Oregon Hill (32 page)

I come to in a room that smells of mildew and bachelor funk. There’s one light bulb overhead, illuminating a small area surrounded by darkness. I feel like I’m onstage.

What a dumbass. I never saw it coming.

I’d probably be screaming like a little girl right now if I wasn’t gagged and tied rather securely to what appears to be a heavy metal chair in what appears to be someone’s basement. For some reason, the chair is covered with plastic.

“Well,” I hear Shiflett say, from somewhere behind me, “Sleeping Beauty is awake.”

He walks around into my view. The light is behind him so that I only see his silhouette. Then he pulls up another chair, close to mine, and I can see his face. He looks as if he’s at peace.

“You’ve been wanting this,” he says, almost in a whisper. “You’ve been begging for this. And now you’re going to get it. You’re going to get the best story you ever heard, ever will hear.”

He smiles, or at least shows his teeth.

“The pisser is, you’ll never get to write it.”

He reaches over and picks up the .22, which is lying on the table beside him.

“Protection,” he says, the way he might have said “child molester.” “You fuckin’ civilians. You get one of these things and then you don’t know how to use it. Here let me show you.”

He takes the little pistol in his right hand. He holds it up for a couple of seconds, examining it. Then, he slowly lowers it to my head, my chest, my balls, my legs. He stops at my left foot. And he fires.

It’s surprisingly loud for something so small, a thought that hits me a millisecond before all my senses are overtaken by blind, searing pain. I almost swallow the gag, and I realize that I have lost control of my bladder. It hardly matters to me. The only thing that matters is my left foot.

“Man,” Shiflett says, “I’m glad I put some plastic down. You’re not scared, are you, Willie? I probably shouldn’t have done that, because I want all your concentration. But sometimes you just can’t help yourself.”

He puts the .22 back down. I feel my shoe filling up with blood. I’d like some Tylenol. Or to pass out again.

“I guess you think I’m crazy, huh?” Shiflett says.

I decline to either nod or shake my head.

“Well, I’m not crazy, or at least not Ted Bundy crazy. What I am, Willie, is persistent. Do you remember my father?”

The pain has become manageable enough that I can concentrate on something else. I nod.

Shiflett is standing now, pacing a little. It occurs to me that despite being in the spotlight, I’m not the performer here.

“He was a good man. He didn’t take any shit, but he was fair and decent and honest. He was about the only person I’ve ever really respected. My mom, she was shaky even before it happened, and after that, she just fell apart. My dad was the glue.”

He sighs, looking me in the eye. He turns toward the .22, and my sphincter clinches. But he looks back toward me and continues.

“When that boy, Valentine Chadwick the fourth, killed him, I was twelve years old. It was the end of my childhood, the end of the good part of my life. What’s followed has been the rest.”

I would tell him, if I wasn’t gagged, that he’s a respected lieutenant in the Richmond police department, that he has done well.

“When they convicted him, it felt OK, although it was more about making him feel bad than making us feel good.

“Then, they let him disappear. They found the boat, and they said he was dead, and I accepted that for a while. But the more I thought about it, the more I was sure he was alive. I’m not religious, don’t even think there is a God, but I’d dream about this guy, and he was always laughing, and I became convinced that he was out there, somewhere.

“I didn’t know where, but I swore that I’d never stop looking.”

He goes over to a beer fridge and takes out a PBR. He drains half of it in one swallow.

“The Army was good for me. Learned some shit. My only regret? I was too young for Vietnam.”

He leans closer. I can smell the beer on his breath.

“I really, really wanted to kill somebody.”

He stops for a couple of seconds, like he’s weighing his options.

“Oh, what the fuck,” he says. “In for a dime, in for a dollar. You wanted a story? OK, here’s one, Mr. Writer. Let me tell you what happened to Lester Corbett.”

Through the haze of pain, the name comes back to me. Corbett probably was the town’s most famous defense lawyer at the time. Every town’s got one—the guy who takes on the most ridiculously no-hoper cases for enough money and/or fame.

Val Chadwick probably was one of Corbett’s better paydays. He lost the case, but he won plenty after that. I still remember him with his seersucker suit and suspenders, right out of central casting.

