Oregon Hill (12 page)

We’re headed back to the Prestwould when my cell phone rings. It’s Kate.

“I got him put into solitary,” she says. “But, Jesus, is that the best you could do in terms of telling his side of the story?”

I explain to her that, as always, I am neither the publisher nor the editor, and that those decisions come from higher up.

“Well,” she says, “try harder,” and she hangs up.

As I’m putting the phone back in my pocket, a city cop car slides up beside us and stops. David Junior Shiflett rolls his window down.

“Y’all don’t believe that bullshit, do you?” he says.

I play dumb and tell him I hear bullshit all day long, and which particular piece of excrement is he referring to.

“Fell and his momma. Claiming he didn’t do it.”

I tell him I don’t believe it or disbelieve it right now, and I wonder if he knows which part of the article my “contribution” was, and who told him.

“Well,” Shiflett says, “I was there, in the room with him. And I’m telling you, he did it.”

He points his finger at me when he says it, and I’m transported back to what must have been eighth grade. David Shiflett was one of the toughest guys on the Hill, and somebody, out of mischief, told him I’d said something unflattering about his character. Shiflett, who would have been a junior, caught me when we were messing around by the Big Ditch. They were making a hole in the ground for the Downtown Expressway. Peggy called the hole the Oregon Hill quarantine. The air was smoky, the way it usually was in those days, from burning all the kindling-wood houses that got in the way of progress. David Junior called me over to where he was standing by himself, looking down at the hole. He did that same finger-pointing thing as he threatened to rip my head off and shit down my neck. I ran away.

I fight the urge to regress to junior high, telling myself that we’re both grown men now, although Shiflett still looks as if he could do the head-ripping-and-defecating thing.

I tell him that I’ll take that under advisement, but that I’ll make my own decisions. It makes me more bold, maybe, that Abe Custalow, one of the few men around who looks capable of going a few rounds with David Shiflett, has my back.

“You newspaper guys,” Shiflett says, shaking his head. He asks Custalow, with what looks like a smirk, if he’s watching himself, then slowly drives off before Abe can say or do anything. Just as well.

When we get back to the Prestwould, Feldman is in the lobby, talking to the guard and Marcia the manager. When he sees me, he motions me over with one hand while he lets Custalow know with the other that this conversation doesn’t involve him. Abe gives me a look and pushes the elevator button.

“We’ve had a robbery,” Feldman says, when Abe is gone.

The Barrons, who’ve spent the last two months in Tuscany, returned this afternoon. It took Louisa Barron a couple of hours to realize that most of her jewelry was missing from its not-so-well-hidden place in her bedroom dresser. A few other items were taken as well.

“I think it was an inside job,” McGrumpy says, his eyes gleaming.

“I don’t think we can say that, Mr. Feldman,” Marcia says, interrupting. “It could have been anybody.”

“Yeah,” McGrumpy says, looking at me, “anybody with access.”

I know where he’s going. The staff does have access, but the Barrons have given two other couples here copies of their keys, in case they’re abducted and killed by terrorists or something. Plus, Fred’s told people he’s had some major investment setbacks—haven’t we all? I’m thinking what was stolen is insured.

I keep that to myself.

“I’ve known Abe Custalow my whole life,” I tell them. “He has never stolen anything, ever.”

“Nah, he just kills people,” McGrumpy says.

“One person,” I tell him, giving him the evil eye, “and he had a reason.”

“Still,” Marcia says, “we’re going to have to investigate this, somehow.”

The Prestwould has its share of excitement, between the occasional 911 call that happens when the median age is somewhere beyond retirement, and the rare cop visit when one of Monroe Park’s medicated denizens gets too big or too small a dose and starts harassing the citizens.

A deliberate and reasonably sane act of thievery, though, is something else.

“Well,” I tell Marcia and Feldman, “I can tell you for a fact that Abe didn’t do it.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Marcia says. McGrumpy doesn’t say anything.

Upstairs, Custalow is watching a pro football game and waits for me to tell him what’s going on.

“Do they think I did it?” he asks, not looking at me when he says it, knowing the answer.

“I don’t, most people won’t, but you know how it is. This place is a Petri dish for rumors.”

“Yeah. Maybe I should go.”

“You’re not going any damn where. It’d be like admitting you did it.”

“I don’t want to cause you trouble.”

I think about all the times Abe Custalow has saved my ass over the years, fighting my fights. I think about how he was the one person who was at all three of my weddings, even the one in the middle, when just about everybody thought—correctly, as it turned out—that I had lost my mind. I remember all the times he’d tried to steer me away from the one drink too many, and how many times he’d gotten me home when the general consensus at the bar or party was to just kill me and throw me in the street.

“You aren’t going anywhere,” I tell him, trying not to let my suspicious nature plant seeds of doubt about my oldest friend.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Monday

S
omebody at the university decided it would be politically correct to have a memorial for Isabel Ducharme. It’s kind of a hurry-up thing, set for eight tonight. The actual funeral up in Massachusetts is tomorrow, which seems like a long time to wait. Down here, we tend to try to get ’em into the ground in two or three days, but with the autopsy, and with family and friends coming in from at least two continents, I guess this was the best they could do.

In the afternoon, I walk around the Fan before going in to work. It’s getting cooler now, with real fall just around the corner. The maples are starting to turn. They turn later these days.

I zigzag, walking a few blocks west, one south, then a few west again, just more or less wandering. When I come out on Main, I’m within eyesight of Three Monkeys. It wasn’t something I planned, but now that my feet have led me here, I might as well go in.

It’s still warm enough for some people with nothing to do on a Monday afternoon to sit outside. The place always seems packed, and everyone here always appears to be about half my age. They call me “sir,” which makes me want to buy a gun and swallow it.

