“Those candle holders are menorahs for Hanukah,” a G.I. said.
“What’s that?” he asked. “And how do you know?”
“That’s a Jewish festival and I know because I’m Jewish.”
He hadn’t met any Jews until the Army. Best as he could tell, they were pretty much like everybody else—cold, tired, crabby and wanting to go home. Why would these Jewish things be in a house in Heidelberg, waiting to be transported somewhere?
“Get those hands up. I said get those hands up, you stupid bastard.”
The shout came from a GI in the back garden, followed by a single shot. The other Americans tore down the stairs to help, but he ran to the windows. A GI in the garden had his rifle pointed at a short, slight German in an SS uniform.
In the far corner of the garden was a bonfire he hadn’t noticed before. The German had been feeding it a pile of papers and objects. When the GI found him, the German had frantically tried to shove the entire pile into the fire.
As the SS man stood there shivering, looking more like a skinned rodent than a member of the death squad, the Americans rushed to save the papers. They started kicking the glut away from the flames.
This seemed like a good time to leave, so he turned from the windows, patted his stomach to hear the crinkly sound and headed downstairs.
CJAPTER FOUR
Clarice finally heads for the mountains. Don Roberts is first to notice her absence. Roberts is older, and should be wiser. He’s been at small dailies all his career and believes that he needs just “a break,” the fluke story that will go national.
For now, he covers religion, writes an occasional feature and does the minimum so I won’t fire him. He’s supposed to be the lead reporter on the mega church that’s oozing through the city’s planning process. Most of his time is spent finding ways to con the other reporters into doing his work.
He watches the clock until 3 p.m. waiting for Clarice to come in, panting after her race from nowhere.
“Where’s your little pal? Off chasing some ambulance or cop car?” he smiles a snarky grin. “I hope you don’t think one of us will do her work.”
“No, Don. She’s on an assignment. Might take a couple of days. Things are covered.” I turn my back on him and even he’s not so dense, picking up that I’m finished with him.
I slot Clarice’s police-chief story for page one and call over the summer intern.
“OK, it’s time you learned how to do routine cop calls.”
“I’ve never done them,” she says, her voice rising an octave. “I’ve never even talked to a cop.”
“It’s easy.” I cajole her with my Mom voice. “Here’s the list of phone numbers. Just call them in order, tell them who you are and ask if they have anything. Use Clarice’s desk, the cops are used to getting calls from that number.” This experiment better go well. If Monroe has a major crime outbreak, I’ll be covering it myself.
The intern handles two days of routine cop calls without blowup and even seems to enjoy herself.
As Clarice blows back in, I hit her with “What did you find?”
“Well, thanks Amy,” she says. “And how are you?”
It might be abrupt, but I can’t spend time dancing with Clarice. I need to know if she has enough information to write about the senator’s history in this area.
“I know you know that the Senator was born in the Marshalltown hotel, but did you know his parents sold it?” Her eyebrows are two commas as she drops her stuff.
“What do you mean? The obit said his grandson owned it and was running it. Renovating it, as I remember.”
“Yeah, the grandson, Royce, bought it back two years ago. The deal was handled by that real estate woman, don’t you know her, Janice Boxer?”
I slue my chair around. “OK, Janice Boxer. I’ve met her. But is it being redone?”
“That’s the talk of the town, to coin a phrase,” Clarice’s voice is tense. “I’ve heard there’s something strange going on at the hotel. People are mysteriously coming and going at night.”
“Who’s telling you that?”
“Oh, I’ve just gotten calls.” Clarice waves her hand airily. “Sources, just sources.”
Maybe I’ve shot myself in the foot, letting Clarice go off on her own for a couple of days.
“OK, what’s your story. Don’t think you’re going to write a ghost tale or something.”
“It’s pretty straightforward,” she says, settling her face into an earnest story-telling mode. “Robert and his brother William were born at the Marshalltown Hotel. Their family owned it since late in the Gold Rush. William was older and the goodie-goodie. Robert was the one who acted out. Lots of teenage stuff, vandalism. There were people who thought he was going down a bad road. No record with the San Juan County Sheriff, who I met by the way. A little dishy. I may have to stay in touch.”
I watch a flush start up Clarice’s neck. She sees my eyes widen and says, “I know, you’ve been there and all that crap. Cops reporters and their sources. I just think he’s nice looking.”
“And that’s part of the story?”
“Oh God. No. Don’t be so bitchy.”
She’s right. I let my business and personal lives get mixed up when I fell in love with Vinnie. We kept secrets from each other because of our jobs, built tall fences with “No Trespassing” signs and were forever manning guard posts to keep the other out. It was a lousy way to live. I didn’t wish it on a young woman full of enthusiasm and promise so I subconsciously acted like some kind of keeper of morality.
“Both William and Robert were in the war,” she rolls on. “Robert was a war hero. He got medals and a bunch of commendations from some incident in Germany. Whatever happened, it straightened him out. When he came back, he moved to the Bay Area, went to school, got involved in politics and the rest is history.”
