No Stone Unturned (13 page)

We sped into the Mohawk with four cars on our tail, lights still spinning but sirens silent. I was impressed by the sheriff’s timing and sense of the dramatic. The four prowlers skidded to a stop in front of the motel, headlights blazing against Jean Trent’s door.

“Ready, Ellie?” asked Frank. I nodded, and he yanked his cap onto his head. “Say, you sure look pretty today.”

I followed the sheriff to the front door, where Jean Trent was already waiting, barring the way.

“What do you want, Sheriff?” she scowled.

“I got a warrant, Jean. We’re coming in.”

Frank showed her the document through the storm door and explained he had the right to search her premises for a knife and any evidence of Julio Hernandez’s presence. I understood the law well enough to know that such a document gave Frank carte blanche to snoop through everything in the motel. Jean tried to block the door just the same, and Deputy Brunello was summoned to remove her from the sheriff’s path. She kicked and screamed, tried to scratch Brunello’s eyes out, but a short moment later, Frank had won the first round without much fuss.

A couple of troopers from Albany were due within the hour to dust the entire motel for fingerprints, so Olney instructed his men to put on their gloves for the search. I churned through my purse, retrieved a pair of white gloves I’d bought a few years earlier at B. Altman in New York, and pulled them on. Pat Halvey was assigned to the office; Pulaski and Wycek to the guest rooms; Spagnola and Miller to comb the grounds, especially the area near the garbage enclosure. Vinnie Brunello drew the chore of keeping Jean Trent at bay while Frank and I went through her place.

Jean’s inner sanctum was a cluttered nest of
True Police Cases
magazines,
TV Guides
, old newspapers, and half-eaten boxes of chocolate samplers. The stuffed couch, stained and brown, listed to the right, standing on three legs and a stack of dog-eared pulp novels. A coffee table, its veneer ringed and chipped, was moored on the dingy braided rug that stretched between the couch and the seventeen-inch, portable Zenith. On the walls, two yellowing landscapes, cut from a magazine, had curled out of their frames, showing cinderblock underneath. Atop a chest of drawers against the wall, Jean Trent’s pale eyes stared across the room from a recent black-and-white photograph. The place smelled of menthol cigarettes, mildew, and hairspray.

Training his sights on the drawers, Frank Olney pulled a pair of leather gloves onto his bearish hands and invited me to help him turn the place upside down. I made a quick survey of the room while Frank rummaged. There was a heap of Pall Mall and Salem butts crammed together in the standing ashtray next to the lumpy couch, and five empty Rheingold bottles stood like duckpins on the floor. I pulled a couple of magazines from between the cushions of the couch, flipped through them absently, then tossed them back to where I’d found them. I lifted a corner of the rug, was frightened by what I saw, and dropped it. A close inspection of Jean’s photograph convinced me it had been developed by an amateur—no quality judgment intended. I slid the back off the frame to look for a dedication or note, but the only words I found were “Kodak Paper.”

“I’m going to have a look in the bedroom and bath,” I told Frank, who interrupted his burrowing long enough to remind me to keep my gloves on.

Jean Trent’s double bed, quilted satin cover and all, nearly filled her boudoir wall to wall. There was barely room for a wastebasket and a nightstand. I discovered her clothes in a small closet, hidden behind a crooked folding door. On the shelf inside, there was a shoebox filled with yellowing letters, creased snapshots, and memorabilia of what looked like a mostly forgettable life. Under the bed, dust colonies had long since prevailed over broom and mop, staking their claim to that netherworld. And there was a small strongbox amid the dirt. The lock was broken. Inside was a gun: a small, black Clerke revolver, unloaded but with a box of .22-caliber bullets. There was also an envelope with the gun’s registration papers, made out in the name of Jean Marie Trent. Everything looked in order, and Frank confirmed it when I showed him. He vaguely remembered having approved the permit a few years earlier.

“What should I do with it?” I asked.

“Leave it where you found it,” he said. “Jordan Shaw wasn’t killed with a gun.”

The bathroom was easily the cleanest room in the place. I smelled the ammonia and soap, used liberally during a very recent cleaning frenzy. The sink was ordered and scrubbed to a shine. The dull linoleum countertop was spotless, though bleached and discolored in places. My heels scratched over the remnants of a gritty cleanser left on the tiled floor. The grimy porcelain of the toilet and the mildewed tub, however, revealed the same neglect Jean Trent displayed in the rest of her housekeeping. Why clean only half of the bathroom? The room smelled clean, all right, but the caustic detergents could scarcely cover the familiar odor of hypo underneath. I had lived with that smell for years. Someone had been developing photographs in Jean Trent’s bathroom. And whoever it was didn’t want anyone else to know.

I searched the medicine cabinet above the sink, hoping to find evidence of a man’s presence, but the shelves were crammed exclusively with witch hazel, cold creams, depilatories, and other women’s products. I went through the cabinets under the sink, looking for the chemicals, basins, clothespins, enlarger, or other photo-developing paraphernalia I had expected to find. But the place was clean, so to speak.

I rejoined Frank Olney in the other room. He looked at me with a satisfied grin, slapping an X-acto knife into the leather-gloved palm of his left hand.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Just might be the weapon Julio used to cut Jordan Shaw,” he said.

