Friday, March 30
It was Friday, a day I usually coast a little more than usual. But that Friday I couldn’t wait to get to the paper. I took a quick shower. Left my hair damp. Made instant oatmeal.
You can understand why I was in such a hurry. Dale had dominated Page One most of the week. His Wednesday story had detailed Kurt Depew’s fatal shootout with police. His Thursday story had dug deeper into the possible link between the Depew brothers and Congresswoman Zuduski-Lowell’s brother. His story in today’s paper was going to knock a lot of politically sensitive socks off. I wanted to be there to see them fly.
According to well-placed sources, after weeks of pressuring police to speed up their investigation into her brother’s death, the congresswoman was now warning them to move slowly. I’d stayed around long enough Thursday night to see the story before it went to press. The headline was wordy but wonderful:
Zuduski-Lowell To Police:
“Don’t you dare embarrass me”
I’d caught Dale just as he was getting into the elevator. “This well-placed source wouldn’t happen to include a certain detective of Scottish heritage, would it?” I asked. He’d done his best to speak in a brogue: “Now lassie, behave,” he croaked, poking the elevator button. “You know darn well that’s something I’ve got to keep under me kilt.”
So that morning I ate half of my oatmeal and left the rest to harden into cement. I threw on my coat and headed for the garage. And wouldn’t you know it the damn phone rang. It was Eric Chen. “I think I lost my truck keys,” he said.
“You think you lost them?”
“Well, I know I lost them. Just not how thoroughly.”
So instead of zooming straight downtown, I had to zigzag north through the morning traffic to the old Cedar Hill apartments where Eric lived.
“You should have a second set,” I snarled when he got into my Shadow with his daily six-pack of Mountain Dew.
“That was my second set,” he said.
I fought my way over to Cleveland Avenue and started south through an exasperating gauntlet of traffic lights.
Eric took my cursing at the red lights personally-which he was smart to do-and did his best to get my mind on something else. “Any of that toxic waste stuff I gave you panning out?” he asked.
“Too early to tell,” I said. “But I have confirmed that eighteen drums of toluene are still out there somewhere. And I did learn that Gordon was involved with the original EPA investigation. And that the Wooster Pike landfill was one of the suspected sites. And that Kenneth Kingzette was paroled in November.”
Eric added another and. “And you think he killed Sweet Gordon before he could find those other drums?”
The light ahead of us turned red. “I think it’s a possibility,” I said.
It was only eight-thirty on a very chilly day, but Eric couldn’t resist the temptation. He twisted the cap off one of his Mountain Dews and took a long chug of the green goop. “How would Kingzette even know Gordon was digging out there?” he asked. “He’s been in prison for several years, right?”
“In prison in Lucasville, not on the moon,” I said.
“You ever been to Lucasville?”
I jabbed my finger at the canvas bag crowding his feet and told him to find the folder marked ROWE/DIG. “You remember that day at the bookstore when you called me a sweet potato?” I asked.
He pulled the bag onto his lap and dug through the thick stack of folders. “I think you called yourself a sweet potato, Maddy.”
The light turned green, but not long enough for me to get through it. “I guess it was me,” I admitted. “But only because you were already thinking it. I don’t know why you think I’m incapable of doing a computer search on my own.”
He found the folder and opened it. “Fifteen years of empirical experience-whoa!”
He was looking at the printout of a story written by Doris Rowe. Read the headline: GORDON’S GOLD MINE
College garbology class is a blast from the past
“As you can see, it’s hardly an in-depth story. It ran in that Our Crazy Town column that used to run in the back of the Sunday magazine. Four summers ago. When Gordon first started digging out there.”
“So you think Kingzette may have seen this, held his breath hoping the professor wouldn’t find the missing toluene, and then when he got out- bang -to make sure he never did?”
