No Stone Unturned

by James W. Ziskin

  I put the album down and thought with irony that the photographic record of Jordan Shaw’s life ended as it had begun. My pictures of a muddied, naked corpse—as naked as the day she was born, as naked as the day she posed on a baby blanket—closed the book on her brief, privileged existence.

  The judge returned, appearing suddenly behind me and giving me a good scare. “Virginia White is the roommate’s name. Here’s her number,” he said, extending a square of paper to me. “Jordan and Ginny’s phone number.”

  I took the paper and thanked him.

  “How do you plan to proceed, Miss Stone?”

  “There’s someone from the motel I want to talk to,” I said. “And Tommy Quint.”

  He saw me to the door, and I was happy to be getting out of there. As I walked down the path to my yellow Plymouth, he called to me. I stopped and turned. The judge came out into the cold in his shirtsleeves, approached me slowly, and looked deep into my eyes. I wanted to get away, but his determined gaze held me.

  “How,” he began, “how did you . . .”

  I wanted to ask for clarification, but couldn’t get the words out. My throat had closed tight, and I fought an instant urge to burst into tears. As he stared at me, his steel eyes glistened behind their intense stare. I understood what he wanted to know. In that moment, my reluctance to engage with him evaporated. He was tortured by the same pain I had felt, and he wanted help.

  “It’s horrible,” I said softly. “There is nothing anyone can say or do to fill the void. It’s a cruel agony, which is something I think you already know.”

  He sighed in the night air, looked skyward, then nodded knowingly. “It’s a nightmare from which I cannot awaken.”

  He stared at me for another minute, with God-knows-what misery twisting his thoughts. Then he stepped back and thanked me for my help. I drove away, slowly. He watched me go, then turned like a condemned man to face the pitiless grief waiting for him inside.

  Glenda Whalen’s home was a modest, brick traditional, about ten years old, with an attached garage and a small front yard. The lights were on in the front room, so I switched off the motor and climbed out of my car. The door banged shut with a thud in the cold evening air, then all went silent. I made my way up the walk to the front door, through two rows of bare shrubs, my shoes clacking on the cement, again shattering the cold stillness of the evening. The small, steel knocker was cold in my fingers, and its rap echoed high-pitched and hollow against the door.

  “Yes? What is it?” asked the tall, hefty man who answered.

  “I hope I’m not interrupting your supper,” I said.

  “We already ate. And, sorry, we don’t want any cookies, miss.”

  “Oh, I’m not with the Girl Scouts,” I said. “I’d like to speak with Glenda Whalen.”

  “Glenda!” he called over his shoulder. “Someone’s here to see you.” Then he invited me into the foyer.

  A large girl in slacks and a sweater appeared, and the man left us. Her eyes were ringed with red, and her nose looked raw, as if she had a cold. She regarded me curiously, her brow furrowed slightly.

  “Do I know you?” she asked softly.

  I gave her my name and explained that I was a reporter for the Republic.

  “You’re a reporter?” she asked. “What do you want from me?”

  “I’m investigating Jordan Shaw’s murder,” I began, and the girl’s red eyes grew before me.

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “You were her friend. I thought I might ask you some questions.”

  She stood back and looked me up and down. “What could I possibly tell you?”

  “I wanted to ask you about her friends. Her boyfriends, what she liked to do, where she liked to go.”

  Glenda’s face soured. “Are you kidding me? Are you some kind of ghoul?”

  “I’m just trying to do my job,” I answered. “And find her killer.”

  “You’re pathetic,” she sneered. “Have you no shame? Or respect for the dead? Or for yourself?”

  “I’m just trying to help.”

  “I am mourning my oldest and dearest friend,” she said, nearly sobbing. “And you come here nosing around, trying to dig up dirt on the most marvelous girl I’ve ever known.”

  “It’s not like that. Someone broke her neck, murdered her. Don’t you want to help me find out who?”

  “You’re just a girl. What can you possibly do? You’re not trying to solve this murder. You just want to ruin her name.”

