Dig (Morgue Mama Mysteries)

by C. R. Corwin

  James had given up on the chipmunk hole. He was waddling along at my side again. “Of course, if it was a jealousy thing, a gay thing, then maybe it wasn’t Andrew who killed Gordon, but somebody upset about their relationship. Which, as you might imagine, James, leads us right to Chick Glass. I’ve known Gordon and Chick forever, but I can’t for the life of me figure their relationship out. And that goofy argument over Jack Kerouac’s cheeseburger! Good gravy! Were they really that vexed over Ti-Jean’s lunch? Or was it something deeper? All I know is that they had one helluva brouhaha at the Kerouac Thing, just a day before Gordon was killed.”

  James lifted his leg on Mindy Craddock’s prized pink azalea. Then we turned north on Teeple and headed for the park. I continued: “Chick originally played down their argument at the Blue Tangerine. And so did Effie. But then Gwen told me how serious it was, the bean throwing and the wrestling match. And Chick was forced to admit it when I went to see him again. Maybe it was over the cheeseburger. Over which one of those two old fools would be, as Effie put it, ‘the rock upon which Kerouac’s Hemphillite Church was built.’ Or maybe it was over something else. Which now brings us to David Delarosa.”

  I explained to James how Gordon was David’s tutor. That they’d gotten very close in a very short time. “Then David was murdered. Brutally murdered. The same night he’d had a very public confrontation with Sidney Spikes at Jericho’s. I don’t know if you’re a jazz fan or not, James, but today he calls himself Shaka Bop. Anyway, you can see where I’m going, can’t you? Maybe Chick didn’t like it when Gordon got too close to other men. David in 1957. Andrew now.”

  We were at the corner of White Pond Drive now, waiting for a break in the traffic to cross. “Yet there are a couple of big differences that make that particular theory unlikely, aren’t there? In that first murder, it was Gordon’s young friend who was killed. In the second it was Gordon himself. That was Gwen’s point the other day at Pettibones. Remember what she said, James? If Chick was going to shoot somebody, why didn’t he shoot Andrew? A very good point, don’t you think?”

  The last car passed. I gave James a yank and we trotted across the street. “Which brings us right back to Jack Kerouac’s cheeseburger. Which is such a silly idea I don’t even want to think about it.”

  We reached the park, a tiny wedge of grass at the intersection of White Pond and West Tuckman, Hannawa’s main east-west artery. I sat on the park’s only bench. It gave me a wonderful view of the gas station across the street. James made a couple of quick, territory-marking pees and then plopped down at my feet. I gave him another biscuit and continued my evaluation of Gordon’s murder: “We also have to consider the possibility that Effie and Sidney are in cahoots. What if Sidney killed David Delarosa just as the police back then suspected? And what if Effie lied to protect him? And now all these years later, they learn that Gordon is looking for the murder weapon in that old dump? Or maybe they just suspect he’s looking for it? Or fear he’ll stumble across it? Because that’s where they threw it? It’s no coincidence that Effie’s copy of The Harbinger showed up on Sidney’s desk—that’s for damn sure.”

  The bench was even more uncomfortable than it looked. I lowered myself to my knees and crawled over to James. I used his broad curly belly as a pillow. I didn’t give a rip what people in passing cars thought. “If this is boggling your brain, James, wait until you hear my other Effie theory. David’s old college roommate told me he’d always figured that David was murdered by a girl. Because David was too good an athlete to let another boy get the best of him. And because David was always luring girls back to their apartment. The seven was upside-down the night David was killed. So maybe David’s murder wasn’t about Gordon’s sex life. Or Sidney’s sex life. But Effie’s! Let’s say she went back to David’s room that night. And something went wrong. And she beat the bejesus out of David with something hard. Her alibi for Sidney was really an alibi for herself. And Sidney understood that. And protected her. Maybe out of gratitude. Maybe out of fear. The times being what they were, she easily could have let him take the fall for her. Plenty of other white girls would have. Which brings us back to the present. They’re afraid Gordon will find the murder weapon out there. Effie goes nuts and kills David Delarosa. Sidney coolly puts a bullet in Gordon’s head.”

