The Philadelphia Quarry (26 page)

“But he knew all along the wrong man was in prison.”

“I don’t know what Wesley knew. He seemed so sane at times, but then he’d go into some tirade about ‘those black bastards’ who raped Alicia, and I really wondered if he knew at all, or if it was just somebody else inhabiting his body that night. Somebody else inhabited his body a lot, especially back then, before the drugs got better.”

It wasn’t that hard, the way Lewis explains it. Carl kept a variety of guns around the house, collected over the years. Lewis had gone out with him to the firing range on occasion. He had one gun, a Colt, that he used to brag he’d gotten from a guy his firm represented. It was completely untraceable. Carl joked that this was the one he’d use if he ever had to kill somebody.

“He’s still not aware it’s missing,” she says. Her laugh is as dry as an Arab’s umbrella.

“I just sat there, at that light at Cary and Meadow. Thursday morning, the light was green when she went through. Friday morning, the same thing.

“Then, on Saturday, I looked in the rearview mirror and saw her Acura coming down the street. About half a block before she got there, just when I thought I’d wasted another night’s sleep, the light turned to yellow. Alicia might have run it, but she didn’t.”

Lewis was parked on the left side of the street, just before the light. When Alicia stopped, Lewis got out of her car, ran the twenty feet between her and her sister and tapped on Alicia’s window.

“She seemed surprised, and then she recognized me, and she rolled down the window.

“And then I shot her. Three times. I don’t think she really felt anything. At least, I hope not.”

How humane, I’m thinking.

“You see,” Lewis says, turning to face me, talking to me again, “I couldn’t let her do it. I couldn’t let her ruin us like that.”

I’m thinking that things are pretty much in the crapper for the Simpson-Witts anyhow. She seems to have read my mind.

“I tried,” she says. “But there’s just too much out there now. It would be like trying to put water back in a vase after it’s spilled. There’s nothing left to do now. Except this.”

I’m getting a little uneasy about what “this” might be.

“Um, maybe we could make some kind of arrangements. About the manuscript.”

She doesn’t even bother to laugh this time.

“No, Mr. Black. This is it. You’ll never give Alicia’s manuscript back. And Carl will, someday soon, realize that his prized Colt is gone. He might cover for me, but I’ve considered the odds, and the chances of that damn confession not seeing the light of day, compounded by the chances of Carl not reporting that gun missing and solving the big mystery of who shot Alicia, are not very good at all.

“I hope my children will forgive me. But now I’m very tired, Mr. Black.”

I ask her if she wants me to drive back.

“I don’t think so,” she says, as I slowly, quiet as a mouse, reach for the door handle. I’ve already released the seat belt. My eyes have adjusted to the darkness, and I can see that what lies directly ahead of us is space. The yard seems to slope downward a few feet in front of us and then disappear into nothingness. I am fully aware, for the first time, of what lies beyond and beneath us.

“Mr. Black,” Lewis Witt says, “did you ever see that movie,
Thelma and Louise?”

I’ve already rolled the window back down. But when I push on the door handle, I learn to my great regret that Lewis has put the childproof lock on. I give up all pretense and subtlety. My pleas and promises bounce off her.

“Here we go,” Lewis says. She slips the car into drive.

As the car starts moving forward, slowly at first, I have only one option.

I once rode in a pace car at the NASCAR track in town. They were giving all the reporters free rides, probably because they liked to torture helpless creatures. There are no doors on those damn things. You have to climb in through the window and then climb back out again. I still have the hoary image of a fat woman sportswriter wedged halfway in, halfway out, her butt blotting out the sun, imbedded in my brain. When I’m trying to be good, I think of her.

So, for the second time in my life, I attempt to leave a car via the passenger-side window. It seems to take forever, and I can feel the car gain momentum. When I finally throw myself, head first, to freedom, I’m tumbling downhill. It doesn’t feel like good luck, but a tulip poplar stops me ten feet from the edge. I scream like a little girl when my already abused ribs collide with the tree’s thickness, but it saves me.

I hear the roar of an engine and then a second of silence as Lewis Witt leaves solid ground.

