“Honey, what is it?”
“Oh, Mother,” Charlotte breathed.
“What? What is it, and why is my driver’s license on the counter?” She was concerned about Charlotte’s frightened reaction, of course, but not as much as she was about Mildred Fischer.
“Your license?” Charlotte asked, confused.
She must have been sleeping.
“My driver’s license is sitting on the kitchen counter.”
“Oh. Mrs. Gifford brought it over today. I think it fell out of my book bag.”
“Mrs. Gifford,” Vivian repeated, her voice flat. “Erma Gifford? Your book bag? Why would she . . .”
“Mother, someone followed me home from school today. I’m afraid he’s still out there.”
“Someone was following you?” Vivian reached out and placed her palm to Charlotte’s forehead, like she always did when anything was wrong with her. “You said he? He who?”
Charlotte sat up, comforted by her mother’s presence, sitting on the bed next to her like she used to do when Charlotte was little. But she kept the covers clenched in her fists.
“I don’t know. I just know it was a man. I sprayed him with Spray Net, and I dropped the can and ran.”
“Charlotte!”
Charlotte winced.
“When Mrs. Gifford came over she brought the license and the Spray Net. I had dropped it in the alley behind the Messners’ garage.”
“Oh, my goodness, honey.” Vivian knit her eyebrows together and grabbed the points with her thumb and middle finger, as if she were experiencing pain. This was all her fault. The accidentally dropped driver’s license had brought this mess to her doorstep, and to her family. But, I dropped it, I dropped it, I dropped it . . . A little boy picked it up, and put it in his pocket. She took a deep breath.
“Well, maybe it was someone who found my license and was just trying to return it.”
The sentence came out in a calm, smooth, unbroken line, and Vivian hoped it might make Charlotte feel a little better. She almost believed it herself.
Charlotte frowned as if this wasn’t something she had considered.
“You didn’t put it in my book bag?”
Vivian ignored this. Why would her driver’s license have been in Charlotte’s book bag?
“You probably scared the poor person off, or maybe they had to rush to the hospital because of the Spray Net.”
“Well,” Charlotte began. “Maybe. That would make sense, wouldn’t it? If you just dropped it somewhere.” She released her grip on the covers.
Vivian reached out to pat Charlotte’s now-relaxed hands.
“Don’t give it any more thought, honey. Get some sleep.”
Charlotte sank back against her pillow as a rush of relief washed over her. Her eyelids drooped and she felt herself being pulled into a deep sleep triggered by exhaustion.
Vivian got up from the bed, leaned over, and kissed Charlotte’s forehead, the way she used to do when Charlotte was little.
“Good night,” she whispered.
As she closed the door to Charlotte’s room behind her, she thought she heard a bump from outside. She crept along the wall to the window at the end of the hallway that looked out onto the Giffords’ house. As her gaze traveled down, she saw a figure in the bushes up against the house.
I just know it was a man.
This was not a coincidence. There was no way that driver’s license could have traveled itself all the way back here from Syracuse. This was someone who had been in Mildred Fischer’s house.
She hoped Charlotte had fallen asleep already, but didn’t have time to worry about that. She flung open the door to their bedroom, crossed to Edward’s sleeping form, and shook him. Hard.
“Get up!” she hissed. “Get up, get up, get up! Someone’s trying to get into the house!”
As soundly as he slept, his response time to being awakened was always immediate. Maybe it was from the few years he worked at the prison. Vivian didn’t know. But now, Edward shot up in bed, grabbed his robe, and started down the stairs, with Vivian following close behind. Before Vivian reached the bottom step, there was a shattering crash of glass. She flew around the corner to see a brick lying in the hallway surrounded by the pieces of broken window.
It took four steps for her to reach the telephone in the living room as Edward went for the baseball bat in the hall closet.
“Dorothy!” she shouted into the receiver. “Dorothy, put me through to the police!”
Chapter 41
The newspaper story was all Wooster could talk about. It was all most of Ohio, not to mention the surrounding states, could talk about. It had first been published in Buffalo, New York, and then the Pennsylvania and Ohio papers had picked it up and printed their own versions of it.
