Stone Cold Dead (28 page)

“That’s absurd. It’s eleven in the morning. I haven’t been drinking.”

“Please come quietly, miss, or I’ll arrest you for resisting an officer.”

I soon realized that no amount of pleading or tears—which I refused to let fall from my eyes in front of that louse—could have persuaded him to let me go. I knew I wasn’t drunk, so he couldn’t make that stick, but he could charge me with resisting arrest if I didn’t comply. So I did. I grabbed my purse and umbrella and popped open the driver’s door, which, thanks to the protracted warm spell, was now unfrozen and functioning as designed. I stood up in the rain, opened my umbrella, and slammed the car door shut. Sergeant Joe Philbin, as I later found out he was called, put me in the back of his squad car and drove me off to the station downtown.

I’d visited the station many times in my capacity as a reporter, but I’d never made it beyond the lobby, where a duty sergeant sat behind a high, wooden desk, scratched and worn from decades of use. The desk, not the cop. This day was different. I was going into the clubhouse.

Philbin escorted me inside and left me in a dingy questioning room. I cooled my heels there for nearly an hour, sitting on a hard wooden chair, before the door opened, and Chief Patrick Finn stepped in.

“You’re always turning up somewhere, aren’t you?” he said, his red face practically throwing off heat. His was a drinker’s red, a flush that comes from within, not from sun- or windburn, and the edges of his nose showed a spiderweb of broken blood vessels. Not the pock-marked schnoz that Gus Arnold sported, but Chief Finn tipped the bottle, that much was obvious.

I cleared my throat. “May I ask why I’m being detained?”

“Detained?” he laughed. “Oh, you’re a classy one, aren’t you? Big words and a fancy job as a girl reporter.”

“I’m not lit, and I ain’t nicked nothin’ neither,” I said for his benefit, and just as sassy as it sounds. “I know my rights. Wait till my mouthpiece gets here.”

He smirked. “Real funny, girlie. You got a wise mouth, you know that? Some folks don’t appreciate your big-city sense of humor.” He pronounced “humor” without the
H
.

“I want to call my lawyer,” I said.

“First you’re gonna walk a straight line,” he said. “Get up.”

I said nothing but looked away and crossed my arms over my chest.

“Up,” he said, but I wouldn’t budge and pretended to be deaf.

Finn took a step toward me, and I grabbed onto the chair with both hands.

“‘Police Chief Roughs Up Girl,’” I said.

He stopped. “What? What are you talking about?”

“That will be the headline in tomorrow’s paper if you lay one finger on me.”

Finn waved a hand at me and chuckled. “I’m not going to touch you, girlie. You got a wild imagination.”

“I believe I have the right to make a phone call,” I said.

I phoned Charlie Reese, who wasn’t too happy to hear I was in stir. I assured him he couldn’t possibly be more upset than I was. He said he’d get me out as soon as he could.

After my phone call, Finn left me alone in the questioning room, door closed, for another forty-five minutes. He had taken my purse with him, so I had no pad, no pencil, no cigarettes. This was solitary confinement. I passed the time working out possible corruption stories I could write about Chief Finn and the NHPD. There was a shady investment that had panned out extremely well for the career cop: some property he’d bought just weeks before General Electric announced plans to build a research facility in nearby Saratoga County. As luck would have it, the land earmarked for the plant had recently been acquired by Finn. The rumor was that the police had hauled a GE executive in on a charge of corruption of a minor two months before Finn bought the land. Somehow, the man was never arrested, and the whole thing went away. I’d heard the story from Pat Halvey. Not the most reliable source, but he claimed he had buddies on the New Holland police force who’d given him the skinny. It would be sweet to serve the crooked cop his comeuppance and nail a pervert at the same time. I was thinking just that when the door sprung open, and Philbin told me I could go.

“What, no blood test?” I asked.

“No. Just a citation for a broken taillight,” he said with a smile.

“I don’t have a broken taillight.”

“You do now,” he said, handing me the ticket and my purse.

Outside in the lobby, Charlie was waiting for me with Sol Meshnick, the
Republic’s
lead counsel. Bespectacled and befuddled, nearing seventy, Sol tilted his head back on the fulcrum of his neck and inspected me as if looking for damage. He looked me up and down, taking his time and care as his eyes ran over my bust and the curves of my hips.

“I’m fine, Sol,” I said, pushing past the old lecher. “Let’s get out of here.”

Charlie drove me to collect my car, still parked in the slush where I’d left it. We didn’t say much to each other. He knew when not to test me, and I was so angry—both at the cops who’d harassed me for their own entertainment and the lawyer who’d ogled me for his—that Charlie kept the conversation to a minimum.

The rain had stopped, but the streets were still a sloppy mess, with puddles and mud everywhere. I examined the left taillight of my Dodge, broken very recently by what looked like a sharp kick from a black shoe. I sighed, climbed in, and drove off toward the
Republic
’s office on Main Street.

Norma Geary met me at the City Room door. She gave me a sidelong glance, as if playing it cool in front of potential witnesses, then told me to stop by her desk in the steno pool when I had a chance. I wanted to get my bus-ticket story down and into Composition before another hour had passed, but Norma squeezed my arm and said it was important. I dropped my purse on my desk and picked up an old memo to use as a prop for my visit to the steno pool.

“Why, you’re right, Miss Stone,” she said, holding my memo out at arm’s length, hamming it up for anyone in earshot. “That is quite a bad typo. I’ll redo it.” Then in a whisper, she told me it wasn’t safe to talk near her desk. “Let’s go downstairs to the alley for a smoke.”