I ask one of the waitresses if she was there Friday a week ago, when the girl disappeared. She says she wasn’t, but that Colleen was, and she points out Colleen. I didn’t know her name, but I’ve seen her all over town, one of the legion of professional waitstaff/bartenders who come to VCU and seem to change their major to Night Life at some point. I hope this isn’t Andi in five or ten years.

“Yeah,” Colleen says, after I assure her I’m not a cop, only a reporter who isn’t reporting right now, “I’ve seen you around, too.”

I ask her if Isabel Ducharme was a regular.

“Regular? Hell, she was too young to be a regular. She was too young to be an irregular, too, turns out. Glad I’m not the one who was supposed to check her ID.”

She’s just come back from a cigarette break, and I’m thinking the upcoming ban on smoking in bars and restaurants is going to hit her as hard as it’s going to hit me. She’s trying to look ten years younger—just like Martin Fell—but I can see the wrinkles around her eyes and a kind of adult hardness. The people who stick around college campuses, in my experience, do have some kind of desire to keep the clock from moving forward. Well, give it your best shot, but there’s an entrepreneurial class that also works this strip, and they know they can get cheap help damn near forever from the Peter Pan wannabes.

The people working here have a kind of chastened look to them, as if they’re just waiting for the ABC goons to come in and pull their license. Don’t know what I’d have done with my leisure time in college if the drinking age had been twenty-one back then.

Colleen says she doesn’t remember Isabel at all, but she does remember Martin Fell.

“Marty? Sure. He was a regular. He seemed harmless, though. I wouldn’t have thought.”

I ask her if she’d ever seen him act out, show his ass, fail to handle his booze.

She gives it a couple of seconds’ thought.

“I never saw him do anything bad. They said he didn’t even hit that Ducharme girl back after she slapped him. Nah, I don’t think he was like that. He was always trying to play the James Dean-Mick Jagger forever-young thing, you know? Lot of that around here.”

Colleen pushes her blonde hair back and I get a glimpse of the black roots, with maybe a little gray. She might really be ten years older than I first thought, maybe forty-two looking like thirty-two wanting to be twenty-two.

I drink iced tea with my barbecue sandwich. She answers what she can between customers, but about all she knows is that Martin Fell didn’t seem like a threat.

She shakes her head.

“You never know, though, do you?”

Perhaps thinking that we’re kindred spirits, she asks me if I ever go to Bogart’s for the music, and when I say I do sometimes, she says she’s usually there on Thursdays, when Chez Roue plays.

I tell her maybe we’ll run into each other, and she says she hopes so with enough enthusiasm to make me think that at least she thinks I don’t need to be called “sir.”

So who’s fooling whom? I’m forty-nine, hanging out in the same places where Colleen the waitress and Martin Fell have been getting their emotional Botox.

Back outside, my eyes adjust to the sunlight and I head west again. I’ve gone maybe a block when I hear someone calling a close approximation of my name.

Turning around, I see the thin and damaged frame of Awe-some Dude.

He’s even skinnier than I remember, and he’s walking with a pronounced limp. He isn’t pushing a purloined shopping cart, which I take as a hopeful sign. Maybe the poor bastard is living indoors somewhere.

“Black!” he yells, too loud. With Awesome’s tooth shortage and what appears to be some kind of residual stroke damage, “Black” sounds more like “Back,” and “Where you been?” comes out as “Ere u been?”

I reach out to shake his hand, and he draws back out of instinct, then relaxes and steps forward again, grinning. He reminds me, as he has for some time, of a feral cat, expecting the worst from humans even as he looks to them to meet his needs.

I don’t remember what his real name is anymore. He must be damn near my age, and it’s a miracle he’s still alive, wandering around town like a ghost of excesses past.

When I first started working at the paper, he had just come here, allegedly to go to college, although nobody ever saw Awe-some with a book. He hung out at the student places on Grace, where they come in and hose the beer and puke off the cement floors sometime between closing time and noon. Some of us went there in the afternoon when we were supposed to be doing more constructive things.

He was a talker and a doper. His response to just about anything was “Awesome, Dude.” Tell him you just won the Pulitzer Prize or your mother just died, and the response was the same. Only the inflection changed.

After a very short while, somebody—was it me?—started calling him the Awesome Dude, Awesome for short. Rather than take offense, he reveled in his new name.

One day, he came in and showed everyone the papers that officially changed his name to Awesome Dude. We turned it into a big party, and I’ve never seen Awesome any happier.

He became the drifter who never left, just changed bars and hangouts on occasion, usually after a beat-down or an arrest, usually for public drunkenness. I think his family had some money, and over the years, he has managed to keep a roof over his head for most of the cold weather months. He knew we worked at the paper, and for a time he would plant himself on the stone ledge outside the building, chatting up everyone, before our guards made him leave. Awesome was deemed to be an undesirable character, even by newspaper standards.

Once, one of our feature writers did a story on him. She called him “peripatetic,” then had to explain that she wasn’t insulting him. Around Christmas, we’d take up a collection and give the money to him, no doubt so he could immediately relay it to the ABC store around the corner. He was, and no doubt still is, fond of Ten High. But we thought, high-minded as we are, that a man should be able to choose his own poison. Who am I to deny Awesome Dude a taste?

After we’d had a few rounds one afternoon, I told him I was going to take him for a home-cooked meal. We showed up on Peggy’s rickety front porch sometime after six. I did it mainly because I liked to drive Peggy crazy. It should not have amazed me that she took to Awesome Dude, embraced him as a kindred spirit. In other words, they were both crazy and both somewhat fond of getting fucked-up. I’m pretty sure Peggy never had sex with Awesome Dude, or at least I’ve convinced myself of that because the image of it might render me permanently celibate.