My memory is that it was about ten years after the Chadwick trial that Corbett disappeared. David Shiflett fills me in.

“I’d been on the force two years, so it was 1981. It was twelve years after Chadwick killed my father. But I couldn’t get that asshole lawyer out of my mind—the way he tried to insinuate that my father was some kind of bully, some drunk wife-and kid-beater who got what he deserved. The way he smirked at all of us, like we were dirt.”

Shiflett says he wanted to do Val Chadwick’s father, but by then nature, in the form of a fatal heart attack, had done it for him.

“Too bad,” he says. “I had some really bad shit planned for him.”

He sits back and finishes his beer.

“One night, Corbett’s driving east out toward the airport when he sees the blue light. He pulls over and just sits there at the wheel, the way he’s supposed to.

“I doubt he ever saw my face. It was the first time I used chloroform. Useful stuff, don’t you think?”

Shiflett’s aunt had married a guy who had a trailer and a little bit of land along the James, down in Surry County. That’s where the lawyer woke up.

“Wasn’t much, just the trailer and a boat. It was two in the morning when we got there. There weren’t any cars around. Most people just used the place on weekends, to fish and play poker and piss in the woods.

“By the time I was through playing with Corbett, he was begging me to kill him. Understand, I’m not some psycho. I didn’t jerk off on him while I was cutting him up. Nothing like that. I just wanted—what do they call it?—my pound of flesh.”

Shiflett took Lester Corbett out to the boat, wrapped in the same sheet of plastic he woke up inside of “so he didn’t mess up the floor or anything.” He zipped him inside it, along with enough cinder blocks to do the trick.

“But I cut an air hole. Didn’t want old Lester to suffocate, although he probably would have bled out in another half-hour anyhow. I wanted him to have the full drowning experience.” Shiflett laughs, then gets himself another beer. He opens another one, removes the gag and pours about a third of it down my throat, then puts the gag back on. Actually, the beer tastes pretty good right now. My throat’s a little dry.

“I know how much you like your booze,” Shiflett says.

“So, I row that damn boat right out to the ship channel, where it’s deep enough. I can still hear Lester moaning a little, begging me to either kill him or not. And then I pushed him overboard. Damn near turned the boat over doing it.”

Shiflett looks at me.

“You know, so many people hated Lester Corbett’s guts that they never even got around to questioning me about it. And I suppose the crabs and catfish ate him. Never found him, anyhow.”

The air’s getting pretty thick in here. It’s hard to breathe. My heart sinks a little when I remember the chair I’m tied to is sitting on a sheet of plastic.

“Never killed anybody before that,” Shiflett says.

“It wasn’t like I was satisfied or anything, like I felt vindicated. I thought, more than once, about killing that damn bitch mother of his. But something told me to wait, that every dog has his day.

“And I had mine.”

Three years ago “almost to the day,” Shiflett was in Vermont. He was there to bring one of our local knuckleheads back. The guy had killed his wife and her boyfriend, then had stolen a car and headed north. Nobody told him he needed a passport at the Canadian border, or that they might run a license check on him.

So, Shiflett was sent to some middle-of-nowhere town to bring him back.

“While I was there, all we could get to read was the damn Boston paper. Inside, there was this story about this hotshot who was running some kind of fund that was making everybody rich.

“And it was him.”

He shows me the page he ripped from the
Boston Globe
three years ago. Philippe Ducharme in all his glory.

“He had a beard then, but I knew it was him. There wasn’t much doubt in my mind. Something about those little piggy eyes. Or that prissy mouth. I’m good at spotting faces, and this one had been on my mind for thirty-seven goddamn years.”

Shiflett knew a guy. They’d worked together as cops for five years. Now the guy was a private detective, and Shiflett knew he did big-time stuff, even tried to get Shiflett to work with him.

So he called.

“He did what he could,” Shiflett says, taking another draw from the PBR. “He traced him back to France, back to when he was not much older than Val Chadwick was when he killed my father.

“But then the trail went cold. He was supposed to have come over there from the States with his father and mother, but the guy couldn’t find any evidence of his family, anywhere. It was like this guy, Ducharme, sprang out of nowhere. Got a bunch of degrees, speaks at least three languages. Smart guy.”

