A Stone's Throw

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A Stone's Throw Page 8

by James W. Ziskin


  “Like a jockey. The man she was staying with at the Friar Tuck was a shrimp.”

  “Sounds like a good bet to me.”

  “The description of the redhead at the motel sounded a little older than Micheline. Of course she might have been trying to disguise herself.”

  “You should find out who the lady at the motel is instead of trying to make her fit your solution.”

  Fadge was right. It was too easy. If I could shoehorn Micheline into the barn with Johnny Dornan, my story would be halfway done. But I knew deep down that it was laziness on my part. The pieces didn’t fit together. More likely than not, it was someone else.

  “I’m going to drive out to Halfmoon tomorrow and try to get to the bottom of this,” I said with a sigh. “There’s a man living there with the name the desk clerk provided. It’s probably a dead end, but I have to be sure.”

  “Anything else to go on?”

  “A license plate. The car the woman was driving. But that means talking to Benny Arnold. And you know I don’t want to do that.”

  “Leave him to me,” said Fadge. “He owes me a favor.”

  MONDAY, AUGUST 13, 1962

  I bolted from the gate Monday morning, grabbing a quick coffee and a hard roll at Fiorello’s before heading down to the New Holland Savings Bank. I hadn’t set foot in the place since an unsatisfactory tryst with a teller two years earlier had left me with little choice but to transfer my passbook account to another bank. Maybe my erstwhile quick-draw Lothario was on vacation, I told myself. Or perhaps he’d be too busy with the early-morning crowds to notice me. As things turned out, I ran smack into him on the marble steps leading up to the polished brass-and-glass entrance. He pretended not to know me, which suited me fine.

  Issur Jacobs was high in the saddle at 9:00 a.m. A clerk announced me to the venerable man, and in short order I was seated before him in his office.

  “What’s this about Tempesta Farm?” he asked, polishing his pince-nez.

  “There was a fire in the early hours of Saturday morning,” I said. “Two people died in one of the old foaling barns.”

  “My God. How terrible.”

  “You didn’t hear about it? No one phoned to let you know?”

  “Why should anyone let me know? I no longer have any dealings with the Shaws. We tied up the last of their business four years ago. Now their lawyers handle everything to do with their assets here in New Holland.”

  I sized up the man sitting behind the leviathan desk that dwarfed him. He was impeccably groomed, small, and bald with fine features. I figured he went for a haircut and shave once a week, and had his nails clipped and buffed at least as often. He sat bolt upright in his leather chair, looking like a captain of industry from the last century. His bow tie was perfectly straight and dimpled at the knot, his vest tight, and his shirtsleeves pressed and starched. Indeed, the only concession he appeared to make to comfort and the summer heat was that he’d doffed his pinstriped jacket and draped it over a hanger behind his desk.

  “Then you’re not familiar with who’s running the farm?”

  “No one that I’m aware of. There’s nothing left up there except the old barns and the caretaker’s house. What you should do, young lady, is speak to Judge Shaw. He was the executor of his father’s estate. He’ll be able to point you in the right direction.”

  I must have looked doubtful, since he softened.

  “I’ve seen your articles in the paper, Miss Stone,” he said. “Including two years ago when poor Jordan Shaw was murdered. Is that why you’re reluctant to speak to the judge?”

  “Of course not,” I said, in a pathetic attempt at bravado. “I met Judge Shaw several times during the investigation. And his wife, too.”

  “Yes, Audrey Shaw.” He nodded but offered nothing else to illuminate his thoughts on her.

  He didn’t really need to. I knew Audrey Shaw and her cold enmity toward me all too well. She had wielded her maternal grief like a dagger to slice out my heart as I struggled to come to grips with my own father’s murder a year before her daughter’s.

  “Then there’s nothing I can do to help you,” he said.

  I stared at him, wishing so much that he could offer something more. Something to obviate the need to meet or speak with Judge Shaw or his cruel wife.

