The Philadelphia Quarry Read Online Free PDF Page B

me.
    “You can go up to the floor, though,” she says, “and maybe go to the family waiting room.”
    I thank her and ask her when Goat’s going to be back in town.
    “Ah,” she says, “he’s too big for Oregon Hill now. I think he’s high-hatting us.”
    “Hard to believe a guy named Goat could high-hat anybody, even if he is a college president.”
    She laughs and sends me on my way.
    It isn’t that easy finding the family room. I’ve never been in a big hospital yet that wasn’t designed along the same lines as those corn mazes every farmer these days seems to create for the city folk to get lost in. By the time I reach my destination, I have met the same dazed-looking older couple twice. I want to help them, but I can barely help myself.
    The family room is the kind of place you never want to be unless you must. Everybody in there has a loved one, or at least a relative, hanging by a thread. The fear and despair are as thick as a river-bottom fog. Teaching hospitals are where they send you when nothing less can possibly save you; and ICUs in teaching hospitals are where skill has to turn the wheel over to luck and prayer, and the prayers don’t get answered on anything like a regular basis.
    When I walk in, the first person I see is Carl Witt. I recognize Lewis Witt’s husband from his photographs, which regularly adorn the paper’s pages, either for his work as an attorney or with Lewis on his arm at some fundraiser.
    He’s sitting forward, his elbows resting on his thighs and his hands clasped together. He seems to be dozing, but then he looks up at me, and I see that he’s wide awake.
    “Yes?” he says. He can see that I’m not a doctor. The way I’m dressed, he might think I’m one of the neighborhood’s homeless who wander in occasionally, looking for free medical attention or just warmth.
    “I heard about Alicia,” I say. “I used to work with her.” Well, that’s not technically a lie.
    “Where?”
    At the paper, I tell him.
    The nickel drops.
    “Ah,” he says. “You guys don’t waste much time, do you?”
    I say nothing. Somebody with a family member headed for the light doesn’t really care to hear about the public’s right to know. Anyhow, this story probably is more about the public’s thirst for information it doesn’t really need, a.k.a. entertainment. And we are entertainment’s eager little handmaidens.
    He sighs.
    “Well,” he says, “everybody’s got a job to do.”
    Witt, being a corporate lawyer, understands how it feels to be a notch or two below whale shit in the public’s pecking order. But at least corporate lawyers get paid pretty well. I once asked Kate why she didn’t go for the money instead of trying to change the world through our criminal justice system.
    She asked me why I turned down that PR job they offered me at Philip Morris, since I was pretty much single-handedly propping up the tobacco industry anyhow.
    “You could get some of your cigarette money back,” she said.
    I told her that even scum-sucking, Commie journalists like me had their standards.
    Carl Witt is willing, once we’ve gotten past our opening parry, to tell as much as he knows about “the incident.”
    “Alicia gets up every morning and goes to work out. God knows why. She weighs about ninety damn pounds. But she gets to that gym on West Main by five thirty, and she’s out by seven. She says it’s pretty empty that time of day.”
    They found her car, with the engine running, rammed into a parking meter just beyond the stoplight where West Cary crosses Meadow. A city cop came by and saw that the driver was slumped over the steering wheel. He thought he might have a case of severely drunk driving on his hands, but then he saw that the side window was shot out. And then he saw all the blood.
    “They told Lewis that the rescue squad was there in less than ten minutes, but I don’t know if there was much they could do. Lewis is back there now. They’re not supposed to let