No Stone Unturned

by James W. Ziskin

  “Just might be the weapon Julio used to cut Jordan Shaw,” he said.

  The deputies gathered in the motel’s office, gave Frank the rundown of their findings—nothing—and prepared to leave. Two men from Albany arrived and started dusting room number 4 for prints. The sheriff sent his men back to the barracks, precious knife wrapped safely in an evidence bag.

  “All right, Jean,” said Frank, once we three were alone in the registration office. “Talk.”

  “Go suck an egg.”

  “Don’t rile me, or I’ll haul you in for complicity to murder.” Frank’s booming voice knocked Jean’s insolence to the floor, and, knowing he had no grounds for arrest, I admired his convincing bluff.

  “So ask me,” she said, retreating into her parlor. “You’ve made up your mind I’m guilty, whether I am or not.”

  Frank winked at me, grabbed a folding chair, and dragged it into the next room. I followed, no furniture in tow.

  Jean plopped herself down on the couch and lit a cigarette. She glared at Frank and me. The sheriff swung the chair around backward, planted it in front of her, and sat down. The aluminum legs squealed under his weight, and Jean snorted back the urge to laugh. Frank’s face flushed red.

  “Don’t you know what kind of trouble you’re in?” he yelled.

  “I ain’t done nothing.”

  “Accessory to murder, Jean.” Frank stood and started to pace the room. “We’ve got the knife, and I’ll have a warrant for Julio’s arrest tomorrow afternoon, I promise you that. And I’ll get an envelope with your name on it, too, if you don’t start cooperating.”

  “Knife?” she croaked, puffing away. “What are you talking about?”

  Frank lit himself a cigarette and took a deep drag. “The knife Julio cut her with,” he said. “The pervert probably wanted a souvenir.”

  Jean spat two lungfuls of mentholated smoke, laughing, and jumped to her feet. “That kid wouldn’t hurt a fly!”

  “Where is he, Jean?”

  “Who?” she asked, just to provoke him.

  “We know he was living here. Where is he?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Julio never lived here. Why don’t you go look for him down on the East End?”

  Frank’s interrogation was getting nowhere fast, so I decided to try a different tack.

  “Where do you do your laundry?” I asked, silencing both Jean and the sheriff. “I mean, do you have a washing machine or do you go to the Laundromat?”

  Frank looked at me as if I were mad. Jean, too, was thrown.

  “I do some washing by hand,” she said, cautious, blushing, perhaps embarrassed to admit she didn’t own a washing machine. “What’s left I take to the Laundromat down at the shopping center on Route Forty.”

  “Where do you dry your things?” I continued. “When you wash your clothes here, where do you hang them?”

  “I tie ’em to Sputnik,” she sneered. “They dry in no time.”

  “Just answer her,” Frank warned. He wanted to find out where I was going as much as Jean.

  “In the bathroom, where do you think?”

  “Do you have a clothesline?”

  “Of course I do. How else am I supposed to hang my clothes? What is this, Sheriff?”

  “And how do you keep your clothes from falling off the line?”

  “Are you some kind of moron or something? I use the latest invention. It’s called a clothespin. Ever hear of it?”

  “What kind of clothespins do you use? The kind you push down on the line, or the kind with the spring clips?”

  “Oh, I got only the best,” she snipped.

  By now, Frank was gaping at me in utter confusion.

  “And where do you keep your clothespins?”

  “In the bathroom, like any other God-fearing, anti-Communist American.” She seemed to have no idea the pins and clothesline were gone, so I dropped it.

  The men from Albany had finished dusting room 4 from top to bottom, including the louvered bathroom windows, and Frank gave up on pumping Jean Trent for information on Julio. I stood on the concrete walkway in front of the registration office, waiting for Frank to reappear from a trip to the toilet. I looked past the pay phone and Dr Pepper machine to where the trash can had once stood.

  “You have any ideas on how the grave was dug?” I asked the sheriff once he’d joined me.

  “I figure it was a shovel. Why?”

  I stared at the rusty circle the garbage can had left, then looked at Frank. He was confused at first, but soon caught on.

