Oregon Hill

by Howard Owen

  David Junior was an only child. I think his mother kind of lost it after the shooting, and she was in and out of Central State, and then committed for good. David Junior, like Dewey Tate, wound up being haphazardly reared by an aunt. I lost track of him, just knew he left right after his senior year and joined the Army. One day, when I was in college, somebody told me he had become a cop.

  When I’d run into him from time to time over the years, we never had much to say, and I can’t really blame him for treating my suggestion that we “catch up” as the bullshit suck-up ploy that it is.

  I have to write a story about the arrest, after, of course, posting everything I knew to our free Web site.

  I can feed the Web monster from my laptop, but before I go back to the office, I do want to make at least a token effort at contacting the girl Andi knows from high school.

  I call around noon and am semi-surprised when the girl, Stephanie, answers.

  I explain quickly that I’m Andi Black’s father and that Andi said she knew Isabel Ducharme. And could I talk with her just a bit, to get some idea of what Isabel was like.

  She surprised me by saying, “Sure. I don’t want to go back there anyhow. All those creeps hanging out, all running up at once every time somebody tries to get in or out.”

  She doesn’t seem to lump me with all the other creeps, maybe because it’s just me and not the pack, maybe because of the Andi connection. Either way, I’m grateful.

  We meet at a place off campus that’s vegan. Tobacco is about the only vegetable I have much use for, so I order some kind of organic tea and nibble on the club crackers.

  Stephanie says her parents want her to come home. They probably didn’t want her to come to VCU to start with, or at least they wanted her to live at home. I see their ilk every fall, the parents parking loaded-down SUVs and pickups beside Monroe Park, eyeing the bums over there, looking around at all the old buildings and the art students with their pink-and-green hair, silently wondering, What the hell was wrong with Virginia Tech? Blacksburg’s a nice town.

  But Stephanie likes it here.

  “I mean, what are the odds?” she asks, taking a bite of her beans and rice. “What are the odds that some perv is going to kill you? I figure, Izzy used up all the bad luck for the whole campus, right?”

  She can maybe see that I’m a little shocked by how casual she is about it all.

  “I’m sorry. But it’s just so weird, you know? My dad always said if we couldn’t laugh, we’d all go insane. I think he got it from a song.”

  I nod. She’s funny, talking a mile a minute. I resist the urge to wipe the food particles off the side of her face, just make a little motion with my hand.

  “Sorry,” she says, swiping at her cheek with a napkin. “I get carried away.”

  She says she didn’t really know Isabel that well, just a few chats about classes and guys and home.

  “I think she was kind of rich,” Stephanie says. She looks and sounds like somebody who’s going to be paying off some five-figure loans when she graduates, somebody whose parents said, “Honey, we’ll pay your tuition and fees, but you’re going to have to get some loans and a part-time job.”

  “She actually picked up the check when we went to dinner the first night here. There were five of us!”

  She shakes her head at such wanton spending.

  “But she was nice. She always smiled, and she had the cutest accent. She was from Boston.”

  I ask her if she knew that they’d arrested a suspect.

  “Everybody on campus knows that,” she says, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. “Maddy, she’s in the suite, too, she tweeted me about it like three hours ago.”

  I ask her what she knows about Isabel and Martin Fell. She’s told the cops most of this already, I’m sure. I’m not sure this is germane to whatever I’m going to write, but I have a curious nature.

  “She met him at that bar over on Grace. She had, like a fake ID or something. She looked very mature. Sometimes, she’d stay over at his place. She brought him up one time, and you could see that he was a little older, but thirty-two? Oh, my god!”

  I can tell she thinks thirty-two is somewhere near retirement age.

  The night Isabel disappeared, she’d gone with some other girls to dinner, and then, Stephanie had heard, she was supposed to meet Martin Fell at a bar on West Main.

  “I think she walked there,” Stephanie said. “At least, that’s what we heard the girl who drove said.”

