The Philadelphia Quarry by Howard Owen

Author:Howard Owen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781579623494
Publisher: The Permanent Press
Published: 2013-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Saturday

Job One today is finding Bump Freeman. Richard Slade wasn’t quite sure which house is Freeman’s present abode, and it isn’t like I can pick up the damn phone and call Slade at the city lockup right now. So, off to the East End.

Nobody who lives there and doesn’t know me is going to give me the time of day, which is nine thirty A.M. when I park the car out front and knock on Philomena Slade’s front door.

It takes a little back-and-forth for her to decide that I might still be trying to help her son.

“So, are you on it or off it?” she asks me, with her arms crossed, standing like a bouncer behind her screen door.

“I’ve always been on it, Philomena.”

“So who was that white boy you brought around here yesterday?”

I explain to her, as honestly as I can, about being taken off the story. She grills me awhile longer.

Then she sighs and finally opens the door.

“You’re like one of those double agents,” she says. “You playing both sides against the middle.”

I want to tell her that I’ve been doing that my whole life, and making a pretty good living at it.

“Someday,” she says, her hands on her hips, “you’ve got to pick one team or the other.”

She tells me that Bump is living with his aunt, two blocks up the street on the other side. She gives me the house number.

“He wouldn’t look me in the eye for twenty years after Richard went away,” she says. “That boy has always been trouble. I think he was the one that got Richard and them to go to that white folks’ swimming hole that night.”

I thank her and start to leave.

“Wait a minute.”

I turn, and she’s putting on her overcoat.

“If they don’t know you, they’re not going to tell you anything.”

I thank her. She gives me a hard stare.

“It isn’t for you. It’s for Richard.”

The neighborhood goes downhill at a fairly steady pace between Philomena’s place and our destination. Bump Freeman’s aunt’s house is in the middle of the block, better kept-up than most of the ones around it. A couple of them look like they’re abandoned, waiting to be homesteaded by dealers or our fair city’s growing homeless population.

The sight of a presumed white guy, even accompanied by one of the neighborhood’s more solid citizens, apparently is enough to raise the alarm. A lady who appears to be about Philomena’s age finally opens the door a crack and asks, none too friendly, “What you want?”

I start to talk, but then my guide steps up and does the heavy lifting for me, explaining that we just want to find out whether Bump can vouch for her son’s comings and goings the week before, in the hours before Alicia Simpson’s brains were splattered all over her nice new car.

“Bump hasn’t done nothin.’ He’s been straight for almost two years,” the woman starts to protest. Philomena says she knows that’s true, but that Richard and Bump had a beer together down by the city docks, and it might help Richard if he could prove where he was.

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