C Corwin - Dig

I didn’t know whether to be delighted or depressed. I did know that I needed more information before going to Detective Grant. “Eric,” I said sweetly, “how about I buy your supper tonight?”

Thirty minutes later we were sitting in my Shadow outside the office building in Brinkley where Rollie Stumpf had his insurance agency. I had a fish sandwich inside of me. Eric had a Whopper inside of him. He was still protesting.

Right at five the three women who worked in Rollie’s office hurried out to their cars and drove off. “I’m not good at this kind of thing,” Eric whined.

“Nobody is,” I assured him. “Now go!”

So Eric went inside. My instructions to him couldn’t have been clearer: Under the guise of seeking information on insurance rates for his pickup, he was to scour every desk, table and shelf for that debate trophy.

Eric was back in fifteen minutes with a thick stack of brochures. “And?”

“No debate trophy,” he said.

“You look everywhere?”

“He’s got plaques and awards all over the walls. Couple hundred of them. All for selling lots of insurance.”

“You’re sure you didn’t tell him you worked at the paper?”

“I’m sure.”

“Anybody else in there besides Rollie Stumpf?”

“Nope.”

“You didn’t give him any reason to be suspicious?”

“I just looked like an idiot looking for cheaper truck insurance.”

“And no debate trophy?”

“Not unless he keeps it in the bathroom.”

“You didn’t look there?”

“Maddy. Get a grip.”

Monday, June 25

Detective Grant and I started up the pathway. The brown matted grass that covered the hill when I was there in March had been replaced with a thick growth of green sprinkled with yellow buttercups. It wasn’t any easier passing the spot where Gordon was killed than it was three months before.

We followed the rim of the landfill to the old dump. It was only eight in the morning but Andrew J. Holloway III and his students were already busy digging.

There had been quite a nasty debate in the weeks after Gordon’s death whether to continue his garbology project. The new chair of the archaeology department-some woman from New Jersey who was absolutely gaga over old Buddhist temples-wanted nothing to do with it. But Gordon’s students raised such a fuss that the dean persuaded her that it would be politically incorrect to drop the dig so soon after Gordon’s murder. So it was handed off to Andrew, who accepted it eagerly.

“Well, here we are,” Grant said to me. His arms were folded menacingly over his chest. His feet were planted far apart. His chin was jutting out.

I just had to laugh. “You look like Yul Brynner in The King and I .”

He self-consciously put his hands in his pockets and shifted his weight onto one leg. “I hope you didn’t invite me out here for a dance lesson.”

“Not hardly,” I said. “I want you to arrest Rollie Stumpf.”

“For Professor Sweet’s murder, I gather?”

I dug the letter from my purse and handed it to him. “For David Delarosa’s, too.”

His huge eyebrows shot up. The corners of his mouth went down. He opened the letter in slow motion, as if it might be filled with anthrax.

“It’s from David to Gordon,” I said as he read. “Written the Christmas break before David was killed.” I told him who I thought Miss Forty Below was. “David could have been talking about any number of girls at the college. But I don’t think Gordon would’ve been too upset about David trying to seduce any of them. And Gwen and I were the only two women in our crowd engaged at the time.”

Grant peeked at me over the top of the letter. “Any chance you were Miss Forty Below?”

“I wondered about that, too.” I told him about the night at Jericho’s when David tried to protect me from Shaka Bop. “But there’s that line about the tiny chip of ice. Gwen had a diamond. I didn’t. My Lawrence couldn’t afford a plastic ring from a bubble gum machine. It had to be Gwen.”

I then told him all I’d learned about the debate team trip to Columbus. About Rollie deciding to take the overnight bus. About Gwen’s pink Buick. About my own middle-of-the-night walk down Hester Street.

“Do you have any proof that Gwen went home with David Delarosa that night?” he asked.

I admitted that I didn’t. That I’d left Jericho’s before midnight. “But some of the others might. Effie or Chick Glass or maybe even Shaka Bop. After his scuffle with David, I’m sure Shaka kept his eye on him the rest of the night.”

Grant was not impressed. “It might be hard to get a conviction based on a fifty-year-old recollection of a guy picking up a girl in a bar,” he said.

That’s when I told him about Rollie’s trophy-or more accurately the absence of his trophy.

This he considered seriously. “And you think after bludgeoning David Delarosa, he threw it in a garbage can and it ended up here? And all these years later that’s what Professor Sweet was looking for? And Rollie Stumpf killed him before he could find it?”

“Actually,” I said, “Gordon was looking for something else.”

“Oh yes,” he said, “proof about Jack Kerouac’s cheeseburger.”

“You know about that, do you?”

“Of course I know about that.”

“Well, then you can forget about it,” I said. “Because Gordon was actually digging for a cocoa can full of pine cones.” I told him about my visit with Penelope Yarrow. The collection of cocoa cans I’d bought from Gordon’s nephew.

“Digging up an old dump for a can of pine cones-why the hell not?”

I didn’t care for his attitude. “It really doesn’t matter what Gordon was looking for. It only matters what Rollie thought Gordon might find. A dented, bloody trophy that would lead right to him.”

I started across the dump toward Andrew. Grant followed me like a nervous penguin. Which I liked. “I have to admit you’ve dug up some interesting stuff,” he said.

“Well, thank you.”

As quickly as he gaveth, he tooketh away. “But it’s all a tad circumstantial, isn’t it? You have no real proof that the trophy is missing. And no proof that it’s buried out there.”

“True enough,” I admitted. “But you’ve got to admit Rollie sure had a motive. For both murders. And from what I understand, he doesn’t have an alibi for the evening Gordon was killed.”

“Neither does anybody else-as you know.”

I was not going to let his pessimism deter me. “But we are off to a promising start, aren’t we?”

“There is no we, Mrs. Sprowls. There is only me. Cautiously taking one step at a time.” He promptly tripped on one of the archaeological stakes hidden in the high grass.

He was a big man. I was a little woman. I let him get up by himself. “I should have warned you about those,” I said.

We reached the hole where Andrew was digging. He crawled out and slapped the dirt off his knees. He hadn’t known we were coming. He was nervous. Uncertain. Andrew the boy instead of Andrew the man. Detective Grant got right to the point. “Andrew, did Professor Sweet ever tell his students to be on the lookout for an old trophy?”

“Not that I ever knew.”

“If anybody knew, it would be you, wouldn’t it?” Grant asked. “The two of you were very close.”

For all Andrew knew, Detective Grant was there to arrest him. “We discussed the dig every week-as I’ve told you.”

Grant let him stew. “To your knowledge was a trophy ever found?”

Andrew’s head quivered no.

I piped in. “How about cocoa cans? Find any more of them?”

“We always find cocoa cans,” he said. “Why?”