There’d been no leaks of possible suspects but the police had freely discussed how high on the hog 32-year-old Paul Zuduski had lived for a guy on a congressional staffer’s salary. He had a pricey townhouse in Greenlawn and drove a $60,000 Humvee. Investigators learned he’d paid cash for both. He’d also taken a startling number of vacations to islands with palm trees.
Dale finished his muffin and started ogling mine. I preemptively gave him half. “The cops aren’t saying much,” he said, “but apparently the Depew brothers were young Paul’s business associates. And when they went to Kurt’s apartment this morning-presumably to inquire about the nature of their business with the late, rolled-up-in-a-rug congresswoman’s brother-he welcomed them with a deer rifle.”
I sipped sparingly at the last inch of my tea in my Styrofoam cup while Dale called Metro. He gave them what he had.
It sounds silly, but I could not keep my eyes off him. He was bald and jowly. His glasses were ten years out of style. But watching his brown eyes stare soberly into space while he dictated perfect sentences and paragraphs-well.
He pressed his cell phone against his chest and smiled at me. “You want someone from the newsroom to pick you up, Maddy?”
I shook my head no.
“I guess you know why I asked you to lunch.”
“Sure,” said Dale. “David Delarosa.”
We’d been hovering around Big Bertha for two hours now, watching the police hover around their cars and the EMS teams hover around their trucks, watching Tish Kiddle hover around her hairspray can. “And?”
He yawned like a hippopotamus in a Disney cartoon. “And not much, Maddy. No weapon. No suspect. No motive. The investigation just petered out.”
The investigation may have petered out. But I wasn’t going to let Dale peter out. “Was the type of weapon ever identified?”
“Just that it was something heavy-and apparently blunt.”
“Apparently blunt?”
“No major cuts. Just a faceful of small abrasions and big ugly bruises.”
Reporters ask questions for a living. But when they’re on the receiving end, they’re as aggravating as everybody else. “Something like a hammer or a baseball bat?” I asked.
He yawned again. This time with his mouth shut. “From the size and shape of the bruises, the police surmised that the surface of the weapon was rather large and possibly flat.”
I tried to think of all the large, flat things that could be used to bludgeon somebody. “Frying pan, maybe?”
“Actually that was one of the things police looked for. A big bloody frying pan.”
I could feel my face scrunching. “That’s right, there was blood. The old stories said it was splattered all over the walls and floor. Upstairs and down.”
“More of a smattering than a splattering,” Dale said, enjoying his way with words. “Delarosa’s nose was smashed to smithereens. Police figured that happened upstairs, when he was first attacked.”
“So the killer could have gotten blood on himself?”
“Bloody clothes were on the police search list.”
“None found?”
“None found.”
Dale now went on and on, quite cockily I must say, about how he’d talked the public information office at police headquarters into letting him see the Delarosa files: “I sure couldn’t tell them I was trying to link Delarosa’s murder to Gordon Sweet’s. Shit, they’d stitch a big red N for nutcase on my chest and never let me get farther than the Mr. Coffee again. So I told them the paper was thinking of doing a series on cold murder cases. Which immediately got their sperm wiggling. There’s no better PR than solving some difficult old case. Even if the media has to help. ‘Well, we’re just thinking about it,’ I said. I asked to see a sample cold case file, to see what they looked like and how we might develop a story around it. And they bit. And I suggested the Delarosa case. You should have seen me, Maddy. I was almost as devious as you.”
While Dale proudly described his deception, I tried to recreate David’s murder in my head, matching what I already knew with what I’d just learned. It wasn’t much but it did conjure up some very nasty images:
On the morning of Thursday, April 18, 1957, maybe just before dawn, David Delarosa, wearing nothing but socks and boxer shorts, came face-to-face with his killer in the hallway outside his off-campus apartment on Hester Street. Maybe they argued. Maybe they struggled a little. Then the killer swung something heavy at him. All I could picture was a big frying pan but almost certainly it was something else. Whatever it was, it struck him square in the face and apparently broke his nose, spritzing blood on the wall and the floor. Maybe the killer just struck him once upstairs, maybe it was a few more times or several more times, but clearly one blow sent David backward over the stairwell railing. He tumbled twelve feet to the marble floor in the lobby. You’d think the killer would flee at that point, wouldn’t you? But he didn’t. Either he knew the apartment building was empty or he was too enraged to care. He kneeled over David. He struck him again and again. “I guess it doesn’t matter,” I asked Dale, “but did David die from the battering or the fall?”
I could tell from Dale’s smile that he liked my question. It was the kind of question a good reporter would know to ask, I guess. “Actually, the coroner was pretty clear on that,” he said. “He died from the fall. It fractured the back of his skull and ripped his brain loose. His head quickly filled with blood and some of it trickled out.”
“So the blood upstairs was from the frying pan-or whatever-and the blood downstairs was from the fall?”
“The coroner’s opinion-”
“His opinion?”
Dale chuckled at my skepticism. “A coroner’s opinion is not exactly the same as you having an opinion, Maddy.”
I didn’t care for the chuckling and I sure didn’t care for his lack of faith in my deductive powers. “You think I’m going off half-baked here, don’t you?” I hissed.
He had the good sense to retreat: “You’re the most fully baked woman I know. What I meant is that the coroner’s opinion comes at the end of a very thorough autopsy report. And the coroner’s opinion was that the initial blow upstairs knocked him over the railing and while he was lying flat on his back, dying from a massive cranial hemorrhage, the killer smashed away at his face.”
I thought my own brain was going to rip loose. It was filled with a swirl of grisly images: David sprawled helplessly on the cold floor while some fuzzy, faceless beast swung that big imaginary frying pan; Sweet Gordon climbing that grassy hill while an equally fuzzy beast raised a pistol and took careful aim.
Wouldn’t you just know it, Kurt Depew chose that moment to poke the barrel of his rifle out his bathroom window and fire.
Everyone in Hannawa Falls ducked but me.
I heard Dale screech, “Will you get the fuck down?”
Well, I did get down. But it was a waste of time. There was only the one shot and it landed a million miles from us. By the time I pulled myself up Dale was already heading toward the police line. He was bent low like Alan Alda in the opening shots of a M*A*S*H episode, running toward that helicopter full of wounded soldiers.
I was only the paper’s librarian. But when a big story like that breaks, you have to put everything else aside- your job description, your well-deserved reputation as an uncooperative old crone-and do what you can to help get that story covered. So I bent low and headed back to Starbucks for more tea and coffee. I’m sure I looked a lot more like Groucho Marx than Alan Alda.
