Oregon Hill

by Howard Owen

  I’ve seen the drill already half a dozen times. One night the ambulance comes, and in the morning, there’s a sterling silver bowl in the lobby with two white roses inside, beside a silver tray for sympathy cards. I haven’t had much elegance in my life, and acts like this sometimes make me think I’m living in a foreign land.

  Several neighbors looked in on Maddie on a regular basis. She has congestive heart failure and seemed to be getting a little weaker, but she’s hanging in there.

  The thing is, like a lot of the older residents, she leaves her door unlocked, supposedly so help can be administered without breaking down her beautiful front door. And, as she’s said to me, “I’m on the eighth floor, with a locked door out front and a guard desk. Who’s going to rob me here?”

  Well, somebody did. Either while Maddie was asleep or while she was visiting elsewhere in the building, someone apparently has relieved her of a good bit of her jewelry, plus an impressive sum of cash that she kept in a little lockbox on her bedside table. Maddie has never completely trusted banks, being a child of the Depression. The way things are going, who’s to say she’s wrong? Still, a thousand or so dollars are gone.

  She told Clara that she didn’t mind losing the money, but that the lockbox also had her obituary in it, plus instructions for what she was to wear to her funeral.

  There is, understandably, a desire around here to have a lynching and then maybe later a trial.

  McGrumpy just glares in my direction. Marcia calls me aside.

  “I don’t want to make accusations,” she says, in the comfort of her broom-closet office, “but have you seen anything, er, unusual? At all?”

  Like Abe Custalow slipping into my apartment with a lockbox and a pocketful of jewels?

  No, I tell her, I haven’t seen anything unusual.

  “You know,” I tell her, “he was in prison for killing some guy in a fight. From what I heard, the guy deserved it, but it was an accident. I’ve known Abe since we were kids, and I’ve never known him to take anything that didn’t belong to him.”

  “I know, I know,” she says, holding her hands up. “I like Abe. He’s a good worker. He can fix anything. But there’s talk. What am I going to do?”

  What she’s going to do is leave it up to the board, which will be holding a special meeting on Monday to deal with “the problem.” And, right or wrong, that might be it for Abe.

  It’s late in the afternoon when Kate calls, giving me a progress report on her new client.

  “He’s not doing so well,” she says.

  I ask her if he’s in isolation and she says that he is, but that he keeps hitting his head against the bars.

  “He looks like somebody’s beaten him, Willie,” she says. “He’s just so damn pathetic.”

  She says that Mrs. Fell has moved up from Chase City and plans to be here until her boy is exonerated. I want to ask her how soon until hell freezes over. I do ask where Mrs. Fell is staying.

  “Well,” she says, “right now, with me. With us. Just until we can figure something out. I’m going to find her a place.”

  I ask her how her latest husband is dealing with that and she says “fine” too quickly, in a way that lets me know further questioning will not be productive or welcome.

  “How do Bartley, Bowman and Bush feel about you taking this case?”

  She pauses for a couple of seconds.

  “You know the scene in Miracle on 34th Street, where the guy decides to defend Santa Claus? About like that.”

  Oh.

  “The thing is,” she says, “I really don’t believe the little SOB did it. He’s a jerk, and he’s a loser, but I don’t think he did it.”

  If he’s such a jerk and loser, I ask her, why is she risking a future partnership at BB&B to defend him?

  I know, though. Like Peggy, she’s always had a soft spot for losers.

  McGonnigal calls, and when he finds out I’m off, he gets a poker game together—me and Abe, Peroni and Jimmy-something-or-other, whom I assume is R.P.’s latest. Don’t ask, don’t tell, but there are two toothbrushes in the bathroom. R.P. is still playing the field, and I guess he always will. Who am I to talk?

