Oregon Hill Read online

  “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.

  Still, Peachy’s a sport, and I do think that, despite everything they must teach you when you take a job that involves handling the news media, she still has a certain fondness for the truth.

  I stay silent, and she finally gets to it.

  “You mentioning Shiflett, it made me think.”

  I will her to go on.

  “It’s about the car,” she continues. “The one Fell was driving. They didn’t find anything even vaguely incriminating. Oh, there were the usual fingerprints, some of your basic doin’-the-dirty body fluids. She was there, all right.

  “But, there wasn’t anything else. No signs of a struggle, no blood, no fingernail scratches on the seat. If anybody did anything violent to anybody else in that car, they couldn’t find it.”

  I should just tell Peachy about what Awesome Dude said, but for some reason I don’t. Maybe Peachy and I ought to change jobs. I’m getting pretty good lately at withholding the facts.

  Maybe, I suggest, he took her all the way out to the South Anna River under false pretenses, like they were going for a midnight stroll or something.

  “But they fought, back at that bar. I dunno. It just doesn’t sound right.”

  I ask her how that relates to David Shiflett.

  “Well,” she says, not sure what to say next. “This is all off the record, right?”

  She’s asked me already, and she knows she can trust me, but Peachy’s nervous.

  I reassure her, and she goes on.

  “Shiflett, he’s on a tear about this. He won’t take no for an answer, won’t even consider anybody but Fell. I know Fell more or less confessed, but I’m getting a little worried.”

  I tell her I’m not quite sure about Martin Fell either. Finally, I turn the tables and tell her that what I’m telling her is off the record. She pauses for what seems like half a minute. It’s one thing for a reporter to jeopardize a story by agreeing not to use what he’s about to be told, but the cops kind of frown on their numbers withholding something that might be germane to a live case.

  Finally, she says it’s OK, and I tell her that the guy who’s running scared thinks he saw the girl get into a cop car, but he’s not sure about the time.

  “Car belonging to a guy named Bear?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  Before she hangs up, I ask her for a favor. Can I put something on my blog that simply says the cops can’t find any incriminating evidence in Martin Fell’s car? At first, she’s adamant and accuses me of trying to double-cross her.

  “You know I won’t run it if you don’t say so, Peachy. You know me.”

  I cross another line and promise her that I’ll let her see exactly how it’s written, and that I won’t change a thing, and that editors could pull my fingernails out and I’ll never reveal my source.

  “I must be crazy,” she says, finally agreeing.

  The blog just came to me. I’ve had one for several months and haven’t written a word yet. They want their high-profile reporters to have them, I guess because we’re not giving quite enough information away for free on the Web site as it is. The last time the tech guy had a chat with me, by direction of upper management, he tried to make it sound like it’d be something “neat,” “cool,” a refreshing change from my usual Luddite existence. He caught me on a smoke break, and my only advantage was that he was trying to stay as far away from me as possible so as not to catch air cancer.

  But part of the pep talk was that, on my blog, I could “have some fun,” “go outside the box,” “get a little crazy.”

  I’m not much for going outside the box. I’m pretty fond of the box. However, anyone will tell you that I am capable of getting a little crazy, even without the aid of alcohol.

  None of the editors above me, even Jackson, is willing to sign off on another story about Martin Fell. It is, as Wheelie put it redundantly, “past history.” The cops are sure they have the right guy, and don’t we have enough outstanding criminals in the city without writing about one who’s one impartial jury trial away from death or a fate worse than?

  So, while I’m talking to Peachy, the penny drops. If the print paper—which is the only damn paper there is, by the way— doesn’t have room for a little conjecture about Isabel Ducharme’s murder, my blog awaits. I am being begged to go beyond the daily grind and get people’s blood pumping.

  Normally, I like the daily grind, whether it’s covering politicians or criminals. Sally Velez has urged me to keep track of what she calls Stupid Criminal Tricks and then run a big, funny story at the end of the year, but I never
get around to it. There’s something satisfying about coming to work, covering what’s out there as honestly and impartially as possible, then going home or to a bar and forgetting about it.

  This one, though, is a little harder to forget about. I can’t deny it.

