Oregon Hill

by Howard Owen

  Lately, though, it seems to be catching up with me. Custalow said a guy told him you could fool just about everything but your liver. Maybe my liver is telling me something by making me puke every time I have a dozen or so Millers.

  “You OK?” Abe asks me as I try to get out the front door, checking to see if my pants are zipped and my shirt is buttoned all the way. I only have fifteen minutes to get to the jail by the time Kate told me to be there.

  I tell him it doesn’t matter much whether I’m OK or not at that point. As I leave, I at least have the grace to thank him for whatever it took to get me out of Penny Lane and into my bed at the Prestwould.

  He almost smiles and tells me he’s seen worse. I wonder where. He hands me a ball cap, and I realized I haven’t even combed the remnants of my hair. Sometimes, days like this, looking in the mirror is just too damn painful.

  Kate’s waiting for me on the front steps. I’m maybe five minutes late, but she looks at her watch and frowns. She used to think it was amusing when I’d show up late by a few minutes or half an hour or whatever.

  “You look like hell,” she says, and I know she knows I’ve stepped off the wagon. The last year or two we were married, she tried very hard to convince me that I should be on that venerated vehicle, but I always told her that, if I did take a short sabbatical from it, another one would come along soon, and I’d get on that. As with the punctuality thing, that answer seemed to get less and less amusing.

  But, hell, she’s throwing me a pretty big bone today, so snip away, Kate.

  We are led to the cells, which have about twice as many citizens in them as was intended. We don’t produce much in this country anymore, but we are making prisoners faster than we can build prisons, apparently.

  They bring Martin Fell out. He looks even younger than he did in the perp walk picture we ran in this morning’s paper. I can see how he was able to pass himself off as eight or ten years less than his driver’s license age. He is small, maybe five-seven, and thin, I’m guessing 140 pounds. He seems so fit that, if it weren’t for his reputation as a very committed heterosexual, I’d think he was gay. His hands and feet are small, and his blond hair is cropped close. Everything about Martin Fell seems small. I wonder how he’s faring in the city lockup. The look in his eyes says: not well.

  “Th-thank you,” he says to me and Kate. “Thank you for being my lawyers.”

  Kate explains that I’m a reporter for the newspaper, and that it might be in his best interest for me to know what really happened. She further promises that I won’t quote anything he says, that I just want some background.

  He turns toward me, and he doesn’t look quite as thankful as he did before.

  “You all have just about convicted me already,” he says. “I saw the paper, what that shrink said about psychopaths, and what the police said. And you just printed it. Didn’t anybody ask me about my side of it.”

  I try to tell him that we just printed what we were told, but it sounds kind of lame.

  “Plus,” he says, getting cranked up now, “your music critics suck. They don’t know shit about anything that’s happened since like 1975.”

  Well, true. We could beef up our pop music coverage a bit. Martin Fell probably doesn’t care that in the last round of cuts we laid off the only guy on the staff who knew Bono from Sonny Bono.

  Kate gets us back to the point by telling Fell that, if he’s going to have a prayer of getting out of this hole he’s in, he’d better find a new attitude.

  He takes a deep breath, tenders me a half-hearted apology, and we’re on track again.

  He tells Kate and me about last Friday night, and it seems to mesh with what his mother said. He rubs his head and looks around, jumping at every loud sound, of which there are plenty in this Bedlam for the legally if not actually sane.

  He tells us about the argument he had with Isabel, the face-slap, how she stormed out, how he didn’t go after her.

  “I should have,” he mumbles, holding his head in his hands. “I should have. Then it never would’ve happened.”

  I can’t tell if he’s sincere. If he is sincere, I can’t tell whether his regret is over Isabel’s death or over the fix he’s in. Probably both.

  He gets to the part about driving down to Chase City. He says he went to bed after his mother did, then woke up at five A.M., unable to sleep. Not wanting to be confronted again about his ETA for graduation and his career plans, he slipped out of the house and drove back to Richmond.