  Frank’s car heaved and pitched over the deep ruts of the service road, the throw of its headlights dancing against the gray trees. The woods were deathly quiet and looked like a graveyard. If Big Frank Olney hadn’t been at my side, I would have been shivering from more than just the cold.

  “Pull over here,” I told him, and we both got out. Frank left the headlights burning. “Over here,” I called once I’d found it.

  “What the hell’s that?” he asked, his breath billowing in the cold night air.

  “I think it’s Jean Trent’s trash can.”

  Frank dropped me off on Lincoln Avenue and headed back to his office with the flattened trash can in his trunk. He was sure now that it had been used to dig the hole in the woods, and that supported his theory that Julio was the killer. I reminded him that at least three other men had visited Jordan Shaw’s room that night, and any one of them could have taken the garbage can. But Frank said he knew. Julio had been spying on Jordan, she caught him, and he killed her in a panic. And now he was on the lam.

  It was after ten when I trudged up the stairs to my apartment. I kicked off my shoes, remembering Mrs. Giannetti below, poured myself a long Scotch, and sat down at the kitchen table to examine the 1957 yearbook. I pored over the whole thing, all 174 pages, not just where I might expect to find Jordan Shaw, Glenda Whalen, or Tom Quint. Some people I’d seen around town; others had surnames I recognized. Most rang no bells nor drew any interest. Just forgettable souls in a fading town.

  The list of Jordan’s activities under her portrait led me to group pictures near the back of the book. For the field-hockey team photo, she knelt front and center in a plaid skirt. For the French Club, she smiled brightly in the second row from underneath a beret. And for the cheerleading squad her long, slim legs stretched into a full split on the gym floor. Rah! She played Helena in a production of All’s Well That Ends Well. Her name and picture were everywhere, perhaps because she had edited the book, perhaps because she had been so popular.

  I spotted a pretty blonde in the photography club, but the picture was out of focus—if you can believe it—and I wasn’t sure it was her until I checked the caption below. Jordan Shaw, treasurer. But what really opened my eyes was the name next to hers. I checked it twice, then matched it to its owner in the picture. Standing beside Jordan was a tall, skinny, dark-haired boy who seemed to be more interested in her than in the birdie. His head was turned to the side, and it looked like he was staring at the beautiful girl to his right. The caption said it was Julio Hernandez.

  I rechecked the Hs for Julio’s picture, but it still wasn’t there. After the Zs, however, I found a list of “camera-shy” students whose portraits did not appear in the yearbook. In the middle, I found his name. No activities, except the photography club; no quote; no future plans.

  I repaired to the parlor, another tall, brown drink in hand, stacked some records on the spindle of the hi-fi, and settled into an armchair with a couple of crossword puzzles. The first long play was Beethoven overtures: Consecration of the House, Fidelio, Coriolan, and a couple of Lenores. The first puzzle, a reprint of the Boston Globe’s in the Republic, was a breeze. I refreshed my drink and started in on the second: a New York Times puzzle from the previous Friday’s edition. The second record dropped: Beethoven’s Violin Concerto.

  Seventeen years earlier. A Saturday night, and I was fast asleep in my bed. The door opened. Animated cocktail banter invaded t
he room along with a shaft of light thrown across the floor to my bed and onto my pillow. Cigarette smoke and perfume and spirits wafted in behind the noise and light.

  “Abe, let her sleep!” whispered my mother.

  “Nonsense, Libby,” answered my father. “This will be fun. She loves to do this. Ellie, my dear. Come. Wake up.”

  Dragged from my warm bed, I was presented to a crowd of my parents’ guests, pushed to the center of a wartime gathering in the parlor. Standing barefoot in my cotton pajamas, I rubbed my eyes, which were still smarting from the light, and recognized no friendly faces, despite the broad smiles beaming back at me. Then I saw Elijah in the corner, watching silently. He sent me a gritty nod of encouragement and support, and I looked to my father standing above me.

  “Okay, Jack,” my father called to the man in a plaid jacket and dark-green tie stationed next to the portable record player. “Play the first one.”

