Stone Cold Dead

by James W. Ziskin

  My first stop took no small measure of courage: the New Holland Police Department. Just three days before, Chief Patrick Finn had been ready to slap me in irons on a trumped-up charge. I was about as confident of walking back out of the station as I was of winning Miss Montgomery County at the next 4-H fair. Despite my fears, I marched up to the duty sergeant and smiled. He didn’t smile back.

  “Eleonora Stone from the New Holland Republic,” I announced to little effect. He didn’t know who I was and didn’t care. “I understand there was a stabbing at Mertens Men’s Store a while ago. I was hoping to get a statement for the press.”

  “I just came on duty,” he said. “Why don’t you ask Iavarone. He makes it a habit to know everyone’s business.”

  The name sounded familiar. Then I remembered him as Pat Halvey’s bowling pal. The desk sergeant waved me past, and two minutes later I was in conference with Officer Paulie Iavarone in a small private room. Iavarone was a short, thin man, with a friendly face and a thick mop of dark hair slicked down with oil. His black uniform was pressed and creased, and his badge sparkled silver on his chest.

  I repeated my name and affiliation for the officer’s benefit then asked if he had any information on Ted Russell’s condition or Joey Figlio’s whereabouts.

  “No, miss. The assailant eluded capture and is presently at large,” said Iavarone in his most official tone. “I don’t have any word on the victim’s condition either. He’s at St. Joseph’s. They’ll be able to provide you with that information.”

  “Can you tell me what happened?” I asked.

  Officer Iavarone demurred politely, saying he wasn’t sure if he was authorized to speak to the press.

  “Chief Finn is having dinner with his family and doesn’t like to be disturbed on Saturdays. He was annoyed enough as it was when we called about the fracas.”

  “Aren’t you a friend of Pat Halvey’s?” I asked, changing tactics. “He said you two bowl together and told me how much he admires your grip.”

  “My grip? There’s three holes in the ball. Everyone has the same grip,” he said. When engaged on the topic of bowling, his policespeak melted away.

  “I mean your technique.” Damn, I knew almost nothing about bowling. Why couldn’t he have been a softball or tennis player? “Anyway, he said you were an ace.”

  Iavarone was taken aback for a moment, then a mushy grin spread slowly across his face. “Well, I did bowl a 167 last Saturday night.”

  “I understand it all happened at Mertens in the menswear section.” I said.

  “No,” he answered, confused. “It was at Windmill Lanes.”

  “I meant the stabbing. Joey Figlio.”

  “Oh, right. Yeah. Well, casual wear, actually.”

  “He just jumped out and stabbed him?” I asked. “Did he say anything? Sic semper tyrannis or anything like that?”

  “I don’t know if he said anything in Spanish,” said Iavarone guardedly. “But it looks like he followed Mr. Russell down Main Street into Mertens. Then he ambushed him in the casual wear department. Got him pretty good in the neck but missed the artery.”

  “Did Joey say anything at all that you know?”

  “Well, I responded to the call at Mertens along with two other patrolmen. Mike Palumbo and Denny Kerry. The tailor saw everything and said the kid was swearing and yelling that he would kill the SOB if it was the last thing he did.”

  Mike Palumbo. So that was his first name. I still thought of him as Vic Mature.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “He said, ‘She will always be mine!’ Then he ran out into the alley and disappeared down Mohawk Place.”

  “Can’t anyone catch that kid?” I asked. “He’s slipperier than an eel.”

  “When we find him, we’ll book him for assault with a deadly weapon and attempted murder. Of course he is a minor, so he’ll probably just get sent back to Fulton.”

  I agreed. “Yeah, he’s got a good lawyer.”

  On the station’s front stairs, I bumped into the handsome Officer Mike Palumbo. He tipped his hat and told me he was just going out after his dinner break. I asked if he’d heard anything new about Joey Figlio.

  “No, miss. Nothing yet.”

  “To tell you the truth, Officer, I’m worried he’ll come after me. I think that might have been him the other night at my place.”

