Oregon Hill Read online

  “C’mon, Willie,” she says, suppressing a smile. “That’s not right.”

  Well, it felt right.

  I’m usually off Mondays, but I agreed to work for Chuck Apple, who usually has night cops on Sundays and Mondays.

  I try to persuade Jackson to get someone to cover for me for a couple of hours so I can go to the memorial. He reminds me that Wheelie’s assigned Baer to cover it. He’s already filed the arraignment story. I tell him that I’m just curious, just want to be there. I lie and tell him that my daughter wanted me to meet her there, that she’s kind of creeped out by what’s happened, being a young woman alone. Andi’s not afraid of half the things she should be afraid of, and Martin Fell, languishing in solitary down at the city jail, probably doesn’t cross her mind. Still, I lay it on thick, and Jackson buys it.

  “Your ass better be back here by nine thirty,” he warns.

  They’re having the memorial indoors, at the basketball gym, right on campus, and it’s already one-third full when I get there. They are expecting somewhere between 5,000 and 7,500 people, although how you predict the crowd for a murdered girl’s memorial is beyond me.

  They continue to stream in, and I’m somewhat amazed that this girl, who couldn’t have known that many people in her short few weeks on campus, could bring out this many kids. Many have white, lit candles, and I look around for the nearest fire exit. Not all of them are taking it seriously, but a lot are. I wonder if, for some of them, it’s the first time they’ve given a passing thought to the depressing fact that they won’t live forever, and that bad things happen to good people all the time.

  I’d half-forgotten how cheap life can be, after all those years covering the legislature, whose crimes were mostly misdemeanors. Coming back on night cops, I got a refresher course. Most of the murders were African-Americans, and most of the victims didn’t seem to have much of what you’d call a strong male influence in their lives.

  I’ve gone to three or four funerals for victims of cases I’ve covered in the last year. I usually go on my own time, because I’m a sap. The mothers seem to take on all the grief, comforted by friends who probably have lost someone, too. They often are so overcome that you wonder how they can go on living. It makes the white funerals I’ve been to seem like board meetings.

  This is something else, though.

  Most of these kids couldn’t have known Isabel Ducharme, and the longer I sit there, through blandishments and nonecumenical, white-bread songs accompanied by guitars and a drummer, the more I think that this is mostly about them. It’s some kind of statement about how precious each and every one of their lives is, worthy of bringing the world to a halt to recognize the monstrosity of youth snatched away.

  At some later date, it might occur to them that the little black girl who died sitting in her living room, struck down by a pinhead with an Uzi who sprayed the neighborhood because he thought somebody that lived there had dissed him, might deserve to have her death publicly mourned as well.

  I estimate the crowd at a little over 4,000, although Baer, who like most journalists sucks at numbers, will call it 6,000 in the paper. The only people of note who are missing are the girl’s mother and father.

  As I look around, trying to see if Andi is there, I spot Clara Westbrook in the section on the other side of the basketball floor. She’s sitting beside another woman who looks, from my vantage point, to be about Clara’s age—somewhere over eighty. Clara seems to be comforting her.

  I think I’ll try to find them after it’s over, but just then a minister who never met Isabel Ducharme stands and leads us in prayer. I close my eyes, more out of respect than belief, and when I open them again—four long minutes later—I see that Clara and the other woman are leaving, walking up the long flight of steps to street level. Clara, who doesn’t have great pins herself, seems to be supporting her friend.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Tuesday

  I lie there, coming to, and my mind ticks off the things that are disturbing my peace.

  What’s going to happen to Andi? How’s Peggy going to handle Les if he continues to get worse? When am I going to get the call from human resources to come chat about “new directions”? Who was that woman with Clara Westbrook, and why does the look on her face, from halfway across a crowded gymnasium, still bug me?

  Who is in my bed?

  Oh, yeah.

  Last things first.

  I didn’t miss anything by taking a couple of hours off to go to Isabel Ducharme’s memorial, although Jackson acted as if he’d done me a big damn favor that would require payback with interest.