Not only did I get caught by another red right, I found myself in the left turn-only lane. I had to detour off Cleveland Avenue through a maze of one-way streets. “I checked with the prison library,” I said. “They don’t have a subscription for The Herald-Union. But Kingzette’s son has one. And apparently he’s pretty thick with his father. At least he brought him into his moving business as soon as he was paroled. Maybe they were in cahoots back then, too.”
Eric finished his Mountain Dew. “Good work.”
I found my way back to Cleveland Avenue and headed for the Memorial Bridge. “Maybe it’s all just a bunch of rubbish. But it keeps Kingzette in the mix a while longer.”
I still don’t know why I had such a bug up my behind about Kenneth Kingzette and those missing drums of toluene.
It was such a silly probability. As silly as thinking Andrew J. Holloway III killed Gordon. As silly as thinking Gordon’s murder had something to do with David Delarosa’s murder. As silly as thinking Chick Glass killed Gordon over that alleged slice of cheese. There could be a million things buried out there that somebody didn’t want found. And there could be a million other reasons somebody wanted Gordon dead.
But, good gravy, my dander was up. And so was my curiosity. As silly as those four possibilities were, and as silly as I knew I’d look when Scotty Grant arrested the real murderer, I knew I simply could not stop my silly investigation.
The worst thing about Eric losing his keys, which he manages to do three or four times a year, is that he attaches himself to me like a barnacle on a shrimp boat until he finds them. But that particular Friday I was glad he’d lost those damn keys again. Right after work I was going to see Effie. It would be good to have Eric with me. Not for physical protection, of course. And certainly not for moral support. He was absolutely worthless in both of those departments. But Eric’s irritating presence would make it easier for me to make a quick exit if things didn’t go well. “I’d love to stay and talk,” I could say to Effie, “but I promised to get Eric home by six. Bye-bye!”
So at five o’clock I herded Eric into the elevator, and into my Dodge Shadow, and headed across town to Hemphill College.
Effie’s used book store, Last Gasp Books she called it, was located in a ramshackle shopping plaza at the corner of White Pond and Parvin, just two blocks west of H.E. Hemphill’s glorious statue. It was a narrow storefront sandwiched between rival Mexican restaurants.
I made Eric open the door for me. I protectively covered my elbows with my hands and went inside. “Maddy!” Effie sang out. She was wearing a sleeveless denim jumper and a pair of lace-up boots better suited for marching across the Gobi desert. Several turquoise necklaces were orbiting her wrinkly neck. And of course she was wearing those big yellow lollypop glasses.
Seeing that my elbows were covered, she drilled Eric’s. “This your boy toy, Maddy?”
“I’m too old for boys or toys,” I said. “This is Eric Chen, my assistant at the paper.”
Effie tried to give him a welcoming hug. But Eric, still rubbing the pain out of his elbow, kept backing away. Effie loved that. “I like skittish,” she said.
She gave us the nickel tour. The front of the store was bright and airy. There were tables piled high with newer books. There was a rack of humorous greeting cards and a display of fancy pens and stationery. The middle section of the store was dark and cramped, a claustrophobic maze of ceiling-high shelves crammed with thousands and thousands of musty books. “These are my meat and potatoes,” Effie said. “When you can’t find it anywhere else, you find it here, and you pay dearly.” At the back of the store was a narrow doorway. The sign above the arch said, in Old English, Ye Dirty Stuff. “My erotica collection,” she said. “None of it later than the Kennedy administration.”
We headed back toward the front of the store, to Effie’s tiny office behind the counter. Eric immediately excused himself. “Think I’ll browse a bit,” he said. He headed straight for Ye Dirty Stuff.
Effie didn’t have any tea bags, but she did have a coffee maker. She divided what was left of the sludge in the carafe. “I guess I’m having trouble with Gordon’s death,” I began.
“Aren’t we all,” she answered.
She offered me an ancient jar of artificial creamer. I waved it off. “I’m afraid the police may get the wrong idea, Effie,” I said. “About some people.”
“Some people like Andrew Holloway?” she wondered.
