The Philadelphia Quarry

by Howard Owen

  I tell him that I just found out about it yesterday morning. Plus, we’re not even supposed to be pursuing this end of the story anymore.

  “But we are,” Baer says. “Or at least you are.”

  I tell him I’ve got lots of free time these days.

  Sarah comes over to us, yawning as if she hasn’t been awake all that long. Something about the way she greets him and the almost-bashful smile with which he responds makes me wonder if she hasn’t had a relapse and again hooked up with Mr. Baer. Well, she’s done worse. At least he’s age-appropriate.

  Baer tells her we’re talking about the Richard Slade case, as if we’re cops instead of just reporters meddling where we probably shouldn’t be.

  Sarah has no intention of leaving, so I figure she might as well hear it, too.

  “I could use some help,” I tell Baer and Sarah. The way Baer’s eyes shine makes me wish I’d kept my own counsel. He’ll be on this like a beagle on bacon.

  But I’ve long since used up all the good will I might ever have had when it comes to Lewis Witt, and it would be nice if someone could still go over there and get a foot inside the door long enough to make Lewis aware of that phone call and its possible implications. Plus, I’m not even getting paid to do this crap.

  “Shouldn’t you just call the cops?” Sarah asks.

  I tell her that I’m going to do that, but not just yet.

  “You want to do it yourself,” she says, laughing and pointing a finger.

  No, I tell her and Baer. I’m not even on the story anymore, just trying to help out. I don’t even know why, but I tell them about the family connection.

  “He’s your cousin,” Baer says. “Damn.”

  I’m not sure Baer was totally aware of my ethnic heritage until now. He’s reasonably color-blind, and it probably never occurred to him to wonder where I got my great tan.

  “So you probably shouldn’t have been on this story anyhow.”

  I tell him that if anyone farther up the food chain ever hears about this, I’ll have his ass.

  “Well,” Sarah says, “mum’s the word, then. We certainly wouldn’t want you to have our asses.”

  Baer laughs, a little too heartily for my liking, but he takes the vow of silence.

  What I need, I tell him, or them, is for someone to get the word to Lewis that there is evidence of a five A.M. call to Richard Slade, and a guy who’ll say he talked to Slade at that time, on Slade’s home phone.

  Time to do a little cage-rattling.

  “I can do that,” Sarah says. “I can go by there this afternoon, see if she’ll let me in.”

  Baer says he should be the one to go over there, but Sarah correctly reminds him that he might be wearing out his welcome as well, having appeared there before with the notorious Willie Black in tow.

  So now there are three of us, kind of like the Mod Squad—one white, one blonde, one about one-half black—although neither of my dewy-eyed co-conspirators would be old enough to understand the allusion.

  I walk over to see Les and Peggy. I ask Les if he wants to go for a walk, and he says yes. Peggy bundles him up against the chill, after he tries to leave the house with just a jacket. As Les becomes more childlike, Peggy becomes motherly. Hell, I don’t remember her taking that much care with me, her only begotten son. But I’m still here, so I guess she did something right.

  “Don’t let him stay out too long,” she admonishes me.

  The house farther down Laurel where I almost burned to death fifteen months ago is still sitting there, its black eyes staring out at the empty winter street, still waiting for some demolition firm to put it out of its misery.

  We walk down to the overlook and watch the James rush past below us.

  “It’s cold,” Les says, as if it’s just occurred to him. “How long till baseball season?”

  I tell him “too long,” and we head back.

  Awesome Dude has returned from his daily perambulations. Even though he has the option of a roof over his head, what Peggy calls “homeless insurance,” he is not a creature to sit by the fire. All those years of rambling have made the sedentary life foreign to him.

  We tell him and Peggy about walking by the ruins of the late David Shiflett’s home.

  “Dude,” Awesome says, “that place scares me. I walk a block over just so I don’t have to see it.”

  He and Peggy have shared the better part of a joint, and soon the two of them and Les are more or less transfixed by an old William Powell movie. Peggy and Awesome ascribe more humor to it than it deserves. Les and I exchange a glance. He smiles and shakes his head.

