The Philadelphia Quarry (2 page)

Finally, he tells the driver to pull over.

“You put him in there!” she’s shouting as I slide away from her and out the door in a somewhat frayed district of our fair, careworn city.

“I’m sorry, man,” Green says, trying to stifle a giggle. “But you were the one that wanted a ride.”

The car tears away. I pull my cellphone out of my pocket. Sarah Goodnight answers on the fourth ring.

“I need you to come get me.” I’m walking toward a street sign and give her the name when I can finally read it.

“Did you get an interview?”

I’m fishing for my cigarettes with my free hand while I answer her.

“More like it got me.”

CHAPTER TWO

I
pitch the Camel and get into Sarah’s Hyundai.

“Rough day?” she asks, either smirking or smiling.

“I’ve had worse.”

I tell her about my morning, and about how much I want to kick Marcus Green’s ass.

We go to the hole-in-the-wall across the street from the paper for lunch. No sense in rushing into the day. I forgo a beer, ordering iced tea instead, but then Sarah surprises me by ordering a Miller Lite.

“Are you old enough to drink this early in the day?”

She flips me the bird.

“The way things are going around here, they ought to make beer mandatory,” she says.

Sarah’s too young to get really cynical about this business, and she hasn’t been around newspapers long enough to remember the good times and have a fair basis for comparison. One thing I have learned: You never really appreciate the good stuff when it’s here. You take things for granted, things like raises and decent health insurance and the knowledge that your job probably will be there tomorrow.

But Sarah’s giving it a good try.

“You know what Grubby wants me to do?”

I offer a guess. She gives me a disgusted look and tells me to keep my mind on a higher plane, that Grubby isn’t like that.

Probably not, I concede.

“OK. What, then?”

“He wants to loan me out to SOP.”

I suggest that my original guess wouldn’t have been as disgusting.

SOP is Sense of Place. It’s our version of the special section every newspaper does every year. It’s full of stories about various aspects of “our community,” whatever that is. By a remarkable coincidence, the stories we do often are about some of the same organizations that buy full-page ads in the section. It comes out every August. We do it because it makes money, but I don’t think SOP is ever going to be nominated for a Pulitzer.

Grubby is our publisher, James H. Grubbs. We have a managing editor, but sometimes Grubby can’t help himself and has to drill down through about four layers of management and take the hands-on approach.

“I’ll have to ‘coordinate’ with advertising,” she wails.

There’s not much choice, though. She and I both know that. There are ads on the section fronts, little sticky note ads attached to A1, and ad salespeople sit in on our afternoon meetings. Back in the day, like about six or seven years ago, that would have been about as permissible as pork chops in Mecca.

But we’ve all found out just how low we’ll go when the bottom line is below sea level and health insurance is a privilege instead of a given.

I suggest that she might not ought to refer to our publisher as Grubby.

“Why not?” She takes a swig. “You old farts call him that.”

I’m stung. I am too courtly, or not stupid enough, to tell her that I wasn’t too old for her on one memorable (for me, at least) occasion. Best not to go there. I am trying to be good, and she probably doesn’t even have to try. Hell, she might not remember.

“Well,” I say, “we usually try not to say it where he can hear it.”

Sarah shrugs. She’s twenty-four. She has options. Oh, to be in the don’t-give-a-shit years again.

“So,” she says, “what’re you going to write? I mean, you were there for the trial, right? Back in, like, 1983?”

Eighty-four, I tell her.

“Wow,” she says, “that was the year my older brother was born.”

“Cool,” I reply.

“So, bring me up to speed.”

I give her the CliffsNotes version, from what I remember and what I’ve read in the morgue.

I was younger than Sarah is now when it happened, in my first full year at the paper. I’d worked for them some in college, and they probably hired me because I’d already become a dependable designated driver for some of the older editors, who liked it that I didn’t roll my eyes, outwardly at least, when they started telling the old, old stories.

Night cops was what they put you on, still is, when you’re low man or woman on the politically incorrect totem pole. How I’m back on that beat is a long story nobody cares or has time to hear.