  One of the other girls from the suite saw her later at the place on West Main with Martin Fell, but she said it didn’t look like they were getting along too well. And Isabel appeared to be a little drunk.

  “Not like falling-down drunk,” Stephanie says, “just, you know, toasted a little around the edges. But then Kathy said it looked like Izzy and the guy were arguing about something.

  “She said that next time she looked, Izzy was gone. She never even saw her leave.”

  Stephanie seems to at least temporarily understand the permanence of “gone,” and she tears up. I’m about to do some black-and-white movie thing like hand her my handkerchief, when she shakes her head like a dog after a swim, smiles and tells me she’s fine, fine.

  She tells me that Stephanie already knew what she wanted to be. She had told her, on the first day, that she was going to be a vet.

  “She was signed up for all kinds of hard science shit. She was serious as hell, about school at least.”

  We talk a little more, and then I pay for our lunch and she leaves. She barely looks before crossing the street, as unafraid of the city bus coming toward her as she seems to be of everything else. I think of Andi, and I’m more scared than my pitiful parenting record gives me a right to be. Men and women are equally entitled to walk on the wild side, but how come it’s never a girl doing something like this to some guy? Whoever Martin Fell is, I want him dead in a slow and painful way.

  I talk with the head of the campus cops at VCU for the hand-job piece on what you’re supposed to do to keep from getting killed on campus, then head back to the paper, where Jackson wonders why I don’t answer my cell phone.

  Because I turned it off, I tell him.

  I rewrite the lead story on the arrest, do the sidebar on safety, then write another one that uses most of what Stephanie told me, trying to make Isabel Ducharme look like the smart, interesting young woman I’m pretty sure she was and not an accident waiting to happen. Wheelie makes me fold it into what Baer wrote, since Baer is supposed to be doing the piece on campus reaction. He says something about being a team player.

  Baer’s stuff isn’t nearly as good as what I have, but he gets the main byline. When he asks me for Stephanie’s phone number, so he can “follow up,” I tell him he can’t have it. He seems pissed. Take a number, pal.

  The “team” seems to be short-lived, since the so-called manhunt is over already. Fine with me.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Friday

  Custalow is standing with the refrigerator door open, pondering his choices. He and the side-by-side are about the same dimensions.

  He’s still getting used to having choices again, I guess. I don’t imagine they asked him what he wanted for breakfast down at Greensville.

  He doesn’t say much, but that’s OK. I’m not much of a talker, either.

  Abe Custalow grew up in Oregon Hill. His mother and step-father lived right down the street from us for a while, before either they or we moved. We moved a lot in those days, but always somewhere else on the Hill.

  Maybe because we were both just a bit different in a place where people tended to look like their parents married their first cousins, we hung out together.

  Custalow is a Native American, American Indian, whatever you call it these days, but I kid him that he’s really kind of a rinky-dink Indian. The Pamunkey can’t even get gambling casinos, for God’s sake. Most of them live around here, and they have blended in so well that usually only their last names give them away. A
be said his stepfather wanted him to change his, but Abe’s mother wouldn’t let him.

  Abe went into the Marines the same week I started at VCU. He was a pretty good student but had no desire to open another book again after we graduated from high school. Plus, he was born to be a Marine. Probably would have done twenty or thirty years in the Corps and retired with a great pension, but his mom got cancer and found out that neither her husband nor any of Abe’s sibs were there for the long haul. So Abe came back, about four years into his hitch, around the time I was graduating from college, to take care of his mom. She died a year later, but he never left again.

  His most notable physical characteristic is his width. Abe Custalow is just under six feet tall, and he’d probably weigh 200 pounds if he never ate again. His bones probably weigh 200 pounds. He’s just wide. He sometimes has to turn sideways to get through doors. Abe was a damn good high school tackle, offensive and defensive, and, while he doesn’t have a mean streak in his body, he does have kind of an on-off switch without any gradations to it. When Abe starts fighting, he doesn’t stop fighting until everything is settled. Which probably is why he’s spent the last three years as a guest of the state.