The sound, when the Lexus hits the water fifty feet below, is as cold and final as a death rattle.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Thursday, February 10th

M
cGrumpy, the Prestwould’s self-appointed wit, refers to our unit as General Hospital.

Good thing McGrumpy isn’t funnier. It hurts like a bitch to laugh.

Andi’s doing better and should be able to face the world unaided by her feckless father in a few days.

Me, I look like King Tut. All this crap wrapped around me keeps my ribs intact, I guess. Now, if I could only breathe. And scratch that spot on my back.

Custalow’s a prince. I think he’s giving preferential treatment to my daughter, but he’s doing a pretty good job of playing nurse-maid to me, too. It wouldn’t surprise me if Abe wasn’t looking for another place to live, somewhere that you don’t have to take care of a pair of semi-impaired adults.

All in all, though, I don’t have much to complain about. I am, after all, aboveground.

As Peggy used to say (often, I thought, without much evidence to back it up), things could be worse.

It has been six days since Lewis Witt’s Lexus did an Olympic swan dive into the Quarry. It felt like I was going close to the legal speed limit when I hit that tulip poplar like a crash-test dummy.

I remember hearing the car hitting the water, and then I must have blacked out. The next thing I know, there are sirens blaring and flashing lights everywhere. I managed to crawl a few feet until I could see over the lip to the cluster-fuck below.

Somebody down there must have called 911 when they heard the Lexus hit, and by the time I looked, half the city’s paid employees seemed to be in attendance. The lights were playing on the Quarry’s water, turning it all red and blue like a Fourth of July fireworks show. I could make out the rear end of the last car Lewis Witt would ever drive, its license plate poking out. It landed in a shallow spot near the edge.

I reached Custalow on my cellphone, which took a mauling and kept on calling. I think I told him to get me the hell out of there. But before Abe could ride to my rescue, the cops found me.

It didn’t take Richmond’s finest too long to figure out that the aquatic Lexus didn’t fall from outer space. Eventually, they found their way to the side yard of the late Harper and Simone Simpson.

I was lying there, wondering why there were two moons out tonight, when the sky was blocked out by an impressive beer belly.

“I might have known your ass would be involved in this somehow,” a familiar voice said.

Gillespie.

I tried to say something smart, but talking, as well as breathing, was becoming kind of hard. I felt like somebody had beaten me with a tire iron. Inexplicably, in the middle of all the hubbub, Sarah Goodnight appeared and rode with me to the hospital.

They stationed a cop outside my room and gave me plenty of what would have been, under better circumstances, outstanding party drugs. I slept between nightmares.

Two police officers came around the next day. They haven’t been too happy with me since the unfortunate incident with the late, unlamented David Junior Shiflett. I had the feeling they were dying to make me more complicit than I was in the death of Lewis Witt.

Fortunately for me, another item in my jacket pocket also proved to be too tough to kill. The recorder caught enough of what Lewis said to convince the cops that they didn’t have a prayer of convicting me for anything worth the trouble.

Even the chief himself came by. I’ve known L. D. Jones since high school, and he doesn’t really wish me any permanent harm.

He wanted to know if I still had the manuscript. I told him that I had burned it. He told me he didn’t believe that. I told him to prove it.

“Well,” the chief said, “this is a mess. And now we’ve got the brother to deal with.”

Sometime after dawn the next day, one of the cops on the scene at the Quarry, perhaps trying to figure out how to get that Lexus out of the city’s most exclusive swimming hole, decided to use the facilities.

When he opened the door to the men’s dressing room, there hung Wesley Simpson.

They figured later that he’d been there about two days. He’d tied one end of a rope to a hook overhead, stood up on one of the worn-out benches and tied the other end around his neck. From the scuff marks on the floor below, he almost left himself too much rope to be successful. Almost. I guess close doesn’t count in horseshoes and hangings.

They couldn’t find a suicide note. My guess, which I kept to myself, was that Lewis told him the jig was up, and he couldn’t take it. Being held up as a guy who had committed incest with, or even raped, his baby sister, and then let some black kid take the rap and go to prison for half his life for the crime was, I’m guessing, more than the shaky equilibrium of Wesley Simpson could handle.

