Dig (Morgue Mama Mysteries)

by C. R. Corwin

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “You’re sure? It happened before you were born.”

  “I know about a lot of things that happened before I was born.” She said it with a smile but I could tell from the way her cheeks were quivering that I’d insulted her.

  “I’m sorry—I guess I’m just disappointed.”

  She accepted my apology. “The fire’s sort of a legend around here.” She led me into the once-magnificent dining room. There was a row of battered filing cabinets along the wall. She pulled out a file and showed me a story published in The Harbinger two weeks after the fire. Said the headline:

  FIFTY YEARS of history

  go up in ANGRY smoke

  “That’s the oldest story we have,” she said.

  “What about the college library?” I asked.

  “They don’t even have this one,” she said.

  I drove back to work, right past a Burger King and a McDonald’s and two Wendy’s. I was feeling much too empty to eat.

  What had I hoped to find in The Harbinger’s old files?

  For one thing, I wanted to see how they’d covered David Delarosa’s murder. If they’d uncovered some interesting little morsel The Herald-Union hadn’t. For another, I wanted to see if something else had happened back then, something that I’d forgotten about, or never knew about, that Gordon might have known about and might have remembered.

  And, to tell you the truth, I also wanted to splash around in my own past a bit, just like I’d told Gabriella Nash that afternoon. Hemphill College was an important part of my life. I’d grown up there. Blossomed there. Lost all of my small-town virginities there. When you reach my age you’re no longer interested in reliving your youth, but you do like to visit it occasionally.

  ***

  I left the morgue right at five. Not to forage through my files in the basement. To pick up James’ winter poop in the backyard, before the grass started growing in earnest.

  James is my neighbor Jocelyn Coopersmith’s American water spaniel. Of all the backyards in the neighborhood, James, for reasons only a dog could appreciate, likes to poop in mine the most. Even in the winter when the snow’s a foot high he waddles back there to do his business.

  I put on my worst pair of khaki slacks and an old sweatshirt that, if worse came to worst, I could deposit right in the trash can. I got my biggest garden trowel and a plastic garbage bag, wiggled my fingers into a pair of yellow kitchen gloves, and headed for the backyard.

  I don’t have much of a front yard—but boy do I have a backyard. It’s as big as a football field. My bungalow was built in the late forties, when young newly married couples were leaving the inner city neighborhoods for, quite literally, greener pastures. The old houses in the city were huge but they had very small yards. The new houses being built on farmland at the edge of the city were just the opposite. To make them affordable, the houses were no bigger than a shoebox. To make them attractive to couples bent on producing a gaggle of antsy kids, the backyards were enormous. Lawrence and I bought my bungalow in 1963, four years after we were married. We planned to fill our backyard with antsy kids, too. But then Lawrence got that job doing PR for the autoworkers’ union. A secretary with irresistible tits came with the job. His preoccupation with those irresistible tits put an end to our procreation plans. We divorced. Lawrence got the secretary. I got the bungalow. Which turned out to be the better long-term investment. Lawrence would marry three more times before he died.

  I started at the back of the yard and worked forward. For a while I worked alone. Then Jocelyn let James out the back door. He came running, with all the grace of a duck learning to roller skate.

  James is never going to win the Westminster. He’s covered with wild brown curls. His sides stick out like he’s swallowed a beach ball. His front legs are shorter than his back, so he’s always going downhill. His ears dangle like ping-pong paddles and his tail looks like it was transplanted from an opossum. His tongue flops over his gums like a big, pink slice of Easter ham. He also has the most beautiful brown eyes you’ve ever seen. And I just love him to death. “Good afternoon, Mr. Coopersmith!” I sang out.

  He circled me twice and gave me another plop of his neighborly love to pick up.

  I laughed. And quoted Shakespeare. “Et tu, Brute?” He rolled onto his back and dangled his legs in the air. I peeled off my rubber gloves and scratched his big belly.

