A Brilliant Death (11 page)

“Now, there’s sweat rolling down Sirgusiano’s forehead. Tornik says, ‘You probably have already figured out where we got this, but for my personal enjoyment, let me tell you. On the day of the murders, I found this lovely specimen pressed into a frozen butter dish at the Little Napoli Restaurante—the very same restaurant that just a few minutes ago you said you’d never in your life set foot inside.’

“The lawyer tells Sirgusiano to clam up.

“Tornik says, ‘We don’t think you killed the boys at the restaurant, Mr. Sirgusiano, but we’re betting you know who did. And the first guy to the door is the one who gets the deal.’ The lawyer says, ‘Don’t say a word. Mr. DiCarolis will take care of you.’

“Tornik knows he’s in charge, so he leans back in his chair and says, ‘Sure, listen to your counsel, Joey. Go on back to Youngstown. I’m sure Mr. DiCarolis will take care of you, just like your lawyer said. What is it that all his friends in the mob call Mr. DiCarolis? Let me think. Oh, yeah, I remember—Donny Death. I’m sure Donny Death will be very understanding and loyal to a second-rate thug who leaves behind evidence that implicates the family in the slaughter of three people, two of whom are known associates of the Antonelli family. So, go ahead. There’s the door. You can leave now, if you like. But, I’ll tell you this, even if Mr. DiCarolis forgives you, I’m not so certain that Il Tigre is going to be so understanding. He probably doesn’t care about you shooting the cook, but he’s not going to be too happy that you dusted one of his top lieutenants and the owner of the Little Napoli.’ Tornik smiled and said, ‘I understand Il Tigre was very fond of the eggplant parmesan.’

“Sirgusiano blurts out, ‘I’ll talk, I’ll talk, I’ll talk. Just get me a real lawyer and you’ve gotta promise me protection.’ Before morning, Joey Sirgusiano was tucked away in a cottage in the Allegheny National Forest near the Pennsylvania-New York line with Tornik and the county prosecutor. He was the star witness against the DiCarolis crime family. The top six members of the DiCarolis family went to prison, as did seven of their lieutenants.”

We had been mesmerized by the tale and sat slack-jawed as the sheriff relit his cigar. Finally, I asked, “Why’d Tornik go to prison?”

Bonecutter sent a stream of blue smoke over his desk. “He started believing his own press clippings,” Bonecutter said. “There was a big feature story in one of those national news magazines about him—talked about the boy cop who brought down the DiCarolis crime family. He started writing first-person stories for those true crime rags. Pretty soon, he thought he had to solve every crime in the county. He started to phony-up evidence to solve cases and protect his reputation. He was planting evidence, forcing confessions, and paying witnesses for bogus testimony.”

“Like what?” Travis asked.

“The one that brought him down involved a guy here in Steubenville named Leon Jefferson—a black guy, everyone called him Stony—who got charged with a string of burglaries. After Stony got popped for the burglaries, he was looking for something to bargain with in exchange for a lighter sentence. He tells the prosecutor that Tornik had paid him two hundred dollars to testify against Willie Potts in a murder trial the year before. Stony said he witnessed Potts stab Luther Bigelow to death. Potts got convicted and was sent to Death Row. Turns out, Stony wasn’t within ten miles of Luther Bigelow the night he got popped. That opened up the floodgates. The prosecutor started going back through Tornik’s cases and found three or four other instances of misconduct. Those were just the ones he could prove. There were probably more, but that was enough to send Tornik to prison.”

Travis asked, “Do you know why he was investigating my mom’s death as a homicide?”

Bonecutter shook his head. “No idea, son. Hell, it was probably just more of his grandstanding. Like I said, the guy was a hell of an investigator, but he had an ego as big as all outdoors. When he started to phony up evidence, he made us all look bad. Most guys around here think he’s lower than whale shit. They can’t say his name without getting a bad taste in their mouths. But he paid the price. He got convicted and did hard time, and former cops don’t have a real easy time of it in prison.”

“Is he out of prison?” I asked.

