Oregon Hill (4 page)

The interior walls are terra cotta. You could slaughter a sheep in the next room and no one would hear. It has maid’s rooms that most have turned into space for washer-dryers. High ceilings and lots of single-pane windows. My unit (the one I rent from Kate since she left) overlooks the park and downtown. I can’t quite see the newspaper building, ten blocks away, but I can see the corporate headquarters, Suitville, across the street from it. One time when Sally Velez was up here, she asked me if I thought a sniper could pick somebody off that far away.

When Kate and I moved in here nine years ago, it took us a while to figure out where the distant buzzing came from that we heard sometimes when we ate in the dining room. One of the older residents had to tell us about the button for summoning the maid, hidden underneath the rug.

It’s a nineteenth-century kind of building constructed in the twentieth and trying to get by in the twenty-first. The roof leaks, the windows leak. Hell, the walls leak if you get a big enough storm. If the plumbing goes south, you get a guy with a sledgehammer to knock a hole in one of those brick walls, then the plumber comes in and tries to fix it, and then a crew comes in to fix the hole the sledgehammer made. The radiators play the Anvil Chorus, and the place smells like hot metal when they’re on full blast.

How could I not love it? When Kate left, I asked her to let me stay and pay rent and half the condo fee. She said fine, that the place had nothing but bad memories for her, but if I wanted to live there, to knock myself out. I can just about make the rent, usually, as long as Mel Wheelwright and his corporate masters let me hang on by my scratching, clawing fingernails to what I’m sure is the best-paying job I’ll have for the rest of my sorry-ass life.

The residents here skew toward old. There are still a couple from before the building converted to condos. They hate change, mainly because change, in the last tenth of your life, is seldom for the better. They balk at fixing things, for the same reason that they opt for only the one-year subscription to
The New Yorker
. If the roof doesn’t leak, but I’m dead, so what?

However, they are the smartest, most interesting people I’ve ever lived among. And they need me to change their light bulbs and fix their cable TVs and computers when one of them hits a wrong button and is sure they’ve broken the contraption forever. In exchange, they bake me brownies and cookies and brighten my life.

Kate was the one who wanted to move here. We were renting a place on Laurel Street, on the Hill, because R. P. McGonnigal’s Uncle Ookie owned it and gave us a bargain. It was kind of nice, to me, living on the Hill again, but Kate had just gotten her law degree and thought we could “do better.” She said she’d always wanted to live in the Prestwould, ever since she was a little girl. When a unit halfway up came open in 2000, at a price that sounds like a steal now, even with real estate tanking, we took it. We were married there four years later. We had some good times, often with each other.

She insists that I don’t smoke inside for fear of bringing down the future resale value, but she wished that when we lived together, too. I try to be good, but you can’t have everything.

As I walk in the front door and then fob myself into the lobby, I see Clara Westbrook, one of our older and more astute residents, sitting there in one of the chairs where she waits when someone’s coming to take her someplace. She has her oxygen tank with her. She rolls it behind her like a kid pulling a toy duck.

“Oh, that poor girl,” Clara says. She looks like she’s been crying. “She couldn’t have been much younger than your Andi.”

How does she do that? I can’t remember the names of everyone in the building, and there aren’t that many of us, but she knows my daughter’s last name and age. I don’t believe she’s ever seen Andi, except in pictures.

“There are such bad people out there,” she says. “Sometimes, I don’t think I’ll mind leaving this place very much.”

I know she means Earth and not the Prestwould.

Then she looks up at me and smiles.

“But I get over it.”

She asks me if I know anything else about it.

I tell her that I emptied my brain into the computer at work last night, that everything I know she’ll know if she reads the paper.

“Well, I hope they catch the bastard.”

I tell her I do, too, and that I’m sure they will.

I ask her if she’s seen Custalow.

“Oh, I think Abe and Susan are down in the basement, trying to fix the heat. It’s freezing in here.”

Actually, it feels as if it’s about seventy-five in the lobby, and this likely is Antarctica compared to Clara’s unit. It’s a bone of contention here among the newer, younger, more affluent members of our little insane asylum. We pay a common heating bill as part of the condo fee, and there are those among us who would like to take very old people far below their comfort zone in order to save a few dollars. What passes for sweater weather for Clara Westbrook and her friends is a pleasant temperature for the newbies. Such people deserve to spend all eternity in hell, with Clara controlling the thermostat.

I take the stairs down to our basement and finally find Abe Custalow and the lovely Susan looking mildly confused as they stare at the Rube Goldberg expanse that is our boiler.

“Don’t know,” Custalow says. “We might ought to get somebody in here that knows what they’re doing.”

“Shit,” says Susan. “These old farts will never pay for that. They want us to fix it.”