The deputies gathered in the motel’s office, gave Frank the rundown of their findings—nothing—and prepared to leave. Two men from Albany arrived and started dusting room number 4 for prints. The sheriff sent his men back to the barracks, precious knife wrapped safely in an evidence bag.

“All right, Jean,” said Frank, once we three were alone in the registration office. “Talk.”

“Go suck an egg.”

“Don’t rile me, or I’ll haul you in for complicity to murder.” Frank’s booming voice knocked Jean’s insolence to the floor, and, knowing he had no grounds for arrest, I admired his convincing bluff.

“So ask me,” she said, retreating into her parlor. “You’ve made up your mind I’m guilty, whether I am or not.”

Frank winked at me, grabbed a folding chair, and dragged it into the next room. I followed, no furniture in tow.

Jean plopped herself down on the couch and lit a cigarette. She glared at Frank and me. The sheriff swung the chair around backward, planted it in front of her, and sat down. The aluminum legs squealed under his weight, and Jean snorted back the urge to laugh. Frank’s face flushed red.

“Don’t you know what kind of trouble you’re in?” he yelled.

“I ain’t done nothing.”

“Accessory to murder, Jean.” Frank stood and started to pace the room. “We’ve got the knife, and I’ll have a warrant for Julio’s arrest tomorrow afternoon, I promise you that. And I’ll get an envelope with your name on it, too, if you don’t start cooperating.”

“Knife?” she croaked, puffing away. “What are you talking about?”

Frank lit himself a cigarette and took a deep drag. “The knife Julio cut her with,” he said. “The pervert probably wanted a souvenir.”

Jean spat two lungfuls of mentholated smoke, laughing, and jumped to her feet. “That kid wouldn’t hurt a fly!”

“Where is he, Jean?”

“Who?” she asked, just to provoke him.

“We know he was living here. Where is he?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Julio never lived here. Why don’t you go look for him down on the East End?”

Frank’s interrogation was getting nowhere fast, so I decided to try a different tack.

“Where do you do your laundry?” I asked, silencing both Jean and the sheriff. “I mean, do you have a washing machine or do you go to the Laundromat?”

Frank looked at me as if I were mad. Jean, too, was thrown.

“I do some washing by hand,” she said, cautious, blushing, perhaps embarrassed to admit she didn’t own a washing machine. “What’s left I take to the Laundromat down at the shopping center on Route Forty.”

“Where do you dry your things?” I continued. “When you wash your clothes here, where do you hang them?”

“I tie ’em to
Sputnik
,” she sneered. “They dry in no time.”

“Just answer her,” Frank warned. He wanted to find out where I was going as much as Jean.

“In the bathroom, where do you think?”

“Do you have a clothesline?”

“Of course I do. How else am I supposed to hang my clothes? What is this, Sheriff?”

“And how do you keep your clothes from falling off the line?”

“Are you some kind of moron or something? I use the latest invention. It’s called a clothespin. Ever hear of it?”

“What kind of clothespins do you use? The kind you push down on the line, or the kind with the spring clips?”

“Oh, I got only the best,” she snipped.

By now, Frank was gaping at me in utter confusion.

“And where do you keep your clothespins?”

“In the bathroom, like any other God-fearing, anti-Communist American.” She seemed to have no idea the pins and clothesline were gone, so I dropped it.

The men from Albany had finished dusting room 4 from top to bottom, including the louvered bathroom windows, and Frank gave up on pumping Jean Trent for information on Julio. I stood on the concrete walkway in front of the registration office, waiting for Frank to reappear from a trip to the toilet. I looked past the pay phone and Dr Pepper machine to where the trash can had once stood.

“You have any ideas on how the grave was dug?” I asked the sheriff once he’d joined me.

“I figure it was a shovel. Why?”

I stared at the rusty circle the garbage can had left, then looked at Frank. He was confused at first, but soon caught on.

Frank’s car heaved and pitched over the deep ruts of the service road, the throw of its headlights dancing against the gray trees. The woods were deathly quiet and looked like a graveyard. If Big Frank Olney hadn’t been at my side, I would have been shivering from more than just the cold.

“Pull over here,” I told him, and we both got out. Frank left the headlights burning. “Over here,” I called once I’d found it.

“What the hell’s that?” he asked, his breath billowing in the cold night air.

“I think it’s Jean Trent’s trash can.”

Frank dropped me off on Lincoln Avenue and headed back to his office with the flattened trash can in his trunk. He was sure now that it had been used to dig the hole in the woods, and that supported his theory that Julio was the killer. I reminded him that at least three other men had visited Jordan Shaw’s room that night, and any one of them could have taken the garbage can. But Frank said he knew. Julio had been spying on Jordan, she caught him, and he killed her in a panic. And now he was on the lam.

It was after ten when I trudged up the stairs to my apartment. I kicked off my shoes, remembering Mrs. Giannetti below, poured myself a long Scotch, and sat down at the kitchen table to examine the 1957 yearbook. I pored over the whole thing, all 174 pages, not just where I might expect to find Jordan Shaw, Glenda Whalen, or Tom Quint. Some people I’d seen around town; others had surnames I recognized. Most rang no bells nor drew any interest. Just forgettable souls in a fading town.