by Howard Owen
On the way out, Marcus Green doesn’t say much.
I try to crack the silence a little as we’re walking down the steps.
“So, do you think he did it?”
He stops and turns to me.
“If I did,” he says, “I sure as hell wouldn’t tell you about it. He’s my client.”
“But you told him that if he wasn’t telling the truth, he’d have to get another lawyer.”
Marcus frowns and then nods.
“Yeah. I said that.”
“And you didn’t drop him.”
Marcus starts walking away. With all the street noise, I barely hear him say, “Not yet.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The newsroom is humming when I get there, or as close to humming as it gets without typewriter keys as background music. Sarah looks up when I walk by.
“Some story, huh?” she says.
“Yeah. Where’s Baer?”
She motions toward Wheelie’s office. I see the back of Baer’s head, nodding up and down like a Bobblehead doll. Whatever Wheelie’s telling him, he seems to be in complete agreement.
Then I notice another head, to the left of Baer’s and much less animated. I take a few steps over and see that our publisher has graced us with his ghostly presence.
Wheelie and Grubby. Grubby doesn’t descend into the newsroom except on rare occasions. I’m guessing that the latest bombshell in the Alicia Simpson story has led to some cages being rattled. Maybe even Grubby’s cage.
I slip away to get a cup of coffee before anyone sees me, in case they want to invite me to the party. Wheelie’s office gets awfully small when there are more than two people in there, especially if one of them is the publisher.
When I come back, Grubby’s gone back upstairs and Baer’s been freed.
I’m checking with the cops to see what mayhem has occurred during the past fourteen hours when I feel Baer’s presence. He likes to hover, and he’s been known to read what’s on other people’s screens, like a runner on second stealing signs from the catcher. I have an urge to brush him back.
“Willie,” he says when I reluctantly hang up. “Can you help me? Nobody knows more about this than you do.”
One of Baer’s strong points, and one that might eventually earn him a job in Washington or New York, or at least Atlanta or Philadelphia, is that he can lick ass when the occasion calls for it. If you’ve been around him long, you know that it’s only temporary. You know that, if the situation were reversed, he wouldn’t piss on you to douse the flames if you were on fire. But, it works, for a while.
Baer can’t get anyone to talk to him. After TV was fed the news that Richard Slade was out and about in the wee hours before the murder, the cops stopped talking. I know for a fact that Marcus Green isn’t talking to Baer, as a small favor to me that I’m sure I’ll be repaying with twenty percent interest, compounded weekly, and he sure as hell isn’t letting his client speak to him. I’m pretty sure that Philomena Slade would kick his ass around the block a time or two if he showed up in her neighborhood, just because he was from the paper.
“I’ll make you a deal,” I tell him after he’s made his pitch.
Baer, I am sure, has complete and unfettered access to Lewis Witt, and probably to brother Wesley, too. Not even the intervention of Clara Westbrook can get me so far up that road.
“You’re going to go see Lewis Witt, right?”
“Well, yeah. Matter of fact, I’m going over there this afternoon.”
“Take me with you.”
Baer is stumped. He doesn’t want me to weasel back into this story that’s been dropped into his lap.
He frowns and then realizes he doesn’t know what the tit for his tat is.
“What do I get?”
“I’ll get you an interview with Philomena Slade.”
I doubt this is possible, but I’m pretty sure Baer doesn’t know whether he can get me past the front door at the Witts’ abode, either. We’re just two guys holding low-card pairs and bluffing. He’s got to get something from the other side to go with everything the Witts are more than eager to tell him. I really, really want to talk to Lewis Witt.
“Aren’t you supposed to be off this story?”
“I just need to scratch an itch,” I tell him.
He thinks about it and then shrugs.
“OK with me. I don’t know if she’ll let you in, though.”
I tell him I’ll count on his boyish charm.
“But I really need to talk to Mrs. Slade.”
I nod my head.
