Oregon Hill (9 page)

We went down the street to Penny Lane. There were six of us. I remember that. All the others were younger than me. I think I’m kind of a mascot for the kid reporters. They might not want to be me, but they want to think that they work in a business that has so-called characters (if not character) in it. They think I’m some kind of romanticized embodiment of a reporter who probably never really existed, except in the minds of old-fart editors who embellished and polished stories until the hopeless alcoholic with no talent and less scruples—the guy they wished in hell many times as deadlines were blown, participles were dangled and newsrooms were trashed—morphed into a Bogart-Gable hybrid.

Not that I’m an alcoholic.

Alcoholics fall down and hurt themselves all the time, lose their homes and families, get fired and wind up living in a box down by Texas Beach.

I haven’t broken anything since the ankle I messed up at Edo’s Squid, and they’re lucky I didn’t sue them about those damn stairs. I’ve got a home as long as my ex-wife doesn’t evict me. I haven’t been fired, although some would say covering the one
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. murder beat is a step down from hobnobbing with the governor. It depends on your taste in people.

Plus, alcoholics go to Alcoholics Anonymous, and you’d never catch me dead near that place. I can quit. I’ve done it a hundred times.

Usually, though, breaking up with booze just leads to a more vigorous reunion. Like last night.

It had been awhile since I’d had anything much to drink, and the memory of those High Lifes Peachy was knocking back made me thirsty. And, hell, it was just beer. And Penny Lane is only eleven blocks away from the Prestwould.

Anyhow, we were able to seize the upstairs room, the one with the pool tables, and more people started coming over. Sarah Goodnight and one of the young photographers seemed to be hanging on my every word, and the more I drank, the funnier I apparently got. I got so funny that, at some point, somebody who knew where I lived called Custalow, who came and got me. I’m lucky I didn’t get paged. The mean streets, unlike me, were quiet last night.

I have fleeting memories of being somewhat inappropriately attentive to young Sarah, and there was a look she gave me that I hope I’ve dreamed. But since the puke in my shoes is real, the rest might be, too. I’ll have to make peace later.

I’m the victim of a strong stomach. It was a point of pride with me when I was young that I could drink anybody under the table. It was something to boast about in Oregon Hill, right up there with boxing skills and the ability to work on your own car. Out of necessity, I wasn’t a bad boxer, but if it weren’t for my drinking prowess, being a journalist would put me somewhere in the near-pussy range, Hill-wise.

Most guys I hung out with hit a point in the evening where they really, really didn’t want to drink anymore. I’ve heard McGonnigal say if he had any more Ten High or Old Milwaukee or cheap burgundy, he’d puke. And then he’d drink. And then he’d puke.

But I never seemed to reach a saturation point. Alcohol always tasted good to me. Still does. Usually, I could maintain. Sure, my bosses got upset about the vodka I sometimes drank from a Styrofoam cup in the office, and maybe I’d still be covering the capitol despite my other issues if they hadn’t found out about it, but I almost never missed a deadline. And it’s not like some of those hayseed legislators weren’t matching me drink for drink.

Lately, though, it seems to be catching up with me. Custalow said a guy told him you could fool just about everything but your liver. Maybe my liver is telling me something by making me puke every time I have a dozen or so Millers.

“You OK?” Abe asks me as I try to get out the front door, checking to see if my pants are zipped and my shirt is buttoned all the way. I only have fifteen minutes to get to the jail by the time Kate told me to be there.

I tell him it doesn’t matter much whether I’m OK or not at that point. As I leave, I at least have the grace to thank him for whatever it took to get me out of Penny Lane and into my bed at the Prestwould.

He almost smiles and tells me he’s seen worse. I wonder where. He hands me a ball cap, and I realized I haven’t even combed the remnants of my hair. Sometimes, days like this, looking in the mirror is just too damn painful.

Kate’s waiting for me on the front steps. I’m maybe five minutes late, but she looks at her watch and frowns. She used to think it was amusing when I’d show up late by a few minutes or half an hour or whatever.

“You look like hell,” she says, and I know she knows I’ve stepped off the wagon. The last year or two we were married, she tried very hard to convince me that I should be on that venerated vehicle, but I always told her that, if I did take a short sabbatical from it, another one would come along soon, and I’d get on that. As with the punctuality thing, that answer seemed to get less and less amusing.

But, hell, she’s throwing me a pretty big bone today, so snip away, Kate.

We are led to the cells, which have about twice as many citizens in them as was intended. We don’t produce much in this country anymore, but we are making prisoners faster than we can build prisons, apparently.

They bring Martin Fell out. He looks even younger than he did in the perp walk picture we ran in this morning’s paper. I can see how he was able to pass himself off as eight or ten years less than his driver’s license age. He is small, maybe five-seven, and thin, I’m guessing 140 pounds. He seems so fit that, if it weren’t for his reputation as a very committed heterosexual, I’d think he was gay. His hands and feet are small, and his blond hair is cropped close. Everything about Martin Fell seems small. I wonder how he’s faring in the city lockup. The look in his eyes says: not well.

“Th-thank you,” he says to me and Kate. “Thank you for being my lawyers.”

Kate explains that I’m a reporter for the newspaper, and that it might be in his best interest for me to know what really happened. She further promises that I won’t quote anything he says, that I just want some background.

