Oregon Hill (27 page)

They amble out of their squad car, big Irish guys who are pleased to have some excitement on this dull, raw morning in a neighborhood where failing to recycle probably passes for high crime.

When they are almost to me, hands on their stun guns, Ducharme opens the door.

“This is the man, officers,” he says, pointing at me. “He will not leave us alone.”

I have one card left, the only one I brought, really.

I turn back to Philippe Ducharme.

“I’m here,” I tell him, “to talk about David Shiflett.”

It takes a couple of seconds for it to sink in. Then, Ducharme seems to fade. He goes from what an English professor of mine once called saturnine to what I’d call pale as a ghost. If the cops pick up on it, they don’t let on.

Ducharme tells them he’s made a mistake, that he doesn’t wish to press charges, that I’m an old acquaintance that he didn’t recognize at first.

The cops only seem put out that they aren’t going to get to use any of their toys on me, at least for now.

They leave, telling Ducharme to call them if he needs anything else. I detect a hint of sarcasm.

I am allowed inside what I suppose is a foyer, where I stand and tell Ducharme what I came to tell him.

“We are in mourning,” he says. “We have lost everything. Why do you torture us?”

Indeed, at this point it occurs to me that maybe the game is tied, and we shouldn’t go into sudden-death overtime. But it isn’t that simple anymore. Strange as it seems, it’s Martin Fell who screws things up from an Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye standpoint. Being something between Peter Pan and a predator doesn’t justify what he’s facing.

When we were kids and it rained hard, there were these big holes that would fill with muddy water where they were building the Downtown Expressway. We’d go over there and play. I can remember throwing rocks into the water and watching the ripples radiate out. For some reason, I think of that now, how the ripples would go on and on, one begetting the next.

I don’t think it’s just about Leonard Pikarski. At least I’ve convinced myself of that.

“There’s a guy charged with murder,” I tell Ducharme, “and he didn’t do it.”

“Justice,” my reluctant host says, “sometimes fails us.”

Sometimes, I tell him, it needs some help.

“You mentioned a name . . .”

He’s pretending he doesn’t know who David Shiflett is. I play along. I tell him there’s a police lieutenant in Richmond, the one who got Martin Fell’s confession. I tell him much of what I know—the alibi Louisa Fell and her son have for his whereabouts that night, the missing minutes on the interrogation tape, Awesome Dude’s story, the little piece of plastic with Shiflett’s name on it. I don’t mention Christina Chadwick or anything Clara Westbrook told me.

“Tell me about this . . . Shiflett,” Ducharme asks.

“He’s actually a guy who grew up in my neighborhood,” I tell him. “Tough guy, but he had a rough time of it.” And then I drop the bomb.

“His father was murdered when he was just a kid. I don’t think he ever got over it.”

I watch his face. He pretty much knows where this is going, but when I seal the deal with those last words, he closes his eyes for about five seconds. When he opens them, it’s as if something has changed, some internal gear has shifted.

“I see. Yes, that’s unfortunate. But why are you telling me this?”

“I wanted to see if you cared whether they punish the right son of a bitch for killing your daughter.”

He flinches, but then recovers.

“So, this Shiflett, you think he is—what’s the expression— covering up? That he has something that he is trying to hide?”

“Yes. Definitely.”

“But shouldn’t you be going to the police with this?”

“He’s one of theirs. I want to be sure. If you weigh in, demand that they reopen the case, it’ll mean a lot.”

“And you have written about this, in the paper?”

“Yeah, what I can write.”

“What kind of man is he?”

I tell him he’s a tough guy. That he has a good reputation in the department. That he scares me a little.

In the background, I can hear what can only be described as screeching. I want to tell Mrs. Ducharme that, if it were Andi, I might be just as batshit as she is right now. Philippe Ducharme seems to be handling it better, but there’s something just below the surface, ticking like a bomb in a bad movie. I wouldn’t want to be around when it goes off.

There’s not much else to talk about. I’m torn about telling Ducharme anything else. At the end, though, when there’s nothing else to say and it’s pretty obvious that I’m not going to be invited in for coffee, I ask one more thing:

“Do you know Christina Chadwick?”

This time, he actually holds on to the door frame, like he might fall down otherwise. And then, he recovers, more or less.

“No, I don’t,” he says, no louder than a whisper, his color coming back. “But you should leave. Now.”

And so I do, after handing him my card.

That last look, and all that it told me, is making the hairs on my arms stand up. Or maybe I’m just freezing. At any rate, I’m glad I caught Philippe Ducharme in a nice neighborhood, in the middle of the day, with potential witnesses around.

Even at that, I have a definite spring in my step as I make my way back to the relative safety of the T.

I do have time for that lobster roll and chowder. I’d put steamed blue crabs at Captain John’s up against anything New England has to offer, but this is pretty damn good.

There’s nothing to write, yet. Being cocksure of something isn’t the same as being able to write it. But I’m a step away. One visit away.

I call the paper from my cell phone. Sally isn’t there, and neither is Jackson, so I try Sarah Goodnight’s number.

