“Okay, so she didn’t run away with her boyfriend,” I said. “Does she have any friends?”
“There’s a couple of girls she rides the bus with. Susan Dobbs, Carol Liswenski, and Linda Attanasio. And there’s Edward, a boy who’s had a crush on her since the seventh grade.”
I stood and fetched my grocery pad and pencil from the counter near the icebox. I wrote down the names. I also noted the neighbors, Rasmussen and Karl. Under normal conditions, my memory is as faithful as a dog and as trustworthy as the mighty Jeep, but this night, I feared the whiskey might prevail and blur everything in the morning.
“Now, about your husband,” I said. “I really would like to talk to him. Since he’s just downstairs . . .”
She seemed to ignore me.
“If you want my help, you’ll have to let me do things my way,” I said. “You can say what you want, but I need to believe what you tell me. And the only way I can do that is to satisfy my doubts.”
Irene Metzger sat quietly, slouched a bit to one side, fixing me with her stare. I couldn’t tell if she was riled or just considering my words. Finally she spoke.
“I’m sorry if you don’t like what I’m telling you, but I know my daughter. And my husband.”
I shook my head; I had drunk enough whiskey for two New Year’s Eves, there was an eager young man waiting in the next room, and this lady wasn’t cooperating. She wouldn’t allow that her daughter might have run off or—if she hadn’t—that her husband might have a darker side than she could ever imagine.
“Okay,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “I’ll think about it.”
“Think about what?” she asked, alarmed.
“Whether I can help you or not.”
A grimace, bitter and disappointed, curled slowly across her upper lip and flared her right nostril. She tried to hide it.
“You mean you won’t help me,” she said.
I said nothing, just stared at her.
“I’ll talk to him,” she said, almost in a whisper. “Can’t promise anything.”
“And I’ll make some inquiries,” I said. “Then I’ll be in touch. Give me a few days.”
“I brought this,” she said, producing an envelope. “It’s Darleen’s school picture. In case you can use it.”
“Thanks,” I said, pushing it to one side on the table.
I accompanied her down the stairs in my stocking feet. Shivering on the porch, I watched her climb into an old, faded-green Ford pickup at the curb. Judging by the looks of it, the truck must have been the first one to roll off the assembly line after the war. Or maybe it had been through the war. For a couple of seconds, while a dim glow shone from the dome light, I could see the man at the wheel inside. He looked hard, like sunburn, chewing tobacco, and a three-day beard. My stare met his pale eyes for a short moment, and I froze. He aimed a piercing look at me, expressionless, almost dead like a lizard’s. The dome light went off as Irene Metzger yanked the door closed with an icy, metallic bang. Then Dick Metzger pushed the starter, shifted into gear, and eased away from the curb.
I stood there in the cold for another minute, watching the red taillights recede down Lincoln Avenue. My encounter with Irene Metzger had unsettled me. Convinced her daughter had not run off, she must have feared the worst. She must have been sure Darleen had met a terrible end. What other explanation could there have been? I remembered some of the chances I had taken as a teenager. I had been lucky in my games of Russian roulette, while Darleen Hicks, it seemed, had spun the cylinder and come up with a bullet in the chamber. Irene Metzger’s pain must have been cruel, incorporating both grief and uncertainty. A heavy sadness welled up in my chest as I thought of my own parents, both gone, and the wayward girl I had been. The wayward girl I still was.
Damn! Eddie Robeleski. He was still upstairs. When I returned to the warmth of my apartment, I found him standing there, lipstick smeared over his face, his shirttail hanging out.
“Come on over here,” he said with a big grin, and he reached out both arms for me.
“Oh, God,” I said, rubbing my temples. “I’m sorry, Eddie, but you have to go now.”
CHAPTER TWO
SUNDAY, JANUARY 1, 1961
I don’t normally suffer from hangovers. That’s the blessing, or perhaps the curse, of holding one’s drink. But this day I woke up slowly, my mouth a little dry, one nostril hermetically sealed, and my eyes crusted shut by the sandman. The new year had dawned, and I had slept through the morning.