Gilbert J. Ogden had been shot and killed as he was trying to cross the border into New York State from Ontario, Canada. That front-page story had revisited the details of the June embezzlement and robbery of the Wayne Building & Loan in Wooster, Ohio, and then borrowed details from the Buffalo Courier-Express to describe the recent scene at the border. One of the policemen involved had agreed to speak to Harry Sweeney at The Daily Record, and told a tale of police and FBI lying in wait for the fugitive. They had received a tip from a Buffalo switchboard operator by the name of Hazel Horschatz that Gilbert would be traveling to New York. Hazel had contacted local police after connecting and “accidentally overhearing” a call between a man in Toronto and a woman in Lackawanna, “a little nothing town just south of Buffalo.”
“The lady, she sounded like an old lady,” Hazel had said. “And she said, ‘Gilbert!’ and then the caller, Gilbert, told her to ‘Shushh’ and said, oh, what was it he said, it sounded like that guy in Double Indemnity. Something like, ‘secrecy is of the most importance.’ The old lady didn’t sound too ‘with it,’ if you know what I mean,” Hazel had said. “The man calling, Gilbert, had to repeat himself, and he just sounded nervous. Nervous and guilty of somethin’.”
Hazel Horschatz, “that’s H-O-R-S-C-H-A-T-Z if you’re gonna put it in the paper,” fancied herself quite the amateur sleuth. She’d been listening in on people’s conversations ever since she started that job at the phone company three years ago. Three years was a long time to have a job, you know. She read detective novels, except not all the way through, and watched “film noar” movies, mostly all the way through, and boasted to her coworkers about her skill with “figuring things.” Sure, sometimes she was wrong, like when Annie Fuller called her ma to tell her about the fella she was going with, and Hazel said Annie’s ma would put a stop to that, “mark my words,” but Annie ended up marrying the guy, with her ma’s blessing.
It wasn’t just detective novels and movies, neither, she also read the papers and followed crime stories, until they went dullsville. Back in June she’d latched onto the Wayne Building & Loan story down there in Ohio, due to her fascination with the names of the characters—that’s how she referred to the people involved in the news stories, as “characters.” Anyway, she thought “Gilbert Ogden” was maybe one of the best names she’d seen so far. She pictured him as a big, fat guy with crazy red hair, and a face just as red from drinking too much of the hooch. “He probably got his start in crime bootlegging,” she’d said to the other girls at the switchboard, with a squeezing wink of her left eye (she couldn’t wink the right one) and a tap of her index finger to her temple.
Hazel hadn’t bothered to read the whole article, which included descriptions of the “characters,” and a warning to be on the lookout for anyone fitting those descriptions. If she’d read the whole article, she would have realized how wrong her imaginary sketches were.
She’d told so many of the other girls about her theories about Gilbert Ogden and Flora Parker that when Gilbert was shot and killed, the girls all scrambled to read about it in the papers the next day. A few of them read the article from start to finish and felt like they should point out to Hazel how wrong she’d been in
her profiling. She didn’t much appreciate being proven wrong, and had sniffed and reminded everyone that if it hadn’t been for her, that bum never woulda been caught in the first place. Hazel had at least been spellbound enough by the name Gilbert and the fact that he was on the lam. That much had stuck with her. When he started stumblin’ over that call with the old lady, she just knew it was him. She just knew it!
The Flora Parker woman wasn’t caught yet but Hazel was sure she’d be easy to find, with her platinum-blond bouffant hairdo and all the heavy makeup she wore. Again, her coworkers pointed to the description of Flora Parker in the newspaper article to prove her wrong. Hazel had glanced at the page, shrugged, and cracked her gum. In her opinion, anyone named “Flora Parker” should have a platinum-blond hairdo. Well, what did she care, anyway? Richie was going to be proposing any day now and once she was married she could leave that lousy job. Who wanted a job where you couldn’t get your ears pierced if you wanted to, that’s what she wanted to know. Yeah, that was right, she’d leave that lousy job and those lousy dames who thought they knew so much. If they knew so much, how come they wasn’t the ones tippin’ off the coppers? Eh? Tell her that. It’s Horschatz, H-O-R . . . oh, never mind. Richie’d be proposing soon enough, and she’d just be changing it to Rindfleisch, anyway. Make it Hazel Rindfleisch. That’s R-I-N-D-F . . .