“Newsroom. Goodnight.”

“Airport. Black.”

I suggest that she might want to rephrase her phone greeting and then ask her what’s going on.

“It isn’t pretty,” she says, actually whispering into the phone now. There’s such an air of fear around the place these days that some people think they’re being bugged. I went to a party three months ago where the state editor was telling a story about one particularly graceless thing the publisher had done. I couldn’t help notice that he kept jerking his head around while he talked, as if he suspected one of his compatriots was spying for Grubby and the suits. I have noticed this phenomenon twice more lately, in the newsroom. Paranoid whiplash.

“There’s all kinds of rumors around here,” she says. “You don’t think they’ll fire me, do you, Willie?”

No, I tell her. They aren’t going to fire you. I don’t tell her that it’s not just because she’s a talented journalist with a bright future, great word skills combined with the Type-A personality that separates in-your-face investigative reporters from the folks eating cheese sandwiches at ten
P
.
M
. on the night copydesk. What will truly save her is the fact that she’s a cheap date who won’t get much more expensive for a long time now that they’ve redone the step pay-raises so you have to be about forty before you can afford a house. Plus, Grubby tends to skew toward young, pretty women. Women in general ride in the back, as always, but the young, pretty ones get a pass—as long as they stay young and pretty.

“You’ll be fine,” I tell her. “You’ll be the last one they fire. On the last day, it’ll be just you and Grubby and the cockroaches.”

“Ewww. I’d prefer the cockroaches.”

“Don’t get persnickety, young lady.”

She laughs. She loves it when I use what she calls “old folks” words like “persnickety.” At least, she pretends to.

“Oh, one other thing,” she says. “Mark’s doing a story on the Ducharme case. Wheelie told him to do it. Police side and all.”

Sarah is dating Mark Baer these days. The noble part of me says that’s a good thing. Play with kids your own age. The other, south-of-the-belt part says: Good God. Baer is an avowed metrosexual, like most of the younger guys in the newsroom. I don’t get exactly what that means. From what I see, it entails an ability to neuter yourself in a work situation, carry a man purse and treat women like buddies with tits, people you have some laughs with, maybe hook up with later. Maybe get married to someday, after an eighteen-month engagement, with the understanding that nothing lasts forever.

What the hell do I know? With my track record, going metrosexual probably would be a step in the right direction.

“Anything about me?” I ask Sarah.

“Oh, yeah. They fired you right off. First one.”

When I was twenty-three, I was pretty flip about my job. I told more than one editor to just can my ass if he didn’t like what I was doing.

Sarah doesn’t understand the golden handcuffs. You work somewhere, keep getting the raises, keep painting yourself into a smaller and smaller box, get comfortable, and suddenly you wake up one day and realize you’d be truly fucked without the job you don’t even like that much anymore.

“No, really.”

Sarah sighs.

“Chill, Willie. We haven’t heard anything yet. Wait a minute. There’s something going on. Just a sec. . . . Holy shit. That bitch from HR, the one that you can never get on the phone? She and a guard are over at Jackson’s desk. They’re getting his coat and his briefcase. . . . They’re leaving.”

Jackson. Son of a bitch. Jackson never won a Pulitzer, but he would’ve stepped in front of a bus for the goddamn paper.

I tell Sarah I’ll come by tomorrow and see if my ID badge still gets me in the building.

“I’m sure you’ll be fine,” she tells me, in a voice that conveys she’s not sure at all. Neither am I.

“What airport?” she asks.

“What?”

“You said, ‘Black, airport.’ What airport?”

I tell her it’s a surprise. Sarah can keep a secret, but just in case, I’m pleading the Fifth. They’ll find out at the paper when I turn in my expense form.

I call the only person I know in the greater Boston area and get Chandler Holmquist’s voice mail. My second wife is out of the newspaper game these days. She always did have a knack for dumping a losing hand just in time. These days, she’s working for a state senator who has higher ambitions.

When I’m ten seconds into my spiel, and she’s recognized me and decided I’m answer-worthy, she picks up.

“Willie,” she says. “Where the hell are you?”

I tell her I’m at Logan. I can hear the keys clicking in the background and know I’ve got maybe one-quarter of her attention.

“Well, you should have called. We need to catch up.”

Sometime, maybe, but not now. I guess you’d say I’m sub-consciously avoiding the possibility of a real sit-down with Chandler.

“How’s Ned?”

“Neal. You always do that. He’s fine. We’re fine. We’re thinking about having a baby.” They’ve been thinking about that for years, apparently trying to figure out how it’s done. “How’s, uh, Andi?”

I’m trying to keep it light. This is just a check-in call to assure me that it isn’t possible to have somebody you once gave up the world for disappear from your life like a deleted file. But I’ve had a couple of Sam Adamses.

“It’s hard to believe we spent a couple of years in the same bed,” I say, and the clicking stops.

“Well,” she says at last, “we didn’t spend much time talking.”

It’s a quick call. I have forty minutes, so I order another.

I try to call the apartment, afraid of what I’ll hear from Custalow. There’s no answer.