Oregon Hill

by Howard Owen

  Then he hung up.

  Andi doesn’t rattle easily. In addition to the drug overdose, she’s been in a couple of impressive wrecks, and I’ve never seen her hands shake before.

  I wrap mine around hers and ask her if there have been other calls.

  “No,” she says, “but I’ve been having this feeling that I’m being followed, the last couple of times I walked home from work. It was just a feeling, but then a cop car came by, like cruising the neighborhood, and I felt a lot safer.”

  I tell her to pack enough things for two or three days.

  “Dad,” she says. Now that she’s a little calmer, I’m Dad instead of Daddy. “It’s just a phone call. It just spooked me is all. I’m sorry I worried you. It’s OK.”

  I don’t want to disabuse her about the true nature of the world, but there’s no time for that.

  “I don’t think they arrested the right guy,” I tell her. “I think he’s still out there.”

  She starts to interrupt, but I hold my hand up and keep going.

  “I think he’s a little pissed at me, and I think you might be in the line of fire. I’m sorry, but we’ve got to do it this way.”

  She says nothing else, just goes to pack.

  “What about my job?” she asks me when she comes out.

  I tell her I’ll call the restaurant. Then I put her and her duffel bag into my car.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To your mom’s.”

  Jeanette and Glenn live out in Highland Springs. On the way, I turn off a couple of times, just to make sure I’m not being followed.

  When we get there, Glenn comes to the front door and I give him the short version, explaining that I have to be in Boston in the morning or I’d take her in myself. Jeanette comes to the door, and she goes off toward the family room with her arm around Andi.

  “I wish that son of a bitch would come around here,” Glenn says as I’m leaving.

  I tell him that I hope it won’t come to that.

  “Wait a minute,” he says and goes into the house.

  “Here,” he says, when he comes back out.

  The pistol is so small that I can hardly believe it can do any harm, but Glenn assures me it can.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “I got something bigger if I need it.”

  It takes him thirty seconds to tell me all I need to know.

  “The main thing,” he says, “is that when you need to use it, use it. Don’t do any half-ass dillydallying.”

  It would be rude to turn down what Glenn Stone obviously sees as a generous offer.

  I tell him I probably won’t need it.

  I hope I’m right.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Monday

  I get to the airport less than an hour before my seven A.M. flight, which doesn’t seem to be enough time these days. I’m in a hurry, but the skies get decidedly unfriendly if you look like you’ve had the crap beat out of you on the way over. The distinctly unfriendly woman at the counter looks at my driver’s license, then at me, then back at the driver’s license again. I guess she’s not used to the DMV picture looking better than the actual person.

  Even my name seems to arouse her suspicion. She seems to think that perhaps I’ve stolen the identity of an African-American named Willie Mays Black. I am able to convince her, by showing her my VISA card and Virginia Press Association ID with the same name on it, that I am not a terrorist. Maybe it was fear of the fourth estate that did the trick. Maybe she just doesn’t think anybody would be dumb enough, these days, to pretend to be a journalist if he wasn’t.

  I get through the metal detector on the third try and notice, as I’m putting my shoes back on, that my left sock has a spectacular hole in it. I head off at a fast clip, then remember my jacket. By the time I’ve gone back and found it, miraculously still there, walking is not an option.

  The commuter jet is already loading when I get to the gate, and I fall into my seat, near the bathroom and next to the obligatory fat woman. The flight attendant, a black guy named Reginald who must have to lie about what he does for a living, starts telling us what to do in the unlikely event that we fall screaming from the sky. I always like the part about using the seat cushion as a flotation device. What we’ll use them for, in that “unlikely event,” is to shit ourselves.

  I did go by Peggy’s to watch at least some of the game with Les. It’s funny. He can’t remember where his glasses are (on his head), and he forgets what decade he’s in sometimes, but baseball he remembers.

