by Howard Owen
Peggy doesn’t miss much.
“I don’t suppose he told you the address.”
“Why would he do that?”
Les comes out before I leave. He looks older, probably because he hasn’t shaved or washed his face.
He’s not one to hide anything or pretend things are good when they’re bad. He says he only has his “spells” when he wakes up. Sometimes, he says, he isn’t quite on the right planet for a while. And so, he’s afraid to fall asleep, afraid he’ll wake up on the roof and not know how the hell he got there.
Peggy’s taken him to the doctor who told him to make an appointment with a specialist, but they haven’t done it yet. I start to lecture but then check myself, for a change. Sometimes, you’re in a situation where you don’t even want to know how bad it is.
I tell him I’ll come by Monday and we’ll watch the baseball playoffs together.
I drive over to Maplewood. It’s a really nice neighborhood, and it’s cheap. When they built the Expressway, it might as well have been the Berlin Wall. Places like Oregon Hill and Randolph, on the south side of that enormous hole in the ground, were suddenly another world from the Fan. When people in the 1970s decided they actually liked neighborhoods, with restaurants and sidewalks and character, the Fan was revived by Yuppie money. Those of us in East Berlin, on the wrong side of the ditch, were kind of frozen in time. Consequently, a place on Maplewood might cost half to two-thirds what a place with the same design and square footage would cost in the Fan.
It takes me a while to find the Pattersons’ place. The van outside with “We Fix Anything” painted on the side tells me I’m getting warm. The second doorbell I ring, the lady informs me the Pattersons live right next door.
Mrs. Patterson, whose name I never get, says that they haven’t seen Awesome since Tuesday night, and she allows that she’s a little worried, too.
“But, you know, it’s getting right cold. He might have gone to the shelter.”
I go by the nearest homeless shelter, and nobody there has seen the Dude, who is more recognizable in these parts than the mayor.
“He’s around,” one toothless African-American gentleman says, squinting up at me from the steps. “The Awesome Dude always comes back.”
I tell him I hope so.
Clara Westbrook greets me at her front door, the oxygen tank in tow, rolling along on its little cart. She seems to be using it more and more now. She offers me scotch or bourbon when I get there. I demur but offer to make her one.
“Scotch, with just a splash of water,” she says, and I know she means I should just let the ice cubes melt. What the hell. She’s eighty-five. She has a right to not go gently.
I help myself to a Coke, bring the drinks out and see that she’s managed to put out some cheese and crackers for us.
“So, what’s on your mind?” she asks me at last, and I can tell by looking at her that she’s pretty sure of the answer.
I tell her it’s about Christina Chadwick.
“I thought it might be,” she says, and then she tells me what she knows, which is plenty.
They’d been friends since they were girls, both part of the crowd that went from St. Catherine’s to Sweet Briar or Hollins, and then back to Richmond as the eventual wife of someone appropriate. The secret she’s kept for most of forty years weighed on her, she says, but she didn’t think she could betray her old friend, who never should have put that kind of information on her in the first place. “I’m going to tell you something, but you can never tell anyone else,” can be a terrible burden. To Clara’s credit, she doesn’t saddle me with that, even before I tell her that she’ll never be quoted. I just want confirmation.
“We’d already known each other half a life,” she says. The little tubes are draining oxygen from the tank on rollers beside her into her nose, and she seems to be working harder to keep up. I urge her to take it slow. “She had to tell someone. And I was his godmother. Christina was godmother to my oldest. And she’d been drinking a lot that day.”
After she’d told me what she knew, or at least what she wanted to tell me, I asked her why I’d never seen Christina before.
She takes another sip of her scotch, which I see she has nearly finished.
“It just wasn’t the same after I knew,” she said. “I didn’t want to know any more than I did, and just the fact that I knew made her a little shy around me, I think.”
They’d see each other, off and on. You couldn’t help it, with the godmother thing and all, but, before Isabel Ducharme was murdered, Clara hadn’t seen her old friend in nearly two years.
