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

preparing for the upcoming inauguration, while President Eisenhower was packing his bags.

“How’s your story coming along?” asked Fadge, who joined me in the booth during a lull in business.

“Things are heating up. I seem to have a target on my back.”

“I heard about your exciting night from Mrs. Giannetti,” said Fadge. “Sounds like you had every guy in town up in your apartment except me.”

“We had a party,” I said. “Joey Figlio and Wilbur Burch were going to fight to the death until the cops showed up.”

“Who’s Wilbur Burch?”

“Darleen Hicks’s betrothed. He’s AWOL from the army. Thinks Joey Figlio killed Darleen.”

“What’s Joey Figlio think?”

“He thinks the music teacher, Ted Russell, did it.”

“And what does Ellie Stone think?”

I considered his question. Quite legitimate at this stage of my investigation. Who did I think killed Darleen Hicks? There was no dearth of potentials, from Darleen’s own household to the neighbors to her various suitors. There was even the taxi driver, whom I had yet to locate. I couldn’t eliminate anyone yet, even if I felt the odds were longer for some.

The man currently under arrest in the county jail, Ted Russell, was slippery enough in my mind to be the killer, but the appearance of the corpse so close to his house made him look either very guilty (and stupid) or incredibly unlucky. The Mohawk had been running west to east—presumably—for millennia. No matter where Darleen Hicks had been dumped into the river upstream, she would certainly have had to pass Lock 10 eventually. It was Ted Russell’s bad luck that she got caught in the dam gate at Cranesville. He had admitted to giving Darleen money for an abortion. That confession wasn’t going to win anyone’s sympathy on a jury, even if he was innocent as he claimed. The stink of suspicion would cling to him for a long time.

Joey Figlio’s single-minded sense of purpose was remarkable. It pointed to his innocence, at least in my mind. But who knew how a damaged mind might behave? He was certainly jealous enough to kill for Darleen. What I didn’t know was whether he was jealous enough to kill Darleen herself. She had written to Wilbur, after all, that he had threatened to kill her if she left him for another. I was on the fence as to whether that letter was part of Darleen and Joey’s plan to raise money for their escape. But I couldn’t be sure either if Darleen had indeed intended to leave with Joey or use the money for some other unknown purpose. If that were the case, Joey might well have carried out the threat Darleen had described to Wilbur in her letter.

Louis Brossard. Just on the periphery of Darleen Hicks’s world, he, nevertheless, had been involved up to his elbows in the investigation of the alleged impropriety between the schoolgirl and the music teacher. Furthermore, a girl had disappeared from the school where he’d worked in Hudson. And there was the question of whether Darleen had ever asked him for money, as Ted Russell maintained and Brossard denied. Unlike Ted Russell and Joey Figlio and her own stepfather Dick Metzger, there were no clues to point to Louis Brossard beyond his general creepiness and the suggestion that he had been approached by the victim for money. By all accounts, even if Darleen had asked him for money, he’d refused. And he had an alibi for December 21. He had been at the superintendent’s Christmas banquet, and there was photographic evidence to prove it. I had found no other proof to clear any of the other men on my list. Finally, he just didn’t seem interested in girls, at least if I qualified as suitable bait. I confess that I suspected young Ted Jurczyk was more his speed.

Bobby Karl? Strange enough and interested in Darleen in an unhealthy way, but I hadn’t unearthed anything more to implicate him. He had no car or truck to transport the body from the Town of Florida to the river, where Darleen had ended up.

I had all but crossed Walt Rasmussen off my list. But he had admitted that he’d seen her just an hour or so before she was killed. I couldn’t ignore the overwhelming evidence that Darleen had met her end near or in the snow hills at the end of her road. Her lunch box and gloves had both turned up in the search. That pointed most probably to a quick end between four thirty and five fifteen or so. Walt Rasmussen lived within five minutes of the putative murder scene.

Ted Jurczyk was the all-American boy. A basketball star and smart, polite kid. He seemed to be too sweet and good to be mixed up in any of this sordid affair. And yet he was the one who had lured Darleen off the bus the day she died. He was surely one of the very last people to have seen her alive. Could I cross him off my list?

Then came the two men I suspected most of all.

Gus Arnold, the surly, old bus driver. He had changed his story about Darleen’s presence on his bus the day she disappeared. It seemed possible, even likely, that he had come across her along County Highway 58 as he finished his route. Furthermore, he had lied about having returned his bus to the depot, claiming he’d had a flat tire. Finally, and most damning, he had spent as much as an hour parked behind the snow hills, not far from where Darleen’s frozen gloves were recovered by the sheriff's deputies. He was old, but looked strong enough to carry a body through the bordering woods to the other side where her lunch box was discovered.

Which brought me to Dick Metzger. His denials of impure intentions while kissing Darleen on the lips, and the suggestion that he may have spied on her in her bath, had done nothing to convince me of the propriety of his relationship with his stepdaughter. He had