“It happened the week after Labor Day. They made the arrest late on a Wednesday night, and we didn’t hear about it until the next morning.

“I had to rely on the only cop I knew very well at the time, guy named Gillespie . . .”

“Gillespie? The fat guy who’s always trying to tell me dirty jokes from, like, 1957?”

Sarah has done a few turns on the night cops beat, trying to work off her natural overload of curiosity and energy.

“Well,” I say, forced to semi-defend the indefensible, “he wasn’t so bad back then.

“Anyhow, I had to depend on Gillespie to tell me what really happened at the Philadelphia Quarry.”

“Wait,” Sarah says, setting down her beer. “What the hell is the Philadelphia Quarry?”

“If you can rein in your ADD, all will be revealed.”

“I haven’t taken Ritalin since I was ten,” she says.

That morning, I was hung over. I had gotten off work at one, and then we’d gone over to Jack Wade’s house and wound down until we could all fail a Breathalyzer test.

When the phone rang, I’d been asleep maybe four hours. Since it had happened at night, this one still fell to me.

“There was a rape over in Windsor Farms last night,” the guy playing adult supervision that morning told me. “Find out what happened.”

It got my attention. Most of our serious crime happens in less well-tended neighborhoods. About the worst thing that ever happened in Windsor Farms was some guy would earn himself a DUI coming back from the Commonwealth Club.

“It was at some place called the Quarry.”

The place had never been that well-known. One of my neighbors at the Prestwould calls it Richmond’s most exclusive club. I was never an invited guest until recently, but I had swam there, sans invitation or trunks, in my youth.

I got dressed and headed out. Jeanette was leaving for work as I brushed my teeth. We had been married a little over a year, and she was still relatively tolerant of the fact that there was a serious time lag between when I got off work and when I returned to our little Bon Air apartment.

I didn’t have a lot of great sources yet. I went to Gillespie because he was around the station that morning and I had played five-card draw with him.

“It’s still under investigation,” he told me.

I assured him that nothing he said would be quoted; I just wanted a starting point. “Just some background.”

He looked around and then led me outside.

“I gotta go on patrol. Come on and ride with me.”

We left the station, and he started talking.

They had gotten a call sometime after eleven. Somebody was swimming in the Philadelphia Quarry. Just some kids raising hell, but one of the neighbors had complained, and complaints from Windsor Farms were heeded.

When they got there, Gillespie said, the kids ran for it. Most of them were able to get through the break in the fence and disappear into the night. One of them, though, the slowest, or maybe just the one who was farthest out in the water, couldn’t get out in time.

“He said that they were out driving around, and then somebody said he knew where they could go swimming in some white guy’s pond.”

It had been a sticky night, September on the calendar but August on your skin.

They took Richard Slade back to the patrol car, but then the guy with Gillespie had said maybe they ought to take a look inside the fence, check for vandalism.

Gillespie even then was hitting the doughnuts pretty good, and when we arrived at the Quarry that morning and I saw the hole in the fence, I had to smile at the thought of him squeezing his fat ass through.

“So we went inside,” he told me, “checked around, gave it the once-over. Then we went over to this shack there, where people changed clothes, I guess.

“And that’s where we found her.”

Alicia Parker Simpson was sixteen. She was lying on a bench inside the men’s changing area. Her arms were tied over her head. The rope was attached to a hook on the wall behind her. Her panties, the only item of her clothing in the room, were stuffed in her mouth.

They managed to find a robe someone had left there. When they helped her to her feet, she told them to please not tell her father.

They asked her who did it, and she sat there, crying and shaking her head.

Finally, Gillespie said he asked her if it was a black guy. They brought Richard Slade over and made him stand a few feet away, outside the open door to the changing room. She was silent for a few seconds, and then Gillespie said she nodded her head.

The hospital confirmed what the cops there already knew, and they charged Richard Slade with rape.

Gillespie told me who she was. We never ran her name in the paper.

I covered the trial, the next spring.

