Oregon Hill (10 page)

Sally sighs, because what you mostly want, if you’re the week-end editor, is no drama, a quiet couple of days babysitting the place and making sure everybody hits deadline, maybe catching up on your annual review paperwork.

“Why?”

“Because I think there’s a very good chance Martin Fell didn’t do it.”

I see Sally shift gears, go through all the stages of grief for her dearly departed quiet weekend, reach “acceptance” and get her game face on. Sally’s a pro, and I think she knows I wouldn’t stir up shit just to be stirring. Hell, I wanted a quiet weekend, too.

I tell her the story, and I can tell she’s impressed, but she’s not totally on board.

“You know, Wheelie really wants this story to run. We’ve been promoting it like hell.”

No kidding. The skybox on top of section A1 today is all about Isabel Ducharme and Martin Fell, with a high school yearbook photo of her on one side and another version of the perp-walk picture on the other. “How could this happen?” the big words ask, as if we’re going to tell them Sunday for a buck seventy-five. I hope Isabel’s mother has gone back home and doesn’t have to see her dead daughter’s picture used to sell newspapers.

I tell Sally that, whatever the story is, we probably want to get it right.

She sighs again.

“OK, I’m calling Wheelie. Just one thing, and I hate to ask, but this isn’t some kind of Leonard Pikarski make-up call, is it?”

Only Sally, or maybe Jackson, would have been around long enough and know me well enough to bring up Leonard Pikarski.

It was during my first stint as night cops reporter. I had just gotten on full time at the paper after spending a couple of postgraduate years interning there for as close to nothing as the law allowed. The old night cops guy was bicycling back to work after his lunch hour one night, and somebody on Monument Avenue opened a parked car door right in front of him. He hit head-first on the paving stones, and I had a full-time job.

I’d been on it for all of a year, showing “promise,” according to my annual review.

That spring, two sisters were murdered in their home on the North Side. They apparently had let a man into the house after school one day. When their mother got home, she found the fourteen-year-old tied to a chair with her throat slit. The other one, the twelve-year-old, had been strangled in another chair, facing her. Before he’d murdered them, the killer had raped them both.

Leonard Pikarski was the prime suspect all along. He lived two doors down, and he was a convicted sex offender who had spent two years in prison for molesting a thirteen-year-old when he was nineteen. At the time he entered my life, he was thirty-three. He was borderline retarded, and his parents had moved to Richmond from Baltimore to start over.

Pikarski had done yard work around the neighborhood and was not as aware as some might have been of the concept of respecting others’ space. He was a friendly man, and he was prone to walk up uninvited to neighbors in their backyards or on their front porches. Some of the neighbors said he gave them the creeps, the way he’d just stare at them and overstay his welcome, which in most cases seemed to have run out the minute he got there.

When his past was dug up, all kinds of stories emerged. Leonard was seen staring into someone’s bedroom window. A dog turned up missing shortly after Leonard was seen petting it. Leonard seemed unusually attracted to young girls, and especially the two sisters.

The cops got him to confess. The trial was six months later and took a week. Despite no solid physical evidence, he was sentenced to death. He might have gotten life without parole, but he kept insisting, despite an earlier confession, that he was innocent. The judge noted the lack of contrition on the part of the defendant, and I was pretty sure Leonard didn’t know what contrition was. He just seemed confused.

I covered the whole mess, including the execution a little over a year later. I’d been touched by the brutality of the whole thing, the way it destroyed a whole family, and Leonard was a hard man to have empathy for. He tended to smile at unfortunate times, and he just irked me at some gut level. I didn’t like Leonard Pikarski.

He got kind of fixated on me, I guess, because I’d written so much about the case. He wrote me from prison, in his sad, third-grade hand, with about every third word misspelled, always telling me he didn’t really do it, that he had proof, to please help him. I shared some of those letters with other reporters, for the entertainment value. They always got a laugh.

“Hey,” I’d announce. “Got another Leonard-gram.”

They let me write a column once, a real privilege for a young reporter, a couple of months before he was executed. I wrote about what a pathetic loser he was, how even the most craven, sadistic killer was always claiming he didn’t do it. I even shared some of the more embarrassing parts of his letters with our salivating readers. The last five words of the column: Burn in hell, Leonard Pikarski. He never wrote me again.

I had one of the reporters’ seats at the execution itself. I told myself this was necessary, part of being a hard-nosed reporter who had to see it all.

The room was a dingy off-white, and most of it was filled with the glass booth where we all sat. There was another booth, with a one-way mirror, and I assumed that either one or both of Leonard Pikarski’s parents were in there.

The gurney was shaped like a cross. One idiot, a couple of years earlier, insisted on the electric chair instead because he said he “didn’t want to die like Jesus did.” I’m thinking he had a moment of regret about that decision, just after they threw the switch.

There was a bright red phone on the wall, in case the governor called at the last second, which he never had.

Leonard was led in by six big guys, who strapped him to the table. I knew they drugged them beforehand, and he didn’t look like he really knew what was going on.

Still, it seemed like he was looking right at me. As much as anything, it reminded me of the one time I’d had to take a dog to the vet’s to be put down—the same look of confusion and mild disappointment.

