The Philadelphia Quarry Page 2

  “Wait,” Sarah says, setting down her beer. “What the hell is the Philadelphia Quarry?”

  “If you can rein in your ADD, all will be revealed.”

  “I haven’t taken Ritalin since I was ten,” she says.

  That morning, I was hung over. I had gotten off work at one, and then we’d gone over to Jack Wade’s house and wound down until we could all fail a Breathalyzer test.

  When the phone rang, I’d been asleep maybe four hours. Since it had happened at night, this one still fell to me.

  “There was a rape over in Windsor Farms last night,” the guy playing adult supervision that morning told me. “Find out what happened.”

  It got my attention. Most of our serious crime happens in less well-tended neighborhoods. About the worst thing that ever happened in Windsor Farms was some guy would earn himself a DUI coming back from the Commonwealth Club.

  “It was at some place called the Quarry.”

  The place had never been that well-known. One of my neighbors at the Prestwould calls it Richmond’s most exclusive club. I was never an invited guest until recently, but I had swam there, sans invitation or trunks, in my youth.

  I got dressed and headed out. Jeanette was leaving for work as I brushed my teeth. We had been married a little over a year, and she was still relatively tolerant of the fact that there was a serious time lag between when I got off work and when I returned to our little Bon Air apartment.

  I didn’t have a lot of great sources yet. I went to Gillespie because he was around the station that morning and I had played five-card draw with him.

  “It’s still under investigation,” he told me.

  I assured him that nothing he said would be quoted; I just wanted a starting point. “Just some background.”

  He looked around and then led me outside.

  “I gotta go on patrol. Come on and ride with me.”

  We left the station, and he started talking.

  They had gotten a call sometime after eleven. Somebody was swimming in the Philadelphia Quarry. Just some kids raising hell, but one of the neighbors had complained, and complaints from Windsor Farms were heeded.

  When they got there, Gillespie said, the kids ran for it. Most of them were able to get through the break in the fence and disappear into the night. One of them, though, the slowest, or maybe just the one who was farthest out in the water, couldn’t get out in time.

  “He said that they were out driving around, and then somebody said he knew where they could go swimming in some white guy’s pond.”

  It had been a sticky night, September on the calendar but August on your skin.

  They took Richard Slade back to the patrol car, but then the guy with Gillespie had said maybe they ought to take a look inside the fence, check for vandalism.

  Gillespie even then was hitting the doughnuts pretty good, and when we arrived at the Quarry that morning and I saw the hole in the fence, I had to smile at the thought of him squeezing his fat ass through.

  “So we went inside,” he told me, “checked around, gave it the once-over. Then we went over to this shack there, where people changed clothes, I guess.

  “And that’s where we found her.”

  Alicia Parker Simpson was sixteen. She was lying on a bench inside the men’s changing area. Her arms were tied over her head. The rope was attached to a hook on the wall behind her. Her panties, the only item of her clothing in the room, were stuffed in her mouth.

  They managed to find a robe someone had left there. When they helped her to her feet, she told them to please not tell her father.

  They asked her who did it, and she sat there, crying and shaking her head.

  Finally, Gillespie said he asked her if it was a black guy. They brought Richard Slade over and made him stand a few feet away, outside the open door to the changing room. She was silent for a few seconds, and then Gillespie said she nodded her head.

  The hospital confirmed what the cops there already knew, and they charged Richard Slade with rape.

  Gillespie told me who she was. We never ran her name in the paper.

  I covered the trial, the next spring.

  Slade, represented by a court-appointed attorney, never admitted to anything. They interrogated him for a few hours and got nothing but denials. Basically, it was her word against his.

  The other guys from the neighborhood, Richard’s so-called friends, took a powder. They were made to know that if they falsely claimed that Richard Slade was innocent, that they had only gone to the Quarry to sneak in a late-night swim (and maybe thumb their noses at the rich white folks who put fences up everywhere they wanted to go), that they could be charged with perjury. And they also could be charged as accomplices, although the girl said it had been only the one boy who raped her.

  Richard told them who the other boys were, and that they would vouch for him. But the other boys knew, and their parents knew better than them, how it was likely to play out. White girl says she was raped. Black boy says he didn’t do it. When his lawyer got them on the stand, they didn’t know nothin’. They weren’t sure whether Richard was with them all the time or not, just knew that, when they made a run for it, he wasn’t there.

  When it came time to step up for Richard Slade, everybody stepped back.

  Even his own family didn’t seem to believe him. Or they just decided to cut their losses. Whatever; by the end of the trial, it was just Philomena. I still remember her sitting there, clutching that ridiculously large purse that was searched meticulously every day by the guards, clinching and unclinching her hands, hoping to exchange a glance with her only child, waiting for the inevitable.

  The court-appointed attorney had advised him to forgo a jury trial. The lawyer, who was about two minutes out of law school, told me later, over a few beers and off the record, that he thought a judge would see the irrefutable fact: No one could prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that Richard Slade raped the girl. Hell, there was so much doubt shading that case that you needed a searchlight.

  But he hadn’t counted on the cops finessing the other boys into going deaf, dumb and blind.

