The Philadelphia Quarry (21 page)

“I’m sure she will,” the nurse practitioner said. “We’ll go over all that with you on Friday.”

I nodded my head, unwilling to admit to a stranger that the thought of taking care of my adult daughter somehow freaked me out. I am a liberal arts major, I wanted to tell her. If I had wanted to minister to the sick, I would have taken a biology course or two.

On the way back to the car, I told Peggy what the plan was. She told me, again, that she and Les could take care of Andi.

I told her I was afraid she’d misplace her.

“She won’t be the most difficult person I’m taking care of, and at least I want to do it.”

I looked at my mother, wondering: Is it that obvious?

“Don’t worry,” I tell Peggy. “I’m on it.”

“You damn sure ought to be.”

Coming back meant dropping Peggy off, guiding Les back to the Prestwould parking lot, then walking Les back, lest he forget the way.

When I headed home, it was already two thirty. So I stopped at the 821, had a burger and then, when the food was gone, continued with the longneck Miller High Life’s, which are damn near free. I like to go in, slap down a ten dollar bill, and say, “Keep ’em coming.”

With nothing to do until tonight except drink and sober up, I went at the former pursuit with some vigor.

It was dark when I stumbled up the steps. The wind had picked up, and the snow peppering my face had an icy feel to it.

Upstairs, I didn’t say much to Custalow, just reminded him that he had promised to drive me somewhere.

“When?”

“When I wake up.” And I asked him to rouse me at eight. I figured that would be late enough.

I’m glad for the wind and generally nasty conditions. It’ll make it easier to do what I mean to do.

I feel like a fool, chasing Bitsy’s long-shot hunch. I’ve learned that long shots seldom pay off. But if you don’t bet, you don’t win.

So here I am. The Simpsons’ old house looks as grand as Monticello in this light. My knowledge of old homes that are only sporadically lived in, though, tells me that a closer inspection would show broken tiles, half-empty rooms and water damage.

I don’t intend to do any home inspections tonight, though. I try to make my running shoes as silent as possible as I creep along the driveway, headed for the fence that separates me from the patio. I figure the wind covers what little noise I’m making. There’s a streetlight out front. When I get to the fence, I see that someone has left the light on over the back door, but there’s no other light either inside the house or out. I won’t be in total darkness, but close enough. The red fleece jacket probably wasn’t the best idea, but I forgot to change into my burglar’s clothes. I can feel the garden trowel sticking out of the pocket of my khakis every time I move.

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.