Dig (6 page)

“It’s a riot,” he said. His voice that told me that he was not exactly proud to be from a town that celebrates pumpkins.

“I’m from LaFargeville, New York,” I said in the same voice. “Three hundred people. Seven thousand cows.”

I didn’t take the same route back to the college. Instead I took the Indian Creek Parkway and wound through the bare oaks toward the athletic fields at the northern edge of the campus. It’s a somewhat isolated area, flatter than a pancake, separated from the campus and its adjoining residential streets by the creek and a long shale ridge. There are soccer and lacrosse fields there, the practice fields for the track and football teams, tennis courts, a winding asphalt jogging path, and, of course, the four back-to-back baseball fields where Dale Marabout told me Andrew had found Gordon’s car. Like the Wooster Pike landfill, it would be a perfect place to go unnoticed, especially in March when every day is shittier than the last. “I hope you don’t mind,” I said.

What could he say? We were already there, pulling into the parking lot alongside the baseball fields. “Where exactly was Gordon’s car?” I asked.

He pointed. “In front of the restrooms there.”

I drove up to the restrooms and stopped. We were a good two hundred yards from the jogging path, which presumably Andrew was using for his morning run. “You were able to recognize his car from quite a distance,” I said. My question sounded an awful lot like a police question and I immediately wished I’d asked it less skeptically.

“Professor Sweet drove an old pea-green Country Squire station wagon, the kind with fake wood panels on the sides. Big as a battleship. Not too many of those on the road anymore.”

It sounded reasonable. There weren’t too many 1987 Dodge Shadows on the road anymore either. “I’m sure you were relieved to see his car.”

“I figured maybe he was around here somewhere,” said Andrew. “Using the restroom. Hiking along the creek or something. But his car doors were unlocked and the keys were in the ignition. And his briefcase was on the back seat. His whole life was in that bag.”

“Now you got frantic?”

“I checked the restrooms—both sides—and yelled his name. I got in his car and started it—I thought maybe he’d had car trouble—and it ran just fine. Then I ran back to my apartment and got my car. I drove to his house again and then came back to the ball fields. I drove all over the place.”

“And then you drove out to the landfill?”

Andrew’s head bounced up and down like a basketball.

“I think I would have called the police first,” I said.

He raked back his wet hair. “I almost did. But I felt a little foolish, know what I’m saying? Like I was overreacting. I thought maybe he’d arranged to meet somebody here and drove out to the dig with them. He was always going out there. Even in the winter. I just wanted to make sure he was okay.”

Up to that point Andrew’s story had made sense to me. Now I could see why the police were interested in him. Why would he think Gordon was at the landfill if his car was here? With the doors unlocked and keys in the ignition? With his briefcase on the back seat? Wouldn’t Andrew suspect foul play by now? Wouldn’t he call the police by now? Even the dopey campus police? No matter how foolish he felt? There simply had to be more to the story, even if this Andrew J. Holloway III was telling the truth. “I apologize for putting you through all this again,” I said.

He tried to smile. “I know I don’t have the greatest alibi,” he said. “I can account for the hours I take classes and teach, and deliver pizzas, but I spend an awful lot of time alone in my apartment.”

I drove him back to Menominee Hall.

Chapter 6

Tuesday, March 20

After dropping Andrew off, I drove to Artie’s for a few things. I bought a half-pound of smoked turkey breast, a few slices of baby Swiss, a bag of freshly baked croissants, and a big jug of laundry detergent. When I got home I put three strips of bacon in the microwave. While they shriveled, I sliced one of the croissants. I piled the bottom half high with turkey and cheese. I squeezed a thick squiggle of horseradish sauce onto the top half. I piled the bacon in the middle and carefully put the croissant back together, so the pointy ends matched. I searched the shelves in the refrigerator door and behind my sticky, almost-empty bottle of maple syrup found a lone pickle spear swimming in a jar of green juice. I poured myself a glass of skim milk. I put it all on a tray and headed for the basement. Not to do the laundry. To conduct an archaeological dig of my own.

