Stone Cold Dead (2 page)

“What about neighbors? Any men living in the area?”

“Why, sure, there are men around. It’s farm country.”

“Any of them close by?”

“Walt Rasmussen owns the next farm over. He’s a giant. Must be six foot nine or ten. And as unpleasant as he is tall. He’s about sixty-five. Then there’s Mr. Karl and his wife on the other side. They have a son, too. Bob Jr. About twenty-five years old.”

“Nice enough people?”

She shrugged. “Suppose they are. Walt Rasmussen had a disagreement with Dick over the property line a few years ago. He said our fence was a couple of feet on his side, but Dick don’t make mistakes like that. He’s careful that way. We’re not friendly with him, but I don’t know that he’s ever talked to Darleen.”

“Anyone else in the area?”

“There’s Pauline Blaine and her two boys who live not too far. She’s a widow.”

“How old are the boys?” I asked.

“Small. Maybe the older one’s ten.”

“Is Dick your husband?” I asked, shifting gears, and she nodded. “Tell me about him.”

“Dick? What do you want to know about him for?”

“I want to know about everyone Darleen knows, starting at home.”

Irene Metzger didn’t much like it, but she explained that Dick Metzger was her second husband. She’d lost her first, Gene Hicks—Darleen’s father—in the closing days of the war in the Pacific. Dick was fortyfive, a simple, dirt-under-his-nails, hard-working Joe, struggling to make something of his small dairy farm. He had borrowed money from every bank in town, each to pay the last, enough to hold off foreclosure at least until spring. He had a plan to buy some good cows from a neighbor, and things would turn around soon. I didn’t see it.

“How long have you been married?”

“Fourteen and a half years,” she said. “Dick and Gene were childhood friends. When Gene was killed in action, Darleen wasn’t even born yet.” She paused then explained that Darleen was born December 9, 1945, the consequence of her husband’s last furlough in February of that year. Irene Metzger wanted to be sure I understood the timeline. “Gene was home in February, you see. Nine months earlier,” she said, punctuating the math with a sharp tap of her finger on the table. “Anyways, when Gene was killed, I was six months along. A war widow, living on aid. Then Dick come back from overseas and stopped by to see me. He helped me out, and we got married a year later.”

“How is he with your daughter?”

“He’s a good father to her,” she began then suddenly caught on. She frowned at me. “I don’t know what you’re driving at, but you got the wrong idea about Dick. He loves Darleen like she was his own. Always treated her like his own daughter. He’s sick about this thing. Drove me over here at one in the morning and is waiting downstairs in the truck. That’s how much he cares.”

“He didn’t adopt her?”

“Of course he did,” she said.

“But she didn’t take his name?”

“I wanted her to, but Dick thought it wouldn’t be right for Gene’s memory. Like I said, they were fast friends, and Dick wanted Darleen to keep her father’s name.”

“Why don’t you invite him up?” I asked, wanting to have a talk with him. “He must be freezing.”

“No, he don’t want to come up,” she said, draining her glass and stubbing out her cigarette. She’d smoked the whole thing right down to her brittle, yellowed fingertips, wasting none of it. “He wouldn’t be any help in this; he don’t know about girls.”

I regarded her with suspicion, and she picked up on it right away.

“Look,” she said, “Dick is a good husband and father. Why do you have to go suspecting him?”

“I don’t suspect him,” I lied. Of course I suspected him. He might well be Father of the Year, but other stepfathers before him had put a bull’s-eye on his back in cases like this. “I’d still like to talk to him. He might know something.”

“Don’t waste your time,” she said simply.

I sighed, poured a short drink for each of us, and asked if Darleen had a boyfriend.

“She took up with a boy last spring. Joey Figlio.” She pronounced it FIG-lee-oh. “He’s in Darleen’s class, I think. Lives near the hospital on the West End. I had to stop her from seeing him last month because things were getting too serious all of a sudden.”

“And you don’t think Darleen might have bucked and taken off for a while with him?”

“Nope,” she said, lighting another cigarette and sucking half of it down in one gasp. “I told you, she didn’t run away.”

I must have appeared skeptical, because she offered more without my asking: “She couldn’t have run off with him because he’s up to Fulton over in Johnstown. Locked up in reform school since the beginning of December. He snuck out, though, and Dick found him hiding in our barn the night Darleen disappeared. You see, he was waiting for her to come home, too.”

