A Stone's Throw

by James W. Ziskin

  I told him I would try, leaving out that Jimmy Burgh already knew my name and where I worked.

  “What trouble are you off to find next?”

  “Cherchez la femme. Micheline Charbonneau. I’ve got her address. Got to run.”

  “Be careful.”

  There was no answer when I dialed Micheline’s place, so I decided to chance a visit. Across the river from downtown Albany, the squat, two-story red-brick building sat on the corner of Second Avenue and Walker Street. Rensselaer. Four apartments, two on each floor. I climbed the stoop and tried the front door. It was open. Inside the poorly lit lobby, I located the names Stevens, Charbonneau, and Schuyler on one of the mailboxes. Apartment 1A.

  I rapped on the door and waited for someone to answer. It was nearly two o’clock. I needed to speed things up if I wanted to finish my story in time to catch Harry, the typesetter, before he put Monday’s paper to bed. I knocked again, and this time I heard a shuffling behind the door.

  The door cracked open, and a young woman peered out at me. She’d been sleeping on her hair. Blonde hair. Her eyes were ringed with black mascara from the night before, and she’d neglected to wipe off her lipstick.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I’m a friend of Micheline’s,” I lied.

  She rubbed her right eye with the heel of her palm and yawned, big and wide. “She’s not in.”

  “Darn. I was hoping to catch her.”

  The young woman let the door open fully. “How do you know Miche anyway?” She pronounced it Meesh.

  “She lent me some money,” I said, sidestepping her question. “I wanted to return it. My name is Ellie.”

  I extended a hand. She wiped hers on the robe she was wearing and placed it in mine. Dead fish handshake.

  “I’m Joyce Stevens. Come on in. I think we have some iced tea if you’re thirsty.”

  She led the way into the parlor. I could see the kitchen off to the right and a couple of bedrooms down a darkened hallway.

  “No church today?” I asked once we’d reached the kitchen.

  “Oh, no. I couldn’t show my face in church after last night.” She giggled, then, perhaps remembering that she didn’t know me, put on a serious face. “I mean I’m not very religious.”

  She reached into the fridge and pulled out a pitcher. I watched her knit her brow and wrinkle her nose as she poured the tea into a glass. Measuring the proper amount was tasking all her faculties.

  “Sorry for my appearance,” she said as she handed me the tea.

  She pushed her hair out of her face, and I saw that she was quite pretty, if you didn’t mind bloodshot eyes and day-old makeup. I figured she was twenty-two or twenty-three.

  “I met a couple of ROTC fellows from the university last night. Young, but a lot of fun.”

  “No Micheline?”

  “She’s in Canada visiting her mother. How do you know Miche, anyway?”

  “From work.”

  “At the Safeway?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I’m a cashier.”

  She considered me for a long moment. “Miche never mentioned anyone named Ellie. You don’t look like you work at the Safeway.”

  “Neither does Micheline,” I said, bluffing my way.

  “Yeah. You’re right about that.”

  “How long has she been away?”

  “Since Friday. She’s always taking off to visit her mother. A real momma’s girl, our Miche.”

  Micheline was someone else’s girl, I thought. And she certainly hadn’t been in Canada Friday evening. Either Joyce Stevens was unaware of her friend’s night job or she was lying to cover for her. I wasn’t convinced she was smart enough to tell a convincing lie.

  “Have you known Micheline long?”

  “A little more than a year. We were waiting tables at a diner near GE. For a while we got good tips from the guys from the plant. They’d come in just to talk to us.”

  “So why’d you leave?” I asked.

  “The men were all trying to make time with us. We wouldn’t have minded if they were single. Or rich.” She giggled again. “Then some of them got a little too familiar. All hands. We complained to the owner, and he fired us. My cousin Brenda said she had a couple of free rooms, so we moved down here with her.”

  “Too bad about the job.”

  She said it didn’t matter. “There’s more than one way for a girl to get by.”

  A second young woman appeared in the kitchen doorway. Fully dressed and presentable at two on a Sunday afternoon, she was a big girl. A pretty brunette in the way Roller Derby queens are pretty. She eyed me with suspicion.