  We were watching the Phillies pound the Dodgers, and he started telling me about the time he caught a future Hall-of-Famer when he was at spring training with the Phils later in his career. It was after the Yankees cut him, and he was trying to land somewhere. He remembers everything the guy threw that day. He remembers calling for a changeup and being summoned to the mound.

  “He told me, ‘Kid, I appreciate you trying to help and all, but how about you get back there and take those fingers you keep wagging at me and stick ’em up your ass. I know what I’m doing.’ Struck him out on three pitches, all fastballs.”

  He’s told me that one before, but I don’t mind. The fact that he tells it the same way every time gives it a kind of validity. Besides, I looked it up once. He did do spring training with the Phillies that year.

  I didn’t tell Peggy and Les about Andi, or any of the later developments regarding Isabel Ducharme, although I might as well have. Hell, Peggy’s stoned and Les is stuck in some other year. I could tell them I’d discovered a cure for cancer and neither one of them would remember it in the morning.

  We land not long after the promised eight thirty arrival.

  I’m partial to Boston. They like to drink and they hate the Yankees. Today, though, I’m here on business. If I’m lucky, I’ll have time for a lobster roll and a cup of chowder at the airport on the way out.

  I have the address, and I’ve brought a little map I printed out from MapQuest. I take the same T-line I once took from my hotel to Boston College when a bunch of us used a University of Virginia football game as an excuse for a road trip a few years ago. Today, I’m sober if not completely awake, so finding what I’m looking for should be easy.

  I get off at the stop that appears to be nearest to the house I’m looking for. It feels more like January than mid-October up here, and I wish I’d worn heavier clothes.

  I’m directionally challenged, and when I try to convert what I see on the map into real streets, I soon become lost. It doesn’t help that the streets here seem to have been laid out by the same sadist who devised Windsor Farms. Nothing is parallel or perpendicular, just curves off of curves.

  By the time I find the right street and then walk what seems like half a mile looking for the right number, it’s after ten. I know, from scouring the archives of the Boston Globe online, that Philippe Ducharme runs some sort of investment business out of his own home. I’m hoping that means he’s home on Mondays.

  He must be doing well, if the dump I’m standing in front of is any indication. It’s a Tudor that could hold the square footage of about a block of Oregon Hill houses. There appear to be three floors and a basement. Andy Peroni, who actually has some money to invest, said once that he worried when he saw that his broker drove a used car. I don’t think Andy would have any such concerns about Mr. Ducharme.

  I ring the doorbell. No one answers. The garage door is open, and one car sits inside with an empty space for another. I walk back down the street, carefully noting my turns. I had passed a coffee shop earlier, and I go in there now for a four-buck concoction that is, I must admit, better than the stuff we make in the newspaper’s break room. I kill about forty-five minutes, then try my luck again.

  This time, the garage door is closed.

  I walk up and ring the bell. After my experience with Christina Chadwick, I’m expecting something along the lines of Jeeves to answer. Instead, Marie Ducharme appears.

  “Yes?” she says. She looks like sh
e has aged five years since she was pleading for her daughter’s life a couple of weeks ago.

  I try to explain that I’m a reporter from Richmond, and I want to ask Mr. Ducharme a couple of questions. She responds by spitting in my face. I truly didn’t see that coming. She seems to be loading up again as I’m wiping my face when Philippe Ducharme appears, swinging the door open and filling its frame.

  I’ve looked at the photographs from the Globe, but I wanted to see the genuine article. I’ve backed up, out of spitting range. Standing on the next-highest step, I find myself looking up at Ducharme. From here, there is little doubt that I’ve come to the right place. I’m looking at a man in his fifties, gray hair tinted with some blond, enhanced by a fifty-dollar haircut. But it’s the same guy. Flushed from anger and rich food, he has the same close-set eyes—small, cruel, dead little marbles dwarfed by his round face. His mouth is surprisingly delicate, and his nose is more pug than Gallic. I figure he goes about 250, and he looks like he’s more into golf and scotch than jogging.

