Stone Cold Dead (34 page)

I wasn’t willing to let Georgie Porgie off the hook this time for stealing my work. It was Saturday, with a special edition already on the streets, so there was no one in the office except Luba when I stormed in, ready to make my
J’accuse
speech. My frustration mounted. Charlie Reese was out of town, George Walsh was basking in glory that was rightfully mine, Artie Short was probably counting beans somewhere, and the offices were empty. I rifled through George Walsh’s desk drawers, hoping to find something I could use against him: my original story, perhaps, or pictures of him in ladies’ lingerie. But there was nothing. I would have to be content with the hope that he’d visit Fiorello’s very soon.

Then the City Desk phone rang. I didn’t want to answer it, for fear of barking at the person on the other end. But Luba was there, looking at me with hands turned upward, as if to ask what her broken English couldn’t: “Why don’t you answer it?”

I picked up the phone.

“Is this the
Republic
?” came an excited voice over the line. I said it was. “You got to get someone over to Cranesville right away,” the man said. “They just found a body stuck in the lock on the river.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I roared down Route 5, speeding toward Schenectady. To my right, the swollen Mohawk roiled and churned, a brown sludge coursing east, washing huge chunks of dislodged, melting ice down its throat. The river was running as high and fast as I’d ever seen it. I tried to outdrive it in my rush to reach Lock 10 at Cranesville.

Five county prowlers crouched on the side of the highway, just beside the railroad tracks and the huge, arching trestles that formed the lock and spanned the river. The gates were down, submerged into the rushing Mohawk, holding it back to the west, while releasing rockets of water out on the other side. The river was at least fifteen feet lower beyond the lock heading toward Schenectady. I marveled at the ferocity of the pitched battle between man and river, as if both had agreed to meet at this site to settle which would hold dominion over the Mohawk.

A big Packard Henney hearse sat behind the line of county cars facing the river, its back door swung open to the side, as the coroner, Fred Peruso, stood by with two uniformed crewmen and several county deputies. Bob Franklin, the police crime scene photographer, leaned against the hearse, his camera hanging from his hand. The Cranesville fire truck, a relic from the thirties, had made the quarter-mile trip across Route 5 from its station, ostensibly to put out any fires that might break out. Four volunteer firemen lounged about, smoking and chatting. Besides a couple of onlookers who had pulled off the highway to watch the scene, I was the only civilian present.

I called to Stan Pulaski, who was guarding the perimeter, and caught his attention. He waved for me to join him.

“The sheriff's over there,” he said, indicating the concrete deck of the lock near the edge of the river. The water roared over the gate just a few yards below his feet. Frank Olney and a man in a brown overcoat and fedora talked and pointed as they examined alternately the west and then the east side of the lock.

“What’s the scoop, Stan?” I asked, breathless, trying to see past him to the hearse.

“A state inspector came out here about an hour ago to check on the lock. To make sure it was working properly and not damaged by the fast water and ice. He found a little girl jammed in the gate. Stone cold dead.”

“Oh, God,” I choked. “Is it Darleen Hicks?”

Stan pursed his lips and nodded sadly. “That’s what the sheriff thinks. No positive ID yet.”

“Oh, God, oh, God,” I found myself repeating, feeling as if I’d been kicked in the stomach. Although I’d known in my heart she was dead since we found the unused bus ticket, this news hit me harder than I’d expected. This was the confirmation, the finality, the end. The girl who’d helped me when I was sick in the bathroom, the one whose risks mirrored mine at her age, that one: she was dead, dashed and buffeted against the cold steel of a mechanical lock by a raging river. “That poor girl,” I said, wiping the tears from my cheeks with my gloves.

“Take it easy, Ellie,” said Stan, handing me a handkerchief. “Come on over here and have a seat in the car.”

“No, I’m all right,” I said, pushing past him. “I want to talk to Frank.”

