No Stone Unturned (10 page)

I told Fadge about my discovery behind the Mohawk, but that Jean Trent seemed unwilling to help me find her handyman voyeur. Fadge pushed off the register and leaned toward me. His brown eyes, bulging from a thyroid condition, sparkled with amusement.

“She’s not going to turn him in, Ellie. Not her young rooster.”

“You’re telling me this Julio guy is . . .” I searched for the right word, “romantic with Jean Trent? She said he was just a kid.”

“About twenty-one,” said Fadge, pulling back to his position against the register. “And, by the way,
romantic
isn’t the right word.”

“She must be fifty years old,” I said, ignoring him. “What’s he see in her?”

“Who can say? Every Saturday night I see the prettiest girls in high school swooning over the cheapest punks and greasers in town. Nice, smart girls. Even girls like Jordan Shaw.”

“I thought she went out with Tom Quint,” I said.

“She did, but there was a goon she took up with for a while that last summer before college. His name was Pukey Boyle. A hood, a loser who never graduated high school. I kicked him out of here about five years ago for stealing magazines. After that, he used to wait in his car while Jordan bought him cigarettes. Now he sews fingers into gloves at Fowler’s Mill down by the river.”

“Seems like a strange match,” I said, recalling Judge Shaw’s shudder earlier that evening. “What do you suppose she saw in him?”

Fadge shrugged his shoulders and explained that a lot of New Holland girls displayed similar poor judgment at about that age.

“Puerto Rican boys don’t seem to be immune, either,” I added.

Fadge smiled. “A young kid like that has a roll with an experienced lady . . . I’m sure he was overwhelmed by the whole thing. Sex is pretty scary at first.”

“Sure,” I mumbled, “when you’re doing it with Jean Trent.”

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 1960

I rose the next morning at about five thirty. After dressing, I ran downstairs to fetch the Schenectady and Albany papers from the stoop in front of Fiorello’s. Fadge was always late, and people just took papers from the bundles left by the drivers. Back at my kitchen table, I found a two-column item on New Holland’s murder in the second section of the
Gazette
. “B
ODY
F
OUND IN
N
EW
H
OLLAND
W
OOD
,” announced the headline. The article was thin. I couldn’t believe my luck until I noticed the byline: Harvey Dunnolt, Montgomery County Bureau Chief. He obviously hadn’t bothered to look into the story; he didn’t even have the victim’s name. Harvey lived in Schenectady and only ventured west to New Holland for county-board meetings once a month. Now he’d missed the biggest story in years.

The
Times-Union
featured a concise, accurate story on the murder, but the
Knickerbocker News
had nothing. I smiled to myself and turned on WSCC, the local radio station. There were news flashes, bulletins, and a general frenzy over Jordan Shaw. The Capital District stations picked up on the story as the hour wore on. By eight, WGY, flagship station of the General Electric Company in Schenectady, was transmitting news of the New Holland murder as far as Montreal, Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland—I may be embellishing, but the weather
was
clear. I blessed Charlie Reese under my breath for the early edition.

The gravel lot of the Mohawk Motel was empty when I arrived at quarter to nine. Jean Trent had said this wasn’t her high season, but I wondered how she stayed in business.

“You again?” she said through the storm door. “You’re going to ruin my business with your newspaper stories. What do you want now?”

“I’m still trying to find Julio,” I said, unable to shake the vision of a fiftyish Jean Trent in bed with a teenager.

“You and the Royal Mounties. The sheriff was here yesterday looking for him. What did you tell him?”

“I never mentioned his name. May I come in?”

“No.” She held the door fast, her eyes difficult to read in the shadows. “I ain’t receiving visitors.”

“Where does Julio live?” I asked as nicely as I knew how.

“Down on the East End. I don’t know exactly.”

“Well, what’s his last name?”

“Some Rican name. How should I know?”

“You pay him, don’t you?”

“Cash. Never had to write a guy’s name on a dollar bill before. And I ain’t telling you nothing else,” she snapped. “You’ve already ruined me with your nosing around.”

