Oregon Hill

by Howard Owen

  “We talked maybe half an hour, and then I went back to bed.

  “And when I got up in the morning, he was already gone.”

  I ask her if she’s sure it was midnight, and she says she’s positive.

  I do some quick math. I know from the cops that Martin Fell and Isabel Ducharme allegedly had some kind of argument about nine thirty at Three Monkeys, and that she left a little bit later, maybe ten, apparently after slapping his face. I know Chase City is about an hour and a half from Richmond. I know they’ve traced the UPS box containing Isabel Ducharme’s head back to a doctor’s office in the West End. Somebody got on the computer there and created the label that went on it at one forty-three on Saturday morning.

  Even if Martin Fell caught up with the girl and killed her almost immediately after she left the Three Monkeys, threw her body in the trunk, drove to Chase City, spent half an hour or so bonding with his mom, then drove back to that doctor’s office, cut off her head, printed out the label and put the box with all the others to go out Monday morning, then drove her headless torso out to the South Anna River and dumped it, it is barely on the edge of possible.

  Either Louisa Fell is lying or mistaken, or the numbers don’t work.

  I look into her face and see nothing but a mother who is absolutely convinced that her son is innocent. Unfortunately, I see that look often among the mothers of young thugs about to be rightfully convicted of crimes rivaling this in heinousness. The statehouse beat made me cynical about politicians. Night cops just make me cynical about homo sapiens.

  Still, I can’t quite shake her off, the way I’d like to. It’s time to move on to the next big thing that’ll sell a few more papers or at least enliven our Web site. I’ve been wrong before, but my reporter’s bullshit detector has generally stood me well over the years.

  Kate tells her that she’ll think about it, and I know that the “it” is taking Martin Fell’s hopeless case, something that normally would be in the hands of a bored, semi-competent court-appointed attorney.

  After Louisa Fell leaves, Kate tells me that the woman does indeed want to employ the services of Kate’s venerable, old-money law firm, and that she’s thinking about taking the case if the firm agrees. Mrs. Fell has taken out a loan on her paid-for home. She is going to bet what little she has in the world on her son’s innocence. It makes me want to cry.

  I mention the hopelessness of it to Kate, who’s already checking her Crackberry to see what’s next.

  She looks at me, gives me a kind of half-smile, and says she thinks the firm might be willing to give Mrs. Fell a discount.

  I ask her why. She says she has this crazy thing about justice. I note that I didn’t realize Bartley, Bowman and Bush felt that way, and she said that they might need a little convincing.

  She glances at her watch and I can see that it’s time to leave. At the door, she asks me about how it’s going with Custalow, and I tell her we’re bonding. Plus, I add, he makes it possible almost every month for me to get her a rent check that won’t bounce.

  “Let’s try for ‘every,’ ” she says. I lean forward and she turns her face slightly so I’m kissing her cheek.

  We were together for almost six years, which probably is a testimony to her endurance.

  I’m in the office by three. Jackson tells me Wheelie wants some kind of overview, tying it all up.

  I tell Jackson why I’m not so sure things aren’t coming untied.

  “She’s his mother, for Christ sake,” he says.

  “Yeah, and she’s probably full of crap, but what if she isn’t?”

  “Just write the story. Get Baer to help you with some of the details.”

  I tell him I’ll be back in an hour.

  I don’t have a lot of friends down at the station. Gillespie stopped speaking to me when I tried to get him fired last year after his Barney Fife does Dirty Harry act caused an addled woman to jump off the top of the Prestwould. I’m thinking that my old Hill buddy David Shiflett will be similarly incommunicado.

  I do have one ace in the hole, though—or at least a queen. Peachy Love. That’s her name, swear to God. It’s what happens when your parents name you Pechera and their last name’s Love. Did they get that from a Scrabble board?

  Anyhow, Peachy used to be a reporter. She was the first woman at the paper to do the night cops beat, and she liked it so much that she became a cop. Actually, she’s a public information officer, which usually means you’re in charge of giving the public no information and the press even less.