  Sarah Goodnight was working late, finishing a feature story for Sunday. She asked me to take a look at the first draft, and I offered some advice, warning her first that I’m a reporter, not a writer. Still, if you push words around all day for twenty-seven years, you ought to know something; although some of my associates seem to have blackboards for brains, wiped clean when they go home at night. There’s one sportswriter, been here longer than me, that we call Groundhog, after that movie where you repeat the same day over and over.

  Sarah’s going to be a good reporter. As with all promising young journalists, I wonder where she is going to cash in that promise, as newspapers shrink and disappear, but she doesn’t seem worried. Just last week, she broke a story on this big company allegedly coming to town. When I asked her who tipped her off, she said Twitter, and then patiently showed me why all the wisecracks about tweeting and the harrumphing about our callow youth spending too much time online is a bunch of bullshit. There is information flying around out there that I am missing entirely. Don’t worry about me, Sarah’s eyes said. Worry about you.

  Still, I occasionally think she might want to experience something a little more human than can be accessed on a keyboard, and when I heard on the scanner about a shooting north of Broad, somewhere in the low 30s, I asked her if she wanted to come along like she’s done a couple of times before.

  A kid, nineteen years old, had been shot to death sitting in his car. He probably did something that made him eminently eligible for elimination by some other thug. Still, lying there with his head on the steering wheel, surprise on his dead, ruined face, his do-rag soaked with blood—as Gillespie and a couple of other cops worked around him like they were handling a hunk of beef—he didn’t look like a bad guy. I always have this feeling, at times like this, that there was a turning point, some bypass on the road to bad. Probably not, though. If your mom’s fifteen when you were born, and you come from a line of dysfunctionality stretching back probably to the time some distant ancestor was yanked from his village and hauled across the Atlantic to be sold on an auction block, maybe destiny is sitting on you like a bull elephant.

  This was the first time Sarah Goodnight had actually seen a dead body that was still cooling down. The other times, there was a sheet over the deceased by the time we got there. Gillespie found it amusing when she turned and threw up beside the car. I offered her my slightly soiled handkerchief, and within half a minute, she was “fine, fine” and insisted on staying beside me, making a point of examining the body with her eyes like she was memorizing it for a test.

  Still, I was glad she hadn’t been there when most of Isabel Ducharme was retrieved from the South Anna River. She’d have to work up to that. Or not. Maybe she’d be lucky enough to spend the rest of her newspaper career—should there be such a thing in any of our futures—without ever again having to watch blood soak asphalt that had already absorbed a few quarts of it while five-year-old kids pointed imaginary guns at each other ten feet way. You don’t need to see a hundred murders; one or two will do the trick.

  We went back, and I filed what I could for the paper, then put more online.

  She emailed me just before I was starting to leave.

  “Thanks for the tour.”

  I emailed back that she was welcome, then added, “Sorry about the other night. I shouldn’t drink.”

  She: NBD.

&
nbsp; Me: NBD?

  She: No Big Deal.

  Oh.

  She said she was about to leave, too. It was almost closing time, but she said she figured we could get one or two in before Penny Lane closed.

  My main brain, the one in charge of boring shit like common sense and motor skills, set off a red light.

  The other brain, the one in charge of liquor and other naughty things, turned the red light off.

  We were able to order two Harps each when we got there, me being a regular and Sarah becoming one.

  Walking out at two A.M., she said it was too bad they closed the bars so early.

  I said I had access to a place where they never stopped serving.

  She looked up at me and smiled, while she pushed a few strands of hair out of her face.

  “I know,” she said.

  So, the head lying beside mine, helping make the king-size bed a little smaller, daintily snoring away, belongs to Sarah Goodnight. And I’ve done it again.

  At this point, my moral tablet doesn’t have a lot of commandments etched on it. About the only one that applies here is: Thou shalt not do the nasty with any woman younger than thy daughter. It used to be something about women half my age, but I’ve busted through that barrier.