“Yeah, he got out a while back.”

“Do you know where we can find him?” Travis asked.

“Nope. I haven’t seen him in years. Frankly, if I did know, I’d do my best to stay away from him.” The sheriff winked. “It’s not good for an elected officer of the law to be seen chumming around with a convicted felon.”

As we left the sheriff’s office, I said, “Well, based on that story, maybe there was no reason for a homicide investigation. Sounds like he had a giant ego and was just trying to make a mountain out of a molehill.”

“I’d still like to talk to him,” Travis said.

“Of course you would.”

The next day, Travis telephoned the offices of the state parole board. A lady who didn’t want to be bothered with our inquiry said that privacy laws forbade the release of any information. Travis also wrote to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections in Columbus, and they responded with a terse, standardized note that stated that Chase Tornik, Inmate No. A-12-0778, had been incarcerated in the Ohio penitentiary system from June 1955 until November 1963, when he was released from the Mansfield Reformatory and paroled to a halfway house in Toledo. He was released from parole in November 1966.

CHAPTER TEN

Travis slouched back into the corner booth of the Coffee Pot, mindlessly stirring his RC Cola with a straw. “At least we know why Tornik didn’t finish the investigation,” I said. Bea Cranston slid two cheeseburgers and fries across the table, then tore a couple of grease-stained checks from her pad and dropped them without comment.

“We know why Tornik didn’t keep investigating, but why didn’t someone else pick up the case?” Travis asked.

“Probably because Tornik was poison and no one wanted to be associated with anything he touched.” I covered my burger with mustard. Avoiding eye contact, I said, “I have an idea why he might have been investigating your mom’s death.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“I heard something once—a long time ago. Now, before I begin, understand this is only a rumor, okay?”

Travis nodded. “Go on.”

“Well, this mystery man that was on the boat with your mom—there’s always been this speculation that it was someone prominent here in town, and he knew that his reputation would be ruined if they got caught, so after the boat got hit, he swam to shore and let your mom drown. Or . . .” I took a breath. “Or he might have helped her drown.”

Travis looked at me with that familiar look of disbelief. “When we started this, you told me you didn’t know anything about my mom.”

“I just remembered that today. I don’t even know where I heard it, I swear. And it never seemed that important. You know, it was just one of the rumors I heard, and who could ever prove it one way or the other? I remembered it when we were talking to Sheriff Bonecutter. Suddenly, it made sense that Tornik was investigating it as a homicide if he thought that your mom’s boyfriend . . .”

“Killed her?” he said, finishing my stammer.

“Yeah. It seems possible that Tornik knew who was with your mom that night and was going after him.”

“Why would he drown her if he was in love with her?” Travis asked.

“Maybe he wasn’t in love with her. Maybe . . .” I swallowed. “This isn’t a visual you want about your mother, but maybe it was just a romp in the hay and he didn’t want to explain things to his wife and family.”

Travis ran a french fry though a puddle of ketchup. “That’s interesting, and suppose it’s true. It still doesn’t answer the question of why they didn’t keep investigating.”

“Maybe they did. Maybe there just weren’t any more stories in the paper. They could have been investigating this for years, for all we know.”

“Who was the guy she was with?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who did you hear it was?”

“I never heard a name.”

He leaned across the table at me. “Say, ‘Swear to God.’”

“I swear to God, Trav. I don’t know.”

“Do you think it’s the same person who’s been putting flowers on her grave?”

I shrugged. “You think someone has a guilty conscience?”

“If we find out who’s been visiting the grave, maybe we’ll know.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Make sure there’s no poison ivy down there,” I said, standing on the bank overlooking the makeshift bunker, scanning the rim of our fortification with my flashlight.

I heard Travis drop his sleeping bag and a small ice chest of supplies on the dirt floor of the bunker. Although faint moonlight filtered across the hillside, the bunker was shrouded by the low-hanging limbs of an enormous willow tree. I couldn’t see his face through the shadows, but I knew he was rolling his eyes and giving me a look of exasperation. You know certain things about your friends. “I told you, Mitchell, there’s no poison ivy here. I’ve already checked it out. Man, sometimes you are such a wimp.”