  “I’m on duty until midnight,” he said. “I’ll circle your block every hour like last time, if you’d like.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” I said, my eyes surely sparkling at him; he was blushing. “I’ll leave my front lights on if everything is fine. If there’s trouble, the room will be dark.”

  “All right,” he said, smiling. “If I don’t see the light, I’ll come up those stairs with guns blazing.”

  I chuckled and wondered if he’d be annoyed or pleased if I turned off the lights for no reason . . . Put a stopper in it, Eleonora. I took a quick breath of cool evening air and skipped down the steps to the street.

  I returned to the office to write stories on the discovery of the body and the attack on Ted Russell. I still needed official confirmation of the ID of the body from the sheriff's office, but I expected to have that before the evening was out.

  Of the three rolls of film I’d shot at the lock, I recalled several shots that would do nicely for the front page: the brown water roaring over the spillway, the sheriff consulting with the State engineer, and the tragic open door of the Packard Henney hearse. My only concern was whether I had used the correct shutter speed and aperture settings in the falling light. I left the film for Bobby Thompson to develop on Monday morning. Then I tucked my article into an envelope and slid it into my purse to take with me when I left the office. George Walsh wasn’t getting his mitts on this story.

  I called St. Joseph’s Hospital before writing my Ted Russell-Joey Figlio piece, thinking that the lustful music teacher’s condition might well change my headline from “Manhunt for Vengeful Teen Who Stabbed Teacher” to “Manhunt for Vengeful Teen Who Stabbed Teacher to Death.” I spoke to Sam Belson, an emergency room doctor I knew casually from previous scrapes and bruises. Sam confirmed that Ted Russell’s wounds were quite superficial and had been repaired with a pair of stitches, after which two sheriff's deputies trundled him off to the county jail on suspicion of murder.

  I telephoned the DA for comment, but his service said he was unreachable. The sheriff was next on my list. He answered the phone at the jail and told me Don Czerulniak was sitting in front of him at that very moment.

  “The mother ID’d the body,” he said. “No surprise, except that she flat out fell apart. Wept for an hour until she’d exhausted herself. Real sad scene.”

  I felt a knot tighten in my chest and a mounting pressure in my throat that took my voice away. I struggled to draw a breath and dabbed my eyes with my handkerchief. Irene Metzger’s self-possessed calm had crumbled with the presentation of her little girl’s dead body, mangled and torn, having been battered against the cold steel of a canal lock by the roaring waters of the Mohawk. The unspeakable hope she’d expressed to me—to recover her daughter for a proper burial—had sustained her in her quest until this moment. Now her work was done. She no longer needed to be strong. Now she, too, could weep and abandon herself to her unfathomable grief. Darleen was gone, but she was home again. Irene Metzger’s motherly charge to safeguard her child was over. For good.

  “Ellie, are you still there?” asked Frank from the other end of the line.

  “I can’t talk now,” I choked and dropped the receiver into its cradle.

  Later, having splashed water on my face and stared at my wan reflection in the ladies’ room mirror long enough to rebuild my composure, I returned to my desk and finished my article. I had no photographs to illustrate the Joey Figlio-Ted Russell story, but I thought we probably had a picture of Russell in the school-district photo file. I left a note for Maggie in Research to dig one up.

  As I was hurrying out, I stoppe
d at George Walsh’s desk, the emotional hangover from my breakdown still tingling in my head. I considered the order. Everything in its place. A pad of ruled paper, three number 2 Ticonderoga pencils, a rotary sharpener (emptied daily of its shavings by its master) screwed down to the edge of the desk, and a fancy IBM Executive Typewriter on top of the green blotter. I eyed the cloth cover and its smug little IBM logo, comparing it to my sturdy, serviceable Underwood manual machine. Tucked neatly around the sleek lines of the IBM, the gray cover mocked me silently.

  George Walsh was a pitiful typist. Shortsighted and lacking hand-eye coordination, he had to lean in so close to the keyboard that the swinging type bars practically clipped his nose as he typed. He had never memorized the arrangement of the keys, so he couldn’t touch-type. Georgie Porgie was the classic hunter and pecker, a two-finger man, slow and methodical.

