by C. R. Corwin
James balked completely when we reached the automatic door. Unfortunately so did my brain. While I was trying to drag him inside, I let go with that biblical verse about it being easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Oh, the look Gwen gave me.
“Present company excepted,” I said, trying to make light of my faux pas.
Gwen pulled a Ziploc bag from her purse and with her thumb and forefinger extracted a cube of pink steak. James followed her inside. I followed James.
Pettibones was everything I’d read about. It was a big as a people supermarket, with long, wide aisles and five busy checkouts. There was one aisle for cats, one for fish, one for birds, one for rodents, reptiles, spiders and the like, and five for dogs.
While Rollie headed for the squeak toys with Queen Strudelschmidt and Prince Elmo, Gwen and I got shopping carts. I tethered James to the handle of mine and away we went.
Gwen let the dachshunds pick out their own toys. They passed up the rubber hotdogs and hamburgers—too working class apparently—and chose T-bone steaks. James chose a rubber skunk. We headed for the aisle marked “Yummies!”
As James was sniffing the biscuit bins, debating between red fire hydrants and green mailmen, Prince Elmo turned up his stubby hind leg on the wheel of my shopping cart. James’ territorial instinct ignited. He swung around angrily, growled his way to my cart and showed the little prince what peeing was all about. When Rollie tried to pull the dachshunds out of the path of the spreading puddle, he backed into a pyramid of Milkbone boxes. The boxes went down, Rollie went down, and their royal highnesses, frightened out of their wits, wound around Gwen’s legs, who, wouldn’t you know it, twirled right into James’ pee. She joined Rollie on the floor.
Were this still the 1950s, and Gwen, Rollie and I still beatniks, this unfortunate chain reaction would have been accompanied with as much laughing as barking. But it was not the fifties anymore. And we were anything but beatniks. Now there was only the barking and my breathless apologizing.
“I was afraid something like this would happen,” Gwen snarled at me, dabbing at her white slacks with Rollie’s handkerchief.
My attempt at a joke landed with a thud. “And yet you went right ahead and invited us along. How courageous.”
Gwen answered with a string of blue words. But it was a short string. Her good breeding kicked in. Her grace and good humor quickly restored. She sent Rollie and the dachshunds back to the SUV to wait, and then led James and me to the book section. “‘I hope you’ve got your credit cards, Maddy dear,” she said. “Because you and Bladder Boy here have a lot of reading to do.”
I was leafing through a book called I’m OK, My Dog’s OK, when Gwen suddenly brought up Gordon’s murder. “You remember the other day at lunch how we talked about Chick maybe losing his head?”
I figured when Gwen invited me along there was more on her mind than my struggles with James. I put the book back on the shelf. “Yes, but I don’t think it’s worth worrying about. The odds of Chick shooting Gordon over a questionable piece of cheese are right up there with me being crowned Miss Universe.”
“It’s not just the cheeseburger. It’s that other stuff.”
I knew where she was going. I played dumb. “Other stuff, Gwen?”
“Their relationship.”
“I’ve had a few uneasy thoughts about that myself,” I said. “But I can’t believe there’s anything there.”
“I hope you’re right, Maddy.”
“But you don’t think I’m right?”
“I’ve heard some things. About Gordon and his graduate assistant.”
I’d wondered about Gordon’s relationship with Andrew J. Holloway III, too, of course. But I figured it best to keep my lip buttoned—and do my best to unbutton hers. “That nice young man, Andrew? Wherever did you hear that?”
Gwen knelt in front of James and started scratching his ears. So she didn’t have to look me in the eyes, I think. “Let’s just say through the proverbial grapevine.”
“Do you think it’s true?” I asked, certain the busybody on the other end of that grapevine was Effie.
Gwen gently kissed James on the top of the head. Went back to scratching his ears. “I think it’s possible that Gordon and Chick were something more than friends. And maybe Gordon and that kid—”
She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. “And their argument at the Kerouac Thing was about more than cheese? And the next day Chick killed him in a fit of jealousy? That’s what you think, Gwen?”
