The Philadelphia Quarry (3 page)

We’re back in the newsroom by two thirty. It’s my day off, but news is news. If I hadn’t dragged my ass to court this morning, I know Mark Baer would have been there, poaching my story.

Jackson tells me that Mal Wheelwright wants to see me. It seems wrong, being forced to have a sit-down with our managing editor on a day when I’m not even supposed to be here, but no good deed goes unpunished.

I prefer to stand in Wheelie’s office. Makes the meetings go faster.

“So, what’re you going to write?”

He ought to know that already, but I explain it to him.

He clears his throat.

“Not too much about our, ah, editorial stance in the past? We don’t want to come across looking like the bad guys here.”

“Well,” I say, yearning to win the lottery so I can tell Wheelie to go fuck himself, “we aren’t exactly the good guys.”

“That was editorial.”

Like the readers give a shit. Anybody who’s worked at a paper whose editorial writers have their heads up their asses knows how stupid you look when you say, “It’s not me; it’s them. Never mind that it comes in the same plastic wrapper. We’re news, not editorial.”

That usually flies like a concrete block. Like it did with Philomena Slade.

I ease his fears about my further sullying the reputation of this fine rag. It really isn’t fair to lay it all on Wheelie, anyhow. He’s just following orders. I’d have to go a couple of floors up, to the publisher’s office, to find the puppet master who’s pulling Wheelie’s strings. I can feel the pale fingers of James H. Grubbs all over this one.

So I write the story of Richard Slade, such as I know it.

I tell Sally Velez she’s got thirty minutes to read it before I check out. It’s almost happy hour, and I could use a couple of pints of happy.

She obliges me, because she knows it’s easier to fix any problems the story might have with me sitting beside her, clean and sober. Reaching me later at Penny Lane, as I get happier and happier, can be difficult. Or so I’m told.

“Not bad,” she says, after making a couple of changes that I grudgingly admit make it better.

She asks me what happened when the Slades got home, and I have to tell her about my aborted ride. She seems to think it’s funny.

She turns to face me.

“What next? Are you going to try to see her?”

“See who?”

She sighs. Sally and I have known each other too long for this kind of bullshit.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m going to give it a shot anyhow. I’ll go out there tomorrow, I guess. She’ll probably slam the door in my face. I’m getting used to rejection.”

CHAPTER THREE

Tuesday

W
ith the exception of three reportedly eventful and unhappy married years, Alicia Parker Simpson lives where she’s always lived. When she came back, she didn’t even take her husband’s name with her.

The geezers at the paper, like Sally and Jackson and Ray Long and me, knew her back when. She worked as an intern one summer, at the publisher’s “request.” The old publisher, the one before Grubby, lived in the same Windsor Farms neighborhood as the Simpsons. He and Harper Simpson were bourbon buddies.

She wasn’t bad. A little brittle, maybe. I doubt if I’d have taken her to a dirt nap the way I did Sarah when she was a cub reporter, but Alicia was a good writer, and she did several freelance features for us after she dropped out of Sweet Briar, before she got tired of journalism. The sense I had: Alicia Parker Simpson got tired very easily. After what she’d been through, the general consensus was that she was entitled to a little fatigue of the soul.

We all knew who she was, of course. After the rape, the paper never mentioned her name, but Richmond isn’t that big a town. Everyone handled her with white linen gloves, and maybe that just made her more tired.

Over the years, I’ve seen her from time to time.

“There she is,” someone will whisper, and there she will be. We’ve even spoken a couple of times. She seems to know me, but maybe that’s just good manners.

I ring the bell. Standing here, with the aspirin kicking in finally, in the sunshine and out of the wind, I’m feeling halfway human.

I expect a maid to answer the door. Instead, a West End caricature greets me, although “greet” might not be quite the word I’m looking for.

“Yes?” she says. “May I help you?”

The woman in front of me bears a slight resemblance to Alicia Simpson. I tell her who I am and what I am.

She gives me a firm handshake and identifies herself as Lewis Witt.

