Free No Stone Unturned by James W. Ziskin Page A

we buried the picture of the Mohawk Motel deep inside the paper, on page seventeen.
    Once Charlie had settled on the layout and sent it off to Composition, he congratulated me on the work I had done and told me he was putting out a special morning edition.
    “It may mean my job tomorrow,” he said, “but you ran circles around George.”
    I thanked him, and he smiled. We both knew he was going to take the flak for my story.

    At ten I sat down in the phone booth at Fiorello’s and dialed the Boston number Judge Shaw had given me—Ginny White. No one answered. I hung up and joined Fadge at the counter. The place was empty of customers, as could be expected on a Sunday night in November, and we talked about football, the weather, and Jordan Shaw.
    “I heard a rumor she was raped,” said Fadge, leaning against the cash register behind the counter, his huge shoes propped up on the ice cream freezer. Not the most hygienic practice, but par for the course.
    “You heard wrong,” I said, proffering my glass for another Coke.
    He motioned for me to fill it myself. I leaned over the counter to pump some Coke syrup into my glass, then topped it off with carbonated water from the spigot. Fadge flipped a long soda spoon at me. I caught it and stirred my drink. No one ever accused Ron Fiorello of overexertion.
    “Tomorrow’s paper is going to raise some eyebrows,” I continued. “And not just because a local girl was murdered.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “The way she died. Or rather, the way she lived. She wasn’t exactly saving herself for marriage.”
    Fadge shrugged it off. “That’s overrated.”
    “How would you know?” I asked.
    He ignored me. “So you were there, Ellie. What do you think happened?”
    I explained, without giving the most sensitive details; I trusted Fadge more than anyone else in New Holland, but Fred Peruso and I had an agreement about the IUD. It was one thing to presume that Jordan Shaw had slept with someone Friday night. It was another to imply that she was bouncing on the mattress like a trampolinist every time the sun went down. I told Fadge exactly what was in my article and gave him my gut feelings besides.
    “If she’d been raped, I’d get it,” I said. “If she hadn’t been cut, or even if it had been accidental, I might buy it. But something doesn’t add up here. I believe people do things for logical reasons, whether we find their actions abhorrent or not. This guy cut out a piece of her skin and took it with him. Why?”
    “Maybe he wanted a souvenir.” said Fadge.
    We sat quietly for a few moments, mulling over the possible explanations. Neither of us could think of any.
    “Hey, guess what I discovered today,” I said to change the subject and brag a little at the same time. “The Mohawk Motel has a Peeping Tom.”
    “You just figured that out?” He laughed, and he told me a story. “Joey McIlhenny used to screw his sister-in-law up at the Mohawk. To hear him tell it, he was giving it to her eight or ten times a week, but everyone knows Joey’s a talker. Anyway, after a couple of weeks, he starts to worry maybe his brother’s wise to him, and he feels like someone’s watching every time him and his sister-in-law hit the sheets. Then, one day, he catches that Puerto Rican kid peeping through the bathroom window.”
    I told Fadge about my discovery behind the Mohawk, but that Jean Trent seemed unwilling to help me find her handyman voyeur. Fadge pushed off the register and leaned toward me. His brown eyes, bulging from a thyroid condition, sparkled with amusement.
    “She’s not going to turn him in, Ellie. Not her young rooster.”
    “You’re telling me this Julio guy is . . .” I searched for the right word, “romantic with Jean Trent? She said he was just a kid.”
    “About twenty-one,” said Fadge, pulling back to his position against the register. “And, by the way, romantic isn’t the right word.”
    “She must be fifty years old,” I said,