The Philadelphia Quarry (23 page)

Giles Whitehurst.

I guess I’ve pissed the chairman off enough that he wants to eliminate the middleman and fire me personally.

It’s a call I’d rather not make for a while, say until hell freezes over, but it’s going to be hard to eat or sleep until I do the deed.

“Whitehurst residence,” an unctuous voice answers.

When I tell the butler or whoever the fuck answers Giles Whitehurst’s phone who it is, he says, “Just a moment, please,” and it seems almost like I can hear him chuckle as he goes to deliver the news to his master.

A few seconds later, Whitehurst is there, probably holding his bourbon glass in his free hand.

“Yes?”

I explain that I’m returning his call.

“Ah, yes,” he says, as if he’s totally forgotten, in the chaos of his busy day, that he was supposed to ream out and then fire a reporter. “Mr. Black. Yes. I, um, wanted to talk to you about this whole Alicia Simpson business.”

I’m silent.

“The thing is, the family has been through quite a lot lately, and I would really appreciate it, as a personal favor, if you would drop the matter. The police seem to have things well in hand without your help.”

I should just shut up, but I gotta be me.

“I’m not so sure they have the right man in jail.”

“So I’ve heard,” Giles Whitehurst says, with perhaps a bit more edge, a little steel poking up through the silk. “But let’s just wait until after the trial. Let justice run its course.”

“I’m not so sure justice is running its course.”

I hear a sigh and the tinkle of ice cubes.

“Mr. Black, I’m not sure you understand what I’m saying. This isn’t exactly a request.”

Well, why didn’t you say so? Here I thought it was just a multi-millionaire who’s chairman of the board of the company that owns me asking me for a pretty-please favor.

“I understand.”

“And although I haven’t talked with Lewis in a couple of days, I’m sure she would be very grateful if you were to back off a bit.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No, Mr. Black, you don’t, other than unemployment.”

When I don’t speak, he says, “Are we in agreement?”

I tell him we are, and he hangs up.

I’m halfway to the living room when it hits me. Giles Whitehurst hasn’t talked with Lewis since I talked to her. Which means she hasn’t called him to complain about my latest round of meddling.

Which means she hasn’t seen fit to tell him about our meeting tomorrow night.

Which means, hell or high water, I’m going. There are some things, it seems, that Lewis Witt doesn’t want the chairman to know about. Just me.

I’m watching an
Everyone Loves Raymond
rerun and trying not to think of bourbon when I get the call from Jeanette.

“They’re releasing her first thing in the morning,” my first wife says. “You should be here by nine.”

Andi. Shit. I’d forgotten all about my daughter. I’m too tired and ashamed to come up with some lame-ass excuse as to why I can’t, finally, do something helpful for Andi.

“I’ll be there,” I tell her. “Glad to do it.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Friday

T
he Witts don’t seem to mind wasting electricity. It looks like every light in the place is on.

The old Tudor glowers down at me, daring me to approach it. It’s bone-deep cold, one of those nights that make you count the hours until the Red Sox head for spring training. One year about this time, between marriages, I got up on a day like this and started driving south until I smelled spring. I think I was outside of Lakeland, Florida, before that happened. Which made it all the colder when I turned around and came back.

I look at my watch: 6:55. I don’t want to appear overeager, but I’m freezing my ass off. Besides, she had to hear the Honda straining its way up the drive.

Custalow wanted to chauffeur me here, but I told him that wasn’t the deal. I was to come alone, even if it meant defying the law by driving myself. It felt kind of funny to be behind the wheel again.

Before I left, he put his big bear paw on my shoulder and told me to be careful, and to call him if anything went wrong. I told him not to worry. What was a West End matron going to do to me?

Then I kissed Andi on the cheek and told her I’d see her soon. She doesn’t know much about what her idiot father is doing, which is the way I want it.

Misgivings? I have a few. But I didn’t come unarmed. I have my tape recorder.

I push the buzzer. A few seconds later, Lewis Witt opens the door. I think at first I’ve come at the wrong time, because she seems to be dressed for a party. Pearls, little black dress, heels. The works.

