Joey Figlio’s single-minded sense of purpose was remarkable. It pointed to his innocence, at least in my mind. But who knew how a damaged mind might behave? He was certainly jealous enough to kill for Darleen. What I didn’t know was whether he was jealous enough to kill Darleen herself. She had written to Wilbur, after all, that he had threatened to kill her if she left him for another. I was on the fence as to whether that letter was part of Darleen and Joey’s plan to raise money for their escape. But I couldn’t be sure either if Darleen had indeed intended to leave with Joey or use the money for some other unknown purpose. If that were the case, Joey might well have carried out the threat Darleen had described to Wilbur in her letter.
Louis Brossard. Just on the periphery of Darleen Hicks’s world, he, nevertheless, had been involved up to his elbows in the investigation of the alleged impropriety between the schoolgirl and the music teacher. Furthermore, a girl had disappeared from the school where he’d worked in Hudson. And there was the question of whether Darleen had ever asked him for money, as Ted Russell maintained and Brossard denied. Unlike Ted Russell and Joey Figlio and her own stepfather Dick Metzger, there were no clues to point to Louis Brossard beyond his general creepiness and the suggestion that he had been approached by the victim for money. By all accounts, even if Darleen had asked him for money, he’d refused. And he had an alibi for December 21. He had been at the superintendent’s Christmas banquet, and there was photographic evidence to prove it. I had found no other proof to clear any of the other men on my list. Finally, he just didn’t seem interested in girls, at least if I qualified as suitable bait. I confess that I suspected young Ted Jurczyk was more his speed.
Bobby Karl? Strange enough and interested in Darleen in an unhealthy way, but I hadn’t unearthed anything more to implicate him. He had no car or truck to transport the body from the Town of Florida to the river, where Darleen had ended up.
I had all but crossed Walt Rasmussen off my list. But he had admitted that he’d seen her just an hour or so before she was killed. I couldn’t ignore the overwhelming evidence that Darleen had met her end near or in the snow hills at the end of her road. Her lunch box and gloves had both turned up in the search. That pointed most probably to a quick end between four thirty and five fifteen or so. Walt Rasmussen lived within five minutes of the putative murder scene.
Ted Jurczyk was the all-American boy. A basketball star and smart, polite kid. He seemed to be too sweet and good to be mixed up in any of this sordid affair. And yet he was the one who had lured Darleen off the bus the day she died. He was surely one of the very last people to have seen her alive. Could I cross him off my list?
Then came the two men I suspected most of all.
Gus Arnold, the surly, old bus driver. He had changed his story about Darleen’s presence on his bus the day she disappeared. It seemed possible, even likely, that he had come across her along County Highway 58 as he finished his route. Furthermore, he had lied about having returned his bus to the depot, claiming he’d had a flat tire. Finally, and most damning, he had spent as much as an hour parked behind the snow hills, not far from where Darleen’s frozen gloves were recovered by the sheriff's deputies. He was old, but looked strong enough to carry a body through the bordering woods to the other side where her lunch box was discovered.
Which brought me to Dick Metzger. His denials of impure intentions while kissing Darleen on the lips, and the suggestion that he may have spied on her in her bath, had done nothing to convince me of the propriety of his relationship with his stepdaughter. He had threatened to beat her if she disobeyed him, and I had endured his wonton, lascivious gazes at my posterior. This man lusted after young women, that much I knew. I didn’t like him. He gave me the creeps in spades.
Darleen was one of those girls who attracted older men as well as boys her own age. Unwittingly, unintentionally, she radiated something that the male of the species detected and thought he could exploit, like a pickpocket who sizes up a vulnerable target. I believed her stepfather was one of those men. And if he wasn’t the killer, then there was at least one other of that breed somewhere on my list. I just wasn’t sure who.
“Ellie,” prompted Fadge, bringing me back to the present. “I asked what you thought? Who do you think killed her?”
“Sorry about that,” I said. “I have no idea.”
Fred Peruso was waiting for me in the doctors’ lounge at City Hospital when I arrived at eleven. He told me the autopsy was straightforward: death by strangulation. Darleen Hicks had been dead before she went into the water, which had preserved the body and, thus, much of the evidence.
