Stone Cold Dead (41 page)

I pushed the bed back into place. That’s when I noticed that the large, round finial atop the headboard’s post was loose. I nudged it then carefully twisted it. It spun effortlessly. I pulled it off and turned it over in my hand to examine it. About the size and shape of a softball, the finial sported a hole two inches deep, drilled to fit the post atop the headboard. The glue must have dried out. One look into the hole solved the mystery. There was a wad of tightly folded paper wedged inside.

Retrieving a pencil from my purse, I dug the paper out with great care. Unfolding it on the bed, I smoothed the wrinkles to find a long note addressed to Joey.

Dear Joey,

It won’t be long now. Soon we can leave and get married like we said. You will write me poems and make money from them. Maybe sell them to Brenda Lee or Roy Orbison. We’ll be rich.

So far I have $7.50 that I saved from chores and sneaking money from my dad’s jar. But I’ll get more, just like we planned it.

I know you’re no good at math, so I figured it all up at the bottom of the page.

There followed a list of figures. Dollar amounts with projected dates, tallied carefully with remainders carried over. And there were names. Wilbur Burch: $100. Joey’s mother: $42. Mr. Brossard: $15. Darleen’s savings: $7.50. Ted Jurczyk: $2. There was a question mark after Brossard’s name, as if it was a maybe. It all added up to $166.50. At the very bottom, next to a heart pierced by an arrow, appeared Darleen’s signature, as clear and as big as day.

“I need to give this to the police,” I told Mrs. Figlio. “It will help Joey for sure.”

“What if they tear it up and say it never existed?” she asked.

“I’ll take a photograph of it now,” I said. “We’ll put yesterday’s newspaper in the picture for proof of the date. And I’ll hand it over to the DA instead. It will be safe that way.”

Mrs. Figlio agreed and found me her husband’s copy of the previous day’s
Republic
. Instead of photographing the front page with George Walsh’s stolen article, I turned to the funny pages. With the date visible, I placed Darleen’s letter on the page and shot ten frames to be sure I’d have a good one.

My feet were tired, and it was only just after three thirty. No rest for the wicked this day, as I stopped by the
Republic
offices on Main Street to drop off two rolls of film: the one I’d just shot of Darleen’s letter and the one with Joey Figlio’s arrest in my apartment. I left a note asking Bobby Thompson to develop them for me first thing Monday morning.

Since the district attorney’s office was across the street, I left an envelope for Don Czerulniak in the mail slot. Inside was Darleen’s letter to Joey, along with a page of hastily scribbled instructions for the prosecutor to keep the original away from Chief Finn, who would most likely make it disappear.

Then there was an errand I had neglected even longer than my visit to the Figlios. I was fairly certain that only two or three people had seen Darleen after she left the bus in the junior-high-school parking lot on December 21. Four, if you counted Walt Rasmussen. I knew Ted Jurczyk was one, and the taxi driver who took her part way home was another. Then, if neither of them was the last to see her, there was a third man. Her killer. On this day, I was looking for the man who had left her on the side of Route 5S moments before she died.

Sitting in my car, idling outside the junior-high parking lot, I asked myself what route Darleen would have taken that day. Whether she exited the parking lot on the north or south side, she still had to turn east to head toward the Mill Street Bridge, the only river crossing in New Holland. Three city blocks separated the junior high from Mill Street, which ran down from the top of Market Hill on the north bank of the Mohawk, over the bridge, and back up the steep incline to Route 5S on the South Side.

I left my car on Division Street, in front of the school, and walked east to Mill Street. There, I turned right and could see the bridge looming several blocks ahead. I passed a florist, a shoeshine shop, and two barbershops before crossing Canal Street. As I waited at the light, I noticed the taxi stand in front of the Nederlander Hotel, an inn that had closed and now housed only a bar on the ground floor: The Keg Room. This must have been where Darleen found her cab.

At the head of the stand, a big, green-and-red Plymouth taxicab marked time, its driver leaning against the fender jawing with two other hacks about the numbers.

“Can you help me?” I asked. The driver looked me up and down, a hint of a smile on his stubbled face.

“Sure, sweetheart. Where you going?”

“Nowhere, I’m afraid. I was hoping one of you gentlemen could tell me if you remember a teenage girl who hailed a taxi here a few weeks ago.”

The hack pushed off his fender, and the other two men took a step forward. The three formed a loose semicircle in front of me.

“A few weeks?” he asked, rubbing his chin. “That’s a lot of fares ago.”

“How about you fellows?” I asked the other two. They shook their heads no. “Come on, how many teenage girls take a cab by themselves? Surely you’d remember that.”

“I didn’t see no one,” said the first hack. Then whistling through his thumb and forefinger, he called out down the line of cabs. “Hey, anybody remember picking up a teenage girl a couple of weeks ago?”

“Four weeks,” I prompted. “December twenty-first.”

“Four weeks ago!” he yelled.

The other cabbies frowned, shrugged, and shook their heads. All except one. A small, pudgy man in a black stocking cap shuffled forward.

“I used to get fares from a girl. Regularly. Ain’t seen her in a while.”

“Excuse me,” I said. “May I have your name?”

He looked up at me with suspicion. His fat cheeks pushed his mouth into a permanent pout.

“Benny Colonna,” he said, as if uncertain. “Who are you?”

“My name is Eleonora Stone. I’m a reporter with the
Republic
.”

“So what do you want with me?”

