The Philadelphia Quarry

by Howard Owen

  When I woke up at seven to take a piss, I thought I’d better wake Kate, too. I was sure she’d want to get over to the hospital right away.

  I had to shake her a couple of times before she opened her eyes.

  “Shouldn’t you get up, sweetie?” I asked. “Your mom’s probably waiting for you.”

  “What?”

  “At the hospital.”

  “Hospital?”

  She didn’t remember a damn thing. She was mortified that she hadn’t rushed right over when she got the call she didn’t remember getting, and she never took Ambien again.

  Kate explains that it is possible to do things under the influence of some of our finer sleep-inducing drugs and then not remember them later.

  “So,” Richard Slade says, not quite seeming to believe it, “I could have talked to Bump and not even remembered it?”

  Kate tells him that’s so.

  “Damn.”

  Of course, I’m wondering what else you could do under the influence of Ambien and not remember, but keep it to myself.

  We talk a bit more, and then the three of us leave.

  “In the future,” Marcus tells me, “you might want to keep us informed on shit like this.”

  “When I’m working for you,” I tell him, “I might do that.”

  I get a call from Sarah while Kate’s driving me to the paper.

  “You might want to be here for this,” she says. “Wheelie’s about to fire Mark.”

  “He’s going to can Baer?”

  As much as I have grown to dislike the guy who seems to be permanently affixed to my coattails, this doesn’t seem right. Baer’s sucked up enough to Wheelie, Grubby and anybody else in a suit to be fireproof. Or so I thought.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, he put something on his blog about Wesley Simpson going missing. It wasn’t much, just a couple of paragraphs.”

  I guess that somewhere deep inside Baer’s upwardly mobile DNA a few strands of journalist exist. He couldn’t resist the urge to print—or at least commit to the ether—the truth.

  “I tried to stop him,” Sarah says, and I’m depressed by how upset she sounds. Not that it’s any of my business. Right.

  I ask Kate to drop me by the paper.

  “More news to hoard?” she says.

  “Nothing new. It’s just that half the town probably knows about Wes Simpson by now.”

  “I hope this doesn’t get your little mentee in trouble.”

  She’s definitely smirking now.

  “Just because you imagine it,” I say, “doesn’t mean it’s so.”

  We’re at the paper. I get out of the car. I should just keep walking, but I walk around to her side and ask what I think is a pertinent question:

  “Besides, what’s it to you?”

  The sparsely populated newsroom is quiet. A couple of the features reporters look kind of lonely.

  “They’re up in Grubby’s office,” Sarah tells me when I reach her desk.

  Upstairs, Sandy McCool is her usual poker-faced self. When she informs me that Grubby’s in a meeting, I tell her I know, that I’m there for the meeting, too.

  “I don’t think so,” she says.

  I like Sandy. She’s a pro. But when I realize that I’m three steps closer to Grubby’s office than she is, and when I further deduce that it’s unlikely Grubby has locked his door, I spring into action, spring being a relative word. At any rate, I’m able to beat Sandy to the publisher’s Holy of Holies and step in unannounced and very definitely uninvited. I’m only slightly winded.

  Baer is there, with Wheelie sitting beside him. Our managing editor looks decidedly uncomfortable. He’ll probably be splattered with some of the blame for the unfortunate blog that no doubt has already elicited a call from Giles Whitehurst or perhaps Lewis Witt herself. Baer looks nervous. This won’t look good on his résumé. It’s much easier to get a job at the Post if you haven’t just been fired.

  James H. Grubbs, who sits facing them, picks up the phone as if to call security. He holds the receiver a foot or so in the air, then sets it down.

  “Willie,” he says. “I should have known you had a hand in this. Do you really want to make that suspension permanent?”

  I assure Grubby that this is not my fondest wish, but that there is more to the story than even the doughty Mr. Baer knows.

  “I don’t really care how much of the story there is,” Grubby says. “The story does not exist. Until Richard Slade’s trial, there is no story. Period.”