  If it had happened a couple of years later, DNA probably would have cleared him, the way it finally, belatedly has now.

  Judge Cain chose to believe the girl. I suppose he thought that no one would put herself through a trial like that if she hadn’t actually been raped. Or maybe he was hardwired, when it came to black vs. white, to go with white.

  She wasn’t particularly convincing, but she never wavered. She had been coached well, no doubt. Her parents and older sister sat there every day, hard-eyed, firm-jawed counterparts to Philomena Slade. Alicia looked back at them often for eye contact and, I suppose, reassurance.

  When she broke down a couple of times, she only made the accused’s lawyer look like a bully. She never really gave a good answer as to why she was at the Quarry at that time of night, just something about “wanting to go for a swim.”

  Richard Slade got life. When the judge pronounced the verdict, I turned to look at Philomena Slade, but by then, she already had zipped up her sorrow and rage.

  Richard himself looked a little gut-shot, the way I would have looked upon receiving a life sentence at the age of seventeen.

  They took him away, and not much was heard of Richard Slade, except for his mother’s yearly letters to our editorial pages on the date of his conviction, demanding justice. They ran the first one and threw the others away, sometimes sharing them with the newsroom, for the amusement factor. They’ve done a half-assed mea culpa—or them-a culpa, since we have new Neanderthals doing our deep thinking now—for that “black day for justice” crap four years ago; but being one of our editorial writers apparently means never really having to say you’re sorry.

  When Mr. DNA entered the picture, people buried forever in black holes started turning up inconveniently innocent. Of course, it was hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, because every murderer and rapist in the federal system wanted some
kind of science-based exoneration, but finally it was Slade’s turn.

  Once they finally were able to compare that long-ago semen with Richard Slade’s present-day fluids, it seemed pretty cut-and-dried; but it still took four years and a month to get everyone on board. The commonwealth’s attorney, when all hope of keeping Slade in prison legitimately was lost, threw his predecessor to the lions and welcomed Richard Slade back to the land of the living.

  Sarah Goodnight is taking all this in as she finishes her fries.

  “Wow,” she says. “This guy must be sorely pissed.”

  “Funny thing, it didn’t seem that way.”

  Maybe the rage comes later, after the relief wears off. Before it’s over, I’m pretty sure the commonwealth will be giving Slade a nice little welcome-home gift, too. I don’t know if Marcus Green can make any money for his client and himself suing the girl’s family, but he ought to give it his best shot.

  We’re back in the newsroom by two thirty. It’s my day off, but news is news. If I hadn’t dragged my ass to court this morning, I know Mark Baer would have been there, poaching my story.

  Jackson tells me that Mal Wheelwright wants to see me. It seems wrong, being forced to have a sit-down with our managing editor on a day when I’m not even supposed to be here, but no good deed goes unpunished.

  I prefer to stand in Wheelie’s office. Makes the meetings go faster.

  “So, what’re you going to write?”

  He ought to know that already, but I explain it to him.

  He clears his throat.

  “Not too much about our, ah, editorial stance in the past? We don’t want to come across looking like the bad guys here.”

  “Well,” I say, yearning to win the lottery so I can tell Wheelie to go fuck himself, “we aren’t exactly the good guys.”

  “That was editorial.”

  Like the readers give a shit. Anybody who’s worked at a paper whose editorial writers have their heads up their asses knows how stupid you look when you say, “It’s not me; it’s them. Never mind that it comes in the same plastic wrapper. We’re news, not editorial.”

  That usually flies like a concrete block. Like it did with Philomena Slade.

  I ease his fears about my further sullying the reputation of this fine rag. It really isn’t fair to lay it all on Wheelie, anyhow. He’s just following orders. I’d have to go a couple of floors up, to the publisher’s office, to find the puppet master who’s pulling Wheelie’s strings. I can feel the pale fingers of James H. Grubbs all over this one.

  So I write the story of Richard Slade, such as I know it.

  I tell Sally Velez she’s got thirty minutes to read it before I check out. It’s almost happy hour, and I could use a couple of pints of happy.

  She obliges me, because she knows it’s easier to fix any problems the story might have with me sitting beside her, clean and sober. Reaching me later at Penny Lane, as I get happier and happier, can be difficult. Or so I’m told.

  “Not bad,” she says, after making a couple of changes that I grudgingly admit make it better.

  She asks me what happened when the Slades got home, and I have to tell her about my aborted ride. She seems to think it’s funny.

  She turns to face me.

  “What next? Are you going to try to see her?”

  “See who?”

  She sighs. Sally and I have known each other too long for this kind of bullshit.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I’m going to give it a shot anyhow. I’ll go out there tomorrow, I guess. She’ll probably slam the door in my face. I’m getting used to rejection.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Tuesday

  With the exception of three reportedly eventful and unhappy married years, Alicia Parker Simpson lives where she’s always lived. When she came back, she didn’t even take her husband’s name with her.

  The geezers at the paper, like Sally and Jackson and Ray Long and me, knew her back when. She worked as an intern one summer, at the publisher’s “request.” The old publisher, the one before Grubby, lived in the same Windsor Farms neighborhood as the Simpsons. He and Harper Simpson were bourbon buddies.