The newspapers around Wooster were beaten and battered, folded, unfolded, slapped, shaken, read, and reread over the Gilbert Ogden story, and the townspeople were responding in a variety of ways. Blue-haired Alma Kellerman, who had lived next door to Gilbert Ogden when he’d lived in Wooster, and had enjoyed having him as a neighbor, had gasped in astonishment when she learned he was a bank robber.
“Oh! That nice young man!”
And then this time, when she read he was shot, she was so sorry about it.
“Oh, that nice young man.”
He really had been just lovely, helping her plant her hydrangeas and making sure the milkman left her milk up close to the door, instead of leaving it on the bottom step of the porch, where she’d have to limp down to get it.
“Oh, that nice young man!”
And she had been even sorrier when she’d read the part about Gilbert’s mother’s heart attack upon hearing the news that her son had been shot.
“Oh, dear. That poor woman.”
Gerald Houder’s wife had told him about the newspaper story, but he hadn’t heard her, and had to wait until she was finished with the paper to read it for himself. He’d clenched his pipe between his teeth and shaken his head from side to side, before shouting, “IT’S NOT GOING TO GET YOU ANYWHERE, STEALING FROM HONEST FOLKS LIKE HE DID, THAT’S FOR SURE! SHAME ABOUT HIS MOTHER, THOUGH!”
Once she had recovered from her initial outrage at her Valentine’s Day party at the country club having been relegated to page four of the paper, Betty Miller’s response to the Gilbert Ogden cover story was stomping around victoriously, nearly growling in vindictive glee, and crowing, “I told you so!” and “He got what he deserved!” She showed not a shred of sympathy, even for Gilbert Ogden’s mother. “His mother was probably just as much of a criminal as he was!” Apples didn’t fall far from their trees. Everyone knew that.
She had taken it so personally when those criminals stole from her daddy’s bank, and embarrassed him in front of the entire town and all the bank employees, when he had done nothing more than be a wonderful employer for them. How ungrateful people could be. The gall and the nerve it took. She would never understand it, never.
She had read the story over her coffee while sitting at the breakfast table, after sending Charles off to work. With the paper still in hand, she marched triumphantly to the telephone and proceeded to call everyone she knew to make certain they all read the story. It wasn’t enough that she knew justice had been served, and it wasn’t enough that it was the front-page story in The Daily Record, not to mention a few of the papers in the surrounding area. She needed everyone to know it, and couldn’t just count on them reading it in the paper.
“Crime simply does not pay!” and “Rats will always get what’s coming to them, in the end!” Her voice had reached levels of shrill her friends hadn’t heard from her before, and they wondered if she had been drinking, so early in the morning. Marilyn Dean even considered calling Dr. Charlton to ask for a prescription for Dexamyl. She wouldn’t mind running over to the Rexall for her, really. It wouldn’t be any trouble.
That had been the first front-page story about Gilbert J. Ogden, but it wasn’t the last. The details of his death were reported with the location, date, and time of day that he had died, and that the cause of death had been “gunshot wound.” Gilbert Ogden’s death certificate, which was seen only by the attending physician, the coroner, and the Buffalo city clerk who filed it away, would not have been released to the press nor available for public viewing. The death record contained more information than the newspaper story and would have created quite a commotion had it been made public. But it wasn’t. And then the commotion happened anyway.
That first Gilbert Ogden story had triggered a wave of calls to the Daily Record office, and caused a ripple of shocked murmuring throughout the town of Wooster. But it was the second story that swelled the ripple into a tidal wave and upended the town completely. The envelope addressed to Harry Sweeney, sent anonymously without a return address, had held the smoking gun, so to speak. It wasn’t the death record of Gilbert J. Ogden, but a photostat copy of his birth record, with the official stamp of the city of Syracuse. It showed fraternal twins Gilbert Ogden Jacobs and Flora Isabelle Jacobs, their mother, Isabelle Jacobs (mulatto), and their father, Johnston Ellis Reed (white).