Stan tried to stop me, but Fred Peruso saw me and signaled it was okay. I reached him, and we stepped away from the others to speak privately.

“You always seem to appear when a body turns up,” said Fred, puffing on his pipe.

“I’ve been following this one,” I said. “I was at the paper when someone called with the tip. What can you tell me?”

“Looks like it’s the Hicks girl. Adolescent female, between thirteen and sixteen, I’d say.”

“Braces on her teeth?” I asked.

Fred nodded solemnly.

“Can I have a look at the body?”

“You don’t want to see it. Trust me. This isn’t like Jordan Shaw,” he said. “She was badly beaten up by the water. It’s not a pretty sight.”

I looked over Fred’s shoulder to the hearse, its back door still open, but the contents dark and invisible from my position.

“The body is remarkably well preserved,” he continued. “That tells me she’s been in the river since shortly after she died. Very little decomposition. Temperatures under forty degrees prevent most decay for extended periods. Imagine meat in your refrigerator. This is about the same thing.”

“But the weather’s been so warm,” I said, still trying to see inside the hearse.

“The river was frozen over until a couple of days ago. She was surely trapped in the cold water near the bottom for three or four weeks. Then when the ice began to melt and move, the fast currents must have dislodged her and carried her here.”

“Unless she was here all along,” came a voice behind us. Frank Olney. “Ellie,” he nodded to me.

“How do you mean, she was here all along?” asked Peruso.

“Just that,” said Frank, looking back west past the lock. “The most logical conclusion is that whoever killed her dumped her in the river somewhere back there. Not too far, I’d say.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Remember I asked you to keep that information about the bus ticket quiet?”

I frowned. “Yes. Too bad you didn’t ask the same of George Walsh.”

“What do you mean?” asked Frank.

“Georgie Porgie stole my story and printed it. There’s a special edition of the
Republic
this morning. Front page.”

Frank swore.

“What’s the difference now anyway?” I said. “Tomorrow the whole world will know Darleen Hicks was pulled out of the river dead. No need to keep it quiet anymore.”

I stewed, while Fred Peruso packed his pipe with tobacco and lit it. The sheriff glowered at the ground, then the river, then me.

“What makes you so sure the body went into the river near here?” asked Peruso, breaking the silence.

“Like I was saying,” began Frank. “I asked Ellie not to print some information that made it clear Darleen Hicks never left town when she disappeared. We found her bus ticket in her school locker. Unused.”

Peruso nodded.

“Well, I didn’t want her to print the story and tip our hand to whoever killed her.”

“What did you hope to gain by that?” asked the doctor.

“You never know,” said Frank. “Maybe nothing at all. But sometimes the killer will do something to reveal himself. No need to arm him with everything we know.”

“So, again,” pushed Peruso. “What makes you think Darleen Hicks went into the river here and not upstream somewhere?”

Frank turned and pointed to the hills to the north, just on the other side of Route 5.

“The guy I’ve had my eye on just so happens to live three hundred yards over there.”

“Ted Russell?” I asked, nearly gasping. The proximity was indeed compelling. I’d been in such a rush to reach the scene, I hadn’t even thought that Ted Russell’s house was so close. If not for the thick trees on the hill, it would have been clearly visible from our position near the river.

Frank nodded. “We’re looking for him right now. He wasn’t home when we went visiting a while back. We’ll get him.”

“So how do you think he did it?” I asked. “Just dumped the body in the river three and a half weeks ago?”

“Maybe. Or maybe more recently than that. We found her lunch box and gloves in the snow hills out near her house in the Town of Florida. I think he buried her there, then went back to dig her out later on.”

I considered Frank’s scenario. It seemed solid. The presence of the lunch box and the gloves in the snow hills, together with Walt Rasmussen’s sighting of Darleen around four p.m. on Route 5S on December 21, proved that she had been alive in the vicinity of her home that afternoon. The sheriff's theory that she’d been buried for some time also made sense. And it would explain the preservation of the body after twenty-four days. It was impossible to say how long the body might have been in the snow, but even if it had only been for a day or two, Fred Peruso said that interment in a snow bank would retard decomposition just as well as three weeks at the bottom of the river. Probably better.