  “Get out of here,” he says, slowly and deliberately, without a hint of anger in his voice, “or I will break your neck.”

  I think that, even if I weren’t a reporter, he’d want to kill me anyway, just because I’m from Richmond.

  He does have a French accent. It probably wows the potential investors in whatever hedge fund he’s made his fortune managing. But I have to wonder, considering the market, how much longer he can hang on to this place. Maybe he was one of the smart ones who didn’t always tell everyone it was a good day to buy.

  There’s something beneath the surface of that accent, though. I don’t think I’d have picked up on it if I didn’t have a clue already. Now it seems obvious.

  I tell him I’m from the newspaper, figuring my stock—so to speak—can’t sink any lower. I tell him, as quickly as I can, that I’m just trying to make sure they arrested the right man.

  “They have the right man,” Ducharme says, glowering down at me and blocking his wife. “You are just a muckraker. You are trying to get famous. Maybe you will get famous for being arrested.”

  He is punching his cell phone as he slams the door.

  I wait there for a few minutes, not knowing what else to do. I try the doorbell twice again to no avail, before the cops show up.

  They amble out of their squad car, big Irish guys who are pleased to have some excitement on this dull, raw morning in a neighborhood where failing to recycle probably passes for high crime.

  When they are almost to me, hands on their stun guns, Ducharme opens the door.

  “This is the man, officers,” he says, pointing at me. “He will not leave us alone.”

  I have one card left, the only one I brought, really.

  I turn back to Philippe Ducharme.

  “I’m here,” I tell him, “to talk about David Shiflett.”

  It takes a couple of seconds for it to sink in. Then, Ducharme seems to fade. He goes from what an English professor of mine once called saturnine to what I’d call pale as a ghost. If the cops pick up on it, they don’t let on.

  Ducharme tells them he’s made a mistake, that he doesn’t wish to press charges, that I’m an old acquaintance that he didn’t recognize at first.

  The cops only seem put out that they aren’t going to get to use any of their toys on me, at least for now.

  They leave, telling Ducharme to call them if he needs anything else. I detect a hint of sarcasm.

  I am allowed inside what I suppose is a foyer, where I stand and tell Ducharme what I came to tell him.

  “We are in mourning,” he says. “We have lost everything. Why do you torture us?”

  Indeed, at this point it occurs to me that maybe the game is tied, and we shouldn’t go into sudden-death overtime. But it isn’t that simple anymore. Strange as it seems, it’s Martin Fell who screws things up from an Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye standpoint. Being something between Peter Pan and a predator doesn’t justify what he’s facing.

  When we were kids and it rained hard, there were these big holes that would fill with muddy water where they were building the Downtown Expressway. We’d go over there and play. I can remember throwing rocks into the water and watching the ripples radiate out. For some reason, I think of that now, how the ripples would go on and on, one begetting the next.

  I don’t think it’s just about Leonard Pikarski. At least I’ve convinced myself of that.

  “There’s a guy charged with murder,” I tell Ducharme, “and he didn’t do it.”

  “Justice,” my reluctant host says, “sometimes fails us.”

  Sometimes, I tell him, it needs some help.

  “You mentioned a name . . .”

  He’s pretending he doesn’t know who David Shiflett is. I play along. I tell him there’s a police lieutenant in Richmond, the one who got Martin Fell’s confession. I tell him much of what I know—the alibi Louisa Fell and her son have for his whereabouts that night, the missing minutes on the interrogation tape, Awesome Dude’s story, the little piece of plastic with Shiflett’s name on it. I don’t mention Christina Chadwick or anything Clara Westbrook told me.

  “Tell me about this . . . Shiflett,” Ducharme asks.

  “He’s actually a guy who grew up in my neighborhood,” I tell him. “Tough guy, but he had a rough time of it.” And then I drop the bomb.

  “His father was murdered when he was just a kid. I don’t think he ever got over it.”

