Oregon Hill (16 page)

All those steps are more exertion than I feel up to right now.

“Read it to me.”

“You sound like shit. Oh, yeah. You haven’t had your Special K and Camels yet, have you?”

“You know I don’t smoke in here.”

“No, I hope you don’t smoke in there.”

Her nagging is more gentle these days. I’m a bad habit she’s shaken and doesn’t have to worry about anymore.

“The story?”

“Oh, yes. The headline reads, ‘Accused murderer once accused of rape.’ ”

She reads me the gory details. I wonder if someone leaked it to us, or if we got it through good, old-fashioned research and reporting. My money’s on the former, especially since they laid off the whole damn library staff several months ago.

“I might have to go for a change in venue,” Kate says.

I remind her that nobody remembers anything they read in the paper more than a few days anyhow. She reminds me that this little tidbit will be thrown into every story written about Martin Fell from now until they send him away for life or execute his ass.

“Well, you knew it was coming.”

She asks me if I want to talk to her client, off the record again.

“Why?”

“For some reason, he wants to talk to you. Must have made an impression.”

I know Baer has tried to get an interview with Fell already, and that he knows I’ve already had one conversation with him. It doesn’t exactly bother me that this pisses Baer off.

“What good does it do,” he asked me, “if he talks to you and you can’t use it?”

Normally, I’d say good point, or at least think it. With Fell, though, I need something that can’t be converted into quotes in a story: I need to be convinced.

I need to know that I’m not just some clown trying to exorcize the confused and guiltless ghost of Leonard Pikarski a quarter-century too late.

I tell her that’ll be fine. When can Martin Fell see me?

“He doesn’t have a lot on his social calendar. How about today?”

We arrange to meet at the jail at eleven.

Almost as soon as I hang up, the phone rings again. It’s Peggy, which seldom presages good news.

“Is he on the roof again?”

“No, he’s fine. It’s about Awesome. Awesome Dude?”

It turns out that Awesome has come around to Peggy’s, that he’s there right now and really wants to talk to me.

“He seems like he’s scared,” she says. “He keeps peeking out the window like he thinks somebody’s after him.”

I tell her to fix him a nice lunch, which I know she will anyhow, and that I’ll be there as soon as I can.

“He says he can’t wait. Willie, I don’t think he’s just imagining things.”

Awesome definitely can slip into paranoia gear, but Peggy knows his addlepated brain as well as anybody. Even though she sounds a little out of focus herself, which probably means she’s had her first happy smoke of the day before the breakfast dishes are cleared, I make a snap judgment.

I call Kate to postpone my jailhouse meeting with Fell, a meeting any reporter at the paper would kill to get, on or off the record.

“He might not talk to you again,” she warns, and I tell her that I’ve had to prioritize, without getting into details. Never tell a lawyer anything you don’t have to, even if you did sleep with her.

“Yeah,” she says “you always were good at prioritizing.”

And she hangs up.

When I go outside, I curse myself for not checking the Weather Channel. It has turned cold as a well-digger’s ass overnight. I run back inside for a sweater and make the half-mile trip by car instead of foot.

When I get to Pine Street, I can smell Mama Zu’s a block and a half away and wonder if spaghetti Caruso is on the menu today.

I walk into Peggy’s place, which is always an assault on the senses. It is made up as if it were designed by stoned hippies in 1969 and never painted or cleaned since. Same as it ever was. I don’t remember us ever getting a deposit back. Peggy would open a letter from our previous landlord, mutter “bastards” under her breath, then tear up the letter. There is a Jimi Hendrix poster on the wall, an honest-to-God lava lamp over in the corner, and some recently adopted cat lying on the couch giving me his best “fuck-with-me” look. The smell is equal parts dope and dirty dishes with a slight bouquet of cat piss.

She leads me back to the kitchen, where Les sits across the table from where she repositions herself. He seems sober and alert, and I wonder if and how much he disapproves of her getting stoned before noon. Between them, facing me as I sit in the only unoccupied chair, is Awesome Dude.

“I was going to tell you somethin’ the other day,” he says by way of greeting. “But that cop car scared me. I think they’re after me.”

The cops have never really been “after” Awesome, to my knowledge, but he just makes himself such easy pickings when they have to make their biannual raids of the homeless and deranged, making a good show of keeping the streets safe for decent folk who don’t want to have their consciences rubbed a little raw by panhandlers.

So, he does go to jail briefly, occasionally, but nothing serious. It isn’t the worst place he has to spend the night, I’m sure. And if he’d stop being so conspicuous, so “peripatetic,” maybe they’d leave him alone entirely.

This, though, sounds a little worse than usual.

“I see that same car, same patrol car, all the time,” he says. “The dude looks at me.”

“What dude? He looks at you?”

“The big one. Bear. He looks at me, and then he does this.” And Awesome makes his index finger into a gun, pointed at me.

I haven’t been back on cops long enough to know everybody’s street nickname.

I ask Awesome what’s going on, what he wanted to tell me the other day.

He has to change gears, of which he doesn’t have many. He’s had a hit or two, it appears, which has not improved his razor-sharp mind.

“Oh, yeah. Tell you. Yeah.”

Awesome moves closer to the table. His breath threatens to wilt the mums Peggy has, in a rare display of domesticity, placed in the middle.

“I seen her. That night. I seen that girl.”

“That girl?”

“The one that got her head cut off.”

Awesome Dude has my attention.