In addition to this physical evidence, the sheriff had a handwritten love letter signed “Ted,” as well as a note signed with the same name discovered in Darleen’s lunch box. I hadn’t actually seen the latter, but Frank had described it well enough. Of course, I was convinced Ted Jurczyk had written those, but what if I was wrong? Standing on the banks of the raging Mohawk River, I had to concur with the sheriff. Things looked mighty bad for Ted Russell, dreamy music teacher, unprincipled Lothario, and seducer of little and not-so-little girls. That wasn’t exactly fair; Ted Russell hadn’t seduced me. I had known exactly what I was doing and could blame no one but myself for my poor judgment. I kicked myself—figuratively—yet again for having been so foolish. Why had I gone back to his place that night?

“Ellie, are you all right?” asked Frank, rousing me from my nightmares.

Before leaving the scene, I begged Fred Peruso to let me have a look at the body, but he refused. He finally agreed to meet with me after the autopsy at New Holland City Hospital Sunday morning.

“It’s not for kicks that I want to see her, Fred,” I said one last time. “It’s something very personal. Please.”

“Think it over,” he said. “If you still want to see her tomorrow, we’ll talk. But take my advice: You’ll regret it if you do.”

Frank Olney called his men together to dispense final marching orders. It was after four, and the light was falling fast. The hearse drove off with the body in the back, and I watched it disappear down Route 5, heading to New Holland. The wind was whipping cold from the west just as another county cruiser skidded to a stop on the shoulder of the road. Pat Halvey jumped out and ran to deliver an urgent message to Frank. I was just a few feet away.

“Sheriff,” he called, his breath puffing in the cold air. “I just heard that Joey Figlio attacked Ted Russell in the casual wear department of Mertens. He stabbed him in the neck with a knife.”

“Holy hell,” said Frank. “Where’s Russell now?”

“St. Joseph’s Hospital.”

“What about Figlio?”

Pat shook his head.

“Don’t tell me he got away again.”

“City police said he ran down Mohawk Place and disappeared over the railroad tracks by the river. They haven’t found him.”

The sheriff dispatched a car with two men to the hospital and ordered them to keep him apprised and to await instructions. Then he sent the rest of his deputies back to duty. Before he left, he sauntered over to talk to me.

“What’s first on your agenda?” I asked, wearing my reporter’s hat again.

He frowned and looked off into the distance. “I’ve got to go visit the Metzgers,” he said. “That’ll be a treat. I need one of them to ID the body.”

“Can I come with you? To break the news, I mean.”

“You actually
want
to do that?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Of course not. But I promised Irene Metzger I’d see this through to the end.”

“Let me take a rain check on that,” said Frank. “It wouldn’t look right. You’ll have to visit the family on your own.”

“I understand.”

“Ellie . . .” he began after a short pause. “About that story of yours.”

“Never mind, Frank,” I said. “You were right to ask me not to print it. It’s not your fault that George Walsh is a thief.”

His eyes expressed relief, even if he said nothing.

Long after the hearse had driven away with Darleen Hicks’s remains inside, and long after Fred Peruso and the sheriff had closed shop and decamped, I sat at the wheel of my Dodge Royal Lancer, scribbling notes for my story. A little after five, I pulled away from the shoulder and gained speed traveling east toward Schenectady, looking for a spot to make a U-turn. A few hundred feet along, I turned onto Cranes Hollow Road—the scene of my disgrace with Ted Russell—and wheeled around toward New Holland. My headlamps lit up a square signpost that read, “Congregation of Israel Cemetery.” It pointed off to the right. I veered up the narrow road that led to Ted Russell’s house but pulled over well short of it, cut the motor, and stepped out into the cool night air.