  She wasn’t bad. A little brittle, maybe. I doubt if I’d have taken her to a dirt nap the way I did Sarah when she was a cub reporter, but Alicia was a good writer, and she did several freelance features for us after she dropped out of Sweet Briar, before she got tired of journalism. The sense I had: Alicia Parker Simpson got tired very easily. After what she’d been through, the general consensus was that she was entitled to a little fatigue of the soul.

  We all knew who she was, of course. After the rape, the paper never mentioned her name, but Richmond isn’t that big a town. Everyone handled her with white linen gloves, and maybe that just made her more tired.

  Over the years, I’ve seen her from time to time.

  “There she is,” someone will whisper, and there she will be. We’ve even spoken a couple of times. She seems to know me, but maybe that’s just good manners.

  I ring the bell. Standing here, with the aspirin kicking in finally, in the sunshine and out of the wind, I’m feeling halfway human.

  I expect a maid to answer the door. Instead, a West End caricature greets me, although “greet” might not be quite the word I’m looking for.

  “Yes?” she says. “May I help you?”

  The woman in front of me bears a slight resemblance to Alicia Simpson. I tell her who I am and what I am.

  She gives me a firm handshake and identifies herself as Lewis Witt.

  I’ve mercifully never done a stint as society columnist, but Lewis Geneva Simpson Witt I know. Her picture shows up somewhere in our paper every week or so. She must be on every do-good board in the city. And she’s Alicia Simpson’s older sister.

  She invites me inside, then stops me a few steps beyond the door.

  “Alicia isn’t seeing anyone right now,” she explains, planting her athletic body in front of me. I’m guessing she’s about fifty, but she looks fine. She looks well-maintained. “I’m sure you can understand. It’s been quite a strain on her, with the news media and all. They aren’t all as polite as you.”

  Well, I did put my cigarette out before I knocked and squashed it flat on the stone walkway.

  I tell her that I know Alicia from when we worked together at the paper.

  Lewis Witt just nods and smiles slightly. I know the smile. It says No Sale.

  “Well, do you think Alicia might be willing to talk about it all at a later date?”

  “I don’t know. You might check back again. But I’m sure you understand this is a very difficult time.”

  There isn’t much left to do, short of getting arrested for trespassing. I give her my card, which she is polite enough not to throw away in front of me, and leave.

  As I’m walking back down the slate walkway toward my car, something makes me turn and look back.

  In one of the four upstairs windows I can see, Alicia Simpson is standing, the curtains half open. When she realizes I see her, she draws them back.

  It can’t be a lot of fun. As soon as the DNA evidence told the world that the great Commonwealth of Virginia had stolen twenty-eight years of some innocent black man’s life after he was falsely convicted of raping a pampered Windsor Farms teenager, the heat was on.

  We’ve been trying to get an interview ever since, but she has always refused. To Alicia’s credit, she did make a statement, in which she said that she was horrified to discover that it was possible an innocent man had been imprisoned on her testimony, but that she was sure, at the time, that she had been right.

  “Apparently,” her statement concluded, “I was wrong.”

  In the past four years, she’s never been unpleasant to the occasional reporter who manages to waylay her when she makes what seem to be more and more infrequent forays out of her home. But she’s usually with someone else, and that someone else usually whisks her away before she can be bothered.

  After Richard Sl
ade got the long-awaited writ of actual innocence, she issued another statement, apologizing for her long-ago mistake and wishing the alleged rapist well. For right now, it seems that’s all the fourth estate is going to get out of Alicia Parker Simpson.

  I have time to run back to my apartment and grab a quick bite before my real workday begins. Kate is still letting me rent from her, which I appreciate. I have come to think of the Prestwould as home. Most of the other residents are older than me, and most of them surely have bigger stock portfolios, but we get along. And in how many places can a fifty-something newspaper reporter be referred to on a regular basis as “young man”?

  Custalow is taking his lunch break. He’s sitting there at the table, looking out at the park six floors below, munching on one of the two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches he’s made for himself.

  “The hawk’s back,” he says. I walk closer to the window and see the red-tailed hawk that keeps the pigeon and squirrel population manageable. This time of year, you can spot him a mile away, a fat silhouette adorning the top of an oak tree like an ornament left over from Christmas.

  I observe that the radiators are making more noise than usual. Custalow glares at me like I’ve questioned his janitorial competence.

  “We’re working on it,” he says and tucks into the other sandwich.

  It works out pretty well. Abe Custalow has a roof over his head and something resembling a salary. I have an old friend to help me make the rent payment to my ex-wife.

  “Oh,” he says, “Clara Westbrook was looking for you.”

  Clara probably needs a light bulb replaced. Or just some company. The grande dame of the Prestwould is a social butterfly, and her friends keep leaving for “independent living” or the Great Beyond.

  “So Slade is finally free?”

  “Seems like it.”

  Abe finishes the second sandwich and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Good.”

  Abe Custalow has spent some time as a guest of the state, and it has occurred to me that he might have crossed paths with Richard Slade. I’ve never asked him. Prison isn’t something he really likes to talk about. I doubt he’ll want it mentioned in his obituary.