  Les has been the adult, caring for Peggy better than any of her three husbands or assorted and sordid other boyfriends did. Now, with dementia scooping out bits of his brain with a melon baller, the dynamics are shifting. Peggy, Les or even the late-arriving Mr. Dude takes the adult supervision role, according to who is the most sane and/or sober at the time.

  I fill Peggy in on what’s happening with Richard Slade.

  “Philomena must be going nuts,” she says. “But you make it sound like maybe he didn’t do it.”

  “I don’t know that. We’re trying to find out.”

  “Well,” she says, turning back to the TV as an ambulance-chasing commercial, urging everyone who’s short of breath to get a lawyer, fades out, “you be careful.”

  “You know,” she says, taking another toke as William Powell reemerges to steal her attention, “I think I might have that mesothelioma.”

  No doubt, I assure her.

  I let myself out, wondering if Sarah’s having any luck storming the fortress that is Lewis Witt.

  Back at the Prestwould, Custalow’s glued to the boob tube, too, but at least he’s multitasking, munching away on some takeout pizza. He once told me he was incapable of boredom, and I believe him. He doesn’t seem to have any real hobbies, hasn’t even hooked up with a girlfriend that I know of since he traded his park bench for my guest bedroom.

  He asks me about Peggy and Les. He stops by and sees them from time to time when he makes a trip into our old neighborhood.

  The phone rings half an hour after I get home.

  It’s Sarah.

  “I was going to call you,” I tell her.

  She talks over me.

  “Wesley Simpson is missing.”

  Sarah says she rang the doorbell three times before a man who turned out to be Carl Witt answered it.

  “I told him who I was, and that I was from the paper, and he kind of blanched. He said that they didn’t have anything to say, that they were kind of having an emergency. I could hear somebody on the phone in the next room, and I figured it must be Lewis.”

  He was starting to close the door on her when she played the only card she had.

  “He didn’t really seem that pissed,” Sarah says. “He just seemed kind of, you know, bedraggled, like he’d maybe been up all night.

  “But when I told him about the phone call, and told him we had a witness who said he’d called Slade and talked to him at five A.M., he stopped. And I heard the other person, Lewis, put the phone down. And it got kind of quiet.”

  “Did they throw you out?”

  “Not right then. Lewis came to the door. I recognized her from pictures I’d seen in the paper. She asked me to repeat what I’d just said, about the phone call, and then she said it was bullshit, that they were just trying to make a few headlines, and that she was going to call some guy named Whitehall, something like that, right then.”

  “Giles Whitehurst?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  I tell her who Giles Whitehurst is.

  “Am I going to get fired, Willie?”

  I assure her she isn’t and hope I’m right.

  “She mentioned your name, too. She said she bet she knew who put me up to this. ‘That damn Willie Black.’ I told her I’d come on my own, but I don’t think she believed me.

  “Then she started ragging on me for disturbing them ‘in the
ir time of grief.’ She must have been a little unhinged, because she starts talking to her husband about it, with me standing right there.

  “She said she’d called the police, but that they were, quote, ‘too damn lazy’ to go find a man who obviously was off his medication.”

  “Did she mention Wesley by name? I mean, how did you know she was talking about her brother?”

  “Oh, yeah. When I was leaving, just before they did shut the door in my face, she started kind of yelling at her husband, or the world, or something. She said, ‘Wesley, you idiot. Why now? Why now?’ And that was the last I heard before the door slammed.”

  I tell her she did a good job.

  Like Lewis Witt, I’m wondering why Wes Simpson has chosen this particular moment to go off his meds.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Monday

  I get the story from that fount of knowledge, Susan Winston-Jones.

  I hear her voice on the answering machine and pick up.

  “Hey,” Bitsy says. “I thought I’d give you a call, in case your keen reporter’s instinct hasn’t picked up on this tidbit already.”

  She sounds as if she might be mocking me. I guess correctly that she’s talking about Wesley Simpson.