A confirmed heathen, I usually spend my Sunday mornings lingering over coffee, a hard roll and butter, and the newspapers at Fiorello’s across the street. Fadge, the proprietor and my dearest friend in the world, was sure to be there on New Year’s Day, albeit late. Not because it was New Year’s Day, of course, but because it was morning, and he always ran late. He usually rolled up to the curb in his ’57 Nash Ambassador at eight thirty. Unshaven and (sometimes) unwashed, he would trundle across the seat to the passenger’s side like a walrus undulating across an ice floe, the car rocking on its struts beneath him. The driver’s door was dented shut, so he always dismounted from the right-hand side. Barely four years old, the car was a disgrace. From the day he’d driven it off Bob Frank’s Hudson-Nash lot on Division Street, Fadge had abused it through neglect of maintenance, willful flaunting of the laws of physics, and a demolition-derby style of driving. Vinnie Donati, a local mechanic, once begged Fadge to tell him what he had against the car.
But this frigid New Year’s Day, I was curled up on the sofa under an afghan watching George Blanda lead the Houston Oilers over the Los Angeles Chargers in the inaugural AFL Championship Game. There were no college bowl games due to New Year’s falling on a Sunday, and the NFL had finished up the week before, so I settled for the new league’s championship. Just one of the boys when it came to sports.
By six I still hadn’t dressed and didn’t see the use of changing from my flannel pajama bottoms and terrycloth robe; I’d be ready for bed before too long.
I heated up a forty-nine-cent Salisbury steak frozen dinner. Having withered in the heat of the oven and long since given up the ghost, the steak sat mired in an epoxy of reduced gravy, like a mastodon trapped in the La Brea Tar Pits. The mashed potatoes had stiffened to a grayish plaster, and the peas and carrots had somehow come out sodden toward the edge of the tray and dried out in the middle. I lost my enthusiasm for the meal and left it to clot before me on the coffee table.
I rose to change the channel, and the television threw a fit. Jack Benny warped and skipped rhythmically from the bottom of the screen to the top, and neither the vertical-hold knob nor the rabbit ears remedied the situation, despite my repeated fiddling. I switched off the set and plopped back down on the sofa, wrapped the afghan around my shoulders, and gazed up at the painted tin ceiling and alabaster light fixture above me. In moments like this, I especially appreciated these unexpected touches in such a simple duplex.
I tried to will time to pass. It was too early for bed and too late to make anything of the day. I turned my head, and my eyes fell on the unopened letter on the end table beside the sofa. Not ready to deal with that.
Across the room to my right, a pair of mahogany pillars framed a wide passageway between the kitchen and the parlor. Two waist-high hutches with glass windows and shallow drawers anchored the columns. I assumed the cabinets had been designed to display books or curios. Picture Hummel figurine knockoffs or pressed-glass swans trying to pass as crystal. But the hutches were, nevertheless, well built and tasteful. I kept my liquor in the one on the right.
The cabinet beckoned me, as surely as if it had crooked a finger. It wasn’t yet seven, but I’d waited long enough. Answering the siren’s song, I poured myself a thimbleful of Scotch, then, after a moment to consider properly the miserly amount, I topped it off with another two fingers and some ice. The first sting of whiskey, the sip you take before the ice has had a chance to melt and dilute the kick, that’s the one that reminds you it’s alcohol, r
eminds you why you drink. With each passing glassful, you think less and less that it’s booze. It dissolves into a simple beverage, transforms as if by alchemy into a social lubricant, something to hold in your hand and raise to your lips every so often. It loosens the binds of your corset, and makes you smarter and more attractive. You sparkle with charm. Personality in a bottle. At least for me. But once the burn of that first undiluted swallow has faded in your mouth, your guard drops, you drain the bottle, and end up snoring on the sofa hours later, fully clothed, with the Indianhead test signal glowing blue from the television set across the room. That’s still better than waking up with a stranger in your bed. Or you in his.
Two whiskies later, the letter was still there on the table.
I pulled a record at random from the bookshelf and placed it on the hi-fi: Brahms’s “Academic Festival Overture,” the one that ends with an old German university drinking song: “Gaudeamus Igitur.” I raised my empty glass in a toast to nothing. Then I refilled it. I must have been really smart and beautiful by nine o’clock, when I popped the spring cap off a new fifth of White Label and poured myself another drink. Then Fadge showed up with a pizza and a couple of quarts of Schaefer beer.
“About time you showed up,” I said, giving him a New Year’s peck on the cheek and grabbing the pizza. “I was about to drown.”