Shiflett’s old gumshoe buddy told him that Ducharme, who lived outside Paris before he came to the States, had kept a place in the south of France, outside of Nice.

“I had kind of kept an eye on the old lady for years, but I never had any hint that her baby boy came anywhere near here.

“But she did go on fancy vacations. Never to Boston, though. But once or twice a year, she’d go to Europe. She’s a tough old bitch, traveling at her age. Traveling alone, too.”

So, when Christina Chadwick took her next big vacation, Shiflett’s detective found out what Shiflett suspected already.

She was flying to Paris, then taking another short flight to Nice.

“Cost me a damn fortune,” Shiflett says, “But it was worth it.”

He’s been dying to tell this story. Problem is, I might be dying to hear it.

He gets another beer, then looks at me.

“Tell you what,” he says. “I take that gag out, you won’t scream?”

I nod my head with as much energy as I can rally.

“ ’Cause if you do, I’m going to shoot you again, this time in the mouth. With a real gun.” He points to the Luger he has on the table beside him.

I nod that I understand. Mum is definitely the word.

It feels so good to have that thing out of my mouth that I almost thank him.

I’m still tied up, so he feeds me some more beer.

“You got any questions, Mr. Reporter?”

I croak out a “no.” He’s doing just fine.

He waits, then goes on.

“This French guy follows her from the airport. She has a driver. And where do you think she winds up?”

“Philippe Ducharme’s place?”

“Exactly,” Shiflett says. “You’ve been paying attention, Mr. Reporter. And when he sent the pictures back, there was the same guy I’d seen in the Boston paper, with his lovely wife and daughter.”

“Why didn’t you just turn him in when he got back?”

“I could have,” Shiflett says, scratching his neck. “It probably would’ve worked. But there were two things: One, I didn’t trust a rich guy in Massachusetts with the kind of lawyers rich guys can buy. There’s plenty of Lester Corbetts up there.

“Two, I think I just wanted it to last. It was like I’d been drooling about a big, fat tenderloin steak for thirty-seven years, and I didn’t want to eat the damn thing right away. Wanted to savor it, you know? Just knowing I had the power to ruin him was almost worth the wait.”

The detective was on retainer. Shiflett paid him to keep an eye on Philippe Ducharme and his family.

“Then, in the spring, I found out that the daughter was coming to VCU for college.”

He did his own detective work when Isabel got to Richmond, and he knew that she had paid at least three visits to the big house in Windsor Farms, staying overnight each time.

“So I waited,” he says. “I have a lot of patience, Willie. I tailed her several times. She never suspected a thing. Then, that night, it all fell into place. She wasn’t all that drunk, but I think she had the impression that if she didn’t let me drive her back to her dorm, she’d be arrested. I told her that we’d forget the underage drinking stuff, that I just wanted to make sure she got back OK.

“And she got in. You know all about chloroform, don’t you, Mr. Detective?”

“But . . .” I say, then hesitate, then say it anyhow. “She didn’t do anything. She was innocent.”

If I expect Shiflett to show or express any regret, I’m disappointed.

He shrugs.

“Collateral damage,” he says. “A means to an end. See, I realized finally that this was how I could come the closest to getting the ol’ pound of flesh. Kill him? Big deal. He’s dead. Feels nothing. His mother? Jesus, she’s got one foot in the grave anyhow. Wife? I dunno. He could get another one.

“But the daughter. His only child. Now, that’s gotta hurt. To get your only child’s head delivered to you in a box. Wouldn’t that hurt, Mr. Detective?”

The hairs are standing up on my arms.

“Oh, she didn’t feel any pain. She was out cold when I strangled her, out at the landing. She gurgled a little, and then she was gone. The hardest part? Cutting her fuckin’ head off afterward. Even with a big, sharp knife, that takes awhile.

“And, you’ve got to admit, she was a little bit guilty. I mean, she knew who her grandmother was, right? She knew something.”

“Not guilty enough to have her head cut off,” I manage to croak out.

Shiflett shrugs again.

“Whatever. They won’t find the knife, by the way. They got about as much of a chance of finding Lester Corbett.”

My curiosity overriding my pain, I ask him about the head.

“How’d I get it to Boston without getting caught? Well, I’d been thinking about this, almost since I knew she was coming here to school.”