I’ve mercifully never done a stint as society columnist, but Lewis Geneva Simpson Witt I know. Her picture shows up somewhere in our paper every week or so. She must be on every do-good board in the city. And she’s Alicia Simpson’s older sister.

She invites me inside, then stops me a few steps beyond the door.

“Alicia isn’t seeing anyone right now,” she explains, planting her athletic body in front of me. I’m guessing she’s about fifty, but she looks fine. She looks well-maintained. “I’m sure you can understand. It’s been quite a strain on her, with the news media and all. They aren’t all as polite as you.”

Well, I did put my cigarette out before I knocked and squashed it flat on the stone walkway.

I tell her that I know Alicia from when we worked together at the paper.

Lewis Witt just nods and smiles slightly. I know the smile. It says No Sale.

“Well, do you think Alicia might be willing to talk about it all at a later date?”

“I don’t know. You might check back again. But I’m sure you understand this is a very difficult time.”

There isn’t much left to do, short of getting arrested for trespassing. I give her my card, which she is polite enough not to throw away in front of me, and leave.

As I’m walking back down the slate walkway toward my car, something makes me turn and look back.

In one of the four upstairs windows I can see, Alicia Simpson is standing, the curtains half open. When she realizes I see her, she draws them back.

It can’t be a lot of fun. As soon as the DNA evidence told the world that the great Commonwealth of Virginia had stolen twenty-eight years of some innocent black man’s life after he was falsely convicted of raping a pampered Windsor Farms teenager, the heat was on.

We’ve been trying to get an interview ever since, but she has always refused. To Alicia’s credit, she did make a statement, in which she said that she was horrified to discover that it was possible an innocent man had been imprisoned on her testimony, but that she was sure, at the time, that she had been right.

“Apparently,” her statement concluded, “I was wrong.”

In the past four years, she’s never been unpleasant to the occasional reporter who manages to waylay her when she makes what seem to be more and more infrequent forays out of her home. But she’s usually with someone else, and that someone else usually whisks her away before she can be bothered.

After Richard Slade got the long-awaited writ of actual innocence, she issued another statement, apologizing for her long-ago mistake and wishing the alleged rapist well. For right now, it seems that’s all the fourth estate is going to get out of Alicia Parker Simpson.

I have time to run back to my apartment and grab a quick bite before my real workday begins. Kate is still letting me rent from her, which I appreciate. I have come to think of the Prestwould as home. Most of the other residents are older than me, and most of them surely have bigger stock portfolios, but we get along. And in how many places can a fifty-something newspaper reporter be referred to on a regular basis as “young man”?

Custalow is taking his lunch break. He’s sitting there at the table, looking out at the park six floors below, munching on one of the two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches he’s made for himself.

“The hawk’s back,” he says. I walk closer to the window and see the red-tailed hawk that keeps the pigeon and squirrel population manageable. This time of year, you can spot him a mile away, a fat silhouette adorning the top of an oak tree like an ornament left over from Christmas.

I observe that the radiators are making more noise than usual. Custalow glares at me like I’ve questioned his janitorial competence.

“We’re working on it,” he says and tucks into the other sandwich.

It works out pretty well. Abe Custalow has a roof over his head and something resembling a salary. I have an old friend to help me make the rent payment to my ex-wife.

“Oh,” he says, “Clara Westbrook was looking for you.”

Clara probably needs a light bulb replaced. Or just some company. The grande dame of the Prestwould is a social butterfly, and her friends keep leaving for “independent living” or the Great Beyond.

“So Slade is finally free?”

“Seems like it.”

Abe finishes the second sandwich and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Good.”

Abe Custalow has spent some time as a guest of the state, and it has occurred to me that he might have crossed paths with Richard Slade. I’ve never asked him. Prison isn’t something he really likes to talk about. I doubt he’ll want it mentioned in his obituary.

Still, since he brought it up . . .

“Did you know him?”

He looks at me.

“Yeah, a little.”

And then he gets up, takes his paper plate into the kitchen, and is out the back door leading from the kitchen to the service hallway before I can ask him anything else.