  I watch his face. He pretty much knows where this is going, but when I seal the deal with those last words, he closes his eyes for about five seconds. When he opens them, it’s as if something has changed, some internal gear has shifted.

  “I see. Yes, that’s unfortunate. But why are you telling me this?”

  “I wanted to see if you cared whether they punish the right son of a bitch for killing your daughter.”

  He flinches, but then recovers.

  “So, this Shiflett, you think he is—what’s the expression— covering up? That he has something that he is trying to hide?”

  “Yes. Definitely.”

  “But shouldn’t you be going to the police with this?”

  “He’s one of theirs. I want to be sure. If you weigh in, demand that they reopen the case, it’ll mean a lot.”

  “And you have written about this, in the paper?”

  “Yeah, what I can write.”

  “What kind of man is he?”

  I tell him he’s a tough guy. That he has a good reputation in the department. That he scares me a little.

  In the background, I can hear what can only be described as screeching. I want to tell Mrs. Ducharme that, if it were Andi, I might be just as batshit as she is right now. Philippe Ducharme seems to be handling it better, but there’s something just below the surface, ticking like a bomb in a bad movie. I wouldn’t want to be around when it goes off.

  There’s not much else to talk about. I’m torn about telling Ducharme anything else. At the end, though, when there’s nothing else to say and it’s pretty obvious that I’m not going to be invited in for coffee, I ask one more thing:

  “Do you know Christina Chadwick?”

  This time, he actually holds on to the door frame, like he might fall down otherwise. And then, he recovers, more or less.

  “No, I don’t,” he says, no louder than a whisper, his color coming back. “But you should leave. Now.”

  And so I do, after handing him my card.

  That last look, and all that it told me, is making the hairs on my arms stand up. Or maybe I’m just freezing. At any rate, I’m glad I caught Philippe Ducharme in a nice neighborhood, in the middle of the day, with potential witnesses around.

  Even at that, I have a definite spring in my step as I make my way back to the relative safety of the T.

  I do have time for that lobster roll and chowder. I’d put steamed blue crabs at Captain John’s up against anything New England has to offer, but this is pretty damn good.

  There’s
nothing to write, yet. Being cocksure of something isn’t the same as being able to write it. But I’m a step away. One visit away.

  I call the paper from my cell phone. Sally isn’t there, and neither is Jackson, so I try Sarah Goodnight’s number.

  “Newsroom. Goodnight.”

  “Airport. Black.”

  I suggest that she might want to rephrase her phone greeting and then ask her what’s going on.

  “It isn’t pretty,” she says, actually whispering into the phone now. There’s such an air of fear around the place these days that some people think they’re being bugged. I went to a party three months ago where the state editor was telling a story about one particularly graceless thing the publisher had done. I couldn’t help notice that he kept jerking his head around while he talked, as if he suspected one of his compatriots was spying for Grubby and the suits. I have noticed this phenomenon twice more lately, in the newsroom. Paranoid whiplash.

  “There’s all kinds of rumors around here,” she says. “You don’t think they’ll fire me, do you, Willie?”

  No, I tell her. They aren’t going to fire you. I don’t tell her that it’s not just because she’s a talented journalist with a bright future, great word skills combined with the Type-A personality that separates in-your-face investigative reporters from the folks eating cheese sandwiches at ten P.M. on the night copydesk. What will truly save her is the fact that she’s a cheap date who won’t get much more expensive for a long time now that they’ve redone the step pay-raises so you have to be about forty before you can afford a house. Plus, Grubby tends to skew toward young, pretty women. Women in general ride in the back, as always, but the young, pretty ones get a pass—as long as they stay young and pretty.

  “You’ll be fine,” I tell her. “You’ll be the last one they fire. On the last day, it’ll be just you and Grubby and the cockroaches.”

  “Ewww. I’d prefer the cockroaches.”

  “Don’t get persnickety, young lady.”