Oregon Hill (7 page)

So, Abe came to live with me. I told him he’d have to get a job, because I needed some help with the rent. By that time, I’d been paying it all on a reporter’s salary for almost a year, and my savings were turning into spendings.

He can fix just about anything, and when we suddenly needed another maintenance person here, right after Christmas, I pitched hard for Abe. The board wasn’t too crazy about it, but even McGrumpy had to concede that “as long as we’ve got a murderer living in the building, we might as well get some work out of him.”

Most of our neighbors like Abe, and I think they understand that the unfortunate roofing incident probably was a one-time thing. And Abe is good. He lets Susan pretend she’s the boss of him, but we all know who to go to when some ancient piece of our tired-ass building needs attention.

I’ve just gotten out of the shower, and Abe looks up from his inspection of the refrigerator.

“Oh. Your ex-wife called.”

Only one of my ex-wives ever calls. Jeanette is willing to accept calls from me; we actually have a pleasant relationship, almost bordering on affection. But she never phones me. Chandler, aka The Mistake, is a reporter in Boston. That would leave Kate.

“How long ago?”

“Five minutes, maybe. She said it was about the guy they arrested.”

I find the sticky note with her number on it. She answers on the first ring, like a linebacker pouncing on a fumble. Which is how she always answered the phone.

“Fine,” she says when I ask her how she is. “I’m fine. But this is business.”

I’d already figured that much. Kate does call from time to time, but it’s usually about “business,” often along the lines of “I haven’t gotten your rent check yet.”

“I’ve been contacted by a Mrs. Louisa Fell,” she says, and waits a second or two for the penny to drop.

“As in Martin Fell?”

“Right,” she says. “Hold on. I have a call.”

She did that when we were married, too. You remember the good stuff, but you remember the other, too, like never saying no to another call, or how she would jump out of bed about point-five seconds after the alarm went off, even on Saturdays and Sundays, when my past-prime body does some of its least-worst lovemaking.

“Sorry. Had to take that one. Anyhow, Mrs. Fell got in touch with another lawyer here, and she said, among other things, that she wanted to talk to the reporter who wrote the story, wants to set him straight. So he sent her to me, and I’ve set it all up.”

I’m to be at my ex-wife’s office at one, so Mrs. Louisa Fell can straighten me out.

“I’m not sure this is worth it,” I tell Kate. “I mean, he’s arrested, so this isn’t much of a story now.”

“It might be. She says she has some information.”

“So tell her to call a cop.”

“She did. They just blew her off.”

At 12:55, I’m telling the secretary that I’m here to see Ms. Kate Ellis. It’s still hard for me to get my head around that. It took her about nine months to get married again, this time to someone a little more age-appropriate.

Kate doesn’t get up when I walk in. She still looks damn good. She dresses more professionally now than when she was a law student, and that auburn hair is a little more reined-in. She might have gained a pound or two. But I wouldn’t kick her out of bed. I never did.

Sitting at a round table is a plain-looking woman with gray hair in a bun, wearing bifocals. She has on a print dress. Her eyes look like she hasn’t slept in some time. She’s been crying.

Louisa Fell appears to be about sixty-five, but she hasn’t enjoyed the luxury of retirement yet. She says the shirt factory down in Southside let her take time off without pay.

“But I had to get this mess straightened out,” she says. “I know Marty didn’t kill nobody.”

You’re his mother, I want to tell her. Of course you don’t believe your darling boy chopped a girl’s head off.

But I just sit and listen.

The Fells were from one of those hard-shell Baptist strains. They probably didn’t handle snakes, but they weren’t necessarily opposed to the idea, just hadn’t gotten around to it.

Martin had “strayed,” but when he wanted to go to college, she did what she could to help him with it. Mr. Fell had died in a logging accident while Martin was in junior high.

Martin Fell, as I already know, never graduated from VCU. His mother says he just needs one more course, which usually means he’s about a thousand years away. I wonder when Andi will reach the “one more course” phase. Martin Fell has been working different jobs around the campus, and he’s had a few girlfriends.

I know that, too. Martin Fell had a habit, it turns out, of trolling the bars around VCU and glomming on the fresh meat, girls naive enough to believe he was twenty-five instead of thirty-two, doing graduate work or some such shit. The cops had dug that up. When, I wonder, are you going to tell me something I don’t know? I think about Andi, about how it might have been her, and I’m about ready to tell Momma that I don’t give a shit what they do with her darling son, as long as it’s slow and painful.

“But he never treated none of them bad,” she says, tearing up again. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

I point out that the cops seem convinced that Marty decapitated Isabel Ducharme, which is pretty harmful.

“He wasn’t even there,” she says, wiping her eyes. “That’s what I tried to tell ’em, but they won’t even listen to me. They say I’m just trying to cover up for him. They called him bad names.”

I ask the obvious question. Kate doesn’t say anything, just listens for a change.

