The Philadelphia Quarry (4 page)

“Harper was a good man, but he was stubborn,” she says, and takes another sip.

“But it seemed like they got, you know, diminishing returns with those kids. The other two started out like Lewis, the apple of everybody’s eye. Wes and Alicia were adorable. Everybody said so, not just me.”

I ask her if she thought it was the rape that changed her.

Clara thinks about it a minute. I try not to hear her breathing with the help of her little friend.

“No,” she says. “I think there was something odd about her before that. She had a way of zoning out. You’d be talking to her, and then you’d see that she wasn’t really there.

“And, by then, they were already having trouble with Wesley.”

Coming from the West End, where girls wind up with androgynous, family-heirloom names as often as not, Wesley could have been the third sister.

“Oh, no,” Clara says, laughing. “Wesley was all boy. He was the apple of Harper and Simone’s eyes. Before he . . . well, before he lost his mind, I suppose you’d say.”

He was fifteen, a straight-A student and already a starter on the lacrosse team as a freshman, popular and handsome.

“And then, he came home from school one day and told them he couldn’t go back. Just like that.”

Clara snaps her fingers.

“He went to a ‘special’ school somewhere up in the valley, and then he came back and lived with them, but from then on, he was in and out of different kinds of homes. I saw him at Simone’s funeral, last year, and I meant to speak to him, if he even still knows me. But then he disappeared. I suppose Lewis and her husband look after him now, if anybody does.”

Clara shakes her head. I need to go, just to keep her from talking. It’s pretty obvious that the oxygen tank is having trouble keeping up.

“I always felt bad about it all, felt bad that I couldn’t help Wesley in some way. You know, I was his godmother.”

I have one hand on the ottoman to push myself up when she says it. I stop.

“Oh, I know,” Clara says, laughing and wheezing a little. “I buried my lede.”

Clara never forgets anything, including old newspaper jargon. I told her about burying ledes one time when she’d spun some fifteen-minute yarn about a run-down home she was trying to help save near the VCU campus before finally mentioning that she and her late husband had reared three kids there.

“I’ve left him something in my will. Maybe it’ll keep him independent for a few more years.”

But after that day when he told them he couldn’t go back to school, Clara rarely ever saw him.

“I think there was some sense of shame. They diagnosed it as schizophrenia, but neither Harper nor Simone would talk about it, even with me. They’d just change the subject, and after a while, you just stopped asking. And I never tried as hard as I might have to stay in touch with him, later.”

The general feeling, Clara said, was that “losing” his beloved son, and then the rape of his youngest daughter three years later, contributed greatly to Harper Simpson’s fatal heart attack when he wasn’t yet sixty.

“That’s all hooey, of course. What caused Harper Simpson’s heart to quit was too much Smithfield ham and too many Marlboros.”

I make sure she’s OK and take my leave.

“Come back anytime,” she says, walking me slowly to the door, which only wears her out and delays my parting a couple of minutes.

Feldman, a.k.a. Mr. McGrumpy, the Prestwould’s resident busybody (although he has plenty of competition), is in the lobby when I come down.

“Ah,” he says, “and how is Clara today?”

He loves to do that shit. He saw the elevator go up to twelve and then come down, depositing me in the lobby. The only other unit on twelve is unoccupied.

I tell him she’s fine and congratulate him on his skills as a snoop. I’d like to throttle him sometimes, but he’s almost as old as Clara, and I think they put you in jail for dough-popping people that age, even if they do deserve it.

“And how is our resident felon?”

He must spend half his waking hours down here in the lobby, watching and waiting for chances to piss people off.

He’s really pushing it. If McGrumpy had his way, Custalow would be back out on the street. Other than one rather unfortunate and semi-deserved killing, Abe Custalow is as gentle as a lamb; but I think McGrumpy’s afraid our maintenance man and my co-tenant might pinch his head off and shit down his neck, and I like the idea of the old bastard being a little jumpy.

“Abe was looking for you,” I tell him as I leave.

CHAPTER FOUR

Saturday

T
he forecast is for snow. Sitting in the den and looking out, I think the TV moron with the bad hair might have gotten it right. Even a blind hog finds an acorn now and then.