My unreliable source says he was making his rounds the night of October 1st, Friday, a week ago.

The way his story goes, Awesome is walking down Floyd Street, headed for Meadow, where he can cross over. Somebody on Maplewood is letting him crash in a shed out back, at least until the neighbors complain. He has a network. Usually, when he wears out his welcome in one place, there’s another. When his luck runs out in the summer, it’s the hobo jungle over by Texas Beach or some alleyway, or a dark, bushy corner of some Fan pocket park. In the winter, it’s the homeless shelter.

He sees a girl walking in his direction, on the other side of the street.

“It looked like she was headed back towards VCU. She was weaving a little, you know, like she’d been drinking,” he says. “You know, I used to go to VCU. Only need a couple of courses to graduate. I was a history major. I was almost an alumni.”

I nod and get him back on track.

The girl, Awesome says, was just past him when he saw the cop car cruise by, headed in the same direction as the girl. Awesome stepped into somebody’s hydrangea bushes, not wanting to attract attention, and he watched while the cop called the girl over.

“I couldn’t hear nothin’ they said,” he tells me, taking a sip of coffee. “But she kind of nodded her head, and then she got into the car. But then, before they took off, that cop, Bear, looked back, right at me. He shined his big flashlight right at me from across the street. I swear he seen me, and now he’s always pointin’ his finger at me.”

Awesome seems a little shakier than usual. I ask him how he can be sure that it was Isabel Ducharme he saw.

“Aw, it was her,” he says. “I seen the picture in the paper. It was her. I’m almost sure.”

I have doubts about Awesome Dude’s ability to identify anyone across a Fan street at night, but he has surprised me before. Despite the mugging street life has given the rest of his body, his eyes are apparently twenty-twenty, even if his brain isn’t. Once, a few years ago, I was persuaded to give him a ride to the shelter. We were stopped at a light, and he bet me he could read the numbers off a license plate half a block away, one that I couldn’t begin to make out. He won the bet.

“So, you’re almost sure?”

“As much as I can be,” he says, a little defensive that I would besmirch his cognitive abilities.

“Do you know what time it was?”

“I know it was late. I don’t carry no watch.”

So, maybe it was Isabel Durcharme. Maybe she was walking back to campus, before or after her set-to at Three Monkeys with Martin Fell. Maybe it was or wasn’t some cop called Bear that stopped and somehow got her to get in the car. Maybe it was the wrong night, wrong girl, wrong cop. Lot of maybes. And maybe-nots.

Where we’re sitting, you can see out into the backyard one way and right onto Laurel Street the other. Suddenly, I see Awesome turn paler and duck down a little.

“It’s him,” he whispers. Now he’s actually on his hands and knees beside the table, although no one can see us this far back from the window.

I turn and look where Awesome’s looking, just in time to see the object of his terror walk by, maybe coming back from breakfast at the 821.

“Are you sure?”

Awesome is kind of curled up in a ball on the floor. He nods his head.

“He lives in the next block,” Peggy says, which doesn’t do much for her guest’s peace of mind.

“You got to get me out of here,” he says, still whispering as if the man he’s so terrified of might have super hearing powers.

Nothing will do but for me to go outside, get my car, then drive through the alleyway that runs between Laurel and Cherry, and let Awesome slip out through the gate in the back fence.

He dives into the front seat as if he’s being strafed by machine-gun fire and won’t get up until we’re clear of the Hill, headed west on Main.

I let him out at Meadow, although it’s far too early for him to be crashing at his latest haven.

“You got enough clothes?” I ask him. He obviously doesn’t. He’s a lot less likely to be checking the Weather Channel than I am, and the light sweater and dirty flannel shirt aren’t going to do much for him today.

I give him ten bucks and tell him to get his ass over to Fan Thrift and see if he can’t come up with a winter wardrobe.

It’s so damn cold that Awesome Dude might actually spend the whole ten bucks on clothes. In the rearview mirror, I see him wave feebly and head toward the thrift store.

I call Peachy Love on my cell phone. I tell her it’s me, and that I’m sorry to call her at work, which I’m never supposed to do, but I need only two words from her.

“Who,” I ask when she doesn’t hang up, “is ‘Bear’?”

Very quietly, she says the two words I’m expecting.

She hangs up, and I have to pull off the street for a minute.

While I’m stopped, I try to call Andi. This time, to my amazement, she answers, and we have a conversation, something of a rarity.

She’s doing “OK” in her fall courses and is so taken with one of them, a creative writing course, that she might change her major to English.

Dear God.

I ask her if she’s being careful, and she says she is, and that nobody’s really worried about anything, since they’ve already caught “the creep.”

I don’t want to alarm her by telling her I’m less and less sure about Martin Fell’s guilt, but I let it go with the usual boilerplate fatherly warning about getting into cars with strangers. I hear her sigh.

We agree to meet for breakfast tomorrow. She asks me how I’m doing, which I appreciate.

My workday is fairly normal until about nine, when I get a call from Peachy Love.

“What was that about?” she asks.

I tell her that “Bear” is scaring the shit out of an old acquaintance of mine.

“Being an old acquaintance of yours, probably for good reason.”

I tell her she might be right and wonder why she’s calling me at the paper. Peachy never calls. I either call her or drop by, neither of which pleases her much. We nod in passing when I’m making my rounds at the station. If it ever got out that Peachy Love was consorting with the enemy, she might have to go back to honest journalism for a living.