Now she lifted her eyes. “No, Maddy. That’s not what I think at all.” She stood up. Put that book I was looking at in my cart. “If Chick was going to shoot anybody,” she said, “wouldn’t he shoot Andrew?”
Chapter 17
Sunday, May 6
I had a couple of those awful frozen toaster waffles for breakfast and then headed for Mallet Creek. By myself. To see David Delarosa’s old college roommate and wrestling buddy, Howard Shay.
Eric had never been able to find him in Florida, but I’d kept calling his house and just that past Wednesday I’d finally connected with him. He’d been back in Ohio just three days. “The house is still a mess,” Howard said, “but if you want to come out, that’s fine with me.”
“I don’t mind a mess,” I said.
Mallet Creek is in neighboring Wyssock County, a tiny crossroads community surrounded by miles of cornfields. If you ignore the 35 mph limit on those empty county roads you can get there in an hour. I easily spotted all the landmarks he’d told me to look for: the fire station, the Methodist church, the meat packing plant with the huge plastic bull on the roof. The bull was sitting back on his haunches, joyfully eating a hamburger made out of the same plastic he was. Just two houses west of that monument to bad taste stood Howard Shay’s house, a brick, sixties-style ranch at the end of long driveway. The lawn was choking with a half-foot of unmowed grass.
Howard was waiting for me on his front steps. If he hadn’t spent the winter in Florida, he’d sure gone to great efforts to make it look like he had. His skin was as orange as a flower pot. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts. His only concession to the chilly Ohio climate was the white socks under his sandals.
He waited until I got to the steps before he stood up. He was a huge man, well over six feet, with wide shoulders and a barrel chest. “No problem finding me?” he asked.
Up close his tan looked real enough. His perfect white teeth did not. “Mallet Creek isn’t exactly New York City,” I said.
“Thank God for that,” he said. He led me inside. When he’d told me on the phone that his house was a mess, he wasn’t kidding. It was a pigsty. I quickly found out why.
“I suppose you know my wife died,” he said, steering me to his dining room table where amongst the clutter he had a pitcher of lemonade waiting. He poured me a glass. I took a sip. It was sour as hell.
“No, I didn’t know that.”
He poured himself a glass. “Two years in August. She had a heart attack driving back from my grandson’s tenth birthday party. Who ever heard of a woman having a heart attack?”
“I guess it happens.”
He nodded. Changed the subject. But didn’t really. “As you can see, I’m not the housekeeper she was.”
“So you went to Florida by yourself?” I asked.
“We always went together. Every winter for eight years, Nanzie and me. Since we retired from the school system here. We were both teachers.”
A man losing his wife is a sad thing. But I was there to talk about Gordon’s murder, not his loneliness or inability to plug in a vacuum cleaner. “I guess you didn’t hear about Gordon’s murder while you were down there.”
“It wouldn’t have meant much to me if I had.”
“But in college you knew David hung around with him, didn’t you?”
Howard took his first sip of the lemonade. “Wooooo!” He trotted to the kitchen for the sugar bowl. “Chris
t, why didn’t you say anything?”
One of my famous nervous giggles leaked out. “I figured that was the way you liked it.”
He emptied the entire bowl in the pitcher. Swirled it until it was dissolved. “I don’t think there’s much I can tell you—about David or your friend.”
Howard was a man in pain. A man trying to maneuver through the complexities of life without the woman who’d obviously done all the heavy lifting for him. I wasn’t about to point out that our glasses were still filled with the old sugarless lemonade. I took another sip and tried not to pucker. “Were you at the college the night David was murdered?”
“Home for Easter like everybody else,” he said. “At our family’s farm on York Road. Just a quarter mile north of my place here. My brother Don has it now. It’s a wonderful old place, Maddy, you should see—”
I interrupted him. He was getting nostalgic, and much too familiar. I had no interest in him doing either. “Being David’s roommate, I suppose the police gave you a thorough going over when you got back to school the next week.”