  He was working as a roofer, a job Les Hacker got for him after the machine parts company where he’d been for more than twenty years downsized his ass.

  One of the other roofers was a bit younger than Custalow. Hell, Abe would have been about forty-four or forty-five then, which would be about 110 in roofer years. Anyhow, the younger guy apparently started ragging on Abe for some reason. He knew he was an Indian because of his name, and he fixed on that, all the time doing stupid kid stuff like talking pidgin English—“Me wantum hammer,” shit like that—and asking about his teepee and his squaw.

  Mostly, they said, Abe let it ride, just giving a tight little smile. But the guy wouldn’t let up, like he had a death wish. And one day Abe Custalow granted it.

  The two of them were up on a roof. Abe said it must have been 100 degrees, and there was no shade. When it was time to break for lunch, Abe realized he hadn’t heard his partner for a while, and when he turned, he saw that the ladder was gone from the edge of the two-storey house. Down on the ground, the younger guy was standing there grinning, the ladder on the ground beside him.

  The guy got in the truck and drove off, leaving Abe there. Abe didn’t have a cell phone, and the guy left him there for about an hour. When he got back, Abe was just sitting there on the roof, waiting, not saying a word. The kid probably realized about this time that he’d kind of overstepped the bounds of humor, so he put the ladder back up, and Abe came down.

  He said he only meant to slap the guy around a little. But then the guy picked up a hammer, probably out of fear. When Abe got close enough, he hit him with it. Custalow said he was swinging for his head, but Abe moves faster than you’d think for a big man, and he only got a blow to the shoulder.

  Abe says he doesn’t remember very much after that, except that when the cops got there, he was holding the hammer and the amateur comedian was lying on the asphalt driveway, most of the way to dead.

  The judge gave him five years with two suspended, and Abe served almost all of it. When he got out, he found out that his family members were standing about as tall as they were when his mother got sick. His latest girlfriend (in Abe’s world, “wife” and “girlfriend” aren’t cut-and-dried terms, and legal documents are seldom involved) had moved in with some other guy.

  We heard that Abe was living at a homeless shelter, but nobody knew exactly where. To my discredit, I didn’t try very hard to find him. When I saw him for the first time in more than three years, he was just sitting out there in Monroe Park. He’d been right beneath my window, and I didn’t even know it.

  So, Abe came to live with me. I told him he’d have to get a job, because I needed some help with the rent. By that time, I’d been paying it all on a reporter’s salary for almost a year, and my savings were turning into spendings.

  He can fix just about anything, and when we suddenly needed another maintenance person here, right after Christmas, I pitched hard for Abe. The board wasn’t too crazy about it, but even McGrumpy had to concede that “as long as we’ve got a murderer living in the building, we might as well get some work out of him.”

  Most of our neighbors like Abe, and I think they understand that the unfortunate roofing incident probably was a one-time thing. And Abe is good. He lets Susan pretend she’s the boss of him, but we all know who to go to when some ancient piece of our tired-ass building needs attention.

  I’ve just gotten out of the shower, and Abe looks up from his inspection of the refrigerator.

  “Oh. Your ex-wife called.”

  Only one of my ex-wives ever calls. Jeanette is willing to accept calls from me; we actually have a pleasant relationship, almost bordering on affection. But she never phones me. Chandler, aka The Mistake, is a reporter in Boston. That would leave Kate.

  “How long ago?”

  “Five minutes, maybe. She said it was about the guy they arrested.”

  I find the sticky note with her number on it. She answers on the first ring, like a linebacker pouncing on a fumble. Which is how she always answered the phone.

  “Fine,” she says when I ask her how she is. “I’m fine. But this is business.”

  I’d already figured that much. Kate does call from time to time, but it’s usually about “business,” often along the lines of “I haven’t gotten your rent check yet.”

  “I’ve been contacted by a Mrs. Louisa Fell,” she says, and waits a second or two for the penny to drop.

  “As in Martin Fell?”

