The Philadelphia Quarry

by Howard Owen

  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.

  “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

  The 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 turne
d 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.