Dig (Morgue Mama Mysteries)

by C. R. Corwin

  According to Andrew, Gordon never let on that he was looking for something in particular. Yet Andrew clearly suspected that Gordon’s murder might be tied to something buried out there. “I’ve been wondering about that like everybody else,” he said. As an old beatnik might say, Andrew had picked up a vibe.

  And so had I.

  And so all the time I was at Artie’s, fighting my way through the aisles clogged with harried young moms, like some old salmon struggling up the rapids to spawn, my fertile mind was fixed not only on the fifties, but on the late fifties, and what might have happened all those years ago that touched Sweet Gordon’s life enough to make him go digging now. David Delarosa’s pretty face popped up again and again.

  ***

  People are more ho-hum about murder these days. There are just so many of them. But back in the fifties, even in a big city like Hannawa, they rattled everybody. And David Delarosa’s murder sure rattled us. I remember Effie calling me in a panic. It was April 18, 1957, the Thursday before Easter. “Somebody’s killed Gordon’s new friend,” she said.

  Just how Gordon met David Delarosa, I still don’t know. But all of a sudden Gordon started bringing him to the jazz clubs, and inviting him to our parties. He didn’t fit in and Gordon knew it. “Maybe David ain’t the hippest cat,” Gordon once told me, “but he’s cool enough in his own way, don’t you think?”

  David Delarosa wasn’t an intellectual. He wasn’t artsy. He wasn’t angry or introspective or full of high ideals. He was just a fun-loving kid from Sandusky on a wrestling scholarship. And boy was he good looking! He was lean and muscular. He had curly black hair, which he wore quite long for those years, and full pouty lips just like that actor Sal Mineo. Instead of having black Mediterranean eyes like you’d expect, his eyes were a cool, spooky gray.

  Anyway, two days into the spring break, somebody threw David Delarosa down the stairway of his apartment building and then bludgeoned his pretty face with something hard and heavy until he was dead. As far as anyone knew, there was only one suspect, a local bebop jazz musician named Sidney Spikes, who was held for a few days, badgered relentlessly and then released. A decade later Sidney, as I’ve said, would change his name to Shaka Bop and become a major political force in the city.

  ***

  Just as I’d expected, there were no stories filed under Dumps. But there sure were under Delarosa, David. I took them to the table, took a big bite from my sandwich and leafed through the clippings. The fat, black headline in the Friday, April 19, 1957 edition of The Herald-Union declared:

  STAR HEMPHILL WRESTLER SLAIN

  The headline in the Easter Sunday edition hinted at the difficulty police were going to have solving David’s murder:

  POLICE SCOUR CAMPUS FOR MURDER WEAPON

  On Wednesday, May 1, there was this frustrating headline:

  SEARCH FOR CAMPUS KILLER DRAGS ON

  Then on Tuesday, May 7, this one:

  POPULAR NEGRO MUSICIAN

  HELD IN DELAROSA MURDER PROBE

  Oh my, how sick we were when we first saw that story! We all just idolized Sidney. He was the only Negro most of us fluffy, white slices of Wonder Bread knew. He was smart and funny and handsome. And could he play that saxophone! We simply could not believe he was a suspect.

  I remember sitting that night with Gordon at Mopey’s, nursing bowls of chili while the street outside filled with blowing snow. He yelled at his copy of The Herald-Union like it was God: “First you tell me David’s dead. Then you tell me maybe Sidney did it. Man, what you gonna tell me next? That the moon’s made out of cabbage?”

  Three days later, on Friday, May 10, there was a happier headline:

  NEGRO JAZZ MAN RELEASED

  We were still worked up about David’s murder—and the way the police were bungling the investigation—but the spring semester was slipping away and other things needed our attention. We took our finals. We graduated. Lawrence took his journalism degree and a 3.8 grade point average straight to The Herald-Union. I got a crappy part-time job at the city library scrubbing the sticky fingerprints off children’s books. Gordon and Chick got jobs at a local factory to help pay for graduate school. Effie drove across country with a professor who’d just gotten his divorce decree. Gwen and Rollie had a huge church wedding. Lawrence and I took the bus downtown and got married by the mayor.