  I don’t believe that R. P. McGonnigal ever “came out.” Coming out always sounded to me like it called for some kind of party, with gifts and balloons. He’s kind of quietly gone over to the other team, although I suppose it would be more correct to say he’d stopped pretending he’s on ours. He handles it with a light touch, which we all appreciate. It’s OK to kid around about R.P.’s sexual persuasion, and there’s always some amusing story about his mother and father’s latest attempts to turn him into a card-carrying heterosexual. His old friends know it’s a defense mechanism and, to some extent, a way to tell the rest of the Hill and the world that he doesn’t give a shit what they think, but he does.

  The game lasts until after midnight. Abe, who has a poker face whether he’s playing or not, is the big winner, and I turn early gold into late crap with the aid of Miller High Life. Beer tends to make me fall in love with inside straights, and forget the rules to some of the more arcane games we’ve made up that could barely be called poker.

  We like to play at McGonnigal’s, because he has this big backyard over in Church Hill where, in summer, you can stretch out, listen to the cicadas, drink beer, harass each other and smoke cigars. In October, we’re forced to play indoors, and R.P., like everyone else on the planet, doesn’t allow smoking in his house.

  We do go outside for cigars after the last hand. I’m leaning against the fence when Jimmy starts asking me questions about the Isabel Ducharme story.

  Finally, he says, “I knew that guy. Used to work with him.”

  “Martin Fell?”

  “Yeah. He was a strange little dude. Worked for me for a while at Community Pride, over on Grace.”

  Turns out that Jimmy was, at one time, head butcher at a now-defunct grocery store just off the VCU campus. R.P., who does creative work for various ad agencies—bouncing around at work the way he does in his love life—seems to be drawn to the meat-and-potatoes, big-truck guys.

  “I hired him maybe eight, nine years ago. He’d been stocking shelves, and he wanted to try something different. I wasn’t sure it was him at first. Name sounded familiar. So I went back and found this picture. They took one of the whole staff, ran it as an ad in the paper. You know, ‘We’re the big, happy Community Pride family,’ that kind of crap. And there he was, big as life. He hasn’t changed much since then. Maybe dyed his hair.”

  He gives out with a short laugh.

  “You say he cut her head off?”

  “Somebody did. Didn’t come off on its own.”

  “Well,” he says, reaching around and scratching his neck, “maybe he’s changed.”

  I ask him what he means.

  “I don’t know why he took the job. Got tired of being a stock boy, I guess, and the meat department paid more. Just took what was available, I suppose. But part of the job was that he had to cut up the chickens. You know, turn the whole bird into those packages of thighs and legs and breasts and wings and livers. Had to learn how to bone them. It ain’t rocket science, but it’s got to be done right.”

  He takes a swig of Budweiser.

  “But this guy, Martin Fell, he can’t do it. He’s there for a week when he comes in one day and, real dramatic, he hands me his apron.

  “You know what the problem was?”

  I shake my head.

  “He said he just couldn’t handle all the mess. The blood and guts, all that. He said he was having nightmares about chickens chasing him around with a knife.”

  He laughs again.

  “Chickens with knives. Well, people do change.”

  I zip my leather jacket up a little more against the cold, and agree that this is apparently so.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Wednesday

  Kate’s call wakes me up. Why even bother with an alarm?

  “Did you see the paper? It didn’t take
you bastards long.”

  No, I tell her, I haven’t seen the paper. That would require opening my eyes, getting out of bed and walking all the way to the front door (peeking out first in case the Garlands have their door open and don’t want an image that will be seared on their eyeballs forever), then leaning down and picking it up.

  The paper’s easier to pick up these days, being considerably thinner than it used to be. (Our “alternative” weekly, which likes to think of itself as the city’s real voice and mostly uses “reporters” who’ll work for food, ran a cover a few weeks ago of a particularly scrawny Tuesday edition lying on somebody’s doorstep. The headline was halfway clever, for those clowns: “Have you lost weight?”)

  All those steps are more exertion than I feel up to right now.

  “Read it to me.”

  “You sound like shit. Oh, yeah. You haven’t had your Special K and Camels yet, have you?”

  “You know I don’t smoke in here.”

  “No, I hope you don’t smoke in there.”