Susan Sheets is about half Abe’s (and my) age, but she already looks ridden hard and hung up wet. She’s got two kids out in Powhatan somewhere and a boyfriend who “visits” her occasionally here. I know because I caught them one night visiting on a table in one of the utility rooms when I came down to look for something in my storage cage. Because I didn’t tell, Susan gives me wry, conspiratorial smiles now and then, and I think she would show her appreciation in a more corporeal way if I only asked. I do not believe this will happen in my lifetime, but Mr. Johnson, my auxiliary brain, has disappointed me and others before.

She’s been the super here five years, and Custalow only started four months ago, so she has assumed the role of his boss. Abe goes along with it, doesn’t complain to the manager. The last guy got arrested for setting his girlfriend’s car on fire, and since Abe was crashing with me already and had a background in building maintenance, among other things, he seemed like a natural to replace him.

McGrumpy opined that we were trading one criminal for another, but enough people knew Abe by then that they were willing to give him a second chance.

“After all,” Grace Montross said, “he didn’t kill anybody.”

Well, not on purpose.

I tell Custalow I’m going upstairs to have a sandwich and a beer, and he says he’ll be awhile. I leave them there, standing, smoking and staring at something neither of them really knows how to fix.

I get a call on my cell phone as I’m taking the elevator up. It’s Jackson, my editor.

“Better get over here a little early, Willie,” he says. “Wheelwright wants to get the team moving on this.”

“The team? Have I been drafted, Enos? Is Wheelie going to give me a signing bonus.”

“The Isabel Ducharme team.”

It must grind Jackson’s gears to have talk like this, but he’s got more bills than me, and so he’s a team player. He acts as if I’m wearing a wire when I ask him to tell me what he really thinks of the new world order, whose goal seems to be to save money on newsprint by reducing our circulation to zero.

It’s a ten-minute walk to the paper. I get there at 2:10, which is ten minutes later than Wheelwright wanted but fifty minutes earlier than the time at which they start paying me.

Wheelie glances at his watch and gives me a look. I tell him traffic was a bitch.

The “team” consists of me and Jackson, who’ll be the team leader, Sally Velez, who’ll be the “first-read” word editor, a photographer who seems to be picking his nails with a folded-up piece of paper, a designer, an artist (gotta have locator maps), a representative of our crack online operation, and two other reporters, Sarah Goodnight and Mark Baer. Baer has been here for five years. His hobby is sending out résumés.

I can’t help but notice that only three of the ten people in the room are reporters, but that’s the way it goes lately.

We should be talking to friends of Isabel’s, Wheelie says, and “working the traps” with the police, who would dearly love it if we went away until they call a press conference and announced that they’ve caught the killer. We should talk to shrinks, find out what would make someone do something like this. We should run a story on being safe on college campuses. We should feed it all to our Web site as soon as we get it. The Web guy nods enthusiastically at this.

Don’t get me wrong. I really, really want to catch this guy. But it makes me a little queasy how Wheelie’s eyes gleam. Newspaper people are as bad as cops about the tragedy turn-on. Worse, because we don’t actually accomplish anything, don’t catch anybody. We just go by afterward, like the guy said, and shoot the wounded.

He says someone needs to check into the girl’s background: “You know. Did she sleep around. Was she a party girl?”

I suggest, maybe with more irritation than was intended, that we should at least wait until we have some idea of what happened before we paint poor Isabel Ducharme as the town slut.

Wheelie stares at me. Jackson, standing behind him, gives me the “shut up” look.

“This is news,” he informs me. “We need to give our readers as complete a picture of who the victim was as we can.”

I think of Andi and hold my tongue, for once.

So, we divvy it up. Sarah will try to round up a shrink for a thumb-sucker on why psychopaths are psychopaths. Baer will go on campus and harass students, maybe find out who eighteen-year-old Isabel Ducharme has been screwing. I’m supposed to find somebody to talk about how not to get your head cut off. That and keep in touch with the cops.

I don’t mention the phone number I was able to parlay out of the name Andi gave me. I’d like to make that call myself.

CHAPTER THREE

Thursday

I
wake up about ten. The message light on the phone is blinking.

“Willie? Pick up if you’re there. I know it’s early, but they caught him.”

Jackson.

A couple of the copydesk guys came by after work last night and helped me finish off the majority of a half-gallon of Early Times. I’d savored the idea of going back to sleep for another hour or so. Not to be.

By the time I get half-dressed and down to city hall, smoking my breakfast on the way, the press conference has started without me. All the TV stations are well represented.

On the dais, L. D. Jones, our police chief, sits along with a couple of mid-level cop-bureaucrat types, our knucklehead mayor and David Shiflett.

The chief is explaining how they pored over the video from the camera in the lobby of the victim’s dorm and had, with corroboration from Isabel’s roommates, determined that she had dated one Martin Fell, age thirty-two, the night she disappeared. So much, I think, for talking with Andi’s old high school acquaintance. Cops beat me to it, for once.