The Philadelphia Quarry (7 page)

At the office, somebody has already done a screen grab and has left a printout on my desk. There’s the press conference, with the TV “talent” in their camel-hair overcoats, and there’s me. Somebody got a red pen and drew a line to one of the talking heads standing next to me, then wrote in “TV journalist,” then drew another line to me. That one was titled, “real journalist,” but somebody had marked through it and wrote “homeless person asking TV journalist for spare change.”

“Nice of you to dress,” Sally Velez says.

“It’s my day off. You’re lucky I’m wearing pants.”

“Very lucky.”

I lean closer to her, so no one else can hear.

“That’s not what you used to say.”

Sally comes as close to blushing as she ever does.

“Are you writing the story?”

“No, I just went to the press conference to wipe Baer’s butt.”

She looks surprised.

“Baer was there?”

Mal Wheelwright is in his office.

“Wheelie,” Sally calls over, “did you send Baer over to cover the chief’s press conference?”

Wheelie, looking up and seeing me, looks embarrassed.

“Uh . . . yeah. He told me he’d cover it, since it was Willie’s day off.”

Every year at the state press contest awards dinner, where everybody’s a winner, Mark Baer leads the league in shared awards. A good story turns up on somebody else’s beat, and suddenly, there’s Baer, “helping” and earning a byline or two for a sidebar, or stepping in when the reporter’s been chasing the story for nine days and needs a break.

It only takes me a few minutes to bang out fifteen inches for the Tuesday paper. I tell Sally that there might be a write-through later.

She’s already given my story a cursory read as I’m putting on my jacket.

“Where to now, Clark Kent?” she asks. “It’s too early for happy hour.”

“Always happy hour somewhere,” I tell her. I blow her a kiss, and she graces me with the smallest of smiles and gives me the finger.

Philomena Slade’s home is pretty easy to find. By the time I get there, the TV types have already gone. This isn’t Los Angeles, and paparazzi might as well be some appetizer at Mamma Zu’s.

Still, I don’t relish this. I only hope a couple of large male relatives haven’t been left in charge of dispatching snooping reporters. It’s hard to hurt my feelings, but I have a strong aversion to pain.

I knock three times, then wait a few seconds and knock again.

Finally, the door opens. There’s a storm door, locked, I’m sure, between me and Richard Slade’s mother. I can barely see her with the sun reflecting off the glass.

“Go away,” she says. I don’t think she even realizes yet that I’m the SOB from the paper that she threw out of Marcus Green’s Yukon a week ago.

“Please, Mrs. Slade,” I say, trying to make myself heard through the storm door. “I’m not here to make trouble. I want to get his side of the story.”

This goes about as far as I thought it would. She’s starting to shut the door when I play the only card I have.

“Wait. Please. I’m Artie Lee’s son.”

The door shuts. I wait for about two seconds. The door opens.

She looks me up and down.

“Bull,” she says.

Then, she opens the storm door and squints at me, giving me the once-over.

“You’re passin’,” she says.

As in passing for white. We both know it isn’t necessary to “pass” these days. They get extra PC points where I work if they can claim you’re black. But, yeah, maybe I have been passing, for about half a century.

She asks me who’s my momma, and I give her a concise enough description of Peggy Black that she finally believes me.

“Peggy still smoking that weed?” she asks.

I tell her I think she’s trying to quit. Yeah. She’s down to a joint a day.

As I start to step inside, though, she stops me again.

“You’re the one I had them throw out of Marcus Green’s car. That reporter from the paper.”

I wait, not bothering to deny it. Finally, though, family wins out.

“Well,” she says, “come on in anyhow.”

We go through a living room full of photographs and time-worn furniture, with a pre-flat-screen TV sitting in the corner. We dodge kids’ toys, which seems strange until we get to the kitchen, where two little boys, maybe four years old, are sitting at the table, coloring.

“Momma Phil,” one of them says, “look.”

She offers the first smile of the day.

“That’s very good, Jamal. Very good. You stayed between the lines and all, just like I told you to. Let’s see, Jeroy. Umm. Yes. That’s nice. Now, you all go on back to the bedroom. This gentleman and me have got to talk.”