  A full twelve months went by before the next story on David’s murder appeared, on Sunday, May 17, 1958, in a black-bordered box across the top of Page One. The headline asked:

  WHO KILLED DAVID DELAROSA?

  One Year Later Police Admit They Don’t Have A Clue

  And that was the last of The Herald-Union’s stories on David Delarosa’s murder. I read the headlines again. Then I read the stories themselves, and then re-read them, three or four more times, until my brain and my heart were filled with a dump truck-full of questions. I put the Delarosa file under my arm and carried my dirty dishes upstairs to the sink. I combed my hair and dabbed on just enough makeup to make myself presentable. I drove downtown to The Herald-Union.

  Eric spun around on his chair when he saw me. He pretended to be disappointed. “I was hoping you’d died.”

  I threw my coat over the back of my chair and grabbed my mug. “So was I,” I said, “but I guess the good lord wants both of us to suffer a while longer.”

  I went to the cafeteria and made myself a cup of tea and then sipped my way to Sports. Ed Boyer looked up from the funny pages he was reading. His chewing gum literally fell out of his mouth. “Mrs. Sprowls—everything all right?”

  You can understand his alarm, can’t you? I regularly cut through Sports on my way to the cafeteria. But I never stop to chat. As far as I’m concerned, that ramshackle corner of the newsroom is a foreign country. They speak a different language. They have unfathomable customs. They wear bizarre native costumes. They eat indigestible things. “I was wondering if I could take a look at your old files,” I said.

  Ed’s face went white with worry. “For?”

  “I’m looking for information on a wrestler who was murdered many years ago—”

  Ed was suddenly a statistic-spitting robot: “David Anthony Delarosa. Hemphill College. Wrestled in the 141-pound weight class his freshman year, 149 after that. Ohio Athletic Conference champ in fifty-four and five, All-American in fifty-six and seven.”

  I’d long ago learned that sports reporters know more useless information than anybody on earth. I was impressed nonetheless. “How the hell you know all that?”

  “He’s got a plaque in the field house,” Ed explained. “Between the concession stand and the toilets. You see it every time you go for a wiz.”

  Ed led me to the storeroom by the back steps where Sports keeps its files. It was a filthy mess. “Do you have a plastic liner to catch the leachate?” I asked.

  Despite all of my efforts, Ed never quite understood my joke. But he did know right where to find the file on David Delarosa. He accompanied me to the Xerox machine and chewed on his gum like a woodchuck while I made copies. I escaped to my desk just as fast as I could.

  ***

  There was an inch of clippings on David Delarosa in the file but only one interested me. It was a column written by Ted Thomas, the paper’s sports editor at the time. It was dated Tuesday, December 9, 1957:

  WRESTLERS GRAPPLE

  WITH SLAIN CHAMP’S DEATH

  By Ted Thomas, Sports Editor

  Howard Shay says he doesn’t feel like wrestling anymore, not since two-time All-American David Delarosa was brutally murdered just four days before Easter. But Shay, like the other young men on the Hemphill College squad, says he has no choice but to return to the mats this winter.

  “I can feel him right next to me in the gym,” Shay said with a sad grin, “threatening to haunt me for the rest of my life if I don’t do my best to get the win.”

  Shay, an education major from Mallet Creek, who wrestles in the 197-pound class, was more than Delarosa’s friend and teammate.
For the two years they shared a one-room apartment in the off-campus building where Delarosa’s body was found.

  “We’re determined to carry on,” Shay told this reporter. “It’s what he’d want us to do.”

  Indeed, at a prayer breakfast before the team’s first match of the season, against arch rival Edinboro College, Coach Patrick Zemary dedicated the wrestling team’s season to Delarosa’s memory, saying, “David was an inspiration in life and he will remain an inspiration to us in death.”

  I went to the rack where we keep the phone books. I found the listings for Mallet Creek, a small town in neighboring Wyssock County. I found Howard Shay’s number and dialed it. It rang four times before triggering one of those damn recordings: “Big Howie here! Sorry I’m not there to take your call. I’m down in sunny Flor-ee-dah wintering away the kid’s inheritance. Call back after the ground thaws!”