“Come in, Mr. Black,” she says. “I’ve been expecting you.”

Custalow and I brought Andi home this morning. We were at the hospital by eight thirty, just in case. Hospitals being hospitals, we finally made our escape sometime after eleven, after they had schooled me on what signs might indicate that my daughter’s concussion was worse than they thought. I apologized to Abe for costing him half a day’s work. He told me to shut up.

Andi had a cast on her left arm and looked like somebody had used her for a punching bag. I probably didn’t look much better. One of the smart-ass nurses asked me who was going to be taking care of whom.

When they finally released her, she refused to let them roll her out to the car in a wheelchair. As we made our way slowly down the endless corridors between us and freedom, Andi looked at me and laughed.

“We look like the walking wounded,” she said.

“At least we’re walking.”

She has always gone a mile a minute. Jeanette thought for a while she had ADHD, but she’s just enthusiastic. And so, it was a bit of a shock to see how slowly she was moving. Three times, I had to stop when I realized I was leaving her behind in my eagerness to get out of that damn hospital.

Custalow had gone ahead to get the car, probably as glad as me to be back in well-world. It occurred to me that we could have gotten there maybe five times quicker if we’d accepted the wheelchair ride, but I appreciate Andi’s independence, her refusal to lie down. If I’d been in her place, in a hospital for six days, I’d have done it just like she did.

Back at the Prestwould, Grace Montross and Louisa Barron were in the lobby and made a big fuss over Andi. Through the grapevine, they’d heard about her accident. She endured the attention, even smiling slightly. They assured me that they would be checking in on her. The way the Prestwould works, I was pretty certain that Abe and I wouldn’t have to worry about fixing dinner for the next few nights.

I had changed the sheets so Andi could have the master bedroom. The trundle bed in the study would be my resting place until she was OK to be on her own. She objected, said she didn’t want to be a bother. I told her she was my princess, and the princess should always get the best bed.

“You used to call me that,” she said. “When I was little.”

We talked some, about nothing much. The guard Andi usually has up when I’m trying to act like an actual father was down a bit. Nothing like getting half-killed in a wreck to make you vulnerable.

She said she was a little tired, so I helped her into bed. I leaned over to tuck her in and kissed her on her forehead. Over the years, we’ve hugged when meeting or departing from each other’s company, and I’ve slipped a stray kiss or two onto her cheeks, but shows of affection aren’t Andi’s thing—at least where her delinquent dad is concerned.

Today, though, she looked at me and said, “Thank you, Daddy.”

It made sleeping on the trundle bed more than worth it.

After Andi drifted off, I called Sarah Goodnight. I gave her a progress report.

“You’re going over there tonight? No shit?”

I assured her that I had indeed arranged a meeting with Lewis Witt.

“Man,” Sarah said, “you must really have her spooked. She hates your ass.”

I told Sarah that she needed to watch her language. She told me she’s been spending too much time around journalists. Then she asked me when we might be able to write something about this for the paper.

“Maybe never,” I told her, relating the high points of my conversation with the chairman of the board.

“But if it’s good enough, we’ll write it anyway, right?”

I told her, yeah, but we have to get the paper to run it, and it has to be good enough to make it worth getting fired over.

“No prob,” Sarah said. “I can always get another job.”

“I’m not thinking about you.” Well, maybe a little.

“Oh, you’ll be fine.”

The confidence of youth is amazing. I used to have that. The newborn lamb does not fear the lion, and all that shit.

“Can I come with you?” Sarah asked.

I tell her that’s out of the question. Lewis made it clear that she would only talk to me, alone.

“Lucky you.”

“I hope so.”

I spent much of the day looking after Andi, who napped on and off and gobbled down the BLT I made her for lunch. I hovered so much that she finally asked me, nicely, if she could just be left alone for a little bit. She doesn’t need that much assistance, but having only one working arm does present problems.

When she had to go to the bathroom and I offered to help, she told me that she would have to be a lot worse off than she was now for that to be an option.

Late in the afternoon, I got a call from Susan Winston-Jones. Before I could even tell Bitsy that her hunch about the bricks was right, she started in on me.