Slade, represented by a court-appointed attorney, never admitted to anything. They interrogated him for a few hours and got nothing but denials. Basically, it was her word against his.

The other guys from the neighborhood, Richard’s so-called friends, took a powder. They were made to know that if they falsely claimed that Richard Slade was innocent, that they had only gone to the Quarry to sneak in a late-night swim (and maybe thumb their noses at the rich white folks who put fences up everywhere they wanted to go), that they could be charged with perjury. And they also could be charged as accomplices, although the girl said it had been only the one boy who raped her.

Richard told them who the other boys were, and that they would vouch for him. But the other boys knew, and their parents knew better than them, how it was likely to play out. White girl says she was raped. Black boy says he didn’t do it. When his lawyer got them on the stand, they didn’t know nothin’. They weren’t sure whether Richard was with them all the time or not, just knew that, when they made a run for it, he wasn’t there.

When it came time to step up for Richard Slade, everybody stepped back.

Even his own family didn’t seem to believe him. Or they just decided to cut their losses. Whatever; by the end of the trial, it was just Philomena. I still remember her sitting there, clutching that ridiculously large purse that was searched meticulously every day by the guards, clinching and unclinching her hands, hoping to exchange a glance with her only child, waiting for the inevitable.

The court-appointed attorney had advised him to forgo a jury trial. The lawyer, who was about two minutes out of law school, told me later, over a few beers and off the record, that he thought a judge would see the irrefutable fact: No one could prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that Richard Slade raped the girl. Hell, there was so much doubt shading that case that you needed a searchlight.

But he hadn’t counted on the cops finessing the other boys into going deaf, dumb and blind.

If it had happened a couple of years later, DNA probably would have cleared him, the way it finally, belatedly has now.

Judge Cain chose to believe the girl. I suppose he thought that no one would put herself through a trial like that if she hadn’t actually been raped. Or maybe he was hardwired, when it came to black vs. white, to go with white.

She wasn’t particularly convincing, but she never wavered. She had been coached well, no doubt. Her parents and older sister sat there every day, hard-eyed, firm-jawed counterparts to Philomena Slade. Alicia looked back at them often for eye contact and, I suppose, reassurance.

When she broke down a couple of times, she only made the accused’s lawyer look like a bully. She never really gave a good answer as to why she was at the Quarry at that time of night, just something about “wanting to go for a swim.”

Richard Slade got life. When the judge pronounced the verdict, I turned to look at Philomena Slade, but by then, she already had zipped up her sorrow and rage.

Richard himself looked a little gut-shot, the way I would have looked upon receiving a life sentence at the age of seventeen.

They took him away, and not much was heard of Richard Slade, except for his mother’s yearly letters to our editorial pages on the date of his conviction, demanding justice. They ran the first one and threw the others away, sometimes sharing them with the newsroom, for the amusement factor. They’ve done a half-assed mea culpa—or them-a culpa, since we have new Neanderthals doing our deep thinking now—for that “black day for justice” crap four years ago; but being one of our editorial writers apparently means never really having to say you’re sorry.

When Mr. DNA entered the picture, people buried forever in black holes started turning up inconveniently innocent. Of course, it was hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, because every murderer and rapist in the federal system wanted some kind of science-based exoneration, but finally it was Slade’s turn.

Once they finally were able to compare that long-ago semen with Richard Slade’s present-day fluids, it seemed pretty cut-and-dried; but it still took four years and a month to get everyone on board. The commonwealth’s attorney, when all hope of keeping Slade in prison legitimately was lost, threw his predecessor to the lions and welcomed Richard Slade back to the land of the living.

Sarah Goodnight is taking all this in as she finishes her fries.

“Wow,” she says. “This guy must be sorely pissed.”

“Funny thing, it didn’t seem that way.”

Maybe the rage comes later, after the relief wears off. Before it’s over, I’m pretty sure the commonwealth will be giving Slade a nice little welcome-home gift, too. I don’t know if Marcus Green can make any money for his client and himself suing the girl’s family, but he ought to give it his best shot.