by JoAnna Carl
“I was urging her to go back to Amity,” he said. “She’d always been dependent on her parents—even when she resented their ‘interference.’ But I thought getting away from their steadying influence was a lot of her problem. I thought maybe we could work it out if she’d go back, stay with them a while. I’d look for another job, back in the Southwest, where we were more at home. We’d get the hell out of Jessamine.”
But Sally had been adamant, he said. “She kept telling me she hadn’t done anything wrong and that she was going to prove it.”
“Did she say how she was going to do this?” Mike asked.
“She said she’d find the person who could back up her word. She wouldn’t give me any details. When Sally was huffy, she could really be bullheaded.
“Anyway, that’s where we were two weeks later when Vanderkolk himself came over to tell me she’d been found dead on a back road. She’d been run over by our car.”
“Where was the car found?” Jim asked.
“In the parking lot of one of Jessamine’s two grocery stores. Nobody noticed who put it there.”
“Fingerprints?”
“Mine, of course. Sally’s. Sally’s Chicago friend. But it was November. Cold weather in Michigan. People would be wearing gloves.”
“How about the Chicago friend? Did she know anything?”
“She said she didn’t. Said Sally had dropped her like a hot brick after their escapade at the Elks Club.” Arnie shrugged. “I was the most logical suspect, of course. The betrayed and angry husband. And Vanderkolk and I had already bumped heads over a story we ran on slot machines. I can’t blame him for considering me the prime suspect. But I couldn’t get him even to look at anybody else.”
“Did you have an alibi?”
“No. I’d left the Journal office for several hours during the evening. All I’d done was walk back to the hotel and lie down and watch the ceiling, but I couldn’t prove it. That hotel didn’t man the desk all the time. I had a key. Just let myself in and went on up. I went back to the office around eleven and stayed until the presses rolled, but the medical examiner thought Sally had died earlier in the evening.”
“Still,” Jim said, “your lack of an alibi isn’t much to go on.”
“That’s where little Nell came in,” I said. “Apparently I was the one who convinced Vanderkolk that my parents had been together the night my mother was killed.”
Mike passed Vanderkolk’s notes around then, and there it was in black and white. A man had been talking to my mother on the phone. I had thought it was my daddy. My mother had said she was going to see my father the next day, then shooed me back to bed.
“And I still say, if I’d been the man on the phone, I would have talked to Nell,” Arnie said. “I didn’t call that night. I did not arrange to meet Sally the next evening.”
I listened to all this, and I still kept my mouth shut about the most important reason I had thought Arnie was the man on the phone.
“Three days later, after I decided Vanderkolk wasn’t going to do it, I thought I’d try to find out just who had been registered at that motel in Holland,” Arnie said. “I was pretty sure Sally had met somebody and that was the guy she was talking about when she said something ‘terrible’ had happened. I felt sure he was the person who killed her. Of course, Vanderkolk said he had looked at the people registered, and there was nothing unusual about any of them. But I thought I might recognize a name, a license plate—something.
“Since our car was still being held by the sheriff’s office, I had to borrow a car from one of the reporters to drive over there. And I was able to talk to the motel manager. He’d had a full house that night, didn’t remember much about anybody who’d checked in—except this one rather furtive individual whose name was supposedly Smith. While I was there, the reporter whose car I’d borrowed called. He said Vanderkolk had been in, looking for me. The gossip was that he’d asked for a warrant.”
Arnie shook his head. “My situation seemed hopeless. I decided my only chance was to find this Smith. It was obvious Vanderkolk wasn’t going to look for him. I got his name and license number—it was an Illinois tag. I walked across the street to a grocery store, and I cashed a check for the few hundred dollars on our account. Then I wrote Sally’s parents a note saying they were Nell’s guardians, and I wrote the reporter a note telling him where his car was. I got on the next bus for Chicago.
“I really felt that I could track this Smith guy down and be back in a few days. Of course, it turned out to be hopeless.” He stubbed out his latest cigarette.