“Hell—they came out to the farm that same day.”
“The Friday his body was found?”
Howard now was smiling at me like we were on a first date. “They were disappointed to hear I wasn’t anywhere near the college the night before.”
“So the police suspected you?”
“Yessirreebob, they did. I could tell by their hungry eyes they wanted to wrap it up right there. They figured I’d gone nuts and killed him because he hadn’t put the cap on the toothpaste or something.”
Howard was one to talk about hungry eyes. His were all over me, trying to find something to like. “But you were here in Mallet Creek?” I asked.
“Snug as a bug in my old twin bed. Donny in the other one. My mama and daddy right across the hall. I hope you believe me.”
I pawed the air. “I didn’t drive out here for your alibi. I’m just trying to see if there’s a connection between David’s death and Gordon’s.”
His eyes were studying my ringless fingers now. “You a divorced lady or a widow?”
“Happily divorced.”
The hint went over his head—as high as a damn weather satellite. “Divorce is easier than death, I suppose,” he said.
“Everything’s easier than death,” I said.
Howard finally took another sip of his lemonade. His lips twitched and his eyes quivered. Like all men, he was too proud for his own good. He kept sipping. “This Gordon wasn’t your boyfriend, was he?” he asked.
“Just an old friend, Mr. Shay. Now about David—did you have any suspicions at the time, about who might have killed him?”
It finally dawned on him that Dolly Madison Sprowls was not going to be the next Mrs. Howard Shay. Not his girlfriend. Not his housekeeper. Not anything. He settled back in his chair. “Not many people liked David Delarosa. Including me. He was a real so-and-so. Nasty off the mat as on it.”
“That’s right—you were on the wrestling team together.”
“That’s how we ended up as roomies,” he said. “A lot of athletes shared apartments over there.”
He was referring, of course, to the row of brick apartment buildings on Hester Street, on the eastern edge of the campus. They were privately owned apartments but approved by the college for upperclassmen and, as he said, athletes. “Girls seemed to like him,” I pointed out.
Howard grinned at some old memory or the other. “David was a very handsome boy, wasn’t he? And he knew it, too.”
“Some people I’ve talked to think that’s why he hung around with Gordon—to get girls.”
Howard stuck out his bottom lip and nodded. “I can believe that.”
“Believe, Mr. Shay? But not know for certain?”
“We didn’t exactly have a lot of heart-to-hearts,” he said. “But he sure didn’t think much of those stupid beatniks, I can tell you that.”
I confessed. “I was one of them.”
“Whoops.”
Now I got a chance to grin. “No need for a whoops. It was a long time ago, and besides, stupid would have pretty much summed up my opinion of the boys on the wrestling team.”
He held up his lemonade glass. “Touché.”
“No need for a touché, either.” I let him squirm a bit then asked my big question: “Do you think there was any chance that David Delarosa was gay?”
“Hoo! He sure hid it well if he was. From himself especially.”
“He definitely liked girls then?”
“He definitely liked what they had to offer—if you get my drift.”
“I get it.”
Howard now leaned forward on his elbows and whispered, as if he were in a crowded restaurant. “The truth is I’ve always wondered if it wasn’t a girl who killed him.”
I took both our lemonade glasses to the sink and emptied them. I filled them with the sweet lemonade from the pitcher. I had the feeling I was finally getting somewhere and I wanted him to feel he was getting somewhere, too. “And just what makes you think it was a girl, Howard? He was overpowered and beaten to death.”
He took a long, happy sip. I’d finally loosened up and called him by his first name. “I know it’s hard to imagine how a girl could get the best of a guy like David,” he said. “He was one of the best wrestlers in the state of Ohio. In the whole fudgin’ country. But it’s just as hard to see how another guy could’ve gotten the best of him, isn’t it?”
“Another athlete might’ve.”