  Jack gave a thumbs-up and dropped the needle. The room fell silent as the music began to play.

  “OK, Ellie,” prompted my father. “What is it?”

  “Schubert,” I mumbled. “Unfinished Symphony.”

  The crowd cheered good-naturedly, but that was an easy one.

  “Good girl, Ellie,” said my father. “Next!”

  Jack dropped the needle again, this time in the middle of a Bartók string quartet. I couldn’t name which one, but the guests seemed impressed by my answer anyway.

  “That’s enough, Abe,” said my mother. “Let the girl go back to bed.”

  “Just one more,” he insisted. “Fire away, Jack.”

  This one was hard. I knew the music, the melody, so well, but I couldn’t place it in the canon of orchestral piano music. Then I heard the voice behind the instruments. Not a human voice, but a musical one.

  “Well, Ellie?” asked my father. “Don’t make me wrong in front of everyone. I promised you’d get all three.”

  “Abe, don’t pressure her like that!” whispered Mom.

  “It’s Beethoven’s Violin Concerto,” I said, and there was a collective gasp.

  My father placed his hands firmly on my shoulders and turned me to look him in the eye. “Beethoven’s Violin Concerto?” he asked as if to confirm. I nodded. “I hear a piano soloist, not a violin.”

  “I don’t know why it’s being played on the piano,” I said tentatively, “but it’s Beethoven’s Violin Concerto.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked solemnly. “Don’t embarrass me in front of my friends, Ellie.”

  I didn’t answer. He asked again.

  “Yes, it’s Beethoven,” I said finally. “The violin concerto. The third movement.”

  After a long, silent pause, my father burst into laughter.

  “Brava, Eleonora!” he shouted, turning to the guests. “How do you like that?” he crowed as he joined his guests to accept congratulations.

  “Tricky!” laughed Jack, slapping my father on the back. “I didn’t even know there was a piano version of the violin concerto.”

  “How do you do that, El?” Elijah asked me later. “How can you tell them apart? I just hear music.”

  “It’s like a person’s voice,” I said. “I recognize the voice.”

  Now, before turning in, I listened to the late news from Albany and Schenectady. New Holland’s murder was the lead story on WGY and WTRY. They quoted details from my stories and cited my byline. It was the last thing I had expected, and I was positively giddy, even if both radio stations referred to me as Eleanor Stone. As far as I knew, George Walsh had never had his name mentioned on the radio news. And in the midst of my gloating, I allowed myself a fleeting vision of my father catching the broadcast and beaming with pride, bragging to his colleagues and cocktail-party guests, and congratulating my mother for the fine job they’d both done raising me.

  As I bedded down with yet another whiskey on my nightstand, I couldn’t shake the Beethoven melody from my head. It just turned around and around without end, like a rondo, until I fell asleep.

  Sleep is a funny state. Sometimes, when our minds are most preoccupied, it comes only after much tossing and turning. Other times, it washes over us easily, sweeping away the troubled thoughts of the day in order to replenish our physical and mental strength. But that night, my sleep was anything but refreshing. Once the music in my head had finally stopped, I found myself stuck in dreams of my father, my brother, and 1947. My childhood obsession.

  “Tickets to the World Series, El,” Elijah said, pointing a finger into my chest. “I don’t know how he did it, but Dad got tickets to Game One.”

  “No way,” I said, sure Elijah was having a good laugh at my expense, playing dangerously with my Yankee emotions.

  “Don’t believe me, then,” he said, turning away. “I’ll bring you back a program.”

  I sought out my father in his study, interrupting his reading, to set the story straight.

  “As a matter of fact, Ellie, I do have tickets to the Series,” he said, regarding me over his glasses.

  My heart stopped. Dad took note, and his expression darkened. He sat up in his chair and removed his glasses.

  “I’m sorry, Ellie,” he said, leaning toward me. “You see, I could only get two tickets, and since Elijah is older, it’s only fair to take him. You’ll go next time.”