She slammed the door shut and bolted it tight. I walked back to my car, and Jean watched me through a window as I drove away. Not ready to throw in the towel, I pulled into the Sinclair station a half mile up the road and called Frank Olney from the phone booth.

The sheriff told me he had indeed tried to find Julio the day before but hadn’t located him yet. He knew his last name, though, and gave it to me: Julio Hernandez, resident of 2 Hawk Street on the east end of town.

“He wasn’t there yesterday,” said Olney. “But we’ve got the city and state police looking for him.”

“I heard a rumor he and Jean Trent were playing house.” I can’t help looking for confirmations.

Frank chuckled. “Everyone knows that, Ellie.” He gloated over his small victory, and I let him.

“Have you asked for a warrant to search her place? You never know what you might find.”

“Uh, yeah, we’re working on that.” I could almost hear him scribbling a note to get a warrant. It seemed a little late in the game; if Jean Trent had wanted to get rid of incriminating evidence, she could have done so Saturday or Sunday.

“Will you take me along when you get it?” I asked.

Olney thought for a moment, then said sure. Before I hung up, he referred to my article in the
Republic
.

“That was a nice piece you wrote, Ellie,” he said, his tone conveying more gratitude than admiration. “You’re not like some smart-aleck reporters, just trying to shoot me in the rear. I appreciate that.”

Charlie Reese was a wise man.

“Just doing my job, Frank.”

I hung up the phone, intending to return to the Mohawk to do some exploring behind the motel. I was sure Jean Trent knew a lot more than she was telling, and I wanted the chance to prove it.

I left my car on the dirt path that led to the rear of the motel, and I approached on foot. The garbage cans, still flanked by the rusting junker and old television, anchored the clearing. The blue pickup was there, too, alongside a new arrival to the pastoral scene: a dark-green Pontiac station wagon woody, circa late forties. The massive chrome grill and bumpers were rusted, the fenders were dented, and the wood paneling had faded and blistered from neglect. But the car was sporting four new whitewall tires. I ducked my head under the chassis, looking for a triangular oil stain. The car was leaking oil, all right, but in steady drops, forming a tacky, black pool in the dirt. No triangle. I stood up, brushed the dirt from my hands and knees, then tested the car door. Open; this was New Holland, after all. No one locked doors. I slid in on the passenger side and tried the glove compartment, which opened on command. Inside, I found a crumpled package of Pall Malls, a broken flashlight, varicolored fuses, and one size D Ray-O-Vac battery. No registration or insurance papers. I noticed, however, that the inspection sticker on the windshield was dated 1959 and had expired seven months earlier.

The ashtray overflowed with Pall Mall and Salem butts, while a couple of empty root beer bottles and peppermint gum wrappers lay strewn about the floor. I found three nickels and six pennies under the seat, along with a small, black, metallic canister. Nearby, a lonesome cap, made of the same material, was collecting crud. I recognized these last two items immediately; I had at least a hundred just like them in my refrigerator at that very moment: film canisters. I shimmied across the bench seat to exit on the driver’s side and noticed the seat was in its rearmost position, far from the controls. Either little Jean Trent had been wrestling behind the wheel, or someone else had been driving the car.

I climbed out, closing the door gently, and crept to the rear of the Mohawk. Dipping into the bushes with my camera at the ready, I slipped along the wall to the center of the complex: Jean Trent’s room. To my surprise, I found each louver secured on its hinge. The opaque glass thwarted any chance of seeing inside. I tried two other windows that had been loose the day before and found them closed tight. Afraid to press my luck any further, I pushed through the heavy brush and returned to the dirt road where I’d parked my car.

Once off Jean Trent’s property, I stopped to put my camera back in its case. As I slid it inside, the lens cap popped off and fell to the ground. Bending over to pick it up, I came nose to nose with a triangular oil spot.

Actually, there were two sets of triangular oil spots, a couple of feet apart. But the pattern was identical to the one I’d seen on the service road, though somewhat smaller. I snapped a few frames of the triangles, then returned to my car a little farther down the road. Heading back into town, I stopped at a corner phone booth to try the Boston number again. Still no answer. There was always Western Union, but that wasn’t the fastest way to research a story.