen

  Havana Noir (Cuba), edited by Achy Obejas

  Istanbul Noir (Turkey), edited by Mustafa Ziyalan & Amy Spangler

  Las Vegas Noir, edited by Jarret Keene & Todd James Pierce

  London Noir (England), edited by Cathi Unsworth

  Los Angeles Noir, edited by Denise Hamilton

  Manhattan Noir, edited by Lawrence Block

  Manhattan Noir 2:The Classics, edited by Lawrence Block

  Mexico City Noir (Mexico), edited by Paco I. Taibo II

  Miami Noir, edited by Les Standiford

  New Orleans Noir, edited by Julie Smith

  Paris Noir (France), edited by AurèUen Masson

  Phoenix Noir, edited by Patrick Millikin

  Portland Noir, edited by Kevin Sampsell

  Queens Noir, edited by Robert Knightly

  Rome Noir (Italy), edited by Chiara Stangalino & Maxim Jakubowski

  San Francisco Noir, edited by Peter Maravelis

  San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Peter Maravelis

  Seattle Noir, edited by Curt Colbert

  Toronto Noir (Canada), edited by Janine Armin & Nathaniel G. Moore

  Trinidad Noir, Lisa Allen-Agostini & Jeanne Mason

  Twin Cities Noir, edited by Julie Schaper & Steven Horwitz

  Wall Street Noir, edited by Peter Spiegelman

  FORTHCOMING:

  Barcelona Noir (Spain), edited by Adriana Lopez & Carmen Ospina

  Boston Noir, edited by Dennis Lehane

  Copenhagen Noir (Denmark), edited by Bo Tao Michaelis

  Haiti Noir, edited by Edwidge Danticat

  Indian Country Noir, edited by Liz Martinez & Sarah Cortez

  Lagos Noir (Nigeria), edited by Chris Abani

  Lone Star Noir, edited by Bobby Byrd & John Byrd

  Los Angeles Noir 2:The Classics, edited by Denise Hamilton

  Moscow Noir (Russia), edited by Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen

  Mumbai Noir (India), edited by Altaf Tyrewala

  Orange County Noir, edited by Gary Phillips

  Philadelphia Noir, edited by Carlin Romano

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Foreword by Tom Robbins

  Introduction

  PART I: NEVERMORE

  PIR ROTHENBERG Museum District

  The Rose Red Vial

  DAVID L. ROBBINS East End

  Homework

  MINA BEVERLY Providence Park

  Gaia

  DENNIS DANVERS Texas Beach

  Texas Beach

  PART II: NUMBERS

  CLAY MCLEOD CHAPMAN Belle Isle

  The Battle of Belle Isle

  X.C. ATKINS Oregon Hill

  A Late-Night Fishing Trip

  LAURA BROWDER Church Hill

  The Heart Is a Strange Muscle

  DEAN KING Shockoe Slip

  The Fall Lines

  PART III: NEUROSIS

  TOM DE HAVEN Manchester

  Playing with DaBlonde

  ANNE THOMAS SOFFEE Jefferson Davis Highway

  Midnight at the Oasis

  MEAGAN J. SAUNDERS Jackson Ward

  Untitled

  CONRAD ASHLEY PERSONS West End

  Marco’s Broken English

  PART IV: NONSUCH

  HOWARD OWEN Monroe Park

  The Thirteenth Floor

  HERMINE PINSON Devil’s Half Acre

  Mr. Not

  CLINT MCCOWN Hollywood Cemetery

  The Apprentice

  Editors’ Acknowledgments

  About the Contributors

  Just think of all the people not fortunate enough

  to be bom in Richmond, Va.

  —Tom Wolfe

  FOREWORD

  BY TOM ROBBINS

  It may sound odd, but when I think of Richmond, Virginia—or, at least, when I look back on my years in that charming, antebellum, ostensibly conservative town—my thoughts turn frequently to alleys. And considering the images and moods that most people associate with those narrow, secluded, generally unlit and gritty little passageways, it should not then be totally unexpected that my memories of Richmond’s alleys tend to be colored with shades of noir. Which is to say, colored with seamy urban romance and suave big-city vice, the twin elements most responsible for the seductive throb at the murky heart of noir.

  Presumably, alleys in other parts of Richmond are quite different in character, but the bohemian/bourgeois/badass Fan District, where I lived, boasts to this day alleyways that are simultaneously inviting and forbidding, elegant and squalid, ominous and suffused with grace. Old, cobblestoned (Stone Age marshmallows in the silver moonshine), lined with wisteria, rose bushes, and carriage houses (servant quarters become artist studios, stables become garages); perfumed by honeysuckle, motor oil, invisible kitchens, brown-bagged beverages, garbage cans, and history; resonant with dog-bark, woo-pitch, bottle-shatter, domestic squabbling, financial plotting (legitimate and otherwise), fervent intellectual discourse, and stray fragments of Southern rock and jazz; they become all the more interesting after nightfall, when secrets—some merely naughty, others more darkly hued—seep increasingly into them from shadowed crannies or the backrooms and walled gardens of abodes along the way.