  Joyce introduced her as Brenda Schuyler, the third roommate.

  “You’re a friend of Miche’s?” she asked me.

  Joyce volunteered that I worked at the Safeway as a cashier. Brenda scowled at her.

  “And you believed her?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  Brenda stared daggers at me as she answered her naï;ve friend. “Because she’s got a nice big car outside. And she’s a little too smooth around the edges to work at the Safeway, don’t you think?”

  Joyce didn’t know what to say. I wanted to protest her characterization of my car but resisted the urge. Brenda couldn’t have known it had once been driven into the lake and had never been quite the same since.

  “She can’t be a cop,” said Brenda. “But don’t say another word about Miche or yourself. I don’t trust her.”

  I decided to come clean. “I’m not a cashier at the Safeway. I’m a newspaper reporter from New Holland.”

  Brenda turned to Joyce and fired a wicked glare at her. “You see why you shouldn’t blab to strangers?”

  Then she ordered me to leave.

  “But wait,” said Joyce. “If she’s a newspaper reporter, shouldn’t we find out what she wants with Miche before we throw her out?”

  I explained about the Saturday morning fire at Tempesta and that two bodies had been found in the rubble. Both women appeared spooked. Joyce asked if Micheline was one of the victims.

  “I believe it was someone else,” I said. “But I can’t be sure yet.”

  “It wasn’t Miche,” said Brenda. “She’s in Canada.”

  “But there is the possibility it was your friend,” I continued, ignoring her pronouncement. “That’s why I need your help. When did you last see her?”

  “Don’t answer her.”

  Joyce wilted under Brenda’s stare. I begged them to tell me where I might find Micheline, but they stuck to the story that she was in Montreal visiting her mother.

  “She spent Friday night with a man named Johnny Dornan,” I said. “He’s a jockey over at Saratoga. And he’s the man who was found dead in the barn.”

  Joyce looked to Brenda, appealing to her for permission to speak openly with me. But Brenda held fast, insisting that Micheline had taken a Greyhound bus to Montreal Saturday morning. Ten minutes later, I’d still made no progress against their intransigence, and Brenda showed me the door with all the civility of a Roller Derby jammer.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I found a secluded phone booth where I could make my calls in peace. There was no time to drive to Saratoga to interview the innkeepers in person, so I filled my purse with change acquired at a nearby Laundromat and started going down the list provided by the chamber of commerce.

  As Saratoga hadn’t yet entered the world of direct distance dialing, I had to call the operator to connect me to my parties. After more than an hour of slipping nickels and dimes down the slot and asking for one hotel, motor inn, and boarding house after another, I’d gotten nowhere. No guests had disappeared without settling the bill, no one was missing, and several desk clerks I spoke to expressed doubts about the propriety of my inquiries. The man at the Gideon Putnam, in particular, seemed insulted by the suggestion that any of his guests would “skip out” without paying.

  Finally, after moving on to the Yellow Pages, I hit upon a possible lead.
The Friar Tuck Motel on Route 50 confirmed that a guest—a woman—had not returned to the establishment since leaving in a sedan late Friday night.

  “Must’ve been after eleven,” said the woman who’d identified herself as Margaret. “But if she thinks she can run off without paying, she’s mistaken. I’ve got her stuff locked up where she can’t get it.”

  “Anything worth coming back for?” I asked.

  After some coaxing, Margaret admitted there was little of value beyond a dented cigarette lighter, a half-drunk fifth of cheap rye, and a suitcase of clothes. It took little effort to convince her to share everything she knew. Perhaps, like Mrs. Russell, Margaret thought I might help her collect from the deadbeat guest.

  “She checked into a single room three days ago under the name of Mrs. Everett Coleman of Manitoba, Canada,” she recited as if reading from the register. “Of course I discovered later she was stashing a fellow in the room with her.”

  “He was staying there, too?”

  “One night at least. The bed was all mussed on both sides.”

  “His name wasn’t Robinson, by any chance.”

  “Don’t know what his name was. He didn’t register.”

