Wisehart looked at the trunk’s tag for a date. It didn’t have one. Rachel held up her phone.
“While we were waiting for you, I spoke to my office. I wanted someone to check the files in case we had to call Mrs. Petrone about the ammunition. Carol, who checked for me, said that a Marie Petrone first wrote in August offering us the footlocker. That was before the murder, wasn’t it?”
“Sure was,” Ryan said. “Which is good, ’cause we don’t need any more suspects. We got the guy.”
“Got a guy, anyway,” Wisehart said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
The patrolmen’s radios produced what sounded like static to me and a call to duty to them.
“Whoops,” Ryan said. “Gotta go.”
“And why the rosary?” I asked.
“Think stockpile,” Wisehart said to Rachel. “We’ll catch you later.”
2
Rachel followed the policemen out, leaving me alone with my unanswered questions. And a definite feeling of dread. It was more than just the here-we-go-again sensation I experienced whenever I happened on a mystery, more than the certainty that I would poke it with a stick even though I should have learned by then to think twice. What bothered me was the timing of it. In the past few months, I’d investigated two mysteries, which was quite a caseload, considering that I didn’t average two a year. And here was a third. I couldn’t escape the feeling that events were building to something, something I wouldn’t like. Whether this rosary murder was that ominous something or just another step toward it, I couldn’t say.
I could have escaped the whole question by forgetting I’d ever heard of James Petrone, by adopting a protocol for murder similar to Rachel’s for live ammunition: Leave it to the police. Instead, I reopened the dead man’s footlocker and turned it inside out.
The carefully folded uniforms beneath the dummy ammunition were lying in a tray that lifted out of the locker, revealing the main compartment. Its contents, which filled a full page of my notepad, included Petrone’s mess kit, his corporal’s stripes — still fringed in the threads cut from his uniform when he’d made sergeant — curled photographs of the camps where he’d trained, and postcards from Paris and other places in France. There were also citations for two medals — the medals themselves were missing — and a small bundle of letters loosely tied with black ribbon. The letters weren’t in envelopes, so I could see a little of them without undoing the bundle. Each was written in pencil on a tiny piece of paper folded once. And each was signed by Petrone’s wife, Marie.
I thought, as Wisehart had, how odd it was that the widow had donated the locker, especially since it contained her wartime letters. But she might not have searched the locker first. It couldn’t have been that hanging on to mementos of a murdered husband was too painful for her, since she’d arranged for the donation before he’d been murdered. It was more likely that she was just unsentimental about the baggage of a serial philanderer. And more likely still that I was making too much of it. After all, I was sitting in a room full of other donations made by other, equally unsentimental families.
I turned to a new lot and worked away quietly until the time came for my lunch break. Then I headed for the Central Library on Livingston Avenue. I hadn’t been in New Brunswick long, but I was already on a first-name basis with one important contact, a reference librarian named Darryl Craddock. Darryl was another cog in the historical society’s World War II exhibit wheel. He and his library were to provide poster-size blowups of important wartime front pages, culled from the files of the Examiner, a defunct local newspaper.
I’d met Darryl during a meeting about the posters. And made a good impression on him, I hoped. If the rosary murder had happened sometime since last September, it was too recent to be in any newspaper’s index, and I didn’t feel like working my way through weeks of dailies. Darryl looked like a high-school junior, but in our meeting he had demonstrated a real knowledge of 1940s history. I was hoping he was at least as good at current events.
The young archivist was on duty in the library’s stacks, and he knew all about the Petrone murder. In fact, he saw it in a way the others hadn’t, as a cause célébre.
“It’s a travesty of justice, Owen. He’s being railroaded.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Raymond Sleeth. He’s a homeless guy. And he’s gay. That’s two reasons for them to want him locked away.”
Some of Darryl’s extreme youthfulness came from his small size, some from the loop in his earlobe, and some from his fashionably shaved head. Three decades separated me from the sixties and my own extreme youthfulness, but it still made me cringe inwardly to see a young man wasting hair like that.
“You’re saying the police don’t have any evidence?”
“Sure they have evidence. When Sleeth was arrested, he was carrying the murder weapon and Petrone’s wallet.”
“Not exactly circumstantial,” I said.
“Sleeth explained it. He’d been Dumpster-diving behind a Shoprite a couple of blocks from where Petrone was shot and found the gun and the wallet.”
“The wallet was empty?”
“No, it had twenty or thirty bucks in it. The police made a big deal about that. But all it means is, the real killer panicked. He didn’t want any part of the money when he realized what he’d done. I think that’s why whoever did it left the rosary beads. They were a sign of remorse.”
“Didn’t the rosary come from a church Sleeth robbed?”
“Another conclusion the cops jumped to. Sleeth slept in some churches last winter when he could get away with it. He may have helped himself to some stuff in one of them.”
I risked a little of Darryl’s goodwill. “Helped himself?”
“Okay, he took some things. But I don’t think he really knew what he was doing. He’s not quite balanced mentally. That’s the third strike against him. He’s as good as in Rahway Prison right now.”
I said, “Maybe Sleeth happened across Petrone after he’d been shot and took whatever he found. He could have left the rosary in exchange.”
“No, Owen. That’s not how he tells it. He never saw Petrone. He didn’t leave anything with him or take anything away. He’s stuck to the same story through all of this, and I believe him.”
I tried another angle. “How did the police find Sleeth?”
“They got a tip from another homeless guy who shared a packing case with Sleeth one night down near the river. Sleeth showed him the gun and the wallet. This guy figured he deserved a share and Sleeth wouldn’t give him one, so he turned him in.
“The cops swarmed all over Sleeth. They found the gun and the wallet in his knapsack. They checked his record and found out he’d tried to pawn some stuff from St. Monica’s last year, which explained to them why he’d have a rosary. They figure they have an airtight case.”
It was looking that way to me, too. The other side of the balance contained only Wisehart’s subtle dissent. And Darryl’s unsubtle one.
“You can read all about it for yourself, Owen. I’ve kept every story the Star Ledger and the Specter ran.”
3
When Darryl spoke of saving “every story,” it led me to expect a thick file that would swallow the rest of my lunch hour whole. What he actually delivered to the one cubicle I found with a working reading light was a very thin folder. The biggest nearby daily, Newark’s Star Ledger, was represented by a total of three clippings. But from them I learned a few new facts. Petrone had been sixty-nine when he’d died. He’d been on his way from the New Brunswick apartment of Geneva Majo, fifty-seven, to his favorite watering hole, the Ten-Spot Tavern, when last seen alive. That had been by Majo herself, who had said goodnight to Petrone at about ten-thirty, a fact substantiated by one of her neighbors.