“I’d like to know if this is the girl you picked up on December twenty-first.” I produced Darleen’s school picture. “She was going to the farmlands out in the Town of Florida.”

He tilted his head to see. “Yeah, that’s her.”

“Can you tell me if she was calm or nervous or normal that day? Was she upset about missing her bus?”

Benny Colonna shrugged. “I don’t know. She seemed normal, I guess.”

“Did she say anything at all to you?” I asked, and he shook his head. “One last question, Mr. Colonna.”

“Sure,” he smiled.

“Why did you let her out on the highway? It was about two and half miles from her house.”

“Well, she got in the cab right here,” he began. “And I recognized her because the last time I picked her up, she was short thirty-five cents on the fare. So this time I didn’t trust her. I asked for the money up front. She only had a dollar ten. So when the meter hit seventy-five cents I pulled over and said if she didn’t have any more money, that was as far as I was going. A dollar ten minus thirty-five is seventy-five, see?”

The image of Darleen’s bluish face, swollen and battered, flashed before my eyes, and I nearly slapped the man. I wanted to do even worse.

“You just left her on the side of the highway in near-zero temperatures?” I stammered.

“Yeah. I mean, she didn’t have enough to go any farther. Anyways, she had a winter coat on.”

I took a step closer to him, my nostrils flaring, eyes burning. I sensed my hack–the first driver–tensing next to me as I grabbed the fat, little man by his lapels and drew him close to my face.

“I want you to know that you sent that little girl to her death that day.”

Benny Colonna’s lower lip quivered. He didn’t resist, didn’t try to push me away or free himself. He just shook. Then he managed to speak and asked me what I meant by that. I shoved him away.

“That girl was murdered that day. The man who killed her picked her up after you threw her out. You might just as well have put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”

His eyes grew, betraying the dawning of the horrible truth. “Was she that girl that disappeared?” he asked. “I had no idea. My God . . .”

“You killed her,” I said with a shrug of my shoulders. Then I reached into my handbag, hands trembling, and fumbled with my change purse. I retrieved a quarter and a dime. “Here’s your tip,” I said, folding the thirty-five cents into his hand.

Benny Colonna staggered back a step and steadied himself on the cab behind him. His expression of horror told the story. I glanced at my hack standing a few feet away and thanked him for his help. He nodded solemnly, and I strode off back the way I’d come.

By five, I was back home. I spent two hours writing up several pieces for Monday’s edition, including one about the cab driver who, for thirty-five cents, had abandoned a young girl on the side of the highway in the freezing dark. I rapped out another article on Joey Figlio’s and Wilbur Burch’s arrests. And I wrote a third on the discovery of the body at Lock 10. Finally, I put together a timeline for the murder and the dumping of the body in the river. Basing my calculations on what I knew of Darleen’s cab ride and Gus Arnold’s account of his route that day, I figured the murder had most likely taken place between four thirty and five thirty that afternoon. It was cold that day, so Darleen must have been walking fast to get home as soon as possible. I estimated a walking speed of about five miles an hour. At that rate, she would have reached home in about thirty minutes. But if Gus Arnold had made his last drop at four twenty as he said, then Darleen and her murderer crossed paths along County Highway 58 sometime between four and four fifteen. I was assuming a man in a car stopped and offered her a ride the rest of the way home. Furthermore, I believed that she knew the man, even though she had been known to take rides from strangers. And if she knew the man, I could narrow the field of suspects. But what if someone had been on foot along the road, waiting? That list could include Bobby Karl, Joey Figlio, Walt Rasmussen, and Dick Metzger. I felt sure that Ted Jurczyk had no opportunity to find himself on that road at that time on that day. I made a note to check with Coach Mahoney, just the same, but Ted must have been at basketball practice.

Next, I wanted to establish exactly where Darleen had been murdered and how her body had ended up in the river. I was confident she’d been killed in or near the snow hills at the end of her road. But to be sure, I needed to prove how the body had traveled from there to the lock at Cranesville.

I worked backwards from the river. The Mohawk flowed west to east, of course, meaning that the easternmost spot Darleen could have entered the river was at Lock 10 in Cranesville. I doubted that. For one thing, her body would surely have surfaced earlier, as the water had never completely frozen in Cranesville. That meant the body probably entered the river somewhere to the west. I kept a street map of New Holland and the surrounding area in my car; I often used it to find my way around when working on assignments for the paper. Now, I spread it out before me on the kitchen table and studied the area map on the reverse side. The river bisected the page from left to right, and I could see all the crossings at once. Starting in Canajoharie, there were locks on the river at regular intervals, all part of the Erie Canal system. From the article I’d read in the
Canajoharie Courier Standard
earlier, I knew that the river had been frozen solid at Lock 12 in Tribes Hill on December 21, so Darleen could not have entered the water there or anywhere west of there. Next came Lock 11 to the west of New Holland, just opposite Tedesco’s. I wasn’t sure if that had been frozen on December 21, but I knew who would: Jimmy Tedesco. He kept an eye on the river and could tell you all you wanted to know about it and then some. I was due to have dinner at Tedesco’s with Officer Mike Palumbo in little less than an hour’s time.

So, if the river had been flowing at Lock 11, someone could have thrown Darleen’s body into the river there. In fact, it was the closest span to the snow hills where I assumed Darleen had met her end: about four miles as the crow flies. Dumping a body off the lock would surely take great care, especially in extreme weather conditions, but one could climb up to the maintenance walkway and reach the middle of the lock and running water. That is, if the water had been running on that day.