He turns toward me, and he doesn’t look quite as thankful as he did before.

“You all have just about convicted me already,” he says. “I saw the paper, what that shrink said about psychopaths, and what the police said. And you just printed it. Didn’t anybody ask me about my side of it.”

I try to tell him that we just printed what we were told, but it sounds kind of lame.

“Plus,” he says, getting cranked up now, “your music critics suck. They don’t know shit about anything that’s happened since like 1975.”

Well, true. We could beef up our pop music coverage a bit. Martin Fell probably doesn’t care that in the last round of cuts we laid off the only guy on the staff who knew Bono from Sonny Bono.

Kate gets us back to the point by telling Fell that, if he’s going to have a prayer of getting out of this hole he’s in, he’d better find a new attitude.

He takes a deep breath, tenders me a half-hearted apology, and we’re on track again.

He tells Kate and me about last Friday night, and it seems to mesh with what his mother said. He rubs his head and looks around, jumping at every loud sound, of which there are plenty in this Bedlam for the legally if not actually sane.

He tells us about the argument he had with Isabel, the face-slap, how she stormed out, how he didn’t go after her.

“I should have,” he mumbles, holding his head in his hands. “I should have. Then it never would’ve happened.”

I can’t tell if he’s sincere. If he is sincere, I can’t tell whether his regret is over Isabel’s death or over the fix he’s in. Probably both.

He gets to the part about driving down to Chase City. He says he went to bed after his mother did, then woke up at five
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., unable to sleep. Not wanting to be confronted again about his ETA for graduation and his career plans, he slipped out of the house and drove back to Richmond.

When he got back, he says, he crashed until sometime after noon, then tried to call Isabel that evening, but no one answered.

“I didn’t even know she was missing ’til the next day, when I went around,” he says.

Kate asks him why he didn’t go to the police then. He hesitates a beat, then shakes his head.

“I didn’t know what they’d think.”

Probably what they thought when they checked out the security cameras and the suitemates and the other patrons at Three Monkeys—that Martin Fell was a Grade-A, number one suspect, an overworked and underappreciated police force’s dream. Case closed.

“What about the confession?” I ask him. The way Kate looks at me, I know this is news to her.

“I never said it,” he says. “Not really. They’re lying. That cop, the big, mean one, he kept at me all night. He told me they’d throw me in the city jail, let them use me any way they wanted, if I didn’t sign that paper . . .”

His voice quavers, and I wonder if they haven’t done what Shiflett threatened anyhow.

“He told me . . . He said, ‘If you just say it was you, you can prove later it wasn’t you, but if you don’t say it, we’re gonna let ’em . . .’ ”

Here, he pauses and looks over at Kate, then down.

“He said he was gonna let ’em fuck me to death.”

Fell swallows. Kate offers him some bottled water, and he takes a sip.

“The cop said if I just nodded my head when he asked me if I did it and then signed that paper, that they’d put me in a private cell; and that he’d get me a lawyer so I could make my case to him.”

“So you nodded your head.”

“Yeah. I nodded my goddamn head, and I signed that paper, and then they threw me in there anyhow.”

He looks at Kate and asks her, “How can they do that?”

They had to have a lot of help from a dumbass who apparently forgot everything he ever learned from watching cop shows on TV, I’m thinking.

I mentioned that some of the interview hadn’t been taped, that the tape seemed to have run out. Kate, I could see, was learning this for the first time, too.

We talked awhile more, and then I remembered something.

“Your mother,” I asked him. “When she was telling us about your midnight trip home, she said you had a stain on your shirt. What was it?”

He looks at me like I’m speaking Urdu. He starts to ask me what the hell that’s got to do with anything, then knows what I want.

“Mustard,” he says. “It was mustard. I was eating a hot dog I bought at the place I stopped for gas and must have spilled it on me.”

We wind it up.

“Hey,” he says to Kate, “get me out of here. At least get me somewhere where I’m safe. Please.”

Kate tells him that’s her next stop, that she won’t quit until she’s sure he’s in a private cell by tonight. And I’m sure, from the set of her jaw, that this will be done.

We’re walking down the steps when she turns to me.

“Asshole!” she says. “When were you going to tell me about that shit!”

I remark that she didn’t ask me, and that I couldn’t tell her my source, but that it was almost certainly true.

I finally more or less mollify her, or at least redirect her anger over being left out of the loop by the cops who haven’t told her as much as they should have. After all, I tell her, she’s only been on the case less than a day, only just met her client for the first time.

I ask her if Martin Fell has talked with his mother yet.

Yes, she says, but not for very long.

I tell her I’m thinking that Martin Fell’s mother doesn’t seem like the kind to cook up a story with young Martin about a mustard stain just to lend credibility.

“I tend to think,” I tell her, “that our boy was in Chase City on Friday night and Saturday morning.”

“Yeah,” she says, nodding.

“Next,” she says, typing a note to herself on the Crackberry, “I have to find out who the mean cop is.”

I save her the trouble.

“His name is Shiflett.”

The newsroom is pretty quiet on Saturdays. A lot of what goes in Sunday’s paper was done before sundown on Friday. You have a handful of reporters and photographers, plus copy editors and one in-charge editor.

It’s Sally Velez’s turn to be the adult supervision. I tell her that we might have to make some changes in our big Sunday package.