  “That’s not true, Glenda. Judge Shaw asked for my help. I just came from his house.”

  “No you didn’t,” accused Glenda. “You’ve been drinking is more like it. I can smell it on your breath.”

  Then the tears gushed from her eyes, and she buried her face in her hands. I tried to comfort her, awkwardly, and she didn’t resist.

  “Will you answer some questions?” I asked, once she’d stopped crying.

  “Get out of here,” she said, almost in a whisper, and she turned away. When I didn’t move immediately, she spun back around and roared at me: “Get out of here and leave me alone!”

  I arrived home at seven thirty, opening radiator valves and flicking on lights as I went from room to room. Charlie Reese would be waiting for me downtown at eight, so I had just enough time to make a call to Rochester.

  “Is Tom Quint there?” I asked the boy who answered the phone.

  “Quint!” the voice called. “Is Quint here? Some girl wants to talk to Quint!”

  I could hear the chatter and laughter of several young men in the background, and after two minutes, I wondered if the phone had been abandoned. Finally, though, a soft voice came on the line and confirmed I had reached my party. I introduced myself, excused the interruption, and asked if he’d heard the news about Jordan Shaw.

  “Yeah,” he said weakly into the receiver, his voice tight with grief.

  “Would you mind if I asked you a few questions? It might help the investigation.”

  Tom said okay.

  “Did you see Jordan this past week?” Right to the point; I didn’t want to dance with him.

  “Yeah, I saw her . . . Wednesday . . . and . . . um . . .”

  “Friday night?” I prompted.

  A long pause. Nothing but faint white noise coming down the line. “Yeah, Friday night.”

  So much for Judge Shaw knowing his daughter’s comings and goings . . . Now it was my turn to weigh my words. “Where and when did you see her Friday?”

  “I don’t want to talk about this,” he said, and I thought he was going to hang up. “I don’t know who you are, and . . .”

  I repeated my name and affiliation. “You know who I am, Tom. I’m a friend of Fadge’s. I live across the street from Fiorello’s. You waited on me a few times last summer when you were home from school.”

  “Are you that girl with the long curly hair? The crossword girl?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re that girl Fadge is in love with.”

  “Um, yes, I suppose,” I stammered. That came out of left field. “Now listen,” I said, trying to regain my balance, “I’m not trying to dig up dirt or make a mess. I just think it’s important to know. Sheriff Olney is sure to be talking to you soon, so why don’t you tell me what you know?”

  “Why should I tell you?” His tone was polite, but distrustful just the same.

  I decided to play my trump. “Judge Shaw has asked me to help find out who did this. If it was you, Tom, you’ll be in jail tomorrow, because I’m sure you left some fingerprints on her neck or in the car.” I was bullying him, and it worked.

  “I didn’t do it!” he yelled, coming to life. “I loved Jordan. I would never hurt her!”

  “All right, then help me.”

  There was another long silence. “Judge Shaw asked you to help?”

  “I’ve just come from his house. He gave me two Scotches in his den.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I met Jordan abou
t eight on Friday night. She picked me up at my house in her dad’s car.”

  “And?”

  “We went for a drive.”

  “Tom, you’re going to have to tell the story, so just do it.”

  He relented, explaining that he had phoned Jordan Wednesday, and they agreed to meet that night at Blue Diamond Bar, a popular hangout for the kids home from college for Thanksgiving recess. The two chatted over a beer, and things warmed up between them. Jordan let him kiss her a couple of times in the parking lot, and they parted on the friendliest terms in years. Tom apparently read more into the kisses than Jordan had intended. He was expecting a definitive reconciliation, leading to a short engagement, marriage, mortgage, and Saturday evenings on Judge Shaw’s couch. He convinced her to see him again Friday, if only briefly, as she insisted she had plans.

  They didn’t drive anywhere in particular on Friday, just around on some of the country roads in the hills above the Mohawk River. Tom tried, without success, to convince Jordan to take him back. After about twenty minutes, she grew tired of the hard sell and dropped him off at his house. She drove away.

  “Did she say if she was going to meet someone?” I asked.

