If Katy had any mixed feelings about my return to duty, she hid them well. Like Aaron, she understood that this was an opportunity that would not come again. She knew this wasn’t going to last forever. I was going to hit forty in a few years, and unlike Larry McDonald, I had no ambition beyond detective. Katy also got that detective work tended not to be very dangerous stuff. I think if they had offered to put me back on the street, Katy wouldn’t have been nearly so gung ho. Nor would I.
Aaron was as good in deed as in word. Maybe even a little too good. Initially, he resisted the notion that I take a cut in my share of the business. In the end, though, he saw the wisdom in doing it my way. He was taking on a huge burden and deserved to be compensated for it. A wise man once said you can’t have a fifty-fifty partnership if one of the partners does one hundred percent of the work. So he gave Klaus a raise, began interviewing new people, and elevated my old buddy Kosta to manager. Kosta, whose previous claim to fame had been managing failed punk bands, nearly fainted at the prospect of earning a substantial income.
Then the envelope came. I recognized it the moment the mailman pulled it out of his pouch. It had been ten days since I had spoken to Judith Resnick that last time. The check was mailed, and in all the fuss surrounding my return to the job, I’d nearly forgotten HNJ1956. It had receded to that place where curiosities go when left immediately unfulfilled. I remembered back to the first time I’d heard Moira Heaton’s name. Thomas Geary had spoken it to me at his daughter’s wedding. A wedding that now seemed long long ago. I had been so curious the next day, that Sunday, when I went to Pete’s place. Then the curiosity had faded. If Geary and Brightman had not elected to rekindle my interest, Moira would have been forgotten like a windblown leaf tumbling across my path.
The envelope was the shade of a paper grocery bag. I held it in my hand for what seemed like a half hour but was probably no more than twenty seconds. It was both thick and light, as one would expect an envelope stuffed with newspaper clippings to be. Walking to the office, I wondered whether I should bother opening it, or just let the past be. Moira was dead. Her murderer was behind bars. Nothing in this packet was going to change that. Looking back, I felt almost stupid for having pursued the matter with such fervor in the first place. In some ways it had all been about my ego. I thought I owed John Heaton an apology. Maybe I’d get around to it someday.
I tossed the envelope in the trash, but realized there was a balance due. If I didn’t open up the envelope … Screw that. I’d call Judith and get the tab and thank her personally.
“Hello,” a younger, unfamiliar female voice answered, “Media Search, what’s up?”
“Is Judith Resnick there?”
“She’s not in. Her dad passed away yesterday.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Do you have an address I can send-”
“Hold on, yeah, here it is. Twenty-four Montrose Place, Melville, New York 11747.”
“Thanks,” I said distractedly as I jotted the zip down. “If you don’t mind me asking, to whom am I speaking?”
“Janey.”
“Are you an employee, Janey?”
“Nope. They’re all at the funeral. I’m a temp, just here to answer the phones today.”
“So I guess you wouldn’t be able to help-”
“Mister, if it don’t involve picking up the phone, I can’t help you.”
“Thanks again, Janey.”
I had a basket of fruits and chocolates sent to the house at 24 Montrose Place and then fished the Media Search, Inc., package out of the trash. The least I could do was to pay the bill and get on with the newest chapter in my life.
I dumped the contents of the envelope out onto my desk. There was less inside than I had thought, about forty photocopies of newspaper stories and an invoice. Most of the girth of the envelope, as it happened, resulted from a thick layer of protective stuffing. Ignoring the clippings, I plucked out the invoice. The balance was a tidy one hundred dollars. Attached to the invoice was a note from Judith.
Moe-
Sorry, but this is all we came up with. Though you asked for only 1956, we found one story in particular that reappeared for several years hence. We included those articles at no extra charge to you. Hope this is what you were searching for. Maybe we can have a drink sometime.
Regards,
Jude
It turned out that 1956 was a big year for bicycle giveaways in New Jersey towns that began with the letter H. I suspect that was true in many towns across the country. Nineteen fifty-six was a prosperous year, a good year unless you were a Communist or a Brooklyn Dodger fan. In Washington, D.C., those two disparate affiliations were often seen as one.
In Hackensack, a boy named Jeffrey Bigdow won a Schwinn for his eleventh birthday by simply entering his name in a drawing. Annie Gault won a pink Huffy in Hobbs End and Calvin Brown, a bright Negro student at St. Mallory’s, as the Hoboken Journal described him, won a Raleigh English Racer. The saddest story, and the only one I thought might have interested Moira, was about Hildie Steen, an eight-year-old girl who was dying of an incurable childhood disease. These days we call that cancer, but back then you didn’t write the words “child” and “cancer” in the same sentence. Hildie had been given a two-wheeler by Hasbrouck Bicycles for her birthday, but died before it was delivered to the hospital. I put that story aside.
The remainder of the clippings referred to the story Judith had mentioned in her note. It had nothing to do with promotional giveaways or little girls with incurable diseases. It had to do with homicide. The stories were in chronological order. The first one, dated October 17, 1956, was from the Hallworth Herald.
MAYOR STIPE’S BOY MURDERED
Hallworth, N.J.-Carl Stipe, the nine-year-old son of Mayor Michael James Stipe, was found murdered last evening in the woods near the reservoir. The boy had been reported missing by his mother earlier in the afternoon when he failed to return home from school at the expected time. The case has already been turned over to the New Jersey State Police, who have thus far refused comment. No details about the condition of the body or cause of death have been released. One member of the search team that combed the woods did say the boy’s bicycle seemed to be missing. The mayor and his wife are …
Other, more detailed stories, from bigger area newspapers, appeared with headlines like
STIPE’S SON SUFFOCATED BY STICKS, STOLEN BIKE STILL MISSING, STATE POLICE STUMPED. DRIFTER PICKED-UP, DRIFTER RELEASED, STIPE DRIFTER DROWNS.
Even couched in the less graphic language of the day, the papers detailed a rather gruesome murder. The police theorized that Carl Stipe had been attacked while taking a popular shortcut home from a friend’s house. His attacker had knocked Carl off his bicycle and had tried to molest the boy. The cops pointed to the boy’s torn clothes as proof of this. But the boy must have struggled and started to scream. In order to keep his victim quiet or to satisfy some deviant fetish, the attacker grabbed a stick and shoved it down the boy’s throat. That first stick snapped and the attacker shoved in another stick, then another. The sticks blocked his trachea, and the Stipe boy quickly suffocated.
The attacker panicked and, using the boy’s bicycle, fled. Unfortunately, the leaves and pine needles that covered the ground near the crime scene and the windy weather made it impossible for the police to retrieve any tread or footprint evidence. The only lead the cops had concerned a “drifter” two town kids had spotted leaving the vicinity on a bicycle. The boys, acquaintances of the victim, could not say for sure if the bicycle was Carl Stipe’s.
About a week later, a man named Andrew Martz was picked up for questioning in the nearby town of Closter. Martz, with no current address and a history of psychiatric problems, seemed like a good fit to the state police. However, the town’s boys could not positively identify him, nor did the state police have any physical evidence tying Martz to the victim or the crime scene. They were forced to release him. Some weeks later, Martz’s body washed up on the New York side of the Hudson. He had drowned, but whether it was homicide, suicide, or an accident, no one could say.