Majo’s testimony had helped to establish a time of death, an always imprecise process. Without her help, it would have been especially imprecise, since Petrone’s body hadn’t been found right away. He’d either been lured or forced into the alley next to the tavern or else he’d stumbled in there after he’d been shot. Either way, he’d gone unnoticed until early the next morning. But based on the time it took to drive from Majo’s to the Ten-Spot, the police had placed the attack at approximately ten-forty. No one inside the tavern had heard the single shot that killed Petrone, but a late basketball game had been showing on the bar’s televisions, which were kept loud to accommodate a graying clientele.
The Star Ledger’s second story announced the arrest of Raymond Sleeth, thirty-one, following a tip to the police. The piece mentioned the wallet and the unregistered gun found in Sleeth’s possession and elaborated on something that had been touched on in the first story: the rosary left on Petrone’s body. The beads hadn’t belonged to the victim, according to his wife, and had probably been placed on his chest just after the wound in its center had stopped pumping blood.
The third Star Ledger clipping was Petrone’s somewhat brief obituary. It listed his wartime service in France, his decorations, his thirty years as a tool- and-die maker in a Ford plant in Edison, and his sole survivor, his wife of fifty-two years, Marie.
The remaining clipping in the file was from the second paper Darryl had named, the Specter. I’d seen its racks outside the place where I bought my morning coffee and in a bookstore near my apartment. It was a counter-culture weekly, a more likely source of concert reviews and exotic personal ads than crime reporting. But it had run a lengthy story on what it had called “the Sleeth Scandal,” a report that echoed Darryl’s outrage and may have inspired it. The feature was certainly the source of much of the librarian’s inside information. It told of Sleeth’s past arrest for church robbing, the jealous “street person” who’d turned him in, and Sleeth’s story about finding the gun and wallet in a Dumpster.
The Specter article may also have been where Ryan and Wisehart had gotten the inside information they’d tossed around. It named the same two alternate suspects they’d mentioned, Marie Petrone and Geneva Majo, and discussed their alibis. Mrs. Petrone had reported for duty at ten-thirty at the hospital where she worked as a volunteer. Majo had invited a neighbor over to watch television as soon as Petrone left her. That had to be the same neighbor who’d backed her up on Petrone’s time of departure.
Like Patrolman Ryan, the Specter liked Majo for the crime. The article described the money Petrone had talked her out of as her “life savings.” It passed along the rumor about the off-track betting parlor and added a second one concerning a trip Petrone may have made to Las Vegas.
Petrone’s past affairs were mentioned, five of them, going back to 1955. According to the writer, they were known to the police because the long-suffering Marie Petrone had listed them by way of proving that this latest example was no big deal. She’d told the police that she worked the late shift at the hospital because she’d gotten tired of waiting for her husband to come home.
The reporter didn’t explain why Marie hadn’t gotten a divorce, except to say that she and Petrone were Catholics. That satisfied his inquiring mind, but not mine. A lapsed Catholic myself — I’d lapsed my way right out of a seminary — I’d known a number of divorced ones, one or two from Marie’s generation. I was also bothered by the rosary left on the chest of a Catholic man. That had to be a coincidence, if it had been done by Sleeth or some other stranger, and I had the amateur sleuth’s natural distrust of coincidence. It was true that in this corner of New Jersey you couldn’t swing a rosary without hitting a Catholic, but it still made me wonder.
It bothered me while I was returning the clippings and thanking Darryl and through the process of looking up the addresses of Marie Petrone and Geneva Majo in a city directory. It was still rankling when I returned to my Saturn, so much so that it knocked my earlier visions of burgers and fries clean out of my head.
4
I kicked myself for not bringing along the packet of letters I’d found in Petrone’s footlocker. They would have given me the perfect excuse for showing up at Marie Petrone’s house. I could have returned them on behalf of the historical society and, as long as I was there, asked her why on earth she’d stayed with a cheating husband. Also about possible accomplices. She’d have needed one, if she was behind the murder, since she couldn’t have reported for work at ten-thirty and killed her husband blocks away at ten-forty.
I considered tracking down the Specter’s all-knowing correspondent. Instead, I drove to the apartment of the correspondent’s number-one suspect, Geneva Majo. I didn’t go there hoping to break her alibi, though that would have been fine with me. I went there to ask her whether she’d ever seen a rosary on her late lover’s person.
The other woman lived in an older, well-kept building on Leyland Street. I was saved from having to negotiate with Majo via the front-door intercom by a deliveryman who happened to be leaving the building as I walked up. That only postponed the problem of explaining myself and my interest in the Petrone murder, but I was a man who’d take a postponement whenever I could get one.
That day I got two. When I rang the bell of Majo’s second-floor apartment, no one answered. Someone was home in the next apartment, though. I heard movement behind the door as I turned toward the elevator. On impulse, I knocked on that door, and it opened as far as the security chain would permit. A very short, very old woman peered out at me. Or rather, peered over my right shoulder.
“There’s no soliciting in this building,” she said.
“I’m not selling anything,” I told her. “I came by to ask Ms. Majo about James Petrone.” Which got me back to the challenge of explaining myself, or would have, if the old woman had asked for an explanation.
“I won’t undo the chain,” she said instead. “You have a nice voice. I’m sure you have a nice face, too, but I won’t undo the chain.”
“You can’t see my face?”
“Not very well. Macular degeneration, both eyes. I can’t see anything I look at straight on. I only see things at the edges. But I don’t complain about it.”
“You told the police that you’d seen James Petrone leave on the night he died. Did you really see him?”
“A little. Mostly I heard him. He and my neighbor Geneva were having words that night. I’d been dozing a little, and they woke me. I heard them in her apartment and then out in the hall. I think she knocked on my door so he would leave. It worked, too. As soon as I opened up, he went away.”
“What were they arguing about?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t hear that well either. Geneva said later it was over money. It usually is, isn’t it? She didn’t want to talk about it. Geneva is a good person and a good neighbor, but she picks bad men. She doesn’t like to be alone. I know all about that.”
“You’re sure it was ten-thirty when Petrone left? Can you still read a clock?”
“I’m not blind. I can see the buttons on your coat don’t match. And I’ve got a clock that reads out the time if you push a button. But I didn’t have to use it that night. I know what time it was because Geneva asked me over to watch Cheers. It had just started, and it comes on every evening at ten-thirty on Channel Eleven out of New York. We watch it a couple of times a week together, sometimes at her place, sometimes at mine. She has a bigger television set. If I sit real close and kind of look away, I can see a lot of what’s happening. They’re all reruns, of course. Even so, I almost called the station to complain about that night’s episode.”