  Well, Sarah’s twenty-three. I might go to hell for it, but I won’t have to take down the mirrors.

  I try to slip out of bed without waking her, but she opens her eyes, stretches and yawns. I ask her if she wants some breakfast and she says no, she’s just going to get something at Starbucks.

  She’s in her jeans and blouse, putting on her car coat, by the time I’m out of the bathroom.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her, and I really am. Now. “You shouldn’t let me drink.”

  She laughs.

  “You’re, like, fifty?”

  “Forty-nine. But I need supervision.”

  “Well,” she says, giving me a niece-like peck as she reaches for the door, “you’ll have to look elsewhere for that. I have enough trouble controlling me.”

  “Still,” I say, “I shouldn’t have . . .”

  “Hey,” she says, in lieu of farewell, “NBD.”

  “Got it.”

  She’s smiling as she closes the door, already calling someone on her cell phone as the elevator dings. I hope the Garlands across the hall are somewhere minding their own business.

  Custalow is already on the job, assuming he still has one. He’s seen worse.

  Before I leave, I call Clara. I tell her I’m sorry I didn’t check with her before I went to the funeral, that I could have given her a ride.

  “Honey,” she says, “I needed to drive, anyhow. At my age, I’m afraid to stop doing anything for more than a day or two for fear I’ll forget. My kids already have the assisted-care place on speed dial.”

  I tell her I saw her there, and I ask who her friend was.

  There’s a silence, which is rare for Clara.

  “Oh,” she says finally. “You mean Christina? We’ve known each other forever.”

  I ask her why Christina was there.

  “She’s just like me. She was just heartbroken about that girl. It was so sad, wasn’t it? Somebody said you’d talked to the boy who did it.”

  I tell her we’re not sure he did it, and that he’s long past boyhood.

  Before I can ask her more about Christina, she says she has to go check something on the stove.

  “Remember the time I left the burner on and forgot about it?” she asks. “All those fire trucks. You’d have thought the whole town was burning down. Lord, I don’t want that again. Gotta go. Bye.”

  Before I can finish my Special K and orange juice and get out of the building, Peggy calls.

  “Can you come over, like now?” she says. Peggy has got to be the oldest person in the world who uses “like” as a conversation bridge.

  “Les?”

  “Yeah. He’s up there again.”

  “Can’t you just shoot him down?”

  “Not funny. And I don’t have a gun.”

  When I get there, not even stopping off at the 821 Café, he has already been coaxed down, to my relief. No trips up shaky ladders to retrieve burly, unpredictable old ex-catchers today.

  We lead Les inside, ignoring Jerry Cannady, who seems to have nothing to do all day except pass judgment on his neighbors.

  “I don’t know,” Les keeps saying. “I just don’t know.”

  “Me either, buddy,” Peggy says. “Maybe we oughta move.”

  Yeah, I’m thinking, somewhere with a roof that’s not too far off the ground.

  Peggy probably wouldn’t mind moving. It was most of what we did when I was a kid. We’d rent a place on Pine, then Peggy would hook up with some guy over on Cherry, then they’d break up and she’d find us a place on China or Spring. She and Les have been renting this place on Laurel now for about five years, which, I think, is her personal best.

  The funny thing, though, is that we never left Oregon Hill. Every time Peggy would find a new love interest or just a friend to move in with for a while, it was in that tight little inbred box between Belvidere, Hollywood Cemetery, the river and that hole in the ground where they were building the Downtown Expressway.

  Despite Peggy’s peripatetic proclivities, it did give me a sense of place. I probably had more fights over Peggy’s free and easy ways than I did over my own racial heritage. You might not duke it out every time over some wise-ass making a crack about half-breeds or watermelons, but on the Hill, your momma was your momma, no matter what.

  “Thank God for David Junior Shiflett,” Peggy says, and I briefly wonder why his existence should be viewed as a blessing.