  When he got back, he says, he crashed until sometime after noon, then tried to call Isabel that evening, but no one answered.

  “I didn’t even know she was missing ’til the next day, when I went around,” he says.

  Kate asks him why he didn’t go to the police then. He hesitates a beat, then shakes his head.

  “I didn’t know what they’d think.”

  Probably what they thought when they checked out the security cameras and the suitemates and the other patrons at Three Monkeys—that Martin Fell was a Grade-A, number one suspect, an overworked and underappreciated police force’s dream. Case closed.

  “What about the confession?” I ask him. The way Kate looks at me, I know this is news to her.

  “I never said it,” he says. “Not really. They’re lying. That cop, the big, mean one, he kept at me all night. He told me they’d throw me in the city jail, let them use me any way they wanted, if I didn’t sign that paper . . .”

  His voice quavers, and I wonder if they haven’t done what Shiflett threatened anyhow.

  “He told me . . . He said, ‘If you just say it was you, you can prove later it wasn’t you, but if you don’t say it, we’re gonna let ’em . . .’ ”

  Here, he pauses and looks over at Kate, then down.

  “He said he was gonna let ’em fuck me to death.”

  Fell swallows. Kate offers him some bottled water, and he takes a sip.

  “The cop said if I just nodded my head when he asked me if I did it and then signed that paper, that they’d put me in a private cell; and that he’d get me a lawyer so I could make my case to him.”

  “So you nodded your head.”

  “Yeah. I nodded my goddamn head, and I signed that paper, and then they threw me in there anyhow.”

  He looks at Kate and asks her, “How can they do that?”

  They had to have a lot of help from a dumbass who apparently forgot everything he ever learned from watching cop shows on TV, I’m thinking.

  I mentioned that some of the interview hadn’t been taped, that the tape seemed to have run out. Kate, I could see, was learning this for the first time, too.

  We talked awhile more, and then I remembered something.

  “Your mother,” I asked him. “When she was telling us about your midnight trip home, she said you had a stain on your shirt. What was it?”

  He looks at me like I’m speaking Urdu. He starts to ask me what the hell that’s got to do with anything, then knows what I want.

  “Mustard,” he says. “It was mustard. I was eating a hot dog I bought at the place I stopped for gas and must have spilled it on me.”

  We wind it up.

  “Hey,” he says to Kate, “get me out of here. At least get me somewhere where I’m safe. Please.”

  Kate tells him that’s her next stop, that she won’t quit until she’s sure he’s in a private cell by tonight. And I’m sure, from the set of her jaw, that this will be done.

  We’re walking down the steps when she turns to me.

  “Asshole!” she says. “When were you going to tell me about that shit!”

  I remark that she didn’t ask me, and that I couldn’t tell her my source, but that it was almost certainly true.

  I finally more or less mollify her, or at least redirect her anger over being left out of the loop by the cops who haven’t told her as much as they should have. After all, I tell her, she’s only been on the case less than a day, only just met her client for the first time.

&nbs
p; I ask her if Martin Fell has talked with his mother yet.

  Yes, she says, but not for very long.

  I tell her I’m thinking that Martin Fell’s mother doesn’t seem like the kind to cook up a story with young Martin about a mustard stain just to lend credibility.

  “I tend to think,” I tell her, “that our boy was in Chase City on Friday night and Saturday morning.”

  “Yeah,” she says, nodding.

  “Next,” she says, typing a note to herself on the Crackberry, “I have to find out who the mean cop is.”

  I save her the trouble.

  “His name is Shiflett.”

  The newsroom is pretty quiet on Saturdays. A lot of what goes in Sunday’s paper was done before sundown on Friday. You have a handful of reporters and photographers, plus copy editors and one in-charge editor.

  It’s Sally Velez’s turn to be the adult supervision. I tell her that we might have to make some changes in our big Sunday package.

  Sally sighs, because what you mostly want, if you’re the week-end editor, is no drama, a quiet couple of days babysitting the place and making sure everybody hits deadline, maybe catching up on your annual review paperwork.