  I call Sarah over and ask her, not for the first time, to show me how to “access” my blog. Sarah’s been exactly the same today as every other day. With a mixture of relief and regret, I understand that what happened Monday night stays in Monday night. NBD. For ancient twenty-three-year-old Sarah Goodnight, each day is a new adventure, too, apparently.

  When I start writing, things kind of come pouring out. I go back to the mother’s story and the son’s corroborating explanation of how his jacket got stained that night. I mention Martin Fell’s aversion to blood and gore, even when it’s only poultry. I point out how “others” attested to his gentle nature. I mention how quickly the rape charges against Fell were dropped all those years ago. I make an allusion to a witness who might have seen the girl getting into a car on Floyd Avenue sometime that night. (I don’t mention that it was a police car, I don’t mention “Bear,” and I make the witness a “she,” to protect Awesome. I wouldn’t do this in the newspaper, but the blog, which doesn’t in any way seem like journalism, sets me free.)

  Last, I note that reliable sources indicate that Martin Fell’s car showed no signs of a struggle, despite extensive efforts by the police to find such signs.

  As promised, I email all this to Peachy before posting. She calls me back fifteen minutes later.

  “Yeah, I guess you can go with that,” she says. “I wondered about the ‘extensive’ part, but they did check that sucker out for the better part of three days, I heard.”

  She asks me what’s going to happen when the shit hits the fan.

  “Hell if I know. I doubt anybody even reads the damn thing. Be interesting to see how many visitors it gets.”

  “Well,” she says, “you be careful. You’re liable to be getting some visitors yourself if you’re not careful. Watch your ass. Shiflett kind of scares me.”

  Unlike Awesome Dude, Peachy Love is not afraid of much.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Thursday

  As it turns out, people do read blogs.

  I posted my observations (headline: Is Martin Fell being rail-roaded?) at eleven fifteen. Sometime after one A.M., I went over to Penny Lane to try to catch up with my cohorts whose beats permit leisurely alcohol consumption as opposed to speed drinking.

  Sarah had already been there an hour and a half. She left by herself five minutes before I did, with no allusion to past or future dalliances on either of our parts. I was prepared to do the honorable thing if opportunity knocked, but I am easily persuaded, and it was something of a relief when I looked around and found she was gone.

  Jackson calls me at six forty-five. Jackson never willingly gets up before nine, and he would never have the initiative to call me, even after nine, unless the building where we publish had been blown up. Someone higher up, in other words, has already been frying Jackson’s ass at an even earlier hour.

  “Willie, what the hell are you doing?” he says by way of greeting. His use of my first name is another red flag. When all is well, Jackson’s reporters, male and female, are on a last-name basis. The more intimate he gets, the worse the trouble.

  I tell him what I had been doing was sleeping until some asshole woke me up. He calls me some very bad names and then says, as I have already surmised, that this is about my blog.

  “What? The online guy told me to stretch myself, go outside the box. He said it wasn’t supposed to be like what’s in the newspaper.”

  “It isn’t supposed to contradict what’s in the paper, either.”

  I tell him that I was just filling in some of the blanks.

  “You’re filling in the blanks with bullshit. We look like jerks,” Jackson says, and I tell him not to yell. It’s too early.

  “The sun isn’t even up,” he goes on, slightly quieter but no less pissed, “and already we’ve got a dozen responses. Half of ’em are bashing us for being soft on crime and the other half want to know why it hasn’t been in the paper.”

  I tell him that I didn’t know the vampires actually read the paper. Vampires is what we call the insomniacs and compulsives who troll Web sites in the middle of the night. I don’t know how many of them are out there, but I’ve never heard of as many as a dozen responding to anything this early.

  I ask Jackson what time Wheelie called him, and what time he supposed the publisher called Wheelie.

  The publisher, who used to be a reporter and editor before he went corporate, worries us.

  Beyond the fact that he is prone to throwing his old colleagues overboard whenever we start taking on water, there’s more. He is seldom seen in direct sunlight. He’s there when the earliest of us get there in the morning. He never leaves the building in daylight hours except to get his car from the underground parking garage and go to meetings where, we suspect, he and others of his ilk drink employees’ blood. He has what the obit writer calls a “deathly pallor” about him. He has been known to email us about online content before three A.M.

