Stone Cold Dead (39 page)

More police arrived, as well as half the neighborhood who’d seen the cherry tops spinning. Wilbur Burch came to and claimed I’d pushed him down the stairs. When asked what he had been doing in my apartment after midnight, he couldn’t think of anything and asked for his lawyer instead. The police were willing to oblige him but soon discovered that Wilbur didn’t have a lawyer or even a dime to phone one.

“At least you can sleep soundly now that we know who tried to break in the other night,” said Palumbo.

“Was it you the other night, Joey?” I asked. He shook his head. “Dr. Dienst?”

“Certainly not, Miss Stone.”

“Then it must have been Burch,” said the cop.

I shivered. “No, I’m afraid not,” I said. “Wilbur told me he got into town this afternoon.”

“Then who was it?” asked Palumbo.

“I don’t know.”

“Now I bet you wish it was me,” said Joey. “I always knew you had a thing for me.”

Palumbo finished with the legalities and cuffed Joey. As he led him to the door, I reached out and touched Joey’s hand. He stopped and looked at me, nothing in his dark eyes.

“Thank you, Joey,” I said. “You were very brave.”

He shrugged it off and said it was no big deal. “Thanks for the bacon and eggs,” he said. “And the booze.”

“You served him liquor?” asked Dr. Dienst. “And bacon?”

“Can you do me one favor, Ellie?” asked Joey.

“Of course. What?”

“Take a picture of me and print it in the paper. I’ve never been in the paper before, and I think it would be cool.”

Palumbo had no objections. Dienst just stared. So I fetched my Leica from the other room, focused it on Joey and the arresting officer, Mike Palumbo, and clicked off five quick shots. Joey was pokerfaced in all of them. No expression on his lips or in his eyes. Perhaps a little sorrow, but nothing else.

Once he and Wilbur had been taken away to the station, Officer Palumbo came back upstairs and smiled apologetically.

“I got a call for a break-in on Prospect Street,” he said. “Otherwise I would have been here earlier.”

“All’s well that ends well,” I said.

“Are you okay?” he asked, squinting at my red cheeks.

I made a move to cover my face then blushed. “I’m fine. He just slapped me around a bit. Open hand.”

“Only a very small man strikes a woman,” he pronounced.

We stood in awkward silence for a moment. Then he asked if I might be free for dinner sometime.

I smiled. “Like when?”

He cleared his throat and coughed out an invitation for the following evening.

“Tomorrow night?” I asked. “Sunday?”

“Sunday and Monday are my days off,” he said. “If you’d rather not, I understand.”

“I’ve got to eat on Sundays too,” I said. “Sure, I’d love to.”

“I’ll pick you up at eight.”

SUNDAY, JANUARY 15, 1961

I read the Sunday papers over a hard roll and coffee in a booth at Fiorello’s. The University of Georgia had been ordered to admit two Negro students. President-elect Kennedy was preparing for the upcoming inauguration, while President Eisenhower was packing his bags.

“How’s your story coming along?” asked Fadge, who joined me in the booth during a lull in business.

“Things are heating up. I seem to have a target on my back.”

“I heard about your exciting night from Mrs. Giannetti,” said Fadge. “Sounds like you had every guy in town up in your apartment except me.”

“We had a party,” I said. “Joey Figlio and Wilbur Burch were going to fight to the death until the cops showed up.”

“Who’s Wilbur Burch?”

“Darleen Hicks’s betrothed. He’s AWOL from the army. Thinks Joey Figlio killed Darleen.”

“What’s Joey Figlio think?”

“He thinks the music teacher, Ted Russell, did it.”

“And what does Ellie Stone think?”

I considered his question. Quite legitimate at this stage of my investigation. Who did I think killed Darleen Hicks? There was no dearth of potentials, from Darleen’s own household to the neighbors to her various suitors. There was even the taxi driver, whom I had yet to locate. I couldn’t eliminate anyone yet, even if I felt the odds were longer for some.

The man currently under arrest in the county jail, Ted Russell, was slippery enough in my mind to be the killer, but the appearance of the corpse so close to his house made him look either very guilty (and stupid) or incredibly unlucky. The Mohawk had been running west to east—presumably—for millennia. No matter where Darleen Hicks had been dumped into the river upstream, she would certainly have had to pass Lock 10 eventually. It was Ted Russell’s bad luck that she got caught in the dam gate at Cranesville. He had admitted to giving Darleen money for an abortion. That confession wasn’t going to win anyone’s sympathy on a jury, even if he was innocent as he claimed. The stink of suspicion would cling to him for a long time.

Joey Figlio’s single-minded sense of purpose was remarkable. It pointed to his innocence, at least in my mind. But who knew how a damaged mind might behave? He was certainly jealous enough to kill for Darleen. What I didn’t know was whether he was jealous enough to kill Darleen herself. She had written to Wilbur, after all, that he had threatened to kill her if she left him for another. I was on the fence as to whether that letter was part of Darleen and Joey’s plan to raise money for their escape. But I couldn’t be sure either if Darleen had indeed intended to leave with Joey or use the money for some other unknown purpose. If that were the case, Joey might well have carried out the threat Darleen had described to Wilbur in her letter.