They ask her if they can watch TV, and she says maybe after a while. They whine a little but don’t question her.

“That TV,” she says, shaking her head.

I observe that she seems to have a way with kids.

She looks at me and kind of snorts.

“You caught ’em on a good day.”

She says Jamal and Jeroy are her great-nephews, her niece’s twins. She’s keeping them while their mother works at the post office.

“You’re related to them, I suppose. Chanelle would’ve been Artie’s cousin, too. Anyhow, there’s always somebody needs some help. And now I’m retired, I’ve got the time.”

She offers me a Coke or some water. I can see when she opens the fridge that there’s no beer.

“I’d meant to work until next year, when I’m sixty-five,” she says, “but when I found out Richard was getting out . . .”

She pauses for a few seconds. She has her back to me, pouring the Coke. I see her left hand clench into a fist, then relax.

“It just seemed like a good time to quit.”

She says she was a secretary for thirty-two years at Philip Morris, “long enough to pay for this place.”

After an appropriate amount of time, I get around to asking what I came to ask. At first, it looks like she’s just going to tell me to leave.

“Richard was here Friday night,” she says at last. “Some folks came over, but they were gone by ten, and Richard went to bed right after that. He’s used to going to bed early. He says he has trouble sleeping here, because it’s so quiet.”

Philomena says she went to bed right after the eleven o’clock news, and that Richard was asleep when she looked in on him at eleven thirty—in the bedroom she’d kept waiting for him to return to for the past twenty-eight years.

“Then, when I got up Saturday morning to fix breakfast, about seven, he was in here, watching that sports channel on the TV. You could tell that he’d just woke up.

“I told the police that, told ’em three times, but they believe what they want to believe.”

She’s chopping up some onions, getting supper ready for the boys, or maybe just for herself. She turns toward me and points with her hand, still holding an impressive chopping knife.

“He didn’t do it. He didn’t do it twenty-eight years ago, and he didn’t do it now.”

I’m not inclined to argue with anybody holding a knife that big, but I wonder. Is it possible that Richard Slade could have left the house, done the deed and come back before his mother got up? The shooting happened about a quarter past five. He would have had time.

I ask her about her car. There’s a ten-year-old Camry outside on the street, which must be hers.

“I keep the keys in my purse,” she says. “I keep my purse by my bedside table. I told the police that, too.”

Well, he could have jump-started it. Or, he could have just gotten somebody else to do the deed. Slade probably knew a character or two, from nearly three decades as a guest of the state, who could have done it for him. Or maybe it was just a cousin or a nephew. Maybe revenge takes a village, too.

Philomena shows me his room. There are trophies, from Little League baseball and pee-wee football, then a few from junior high and high school. She probably dusted them off every week, waiting.

“He was quite an athlete,” she says, “and he was full of himself, the way boys are. He was running with some boys that he shouldn’t of been running with. And I was always on him about his grades. But he was a good boy.

“He always told me not to worry, that he was going to go to college and make me proud.”

When they heard the news, later on Saturday, about Alicia Simpson’s murder, Philomena says Richard just “kind of wilted.”

“ ‘Oh, lord, Momma,’ he told me. ‘They gonna think I did it.’ ”

She says it was all she could do to keep him from running, right then.

“I told him, ‘You stay right here, and when they come asking questions, you and I both know where you were, and we’ll tell ’em.’

“And we did, like it did any good. They came for him on Sunday morning, just as we were getting ready to go to church. They took him away, and they stayed here and asked me the same damn—excuse me—the same questions over and over. And telling them the truth didn’t seem to matter.”

I ask her if she thinks Richard would like to talk to somebody from the newspaper, to give his side of the story.

“I don’t know. I’d have to ask Marcus Green.”

Well, I should have figured that one out. I can’t believe our premier bomb-throwing mouthpiece hasn’t already called a press conference of his own.

I tell her I’ll call Mr. Green myself.

At the door, she puts her hand around my wrist. She’s strong for such a wiry woman.