  “You seem like a nice girl,” he said. I had my doubts. “A nice Jewish girl. Why don’t you come to services next Friday?”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Services. At the temple on Mohawk Place. Friday. We’ve a fine rabbi and a new cantor. The community is starved for new faces. And there are a couple of nice young boys I could introduce you to. From good families.”

  “Oh, Mr. Jacobs, I don’t think so.”

  “You’ve been away too long from your faith. Your people, young lady. Come back.”

  “Thank you for your time, Mr. Jacobs,” I said, averting my eyes from his persistent stare. “I’ve got to be going now.”

  As Vinnie Donati gassed up my Dodge Lancer at Ornuti’s Garage, I phoned Norma Geary at the paper from the booth inside. She answered her line on the first ring and greeted me with congratulations for my story, which was set to appear in the afternoon edition. I asked her to try to dig up some information on Johnny Dornan. Where was he from? Where did he learn to ride horses? Anything she might find would be helpful.

  “And can you search the local phone books for him and a man or a business named Robinson S.? That might be an initial. Or maybe nothing. I don’t know.”

  “Will do,” she said. “What else?”

  “I’m also trying to find the name Everett Coleman, but not in the phone directory. I’ve already got that. I’m wondering if there’s a newspaper article. An arrest, a wedding, anything.”

  “I’m on it, Miss Stone.” Norma liked to call me that despite my many attempts to convince her that I preferred Ellie. I’d finally given up and accepted it as a charming quirk of our relationship.

  Back outside at the pump, Vinnie asked me if I’d heard about the fire out at Tempesta Farm. I said maybe.

  “Five people and ten horses died,” he announced.

  I forked over three dollars for the gas. “Don’t believe everything you hear, Vinnie.”

  There was a stop downtown I should have made on my way out of town, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to pay a visit to Judge Shaw’s office on Main Street. Sure, I told myself, I’d call him later. Maybe that same day. But my trip to Halfmoon was more important. In truth, I doubted I’d find anything of value on my fishing expedition. The phone had been disconnected, after all. Mr. and Mrs. E. Coleman had surely long since departed or simply perished in the fire on Tempesta Farm. Still, the prospect of driving fifty minutes to the far end of Saratoga County appealed to me more than climbing a flight of stairs to Judge Harrison Shaw’s chambers, located a couple of blocks from the New Holland Republic’s offices on Main Street.

  It was past ten thirty when I pulled into the dirt-and-grass driveway. If forced to guess, I’d say no vehicle had used it in at least five years. The old clapboard farmhouse, long since stripped of its protective paint, was mostly gray with liver spots and warping weather panels. It was listing visibly to port, and I feared a stiff breeze might well knock it over. The deck of the front porch had collapsed on one side, and the torn screen door in the entrance hung half open by the rusty bottom hinge, the only one of three still dispatching its duties. The yard was overgrown in places and hard, bare dirt in others. An old garage, doors thrown open wide, was crammed with junk, and the carcass of an old pickup at least thirty years old languished shipwrecked in a sea of tall grass beyond the end of the drive.

  I climbed out of my Dodge and approached the pile of lumber with care. I even left the driver’s door open in case I needed to make a quick escape from what looked like an amusement park haunted house. This was the address I’d found in the phone booth directory the day before, the one listed as “Coleman, E.” I climbed the steps gingerly, fearing a fall
through the rotting boards, but they bore my weight, such as it was, and saw me safely to the door. I rapped three times on the dusty glass behind the screen and waited. A second attempt roused something inside.

  “If you’re here for the meter, it’s broke,” came a man’s voice from somewhere inside.

  I explained that I was not there to read the meter.

  “I said it’s broke, and I’m not paying for no electricity.”

  “I’m not from Niagara Mohawk,” I called out as a man in his late fifties or early sixties appeared in the doorway. His face was long and haggard, with a week’s growth of black-and-gray whiskers sprouting from his chin. He was wearing a long undershirt and, so it appeared, nothing else. I wanted to avert my frightened gaze, but the shotgun he was pointing at my chest held my attention.