  “Can you describe what they looked like?”

  “She was average. Mid to late thirties, I’d say. Best days behind her, but not bad.”

  “What color was her hair?”

  “She was wearing a rain hat when she checked in, but I saw her the next night getting into her car. All dolled up in a fur. Fox, I’d say. Looked to be a brunette. Maybe a redhead. Not a carrottop. More auburn.”

  “And the man who shared her room? Did you get a look at him?”

  “Just a glance Friday night when they were leaving.”

  “You didn’t see his face?”

  “No, he was wearing a cap or a hat of some kind. But I can tell you he was a shrimp.”

  “A shrimp? Like how tall?” I didn’t want to influence her with leading questions.

  “Put it this way,” she said. “Give him a red coat and paint his face black, and he could stand out front as a hitching post.”

  I felt uncomfortable with her attempt at humor. Was she simply describing a jockey-sized man or adding a ham-fisted bit of racism to her joke? Either way, I needed more information. She’d mentioned a car.

  “I assume you record the license plate numbers of your guests.”

  “Of course we do,” she said and put down the phone. There was a sound of shuffling papers—most certainly the register—for several seconds before she came back on the line. “She was driving an older model Chrysler. Black. License B-Y-W-sixty-six.”

  “B-Y-W-six-six,” I repeated, noting the number in my pad. “And that’s a Manitoba plate?”

  “Nope. Good old New York State.”

  Margaret’s bigotry notwithstanding, I felt encouraged by the information I’d gathered. “Maybe a redhead” and “a shrimp” fit the descriptions of the burned bodies as well as anyone could have hoped. Nevertheless, the characterization of the woman as being in her thirties with her best days behind her troubled me somewhat. That didn’t exactly match Jimmy Burgh’s “palindrome” of Micheline as a pretty young brunette with a shapely caboose. But for all I knew, Micheline had disguised herself for the consumption of the nosy motel clerk. If she’d wanted to hide her true identity, a wig, a frumpy outfit, and some strategically applied makeup might have done the trick.

  I wondered about the timeline. Would she have had time to give Johnny Dornan “a ride” in his room at the boarding house, then drive with him to the Friar Tuck for a costume change? All within an hour and a half? Was I trying too hard to put Micheline in the burned-down barn? Would a dead Micheline make my story any easier to report? I asked myself why I cared either way if it was Micheline or not. I certainly took no pleasure in the thought of her murdered, then incinerated, in the foaling barn at Tempesta Farm. But if she hadn’t perished there, some other poor woman had. One way or another, two people were dead. Which brought my thoughts back to the shrimp. Margaret’s description pointed to Johnny Dornan as the man in the barn, especially when you took the racing silks into account. Which meant I’d been off base thinking this Coleman woman had been staying with the mysterious Mr. Robinson at the Friar Tuck Motel.

  But the Coleman name itself bothered me. Wouldn’t it have been convenient if the woman had registered under the name “Mrs. John Dornan”? Instead, I had a mystery that stretched halfway across the continent to Manitoba, Canada. And where in Manitoba?

  I slouched against the wall of the phone booth pondering these questions, wondering how to proceed. I could try Bell Canada Information, of course, searching the larger cities first. But Manitoba was a huge, rural province that stretched from the US border in the south to the Northwest Territories and Hudson Bay to the north. Who knew if they even had telephones outside of Winnipeg?

  Digging into my purse, I counted the change I had left. About three dollars’ worth. Drawing a sigh, I picked up the receiver and dialed 0.

  “Manitoba Information, please.”

  “Mani-what?” came the operator’s voice.

  “Manitoba, Canada.”

  As polite and helpful as the Bell Telephone Canada operator was, she could locate no Everett Coleman in Winnipeg. Or in Brandon, Steinbach, or Thompson for that matter. Flin Flon—yes, that’s a town in Manitoba—also came up snake eyes. There were plenty of Colemans, all right, but none who answered to the name Everett. I tried a couple of subscribers anyway—those with the initial E—until I ran out of change. None knew anything about Everett Coleman or his redheaded bride.