  Chapter 9

  Tuesday, March 27

  It had been a week since Dale promised to look into the Delarosa murder for me. A week since that uncomfortable episode at Ike’s. Except for a few finger wiggles across the newsroom, a week since we’d had any communication at all. Half of me would have been perfectly happy to wait another week. But the other half—the half that almost always ends up winning—refused to wait another minute. I punched Dale’s extension the second he got to his desk. “Up for a little lunch today, Mr. M?”

  “Why not,” he said.

  So at noon we buckled ourselves into his red Taurus station wagon and drove to Speckley’s. We were still waiting for the hostess to seat us when he clutched his chest and hissed, “Shit!” I thought he was having a heart attack. But it was only his cell phone vibrating. He angrily fished his phone from the breast pocket of his sports coat and pressed it against his cheek. His eyes narrowed and darted back and forth. “Okay,” he growled into the tiny, candy bar-sized electronic wonder. “And send Weedy if he’s available.”

  Weedy was Chuck Weideman, the photographer Dale always wanted with him on important crime stories. I started buttoning my coat. If Dale wanted Weedy sent somewhere, that meant Dale was going there, too. “You can drop me off on the way,” I said.

  The afternoon of misery that apparently awaited me made him grin. “No time for that, Maddy.”

  We got on the interstate and hurried north to Hannawa Falls, a once picturesque village now uglified beyond recognition with strip malls. Dale told me what he knew: “A man in a fifth-floor apartment apparently doesn’t want to be questioned by police. He’s got a rifle and a whole lot of bullets. He’s already shot one cop in the foot and blown out a bunch of windshields. We get to hang around until he’s arrested or dead.”

  We parked at the Home Depot and trotted against the sloppy March wind toward a large block of apartment buildings. A dozen silver cars with blinking blue lights were scattered about the street and adjoining parking lots. Cops in combat wear were jogging about with huge black shields. Yellow police tape was being strung between telephone poles. Behind us a trio of EMS trucks were inching forward without their sirens. The satellite truck from TV 21 was already there. Tish Kiddle, the station’s cute-as-a-button crime reporter, was already preparing to go live.

  We spotted Weedy and waved to him. He waved back and went about his business, looking for that one perfect photo that told it all.

  Dale led me to a corner mailbox just a few yards from the police line. It was one of those big blue jobbies that look like a World War I battle tank. “We’ll make this our office,” he said. “We can duck and cover if bullets start flying our way.”

  “That likely to happen?”

  “I’ve covered enough of these SWATathons to know anything can happen any second. That’s why the cops take their good old time.” He spanked the top of the mailbox. “And why we’re going to stay close to Big Bertha here.”

  No sooner had he said that, than he started walking toward a gaggle of police officers. “I thought we were going to stay close to Big Bertha?” I squeaked.

  He turned and grinned. “I’ve got a story to cover. See if you can find some coffee.”

  I pitied myself for a few minutes then let the wind blow me back toward the Home Depot. There was a Starbucks right across the street from it. I bought two blueberry muffins, a large coffee and tea to go. I also took the opportunity to use the ladies’ room. I am a big believer in the preemptive strike.

  It was a good forty-five minutes before Dale returned to the mailbox. He t
ook a huge gulp of his coffee. “Cold as polar bear piss. Just the way I like it.” He chewed on his muffin and told me what he’d learned: “This is going to be a good story no matter how it comes out. The shooter in the apartment is—lo and behold—a suspect in the Zuduski murder. His name is Kurt Depew. Apparently his brother Randy is a suspect, too. No evidence they’re both up there, though.”

  The murder of Congresswoman Zuduski-Lowell’s baby brother had been Page One for several weeks now. There’d been no leaks of possible suspects but the police had freely discussed how high on the hog 32-year-old Paul Zuduski had lived for a guy on a congressional staffer’s salary. He had a pricey townhouse in Greenlawn and drove a $60,000 Humvee. Investigators learned he’d paid cash for both. He’d also taken a startling number of vacations to islands with palm trees.

  Dale finished his muffin and started ogling mine. I preemptively gave him half. “The cops aren’t saying much,” he said, “but apparently the Depew brothers were young Paul’s business associates. And when they went to Kurt’s apartment this morning—presumably to inquire about the nature of their business with the late, rolled-up-in-a-rug congresswoman’s brother—he welcomed them with a deer rifle.”