In the old days the morgue was a sea of filing cabinets. Stories were clipped from the paper, dated, and stuffed into manila envelopes. The envelopes were stuffed into the cabinets, alphabetically, sometimes by subject, sometimes by people’s last names. Finding what you wanted was always an adventure. Now we store everything in cyberspace.
Bink-bink-bink
on your keyboard and a story that might have taken you an hour to find in the old cabinets is hovering in front of your nose. Eric Chen, meanwhile, is slowly transferring all of the old files onto computer disks. As soon as he finishes with one of the old cabinets, that cabinet, files and all, goes straight into the back seat of my Dodge Shadow, and then down my basement steps. I bet I’ve got fifty of them down there. A few are painted an ugly green but most are what we used to call battleship gray. They are all exactly five feet high and 18 inches wide. They all have four deep drawers that require a determined tug to get open. Two or three nights a week—even when I’m not looking for anything in particular—I go down there and sift through the old clippings, remembering things I’d forgotten, stuffing my brain with things I never knew. I know it doesn’t say much about my social life but I just love it.

I put my lunch on the old chrome-legged kitchen table I keep by the dryer, pulled on the light, and headed for the D drawers.

Why the D drawers?

One reason was to see if any stories had ever been filed under
Dumps
, although that seemed unlikely. I couldn’t remember ever filing anything under that category in my forty-odd years in the morgue. But I knew
The Herald-Union
had written about the David Delarosa murder. There would be plenty in the D drawers about that.

Andrew, you see, had pointed me in a direction I was already beginning to point myself. But it wasn’t any of the interesting facts he told me about landfills, or archaeological techniques, or even the condition of Gordon’s body that got my mind working. It was his
perceptions
—which was ironic given his high-minded declaration that “perception doesn’t hold a candle to a trowel.”

According to Andrew, Gordon never let on that he was looking for something in particular. Yet Andrew clearly suspected that Gordon’s murder might be tied to something buried out there. “I’ve been wondering about that like everybody else,” he said. As an old beatnik might say, Andrew had picked up a vibe.

And so had I.

And so all the time I was at Artie’s, fighting my way through the aisles clogged with harried young moms, like some old salmon struggling up the rapids to spawn, my fertile mind was fixed not only on the fifties, but on the late fifties, and what might have happened all those years ago that touched Sweet Gordon’s life enough to make him go digging now. David Delarosa’s pretty face popped up again and again.

***

People are more ho-hum about murder these days. There are just so many of them. But back in the fifties, even in a big city like Hannawa, they rattled everybody. And David Delarosa’s murder sure rattled us. I remember Effie calling me in a panic. It was April 18, 1957, the Thursday before Easter. “Somebody’s killed Gordon’s new friend,” she said.

Just how Gordon met David Delarosa, I still don’t know. But all of a sudden Gordon started bringing him to the jazz clubs, and inviting him to our parties. He didn’t fit in and Gordon knew it. “Maybe David ain’t the hippest cat,” Gordon once told me, “but he’s cool enough in his own way, don’t you think?”

David Delarosa wasn’t an intellectual. He wasn’t artsy. He wasn’t angry or introspective or full of high ideals. He was just a fun-loving kid from Sandusky on a wrestling scholarship. And boy was he good looking! He was lean and muscular. He had curly black hair, which he wore quite long for those years, and full pouty lips just like that actor Sal Mineo. Instead of having black Mediterranean eyes like you’d expect, his eyes were a cool, spooky gray.

Anyway, two days into the spring break, somebody threw David Delarosa down the stairway of his apartment building and then bludgeoned his pretty face with something hard and heavy until he was dead. As far as anyone knew, there was only one suspect, a local bebop jazz musician named Sidney Spikes, who was held for a few days, badgered relentlessly and then released. A decade later Sidney, as I’ve said, would change his name to Shaka Bop and become a major political force in the city.

***

Just as I’d expected, there were no stories filed under
Dumps
. But there sure were under
Delarosa, David
. I took them to the table, took a big bite from my sandwich and leafed through the clippings. The fat, black headline in the Friday, April 19, 1957 edition of
The Herald-Union
declared:

The headline in the Easter Sunday edition hinted at the difficulty police were going to have solving David’s murder:

On Wednesday, May 1, there was this frustrating headline:

Then on Tuesday, May 7, this one:

Oh my, how sick we were when we first saw that story! We all just idolized Sidney. He was the only
Negro
most of us fluffy, white slices of Wonder Bread knew. He was smart and funny and handsome. And could he play that saxophone! We simply could not believe he was a suspect.

