Oregon Hill (5 page)

Nobody looks good getting arrested, but in the picture they show us, Martin Fell looks worse than most. He’s a little guy. They list him as five-nine, and he looks skinny as hell. He has an eyebrow and a nostril pierced and some kind of tattoo on his neck. He has dark, spiky hair. He looks dazed and confused. One of the TV guys asks if there’ll be a perp walk later and the chief says yeah, and the rest of the TV people perk up. Fresh meat.

Other evidence indicated that Fell was the prime suspect, the chief says. Plus, he confessed. He was now in custody. Shiflett is there because apparently he was the one who was heading the investigation and put it all together.

They play the “ongoing investigation” card when we try to learn anything else, leaving us to our own devices.

I catch up with Shiflett outside, hoping for some kind of Hill homeboy advantage, even though I’d never been that tight with him. Hell, he was three years ahead of me in school.

“So, you pretty sure this is the guy?” I say, and he just half-turns and stares at me.

Finally, he speaks.

“I’ve got nothing to say. When we get this nailed, we’ll talk. Until then, nothing. Nothing.” He bears down on that last word.

The way he looks at me dissuades me from trying to work any kind of angle with him.

I hand him my card, the one with “political reporter” crossed through and “night cops” written in. Never got around to getting new ones made.

“Call me. Let’s have a beer and catch up,” I say, and he takes the card, never looking at it, just me, and puts it in his pocket.

“Catch up on what?” he says, then turns and walks away, leaving me to deduce that it was only a rhetorical question.

Well, what the hell. David Junior Shiflett has had a tough life. Anybody in Oregon Hill could tell you that.

It was part of the lore and legend when I was growing up. David’s father, David Senior, was thirty-four years old. It was the summer of 1969, so I was nine years old. David the elder was shooting pool, the story went, at the place on Pine that closed sometime back in the eighties. There was a guy at the next table who came by from time to time, slumming with the poor folks.

Valentine Chadwick IV was twenty, home for the summer from Princeton. He fancied himself quite the hustler, and he did sometimes take some major green off a few of the locals; probably because he needed it less than they did, he didn’t give a shit if he went double or nothing after losing fifty dollars in a game of eight ball. But he lost more than he won, so they tolerated him.

Val Chadwick, they said, could be had if you let him drink long enough. He was still a kid, and he didn’t quite know how to hold his liquor. He’d get a little careless, and sometimes that carelessness caused his mouth to activate before his brain really kicked in. Sober, he knew to win poor people’s money gracefully. When he got past about the sixth or seventh beer, though, he could forget where he was.

I remember it was in the middle of a heat wave. That Saturday night, when I heard the sirens, I slipped out of my frying-pan bed, put on some shorts and was out the window. Peggy’s bedroom was on the other side of the house. I could hear her snoring. The asshole sharing her bed that summer was somewhere else, as was often the case.

Goat Jackson across the street had done the same thing, and we walked toward the flashing lights, steering clear of other adults who might know whose kids we were. It was hard to get away with much on the Hill back then.

All I remember, really, was the sheet with David Shiflett’s body underneath and the wet lines trickling from it, headed downhill toward Belvidere and the state penitentiary. That, and David Junior holding his mother as they stood on the sidewalk and watched, dry and helpless.

We had most of the story by the end of breakfast the next morning. The asshole was happy to be the bearer of bad tidings. He had been in the crowd the night before, although we didn’t see each other, thank God.

The argument had started over a beer. A sip of beer, actually, probably about two ounces, maybe a dime’s worth back then.

David Shiflett was playing rotation at the next table over. There was a little ledge next to the wall, and guys would put their beers there while they shot.

Val Chadwick came back from the bathroom, zipping up and looking for his beer. He saw Shiflett pick up a Budweiser, which was Chadwick’s choice, too, and take a swig. He went up to Shiflett and accused him of stealing his beer. Nobody, then or later, could say for sure who made the mistake. Did Val Chadwick forget that he had finished his last beer and hadn’t bought another one yet? Did David Shiflett reach behind him and pick up the wrong bottle?

It became a moot point. On Oregon Hill, at one o’clock on a Sunday morning, somebody gives you a little shove and calls you a beer thief, with half the young guys in the neighborhood there, you have to do something. I knew that at nine. Even now, almost fifty, I’d have to do something, ineffectual and self-destructive as it might be.

David Shiflett was what they called a good provider and had never been known to beat his wife, but he had a hard side. He’d been to Korea, like about every other guy his age on the Hill at that time, and came back kind of a second-rate war hero. He’d been a good street fighter before he left. Sober, even Val Chadwick would have known to just assume the guy made an honest mistake.

But Chadwick gets right in his face and, as they say now, disrespects him.

Shiflett just stared at the boy for a long second or two and then advised him to fuck off, which was generous. Many of the teeth that adorned the bar’s gravel parking lot had been put there by David Shiflett.

Nobody expected the gun.

Chadwick pulled it out, and people melted back toward the walls. It being the Hill, nobody much left. They wanted some entertainment and just got far enough away to reduce the chances of catching the stray bullet.

They said Shiflett stared at it for what seemed like a long time, and then he laughed. He had a scar on his right cheek from a knife fight a few years earlier, and I’ve heard men say that he tended to laugh at unexpected times, like when he was about to tear you a new asshole.

He walked up to Val Chadwick, straight toward him while the pistol pointed right at his gut. They said he stopped about six inches away, and then he told Chadwick to take his play-toy gun and put it away before he kicked his Ivy League ass all the way back to the West End.

And then he slapped his face.