  “You’re not from the electric company,” he said as if to accuse. All of his upper incisors were missing, and canines, too. The rest of his teeth didn’t appear to be long for this world either.

  “I’ve been trying to tell you that,” I said.

  He lowered the gun. Now it was pointing at my knees. “Then who are you?”

  I gave him an abbreviated explanation. He didn’t strike me as the patient type, and until he put the weapon away, I wasn’t resting easy.

  “Do you know a man named Everett Coleman?” I asked.

  “Are you funning me?”

  “No, I’m looking for Mr. and Mrs. Everett Coleman.”

  “What for?”

  There was no way to sugarcoat this. I drew a deep breath and explained. “Because I think they died in a fire Saturday morning.”

  More confused than ever, the old man gaped at me. He let the muzzle of his shotgun drop until it was pointing at his own feet. I was safe for the present.

  “Everett Coleman, you say?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m Everett Coleman. And my wife’s been dead for eight years. No great loss there. She run off with a trucker and left me with the girl.”

  “Do you own a black Chrysler by any chance?”

  He scoffed. “A Chrysler? I don’t own nothing, can’t you see? Nothing except for this shack of a house.” He made a limp gesture with his left hand, as if to showcase the property.

  “Have you ever been to Manitoba?”

  “What business would I have in Africa?”

  Of all the false leads I’d ever chased, this might have been the oddest. As I was searching for the words to excuse myself without scaring him into hoisting his shotgun again, I decided to cover the last base and ask one more question.

  “You mentioned a girl. What girl?”

  “I’m gonna put some pants on,” he said. “Then you can come inside, and we’ll talk.”

  “Actually, I prefer to wait outside.”

  He tilted his head and aimed a crazy eye at me. I thought for a moment that he was going to squeeze the trigger a mite too hard, discharge his weapon, and blow off a couple of his toes.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Of course I’ll come in.”

  Clothes make the man. Everett Coleman slipped into an old pair of trousers and donned a short-sleeve shirt for receiving hours. He offered me some water in a grimy glass, which I sedulously avoided. We sat opposite each other in the parlor, him on the worn sofa, me on a wooden chair. I asked if he minded if I smoked. His eyes grew to twice their size, so I held out the package to him. He leaned forward on the couch and, ogling the cigarettes with avidity, rubbed his fingers together as a greedy child might while trying to decide which chocolate to choose from a sampler.

  “Take the whole pack,” I said at length. “I’ve got another in my purse.”

  I didn’t need to repeat the offer. In short order, he’d lit a cigarette and leaned back on the sofa to take a deep drag. Then another.

  “The wife left me when I was serving in the navy overseas,” he said without preamble. Smoke oozed from his nostrils. “I was wounded at Guadalcanal. Shrapnel from a shell in my hip. Can’t walk straight no more, at least not without a lot of pain.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Won the Purple Heart. But Betty, she didn’t care. Didn’t even bother to send a Dear John letter. All I got was a wire from my sister saying that no-good tramp of a wife of mine dropped off my girl and run away with a long-haul trucker named Len. Some shirker with a 4-F classification.”

  “How terrible. How old was your daughter?”

  “Sixteen at the time. She was born in twenty-six.”

  “It must have been hard on a young girl, losing her mother like that.”

  “Well, they were cut from the same cloth, mother and daughter. So no great loss, like I said.”

  “What’s your daughter’s name?”

  He squeezed the cigarette between his lips and sucked the life out of it. “Vivian. After my sainted mother.” He frowned and stared at the smoldering end of his smoke. “She didn’t do honor to the name.”

  Everett Coleman told the sad tale of an undisciplined, wayward daughter. A wild child through her early teens, and a lying, smoking, drinking, car-stealing dropout by the age of sixteen. At seventeen, she married a boy five years her senior and moved away.

  “Good riddance to bad garbage,” he said.

  He gave me her married name—McLaglen—and said the last time he’d heard from her was in October of 1943, when she dropped by with her baby-faced husband, Ernie, to ask for money. He didn’t give her any.

