Stone Cold Dead (36 page)

I realized that my sabotage would only be temporary, but it served as a tonic for my frustration. I had toiled and sweated and frozen for the story that Georgie Porgie stole from my desk. If he wanted another scoop, he’d have to write it himself and learn to type all over again.

Satisfied with my work, I replaced the cover carefully, smoothed its wrinkles, and made good my escape undetected.

After my meltdown, I had to visit the sheriff without delay or never be able to show my face there again. I walked in, clearheaded and composed, as if nothing had happened, to speak to him and the district attorney.

“The jailbird herself,” said the DA.

“Thanks for getting me out, Don,” I said.

“Yeah, those morals charges are tough to beat.”

Frank didn’t appreciate that kind of humor in general. In particular, when it involved me, it seemed to pain him.

“Any word on Baby Face Nelson?” I asked.

Frank shook his head. “Last seen downtown, heading toward the river. If he fell in, he’s a goner.”

“What’ll happen when you find him?”

Frank smirked and nodded in the DA’s direction. “I’ll let the honorable district attorney break it to you.”

The Thin Man took a long, slow breath, then groaned in his typical manner. “The kid’s got to go back to Fulton,” he said. “Nothing we can do about it. He’s a minor.”

“Can’t you forget where you set him down until he’s eighteen?” I asked. “I’m afraid of that kid.”

“He won’t bother you,” said Don. “He’s got bigger worries now.”

I shook my head in disagreement. “Joey Figlio has exactly one worry: how to kill Ted Russell. Now that it’s certain that Darleen is dead, he has nothing else to live for.”

“Well, I’ve got Ted Russell now, and Joey Figlio ain’t getting near him,” said the sheriff.

“How about me?” I asked, aiming my best smile at him. “Can I get near him?”

Frank wasn’t keen on the idea.

“What about his lawyer?” I asked. “Who’s representing him?”

“Public defender,” said Don. “Some kid who just passed the bar. But I called the superintendent and the teacher’s union and told them to get on their horse and hire him a real lawyer.”

“How magnanimous of you,” I said. “Itching for a fair fight?”

“Not really,” said the DA. “If I think a guy’s guilty, I don’t care if he’s got a trained monkey for counsel. In fact, I prefer it. But I’m not convinced yet. There’s some circumstantial evidence, but this doesn’t look open and shut to me.”

“It does to me,” said Frank. “I got the girl’s dead body not four hundred yards from the guy’s house, plus a signed love letter and another handwritten note from him to the victim.”

“But why did he kill her?” I asked. “What was his motive?”

“I got a theory,” he said, and the DA and I waited for it. “She was planning to run off with another guy—that Wilbur Burch out in Arizona. Russell didn’t like the idea. Maybe he couldn’t stomach losing her.”

I exchanged a glance with the DA. “Seems pretty thin to me,” said Don to the sheriff. “But we’ll go slow on this and see. Maybe he’ll say something stupid to Ellie.”

I had one more nit to pick with the sheriff.

“Have you checked Ted Russell’s handwriting against the love letter and the note you found in the lunch box?” I asked.

“Yes, I have,” said Frank. “And they match. Both letters were written by the same hand.”

“No, I meant did you check them against a writing sample from Ted Russell?”

“Not yet,” he said. “But what are you driving at anyway? You don’t think he wrote those?”

I shook my head. “I’m positive he didn’t.”

“Then who did?”

“You’re not going to like it,” I said. “And neither will the adoring public.”

“Just tell me who you think wrote those letters to Darleen.”

“Teddy Jurczyk.”

“Holy hell,” said Frank, sitting up straight in his seat. The DA whistled through his teeth. “Are you saying that an All-American, straight-A, basketball hero murdered Darleen Hicks?”

“Of course not. But I believe he wrote the notes. According to Irene Metzger, he’s been in love with Darleen for years.”

“But the letter and the note were signed ‘Ted,’ not ‘Teddy,’” said Don.

“He told me he hates the name Teddy,” I said. “So he wouldn’t have signed the letters that way.”

Frank consulted a page from the open file on his desk, picked up the phone, and dialed. After a couple of rings, he asked for Leonard Platt, Ted Russell’s attorney.

“This is Sheriff Olney,” he said once he’d reached his party. “I’d like you to come over to the jail, if you don’t mind.” The man at the other end of the line said something, and Frank explained. “I need a handwriting sample from your client, and I want the whole thing to be done above board.” Another pause. “Well, I understand it’s Saturday, Mr. Platt, but I think this is a reasonable request.” Frank waited some more, frowned, then tried again. “
Gunsmoke
isn’t on till ten. You’ll be home long before that.” Another pause. “Don’t tell me you’re watching Lawrence Welk.” He listened a bit more then lost his temper. “Of course you’re not getting paid enough to come over on a Saturday night. You’re a public servant, you jackass. Just forget it. We’ve already impounded his car. We’ll check the briefcase he had inside. Good night, counselor,” and he slammed down the receiver.

At times like these, I truly admired Frank Olney.

“What?” he asked, noticing my adoring stare. “The guy deserves a better lawyer than that.”

“So do I get to talk to Ted Russell or not?”

I met the prisoner in a room reserved for interrogations and meetings with counsel. He entered the room in a gray county jail shirt and trousers. No stripes, but “Montgomery County Jail” was stenciled across the front and back of the oversized shirt. His hands were shackled before him. A precaution to protect me, I figured, just in case he really was a murderer. He was also sporting a large, white bandage on the right side of his neck. He looked scared.

“How are you, Ted?” I asked once he’d sat down.