One of the disadvantages of living ten blocks from the paper is that you can’t exactly claim the roads are too icy. I tried it once, told Jackson I might fall on those slick brick sidewalks and hurt myself. He reminded me that the bus stops right in front of my building.

When the phone rings, I let the answering machine pick it up. That’s only fair. I wouldn’t even be up now if I could have gone back to sleep after I got my acid reflux wakeup call at five.

Then I hear Sally Velez’s voice, and it doesn’t sound like a casual call. What call is casual at seven thirty on a Saturday morning?

“Alicia Simpson has been shot. They don’t think she’s going to make it.”

I pick up and ask her where.

“Somewhere on West Cary. She’s at MCV.”

“When?”

“It must’ve just happened. Maybe an hour or two ago. Some friend of Ray Long’s, an ER nurse, called him and he called me. I don’t know much else.”

“We’re sure it’s her?”

“Pretty sure. Sure enough that I’m calling you.”

Point taken. Unlike some editors, Sally doesn’t get her kicks by playing newspaper. When she pulls the alarm, there’s probably a fire.

I put down my coffee and head for the bedroom. There on the floor, where I left them, are my pants and shirt. I can always take a shower later and get presentable before I start my real workday, the part I get paid for.

I see Custalow in the lobby, talking to Marcia the manager. I tell him what’s going on.

He shakes his head.

“You didn’t get in until one thirty.”

I tell him I’ll get the hours back sometime.

“After you’re dead,” he says, and turns back to Marcia, to whom he is trying to explain the latest plumbing issue.

I light a Camel while I’m on the front steps. I’m not dressed for bad weather, and I debate for a few seconds whether I should go back up. But then I’d have to waste a cigarette. Screw it.

The air is cold and still, and it seems like I can already feel the snow. But when I get to the car, there’s no evidence of ice on my windshield, just an empty Bud on the hood, which some young scholar must have mistaken for a recycling bin sometime after I got in. I think briefly of the Black family’s current contribution to higher education. I need to give Andi a call.

The VCU hospital is a long walk or a short drive from the Prestwould. Everyone beyond a certain age still calls it MCV, as in Medical College of Virginia.

With HIPAA and all, it’s very difficult to get information out of hospitals these days, or at least it is supposed to be. I recognize one of the receptionists, though. As luck would have it, she’s Goat Johnson’s niece. I’ve known her since she was a baby.

“Willie,” she says, brightening when she sees me. “You look like you’ve been run over by a bus. Sure you don’t need the emergency room entrance?”

I tell her what’s happened. She looks around and then gives me what I need.

Alicia Parker Simpson is in intensive care. I can’t get in there without a pass, and even Goat Johnson’s niece can’t do that for me.

“You can go up to the floor, though,” she says, “and maybe go to the family waiting room.”

I thank her and ask her when Goat’s going to be back in town.

“Ah,” she says, “he’s too big for Oregon Hill now. I think he’s high-hatting us.”

“Hard to believe a guy named Goat could high-hat anybody, even if he is a college president.”

She laughs and sends me on my way.

It isn’t that easy finding the family room. I’ve never been in a big hospital yet that wasn’t designed along the same lines as those corn mazes every farmer these days seems to create for the city folk to get lost in. By the time I reach my destination, I have met the same dazed-looking older couple twice. I want to help them, but I can barely help myself.

The family room is the kind of place you never want to be unless you must. Everybody in there has a loved one, or at least a relative, hanging by a thread. The fear and despair are as thick as a river-bottom fog. Teaching hospitals are where they send you when nothing less can possibly save you; and ICUs in teaching hospitals are where skill has to turn the wheel over to luck and prayer, and the prayers don’t get answered on anything like a regular basis.

When I walk in, the first person I see is Carl Witt. I recognize Lewis Witt’s husband from his photographs, which regularly adorn the paper’s pages, either for his work as an attorney or with Lewis on his arm at some fundraiser.

He’s sitting forward, his elbows resting on his thighs and his hands clasped together. He seems to be dozing, but then he looks up at me, and I see that he’s wide awake.

