I threw my coat over the back of my chair and grabbed my mug. “So was I,” I said, “but I guess the good lord wants both of us to suffer a while longer.”
I went to the cafeteria and made myself a cup of tea and then sipped my way to Sports. Ed Boyer looked up from the funny pages he was reading. His chewing gum literally fell out of his mouth. “Mrs. Sprowls-everything all right?”
You can understand his alarm, can’t you? I regularly cut through Sports on my way to the cafeteria. But I never stop to chat. As far as I’m concerned, that ramshackle corner of the newsroom is a foreign country. They speak a different language. They have unfathomable customs. They wear bizarre native costumes. They eat indigestible things. “I was wondering if I could take a look at your old files,” I said.
Ed’s face went white with worry. “For?”
“I’m looking for information on a wrestler who was murdered many years ago-”
Ed was suddenly a statistic-spitting robot: “David Anthony Delarosa. Hemphill College. Wrestled in the 141- pound weight class his freshman year, 149 after that. Ohio Athletic Conference champ in fifty-four and five, All- American in fifty-six and seven.”
I’d long ago learned that sports reporters know more useless information than anybody on earth. I was impressed nonetheless. “How the hell you know all that?”
“He’s got a plaque in the field house,” Ed explained. “Between the concession stand and the toilets. You see it every time you go for a wiz.”
Ed led me to the storeroom by the back steps where Sports keeps its files. It was a filthy mess. “Do you have a plastic liner to catch the leachate?” I asked.
Despite all of my efforts, Ed never quite understood my joke. But he did know right where to find the file on David Delarosa. He accompanied me to the Xerox machine and chewed on his gum like a woodchuck while I made copies. I escaped to my desk just as fast as I could.
There was an inch of clippings on David Delarosa in the file but only one interested me. It was a column written by Ted Thomas, the paper’s sports editor at the time. It was dated Tuesday, December 9, 1957:
WRESTLERS GRAPPLE WITH SLAIN CHAMP’S DEATH
By Ted Thomas, Sports Editor
Howard Shay says he doesn’t feel like wrestling anymore, not since two-time All-American David Delarosa was brutally murdered just four days before Easter. But Shay, like the other young men on the Hemphill College squad, says he has no choice but to return to the mats this winter.
“I can feel him right next to me in the gym,” Shay said with a sad grin, “threatening to haunt me for the rest of my life if I don’t do my best to get the win.”
Shay, an education major from Mallet Creek, who wrestles in the 197-pound class, was more than Delarosa’s friend and teammate. For the two years they shared a one-room apartment in the off-campus building where Delarosa’s body was found.
“We’re determined to carry on,” Shay told this reporter. “It’s what he’d want us to do.”
Indeed, at a prayer breakfast before the team’s first match of the season, against arch rival Edinboro College, Coach Patrick Zemary dedicated the wrestling team’s season to Delarosa’s memory, saying, “David was an inspiration in life and he will remain an inspiration to us in death.”
I went to the rack where we keep the phone books. I found the listings for Mallet Creek, a small town in neighboring Wyssock County. I found Howard Shay’s number and dialed it. It rang four times before triggering one of those damn recordings: “Big Howie here! Sorry I’m not there to take your call. I’m down in sunny Flor-ee-dah wintering away the kid’s inheritance. Call back after the ground thaws!”
There was no beep to leave a message. Just a quick click. Whatever I might learn from David Delarosa’s old college roommate would have to wait. I took a deep breath and called Dale Marabout’s extension. “Busy, Mr. M?” I asked.
“As a termite in a toothpick factory. What’s up?”
“I just wanted to talk-about Gordon Sweet’s murder.”
I peeked across the newsroom and saw Dale glowering at me. I wiggled my fingers at him. “I know you told me to let the police handle it,” I said, “but I think maybe I’ve stumbled onto something.”
And so an hour later, after Dale had finished with his story for the next day’s paper, he and I were walking down the hill, wet wind chapping our faces, toward Ike’s Coffee Shop.
Ike’s is located in the Longacre Building, one of the many empty office buildings in Hannawa’s dying downtown. It used to house some of the city’s most successful doctors and lawyers. Now it just houses Ike.
“Morgue Mama!” Ike sang out when we walked in. “Mr. Marabout!”
Ike is the nicest man. He’s about my age. He taught high school math for 30 years before opening his coffee shop. He makes me laugh when there’s nothing to laugh at. He drives me home when my car won’t start. He maintains his high opinion of me no matter how cranky I get. He’s earned the right to call me Morgue Mama to my face.
I should also explain that Ike’s name isn’t really Ike. It’s Leonard, Leonard Breeze. He says he got the nickname because he was the only black man anybody knew who voted for Dwight Eisenhower.
Dale and I took a table by the window. We didn’t have to order. Ike knew I’d want a mug of Darjeeling tea and Dale a regular coffee with room for a little half-and-half. He got busy pouring them.
“So what’s this you’ve stumbled on?” Dale asked me, drumming his fingers on the table. “And more importantly, on a scale of one to ten how much agony is it going to cause me?”
I hate drumming fingers. I stopped them. “No more than a six,” I said. “I just want you to do a little checking.” I told him about my trip to the landfill that morning with Andrew, about David Delarosa’s murder all those years ago.
Dale connected the dots. “So you think maybe Gordon was looking for the murder weapon out there? That’s a real stretch, don’t you think?”
“I won’t know if it is or isn’t until you look into the status of the Delarosa case.”
“It’s been a billion years, Maddy. I’d say the status is that there isn’t a status.”
“I know the case is cold. But I thought maybe you could see if there’s something in the police files that didn’t make it into our stories. Was the murder weapon ever identified or found? Was Shaka Bop the only suspect ever questioned?”
I’d told Dale something he didn’t know. “ The Shaka Bop?”
Ike appeared out of nowhere with our drinks. “How many Shaka Bops do you think there are in Hannawa?”
Ike grinned at Dale. Dale grinned back at Ike. But they were not easy grins. Ike knew all about my history with Dale. And Dale knew that Ike knew. It was nice to have two men go grin-to-grin over me like that, but it sure wasn’t going to help me get to the bottom of Gordon’s murder. “Thanks, Ike,” I said. “You’re a lamb.”
Ike retreated behind the counter and watched us over the top of his espresso machine while he pretended to work.
“I’m sure I’m just tilting at windmills,” I whispered to Dale, “but Gordon was pretty thick with David Delarosa and I remember how hard he took his murder.”
Dale tipped his head and squinted, the way dogs do when they’re trying to decipher the confusing sounds coming from the flat faces of their masters. “Are you saying Gordon was gay?”
“Good gravy, does everything have to be about sex?”
The second I said it I wished I hadn’t. Sex was not a good topic for Dale and me. We were just friends now. He’d been married to Sharon for twenty years and I’d long ago lost what little physical appeal Mother Nature rationed out to me. But once upon a time Dale Marabout and I had been a couple of real bunny rabbits with each other, I’ll tell you. So the S-word, in any context, always dredged up a lot of awkward feelings better left in the murky past.
And having those feelings dredged up in front of Ike made matters all the worse. Unfortunately, there was something more than friendship between Ike and me, too. Not that we’d ever acted on those feelings, of course. Good gravy! We were both closing in on seventy. He was black. I was white. He was a Republican and I’d once held
