Edited for Death (2 page)

In the enclosed space, the explosions rang, rang, rang, echoing back from the hard stone walls and stairs, smacking his ears with sound and beating against the back of his neck with concussion waves.

“Hey buddy. Hey, buddy!”

The voice cut through the haze in his head.

“Where’d you come from? We thought we were the only ones up in this part of town,” the GI said. “That was some great toss. You saved us a buncha grief and maybe our butts.”

He could see and hear much better and now realized there were four GIs gathering around the base of the stairs to tend the one still lying on the floor, the seep of blood slowing down.

“I was on duty down by the bridge and freezin’ my ass off,” he said. “I sure didn’t plan to run into this.” He waved in a vague way, not sure if he meant the house, the Germans, the blood.

“Well, I’m gonna put you in for a medal,” a voice said.

He saw that a sergeant was talking but the guy’s voice came through like he was speaking down a tube.

“Hey, thanks, but I didn’t do it to win any medals,” he said. “What is this anyway? Now that the Krauts are outta the way, mind if I look the place over? It at least gets me inside.”

The sergeant shrugged. “Go ahead. I doubt there’s anybody else here. You might want to check this house out. It sure used to be somethin’ special.”

He nodded to the sergeant and the other GIs and started up the stairs, now covered with shrapnel and fragments of stone and peppered like measles with blood and bits of bone. At the landing he carefully stepped over what was left of the nest, trying to keep his eyes off the remains of the bodies. His grenades had blown apart the sandbags and walking across the grit felt like vacations at the beach boardwalk at home.

The next flight of stairs took him to the third floor. It consisted of a hall and a series of small rooms with what may have been a kid’s nursery or playroom at one end. Now all the rooms were empty, the windows grimy and the wallpaper faded around the ghosts of furniture.

Heading back down to the second floor, he turned away from the gore on the landing and walked into a room that ran the width of the house. The room may have been a ballroom or a big living room for the family. Tall windows looked out on the back garden, neatly manicured but filled with dead winter plants. Opposite the windows, the Germans had arranged a long row of tables covered with a jumble of objects.

He picked up a handful of typed papers. He may as well have been reading Greek for all the sense the German meant to him. About all he was able to pick out were the words Transport Ministry.

Stacks of wood lay piled at one end of the room. There were wooden boxes, too. Some square ones as high as his waist. Some tall thin ones, taller than him, wider than he could reach but not a foot deep. Some the size and shape of coffins sat open, partially filled with things wrapped in sheets.

A table covered with packing tape, hammers, nails. Stencils used so much the letters would be fuzzy. Packing straw was scattered around the room. Two of the tall wooden crates were nailed shut. One box was already stenciled with arrows.

Transporting what? Transporting it where? The packing crates made sense in a Transport Ministry, but when he reached the last table he was stunned
.

Funny-shaped silver candlesticks. Some old-looking jewelry, a handful of gold hair combs, crystal and silver vases, a chest of heavy, carved silverware and heaps of carved and gilded picture frames.

One of the frames at the back of the table lay angled to the wall He reached over to pick it up and saw it wasn’t empty.

The frame held a small piece of paper, maybe six or seven inches square. This pulled away from the matting and slid to the table. The paper had an odd texture, thick and heavy and kind of lumpy. It was yellowish and crinkled when he picked it up.

The drawing was a pen-and-ink sketch of a group of very fat or round-looking horses. Up in the right-hand corner was a sketch of a structure that might have been a bridge.

He was no art expert. He had no idea what this was—except that it was old, and probably valuable
.
The ink was fading and the lines were sketchy, drawn quickly. The small picture shook in his still-icy hand.

“Looks like they were transporting stuff that didn’t belong to them,” he said. “I don’t know what all this is, like those weird candle holders, but I sure don’t think anybody would keep a bunch of empty frames around to hang on the walls.”

He hadn’t met any Jews until the Army. Best as he could tell, they were pretty much like everybody else—cold, tired, crabby and wanting to go home. Why would these Jewish things be in a house in Heidelberg, waiting to be transported somewhere?

“Get those hands up. I said get those hands up, you stupid bastard.”

The shout came from a GI in the back garden, followed by a single shot. The other Americans tore down the stairs to help, but he ran to the windows. A GI in the garden had his rifle pointed at a short, slight German in an SS uniform.

In the far corner of the garden was a bonfire he hadn’t noticed before. The German had been feeding it a pile of papers and objects. When the GI found him, the German had frantically tried to shove the entire pile into the fire.

As the SS man stood there shivering, looking more like a skinned rodent than a member of the death squad, the Americans rushed to save the papers. They started kicking the glut away from the flames.

This seemed like a good time to leave, so he turned from the windows, patted his stomach to hear the crinkly sound and headed downstairs.

CJAPTER FOUR

Clarice finally heads for the mountains. Don Roberts is first to notice her absence. Roberts is older, and should be wiser. He’s been at small dailies all his career and believes that he needs just “a break,” the fluke story that will go national.

For now, he covers religion, writes an occasional feature and does the minimum so I won’t fire him. He’s supposed to be the lead reporter on the mega church that’s oozing through the city’s planning process. Most of his time is spent finding ways to con the other reporters into doing his work.

