The Philadelphia Quarry

by Howard Owen

  “What is this place?” Andi asks. Like most people in Richmond, she’s never seen it.

  I tell her that it is an icon of my wayward youth.

  “Also, it’s where Alicia Parker Simpson was raped.”

  I fill her in, and we take a short walk around the place.

  Like almost everything except my damn waistline, the Quarry seems to have shrunk over the years. I remember it being much bigger. There’s a white sandy beach with some picnic tables. Beyond that is the water, with a fifty-foot wall of granite behind it. The Quarry is shaped like an S, with the tails at either end just out of view.

  The two sheds are still there, one of them still housing the men’s and women’s changing rooms. The buildings are nondescript cinder block.

  I walk into the men’s room there, where Alicia Parker Simpson’s and Richard Slade’s lives changed so long ago. The bare smell of concrete and mildew make it seem more like a YMCA summer camp than a den of exclusivity.

  “This is like the most hoity-toity club in Richmond? It smells.”

  Andi is behind me. She is obviously unimpressed. I tell her the story that brought me here, and I tell her how we used to sneak in.

  “Seems like sneaking into a pay toilet,” she says before she goes outside.

  The bare sycamores hover over us. Their dead leaves float on the greenish surface. A lone heron flies over, headed for the river that’s just beyond the cliff we’re facing.

  “Well,” I tell Andi, “it was much bigger when I was a boy.”

  “Wasn’t everything?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I reply, “it was.”

  “So,” she says, “this was where that black guy was supposed to have raped the white girl way back when, and she’s the one that got killed yesterday?”

  “Yeah. That’s pretty much it.”

  “Wow. Sucks being him today.”

  I drop her off at her apartment on Floyd, the one she shares with another girl and two guys. They’re just friends, she told me the first time I came by. Not, I’m hoping, friends with benefits.

  I shouldn’t stop by the paper. It is my day off. But my car seems to have a magnet in it, guiding me to one of the empty parking spaces beside the building. Even on weekdays, there are often empty spaces right out front. In its infinite wisdom, the company that owns us built its corporate headquarters right across the street from the newspaper building, back when newspapers made money. Now, you could fit all the suits and the worker bees in one of the two buildings, but nobody’s done that. I guess it would be kind of like running up the white flag.

  I stop by and say hello to Enos Jackson on the copy desk, where he seems at least moderately content to end his working career. Jackson gets grumpy sometimes. He’s done bigger things than this. But he knows he’s lucky to have a job at all.

  I see Sarah Goodnight’s head barely visible over the top of her computer terminal. She seems to be the only reporter in the place.

  “Oh,” she says when she sees me standing there. “Hi. Just trying to finish my latest Pulitzer nominee. It’s about catfish.”

  Something—could be global warming or the fertilizer that gets washed into the James upstream—is making our catfish grow to monstrous proportions. A couple have topped 100 pounds. They look like fish versions of the overweight, Big Gulp-sucking kids I see around town. Maybe the catfish are going to McDonald’s. And Sarah, the weekend reporter, has been elected to go down to the docks and interview some of the people who catch them for food. You’re only supposed to eat them a couple of times a month, the health officials say. The river is still recovering from about a century of industrial abuse.

  Two things: If you’re desperate enough to look on river catfish as a reliable source of protein, you’re going to eat what you catch—all of what you catch. And, anything that you should eat only once or twice a month, you probably shouldn’t eat at all. A little bit of cancer is a little too much.

  I read Sarah’s story. She’s done the best she can, even got some pretty good quotes from a couple of the old black men and women fishing down there. She found out that most of them, including the ones going out into the deep current in leaky rowboats, can’t swim a lick.

  “Honey,” she quotes one woman as saying, a grandmother with her five-year-old grandson at her side, “something’s gonna get you.”

  Chuck Apple, who does night cops on Sundays and Mondays, comes in from a shooting. No fatalities this time, so it’s maybe a 1-2-18 on B5. I ask him what’s happening on the Alicia Simpson front.

  “The cops say they’ll have an announcement tomorrow morning, nine A.M.”

  They don’t tell you ahead of time that they’re having a press conference unless there’s some good news—at least their version of good news, which means they’ve got their man, or will sometime soon.

  Chuck isn’t what you’d call extremely motivated. He’s having to take a couple of unpaid furlough days, like the rest of the workers, and I know he’s worked at least one of those, because, as he said, somebody’s got to put the damn paper out. But he’s not exactly gung-ho. Five years ago, he might be out there hitting up every source he knows, trying to find out what the police are planning to trot out for their dog-and-pony show tomorrow.

  Hell, we both have a pretty good idea of what’s coming, although it would have been good to have nailed it down. It’s always satisfying to a cops reporter to know the police chief is spitting out his cornflakes, reading his day’s itinerary in his morning paper.

  “Can’t be but one thing,” Apple says.

  I nod. Like Andi said, it sucks being Richard Slade.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Monday

  Why can’t they ever have press conferences in the afternoon, or at least on a day when I’m paid to work? I don’t have to be here, but if it wasn’t me, it’d be Mark Baer or Handley Pace or some other byline poacher half my age. It’s my story, even if it is my day off.

  When I get to city hall, damned if Baer isn’t the first person I see, all spiffy and ready for an easy A1 byline to add to the résumé he still hopes he can convert into a job at the Washington Post.

  “I thought this was your day off,” he says.

  I tell him to get the fuck out of there, and he does.

