Oregon Hill

by Howard Owen

  “We’ve had a robbery,” Feldman says, when Abe is gone.

  The Barrons, who’ve spent the last two months in Tuscany, returned this afternoon. It took Louisa Barron a couple of hours to realize that most of her jewelry was missing from its not-so-well-hidden place in her bedroom dresser. A few other items were taken as well.

  “I think it was an inside job,” McGrumpy says, his eyes gleaming.

  “I don’t think we can say that, Mr. Feldman,” Marcia says, interrupting. “It could have been anybody.”

  “Yeah,” McGrumpy says, looking at me, “anybody with access.”

  I know where he’s going. The staff does have access, but the Barrons have given two other couples here copies of their keys, in case they’re abducted and killed by terrorists or something. Plus, Fred’s told people he’s had some major investment setbacks—haven’t we all? I’m thinking what was stolen is insured.

  I keep that to myself.

  “I’ve known Abe Custalow my whole life,” I tell them. “He has never stolen anything, ever.”

  “Nah, he just kills people,” McGrumpy says.

  “One person,” I tell him, giving him the evil eye, “and he had a reason.”

  “Still,” Marcia says, “we’re going to have to investigate this, somehow.”

  The Prestwould has its share of excitement, between the occasional 911 call that happens when the median age is somewhere beyond retirement, and the rare cop visit when one of Monroe Park’s medicated denizens gets too big or too small a dose and starts harassing the citizens.

  A deliberate and reasonably sane act of thievery, though, is something else.

  “Well,” I tell Marcia and Feldman, “I can tell you for a fact that Abe didn’t do it.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Marcia says. McGrumpy doesn’t say anything.

  Upstairs, Custalow is watching a pro football game and waits for me to tell him what’s going on.

  “Do they think I did it?” he asks, not looking at me when he says it, knowing the answer.

  “I don’t, most people won’t, but you know how it is. This place is a Petri dish for rumors.”

  “Yeah. Maybe I should go.”

  “You’re not going any damn where. It’d be like admitting you did it.”

  “I don’t want to cause you trouble.”

  I think about all the times Abe Custalow has saved my ass over the years, fighting my fights. I think about how he was the one person who was at all three of my weddings, even the one in the middle, when just about everybody thought—correctly, as it turned out—that I had lost my mind. I remember all the times he’d tried to steer me away from the one drink too many, and how many times he’d gotten me home when the general consensus at the bar or party was to just kill me and throw me in the street.

  “You aren’t going anywhere,” I tell him, trying not to let my suspicious nature plant seeds of doubt about my oldest friend.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Monday

  Somebody at the university decided it would be politically correct to have a memorial for Isabel Ducharme. It’s kind of a hurry-up thing, set for eight tonight. The actual funeral up in Massachusetts is tomorrow, which seems like a long time to wait. Down here, we tend to try to get ’em into the ground in two or three days, but with the autopsy, and with family and friends coming in from at least two continents, I guess this was the best they could do.

  In the afternoon, I walk around the Fan before going in to work. It’s getting cooler now, with real fall just around the corner. The maples are starting to turn. They turn later these days.

  I zigzag, walking a few blocks west, one south, then a few west again, just more or less wandering. When I come out on Main, I’m within eyesight of Three Monkeys. It wasn’t something I planned, but now that my feet have led me here, I might as well go in.

  It’s still warm enough for some people with nothing to do on a Monday afternoon to sit outside. The place always seems packed, and everyone here always appears to be about half my age. They call me “sir,” which makes me want to buy a gun and swallow it.

  I ask one of the waitresses if she was there Friday a week ago, when the girl disappeared. She says she wasn’t, but that Colleen was, and she points out Colleen. I didn’t know her name, but I’ve seen her all over town, one of the legion of professional waitstaff/bartenders who come to VCU and seem to change their major to Night Life at some point. I hope this isn’t Andi in five or ten years.