  I tell Bitsy that I didn’t know he was still hearing those voices telling him to stop taking his meds and go nuts.

  “I think you stop taking your meds and then you hear the voices,” Bitsy says, “but at least he didn’t stay gone long this time.”

  “They’ve got him already?”

  “Yeah. Lewis must have raised holy hell at some level way higher than Richmond’s finest.”

  They found him in Arkansas. He was, for reasons that we’ll never know, I guess, in some town in the northeast corner of the state, Blytheville. Between the time he rented a car at the Memphis airport and the time he tried to pay for his room at a Holiday Inn, Lewis had managed to have his credit card canceled. When he made a fuss about it, they called the local cops, who found out they had a missing person, presumed dangerous, on their hands.

  “Anyhow,” Bitsy says, “I think Carl was flying out to Memphis today to get him and bring him back. He’s lucky they didn’t keep him in jail. I understand he hit a cop.”

  Money talks, I remind her. Then I ask her how she found all this out so quickly. I figured she’d know something about it, but not this much.

  “Oh,” she says, laughing, “I have my ways. Carl Witt and my brother were in the same fraternity at U.Va. Carl called him last night and asked him to meet him for a drink or three. Carl kind of likes to drink, I think, and I imagine he felt like he needed to get away from Lewis’s ranting for a while.”

  So, sometime after Sarah Goodnight was shown the door at close range yesterday, Lewis must have gotten the call from Arkansas.

  “Fast work,” I say.

  “Better than the last time. This time, they found the car.”

  I have to ask.

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  She’s uncustomarily quiet for a few seconds.

  “I don’t like this,” she says at last. “I don’t like what happened to my friend, and I don’t think I like what’s happening to that man they arrested for it.”

  Fair enough, I say. I’m not exactly sold on the police version of things either.

  “I figure,” she goes on, “if I can shed a little sunlight on what’s happening, maybe somebody will find the truth, just lying there like a diamond amid all the broken glass.”

  I tell her that’s very poetic, and then I sincerely thank her. I tell her that I’m not allowed to write about the case right now, or even to work at the newspaper, but that I’m passing my information to somebody who can help her shine truth’s own flashlight on this mess.

  “You mean that girl who went to Lewis and Carl’s yesterday?”

  “You do get around,” I say.

  “Like I said, I have my sources.”

  “Stay in touch,” I tell her, and she hangs up.

  The sun is streaming in the east-facing windows. Not being able to legally drive is going to be a big problem, I can tell. It’s a good thing I live within walking distance of the newspaper (assuming I get to work there again) and right on the bus line. The hospital, where I’m eventually headed, would be a haul otherwise, and Custalow doesn’t have time to be my full-time personal chauffeur.

  I’ve arranged for Kate to meet me for coffee at Perlie’s first, though, so I can probably forgo the services of our fine transit system this morning if I don’t piss my ex-wife off too much.

  When she walks in, I can see she looks a little tired. She’s talking on her cellphone, as usual, as she slides into the booth, facing me. She nods slightly and holds up a finger.

  “Sorry,” she says when she momentarily returns from cell-world to the one where people have face-to-face conversations. “It was Marcus. He wants us to meet with Slade today. I don’t know, Willie. It’s not looking good. But let’s talk about you. You really ought to drink less, or at home, or something.”

  I concede that this is true. Protest is futile. As one of my former wives, she knows too well what alcohol, nicotine and Mr. Johnson, a.k.a Willie’s willie, have done to the general well-being of myself and those I profess to love.

  We order omelets, hash browns and coffee. As we’re eating, she lays out my future. She thinks that the system won’t be overly harsh with me, but that I’m likely to be restricted to work-only driving for six months or so, in addition to making a hefty withdrawal from my not-so-hefty checking account.

  “And your insurance company is going to drop you,” she adds.

  “I hope I can still afford to pay the rent,” I say.

  She doesn’t smile and says she hopes so, too.

  She pats her mouth with her napkin, wiping a bit of egg that was stuck on her upper lip.

