The Philadelphia Quarry (13 page)

Back in the car, Baer wants to know what I think.

“About?”

“About what Lewis Witt just said.”

“I’d say she’s had a rough week. Write the story and move on.”

When we get back to the paper, there’s a message on my phone. Ninety seconds, the recorded female voice says. Damn, I hate those. Ninety-second calls are usually from poor suckers who want you to do a story on how they’ve been fucked over by life through no fault of their own and want somebody to write about it.

This one, though, is a little different.

“Hello? This is Susan Winston-Jones?”

It takes me a few seconds to remember who Susan Winston-Jones is.

“You know, we met after the funeral yesterday?”

The late Alicia Simpson’s friend seems to be playing
Jeopardy
, framing everything in the form of a question, but after she rambles a bit, she cuts to the chase.

“I’d like you to give me a call, at your convenience. I think I have something that might be of interest to you, about Alicia?”

She has my attention.

I go into one of our conference rooms and call the number she gave me.

She tells me to call her Bitsy, and then spends a few minutes telling me what a fine person her late friend was.

“She was a little fragile, but, you know, she always wanted to do the right thing.”

I’m wondering if Richard Slade would necessarily agree with that.

“Here’s the thing,” Bitsy says, just as I’m about to tell her to get on with it. “Alicia was writing something.”

“Writing something?”

“You know, like her memoirs or something? But she wouldn’t let me see it. She told me, sometime early last week, that she’d let me read it when she was finished, and she said she was nearly finished.”

“Do you have any idea,” I ask, “what it was about?”

There’s a pause.

“Kind of,” Bitsy says at last. “She said that it would—how did she put it?—‘finally tell the truth.’ She said she’d finally be able to sleep nights.”

“But you don’t know what she did with it?”

“I asked Lewis about it, the day of the funeral. She said she didn’t know anything about it, and that there wasn’t anything in the desk Alicia was using, but that she would check and see if there was anything on her computer.”

I ask her if she knows anything else about Alicia Parker Simpson’s “memoirs,” and she says she doesn’t, “but there was something there, something she wanted to get out.”

“Did Lewis seem like she knew about it at all before you mentioned it?”

“Well, she tried to hide it, but I think she did know. She acted kind of funny, kind of flustered, which is not Lewis, trust me. She did seem surprised, but I couldn’t tell if it was because Alicia was writing something or because I knew about it.”

One of the news editors and a reporter open the conference room door. I wave them away, and the editor frowns and mouths that he has the room reserved. I hold up five fingers.

“Anyhow, I wanted you to know about it. In case there was something there, you know?”

I ask Bitsy why exactly she wanted me to know about a missing manuscript that was probably just a middle-aged socialite’s bow to Narcissus. Well, I didn’t put it quite that bluntly, but she got the message.

“Because of something she said.”

I resist the urge to ask. Better to let the silence draw it out.

“It was the same conversation where she told me about her memoirs, so it must have been Monday week, because it was the same day they released that man. And you know what she said?”

Silence.

“She said, ‘Thank God. He’s suffered enough. I’m the one that ought to be suffering.’ And then she shut up about it and never mentioned it again. I meant to talk with her about it, but I never had the chance.”

Bitsy’s voice breaks a little. I tell her I’m sorry about her friend, and that I’ll look into it, although I have no earthly idea how.

I ask her, before I hang up, to call me if she remembers anything else.

Outside, having avoided the lethal stare of the editor who had reserved space in the conference room at the time I was interviewing Bitsy Winston-Jones, I warm myself from the heat of the Camel I’m forced to smoke alfresco. I’m trying to figure if there’s anything out there that I should be chasing. Richard Slade looks as guilty as sin, to me and everyone else. Even if he didn’t do the deed twenty-eight years ago, he sure as hell is the prime suspect for Alicia Simpson’s murder. What difference could a manuscript, missing or otherwise, make?

Only one thing to do, I decide at last: Blog.

They want us to blog every day, like flossing. With me, it’s a sometimes thing. I still don’t hold some unedited crap offered to our former readers on the Internet in the same high regard I reserve for the printed, paper-and-ink word. And I don’t care if we cut down all the trees in Oregon to do it.