  But Peachy has some loyalty to her old occupation. I love it when my co-workers call journalism a “profession,” as if you actually had to graduate from college or something.

  Peachy has been willing, from time to time, to do something that surely would get her fired if the police department ever found out about it. She will, now and then, give us some actual and useful information, if she’s sure it can never be traced back to her.

  I know where Peachy lives. Actually, I’ve had breakfast there a couple of times, years ago, when I was still doing politics and she was doing what I’m doing now. She sees it’s me at the door and lets me in, looking both ways to make sure no one else sees me. I don’t think she cares about the man-in-the-house part of it. She just doesn’t want anyone to know she hangs out with reporters.

  She has the day off, and I’m lucky to have found her in. She’s obviously getting ready for a big evening, dressing to the nines, with her dress, nails and shoes matching. African-American women have it all over their pale counterparts there, if you ask me. But I’m just stereotyping.

  She offers me a Miller High Life, and I want to take her up on it, but one beer tends to lead to another, and there is a story to write. She takes one for herself, twisting the cap off, and we sit down.

  “You’re pretty sure this guy Fell did it?” I ask.

  She takes a long swig. The bottle’s almost half-empty. I’m suddenly very thirsty.

  “Oh, yeah. They got the videotape, at the dorm, and they got witnesses at that place, The Three Chimps . . .”

  “Monkeys.”

  “Yeah. Whatever. Anyhow, people saw them have some kind of fight, saw her slap him, saw her leave. Saw him leave not long after.”

  She takes another drink and the bottle’s mostly empty.

  “And you heard about the confession, right? The guy leading the interrogation said he confessed, but just to him, and when his partner came back, the perp said he never said any such thing—but there was a signed piece of paper there, with his John Henry on it.”

  Peachy and I know there are confessions and then there are confessions. There’s the guy who turns himself in, crying like a baby, and says he did it. And there’s the guy who comes out of a small room with a couple of cops after having his memory jogged for a few hours.

  Peachy is quiet for a few seconds.

  “Who did he allegedly confess to?”

  “Well,” she says, “you’re not hearing this from me . . .”

  Which is always a hopeful lead-in.

  The interrogation was done by David Shiflett and another cop, named Walker. Peachy knows Walker, and he told her they kept Fell for about six hours, somehow convincing him that he didn’t need a lawyer, that if he wanted a lawyer, then it was really going to get serious. Like it wasn’t already.

  “Walker said Shiflett told him to leave for a few minutes, and when he came back, the perp was crying, and Shiflett said he’d confessed, but Fell said he hadn’t. They looked at the tape, and it looks like the guy is nodding his head when Shiflett asks him if he did it, but you don’t hear him say the words. When Walker comes back in, the guy says Shiflett made him sign the confession. That’s when he finally demanded a lawyer.”

  Peachy says she’s sure that Martin Fell did it.

  “I mean, what are the odds? It’s always the pissed-off boyfriend, right?”

  Usually is, I admit, but it isn’t going to be exactly airtight if all this was done before they let Fe
ll have a lawyer.

  “There was one thing, though,” Peachy says. “Some of the time, it wasn’t taped. They said the videotape ran out or something, and there was a gap in there.”

  “So, just Shiflett and Fell and Walker, no tape?”

  “Not even Walker. The part with no tape was when Walker had left the room.”

  I tell Peachy about Martin Fell’s mother.

  “Yeah, she said the same thing down at the station, but she’s his mother. Can’t trust mothers.”

  “Did anybody believe her?”

  Peachy hesitates. She gets another High Life. I look away and try to think of other things.

  “I saw that tape,” she says. “I was sitting next to Andrea Parsons, who’s got almost twenty years in, one of the oldest gals on the force. And we looked at each other, didn’t say anything, but I know she was thinking what I was thinking.”

  “Which was?”