  I cast a glance behind me to see if Luba was on the prowl. She had the habit of materializing out of nowhere like a ghost and scaring the wits out of you. It didn’t help matters that her hair was a wiry, gray rat’s nest and that her chin nearly reached the tip of her nose, giving her an eerie resemblance to a caricature of a witch. Having spotted no Lubas in the vicinity, I peeled the cover off the typewriter and retrieved a nail file from my purse, ready to operate. Placing the point of the file under the edge of the W key, I pried the plastic key top off with little trouble. I did the same to the E key. Then I pushed the E down onto the W’s type lever until it clicked smartly into place and put the W where E should have been. Then I did the same with three more pairs of keys. With his nose so close to the grindstone, George might well type an entire page before realizing he’d written gibberish. Then he would surely try again with the same results. It would take him an hour to figure it out.

  I realized that my sabotage would only be temporary, but it served as a tonic for my frustration. I had toiled and sweated and frozen for the story that Georgie Porgie stole from my desk. If he wanted another scoop, he’d have to write it himself and learn to type all over again.

  Satisfied with my work, I replaced the cover carefully, smoothed its wrinkles, and made good my escape undetected.

  After my meltdown, I had to visit the sheriff without delay or never be able to show my face there again. I walked in, clearheaded and composed, as if nothing had happened, to speak to him and the district attorney.

  “The jailbird herself,” said the DA.

  “Thanks for getting me out, Don,” I said.

  “Yeah, those morals charges are tough to beat.”

  Frank didn’t appreciate that kind of humor in general. In particular, when it involved me, it seemed to pain him.

  “Any word on Baby Face Nelson?” I asked.

  Frank shook his head. “Last seen downtown, heading toward the river. If he fell in, he’s a goner.”

  “What’ll happen when you find him?”

  Frank smirked and nodded in the DA’s direction. “I’ll let the honorable district attorney break it to you.”

  The Thin Man took a long, slow breath, then groaned in his typical manner. “The kid’s got to go back to Fulton,” he said. “Nothing we can do about it. He’s a minor.”

  “Can’t you forget where you set him down until he’s eighteen?” I asked. “I’m afraid of that kid.”

  “He won’t bother you,” said Don. “He’s got bigger worries now.”

  I shook my head in disagreement. “Joey Figlio has exactly one worry: how to kill Ted Russell. Now that it’s certain that Darleen is dead, he has nothing else to live for.”

  “Well, I’ve got Ted Russell now, and Joey Figlio ain’t getting near him,” said the sheriff.

  “How about me?” I asked, aiming my best smile at him. “Can I get near him?”

  Frank wasn’t keen on the idea.

  “What about his lawyer?” I asked. “Who’s representing him?”

  “Public defender,” said Don. “Some kid who just passed the bar. But I called the superintendent and the teacher’s union and told them to get on their horse and hire him a real lawyer.”

  “How magnanimous of you,” I said. “Itching for a fair fight?”

  “Not really,” said the DA. “If I think a guy’s guilty, I don’t care if he’s got a trained monkey for counsel. In fact, I prefer it. But I’m not convinced yet. There’s some circumstantial evidence, but this doesn’t look open and shut to me.”

  “It does to me,” said Frank. “I got the girl’s dead body not four hundred yards from the guy’s house, plus a signed love letter and another handwritten note from him to the victim.”

  “But why did he kill her?” I asked. “What was his motive?”

  “I got a theory,” he said, and the DA and I waited for it. “She was planning to run off with another guy—that Wilbur Burch out in Arizona. Russell didn’t like the idea. Maybe he couldn’t stomach losing her.”

  I exchanged a glance with the DA. “Seems pretty thin to me,” said Don to the sheriff. “But we’ll go slow on this and see. Maybe he’ll say something stupid to Ellie.”

  I had one more nit to pick with the sheriff.

  “Have you checked Ted Russell’s handwriting against the love letter and the note you found in the lunch box?” I asked.

  “Yes, I have,” said Frank. “And they match. Both letters were written by the same hand.”