Still, it has its place. When you don’t know shit, but you’ve heard some pretty juicy gossip, it’s a good place to fling it, see if any of it sticks. I’ve gotten some pretty good tips, actually, by slinging stuff up against the electronic wall.

So, back inside and, with no murders to sully our fair city so far tonight, I blog.

“Is there a story behind the story of Alicia Parker Simpson’s tragic death?” I muse. I love to muse. “Is it true that she was working on her memoirs at the time of her death, and that those memoirs have mysteriously disappeared?” (Nothing ever just disappears, it mysteriously disappears.) I blog on, mentioning Richard Slade’s unfortunate bad judgment in being out in the wee hours before Alicia was murdered, even throw in the fact that an old friend might be able to vouch for his whereabouts, if that old friend can be found.

It goes on for a few paragraphs. Then I hit the “publish” button and wait to see what happens next.

Sally Velez, who actually reads some of the crap we put on our blogs, comes by an hour or so later.

“Jesus Christ,” she says. “Grubby is going to barbecue you.”

Well, I said I’d cede the story to Baer. I didn’t say I wouldn’t blog about it. But I doubt if our publisher will appreciate that fine distinction.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Friday

C
ustalow is in the kitchen, getting breakfast. I’m sitting by the living room window, overlooking Monroe Park, with my head halfway out, sending my secondhand smoke in the direction of the pigeons and squirrels.

“You going to keep that window open much longer?” Custalow asks as he walks in. It is late January, and even the joy of nicotine is diminished somewhat by the fact that I’m freezing my ass off. Abe, munching on a bagel, is only getting the down side.

“Doesn’t look good for Richard Slade,” he says as he sits down. He’s carrying the paper, reading the front page.

I agree with him.

“I still can’t see it,” he says.

“Can’t see what?”

“Nobody I knew at Greensville ever thought he did it to start with, you know, rape that girl. And he was the most peaceable guy you’d ever want to meet. Course, he was pushing forty when I met him. Maybe he was wild when he was young.”

“Weren’t we all.”

Custalow checks his watch.

“The thing is,” he says as he gets up, “he spent twenty-eight years behind bars. He did everything right. And then it turns out he really didn’t do it. So, I’m thinking, is it possible the first crime Richard Slade ever committed was a well-planned execution?”

Not that well-planned, I remind him, but Custalow does have a point. It’s why I haven’t given up on the fact that there’s a story here beyond the one we’ve spread across the front page this morning. I’ve checked, and Slade didn’t seem to have any kind of record before he was arrested for raping Alicia Simpson.

“Maybe he was a little pissed off,” I suggest, always the devil’s faithful advocate, “spending half his life in prison for something he didn’t do. That’d do it for me.”

“Maybe,” Custalow says, “but he didn’t seem like that kind. You know, he wrote his mother every week, read the Bible all the time, led prayer groups. You can fake that stuff for a while, but not for twenty-eight years.”

Custalow heads for the door.

“Hey,” I call to him, “the radiator pipes are still clanging. Maybe you ought to get some outside help.”

“I’m on it,” he says, fixing me with a stare that would surely qualify as baleful.

Not fifteen minutes after he leaves, the phone rings. Foolishly, I answer it.

It’s Sally.

“Mr. Grubbs wants to see you,” she says, and the fact that she doesn’t call him “Grubby” tells me he must be right there by her desk.

“About what?”

I’m pretty sure I know what. The blog. Probably wasn’t one of my better ideas. I may have used up whatever stay-out-of-the-unemployment-line points I’ve ever earned.

She ignores my question.

“He wants you here in an hour.”

That would be ten o’clock, about four hours before I start getting paid.

“Sally,” I tell her, “I know he’s standing right there beside you, making you call me. Just say ‘All right’ if that’s so.”

She pauses for a couple of seconds, then says it.

“OK. Tell him I’m on my way.”

She says “All right” again and I hang up.

It’s only ten blocks up Franklin Street from the Prestwould to the paper. It’s a nice, compact little world. I pass the YMCA, where a better person would stop for a workout on the way to the office, and the city library, and only a block beyond the paper is Penny Lane, where everybody knows my name. Who could ask for anything more?