  “Maybe you don’t care, then, that Wesley Simpson’s already been found and is, as we speak, headed back to Richmond.”

  “I know that,” Grubby says, confirming what I already pretty much knew: Either our board chairman or Lewis Witt has been lighting his ass up already.

  Might as well take a chance.

  “There are a few things that you probably don’t know.”

  Grubby is silent.

  “When we found out Wesley Simpson was missing, I knew that I wasn’t allowed to put anything on my blog, so I convinced Baer to let me put it on his.”

  Baer looks like he wants to refute this for a half-second, not enough time for either of my bosses to notice. Then Baer, quick learner that he is, closes his mouth.

  “He didn’t know how much of a shitstorm this would kick up,” I add. “I just told him we wanted to see if we could ferret out the truth.”

  “The truth,” Grubby says, as if it’s an obscenity. “The truth is, I’ll give you a one-minute head start before security comes and has you arrested for trespassing in my office.”

  “But, Grubby,” I continue, already off the high board now and hoping there’s water in the pool, “you need to know a couple of other things.”

  I lay out what I know so far: How we have a witness who will swear he talked to Richard Slade on his home phone around five A.M., just before Alicia Simpson was murdered, and proof that the call was made. How an unnamed source says Alicia was writing a manuscript at the time of her death and was fearful that something was going to happen to her. How I am close to laying my hands on that manuscript. (OK, I’m stretching the truth a little there.) I also mention that a man who never harmed a soul in twenty-eight years behind bars didn’t seem like a likely candidate for first-degree murder.

  “Do you realize how stupid we’ll all look if we don’t follow this thing through, and then the Innocence Project comes in and gets his ass off a second time? The paper—hell, the whole damn city will look like assholes.”

  I know I’m drawing to an inside straight here, but I don’t have much to lose.

  Grubby is quiet. I’m standing, kind of wedged in a corner. Wheelie and Baer are afraid to look up.

  “OK,” he says at last. “You have a week. I’ll tell . . . whoever I have to tell that it was your mischief that caused this, and that you’re fired. That shouldn’t be too hard a story to sell. And, if at the end of a week you haven’t produced the goods, you really are fired, plain and simple.”

  “And if I come through?”

  “Then,” Grubby says, “you’ll have to trust me to make the suits happy.”

  Trusting Grubby may not be the smartest move, but what are my choices?

  I walk the few blocks to the hospital. Outweighing all the crap that’s been coming down lately, Andi seems to have turned some kind of corner and appears to be beyond the danger zone. She’s being moved to the step-down unit, and they might release her in a day or so, but she’s going to need to have a lot of rehab.

  “Is she really that close to being released?” I ask a nurse, a tall African-American woman who looks as if she doesn’t have much time for civilians’ dumb questions.

  “If she wasn’t,” she says, only slowing down enough to let me walk with her for a few yards, “they wouldn’t release her.”

  Still, part of me thinks they just need her damn bed, or her health insurance only covers five days.

  I talk with Andi for a few minutes and then she says she’s
tired and drifts off. It goes like that for a couple of hours. When she’s asleep, I brush her blonde hair, crushed and dirty, with my hands and close my eyes. I don’t pray for things these days; it would just be hypocritical and ridiculous. It seems OK, though, to say ‘Thank you,’ in case Anybody’s there.

  I’m dying for a cigarette. When Jeanette and Glenn come back from grabbing a late lunch, I tell them that I’ll be back later, or maybe tomorrow.

  “She’s going to need some rehab,” Jeanette tells me. “They’re not sure she’s ever going to have full use of that left arm.”

  At least, I think, she’s right-handed.

  “What can I do to help?”

  I know as I’m saying it that it sounds like bullshit. People always ask what they can do, and I know that real friends, real family, will offer to do specific things, insist on doing them, really.

  Jeanette, though, instead of waving off my feeble offer, says, “Well, she might need a place to stay for a few weeks.”