  “Yeah,” Colleen says, after I assure her I’m not a cop, only a reporter who isn’t reporting right now, “I’ve seen you around, too.”

  I ask her if Isabel Ducharme was a regular.

  “Regular? Hell, she was too young to be a regular. She was too young to be an irregular, too, turns out. Glad I’m not the one who was supposed to check her ID.”

  She’s just come back from a cigarette break, and I’m thinking the upcoming ban on smoking in bars and restaurants is going to hit her as hard as it’s going to hit me. She’s trying to look ten years younger—just like Martin Fell—but I can see the wrinkles around her eyes and a kind of adult hardness. The people who stick around college campuses, in my experience, do have some kind of desire to keep the clock from moving forward. Well, give it your best shot, but there’s an entrepreneurial class that also works this strip, and they know they can get cheap help damn near forever from the Peter Pan wannabes.

  The people working here have a kind of chastened look to them, as if they’re just waiting for the ABC goons to come in and pull their license. Don’t know what I’d have done with my leisure time in college if the drinking age had been twenty-one back then.

  Colleen says she doesn’t remember Isabel at all, but she does remember Martin Fell.

  “Marty? Sure. He was a regular. He seemed harmless, though. I wouldn’t have thought.”

  I ask her if she’d ever seen him act out, show his ass, fail to handle his booze.

  She gives it a couple of seconds’ thought.

  “I never saw him do anything bad. They said he didn’t even hit that Ducharme girl back after she slapped him. Nah, I don’t think he was like that. He was always trying to play the James Dean-Mick Jagger forever-young thing, you know? Lot of that around here.”

  Colleen pushes her blonde hair back and I get a glimpse of the black roots, with maybe a little gray. She might really be ten years older than I first thought, maybe forty-two looking like thirty-two wanting to be twenty-two.

  I drink iced tea with my barbecue sandwich. She answers what she can between customers, but about all she knows is that Martin Fell didn’t seem like a threat.

  She shakes her head.

  “You never know, though, do you?”

  Perhaps thinking that we’re kindred spirits, she asks me if I ever go to Bogart’s for the music, and when I say I do sometimes, she says she’s usually there on Thursdays, when Chez Roue plays.

  I tell her maybe we’ll run into each other, and she says she hopes so with enough enthusiasm to make me think that at least she thinks I don’t need to be called “sir.”

  So who’s fooling whom? I’m forty-nine, hanging out in the same places where Colleen the waitress and Martin Fell have been getting their emotional Botox.

  Back outside, my eyes adjust to the sunlight and I head west again. I’ve gone maybe a block when I hear someone calling a close approximation of my name.

  Turning around, I see the thin and damaged frame of Awe-some Dude.

  He’s even skinnier than I remember, and he’s walking with a pronounced limp. He isn’t pushing a purloined shopping cart, which I take as a hopeful sign. Maybe the poor bastard is living indoors somewhere.

  “Black!” he yells, too loud. With Awesome’s tooth shortage and what appears to be some kind of residual stroke damage, “Black” sounds more like “Back,” and “Where you been?” comes out as “Ere u been?”

  I reach out to shake his hand, and he draws back out of instinct, then relaxes and steps forwa
rd again, grinning. He reminds me, as he has for some time, of a feral cat, expecting the worst from humans even as he looks to them to meet his needs.

  I don’t remember what his real name is anymore. He must be damn near my age, and it’s a miracle he’s still alive, wandering around town like a ghost of excesses past.

  When I first started working at the paper, he had just come here, allegedly to go to college, although nobody ever saw Awe-some with a book. He hung out at the student places on Grace, where they come in and hose the beer and puke off the cement floors sometime between closing time and noon. Some of us went there in the afternoon when we were supposed to be doing more constructive things.

  He was a talker and a doper. His response to just about anything was “Awesome, Dude.” Tell him you just won the Pulitzer Prize or your mother just died, and the response was the same. Only the inflection changed.

  After a very short while, somebody—was it me?—started calling him the Awesome Dude, Awesome for short. Rather than take offense, he reveled in his new name.

