Dig by C.R. Corwin

police hover around their cars and the EMS teams hover around their trucks, watching Tish Kiddle hover around her hairspray can. “And?”
    He yawned like a hippopotamus in a Disney cartoon. “And not much, Maddy. No weapon. No suspect. No motive. The investigation just petered out.”
    The investigation may have petered out. But I wasn’t going to let Dale peter out. “Was the type of weapon ever identified?”
    “Just that it was something heavy—and apparently blunt.”
    “Apparently blunt?”
    “No major cuts. Just a faceful of small abrasions and big ugly bruises.”
    Reporters ask questions for a living. But when they’re on the receiving end, they’re as aggravating as everybody else. “Something like a hammer or a baseball bat?” I asked.
    He yawned again. This time with his mouth shut. “From the size and shape of the bruises, the police surmised that the surface of the weapon was rather large and possibly flat.”
    I tried to think of all the large, flat things that could be used to bludgeon somebody. “Frying pan, maybe?”
    “Actually that was one of the things police looked for. A big bloody frying pan.”
    I could feel my face scrunching. “That’s right, there was blood. The old stories said it was splattered all over the walls and floor. Upstairs and down.”
    “More of a smattering than a splattering,” Dale said, enjoying his way with words. “Delarosa’s nose was smashed to smithereens. Police figured that happened upstairs, when he was first attacked.”
    “So the killer could have gotten blood on himself?”
    “Bloody clothes were on the police search list.”
    “None found?”
    “None found.”
    Dale now went on and on, quite cockily I must say, about how he’d talked the public information office at police headquarters into letting him see the Delarosa files: “I sure couldn’t tell them I was trying to link Delarosa’s murder to Gordon Sweet’s. Shit, they’d stitch a big red N for nutcase on my chest and never let me get farther than the Mr. Coffee again. So I told them the paper was thinking of doing a series on cold murder cases. Which immediately got their sperm wiggling. There’s no better PR than solving some difficult old case. Even if the media has to help. ‘Well, we’re just thinking about it,’ I said. I asked to see a sample cold case file, to see what they looked like and how we might develop a story around it. And they bit. And I suggested the Delarosa case. You should have seen me, Maddy. I was almost as devious as you.”
    While Dale proudly described his deception, I tried to recreate David’s murder in my head, matching what I already knew with what I’d just learned. It wasn’t much but it did conjure up some very nasty images:
    On the morning of Thursday, April 18, 1957, maybe just before dawn, David Delarosa, wearing nothing but socks and boxer shorts, came face-to-face with his killer in the hallway outside his off-campus apartment on Hester Street. Maybe they argued. Maybe they struggled a little. Then the killer swung something heavy at him. All I could picture was a big frying pan but almost certainly it was something else. Whatever it was, it struck him square in the face and apparently broke his nose, spritzing blood on the wall and the floor. Maybe the killer just struck him once upstairs, maybe it was a few more times or several more times, but clearly one blow sent David backward over the stairwell railing. He tumbled twelve feet to the marble floor in the lobby. You’d think the killer would flee at that point, wouldn’t you? But he didn’t. Either he knew the apartment building was empty or he was too enraged to care. He kneeled over David. He struck him again and again. “I guess it doesn’t matter,” I asked Dale, “but did David die from the battering or the fall?”
    I could tell from Dale’s smile that he liked my question. It was the kind of question a good reporter would know to ask, I guess. “Actually, the coroner