  “No, but I got the feeling she was. She was in a big hurry. Kept looking at her watch and smoothing her hair. Looked like she’d been at the beauty shop that day. Her hair was kind of teased up, you know?”

  Not when I saw her.

  “Did she have a steady? Was that why she wouldn’t come back to you?”

  “Jordan always had someone, but she wouldn’t have told me. She knew it would upset me.”

  “Do you think she was meeting someone from New Holland?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a fellow who was back from college.”

  “What did you do the rest of Friday night?” I asked, realizing I’d reached a dead end. He stumbled on his answer, tried to have me believe he’d watched a movie on TV, but he couldn’t tell me what it was. He might have been lying, but I couldn’t believe he’d killed her.

  The night air packed a sharp bite now. A cold front had crossed the border from Canada and was creeping south, its crisp Arctic air and high, frosty clouds advancing on light winds. As I pulled up to the Republic’s offices, the moon peeked over the New Holland Bank Building and cast a pale shadow over Main Street. A quiet Sunday night, eerier than most, and I felt relieved to get inside where it was warm and bright. Charlie Reese was working in his office on the second floor. He didn’t smile when I came in.

  “I’ve got George Walsh’s piece on the murder right here,” he said, waving some paper at me. “Artie wants me to run it.”

  “He’s lucky if he spelled her name right,” I said, reaching into my purse for my own copy. “I’ve got everyone scooped on this. Mr. Short can’t take it away from me.”

  Charlie frowned. “Don’t count on it. You know he doesn’t like you. And after you showed up Walsh today at the sheriff’s office, he’s just looking for one good reason to fire you.” Charlie pushed George’s copy across the desk to me. “Read this, then tell me if you’ve got something better.”

  The article stated the facts: the twenty-one-year-old daughter of State Appellate Division Judge Harrison Shaw had been found dead Saturday in Wentworth’s Woods, north of New Holland. The sheriff’s department and state police were treating the case as a homicide. Walsh described the condition of the body and the pelvic gash, and he quoted the coroner on the cause of death. He made no mention of the IUD—neither had I—nor that the judge’s missing car had been found.

  “I’ve lapped him three times,” I said, sitting on the corner of Charlie’s desk. He glanced at my bare knee, and I pulled my skirt down to cover it.

  “Like for instance?” he asked.

  “I found Judge Shaw’s Lincoln at Phil’s Garage,” I said. “And I traced it back to the Mohawk Motel where Jordan spent part of Friday night. She would have spent all of Friday night there, by the way, but she was murdered in room four.”

  Charlie raised an eyebrow. “What else?”

  “I found the bloody tissue in the trash. From the gash in her pelvis. Then I spent an hour talking to her dad over a couple of cocktails, and I had a long chat with an old flame of hers who saw her minutes before she went to Mohawk Motel. One of the last people to see her alive. And I interviewed the innkeeper, who identified Jordan Shaw from a photo I showed her. I’ve got more than a full day on George. Read my story if you don’t believe me.”

  Charlie took my copy and rifled through it. When he’d finished, he settled back into his chair, thinking about what I had written.

  “We may have to hold back on some of the coroner’s findings,” he said. “I don’t think we can get away with saying there was semen inside her unless we say she was raped. And we can’t say that because it’s not true. I want to tip-toe through this minefield, Ellie; Judge Shaw is an influential man.”

  “Charlie, I just came from his house. He knows what I know, that I’m from the paper, and he didn’t ask me to hold back on anything. As it is, I promised Fred Peruso I would keep quiet on the IUD.”

  “The what?”

  I had to explain to Charlie what it was and that it had been found in Jordan Shaw’s uterus.

  “It may have to come out later,” I continued. “But for the time being, I don’t see what purpose would be served by including it in the story.”

  Charlie conceded. “Okay, I’ll back you up on this one, as you wrote it. But take the advice of an older hand, and have another look at what you wrote about Frank Olney. He won’t give you the time of day once he reads that. You make him look like a bumpkin lost in his own cornfield. Granted, it’s a fair depiction, but if I were you . . .”

