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P.M. meetings.
    I see the back of Wat Chenault’s head and, across the desk, Wheelie’s earnest face nodding in agreement to something— probably something he shouldn’t be agreeing to.
    Wheelie motions for me to come in.
    “I guess you know Willie Black,” he says.
    Wat Chenault gives me the once-over and says, “I expect I do.”
    Chenault was a football player in college. He was a wide receiver, but nowadays the main thing that’s wide is his ass. He looks like one of those lard-butt middle guards you see in the NFL games, the ones who stop the running attack by just throwing their fat guts into the middle of the action like sumo wrestlers and letting the runners bounce off them. Christ, he must weigh 350 pounds. His face is as wide as it is high, with little piggy eyes peeking out from under bushy gray eyebrows. He’s wearing a UVA polo shirt with orange horizontal stripes, as if he searched long and hard in his closet for the one thing that could make him look more obese than he already is.
    He is a homegrown product, as Virginia as blue crabs and massive resistance. He grew up in one of those sleepy towns down in peanut country, about as Heart of Dixie as anywhere in the commonwealth. After college he was a natural choice to be a state politician, with his jock creds, family money and old-boy ties. He got elected the first time despite having falsely claimed that he played for the Washington Redskins. In reality, the team used Wat for a tackling dummy for a couple of weeks in August before sending him back to the Southside. He could slap you on the back and make you feel like he gave a shit. And the ex-jock thing, even if he did gild the lily, didn’t hurt.
    He was the kind of guy who you always knew could be counted on to tell a racist joke, if he knew only “his” people were listening. I have to admit that he did not endear himself to me in my days covering the legislature when I heard, third-hand, that he had taken to referring to me, after a few bourbon-and-waters, as “Woodshed Willie,” his humorous reference to my mixed-race heritage.
    He advanced from the House of Delegates to the State Senate, and he was considering a run at attorney general, gateway to the governor’s mansion, back in 2001 when his political career went farther south than an Antarctic expedition.
    The girl he was caught with was fourteen years old. I still remembered her name when I reintroduced our readers to the story: Leigh Adkins. He swore she said she was eighteen, and maybe she did. But when you’re a forty-six-year-old state senator and you slip a girl who “says” she’s eighteen into your room at a boutique hotel favored by the pols, you might expect somebody to talk. One of our young lions got a tip from a friend who ran the night desk there. He borrowed a camera from photo, took a seat near the elevator, unscrewed the nearest lightbulb, and waited five hours in the twilight before Ms. Adkins, accompanied by the senator and looking somewhat used, came around the corner.
    He managed to take the picture and run down the stairs before Wat Chenault could catch him. Even then, Wat wasn’t doing a real fast forty-yard dash. The picture pretty much told the story, but we managed to track down Leigh Adkins. Actually I was the one who got a call from her sister, who was somewhat pissed. Leigh was, it turned out, one of Chenault’s constituents and a former babysitter of his. The sister had an apartment in Bon Air. She worked down at the Capitol and took little Leigh in one day to see the sausage being made. They visited the office of her old employer, the senator, and the girl must have been overcome by the aphrodisiac of power. The sister somehow let him take her to a party, which turned into a rather intimate gathering at the boutique hotel, where Wat presumably showed her the sausage.
    The young buck and I had a dual byline. He’s at the Los Angeles Times now, so I was left to be Mr. Institutional Memory and remind