“She knows,” is how she began the conversation. “How the hell does she know?”

It didn’t take me long to deduce that “she” was Lewis Witt, and what she knew was that Bitsy had been talking to me.

I apologized, explaining how I had inadvertently mentioned that I knew about Alicia’s manuscript because a friend had told me about it.

“And she figured right away that the friend was you.”

“You didn’t tell her it was me? Then how did she figure it out?”

I wanted to say that maybe Bitsy was the only one of Alicia’s friends who might have felt compelled to tell a stranger about it. Or maybe she was Alicia’s only friend.

“Lucky guess,” I said.

“Well, she knows. She called me every name she could think of. She scared me.”

“Scared you? How?”

“She said that she wouldn’t forget. Forgive or forget.”

“OK, so you have to live with somebody giving you the cold shoulder. You’ll survive.”

“You don’t understand. You don’t know Lewis.”

I was quiet. She continued.

“Let me tell you a story.”

When Lewis was a teenager, Bitsy told me, she was madly in love—or thought she was—with a young man, a member of her group with a rather impressive Roman numeral after his name.

One day, the boy told her it was over. He didn’t want to go steady anymore.

“I knew his family, they lived four houses down from us. My older sister, Elizabeth, was just a year behind Lewis at St. Catherine’s, and she hung out with the boy’s sister. One day, Liz let me tag along with her when she went over there. It was an early summer morning, and we had our bathing suits. We were going down to the Quarry.

“But when we got there, Bobby, that was the boy’s name, and his sister and his mother were all standing there at the edge of the driveway. It was early. I remember the dew was still heavy.

“What they were looking down at, lying half-hidden inside the boxwood hedge, cold and dead, was Dabney.”

Dabney was Bobby’s Labrador retriever. He’d had her since he was in second grade. The dog had gone missing the day before. They’d walked all around the neighborhood, but couldn’t find her anywhere. Bobby’s father hadn’t noticed her body when he went to work that morning, and so it was left to the kids to find her. Her collar was missing, but it was obvious that it was Dabney. When the vet took her away and did a doggie autopsy, he determined she had been poisoned.

“I was ten or eleven. Liz pulled me away, and we went back home. The whole thing with Dabney was a real shock. Nothing like that ever happened in Windsor Farms. There was talk of neighborhood watches or hiring private security. But then it died down.

“A month or so later, though, we were at the Simpsons’ for a party. I wandered away and started exploring. It felt kind of wicked, you know, to be in somebody else’s house like that, just snooping.”

Somehow, she said, she wound up in Lewis’s room.

“I was just going around, opening drawers and stuff. I could hear the adults and the kids off in the distance, mostly out by the pool. Anybody could have walked by.”

She said there was a desk, where Lewis probably did her homework.

“I opened the drawer underneath the desktop, and there, with all the pens and pencils and such, was a collar. A dog collar. And you know whose name was on it?”

Didn’t take a genius to figure that one out.

“Dabney.”

“Yeah. You know, I never told anybody about it, not until I went to college. And nobody in Windsor Farms. To this day. It’s about the only secret I’ve ever kept, I guess.

“But I’ve always been afraid of Lewis, since then.”

Well, I told Bitsy, that was a long time ago.

Bitsy’s laugh is as sharp and dry as a good martini.

“People,” she said, “don’t change.”

So here I stand. Lewis Witt leads me into what seems to be an otherwise empty house.

“I understand,” she says when we’re seated in the living room, which is about the size of my whole apartment, “that you have some information.”

I nod. Then, I spell out what I’ve learned, what Alicia wrote, giving her the short version.

She sits quietly as I tell her what I think happened twenty-eight years ago.

She seems less than shocked.

“I thought there might have been something,” she says. “And I just didn’t want to know. The sad truth is, both my brother and sister have had issues.”

Then I tell her what I think might have happened on January 22nd.

“That’s quite a story, Mr. Black,” she says when I finish my spiel. “Complete fiction, because my brother has trouble planning what he’s going to wear, let alone a murder, but quite a story nonetheless. Do you think anyone will believe it?”