Oregon Hill

by Howard Owen

  She’s been the super here five years, and Custalow only started four months ago, so she has assumed the role of his boss. Abe goes along with it, doesn’t complain to the manager. The last guy got arrested for setting his girlfriend’s car on fire, and since Abe was crashing with me already and had a background in building maintenance, among other things, he seemed like a natural to replace him.

  McGrumpy opined that we were trading one criminal for another, but enough people knew Abe by then that they were willing to give him a second chance.

  “After all,” Grace Montross said, “he didn’t kill anybody.”

  Well, not on purpose.

  I tell Custalow I’m going upstairs to have a sandwich and a beer, and he says he’ll be awhile. I leave them there, standing, smoking and staring at something neither of them really knows how to fix.

  I get a call on my cell phone as I’m taking the elevator up. It’s Jackson, my editor.

  “Better get over here a little early, Willie,” he says. “Wheelwright wants to get the team moving on this.”

  “The team? Have I been drafted, Enos? Is Wheelie going to give me a signing bonus.”

  “The Isabel Ducharme team.”

  It must grind Jackson’s gears to have talk like this, but he’s got more bills than me, and so he’s a team player. He acts as if I’m wearing a wire when I ask him to tell me what he really thinks of the new world order, whose goal seems to be to save money on newsprint by reducing our circulation to zero.

  It’s a ten-minute walk to the paper. I get there at 2:10, which is ten minutes later than Wheelwright wanted but fifty minutes earlier than the time at which they start paying me.

  Wheelie glances at his watch and gives me a look. I tell him traffic was a bitch.

  The “team” consists of me and Jackson, who’ll be the team leader, Sally Velez, who’ll be the “first-read” word editor, a photographer who seems to be picking his nails with a folded-up piece of paper, a designer, an artist (gotta have locator maps), a representative of our crack online operation, and two other reporters, Sarah Goodnight and Mark Baer. Baer has been here for five years. His hobby is sending out résumés.

  I can’t help but notice that only three of the ten people in the room are reporters, but that’s the way it goes lately.

  We should be talking to friends of Isabel’s, Wheelie says, and “working the traps” with the police, who would dearly love it if we went away until they call a press conference and announced that they’ve caught the killer. We should talk to shrinks, find out what would make someone do something like this. We should run a story on being safe on college campuses. We should feed it all to our Web site as soon as we get it. The Web guy nods enthusiastically at this.

  Don’t get me wrong. I really, really want to catch this guy. But it makes me a little queasy how Wheelie’s eyes gleam. Newspaper people are as bad as cops about the tragedy turn-on. Worse, because we don’t actually accomplish anything, don’t catch anybody. We just go by afterward, like the guy said, and shoot the wounded.

  He says someone needs to check into the girl’s background: “You know. Did she sleep around. Was she a party girl?”

  I suggest, maybe with more irritation than was intended, that we should at least wait until we have some idea of what happened before we paint poor Isabel Ducharme as the town slut.

  Wheelie stares at me. Jackson, standing behind him, gives me the “shut up” look.

  “This is news,” he informs me. “We need to give our readers as complete a picture of who the victim was as we can.”

  I think of Andi and hold my tongue, for once.

  So, we divvy it up. Sarah will try to round up a shrink for a thumb-sucker on why psychopaths are psychopaths. Baer will go on campus and harass students, maybe find out who eighteen-year-old Isabel Ducharme has been screwing. I’m supposed to find somebody to talk about how not to get your head cut off. That and keep in touch with the cops.

  I don’t mention the phone number I was able to parlay out of the name Andi gave me. I’d like to make that call myself.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Thursday

  I wake up about ten. The message light on the phone is blinking.

  “Willie? Pick up if you’re there. I know it’s early, but they caught him.”

  Jackson.

  A couple of the copydesk guys came by after work last night and helped me finish off the majority of a half-gallon of Early Times. I’d savored the idea of going back to sleep for another hour or so. Not to be.