They asked him if he had any last words. You couldn’t hear him, and the flack later told us he just said he wanted to sleep. It seemed like he said more than that, but who knows? Then they put in the IV lines, and pretty soon Leonard Pikarski drifted away, I presumed to that hell I’d wished for him earlier.

It was summer, and the room was not well ventilated. It didn’t smell like death, whatever that’s supposed to smell like, just fear and sweat and maybe some undefined odor that you only get when you’re watching the life ebb out of a helpless human being a few feet away.

Nobody said anything to each other as we left. As rude and crude as some reporters can get, I’ve never known anybody who was at an execution to joke about it later.

Afterward, I was always cool and reserved about it, telling others—especially young female reporters—what a necessary evil capital punishment was.

About six months after his execution, they caught the killer. He’d tried to abduct a girl on her way home from school in Louisa County, but she escaped and got a neighbor to call the police. Through sheer luck, a deputy was nearby, and they surrounded him in a barn. Before they could capture him, he killed himself.

He had a motel room key, and when they searched the room, they found an assortment of used underwear. They also found a diary. He apparently was quite proud of his achievements. He’d raped and killed another girl in Ohio a few months before he murdered the sisters. He hinted that there might have been others.

The same people who had been so entertained by Leonard Pikarski’s letters seemed to avoid me in the newsroom now.

A few days after all this came to light, I got a call. There was a gentleman to see me in the lobby. He had information about Leonard Pikarski.

I went down. At first, I didn’t recognize Leonard’s father. He seemed older than he had at the trial.

Mr. Pikarski walked up to me. He had a box with him. Without saying a word, he opened it and threw the ashes on me.

“You people,” he said, his voice quiet and calm, “you’re always so sure. You wanted Leonard. You got him.”

He turned without another word, and left.

I brushed Leonard Pikarski’s ashes off me as best I could and went back upstairs, past the stares of the receptionists and the security guard.

I was never quite so sure again.

I look Sally in the eye.

“Sorry,” she said, “I had to ask.”

“It was a long time ago,” I tell her. “One doesn’t have anything to do with the other.”

So she called Wheelie, and I could tell from her end of the conversation that our managing editor wasn’t buying into any last-minute changes in the preordained story line. Mostly, I figured, he just didn’t want to get his lazy, already half-drunk ass into the newsroom on a Saturday. Wheelie, like a lot of suits of my acquaintance, thought newspapering was a nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday job.

Sally kept after him, though. Finally, just to get some peace and quiet and to avoid the hassle of coming all the way back into the office from the West End, he allowed me to put some of my caveats into the main story. He wouldn’t let me use anything with unnamed sources, which knocked out anything Peachy had told me; but we were able to tell our breathless readers that the boy and his mother both claimed Martin had been down in Chase City when Isabel Ducharme was being butchered.

I think it irked Baer that I was pissing a little bit on his A1 parade, but at least he got to have the whole byline. Sarah Good-night and I “contributed,” it said at the end of the story.

By the time I got back from covering the latest drug deal gone bad over by Gilpin Court, the first edition was rolling off the presses. We used to be able to hear and feel the presses, and some guy in a hat made from a newspaper would slam a bunch of them down on the copydesk. Now, the presses are fifteen miles away, and we get to look at page proofs. If we’re lucky, they’ll remember to send some actual papers to us from the printing plant, although they like to keep those to a minimum, so as to save paper. The way circulation and advertising are going, we’re saving a lot of paper these days.

The headline said, “How did this happen?” just like we told people it would in the Saturday paper.

“Tell me,” I muttered.

CHAPTER SIX

Sunday

G
rowing up in Oregon Hill, this was my favorite time of the week. It was as quiet as it ever was, for one thing. It was a day you could ease into like an old pair of slippers. Whoever Peggy was with got up late and slow. Sunday was comics and cinnamon toast. At least, that’s the way I remember it.

There’s the GTO, sitting right where it might have been in the fall of 1977, our senior year. Goat is standing next to it, a Blue Ribbon in his hand. McGonnigal is there, too, walking around this ghost from our past, touching it gently like it might bolt away. Goat sees us and waves. The glass from the bottle reflects the morning sun. It seems, for a second or two, like old times.

“How do you like this shit?” he says, maybe a little too loud. “Is this the spitting image, or what?”

Yeah, I say, it is. It is a dead ringer for the 1967 GTO that Goat and his dad were able to somehow buy off one of the older guys whose wife was tired of a work of art that wouldn’t start half the time. Same powder blue, same interior.

“Found it sitting in somebody’s backyard, outside Canton. I’ve been working on it for a year. Three hundred and thirty-five horsepower, just like the old one. It runs like a scalded cat now, most of the time.”

He recites all the rest of the specifics, losing me fast in the argot of Hurst shifters and Quadrajets. Apparently, he’s driven it all the way down here from Ohio.

It is a testament to the Hill’s car culture that two of us have automotive references embedded in our names. R.P. is Richard Petty McGonnigal, because his father was a big NASCAR fan and thought it’d be funny to name the kid after the King. R.P. might have forgiven him for that addled idea, but I don’t think he’s forgiven his mother for actually going along with it.

Goat, against all odds, is president of a small liberal arts college in Ohio that must not check résumés very carefully, and he’s managed to wangle a trip back home around the fact that his school has a dozen or so living alumni in the area who might die and leave something to their alma mater.