The Philadelphia Quarry (17 page)

Still, I have to concede to myself that this might be a new low.

She says she’ll look into it tomorrow morning, and find out how much it’s going to cost me to get out of Stupid Town.

I thank her for her time.

I hang up before she can say “Oh, Willie” again.

Custalow drops me off at the hospital. I offer a half-assed excuse that Jeanette and Glenn seem to accept, probably because they’re focused on Andi.

My daughter looks like holy hell, and she probably feels worse than she looks. Jeanette says she can’t move around at all because of her ribs.

The good news, though, is that she is conscious. The nurses and other medical types come in every ten minutes or so to wake her up and make sure she’s still among the living. Hell, I’m not complaining, although I’m sure Andi would if she were a little more coherent. I’m just glad to live in a town with a large, competent hospital.

While I’m there, they have what the doctors would call an incident. They have her open her eyes and follow the nurse’s finger. Except only the right eye follows. The left one is frozen. It freaks us out, but the nurse tells us that this is a common occurrence, and that it “usually” corrects itself. Still, they have one of the doctors on call in the ICU come look at her, and he says the same thing.

“Can’t you fix it?” I ask him, knowing as I say it how stupid it sounds.

He indulges me, explaining in terms no liberal arts major can understand just what the problem is. We all nod our heads as if we know what the hell he’s talking about.

A couple of hours later, Jeanette and Glenn go down to get some hospital cafeteria food, leaving me alone with Andi. She seems to be awake, so I start talking to her. She listens for a while, and then she says, “Daddy?” She says it as if she’s just realized I was there.

I’m sitting in the big chair beside her bed, and she turns to look at me.

“Daddy,” she says again, “where am I?”

That’s a little disturbing, but I start explaining, as gently as possible, what’s happened. Then I notice something. She’s following me with both eyes. I want to yell, or cry, and she seems puzzled when I tell her what a good girl she is, as if she’s six years old and learning to ride a bike.

I announce our good news to the nurses, as if I myself had somehow made my daughter’s left eye work again. They smile indulgently, but when I ask the doctor if the “eye thing” is likely to happen again, he’s noncommital.

Jeanette and Glenn are as happy as I was over the news that, for now, our daughter doesn’t seem to have any problems that rest and luck can’t fix. Glenn says prayer can’t hurt either, but I’m thinking that he and my ex-wife have a better connection there than I do.

You have to go all the way to the parking lot to smoke. On the way, I pass two patients, pulling their IVs along with them, headed there, too. I’m sure that, if I were in dire enough straits to be treated in a major teaching hospital, I’d be able to quit smoking. Well, almost sure.

I check my phone messages. There’s one from Baer, trying to pump me for information, insinuating that I owe him something, since my promised interview with Philomena Slade kind of fell apart.

It occurs to me, halfway through the second coffin nail, that there may be a way for the tireless Mr. Baer to help me while he thinks I’m helping him.

I go back to Andi’s room and stay for another hour. Jeanette says she’s going to stay longer, which probably means until they toss her out. Glenn’s going home to make sure their sons haven’t burned down the house. I leave with him, telling Jeanette I’ll try to come by later. She smiles, fully aware of how seldom I actually do something when I say I’m going to “try.”

I do tell her, on the way out, about last night.

She puts her hand on top of mine.

“Oh, Willie,” she says.

I could have called Custalow back for a ride, but the paper’s only a few blocks from the hospital. As I walk in the front door, I can look down Franklin and see where Richmond’s finest found fault with my driving last night.

Baer’s in the office. He doesn’t seem to have much of a life outside the newspaper. I don’t think he and Sarah Goodnight are “seeing” each other anymore. I have to admit that, self-serving backstabber that he is, he does work.

I ask Baer what he’s up to, and he says “Richard Slade.”

I note that the whole sorry Slade-Simpson story appears to have been put to sleep by powers above us.

“I dunno,” Baer says, and frowns. “Something doesn’t seem right.”

Really.

“Like what?”

He scratches his head.

“Like the way Alicia Simpson’s sister wants us to stop writing about it. Like how Richard Slade spent twenty-eight years in prison for something he didn’t do and never got written up for one single violent act—not even a fistfight—and then he murders Alicia the first week he’s out.”

“Maybe he’d been saving it up, for twenty-eight years.”

Baer looks at me.

“No, it doesn’t make sense.”

Baer’s getting warm. It’s probably time to give him a little information. If nothing else, it’ll be a small payback for the fact that I couldn’t get Philomena to talk to him.

So, I tell him about the five
A.M
. call.

“And it was recorded there, on the incoming calls ID list, at his mother’s house?”

I nod.

“Damn. Why didn’t you tell me before?”

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 their 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.”