I started down over the embankment. “I’m not a wimp, I just happen to be terrified of poison ivy. I would rather have a broken leg than poison ivy.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

I shrugged. “It’s not logical and it’s not a choice; it’s just the way it is.”

I had suffered through a couple of cases of poison ivy in which it had blanketed me thoroughly. Just recalling those awful bouts made me start clawing at imaginary outbreaks on my arms and legs, a fact that had made my mother especially curious as to why I wanted to go camping with Travis. In reality, of course, I didn’t. I told her that it was a chance to celebrate the end of the school year, and Travis had his heart set on it. It was a harmless venture, and she seemed to buy it. If I had told her the real reason, that Travis had conned me into setting up a stake-out operation to catch the mystery man who continued to visit his mother’s memorial, she would have locked me in my room. If I’d had half a brain, I’d have done it myself.

But I hadn’t and therefore found myself crouching in a bunker that Travis had devised behind the brush and locust trees that divided the northeastern corner of New Alexandria Cemetery from the west pasture of McConnell’s dairy farm. Travis had dug out what resembled a shallow grave, which was somewhat appropriate, and piled sticks and twigs at its front, giving it the look of a large beaver dam while providing us with a clear view of the memorial garden for Amanda Baron. “Why didn’t we just go up on the hill and hunker down behind one of the bigger tombstones?” I asked.

“You know nothing about military strategy,” he said.

“Sorry for questioning you, General.”

It was ten o’clock, and a sliver of gray moon was perched over the West Virginia hills. It was cool for early June, and the night was silent except for the ache of the crickets and the soft wash of the nearby stream as it wandered over the shallows on its way to the pond in McConnell’s meadow. Mist was forming over the moving water, creeping out between the trees that rimmed the cemetery, slowly consuming the tombstones on the hillside that led down to the small memorial.

Travis had temporarily lost interest in pursuing the homicide angle. Once the weather turned nice, he returned to his previous obsession—finding out who had been putting flowers on his mother’s memorial. That spring, Travis had won the two-mile run at the Big Valley Athletic Conference track and field championships. I speculated that this feat was due largely to the number of times that winter and spring that he had made the five-mile run to the cemetery and back. If I couldn’t secure a car for the trip, he would get up early and run under the guise of needing additional training. Big Frank thought he was crazy and said so on several occasions.

Travis decided that a stakeout was the only way to catch the mystery man. Thus, on the first Thursday of my summer vacation following my sophomore year, I was hunkered in the bunker, cattle snoozing across the stream, the mist rolling in, poison ivy preparing to attack from all sides, anticipating the arrival of the mystery man.

“Here,” Travis said, opening the cooler he had brought along. It was packed with twelve-ounce bottles of RC Cola, peanut M&M’s, and pretzels. All my favorites.

“Nicely done,” I said. “You even remembered a bottle opener.”

He smiled. “Well, I figure it’s the least I can do. You deserve some kind of reward for all the hell I’ve put you through.”

“You mean, like causing me to piss myself in your attic?”

“Yeah, that and all the other crap, like you hauling my ass all over the place.” Travis actually choked up for a minute, struggling to find the right words. “I just really appreciate you being such a buddy, that’s all.”

I was touched, and a little choked up myself. “Not a problem, Trav.” I gave his shoulders a squeeze. “I’m glad to do it. Hell, you’d do it for me.”

We sat in silence, sipping our RCs, enjoying the quiet of the night. Despite the tribulations involved in playing the role of Watson to Travis’s Sherlock Holmes, our sophomore year had been a good one. It marked the second consecutive year that Travis had earned straight As, which was creating a particularly amusing situation. Travis Baron was not one to normally concern himself with grades or honors. In fact, his grades through elementary and junior high were only marginal, not because he wasn’t brilliant, but because he handed in only about half of his assignments. He couldn’t be bothered. Education was not a priority in the Baron household.