The Philadelphia Quarry Read online

  OTHER BOOKS BY HOWARD OWEN

  Littlejohn

  Fat Lightning

  Answers to Lucky

  The Measured Man

  Harry and Ruth

  The Rail

  Turn Signal

  Rock of Ages

  The Reckoning

  Oregon Hill

  Howard Owen

  The

  Philadelphia

  Quarry

  Copyright © 2013 by Howard Owen

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Owen, Howard—

  The Philadelphia Quarry / Howard Owen.

  pages cm.

  ISBN 978-1-57962-335-7

  eISBN 978-1-57962-349-4

  1. Reporters and reporting—Fiction. 2. Murder—

  Investigation—Fiction. 3. Richmond (Va.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3565.W552P55 2013

  813’.54—dc23

  2013009167

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Karen, as always

  CHAPTER ONE

  Monday, January 17

  The morgue is self-serve, which isn’t the best of news, because some of our reporters are mechanically challenged, and there’s no one there to teach them for the third time how to thread the microfilm machine. Watching someone like Ray Long try to do it, Jackson noted once, was like watching a monkey try to fuck a football.

  The files for August of 1983 weren’t between July and September, of course. They were after April, like someone thought the months should be alphabetized.

  But I finally found Richard Slade, at the time of his arrest.

  He looked even younger than his seventeen years. I didn’t remember that, didn’t remember much about it at all.

  He wouldn’t be convicted until May of the following year, but he never saw unfettered daylight again. Until today.

  It is instructive to see what that much prison can do to a man.

  The Richard Slade who stands today, waiting for some white man to undo what another one did in 1984, has been reborn—probably, I’m thinking, not in a good way.

  He wears glasses now. When he walks, you can see that he has picked up a limp at Red Onion or Greensville that makes him seem old and arthritic. In addition to those twenty-seven-plus years he lost, he’s probably aged another ten. But it’s the beaten-down aspect that really stands out. Richard Slade, 1983 version, was, from my memory and catch-up reading, a big talker, a smart kid who also was a smart-ass. He would have been called uppity if he’d been born a little earlier. It didn’t endear him, I’m sure, to Judge Cain, who wore a Confederate flag tiepin when he drank bourbon at the Commonwealth Club.

  Richard Slade, 2011 version, seems as nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs, like a man trying his level best to be humble for fear that anything else might cause him to wake up in his cell after a particularly good dream. When the judge pounds his gavel, he jumps a little. I want to tell him to chill. The Court of Appeals has already issued what they call the “writ of actual innocence.” He is exonerated. Unless he shoots somebody here in this dingy-ass courtroom, he’s walking.

  This judge expresses his regret over the state’s mistake. He sounds about as sincere as I’d expect, but he does say the magic words:

  “You are now free to go.”

  An older woman in the seats just behind Slade leans forward and rubs his back. She doesn’t cry, or shout hosannas, the way much of what appears to be his family does. The uproar causes the judge to bang his gavel and utter some bullshit about clearing the court, as if everyone can’t wait to do just that before he changes his mind. The woman just closes her eyes and rests her forehead against her son’s spine.

  Philomena Slade has aged more than twenty-seven years, too.

  As they leave the old building, the celebration kicks into another gear. Slade’s mother is holding on to his right arm, and various people who might be cousins are tugging at him, taking turns hugging him. They are not a petite family, and I fear that some of the more amply endowed women might smother him. Other than the limp, Slade is prison-fit, not an ounce of fat on him.

  The state was kind enough to allow him to wear the suit Philomena no doubt bought for him. I guess it’s the first time he’s worn civilian threads in his adult life.

  On Slade’s left side is his lawyer. Marcus Green is wearing his usual: a $500 suit and a perpetual frown. Looking at him and Richard Slade, you’d think it was Green who had been done wrong by the state the past twenty-seven years.

  Standing next to Green is the Jewish lawyer from Boston who picked Slade out of the sizable lottery of potentially innocent prisoners and took up his cause four years ago. It’s taken that long to get from there to here, and I wonder why Slade had to count on some skinny, myopic guy from Up North who talks funny to deliver him.

  In addition to the family, there’s us, the News Media. I cringe to be a part of this club, clawing and scratching for a piece of the newly freed man. All four local TV stations and a couple from Washington have sent their hairpieces and camera goons over. Then there’s our photographer, a couple of freelance reporters and one from the Post, and half a dozen guys with iPhones and other high-tech wonders. And here I stand with my notepad. I am the only person out here using a pen and paper. A couple of the young Tweeters are looking at me like I’m some exhibit at the Newseum. “Look! He’s even wearing a wristwatch!”

  A fight almost breaks out between a couple of the Slade cousins and two of the more obnoxious camera guys, who now look as if they’d like to be somewhere else. A deputy moves in our direction, but then Marcus Green stops at the bottom of the courthouse steps, moves in front of the Boston lawyer, and holds up his right hand. The cameramen and cousins part.