  I lay awake, my gut churning, my mind working furiously to create fantasies to rectify the memory. It was September 30. The Yankees won that day, five to three. I watched it on television, and cried, resenting my dad and my brother, who was at best a lukewarm Giants fan. The Yanks took the series in seven games over Brooklyn. And there never was a next time.

  I got up, lit a cigarette, and poured another Scotch I didn’t want or need. The thing I had never understood was why my father didn’t like me more. Why had he preferred Elijah, who shared few of his interests, none of his tastes, none of his goals? It was a fruitless exercise, especially at this late date, to blame either my father or my dead brother for the inadequacies of my relationship with my dad, but that’s what I was thinking as I smoked that sour cigarette and washed it down with warm, watery Scotch. Too lazy to get up to wrestle more ice out of the tray in the freezer. I was the one who loved literature, the one who shared my father’s love of classical music—witness my performance in the drop-the-needle test for his guests. I was the one who knocked off crossword puzzles like lint off my sleeve. Just like my father. I even looked like him, people said, while Elijah resembled Mom. Maybe it’s like the horror you have at hearing your own voice in a recording. A form of self-loathing, I guess, only his self wasn’t involved. Just me.

  I finally dozed off after one thirty. I was hovering in that limbo of near sleep—about two—when the phone next to my bed woke me with two blasts. I knocked it over in the dark and bumped my head on the bedside table.

  “You wanted to talk?” came a voice from the other end.

  “What? Hello?”

  “You were looking for me.”

  “Who is this?”

  Nothing from the other end.

  “Julio!” I gasped, almost in a whisper. “Where are you?”

  “Meet me under the Mill Street Bridge, north side of the river. Alone. Be there in ten minutes.”

  I wanted to ask for more time, but he had thought of that and hung up the phone before I could say another word. Jumping from my warm bed, I pulled on the skirt and sweater I had taken off a short while before. I wrestled my way into my coat as I thundered down the stairs, surely waking Mrs. Giannetti. The Belvedere groaned but started after a few pumps of the gas pedal, and I was on my way. I rolled through a red light on Market Street after looking both ways for police—God, how much had I drunk?—and reached the river about seven minutes later. I was two minutes late.

  A rusting steel-truss structure, the Mill Street Bridge was New Holland’s only river crossing, straddling the Mohawk between downtown and the South Side. The Great Cayunda Creek, enema to the mills on the hill above, spilled into the Mohawk
underneath the bridge, raising an acrid, yellowish foam. I waited on the west side of the creek, about forty feet wide at its end, sure I’d missed my chance to talk to Julio. Five minutes of shivering later, I was ready to leave; the black river, the biting cold, and the eerie underside of the bridge left me less than confident of my safety. Then a voice, nearly covered by the rushing water, called out in the dark, and I saw a young man in a light-weather jacket standing on the other side of the creek.

  “Julio?”

  “You that girl reporter?”

  I nodded. “Did Jean Trent give you my message?” I figured it was worth a try.

  He wasn’t buying it. “My father said you were looking for me. What do you want?”

  “I want to talk to you about the motel. About what happened Friday night. Can we talk in private? Someone will hear us out here.”

  Julio looked around, then shook his head. “No. I’ll stay right here. If you want to ask me something, do it from there.”

  “You can trust me, Julio. I won’t turn you in. Let’s talk in my car. It’s the yellow Plymouth right above us.”

  He hesitated, and I urged him again. He seemed to be considering me carefully from across the creek, weighing the risks, wondering what a young girl like me could possibly do to help him. Or harm him. Finally he nodded consent. I scrambled up the embankment above the Cayunda—not an easy feat in heels and with five Scotches under my belt. I reached my car and climbed in. A few moments later, a thin figure slipped into the passenger seat. He was a bony, dark-haired, handsome kid in rolled-up jeans and Chuck Taylors. He smelled of Vitalis, and he was scared.

  “I don’t have much time,” he said.

  “Were you at the motel Friday night?”

  No answer.

  “You’re the number-one suspect, Julio. The only suspect. And nothing’s going to change that until you talk to someone.”

  “I didn’t do it!” he said, turning to look at me. “It had to be one of those men who visited her.”

  “Then you were there.”

  “I read your article.”