  One day, he came in and showed everyone the papers that officially changed his name to Awesome Dude. We turned it into a big party, and I’ve never seen Awesome any happier.

  He became the drifter who never left, just changed bars and hangouts on occasion, usually after a beat-down or an arrest, usually for public drunkenness. I think his family had some money, and over the years, he has managed to keep a roof over his head for most of the cold weather months. He knew we worked at the paper, and for a time he would plant himself on the stone ledge outside the building, chatting up everyone, before our guards made him leave. Awesome was deemed to be an undesirable character, even by newspaper standards.

  Once, one of our feature writers did a story on him. She called him “peripatetic,” then had to explain that she wasn’t insulting him. Around Christmas, we’d take up a collection and give the money to him, no doubt so he could immediately relay it to the ABC store around the corner. He was, and no doubt still is, fond of Ten High. But we thought, high-minded as we are, that a man should be able to choose his own poison. Who am I to deny Awesome Dude a taste?

  After we’d had a few rounds one afternoon, I told him I was going to take him for a home-cooked meal. We showed up on Peggy’s rickety front porch sometime after six. I did it mainly because I liked to drive Peggy crazy. It should not have amazed me that she took to Awesome Dude, embraced him as a kindred spirit. In other words, they were both crazy and both somewhat fond of getting fucked-up. I’m pretty sure Peggy never had sex with Awesome Dude, or at least I’ve convinced myself of that because the image of it might render me permanently celibate.

  Somewhere, I have a picture of Peggy and Awesome Dude standing next to a tent at some concert down on Brown’s Island. She’s wearing age-inappropriate pigtails and a baseball cap. He has on some kind of skullcap and a Springsteen T-shirt. Even then, he didn’t have all his teeth.

  These days, Peggy sees him more than I do. I kind of lost touch all those years covering the legislature. The state capitol has never been one of Awesome’s hangouts.

  He moves closer to me than I would have liked and says, just above a whisper, “I seen something.”

  He’s never been one for small talk, or at least small talk that made any sense and might be a sane segue into a conversation.

  Seen what, I ask him, and he replies, squinting up at me, “I seen her. That girl.”

  He’s looking over his shoulder every few seconds, like the guy at the office party who wants to bitch about his job but wants to make sure his boss isn’t within earshot.

  I know Awesome has a tendency to be everywhere. I also know that he is at best a questionable witness. Once, years ago, he saw a man get himself shot dead over by the homeless shelter on Grace. On the stand, Awesome testified that the shooter was black, then white, and that his hair was either blond, brown or red.

  Still, I’ll listen to just about anybody. It is a skill I’ve tried with middling success to impart to younger reporters. Let the ears work, I tell them.

  Just as he really starts to get going, though, just before I suggest that I buy him—and me—a beer, I see him look beyond me suddenly. I turn around, and a cop car is stopped at the next light, waiting for it to turn.

  Before I can stop him, Awesome Dude has ducked down an alleyway, scurrying into the shadows. I could have caught up with him, but I’m thinking, what the hell. Chances of an Awe-some Dude tip being worth a short sprint are minimal.

  By the time I get back to the Prestwould, the rumor mill is working overtime. A clutch of senior citizens is standing in the lobby, and by their diffident greetings, I know they must be talking about Custalow. I wonder if Marcia will let him go, and then I won’t even have that little bit of rent coming in to help out. I’m sure Abe is not a thief, but I’ve been sure of so many fallacies in my life. I put my microscopic doubts into that dark corner of my mind where I quarantine things like the idea of my mother having sex with Awesome Dude, and I lock the door.

  Only Clara Westbrook comes over to chat.

  “Are you going to the memorial tonight?” she asks me, and I tell her I will if I can get off work for a couple of hours.

  “What a terrible thing,” she says. “That poor girl. I feel so awful for her father—for her parents.”