  I sipped sparingly at the last inch of my tea in my Styrofoam cup while Dale called Metro. He gave them what he had.

  It sounds silly, but I could not keep my eyes off him. He was bald and jowly. His glasses were ten years out of style. But watching his brown eyes stare soberly into space while he dictated perfect sentences and paragraphs—well.

  He pressed his cell phone against his chest and smiled at me. “You want someone from the newsroom to pick you up, Maddy?”

  I shook my head no.

  ***

  “I guess you know why I asked you to lunch.”

  “Sure,” said Dale. “David Delarosa.”

  We’d been hovering around Big Bertha for two hours now, watching the police hover around their cars and the EMS teams hover around their trucks, watching Tish Kiddle hover around her hairspray can. “And?”

  He yawned like a hippopotamus in a Disney cartoon. “And not much, Maddy. No weapon. No suspect. No motive. The investigation just petered out.”

  The investigation may have petered out. But I wasn’t going to let Dale peter out. “Was the type of weapon ever identified?”

  “Just that it was something heavy—and apparently blunt.”

  “Apparently blunt?”

  “No major cuts. Just a faceful of small abrasions and big ugly bruises.”

  Reporters ask questions for a living. But when they’re on the receiving end, they’re as aggravating as everybody else. “Something like a hammer or a baseball bat?” I asked.

  He yawned again. This time with his mouth shut. “From the size and shape of the bruises, the police surmised that the surface of the weapon was rather large and possibly flat.”

  I tried to think of all the large, flat things that could be used to bludgeon somebody. “Frying pan, maybe?”

  “Actually that was one of the things police looked for. A big bloody frying pan.”

  I could feel my face scrunching. “That’s right, there was blood. The old stories said it was splattered all over the walls and floor. Upstairs and down.”

  “More of a smattering than a splattering,” Dale said, enjoying his way with words. “Delarosa’s nose was smashed to smithereens. Police figured that happened upstairs, when he was first attacked.”

  “So the killer could have gotten blood on himself?”

  “Bloody clothes were on the police search list.”

  “None found?”

  “None found.”

  Dale now went on and on, quite cockily I must say, about how he’d talked the public information office at police headquarters into letting him see the Delarosa files: “I sure couldn’t tell them I was trying to link Delarosa’s murder to Gordon Sweet’s. Shit, they’d stitch a big red N for nutcase on my chest and never let me get farther than the Mr. Coffee again. So I told them the paper was thinking of doing a series on cold murder cases. Which immediately got their sperm wiggling. There’s no better PR than solving some difficult old case. Even if the media has to help. ‘Well, we’re just thinking about it,’ I said. I asked to see a sample cold case file, to see what they looked like and how we might develop a story around it. And they bit. And I suggested the Delarosa case. You should have seen me, Maddy. I was almost as devious as you.”

  While Dale proudly described his deception, I tried to recreate David’s murder in my head, matching what I already knew with what I’d just learned. It wasn’t much but it did conjure up some very nasty images:

  On the morning of Thursday, April 18, 1957, maybe just before dawn, David Delarosa, wearing nothing but socks and boxer shorts, came face-to-face with his killer in the hallway outside his off-campus apartment on Hester Street. Maybe they argued. Maybe they struggled a little. Then the killer swung something heavy at him. All I could picture was a big frying pan but almost certainly it was something else. Whatever it was, it struck him square in the face and apparently broke his nose, spritzing blood on the wall and the floor. Maybe the killer just struck him once upstairs, maybe it was a few more times or several more times, but clearly one blow sent David backward over the stairwell railing. He tumbled twelve feet to the marble floor in the lobby. You’d think the killer would flee at that point, wouldn’t you? But he didn’t. Either he knew the apartment building was empty or he was too enraged to care. He kneeled over David. He struck him again and again. “I guess it doesn’t matter,” I asked Dale, “but did David die from the battering or the fall?”