  “We are here to celebrate the commonwealth’s belated effort to bring justice to an innocent man,” Green says, and I can see that he’s getting into his preacher mode. “We all know that justice delayed is justice denied. We all know that this man, Richard Slade, has endured the unendurable, left to rot by a system that enslaved and marginalized his ancestors, that came this close”—Green holds his right forefinger and thumb half an inch apart—“this close to burying him alive forever.

  “Moses was never allowed to enter the Promised Land, only to glimpse it from afar. Richard Slade is able to walk, proud and free, back to the fresh air and sunshine of freedom.”

  A “Praise Jesus” escapes from the crowd.

  Green stops and pauses for effect. Everything Marcus Green does in public is for effect.

  “And there’s nothing they can do about it except stand and watch. The police can’t keep him from shucking his chains. The courts can’t do it. The racist system can’t do it.” He fails to mention that it was “the system” that just freed him.

  Green pauses and looks at me. I’m about ten feet away, half-hidden by a fat guy wielding a fifty-pound camera.

  “Not even the news media can do it.”

  I hear a couple of muttered “amens” and “uh-huhs.” Green has managed to turn the crowd’s attention toward me. I suppose that I’m the one person here who looks like the stereotype of the newspaper guy.

  That’s it, Marcus, you asshole. Throw me under the bus.

  True, the people I work for haven’t been Richard Slade’s BFF. There was an editorial back in 1984 that more o
r less advocated bringing back public hangings. A search in more recent archives, the ones I can bring up on my computer, shows a distinct lack of sympathy for a man who, according to Mr. DNA, did not do it.

  Green eventually shuts up. The crowd seems not to know exactly what to do next. Then, one of the cousins announces that they’re all invited over to Momma Phil’s, “where the real celebration gonna be.”

  He pauses and looks at all the hunter-gatherers of news and gives his best Mr. T scowl.

  “No damn media,” he says.

  No one’s been able to really talk with Richard Slade himself, other than to get a very small sound bite as he left the courthouse.

  “Richard! Richard! How does it feel to be free?” some genius journalist shouted as he was being escorted toward the door.

  He just looked at the woman who asked the day’s dumbest question so far.

  “Feels good,” was all he said.

  Now, as everyone heads toward their cars, Slade and his mother are led by Green to the lawyer’s shiny black Yukon.

  I’ve known Marcus Green since the first time he had Richard Slade for a client. I know and he knows that he owes me one after the stunt he’s just pulled. Owing and paying are two different things, but it’s worth a try.

  I slip past one of the cousins and fall into step beside Green, who can only go as fast as Philomena Slade, whose arm he has.

  “Can I catch a ride?”

  Green acts as if he doesn’t know me, then seems amused.

  “Willie,” he says. “Willie Black. Well, well. I’m surprised that rag you work for is covering this, it being a ‘black day for justice’ and all.”

  “I don’t write the editorials, Marcus.”

  It had not been one of our editorial department’s finest hours, but, Jesus Christ, it was four years ago.

  Back in 2007, when Stephen Fein of Boston first got publicly involved in Slade’s case through the Innocence Project and called his first press conference—accompanied by co-counsel Marcus Green—our self-appointed judges were not amused.

  The editorial that Green remembers fulminated about the possibility of releasing the man who had committed such a heinous crime.

  “It will be a black day for justice,” our editorial concluded, “if this scourge is allowed to walk free.”

  Our newsroom tends to be a bit more liberal than our editorial department (“Fuck,” Sally Velez once said when someone presented her with that bit of insight. “What isn’t?”), and many wondered if our deep thinkers on the first floor had gone completely tone-deaf.

  Now that Richard Slade has been exonerated, those words might as well be etched in stone in the black community. The weekly that has anointed itself as the voice of Richmond’s African-American majority actually came up with a good headline last week, when it became clear that this was going to be Slade’s own personal Juneteenth: Day for Black Justice.

  Green looks at me for a few seconds. Other reporters are trying unsuccessfully to get past what has now become a human cordon around the car.

  “C’mon,” he says. He gets in the front seat, with the driver. I scurry into the second row, with Richard and Philomena Slade.

  We’re moving before I introduce myself to them.

  Richard Slade doesn’t say much. He seems to be concerned with looking out the window like he’s trying to remember it all. It can’t be more than forty degrees outside, but he lowers his window, after Philomena shows him which button to push.

  I ask Slade when exactly he knew for sure he was going to be a free man.

  He turns his head back toward me and is quiet for a few seconds.

  Finally: “I’m still not sure. Not sure yet. Won’t be sure until we get home.”

  His mother turns to me after I’ve asked Slade a few more questions.

  “What paper?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “What paper are you from?”

  I tell her. I think I hear Marcus Green snort in the front seat.

  Her face is hard, as if it has been baked on by her often-solitary battle to free her son.

  Finally, she says it. “Get out.”

  I don’t say anything. It’s suddenly very warm in here, and I wish I had a smoke.

  “Get out! Get out of this damn car!”