He shook his head, resolutely. “He was a real alpha male, Maddy. He would have been on his toes for another athlete. Even for a guy who wasn’t a jock.”
I tried not to show my disappointment. “So that’s what leads you to believe it was a girl?”
His dentures lit up. “That and the upside-down seven.”
“The upside-down seven?”
He explained: “David and I lived in 207. Those numbers were on the door, held with little brass screws. And David took the bottom screw out of the seven. So he could swing it up. Into an L. He used that as his signal that he had a girl in the room.”
I made my thumb and index finger into a seven and then twisted my wrist to make an L. “So if you came in at night and saw that upside-down seven, that L, then you were supposed to go somewhere else?”
“That’s right. ‘That L means later, Howie,’ he used to say. ‘It means I’m getting laid.’”
I knew exactly where Howard was going with this. But I figured I’d let him tell it in his own words. I topped off his lemonade. “And?”
“And that next week when I got back to my room to pick up my things—the police wouldn’t let me stay there while they were still investigating—the seven was upside-down.”
“But you were back here in Mallet Creek that week, weren’t you? Why would he bother turning the seven upside-down?”
“The upside-down seven was for everybody. You remember how it was in college, Maddy. Somebody was always banging on your door.”
I did remember. And David was hardly the only college student—boy or girl—to have some kind of discreet “do not disturb” sign for their doors. “Were there any signs that he’d had a girl in there?”
He knew what I meant. “None that I saw.”
“Did you share this suspicion of yours with the police?”
“I did. With the officer who let me in to get my things. God only knows if he passed it along.”
In the all the weeks I’d been picturing David Delarosa’s murder in my head, I’d never seen a girl taking that fateful swing at him, or beating the life out of him on the floor below. It had always been a male. A faceless male. Now I pictured a faceless female. “Why would a girl who willingly came back to David’s room suddenly turn on him?” I asked. “And so viciously? Even the dumb clucks in my day knew what going back to a boy’s room meant.”
Howard shrugged. Frowned like a frog. “Who knows? Maybe the girl changed her mind. Before they even got in the room. Maybe
she went in but didn’t like the way she was treated.”
“That ever happen before? To your knowledge?”
He jiggled his head no.
“So all you’ve got is that upside-down seven? That L?”
“That and my knowing the way David was,” he said.
Chapter 18
Tuesday, May 8
I gave the leash another hard yank. “You’ve got to go to the mountain, James. The mountain won’t come to you.”
James was not in the mood for proverbs. Nor for his morning walk. I’d gotten him as far as my front lawn and now he was planted like a petrified woolly mammoth in my pachysandra. I wrapped the leash around my knuckles and pulled harder. I was leaning backward like the damn Tower of Pisa. “For Pete’s sake, James, get off your big curly duff and walk!”
James sank onto his front elbows. He laughed silently at me, the way dogs do. I dug a biscuit out of my raincoat and waved it in front of his nose. I showed him that it was in the shape of a mailman. I told him how “yummy wummy” it was. He sprang up on all fours and snapped it from my fingers. While he chewed I pulled. Soon we were making our way along the sidewalk. So far, so good.
“You’re one of the smarter dogs in the neighborhood,” I said as we headed up Brambriar Court. “Who do you think shot Sweet Gordon?”
James didn’t answer. He was preoccupied with a chipmunk hole on June Cardwell’s tree lawn.
“I don’t have a clue either,” I admitted. I went over my list of suspects: “First, there’s Andrew Holloway III, his graduate assistant. Andrew had lunch with Gordon only a few hours before he was killed. And he can’t account for his time the rest of that Thursday. He not only found Gordon’s body, he found his car, fifteen miles away. A tad fishy, I think. And I think Detective Grant thinks so, too. But Andrew had been tickled pink to get his assistantship with Gordon. He clearly admired him. From the time Gordon gave him every week, I’d say Gordon admired him right back. The question, of course, is whether that mutual admiration went beyond student and professor. Whether it led to a jealous pique that left Gordon dead.”