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

“Well, she got in the cab right here,” he began. “And I recognized her because the last time I picked her up, she was short thirty-five cents on the fare. So this time I didn’t trust her. I asked for the money up front. She only had a dollar ten. So when the meter hit seventy-five cents I pulled over and said if she didn’t have any more money, that was as far as I was going. A dollar ten minus thirty-five is seventy-five, see?”

The image of Darleen’s bluish face, swollen and battered, flashed before my eyes, and I nearly slapped the man. I wanted to do even worse.

“You just left her on the side of the highway in near-zero temperatures?” I stammered.

“Yeah. I mean, she didn’t have enough to go any farther. Anyways, she had a winter coat on.”

I took a step closer to him, my nostrils flaring, eyes burning. I sensed my hack–the first driver–tensing next to me as I grabbed the fat, little man by his lapels and drew him close to my face.

“I want you to know that you sent that little girl to her death that day.”

Benny Colonna’s lower lip quivered. He didn’t resist, didn’t try to push me away or free himself. He just shook. Then he managed to speak and asked me what I meant by that. I shoved him away.

“That girl was murdered that day. The man who killed her picked her up after you threw her out. You might just as well have put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”

His eyes grew, betraying the dawning of the horrible truth. “Was she that girl that disappeared?” he asked. “I had no idea. My God . . .”

“You killed her,” I said with a shrug of my shoulders. Then I reached into my handbag, hands trembling, and fumbled with my change purse. I retrieved a quarter and a dime. “Here’s your tip,” I said, folding the thirty-five cents into his hand.

Benny Colonna staggered back a step and steadied himself on the cab behind him. His expression of horror told the story. I glanced at my hack standing a few feet away and thanked him for his help. He nodded solemnly, and I strode off back the way I’d come.

By five, I was back home. I spent two hours writing up several pieces for Monday’s edition, including one about the cab driver who, for thirty-five cents, had abandoned a young girl on the side of the highway in the freezing dark. I rapped out another article on Joey Figlio’s and Wilbur Burch’s arrests. And I wrote a third on the discovery of the body at Lock 10. Finally, I put together a timeline for the murder and the dumping of the body in the river. Basing my calculations on what I knew of Darleen’s cab ride and Gus Arnold’s account of his route that day, I figured the murder had most likely taken place between four thirty and five thirty that afternoon. It was cold that day, so Darleen must have been walking fast to get home as soon as possible. I estimated a walking speed of about five miles an hour. At that rate, she would have reached home in about thirty minutes. But if Gus Arnold had made his last drop at four twenty as he said, then Darleen and her murderer crossed paths along County Highway 58 sometime between four and four fifteen. I was assuming a man in a car stopped and offered her a ride the rest of the way home. Furthermore, I believed that she knew the man, even though she had been known to take rides from strangers. And if she knew the man, I could narrow the field of suspects. But what if someone had been on foot along the road, waiting? That list could include Bobby Karl, Joey Figlio, Walt Rasmussen, and Dick Metzger. I felt sure that Ted Jurczyk had no opportunity to find himself on that road at that time on that day. I made a note to check with Coach Mahoney, just the same, but Ted must have been at basketball practice.

Next, I wanted to establish exactly where Darleen had been murdered and how her body had ended up in the river. I was confident she’d been killed in or near the snow hills at the end of her road. But to be sure, I needed to prove how the body had traveled from there to the lock at Cranesville.

I worked backwards from the river. The Mohawk flowed west to east, of course, meaning that the easternmost spot Darleen could have entered the river was at Lock 10 in Cranesville. I doubted that. For one thing, her body would surely have surfaced earlier, as the water had never completely frozen in Cranesville. That meant the body probably entered the river somewhere to the west. I kept a street map of New Holland and the surrounding area in my car; I often used it to find my way around when working on assignments for the paper. Now, I spread it out before me on the kitchen table and studied the area map on the reverse side. The river bisected the page from left to right, and I could see all the crossings at once. Starting in Canajoharie, there were locks on the river at regular intervals, all part of the Erie Canal system. From the article I’d read in the Canajoharie Courier Standard earlier, I knew that the river had been frozen solid at Lock 12 in Tribes Hill on December 21, so Darleen could not have entered the water there or anywhere west of there. Next came Lock 11 to the west of New Holland, just opposite Tedesco’s. I wasn’t sure if that had been frozen on December 21, but I knew who would: Jimmy Tedesco. He kept an eye on the river and could tell you all you wanted to know