  I could tell from Dale’s smile that he liked my question. It was the kind of question a good reporter would know to ask, I guess. “Actually, the coroner was pretty clear on that,” he said. “He died from the fall. It fractured the back of his skull and ripped his brain loose. His head quickly filled with blood and some of it trickled out.”

  “So the blood upstairs was from the frying pan—or whatever—and the blood downstairs was from the fall?”

  “The coroner’s opinion—”

  “His opinion?”

  Dale chuckled at my skepticism. “A coroner’s opinion is not exactly the same as you having an opinion, Maddy.”

  I didn’t care for the chuckling and I sure didn’t care for his lack of faith in my deductive powers. “You think I’m going off half-baked here, don’t you?” I hissed.

  He had the good sense to retreat: “You’re the most fully baked woman I know. What I meant is that the coroner’s opinion comes at the end of a very thorough autopsy report. And the coroner’s opinion was that the initial blow upstairs knocked him over the railing and while he was lying flat on his back, dying from a massive cranial hemorrhage, the killer smashed away at his face.”

  I thought my own brain was going to rip loose. It was filled with a swirl of grisly images: David sprawled helplessly on the cold floor while some fuzzy, faceless beast swung that big imaginary frying pan; Sweet Gordon climbing that grassy hill while an equally fuzzy beast raised a pistol and took careful aim.

  Wouldn’t you just know it, Kurt Depew chose that moment to poke the barrel of his rifle out his bathroom window and fire.

  Everyone in Hannawa Falls ducked but me.

  I heard Dale screech, “Will you get the fuck down?”

  ***

  Well, I did get down. But it was a waste of time. There was only the one shot and it landed a million miles from us. By the time I pulled myself up Dale was already heading toward the police line. He was bent low like Alan Alda in the opening shots of a M*A*S*H episode, running toward that helicopter full of wounded soldiers.

  I was only the paper’s librarian. But when a big story like that breaks, you have to put everything else aside—your job description, your well-deserved reputation as an uncooperative old crone—and do what you can to help get that story covered. So I bent low and headed back to Starbucks for more tea and coffee. I’m sure I looked a lo
t more like Groucho Marx than Alan Alda.

  ***

  “What about suspects?” I asked Dale. “There had to be someone other than Sidney Spikes.”

  It had been more than an hour since that shot sent everybody into a tizzy. Dale had gathered what little information there was and called it in. Apparently Kurt Depew had just wanted the police to know he was still alive and kicking. He’d taken aim at a black SWAT team helmet sitting on the hood of a patrol car. Sent it bouncing like a beach ball. “They interviewed lots of people,” Dale said, “but from the looks of their notes, Spikes was the only one they had much interest in.”

  “Any record of the police talking to a student named Howard Shay?” I wondered.

  Dale checked his memory. “Yeah, that was one of the names I saw.” His thoughtful frown twisted into a wicked grin. “Another name I saw was that of a young librarian—one Dolly Madison Sprowls.”

  My brain immediately went back to that day after Easter in 1957 when those two detectives appeared at my apartment door. They were both chubby, both painfully squeezed into threadbare blue suits. I remember thinking they looked like Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Alice in Wonderland. Anyway, they’d come at the worst possible time. I was trying to make the first poppyseed kuchen of my young marriage, using the indecipherable recipe my Auntie Edna had sent me from LaFargeville. They crowded around me in my tiny kitchen and peppered me with questions until I was ready to fly.

  “One Dolly Madison Sprowls who didn’t know diddly,” I told Dale.

  He laughed. “No, you didn’t. And neither did anyone else.”

  “Including Sidney Spikes?”

  Dale had long ago finished his coffee and was now tearing little pieces out of his Styrofoam cup and mischievously feeding them into the mail slot in Big Bertha. “Including Sidney Spikes,” he said. “They tried their best to squeeze a confession out of him apparently. But Mr. Spikes stuck to his story: The night they said David Delarosa was murdered, he was ensconced most blissfully—and according to the interrogation reports those were the exact words he used, ensconced most blissfully—in the bedroom of a woman.”