“What about suspects?” I asked Dale. “There had to be someone other than Sidney Spikes.”
It had been more than an hour since that shot sent everybody into a tizzy. Dale had gathered what little information there was and called it in. Apparently Kurt Depew had just wanted the police to know he was still alive and kicking. He’d taken aim at a black SWAT team helmet sitting on the hood of a patrol car. Sent it bouncing like a beach ball. “They interviewed lots of people,” Dale said, “but from the looks of their notes, Spikes was the only one they had much interest in.”
“Any record of the police talking to a student named Howard Shay?” I wondered.
Dale checked his memory. “Yeah, that was one of the names I saw.” His thoughtful frown twisted into a wicked grin. “Another name I saw was that of a young librarian-one Dolly Madison Sprowls.”
My brain immediately went back to that day after Easter in 1957 when those two detectives appeared at my apartment door. They were both chubby, both painfully squeezed into threadbare blue suits. I remember thinking they looked like Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Alice in Wonderland. Anyway, they’d come at the worst possible time. I was trying to make the first poppyseed kuchen of my young marriage, using the indecipherable recipe my Auntie Edna had sent me from LaFargeville. They crowded around me in my tiny kitchen and peppered me with questions until I was ready to fly.
“One Dolly Madison Sprowls who didn’t know diddly,” I told Dale.
He laughed. “No, you didn’t. And neither did anyone else.”
“Including Sidney Spikes?”
Dale had long ago finished his coffee and was now tearing little pieces out of his Styrofoam cup and mischievously feeding them into the mail slot in Big Bertha. “Including Sidney Spikes,” he said. “They tried their best to squeeze a confession out of him apparently. But Mr. Spikes stuck to his story: The night they said David Delarosa was murdered, he was ensconced most blissfully-and according to the interrogation reports those were the exact words he used, ensconced most blissfully -in the bedroom of a woman.”
“And that woman backed him up?” I asked.
Dale nodded like Oliver Hardy. “And so did the people in the apartments adjoining hers, upstairs and downstairs and on both sides, who’d all suffered through a long night of noisy carnal excess.”
We’d all been shaken when the police took Sidney into custody. We’d seen it as a racial thing, of course, the cops looking for the nearest black man to blame. There was a lot of that kind of justice back then, in Hannawa and everyplace else. But the fact of the matter is that the police had every reason to suspect Sidney.
You see, Sidney Spikes and David Delarosa had a very public fight the night before the murder. It was at Jericho’s, one of the hole-in-the-wall jazz clubs that thrived in Meriwether Square back then. It was Easter vacation, today what they call spring break. Most of the students had gone home to be with their families, but there were still enough of us bohemian-types on campus to keep Jericho’s jumping. In fact, the only Baked Beaners missing that night were my Lawrence and Gwen’s unlikely beau, Rollie Stumpf. Both were in Columbus, at the state debate tournament. Rollie was debating. Lawrence was covering it for The Harbinger.
Well, anyway, Sidney that night behaved as Sidney always behaved. He played himself into a horny sweat during his hour-long sets and then during his breaks sought out as much physical contact as possible with the women in the audience. It didn’t matter whether you were young or old, married or single, good-looking, or as ugly as a bread and butter pickle. And he’d readily admit it. “I’m the same with chicks as I am with my music,” he’d say. “I’m always ready to go just as far as my abundant talent takes me. What can I say daddy-Os and daddy-ettes, I have been profoundly blessed, rhythmically and romantically, beyond the historic bounds of prim and proper behavior. I am such a rascal!”
That’s how Sidney talked and that’s how Sidney behaved. But Sidney was not really a rascal. Beneath all the huff and puff he was a gentleman. He never pushed his musicians or his women any further than they wanted to be pushed. And he was rewarded for his good manners with all the affection he needed, on stage and off.
And so Sidney was just being Sidney that night at Jericho’s when he encountered David Delarosa’s darker instincts. It was after his third set. He’d just finished a twenty minute version of Glenn Miller’s “Little Brown Jug” which, to everyone’s enthusiastic finger popping approval, didn’t sound a bit like Glenn Miller’s “Little Brown Jug.” He jumped off the stage and started hugging the women, purring in their ears about how gone they were, suggesting they disappear out the back door with him for little impromptu love-orooni.
He propositioned his way through a half-dozen women before reaching our table. “How’s my happy little tribe of egg heads tonight?” he asked. He orbited the table, as he always did, slapping the men on the back and pulling the women to their feet for a hug. He hugged Gwen and Effie and then danced to the side where I was sitting between Chick and David. He bent over me and cooed in his easy bebop way: “How ’bout a squeezaroo, Dolly?”
I didn’t mind Sidney’s attention at all. It was all in good fun. But David Delarosa for some reason did mind. He yanked Sidney’s hand off my shoulder. “Save it for your horn, sonny boy,” he said. There was beer foam on his upper lip.
Sidney figured David was just kidding. We all did. He laughed and put his hand back on my shoulder. But David wasn’t kidding. He yanked Sidney’s hand away again. “I said save it!”
Sidney kept smiling but his eyes narrowed with anger. I’m sure he wanted to knock David on his ass. And even though David was a wrestler, Sidney could have done it. But the fire in his eyes quickly dimmed to fear. Maybe he was Sidney Spikes, local bebop god, but he was also a black man playing in a white man’s club. He held up his hands in surrender. “We’ve got no problem, man,” he said.
David stood up. Sidney waved his hands. David threw a punch. It landed square on Sidney’s mouth. Sidney wobbled a little then stepped back. He checked his lips for blood. “We got no problem,” he said again. David cocked his arm for another punch. But he didn’t throw it. Sidney went back to the stage and played like a demon for two hours without taking another break.
When the detectives questioned me that day in my kitchen, I didn’t say boo about the trouble between David and Sidney. The only thing I was thinking about that afternoon was that goddamned poppyseed kuchen. But somebody must have told them about it. Sidney Spikes spent two miserable nights in a holding cell.
“About this woman Sidney was ensconced with?” I asked Dale. “Did the police reports say who she was?”
Dale fed the last piece of Styrofoam into Big Bertha. He grinned devilishly. “It was an old friend of yours. Fredricka Fredmansky.”
“Effie? Well heavens to Betsy! Of course it was Effie!”
While Dale and I were leaning on Big Bertha, yakking about David Delarosa’s murder and a dozen other things, the police were slowly evacuating the people in the apartment building. Then inch by inch, a SWAT team moved down the fifth floor hallway toward Kurt Depew’s door. They didn’t exactly knock. A battering ram tore the door off its frame. Tear gas canisters were fired in. We heard their woosh. Then we heard three quick shots.
Dale would learn later that the first of those shots was fired by Kurt Depew. It struck Sargeant Brian Boyle’s metal-plated Kevlar vest and caused no more damage that a doughnut-sized bruise on his spongy belly, which he proudly showed to everyone he could before it faded. The second and third shots were fired by the police. One shot made mincemeat out of Kurt Depew’s hip. The other made mincemeat out of his heart.
Chapter 10
Friday, March 30
It was Friday, a day I usually coast a little more than usual. But that Friday I couldn’t wait to get to the paper. I took a quick shower. Left my hair damp. Made instant oatmeal.
You can understand why I was in such a hurry. Dale had dominated Page One most of the week. His Wednesday story had detailed Kurt Depew’s fatal shootout with police. His Thursday story had dug deeper into the possible link between the Depew brothers and Congresswoman Zuduski-Lowell’s brother. His story in today’s paper