He pulled off his coat as I dug into the pizza.
“What’s that?” he asked, nodding at the envelope on my kitchen table. It was the one Irene Metzger had left me.
“Nothing,” I said, picking it up and tossing it to the counter next to the toaster.
“How come you didn’t come by the store today?” asked Fadge a while later, once we’d settled in on the sofa with our drinks.
“I was busy,” I said. “New story I’m working on.”
He eyed the empty bottle in the wastebasket. The recently opened one stood without shame in plain sight on the table before us.
“Tough, working on a Sunday,” he said. “And a holiday to boot.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, well, you know how it is. You worked today, too.”
“Sure, but I didn’t get as much done as you did.”
We stared at each other. Fadge was no saint and wasn’t judgmental either. I couldn’t believe he would begrudge me a lazy Sunday of overindulgence.
“How was that party you went to last night?” he asked after a suitable moment of discomfort had passed.
“It was all right,” I said. “What did you end up doing?”
“Worked till about eleven thirty, then closed up and went over to Timmy Gallo’s.”
“Sounds like fun. Did you ring in the New Year there?”
“I wouldn’t exactly say we rang it in. I drank beer with Timmy’s father-in-law, Lou, and we watched Guy Lombardo.”
“No girls?” I asked, mugging a pout.
“Timmy’s wife changed their one-year-old daughter’s diaper on the coffee table in front of the TV. Does that count?”
I shook my head.
“I was so hard up, I drove back here around one thirty to peep through your windows, but someone took away the ladder.”
“And after I’d left the curtains open for you . . .”
“Your light was on anyway, so I figured you were busy.”
I had to tread carefully now. Joking was fine as long as I didn’t cross certain lines. Fadge was sweet on me—I knew that much—and I didn’t want to parade my indiscretions in front of him.
“I had an unexpected, late-night visitor. A lady named Irene Metzger.”
Fadge took a gulp from the quart of beer and waited, watching me, his eyes bulging from an overactive thyroid. I sensed he didn’t believe me. A doubt crawled into my mind: What if Eddie Robeleski had stopped by the store and bragged of his conquest? Why wouldn’t he want to blacken my name? I had left him high and dry, after all. Or what if Fadge really did have a ladder?
Okay, that was paranoia. Fadge was a true pal. Even if we did crack off-color jokes about sex, he’d never so much as made a pass at me, and he’d never inquired about my attachments. Still, a girl likes to give the impression of propriety, even if she’s only kidding herself. So what if Irene Metzger showed up later than I’d said? Would Fadge rather hear that I’d been breaking commandments with a twenty-one-year-old sailor on shore leave? What kind of floozy do I take me for?
“Who’s Irene Metzger?” he asked.
“Have you heard about that junior-high-school girl who disappeared ten days ago? Darleen Hicks.”
“Sure,” he said. “I read the papers. What’s she got to do with it?”
“This Irene Metzger is her mother.”
“So what did she want with you at one thirty in the morning? And on New Year’s Eve.”
“She wants me to help find her daughter. She says the police don’t care, and she read all my articles on the Jordan Shaw murder.”
“How proud you must be,” he smirked.
“Jealous. Anyhow, she thinks I can help find out what happened to Darleen.”
“So what does she think happened?”
“The only thing Irene Metzger’s sure about is that her daughter didn’t run off. And that her husband, the girl’s stepfather, couldn’t possibly be a suspect.”
“Isn’t it always the stepfather?” asked Fadge. “I read Lolita.”
“You read Lolita because you heard it was all about sex.”
“True,” he granted. “A little disappointing in that regard.”
“Serves you right.”
“So you’ve talked to him?” asked Fadge.
I took a sip of my drink. “Not yet. Irene Metzger wouldn’t hear of it. She insisted he knows nothing about Darleen’s disappearance.”
“What else did she tell you?”
“Not much,” I shrugged. “Boyfriend’s up at Fulton. Couldn’t have had anything to do with this, according to her. There are a couple of men who live nearby. Nothing to point to them yet, though.”
Fadge rose to get the second quart of beer from the icebox. He asked if I wanted another drink, but I’d had enough. When he returned, he sat down beside me on the sofa, placing his beer on the end table.
“Can I use this as a coaster?” he asked, showing me the unopened letter.
