Oregon Hill (33 page)

He’d dated a woman for a year or so “until she started giving me shit about getting married. Why buy when you’re living rentfree already, right?”

She worked at a doctor’s office, and a couple of times they’d gone there after hours, to screw in one of the examination rooms.

“She was a little hostile toward her job.”

Sometime in August, he’d reconnected with her, at least long enough to sneak her office key out of her purse and have a copy made.

“I’d seen her do it,” Shiflett says. “She’d have to send stuff by UPS, medical shit. All you had to do was log on to this site, tell ’em where it was going and how much it weighed, print out a label, slap it on and put it in the pile.

“There was always lots of stuff going out. Nobody would have known they’d paid for shipping a human head to Boston, if the cops hadn’t traced it back.”

He laughs, for the first time I can recall.

The police—present company excepted—had tried to figure that one out. They knew the box had been picked up at a medical clinic in Richmond, but they’d never been able to figure out how Martin Fell was connected to all that. No one at the clinic seemed to have any knowledge of Martin Fell, nor he of them. He must have managed to slip in through a back door, jimmy the lock or something, they figured.

“In the middle of the night like that, it was the easiest thing in the world. No surveillance cameras or anything. Maybe they would have tumbled onto my connection with the receptionist if Fell hadn’t fallen into our laps. Probably not, though.”

Shiflett hadn’t counted on Fell. When it became known that Isabel Ducharme was dating some guy in his thirties who had a thing for much younger women, and that they’d had a fight that night, conclusions were reached very quickly.

“They were sure they had the right guy, right from the start,” he says. “I just helped them along. They knew I’d always been good at the interrogation part. And I’d been there, from Day One. I made sure, as soon as we got word, that I was out there.

“Maybe you think that’s crazy, being right at the scene and all, but, fuck, I just wanted to see how it all went. Even talked to the grieving mom a time or two.”

I ask about Jenkins.

He laughs.

“Bobby Jenkins is a little bitch. He’ll do whatever I tell him to do. Thinks it’s for all the right reasons. I told him we’d teach that little panty-sniffer that justice gets served, no matter what. Also, teach a nosy-ass reporter not to jam up the gears. He never liked you, anyhow.

“And those knuckleheads that jumped you? It’ll keep them from getting an active sentence for some shit they pulled. And they think I had them do it just because I was pissed about a guilty fucker maybe getting to go free.”

I point out that Marie Ducharme didn’t do anything to deserve the grief of losing her only child.

He turns quickly, suddenly angry.

“She married that asshole,” he says. “Don’t tell me she didn’t know something, didn’t know he’d invented his ass whole-cloth over there. She knew he had this mystery mother that they could never visit. She knew there was something, some debt that hadn’t been paid.”

He sighs. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a couple of days.

“Well,” he says, “it’s been paid now.”

He looks around the room.

I ask him if he has something for pain. He looks confused, then remembers my foot.

“Oh, yeah. Well, don’t worry, Mr. Reporter. It won’t hurt much longer.”

Shit.

“I kind of hate to do this. You haven’t really done anything worth getting killed for, just got a little nosy is all. If it makes you feel any better, I’m doing this out of necessity, not spite.”

Before I can come up with some eloquent reason why I should be allowed to keep breathing, he puts the gag back on.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “You won’t feel a thing. Just like the last time.”

He leans closer. I can smell his rancid beer breath.

“Thing is, they might catch me anyhow. I don’t know. But maybe not. I’m betting you’re a close-to-the-vest kind of guy, just waiting to tell all you know. So, if I can make your ass disappear, just like I did Lester Corbett, maybe there’s no one to point fingers. Oh, they’ll suspect, maybe, when they find your car over on Riverside, but they won’t find your body. I just brought you back here to get you all packaged up for your trip down to Surry.”

He confirms what I’ve already figured out. I’m in David Shiflett’s basement, not two blocks from where my mother lives. As my thoughts raced, I noticed the framed picture of his family, the three of them, on the bookshelf across the room. They look happy.

Shiflett explains that he threw me in the police car after he put me out, then backed up to his basement from the alleyway behind his house. He’ll knock me out again, put me back in the car and transfer me to a van parked in a grocery-store lot in eastern Henrico. From there, on to Surry.

“Don’t worry about witnesses,” he says. “Lady on that side, she goes to bed by ten,” he says. “She’s sound asleep by now. The place on the other side, it’s vacant.

“I just wrap you up all neat and tidy in plastic, and take you out, like the trash. I won’t shoot you until we get to the river, but don’t worry, I’ll make sure you’re out when I do it.”

If I could speak, I’d tell him that plenty of people know everything, that they’ll be all over him. But, one, I can’t speak; two, I have kept it pretty much to myself; and, three, I’m not sure David Shiflett really gives a damn anymore. I think maybe part of him wants the papers, all the way up to Boston, Massachusetts, to know exactly what happened to Isabel Ducharme, and why.

Suddenly, Shiflett stops and looks up. He’d had the radio on an oldies station, and now he turns it down a little.

I can hear the floorboards squeaking overhead. Every couple of seconds, I hear it again.

It stops, then starts up again. Shiflett reaches over for the Luger.

He walks over to the steps and starts walking up, his pace as slow as the squeaks we hear upstairs.

Then, the squeaks stop. Shiflett is maybe three steps from the top. He looks slightly puzzled. I guess he figures no one has the guts to invade David Shiflett’s home while he’s in it, even if the door is unlocked.

