While Dale proudly described his deception, I tried to recreate David’s murder in my head, matching what I already knew with what I’d just learned. It wasn’t much but it did conjure up some very nasty images:
On the morning of Thursday, April 18, 1957, maybe just before dawn, David Delarosa, wearing nothing but socks and boxer shorts, came face-to-face with his killer in the hallway outside his off-campus apartment on Hester Street. Maybe they argued. Maybe they struggled a little. Then the killer swung something heavy at him. All I could picture was a big frying pan but almost certainly it was something else. Whatever it was, it struck him square in the face and apparently broke his nose, spritzing blood on the wall and the floor. Maybe the killer just struck him once upstairs, maybe it was a few more times or several more times, but clearly one blow sent David backward over the stairwell railing. He tumbled twelve feet to the marble floor in the lobby. You’d think the killer would flee at that point, wouldn’t you? But he didn’t. Either he knew the apartment building was empty or he was too enraged to care. He kneeled over David. He struck him again and again. “I guess it doesn’t matter,” I asked Dale, “but did David die from the battering or the fall?”
I could tell from Dale’s smile that he liked my question. It was the kind of question a good reporter would know to ask, I guess. “Actually, the coroner was pretty clear on that,” he said. “He died from the fall. It fractured the back of his skull and ripped his brain loose. His head quickly filled with blood and some of it trickled out.”
“So the blood upstairs was from the frying pan-or whatever-and the blood downstairs was from the fall?”
“The coroner’s opinion-”
“His opinion?”
Dale chuckled at my skepticism. “A coroner’s opinion is not exactly the same as you having an opinion, Maddy.”
I didn’t care for the chuckling and I sure didn’t care for his lack of faith in my deductive powers. “You think I’m going off half-baked here, don’t you?” I hissed.
He had the good sense to retreat: “You’re the most fully baked woman I know. What I meant is that the coroner’s opinion comes at the end of a very thorough autopsy report. And the coroner’s opinion was that the initial blow upstairs knocked him over the railing and while he was lying flat on his back, dying from a massive cranial hemorrhage, the killer smashed away at his face.”
I thought my own brain was going to rip loose. It was filled with a swirl of grisly images: David sprawled helplessly on the cold floor while some fuzzy, faceless beast swung that big imaginary frying pan; Sweet Gordon climbing that grassy hill while an equally fuzzy beast raised a pistol and took careful aim.
Wouldn’t you just know it, Kurt Depew chose that moment to poke the barrel of his rifle out his bathroom window and fire.
Everyone in Hannawa Falls ducked but me.
I heard Dale screech, “Will you get the fuck down?”
Well, I did get down. But it was a waste of time. There was only the one shot and it landed a million miles from us. By the time I pulled myself up Dale was already heading toward the police line. He was bent low like Alan Alda in the opening shots of a M*A*S*H episode, running toward that helicopter full of wounded soldiers.
I was only the paper’s librarian. But when a big story like that breaks, you have to put everything else aside-your job description, your well-deserved reputation as an uncooperative old crone-and do what you can to help get that story covered. So I bent low and headed back to Starbucks for more tea and coffee. I’m sure I looked a lot more like Groucho Marx than Alan Alda.
“What about suspects?” I asked Dale. “There had to be someone other than Sidney Spikes.”
It had been more than an hour since that shot sent everybody into a tizzy. Dale had gathered what little information there was and called it in. Apparently Kurt Depew had just wanted the police to know he was still alive and kicking. He’d taken aim at a black SWAT team helmet sitting on the hood of a patrol car. Sent it bouncing like a beach ball. “They interviewed lots of people,” Dale said, “but from the looks of their notes, Spikes was the only one they had much interest in.”
“Any record of the police talking to a student named Howard Shay?” I wondered.
Dale checked his memory. “Yeah, that was one of the names I saw.” His thoughtful frown twisted into a wicked grin. “Another name I saw was that of a young librarian-one Dolly Madison Sprowls.”
My brain immediately went back to that day after Easter in 1957 when those two detectives appeared at my apartment door. They were both chubby, both painfully squeezed into threadbare blue suits. I remember thinking they looked like Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Alice in Wonderland. Anyway, they’d come at the worst possible time. I was trying to make the first poppyseed kuchen of my young marriage, using the indecipherable recipe my Auntie Edna had sent me from LaFargeville. They crowded around me in my tiny kitchen and peppered me with questions until I was ready to fly.
“One Dolly Madison Sprowls who didn’t know diddly,” I told Dale.
He laughed. “No, you didn’t. And neither did anyone else.”
“Including Sidney Spikes?”
Dale had long ago finished his coffee and was now tearing little pieces out of his Styrofoam cup and mischievously feeding them into the mail slot in Big Bertha. “Including Sidney Spikes,” he said. “They tried their best to squeeze a confession out of him apparently. But Mr. Spikes stuck to his story: The night they said David Delarosa was murdered, he was ensconced most blissfully-and according to the interrogation reports those were the exact words he used, ensconced most blissfully -in the bedroom of a woman.”
“And that woman backed him up?” I asked.
Dale nodded like Oliver Hardy. “And so did the people in the apartments adjoining hers, upstairs and downstairs and on both sides, who’d all suffered through a long night of noisy carnal excess.”
We’d all been shaken when the police took Sidney into custody. We’d seen it as a racial thing, of course, the cops looking for the nearest black man to blame. There was a lot of that kind of justice back then, in Hannawa and everyplace else. But the fact of the matter is that the police had every reason to suspect Sidney.
You see, Sidney Spikes and David Delarosa had a very public fight the night before the murder. It was at Jericho’s, one of the hole-in-the-wall jazz clubs that thrived in Meriwether Square back then. It was Easter vacation, today what they call spring break. Most of the students had gone home to be with their families, but there were still enough of us bohemian-types on campus to keep Jericho’s jumping. In fact, the only Baked Beaners missing that night were my Lawrence and Gwen’s unlikely beau, Rollie Stumpf. Both were in Columbus, at the state debate tournament. Rollie was debating. Lawrence was covering it for The Harbinger.
Well, anyway, Sidney that night behaved as Sidney always behaved. He played himself into a horny sweat during his hour-long sets and then during his breaks sought out as much physical contact as possible with the women in the audience. It didn’t matter whether you were young or old, married or single, good-looking, or as ugly as a bread and butter pickle. And he’d readily admit it. “I’m the same with chicks as I am with my music,” he’d say. “I’m always ready to go just as far as my abundant talent takes me. What can I say daddy-Os and daddy-ettes, I have been profoundly blessed, rhythmically and romantically, beyond the historic bounds of prim and proper behavior. I am such a rascal!”