Stone Cold Dead by James Ziskin (great novels of all time txt) 📕

for money,” he blurted out. “I said no, of course. At first. Then she said it was important and she really needed it.”

“How much money did she want?” I asked, feeling the impasse had been broken.

“Oh, she wanted a bundle,” he said, chuckling nervously. “She asked me for a hundred dollars. I don’t have that kind of money. I’m just a high-school music teacher.”

“But you relented and gave it to her?” I asked, thinking of the ninety-seven dollars the sheriff and I had found in Darleen’s locker.

“Not a hundred dollars, I didn’t,” he said with as much indignation as he could summon. “I gave her twenty dollars, and that was all I could spare.”

“What did she say the money was for?”

“She didn’t.”

Again the look in his eye. I waited and gazed.

“Okay, she told me.”

“So what did she say the money was for?”

Ted looked down at his hands, turning them over, buying time or steeling his nerve. He couldn’t look at me when he said it. And I shook when he did.

“She said she needed the money for an abortion,” he said softly.

I wrestled with that word. Probably harder than Ted Russell had struggled just to say it. A rush of memories buried deep and far almost took my breath away. I didn’t want Ted to see my reaction, but I was too stunned to do anything to conceal it. Enough surprises from this girl, I thought. Our meeting in the high-school girls’ room during a basketball game; my bottle of whiskey in her locker; the risks chanced; and now this. Darleen Hicks had crawled under my skin or at least wormed her way into my mind. There was something obsessive and compelling in her behavior, and too much of it dovetailed with my own life. This was nothing akin to my reaction to Jordan Shaw’s murder. I had felt sympathy for her, a connection of sorts, too. But it was cursory, perhaps even wished for by me. Darleen Hicks was different. Of course I felt sadness for Darleen, who had treated me kindly even while stealing my bottle of Scotch. But I felt more for her mother. And somewhere deep inside me, I felt remorse and bitterness and sorrow for myself. I couldn’t explain it without an overly simplistic solipsism that Darleen was me. The dead me.

I chased away the thoughts of my own abortion at the age of sixteen, the event that battered and choked my relationship with my father until the last breath of his life. Enough, I thought. That rotten corner of my memory had festered too long. It was over, and I wanted to get over it. I was going to get over it, put it behind me once and for all. Just as soon as I finished with Darleen Hicks. Just one more reason to solve the case and feel sorrow for a murdered girl, instead of for myself.

“Why would she ask you for money?” I resumed. Ted Russell was still looking at his hands. “It makes me suspicious that she went to you, almost as if you had a stake in the situation.”

“It’s not true, Ellie. I never laid a hand on that girl, never even smiled at her. And I wasn’t the only one she asked.”

“Then why did you agree to give her anything at all, even if it was only twenty dollars.”

“Because she threatened to say the baby was mine. I’d be ruined, don’t you see?”

Ted Russell stood up from his chair and paced the room, wringing his shackled hands as he went. I watched him carefully. He was frightened and desperate.

“Let’s change course,” I said. “You know Darleen’s body was found a quarter mile from your house. That looks very bad to the sheriff and the district attorney. They think you might have dumped her body in the river when the thaw started, or maybe even before, when the river was frozen.”

“That’s baloney,” he said, stopping his pacing to point his two hands at me in an attempt to emphasize his point. “There are signs posted along the river to the west of the locks. Do you know what they say? ‘Danger. Thin ice.’ The river was running down the middle of the channel even at the height of the freeze. I couldn’t have walked out there and thrown her body in. I would have broken through the ice.”

I raised an eyebrow and nodded. He had a good point. “But you could have climbed up on the concrete pier at the river’s edge and tossed her in.”

He thought for a second, tried to rearrange some facts in his head, then gave up in frustration.

Now it was my turn to rearrange some facts. If Ted Russell had dragged the dead girl up onto the pier to dispose of her body, why would he throw her in on the west side? Even with the gates up, she would still have to pass through the lock and risk getting snagged on some piece of metal. Why not just dump her on the opposite side, past the lock altogether, and send her floating off toward Scotia to the east?

I didn’t mention this defense to Ted Russell.

“You said Darleen asked someone else for money, too. Can you tell me who?”

He looked terrified and shook his head violently. “No. Besides, it wasn’t his fault she asked him. He was a victim just like me.”

“Do you know if he gave her any money?”

“No. At least, I don’t believe so.”

I stood up and approached him on the other side of the table. “Who was it, Ted?”

He shook his head.

“I can’t help you, Ted,” I said. “You just keep lying. I can’t be sure anything you’ve told me is true.”

“I’ve told you the truth,” he said.

I was inclined to believe his story. He was convincing in his denials and, let’s face it, for my own selfish reasons, I was hoping against hope that he hadn’t bedded or murdered Darleen Hicks. I had, after all, spent an ill-advised evening with him.