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

I know you’re no good at math, so I figured it all up at the bottom of the page.

There followed a list of figures. Dollar amounts with projected dates, tallied carefully with remainders carried over. And there were names. Wilbur Burch: $100. Joey’s mother: $42. Mr. Brossard: $15. Darleen’s savings: $7.50. Ted Jurczyk: $2. There was a question mark after Brossard’s name, as if it was a maybe. It all added up to $166.50. At the very bottom, next to a heart pierced by an arrow, appeared Darleen’s signature, as clear and as big as day.

“I need to give this to the police,” I told Mrs. Figlio. “It will help Joey for sure.”

“What if they tear it up and say it never existed?” she asked.

“I’ll take a photograph of it now,” I said. “We’ll put yesterday’s newspaper in the picture for proof of the date. And I’ll hand it over to the DA instead. It will be safe that way.”

Mrs. Figlio agreed and found me her husband’s copy of the previous day’s Republic. Instead of photographing the front page with George Walsh’s stolen article, I turned to the funny pages. With the date visible, I placed Darleen’s letter on the page and shot ten frames to be sure I’d have a good one.

My feet were tired, and it was only just after three thirty. No rest for the wicked this day, as I stopped by the Republic offices on Main Street to drop off two rolls of film: the one I’d just shot of Darleen’s letter and the one with Joey Figlio’s arrest in my apartment. I left a note asking Bobby Thompson to develop them for me first thing Monday morning.

Since the district attorney’s office was across the street, I left an envelope for Don Czerulniak in the mail slot. Inside was Darleen’s letter to Joey, along with a page of hastily scribbled instructions for the prosecutor to keep the original away from Chief Finn, who would most likely make it disappear.

Then there was an errand I had neglected even longer than my visit to the Figlios. I was fairly certain that only two or three people had seen Darleen after she left the bus in the junior-high-school parking lot on December 21. Four, if you counted Walt Rasmussen. I knew Ted Jurczyk was one, and the taxi driver who took her part way home was another. Then, if neither of them was the last to see her, there was a third man. Her killer. On this day, I was looking for the man who had left her on the side of Route 5S moments before she died.

Sitting in my car, idling outside the junior-high parking lot, I asked myself what route Darleen would have taken that day. Whether she exited the parking lot on the north or south side, she still had to turn east to head toward the Mill Street Bridge, the only river crossing in New Holland. Three city blocks separated the junior high from Mill Street, which ran down from the top of Market Hill on the north bank of the Mohawk, over the bridge, and back up the steep incline to Route 5S on the South Side.

I left my car on Division Street, in front of the school, and walked east to Mill Street. There, I turned right and could see the bridge looming several blocks ahead. I passed a florist, a shoeshine shop, and two barbershops before crossing Canal Street. As I waited at the light, I noticed the taxi stand in front of the Nederlander Hotel, an inn that had closed and now housed only a bar on the ground floor: The Keg Room. This must have been where Darleen found her cab.

At the head of the stand, a big, green-and-red Plymouth taxicab marked time, its driver leaning against the fender jawing with two other hacks about the numbers.

“Can you help me?” I asked. The driver looked me up and down, a hint of a smile on his stubbled face.

“Sure, sweetheart. Where you going?”

“Nowhere, I’m afraid. I was hoping one of you gentlemen could tell me if you remember a teenage girl who hailed a taxi here a few weeks ago.”

The hack pushed off his fender, and the other two men took a step forward. The three formed a loose semicircle in front of me.

“A few weeks?” he asked, rubbing his chin. “That’s a lot of fares ago.”

“How about you fellows?” I asked the other two. They shook their heads no. “Come on, how many teenage girls take a cab by themselves? Surely you’d remember that.”

“I didn’t see no one,” said the first hack. Then whistling through his thumb and forefinger, he called out down the line of cabs. “Hey, anybody remember picking up a teenage girl a couple of weeks ago?”

“Four weeks,” I prompted. “December twenty-first.”

“Four weeks ago!” he yelled.

The other cabbies frowned, shrugged, and shook their heads. All except one. A small, pudgy man in a black stocking cap shuffled forward.

“I used to get fares from a girl. Regularly. Ain’t seen her in a while.”

“Excuse me,” I said. “May I have your name?”

He looked up at me with suspicion. His fat cheeks pushed his mouth into a permanent pout.

“Benny Colonna,” he said, as if uncertain. “Who are you?”

“My name is Eleonora Stone. I’m a reporter with the Republic.”

“So what do you want with me?”

“I’d like to know if this is the girl you picked up on December twenty-first.” I produced Darleen’s school picture. “She was going to the farmlands out in the Town of Florida.”

He tilted his head to see. “Yeah, that’s her.”

“Can you tell me if she was calm or nervous or normal that day? Was she upset about missing her bus?”

Benny Colonna shrugged. “I don’t know. She seemed normal, I guess.”

“Did she say anything at all to you?” I asked, and he shook his head. “One last question, Mr. Colonna.”

“Sure,” he smiled.

“Why did you let her out on the highway? It was about two