  “I was flat on my back, just back from the convalescent hospital downstate. Recuperating from my wounds. I didn’t have enough money for myself, so I wasn’t about to fork anything over to her and that good-for-nothing husband of hers.”

  Ernie McLaglen died in Korea seven years later, according to Coleman. He’d seen a notice in the paper. But that day in 1943 was the last time he’d seen his daughter. Vivian hadn’t even shown up when his “no-good tramp of an ex-wife, Betty,” died from cirrhosis of the liver in 1954. Betty had come back to die in South Glens Falls, where she’d come from, after years of jumping from one loser’s bed to another’s.

  I asked Everett Coleman if he had a photograph of his daughter. Finally, after nearly twenty minutes and three cigarettes, the penny dropped, and he asked me what my business was anyway.

  “As I mentioned before, there was a fire Saturday morning. On a horse farm over by the Montgomery County line. A man and a woman were killed.”

  He nodded slowly, his tired lips sagging a bit into something almost resembling a frown. “And you think it was Vivian?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “Well, it don’t make no difference to me. Not now. She’s been dead to me for years.”

  “Would you have a photograph of her?” I repeated.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Everett Coleman didn’t know anyone named Robinson, but at least I had a couple of names to go after. Vivian Coleman and Vivian McLaglen. How Manitoba figured in the story, I had no idea. It might well have been a random choice on Vivian’s part. I would worry about that later.

  I phoned Sheriff Pryor from a gas station on Route 9, hoping he’d be interested in trading information now that I had something to offer in return. A deputy informed me the sheriff was out and took my contact information with an unconvincing promise that he’d call me back.

  Knowing I could always count on my pal Frank Olney to help, I dialed the operator and asked for the Montgomery County sheriff. Within thirty seconds, he was on the line. I explained the situation, that I was in possession of two new names to track down, and the Saratoga sheriff’s office wasn’t available to help. He said he could check with the state police in Albany to see if they had any information on Vivian McLaglen or Vivian Coleman.

  “I’ll stop by to see you later,” I said, ready to hang up.

  “I’ve got a court appointment. I’ll find you this evening. Fiorello’s at six?”

  “I’ll buy you a cherry Coke.”

  I spent a few hours at the paper, making calls and writing copy for Tue
sday’s edition. Between meetings with Charlie Reese and dodging the publisher, Artie Short, I managed to reach Sheriff Pryor by phone. Since I didn’t want to give away any of my information for nothing, I had to play it cool, testing the waters as it were. In no time, however, Pryor made it clear that he wasn’t interested in anything I might have stumbled across.

  “I think I can run this investigation better if I keep the press out of my hair,” he said after I’d cast my lure.

  “But are there any developments?” I asked. “Has anyone been reported missing in Saratoga?”

  “No one yet.” I could tell he was itching to hang up.

  “Do you have plans to make any statements to the press about the case?”

  “Not at this time.”

  “Will you put out an alert to the local papers before you do?”

  “I’ll let you know,” he said, and ended the call.

  Norma Geary appeared at my side, holding a few folders to her chest. She reached around my right shoulder and placed one of them on the desk before me.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Photograph of Johnny Dornan.”

  I opened the folder and examined the picture, a tight, five-and-a-half-by-eight-inch shot of a young man’s face. He was beaming from beneath a racing helmet, and I was sure it had been taken in the winner’s circle and that Johnny was still perched on the saddle of his mount. His jaw was strong, chin cleanly shaven, teeth straight and white, and his fair eyes twinkled against his tanned skin. I couldn’t tell the color in the black-and-white photo. Studying the young jockey with care, though, I fancied I saw a fierce competitive streak in him, bubbling up from deep inside.

  “Kind of handsome, wouldn’t you say?” I asked Norma.

  “Not bad. Funny, he doesn’t look short enough to be a jockey.”

  “I should hope not. All you can see is his head.” I slipped the photo into my purse. “What else do you have for me?”

  “A list of Robinsons in the Albany-Schenectady-Troy area,” she said, placing another folder before me. “And Saratoga County, too. Plenty of names to go through.”

 

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