Oregon Hill (15 page)

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.

I’ve seen the drill already half a dozen times. One night the ambulance comes, and in the morning, there’s a sterling silver bowl in the lobby with two white roses inside, beside a silver tray for sympathy cards. I haven’t had much elegance in my life, and acts like this sometimes make me think I’m living in a foreign land.

Several neighbors looked in on Maddie on a regular basis. She has congestive heart failure and seemed to be getting a little weaker, but she’s hanging in there.

The thing is, like a lot of the older residents, she leaves her door unlocked, supposedly so help can be administered without breaking down her beautiful front door. And, as she’s said to me, “I’m on the eighth floor, with a locked door out front and a guard desk. Who’s going to rob me here?”

Well, somebody did. Either while Maddie was asleep or while she was visiting elsewhere in the building, someone apparently has relieved her of a good bit of her jewelry, plus an impressive sum of cash that she kept in a little lockbox on her bedside table. Maddie has never completely trusted banks, being a child of the Depression. The way things are going, who’s to say she’s wrong? Still, a thousand or so dollars are gone.

She told Clara that she didn’t mind losing the money, but that the lockbox also had her obituary in it, plus instructions for what she was to wear to her funeral.

There is, understandably, a desire around here to have a lynching and then maybe later a trial.

McGrumpy just glares in my direction. Marcia calls me aside.

“I don’t want to make accusations,” she says, in the comfort of her broom-closet office, “but have you seen anything, er, unusual? At all?”

Like Abe Custalow slipping into my apartment with a lockbox and a pocketful of jewels?

No, I tell her, I haven’t seen anything unusual.

“You know,” I tell her, “he was in prison for killing some guy in a fight. From what I heard, the guy deserved it, but it was an accident. I’ve known Abe since we were kids, and I’ve never known him to take anything that didn’t belong to him.”

“I know, I know,” she says, holding her hands up. “I like Abe. He’s a good worker. He can fix anything. But there’s talk. What am I going to do?”

What she’s going to do is leave it up to the board, which will be holding a special meeting on Monday to deal with “the problem.” And, right or wrong, that might be it for Abe.

It’s late in the afternoon when Kate calls, giving me a progress report on her new client.

“He’s not doing so well,” she says.

I ask her if he’s in isolation and she says that he is, but that he keeps hitting his head against the bars.

“He looks like somebody’s beaten him, Willie,” she says. “He’s just so damn pathetic.”

She says that Mrs. Fell has moved up from Chase City and plans to be here until her boy is exonerated. I want to ask her how soon until hell freezes over. I do ask where Mrs. Fell is staying.

“Well,” she says, “right now, with me. With us. Just until we can figure something out. I’m going to find her a place.”

I ask her how her latest husband is dealing with that and she says “fine” too quickly, in a way that lets me know further questioning will not be productive or welcome.

“How do Bartley, Bowman and Bush feel about you taking this case?”

She pauses for a couple of seconds.

“You know the scene in
Miracle on 34th Street
, where the guy decides to defend Santa Claus? About like that.”

Oh.

“The thing is,” she says, “I really don’t believe the little SOB did it. He’s a jerk, and he’s a loser, but I don’t think he did it.”

If he’s such a jerk and loser, I ask her, why is she risking a future partnership at BB&B to defend him?

I know, though. Like Peggy, she’s always had a soft spot for losers.

McGonnigal calls, and when he finds out I’m off, he gets a poker game together—me and Abe, Peroni and Jimmy-something-or-other, whom I assume is R.P.’s latest. Don’t ask, don’t tell, but there are two toothbrushes in the bathroom. R.P. is still playing the field, and I guess he always will. Who am I to talk?

I don’t believe that R. P. McGonnigal ever “came out.” Coming out always sounded to me like it called for some kind of party, with gifts and balloons. He’s kind of quietly gone over to the other team, although I suppose it would be more correct to say he’d stopped pretending he’s on ours. He handles it with a light touch, which we all appreciate. It’s OK to kid around about R.P.’s sexual persuasion, and there’s always some amusing story about his mother and father’s latest attempts to turn him into a card-carrying heterosexual. His old friends know it’s a defense mechanism and, to some extent, a way to tell the rest of the Hill and the world that he doesn’t give a shit what they think, but he does.

The game lasts until after midnight. Abe, who has a poker face whether he’s playing or not, is the big winner, and I turn early gold into late crap with the aid of Miller High Life. Beer tends to make me fall in love with inside straights, and forget the rules to some of the more arcane games we’ve made up that could barely be called poker.

We like to play at McGonnigal’s, because he has this big backyard over in Church Hill where, in summer, you can stretch out, listen to the cicadas, drink beer, harass each other and smoke cigars. In October, we’re forced to play indoors, and R.P., like everyone else on the planet, doesn’t allow smoking in his house.

We do go outside for cigars after the last hand. I’m leaning against the fence when Jimmy starts asking me questions about the Isabel Ducharme story.

Finally, he says, “I knew that guy. Used to work with him.”

“Martin Fell?”

“Yeah. He was a strange little dude. Worked for me for a while at Community Pride, over on Grace.”

Turns out that Jimmy was, at one time, head butcher at a now-defunct grocery store just off the VCU campus. R.P., who does creative work for various ad agencies—bouncing around at work the way he does in his love life—seems to be drawn to the meat-and-potatoes, big-truck guys.

“I hired him maybe eight, nine years ago. He’d been stocking shelves, and he wanted to try something different. I wasn’t sure it was him at first. Name sounded familiar. So I went back and found this picture. They took one of the whole staff, ran it as an ad in the paper. You know, ‘We’re the big, happy Community Pride family,’ that kind of crap. And there he was, big as life. He hasn’t changed much since then. Maybe dyed his hair.”

He gives out with a short laugh.

“You say he cut her head off?”

“Somebody did. Didn’t come off on its own.”

“Well,” he says, reaching around and scratching his neck, “maybe he’s changed.”

I ask him what he means.

“I don’t know why he took the job. Got tired of being a stock boy, I guess, and the meat department paid more. Just took what was available, I suppose. But part of the job was that he had to cut up the chickens. You know, turn the whole bird into those packages of thighs and legs and breasts and wings and livers. Had to learn how to bone them. It ain’t rocket science, but it’s got to be done right.”

He takes a swig of Budweiser.

“But this guy, Martin Fell, he can’t do it. He’s there for a week when he comes in one day and, real dramatic, he hands me his apron.

“You know what the problem was?”

I shake my head.

“He said he just couldn’t handle all the mess. The blood and guts, all that. He said he was having nightmares about chickens chasing him around with a knife.”

He laughs again.

“Chickens with knives. Well, people do change.”

I zip my leather jacket up a little more against the cold, and agree that this is apparently so.

CHAPTER NINE

Wednesday

K
ate’s call wakes me up. Why even bother with an alarm?

“Did you see the paper? It didn’t take you bastards long.”

No, I tell her, I haven’t seen the paper. That would require opening my eyes, getting out of bed and walking all the way to the front door (peeking out first in case the Garlands have their door open and don’t want an image that will be seared on their eyeballs forever), then leaning down and picking it up.

The paper’s easier to pick up these days, being considerably thinner than it used to be. (Our “alternative” weekly, which likes to think of itself as the city’s real voice and mostly uses “reporters” who’ll work for food, ran a cover a few weeks ago of a particularly scrawny Tuesday edition lying on somebody’s doorstep. The headline was halfway clever, for those clowns: “Have you lost weight?”)