Chapter 6
Tuesday, March 20
After dropping Andrew off, I drove to Artie’s for a few things. I bought a half-pound of smoked turkey breast, a few slices of baby Swiss, a bag of freshly baked croissants, and a big jug of laundry detergent. When I got home I put three strips of bacon in the microwave. While they shriveled, I sliced one of the croissants. I piled the bottom half high with turkey and cheese. I squeezed a thick squiggle of horseradish sauce onto the top half. I piled the bacon in the middle and carefully put the croissant back together, so the pointy ends matched. I searched the shelves in the refrigerator door and behind my sticky, almost-empty bottle of maple syrup found a lone pickle spear swimming in a jar of green juice. I poured myself a glass of skim milk. I put it all on a tray and headed for the basement. Not to do the laundry. To conduct an archaeological dig of my own.
In the old days the morgue was a sea of filing cabinets. Stories were clipped from the paper, dated, and stuffed into manila envelopes. The envelopes were stuffed into the cabinets, alphabetically, sometimes by subject, sometimes by people’s last names. Finding what you wanted was always an adventure. Now we store everything in cyberspace. Bink-bink-bink on your keyboard and a story that might have taken you an hour to find in the old cabinets is hovering in front of your nose. Eric Chen, meanwhile, is slowly transferring all of the old files onto computer disks. As soon as he finishes with one of the old cabinets, that cabinet, files and all, goes straight into the back seat of my Dodge Shadow, and then down my basement steps. I bet I’ve got fifty of them down there. A few are painted an ugly green but most are what we used to call battleship gray. They are all exactly five feet high and 18 inches wide. They all have four deep drawers that require a determined tug to get open. Two or three nights a week-even when I’m not looking for anything in particular-I go down there and sift through the old clippings, remembering things I’d forgotten, stuffing my brain with things I never knew. I know it doesn’t say much about my social life but I just love it.
I put my lunch on the old chrome-legged kitchen table I keep by the dryer, pulled on the light, and headed for the D drawers.
Why the D drawers?
One reason was to see if any stories had ever been filed under Dumps, although that seemed unlikely. I couldn’t remember ever filing anything under that category in my forty-odd years in the morgue. But I knew The Herald-Union had written about the David Delarosa murder. There would be plenty in the D drawers about that.
Andrew, you see, had pointed me in a direction I was already beginning to point myself. But it wasn’t any of the interesting facts he told me about landfills, or archaeological techniques, or even the condition of Gordon’s body that got my mind working. It was his perceptions -which was ironic given his high-minded declaration that “perception doesn’t hold a candle to a trowel.”
According to Andrew, Gordon never let on that he was looking for something in particular. Yet Andrew clearly suspected that Gordon’s murder might be tied to something buried out there. “I’ve been wondering about that like everybody else,” he said. As an old beatnik might say, Andrew had picked up a vibe.
And so had I.
And so all the time I was at Artie’s, fighting my way through the aisles clogged with harried young moms, like some old salmon struggling up the rapids to spawn, my fertile mind was fixed not only on the fifties, but on the late fifties, and what might have happened all those years ago that touched Sweet Gordon’s life enough to make him go digging now. David Delarosa’s pretty face popped up again and again.
People are more ho-hum about murder these days. There are just so many of them. But back in the fifties, even in a big city like Hannawa, they rattled everybody. And David Delarosa’s murder sure rattled us. I remember Effie calling me in a panic. It was April 18, 1957, the Thursday before Easter. “Somebody’s killed Gordon’s new friend,” she said.
Just how Gordon met David Delarosa, I still don’t know. But all of a sudden Gordon started bringing him to the jazz clubs, and inviting him to our parties. He didn’t fit in and Gordon knew it. “Maybe David ain’t the hippest cat,” Gordon once told me, “but he’s cool enough in his own way, don’t you think?”
David Delarosa wasn’t an intellectual. He wasn’t artsy. He wasn’t angry or introspective or full of high ideals. He was just a fun-loving kid from Sandusky on a wrestling scholarship. And boy was he good looking! He was lean and muscular. He had curly black hair, which he wore quite long for those years, and full pouty lips just like that actor Sal Mineo. Instead of having black Mediterranean eyes like you’d expect, his eyes were a cool, spooky gray.
Anyway, two days into the spring break, somebody threw David Delarosa down the stairway of his apartment building and then bludgeoned his pretty face with something hard and heavy until he was dead. As far as anyone knew, there was only one suspect, a local bebop jazz musician named Sidney Spikes, who was held for a few days, badgered relentlessly and then released. A decade later Sidney, as I’ve said, would change his name to Shaka Bop and become a major political force in the city.
Just as I’d expected, there were no stories filed under Dumps. But there sure were under Delarosa, David. I took them to the table, took a big bite from my sandwich and leafed through the clippings. The fat, black headline in the Friday, April 19, 1957 edition of The Herald-Union declared: STAR HEMPHILL WRESTLER SLAIN
The headline in the Easter Sunday edition hinted at the difficulty police were going to have solving David’s murder: POLICE SCOUR CAMPUS FOR MURDER WEAPON
On Wednesday, May 1, there was this frustrating headline: SEARCH FOR CAMPUS KILLER DRAGS ON
Then on Tuesday, May 7, this one: POPULAR NEGRO MUSICIAN HELD IN DELAROSA MURDER PROBE
Oh my, how sick we were when we first saw that story! We all just idolized Sidney. He was the only Negro most of us fluffy, white slices of Wonder Bread knew. He was smart and funny and handsome. And could he play that saxophone! We simply could not believe he was a suspect.
I remember sitting that night with Gordon at Mopey’s, nursing bowls of chili while the street outside filled with blowing snow. He yelled at his copy of The Herald-Union like it was God: “First you tell me David’s dead. Then you tell me maybe Sidney did it. Man, what you gonna tell me next? That the moon’s made out of cabbage?”
Three days later, on Friday, May 10, there was a happier headline: NEGRO JAZZ MAN RELEASED
We were still worked up about David’s murder-and the way the police were bungling the investigation-but the spring semester was slipping away and other things needed our attention. We took our finals. We graduated. Lawrence took his journalism degree and a 3.8 grade point average straight to The Herald-Union. I got a crappy part-time job at the city library scrubbing the sticky fingerprints off children’s books. Gordon and Chick got jobs at a local factory to help pay for graduate school. Effie drove across country with a professor who’d just gotten his divorce decree. Gwen and Rollie had a huge church wedding. Lawrence and I took the bus downtown and got married by the mayor.
A full twelve months went by before the next story on David’s murder appeared, on Sunday, May 17, 1958, in a black-bordered box across the top of Page One. The headline asked: WHO KILLED DAVID DELAROSA?
One Year Later Police Admit They Don’t Have A Clue
And that was the last of The Herald-Union’ s stories on David Delarosa’s murder. I read the headlines again. Then I read the stories themselves, and then re-read them, three or four more times, until my brain and my heart were filled with a dump truck-full of questions. I put the Delarosa file under my arm and carried my dirty dishes upstairs to the sink. I combed my hair and dabbed on just enough makeup to make myself presentable. I drove downtown to The Herald-Union.
Eric spun around on his chair when he saw me. He pretended to be disappointed. “I was hoping you’d died.”