Chadwick might have experienced spontaneous sobriety at about this point, realizing who and where he was. At any rate, he didn’t say another word, just turned, put the gun back in his pocket and walked out. People were laughing, offering to buy David Shiflett a drink “as soon as you finish the one that Ivy League pussy bought you.” The asshole said they all figured it was over, and thought maybe they had seen the last of Valentine Chadwick IV.

Shiflett apparently played another game or two and then left.

They heard the gunshots, and when they got outside, Chad-wick was standing over David Shiflett, who was lying on the ground dying with five bullets in him. Chadwick didn’t even try to get away, just waited there for the cops.

It was a pretty big deal. I’ve read about it in our archives. Chadwick’s father was old tobacco money, and the family got the best lawyers in town, led by Lester Corbett.

Nobody thought Val Chadwick would get much if any time for what he did. The lawyers decided they had a better chance if they didn’t expose Val Chadwick to a jury, and they got Judge Tayloe, who’d grown up on the same side of town, more or less, as the Chadwicks. People on the Hill said that was the way it was—rich people looked after each other.

By the time Corbett and the rest of his team finished, they’d cobbled up a bright young man, considerate to his mother and father, with a limitless future, who had made the mistake of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was afraid of David Shiflett, who had struck him and threatened him. And then, when he was outside, trying to clear his head, Shiflett had accosted him, advancing toward him with murderous intentions. They said Chadwick was very convincing when he told the judge, with tears in his eyes, that he warned Shiflett twice, but “he just kept coming.”

It might have all worked. He was afraid. His mind was clouded by the alcohol. But the Chadwicks hadn’t counted on the prosecutor from hell, or Dewey Tate.

Buckley Lance would have been in his late twenties then, because he’s almost seventy now, in his eighth term in Congress. He wasn’t from around here, as they say, had come to Richmond for law school from Bristol and planned on staying. He was young to have a case like that, but more experienced heads wanted no part of it. Maybe no one told Buck Lance he was supposed to lose, or at least not to win very large. Maybe he saw the bigger picture, starring himself as the Defender of The Little Guy.

Whichever, he gave it his all. He got plenty of witnesses to talk about what a dick Val Chadwick had been that night and many others, the truth squeezing out between the defense lawyers’ objections.

The ace in the hole, though, was Dewey Tate. Dewey wasn’t much older than I was then, but he tended to be a little wilder. He was more or less reared by his aunt, who had eight kids of her own and not many parenting skills left for her absent sister’s kid. It was enough, I’m sure she thought, that she more or less fed and clothed him.

Dewey ran wild, and on that particular night, he was in the gravel parking lot where Val Chadwick, almost sober, came to lean on his car and ponder what came next. Dewey was with a girl who was a year older, doing what you did on the Hill when you were that age and without adult supervision.

Supposedly, Dewey came to the prosecutor, because no one had seen him hiding there that night. He turned out to be an amazingly coherent, convincing witness. His story was as dead-on as those bullets that stopped David Shiflett. When Corbett and Chadwick’s other attorneys tried to confuse or bully him, he just stared at them with his hard little eyes and repeated what he’d said already.

What Dewey said he saw was “that fella,” pointing at Chadwick, coming out the door and going to his car, opening the trunk, sitting there, and waiting. Chadwick saw Dewey and the girl and told them to get the fuck out of there, and the girl did. Nobody ever called her to testify. Dewey stayed, hiding in the bushes next to a trash barrel.

Dewey testified that Chadwick definitely had a gun in his right hand. He definitely stood up when, some minutes later, David Shiflett came out the same door. He definitely approached Shiflett, and he definitely shot him, twice standing and three times on the ground. Dewey said that Shiflett just seemed surprised. According to Dewey, Chadwick said, clear as day, “What do you think of my play-toy now, asshole?”

They tried to get the boy’s testimony thrown out, but Judge Tayloe said it was admissible. At some point, the lawyers got together with Chadwick’s father and decided to cut their losses. Val Chadwick would plead to second-degree murder. They said that Val Chadwick was really pissed off about that, called his father a coward where other people could hear him. His remorse seemed to be nearly invisible.

Still, they thought the judge would go easy. Maybe he’d get ten years, be out in five. He’d still have a life.

But sometimes judges fool you, even ones that belong to your club. Judge Tayloe, it turned out, was offended enough by Val Chadwick’s crime and lack of regret that he put aside any past or future favors from the Chadwick family.

Val Chadwick got fifty years. He would, even with parole, spend most of his adult life in prison.

They said things got somewhat messy in the courtroom after the weight of the sentence settled on Chadwick and his family. Screams and threats led to both Val and his father being led away in different directions. A photo in the paper the next day shows Chadwick’s father, his wide, flushed face in a grimace, his jaw set back, with two deputies gripping each arm firmly, as he’s led down the steps.

Somehow, though, they got the court to set bail. It was for half a million, and Chadwick’s father posted it the next day. Val Chadwick spent exactly one night in jail.

And then, Val Chadwick apparently decided he could not do the time.

They found the boat drifting about twenty miles off Virginia Beach. It was a thirty-footer registered to the Chadwicks. Val supposedly had gone down there and taken the
Unfiltered
out by himself. There was a suicide note, and the anchor was missing.

There was a lot of conjecture for several months, and people would claim they’d seen Val Chadwick here or there. Some clothing that appeared to have been his washed up on shore at Sandbridge that fall. Eventually even the most hardheaded knucklehead on the Hill accepted that, faced with a lifetime in prison, young Val just couldn’t take it.

David Junior was an only child. I think his mother kind of lost it after the shooting, and she was in and out of Central State, and then committed for good. David Junior, like Dewey Tate, wound up being haphazardly reared by an aunt. I lost track of him, just knew he left right after his senior year and joined the Army. One day, when I was in college, somebody told me he had become a cop.