Oregon Hill (28 page)

The sun’s setting when we land at Byrd Field, which some insist on calling Richmond International, I guess because you can eventually get out of the country from here, if you change planes at least once.

Back at the Prestwould, I look up from the parking lot. The lights are on, and I can see Custalow. He’s standing by the living room window, looking out. At least he hasn’t left or been thrown out of the building yet.

I let myself in, and he’s still there, at the end of our thirtyfoot foyer. He doesn’t turn around.

“So,” I say, broaching the subject, “are you still employed?”

He looks around, seems kind of surprised I’d ask such a question.

“Employed? Oh, yeah. No problem.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Tuesday

T
he only calls on the answering machine last night were from Mark Baer and Sandy McCool.

Baer wanted some information I wouldn’t have given him anyhow. In my absence, he did a story for today’s paper in which the police categorically deny that they might possibly have the wrong guy.

“We are certain that we have gotten a violent and dangerous criminal off our streets,” Chief Jones is quoted as saying. “Lieutenant Shiflett is to be commended for his fine work.”

Commend my ass.

Then there was the other call. Sandy McCool is Grubby’s secretary, or administrative officer, or whatever the hell you call them these days. She’s been at the paper for almost forty years, came there straight out of high school. Grubby is her third publisher. She’s a pro. We’ve had a drink or three together. Even shitfaced, she doesn’t talk out of school.

Her voice, neutral as a good referee, told me that I have an appointment with Grubby in his office at nine thirty.

So, I did some tossing and turning.

I called Jackson, who was home, same as he always is when he isn’t at work. Not much to say. “I know how you feel.” “Things’ll look better in the morning.” “You’ve got a lot of good years to give somebody.” You lie through your teeth, and the guy you’re talking to pretends he doesn’t know you’re lying. Otherwise, it gets awkward.

The only thing that makes the sun break through the clouds at all this morning is Custalow, who is redeemed.

He’d had a pretty good idea for some time. There weren’t that many people it could have been. There are about seventy residents, none of whom seemed like good candidates to steal from each other. Even the handful of wild and crazy young renters are mostly med students. They aren’t prone to burglary. Then you have the guards, but you can look at the tape and see when and if they leave the lobby. Marcia the manager absolved them some time ago.

Custalow knew he didn’t do it, and that left only one logical suspect.

The Prestwould’s basement is a rabbit warren of tired, dirty rooms nobody uses. There are doors off of doors, some housing the boiler and the washer-dryers, some used for the residents’ storage, some chock-full of large and small pieces of wood and metal that must have had a purpose at one time.

A year ago, on the first cleanup day we’d had down there in anyone’s memory, Marcia found a couple of rooms nobody even knew about.

Custalow wasn’t keen on claiming some of this dingy space for himself.

“What the hell for?” he asked one night when he told me how Susan Sheets had about three rooms full of crap, mostly things residents were going to throw away and were happy to give to Susan. Made ’em feel good. Noblesse oblige and all that shit. “I don’t have anything I can’t store in one closet. Don’t want anything else.”

Susan was, to put it mildly, a pack rat. At the cleanup, they found a motley assortment of things—toasters, old TVs, armchairs with only one leg missing, broken VCRs. They even found a damn Betamax.

Marcia told her to start hauling some of the crap away. She did, for a while, until Marcia got distracted by something else and stopped checking.

Custalow told me six weeks ago that she was filling the rooms up again, the residents being unable to curb their urge to give away useless items.

Abe said—when he spun it all out for me last night—that he almost always left before Susan, who would claim that she had one or two more little chores to do before she went home.

One morning a few weeks ago, he woke up at three
A
.
M
. and couldn’t get back to sleep, so he went for a walk. He cut through the alley that runs behind the Prestwould. There, parked in a dark, distant corner of the lot, was Susan’s beat-up Datsun. Her workday didn’t start for almost five hours.

“I didn’t say anything to her about it, but at work that day, I did notice she had the same clothes on as she’d had the day before. She might have washed up in the sink in the laundry room.”

It wasn’t relevant until jewelry started disappearing. Last week, Abe started checking. Every night, he’d go downstairs after quitting time and see if Susan Sheets’ car was there. The first three nights, she eventually left, usually within an hour.

Finally, in the nick of time, he got lucky.

