No Stone Unturned (3 page)

I left Whitey’s parking lot at the wheel of my company car: a two-toned, white-and-canary-yellow Plymouth Belvedere of a none-too-memorable recent vintage. The roads were slick from the persistent drizzle that had followed the downpour of the previous night. I was late for my usual evening appointment with a tumbler of whiskey and ice, but I wanted to drop in at the Dew Drop Inn and make some inquiries.

I had visited the Dew Drop only once, about a year and a half earlier. It was too dingy and sad to make a regular haunt of mine. At ten forty-five on a Saturday night, the regulars had all turned out for the merriment and were holding down their usual barstools in the dim, smoky light. The clientele consisted of old-timers, some of whom still worked in the last of the shops on the East End, at the bottom of Polack Hill. The others had been put out to pasture and were biding their time until the quitting whistle blew for the last time.

When I entered, the five gray men at the bar twisted as one on their stools. I gave a short wave and said hello. Their stony faces, creased and stubbly with white whiskers, showed little sign of cognition. They just stared at me blankly, their eyes barely visible in the low light, their rough hands flat on the bar as if they’d been ordered to place them there and not to move. From four tin ashtrays before them, smoldering cigarettes hissed a thick pall into the close air, like incense in some polluted sacrament for the dead. I thought they should change the sign outside to “Don’t Drop Inn.” After a moment, the men turned slowly back to the bar and bowed their heads in bleak silence over their Genesee drafts.

“What’ll you have?” asked the bartender. He sounded like Lawrence Welk.

“Draft, please,” I said, removing my gloves and taking a seat at the bar. I was sure there was no whiskey worth drinking. “How’s business?”

He shrugged and pushed a glass under my nose. “Ten cents. And the gents would probably not appreciate any music you might want to hear on the jukebox.”

“Thanks, friend, but I didn’t come here for the ambiance. I wanted to know if you saw anything funny last night. Any strangers drop in?”

“Like you, you mean? Who are you, anyways?”

“Eleonora Stone, reporter,” I said, offering my hand. “Ellie.” He thought about it a moment, wiped his on his apron, then took my hand.

“Stosh Barczak, proprietor. How come I ain’t seen you here in over a year? How do you think I make a living? Giving out tips to reporters?”

“Sorry about that,” I said. “Quite a memory you’ve got there, Stosh.”

“Yeah, well, it ain’t often we see someone new in here. And it ain’t often she’s a girl, neither. I got a good memory for faces that don’t look like a catcher’s mitt,” and he gave the subtlest tip of his head to his left and the five men at the bar.

“What about last night?” I asked. “Anyone worth remembering?”

He drew another beer for the man to my right. The guy hadn’t moved so much as a finger, but Stosh knew his customers. Another of the regulars pushed off his stool silently, dropped four dimes on the bar one after the other, and shuffled toward the door.

“Drive slowly,” called the bartender after him. “Don’t slip on the ice.”

“There was one fellow,” he said, returning to me. “Never seen anyone like that around here before. Big and dark, with a turban and a funny way of talking. Some kind of foreigner. Kept shaking his head a funny way, too. Like one of those cat figurines with a wobbly head.”

“Really? What was he doing here?”

“He didn’t say. Just asked for a
pint
. I thought he wanted milk and I nearly threw him out. Then I figured out he wanted a beer, so I gave it to him. The membership committee here wasn’t crazy about the idea, but I got to make a living, don’t I? He turned out to be kind of friendly. A smiley kind of guy.”

“What time was that?” I asked.

Stosh squinted at the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling over the pool table. “It was late. Close to midnight.”

“Any idea where he was going or where he was from?”

Stosh pursed his lips and shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“What kind of car?”

“Looked like a light-blue sedan. Maybe a Chevy, but I couldn’t be sure of the make in the dark.”

“Did he have mud on his shoes?” I asked. “Or on the tires?”

“No, he was wearing city shoes, and they were clean. I don’t know about the tires. The rain started later anyway. There wasn’t any mud at that hour.”

Once I’d finished a second glass of beer a while later, I slipped back into my coat, thanked Stosh for his help, and wished him and the regulars goodnight.

“Don’t be a stranger,” said the bartender as I turned the knob on the door. Then he smiled at me, “Drive slowly. Don’t slip on the ice.”

Finally heading home around midnight, I thought about the weather and Wentworth’s Woods. No footprints in the mud; no tire tracks on the service road. Jordan Shaw’s murderer had either dragged her to the shallow grave from Route 40 or lugged her corpse more than a quarter mile up the unpaved service road. What was certain was that he’d dumped her body before the rain started.

Once home, I switched on the light in my parlor, poured myself a drink, and fell into my armchair. I picked up the phone and dialed Charlie Reese, waking him from a sound sleep, and he growled his displeasure.

“I’ve got a big story, Charlie.” I said, waiting for some kind of reaction.

“What? Did Mrs. Navona win the meatball-rolling contest down at the K of C?”

“Judge Shaw’s daughter’s been murdered,” I announced with a glee reserved for bearers of bad news.

I could tell he’d sat up in bed. “Don’t joke about things like that, Ellie.” I’d broken the news of the Communist victory in Cuba to him nearly two years before, and he didn’t believe me then either.

