Parker Field (20 page)

W
EDNESDAY

P
eggy’s spending a lot of her time on the cot in Les’s room. I drive over as soon we get back and I have time to drop Cindy off with a promise to call her in a few hours. I take Awesome Dude with me to the hospital. He’s been more or less fending for himself and hasn’t burned the house down yet, although the strong scent of burned popcorn indicates that perhaps Awesome hasn’t had too much experience with microwaves.

“He’s gonna pull through,” Awesome says when we’re getting out of the car. “I know he is. Les, he’s tough.”

I give Awesome a little squeeze, which makes him jump a little. Even after being taken in by Peggy like a stray mutt and treated like family, he’s still not cool with people invading his space. In the Dude’s life, most people who have touched him have not meant him well.

Jumpin’ Jimmy Deacon is there. I was hoping he would be. I need some information.

Les looks like he’s lost twenty pounds in the last thirteen days. I sit beside him for a few minutes and try to engage him. When I tell him I’ve just been to see Buck McRae, his eyes light up, and I know he understands what I’m saying. Despite being shot and then having a stroke, and despite the fact that he wasn’t clicking on all cylinders mentally before all this happened, Les is still with us. He can still pull 1964 out of his memory bank.

When I tell him Buck wants to come see him sometime soon, his mouth twists into something resembling a smile, and he shakes his head.

Peggy pulls me into the hallway to tell me that the hospital, having somehow let him have a major stroke on their watch and not noticing it in time to reverse its effects, now wants to kick Les out.

“They said they can’t do anything else for him,” my mother says, sniffling a little. “They say we need to find a nursing home or 'assisted care facility’ or some damn thing.”

I can tell she’s overwhelmed. Hell, I’m overwhelmed. Most people don’t deal with the inevitable until it’s, well, inevitable. Who wants to sit down after dinner one night and come up with a plan for what to do when you’re so bad off that the hospital says they can’t help you?

I tell her we’ll work through this. My first job will be to find out who exactly gave her Les’s eviction notice. We need to talk.

After an hour or so, Jumpin’ Jimmy says he’s going outside. I say I’ll go with him. On the trip to North Carolina, I tried to keep my nicotine intake to a minimum. I have this feeling that I’m running up a few demerits with the lovely Ms. Peroni, and she, like so many others in our intolerant world, has a bias against tobacco.

I need a smoke.

I also need to pump Jimmy Deacon.

“Jumpin’ Jimmy’s not feeling so good about old Les,” he says when we’re far enough away from the room. “Les, he was always a fighter, but …”

“Yeah.”

When we get far enough away from the smoke police that I can fetch a Camel from my shirt pocket, I get to what’s on my mind.

“I need to get in touch with Frannie Fling’s family.”

Jimmy frowns. He’s thinking. I can smell something burning.

“She didn’t have much family,” he says. “By the time I got up there, when I went looking for her grave, they had moved.”

“You say you thought they went to Massachusetts?”

“Something like that. What’re you so interested for now?”

I tell him that, if I’m going to do the story I want to do about the 1964 Vees, I need to find out more about Frannie Fling.

“Well,” he says, “just don’t go making her look like she was some kind of whore or something. Jimmy would not like that.”

His eyes are kind of red, and his fists are clenched.

I promise Jimmy that I will do right by Frances Flynn.

S
ARAH
GOODNIGHT
answers on the first ring. She says the latest rumor at the paper is that we won’t be getting any raises again this year. Quelle surprise. I think this makes it four years in a row.

The newsroom has its own half-ass union that is about as worthless as a broke-dick dog when you really get down to dollars and cents. Being a union, and a pissant one at that, in a right-to-work state entitles you to complain a lot. When times were good, our management did not stint on paying the help. But we got spoiled, and when the big stores went out of business or just quit buying print ads, and the geniuses above us decided to give it away online, we found out an obvious (to everyone but us) fact of life: When rich people have to decide between taking care of their families or taking care of the help, the help bites the big one.

“Too bad my landlord decided to give himself a raise this year,” Sarah says. “I’m losing money, Willie.”

“Maybe they can dip into my pension fund and give you a taste.”

She snorts.

“Pension! Like I’ll ever see one.”

I sympathize. Not enough to give up my pension until they tear it from my cold, dead hands, but I do wonder what’s going to happen to Sarah and to Andi and everyone else who came up in this benighted century, when pensions are but a fond memory and the 401(k) plans that were supposed to replace them aren’t being funded any more.

Changing the subject, I ask her how things are going on night cops.

“I hope to hell you’re through playing sportswriter soon,” she says.

I tell her that it won’t be long, especially since now I’m dipping into my paid vacation time to fund my little junket.

“Last night,” she says, “I had to go to your old neighborhood.”

“Oregon Hill?”

“Yeah. It was a real mess. Somebody tried to jack a guy’s car, right there on Pine Street.”

I’m a little surprised. Crime in Richmond tends to restrict itself to certain neighborhoods: Poor sides of town (there’s more than one), places where bars empty their little feuds into the street, the area around VCU, because students don’t know enough to be scared and not walk their dogs at four a.m. Oregon Hill, though, usually doesn’t have many dots on the crime map.

“Tell me more.”

“Four idiots from Blackwell, I think it is, from the address, apparently jumped this guy, just as he was getting out of his car. But they didn’t realize, I guess, that there were, like, three men sitting on the porch across the street, talking.

“They said the would-be victim almost beat one guy to death, and the guys from the porch gave the other three a pretty good pounding before they ran them off in the direction of Hollywood Cemetery. The cops caught up with them later. The guy they tried to jack was driving some kind of vintage car, a Corvette, I think. Said he used to be a boxer.”