  By the time I get half-dressed and down to city hall, smoking my breakfast on the way, the press conference has started without me. All the TV stations are well represented.

  On the dais, L. D. Jones, our police chief, sits along with a couple of mid-level cop-bureaucrat types, our knucklehead mayor and David Shiflett.

  The chief is explaining how they pored over the video from the camera in the lobby of the victim’s dorm and had, with corroboration from Isabel’s roommates, determined that she had dated one Martin Fell, age thirty-two, the night she disappeared. So much, I think, for talking with Andi’s old high school acquaintance. Cops beat me to it, for once.

  Nobody looks good getting arrested, but in the picture they show us, Martin Fell looks worse than most. He’s a little guy. They list him as five-nine, and he looks skinny as hell. He has an eyebrow and a nostril pierced and some kind of tattoo on his neck. He has dark, spiky hair. He looks dazed and confused. One of the TV guys asks if there’ll be a perp walk later and the chief says yeah, and the rest of the TV people perk up. Fresh meat.

  Other evidence indicated that Fell was the prime suspect, the chief says. Plus, he confessed. He was now in custody. Shiflett is there because apparently he was the one who was heading the investigation and put it all together.

  They play the “ongoing investigation” card when we try to learn anything else, leaving us to our own devices.

  I catch up with Shiflett outside, hoping for some kind of Hill homeboy advantage, even though I’d never been that tight with him. Hell, he was three years ahead of me in school.

  “So, you pretty sure this is the guy?” I say, and he just half-turns and stares at me.

  Finally, he speaks.

  “I’ve got nothing to say. When we get this nailed, we’ll talk. Until then, nothing. Nothing.” He bears down on that last word.

  The way he looks at me dissuades me from trying to work any kind of angle with him.

  I hand him my card, the one with “political reporter” crossed through and “night cops” written in. Never got around to getting new ones made.

  “Call me. Let’s have a beer and catch up,” I say, and he takes the card, never looking at it, just me, and puts it in his pocket.

  “Catch up on what?” he says, then turns and walks away, leaving me to deduce that it was only a rhetorical question.

  Well, what the hell. David Junior Shiflett has had a tough life. Anybody in Oregon Hill could tell you that.

  It was part of the lore and legend when I was growing up. David’s father, David Senior, was thirty-four years old. It was the summer of 1969, so I was nine years old. David the elder was shooting pool, the story went, at the place on Pine that closed sometime back in the eighties. There was a guy at the next table who came by from time to time, slumming with the poor folks.

  Valentine Chadwick IV was twenty, home for the summer from Princeton. He fancied himself quite the hustler, and he did sometimes take some major green off a few of the locals; probably because he needed it less than they did, he didn’t give a shit if he went double or nothing after losing fifty dollars in a game of eight ball. But he lost more than he won, so they tolerated him.

  Val Chadwick, they said, could be had if you let him drink long enough. He was still a kid, and he didn’t quite know how to hold his liquor. He’d get a little careless, and sometimes that carelessness caused his mouth to activate before his brain really kicked in. Sober, he knew to win poor people’s money gr
acefully. When he got past about the sixth or seventh beer, though, he could forget where he was.

  I remember it was in the middle of a heat wave. That Saturday night, when I heard the sirens, I slipped out of my frying-pan bed, put on some shorts and was out the window. Peggy’s bedroom was on the other side of the house. I could hear her snoring. The asshole sharing her bed that summer was somewhere else, as was often the case.

  Goat Jackson across the street had done the same thing, and we walked toward the flashing lights, steering clear of other adults who might know whose kids we were. It was hard to get away with much on the Hill back then.

  All I remember, really, was the sheet with David Shiflett’s body underneath and the wet lines trickling from it, headed downhill toward Belvidere and the state penitentiary. That, and David Junior holding his mother as they stood on the sidewalk and watched, dry and helpless.

  We had most of the story by the end of breakfast the next morning. The asshole was happy to be the bearer of bad tidings. He had been in the crowd the night before, although we didn’t see each other, thank God.

