“She sounds a lot like you,” Eric said.
Eric opened the car door, swung his sneakers into the puddle along the curb, grinned at me over his shoulder. “You want to come in for a bite?”
I’d been in his apartment. It was not an invitation I welcomed. “That depends what’s going to bite me? A spider? Cockroach? Rat?”
“I thought maybe we could call out for a pizza,” he said.
“Something to nibble on while we’re looking for your keys, I gather?”
So I followed him up the slippery, noisy iron stairs to his apartment. He’d lost his apartment keys too, of course, and so the door was not only unlocked, but wedged shut with a huge yellow bath towel. He took hold of the towel, and then the knob, and pushed the door open. He explained: “I was afraid if I closed the door I might accidentally lock it-you know how I am-and then I’d really be up shit creek.”
We went inside. “Speaking of shit creek,” I said.
Eric was genuinely surprised by my commentary on his housekeeping skills. “It’s not that bad, is it?”
I stepped over a duffel bag of dirty clothes and crackled across the crumb-laden carpet to the kitchen. I hung my coat on the only chair that didn’t already have a coat hanging on it. “Anything but onions or anchovies,” I said.
And so Eric called the pizza shop and I got busy washing his sink full of dishes. “When you get some time, there’s a couple people I want you to locate for me,” I said.
Eric got a Mountain Dew from the refrigerator and then a paper towel and a ballpoint. “Shoot.”
“The first is a man named Howard Shay,” I said. “I know where he lives in Mallet Creek, but supposedly he’s in Florida for the winter. See if he has a house or a trailer down there. He was an education major, so more than likely it’s a trailer.”
“One of your old beatnik friends?”
“David Delarosa’s college roommate.”
Eric was having trouble writing on the bumply towel. “You’re thinking he wasn’t really in Florida when Sweet Gordon was murdered?”
“Oh, I suspect he was,” I said. “But he might remember something interesting about the hoopla surrounding Delarosa’s murder.”
I found a Brillo pad under the sink and attacked a sauce pan caked with the remains of something red. “I also want you to find my husband Lawrence’s fourth and final wife. Her name is Dory. D.O.R.Y. But I suppose her real name is Dorothy, or maybe Doreen.”
“And her last name is still Sprowls?” Eric asked.
“Lawrence died fifteen years ago. She could be remarried. But start with Sprowls. And start in Pittsburgh. That’s where they were living when he died.”
Eric folded the paper towel and put it in his shirt pocket. “Does this have something to do with the professor’s murder? Or are you just taking advantage of my generosity to satisfy your jealous curiosities?”
“Jealous curiosities?” I hooted. “Believe me, jealousy does not describe my feelings for Lawrence’s ex wives.”
“More like empathy?”
I began searching his kitchen drawers for a clean dishtowel. “More like pity. But this isn’t about ex wives, Eric. This is about a dead husband’s old college clippings.” I told him about my visit to the college newspaper office the week before, how I’d learned that the paper’s old files were destroyed in a fire, how I’d hoped to search them for clues.
“Lawrence wrote for The Harbinger all through college,” I said. “He kept every story he ever wrote. And I’m sure he never threw them out. Journalists just don’t do that. They keep every word they’ve ever written. They lug them from house to house, and spouse to spouse, like they’re ancient biblical texts, written by The Almighty himself.”
Eric showed me where he kept his towels. The drawer was empty. “So Lawrence covered the Delarosa murder for the college paper?”
“Actually, he didn’t,” I said. “The editor wanted him to-he was the best reporter on the paper by far-but Lawrence told him he was a personal acquaintance of David’s and couldn’t possibly be objective. Lawrence just oozed integrity back then.”
“What exactly do you hope to find in his clips?”
“Something I’m not looking for,” I said.
Eric retrieved the same bath towel he’d used to keep his front door from locking. We finished the dishes and then started looking for his keys. We were still looking when the pizza came. And still looking when the pizza was gone.
“I heard a lot of what you and Effie were talking about,” Eric admitted. We were in his living room now, digging into the cracks between his cushions.
“And?”
“She slept with a lot of guys.”
“Apparently.”
“You think she’s still active in that department?”
“She does have sex on the brain, doesn’t she?”
Eric was flat on his belly now, his left arm under the sofa up to his shoulder. “I don’t pretend to understand the libidos of old people but-”
I didn’t just pretend to be offended. I was offended. “Old people?”
He wisely ignored my outburst. “All that erotica. That boy-toy stuff. Every other word out of her mouth. It seems to me she may be a little obsessed.”
“Effie is still Effie.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying, Maddy. At one time or the other she’s slept with just about every guy in your investigation.”
I pawed at the seriousness of his suggestion. “Which means what? That’s she’s some kind of sexual psychopath?”
Eric rolled over and started flipping through the comic books and newspapers piled under his coffee table. “Maybe she and the professor were involved in some kind of wacky lovers’ triangle with somebody. Maybe she’s aware of something so weird that even she can’t talk about it.”
I was furious. “Why does everybody think Gordon’s murder is about sex?”
“Can you be sure it isn’t?”
I struggled to my feet and headed for the mess that surely awaited me in his bathroom. “You’ve got to understand something,” I growled. “In Effie’s world, having sex with a lot of people is like me having lunch with a lot of people.”
Before he could respond with one of his smart-ass remarks, I yelled, “Bingo!”
I’d found his keys. In his shower. In a soggy, half-eaten bag of microwave popcorn stuffed in the soap holder.
I didn’t ask him for an explanation and he didn’t volunteer one.
Chapter 11
Monday, April 2
The coroner finally released the autopsy report on Gordon’s death. Dale brought me a copy as soon as he got to the newsroom. “No surprises,” he said, flopping it into my hands.
The coroner officially listed Gordon’s death as a homicide. The cause of death was a single shot in the back of his head, right on that bump where the spine joins the skull. The barrel of the gun was less than a foot from his