  I could hear James snoring. I gave him a gentle poke in the ribs. “Not yet, Mr. Coopersmith. I’ve still got more. Effie has known Gordon and Chick since they were in college. She knows their history. Their predilections. Their passions. She knows Chick won’t have an alibi. That he spends his evenings curled up with dead poets. And she knows they’ll get into it at the Kerouac Thing. Maybe she orchestrates a bigger fight than usual.” I turned over and buried my face in James’ soft neck. “There is one little problem with all this—which I’m sure you’ve already seen. Sidney doesn’t have much of an alibi. He told me he was at his garage that Thursday working on some old Sunday school bus. That after five he was working alone. According to the coroner, the murder occurred either Thursday afternoon or evening. If the police really pressed him, it would be hard for him to prove he was at the garage after his mechanics went home for the day. But maybe he and Effie figured half an alibi was enough. That there wasn’t a chance in hell the police would link two murders fifty years apart anyway. And they didn’t link them, James. I linked them. At least I’m trying to.”

  I dug out another biscuit for James. I was so lost in my thoughts that I actually took a nibble out of it myself. I gagged and wiped my tongue on my sleeve. James snapped the biscuit from my hand before I could take another bite. “Bon appetite,” I said.

  James swallowed the biscuit whole and then struggled to his feet. I’d been walking him enough mornings now to know what exactly was coming next. I reached into my coat for my wad of plastic bread bags. I waited patiently while he performed his ritual poop dance. He meandered across the park in ever-tighter circles until he found just the right spot. It was like cleaning up after a circus elephant. I tied a knot in the end of the bag, deposited it in the trash barrel and we headed for home.

  “If you don’t mind, James,” I said, “there are two other people I’d like to run by you.”

  He accepted another biscuit as a bribe and I continued: “First, there’s Mickey Gitlin and the greedy nephew theory. True enough, Mickey is a little shaggy around the edges. And a little secretive. And he’s had some trouble with the law. And he’s got financial problems. And he’s Gordon’s sole heir. But all in all, he seems like a good kid. Detective Grant wants me to stay clear of him. I suppose there’s a chance he knows something I don’t. But more than likely, he just doesn’t want me mucking things up in case there is something there. Which is fair enough either way.

  “Then there’s Kenneth Kingzette. The toxic waste dumper. At best he’s an amoral, money grubbing creep. Detective Grant told me to scratch him from my list. And I’d be happy to—if there weren’t so many annoying coincidences. Gordon was not only involved in looking for the missing toluene, he started asking for permission to dig at the Wooster Pike dump just six months after the EPA called off its own search. And when does Gordon get killed? While Kingzette is safely behind bars? No. He gets killed four months after Kingzette is paroled. So why couldn’t the toluene be buried out there? Why couldn’t Kingzette’s old boss Donald Madrid be buried out there, too? And why is Grant so adamant about me staying away from Kingzette? Could it be he suspects him even more than I do? And the only reason he wants me to keep snooping around my crazy old beatnik friends is to keep me out of his precious little hair? I sure have my suspicions, James. I sure have my suspicions.”

  We crossed back over White Pond Drive and headed down Teeple toward my bungalow. “So there you have it, James: Andrew Holloway, Chick Glass, Effie and/or Sidney, Mickey Gitlin or Kenneth Kingzette. Now what do you think?”

  He looked up me at with sad, apologetic eyes. I stopped and scratched his big ears. “Don’t feel bad,” I whispered, “this is too much for
my little brain, too.”

  Chapter 19

  Friday, May 11

  The first thing I had to do was get Kenneth Kingzette out of my system. Take my measure of him. The way I’d taken my measure of Mickey Gitlin.

  The question was how. I didn’t want to foul up Detective Grant’s investigation. And I sure didn’t want to end up missing like Donald Madrid.

  The answer didn’t come to me until that Friday night, when I was curled up on my back porch, watching James watch me. I was also reading the East Side Leader.

  Hannawa has only one daily newspaper, The Herald-Union. But like any big city, there are also a number of neighborhood weeklies: The South End Trader, The Greenlawn News, The Brinkley Bee, there are just oodles of them. Once a month or so I go through them to make sure I haven’t missed anything important. So I was making my way through The East Side Leader when I saw a promising solution to my Kingzette problem. It was in the classifieds, under FOR SALE, MISCELLANEOUS:

  Charming 6 pc. patio set, glider, two chairs, coffee table, end table & serving wagon, wrought iron with floral cushions, $250.