Louis Brossard. Just on the periphery of Darleen Hicks’s world, he, nevertheless, had been involved up to his elbows in the investigation of the alleged impropriety between the schoolgirl and the music teacher. Furthermore, a girl had disappeared from the school where he’d worked in Hudson. And there was the question of whether Darleen had ever asked him for money, as Ted Russell maintained and Brossard denied. Unlike Ted Russell and Joey Figlio and her own stepfather Dick Metzger, there were no clues to point to Louis Brossard beyond his general creepiness and the suggestion that he had been approached by the victim for money. By all accounts, even if Darleen had asked him for money, he’d refused. And he had an alibi for December 21. He had been at the superintendent’s Christmas banquet, and there was photographic evidence to prove it. I had found no other proof to clear any of the other men on my list. Finally, he just didn’t seem interested in girls, at least if I qualified as suitable bait. I confess that I suspected young Ted Jurczyk was more his speed.

Bobby Karl? Strange enough and interested in Darleen in an unhealthy way, but I hadn’t unearthed anything more to implicate him. He had no car or truck to transport the body from the Town of Florida to the river, where Darleen had ended up.

I had all but crossed Walt Rasmussen off my list. But he had admitted that he’d seen her just an hour or so before she was killed. I couldn’t ignore the overwhelming evidence that Darleen had met her end near or in the snow hills at the end of her road. Her lunch box and gloves had both turned up in the search. That pointed most probably to a quick end between four thirty and five fifteen or so. Walt Rasmussen lived within five minutes of the putative murder scene.

Ted Jurczyk was the all-American boy. A basketball star and smart, polite kid. He seemed to be too sweet and good to be mixed up in any of this sordid affair. And yet he was the one who had lured Darleen off the bus the day she died. He was surely one of the very last people to have seen her alive. Could I cross him off my list?

Then came the two men I suspected most of all.

Gus Arnold, the surly, old bus driver. He had changed his story about Darleen’s presence on his bus the day she disappeared. It seemed possible, even likely, that he had come across her along County Highway 58 as he finished his route. Furthermore, he had lied about having returned his bus to the depot, claiming he’d had a flat tire. Finally, and most damning, he had spent as much as an hour parked behind the snow hills, not far from where Darleen’s frozen gloves were recovered by the sheriff's deputies. He was old, but looked strong enough to carry a body through the bordering woods to the other side where her lunch box was discovered.

Which brought me to Dick Metzger. His denials of impure intentions while kissing Darleen on the lips, and the suggestion that he may have spied on her in her bath, had done nothing to convince me of the propriety of his relationship with his stepdaughter. He had threatened to beat her if she disobeyed him, and I had endured his wonton, lascivious gazes at my posterior. This man lusted after young women, that much I knew. I didn’t like him. He gave me the creeps in spades.

Darleen was one of those girls who attracted older men as well as boys her own age. Unwittingly, unintentionally, she radiated something that the male of the species detected and thought he could exploit, like a pickpocket who sizes up a vulnerable target. I believed her stepfather was one of those men. And if he wasn’t the killer, then there was at least one other of that breed somewhere on my list. I just wasn’t sure who.

“Ellie,” prompted Fadge, bringing me back to the present. “I asked what you thought? Who do you think killed her?”

“Sorry about that,” I said. “I have no idea.”

Fred Peruso was waiting for me in the doctors’ lounge at City Hospital when I arrived at eleven. He told me the autopsy was straightforward: death by strangulation. Darleen Hicks had been dead before she went into the water, which had preserved the body and, thus, much of the evidence.

“What evidence is that?” I asked.

“Her tissues and organs are intact,” he said. “It made determining the cause of death a lot easier. No guesswork.”

“And?” I asked. “What about the pregnancy?”

Fred paused to light a green cigar. “You were pretty sure about that,” he said. “Who told you she was pregnant anyhow?”

I didn’t want to say and deflected the question. “Why?”

“Well, you should let whoever told you know that it’s pretty hard to get pregnant when you’re a virgin.”

“A virgin?” I asked. “Are you sure?”

“Shall I draw a picture for you?” he said, puffing billows of blue smoke.

That came from left field. It changed materially the portrait of Darleen that I’d been forming in my head. The rumors and innuendo about her and men and boys. I felt no one was a reliable witness. And what of her quest for money? Perhaps she truly was planning to run off with Joey, and the abortion story was just a ruse. Or maybe she was a ruthless manipulator without scruples or concern for the boys who loved her. I hated myself for thinking ill of the dead, the victim, and a little girl at that, but I just wasn’t sure about her. This was the teenager who had been so kind to me in my moment of need. But even then, her kindness may have been a feint, perhaps no different from the scheme she’d hatched with Joey Figlio. Just a ploy to get what she wanted and nothing more.

“Was there any other physical evidence that might suggest what happened?” I asked Fred.

“Pretty simple,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Two hands around her neck, trachea crushed by intense pressure right about here,” and he indicated the location by touching his right index finger to my neck. I gulped.

“Nothing on her clothes? Nothing elsewhere on her body?”

Peruso shook his head. “Clothes? Everything had been torn away by the current. Everything except a belt around her midsection.”

I cringed. “Fred, I want to see the body.”