This is fine. It will make a nice Sunday package with some art of the town and the hotel, maybe an interview with the grandson who owns it now. I don’t think there can be anyone who remembers the senator as a boy. After all, he was in his 80s when he died.
I’m startled when Clarice says, “I did find one woman, Sally Jacobs, who knew him.”
“Really? Does she remember him?”
“Oh, yeah, she remembers him.” Clarice gives a snort. “She was his high school sweetheart. She used to go joyriding with him. They even stole some older guy’s ID and drove to Monroe to get drunk.”
My curiosity is piqued. A war hero? A U.S. Senator? Well, why not. Everybody is a kid once.
“So did they get together when he came home?” I ask. I have no idea how this would fit in the story, but it’s sounding like a soap.
“No, she married somebody else before he got home,” Clarice says. “She hadn’t seen or talked to him for better than 50 years.”
“OK, this is giving some meat to Calvert. You know, this may even give some meat to the town. A haunted hotel? We can probably get a couple of Sunday packages from this.”
Clarice nods. She isn’t gung-ho for the project but she’s a pro. She’ll follow my lead until it leads her to a wall or she gets bored with too little drama.
She turns back to her desk, ready to start writing from her notes. I jot notes about follow-up stories—a package on the Calvert family, a package on Marshalltown and its mining history, a couple of stories on what keeps the town alive now—and stick them in a tickler file.
I’m deep in reading the daily stories when Clarice looms in my door waving a fax.
“Oh my God, this is from the Sheriff up there, Jim Dodson,” she hisses.
“So now you’re calling him Jim?”
“Whatever. They found a body.”
“And?”
“Amy, they found a body this morning in the hotel. A guy. It was at the end of the big bar. They’ve identified him as a local who’s had problems. Maybe I should go back up there....”
CHAPTER FIVE
Clarice has the bit of a possible murder in her
teeth and is running with it.
I can see the excitement of the chase in her eyes and I’m missing that adrenaline I used to feel when there was breaking news about a found body.
“Hey, hey, hey, wait a minute,” I cut in. “What’s the deal? How did he die? When did he die? Who found him? I won’t authorize any travel or overtime for you to drop stuff here and run off because they found a body. Call the Sheriff’s office; get as much detail as you can. Write it as a brief.”
Clarice’s eyes open wide and she starts making fish faces.
Before she actually gets words strung together I say, “Think about this for a second. Does the fax say anything about a cause of death? He could have had a stroke or heart attack. He may have been drunk and hit his head. Just make the phone calls and ask the questions.
“But for tonight, it’s a brief on the inside local page.”
It’s hard to dump on Clarice’s energy, but now I need to balance a lot of balls in order to get out the paper and help keep it solvent. The story stays as a brief even after the dead guy, Joe Baldwin, is identified and his death ruled a homicide. He’d been hit several times with the proverbial blunt object and was dead for about six hours when a kitchen worker came in to get a bottle of wine.
Even though he’d been murdered, he was a known drunk and panhandler. He’d been allowed to occasionally sleep in the hotel lobby, coming in late and leaving early so guests didn’t run into him. It wasn’t a spectacular murder. The victim wasn’t well-known. It’s unfortunate that in today’s news climate the random killing of a homeless guy doesn’t make much news.
But the next one does.
Janice Boxer’s body is found in her car. She’d been missing for three days according to the San Juan Sheriff’s Department.
This really hits home because Janice was the Marshalltown real estate agent I knew. We met when I thought I might sell my Monroe house and buy a mountain cabin. I threw the idea out with the first snowfall.
Clarice spends an hour or so on the phone piecing together the story. Boxer made an appointment to show a cabin to a buyer from the Bay Area. She left her office in the early afternoon to drive to it and that was the last anyone knew. The next morning it became apparent something was wrong. The last message on the office voice mail was Janice’s client, irate as hell for being stood up.
Co-workers called her house and cell phone. One of them drove to the cabin. It was locked, no sign of Janice. She checked Boxer’s house in town. No one. Her next call was to the San Juan Sheriff’s office. Janice Boxer was well known in the small foothill community and her usual movements were traceable.
Dodson said he checked her house, the post office, the garage where she had her Explorer worked on, the coffee shop, the weekly newspaper office and the Recorder’s office. He rallied Search and Rescue.
His teams combed the cabin and the surrounding clearing for several hours and didn’t turn up a thing that hadn’t spent the winter lying under several feet of snow.
Heading back down the hill, Dodson tells Clarice, the Search and Rescue Jeep was parked on the right-hand side of the road, pulled to the edge of a steep drop off. Janice’s Explorer had flipped over and wedged between two trees.
“We spent better than two hours going over the spot for forensics and came up with nothing; no skid marks, no brake marks. It looked as though she’d just calmly, quietly driven off the edge, into the void,” he tells Clarice.
“But I know there’s more to this,” Clarice has an ah-ha in her voice as she tells me the story.
“Just let it go, Clarice. There are accidents every year on those mountain roads. You’ve got a good little story there that you can follow if there’s any more information.”
“Alright, Amy, but this isn’t going to go away just because you think so,” she says and whirls on her heel. “Two deaths? It’s beginning to spell conspiracy to me.” Her nose wrinkles as the start of a frown.