“The Corvette was red?”

“Yeah. I saw it.”

“Walker Johnson.”

“How the hell did you know that, Willie?”

Goat Johnson’s brother was two years older than I was. It was the classic Hill family. Goat’s the president of some half-ass college in Ohio. Walker was a professional boxer for a while before a romantic entanglement with cocaine led to his early retirement and a brief stint as a guest of the state. Bad man to mess around with, even if he’s got to be almost fifty-five now.

When I was growing up, coming to Oregon Hill to prey on the citizens was like going into a lion’s cage to steal his dinner. It’s good to know that, even with the current gentrification, some things haven’t changed.

“They’re talking about charging the guy with attempted murder.”

“With his fists?”

“Well, he was a boxer.”

What a bunch of bullshit. I hope sanity prevails. It’s depressing sometimes how seldom that happens, though. The little punk will probably sue him.

I tell Sarah to hang on for a few more days and ask her to transfer me to Ed Chenowith.

“Another favor?” he says, sounding like his dance card is pretty much full.

“How’d you know?”

“Nobody calls unless they want something.”

I bring up old times.

“Yeah, yeah. You’re right. You’re not a complete asshole. What do you need?”

It’s about as close to a compliment as Chenowith offers these days. As with a lot of his newsroom compatriots, much of his good will disappeared at about the same time that his raises and matching 401(k) contributions stopped and his pension was frozen. Why can’t people eat shit gracefully?

I tell him that I’m trying to track down Frances Flynn’s relatives, if there are any. All I know from Jumpin’ Jimmy is that everybody had left by the time he visited her grave and that they were supposed to have moved to Massachusetts. And Jimmy remembered her parents’ names, William and Eleanor.

“That’s about all I know, though. She might have had some other family, maybe siblings.”

I tell Chenowith a little of the story, just enough to get his juices flowing. I know he’s addicted to research and won’t be able to stop until he finds Frances Flynn’s family, if there’s any of it left.

I lay a big smooch on Ed’s ass. He says he’ll call me when he has something.

I go back into the hospital and, after many false starts, get in touch with the person who can try to explain to me how Les Hacker should be kicked out of the hospital.

“We just can’t do anything else for him,” the woman says. She’s about half my age and has that same empathy for the human condition as the average human resources drone.

I point out to her that he had a stroke on their watch, or un-watch as it turns out.

“Well,” she says, “according to my information, he was on around-the-clock surveillance. Sometimes, these things just happen.”

When I note that this is a piss-poor way for a hospital to explain ruining what’s left of a man’s life, she closes her little folder and suggests that the decision has already been made, that she’s sorry and that there’s nothing that can be done.

I suggest that there sure as shit is something that can be done, but I’m going to have to hire a lawyer to do it.

She gives me a tired smile. I almost feel sorry for her. She’s probably got a degree in history or psychology, and it’s either this job or join Andi and her legion waiting tables.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

Not much else to do but leave.

On the way back home, I take a left on Fifth Street, just for the hell of it. The empty parking space right beside Penny Lane is an obvious sign I’d be foolish to ignore. I pull in and walk in. I have a light supper of fish and chips and three Harps. Better to keep dinner simple at Penny Lane. “English” and “cuisine” are two words that do not often go well together.

While I’m standing in the men’s room, contemplating a fourth Harp and whatever follows that, my phone rings. It slips from my hand, and only the kind of reflex action common to great athletes and drunks lets me catch it in midair before I piss all over it.

It’s Ed Chenowith.

“I think I have something for you,” he says. It’s been less than four hours since we talked. I compliment him on his fast work.

“The father is dead,” he says. “Died a year after his daughter. The mother married again, a guy named Roger Fairchild. They settled in Worcester, Massachusetts.”

“Do you have an address?”

“She died, too, last year. And she outlived her second husband, too.”

“So, dead end.”

“Not exactly.”

Chenowith has knocked himself out. He’s gone that extra mile and found out that Eleanor Harshman Flynn Fairchild had, in addition to two kids from her second marriage, another son, Frances’s younger brother. Adair Flynn. Eleanor also had a brother, a little younger than her. He was born March 7, 1925, so he’d be eighty-seven years old now.

“And he’s still alive. Still lives in Wells, too. I don’t know if he’s got all his marbles, but as of five days ago, he was still alive.”

I get his name. August Harshman. And his address. Chenowith has his phone number, too. He doesn’t seem to have e-mail. Probably doesn’t tweet, either.

“I owe you about a case of Early Times,” I tell Ed.

“You can’t do better than that?” he says, and hangs up.

I zip up, make my way out of the world’s smallest bathroom, pay my tab and leave. The scent of a good story is just about the only thing that can get me to quit after just a few. Well, maybe that and Cindy Peroni.

I stop by the paper, go online and find Wells, Vermont. It’s not that far from Albany, where I’m told planes take off and land on a regular basis. I call Cindy and ask if it would be possible to impose on her good will for one more little junket. She says she has classes tomorrow that she can’t miss. She’s already bagged too many following me to exotic places like Tallahassee and Fayetteville.

“But let me see what I can do,” she says.

She calls me back and tells me that she’s gotten her brother to pull some strings, and I’ll be on a very cheap flight to Albany, New York.

Cindy seems impressed that I am in my own abode not long after nine
P.M
.

“I thought you might call a little earlier,” she says. I explain that between trying to keep Les from being thrown out of the hospital and trying to find the dregs of Frannie Fling’s family, I’ve been a little busy. I realize that the lovely Cindy Peroni, who must have much better prospects than me on her social calendar, has probably blown her evening waiting to hear from me.

I promise to do better. Promising to do better is one of the things I do best.

Chapter Fifteen