The place still looks good, despite my and Custalow’s best efforts to turn it into a bachelor pigsty. Since Kate owns it, she has a key. She is prone to drop by from time to time, just to make sure I’m not smoking indoors or piling used Miller High Life cans in the living room. When we were married, she was as big a slob as me, but now that she’s a landlady, she takes her job seriously.

Still, the rent’s reasonable, especially with Custalow’s modest contribution. If I had to pay what my neighbors do, or bear the full brunt of that four-figure monthly condo fee, I’d be gone by sundown.

I have time to take a twenty-minute power nap and then check in with Clara before work.

When I get there and knock, she yells down the hallway for me to come on in. Clara doesn’t believe in locking her door, even after the little theft ring that Custalow broke up last year, resulting in his co-worker going to jail and him becoming our Head Janitor in Charge.

Clara’s got some health issues, but she’s not complaining. She drags that oxygen bottle behind her in its little wagon like a pet and offers to get me something to eat or drink. I tell her I know where the bourbon is, but that my boss likes it if he doesn’t smell liquor on my breath, at least not before sundown.

“Nobody has any fun anymore,” she says.

She’s right about that. Gone are the days of the two-bourbon lunch and the sleepy afternoons. And it’s hard to disappear for long when the editors have your cellphone number.

I fix her a very light Scotch and, what the hell, make one for myself, too.

Clara says she invited me up to ask if I want the leftover booze from her New Year’s Eve party, which I and seemingly half of Richmond attended. Clara planted herself at the end of the big foyer leading into the living room and greeted everyone with a kiss. I stopped by for a while, and she whispered to me when I left, “If I’ve got to go, I want to go wearing a party dress.”

I thank her for the offer and tell her I’ve got a fairly ample supply of both the brown and white liquors.

“Well,” she says, with the twinkle in her eye that’ll be the last thing she loses, “you go through it pretty fast.”

We chat for a couple of minutes, then she says what probably was on her mind from the start.

“Wasn’t that awful about Alicia Parker Simpson?”

I observe that it was pretty awful about Richard Slade, too. I’d take feeling guilty over twenty-eight years in prison any day.

She waves her hand as if swatting away a tiresome fly.

“Oh, you know what I mean. The whole thing.”

I mention knowing the woman briefly and then tell Clara about my abbreviated ride with the Slade family.

“I can’t blame her,” she says. “She was his mother. I read about how hard she fought, all those years. That’s what a mother does.”

She takes a sip, trying to make the one drink she knows should be her limit last as long as possible.

“I knew her parents.”

Clara probably could say that about just about anyone in the West End, where “Who was your family?” is not considered to be a rude or inconsequential question.

I glance at my watch. Since I worked gratis yesterday, I think the paper can afford to spot me a few minutes today.

“Tell me,” I say, taking a seat on the ottoman facing her.

Harper Simpson, long since taken from us by a heart attack suffered in the bathroom at the Commonwealth Club, was a well-compensated corporate lawyer. His family had made its money, as had so many in Richmond, in tobacco, and the family still seems to be living off that long-ago bounty.

“At least,” Clara says, “I don’t hear about Alicia having to work, and Wesley and Lewis certainly don’t, although Lewis at least married pretty well.”

I tell her I met Lewis Simpson Witt earlier today, and that she seemed to be quite the brick.

“Oh, she’s a tough cookie,” Clara agrees.

Clara, well into her eighties, had been a contemporary of Harper and Simone Simpson.

“They were very glamorous,” she said, taking another small sip. “And their kids were, too.”

It isn’t that hard to imagine Lewis as the young, raven-haired beauty Clara describes, even if she has, like the rest of us, collected a few wrinkles and pounds along the way.

She was a debutante and went to what was then Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. She was the kind of girl who always made her parents proud.

“She would have been a beauty queen,” Clara says, “but Harper thought beauty pageants were trashy. I remember they had a terrible fight about it one year. But she always gave way to Harper. I tried to convince him one time that she wouldn’t automatically turn into a red-light girl if she got picked as Miss Richmond.”

Clara was runner-up for Miss Virginia back in the day, although you’d never find that out from her. So I could imagine her intervening on Lewis’s behalf, to no avail.