Free Stone Cold Dead by James W. Ziskin Page A

the coffee will take a while,” he said, lowering himself into his swivel chair. “Now what can I do for you?”
    “Irene Metzger came to see me New Year’s Eve,” I began. Frank groaned. “She asked me to look into her daughter’s disappearance.”
    “That woman is a nuisance,” said the sheriff. “She’s been pestering me for more than two weeks. Called me at home on Christmas.”
    “Have a heart, Frank. She’s worried sick. Lost her only child.”
    The sheriff waved a bearish hand at me. “Run off is more like it.”
    “Can you give me a little background on the case? Who did you talk to?”
    “Just about everyone, I suppose. Her friends, family, teachers. I really did look into this, Ellie. No one knows a thing. The girl just disappeared.”
    “What about her boyfriend?” I asked.
    “Yeah, I talked to that little JD. If anything bad happened to her, he’d be my prime suspect. But like I said, she’s just run off somewhere.”
    “But he’s got an alibi, doesn’t he? He’s been locked up at Fulton for a couple of weeks.”
    Frank smirked. “I guess you didn’t 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