“What evidence is that?” I asked.
“Her tissues and organs are intact,” he said. “It made determining the cause of death a lot easier. No guesswork.”
“And?” I asked. “What about the pregnancy?”
Fred paused to light a green cigar. “You were pretty sure about that,” he said. “Who told you she was pregnant anyhow?”
I didn’t want to say and deflected the question. “Why?”
“Well, you should let whoever told you know that it’s pretty hard to get pregnant when you’re a virgin.”
“A virgin?” I asked. “Are you sure?”
“Shall I draw a picture for you?” he said, puffing billows of blue smoke.
That came from left field. It changed materially the portrait of Darleen that I’d been forming in my head. The rumors and innuendo about her and men and boys. I felt no one was a reliable witness. And what of her quest for money? Perhaps she truly was planning to run off with Joey, and the abortion story was just a ruse. Or maybe she was a ruthless manipulator without scruples or concern for the boys who loved her. I hated myself for thinking ill of the dead, the victim, and a little girl at that, but I just wasn’t sure about her. This was the teenager who had been so kind to me in my moment of need. But even then, her kindness may have been a feint, perhaps no different from the scheme she’d hatched with Joey Figlio. Just a ploy to get what she wanted and nothing more.
“Was there any other physical evidence that might suggest what happened?” I asked Fred.
“Pretty simple,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Two hands around her neck, trachea crushed by intense pressure right about here,” and he indicated the location by touching his right index finger to my neck. I gulped.
“Nothing on her clothes? Nothing elsewhere on her body?”
Peruso shook his head. “Clothes? Everything had been torn away by the current. Everything except a belt around her midsection.”
I cringed. “Fred, I want to see the body.”
Peruso finally relented. He only allowed me to see her head, as her neck and thorax had been dissected during the autopsy. He promised me that I did not want to see that. In fact he promised me I didn’t want to see any of it.
I had expected a gruesome sight. I had expected to vomit and run from the room. But what I saw affected me in quite a different way. I was serene in my horror, gazing unflinchingly at the cyanotic blotches that swirled over her bloated face, parts of which had been gashed and gouged by underwater collisions and the violent currents of her watery grave. The nose was partly missing, and a piece of the cheek as well. Fred Peruso theorized that ice chunks or the dam gate had scraped the tissue away. He explained that the body floats through or on top of water face down, with the head slightly lower than the trunk of the body. In fast moving water, the bloated skin puckers, swells, and wrinkles. He called it “maceration” of the skin.
I stared at the face before me. Her hair clung together in bunches, like seaweed tangled and twisted on itself. The last thing I focused on was her lips. Swollen and hardened permanently in a grotesque death grimace, her open mouth revealed the white teeth and silver-gray braces. Peruso gently pulled the sheet back over her face, and I left the room.
“You held up better than I thought you would,” said Fred who rejoined me in the corridor outside. “Why was it so important for you to see the body?�
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I drew a deep breath. Then another. “I want to remember what she looked like when I nail the monster who did this to her.”
I reached the Metzger farm at half past noon. An old Chevy sedan and a weathered pickup sat parked next to Dick Metzger’s green truck and the porch. I knocked on the storm door, and a plump woman in her fifties answered. I told her I had come to offer my condolences to the family. She opened the door, and I stepped inside.
“I’m Winnie Terwilliger,” she said in a low voice in my ear. “I live over in Palatine Bridge, but I’ve known Irene for many years. That’s Mr. Sloan and his wife over there. I’m afraid I don’t recall their first names. They brought a couple of casseroles and some punch.”
I found Irene Metzger in the armchair across the room, staring down at the floor. Mrs. Sloan was holding her hand, patting it from time to time and whispering comfort in her ear. Dick Metzger was nowhere in sight.