  On scores of hot, sticky, summer nights, with a restless city feeling like the interior of a napalmed watermelon, I walked the alleys of the Fan, sometimes until dawn; and having thus been privy to certain of the secrets they protected, having trusted them with a secret of my own (I was desperately in love with a married woman at the time and fully expecting her armed husband to leap out at me from every spooky nook), it doesn’t exactly surprise me that there is sufficient noir in Richmond—enough hidden larceny, lunacy, and lust—to fuel the fiction of the fine writers who enliven these pages.

  INTRODUCTION

  NEGOTIATING THE JAMES

  In The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Henry Miller tosses off a hard-bitten assessment of the City on the James: “I would rather die in
Richmond somehow,” he writes, “though God knows Richmond has little enough to offer.” As editors, we like the dying part, and might point out that in its long history, Richmond, Virginia has offered up many of the disparate elements crucial to meaty noir. The city was born amid deception, conspiracy, and violence.

  In 1607, after Christopher Newport paddled up the river that would one day be the city’s lifeblood, he installed a wooden cross at the future site of Richmond, claiming the area for England. The local Powhatan rightly perceived the symbolism in his act, but Newport, with the aid of flattery and gifts, convinced them that the cross indicated friendship, not conquest. His lie, soon revealed for what it was, led to conflict—not only between settlers and Native Americans, but also among the settlers themselves. Within two years, a second English expedition, excited by skirmishes with the Powhatan, attacked an exploratory party led by John Smith (yes, that John Smith). When Smith retreated, the Powhatan besieged the unruly colonists once more and killed some number of them. Smith returned, calmed the natives, arrested the English ringleaders, and put them in the stocks. He then forced the remaining men to take up residence in a Native encampment at the site of Newport’s cross. The men revolted, freeing the conspirators and abandoning the site. At that point, Smith gave up, but famously noted in his journal that he’d found no place so pleasant in all of Virginia as that site of consternation and bloodshed. (Oh, and then he was horribly burned in an accident.)

  Four centuries later, as Clay McLeod Chapman makes clear in his Belle Isle story, you can’t wander far in Richmond without being reminded by some cast-iron marker that this is where history happened—here’s the church where Patrick Henry declared, “Give me liberty or give me death,” here’s the factory that forged cannonballs and shot during the Civil War, here’s the row of warehouses that churned out America’s tobacco (lately they’ve gone condo), here’s the site of the Negro (read: slave) cemetery, now paved over into a desolate parking lot. Richmond is a city of statues and monuments to the past—Confederate generals mostly. Occasionally you’ll come across something odd, but never anomalous—a statue of tennis player Arthur Ashe, a statue of dancer Bojangles Robinson. Yes, history happened in Richmond, and so did crime, malfeasance, and cruelty. That’s because it’s hard to have the former without the latter. Richmond may be steeped in history, but its residents can seem as ambivalent about that fact—or even ashamed of it—as they are proud.

  Sure, Edgar Allan Poe spent a good part of his life in Richmond, and even went so far as to credit it with shaping his identity, as Pir Rothenberg’s story in this volume might remind us. (“I am a Virginian,” Poe wrote, “at least I call myself one, for I have resided all my life, until within the last few years in Richmond.”) Sure, two U.S. presidents lie buried in the hallowed ground of the city’s Hollywood Cemetery. (It’s also home to the grave of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, as Clint McCown’s tale playfully and darkly points out.) Sure, Thomas Jefferson spent a lot of time in Richmond as governor of the Commonwealth; he was even the architect of its beautiful Capitol building. But Jefferson had to run for his life from Richmond when the British came rolling through during the Revolutionary War; later he found himself put on trial for treason and cowardice by none other than Patrick Henry (yes, that Patrick Henry.)

  During the nineteenth century, the city was a-crawl with slingshot-and shotgun-toting gangs—the 4th Street Horribles, the Bumtowners, the Butchertown Cats, and so on—who preyed on shopkeepers and pedestrians and warred with each other. These groups were forebears of the drug gangs that are very much active in Richmond today, and whose presence here in the 1990s earned the River City the distinction of Murder Capital of the United States—a reputation further buoyed by the presence of the Southside Strangler, the first serial killer ever to be executed following a conviction based on DNA evidence. In Richmond, as in many of America’s great cities, history is a mixed bag.

  Greater Richmond—which means not only the city itself but also the surrounding suburbanized counties (white flight havens that began to grow in the mid-1950s)—has a population of roughly one million. In other words, Los Angeles it ain’t, and the Philip Marlowes and Jake Gitteses of the world might find its palette a little limited. However, Richmond’s size hasn’t precluded the city from falling victim to its own versions of Chinatown-style political chicanery—like the boardroom schemes and bamboozlements that led to entire sections of Jackson Ward (at the time a poor black neighborhood) and Oregon Hill (at the time a poor white neighborhood) being emptied out and cleaved in two to make way for, respectively, an interstate highway and a commuter bypass. Richmond is well versed in the political buffoonery of the public figure—as Howard Owen reminds us, the city is home not only to a municipal government, but also to the Virginia State Legislature and the governor’s office. It’s a place where a junkie councilman can get pinched buying heroin in a housing project and state legislators can spend whole sessions attempting to define what kind of underwear shall be illegal to wear, where a historic American figure can torpedo his political legacy simply by signing on as mayor and deciding to pick a fight with the school system.