“No, I need that,” I said, reaching for the envelope.
He drew it back and squinted at the postmark. “This was mailed a month ago. You haven’t even opened it.” Then he read the return address: “‘Berg and Raphael Statuary.’”
I snatched it away and tucked it into the pocket of my robe. “There’s a coaster right in front of you.”
“Take it easy,” he said. “I didn’t mean any harm.”
Fadge sipped his beer pensively. A long silence settled over us. I was thinking about Darleen Hicks. I don’t know what was on Fadge’s mind.
“Her mother said she sometimes took taxis home when she missed the bus,” I offered finally. “And sometimes she took rides from strangers.”
“There’s your ending,” said Fadge. “Probably jumped into the wrong car. Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Yeah, I thought of that, too. But her mother says she’s smart and resourceful. Never got into trouble before.”
“She tell you anything else?”
I thought some more. “Just that Darleen chews Black Jack gum. Yuck. And I know I’ve heard that recently, but I can’t remember where.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
I looked up at him, waiting for an explanation.
“You really don’t remember?” he asked. “A couple of weeks ago at the high-school basketball game. You were drunk and got sick in the girls’ room. You told me a girl chewing Black Jack gum held your hair while you puked into the garbage can.”
What a humiliating reminder. Though it stung, Fadge was right. Partly right.
“I wasn’t drunk,” I corrected. “And it was the toilet, not the garbage can. I had the flu.”
“And a pint of whiskey in
your purse,” he said. “You told me so yourself.”
I waved him off. “The bottle was unopened. Intended for later. It was the flu.”
The memory returned instantly. I had drawn photo duty for the Friday-evening basketball game. Our sports-page photographer, Gabe Morrissey, was in Herkimer, covering local kegler Casimir Nowicki in a regional bowling tournament. Better him than me. My editor, Charlie Reese, assigned me to the basketball game over George Walsh, who’d just emerged from football season and was convinced that a basketball field goal counted for three points.
The New Holland Bucks, in the midst of their most promising season in a decade, were squaring off against the Gloversville Red Dragons in a Friday-evening tilt. Charlie wanted some action shots of Teddy Jurczyk— Teddy J., the straight-A freshman sensation who had turned around the Bucks’ season after a dismal start, leading them to seven straight wins.
Teddy had been marooned at the far end of the bench, collecting splinters, while the coach’s son, Dickie Mahoney, started at guard. Then Dickie came down with tonsillitis. A tall, wiry kid with a crew cut, palewhite skin, and an Adam’s apple that called to mind Ichabod Crane, Teddy Jurczyk looked more like the scarecrow man in a Charles Atlas ad than a basketball star. But he was a natural: one of those players who made opportunities for himself and his teammates; handled the ball like a wizard; and led the team in scoring, assists, and steals. While almost all the other players launched workmanlike, two-handed set shots, Teddy soared high and let fly grand, arcing jump shots. Deceptively fast, he glided over the polished hardwood in his tight satin shorts, dishing out assists and sinking baskets by the dozens.
Charlie had instructed me to come back with some good action photos and a pithy, post-game comment from the kid, who—I was sure— would be tongue-tied talking to a girl reporter.
At halftime, the score was tied at thirty-two. Teddy J. was leading the way with fourteen points and five assists. I had been running a temperature since morning, but the nausea was new. I had felt like hell all through the first half, but the real trouble began just as the referee tossed the ball skyward for the second-half tipoff. A crawling, cold sweat on my neck, general discomfort of my insides, and a swallowed gag convinced me that the evening was not going to end well. I had the good sense to spring from my seat in the second row, climb over my fellow spectators, and dash for the exit before it was too late. I bounded up the stairs to the corridor ringing the gymnasium above and shouldered my way through the door of the girls’ bathroom. There were three or four girls primping in the mirror, but I hardly took notice. I made a beeline for the first stall. My nausea was cresting, and there was no time to lose. The first stall was locked. I lurched toward the second, covering my mouth and squinting through watering eyes. It was free, but filthy. Summoning God knows what determination (and intestinal fortitude), I managed to dive into the third stall before the floodgates released their plenty. After three or four healthy heaves, I became aware of two firm hands holding my long curly hair clear of the rush of vomit. Or nearly, as I discovered a few minutes later.
Stone Cold Dead Page 2