  “Why?”

  “Because I think there’s a very good chance Martin Fell didn’t do it.”

  I see Sally shift gears, go through all the stages of grief for her dearly departed quiet weekend, reach “acceptance” and get her game face on. Sally’s a pro, and I think she knows I wouldn’t stir up shit just to be stirring. Hell, I wanted a quiet weekend, too.

  I tell her the story, and I can tell she’s impressed, but she’s not totally on board.

  “You know, Wheelie really wants this story to run. We’ve been promoting it like hell.”

  No kidding. The skybox on top of section A1 today is all about Isabel Ducharme and Martin Fell, with a high school yearbook photo of her on one side and another version of the perp-walk picture on the other. “How could this happen?” the big words ask, as if we’re going to tell them Sunday for a buck seventy-five. I hope Isabel’s mother has gone back home and doesn’t have to see her dead daughter’s picture used to sell newspapers.

  I tell Sally that, whatever the story is, we probably want to get it right.

  She sighs again.

  “OK, I’m calling Wheelie. Just one thing, and I hate to ask, but this isn’t some kind of Leonard Pikarski make-up call, is it?”

  Only Sally, or maybe Jackson, would have been around long enough and know me well enough to bring up Leonard Pikarski.

  It was during my first stint as night cops reporter. I had just gotten on full time at the paper after spending a couple of postgraduate years interning there for as close to nothing as the law allowed. The old night cops guy was bicycling back to work after his lunch hour one night, and somebody on Monument Avenue opened a parked car door right in front of him. He hit head-first on the paving stones, and I had a full-time job.

  I’d been on it for all of a year, showing “promise,” according to my annual review.

  That spring, two sisters were murdered in their home on the North Side. They apparently had let a man into the house after school one day. When their mother got home, she found the fourteen-year-old tied to a chair with her throat slit. The other one, the twelve-year-old, had been strangled in another chair, facing her. Before he’d murdered them, the killer had raped them both.

  Leonard Pikarski was the prime suspect all along. He lived two doors down, and he was a convicted sex offender who had spent two years in prison for molesting a thirteen-year-old when he was nineteen. At the time he entered my life, he was thirty-three. He was borderline retarded, and his parents had moved to Richmond from Baltimore to start over.

  Pikarski had done yard work around the neighborhood and was not as aware as some might have been of the concept of respecting others’ space. He was a friendly man, and he was prone to walk up uninvited to neighbors in their backyards or on their front porches. Some of the neighbors said he gave them the creeps, the way he’d just stare at them and overstay his welcome, which in most cases seemed to have run out the minute he got there.

  When his past was dug up, all kinds of stories emerged. Leonard was seen staring into someone’s bedroom window. A dog turned up missing shortly after Leonard was seen petting it. Leonard seemed unusually attracted to young girls, and especially the two sisters.

  The cops got him to confess. The trial was six months later and took a week. Despite no solid physical evidence, he was sentenced to death. He might have gotten life without parole, but he kept insisting, despite an earlier confession, that he was innocent. The judge noted the lack of contrition on the part of the defendant, and I was pretty sure Leonard didn’t know what contrition was. He just seemed confused.

  I covered the whole mess, including the execution a little over a year later. I’d been touched by the brutality of the whole thing, the way it destroyed a whole family, and Leonard was a hard man to have empathy for. He tended to smile at unfortunate times, and he just irked me at some gut level. I didn’t like Leonard Pikarski.

  He got kind of fixated on me, I guess, because I’d written so much about the case. He wrote me from prison, in his sad, third-grade hand, with about every third word misspelled, always telling me he didn’t really do it, that he had proof, to please help him. I shared some of those letters with other reporters, for the entertainment value. They always got a laugh.

  “Hey,” I’d announce. “Got another Leonard-gram.”