“Okay, so she didn’t run away with her boyfriend,” I said. “Does she have any friends?”

“There’s a couple of girls she rides the bus with. Susan Dobbs, Carol Liswenski, and Linda Attanasio. And there’s Edward, a boy who’s had a crush on her since the seventh grade.”

I stood and fetched my grocery pad and pencil from the counter near the icebox. I wrote down the names. I also noted the neighbors, Rasmussen and Karl. Under normal conditions, my memory is as faithful as a dog and as trustworthy as the mighty Jeep, but this night, I feared the whiskey might prevail and blur everything in the morning.

“Now, about your husband,” I said. “I really would like to talk to him. Since he’s just downstairs . . .”

She seemed to ignore me.

“If you want my help, you’ll have to let me do things my way,” I said. “You can say what you want, but I need to believe what you tell me. And the only way I can do that is to satisfy my doubts.”

Irene Metzger sat quietly, slouched a bit to one side, fixing me with her stare. I couldn’t tell if she was riled or just considering my words. Finally she spoke.

“I’m sorry if you don’t like what I’m telling you, but I know my daughter. And my husband.”

I shook my head; I had drunk enough whiskey for two New Year’s Eves, there was an eager young man waiting in the next room, and this lady wasn’t cooperating. She wouldn’t allow that her daughter might have run off or—if she hadn’t—that her husband might have a darker side than she could ever imagine.

“Okay,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “I’ll think about it.”

“Think about what?” she asked, alarmed.

“Whether I can help you or not.”

A grimace, bitter and disappointed, curled slowly across her upper lip and flared her right nostril. She tried to hide it.

“You mean you
won’t
help me,” she said.

I said nothing, just stared at her.

“I’ll talk to him,” she said, almost in a whisper. “Can’t promise anything.”

“And I’ll make some inquiries,” I said. “Then I’ll be in touch. Give me a few days.”

“I brought this,” she said, producing an envelope. “It’s Darleen’s school picture. In case you can use it.”

“Thanks,” I said, pushing it to one side on the table.

I accompanied her down the stairs in my stocking feet. Shivering on the porch, I watched her climb into an old, faded-green Ford pickup at the curb. Judging by the looks of it, the truck must have been the first one to roll off the assembly line after the war. Or maybe it had been through the war. For a couple of seconds, while a dim glow shone from the dome light, I could see the man at the wheel inside. He looked hard, like sunburn, chewing tobacco, and a three-day beard. My stare met his pale eyes for a short moment, and I froze. He aimed a piercing look at me, expressionless, almost dead like a lizard’s. The dome light went off as Irene Metzger yanked the door closed with an icy, metallic bang. Then Dick Metzger pushed the starter, shifted into gear, and eased away from the curb.

I stood there in the cold for another minute, watching the red taillights recede down Lincoln Avenue. My encounter with Irene Metzger had unsettled me. Convinced her daughter had not run off, she must have feared the worst. She must have been sure Darleen had met a terrible end. What other explanation could there have been? I remembered some of the chances I had taken as a teenager. I had been lucky in my games of Russian roulette, while Darleen Hicks, it seemed, had spun the cylinder and come up with a bullet in the chamber. Irene Metzger’s pain must have been cruel, incorporating both grief and uncertainty. A heavy sadness welled up in my chest as I thought of my own parents, both gone, and the wayward girl I had been. The wayward girl I still was.

Damn! Eddie Robeleski. He was still upstairs. When I returned to the warmth of my apartment, I found him standing there, lipstick smeared over his face, his shirttail hanging out.

“Come on over here,” he said with a big grin, and he reached out both arms for me.

“Oh, God,” I said, rubbing my temples. “I’m sorry, Eddie, but you have to go now.”

CHAPTER TWO

SUNDAY, JANUARY 1, 1961

I don’t normally suffer from hangovers. That’s the blessing, or perhaps the curse, of holding one’s drink. But this day I woke up slowly, my mouth a little dry, one nostril hermetically sealed, and my eyes crusted shut by the sandman. The new year had dawned, and I had slept through the morning.