  “He was the one that got him down,” she explains.

  It isn’t often that a lieutenant with the Richmond police performs the human equivalent of getting a cat out of a tree, but I guess Shiflett was on his way to work when Cannady or somebody called. It doesn’t hurt having law and order in the neighborhood, I guess. Whatever personal crap there is between me and him, I appreciate the favor.

  “He said to say hi to you. Said you and him needed to get together and have a drink one of these days.”

  Although it’s still not eleven, Les has gone to take a nap.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do with him,” Peggy says, but she doesn’t say it like she really doesn’t know. It’s more like he was a little kid who had been caught climbing the chinaberry tree again, after she told him not to. Peggy tended to be a little flighty, at least when she was younger, a little too quick to leave a good thing for something that might or might not be better; but she was always drawn to the no-hopers, the ones that might be too much trouble for somebody else. She’d leave a wife-or girlfriend-beater in a New York minute, but she once took in a starving three-legged cat and kept the damn thing for thirteen years.

  Hell, she even took care of her sorry-ass mother at the end. It was while they were clearing all the houses and shit for the Expressway, and some nights I’d just go sleep down there, by all the construction and the smoke that used to be people’s houses. Peggy had given me a secondhand tent one year when I expressed a short-lived interest in camping.

  Compared with what else has floated past over the years, Les is at or near the top of the class. He has taken care of her for years. Still does, when his mind isn’t beaming him somewhere else.

  Peggy asks me about Andi. She came by the other day, she says, which surprises me and maybe pains me a little. Andi never comes by my place. But Peggy didn’t abandon her and her mother, either, so I don’t really have any reason to whine. Still, I want to.

  “I think she’s a little bit like I was when I was her age,” Peggy says. I suppress a “God forbid” and point out that by the time she was Andi’s age, she was taking care of a two-year-old with no support.

  “Well,” she says, “they grow up slower now, don’t they?”

  It’s a nice day for a walk. I endure the disapproving glances of passersby who no doubt
would like to expand the smoking ban from restaurants and bars to the planet Earth. To my knowledge, I’ve never caused a forest fire or given any of the squirrels lung cancer from secondhand smoke. There was the time I was upbraided by one of my neighbors at the Prestwould because I dropped ashes into her espresso cup from six stories up as she read the paper in our courtyard, but hanging out the window is the only way I can get away with smoking indoors. Kate swears she’ll tear up my lease and throw me out if she smells smoke in the apartment again. She still has a key and has been known to drop by.

  “Why don’t you just quit?” she asked me more than once when we were cohabitating. Having never smoked, she doesn’t know. Even Peggy, whose place usually exudes a whiff of cannabis, complains. I’ve told her that her lungs will give out before mine do, and she laughs and says that at least she’ll be happy.

  So, about the only place left to smoke in peace is the streets.

  The bums are out in force in Monroe Park, enjoying an Indian summer day the way only those without dependable indoor accommodations can. One of them, an old black guy with teeth in the high single digits, comes up to me. Thinking I’m going to be panhandled, I’m reaching for spare change when he says, “Hey, buddy, don’t you know that shit will kill you?”

  I thank him for the tip and keep the change.

  When I let myself into the Prestwould and my eyes begin to adjust to the light, I see immediately that drama is afoot.

  Marcia the manager is talking with a gaggle of six Prestwouldians, and the excitement seems to be reaching stroke level.

  Mr. Grumpy is eager to give me the bad news:

  Somebody has stolen jewelry from Maddie Blank’s apartment.

  Maddie Blank is in her early nineties. She’s one of those lucky souls who will be able to die at home, with maybe a night in the hospital just before. Living at a place like the Prestwould, with full staff and caring neighbors (some assholes, too, and I’m looking at you, Feldman), it’s possible to go gently into that good night without spending your final days or years in the care of the surly and untrained in “assisted care.” Here, the caring and assistance are organic, and they don’t require you to run through your life savings in a few years.