“I didn’t know you smoked,” I said once we were outside. It was still warm enough to leave my coat unbuttoned.

“I don’t. But I know that Mr. Reese comes down here when he wants to sneak a cigarette. He’s not fooling anyone, by the way.”

“So what’s the big secret?” I asked, lighting a cigarette for myself.

“I suppose you already know that Mr. Walsh is on a bus heading back to New Holland,” she said. “But what you and he don’t know is that he got a telegram from the army base in Arizona today. From the office of the base commander. I was the only one here at lunchtime when the boy from Western Union delivered it, so I signed for the wire. You may recall it was raining quite hard at that hour. Well, the boy said a car barreled past him and knocked him over with a tidal wave of slush. He fell into a great big pothole filled with water and mud.”

“How awful!” I said. “And the driver didn’t stop?”

“No. Imagine that,” said Norma, shaking her head in woe. “Anyhow, that’s not the point of my story. When the boy handed me the telegram, it was soaking wet from the dunking he’d just had. The paper was nearly mush, and I could read everything without even opening it.”

“What did it say?”

Norma peeked around the corner of the building to make sure no one was listening. Once she was confident we were alone, she turned back to me. “It said Wilbur Burch has gone AWOL.”

Back at my desk, I rolled some paper and carbon into the typewriter and set about writing the story I’d been thinking about since Frank Olney and I had discovered the unused bus ticket in Darleen’s locker. There are times when I struggle to string three words together, when distraction short-circuits the connection between what I want to say and the tips of my fingers on the keys. In those moments, I labor to type correctly, mashing keys clumsily and jamming the type bars into a frozen pileup. I disengage the bars, rub out the misspelled words with an eraser, smudging the ink then tearing the paper. But it’s all an unconscious manifestation of the reluctance to concentrate on ordering the thoughts in my head.

Then other times, I type like a Horowitz of the steno pool, a virtuosa graduate of secretarial school, fingers and mind in perfect accord, words materializing as if by magic on the page.

I’ve never considered myself a wordsmith, but I had managed to sand most of the rough edges off my writing during my three years at the
Republic
. Charlie Reese was a good mentor, and I’d had plenty of opportunities to make dull-as-ditchwater stories sound interesting. From school-board meetings to Kiwanis Club Man-of-the-Year banquets to demolition derbies up in Fonda (actually, those are kind of fun), I’d had my share of stinkers to clean up and make presentable for the twelfth page of the second section of the paper. I’d learned to write those with my eyes closed. But when something that mattered to me came along, I pressed to make the piece perfect. It was often a slog. This day was different. With George Walsh’s imminent return, I felt the motivation more keenly than usual. I wrote fast and, in less than an hour, I had my story, which I thought, despite my haste, had turned out well—organized, logical, and succinct—and I was confident I’d written one of my best pieces.

I led with a dramatic headline: “Missing Girl No Runaway: Cash and Ticket Found Unused.” The public knew already, of course, that a lunch box had been found, but that didn’t prove conclusively that she hadn’t run off. There was no proof it was hers. And even if it was, perhaps she’d tossed it from a car window as she and an accomplice roared out of town for parts unknown. But the unused ticket—and even more telling—the wad of cash found in her locker, put to bed any reasonable doubts that Darleen Hicks had left town of her own volition.

My story traced the history of the evidence trail. I connected the dots on the timeline, from the December 21 disappearance to the discovery of the receipt in the Metzger home, which had led authorities to hope for the best. But the bus ticket and cash in her locker made it likely that the girl had met with foul play. And then, shortly after, the dramatic reappearance of the lunch box buried in the snow convinced the sheriff of the worst. I found myself painting a positively heroic portrait of Frank Olney, perhaps out of affection for him, but more likely out of guilt. My description, while somewhat embellished, was not far from the truth; the sheriff was carrying out a careful and thorough investigation, even if it hadn’t gotten off to the fastest start.

As I tore the final page from the typewriter, I knew it was good, that Charlie, and even Artie Short, would recognize my fine work. I pictured my byline and headline anchoring the front page in the upper right-hand corner. I had a photograph in mind as well: a low-angle shot of Sheriff Frank Olney, looking rugged and in charge under the floodlights at the snow hills. I’d taken it the evening the lunch box was found. But the best thing about the story was the drubbing it would represent for George Walsh. This article would wash him out of my hair for good, or at least for this story. He had a knack for ingratiating himself to the publisher, most probably by serving him toadying helpings of peas and potatoes with meatloaf whenever his wife invited Daddy over for supper.

“Yes?” asked Charlie, looking up when I rapped on the mahogany jamb of his open office door. “Come in, Ellie,” he said, waving at me.

“What are you working on?” I asked.

“This thaw,” he said, referring to the weather. “There’s a lot of snow, and now the big downpour today. I’ve been putting together a piece on the flood risks, interviewing a couple of engineers and meteorologists down in Albany. Did you know that they’re going to start lowering the gates on some of the locks east of town? All the way past Schenectady to Cohoes. That doesn’t happen often in winter, but the water is rising and they need to control it.”

Charlie loved engineering stories. He’d told me how he’d always wanted to build things, but settled into the newspaper biz after a summer job in the printing room back in the early twenties. Then he got married and had a couple of daughters. It was too late to change careers now, but he made sure that no one but himself ever got to do stories on bridges and highways and building demolitions. I loved listening to how excited he got about these things, even if the subject didn’t thrill me personally.