“She called me, almost hysterical, the Sunday after the girl disappeared. I drove over there, and she told me everything. I had no idea. And then when they found her granddaughter’s body . . .”
Clara wipes a tear away.
“This will kill her.”
I ask Clara if she wants another scotch. She thanks me but says no.
She insists on seeing me to the door, which is more work for me than just leaving her there. I help her up and untangle the lines to her tank, then walk beside her down the long hallway. She’s a tough old broad, and I’m all in favor of her fighting like hell all the way to the end. No nursing homes for Clara.
As I open the door, she puts her hand on mine.
“I know it was wrong,” she says. “I know I’m going to pay for this.” I know that, good Episcopalian that she is, she isn’t thinking about conspiracy charges or anything else of this Earth.
I assure her that Whoever is in charge won’t judge her too harshly. There are too many felons for the Almighty to worry about her spiritual misdemeanors.
“Well,” she says, wiping away a tear and managing a smile, “Episcopalians don’t have a very creative concept of hell. At the worst, I think God might make me spend all eternity with Baptists.”
I drive through the Fan before heading to work, looking for him the way you might search for a lost dog. If I had a picture, I’d put it in the laundromats and coffeehouses. Lost: Clueless, sometimes homeless loser. Slight limp.
Gray, stringy hair. Answers to Awesome Dude.
It’s a quiet night at the paper, for a Friday. It’s a little too cold for the kind of heat-rash killings you get in the summer. In general, we don’t have the quantity of mayhem in Richmond we had in the 90s, when the self-immolating drug of choice was crack instead of heroin. These days, the junkies just seem to doze a lot.
I’m wondering where to go next with Isabel and Martin, one who definitely didn’t deserve to die and one who probably doesn’t.
It might be a good time to call the police, I’m thinking, if the police weren’t involved. I know L. D. Jones, the chief, from way back. I still remember him from when he and his twin brother lit up the basketball court for Armstrong-Kennedy, back in the day. Larry Doby Jones and Jackie Robinson Jones. But I don’t know. He’s got to back his lieutenant, and I’d like to have some more information before I take it where it might need to be taken.
There’s something else going on, too, truth be known. I don’t want to share. When I was a kid, they had this contest one time, at Binford. The kid who sold the most tickets to some bullshit chicken dinner, to raise money for the school, got a prize. It was free tickets to the circus, and I had it in mind that this would be the coolest thing I could ever get for Peggy. We didn’t go out much when I was a kid.
I didn’t tell her what I was up to. I went through the neighborhood, knocking on doors and selling my ass off. I went across the Expressway and started working in the Fan. Most people just told me to fuck off, but I discovered the salesman’s secret: If you knock on enough doors and you aren’t crushed by rejection, any fool can sell anything.
When I’d get home and Peggy was already back from work, she wanted to know where I was. I told her it was a surprise.
“Well,” she’d say, “you be careful.” Peggy wasn’t what you’d call a suffocating parent.
So I won the prize. That day, walking h
ome with those tickets in my pocket, I was so proud, ready to savor my moment as the big shot, the hero who took his mom to the circus.
Of course, Peggy got home late that night, and a little under the weather. Somebody at work had a birthday, and they stopped at the Chuck Wagon. By then, Peggy trusted me to let myself in and feed myself without burning down the house.
I should’ve waited until morning, but I’d been waiting all night already, about to burst.
Wanting to be the little drama king, I handed her the tickets, hoping she’d ask me how I got them.
She stared at them for a moment.
“Circus?” she said finally, still holding the last beer, the one the Chuck Wagon let her take home with her. “What the hell do I want to go to the circus for?”
When she woke up the next morning, she remembered the tickets while I was cooking us breakfast. She came up behind me, put her arms around me while I tried to dodge the hot grease spattering up from the skillet, and asked me where I got tickets for the circus.