I knelt down before Irene, took her hand from Mrs. Sloan, and looked up into her bleary eyes. I told her how sorry I was. She stared back at me in misery, her cheeks fallen, hollow, and ashen. Her lips quivered and tears overflowed her eyelids. She began to sob, her entire body convulsing with each breath she drew and expelled. I squeezed her hand gently and, bowing my head in grief, wept with her. Mrs. Sloan continued her whispering, soothing Irene with her warm, rhythmic voice. Then I felt a hand on my head. I lifted my eyes to see Irene gazing down upon me, patting my head so lovingly, so maternally, that I pressed her other hand to my cheek and held it fast. I muttered over and again how sorry I was, and we remained that way: I, at her knee, she, stroking my hair, for several minutes. Finally, Mrs. Sloan offered me something to eat, but I declined, rising from the floor and wiping my sloppy face with the back of my hand. I touched Irene on the shoulder, my weepy eyes holding hers for one more moment.
I left the house in a rush and ran into Dick Metzger as he came up the porch steps. He caught me briefly in his arms, and I nearly fell, his rough hands groping my waist and my breast. I was sure it was an accident, a mistake caused by our collision and my subsequent loss of balance. But then, for just a split second, as I found my legs beneath me and no longer feared a fall, I felt his right hand slide down my back and take a firm grip of my behind. My body was pressed against him, my face inches from his. I saw his dead, lizard eyes staring at me. No expression, no embarrassment, no apology for his straying hands. I wriggled free and ran. He called after me, but I was gone. Moments later, I roared away in my car, barely able to see through the windshield.
The Figlio house was a brick duplex on the west end of town, a few blocks from the railroad tracks and St. Joseph’s Hospital. I had been neglecting my planned interview with Joey’s parents. I particularly wanted to talk to his mother. The weather was dry and cold as I climbed out of my car and onto the stoop. Orlando Figlio answered my knocking in a flannel shirt and gray trousers.
“Miss Stone,” he said through the storm door. “What are you doing here?”
“You told me I could talk to your wife. Remember?”
“Today’s not a good day. She’s very upset about last night. Wouldn’t even go to church this morning. And now I have to apologize to you again for that no-good, little crook bothering you.”
“It’s all right, Mr. Figlio,” I said. “Actually, Joey kind of saved my life last night. I think we’re over the worst, he and I,” and I smiled.
“Saved your life? The cops said he busted in and held you hostage or something.”
“We had supper,” I said. “That was all.”
“Chief Finn says he killed that girl. Darleen. He says he’s asking the DA to file murder charges against him.”
I was shivering on the porch. “May I come in, Mr. Figlio? Can we talk inside?”
He nodded and stood aside to let me in. The place was dark and smelled of tomato sauce, meat, onions, and garlic, all fused together and absorbed by the fabrics and rugs. There was a human smell as well, trapped in clothing and drapes, like when a place smells of dog. Not that the Figlio home smelled bad or dirty or in any way like a dog, but the clinging odor betrayed the presence of people living inside.
“You’re welcome to stay a few minutes, Miss Stone,” he said, motioning to the roll-arm sofa, upholstered in a faded, worn tapestry. “I could offer you a coffee if you like.”
I declined.
“I just don’t know what to do about that boy,” he said. “The day he was born, his mother’s only prayer was for him to stay out of prison. Then, when he started getting into trouble with the law, she prayed to all the saints that he not end up in the electric chair. Now look. Murder.”
“I don’t believe Joey murdered Darleen,” I said.
“Maybe not. But he sure tried to murder that Mr. Russell. Twice.”
He had me there.
“I don’t know where we went wrong with him,” he continued. “Maybe he was just born bad.”
“Perhaps if I could speak to his mother,” I said.
Orlando Figlio frowned and shook his head. “I don’t know. Like I said, this is a bad day.”
“It’s okay, Lando,” came a voice from the hallway. I looked to see a thin, gray woman of about fifty, dressed in a housecoat, her hair disheveled and eyes pink. A smoldering cigarette dangled from her right hand.
“My name is Eleonora Stone,” I said, rising to extend a hand to her. She waved me off and took a seat in the armchair next to the sofa.
“You’re the girl the police say Joey tried to kill last night, aren’t you?” she said.
“Oh, no, Mrs. Figlio. I was just telling your husband that Joey actually saved me from an attack last night.”
