Oregon Hill (21 page)

When I ask her if I can come up, that I need to ask her about something, she asks me what in particular. When I tell her, there’s a pause.

“All right. But can you wait awhile? I’ve got to get decent.”

I know for a fact that Clara is almost always dressed to the nines by eight. I ask her if it’d be OK if I came by around one. She says it is, but I have the feeling that it really isn’t.

Clara Westbrook is our social director and guiding spirit. She is always ready for a party, and her door is always open. Except for now.

I have time to kill, so I decide to go over to Peggy’s. It feels more like winter than fall today, but I’d like a good head-clearing walk. Fighting the wind, I cut through the park, take Laurel across the Downtown Expressway and I’m at Peggy’s in less than fifteen minutes.

When she answers the door, she looks a little more disheveled than usual. I don’t detect the sweet scent of cannabis, so it isn’t that.

The problem is Les. She caught him in the middle of the night, sometime after two
A
.
M
., in the front yard with the ladder. She was able finally to persuade him to come back inside, and then neither of them could sleep.

He’s resting now, and Peggy looks like she could use some more sleep herself. When I find out she hasn’t eaten breakfast yet, I send her into the living room to doze off or watch television, and I fry some bacon and scramble a few eggs, put a couple of pieces of bread in the toaster. I’m a little hungry myself and add a couple of strips and two eggs.

“Just like old times,” I hear her say from the next room.

By the time I was twelve, it was my job to fix us breakfast every morning. My repertoire was limited—sometimes we’d have sausage instead of bacon—but Peggy didn’t mind. She always seemed to have the kind of job where you had to be there at seven or seven thirty, and she’d always give me a little peck on the way out as I got ready for school. I’d wipe the inevitable egg off her mouth and she’d wonder out loud what she’d do without me. I think she has the same toaster and the same skillet she had in 1972.

As we eat, she catches me up on the latest. My old friends drop by to visit her more often than they see me. I think they enjoyed coming here when we were kids. Peggy was not, to put it mildly, like other moms.

She says Andy Peroni’s worried about the hardware store. The new Lowe’s is really putting a hurt on him. It’s half a mile away, and despite the fact that everybody says they’re four-square behind the good old local merchant and clerks that may actually have used tools at some point in their lives, his sales keep falling. People don’t want to live in a Norman Rockwell painting. People want cheap shit.

There was a fire over on Pine, two blocks down, not serious enough to make the paper—student renters drinking and smoking and not using ashtrays and passing out.

“And I’m worried about Awesome.”

I ask her why, and she explains that he always comes by on Thursdays. She lets him take the glass bottles from her recycling to add to what he gets from other kind souls. He can probably buy a couple of bottles of cheap wine just from what he gets here. Peggy has a fondness for Rolling Rock, and there’s usually a small mountain of those green bottles out back by the time Awesome Dude comes to retrieve them.

“But he didn’t come by yesterday, and he hasn’t been today.”

I remark that I didn’t know Mr. Dude was so dependable that his absence was cause for concern.

“He’s been by here every Thursday for three years. I told you that.”

Considering Awesome’s state of mind when last I saw him in the rearview mirror on Wednesday, and considering everything else, I do pay more attention than usual.

I tell her I think he’s staying over on Maplewood.

Peggy sips her coffee and says, “Yeah. Phil Patterson, he said. Runs some kind of construction company.”

Peggy doesn’t miss much.

“I don’t suppose he told you the address.”

“Why would he do that?”

Les comes out before I leave. He looks older, probably because he hasn’t shaved or washed his face.

He’s not one to hide anything or pretend things are good when they’re bad. He says he only has his “spells” when he wakes up. Sometimes, he says, he isn’t quite on the right planet for a while. And so, he’s afraid to fall asleep, afraid he’ll wake up on the roof and not know how the hell he got there.

Peggy’s taken him to the doctor who told him to make an appointment with a specialist, but they haven’t done it yet. I start to lecture but then check myself, for a change. Sometimes, you’re in a situation where you don’t even want to know how bad it is.

I tell him I’ll come by Monday and we’ll watch the baseball playoffs together.

I drive over to Maplewood. It’s a really nice neighborhood, and it’s cheap. When they built the Expressway, it might as well have been the Berlin Wall. Places like Oregon Hill and Randolph, on the south side of that enormous hole in the ground, were suddenly another world from the Fan. When people in the 1970s decided they actually liked neighborhoods, with restaurants and sidewalks and character, the Fan was revived by Yuppie money. Those of us in East Berlin, on the wrong side of the ditch, were kind of frozen in time. Consequently, a place on Maplewood might cost half to two-thirds what a place with the same design and square footage would cost in the Fan.

It takes me a while to find the Pattersons’ place. The van outside with “We Fix Anything” painted on the side tells me I’m getting warm. The second doorbell I ring, the lady informs me the Pattersons live right next door.

Mrs. Patterson, whose name I never get, says that they haven’t seen Awesome since Tuesday night, and she allows that she’s a little worried, too.

“But, you know, it’s getting right cold. He might have gone to the shelter.”

I go by the nearest homeless shelter, and nobody there has seen the Dude, who is more recognizable in these parts than the mayor.

“He’s around,” one toothless African-American gentleman says, squinting up at me from the steps. “The Awesome Dude always comes back.”

I tell him I hope so.