On Friday night at seven thirty, her car was still there. He got into his own piece-of-crap car, a very used Corolla he bought to get him at least as far as the grocery store, and he waited.

“I didn’t know what I was going to do,” he said. “Go in there and try to find her, I guess.”

While he was deciding, a Buick Century older than the Corolla turned into the lot and parked not far from Susan’s car. A guy got out.

“I was probably a hundred feet away, but this guy just looked like trouble. He had that been-to-prison look. He kept glancing over his shoulder, and he kind of scurried along, like he was up to no good.”

Susan Sheets’ boyfriend went down the steps to where a back door leads from the alley to the basement, unseen by anyone but Custalow. He seemed to make a call on his cell phone. The door opened, and he went inside.

Custalow said he got the car’s license number, and then he walked back to the front of the building, went upstairs and waited. He could barely make out the Century and Susan’s Datsun from the sixth floor. When, after an hour, they were still there, he made his move.

He took the elevator to the lobby and then walked down a flight of stairs to the basement.

Abe Custalow is light on his feet for a big man. He was always good at dances and fistfights. It probably wasn’t that hard for him to sneak up on them.

He said he thought he had a good idea what he was going to find.

A rhythmic, familiar sound led him to one of the rooms where Susan kept her stash of junk. The door was cracked slightly. Inside, beyond all of Susan’s worthless cache, he saw a sliver of light, thin as a razor blade, coming from what looked like a closet. Custalow remembered the door having a lock on it when he’d last been there.

He said they seemed to be wrestling the bear at the time and were slightly distracted. He tiptoed out.

Abe must have been exhausted on Saturday after playing detective, and then having to wake up and take care of me after my little nunchuck adventure.

He called Marcia on her cell phone Saturday morning, before I got up. She was out of town and wouldn’t be back until Sunday night, but she promised to be in on Monday morning an hour before Susan got there.

“I was pretty sure what I was going to find,” he said, “but she needed to be there when I broke the lock.”

He used a hammer on it, with Marcia watching. She was nervous, Abe said, afraid she was taking part in a robbery. But the room did belong to the Prestwould, and there weren’t supposed to be any locks.

When they got inside, there was a bed in there from God knows when. Might have been there for decades. And there were cabinets and desks. The “closet” was actually about twelve by twelve, Custalow said.

He broke into two desks before he found what he was looking for—a rather impressive collection of jewelry.

Some of the swag would be identified by the Barrons and Maddie Blank, and they’re still trying to find out who the rest of it belongs to. Among my neighbors here are more than a few of the careless rich, who sometimes don’t miss a four-figure brooch or a diamond doodad.

When Susan came in, she denied everything and was able to muster up a temporary ruse of righteous indignation. But then Custalow grabbed the key ring she was still holding in her hand and said he’d bet that one of the keys on it would fit that lock he’d just busted. And he pointed out that neither he nor Marcia had touched anything in the room except the outside of the two desks, leaving the rest for the police to fingerprint.

Marcia called the cops, and by ten o’clock, Susan was in custody.

“What if you’d been wrong?” I asked Custalow. In addition to losing his job, he’d probably have been arrested for breaking and entering, thus earning himself Strike Two from our state penal system, which sometimes only gives you two strikes.

“I didn’t have much to lose,” he said, “and I was pretty sure I was right.”

I don’t think Susan Sheets is a bad person, all things being equal. But she was driving a rusted-out Datsun thirty miles each way to a job that didn’t pay much, living with her mother and trying to raise two fatherless kids. And she apparently was a scumbag magnet.

The boyfriend, she claimed yesterday morning, made her do it. “Made” is a relative term. In this case, the best guess is that it meant he threatened to stop being nice to her, and Susan didn’t look like she’d been on the receiving end of a whole lot of nice.

The guy had a pretty long record, the kind that makes everybody ask, “How the hell did that asshole get out?” But they do, and he did.

Susan was malleable enough to let the scumbag screw her in their basement love nest and then have the run of the building. She probably told him who was out of town, and he had some experience getting past locked doors. He had the record to prove it. I believe her claim that she didn’t do the actual stealing herself, but I wonder if a judge will, or if it will even matter.

They had pawned a lot of it, but I guess they were waiting for things to cool down a little before selling the rest. It might have been smart to move it away from the building it was stolen from, but sometimes I think the only thing separating us from total anarchy is the general imbecility of the criminal class.