Except somebody has.

He’s right at the door when he looks back down at me, like he wants to say something.

That’s when the middle of the door explodes and Shiflett goes flying backward. He hits the stairs two or three times and finally comes to rest at my feet.

I’m momentarily deaf. When Shiflett shot me in the foot, the .22 didn’t make enough noise to wake up his next-door neighbor. This was loud enough to wake up the folks in Hollywood Cemetery, a block away.

The rest of the door opens, and I’m looking up, through the haze, at the face of Philippe Ducharme.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

H
e walks down the steps, taking his time. He’s light on his feet for a big man. I hear a groan and realize that Shiflett is still alive.

“Well, well,” he says, looking at me. “Imagine finding you here. All my troubles in one place.”

He goes over and catches Shiflett with his foot, turning him over, gives him a kick. The hole that the sawed-off shotgun made in the door made an impressive one in him, too. He’s gut-shot, moaning on the floor.

“Say hello,” he says as Shiflett looks up, “to an old friend. You wanted me, white trash. You have me. Or rather, I have you.”

He laughs. It’s kind of an I-don’t-give-a-shit-what-happens next laugh.

“There’s a kind of symmetry, don’t you think? I kill your white-trash father, and forty years later, I kill you.”

Valentine Chadwick IV stands over Shiflett, who is trying to scream, but it’s kind of muffled and gurgled.

Chadwick pulls some electrical tape from a pocket of the baggy pants he’s wearing.

“Thought of everything,” he says, covering Shiflett’s mouth. “There. I’d rather hear you beg me to finish you off, but this way it will last longer.”

I’m hoping the shotgun blast woke up the old biddy next door, or somebody, and that the cavalry is on the way.

Chadwick turns to me again.

“When you told me his name,” he says, “I knew. I knew that he knew. Why else? The only thing to do was to come down here and finish it.”

He sees the PBR can lying on the floor. He goes over to the beer fridge and opens it. He kind of sniffs as he looks inside.

“You have deplorable taste in beer,” he says to Shiflett, wideeyed and gagging on the floor, bleeding to death. He takes one anyhow.

“I worked forty years to get past this,” he says. I’m still listening, wishing for sirens. “Then, this piece of Oregon Hill merde somehow finds me.”

He’s standing over Shiflett.

“If I were able to torture you to the brink of death a thousand times,” he says, “and then bring you back and do it all over again, with every instrument ever dreamed up in the Inquisition, I wouldn’t be able to make it even.

“But, I do the best I can.”

There’s a gasoline can in the corner of the basement, next to the lawn mower. Shiflett is still alive enough to beg him through the tape.

“I doubt if I will be able to get away with this,” Chadwick says, almost to himself. “I’m not sure it matters.”

He’s dousing Shiflett while he talks, mostly to me.

“You’re lucky, and unlucky. You get to hear a story not even my wife has heard, at least not all of it. But you won’t be able to tell it to anyone else. I know how you people love to tell a good story, but this one you will have to take with you. To hell.”

Lucky me. I get to hear two astounding stories in one night. What a break. Come on, dammit. Somebody must have heard that shotgun blast. Even on the Hill, that had to get somebody’s attention.

“I felt a bit sorry about what happened to his father. He was a scumbag, though, and sometimes you have to take out the garbage. As they used to say down here, he besmirched my honor.”

He laughs.

“After they found me guilty, and that lawyer was able to get me out of jail temporarily, my father took me aside.”

He looks across the room, at something only he can see.

“My father, he was what you would call ‘a piece of work.’ He was old school. He didn’t believe in much of anything that had happened since the 1860s, except making money and looking out for what was his—his money and his name. He ingrained in us a sense of who we were. He always told us we were better than other people, meant to rule.”

He says “wuh” instead of “were,” as if he’s slowly shedding the skin of Philippe Ducharme.

“He called me into his study. He told me that I had brought shame on the family, which was not allowed. But then he sighed, and he looked directly at me, the way he did when I was bad as a little boy. That look could make you piss your pants. I think I was more afraid of him than of prison.

“ ‘I can’t let this happen,’ he told me. ‘I can’t let a Chadwick go to prison.’ And then he spelled it all out. My father knew people everywhere, who were able to do just about anything. He’d already arranged for the boat that would pick me up, and was well on the way to arranging everything on the other side.

“He had powerful friends in France, some of whom were not what you would call ‘legitimate.’ I came ashore at Marseille and was given my new life.”

He takes a sip of the beer and grimaces, but drinks again.

“I’ve been waiting in that damned car for four hours,” he says. “And I drove almost ten before that. I’m a little thirsty. When I saw him pull the car around back and saw the light come on in the basement, I waited half an hour more. If I had waited longer, I might have fallen asleep.

“How nice that Mr. Shiflett is so trusting as to leave his door unlocked.”

He leans down and pulls Shiflett’s head up by yanking on his hair from behind.

“Try to hang on a bit longer. I want you to hear just how badly we fucked you. Before your final act. Your grand finale.”

Unlike Shiflett, he doesn’t offer me a sip, or take off my gag.

“So,” he continues, “I knew a good bit of French and learned more pretty quickly. My schooling was paid for, and everything worked out. I wish my father had lived long enough to see what a fine job I did with my second chance, but he died after managing to visit only one time, when I was still in graduate school. He did send me letters on a regular basis, mostly about business but also emphasizing, over and over, how I could never come back, that some would never stop looking.”