I confessed. “I was one of them.”
“Whoops.”
Now I got a chance to grin. “No need for a whoops. It was a long time ago, and besides, stupid would have pretty much summed up my opinion of the boys on the wrestling team.”
He held up his lemonade glass. “Touche.”
“No need for a touche, either.” I let him squirm a bit then asked my big question: “Do you think there was any chance that David Delarosa was gay?”
“Hoo! He sure hid it well if he was. From himself especially.”
“He definitely liked girls then?”
“He definitely liked what they had to offer-if you get my drift.”
“I get it.”
Howard now leaned forward on his elbows and whispered, as if he were in a crowded restaurant. “The truth is I’ve always wondered if it wasn’t a girl who killed him.”
I took both our lemonade glasses to the sink and emptied them. I filled them with the sweet lemonade from the pitcher. I had the feeling I was finally getting somewhere and I wanted him to feel he was getting somewhere, too. “And just what makes you think it was a girl, Howard? He was overpowered and beaten to death.”
He took a long, happy sip. I’d finally loosened up and called him by his first name. “I know it’s hard to imagine how a girl could get the best of a guy like David,” he said. “He was one of the best wrestlers in the state of Ohio. In the whole fudgin’ country. But it’s just as hard to see how another guy could’ve gotten the best of him, isn’t it?”
“Another athlete might’ve.”
He shook his head, resolutely. “He was a real alpha male, Maddy. He would have been on his toes for another athlete. Even for a guy who wasn’t a jock.”
I tried not to show my disappointment. “So that’s what leads you to believe it was a girl?”
His dentures lit up. “That and the upside-down seven.”
“The upside-down seven?”
He explained: “David and I lived in 207. Those numbers were on the door, held with little brass screws. And David took the bottom screw out of the seven. So he could swing it up. Into an L. He used that as his signal that he had a girl in the room.”
I made my thumb and index finger into a seven and then twisted my wrist to make an L. “So if you came in at night and saw that upside-down seven, that L, then you were supposed to go somewhere else?”
“That’s right. ‘That L means later, Howie,’ he used to say. ‘It means I’m getting laid.’”
I knew exactly where Howard was going with this. But I figured I’d let him tell it in his own words. I topped off his lemonade. “And?”
“And that next week when I got back to my room to pick up my things-the police wouldn’t let me stay there while they were still investigating-the seven was upside-down.”
“But you were back here in Mallet Creek that week, weren’t you? Why would he bother turning the seven upside-down?”
“The upside-down seven was for everybody. You remember how it was in college, Maddy. Somebody was always banging on your door.”
I did remember. And David was hardly the only college student-boy or girl-to have some kind of discreet “do not disturb” sign for their doors. “Were there any signs that he’d had a girl in there?”
He knew what I meant. “None that I saw.”
“Did you share this suspicion of yours with the police?”
“I did. With the officer who let me in to get my things. God only knows if he passed it along.”
In the all the weeks I’d been picturing David Delarosa’s murder in my head, I’d never seen a girl taking that fateful swing at him, or beating the life out of him on the floor below. It had always been a male. A faceless male. Now I pictured a faceless female. “Why would a girl who willingly came back to David’s room suddenly turn on him?” I asked. “And so viciously? Even the dumb clucks in my day knew what going back to a boy’s room meant.”
Howard shrugged. Frowned like a frog. “Who knows? Maybe the girl changed her mind. Before they even got in the room. Maybe she went in but didn’t like the way she was treated.”
“That ever happen before? To your knowledge?”
He jiggled his head no.
“So all you’ve got is that upside-down seven? That L?”
“That and my knowing the way David was,” he said.
Chapter 18
Tuesday, May 8
I gave the leash another hard yank. “You’ve got to go to the mountain, James. The mountain won’t come to you.”
James was not in the mood for proverbs. Nor for his morning walk. I’d gotten him as far as my front lawn and now he was planted like a petrified woolly mammoth in my pachysandra. I wrapped the leash around my knuckles and pulled harder. I was leaning backward like the damn Tower of Pisa. “For Pete’s sake, James, get off your big curly duff and walk!”
James sank onto his front elbows. He laughed silently at me, the way dogs do. I dug a biscuit out of my raincoat and waved it in front of his nose. I showed him that it was in the shape of a mailman. I told him how “yummy wummy” it was. He sprang up on all fours and snapped it from my fingers. While he chewed I pulled. Soon we were making our way along the sidewalk. So far, so good.
“You’re one of the smarter dogs in the neighborhood,” I said as we headed up Brambriar Court. “Who do you think shot Sweet Gordon?”
James didn’t answer. He was preoccupied with a chipmunk hole on June Cardwell’s tree lawn.
“I don’t have a clue either,” I admitted. I went over my list of suspects: “First, there’s Andrew Holloway III, his graduate assistant. Andrew had lunch with Gordon only a few hours before he was killed. And he can’t account for his time the rest of that Thursday. He not only found Gordon’s body, he found his car, fifteen miles away. A tad fishy, I think. And I think Detective Grant thinks so, too. But Andrew had been tickled pink to get his assistantship with Gordon. He clearly admired him. From the time Gordon gave him every week, I’d say Gordon admired him right back. The question, of course, is whether that mutual admiration went beyond student and professor. Whether it led to a jealous pique that left Gordon dead.”
James had given up on the chipmunk hole. He was waddling along at my side again. “Of course, if it was a jealousy thing, a gay thing, then maybe it wasn’t Andrew who killed Gordon, but somebody upset about their relationship. Which, as you might imagine, James, leads us right to Chick Glass. I’ve known Gordon and Chick forever, but I can’t for the life of me figure their relationship out. And that goofy argument over Jack Kerouac’s cheeseburger! Good gravy! Were they really that vexed over Ti-Jean’ s lunch? Or was it something deeper? All I know is that they had one helluva brouhaha at the Kerouac Thing, just a day before Gordon was killed.”
James lifted his leg on Mindy Craddock’s prized pink azalea. Then we turned north on Teeple and headed for the park. I continued: “Chick originally played down their argument at the Blue Tangerine. And so did Effie. But then Gwen told me how serious it was, the bean throwing and the wrestling match. And Chick was forced to admit it when I went to see him again. Maybe it was over the cheeseburger. Over which one of those two old fools would be, as Effie put it, ‘the rock upon which Kerouac’s Hemphillite Church was built.’ Or maybe it was over something else. Which now brings us to David Delarosa.”
I explained to James how Gordon was David’s tutor. That they’d gotten very close in a very short time. “Then David was murdered. Brutally murdered. The same night he’d had a very public confrontation with Sidney Spikes at Jericho’s. I don’t know if you’re a jazz fan or not, James, but today he calls himself Shaka Bop. Anyway, you can see where I’m going, can’t you? Maybe Chick didn’t like it when Gordon got too close to other men. David in 1957. Andrew now.”
We were at the corner of White Pond Drive now, waiting for a break in the traffic to cross. “Yet there are a couple of big differences that make that particular theory unlikely, aren’t there? In that first murder, it was Gordon’s young friend who was killed. In the second it was Gordon himself. That was Gwen’s point the other day at Pettibones. Remember what she said, James? If Chick was going to shoot somebody, why didn’t he shoot Andrew? A very good point, don’t you think?”