I went to the rack where we keep the phone books. I found the listings for Mallet Creek, a small town in neighboring Wyssock County. I found Howard Shay’s number and dialed it. It rang four times before triggering one of those damn recordings: “Big Howie here! Sorry I’m not there to take your call. I’m down in sunny Flor-ee-dah wintering away the kid’s inheritance. Call back after the ground thaws!”
There was no beep to leave a message. Just a quick click. Whatever I might learn from David Delarosa’s old college roommate would have to wait. I took a deep breath and called Dale Marabout’s extension. “Busy, Mr. M?” I asked.
“As a termite in a toothpick factory. What’s up?”
“I just wanted to talk-about Gordon Sweet’s murder.”
I peeked across the newsroom and saw Dale glowering at me. I wiggled my fingers at him. “I know you told me to let the police handle it,” I said, “but I think maybe I’ve stumbled onto something.”
And so an hour later, after Dale had finished with his story for the next day’s paper, he and I were walking down the hill, wet wind chapping our faces, toward Ike’s Coffee Shop.
Ike’s is located in the Longacre Building, one of the many empty office buildings in Hannawa’s dying downtown. It used to house some of the city’s most successful doctors and lawyers. Now it just houses Ike.
“Morgue Mama!” Ike sang out when we walked in. “Mr. Marabout!”
Ike is the nicest man. He’s about my age. He taught high school math for 30 years before opening his coffee shop. He makes me laugh when there’s nothing to laugh at. He drives me home when my car won’t start. He maintains his high opinion of me no matter how cranky I get. He’s earned the right to call me Morgue Mama to my face.
I should also explain that Ike’s name isn’t really Ike. It’s Leonard, Leonard Breeze. He says he got the nickname because he was the only black man anybody knew who voted for Dwight Eisenhower.
Dale and I took a table by the window. We didn’t have to order. Ike knew I’d want a mug of Darjeeling tea and Dale a regular coffee with room for a little half-and-half. He got busy pouring them.
“So what’s this you’ve stumbled on?” Dale asked me, drumming his fingers on the table. “And more importantly, on a scale of one to ten how much agony is it going to cause me?”
I hate drumming fingers. I stopped them. “No more than a six,” I said. “I just want you to do a little checking.” I told him about my trip to the landfill that morning with Andrew, about David Delarosa’s murder all those years ago.
Dale connected the dots. “So you think maybe Gordon was looking for the murder weapon out there? That’s a real stretch, don’t you think?”
“I won’t know if it is or isn’t until you look into the status of the Delarosa case.”
“It’s been a billion years, Maddy. I’d say the status is that there isn’t a status.”
“I know the case is cold. But I thought maybe you could see if there’s something in the police files that didn’t make it into our stories. Was the murder weapon ever identified or found? Was Shaka Bop the only suspect ever questioned?”
I’d told Dale something he didn’t know. “ The Shaka Bop?”
Ike appeared out of nowhere with our drinks. “How many Shaka Bops do you think there are in Hannawa?”
Ike grinned at Dale. Dale grinned back at Ike. But they were not easy grins. Ike knew all about my history with Dale. And Dale knew that Ike knew. It was nice to have two men go grin-to-grin over me like that, but it sure wasn’t going to help me get to the bottom of Gordon’s murder. “Thanks, Ike,” I said. “You’re a lamb.”
Ike retreated behind the counter and watched us over the top of his espresso machine while he pretended to work.
“I’m sure I’m just tilting at windmills,” I whispered to Dale, “but Gordon was pretty thick with David Delarosa and I remember how hard he took his murder.”
Dale tipped his head and squinted, the way dogs do when they’re trying to decipher the confusing sounds coming from the flat faces of their masters. “Are you saying Gordon was gay?”
“Good gravy, does everything have to be about sex?”
The second I said it I wished I hadn’t. Sex was not a good topic for Dale and me. We were just friends now. He’d been married to Sharon for twenty years and I’d long ago lost what little physical appeal Mother Nature rationed out to me. But once upon a time Dale Marabout and I had been a couple of real bunny rabbits with each other, I’ll tell you. So the S-word, in any context, always dredged up a lot of awkward feelings better left in the murky past.
And having those feelings dredged up in front of Ike made matters all the worse. Unfortunately, there was something more than friendship between Ike and me, too. Not that we’d ever acted on those feelings, of course. Good gravy! We were both closing in on seventy. He was black. I was white. He was a Republican and I’d once held a coffee klatch for George McGovern. No way were we going to mess up a wonderful friendship with foolishness. I started over. “Gordon’s sex life is neither here or there. All that’s important is why he was murdered.”
Dale finished his coffee in a few great gulps. He was as anxious to leave as I was. “Okay, Maddy, I’ll see what I can find. But this is not going to be Buddy Wing II.”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “This is the last thing I’m going to ask you to do.”
We said good-bye to Ike and headed out into the evening. The rush hour was over. The streets were all but empty. It was even colder and windier than before. We climbed the hill to The Herald-Union. We said “See you tomorrow” in the parking deck, got into our respective cars and drove off to our respective houses.
I ran straight to Gordon’s apartment that April afternoon in 1957 when Effie called to tell me that David Delarosa’s body had been found. Literally ran, through a shower of cold rain that stung like BBs. Effie was already there, making Gordon the only thing she knew how to make-canned soup. Gordon was sitting in the ratty, overstuffed chair he’d rescued from the dump. He was sucking on a beer and staring at the wall.
I don’t remembering Gordon saying anything that night. Or eating his soup. I just remember Effie and me opening beer bottles for him.
Gordon drank for two more days and then on Easter morning took the bus to Sandusky for David’s funeral. We all offered to go with him, but Gordon wanted to go alone. “Wowzers,” Chick said in his best beatnikese as the Greyhound pulled out, “have you ever seen anything more appropriately beat in your life? Sweet Gordon bouncing along in a half-empty bus past soggy fields of broken corn, on a day when everybody else is celebrating life everlasting?”
I guess the reason I couldn’t believe that Gordon was gay now was that it had never occurred to me then. Homosexuality wasn’t something people talked about much in the fifties, not even us bohemian types, but we did know what it was, and surely we recognized it when we saw it.
Gordon returned from Sandusky just as depressed as when he left. He didn’t say boo about David Delarosa until that morning at Mopey’s when we saw the story about Sidney being questioned by police. His sadness mushroomed into anger. And little by little that anger seemed to heal him.
When I got home I turned on Jeopardy and fell asleep during the first round. When I woke up Barbara Walters was interviewing the parents of sextuplets on 20/20. I ate a bowl of grapes, paid some bills, and went to bed. I turned on my radio and waited for Art Bell to come on. While he interviewed a Wyoming man who’d been abducted nine times by time-traveling aliens, I thought about the men in my life who weren’t in my life. I thought about my father, who’d died when I was eleven. I thought about my dead, philandering ex-husband Lawrence. I thought about Dale Marabout. I thought about Ike. And I thought about Sweet Gordon.