She cajoled me out of my hurt feelings and I told her what I’d been dying to tell her. We went to the circus together two nights later, and she at least pretended to have a good time.
The point is, I’ve always wanted to do it that way. Savor the big moment, the grand gesture. Look what I did, with no help from anyone. Aren’t I great?
Just after midnight, though, word comes on the police scanner that there’s been a shooting in the East End. From the neighborhood, it’s almost certainly the usual DDGB.
The body’s in an abandoned house on a street where nobody will have seen anything. Mercifully, the weather’s so nippy and death is such a common commodity around here that we don’t have a lot of gawkers. With the body inside, there’s nothing to see anyhow, except a bunch of cops picking their noses.
Gillespie’s there, and he pulls me aside.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he asks me as soon as we’re out of earshot of his brethren.
I ask him for enlightenment.
“These guys want to kick your ass,” Gillespie says. “Hell, I’ve wanted to kick your ass for a long time, but now I got company.”
Cops don’t like it when you question them. It makes them grind their teeth and think about doing bad things. They definitely don’t like it when you question them on the front page of the newspaper. They’d cut me off, but there’s only one daily in town. TV? Right. Those assholes get their news by reading the goddamn paper.
“So you’re sure, you’re all sure, that you’ve got the right man?”
“If Shiflett’s sure, I’m sure,” Gillespie says. “He might act a little weird sometimes, but he’s never wrong. I’m telling you, he always knows what he’s doing. He arrests somebody, he knows they did it. You ever hear of one of his cases gettin’ thrown out?”
I say that I haven’t, but I’m thinking there’s a first time for everything.
This one will land on B2 or B3, near the obit pages where we’ll see some pathetic summation of the seventeen-year-old drug dealer’s life in a day or two. Jackson’s on the night desk, and he tells me to keep it to four inches—something for the suburbanites to tsk-tsk over while they eat their bagels and drink their fresh-squeezed orange juice.
“Why,” I imagine them asking each other, because I’ve heard approximately the same conversation at cocktail parties enough times, “can’t those people get their act together?”
“I don’t know,” I said one time, when I’d had enough bullshit and too much to drink. “I guess it’s because they don’t have youth soccer and swimming. Or fathers. Or schools worth pissing on. Or bedrooms with less than four people in them. Or pets, if you don’t count cockroaches.”
Kate stopped me, as she often did in our time together. She later reminded me that publicly humiliating people seldom caused them to have a change of heart.
Still, it felt good.
I log off and drive home. It’s only ten blocks, but I don’t walk it at night. There are more homeless than streetlights between here and the Prestwould.
Being a renter, I don’t have one of the parking spaces inside the chain-link fence that protects the mortgage-paying residents’ cars.
My space is in the alley between the building and Grace Street, beneath a light the city’s going to replace one of these days. I have to hope when I come home that some student hasn’t blithely ignored the permit-only sign. I hate having them towed, and the truck usually doesn’t come until the next day, anyhow.
This time, there are cars front and back, and I’m pretty proud of the fine job I do of parallel parking the Accord. The spaces aren’t big, and I have about two feet on each end when I’m done.
I’m usually pretty careful. There’s a bank of phones at the convenience store across the street, a leftover from the old days before cell phones. Out of habit, I guess, it’s still a hot spot for dealers. Bad things seem to restrict themselves to defined areas in the city, but sometimes shit spills over, and you have the odd purse-snatching or just general harassment of our older residents by young assholes who cross the DMZ separating Drug World from the rest of us. I asked Gillespie once, when we were on reasonably sociable terms, why the Richmond police couldn’t patrol one little chicken-shit corner.
“If we run ’em off,” he explained, and I swear he was munching on a doughnut when he said it, “they’ll just come back.”
Well, I said, you arrest people for murder, and that doesn’t stop them from continuing to kill each other.
“Yeah,” Gillespie said. “Maybe we oughta stop doing that, too.”