  “She seemed real. I haven’t been doing this shit long enough to know, but neither one of us thought she was acting like some white-trash momma-ho trying to get her little criminal-ass son off by lying through her teeth.”

  “So,” I ask, “you might not have the right guy?”

  “Well, I think we have the right guy. I mean, he’s this squirrelly little fucker whose hobby is picking up eighteen-year-olds who don’t know any better, and he was there. Usually, that means he did it.”

  “Usually,” I say. We talk for a few more minutes, about people she knew at the paper and about the sorry state of print journalism.

  “You picked a good time to jump off,” I tell her.

  She doesn’t deny it, just asks, “What about you?”

  “Too old to jump. I’m going down with the ship.”

  “Well,” she says, “maybe somebody’ll toss you a life jacket.”

  Back at the paper, I get with Baer, who’s already written about half the story. It’ll run Sunday, and I’m supposed to supply all the gory details I’ve been able to dig up. I give Baer some of the stuff I got from Stephanie the suitemate, trying to ensure that he gets nothing that will besmirch a dead girl’s reputation. It has always been my policy that there should be a higher journalism standard than “The dead can’t sue.”

  This has gotten me in hot water before, and could be the reason I’m back on night cops, the beat of my youth, after about twenty years covering the state legislature.

  About three years ago, we got a new executive editor, who took a more proactive view of the news than had previously been practiced around here. In other words, he wanted us to get off our asses and go after stories a little harder than was our habit.

  There was a former lieutenant governor of our state who was dying of AIDS. Pretty much everyone knew it, but the new EE wanted it in print. I didn’t think that was necessary and told him so. When I refused to sneak into his hospital room during his last week on Earth, they found someone else who would. There’s always someone who will. Then, I refused to have any part in the seamy postmortem, where the guy’s whole life was sold in the Sunday paper for a buck seventy-five. And, voilà, I’m back on the prestigious night police beat. I am lucky, as Jackson and others never hesitate to remind me, to have a job at all.

  So I tell Jackson to just make it a single byline, all Baer’s; but I also warn him that I might have “something else” on the story for the Sunday paper.

  “Something else,” he repeats, and I can tell he’s a little concerned about what “something else” might be. I have a bad habit of not wanting to tell editors about a story before I write it. I think I’m afraid I’ll talk it to death, or maybe it’s just that they’ll be more impressed if I don’t tell them the punch line ahead of time.

  I tell him I still have to nail down some details, and he tells me that Wheelie is definitely going to want to know what “something else” is before it sees the light of day.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be sure he sees it first, even if he has to put down his bourbon and water tomorrow afternoon and come into the office on a Saturday for a change.”

  Jackson sighs.

  I call Kate. Surprisingly, she answers. She probably put somebody else on hold.

  “Do you think,” I ask her, “that I could talk with your client? Sooner the better.”

  I don’t even know for sure that Martin Fell is her client but, as I suspected, she’s on the case. She’s already called a couple of the partners. The BB&B boys aren’t happy, but she’s built up a few bonus points and is going to defend what appears to be the indefensible. Kate always had a soft spot for the downtrodden. I’m proof of that, even if it didn’t last forever. What does?

  She says she thinks she can get me in to see him early tomorrow morning, with the condition that I can only use what he says for background.

  I agree right away. She seems surprised, even though we both know that’s the only way it can be done. Maybe it’s because when we were married, especially toward the end, we didn’t agree on much of anything.

  I work until sometime after midnight, when Sarah Good-night comes by and tells me a few of the reporters are going over to Penny Lane. Normally, I’d try to find an excuse not to come along, but I’m feeling particularly virtuous, on account of turning down not one but two High Lifes at Peachy’s earlier.

  It’s a habit, one I haven’t broken and probably won’t. Do something good and then reward yourself by doing something twice as bad.

