by Howard Owen
The fence has nothing on the outside for me to boost myself up with. The gate is locked, like I figured it would be, but I’m finally able to get something of a toehold by putting one foot on the lower hinge. I wonder if I’m providing Custalow with his night’s entertainment as I swing one leg up and, on the third try, am able to rather painfully straddle the fence. A minute or so more, and I’m inside, doing a half-gainer into the garden as my trailing foot catches on the top of the gate.
I brush the dirt off me and unlock the latch, then wait a few seconds to let my eyes adjust to the dark. Only the back-door light gives me any illumination at all, and its range stops well short of where I know the brick patio is.
Moving forward a step at a time, I find the patio with my feet. By now, I can see a little bit, and it takes me only a couple more minutes to find the loose bricks Bitsy told me about.
I pry one of them up with the trowel, then the other one. At first, there doesn’t appear to be anything but West End mud underneath. But then I dig a little and feel something that doesn’t give. After scraping away the mud, I reach down and feel plastic. A penlight would have been another good thing to have brought along tonight.
It doesn’t take long to unearth it. It could be what Alicia Parker Simpson buried there in the recent past, or it could be plastic-wrapped Nancy Drew books from 1980.
I pull it out, and then stand stiffly as the ice pelts me with a little more enthusiasm. It could be little Alicia Simpson’s seventh-grade term paper, but it’s definitely paper, and a fair amount of it.
Mission accomplished, I’m saying to myself, when I turn and come very close to losing control of my sphincter muscles.
How Wesley Simpson got that close to me without me hearing is a mystery. I suppose the wind, my alleged friend, was just as good at covering the sounds of Wes’s footsteps as I thought it was at covering mine.
“What are you doing?” he asks. He seems calm. I can barely hear him over the wind. It wouldn’t be as spooky, I’m thinking, if he was yelling and screaming. I can feel the snow hitting my face. My eyes have adjusted well enough to the darkness that I can see him now. He looks every bit as out of it as he did at the funeral, the last time I saw him.
He has a shovel in his right hand, as if he has come to help me dig. I start to answer when he brings the shovel around, faster than I would have thought possible for a man who’s supposed to be on mind-numbing anti-psychotics.
“You were looking for something,” he says. There’s a gash in the side of my face, and my left ear’s ringing like a damn phone.
There’s nothing much I can say to that. I’m crawling around his parents’ patio, digging up the bricks, and I have five pounds of plastic-wrapped contraband in my hand. Busted.
It doesn’t appear to me, though, that Wesley is interested in calling the police. He seems to have something more immediate and permanent in mind. He seems to want to dispatch me the same way he’d take care of a mole that was digging up his garden.
I partially ward off his second blow with my left arm, but I’m knocked on my side by the force of it. Wesley has quite an impressive swing for a guy who probably hasn’t played baseball in a while.
I’m greatly outgunned here, with nothing but my little garden spade, which I’m still gripping in my right hand. I notice that Wesley is wearing bedroom slippers in the cold February night. I guess Lewis and Carl have been letting him stay over here since he was shipped back from Arkansas. Better than having him at their place—for them, at least.
He’s standing over me, and he’s lifting that big shovel over his head when I do the only thing I can think of that might save my butt.
The spade isn’t as good as a knife, but it does have a point at the end, and when I drive it into the top of Wesley Simpson’s left foot, I can feel little bones cracking. That’s got to hurt.
He howls and falls to his knees. I drop the spade, hang on to my plastic-protected treasure and try to get the hell out of there.
My legs are working OK, although my left arm is numb, making it hard to get up. I can feel blood rolling down my face. I push myself up with my right arm and I’m making the transition from prone to running for my life, when Wesley grabs my ankle. I kick his face hard enough to make him let go and scramble for the gate. The fact that I left it unlocked probably makes the difference. He’s limping toward me, screaming, using that damn shovel like a crutch, but he’s too late.
I’m out the driveway, up the street and back in the car in Olympic record time. Custalow has started the engine before I even get there, sensing some urgency in my bloodied face. As we speed past the Simpson house, I see Wesley coming across the front yard at a forty-five-degree angle from us, running hard like a dog chasing a car, waving the shovel. He gets close, and then I hear a thump as we pass him. I’m afraid we’ve hit him, but when I turn around, I see him standing there, and the shovel is spinning around in the road. He must have thrown it when he realized he wasn’t going to catch us.
Back at the Prestwould parking lot, Custalow wipes my face as clean as he can with his handkerchief and has me put on his jacket—which is not covered with blood—while I carry mine.
“You might scare the guard,” he says, referencing the VCU kid who’ll be sleeping at the front desk when we come in. I appreciate that Abe isn’t asking any questions. I don’t mind answering questions, but my face hurts. When I look at the right side of the car, there’s a dent, compliments of Wesley’s shovel. I wonder if he’s left one on my head, too.
We get up to the sixth floor, and I collapse in the Eames chair. Kate’s going to be really pissed that the carpet probably has blood on it now.
“Looks like you got it,” Custalow says.
“What?”
He nods at my right hand.