  There are only six of us there—me, some freelancer from the local entertainment weekly and four TV types. The Post hasn’t deigned to send somebody down. We’re outnumbered by the cops, which seems to piss L. D. Jones off. He shoots me a death-ray glare. He’s still harboring grudges from last year, when my “interference in police matters” led to the uncomfortable revelation that one of his lieutenants was a murderer.

  “No smoking,” the chief says, looking at me.

  We’re outside, for Christ’s sake, in front of City Hall, freezing our butts off. Am I going to give the birds cancer? But I don’t need any more trouble from L. D. Jones. I stub out my Camel. He’s still glaring at me. I reach down, pick it up and walk fifty feet to the nearest trash can. The chief says something to the flunky next to him. They laugh.

  There is little news here that a four-year-old couldn’t have figured out. You free a man on Monday after he’s done twenty-eight years for a rape he didn’t commit, and then the woman who accused him gets shot through the head on Saturday. One plus one equals two. Richard Slade is back behind bars. They got him yesterday. He had six days of open windows and doors that locked from the inside.

  The mayor’s there, too, to reassure the people of Richmond that he personally won’t let innocent people get shot to death in their cars. Well, he won’t let folks from Windsor Farms get shot that way, anyhow. He’s probably the one who insisted we do it outside, with City Hall as the backdrop. He must have laryngitis, though, because he lets the chief do the talking. In good health, Hizzoner would only relinquish a microphone when you tore it from his cold, dead hands.

  Jones is asked if they’re sure they have the right man.

  “We, ah, can’t go into that right now,” the chief say
s, “but we have strong evidence pointing to the suspect.”

  “Do you have the murder weapon?”

  Jesus. Whoever shot Alicia Simpson threw the weapon down on Cary Street, which is where the cops found it. No prints. No serial number. It was in the paper, dumb-ass. Can TV reporters not read?

  He’s never going to call on me, so I yell it out, loud enough so he has to answer.

  “Do you have forensic evidence of any type linking Richard Slade to Alicia Simpson’s murder?”

  The chief would really like to pistol-whip me. He takes a deep breath. He seems to be counting.

  “We can’t reveal that information at the present time,” he says, then adds, “but I’m sure we will have a breakthrough there very soon.”

  In other words, no.

  The TV types were hoping for a perp walk, but they’re disappointed. Slade is already in the city lockup, and they have at least spared him the usual public shaming, for now.

  The press conference lasts all of fifteen minutes. Nothing is revealed, other than what we knew already. The television reporters and crews rush off to get it on the air at noon. I head back to the Prestwould to blog about it. The guy from the entertainment magazine is already posting his with his iPhone. You need one of those, Wheelie told me last week. Buy me one, I said.

  The paper’s as close as my apartment, but I still have fond hopes of sneaking in another hour or two of sleep after I feed the blogees.

  Custalow is there. I’d forgotten he was taking the morning off. He had to attend to a plumbing emergency that ate up half his Saturday. Custalow isn’t afraid of hard work, but he seems to have decided that he won’t go the extra yard for the folks who were ready to fire him for theft last year.

  He’s watching one of the local channels. They’ve broken into some stupid-ass, bare-your-soul-in-front-of-strangers talk show with the breathless news that, yes, Richard Slade is arrested. It’s safe to go outside again.

  “You need somebody to dress you,” Custalow says. I stand next to him and see myself on the screen, in the background. Maybe the jeans and the I AM THE MAN FROM NANTUCKET sweatshirt with chili stains on it weren’t a great choice. Maybe I should have worn socks. And shaved. Maybe I should have gone home from Penny Lane two hours earlier last night.

  “You might as well have worn your pajamas,” he says, suppressing a laugh.

  I suggest to Custalow that he could have saved me. He saw me headed out the door.

  “I thought you must be going out for a walk, somewhere where nobody would see you.”

  Yeah, he’s right. And I really don’t want a male housemate asking, “Are you going to wear that?”

  Custalow turns away from the TV as they switch back to a couple who seem to be having a very public discussion about his having sex with her sister, in their bed.

  “I can’t believe it,” Custalow says, and I assume he’s talking about Richard Slade, not the disaffected couple.

  “What’s so hard to believe? Who had a better motive?”

  “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  I sit back. Custalow chews his words for a while before he spits them out. You have to wait for it.

  “He was in my cellblock for a while. I remember, at lunch one day, he got to talking. He didn’t talk that much, so when he did, you listened.”

  Another pause.

  “He said that if he did get out, all he was going to do was sit under the big shade tree in his momma’s backyard, drink lemonade and watch the world go by. When it got cold, he said, he’d feed the birds, then sit in his momma’s kitchen and watch them.”

  Pause.

  “One of the young bucks on our block kind of laughs and asks him, ‘How about the white bitch that put your ass in here. Ain’t you got sumpin’ for her?’ By this time, most of us believed Slade when he said he didn’t do it.

  “Slade just looked at him for a minute. Then he said, ‘That woman didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t mean any harm.’ And then he just got his tray and walked off.”

  “You don’t think he killed her?”

  “Anything’s possible,” Custalow said. “But if I gambled, I’d bet against it.”

  I blog, and then I nap. When I wake up, Custalow’s gone to work. After I shower, shave and exchange the sweatshirt for a button-down, a sweater and a sports jacket, I do the same. I wouldn’t have showered and shaved for the desk monkeys at the paper, especially on a day I’m not getting paid for, but I have another stop in mind.

  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 . . .”