  They let me write a column once, a real privilege for a young reporter, a couple of months before he was executed. I wrote about what a pathetic loser he was, how even the most craven, sadistic killer was always claiming he didn’t do it. I even shared some of the more embarrassing parts of his letters with our salivating readers. The last five words of the column: Burn in hell, Leonard Pikarski. He never wrote me again.

  I had one of the reporters’ seats at the execution itself. I told myself this was necessary, part of being a hard-nosed reporter who had to see it all.

  The room was a dingy off-white, and most of it was filled with the glass booth where we all sat. There was another booth, with a one-way mirror, and I assumed that either one or both of Leonard Pikarski’s parents were in there.

  The gurney was shaped like a cross. One idiot, a couple of years earlier, insisted on the electric chair instead because he said he “didn’t want to die like Jesus did.” I’m thinking he had a moment of regret about that decision, just after they threw the switch.

  There was a bright red phone on the wall, in case the governor called at the last second, which he never had.

  Leonard was led in by six big guys, who strapped him to the table. I knew they drugged them beforehand, and he didn’t look like he really knew what was going on.

  Still, it seemed like he was looking right at me. As much as anything, it reminded me of the one time I’d had to take a dog to the vet’s to be put down—the same look of confusion and mild disappointment.

  They asked him if he had any last words. You couldn’t hear him, and the flack later told us he just said he wanted to sleep. It seemed like he said more than that, but who knows? Then they put in the IV lines, and pretty soon Leonard Pikarski drifted away, I presumed to that hell I’d wished for him earlier.

  It was summer, and the room was not well ventilated. It didn’t smell like death, whatever that’s supposed to smell like, just fear and sweat and maybe some undefined odor that you only get when you’re watching the life ebb out of a helpless human being a few feet away.

  Nobody said anything to each other as we left. As rude and crude as some reporters can get, I’ve never known anybody who was at an execution to joke about it later.

  Afterward, I was always cool and reserved about it, telling others—especially young female reporters—what a necessary evil capital punishment was.

  About six months after his execution, they caught the killer. He’d tried to abduct a girl on her way hom
e from school in Louisa County, but she escaped and got a neighbor to call the police. Through sheer luck, a deputy was nearby, and they surrounded him in a barn. Before they could capture him, he killed himself.

  He had a motel room key, and when they searched the room, they found an assortment of used underwear. They also found a diary. He apparently was quite proud of his achievements. He’d raped and killed another girl in Ohio a few months before he murdered the sisters. He hinted that there might have been others.

  The same people who had been so entertained by Leonard Pikarski’s letters seemed to avoid me in the newsroom now.

  A few days after all this came to light, I got a call. There was a gentleman to see me in the lobby. He had information about Leonard Pikarski.

  I went down. At first, I didn’t recognize Leonard’s father. He seemed older than he had at the trial.

  Mr. Pikarski walked up to me. He had a box with him. Without saying a word, he opened it and threw the ashes on me.

  “You people,” he said, his voice quiet and calm, “you’re always so sure. You wanted Leonard. You got him.”

  He turned without another word, and left.

  I brushed Leonard Pikarski’s ashes off me as best I could and went back upstairs, past the stares of the receptionists and the security guard.

  I was never quite so sure again.

  I look Sally in the eye.

  “Sorry,” she said, “I had to ask.”

  “It was a long time ago,” I tell her. “One doesn’t have anything to do with the other.”

  So she called Wheelie, and I could tell from her end of the conversation that our managing editor wasn’t buying into any last-minute changes in the preordained story line. Mostly, I figured, he just didn’t want to get his lazy, already half-drunk ass into the newsroom on a Saturday. Wheelie, like a lot of suits of my acquaintance, thought newspapering was a nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday job.

  Sally kept after him, though. Finally, just to get some peace and quiet and to avoid the hassle of coming all the way back into the office from the West End, he allowed me to put some of my caveats into the main story. He wouldn’t let me use anything with unnamed sources, which knocked out anything Peachy had told me; but we were able to tell our breathless readers that the boy and his mother both claimed Martin had been down in Chase City when Isabel Ducharme was being butchered.