“How do you know he wasn’t there?”

“Because he was with me.”

According to Louisa Fell, she was awakened just after mid-night by a car pulling into her driveway. She got up and saw that it was her son.

“Sometimes, he comes home on the spur of the moment like that,” she said.

She met him at the door, and he told her he just wanted to get away from Richmond for a little bit, that he just wanted to see her.

“I think he might have been drinking,” she says, and she actually blushes.

“He had something spilled on his shirt. He told me it was probably mustard. He said he stopped and got some gas and bought a hot dog. He always was a sloppy eater. So I told him to take it off and I’d wash it, but he said wait ’til in the morning.

“We talked maybe half an hour, and then I went back to bed.

“And when I got up in the morning, he was already gone.”

I ask her if she’s sure it was midnight, and she says she’s positive.

I do some quick math. I know from the cops that Martin Fell and Isabel Ducharme allegedly had some kind of argument about nine thirty at Three Monkeys, and that she left a little bit later, maybe ten, apparently after slapping his face. I know Chase City is about an hour and a half from Richmond. I know they’ve traced the UPS box containing Isabel Ducharme’s head back to a doctor’s office in the West End. Somebody got on the computer there and created the label that went on it at one forty-three on Saturday morning.

Even if Martin Fell caught up with the girl and killed her almost immediately after she left the Three Monkeys, threw her body in the trunk, drove to Chase City, spent half an hour or so bonding with his mom, then drove back to that doctor’s office, cut off her head, printed out the label and put the box with all the others to go out Monday morning, then drove her headless torso out to the South Anna River and dumped it, it is barely on the edge of possible.

Either Louisa Fell is lying or mistaken, or the numbers don’t work.

I look into her face and see nothing but a mother who is absolutely convinced that her son is innocent. Unfortunately, I see that look often among the mothers of young thugs about to be rightfully convicted of crimes rivaling this in heinousness. The statehouse beat made me cynical about politicians. Night cops just make me cynical about homo sapiens.

Still, I can’t quite shake her off, the way I’d like to. It’s time to move on to the next big thing that’ll sell a few more papers or at least enliven our Web site. I’ve been wrong before, but my reporter’s bullshit detector has generally stood me well over the years.

Kate tells her that she’ll think about it, and I know that the “it” is taking Martin Fell’s hopeless case, something that normally would be in the hands of a bored, semi-competent court-appointed attorney.

After Louisa Fell leaves, Kate tells me that the woman does indeed want to employ the services of Kate’s venerable, old-money law firm, and that she’s thinking about taking the case if the firm agrees. Mrs. Fell has taken out a loan on her paid-for home. She is going to bet what little she has in the world on her son’s innocence. It makes me want to cry.

I mention the hopelessness of it to Kate, who’s already checking her Crackberry to see what’s next.

She looks at me, gives me a kind of half-smile, and says she thinks the firm might be willing to give Mrs. Fell a discount.

I ask her why. She says she has this crazy thing about justice. I note that I didn’t realize Bartley, Bowman and Bush felt that way, and she said that they might need a little convincing.

She glances at her watch and I can see that it’s time to leave. At the door, she asks me about how it’s going with Custalow, and I tell her we’re bonding. Plus, I add, he makes it possible almost every month for me to get her a rent check that won’t bounce.

“Let’s try for ‘every,’ ” she says. I lean forward and she turns her face slightly so I’m kissing her cheek.

We were together for almost six years, which probably is a testimony to her endurance.

I’m in the office by three. Jackson tells me Wheelie wants some kind of overview, tying it all up.

I tell Jackson why I’m not so sure things aren’t coming untied.

“She’s his mother, for Christ sake,” he says.

“Yeah, and she’s probably full of crap, but what if she isn’t?”

“Just write the story. Get Baer to help you with some of the details.”

I tell him I’ll be back in an hour.

I don’t have a lot of friends down at the station. Gillespie stopped speaking to me when I tried to get him fired last year after his Barney Fife does Dirty Harry act caused an addled woman to jump off the top of the Prestwould. I’m thinking that my old Hill buddy David Shiflett will be similarly incommunicado.

I do have one ace in the hole, though—or at least a queen. Peachy Love. That’s her name, swear to God. It’s what happens when your parents name you Pechera and their last name’s Love. Did they get that from a Scrabble board?

Anyhow, Peachy used to be a reporter. She was the first woman at the paper to do the night cops beat, and she liked it so much that she became a cop. Actually, she’s a public information officer, which usually means you’re in charge of giving the public no information and the press even less.

But Peachy has some loyalty to her old occupation. I love it when my co-workers call journalism a “profession,” as if you actually had to graduate from college or something.

Peachy has been willing, from time to time, to do something that surely would get her fired if the police department ever found out about it. She will, now and then, give us some actual and useful information, if she’s sure it can never be traced back to her.