Tonight, I’m thinking about what Clara told me, and about Isabel Ducharme and Martin Fell. And Shiflett. I’m not paying attention.
My first inkling that I’m fucked is the guy who seems to appear out of nowhere in front of me. The fence is on one side, the car’s on the other. The guy’s wearing a ski mask. Shit.
He isn’t that big, but I’m ready to let discretion rule. When I turn, though, the other one is standing at the back of the Honda. He has on a hoodie, and I can’t really make out the face hidden in there. All I can tell is that one is black, the other white. Who says we can’t work together in Richmond?
With nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, I revert to Hill survival skills.
I walk up to the guy in front, who’s shorter than me, and hit him in the stomach as hard as I can.
“Don’t hit him in the fuckin’ head,” Mickey told me when he and Peggy were still married. “You’ll break your fuckin’ hand.” It was the only useful advice the SOB ever gave me. Mickey knew something about hitting.
The guy doubles over, and I do the thing I figured out myself, no help from Mickey. It always worked as long as you didn’t fight the same guy twice. I come up with both hands together, palms up, and catch him under the chin. His head jerks upward. I hope I haven’t broken the asshole’s neck, but you can’t hesitate. When kindness fails, keep going until somebody isn’t moving.
My young assailant goes flying backward, and I see enough daylight to make a run for it. My goal is the convenience store, a couple of hundred feet away. There, at least I’ll have witnesses to my ass-kicking.
Next thing, I’m tasting pavement. I’d counted on the guy behind me hesitating, which he obviously didn’t.
It was probably a nunchuck, the cop told me later. We can’t even make our own deadly weapons anymore, it seems. Whatever happened to good old Louisville Sluggers?
Later, I remember being down, with people kicking me while I tried to crawl under my car and only succeeded in wedging myself there, helpless as a football on a tee.
I try to reach for my wallet, and that just seems to piss them off. I try to talk, but the blood’s flowing pretty good, and I figure I’m in for a trip to the dentist.
I finally croak out the word “money.” One of them stops and laughs.
“Sure,” he says, the first time either one of them has spoken. “We’ll take that, too.”
The beating probably
doesn’t last a minute, but it feels like about two days. They drag me out, and one of them reaches for my back pocket.
I must have passed out, and when I come to, my head is resting on my wallet. I’m bleeding on it. They took the cash and left the Visa card and everything else. Who says young people don’t have good manners anymore?
The only other thing I remember, before the lights went out, is the other one, who hadn’t talked yet, saying, “Blog that, motherfucker.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Saturday
When Jeanette and I were married, we had a dog, this mutt named Killer we’d taken over when our neighbors decided they didn’t want a pet after all. That was in my first tenure on the police beat, and I got home even later then, before all the technological advances of the last twenty-five years somehow made newspaper deadlines earlier.
Despite that, it was somehow my job to walk the dog, who would wake me up, more dependably than an alarm clock, around dawn. The colder it was, the earlier I had to get up. If I didn’t respond to Killer’s telepathic stare as he stood patiently beside the bed, he’d move closer. His breath would knock a buzzard off a fence post. If that didn’t work, he’d give a little throatclearing whine. As a last resort, he’d piss on the floor.
Soon, he had me trained. I would wake up, nine mornings out of ten, to the sight of his dumb, soulful eyes willing me to take him out.
It’s that same sense I have this morning, though it’s well past dawn and the idea of doing something so strenuous as opening my eyes is not appealing.
I open the right one first. Instead of Killer, though, I see Abe Custalow.
“You OK?” he asks.
I open the other eye and ask him if he’s fucking kidding me.
“Well,” he said, “you’re alive. That’s something.”
Whether that’s something good or something bad, it’s hard to say right now.
It was Abe who called the cops. I must have given the guys who found me, probably the same ones who hang out on the other side of Grace Street, his cell number. They woke Abe up and told him where I was, but they probably didn’t want to be there when the police came.