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.
After Martz had turned up dead, the interest in the story faded. Most folks in the area simply accepted that Martz had been the guilty party and got on with their lives. The following October an article appeared in the
Then in 1974, articles of a completely different nature began appearing. Carl Stipe’s murder had apparently given rise to a peculiar Halloween ritual. Teenagers, most not yet born when Carl Stipe had been murdered, would dress like either Carl Stipe or Andrew Martz, meet in the woods by the reservoir, and reenact the murder. They’d light a bonfire and hold a seance, trying to contact the dead boy’s spirit. By ‘76, the local cops had put an end to the macabre ceremony. The last mention of the murder came in a 1980 obit for the former mayor of Hallworth, Michael James Stipe.
It was all very interesting and terribly sad, but not any more connected to Moira Heaton than Annie Gault or Calvin Brown or Hildie Steen. Maybe John Heaton, drunk as a skunk most of the time, had gotten it wrong about the kid and the bicycle. Maybe he was just fucking with me. Whatever HNJ1956 might have been, it was no longer of concern to me. I wrote out a check to Media Search, Inc., for the balance, attached a note of condolence, and stuffed it into an envelope for tomorrow’s mail. And if I had any lingering doubts, they were put to rest by Sandra Sotomayor when she rang me up later that afternoon.
“Hey, Sandra, what can I do for you?”
“It bothered me for a long time after you called about Moira and that file, so I went back to look over all of Moira’s work. I found a file where she was helping a woman try and locate a man she had immigrated with in the fifties. I see here that the man’s name was Hernando N. Javier” — enunciated with the perfection of a native speaker-“and Moira made a notation, HNJ1956. There are copies of notes from Moira to the INS and from the INS saying they needed more information to locate the man. I think Moira was doing this thing for the woman on her own.”
“You’re probably right, Sandra. Thank you very much.”
So I had been sent on a wild goose chase by John Heaton and spent two hundred bucks to read sad, old newspaper clippings. My maternal grandmother, Bubbeh, we called her, never read a newspaper or listened to the news a day in her life. Aaron once asked her about it.
“Jews, ve got tsuris enough of our own. Ve don’t need to borrow from strangers.”
She had a point.
Chapter Sixteen
Never the best shot on Earth, I still managed to qualify at the range. Up to that point, I had been reluctant to let Katy start inviting people to the reinstatement/promotion party she, Aaron, and my sister, Miriam, had planned. I’d just finished doing a ride-along with detectives from Midtown South and I was pretty well wired. Oh God, how I remembered that feeling, the bizarre combination of elation and exhaustion. I wanted a drink, but the detectives who’d been saddled with me all shift long had families on Long Island that needed getting home to. I decided to kill two wild turkeys with one call.
Wit was glad to hear from me and even more pleased to share a drink. Although he had not profited directly from the solution of Moira’s murder, his expose on Brightman in this month’s
He offered to have me to the Yale Club again, but I declined. I thought we might do the Yale Club for dinner another time. Katy, I told him, was a bit of an Ivy League wannabe and would just be thrilled to enter the realm of the Elis. He told me to consider it done. I decided Pooty’s, Pete Parson’s soon-to-be former bar, would be a good place to meet. I could get that drink and invite both of them to the party.
Pooty’s was doing brisk business. Pete, wearing a rather sour puss, was working up front with a bartender who made Joey Ramone look tan and healthy. Not only was this guy sickly looking, but he moved at a pace somewhere between super slo-mo and catatonic. He aspired to lethargy. Pete’s face brightened when he noticed his two newest customers.
“You want me to jump back there and give you a hand?”
“Thanks, Moe, but don’t worry about it. Hey, Wit.” Pete reached over and shook our hands. “One Wild Turkey rocks, one Dewar’s rocks coming up.” Pete placed them on the bar and took a moment to share a Bud with us.
“Can that guy move any slower?” I asked.
“Are you kiddin'? This fucking guy’s so slow we have to scrape the moss and barnacles off him after every shift.”
Wit liked that. “Can I steal that line, Pete?”
“You, Mr. Fenn, can take anything you’d like. It’s because of you this joint is so crowded.”
“How’s that?” Wit wondered.
“Your
That got my attention. “You mentioned Pooty’s?”
“I’m crushed,” Wit said, putting a hand to his heart. “You haven’t read the piece?”
“Oops! Sorry, Wit. I’ve been a little preoccupied lately. By the way, I wanted to talk to both of you about that. Katy and my brother and sister are throwing a little party for me on September 28 at Sonny’s in Brooklyn.”
Pete squinted suspiciously. “A party?”