  Her nagging is more gentle these days. I’m a bad habit she’s shaken and doesn’t have to worry about anymore.

  “The story?”

  “Oh, yes. The headline reads, ‘Accused murderer once accused of rape.’ ”

  She reads me the gory details. I wonder if someone leaked it to us, or if we got it through good, old-fashioned research and reporting. My money’s on the former, especially since they laid off the whole damn library staff several months ago.

  “I might have to go for a change in venue,” Kate says.

  I remind her that nobody remembers anything they read in the paper more than a few days anyhow. She reminds me that this little tidbit will be thrown into every story written about Martin Fell from now until they send him away for life or execute his ass.

  “Well, you knew it was coming.”

  She asks me if I want to talk to her client, off the record again.

  “Why?”

  “For some reason, he wants to talk to you. Must have made an impression.”

  I know Baer has tried to get an interview with Fell already, and that he knows I’ve already had one conversation with him. It doesn’t exactly bother me that this pisses Baer off.

  “What good does it do,” he asked me, “if he talks to you and you can’t use it?”

  Normally, I’d say good point, or at least think it. With Fell, though, I need something that can’t be converted into quotes in a story: I need to be convinced.

  I need to know that I’m not just some clown trying to exorcize the confused and guiltless ghost of Leonard Pikarski a quarter-century too late.

  I tell her that’ll be fine. When can Martin Fell see me?

  “He doesn’t have a lot on his social calendar. How about today?”

  We arrange to meet at the jail at eleven.

  Almost as soon as I hang up, the phone rings again. It’s Peggy, which seldom presages good news.

  “Is he on the roof again?”

  “No, he’s fine. It’s about Awesome. Awesome Dude?”

  It turns out that Awesome has come around to Peggy’s, that he’s there right now and really wants to talk to me.

  “He seems like he’s scared,” she says. “He keeps peeking out the window like he thinks somebody’s after him.”

  I tell her to fix him a nice lunch, which I know she will anyhow, and that I’ll be there as soon as I can.

  “He says he can’t wait. Willie, I don’t think he’s just imagining things.”

  Awesome definitely can slip into paranoia gear, but Peggy knows his addlepated brain as well as anybody. Even though she sounds a little out of focus herself, which probably means she’s had her first happy smoke of the day before the breakfast dishes are cleared, I make a snap judgment.

  I call Kate to postpone my jailhouse meeting with Fell, a meeting any reporter at the paper would kill to get, on or off the record.

  “He might not talk to you again,” she warns, and I tell her that I’ve had to prioritize, without getting into details. Never tell a lawyer anything you don’t have to, even if you did sleep with her.

  “Yeah,” she says “you always were good at prioritizing.”

  And she hangs up.

  When I go outside, I curse myself for not checking the Weather Channel. It has turned cold as a well-digger’s ass overnight. I run back inside for a sweater and make the half-mile trip by car instead of foot.

  When I get to Pine Street, I can smell Mama Zu’s a block and a half away and wonder if spaghetti Caruso is on the menu today.

  I walk into Peggy’s place, which is always an assault on the senses. It is made up as if it were designed by stoned hippies in 1969 and never painted or cleaned since. Same as it ever was. I don’t remember us ever getting a deposit back. Peggy would open a letter from our previous landlord, mutter “bastards” under her breath, then tear up the letter. There is a Jimi Hendrix poster on the wall, an honest-to-God lava lamp over in the corner, and some recently adopted cat lying on the couch giving me his best “fuck-with-me” look. The smell is equal parts dope and dirty dishes with a slight bouquet of cat piss.

  She leads me back to the kitchen, where Les sits across the table from where she repositions herself. He seems sober and alert, and I wonder if and how much he disapproves of her getting stoned before noon. Between them, facing me as I sit in the only unoccupied chair, is Awesome Dude.

  “I was going to tell you somethin’ the other day,” he says by way of greeting. “But that cop car scared me. I think they’re after me.”