We all took a break then. The April morning had warmed up, so Mike opened the doors and windows and turned on the ceiling fan. Jim called his office and told Peaches to postpone his ten o’clock appointment. Boone used the bathroom.
I worried. I wanted Arnie’s explanation for the fact I was leaving out, but I didn’t want to ask him about it in front of Jim and Boone. Or even in front of Mike.
When we came back, Jim kicked everything off. “Let’s move on to Martina,” he said. “I don’t suppose she was on the staff at Jessamine.”
“No, I first ran into Martina a couple of years later, in Tennessee,” Arnie said.
After a week in Chicago, Arnie had been close to broke. He found a casual job as a dishwasher. “My skills are pretty limited,” he said. “It’s write, edit, or sweep up.”
He’d found a newsstand that carried the Grand Rapids paper, and he kept an eye on the investigation into my mother’s death. Since he was never officially charged or declared “wanted,” the official comments were guarded. But as a former cop reporter himself, he knew the code. Vanderkolk had other cops looking for him.
He’d remembered the tragic car accident that had killed his journalism classmate, Arnie Ashe, so he wrote for a copy of Arnie’s birth certificate and started over as a reporter, using Arnie’s transcript from Eastwick Methodist College as the basis of his credentials. He’d landed a job in Jenkinsville, Tennessee, where he’d picked up the nickname “Red.” After he joined the Gazette staff, he and Martina had argued when she used that nickname.
In Tennessee Martina had been covering county government and agriculture.
“That’s a big beat in Jenkinsville,” Arnie said. “And she was a good reporter. Nosy.”
In fact, she’d been as nosy about everyone’s personal life in those days as she had been when I’d worked with her at the Gazette. “She always made me nervous. Full of questions,” Arnie said.
She’d scared him worst after the birth of a baby to one of the reporters. In the flurry of congratulations, Arnie had made an unguarded comment about his own experience with fatherhood.
“She was on it like a cat on a june bug,” he said. “I’d let the word get around that I’d come to Jenkinsville in the aftermath of a rotten divorce. But I’d never before let out a hint that I had a daughter. After that she was quizzing and probing all the time.”
Arnie snubbed her into silence, but it had been unpleasant. When he heard of a job across the state, he grabbed it.
“Martina won a national prize for breaking a big county scandal that year,” he said. “I went to the state press meeting, told her congratulations. I knew she was a digger. If she’d spent as much energy on investigative reporting as she did on office gossip, she’d have been a Pulitzer prize winner.”
Mike leaned forward. “Would you have come to the Gazette if you’d known she was there?”
“Sure,” Arnie said. “She was a digger, true, but she’d never given me any reason to think she’d figured out who I was. She just thought that there was something fishy about my personal life. I always had the feeling that if I made up some soap opera story about my supposed divorce, she’d leave me alone.”
Jim, Boone, and Arnie went over the time schedule for the night Martina was nearly asphyxiated by blanket wash, and for the next night, the night she was killed. Arnie had no real alibi for either night. Both attacks had happened just as his dinner break ended, at a time wh
en he would logically walk out the back door of the break room, cut through the warehouse, and go over to the fire department for his late check. Since he didn’t clock in or out at the Gazette or at the station, there was no way of proving exactly where he was when the attacks occurred.
As a longtime newsman, Arnie knew enough about presses to know that blanket wash was dangerous if inhaled, and he admitted he’d known about Martina’s nap habit.
He’d certainly known enough to snitch a pair of shoes from a pressman’s locker, ambush Martina on the stairs, and kick her onto the concrete floor. But was he cold-blooded enough to pick her head up by the hair and smash it against that floor until she had no face?
I couldn’t believe it. But I couldn’t conceive of anybody being that cold-blooded. Martina must have been a real danger to someone.
“Threatened,” I said. “Martina had made somebody feel really threatened. The way she was killed—it was truly vicious. That person must have been desperate.”