“You come back, now,” she says. “You’re family, even if you do work for that newspaper.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Tuesday

I
’m fifteen minutes late. Caught unawares, before she can give me hell for making her wait, Kate is adorable. She’s seated facing the wall, with the left side of her face visible to me. She does that thing where she grips her lower lip with her teeth while she does something deathly important on the iPhone. A strand of her brownish-red hair hangs loose. She has started wearing reading glasses. Maybe she’s been wearing them awhile. Paying attention wasn’t one of my strong suits. She’s frowning a little. I used to put my hands on her forehead when she did that and smooth the frown lines out. Usually, I was the one who had put them there.

She doesn’t see me until I reach down and tuck the stray strand behind her ear. She jerks her head around and sees that it’s me, and the look turns from one of surprise to the kind you give a delinquent child who has met your expectations.

“I figured I’d better get here on time,” she says. “If I waited for you, they might have given our table away.”

Well, no. Not likely. Looking around Can Can, with its loose approximation of a Paris bistro, I see plenty of empty tables. In the Great Recession, some seem to have forgone
moules frites.

Still, point taken. Yes, it is a sign of disrespect to always be the waitee instead of the waiter. But I’ve already been around to Marcus Green’s office and been told he’s in court and will be in about two. And then I stopped by Penny Lane for a quick pint, and then a photographer I used to work with before he got laid off dropped in, and we talked for another pint. Time slips away.

She puts away the iPhone.

“This Richard Slade case,” she says, never one for useless verbs. “Any sense in even having the trial before the hanging?”

Kate likes to play devil’s advocate. If you say the sun comes up in the east, she wants to discuss alternative possibilities.

“I am not,” she told me once, when we were arguing about global warming, “a yes woman.”

I tell her that they don’t really do hangings in Virginia anymore, even for black men who kill white women; but the odds seem to favor either a very long stay in a very bad place or an eventual enforced overdose of some very lethal chemicals.

“But he seems so, I don’t know, so innocent.”

“You got that from watching on TV? They didn’t even get to tape him doing the perp walk.”

“I met him.”

“Where? When?”

She gives me a sly smile. As was often the case in our shared past, Kate’s ahead of me.

“Yesterday at the jail. I went with Marcus Green.”

Kate knew Marcus back in the day. I can’t remember now if I introduced him to her or if she knew him first. He’d been a good source, a quote machine, as long as you knew that he had his own agenda and it might not jibe with yours. I haven’t talked to him much since I went back on night cops, but he doesn’t seem to have changed much.

At any rate, we’ve all had a few drinks together over the years.

The Green connection probably explains then why Kate asked me to meet her for lunch today. Her calls to me usually are along the lines of “Why haven’t I gotten the rent check yet?” When she moved out, we reached an agreement. She pays the mortgage and I pay the rent. My ex-wife is my landlady.

“He said he was impressed with what I did in the Martin Fell case.”

I note that there wasn’t really any “case,” since the common-wealth’s attorney chose to free Mr. Fell long before it ever came to trial, mostly due to the efforts of yours truly.

“Still,” she says, “he liked how I took a chance. He said he liked anybody with balls enough to sass Bartley, Bowman and Bush and get away with it.”

“So,” I say, wishing I could smoke indoors, “you’re going to work with Marcus Green? I guess that had something to do with my lunch invitation.”

She graces me with a ten-watt smile.

“Could be. I just wanted to talk, about Richard Slade and all. You know all the history.”

I fill her in. For some reason, I don’t tell her about my recent visit with Philomena Slade, but I do tell her Abe Custalow’s assessment.

“Well, Abe’s pretty astute,” Kate says. ‘Astute’ isn’t a word I usually associate with my old friend, ex-con and housemate, but it’s probably pretty apt.

She frowns. I resist the urge.

“The guy seems real,” she says, and I deduce that she’s talking about Slade. “I mean, there’s nothing about him that indicates he might have killed somebody for revenge. He just seemed, I don’t know, befuddled, like he couldn’t figure it all out.”

Kate’s munching on the “quiche de la semaine.” I ordered a cheeseburger with French fries, “although I guess you just call them ‘fries’ in here.” The waiter didn’t get the joke. Kate winced.

I tell her that I’m not willing to write Richard Slade out of the book of life just yet, either, even if the police think they’ve got this one tied up with a nice little bow on top.