  “No, I meant did you check them against a writing sample from Ted Russell?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “But what are you driving at anyway? You don’t think he wrote those?”

  I shook my head. “I’m positive he didn’t.”

  “Then who did?”

  “You’re not going to like it,” I said. “And neither will the adoring public.”

  “Just tell me who you think wrote those letters to Darleen.”

  “Teddy Jurczyk.”

  “Holy hell,” said Frank, sitting up straight in his seat. The DA whistled through his teeth. “Are you saying that an All-American, straight-A, basketball hero murdered Darleen Hicks?”

  “Of course not. But I believe he wrote the notes. According to Irene Metzger, he’s been in love with Darleen for years.”

  “But the letter and the note were signed ‘Ted,’ not ‘Teddy,’” said Don.

  “He told me he hates the name Teddy,” I said. “So he wouldn’t have signed the letters that way.”

  Frank consulted a page from the open file on his desk, picked up the phone, and dialed. After a couple of rings, he asked for Leonard Platt, Ted Russell’s attorney.

  “This is Sheriff Olney,” he said once he’d reached his party. “I’d like you to come over to the jail, if you don’t mind.” The man at the other end of the line said something, and Frank explained. “I need a handwriting sample from your client, and I want the whole thing to be done above board.” Another pause. “Well, I understand it’s Saturday, Mr. Platt, but I think this is a reasonable request.” Frank waited some more, frowned, then tried again. “Gunsmoke isn’t on till ten. You’ll be home long before that.” Another pause. “Don’t tell me you’re watching Lawrence Welk.” He listened a bit more then lost his temper. “Of course you’re not getting paid enough to come over on a Saturday night. You’re a public servant, you jackass. Just forget it. We’ve already impounded his car. We’ll check the briefcase he had inside. Good night, counselor,” and he slammed down the receiver.

  At times like these, I truly admired Frank Olney.

  “What?” he asked, noticing my adoring stare. “The guy deserves a better lawyer than that.”

  “So do I get to talk to Ted Russell or not?”

  I met the prisoner in a room reserved for interrogations and meetings with counsel. He entered the room in a gray county jail shirt and trousers. No stripes, but “Montgomery County Jail” was stenciled across the front and back of the oversized shirt. His hands were shackled before him. A precaution to protect me, I figured, just in case he really was a murderer. He was also sporting a large, white bandage on the right side of his
neck. He looked scared.

  “How are you, Ted?” I asked once he’d sat down.

  He shrugged and said he was okay. “I agreed to meet with you, Ellie, because I want you to tell the world I’m innocent. I want you to print a story about me in the paper right away explaining that I did not kill Darleen Hicks.”

  “How about you convince me first?” I said.

  “I just can’t believe this is happening. It’s all one giant mistake.”

  “How well did you really know Darleen Hicks?” I asked. “Is it true that you wrote her love letters and notes to arrange secret meetings after school and on the weekends?” Of course, I knew he hadn’t, but I wanted to get him talking.

  “What? No! Never. I swear to you that I only knew that girl because she was in my music class. I never wrote her any notes or letters.” His eyes blurred just a touch with his last pronouncement, as if he’d just remembered something significant.

  “This is the time to tell me everything, Ted,” I said. “If you want me to make your case, I have to believe you. Even if it looks bad, tell me now. It will only look worse later when it comes out.” I paused. “And it will come out.”

  “There was nothing,” he said. “Yes, I wrote one note to her, but it was perfectly innocent. I even signed it ‘Mr. Russell.’”

  “What was in the note?”

  Ted chewed on my question for a good while, squirming in his seat and taking several long, deep breaths. I waited. I don’t like to fill dead air when I’m interviewing a subject. Eventually, people start talking, and if the hole in the conversation is large enough, they try to fill it.

  “It sounds bad, but it really was innocent, I swear,” he said finally. “Look, she’d asked me to do her a favor, and the note I wrote to her was to tell her that I would do it.”

  I stared deep into his eyes, almost gazing, not judging, but blank, inviting him to go on. He was sweating.

  “She asked me for money,” he blurted out. “I said no, of course. At first. Then she said it was important and she really needed it.”