Or maybe he just missed Alicia. The photo of the two of them lay at his feet, undisturbed since I’d first seen it.

I’m certain that Lewis knew her brother was dead when she took me for that little joy ride. Maybe she thought it was time to end everything. Maybe she could see that there was no way out of what might have been worse for her than death—shame and dishonor.

I doubt if Carl and her kids would agree with her right now.

There wasn’t any reason to keep Richard Slade in jail, but still they waited five days to release him. It took the cops and prosecutor that long to go through all the stages of grief at having arrested the wrong man twice. They finally arrived at “acceptance” yesterday morning.

By then, I was able to join Kate and Marcus Green for Richard’s second coming-out party.

Slade was the same decent, honest man he’d been for twenty-eight years in the penal system and during his sojourn as a suspected murderer. He thanked God. He thanked the police. He thanked his mother, as Philomena stood beside him and wiped the only tear I’ve ever seen her shed, with the TV cameras recording it all. He thanked Kate and Marcus. He even thanked me. Journalist gets thanked. Stop the presses.

And then he and his mother got into Chanelle’s car and headed east, toward home.

Kate was standing beside me when they disappeared around the corner.

“Well,” she said, “I guess you’ve got your story.”

I told her that, yeah, I had my story. Well, mine and Sarah Goodnight’s. Because she was on night cops, she had been on duty when word came in about an “incident” at the Quarry. She knew where I was going that night, and she had her suspicions that I was somehow in the middle of it all. She drove out there and got what information she could for the Saturday paper. Unnamed victim’s car does a face-first into the water. No motive. No body recovered yet.

But Sarah heard another siren and realized that it was going not to the Quarry but to the hill above it. She got into her car and followed the flashing lights.

I was still there, being packed into the back of the ambulance. When she saw it was me, she ran over. I was afraid she was going to hug my poor, aching ribs, something I definitely didn’t want right then.

Somehow, she got them to let her ride to the hospital with me. I told her everything she needed to know, including the name of the driver of the car now at the bottom of the Quarry, which she had already guessed.

As soon as we reached the hospital, she scurried off and got Baer out of bed to give her a ride to the paper, where she wrote the story nobody else had. Or at least as much of it as she knew. I like Sarah, but not enough to tell her everything.

She did follow-ups the next four days. She got to tell our breathless readers about Wesley Simpson’s suicide, although she had to give that one to the freeloaders via our website.

Yesterday, though, I told her I was taking over. She didn’t argue.

So, I was out there on a February morning as clean and crisp as a good Sauvignon Blanc, with a slight bouquet of impending spring, watching Richard Slade ride off to freedom again.

Even Marcus Green thanked me.

“For what?” I asked him. “Now you don’t have a chance to undress some dumb-ass prosecutor in a courtroom. You’ve missed one of the biggest roles of your acting career.”

“Some things,” he said, “are more important than a big day in court.”

I almost think he meant it.

Kate and I had coffee and bagels afterward at Perly’s. Outside the front door, a panhandler put his hand on my arm. His dark skin seemed to have faded to gray in the stingy winter light. He might have been thirty or sixty. I started to brush him away when he stepped back and said, “Thanks, man. For Richard Slade.”

It made the broken ribs hurt a little less.

I gave him a buck.

Inside, I posted the story between sips.

Finally, I shut the laptop and looked over at Kate.

“Nice job,” she said.

She brought me up to speed on where I am in the quest to get my driver’s license back. It seems the city takes a dim view of people ignoring its one-way signs and abusing its alcohol. This is going to be expensive, Kate assured me. I might be able to drive only on work-related trips, and I would be expected to submit to some bad-driver classes, for which I also would pay dearly. And they probably would expect me to join AA.

I said nothing about that last one. As always, I can quit any time I want. I’ve barely had a drink since Saturday.

She told me not to worry about her costs.

“Pro bono is my middle name,” is the way she put it.

I reached across and put my hand on top of hers, managing to smear my sleeve with cream cheese. She surprised me by drawing her hand back and putting it in her lap. And I thought things were going so well.