Gwen knelt in front of James and started scratching his ears. So she didn’t have to look me in the eyes, I think. “Let’s just say through the proverbial grapevine.”
“Do you think it’s true?” I asked, certain the busybody on the other end of that grapevine was Effie.
Gwen gently kissed James on the top of the head. Went back to scratching his ears. “I think it’s possible that Gordon and Chick were something more than friends. And maybe Gordon and that kid-”
She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. “And their argument at the Kerouac Thing was about more than cheese? And the next day Chick killed him in a fit of jealousy? That’s what you think, Gwen?”
Now she lifted her eyes. “No, Maddy. That’s not what I think at all.” She stood up. Put that book I was looking at in my cart. “If Chick was going to shoot anybody,” she said, “wouldn’t he shoot Andrew?”
Chapter 17
Sunday, May 6
I had a couple of those awful frozen toaster waffles for breakfast and then headed for Mallet Creek. By myself. To see David Delarosa’s old college roommate and wrestling buddy, Howard Shay.
Eric had never been able to find him in Florida, but I’d kept calling his house and just that past Wednesday I’d finally connected with him. He’d been back in Ohio just three days. “The house is still a mess,” Howard said, “but if you want to come out, that’s fine with me.”
“I don’t mind a mess,” I said.
Mallet Creek is in neighboring Wyssock County, a tiny crossroads community surrounded by miles of cornfields. If you ignore the 35 mph limit on those empty county roads you can get there in an hour. I easily spotted all the landmarks he’d told me to look for: the fire station, the Methodist church, the meat packing plant with the huge plastic bull on the roof. The bull was sitting back on his haunches, joyfully eating a hamburger made out of the same plastic he was. Just two houses west of that monument to bad taste stood Howard Shay’s house, a brick, sixties-style ranch at the end of long driveway. The lawn was choking with a half-foot of unmowed grass.
Howard was waiting for me on his front steps. If he hadn’t spent the winter in Florida, he’d sure gone to great efforts to make it look like he had. His skin was as orange as a flower pot. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts. His only concession to the chilly Ohio climate was the white socks under his sandals.
He waited until I got to the steps before he stood up. He was a huge man, well over six feet, with wide shoulders and a barrel chest. “No problem finding me?” he asked.
Up close his tan looked real enough. His perfect white teeth did not. “Mallet Creek isn’t exactly New York City,” I said.
“Thank God for that,” he said. He led me inside. When he’d told me on the phone that his house was a mess, he wasn’t kidding. It was a pigsty. I quickly found out why.
“I suppose you know my wife died,” he said, steering me to his dining room table where amongst the clutter he had a pitcher of lemonade waiting. He poured me a glass. I took a sip. It was sour as hell.
“No, I didn’t know that.”
He poured himself a glass. “Two years in August. She had a heart attack driving back from my grandson’s tenth birthday party. Who ever heard of a woman having a heart attack?”
“I guess it happens.”
He nodded. Changed the subject. But didn’t really. “As you can see, I’m not the housekeeper she was.”
“So you went to Florida by yourself?” I asked.
“We always went together. Every winter for eight years, Nanzie and me. Since we retired from the school system here. We were both teachers.”
A man losing his wife is a sad thing. But I was there to talk about Gordon’s murder, not his loneliness or inability to plug in a vacuum cleaner. “I guess you didn’t hear about Gordon’s murder while you were down there.”
“It wouldn’t have meant much to me if I had.”
“But in college you knew David hung around with him, didn’t you?”
Howard took his first sip of the lemonade. “Wooooo!” He trotted to the kitchen for the sugar bowl. “Christ, why didn’t you say anything?”
One of my famous nervous giggles leaked out. “I figured that was the way you liked it.”
He emptied the entire bowl in the pitcher. Swirled it until it was dissolved. “I don’t think there’s much I can tell you-about David or your friend.”
Howard was a man in pain. A man trying to maneuver through the complexities of life without the woman who’d obviously done all the heavy lifting for him. I wasn’t about to point out that our glasses were still filled with the old sugarless lemonade. I took another sip and tried not to pucker. “Were you at the college the night David was murdered?”
“Home for Easter like everybody else,” he said. “At our family’s farm on York Road. Just a quarter mile north of my place here. My brother Don has it now. It’s a wonderful old place, Maddy, you should see-”
I interrupted him. He was getting nostalgic, and much too familiar. I had no interest in him doing either. “Being David’s roommate, I suppose the police gave you a thorough going over when you got back to school the next week.”
“Hell-they came out to the farm that same day.”
“The Friday his body was found?”
Howard now was smiling at me like we were on a first date. “They were disappointed to hear I wasn’t anywhere near the college the night before.”
“So the police suspected you?”
“Yessirreebob, they did. I could tell by their hungry eyes they wanted to wrap it up right there. They figured I’d gone nuts and killed him because he hadn’t put the cap on the toothpaste or something.”
Howard was one to talk about hungry eyes. His were all over me, trying to find something to like. “But you were here in Mallet Creek?” I asked.
“Snug as a bug in my old twin bed. Donny in the other one. My mama and daddy right across the hall. I hope you believe me.”
I pawed the air. “I didn’t drive out here for your alibi. I’m just trying to see if there’s a connection between David’s death and Gordon’s.”
His eyes were studying my ringless fingers now. “You a divorced lady or a widow?”
“Happily divorced.”
The hint went over his head-as high as a damn weather satellite. “Divorce is easier than death, I suppose,” he said.
“Everything’s easier than death,” I said.
Howard finally took another sip of his lemonade. His lips twitched and his eyes quivered. Like all men, he was too proud for his own good. He kept sipping. “This Gordon wasn’t your boyfriend, was he?” he asked.
“Just an old friend, Mr. Shay. Now about David-did you have any suspicions at the time, about who might have killed him?”
It finally dawned on him that Dolly Madison Sprowls was not going to be the next Mrs. Howard Shay. Not his girlfriend. Not his housekeeper. Not anything. He settled back in his chair. “Not many people liked David Delarosa. Including me. He was a real so-and-so. Nasty off the mat as on it.”
“That’s right-you were on the wrestling team together.”
“That’s how we ended up as roomies,” he said. “A lot of athletes shared apartments over there.”
He was referring, of course, to the row of brick apartment buildings on Hester Street, on the eastern edge of the campus. They were privately owned apartments but approved by the college for upperclassmen and, as he said, athletes. “Girls seemed to like him,” I pointed out.
Howard grinned at some old memory or the other. “David was a very handsome boy, wasn’t he? And he knew it, too.”
“Some people I’ve talked to think that’s why he hung around with Gordon-to get girls.”
Howard stuck out his bottom lip and nodded. “I can believe that.”
“Believe, Mr. Shay? But not know for certain?”
“We didn’t exactly have a lot of heart-to-hearts,” he said. “But he sure didn’t think much of those stupid beatniks, I can tell you that.”