  The cops have never really been “after” Awesome, to my knowledge, but he just makes himself such easy pickings when they have to make their biannual raids of the homeless and deranged, making a good show of keeping the streets safe for decent folk who don’t want to have their consciences rubbed a little raw by panhandlers.

  So, he does go to jail briefly, occasionally, but nothing serious. It isn’t the worst place he has to spend the night, I’m sure. And if he’d stop being so conspicuous, so “peripatetic,” maybe they’d leave him alone entirely.

  This, though, sounds a little worse than usual.

  “I see that same car, same patrol car, all the time,” he says. “The dude looks at me.”

  “What dude? He looks at you?”

  “The big one. Bear. He looks at me, and then he does this.” And Awesome makes his index finger into a gun, pointed at me.

  I haven’t been back on cops long enough to know everybody’s street nickname.

  I ask Awesome what’s going on, what he wanted to tell me the other day.

  He has to change gears, of which he doesn’t have many. He’s had a hit or two, it appears, which has not improved his razor-sharp mind.

  “Oh, yeah. Tell you. Yeah.”

  Awesome moves closer to the table. His breath threatens to wilt the mums Peggy has, in a rare display of domesticity, placed in the middle.

  “I seen her. That night. I seen that girl.”

  “That girl?”

  “The one that got her head cut off.”

  Awesome Dude has my attention.

  My unreliable source says he was making his rounds the night of October 1st, Friday, a week ago.

  The way his story goes, Awesome is walking down Floyd Street, headed for Meadow, where he can cross over. Somebody on Maplewood is letting him crash in a shed out back, at least until the neighbors complain. He has a network. Usually, when he wears out his welcome in one place, there’s another. When his luck runs out in the summer, it’s the hobo jungle over by Texas Beach or some alleyway, or a dark, bushy corner of some Fan pocket park. In the winter, it’s the homeless shelter.

  He sees a girl walking in his direction, on the other side of the street.

  “It looked like she was headed back towards VCU. She was weaving a little, you know, like she’d been drinking,” he says. “You know, I used to go to VCU. Only need a couple of courses to graduate. I was a history major. I was almost an alumni.”


  I nod and get him back on track.

  The girl, Awesome says, was just past him when he saw the cop car cruise by, headed in the same direction as the girl. Awesome stepped into somebody’s hydrangea bushes, not wanting to attract attention, and he watched while the cop called the girl over.

  “I couldn’t hear nothin’ they said,” he tells me, taking a sip of coffee. “But she kind of nodded her head, and then she got into the car. But then, before they took off, that cop, Bear, looked back, right at me. He shined his big flashlight right at me from across the street. I swear he seen me, and now he’s always pointin’ his finger at me.”

  Awesome seems a little shakier than usual. I ask him how he can be sure that it was Isabel Ducharme he saw.

  “Aw, it was her,” he says. “I seen the picture in the paper. It was her. I’m almost sure.”

  I have doubts about Awesome Dude’s ability to identify anyone across a Fan street at night, but he has surprised me before. Despite the mugging street life has given the rest of his body, his eyes are apparently twenty-twenty, even if his brain isn’t. Once, a few years ago, I was persuaded to give him a ride to the shelter. We were stopped at a light, and he bet me he could read the numbers off a license plate half a block away, one that I couldn’t begin to make out. He won the bet.

  “So, you’re almost sure?”

  “As much as I can be,” he says, a little defensive that I would besmirch his cognitive abilities.

  “Do you know what time it was?”

  “I know it was late. I don’t carry no watch.”

  So, maybe it was Isabel Durcharme. Maybe she was walking back to campus, before or after her set-to at Three Monkeys with Martin Fell. Maybe it was or wasn’t some cop called Bear that stopped and somehow got her to get in the car. Maybe it was the wrong night, wrong girl, wrong cop. Lot of maybes. And maybe-nots.

  Where we’re sitting, you can see out into the backyard one way and right onto Laurel Street the other. Suddenly, I see Awesome turn paler and duck down a little.