  I nod my head.

  “The boys have their room, and now that Glenn’s mother is living with us . . . well, we just have the three bedrooms.”

  I nod again. I’d forgotten that she and Glenn, good souls that they are, had taken in his mother for what probably will be her last days, weeks, months or years.

  And I do have room. No denying that. The space Custalow and I occupy is larger than Jeanette and Glenn’s house.

  The idea of Andi living with me pleases and terrifies me.

  “You know I can’t drive right now.”

  “Well,” Jeanette says, “if it’s going to be too much trouble . . .”

  “No. No. It’s just . . . Let me see what I can do.”

  The look Jeanette gives me pretty much says it all.

  “Well,” she says, “I’m sure we can work something out. Don’t worry.”

  I assure her that I can figure “something” out. She tells me again it’s OK, the way she used to after we split up, when I would have some lame-ass excuse to miss one of Andi’s soccer games or piano recitals.

  I make my way out, saying hasty goodbyes to my ex-wife and her husband.

  There is no one in the world who means more to me than Andi, I think to myself as I’m sucking down my second cigarette waiting in the cold for the city bus. If I wasn’t in the middle of all this mess with Richard Slade, if I had my driver’s license, if we didn’t live all the way up on the sixth floor—I mean, what if she had some kind of seizure or something?

  I am a gold medalist in talking myself out of doing the right thing.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Tuesday

  The short walk over to Laurel Street takes less than fifteen minutes, but it’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. I stop off at the 821 for some coffee on the way and run into Awesome Dude. He’s wearing what looks like Les’s parka, which probably weighs about as much as he does and pretty much swallows him. Awesome hasn’t gained an ounce, I don’t think, since the first time I saw him more than twenty-five years ago. Maybe I can make my next (and first) million writing a diet book. The Homeless Diet: How sleeping outdoors, eating in soup kitchens and drinking at least thirty-two ounces of cheap red wine a day can help you keep your youthful figure, if not your teeth.

  Strangely, not even living mostly indoors at Peggy’s, sleeping in a reasonably soft bed in the English basement and eating two or three times a day has changed that.

  “Dude!” he says.

  “What brings you out today?”

  “I might ast you the same thing,” he grins, showing off his lovely gums, interspersed with the odd tooth.

  Awesome still likes the street, even on a day like this, although he doesn’t turn down a roof over his head, either. But somehow he has enough change to pay for his own cup of coffee, and here he is.

  He waits for me to order mine, black with lots of sugar, and we walk back toward Peggy’s.

  Peggy and Les are at the table. Peggy’s eating cold cereal and Les is having a banana with his coffee. I wonder if Peggy has stopped cooking breakfast. She’s never been a great cook, anyhow. Awesome opens the refrigerator door and takes out some bacon and a couple of eggs. He’s the only one in my mother’s little lunatic asylum who seems interested in a hot meal.

  Peggy doesn’t seem to have had her first toke of the day yet, and she asks me to fill her in on Andi’s condition. I mention that I might have to take her to my place for a while.

  “Oh,” Peggy says, “she can stay here with us.”

  I suddenly realize that being under the care of Abe Custalow and me isn’t the worst thing that could happen to my daughter.

  “And you,” she says. “Are you out of a job for good, or just temporarily?”

  I tell her I’m working on it.

  “You got fired?” Les asks. Every day is a new day with Les, full of surprises after the dementia fairy comes to his bed at night and erases the previous day from his mind, or large parts of it at least. Sometimes, it doesn’t seem so bad being Les.

  “What about that boy?” Peggy asks. “Philomena’s son.”

  “We’re working on that,” I tell her.

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing Philomena again sometime. I liked her.”

  I mention that this might be possible.

  On the way back to the Prestwould, I hear a car coming up behind me. It slows to a crawl. I look over, and there’s R. P. McGonnigal, friend o’ my youth.

  “Hey,” he says. “Where’ve you been?”