“Or rotten mean.” Jim Hammond shrugged. “Let’s recap for a minute. First, Martina apparently found out that you were really Alan Matthews. Second, she didn’t tell you about it. Third, someone tried to kill her Wednesday night, making it look like an accident. Fourth, when that didn’t work, he set up another supposed accident Thursday night, making it look as if she fell downstairs. But he left a footprint on the back of her linen jacket, and Nell and Mike found the jacket. Fifth, that person took the shoes he’d worn to kick Martina and hid them in Arnie’s—Alan’s—desk. Sixth, the perp may have tried to kill Nell by chasing her around in a big car. We don’t know why he did this.
“Now, the big question is, why kill Martina at all? If Martina found out Arnie was really Alan, why would that threaten anybody except Arnie?”
“The obvious answer,” Mike said, “is that somebody else now at the Gazette was connected with the death of Nell’s mother twenty years ago.”
Jim looked skeptical. “Pretty much of a coincidence.”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “If you look at the staff of the Gazette, you’ll find lots of us worked together at other papers. Three of us worked at Amity—and that’s just in the newsroom. Some of the makeup people and pressmen may have worked there, too. Four of our staffers are former employees of the Duncan Banner. Generally reporters start on a small paper—sort of an apprenticeship—then move to a bigger one. And the back shop people—if they’re members of the union, they can move around easily, too.”
“Okay! Okay!” Jim gestured me to silence. “Okay. So the first thing we need to do is take a look at the Gazette employment records, find out if anybody lists previous employment in Jessamine, Michigan. In the meantime—” He frowned at Arnie. “What are we going to do about you?”
Arnie puffed his cigarette. “You going to arrest me?”
“I sure don’t want you to leave town. You willing to make all this a formal statement?”
“After somebody chased Nell, I am. I came to the Gazette because I wanted to see her, not because I wanted to endanger her.”
He sighed and rubbed his head again. “I ran twenty years ago because I wanted to protect Nell. Or that’s what I told myself. But this time running won’t do the job. Until you all figure out who really did kill Martina, the murderer is loose. And if there’s a chance he thinks Nell knows something, or if he thinks—well, if there’s a chance he might hurt her and I could prevent it, I’ve got to do it.”
Mike spoke then. “It seems to me that Arnie’s cooperating, and it might be smarter for us to keep him under cover. If he’s arrested—”
“Yeah,” Jim said. “Since the U.S. Constitution says we have to file charges and so forth, and the Gazette checks up on that sort of thing and on who’s in the jail, if we hold you, Arnie—Alan—whoever you are—it won’t exactly be a secret.”
“He can stay here,” Mike said. “Of course, with Marceline Fuqua across the street, he practically has to live in the back bedroom with the lights out. He might rather be in jail.”
Arnie snorted. “If you don’t arrest me, I can go back to my own apartment, for that matter. Most of my stuff is still there. I was going to write, tell the manager to give my stuff to Goodwill, after I was down the road.”
“Where do you live?” Jim asked.
“Liberty Square Apartments. Ten hundred block of Liberty Boulevard. Apartment 8204.”
The address rang a bell so loud that I almost gasped out loud. “Mike!” I said. “Did you get newspapers while you were out of town?”
“I sneaked them in off the porch while it was still dark,” Arnie said. “News junkie that I am. They’re in the back bedroom.”
“Did you read the agate?” I asked.
Arnie grinned. “You caught me, Ms. Editor. I don’t read the agate unless I write it.”
“I don’t read it unless I edit it,” I said. I stood up.
“What’s the agate?” Jim sounded puzzled.
Arnie explained that “agate” is routine news normally printed in a small-type size, and I raced down the hall. I came back with the Sunday morning paper and quickly turned to what we call the “Daily Gazette” page. That’s where we list the fire reports, deaths, births, and other routine items in small type—agate type. I scanned down the police reports.
“Here,” I said. “Liberty Square Apartments. Apartment 8204. Burglary reported.”
Chapter 18
“I thought I remembered copy-reading that address,” I said.