A confirmed heathen, I usually spend my Sunday mornings lingering over coffee, a hard roll and butter, and the newspapers at Fiorello’s across the street. Fadge, the proprietor and my dearest friend in the world, was sure to be there on New Year’s Day, albeit late. Not because it was New Year’s Day, of course, but because it was morning, and he always ran late. He usually rolled up to the curb in his ’57 Nash Ambassador at eight thirty. Unshaven and (sometimes) unwashed, he would trundle across the seat to the passenger’s side like a walrus undulating across an ice floe, the car rocking on its struts beneath him. The driver’s door was dented shut, so he always dismounted from the right-hand side. Barely four years old, the car was a disgrace. From the day he’d driven it off Bob Frank’s Hudson-Nash lot on Division Street, Fadge had abused it through neglect of maintenance, willful flaunting of the laws of physics, and a demolition-derby style of driving. Vinnie Donati, a local mechanic, once begged Fadge to tell him what he had against the car.

But this frigid New Year’s Day, I was curled up on the sofa under an afghan watching George Blanda lead the Houston Oilers over the Los Angeles Chargers in the inaugural AFL Championship Game. There were no college bowl games due to New Year’s falling on a Sunday, and the NFL had finished up the week before, so I settled for the new league’s championship. Just one of the boys when it came to sports.

By six I still hadn’t dressed and didn’t see the use of changing from my flannel pajama bottoms and terrycloth robe; I’d be ready for bed before too long.

I heated up a forty-nine-cent Salisbury steak frozen dinner. Having withered in the heat of the oven and long since given up the ghost, the steak sat mired in an epoxy of reduced gravy, like a mastodon trapped in the La Brea Tar Pits. The mashed potatoes had stiffened to a grayish plaster, and the peas and carrots had somehow come out sodden toward the edge of the tray and dried out in the middle. I lost my enthusiasm for the meal and left it to clot before me on the coffee table.

I rose to change the channel, and the television threw a fit. Jack Benny warped and skipped rhythmically from the bottom of the screen to the top, and neither the vertical-hold knob nor the rabbit ears remedied the situation, despite my repeated fiddling. I switched off the set and plopped back down on the sofa, wrapped the afghan around my shoulders, and gazed up at the painted tin ceiling and alabaster light fixture above me. In moments like this, I especially appreciated these unexpected touches in such a simple duplex.

I tried to will time to pass. It was too early for bed and too late to make anything of the day. I turned my head, and my eyes fell on the unopened letter on the end table beside the sofa. Not ready to deal with that.

Across the room to my right, a pair of mahogany pillars framed a wide passageway between the kitchen and the parlor. Two waist-high hutches with glass windows and shallow drawers anchored the columns. I assumed the cabinets had been designed to display books or curios. Picture Hummel figurine knockoffs or pressed-glass swans trying to pass as crystal. But the hutches were, nevertheless, well built and tasteful. I kept my liquor in the one on the right.

The cabinet beckoned me, as surely as if it had crooked a finger. It wasn’t yet seven, but I’d waited long enough. Answering the siren’s song, I poured myself a thimbleful of Scotch, then, after a moment to consider properly the miserly amount, I topped it off with another two fingers and some ice. The first sting of whiskey, the sip you take before the ice has had a chance to melt and dilute the kick, that’s the one that reminds you it’s alcohol, reminds you why you drink. With each passing glassful, you think less and less that it’s booze. It dissolves into a simple beverage, transforms as if by alchemy into a social lubricant, something to hold in your hand and raise to your lips every so often. It loosens the binds of your corset, and makes you smarter and more attractive. You sparkle with charm. Personality in a bottle. At least for me. But once the burn of that first undiluted swallow has faded in your mouth, your guard drops, you drain the bottle, and end up snoring on the sofa hours later, fully clothed, with the Indianhead test signal glowing blue from the television set across the room. That’s still better than waking up with a stranger in your bed. Or you in his.

Two whiskies later, the letter was still there on the table.

I pulled a record at random from the bookshelf and placed it on the hi-fi: Brahms’s “Academic Festival Overture,” the one that ends with an old German university drinking song: “
Gaudeamus Igitur
.” I raised my empty glass in a toast to nothing. Then I refilled it. I must have been really smart and beautiful by nine o’clock, when I popped the spring cap off a new fifth of White Label and poured myself another drink. Then Fadge showed up with a pizza and a couple of quarts of Schaefer beer.

“About time you showed up,” I said, giving him a New Year’s peck on the cheek and grabbing the pizza. “I was about to drown.”