“Yes?” he says. He can see that I’m not a doctor. The way I’m dressed, he might think I’m one of the neighborhood’s homeless who wander in occasionally, looking for free medical attention or just warmth.

“I heard about Alicia,” I say. “I used to work with her.” Well, that’s not technically a lie.

“Where?”

At the paper, I tell him.

The nickel drops.

“Ah,” he says. “You guys don’t waste much time, do you?”

I say nothing. Somebody with a family member headed for the light doesn’t really care to hear about the public’s right to know. Anyhow, this story probably is more about the public’s thirst for information it doesn’t really need, a.k.a. entertainment. And we are entertainment’s eager little handmaidens.

He sighs.

“Well,” he says, “everybody’s got a job to do.”

Witt, being a corporate lawyer, understands how it feels to be a notch or two below whale shit in the public’s pecking order. But at least corporate lawyers get paid pretty well. I once asked Kate why she didn’t go for the money instead of trying to change the world through our criminal justice system.

She asked me why I turned down that PR job they offered me at Philip Morris, since I was pretty much single-handedly propping up the tobacco industry anyhow.

“You could get some of your cigarette money back,” she said.

I told her that even scum-sucking, Commie journalists like me had their standards.

Carl Witt is willing, once we’ve gotten past our opening parry, to tell as much as he knows about “the incident.”

“Alicia gets up every morning and goes to work out. God knows why. She weighs about ninety damn pounds. But she gets to that gym on West Main by five thirty, and she’s out by seven. She says it’s pretty empty that time of day.”

They found her car, with the engine running, rammed into a parking meter just beyond the stoplight where West Cary crosses Meadow. A city cop came by and saw that the driver was slumped over the steering wheel. He thought he might have a case of severely drunk driving on his hands, but then he saw that the side window was shot out. And then he saw all the blood.

“They told Lewis that the rescue squad was there in less than ten minutes, but I don’t know if there was much they could do. Lewis is back there now. They’re not supposed to let anybody in, but you know Lewis. Or I guess you don’t.”

“We’ve met.”

We sit there quietly for maybe ten minutes, and then Lewis Witt comes out. She hasn’t had time to do what you do when you’re fifty and want to get your game face on before you meet the world. Her mouth is a grim, tight line.

“She’s gone.”

Her husband gets up and embraces her. There are others in the room, strangers with their own grief. She looks over her husband’s shoulder and sees me.

“Who are you?” she asks me, in a surprisingly strong voice. And then she remembers.

“You’re that reporter,” she says. “Get out.”

Nobody seems to have much use for journalists invading their most private moments these days. Go figure.

I express my sympathy as I back out the door. I really mean it. What I remember about Alicia Simpson is almost all good. She was a competent writer who was not averse to the concept that someone else might know something about the craft that she didn’t. She was a little fragile, I thought, a little too jumpy to be a good newspaper reporter. But she was blessed with enough family money that she never had to find that out.

Whatever happened that night at the Quarry, twenty-eight years ago, I’ll never know, but both Alicia Simpson and Richard Slade definitely were the worse for it.

Back at the paper, I blog a few paragraphs so our potential readers don’t have to actually buy the Sunday paper. I try to leave something really juicy out of the blogs to tease them (“Tune in to the Sunday paper, folks, for the full story”), but the circulation numbers tell me that’s not working so well.

My cellphone rings. It really does ring, like a damn phone is supposed to. What is so cool about having your phone play “Billy Jean” or “Stairway to Heaven”? It’s like that singing fish thing that was so big a few years back. Funny once, maybe twice, then you just want to shoot it.

It’s Peggy.

“He’s gone again.”

Les. This happens now and then, and I usually know where to look.

I tell her I’ll be there in half an hour. I have a couple of hours before I’m expected at the paper.

Les Hacker, the light of my addled mother’s life and the guy who saved my butt from being barbecued last year, has gone walking.

We haven’t had to get him off the roof lately, but he is prone to occasionally wandering off. Les’s body is still in pretty good shape. The last time I got the cops to find him, he was all the way out of town, headed toward Williamsburg. When they stopped him, they said he looked confused, like somebody who’s just woke up from a dream.