  There was no beep to leave a message. Just a quick click. Whatever I might learn from David Delarosa’s old college roommate would have to wait. I took a deep breath and called Dale Marabout’s extension. “Busy, Mr. M?” I asked.

  “As a termite in a toothpick factory. What’s up?”

  “I just wanted to talk—about Gordon Sweet’s murder.”

  I peeked across the newsroom and saw Dale glowering at me. I wiggled my fingers at him. “I know you told me to let the police handle it,” I said, “but I think maybe I’ve stumbled onto something.”

  And so an hour later, after Dale had finished with his story for the next day’s paper, he and I were walking down the hill, wet wind chapping our faces, toward Ike’s Coffee Shop.

  Ike’s is located in the Longacre Building, one of the many empty office buildings in Hannawa’s dying downtown. It used to house some of the city’s most successful doctors and lawyers. Now it just houses Ike.

  “Morgue Mama!” Ike sang out when we walked in. “Mr. Marabout!”

  Ike is the nicest man. He’s about my age. He taught high school math for 30 years before opening his coffee shop. He makes me laugh when there’s nothing to laugh at. He drives me home when my car won’t start. He maintains his high opinion of me no matter how cranky I get. He’s earned the right to call me Morgue Mama to my face.

  I should also explain that Ike’s name isn’t really Ike. It’s Leonard, Leonard Breeze. He says he got the nickname because he was the only black man anybody knew who voted for Dwight Eisenhower.

  Dale and I took a table by the window. We didn’t have to order. Ike knew I’d want a mug of Darjeeling tea and Dale a regular coffee with room for a little half-and-half. He got busy pouring them.

  “So what’s this you’ve stumbled on?” Dale asked me, drumming his fingers on the table. “And more importantly, on a scale of one to ten how much agony is it going to cause me?”

  I hate drumming fingers. I stopped them. “No more than a six,” I said. “I just want you to do a little checking.” I told him about my trip to the landfill that morning with Andrew, about David Delarosa’s murder all those years ago.

  Dale connected the dots. “So you think maybe Gordon was looking for the murder weapon out there? That’s a real stretch, don’t you think?”

  “I won’t know if it is or isn’t until you look into the status of the Delarosa case.”

  “It’s been a billion years, Maddy. I’d say the status is that there isn’t a status.”

  “I know the case is cold. But I thought maybe you could see if there’s something in the police files that didn’t make it into our stories. Was the murder weapon ever identified or found? Was Shaka Bop the only suspect ever questioned?”

  I’d told Dale something he didn’t know. “The Shaka Bop?”

  Ike appeared out of nowhere with our drinks. “How many Shaka Bops do you think there are in Hannawa?”

  Ike grinned at Dale. Dale grinned back at Ike. But they were not easy grins. Ike knew all about my history with Dale. And Dale knew that Ike knew. It was nice to have two men go grin-to-grin over me like that, but it sure wasn’t going to help me get to the bottom of Gordon’s murder. “Thanks, Ike,” I said. “You’re a lamb.”

  Ike retreated behind the counter and watched us over the top of his espresso machine while he pretended to work.

  “I’m sure I’m just tilting at windmills,” I whispered to Dale, “but Gordon was pretty thick with David Delarosa and I remember how hard he took his murder.”

  Dale tipped his head and squinted, the way dogs do when they’re trying to decipher the confusing sounds coming from the flat faces of their masters. “Are you saying Gordon was gay?”

  “Good gravy, does everything have to be about sex?”

  The second I said it I wished I hadn’t. Sex was not a good topic for Dale and me. We were just friends now. He’d been married to Sharon for twenty years and I’d long ago lost what little physical appeal Mother Nature rationed out to me. But once upon a time Dale Marabout and I had been a couple of real bunny rabbits with each other, I’ll tell you. So the S-word, in any context, always dredged up a lot of awkward feelings better left in the murky past.