We’re off an hour later, after I’ve done a couple of shorts on people who were only robbed and shot but not killed. We wouldn’t even put the robbery bit in the paper, but it was VCU students, forced to relinquish their cellphones and cash at gunpoint. Crime against middle-class kids, probably white, will always sell papers. I think about Andi, walking all over the Fan in the dead of night, probably talking on the phone or texting, not paying attention.
I tell Sally that I’ll be back in time to check on any late-night misdeeds among the populace.
The sun is threatening to set on us by the time we get to the Witts’ place. Baer rings the doorbell. They’re expecting him, but certainly not me. I’m hoping maybe Lewis Witt has put some of her animosity toward me on the back burner. When we’re shown in, the look in her eyes tells me I’m mistaken.
“What is he doing here?” she asks Baer.
I tell her that today’s events have made me think twice about Richard Slade. What I say has enough truth in it that I don’t blush saying it.
“Well,” she says, “I hope you know now what kind of animal the criminal justice system has turned loose on us. A little late, though.”
I swallow and nod.
She stands back, silently accepting my non-apology and not bothering to ask why it takes two reporters to interview her.
She stops after a few steps.
“Is your, ah, ex-wife still defending that bastard?”
I tell her that she was helping Marcus Green, but that she’s having second thoughts now.
Lewis Witt’s nose wrinkles at the mention of Marcus.
“I should hope so,” she says.
There’s no one else visible, although I can hear music somewhere in the recesses of the Witt home, which seems about four times too big for the three people living there now.
Baer tells Lewis that we’re just trying to get the story straight, that we want to do a piece on the Simpson family and its impact on Richmond through the years.
The Simpson family’s impact on Richmond, as far as I can learn, is to have made as much money as possible getting suckers like me hooked on nicotine, then giving some of it back to the symphony and the fine arts museum. But Lewis seems to be more or less buying Baer’s explanation for our presence, and she spends a couple of hours regaling us with more family history than anyone should be expected to endure. I get through it by drinking three cups of coffee and asking an occasional question of my own, and finally we get to 1983 and the Philadelphia Quarry.
Baer asks most of the questions. Lewis was twenty-two, just graduated from college, when it happened.
“I was down in Atlanta, interning there for a PR firm, trying to decide what to do with the rest of my life,” she says.
“Daddy called me and said something had happened to Alicia. I didn’t really hear the whole story until I got back, and then Momma had to tell me.”
She abruptly quit her job, such as it was, and returned home.
“They needed me,” she says. “And Wes sure as hell wasn’t any help.”
Baer and I have to agree that whatever she says about Wesley’s disappearance after “the incident” can only be used for background.
He could hardly have picked a worse time to disappear, everyone agreed.
“Daddy was not that inclined to look for him, but Momma and I persuaded him to hire a detective. It was sometime in October before he showed up in Nevada. We never did find ou
t what happened to the car.”
“Where’s he staying now?” I ask. As with my other questions, she looks at Baer when she answers.
“He’s got a place in the Museum District, but we’re letting him stay at my parents’ home, for now.”
The way she says “for now” makes it quite clear that it is a markedly different time span than “forever.”
Baer asks her if we can speak with Wesley. She says she doesn’t think that would be a good idea, that Alicia’s death has hit him very hard.
I’m thinking, Wes is forty-six years old. Surely he can make his own decisions.
But I bite my tongue and then ask her if Alicia had ever talked about that night.
“If she did,” Lewis Witt says, giving Baer the laser death stare she means for me, “I certainly wouldn’t share that with you. We are not the kind of people to air our dirty laundry.”
No doubt Giles Whitehurst has assured her that no one from the paper will be asking any rude questions.
I shut up before I get both me and Baer thrown out. Carl Witt comes in. From the look on his wife’s face, he wasn’t supposed to do that. He offers us drinks and we decline. We play a little verbal badminton for a few more minutes, and it’s time to go.
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
Custalow 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 bage
l, 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.