I nodded. “He seems like a nice boy. And a smart boy. But I gather he’s pretty thin in the alibi department. And God knows what his relationship with Gordon was.”
She put a lethal dose of the creamer in her mug and stirred it with her pinky. She took a bitter slurp. “I can’t vouch for Andrew’s predilections.”
“How about Gordon’s?”
She laughed like a flock of ducks. “If you didn’t know me as well as you do, I think I’d have to be insulted.”
More than likely I was blushing. “You know what I mean, Effie.”
“Yes I do, Maddy. And I can swear on a stack of Masters amp; Johnson studies that Gordon was quite fond of the opposite sex.” She paused and took a quick sip. “If he went the other way, too, well, I never saw any evidence of it.”
“Which brings me to David Delarosa,” I said.
The ducks were back. “I’ll have to put on another pot of coffee if you’re going to bring up every man I’ve slept with.”
I forced a smile. “I can’t help but think Gordon’s friendship with Andrew was a little like his friendship with David.”
Effie spread her fingers across her necklaces, like she was Scarlett O’Hara or something. “My oh my! I don’t think you’re getting enough sleep, Maddy.”
This time I made sure I was frowning. “As I recall, Gordon’s friendship with David Delarosa was quite intense, and quite out of the blue. And then a few weeks later David was dead.”
Effie now told me something I hadn’t known. “The way I remember it, David hired Gordon to tutor him. In biology. And they just hit it off.”
“Gordon did do a lot of tutoring,” I said. “So I suppose you’re right.”
Effie backtracked a little. “But, to tell you the truth, I’m not sure David was as crazy about Gordon as Gordon was about him.” Her voice shrank to a whisper now, as if we were surrounded by ghosts. “I think he latched onto Gordon to get laid. He was a horny boy from the boondocks. And Gordon was up to his armpits in female acquaintances majoring in liberal arts. So he figured he could put up with a little poetry and bebop jazz in exchange for a little beatnik-”
The store’s heavy wooden door squealed open. The windows shook from the hurricane of cold air gushing inside. “That’ll be Edward,” she said.
A man hidden deep inside a fur-lined parka appeared at the counter. Effie excused herself. She handed him a stack of discreetly wrapped books from under the counter. He handed her a Ziploc bag filled with half dollars. “One of my regulars,” she said when the man named Edward left. “He likes Victorian stories about bisexual pirates.”
If I was going to get anything useful out of Effie, I knew I’d have to risk telling her my discreetly wrapped theories. “At the memorial service, you said maybe Gordon had been digging where he shouldn’t have been digging.”
“Ah-so you’re the one who put that bug in Detective Grant’s ear.”
“He’s already talked to you about all this?”
“Not the David Delarosa stuff,” she said. “That’s all yours.”
If Eric had been there, I’m sure that’s when I would have made my excuses and fled. But he was back in the erotica, immersed in stories about God knows what. I had no choice but to plow on. “There are lots of other possibilities, of course,” I said, “but I think maybe Gordon was looking for the weapon used to kill David Delarosa. And maybe somebody figured that out. And killed him.”
Effie was sitting two feet away from me, but she might as well have pushed her chair across the street. “I don’t know anything about that,” she said.
The eyes inside Effie’s lollypop glasses widened. “So you really have no idea what Gordon may have been digging for?”
“No, I do not.”
I bent forward and grabbed her hands. “Oh, Effie, I don’t want to see anybody put through the wringer if they don’t deserve it,” I said. “Not Andrew or Chick or anyone else.”
I got exactly the reaction I wanted. “Chick?”
“That old argument over the cheeseburger,” I explained. “They fought about it at the Kerouac Thing, two days before Gordon was killed. You saw them, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but it was nothing.”
“But the police might interpret it as something,” I said. “You remember what happened to Sidney after that little incident at Jericho’s. If you hadn’t come forward the way you did?who knows what would have happened.”