I look down and see that I’m still gripping what I just took a major beat-down to get.
“Happy reading,” Abe says. “I hope it was worth it.”
A couple of Advils later, I realize that I never even thanked him for risking his freedom to help me chase some half-assed hunch.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Thursday
I was up most of the night, reading.
Alicia wasn’t the greatest writer. At least, she wasn’t when she interned for us all those years ago. But what I’ve just read wasn’t bad. Once you picked it up, you just couldn’t put it down.
It didn’t take me long to get the gist of what had happened. I fell asleep sometime after three.
Now it’s just after nine, and I’m wide awake, sitting in the living room, watching the hawk atop his tree. He seems to be contemplating a little late breakfast. There’s a knot on the side of my head big enough that, when I look in the mirror, my noggin looks lopsided. My jaw aches and my shoulder hurts like a bitch. Wesley Simpson swings a mean shovel.
First, I call Grubby. My earnest, hard-working publisher has probably been in his office for three or four hours already. Grubby seems to think that, if he works hard enough, he can undo the damage technology and illiteracy have done to print journalism. Or at least convince people who have been reading us for free online for several years that they now should pay for the privilege. Good one. There isn’t one honest journalist I know who ever, and I mean ever, thought giving it away was a good idea. But we don’t have MBAs. What the fuck do we know?
Normally, it wouldn’t be possible to reach James H. Grubbs by simply picking up the phone and calling. However, when I tell Sandy McCool who it is (and apologize for my recent invasion of the publisher’s office), and that I have news Grubby’s going to want to hear—or at least that he needs to hear, right now—she puts me through. Sandy, at least, trusts my instincts.
“Willie,” Grubby says. It almost sounds as if he’s stifling a yawn. I suggest that he needs more sleep.
“No, I can get by on four hours a night. Been doing it for years. What I need is for drunk, suspended reporters to not interrupt my workday. DUI? On Franklin Street, practically in front of the
building? Really?”
Word gets around. I tell him that I’m not making a social call.
“What’s this, Thursday? Four more days, Willie.”
It almost sounds like he’d rather fire me than have a great story.
Before he can hang up and chastise Sandy for not screening his calls better, I cut to the chase. I tell him only the basic stuff, just enough to let him know that, Giles Whitehurst and the dis-approbation of the West End notwithstanding, we have a tiger by the tail. If the paper has a hair on its scrawny ass, it will have to proceed. We’ve crawled into a tight little hole, and the only way out is to go forward, toward the pinprick of light at the other end.
“You’re sure it’s hers?”
“It has to be. She told her friend where it would be if anything happened. And it was right there.”
“Did anybody see you?”
I hesitate, then prevaricate a bit.
“The brother. Wesley. He must be staying there. At least he was last night. But he couldn’t identify me. It was too dark.” Not sure about that one. I’m thinking that Wesley Simpson is probably in a fair amount of pain right now. As much as I’m in, I hope. I’m not sure what a concussion feels like, but if I was playing football and took a hit like the one Wesley gave me with that shovel, the trainer might be asking me what day it was. But I can’t swear that ol’ Wes can’t identify me.
“So,” Grubby says, “none of this really proves anything, does it?”
“Not if you take it a piece at a time. But if you add Alicia’s call to Susan Winston-Jones and what I read last night to Bump Freeman’s phone call and Richard Slade’s record of nonviolence over the past twenty-eight years, don’t you start shading over into ‘reasonable doubt’ territory?”
“A court can decide that.”
I remind Grubby that everybody let a court do the deciding twenty-eight years ago, and all it got Richard Slade was a life sentence.
He’s quiet for a few seconds.
“OK,” he says at last. “Let me make a call.”
“To Giles Whitehurst?”
“Let me make a call.”
After I hang up, I ponder my options. Play it safe and wait for Grubby to get a yea or nay from the chairman of the board and arbiter of what’s appropriate in Windsor Farms, or call Lewis Simpson Witt.
Screw it. Like I told Grubby, we have to wriggle our way forward. No going back.
To my surprise, Lewis herself answers.
I identify myself and, before she can hang up, I tell her what I’ve spent much of last night reading.
After a long silence, one that I have to force myself not to break, knowing like any good reporter that the other party will eventually speak, she says, “Alicia told me, shortly before her death, that she was trying her hand at fiction.”
I tell Lewis that I don’t think so.
“I don’t really care what you think, Mr. Black. I suppose this is why my brother is limping around the house. He said he surprised an intruder at my parents’ home last night. It pleases me to think that I won’t have to worry about anonymous strangers disturbing our peace. Case closed, as they say. Expect a visit from the police. Soon.”
“Again, I don’t think so.”
Lewis is furious and trying not to show it.
“And why is that?” she says.
“Because I believe every word I read there. I was told that she was afraid. She told a friend days before that something might happen, and where she could find the manuscript.”
“Bitsy!”
Uh-oh. Me and my big mouth.
“I don’t reveal sources.”
I hear what sounds like a chuckle, albeit a mirthless one. “Oh, but you do, Mr. Black. You do.”