“It’s no joke. Someone tripped over her body in Wentworth’s Woods about four thirty this afternoon. I got there about an hour after she’d been found.”

“Why didn’t you call me right away?”

“Sorry, I had to get my story. And Frank Olney offered me the chance to take pictures at the scene.”

“Pictures of the body?”

“Forget it. The sheriff won’t let us use them. They’re too grisly anyway.”

I gave Charlie all the information on the murder I had, answering his questions for almost an hour.

“I’ve got to call Artie Short,” he said before hanging up. “Be careful how you write it, and I’ll try to convince Artie to let you have the story.”

“Please, Charlie!” I said. “This is my story. You can’t give it to George Walsh.”

“I’ll do what I can,” he said. “But you’re going to have to outwrite George at every turn, and even then I can’t promise Artie will allow it.”

“Go to the mat for me this one time, Charlie,” I said. “You won’t regret it, I promise.”

There was silence down the line.

“I’ll give you copy and pictures tomorrow night,” I said. “I’ve got a lot to do before then.”

The Shaw Knitting Mills had been the town’s first and most important carpet manufacturer. Judge Shaw’s grandfather, Sanford Shaw, built the first knitting mill on the banks of the Great Cayunda Creek in the late 1870s. By 1910, Shaw Knitting Mills had carpeted half of the Eastern Seaboard, and New Holland counted thirty-five thousand souls. With the boom that followed World War I, glove and button factories sprang up, and New Holland grew to a prosperous population of forty-two thousand, one-third of whom wove rugs for the Shaws. When Sanford Shaw died in 1925, his elder son, Joshua, assumed control of the mills and spent three-quarters of the family’s fortune breeding racehorses, marrying then divorcing gold diggers, and building empty mansions in Florida. World War II might well have ruined the mills, as the nation mobilized to defeat the enemy, buying war bonds instead of carpets. But after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Joshua Shaw was replaced by his younger brother, Nathan, the judge’s father, who put the idle looms back into service, producing blankets and canvas for the war effort. The mill flourished. After the Japanese surrender, as the town shifted back to carpet production, costs rose and profits fell. Nathan Shaw took Draconian steps to save the company and the family fortune. The most noteworthy of his measures was the migration of Shaw Knitting Mills to Georgia, where labor was nonunion and cheap. In 1954, the last looms were dismantled, destroyed, or shipped south. New Holland atrophied rapidly, losing a quarter of its population to old age and labor exodus in just five years.

Unwilling to abandon the town his family had built and then orphaned, Judge Harrison Shaw stayed behind after his father and brothers had left for greener pastures in New York and Atlanta. New Holland loved and respected him for having stayed and elected him to the municipal-court bench four times before he was appointed Appellate Division judge by Governor Harriman in 1955.

The story of Jordan Shaw’s murder was daunting, but I knew it represented the biggest opportunity of my career. Hard work aside, this murder would demand great care and sensitivity, given the girl’s name. I felt up to the challenge, eager to carve out some kind of mark for the last of the Stones and, at the same time, sweep away the lingering disapproval of my late father.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 1960

Around four thirty in the morning, I awoke in the same armchair, my last drink still sitting untouched on the table next to me. The ice had melted and the watery Scotch was wasted.

I trudged to the bedroom, stripped out of my rumpled clothes, and showered. Twenty minutes later, I buttoned my blouse, stepped into a skirt, and tightened the belt, feeling thin and empty inside. I hadn’t eaten since noon the day before. Popcorn.

The sun would come up soon, and I wanted to return to the murder scene before the crowds of gawkers had trampled any evidence missed by Frank Olney’s bloodhounds. I pulled to a stop on the graveled shoulder of Route 40, just about the time the car’s heater had finally kicked in. I was surprised to find Olney hadn’t secured the crime scene. No use searching for clues along the road; the three-ring circus of the night before had certainly erased any footprints or tire tracks that may have been there. Remembering my ruined shoes from the night before, I had thought ahead. I slipped out of my heels and into a pair of rubber boots, popped the door open, and climbed out.

The sun rose slowly, throwing a gray, dishwater daybreak over the land. I left my car beside the road and entered the woods, camera loaded and strung over my shoulder.

The police had marched long and hard over the area adjacent to Route 40, leaving it cratered like a moonscape. I made my way to the crime scene where Jordan Shaw’s shallow grave cut into the mud. It was little wonder Fast Jack had tripped over the body; the hole where she’d been buried was barely two and a half feet deep. Someone had been in a hurry to cover the girl and blow.

What kind of instrument had dug the pitiful excuse for a grave? As a girl in New York, I had watched my brother, Elijah, hack better holes using the worn heels of a pair of PF Flyers, and all he’d wanted to bury was the nose of a football to kick off a sandlot game. Jordan Shaw’s grave wasn’t much deeper.

I crouched down to touch the soggy ground, careful not to muddy my stockings in the process. The gash sliced into the earth cleanly, but at a weak angle. The hole deepened gradually as it grew longer, as if opened by one stroke of a large spade. Lengthwise, it was no more than five feet, and its width extended to about thirty inches where the fissure was deepest. The grave wouldn’t have held a large dog.