I remember sitting that night with Gordon at Mopey’s, nursing bowls of chili while the street outside filled with blowing snow. He yelled at his copy of
The Herald-Union
like it was God: “First you tell me David’s dead. Then you tell me maybe Sidney did it. Man, what you gonna tell me next? That the moon’s made out of cabbage?”

Three days later, on Friday, May 10, there was a happier headline:

We were still worked up about David’s murder—and the way the police were bungling the investigation—but the spring semester was slipping away and other things needed our attention. We took our finals. We graduated. Lawrence took his journalism degree and a 3.8 grade point average straight to
The Herald-Union
. I got a crappy part-time job at the city library scrubbing the sticky fingerprints off children’s books. Gordon and Chick got jobs at a local factory to help pay for graduate school. Effie drove across country with a professor who’d just gotten his divorce decree. Gwen and Rollie had a huge church wedding. Lawrence and I took the bus downtown and got married by the mayor.

A full twelve months went by before the next story on David’s murder appeared, on Sunday, May 17, 1958, in a black-bordered box across the top of Page One. The headline asked:

And that was the last of
The Herald-Union’
s stories on David Delarosa’s murder. I read the headlines again. Then I read the stories themselves, and then re-read them, three or four more times, until my brain and my heart were filled with a dump truck-full of questions. I put the Delarosa file under my arm and carried my dirty dishes upstairs to the sink. I combed my hair and dabbed on just enough makeup to make myself presentable. I drove downtown to
The Herald-Union
.

Eric spun around on his chair when he saw me. He pretended to be disappointed. “I was hoping you’d died.”

I threw my coat over the back of my chair and grabbed my mug. “So was I,” I said, “but I guess the good lord wants both of us to suffer a while longer.”

I went to the cafeteria and made myself a cup of tea and then sipped my way to Sports. Ed Boyer looked up from the funny pages he was reading. His chewing gum literally fell out of his mouth. “Mrs. Sprowls—everything all right?”

You can understand his alarm, can’t you? I regularly cut through Sports on my way to the cafeteria. But I never stop to chat. As far as I’m concerned, that ramshackle corner of the newsroom is a foreign country. They speak a different language. They have unfathomable customs. They wear bizarre native costumes. They eat indigestible things. “I was wondering if I could take a look at your old files,” I said.

Ed’s face went white with worry. “For?”

“I’m looking for information on a wrestler who was murdered many years ago—”

Ed was suddenly a statistic-spitting robot: “David Anthony Delarosa. Hemphill College. Wrestled in the 141-pound weight class his freshman year, 149 after that. Ohio Athletic Conference champ in fifty-four and five, All-American in fifty-six and seven.”

I’d long ago learned that sports reporters know more useless information than anybody on earth. I was impressed nonetheless. “How the hell you know all that?”

“He’s got a plaque in the field house,” Ed explained. “Between the concession stand and the toilets. You see it every time you go for a wiz.”

Ed led me to the storeroom by the back steps where Sports keeps its files. It was a filthy mess. “Do you have a plastic liner to catch the leachate?” I asked.

Despite all of my efforts, Ed never quite understood my joke. But he did know right where to find the file on David Delarosa. He accompanied me to the Xerox machine and chewed on his gum like a woodchuck while I made copies. I escaped to my desk just as fast as I could.

***

There was an inch of clippings on David Delarosa in the file but only one interested me. It was a column written by Ted Thomas, the paper’s sports editor at the time. It was dated Tuesday, December 9, 1957:

I went to the rack where we keep the phone books. I found the listings for Mallet Creek, a small town in neighboring Wyssock County. I found Howard Shay’s number and dialed it. It rang four times before triggering one of those damn recordings:
“Big Howie here! Sorry I’m not there to take your call. I’m down in sunny Flor-ee-dah wintering away the kid’s inheritance. Call back after the ground thaws!”

There was no beep to leave a message. Just a quick click. Whatever I might learn from David Delarosa’s old college roommate would have to wait. I took a deep breath and called Dale Marabout’s extension. “Busy, Mr. M?” I asked.

“As a termite in a toothpick factory. What’s up?”

“I just wanted to talk—about Gordon Sweet’s murder.”

I peeked across the newsroom and saw Dale glowering at me. I wiggled my fingers at him. “I know you told me to let the police handle it,” I said, “but I think maybe I’ve stumbled onto something.”

And so an hour later, after Dale had finished with his story for the next day’s paper, he and I were walking down the hill, wet wind chapping our faces, toward Ike’s Coffee Shop.