Jim called the station and got the desk clerk to find the original report on the burglary. It had occurred sometime Friday night. The door to the apartment had been found standing ajar Saturday morning. The neighbor in 8206 had seen the occupant of the apartment, one Arnold T. Ashe, loading up his car for a trip Friday afternoon. So when she saw the open door Saturday morning, she’d known something was fishy and had called the manager. The manager had called police.
Moving as a body, the five of us loaded into two cars and drove over to the Liberty Square Apartments. Arnie and I drove with Jim Hammond, and Mike and Boone went in Mike’s truck.
A new lock had been installed on Arnie’s apartment, and he had to get a key from the unit marked Manager near the office.
The manager, a tough-looking blonde, wasn’t too gracious about issuing the new key. “We’ve haven’t had a burglary here for three years,” she said, glaring at Arnie.
“I’ve never ever had a burglary before anywhere,” Arnie answered, glaring back.
The conversation seemed to be a stand-off.
The apartments in the complex, like most in our part of the country, opened off breezeways that ran through each building, with stairs leading to similar second– and third-floor setups. They’ve always reminded me of the “dogtrots” which pioneers built—two cabins held together by an open, roofed area. Arnie’s second-floor apartment had two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room with a dining area off one end. I was relieved when I saw that it wasn’t bad. I think I’d been picturing him “on the run,” in furnished rooms or with thrift-shop furniture. The apartment had obviously been tossed, so it was a mess, but the furniture itself was okay. He had a nice stereo, a television set with a medium-sized screen, a VCR, lots of bookshelves, and a couch, chairs, and dining table with simple lines. Nothing fancy. Like most men, he didn’t worry about drapes or ornaments. But it looked comfortable. Or it would when the books were back on the shelves and the cushions back on the chairs.
Arnie looked around and shook his head. “I can’t tell you right off if anything’s missing,” he said. “But I see the TV and the VCR are still here.”
“That would seem to rule out a casual burglar,” Boone said. “A lot of this stuff is hockable.”
I’d been walking around. “One of the bedrooms is nearly empty,” I said.
“That’s the office,” Arnie said. “I packed most of it in my car and took it with me. The computer and such. A couple of folding tables. It’s in the trunk of my car, in Mike’s gar
age.”
“Don’t touch anything until the techs go over it,” Jim said.
The Grantham police, like those of most cities, don’t have enough manpower to give the full technical treatment to routine burglary scenes, and with the apartment’s occupant believed to be out of town, not much had been done in the way of investigation. But the possible link to a murder investigation inspired Jim to call for the full treatment, and the lab van arrived within a few minutes. The apartment began to feel crowded. Mike, Arnie, and I stepped out into the stairwell.
Almost immediately the door across the way opened, just a couple of inches, and an eye peeked out over the chain lock. “Oh, good!” a voice said.
The door closed, then opened again, and a young black woman came out. “Oh, Mr. Ashe, you’re back! I’m so sorry about the mess in your apartment.”
“I understand you told the manager about it,” Arnie said. “I sure appreciate that.” He gestured toward me. “Mrs. Marsh, this is my daughter, Nell.”
He and I stared at each other, and I felt tears sting my eyes. I think that was the first moment the situation really sank in. “My daughter,” he’d said. After all these years I’d finally found my father. And it even turned out that I liked him.
But what was going to happen to him? Jim Hammond and Mike were acting as if his story was gospel, but what did they really think? Was he still a suspect? Would he be snatched away again, just when I’d found him? He could still wind up spending the rest of his life in prison. For a moment I almost despaired.
By the time I had my emotions under control, Arnie had introduced Mike to the young woman, and Mike—as usual—had taken over the conversation.
“Did you hear anything over at Arnie’s apartment Friday night?”
Mrs. Marsh shook her head. “No, I’m sure sorry to say I didn’t. I mean, not to notice. My husband, he works nights, and I had the television on most of the evening Friday. It’s company for me after the baby goes to sleep.”
Mike nodded. “So the first thing you noticed was the door ajar Saturday morning?”