He watches the clock until 3 p.m. waiting for Clarice to come in, panting after her race from nowhere.

“Where’s your little pal? Off chasing some ambulance or cop car?” he smiles a snarky grin. “I hope you don’t think one of us will do her work.”

“No, Don. She’s on an assignment. Might take a couple of days. Things are covered.” I turn my back on him and even he’s not so dense, picking up that I’m finished with him.

“It’s easy.” I cajole her with my Mom voice. “Here’s the list of phone numbers. Just call them in order, tell them who you are and ask if they have anything. Use Clarice’s desk, the cops are used to getting calls from that number.” This experiment better go well. If Monroe has a major crime outbreak, I’ll be covering it myself.

It might be abrupt, but I can’t spend time dancing with Clarice. I need to know if she has enough information to write about the senator’s history in this area.

“I know you know that the Senator was born in the Marshalltown hotel, but did you know his parents sold it?” Her eyebrows are two commas as she drops her stuff.

“What do you mean? The obit said his grandson owned it and was running it. Renovating it, as I remember.”

“Yeah, the grandson, Royce, bought it back two years ago. The deal was handled by that real estate woman, don’t you know her, Janice Boxer?”

I slue my chair around. “OK, Janice Boxer. I’ve met her. But is it being redone?”

“That’s the talk of the town, to coin a phrase,” Clarice’s voice is tense. “I’ve heard there’s something strange going on at the hotel. People are mysteriously coming and going at night.”

“It’s pretty straightforward,” she says, settling her face into an earnest story-telling mode. “Robert and his brother William were born at the Marshalltown Hotel. Their family owned it since late in the Gold Rush. William was older and the goodie-goodie. Robert was the one who acted out. Lots of teenage stuff, vandalism. There were people who thought he was going down a bad road. No record with the San Juan County Sheriff, who I met by the way. A little dishy. I may have to stay in touch.”

I watch a flush start up Clarice’s neck. She sees my eyes widen and says, “I know, you’ve been there and all that crap. Cops reporters and their sources. I just think he’s nice looking.”

“And that’s part of the story?”

“Oh God. No. Don’t be so bitchy.”

She’s right. I let my business and personal lives get mixed up when I fell in love with Vinnie. We kept secrets from each other because of our jobs, built tall fences with “No Trespassing” signs and were forever manning guard posts to keep the other out. It was a lousy way to live. I didn’t wish it on a young woman full of enthusiasm and promise so I subconsciously acted like some kind of keeper of morality.

“Both William and Robert were in the war,” she rolls on. “Robert was a war hero. He got medals and a bunch of commendations from some incident in Germany. Whatever happened, it straightened him out. When he came back, he moved to the Bay Area, went to school, got involved in politics and the rest is history.”

This is fine. It will make a nice Sunday package with some art of the town and the hotel, maybe an interview with the grandson who owns it now. I don’t think there can be anyone who remembers the senator as a boy. After all, he was in his 80s when he died.

I’m startled when Clarice says, “I did find one woman, Sally Jacobs, who knew him.”

“Really? Does she remember him?”

“Oh, yeah, she remembers him.” Clarice gives a snort. “She was his high school sweetheart. She used to go joyriding with him. They even stole some older guy’s ID and drove to Monroe to get drunk.”

My curiosity is piqued. A war hero? A U.S. Senator? Well, why not. Everybody is a kid once.

“So did they get together when he came home?” I ask. I have no idea how this would fit in the story, but it’s sounding like a soap.

“No, she married somebody else before he got home,” Clarice says. “She hadn’t seen or talked to him for better than 50 years.”

“OK, this is giving some meat to Calvert. You know, this may even give some meat to the town. A haunted hotel? We can probably get a couple of Sunday packages from this.”

Clarice nods. She isn’t gung-ho for the project but she’s a pro. She’ll follow my lead until it leads her to a wall or she gets bored with too little drama.

She turns back to her desk, ready to start writing from her notes. I jot notes about follow-up stories—a package on the Calvert family, a package on Marshalltown and its mining history, a couple of stories on what keeps the town alive now—and stick them in a tickler file.

“Amy, they found a body this morning in the hotel. A guy. It was at the end of the big bar. They’ve identified him as a local who’s had problems. Maybe I should go back up there....”

CHAPTER FIVE

Clarice has the bit of a possible murder in her teeth and is running with it.

I can see the excitement of the chase in her eyes and I’m missing that adrenaline I used to feel when there was breaking news about a found body.

“Hey, hey, hey, wait a minute,” I cut in. “What’s the deal? How did he die? When did he die? Who found him? I won’t authorize any travel or overtime for you to drop stuff here and run off because they found a body. Call the Sheriff’s office; get as much detail as you can. Write it as a brief.”

Clarice’s eyes open wide and she starts making fish faces.

Before she actually gets words strung together I say, “Think about this for a second. Does the fax say anything about a cause of death? He could have had a stroke or heart attack. He may have been drunk and hit his head. Just make the phone calls and ask the questions.