“Then why do the police say he killed Darleen and tried to kill you?”
“They’re looking for a simple conclusion,” I said.
“A scapegoat, you mean. Lando,” she called, leaning back and craning her neck to make eye contact with her husband, “it’s Sacco and Vanzetti all over again.”
“He did try to kill that teacher,” her husband pointed out gently.
“He’s a good boy,” insisted Mrs. Figlio. Then turning back to me, she asked what would happen to Joey.
“Since he’s a minor, he won’t go to prison for the attack on Mr. Russell,” I said. “As for Darleen Hicks, I don’t believe he murdered her.”
“I know he didn’t harm her,” said the mother with sudden vigor.
This seemed a good opening to make the case for the true motive of my visit. I told her that I wanted to help Joey and was sure I could if she would help me.
“What can a young girl like you do?” she asked. “Cook him a nice meal. That, he would like.”
I drew a breath of resolve and resisted the temptation to answer in kind. “I’d like to have a look at Joey’s things,” I said. “In his room.”
“What? What do you think you’ll find?”
“They’ve searched his possessions at Fulton, twice, and I’ve personally gone through Darleen’s room very carefully. No one has found anything to prove that Darleen returned Joey’s affections and was actually planning to elope with him. Without that, the police will try to show that Joey was pursuing her against her wishes. That will make the case against him stronger.”
“He never said anything about running away,” said Mrs. Figlio. “In fact, he hardly mentioned her to me. A couple of times many months ago.”
“Did he ask you for money recently? In the past two months?”
Her mien darkened. “As a matter of fact, he did. In November. Before he got sent up to Fulton. I cashed in two savings bonds and gave him forty-two dollars. Lost some value by cashing them in early.”
“May I have a look at his room?”
Orlando Figlio said he didn’t care either way. The boy was no good, and my rummaging through his things wouldn’t do anything to change that. Mrs. Figlio shrugged and pushed herself out of her seat.
“Okay,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette in the standing ashtray next to the
chair. She didn’t quite smother it, and the butt continued to hiss smoke into the air. “If you think it might help my Joey.”
Mrs. Figlio led me down the dark hallway, walls papered with an old damask design, past reproductions of lithographic vistas of Naples and the Amalfi Coast and photographs of ancestors posing stiffly in their wedding finery. Of the three doors that squared off the end of the corridor—two bedrooms and one bathroom—Joey’s was on the left. Mrs. Figlio pushed open the door and motioned for me to go on in.
The bedroom was dim, close, and stale-smelling, like a cave, as if it had been moist and dark for too long. A small bed, its lumpy mattress covered by an old, blue, wool blanket and a single flat pillow, occupied the wall on the left, and a wooden dresser slouched nearby. On the next wall was the room’s only window, its roll-down shade shutting out almost all light from the outside. Across from the bed, a large banded trunk sat against the wall. That’s where I would start.
I found comic books, old clothes, newspapers saved for no reason that I could discern, and some scratched forty-fives and older seventy-eights. There was an empty pack of firecrackers, a collection of motor-oil decals, and matchbooks, empty, half used. Near the bottom, I dug out a box of old photographs, but those must have belonged to his parents or grandparents, as the newest picture of the bunch was at least thirty years old. Finally, stuffed into a corner, I uncovered a crumpled stack of papers that represented the sum of Joey Figlio’s literary output.
His poems, like the ones I’d found in Darleen’s room, appeared to have been spelled by a troll. The difference was that these were the filthiest verses I’d ever read. But aside from the spelling, punctuation, and dirty words, they weren’t badly written. Joey was a raw, undisciplined poet, to be sure, but he had a way with words. Foul, suggestive, forbidden words, especially so when you consider that a fifteen-year-old girl was the subject. And how could he write about Darleen’s most private places with such convincing detail if she was a virgin as Fred Peruso had assured me. I supposed the two might have engaged in some heavy petting, but this was clinical and suggested formidable experience and familiarity. A perverted collection of bad intentions and mad love for a dead girl. And yet, somehow, I was seized by the fantasy of some beau writing such shameless obscenities for me, about me.
Stone Cold Dead Page 28