  I tell Sally where I’ll be and that I’ll have my cell phone on. She frowns but doesn’t say anything discouraging.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Saturday

  The digital clock reads 10:07, which gives me most of an hour to get up, be presentable enough for the city jail, and get down there.

  I make a pass at the shower, dry off my large, shiny head, put on clean undershorts and T-shirt, then put the T-shirt back on right-side out. The clothes I wore last night are lying beside the bed, and they pass the smell test.

  I’m thinking maybe I didn’t act as badly as I feared last night until I put my left foot inside one of my Docksiders, and it feels squishy. And then I realized it smells gag-reflex bad. I pick up the shoes and run over to the sink, where I wash them out as best I can.

  I turn around, and Custalow is standing there, not revealing any amusement or judgment that might be in that inscrutable head of his.

  “How,” I ask him, not really wanting to know, “did I get puke in my shoes?”

  I guess you need to know: like Mr. Bojangles, I drinks a bit.

  We went down the street to Penny Lane. There were six of us. I remember that. All the others were younger than me. I think I’m kind of a mascot for the kid reporters. They might not want to be me, but they want to think that they work in a business that has so-called characters (if not character) in it. They think I’m some kind of romanticized embodiment of a reporter who probably never really existed, except in the minds of old-fart editors who embellished and polished stories until the hopeless alcoholic with no talent and less scruples—the guy they wished in hell many times as deadlines were blown, participles were dangled and newsrooms were trashed—morphed into a Bogart-Gable hybrid.

  Not that I’m an alcoholic.

  Alcoholics fall down and hurt themselves all the time, lose their homes and families, get fired and wind up living in a box down by Texas Beach.

  I haven’t broken anything since the ankle I messed up at Edo’s Squid, and they’re lucky I didn’t sue them about those damn stairs. I’ve got a home as long as my ex-wife doesn’t evict me. I haven’t been fired, although some would say covering the one A.M. murder beat is a step down from hobnobbing with the governor. It depends on your taste in people.

  Plus, alcoholics go to Alcoholics Anonymous, and you’d never catch me dead near that place. I can quit. I’ve done it a hundred times.

  Usually, though, breaking up with booze just leads to a more vigorous reunion. Like last night.

  It had been awhile since I’d had anything much to drink, and t
he memory of those High Lifes Peachy was knocking back made me thirsty. And, hell, it was just beer. And Penny Lane is only eleven blocks away from the Prestwould.

  Anyhow, we were able to seize the upstairs room, the one with the pool tables, and more people started coming over. Sarah Goodnight and one of the young photographers seemed to be hanging on my every word, and the more I drank, the funnier I apparently got. I got so funny that, at some point, somebody who knew where I lived called Custalow, who came and got me. I’m lucky I didn’t get paged. The mean streets, unlike me, were quiet last night.

  I have fleeting memories of being somewhat inappropriately attentive to young Sarah, and there was a look she gave me that I hope I’ve dreamed. But since the puke in my shoes is real, the rest might be, too. I’ll have to make peace later.

  I’m the victim of a strong stomach. It was a point of pride with me when I was young that I could drink anybody under the table. It was something to boast about in Oregon Hill, right up there with boxing skills and the ability to work on your own car. Out of necessity, I wasn’t a bad boxer, but if it weren’t for my drinking prowess, being a journalist would put me somewhere in the near-pussy range, Hill-wise.

  Most guys I hung out with hit a point in the evening where they really, really didn’t want to drink anymore. I’ve heard McGonnigal say if he had any more Ten High or Old Milwaukee or cheap burgundy, he’d puke. And then he’d drink. And then he’d puke.

  But I never seemed to reach a saturation point. Alcohol always tasted good to me. Still does. Usually, I could maintain. Sure, my bosses got upset about the vodka I sometimes drank from a Styrofoam cup in the office, and maybe I’d still be covering the capitol despite my other issues if they hadn’t found out about it, but I almost never missed a deadline. And it’s not like some of those hayseed legislators weren’t matching me drink for drink.