He shrugged and said he was okay. “I agreed to meet with you, Ellie, because I want you to tell the world I’m innocent. I want you to print a story about me in the paper right away explaining that I did not kill Darleen Hicks.”

“How about you convince me first?” I said.

“I just can’t believe this is happening. It’s all one giant mistake.”

“How well did you really know Darleen Hicks?” I asked. “Is it true that you wrote her love letters and notes to arrange secret meetings after school and on the weekends?” Of course, I knew he hadn’t, but I wanted to get him talking.

“What? No! Never. I swear to you that I only knew that girl because she was in my music class. I never wrote her any notes or letters.” His eyes blurred just a touch with his last pronouncement, as if he’d just remembered something significant.

“This is the time to tell me everything, Ted,” I said. “If you want me to make your case, I have to believe you. Even if it looks bad, tell me now. It will only look worse later when it comes out.” I paused. “And it will come out.”

“There was nothing,” he said. “Yes, I wrote one note to her, but it was perfectly innocent. I even signed it ‘Mr. Russell.’”

“What was in the note?”

Ted chewed on my question for a good while, squirming in his seat and taking several long, deep breaths. I waited. I don’t like to fill dead air when I’m interviewing a subject. Eventually, people start talking, and if the hole in the conversation is large enough, they try to fill it.

“It sounds bad, but it really was innocent, I swear,” he said finally. “Look, she’d asked me to do her a favor, and the note I wrote to her was to tell her that I would do it.”

I stared deep into his eyes, almost gazing, not judging, but blank, inviting him to go on. He was sweating.

“She asked me for money,” he blurted out. “I said no, of course. At first. Then she said it was important and she really needed it.”

“How much money did she want?” I asked, feeling the impasse had been broken.

“Oh, she wanted a bundle,” he said, chuckling nervously. “She asked me for a hundred dollars. I don’t have that kind of money. I’m just a high-school music teacher.”

“But you relented and gave it to her?” I asked, thinking of the ninety-seven dollars the sheriff and I had found in Darleen’s locker.

“Not a hundred dollars, I didn’t,” he said with as much indignation as he could summon. “I gave her twenty dollars, and that was all I could spare.”

“What did she say the money was for?”

“She didn’t.”

Again the look in his eye. I waited and gazed.

“Okay, she told me.”

“So what did she say the money was for?”

Ted looked down at his hands, turning them over, buying time or steeling his nerve. He couldn’t look at me when he said it. And I shook when he did.

“She said she needed the money for an abortion,” he said softly.

I wrestled with that word. Probably harder than Ted Russell had struggled just to say it. A rush of memories buried deep and far almost took my breath away. I didn’t want Ted to see my reaction, but I was too stunned to do anything to conceal it. Enough surprises from this girl, I thought. Our meeting in the high-school girls’ room during a basketball game; my bottle of whiskey in her locker; the risks chanced; and now this. Darleen Hicks had crawled under my skin or at least wormed her way into my mind. There was something obsessive and compelling in her behavior, and too much of it dovetailed with my own life. This was nothing akin to my reaction to Jordan Shaw’s murder. I had felt sympathy for her, a connection of sorts, too. But it was cursory, perhaps even wished for by me. Darleen Hicks was different. Of course I felt sadness for Darleen, who had treated me kindly even while stealing my bottle of Scotch. But I felt more for her mother. And somewhere deep inside me, I felt remorse and bitterness and sorrow for myself. I couldn’t explain it without an overly simplistic solipsism that Darleen was me. The dead me.

I chased away the thoughts of my own abortion at the age of sixteen, the event that battered and choked my relationship with my father until the last breath of his life. Enough, I thought. That rotten corner of my memory had festered too long. It was over, and I wanted to get over it. I was going to get over it, put it behind me once and for all. Just as soon as I finished with Darleen Hicks. Just one more reason to solve the case and feel sorrow for a murdered girl, instead of for myself.

“Why would she ask you for money?” I resumed. Ted Russell was still looking at his hands. “It makes me suspicious that she went to you, almost as if you had a stake in the situation.”

“It’s not true, Ellie. I never laid a hand on that girl, never even smiled at her. And I wasn’t the only one she asked.”

“Then why did you agree to give her anything at all, even if it was only twenty dollars.”

“Because she threatened to say the baby was mine. I’d be ruined, don’t you see?”

Ted Russell stood up from his chair and paced the room, wringing his shackled hands as he went. I watched him carefully. He was frightened and desperate.

“Let’s change course,” I said. “You know Darleen’s body was found a quarter mile from your house. That looks very bad to the sheriff and the district attorney. They think you might have dumped her body in the river when the thaw started, or maybe even before, when the river was frozen.”

“That’s baloney,” he said, stopping his pacing to point his two hands at me in an attempt to emphasize his point. “There are signs posted along the river to the west of the locks. Do you know what they say? ‘Danger. Thin ice.’ The river was running down the middle of the channel even at the height of the freeze. I couldn’t have walked out there and thrown her body in. I would have broken through the ice.”

I raised an eyebrow and nodded. He had a good point. “But you could have climbed up on the concrete pier at the river’s edge and tossed her in.”

He thought for a second, tried to rearrange some facts in his head, then gave up in frustration.

Now it was my turn to rearrange some facts. If Ted Russell had dragged the dead girl up onto the pier to dispose of her body, why would he throw her in on the west side? Even with the gates up, she would still have to pass through the lock and risk getting snagged on some piece of metal. Why not just dump her on the opposite side, past the lock altogether, and send her floating off toward Scotia to the east?