Effie laughed. Not like a flock of ducks. Like a single, very nervous duck. “How in the world do you know about that?”
I pawed the air, to make her believe I’d known forever. “It took a lot of guts, Effie, times being what they were. I don’t think I could have done it.”
“Slept with Sidney or told the police about it?”
I stood and buttoned my coat, to make her think I was finished prying. “I promised to get Eric home by six,” I said.
We put our arms around each other and headed for the back of the store to extricate Eric from his fantasies. “Why do you think Chick and Gordon fought about such a stupid thing all those years?” I asked her. “It’s so absurd.”
“Absurd but not absurd,” Effie said. “Both Gordon and Chick considered themselves Kerouac’s apostle at the college. They were the best of friends, but they also wanted their version of his legendary visit to prevail. To fortify their own legends. So if Chick was right, and Jack had a cheeseburger, then Chick would be the rock upon which Kerouac’s Hemphillite church was built. But if Gordon was right, and Jack ordered a plain burger-well, they’re hardly the first college professors to get caught up in some meaningless turf war.”
“No, I guess not,” I said. I got Eric’s attention and impatiently motioned for him. He put the tiny green book he was reading back on the shelf and sheepishly trotted toward us. Effie drilled both of us in the elbow before we made it out of the store.
It was exactly six o’clock. The westbound lane was clogged with cars fleeing downtown. Our side of the road was nearly empty. We zoomed along at thirty-five, missing as many red lights as we hit. “You learn anything useful in there?” Eric asked.
“Not as much as you did, apparently,” I said.
“It was erotica, Maddy. High art.”
I groaned. “Unfortunately, so is reading Effie’s mind.” I turned onto Pershing Avenue and headed north toward Cedar Hill. “Either I learned a lot from her or nothing at all. Either intentionally or unintentionally.”
“You think she’s covering up for someone?”
“Protecting maybe.”
“Protecting a murderer?”
“Good gravy, no! Protecting the right of people to be different. To be left the hell alone. Fredricka Fredmansky marched to a different drummer long before she ever read Thoreau. Her father was a rabbi and her mother danced in a burlycue, if that tells you anything. She’s the most virtuous woman you’ll ever meet, but for better or worse her personal morality is cherry picked from a rather large and varied orchard of truths.”
“She sounds a lot like you,” Eric said.
Eric opened the car door, swung his sneakers into the puddle along the curb, grinned at me over his shoulder. “You want to come in for a bite?”
I’d been in his apartment. It was not an invitation I welcomed. “That depends what’s going to bite me? A spider? Cockroach? Rat?”
“I thought maybe we could call out for a pizza,” he said.
“Something to nibble on while we’re looking for your keys, I gather?”
So I followed him up the slippery, noisy iron stairs to his apartment. He’d lost his apartment keys too, of course, and so the door was not only unlocked, but wedged shut with a huge yellow bath towel. He took hold of the towel, and then the knob, and pushed the door open. He explained: “I was afraid if I closed the door I might accidentally lock it-you know how I am-and then I’d really be up shit creek.”
We went inside. “Speaking of shit creek,” I said.
Eric was genuinely surprised by my commentary on his housekeeping skills. “It’s not that bad, is it?”
I stepped over a duffel bag of dirty clothes and crackled across the crumb-laden carpet to the kitchen. I hung my coat on the only chair that didn’t already have a coat hanging on it. “Anything but onions or anchovies,” I said.
And so Eric called the pizza shop and I got busy washing his sink full of dishes. “When you get some time, there’s a couple people I want you to locate for me,” I said.
Eric got a Mountain Dew from the refrigerator and then a paper towel and a ballpoint. “Shoot.”
“The first is a man named Howard Shay,” I said. “I know where he lives in Mallet Creek, but supposedly he’s in Florida for the winter. See if he has a house or a trailer down there. He was an education major, so more than likely it’s a trailer.”
“One of your old beatnik friends?”