  I considered other options. In the morning, I would ask Norma Geary, my industrious gal Friday, to search the morgue—that was what we called the archives at the paper—for any stories on Everett Coleman. I doubted that would lead to anything, but I had to cover the bases. I also wanted her to check all the nearby phone directories for Robinsons. Individuals and businesses. The lone initial S bothered me, of course. If it stood for Robinson’s last name, there was no chance of finding who it was. Maybe Johnny Dornan had left off part of the name. Or maybe it hadn’t transferred through the paper. No, that wasn’t it. The appointment day of Friday followed the initial too closely. Not enough space for any missing letters. I made a mental note to examine again the newspaper Fadge had swiped from Johnny Dornan’s room. In the meantime, I still had a trick up my sleeve, even if I was loath to pull it. I knew a fellow at the Department of Motor Vehicles who could look up the license registration for me. But there might be a price to pay for the information. Benny Arnold would surely take the opportunity to extract a date in exchange for his help. Dreading the consequences of such a transaction, I half-heartedly flipped through the phone directory in the booth. What if Mrs. Coleman lived in Schenectady County? It was possible, after all. Her car was registered in New York State.

  I couldn’t find her in the Schenectady book, but, lo and behold, there was a “Coleman, E.” in Halfmoon in the Saratoga County directory. I dialed the number without enough change, unsure of what I would do if someone answered. No one did. The number had been disconnected.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “About time you showed up,” I said, leaving the kitchen door open for Fadge.

  I lived on the second floor of a duplex, above my intrusive and judgmental landlady, Mrs. Giannetti.

  “I’ve got a business to run,” he said, dumping an unwieldy paper bag and a pizza on the table, dropping the copy of the Racing Form he’d pinned under his arm in the process.

  “There’s your business,” I said, motioning to the paper.

  “Hey, I didn’t come over here to take grief from you. I came over to get you drunk and have my way with you.”

  “Give me that pizza. I’m already two drinks ahead of you.”

  Lounging on my sofa in the parlor, me with my glass of Scotch and Fadge with his quart of beer, I asked him what he’d brought along this night.

  “Something I picked
up at the Blue Note in Albany last Thursday,” he said, reaching into the paper bag. “Nina Simone. Forbidden Fruit. How about you?”

  In recent months the two of us had begun our own ad hoc music appreciation society. Each of us would bring a new record to our Sunday night pizza party in my apartment after he closed up the store.

  “One from my father’s collection,” I said, producing an LP I’d stashed next to the leg of the sofa. “Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras. You’re going to love this.”

  Fadge frowned. “That’s what you said last week about Janaslov.”

  “Janáček,” I corrected. “Don’t worry. You’ll like this better. I promise. It’s Brazilian.”

  “What news of Johnny Dornan?” Fadge asked me as we listened to Nina Simone and sipped/gulped our beverages.

  “Nothing much so far. I tracked down his date to an apartment in Rensselaer. A professional girl named Micheline, hired by Lou Fleischman as a treat for Johnny. Dropped my story and film off at the paper a couple of hours ago.”

  “You spoke to his date?”

  “No. To her roommates. They insist she’s in Montreal.”

  “And you think she’s on a slab in the morgue.”

  “Could be. But then I spoke to someone at the Friar Tuck Motel on Route Fifty in Saratoga. Do you know the place?”

  He coughed up a laugh. “What a dump. A good place to crash with a two a.m. beauty queen you picked up in a saloon.”

  I fired my most judgmental glare at him, and he quickly changed his tune.

  “Not that I would know, of course,” he said, sitting up straight and offering to refill my glass.

  “Apparently someone fitting the description of the dead woman from Tempesta was staying at the Friar Tuck,” I explained as Fadge handed me my drink.

  “How can you be sure? You said she was burned to a crisp.”

  “Except for three things. A bit of red hair survived, an earring, and a scrap of burned fox stole.”

  “Anything else?”

  “A shrimp.”

  Fadge took a swig of beer and popped the last crust of pizza into his mouth. “Shrimp like the cocktail?”