  I’d been thinking about buying new furniture for my porch for years. The wicker set I had out there now was wobbly and musty smelling, real bird’s nest material. Lawrence and I bought it the same year we bought the house. Now here was a way to feed two fish with the same worm, as my Uncle Wally used to say, assuming that patio set was as charming as the classified promised.

  ***

  Saturday, May 12

  Saturday morning I called the number listed with the ad, to make sure the patio furniture was still available. The eager woman on the other end told me it was. I made sure James’ food bowl was full and headed toward Union City.

  Union City is anything but a city. It’s a little nub of a community on the eastern edge of Hannawa’s suburban sprawl. There are some impressive houses out there these days. And some pretty modest ones. The woman with the patio furniture lived in one of the modest ones. She led me through her house to the patio. It was a ten-foot square of red brick overlooking the back alley of a strip mall. “When we moved here it was a beautiful woods,” she lamented. She was in her late fifties, overweight, overwrought and newly widowed. She was selling her house and moving into a condo.

  Well, the patio set was not exactly charming. But it wasn’t horrible either. The iron frames on the chairs and tables were painted a pale yellow. There were a few speckles of rust here and there. The cushions were faded from years in the sun, making the crazy red and orange floral pattern a tad bit easier on my eyes. “This is exactly what I’ve been looking for,” I said. I wrote a check for the full $250.

  When I got home I bolstered my nerve with a strong cup of tea and then called the Kingzette Moving Co. “I just bought this patio set on the other side of town,” I told the unfriendly man on the other end, “and I was hoping you could help me out.”

  “That’s why we’re in business,” he said. From the pitch of his voice I gathered he was a younger man, presumably Kingzette’s son.

  And so I made arrangements for them to deliver my patio set the following Thursday afternoon. It would cost me another $150.

  ***

  Thursday, May 17

  Right after lunch I told Eric I was starting to “feel a little woozy.” Which was a lie. I was actually feeling a lot woozy. My wooziness had been growing all week, since I’d made those arrangements to have Kingzette Moving deliver that awful patio set.

  Eric dislodged the Mountain Dew bottle from his mouth long enough to speak. “I suppose that means you’re going home early.”

  “You think I should?”

  He rolled his Chinese-American eyes. “Maddy, you’ve been preparing to go home since you got here.”

  So I drove home and camped in front of my picture window, getting woozier and woozier waiting for that truck to pull up.

  It pulled up at three. There was a big gold crown painted on the side, along with these words:

  KINGZETTE MOVING

  Expect The Royal Treatment

  I looked over my shoulder at James, who was sprawled on the floor in front of my sofa, gnawing on a log of rawhide. “I don’t expect you to turn into Lassie—dial 911 with your snoot or anything—but if things start going wrong I do hope you’ll reach down deep in that wolfen soul of yours and maybe growl a little.”

  James gnawed away, promising nothing.

  Two men slipped out of the truck. The driver was young and tall, and had way too many muscles for his tee shirt. The other man was a foot shorter, but just as burly. He had the thin gray hair of a man pushing sixty. He leaned against the fender and lit a cigarette while the younger man headed for my door. I opened it before he could knock. “You’re Mr. Kingzette, I gather?”

  “One of them,” the young man said. His face was as sour as Howard Shay’s lemonade.

  I nodded toward the older man. “And that’s your father?”

  “Where you want the furniture?”

  I ignored his impatience. “It must be nice to work together like that—I remember how I used to help my father milk the cows.”

  “Patio in the back, ma’am?”

  “Screened porch,” I said.

  I followed him back to the truck. There were only six lousy pieces of furniture in there. If I was going to make an adequate appraisal of the older Kingzette, I’d have to get in their way as much as I could.

  I greeted Leonard Kingzette with a wiggle of my fingers. He nodded at me. Took a long, painful drag on his cigarette and then flicked it into the street. I joined them at the back of the truck.