“Conspiracy? What have you been smoking?”
She turns back at my office door. “I’m telling you, something’s going on. Both Baldwin and Boxer have ties to the hotel. And doesn’t it seem just the teensiest bit suspicious that people are dropping like fall leaves right after the old Senator goes? I don’t believe in coincidence,” she harrumphs.
“What do you mean?” I ask. “Baldwin was found in the hotel bar. That’s a pretty tenuous tie. And what tie did Boxer have to the hotel? “
“I told you that she was the agent who handled the sale back to Royce Calvert.”
“I’m not sure you did, but so what? It’s a small town and there aren’t that many property sales,” I say.
“What about the blueprints?” She’s talking to me as though I’m a slow three-year-old.
Now I’m stumped. We aren’t having the same conversation.
“What blueprints?”
“When Jim searched Boxer’s house he found a set of blueprints. They turned out to be a copy from when the hotel was renovated in the 1960s,” she says with impatience.
This seems a tad unusual, but I’m certainly not a commercial real estate person.
“I can see where a set of plans like that could be handy,” I say. “If Royce was looking for financing, he’d want to know how much renovation was going to be needed.”
“Huh,” Clarice snorts over her shoulder on her way out. “Don’t forget the ghost stories.”
CHAPTER SIX
I won’t let any of the Press staff know it, but I’m flattered when they come to me for advice. In a different world I may have gone into teaching, though a college classroom is too far removed from the adrenaline high of breaking news. I always feel a little tug of envy as Clarice heads out the door yelling, “I’ve got my cell phone,” when something comes over the scanner.
Clarice is opinionated, a little truculent, and argues about assignments. But she writes two or three stories a day and garners awards. She lives for the adrenaline of breaking news, hanging on the sound of the police scanner. Her co-workers call her the Angel of Death. They don’t know she thinks it’s a compliment. She doesn’t know it isn’t.
And now, there’s Dodson. It’s never good when reporters get involved with sources and even more iffy when it’s a cop.
I leave another copy of the Senator’s obit taped to the front of Clarice’s monitor with a red “See me” note.
She wants to talk about the scanner when she comes in. There’s a lot of chat about the Monroe cops looking for someone.
“That’s way too much for just a missing person,” she slaps her hand down on the arm of the chair. “They’re covering up.”
“Stop it. They can talk without covering anything up. Besides, I need you to deal with the Senator.”
“Oh crap, that’s right. Well, let me go over to the cops and see what this is about first.”
I nod as she bowls out the door. If this is just a lot of chat she’ll find out soon enough. If there really is something, it’s closer to home and needs to be covered. The bodies in Marshalltown may have to wait.
I can still use the time on research. There’s a lot of background stuff I can dig up at the library. Nancy, the reference librarian, is still a friend from B.B.L., Before Brandon Left. A lot of my connections in Monroe are holdovers. Nancy’s special, though. Her daughter is the same age as Heather and when we arrived here, they became friends. One morning I went to pick Heather up after a sleepover and found Nancy sipping a Jack Daniels and Diet 7-Up. Right then I knew we’d be friends.
Clarice comes looking for me after half an hour. She’s right, there is something going on. Terry James, a security guard at a local cannery failed to show up for work. When his supervisor called because he wasn’t at work, his daughter, Jetta Forth, said he’d left home at his usual time. Friends started a search. After several hours there was no trace of him so the local cops were called in. And once the cops were involved, Clarice was on the case like snow on a glacier.
“Go ahead with it,” I say, underscoring her j
udgment “The cannery is one of the big employers in Monroe and people will be talking about this.”
The rest of the day she trails about five minutes behind the cops as they interview everyone who might have seen the missing man. When she hears they’ve found the man’s car, she tears out to the gas station next to the freeway. She gets there in time to watch the cops pull a guard’s uniform shirt out of the trunk.
“I know he’s been murdered,” she says, lounging against my door during one of her brief stops back in the newsroom.
“There’s just too much coincidence. A neighbor told me the daughter’s boyfriend has been hanging around. He left last night after a screaming fight. Another neighbor told me her dad said if she, Jetta, didn’t dump the boyfriend, he’d kick her out.”
Clarice’s voice is a dull background hum as I pull the daily story budget up on the screen. I ‘m looking for likely page one stories. I’m not ignoring Clarice. After two years, I find a nod or “um-hum” will hold her until I can focus on what she’s saying. Suddenly, I’m focused.
“Wait, wait, why do you think this is a page one?”
Clarice’s discussion has rolled right on like a juggernaut, assuming the missing man is the top story of the day. It isn’t an assumption I’m buying. She’s going to have to sell this a lot harder.
“All we have is some guy who didn’t show up for work this morning and who doesn’t seem to be in any of his usual places,” I say, trying to keep the exasperation out of my voice. “The cops aren’t looking at this as too unusual yet. If we were to put this guy on page one, what about the next guy who gets tired of his life and takes off? We need a lot more to make this a page one story. Right now it’s the top of local.”
Edited for Death Page 2