“At any rate,” I go on, “do you have any response to what I’ve just told you, before we write about it?”
“You won’t be writing about anything. And if somehow you do, I’ll own that goddamn newspaper. I’ll sue you so hard you’ll have to move back in with your white trash Oregon Hill mother. Hell, I’ll sue her, too, just for having you.”
“Somebody’s been doing her homework.”
“Mr. Black,” she says, “it pays to know your enemy.”
I try to protest that I’m not really her enemy, just an honest reporter trying to do his job, but she cuts me off.
“You want to talk? All right, we’ll talk. Come here tomorrow night, seven o’clock. Don’t be late. I’ll tell you a story, Mr. Black.”
I’m surprised that Lewis is willing to talk with me under any circumstances, but I’m a little concerned about my apparent good luck.
I ask if we can make it earlier, or somewhere else. No dice. Seven at her place it is.
She hangs up before I even have a chance to say goodbye.
Next call is to Kate. I fill her in, at least as far as telling her I have Alicia Simpson’s manuscript, diary, journal, whatever. I ask if we can have a chat with Richard Slade. She says she’ll check with Marcus. I have a feeling that she’s giving Green and Slade’s case as much time as she’s ever given BB&B.
She calls back in five minutes and says we can meet with Slade at two. It’s after noon, and I ask her if she’s eaten yet. She has a meeting at one and begs off.
“One other thing,” she says as I’m about to hang up. “Slade said he saw somebody.”
“Saw somebody when?”
“That night. Back in 1983. He said he told the cops at the time, but they didn’t really want to hear it, I’m sure, and his half-assed lawyer never brought it up at the trial. Just trying to keep him from frying, I guess.”
“He saw somebody, like at the Quarry?”
“Yeah. But I’ll let him tell you.”
She hangs up before I can ask her anything more.
I do a raid on the refrigerator and am uninspired by the two hot dogs that look to be past their due date, and one lonely egg and cheddar cheese that is turning a lovely color of blue-green. Custalow and I don’t so much shop as forage for groceries, going out for what we might need in the immediate future, and it’s obvious that neither of us has gone out lately.
Abe comes up while I’m staring into the abyss.
“How you doing?” he asks, and I’m touched that he came up here just to make sure I haven’t died. I tell him fine, better than our food supply.
I persuade him to take a slightly longer than usual lunch break and come with me to Perly’s. He can drive, saving me a walk I’d rather forgo. My head tells me it’s Advil time again. And then he can drop me off at the city jail.
“Sure,” he says.
On the way, I see Awesome Dude, ambling along Grace Street. It might be the eighties. The Dude is a perennial.
I tell Custalow to pull over, and I ask Awesome if he’d like to join us for lunch.
“Are you paying?”
When he hears the right answer, he hops in.
When we get to Perly’s, Abe asks me if I’m OK.
“Dude,” Awesome says, “you look like shit.”
I’m not offering Custalow any of the gory details of last night’s reading—not yet anyhow—and I appreciate that he doesn’t ask.
After lunch, Awesome heads for the homeless shelter on Grace. He likes to stay in touch with his old friends. Then Abe takes me to the city lockup. I assure him that I can get a ride back or take the bus.
Kate and Marcus are waiting out front. Kate compliments me for being on time “for a change,” then notices that I’m a little the worse for wear. I tell her it’s the price I pay for being a snoop.
“So I hear you’ve got some good news for our client,” Marcus says.
“Nothing that’s going to stand up in court.”
“I’m just looking for something that’ll make him feel like breathing again. He hasn’t eaten a damn thing in the last two days, or so they tell me.”
I assure him that this won’t make his client feel any worse, but I don’t want to get Richard Slade’s hopes up just to have them squashed like a bug.
He’s had more than enough of that.
When we’re all seated, Richard there in shackles, I tell him that I’ve come across some information that gives us (meaning me) reason to believe someone else might have killed Alicia Parker Simpson.
Richard looks me in the eye. He seems like he’s lost about ten pounds he didn’t need to lose.
“Man,” he says, so quietly that I have to lean forward to hear him, “I thought you knew that. Tell me something I don’t know.”
“I mean,” I tell him, “I’ve got something that might make somebody other than your mother or us in this room believe it, but I’ve still got some work to do.”
I tell him about the diary, without revealing all the gory details.
“Now, you tell me something I don’t know. Tell me about that night. Back in 1983.”
He knows what I’m talking about.
“I told the cops that night, and I told my lawyer. Fat lot of good it did me. And it might have been nothing. All I know is, I remember, when we heard the cop car coming and we were scrambling and all, trying to get out of there, I saw something. Somebody.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. But there was footsteps, going fast, and I just got a glimpse of a guy running off into the dark. He wasn’t under the light but for a second or two, but I know somebody else was there. I told the cops that, but nobody listened. They had what they wanted already, I guess.”
“White guy?” I ask him.
He nods.
“None of this is going to prove anything about Alicia Simpson’s death,” I tell him. “It might even make some jury think, ‘Hell, if it was me, I’d’ve killed her too.’ But it’s something to build on. That plus the phone call might carry some weight.”