  The argument had started over a beer. A sip of beer, actually, probably about two ounces, maybe a dime’s worth back then.

  David Shiflett was playing rotation at the next table over. There was a little ledge next to the wall, and guys would put their beers there while they shot.

  Val Chadwick came back from the bathroom, zipping up and looking for his beer. He saw Shiflett pick up a Budweiser, which was Chadwick’s choice, too, and take a swig. He went up to Shiflett and accused him of stealing his beer. Nobody, then or later, could say for sure who made the mistake. Did Val Chadwick forget that he had finished his last beer and hadn’t bought another one yet? Did David Shiflett reach behind him and pick up the wrong bottle?

  It became a moot point. On Oregon Hill, at one o’clock on a Sunday morning, somebody gives you a little shove and calls you a beer thief, with half the young guys in the neighborhood there, you have to do something. I knew that at nine. Even now, almost fifty, I’d have to do something, ineffectual and self-destructive as it might be.

  David Shiflett was what they called a good provider and had never been known to beat his wife, but he had a hard side. He’d been to Korea, like about every other guy his age on the Hill at that time, and came back kind of a second-rate war hero. He’d been a good street fighter before he left. Sober, even Val Chadwick would have known to just assume the guy made an honest mistake.

  But Chadwick gets right in his face and, as they say now, disrespects him.

  Shiflett just stared at the boy for a long second or two and then advised him to fuck off, which was generous. Many of the teeth that adorned the bar’s gravel parking lot had been put there by David Shiflett.

  Nobody expected the gun.

  Chadwick pulled it out, and people melted back toward the walls. It being the Hill, nobody much left. They wanted some entertainment and just got far enough away to reduce the chances of catching the stray bullet.

  They said Shiflett stared at it for what seemed like a long time, and then he laughed. He had a scar on his right cheek from a knife fight a few years earlier, and I’ve heard men say that he tended to laugh at unexpected times, like when he was about to tear you a new asshole.

  He walked up to Val Chadwick, straight toward him while the pistol pointed right at his gut. They said he stopped about six inches away, and then he told Chadwick to take his play-toy gun and put it away before he kicked his Ivy League ass all the way back to the West End.

  And then he slapped his face.

  Chadwick might have experienced spontaneous sobriety at about this point, realizing who and where he was. At any rate, he didn’t say another word, just turned, put the gun back in his pocket and walked out. People were laughing, offering to buy David Shiflett a drink “as soon as you finish the one that Ivy League pussy bought you.” The asshole said they all figured it was over, and thought maybe they had seen the last of Valentine Chadwick IV.

  Shiflett apparently played another game or two and then left.

  They heard the gunshots, and when they got outside, Chad-wick was standing over David Shiflett, who was lying on the ground dying with five bullets in him. Chadwick didn’t even try to get away, just waited there for the cops.

  It was a pretty big deal. I’ve read about it in our archives. Chadwick’s father was old tobacco money, and the family got the best lawyers in town, led by Lester Corbett.

  Nobody thought Val Chadwick would get much if any time for what he did. The lawyers decided they had a better chance if they didn’t expose Val Chadwick to a jury, and they got Judge Tayloe, who’d grown up on the same side of town, more or less, as the Chadwicks. People on the Hill said that was the way it was—rich people looked after each other.

  By the time Corbett and the rest of his team finished, they’d cobbled up a bright young man, considerate to his mother and father, with a limitless future, who had made the mistake of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was afraid of David Shiflett, who had struck him and threatened him. And then, when he was outside, trying to clear his head, Shiflett had accosted him, advancing toward him with murderous intentions. They said Chadwick was very convincing when he told the judge, with tears in his eyes, that he warned Shiflett twice, but “he just kept coming.”

  It might have all worked. He was afraid. His mind was clouded by the alcohol. But the Chadwicks hadn’t counted on the prosecutor from hell, or Dewey Tate.