  “Nobody called me,” Jackson says with too much enthusiasm. “This is from me.”

  I ask him what he wants me to do about it.

  “I don’t know. Maybe look for another job. Be here at ten-thirty. Sharp, for a change.”

  The allusion to another job isn’t funny. I’ve been skating pretty close to the edge. I’m seeing cracks in the ice.

  The last time I was in this state of disgrace, I had refused a direct order. The then-executive editor, all piss and vinegar, told me to sneak into the MCV hospital and make the life of a dying man just a little bit more miserable.

  I refused, and we had one of those meetings like the one I’m not looking forward to this morning. When I walked out, I was off the capitol beat and back on night cops.

  Then, last year, I quit. This time, it was because I’d trusted a cop, Gillespie, who rewarded my trust by causing the suicide death of a woman I thought I was helping. When the same executive editor ordered me to do a “tick-tock”—what more literate folk might call a narrative—on the fall of her sad, pathetic family, I told him to go sexually gratify himself, then resigned before he could fire me. I do have, as many have noted, a problem with authority.

  After I quit, I sat down and weighed my options, which were few, against my debts, which were many. When I came crawling back, luck was with me. The EE, who was there mainly because the publisher didn’t want to personally fire his old colleagues, was close to being sent back to whatever hell he came from. When he got the ax, three weeks after I quit, Wheelie took over temporarily.

  He’s been more or less in charge since then because we can’t afford to hire another executive editor. Wheelie’s no genius, and I disagree with him on most things important, but he was willing to take me back—after I’d apologized. Since the guy I’d blasted was already gone, the apology was accepted.

  So, as you can see, I’m down to about strike three and could be deep-sixed, having used up all or most of my nine lives.

  I ring off and, not for the first time, curse my disinclination to shy away from head-on collisions. Sleep on it, Jeanette used to tell me, in our early married days when I was even more impetuous.

  The trouble with this, though, is that I have been sleeping on it, and every time I wake up, Martin Fell seems a little less guilty.

  I call Andi at eight and ask her if we can meet for breakfast at nine instead of nine thirty. We finally agree on nine fifteen, at Perlie’s, which has the advantage of being less than a five-minute walk from the paper. I’d looked forward to a leisurely chat with my daughter, but experience tells me that wouldn’t have happened anyhow. After half an hour with me, she’s usually checking her watch.

  She shows up at nine-twenty, and I wave her back to my booth.

  I ask her if she’s eating enough, and she tells
me I need to exercise more “and kick the nicotine.” I badly need a smoke right now, but I’ll have to wait until I’m on the street again. Might have time for one last cigarette before I get to the office. Maybe a blindfold, too.

  I’m struck again with how beautiful my daughter is. I suppress the urge to tell her this, because it tends to embarrass her. I also suppress the urge to ask her why the hell she has a tattoo on her right bicep. I never understand that, even with other people’s daughters. A tattoo on a pretty girl is like a mustache on the Mona Lisa.

  She tells me she’s written a story for her creative writing class, and I tell her I’d love to read it. She says maybe sometime, which doesn’t sound like any time soon.

  When I see her glance at her watch, I ask her about her mother, and she says she’s fine.

  Jeanette’s always fine.

  We met at VCU. The campus has changed so much that most of the touchstones of our courtship are not there to haunt me anymore.

  We had a blind date on April Fool’s Day. She’d been stood up the night before, and I was happily playing the field, horny as a goat at nineteen. She was from eastern Henrico, not half a mile from where Peggy grew up, and it made us think we had some kind of mystical link. We’d joke about how we might be cousins.

  We actually did have an amazing amount in common—liked the same books, movies and music, for the most part. For the first time in my young life, I could just sit and talk with a girl for hours. Don’t get me wrong, the sex was good, too, and we were doing it almost from the start. But I didn’t want her to turn into a pizza at midnight. We cuddled.

  We didn’t date exclusively until we were seniors, but we both knew where it was all headed, even if her family wasn’t thrilled with me. I always suspected it was racial. They knew all about Peggy Black. There’s little enough going on out there that scandals among the families who never leave are passed along from generation to generation, part of the oral tradition.