Oregon Hill

by Howard Owen

  I told him that, against all odds, my tape recorder wasn’t damaged by the fire. He looked as if he might be having an orgasm.

  So, I spent all day Friday and most of the weekend putting it together. The cops wanted to talk with me. I mean, they really wanted to talk to me. But the company lawyer, who usually is involved with ways to fire people as cheaply as possible without getting sued, did something useful for a change and kept them more or less at bay. Pretty much anybody who could be arrested for something was dead, but the police always want to tie up the loose ends. And cover their butts.

  L. D. Jones himself had a brief chat with me before the lawyer swooped in. He said they knew Shiflett was somehow involved, but they were just biding their time. Yeah, right. The cops still didn’t know who Philippe Ducharme really was. They wouldn’t know until they read it in the paper.

  I couldn’t keep Grubby from reading my drafts. He said “Holy shit!” a lot.

  I’ve done tick-tocks before. Start your story with your hero teetering on the edge of the cliff, with the bad guys coming. Then tell ’em how he got there. Then tell ’em how it all ends. It isn’t rocket science.

  So, on Sunday I wrote about my aborted drive to O’Toole’s, waking up at David Shiflett’s house, and everything that happened up until Philippe Ducharme set Shiflett on fire, leaving out just enough, like why Ducharme was there in the first place and who he really was. The last sentence was the teaser: “A blood feud that began forty years ago in an Oregon Hill parking lot was finally being settled in an Oregon Hill basement.”

  Monday, I wrote about the murder back in 1969, and the trial, and Val Chadwick’s disappearance.

  Tuesday, I spelled out, all in one place for the first time, how Chadwick reinvented himself and how Shiflett stumbled on his picture all those years later in a Boston newspaper. I threw in Shiflett’s claim that he’d tortured and murdered Lester Corbett. It isn’t often that you have a story that really does make readers spit out their cornflakes, but this one might have.

  Wednesday, I described Isabel Ducharme’s murder, using what Awesome Dude told me and the piece of faux-plastic I found at the river. I told them what Shiflett told me about planning it, how he chopped an innocent girl’s head off and how he mailed it to Massachusetts undetected. I went into Martin Fell’s arrest and the story he and his mother told.

  In today’s edition, I sealed the deal, from the time Val Chadwick set David Shiflett on fire until Les carried me, chair and all, out the back door. Then I summed it all up, gift-wrapped with a nice little bow on it.

  Of course, the cops are going batshit, and I’ll have to talk to them sometime, probably tomorrow morning.

  Sally Velez came over and stood behind me yesterday to offer her assessment.

  “Great story, Willie. Too bad you’re so fucking old, or you could really ride this somewhere.”

  She’s right. Baer, who’s managed to insinuate himself into the thing with various numbnuts sidebars and rewrites of police press releases, has a better chance of making it to the Washington Post than I do. He’s more than twenty years younger, and he works cheap. He’s already talking about “us” writing a book. I may have to kill him.

  Despite being beaten, shot and almost smoked like a Smithfield ham, I don’t feel that bad. Things, as Peggy used to say when I was a boy, could always be worse.

  I think Abe is going to stay on here, for a while at least, which is good news for me. I need the rent money.

  A few boneheads remain somehow convinced that he had something to do with our little Prestwould crime wave, but they’re in the minority (I’m looking at you, McGrumpy). Several of the classier residents have offered apologies, along with cookies and pies.

  Clara Westbrook came up to see me last Sunday. I’d just finished the last of the tick-tock and was starting to get into the bourbon as a reward. I offered her one, and we sat and talked.

  She said that she was planning to go to the police and confess that she’d known about Chadwick’s identity almost from the beginning.

  “I think it’s just the right thing to do,” she said. “My conscience will bother me forever if I don’t. All this could have been avoided.”

  I told her that sometimes it was better to live with a little guilt. I don’t really think some headline-hungry DA is going to bring charges against Clara. The commonwealth’s attorney’s office would, it’s true, really like to pin something on someone, just because three people are dead—four if you count Lester Corbett—and that’s what they do. But Clara, with her name and connections, would be a bad place to start, and everyone who did any of the killing is dead, anyhow. But if a prosecutor decided to do something stupid, it would be painful and embarrassing and serve no useful purpose. I made a point of leaving Clara out of the story, just told what she knew without coughing up the source, and I never will.

  Clara feels bad, too, because Christina Chadwick is dead. Val Chadwick’s mother had a massive hemorrhage two days after the fire and was gone within twenty-four hours, the last of the Chadwicks. Who, I wonder, will move into that big old house? Maybe she left it to her companion.

  “They brought it on themselves,” I told Clara. “All you did was listen.”

  Kate used to talk about karma all the time, but I don’t really believe in that shit. I think you try to do good because it’s right to do good. Period. If you do it because you think a piano will fall on your head if you don’t, what’s the point? You’re just that fifth-grade kid, keeping quiet at your desk so the teacher doesn’t whack you with a ruler. The bad I’ve done, I’ve tried to make up for it, tried not to do it again. I have tried not to get too discouraged over the demise of good intentions.

  Speaking of Kate, she’s pretty happy with the way things turned out. I suppose, all things being equal, she’s glad I didn’t become part of the barbecue on Laurel Street. What she’s really doing the happy dance about, though, is Martin Fell. They’ll be releasing him presently. There’s talk of some half-ass charge like contributing to the delinquency of a minor, but the personal injury lawyers are circling, and I think more pragmatic heads will tell L. D. Jones and everybody under him that this particular flame has enough fuel without them throwing a few more sticks on it.