  Nowhere much, I tell him. I have missed a couple of poker nights, but I tell him that I’ll definitely be at the one next week, having nothing else to do.

  We catch up. R.P. has a new boyfriend. This one drives a city bus. Images of Ralph Kramden flash before me. R.P., something of gentle soul himself, likes them a little on the rough side.

  “What happened to the butcher?” I ask, and kind of wish I hadn’t. R.P. looks a little sad, and I know that his affairs of the heart are just as serious as mine, maybe more so.

  “Just didn’t work out. We still talk, but . . . it’s just not working. You know.”

  After three marriages, yes, I know.

  R.P. has to be at the office in twenty minutes. We promise to have a beer together, and definitely I’m on for poker next week. I promise to bring Custalow, too. It’s about the only time Abe and I see R.P. and Andy Peroni, the two members of our old wrecking crew still in town and alive. It’s crazy. We live blocks apart and can go months without seeing each other.

  My cellphone interrupts a peaceful if chilly walk back home.

  The voice on the other end is familiarly breathless.

  “Willie? It’s Bitsy.”

  Susan Winston-Jones sounds like she’s in the middle of a hurricane.

  “Oh,” she says. “That was just the vacuum. I’m multitasking.”

  “Is this a social call?”

  I hear her snort.

  “Good one. No, it’s not a social call. I have some very important information.”

  “Hit me.”

  “Well,” she says, “for one thing, Wes is back home. They got him back last night. He’s over at Lewis and Carl’s now, I think. That’s what I heard this morning, anyhow.”

  “You ought to be a reporter, with your contacts.”

  “What’s it pay?”

  “Not enough.”

  Her well-connected source has told her that Wes Simpson had to be transported back to Richmond in restraints—“like a straitjacket or something”—and that if somebody hadn’t pulled some very expensive strings, he’d still be in Arkansas, probably in some nuthouse.

  “Well,” I say, “he’s lost it before.”

  “I don’t know, Willie. Something isn’t right. I mean, Alicia and Wes were always close. She worried about him all the time, what was going to happen to him. But something’s happened, something above and beyond Wes’s usual schizophrenic disasters. I can just feel it.”

  “I wish I could talk to him.”
r />   Bitsy laughs.

  “Fat chance of that.”

  I tell Bitsy I have to be somewhere in half an hour.

  “Where? The unemployment office? Wait, wait. That was cruel. I’m sorry. But there was something else I had to tell you.”

  “I’m still here.”

  “Well, you know the thing about ‘going to the bricks’? I don’t know what I was thinking about, but last night it came to me. It wasn’t my bricks. It was her bricks.”

  I tell Bitsy I need just a tad more clarity.

  She sighs, impatiently I think.

  “The bricks, where we used to leave each other little gifts? Remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Well, what if she meant that whatever she’d hidden, she’d hidden under the bricks at her place? What if she left something out there at her parents’ old place? I mean, it’s possible, right?”

  Yes, I concede that it is possible. Whether it’s probable or not is another question. Maybe Alicia Simpson left something under the bricks in the patio at her parents’ old home. Maybe it was something meaningful. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow morning with a full head of hair.

  “So,” I say, “are you going over there to check it out?”

  “I can’t. Not for a few days.”

  The Winston-Jones family, it turns out, is getting ready to leave for a little skiing vacation. They won’t be back until the weekend.

  There’s another reason, too.

  “I really feel uneasy,” she says, “snooping around over there. Some of this has got me spooked a little.”

  So, I ask what should be done. I know the answer already.

  “Well,” she says, drawing the word out as if she’s just come up with a brand-new solution, something she never thought of before, “you could maybe go over there? And check it out?”

  “I think that’s called trespassing.”

  “Only if you get caught.”

  I note that I am on the cusp of joblessness and losing my driver’s license for an extended period of time. The count is no balls and two strikes, and I need to foul a couple off, work the pitcher a little. I do not at present need to go down swinging.