“David Delarosa’s college roommate.”
Eric was having trouble writing on the bumply towel. “You’re thinking he wasn’t really in Florida when Sweet Gordon was murdered?”
“Oh, I suspect he was,” I said. “But he might remember something interesting about the hoopla surrounding Delarosa’s murder.”
I found a Brillo pad under the sink and attacked a sauce pan caked with the remains of something red. “I also want you to find my husband Lawrence’s fourth and final wife. Her name is Dory. D.O.R.Y. But I suppose her real name is Dorothy, or maybe Doreen.”
“And her last name is still Sprowls?” Eric asked.
“Lawrence died fifteen years ago. She could be remarried. But start with Sprowls. And start in Pittsburgh. That’s where they were living when he died.”
Eric folded the paper towel and put it in his shirt pocket. “Does this have something to do with the professor’s murder? Or are you just taking advantage of my generosity to satisfy your jealous curiosities?”
“Jealous curiosities?” I hooted. “Believe me, jealousy does not describe my feelings for Lawrence’s ex wives.”
“More like empathy?”
I began searching his kitchen drawers for a clean dishtowel. “More like pity. But this isn’t about ex wives, Eric. This is about a dead husband’s old college clippings.” I told him about my visit to the college newspaper office the week before, how I’d learned that the paper’s old files were destroyed in a fire, how I’d hoped to search them for clues.
“Lawrence wrote for The Harbinger all through college,” I said. “He kept every story he ever wrote. And I’m sure he never threw them out. Journalists just don’t do that. They keep every word they’ve ever written. They lug them from house to house, and spouse to spouse, like they’re ancient biblical texts, written by The Almighty himself.”
Eric showed me where he kept his towels. The drawer was empty. “So Lawrence covered the Delarosa murder for the college paper?”
“Actually, he didn’t,” I said. “The editor wanted him to-he was the best reporter on the paper by far-but Lawrence told him he was a personal acquaintance of David’s and couldn’t possibly be objective. Lawrence just oozed integrity back then.”
“What exactly do you hope to find in his clips?”
“Something I’m not looking for,” I said.
Eric retrieved the same bath towel he’d used to keep his front door from locking. We finished the dishes and then started looking for his keys. We were still looking when the pizza came. And still looking when the pizza was gone.
“I heard a lot of what you and Effie were talking about,” Eric admitted. We were in his living room now, digging into the cracks between his cushions.
“And?”
“She slept with a lot of guys.”
“Apparently.”
“You think she’s still active in that department?”
“She does have sex on the brain, doesn’t she?”
Eric was flat on his belly now, his left arm under the sofa up to his shoulder. “I don’t pretend to understand the libidos of old people but-”
I didn’t just pretend to be offended. I was offended. “Old people?”
He wisely ignored my outburst. “All that erotica. That boy-toy stuff. Every other word out of her mouth. It seems to me she may be a little obsessed.”
“Effie is still Effie.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying, Maddy. At one time or the other she’s slept with just about every guy in your investigation.”
I pawed at the seriousness of his suggestion. “Which means what? That’s she’s some kind of sexual psychopath?”
Eric rolled over and started flipping through the comic books and newspapers piled under his coffee table. “Maybe she and the professor were involved in some kind of wacky lovers’ triangle with somebody. Maybe she’s aware of something so weird that even she can’t talk about it.”
I was furious. “Why does everybody think Gordon’s murder is about sex?”
“Can you be sure it isn’t?”
I struggled to my feet and headed for the mess that surely awaited me in his bathroom. “You’ve got to understand something,” I growled. “In Effie’s world, having sex with a lot of people is like me having lunch with a lot of people.”
Before he could respond with one of his smart-ass remarks, I yelled, “Bingo!”
I’d found his keys. In his shower. In a soggy, half-eaten bag of microwave popcorn stuffed in the soap holder.
I didn’t ask him for an explanation and he didn’t volunteer one.