Clara Westbrook greets me at her front door, the oxygen tank in tow, rolling along on its little cart. She seems to be using it more and more now. She offers me scotch or bourbon when I get there. I demur but offer to make her one.

“Scotch, with just a splash of water,” she says, and I know she means I should just let the ice cubes melt. What the hell. She’s eighty-five. She has a right to not go gently.

I help myself to a Coke, bring the drinks out and see that she’s managed to put out some cheese and crackers for us.

“So, what’s on your mind?” she asks me at last, and I can tell by looking at her that she’s pretty sure of the answer.

I tell her it’s about Christina Chadwick.

“I thought it might be,” she says, and then she tells me what she knows, which is plenty.

They’d been friends since they were girls, both part of the crowd that went from St. Catherine’s to Sweet Briar or Hollins, and then back to Richmond as the eventual wife of someone appropriate. The secret she’s kept for most of forty years weighed on her, she says, but she didn’t think she could betray her old friend, who never should have put that kind of information on her in the first place. “I’m going to tell you something, but you can never tell anyone else,” can be a terrible burden. To Clara’s credit, she doesn’t saddle me with that, even before I tell her that she’ll never be quoted. I just want confirmation.

“We’d already known each other half a life,” she says. The little tubes are draining oxygen from the tank on rollers beside her into her nose, and she seems to be working harder to keep up. I urge her to take it slow. “She had to tell someone. And I was his godmother. Christina was godmother to my oldest. And she’d been drinking a lot that day.”

After she’d told me what she knew, or at least what she wanted to tell me, I asked her why I’d never seen Christina before.

She takes another sip of her scotch, which I see she has nearly finished.

“It just wasn’t the same after I knew,” she said. “I didn’t want to know any more than I did, and just the fact that I knew made her a little shy around me, I think.”

They’d see each other, off and on. You couldn’t help it, with the godmother thing and all, but, before Isabel Ducharme was murdered, Clara hadn’t seen her old friend in nearly two years.

“She called me, almost hysterical, the Sunday after the girl disappeared. I drove over there, and she told me everything. I had no idea. And then when they found her granddaughter’s body . . .”

Clara wipes a tear away.

“This will kill her.”

I ask Clara if she wants another scotch. She thanks me but says no.

She insists on seeing me to the door, which is more work for me than just leaving her there. I help her up and untangle the lines to her tank, then walk beside her down the long hallway. She’s a tough old broad, and I’m all in favor of her fighting like hell all the way to the end. No nursing homes for Clara.

As I open the door, she puts her hand on mine.

“I know it was wrong,” she says. “I know I’m going to pay for this.” I know that, good Episcopalian that she is, she isn’t thinking about conspiracy charges or anything else of this Earth.

I assure her that Whoever is in charge won’t judge her too harshly. There are too many felons for the Almighty to worry about her spiritual misdemeanors.

“Well,” she says, wiping away a tear and managing a smile, “Episcopalians don’t have a very creative concept of hell. At the worst, I think God might make me spend all eternity with Baptists.”

I drive through the Fan before heading to work, looking for him the way you might search for a lost dog. If I had a picture, I’d put it in the laundromats and coffeehouses. Lost: Clueless, sometimes homeless loser. Slight limp.

Gray, stringy hair. Answers to Awesome Dude.

It’s a quiet night at the paper, for a Friday. It’s a little too cold for the kind of heat-rash killings you get in the summer. In general, we don’t have the quantity of mayhem in Richmond we had in the 90s, when the self-immolating drug of choice was crack instead of heroin. These days, the junkies just seem to doze a lot.

I’m wondering where to go next with Isabel and Martin, one who definitely didn’t deserve to die and one who probably doesn’t.

It might be a good time to call the police, I’m thinking, if the police weren’t involved. I know L. D. Jones, the chief, from way back. I still remember him from when he and his twin brother lit up the basketball court for Armstrong-Kennedy, back in the day. Larry Doby Jones and Jackie Robinson Jones. But I don’t know. He’s got to back his lieutenant, and I’d like to have some more information before I take it where it might need to be taken.

There’s something else going on, too, truth be known. I don’t want to share. When I was a kid, they had this contest one time, at Binford. The kid who sold the most tickets to some bullshit chicken dinner, to raise money for the school, got a prize. It was free tickets to the circus, and I had it in mind that this would be the coolest thing I could ever get for Peggy. We didn’t go out much when I was a kid.

I didn’t tell her what I was up to. I went through the neighborhood, knocking on doors and selling my ass off. I went across the Expressway and started working in the Fan. Most people just told me to fuck off, but I discovered the salesman’s secret: If you knock on enough doors and you aren’t crushed by rejection, any fool can sell anything.

When I’d get home and Peggy was already back from work, she wanted to know where I was. I told her it was a surprise.

“Well,” she’d say, “you be careful.” Peggy wasn’t what you’d call a suffocating parent.

So I won the prize. That day, walking home with those tickets in my pocket, I was so proud, ready to savor my moment as the big shot, the hero who took his mom to the circus.

Of course, Peggy got home late that night, and a little under the weather. Somebody at work had a birthday, and they stopped at the Chuck Wagon. By then, Peggy trusted me to let myself in and feed myself without burning down the house.

I should’ve waited until morning, but I’d been waiting all night already, about to burst.