Stone Cold Dead by James Ziskin (android e book reader txt) 📗

know he slipped out the night before Darleen Hicks went missing. They caught him two days later and took him back to Fulton,” said Frank.

“What about the bus driver?” I asked, changing gears. “Did you talk to him?”

“Just to ask if he’d seen her that afternoon. He insisted she got on the bus. Remembers seeing her climb on before he drove off. But no one else said she was on the bus. Later on, he changed his mind and said he’s not sure if she ever boarded the bus at all.”

“That’s puzzling.”

Frank shook his head. “He’s an old drunk. Obviously can’t remember straight. In fact, when I questioned him, he said he parked the bus just behind the snow hills near the Metzger farm to take a half-hour nap after finishing his route. That’s baloney, of course. He was drinking is more likely.”

“Snow hills?” I asked. “What’s that?”

“The county plows the snow, collects it if it doesn’t melt, and dumps it in a clearing at the end of that road. That’s where the bus driver says he took his nap.”

Frank gave me the driver’s name and address: Gus Arnold, sixty-one, a former city sanitation worker. He lived by himself in a trailer next to Drusek’s Scrapyard, northeast of town off Route 29.

“You can find him at the school district depot around five,” said Frank. “That’s off Grove Street on Polack Hill. Try to catch him before five fifteen, or he’ll be halfway to the bottom of a fifth of rye.”

I told Frank of my plans to pay a visit to Fulton to speak to Joey Figlio.

“The hell you will!” he said. “Damn it, Ellie, you can’t go up there alone. It’s not safe for a young lady. I’ll send Stan or Halvey with you.”

“I can take care of myself,” I said, feeling touched and annoyed at the same time. “They have guards at Fulton, don’t they?”

“It’s too late to go over there today anyway,” grumbled Frank. “They’ll be locking down those animals in an hour or so.”

Polack Hill, so delicately named for the Polish folk who lived in the humble duplexes around Upper Church Street, dominated the city’s East End from above. On the corner of Church and Tyler, St. Stanislaus Church stood white and tall, bounded by the Polish-American Veterans Club on one side and the Lithuanian Club on the other. Nearby, Jepsen’s Lumber spread out over four entire city blocks, its tall green fence surrounding the yard like a palisade. You could hear the shrill buzz of the saws and the banging of hammers inside; smell and taste the smolder of fresh pine passing under the spinning teeth of the blade; and—if there was no rain—you could see the fine sawdust hanging in the air and feel it settle on your hair.

I drove two blocks past Jepsen’s to the intersection of Tyler and Grove, where a chain-link fence, crowned by a tangle of rusting barbed wire, stretched around a large gravel parking lot. An orange-and-black metal sign read “New Holland School District Vehicle Depot.” Inside, dozens of yellow school buses, spattered with the frozen brown-and-gray residue of slush and salt, huddled on the uneven ground in the bitter cold.

I parked at the curb and waited in the warm car, working up the courage to open the door to the cold. Just to mock me, the radio played “Theme from a Summer Place.” I smoked a cigarette and waited. It was just five, already dark, when an empty bus rumbled up to the gate, negotiated the bumpy bit of cracked sidewalk between the street and the parking lot, then juddered its way toward the other buses. A stocky man, dressed in a red-checked hunter’s cap (flaps down), blue dungarees, and a dark-green field jacket, emerged from the bus. Lugging his gray lunch pail in his meaty hands, he trod off to the dispatcher’s cabin next to the garage. I switched off the radio and climbed out into the cold.

“I’m looking for Gus Arnold,” I announced to the two men inside. One was a slight man, about thirty, with slicked-down wavy hair and a thin, tired mustache. He was seated at a heavy wooden desk with a nameplate that identified him as “S. Pietrewski, Dispatcher.” The other man was the bus driver I’d just seen pull into the parking lot. Both stared at me. I could see their frozen breath in the cold room.

“Gus Arnold?” I repeated.

“That’s me,” said the driver. His broad face was red from the cold, and his bulbous, pocked nose betrayed a fondness for drink.

“My name is Eleonora Stone. I’m a reporter for the Republic.”

“What do you want with me?”

“I’m investigating the disappearance of Darleen Hicks. I believe she rode your bus.”

“Yeah,” he said hesitantly. “I already talked to Sheriff Olney about that. He said she ran off.”

“Would you mind answering a few questions for me?”

He looked at the dispatcher, who didn’t seem to like the idea of one of his drivers mixed up in a story like this. He squinted at me through the low light.

“Do you remember seeing Darleen that day?” I asked, ignoring the dispatcher’s scrutiny.

“Yeah, I seen her get on the bus in the morning like usual.”

“What about that evening? The sheriff said you remembered seeing her on the bus.”

Gus Arnold twitched, wiped his nose with his hand, then shook his head. “I must have remembered wrong. She didn’t get on the bus that afternoon.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

He frowned and whined at me that there were a lot of kids, wearing heavy coats and winter hats. He couldn’t be expected to remember every one of them every day.

“But the sheriff said you were certain Darleen was aboard the bus that afternoon. Then you changed your mind. What would make you doubt your memory now?”

“I seen her in the morning, but not in the afternoon,” he repeated.

“Did she have friends on the bus?” I asked, moving on. “Who did she sit with?”

“There was a couple of girls, I guess. They