Monday, June 11
Eric usually gets to the morgue a good half-hour before I do-or so he tells me. This morning I was the early bird. I handed him the clipping.
He glanced at the four men in the photo above the story before letting it flutter to his messy desk. In one well-practiced motion he clicked on his computer and cracked the plastic cap on his breakfast Mountain Dew. “Who are those goofy looking dudes?”
I’d looked at the photo so many times over the weekend that I’d memorized where each was standing. “Left to right they’re Herbert Giffels, Rollie Stumpf, Don Rodino and Elgin ‘Bud’ Wetzel. They’re the 1957 state collegiate debate champions.”
“I figured they weren’t football players,” he said.
“You have a keen eye, Mr. Chen.” I leaned over his desk and handed him the clipping a second time.
From the look on his face you’d swear it was five in the afternoon and not nine in the morning. “I suppose you want me to find them for you.”
“You only have to find three of them,” I said. “We already know where Rollie Stumpf is.”
The significance of the photo finally dawned on him. “Ah-the woebegone spouse of Gwendolyn Moffitt- Stumpf.”
“That’s right. The other three could be anywhere.”
I got to work marking up the Sunday edition while Eric worked his on-line magic. It took him only fifteen minutes to determine that Don Rodino was dead. “Nothing fishy though,” he said. “Vietnam 1965. Navy pilot shot down over Hanoi.”
Just before noon he found Herbert Giffels. In a cemetery in Zanesville. “Must have been a car accident or something,” Eric said. “Wife died the same day. September 20, 1983.”
The search for Elgin “Bud” Wetzel took all afternoon. “Here he is,” Eric yawned at a quarter to five. “Beaufort, South Carolina.”
“Still alive?”
“Looks like it. Apparently he’s something of an expert on eighteenth century candle snuffers. He’s got a website-www. wickmeister. com.”
“How about a phone number? He got one of those antique things?” I asked.
And so I called Rollie’s last surviving debate partner. The voice of the man who answered was deep and clear, with only a hint that he might be on the south side of middle age: “Wickmeister!”
“This wouldn’t be Bud, would it?” I asked.
“It’s been a long time since anybody called me that,” he said.
I introduced myself. Told him I’d graduated from Hemphill a year before he did. That my late husband Lawrence had covered the state debate tournament for The Harbinger. “As I recall, he drove down to Columbus on the bus with you.”
“I do remember somebody pestering us with stupid questions while we were trying to prepare,” he said, adding a faint “heh-heh-heh” on the end to let me know he was joking.
It wasn’t all that funny, but I mustered up the best laugh I could. Then I got down to business, bending the truth every whichaway as I went along. “The reason I called is that I’m writing a memoir of sorts. And 1957 was such a big year for Lawrence and me. Him writing for the college newspaper. Both of us graduating. Getting married. And that horrible murder. It was the same day as the debate tournament as I recall.”
He corrected me. “The day after.”
I corrected him. “Actually, the police said he was killed in the middle of night. So I guess we’re both right.”
The champion debater in him wouldn’t let it go. “If it was after midnight, then it was the next day.”
I capitulated. “You’re right, of course. Anyway, I’ve been trying to piece everything together chronologically. When exactly Lawrence was in Columbus and when he was back here. And going through his old clippings I found the story he wrote on the debate tournament. And the photo that ran with it. The four of you with your big trophies. I figured somebody smart enough to win a state debate tournament would have a good memory.”
That really puffed him up: “‘Resolved…That the United States should discontinue direct economic aid to foreign countries.’ Don and Herbie handled first and second affirmatives. Rollie and I handled the rebuttal. We made those Wooster College boys sound like a pack of retarded chimpanzees, I’ll tell you.”
A number of snappy retorts came to mind. I wisely kept them to myself. “Lawrence and I knew the boy who was killed a little-David Delarosa was his name-and we were both shaken up. As you can imagine. I’ve been tying to remember exactly when the bus got back to Hannawa. I know I picked Lawrence up but I can’t remember if it was morning or afternoon or just when.”
Bud made my ear buzz with a long, thoughtful moan. “Boy, you’re making me go back a long time.”
“Unfortunately it has been a long time,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic. The reason I was asking him about the bus schedule, of course, was to humor my silly suspicions about Gwen: That just maybe she was the Miss Forty Below in David’s letter to Gordon. That maybe David had succeeded in seducing her that Wednesday night at Jericho’s. That maybe with Rollie down in Columbus she simply couldn’t resist David’s ample animal charm. That maybe she was the girl for whom David flipped the seven on his door into an L. “That L means later,” David told Howard Shay, “It means I’m getting laid.” So maybe Gwen was the one who knocked David over the balcony, and filled with fear and shame continued to batter his pretty face on the hard floor, long after he was dead.
“You know,” said Bud, “I don’t think we all came back together from Columbus. In fact, I’m sure we didn’t.”
I was puzzled. “Didn’t come back together? With my Lawrence you mean?”
“No,” he said. “I mean the debate team. The tournament ended at four. We got our trophies and your husband took that picture that ran in the college paper. We were all supposed to go out for dinner with the debate coach, Professor Cook, stay another night at the hotel and then come back on the Thursday morning bus. But Rollie was anxious to get back. He had something waiting for him the rest of us didn’t. A girlfriend. He asked Professor Cook for permission to take the overnight bus.”
I was more than puzzled now. I was flat out thrown for a loop. “What time did that bus leave Columbus?”
Bud let go with another one of his irritating moans. “I have no idea,” he said. “I do remember Rollie going to dinner with us. Your Lawrence, too. But I know Rollie didn’t come with us afterward on our tour of the local rathskellers.”
“What about my Lawrence,” I asked. “He took the tour, did he?”
Bud laughed like a nervous goat. “As I recall, it was his idea.”
I fought off my old feelings of betrayal and got back on the subject at hand. “About those trophies,” I asked, “did you get to keep them? Or did they end up in a glass case somewhere?”
“Professor Cook got one for the case outside his office. But, sure, we got to keep our individual trophies.”
“Just out of curiosity-exactly what did your trophies say?” I asked.
Either Bud was staring directly at his trophy or his memory was very good: “First Place, State of Ohio Collegiate Debate Tournament, Columbus, 1956-57.”
I jotted that down. “And did they also put your name on it?”
“Not the same day we won them of course,” he said. “But later Professor Cook collected them and had our names engraved.”
“All four of them?”
“No. Just our separate names.”
“I mean did he have all four trophies engraved?”
“I suppose he did.”
“But you don’t remember for sure?”