I’d hate to mess this up. If I get fired, there isn’t anything else I can do that’s legal that would pay nearly what I’m drawing now.

Still, give me truth serum and I’d tell you that I don’t regret being the fly in the ointment, the turd in the punch bowl, refusing to write off Richard Slade. Most of my best stories were the ones somebody told me not to write. If I took orders better, I’d still be drinking and hobnobbing with our state legislators, where all the crimes are legal, instead of spending my late middle age chasing police cars.

It’s not much after ten when I get there.

I go straight to the fourth floor, where Sandy McCool greets me and tells me Mr. Grubbs will be with me shortly. I know better than to expect Sandy, longtime friend and Grubby’s executive assistant, to be The Weather Channel and tell me just how big a shitstorm I’ve stirred up. Sandy’s a good woman, but she takes her job seriously.

Five minutes later, she tells me he’ll see me.

I knock on Grubby’s door and he says to come in. He doesn’t even bother to get up from his desk.

“Sit,” he says.

“Willie,” he begins, leaning forward, “what part of ‘Let Baer have the Richard Slade story’ did you not understand?”

I start to protest that I haven’t written a word about Slade in the last three days’ papers. He puts up one of his hands to stop me.

“You blogged about it, and from what I can tell, about half the city’s read that. You went to the funeral. You went to the city jail and talked to him, you and Marcus Green.”

I don’t know how he found out about that last part, but it’s not that big a town.

“Do you know I’ve been on the phone with Giles Whitehurst? He called me at seven this morning. He doesn’t want to fire your ass, Willie. He wants to fire my ass, because he assumes I don’t have any control over this newspaper, over what our reporters do.”

I’m truly sorry for that. James H. Grubbs is a back-stabbing corporate climber who sold his journalistic soul for an MBA, but I did promise to stay off the story, and I haven’t. I don’t want to make anyone the recipient of a seven
A.M
. phone call from the chairman of the board, not even Grubby.

There isn’t much to do except try to convince our publisher that there was a good reason for doing what I did, that there is that tiny chance that we’re putting the hanging before the trial.

Even as I’m telling Grubby what I know about Slade, I realize that it’s weak as water. My ex-con housemate and friend knew him in prison and doesn’t think he’s capable of something so heinous. There’s a guy out there, according to Slade, who will corroborate his story. Slade has never, to anyone’s knowledge, ever assaulted another human being, let alone murdered one.

When I tell him about Susan Winston-Jones and the alleged missing diary, journal, memoirs, whatever the fuck it was, Grubby seems only mildly more interested than before. I catch him sneaking a peak at his watch.

“We have to do something, Willie,” he says.

“We?”

“OK. I. I have to do something. You’re suspended.”

“For how long?”

“Let’s say two weeks. Two weeks without pay.”

It doesn’t really bother me as much as it should. Two weeks won’t break me. Quite.

“This isn’t going to look good on my résumé. How am I ever going to get a job at the
Washington Post
with this blemish on my reputation?”

Grubby almost thinks I’m serious, then nearly smiles at the idea of the
Post
hiring a fifty-something almost-white guy whose reputation already has more stains than a two-year-old’s bib at a spaghetti supper.

I figure there’s not much to lose, so I tell Grubby that the presumed-guilty Mr. Slade probably is my cousin.

“So you’ve not been exactly unbiased about this.”

I concede that this might possibly be the case, but that I do believe the story hasn’t been fully told yet. I add that it doesn’t seem like Giles Whitehurst is an impartial bystander either.

“Oh, he’s definitely not a bystander,” Grubby says.

We both know there’s a whole herd of sacred cows out in Windsor Farms, and I’ve been trying to tip one of them over.

I have to ask one more thing, though, even as Grubby is reaching for his coat, no doubt due somewhere else in five minutes.

“I promised to help Baer. Do you want me to do that?”

I don’t ever really want to help Baer. I think our publisher and I both know that.

“If you want to, but it’s on your own time. The paper does not back or condone anything you do connected to this story. That is our official stance.”

“But what I do on my own time is my business, right?”