  “You know,” she says, “you might want to think about AA.”

  “Isn’t that for alcoholics?”

  She gives me the thinnest smile imaginable.

  She gives no indication that last Wednesday’s little afternoon delight was anything but an immediately regretted lapse in judgment and good sense. She gives her watch a surreptitious glance.

  “I might have something that would make Mr. Slade’s day a little brighter,” I tell her, and Kate is suddenly all ears.

  I hadn’t exactly planned to tell her, and maybe I’m telling her now just to keep her in my sight for a few more minutes, impress her with my reporterly skills.

  I tell her about Bump Freeman and the phone call.

  “Why the hell didn’t Slade tell us about it?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. Freeman said he sounded like he was half asleep. He never came by the next day like he said he would.”

  “Well, by the end of the next day, he was already in jail.”

  Kate suggests that perhaps, as I have nothing else to do, I might accompany her over to the jail, where she’s supposed to meet Marcus Green. I check my watch and figure I can spare a couple of hours.

  “Oh, yeah,” I tell her as she’s pulling away from the curb, “Wesley Simpson went missing. They found him somewhere in Arkansas.”

  She stops, halfway out in traffic, finally moving on when the guy behind her sits on his horn. She looks at me and shakes her head.

  “Any more surprises? He seemed a little spooky to me, at the funeral. Didn’t Clara say he’d done that before?”

  “Yeah, but the timing’s kind of strange, and Sarah said Lewis seemed pretty upset about it.”

  “Well, he is her brother. She’s running out of sibs. Who’s Sarah?”

  I explain about Sarah volunteering to go to the Witts’ front door, since I was on Lewis’s shoot-to-kill list and not getting paid by the newspaper at present.

  “You always were good at getting the girls to do favors,” she says.

  “You’re smirking.”

  “Wait, let me guess. She’s about twenty-three, blonde, pretty, looking for a mentor?�
��

  “Wrong. She’s twenty-four.”

  “Oh, Willie,” she says, using much the same tone as she did when she found out about my little DUI adventure yesterday.

  At the jail, Marcus is waiting for us. Kate brings him up to speed on the five A.M. call. Marcus stares for a second. Then he smacks his bald, shiny head.

  “He didn’t say a damn thing to me about that.”

  Inside, I’m allowed to accompany Richard Slade’s crack defense team to the interview room.

  Marcus cuts to the chase.

  “What about that phone call Bump Freeman gave you? Were you going to tell us about that? Do you want to spend the rest of your life in prison, or worse?”

  Slade looks genuinely confused.

  “Five A.M. About the same time you were allegedly murdering Alicia Parker Simpson.”

  “I—I don’t remember nothin’ like that. I mean, why wouldn’t I tell you if I remembered it?”

  Something occurs to me. It’s a long shot, but that’s all we have.

  “Richard,” I interrupt, “were you taking any kind of medication, like sleeping pills or something?”

  He thinks for a few seconds.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” he says finally. “I was kind of jazzed up, after talking to Bump and all. I guess it’s just being somewhere without bars, with cars and crickets and all. I’d mentioned it to Momma the night before, and she gave me some of her pills.”

  “Do you know what it was?”

  “I don’t know. Never heard of it. A-something. Amber. Amway. Something like that . . .”

  “Ambien?” Kate asks.

  “Yeah, that’s it! Ambien. I took one after I got back to the house.”

  Kate and I exchange glances.

  “What?” Marcus Green asks.

  Sometime in our first two years of marriage, Kate had a bout of insomnia, and her doctor prescribed Ambien.

  One night, she’d fallen asleep before me. Sometime after one, the phone rang, and I answered it. It was Kate’s mother, and it was serious. It’s always serious that time of night. Kate’s father was having chest pains. She was calling from the emergency room. Kate must have talked with her for five minutes, and then hung up. She told me her father was stable, and that there wasn’t any reason to rush to the hospital. I should’ve made her go right then, but I didn’t. Five minutes later, Kate was asleep again.