  For all the dark marks on Richmond’s past, the darkest and most permanent is its role as hub of the Atlantic slave trade. Richmond was the spot on the James River where traders unloaded their captives to market, and where white Virginians sold enslaved peoples “downriver” to the deeper South. It was the gateway through which the cruel institution was spread into Virginia and much of the country. In present-day Richmond, the monuments to this part of its history are few (the recently erected Reconciliation Triangle statue is a notable exception)—so few that absence, in a way, becomes its own monument. The auction houses of Shockoe Bottom have vanished to time. The extensive slave prison, holding pen, and marketplace in the northwest corner of the Bottom—a site of so much suffering, pain, and heartbreak that captives called it the “Devil’s Half Acre”—lies beneath the empty expanse of that aforementioned parking lot. Also buried beneath that asphalt is Gabriel Prosser, the blacksmith who, as Hermine Pinson’s story stunningly recalls, was leader of one of the few large-scale slave revolts in American history.

  Meanwhile, Richmond has benefited immeasurably from 400 years of African American culture, never more so than in the 1920s and ’30s, when the neighborhood of Jackson Ward was home to a cultural zeitgeist that saw it labeled “the Harlem of the South.” Jackson Ward was the place where Maggie L. Walker chartered the first African American-owned bank. It was a place where jazz-era legends came to perform—Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and of course Bojangles Robinson, to name but a few. Like any good scene, it was also home to con men, gamblers, and hustlers, a legacy that is celebrated in Robert Deane Pharr’s The Book of Numbers—the first and to date best noir treatment of Richmond, and a scathing indictment of the racial boundaries of the 1930s.

  These days, Richmond is a city of winter balls and garden parties on soft summer evenings, a city of private clubs where white-haired old gentlemen, with their martinis or mint juleps in hand, still genuflect in front of portraits of Robert E. Lee. It’s also a city of brutal crime scenes and drug corners and okay-everybody-go-on-home-there’s-nothing-more-to-see. It’s a city of world-class ad agencies and law firms, a city of the FFV (First Families of Virginia) and a city of immigrants—everywhere from India, Vietnam, and Africa to Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey. It’s a city of finicky manners (you mustn’t ever sneeze publicly in Richmond) and old-time neighborliness, and it’s a city where you think twice about giving somebody the finger if they cut you off on the Powhite Parkway (that’s pronounced Pow-hite, not Po-white, thank you very much) because you might get your head blown off by the shotgun on the rack. Richmond has a world-renowned art school, a ballet, a symphony orchestra, and galleries galore; it also has semi-annual NASCAR meets that clog the city’s arteries for days. Even in its best moments, it’s full of stark and sometimes vast contrasts, a dy
namic captured poignantly here in the wonderful story by Dennis Danvers.

  Richmond, in its long, complex history, has seen everything America has to offer, and has at times stood for its worst, darkest bits. It is the oldest of those churning urban centers whose simple existence gave birth to America’s particular art form of violence, desolation, and hard knocks. It’s also a hell of a place to live. We, the editors and authors, love this city. Try standing on a rock in the middle of the James River as the evening sun lights up the tinny but somehow magnificent buildings of downtown. You’ll see. It’s quite a sight. When you accept a city not only for its strengths but also for its weaknesses, when you realize that the combination of the two is what gives the place true beauty—when, indeed, you recognize that the combination might also make for some very good storytelling—well, that’s love. We love Richmond, Virginia. We hope you like it too.

  Andrew Blossom, Brian Castleberry & Tom De Haven

  Richmond, Virginia

  December 2009

  PART I

  NEVERMORE

  Then—in my childhood—in the dawn

  Of a most stormy life—was drawn

  From ev’ry depth of good and ill

  The mystery which binds me still…

  —Edgar Allan Poe, from his poem “Alone,”

  on childhood in Richmond

  THE ROSE RED VIAL

  BY PIR ROTHENBERG

  Museum District

  When I got inside I called her name. My house was dark and quiet, and although nothing appeared altered I felt that something had happened since I’d left for the museum’s summer gala. There was a note on the kitchen table. I scanned it and it made no sense. I stuffed it into my pocket, took back a shot of whiskey, and walked the narrow hallway into the living room. I thought of the note; the words were going to make sense in a moment. I was sure of it, and felt so much like a balloon steadily expanding that I held my breath and winced at the inevitable explosion.

  One month prior, in a storage room below the Virginia Historical Society, I sat before an empty glass cabinet preparing the lamps I would mount on the shelves. There were to be six items of Edgar Allan Poe memorabilia here, among them a lock of dark hair taken off the poet’s head after his death; the key to the trunk that accompanied Poe to Baltimore, where he spent the final few days of his life; and a walking stick, which Poe left here in Richmond ten days before his death. The items were on loan from the Poe Museum across town for the city’s celebration of the poet’s bicentennial, as yet seven months away.