  I’m not even sure Kate cares that much about Fell one way or the other, although she did seem to really care about his mother. But the imminent freedom of Martin Fell is seen as something of a notch in her corporate six-shooter. Now that truth has finally bubbled to the surface, Bartley, Bowman and Bush are proud to have been part of “the relentless pursuit of justice, which is and always will be the cornerstone of our mission.”

  Yeah, right. I think Kate knows what the score would have been if she and I (OK, mostly “I”) hadn’t caught justice’s ass and wrestled her to the ground. To Kate’s credit, she says she will not, under any circumstances, represent Fell in a lawsuit against the police.

  “Good thing you had me on your side,” I told her.

  “You owed me a few,” she said, and she was right. Still, she did thank me.

  She and Mr. Ellis are “trying” to get it together again. I can’t help but think about that dumbass governor, caught redhanded leaving the country to do the nasty down south, who said that he was “trying” to fall in love with his wife again. Even I thought she should have shot him over that. If you have to try, it ain’t love.

  The district attorney and the cops will have at me soon. I don’t know what they could charge me with, but maybe they’ll think of something. Maybe obstruction of incompetence.

  Peachy Love, who is being especially careful these days not to be traced to me, told me in a late-night call that heads are going to roll—the guy who did Fell’s interrogation with Shiflett, whoever was in charge of searching the general area where I found the remnants of Shiflett’s mail, maybe another lieutenant who knew more than he said. The big boys are circling the wagons and deciding who gets left outside to catch an arrow.

  Between gaggings, I never got aro
und to asking Shiflett what he did with Awesome Dude.

  Late last Thursday afternoon, after coming home from my triumphant return to the paper, I was getting ready for some serious nap time when the phone rang.

  It was Custalow, from the lobby.

  “Come down here,” he said. “You gotta see this.”

  As I stepped off the elevator, facing me not ten feet away was the funky, emaciated, agitated, still living body of Awesome Dude. He seemed to have even fewer teeth than before, and he was showing them all, delighted to be alive and enjoying central heating.

  “Dude,” he said, “why didn’t somebody like tell me or somethin’?”

  I almost cried.

  When Awesome became convinced that David Shiflett knew he’d seen something and was going to “kill my ass, chop my damn head off, too,” he grabbed what he could put in a fourth-hand backpack and hauled ass for Texas Beach. He’d been hiding out up in the woods there, along the bank of the James, ever since. He’d been living on baloney, white bread, Triscuits and river water, plus a goose he and a fellow adventurer somehow caught, killed and cooked.

  “Tasted like shit,” was his assessment of his only hot meal in the recent past.

  But somebody in that hobo jungle showed up on Thursday with a bunch of newsprint, good for stuffing in your clothes against the fall chill. And Awesome saw a front page, with the story on it.

  “That’s when I knew I was safe. Dude, it was a miracle!”

  Indeed, I said. I couldn’t quite bring myself to hug him, but I did something that was maybe more self-sacrificing. I let Awesome Dude come upstairs and use my shower. I warned him about pissing in it.

  “Dude,” he said, sincerely offended, “I’m not a animal.”

  The really crazy part? Peggy, Les and Awesome Dude are now a threesome. Peggy, when she heard about him spending those days and nights at Texas Beach, offered him shelter.

  “I shoulda done it before,” she said. I assume that, at some point over the last few days, she has come down from her almost-perpetual high, and Dude is still there, so I can’t blame her decision on drugs.

  Dude lives in the English basement, with his own entrance. He can wander around Oregon Hill and beyond during the day, and know he has a warm place to sleep at night. I’m sure Peggy and Les are feeding him at least part of the time, too. On the plus side, between Les’s dementia and Peggy’s lifetime quest to smoke her weight in weed, Awesome might be the most mentally competent person in the house.

  The funny thing is, I think Les really gets a kick out of Awesome Dude. I’m reminded of those racehorses that share their stable with a goat or a beagle. Awesome comes upstairs and watches ball games with Les and keeps up a constant stream of chatter until Les tells him he needs some quiet time.

  “Then he quiets right down,” Peggy said. “Me, I’d just tell him to shut the fuck up.”

  R.P., Andy, Abe and I got together yesterday for breakfast at Joe’s. By then the first four parts of the series had been digested. R.P. and Andy tried to get me to tell them how the story was going to end, as did a couple of other patrons who recognized me.

  I told them they’d have to read it in the paper, just like everybody else.

  Andi has changed restaurants. The last place didn’t think fear for her life was reason enough to skip work for a couple of days.

  “Screw ’em,” she said. “I can always get another job. People gotta eat.” And she was working at a better place in Shockoe Slip about twenty-four hours later. Apparently, waitressing has not been pounded very hard by the recession.

  She hasn’t dropped any courses lately, which makes this the best fall she’s had since she enrolled. Of course, she’s only taking two.

  I couldn’t help asking her why she doesn’t just get it over with. Four semesters at five courses a semester ought to do it. I’ve got almost enough money to pay for tuition and fees.

  She squeezed my hand, actually smiled, and told me that she was still trying to decide what she wants to do. She said she was thinking about psychology.

  I squeezed back and didn’t say anything discouraging. Everything wasn’t perfect, I was thinking, but it was perfect enough for me.