  Neither Marie nor Philippe Ducharme will be attending the memorial, and to my knowledge the father hasn’t set foot in Richmond since his daughter disappeared, if ever.

  I mention this to Clara, and as I look at her, I see that she’s a little misty-eyed.

  “I’m sure they just can’t bring themselves to come,” she says. “I wouldn’t blame them if they never wanted to see this damn place again.”

  I make it over to court for Martin Fell’s preliminary hearing. Kate is there, of course, and she’s advised Fell to plead not guilty, which he does in a barely audible voice. There is no bail, and he’s taken back to his cell. The charge, as everyone knew it would be, is first-degree murder. A few cops, including David Shiflett, are in attendance, and I see a couple of them shake their heads when they hear the plea.

  Afterward, I ask Kate if she’ll have a cup of coffee with me.

  “Do you think he did it?” I ask her, knowing she’ll dodge that one, but asking it anyhow.

  “I think he deserves a fair trial,” she says, texting someone while we chat. Always the multi-tasker.

  “How about you?” she asks, pinning me with those eyes. Her pupils are always kind of dilated, despite the fact that she doesn’t smoke dope anymore, and it makes them look black. It’s kind of like looking into the eyes of a shark before it attacks. Must work well in court.

  “I’m fine. Thanks for asking.”

  “No, jerk. I mean, do you think he did it?”

  “I don’t know. If I was sure he did it, I don’t guess I’d be down here today. The mother was pretty convincing, but I guess mothers always want to believe the best.”

  “But that thing about the mustard . . .”

  We both nod. It isn’t the kind of detail murderers and their mothers usually rehearse ahead of time so they’re on the same page.

  “What about the missing tape?” I ask her, then assure her that this is just background.

  Before she can speak, her cell phone starts playing the Can-Can. She looks at it and decides the caller isn’t worthy of an immediate response, and I think of the times I’ve listened to her phone ring and then been told to leave a message. Well, ex-husbands shouldn’t expect to be on the A-list. She puts the phone on vibrate and answers me.

  “I don’t know. Their official line is that the tape ran out and they didn’t put another one in right away. I don’t think anybody up the line is covering up. They just want to nail this thing, and they’re pretty sure they’ve got the hammer.

  “But Marty does still swear that he just nodded his head to get a private cell. That doesn’t make him a genius, but nobody suspects him of being one. I got someone I know to check his r
ecords. The kid—the man—is so many points below a C average that he could pull A’s until hell froze over and not graduate. He hasn’t taken a real course in four years.”

  I nod my head and resist the urge to talk. I’m sure Kate Ellis can sweat information out with the best of them, but who the hell do you think taught her, back when I was wringing something resembling the truth from half-drunk state senators and she was trying to get out of law school? Wait for it, I told her, more than once. Wait for it. There’s always something else.

  “There is one more thing,” she says, finally, “but if I tell you, you can’t go out and get this on your own, or let somebody else do it. Hell, the cops probably will leak it soon enough anyhow.”

  I think about that one. You never agree not to publish what you don’t know yet, because you might stumble across it on your own, and then you’re stuck. I knew too many guys covering the capitol who knew everything and couldn’t report shit.

  But I take a chance and tell her it’s in the vault.

  “OK. Here it is. He was arrested once, down in Mecklenburg County. It was after his freshman year at VCU. The girl claimed he tried to rape her. She dropped the charges later, but you know how that goes. How many times did he do some crap like that and nobody pressed charges?”

  Or, I think, he was just a horny but inexperienced dumbass who didn’t know that no meant no. It happens. But I know as well as Kate that this information soon will be public knowledge, and the phrase “was once accused of attempted rape” will be part of Martin Fell’s story line, even if it did happen thirteen years ago.

  When she glances at her watch a second time, I know it’s time to go.

  “Remember,” she says, “this is on the QT.”

  I pull an imaginary zipper across my mouth. I make a move to kiss her cheek, but she doesn’t turn, and we have a real kiss, although when I, by instinct, try to insert my tongue, she backs away.