Harry Sweeney had met with Lester Kaplan, his editor-in-chief, about the story before publishing. It was a stop-the-presses shocker because J. Ellis Reed was Wooster’s mayor. Now, if the editor-in-chief had been the same man who published all the glowing stories about J. Ellis Reed’s generosity with the Wayne Building & Loan scandal back in June, there wouldn’t have been a problem. The story wouldn’t have been a story at all. The birth record would have been mysteriously disposed of, and the matter would have been swept under the rug. Wooster was a town of you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours local government and business dealings. But Lester Kaplan was new as editor-in-chief at the Daily Record, and he had not had his back scratched.
If Lester Kaplan had been one of Mayor Reed’s ardent supporters, or even a friendly acquaintance, the story might have been quashed in a similar way. If Lester Kaplan’s application for the Wooster Country Club hadn’t been soundly rejected by J. Ellis Reed, Kaplan might’ve handled the story differently. But rather than scratching Kaplan’s back, Reed had reached out his hands and given Kaplan a rough, aggressive push. Kaplan chose to print the second Gilbert Ogden newspaper story as he saw fit.
Betty Miller’s response to the second Gilbert Ogden newspaper story was just a touch different from her response to the first. It was good that she had been sitting down when she read it, because when she reached the part with the birth certificate photostat, she fainted.
Chapter 42
J. Ellis Reed enjoyed being mayor. The position suited him. He had been born to be important, and the people of Wooster could see that. In the beginning he had followed all the rules, and made everyone happy. And then he’d thought it might be okay to skim a little off the top of the city coffers. His personal fortune had taken quite a hit with the embezzlement, and it hadn’t been as easy as he’d thought it would be to replenish the stores. He had promised himself he’d keep it occasional and small, his dips into the funds. A happy, content community didn’t question the local government. Especially after he’d had all those benches installed in front of the public buildings so people had a place to sit.
So the timing could not have been more inconvenient for the two unwelcome shocks that had started and ended his week. The first shock (Monday) was that Gilbert Ogden, the bank embezzler, whom J. Ellis had been paying a private
investigator not to find, had not only been found, but had received a “spray of lead justice,” “shot down in the street like the dog he was.” The newspaper description had been overly theatrical and had made J. Ellis feel ill.
The second shock (Friday) was the one that threatened to kill J. Ellis himself, right there in his shiny leather chair behind his desk at City Hall. The shock of seeing his name alongside Gilbert Ogden’s on the front page of The Daily Record, not only tying him to a criminal, but exposing his long-held lie. His firstborn son. The son he had abandoned, because he didn’t fit with what J. Ellis thought his life should look like.
Gilbert Ogden’s last name was actually Jacobs. His first driver’s license had been issued in Syracuse by the state of New York, as had been his second. It was the second license that had been typed up by a distracted office clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles, who erroneously listed him as “Gilbert Ogden,” mistaking Gilbert’s middle name for his surname. Gilbert, usually obsessively detailed and precise, had been tapping his shoe and gnawing at his fingernails impatiently waiting for the distracted clerk to hurry up and give him the license so that he could make it to the bathroom before disaster struck. Gilbert’s groaning intestines (anxiety and undercooked chicken) forced him to snatch the card (without first reviewing it), tuck it in a pocket, and race to the nearest bathroom. Later, as he’d frowned at the driver’s license, displeased at the prospect of having to return to the motor vehicle office to rectify the error, he’d had a peculiar thought. Perhaps the error might actually work in his favor. Pave the way for something else. Anonymous entry into the world of J. Ellis Reed in Wooster, Ohio.
J. Ellis Reed hadn’t recognized the surname Ogden. He hadn’t recognized Gilbert, either. A grown, bespectacled man he had never before met, who seemed extremely bright, with an aptitude for numbers. Perfect for the Wayne Building & Loan. It wasn’t until after the robbery that he’d begun to put the pieces of that puzzle together.
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