  I saw his point. I could blur the focus on a sentence or two, making it appear that the sheriff had found the car and the tissue, or that they had come into his possession, without ever saying so in explicit terms. At the least, the public would conclude that Frank Olney was in charge of his own investigation. I was sure I could benefit from that.

  After doctoring my references to Sheriff Olney, Charlie and I selected eight photos for the story, three of which would anchor the front page: the crime scene; the sheriff looking grimly determined and capable, above a caption of “I’ll get the guy who did this”; and the portrait of the victim herself. My headline stretched across the top of the page—two inches high—with my story and byline in tow. In deference to the judge’s reputation, we buried the picture of the Mohawk Motel deep inside the paper, on page seventeen.

  Once Charlie had settled on the layout and sent it off to Composition, he congratulated me on the work I had done and told me he was putting out a special morning edition.

  “It may mean my job tomorrow,” he said, “but you ran circles around George.”

  I thanked him, and he smiled. We both knew he was going to take the flak for my story.

  At ten I sat down in the phone booth at Fiorello’s and dialed the Boston number Judge Shaw had given me—Ginny White. No one answered. I hung up and joined Fadge at the counter. The place was empty of customers, as could be expected on a Sunday night in November, and we talked about football, the weather, and Jordan Shaw.

  “I heard a rumor she was raped,” said Fadge, leaning against the cash register behind the counter, his huge shoes propped up on the ice cream freezer. Not the most hygienic practice, but par for the course.

  “You heard wrong,” I said, proffering my glass for another Coke.

  He motioned for me to fill it myself. I leaned over the counter to pump some Coke syrup into my glass, then topped it off with carbonated water from the spigot. Fadge flipped a long soda spoon at me. I caught it and stirred my drink. No one ever accused Ron Fiorello of overexertion.

  “Tomorrow’s paper is going to raise some eyebrows,” I continued. “And not just because a local girl was murdered.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The way she died. Or rather, the way she lived. She wasn’t exactly saving
herself for marriage.”

  Fadge shrugged it off. “That’s overrated.”

  “How would you know?” I asked.

  He ignored me. “So you were there, Ellie. What do you think happened?”

  I explained, without giving the most sensitive details; I trusted Fadge more than anyone else in New Holland, but Fred Peruso and I had an agreement about the IUD. It was one thing to presume that Jordan Shaw had slept with someone Friday night. It was another to imply that she was bouncing on the mattress like a trampolinist every time the sun went down. I told Fadge exactly what was in my article and gave him my gut feelings besides.

  “If she’d been raped, I’d get it,” I said. “If she hadn’t been cut, or even if it had been accidental, I might buy it. But something doesn’t add up here. I believe people do things for logical reasons, whether we find their actions abhorrent or not. This guy cut out a piece of her skin and took it with him. Why?”

  “Maybe he wanted a souvenir.” said Fadge.

  We sat quietly for a few moments, mulling over the possible explanations. Neither of us could think of any.

  “Hey, guess what I discovered today,” I said to change the subject and brag a little at the same time. “The Mohawk Motel has a Peeping Tom.”

  “You just figured that out?” He laughed, and he told me a story. “Joey McIlhenny used to screw his sister-in-law up at the Mohawk. To hear him tell it, he was giving it to her eight or ten times a week, but everyone knows Joey’s a talker. Anyway, after a couple of weeks, he starts to worry maybe his brother’s wise to him, and he feels like someone’s watching every time him and his sister-in-law hit the sheets. Then, one day, he catches that Puerto Rican kid peeping through the bathroom window.”

  I told Fadge about my discovery behind the Mohawk, but that Jean Trent seemed unwilling to help me find her handyman voyeur. Fadge pushed off the register and leaned toward me. His brown eyes, bulging from a thyroid condition, sparkled with amusement.

  “She’s not going to turn him in, Ellie. Not her young rooster.”

  “You’re telling me this Julio guy is . . .” I searched for the right word, “romantic with Jean Trent? She said he was just a kid.”