  And having those feelings dredged up in front of Ike made matters all the worse. Unfortunately, there was something more than friendship between Ike and me, too. Not that we’d ever acted on those feelings, of course. Good gravy! We were both closing in on seventy. He was black. I was white. He was a Republican and I’d once held a coffee klatch for George McGovern. No way were we going to mess up a wonderful friendship with foolishness. I started over. “Gordon’s sex life is neither here or there. All that’s important is why he was murdered.”

  Dale finished his coffee in a few great gulps. He was as anxious to leave as I was. “Okay, Maddy, I’ll see what I can find. But this is not going to be Buddy Wing II.”

  “Absolutely not,” I said. “This is the last thing I’m going to ask you to do.”

  We said good-bye to Ike and headed out into the evening. The rush hour was over. The streets were all but empty. It was even colder and windier than before. We climbed the hill to The Herald-Union. We said “See you tomorrow” in the parking deck, got into our respective cars and drove off to our respective houses.

  ***

  I ran straight to Gordon’s apartment that April afternoon in 1957 when Effie called to tell me that David Delarosa’s body had been found. Literally ran, through a shower of cold rain that stung like BBs. Effie was already there, making Gordon the only thing she knew how to make—canned soup. Gordon was sitting in the ratty, overstuffed chair he’d rescued from the dump. He was sucking on a beer and staring at the wall.

  I don’t remembering Gordon saying anything that night. Or eating his soup. I just remember Effie and me opening beer bottles for him.

  Gordon drank for two more days and then on Easter morning took the bus to Sandusky for David’s funeral. We all offered to go with him, but Gordon wanted to go alone. “Wowzers,” Chick said in his best beatnikese as the Greyhound pulled out, “have you ever seen anything more appropriately beat in your life? Sweet Gordon bouncing along in a half-empty bus past soggy fields of broken corn, on a day when everybody else is celebrating life everlasting?”

  I guess the reason I couldn’t believe that Gordon was gay now was that it had never occurred to me then. Homosexuality wasn’t something people talked about much in the fifties, not even us bohemian types, but we did know what it was, and surely we recognized it when we saw it.

  Gordon returned from Sandusky just as depressed as when he left. He didn’t say boo about David Delarosa until that morning at Mopey’s when we saw the story about Sidney being questioned by police. His sadness mushroomed into anger. And little by little that anger seemed to heal him.

  ***

  When I got home I turned on Jeopardy and fell asleep during the first round. When I woke up Barbara Walters was interviewing the parents of sextuplets on 20/20. I ate a bowl of grapes, paid some bills, and went to bed. I turned on my radio and waited for Art Bell to come on. While he interviewed a Wyoming man who
’d been abducted nine times by time-traveling aliens, I thought about the men in my life who weren’t in my life. I thought about my father, who’d died when I was eleven. I thought about my dead, philandering ex-husband Lawrence. I thought about Dale Marabout. I thought about Ike. And I thought about Sweet Gordon.

  Chapter 7

  Wednesday, March 21

  Eric appeared at my desk the moment I sat down with my morning tea. He was waving a folder in each hand. “Wooster Pike Landfill, toxic waste.”

  “Good boy,” I said.

  I wanted to plant my nose in those folders the second he handed them to me. But I was a woman with responsibilities. I put the folders in the top drawer of my desk, so I wouldn’t be tempted. I got busy marking up that morning’s paper, deciding which stories should be saved and under which categories. That always takes the better part of the morning. Then I looked up the information city hall reporter Mike Hugely needed on the Elmer Avenue bridge project. After that I was trapped in a one-sided conversation with Candy Prince about her five hairless Chinese cats. I self-medicated that twenty minutes of agony with a call to my niece in LaFargeville to wish her a happy fiftieth birthday. Finally at eleven-thirty I scooted off to the cafeteria with those two tempting folders and the Tupperware container of leftover chicken teriyaki I’d brought from home.

  The folder on the landfill was filled with a lot of dry government stuff that was absolutely useless. Nor had Eric’s search found any murders, missing person cases or other chicaneries in that part of the county that might require further investigation. I closed the folder. I couldn’t decide whether to be relieved or disappointed.