  They unloaded the furniture onto my front lawn. It took about thirty seconds. The son picked up the two chairs and headed for my backyard. I helped his father with the coffee table. “I have a confession, Mr. Kingzette,” I said, as we waddled sideways with the table. “When I told my neighbor who I’d hired, he got a little nervous. Because you’d been in prison.”

  The word prison hit Kingzette like one of those poison darts Indians in the Amazon use to shoot monkeys out of treetops. His chest caved in. His eyes sagged against the bridge of his nose. The coffee table between us quivered. I moved quickly to reassure him. “But I said, ‘Good gravy, James, if the man has done his time, then the man has done his time. He has the right to make a living.’”

  He recovered. Gave me a quick, uneasy smile. “Not everybody’s so charitable.”

  “James is a real worrywart. He’s probably peeking out the window right now. Anyway, you checked out just fine.”

  A second dart struck him.

  “With the Better Business Bureau,” I said quickly. “They didn’t have a single complaint.” That part of my lie was true. I had checked with the BBB.

  Kingzette managed another smile. “Well, Mrs. Sprowls, I appreciate your going the extra mile.”

  We reached the back of my house. Kingzette’s son trotted past us, heading back to the truck for more. “Your son’s all business, isn’t he?” I said.

  Kingzette pushed the porch door open with his backend. “He sees to it I don’t get into any more trouble—that’s for sure.”

  And that was pretty much it. By a quarter after three, the patio set was on my porch, the old wicker crap was on my tree lawn, the Kingzettes were on their merry way. And I was regretting the whole miserable affair.

  Oh yes, I’d had a few minutes to take my measure of Kenneth Kingzette. But like the damned fool I am, I’d also given Kenneth Kingzette a few minutes to take his measure of me. So instead of enjoying my new patio set that evening—sliding back and forth in my glider with a mug of tea, sleeve of Fig Newtons and that new Dana Stabenow mystery I’d been dying to read—I was perched by my living room picture window, in that uncomfortable wingback chair I just hate, watching the street like a nervous parakeet. I had my phone on one armrest and my butcher’s knife on the other. I just knew that any minute I was going to spot Kenneth Kingzette sneaking through my hostas.

  There were so many things
about my encounter with Kingzette that bothered me. For one thing, he’d called me Mrs. Sprowls. “Well, Mrs. Sprowls,” he’d said, “I appreciate your going the extra mile.” Fair enough. It was my name. It was written on the bill. But he’d said it in such a familiar way. As if he were sending a subtle message that he knew who I was.

  And why wouldn’t he recognize my name? I was no longer the anonymous newspaper librarian I used to be, was I? My name was all over the news during that Buddy Wing business. And just a few weeks ago that awful girl with the green hair told the whole world I was looking into Gordon’s murder.

  And even if he hadn’t recognized my name at first—even if he’d arrived at my house thinking I was just some sweet old penny-pinching broad—I’d sure given him a lot to worry about. I told him I knew he’d been in prison. I told him I’d checked him out. What if I’d made him as nervous as I’d made myself? Nervous enough to check me out?

  I sat by that picture window all evening. The darker it got outside the madder I got inside. Mad at myself for concocting such a damned-fool idea. Mad at myself for not realizing it was a damned-fool idea until it was too late.

  What exactly had I expected Kingzette to do? Confess his sins to me? Somehow convince me with his body language, or some soulful Bambi-like look in his eyes, that while he’d once been callous enough to dump those drums of toluene, he wasn’t the kind of man who shot people in the back of the head?

  The thing that was bothering me most, of course, was that little quip he’d made about his son. The one when he went rushing by us, and I commented about him being all business. And he said: “He sees to it I don’t get into any more trouble—that’s for sure.” Good gravy! What did he mean by that? Was I worried about the wrong Kingzette?

  I kept my vigil by the window until midnight. Then I Kingzette-proofed my bungalow. I put spoons and forks in empty water glasses and put two glasses on every window ledge, so there’d be plenty of clanging and crashing if somebody tried to crawl in that way. I slid my dining room table against my front door and my kitchen table against the back. I turned on every light. I mined the hallway floor with James’ squeak toys. I tethered James to my dresser. I got into bed, fully dressed, with my phone and my butcher’s knife. I even put a paring knife under my pillow as a backup.