  “Right,” she says. “Hold on. I have a call.”

  She did that when we were married, too. You remember the good stuff, but you remember the other, too, like never saying no to another call, or how she would jump out of bed about point-five seconds after the alarm went off, even on Saturdays and Sundays, when my past-prime body does some of its least-worst lovemaking.

  “Sorry. Had to take that one. Anyhow, Mrs. Fell got in touch with another lawyer here, and she said, among other things, that she wanted to talk to the reporter who wrote the story, wants to set him straight. So he sent her to me, and I’ve set it all up.”

  I’m to be at my ex-wife’s office at one, so Mrs. Louisa Fell can straighten me out.

  “I’m not sure this is worth it,” I tell Kate. “I mean, he’s arrested, so this isn’t much of a story now.”

  “It might be. She says she has some information.”

  “So tell her to call a cop.”

  “She did. They just blew her off.”

  At 12:55, I’m telling the secretary that I’m here to see Ms. Kate Ellis. It’s still hard for me to get my head around that. It took her about nine months to get married again, this time to someone a little more age-appropriate.

  Kate doesn’t get up when I walk in. She still looks damn good. She dresses more professionally now than when she was a law student, and that auburn hair is a little more reined-in. She might have gained a pound or two. But I wouldn’t kick her out of bed. I never did.

  Sitting at a round table is a plain-looking woman with gray hair in a bun, wearing bifocals. She has on a print dress. Her eyes look like she hasn’t slept in some time. She’s been crying.

  Louisa Fell appears to be about sixty-five, but she hasn’t enjoyed the luxury of retirement yet. She says the shirt factory down in Southside let her take time off without pay.

  “But I had to get this mess straightened out,” she says. “I know Marty didn’t kill nobody.”

  You’re his mother, I want to tell her. Of course you don’t believe your darling boy chopped a girl’s head off.

  But I just sit and listen.

  The Fells were from one of those hard-shell Baptist strains. They probably didn’t handle snakes, but they weren’t necessarily opposed to the idea, just hadn’t gotten around to it.

  Martin had “strayed,” but when he wanted to
go to college, she did what she could to help him with it. Mr. Fell had died in a logging accident while Martin was in junior high.

  Martin Fell, as I already know, never graduated from VCU. His mother says he just needs one more course, which usually means he’s about a thousand years away. I wonder when Andi will reach the “one more course” phase. Martin Fell has been working different jobs around the campus, and he’s had a few girlfriends.

  I know that, too. Martin Fell had a habit, it turns out, of trolling the bars around VCU and glomming on the fresh meat, girls naive enough to believe he was twenty-five instead of thirty-two, doing graduate work or some such shit. The cops had dug that up. When, I wonder, are you going to tell me something I don’t know? I think about Andi, about how it might have been her, and I’m about ready to tell Momma that I don’t give a shit what they do with her darling son, as long as it’s slow and painful.

  “But he never treated none of them bad,” she says, tearing up again. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  I point out that the cops seem convinced that Marty decapitated Isabel Ducharme, which is pretty harmful.

  “He wasn’t even there,” she says, wiping her eyes. “That’s what I tried to tell ’em, but they won’t even listen to me. They say I’m just trying to cover up for him. They called him bad names.”

  I ask the obvious question. Kate doesn’t say anything, just listens for a change.

  “How do you know he wasn’t there?”

  “Because he was with me.”

  According to Louisa Fell, she was awakened just after mid-night by a car pulling into her driveway. She got up and saw that it was her son.

  “Sometimes, he comes home on the spur of the moment like that,” she said.

  She met him at the door, and he told her he just wanted to get away from Richmond for a little bit, that he just wanted to see her.

  “I think he might have been drinking,” she says, and she actually blushes.

  “He had something spilled on his shirt. He told me it was probably mustard. He said he stopped and got some gas and bought a hot dog. He always was a sloppy eater. So I told him to take it off and I’d wash it, but he said wait ’til in the morning.