  Buckley Lance would have been in his late twenties then, because he’s almost seventy now, in his eighth term in Congress. He wasn’t from around here, as they say, had come to Richmond for law school from Bristol and planned on staying. He was young to have a case like that, but more experienced heads wanted no part of it. Maybe no one told Buck Lance he was supposed to lose, or at least not to win very large. Maybe he saw the bigger picture, starring himself as the Defender of The Little Guy.

  Whichever, he gave it his all. He got plenty of witnesses to talk about what a dick Val Chadwick had been that night and many others, the truth squeezing out between the defense lawyers’ objections.

  The ace in the hole, though, was Dewey Tate. Dewey wasn’t much older than I was then, but he tended to be a little wilder. He was more or less reared by his aunt, who had eight kids of her own and not many parenting skills left for her absent sister’s kid. It was enough, I’m sure she thought, that she more or less fed and clothed him.

  Dewey ran wild, and on that particular night, he was in the gravel parking lot where Val Chadwick, almost sober, came to lean on his car and ponder what came next. Dewey was with a girl who was a year older, doing what you did on the Hill when you were that age and without adult supervision.

  Supposedly, Dewey came to the prosecutor, because no one had seen him hiding there that night. He turned out to be an amazingly coherent, convincing witness. His story was as dead-on as those bullets that stopped David Shiflett. When Corbett and Chadwick’s other attorneys tried to confuse or bully him, he just stared at them with his hard little eyes and repeated what he’d said already.

  What Dewey said he saw was “that fella,” pointing at Chadwick, coming out the door and going to his car, opening the trunk, sitting there, and waiting. Chadwick saw Dewey and the girl and told them to get the fuck out of there, and the girl did. Nobody ever called her to testify. Dewey stayed, hiding in the bushes next to a trash barrel.

  Dewey testified that Chadwick definitely had a gun in his right hand. He definitely stood up when, some minutes later, David Shiflett came out the same door. He definitely approached Shiflett, and he definitely shot him, twice standing and three times on the ground. Dewey said that Shiflett just seemed surprised. According to Dewey, Chadwick said, clear as day, “What do you think of my play-toy now, asshole?”

  They tried to get the boy’s testimony thrown out, but Judge Tayloe said it was admissible. At some point, the lawyers got together with Chadwick’s father and decided to cut their l
osses. Val Chadwick would plead to second-degree murder. They said that Val Chadwick was really pissed off about that, called his father a coward where other people could hear him. His remorse seemed to be nearly invisible.

  Still, they thought the judge would go easy. Maybe he’d get ten years, be out in five. He’d still have a life.

  But sometimes judges fool you, even ones that belong to your club. Judge Tayloe, it turned out, was offended enough by Val Chadwick’s crime and lack of regret that he put aside any past or future favors from the Chadwick family.

  Val Chadwick got fifty years. He would, even with parole, spend most of his adult life in prison.

  They said things got somewhat messy in the courtroom after the weight of the sentence settled on Chadwick and his family. Screams and threats led to both Val and his father being led away in different directions. A photo in the paper the next day shows Chadwick’s father, his wide, flushed face in a grimace, his jaw set back, with two deputies gripping each arm firmly, as he’s led down the steps.

  Somehow, though, they got the court to set bail. It was for half a million, and Chadwick’s father posted it the next day. Val Chadwick spent exactly one night in jail.

  And then, Val Chadwick apparently decided he could not do the time.

  They found the boat drifting about twenty miles off Virginia Beach. It was a thirty-footer registered to the Chadwicks. Val supposedly had gone down there and taken the Unfiltered out by himself. There was a suicide note, and the anchor was missing.

  There was a lot of conjecture for several months, and people would claim they’d seen Val Chadwick here or there. Some clothing that appeared to have been his washed up on shore at Sandbridge that fall. Eventually even the most hardheaded knucklehead on the Hill accepted that, faced with a lifetime in prison, young Val just couldn’t take it.