  Green looks back. I think even he is a little surprised by the sudden violence from this small, self-contained woman. He doesn’t care that she has begun to hit and kick me, as best she can in such tight quarters, but I don’t think he knew this would happen.

  “Careful, Momma,” Richard says, trying to quell her, and Green looks concerned for his upholstery.

  Finally, he tells the driver to pull over.

  “You put him in there!” she’s shouting as I slide away from her and out the door in a somewhat frayed district of our fair, careworn city.

  “I’m sorry, man,” Green says, trying to stifle a giggle. “But you were the one that wanted a ride.”

  The car tears away. I pull my cellphone out of my pocket. Sarah Goodnight answers on the fourth ring.

  “I need you to come get me.” I’m walking toward a street sign and give her the name when I can finally read it.

  “Did you get an interview?”

  I’m fishing for my cigarettes with my free hand while I answer her.

  “More like it got me.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  I pitch the Camel and get into Sarah’s Hyundai.

  “Rough day?” she asks, either smirking or smiling.

  “I’ve had worse.”

  I tell her about my morning, and about how much I want to kick Marcus Green’s ass.

  We go to the hole-in-the-wall across the street from the paper for lunch. No sense in rushing into the day. I forgo a beer, ordering iced tea instead, but then Sarah surprises me by ordering a Miller Lite.

  “Are you old enough to drink this early in the day?”

  She flips me the bird.

  “The way things are going around here, they ought to make beer mandatory,” she says.

  Sarah’s too young to get really cynical about this business, and she hasn’t been around newspapers long enough to remember the good times and have a fair basis for comparison. One thing I have learned: You never really appreciate the good stuff when it’s here. You take things for granted, things like raises and decent health insurance and the knowledge that your job probably will be there tomorrow.

  But Sarah’s giving it a good try.

  “You know what Grubby wants me to do?”

  I offer a guess. She gives me a disgusted look and tells me to keep my mind on a higher plane, that Grubby isn’t like that.

  Probably not, I concede.

  “OK. What, then?”

  “He wants to loan me out to SOP.”

  I suggest that my original guess wouldn’t have been as disgusting.

  SOP is Sense of Place. It’s our version of the special section every newspaper does every year. It’s full of stories about various aspects of “our community,” whatever that is. By a remarkable coincidence, the stories we do often are about some of the same organizations that buy full-page ads in the section. It comes out every August. We do it because it makes money, but I don’t think SOP is ever going to be nominated for a Pulitzer.

  Grubby is our publisher, James H. Grubbs. We have a managing editor, but sometimes Grubby can’t help himself and has to drill down through about four layers of management and take the hands-on approach.

  “I’ll have to ‘coordinate’ with advertising,” she wails.

  There’s not much choice, though. She and I both know that. There are ads on the section fronts, little sticky note ads attached to A1, and ad salespeople sit in on our afternoon meetings. Back in the day, like about six or seven years ago, that would have been about as permissible as pork chops in Mecca.

  But we’ve all found out just how low we’ll go when the bottom line is below sea level and health insurance is a privilege instead of a given.

  I
suggest that she might not ought to refer to our publisher as Grubby.

  “Why not?” She takes a swig. “You old farts call him that.”

  I’m stung. I am too courtly, or not stupid enough, to tell her that I wasn’t too old for her on one memorable (for me, at least) occasion. Best not to go there. I am trying to be good, and she probably doesn’t even have to try. Hell, she might not remember.

  “Well,” I say, “we usually try not to say it where he can hear it.”

  Sarah shrugs. She’s twenty-four. She has options. Oh, to be in the don’t-give-a-shit years again.

  “So,” she says, “what’re you going to write? I mean, you were there for the trial, right? Back in, like, 1983?”

  Eighty-four, I tell her.

  “Wow,” she says, “that was the year my older brother was born.”

  “Cool,” I reply.

  “So, bring me up to speed.”

  I give her the CliffsNotes version, from what I remember and what I’ve read in the morgue.

  I was younger than Sarah is now when it happened, in my first full year at the paper. I’d worked for them some in college, and they probably hired me because I’d already become a dependable designated driver for some of the older editors, who liked it that I didn’t roll my eyes, outwardly at least, when they started telling the old, old stories.

  Night cops was what they put you on, still is, when you’re low man or woman on the politically incorrect totem pole. How I’m back on that beat is a long story nobody cares or has time to hear.

  “It happened the week after Labor Day. They made the arrest late on a Wednesday night, and we didn’t hear about it until the next morning.

  “I had to rely on the only cop I knew very well at the time, guy named Gillespie . . .”

  “Gillespie? The fat guy who’s always trying to tell me dirty jokes from, like, 1957?”

  Sarah has done a few turns on the night cops beat, trying to work off her natural overload of curiosity and energy.

  “Well,” I say, forced to semi-defend the indefensible, “he wasn’t so bad back then.

  “Anyhow, I had to depend on Gillespie to tell me what really happened at the Philadelphia Quarry.”