Suddenly both men heard someone approaching and they watched as a kind-looking middle-aged man entered the room. He was conservatively dressed and reached out to take Dan’s hand.
“Hello, Pastor.” Dan’s chin began to quiver. “You hear what happened?”
As soon as he had arrived at the hospital, Dan had asked the emergency room nurse to call the Reverend Wil Strong. Now, less than an hour later, the pastor had come to offer whatever support he could give.
“Dan, we’re praying for you both. How is she?”
Dan shook his head and again began breathing very fast. “She’s been shot pretty bad.”
Pastor Strong turned to Sorkness. “Have you heard anything, sir?” he asked politely.
Sorkness shook his head. “Not yet. I’m sure they’re doing all they can for her.”
For a moment an uncomfortable silence filled the room and the three men each seemed lost in his own thoughts. The nurses had long since stabilized Dan and left him alone with the officer. X rays had determined he would need emergency surgery to remove a bullet lodged near his intestines. While the surgical team prepared for the operation the two men had been able to talk without interruption. Now, with the pastor in the room and the questioning finished, there seemed to be nothing to say.
At 12:33 in the morning, ninety minutes after Dan’s call to the 911 emergency operator, a doctor walked into the room and motioned Sorkness toward him. Dan watched with interest as the two men talked in hushed tones for several seconds. When they finished, the doctor turned and left.
Sorkness cleared his throat.
“Mr. Montecalvo, I have some bad news.” He paused a moment realizing there was no tactful way to deliver the blow. “Your wife is dead. She died at the scene. There was nothing they could do—”
Sorkness was interrupted by Dan’s scream. “No! No! Not my wife! No!”
The officer hung his head for a moment, giving Dan some privacy as his screams gradually changed to gut-wrenching sobs. Pastor Strong moved closer to Dan, taking his hand and bowing his head, moving his lips in prayer. In a few seconds Dan was more hysterical than he had been back at the house. Instantly, the nurses rushed into the room and began trying to calm him. Sorkness looked up and saw that Dan was wiping his eyes and holding onto the pastor’s hand. Then, for a moment, Dan’s eyes met Sorkness’s and the officer was struck by a disturbing observation. Dan’s eyes were completely dry.
Chapter 4
Two houses north on the same side of the street as the Montecalvo home, Suzan Brown stood motionless in front of her living room window as the paramedics shut the double doors on the ambulance and pulled away. Finally, when the ambulance had disappeared and the sirens faded into the distance, she turned away from the window. Gunfire, swarms of police, paramedics, helicopters with blazing spotlights, hordes of media reporters and cameramen. Nothing like this had ever happened on South Myers Street.
Suzan looked down at herself, smoothing out the wrinkles in her faded shorts and tank top, and began walking quickly toward the front door. Her wheelchair remained folded in the corner of her messy living room.
“Where you going?” Suzan turned to see one of her short-term guests, Ron Hardy, walking toward her. Suzan looked angrily at Ron, a stern brown-haired man with a burly, unkempt appearance. He worked odd jobs and lately he had been occupying a space in her bed. For that privilege, Suzan would say he paid a small amount toward rent and indulged her in large quantities of speed. Until that evening, Suzan had had no complaints.
“Stupid jerk, Ron!” Suzan bellowed at him, not intimidated in any way by his approach. “This is all your fault!”
Ron said nothing, only shrugged his shoulders and turned back toward the kitchen.
“Did you hear me, you stupid jerk?”
“Shut up, woman,” Ron shouted as he walked to the sink and washed his hands. Suzan thought it must have been the eighth time he’d washed his hands in the past thirty minutes. To her they still looked bloodstained.
Suzan glared at him a moment longer before turning her attention again to the scene down the street. More members of the media were arriving now. She could no longer stand to stay on the sidelines.
With no sign of whatever physical handicap usually confined her to a wheelchair, Suzan walked down the sidewalk to the Montecalvo house. For the next hour she made herself available to every television and newspaper reporter at the scene.
Later, three newscasts and one newspaper would carry interviews or statements from Suzan Brown. The Burbank Leader ran a story about Carol’s murder with comments from her. “I was already planning to move, but I’m calling my realtor tomorrow morning. I want to get out of here right now,” Suzan told the paper. “You bet I’m scared. We usually leave our garage door open, but after all the excitement I made sure it was closed.”
It was only later that detectives would learn from Suzan’s friends that she’d never had any intention of leaving South Myers Street before Carol Montecalvo was murdered.
Sometime around one o’clock that morning when much of the commotion that had surrounded the Montecalvo house for two hours had died down, Suzan returned home. By then, nearly everyone in the neighborhood knew what had happened. Burglars had broken into the Montecalvo home, thinking the couple was gone for the night. But they had only been walking around the block. When they returned to the house, Carol walked in first and surprised them. The burglars had made her pay for the mistake with her life. Dan had been luckier. He had been shot in the waist, but he was going to live.
Back inside her home again Suzan found Ron sitting at the kitchen table. She joined him for a cup of coffee while she filled him in on everything the reporters had told her. She was no longer angry with him, and could not decide whether she was afraid or excited about what had happened.
“How do you feel?” She looked at Ron.
“Look. Stop with the questions.” Ron stood up and slammed his coffee cup down on the scratched surface of the table. “Drop it.”
Ron walked into the den and flopped onto the worn sofa. Within minutes, he was snoring. An hour later, when Suzan could no longer stand to think about the events of the evening, she walked back to their bedroom and tried to fall asleep. Instead, she lay awake, wide-eyed, the effects of adrenaline and caffeine causing her entire body to tremble and her mind to rush.
As she lay in bed during those early-morning hours after Carol Montecalvo’s murder, Suzan began to patch together bits and pieces about the evening that she hadn’t remembered at first. New details began to fill in around those that had already been there and she slowly decided that she and Ron had been at home when they heard the three shots ring out. Not at the Montecalvo home as she’d first thought.
In fact, she told herself, what had really happened was that she had heard someone running alongside her house shortly after hearing the sound of gunfire. She thought about this for some time and slowly another bit of description began to emerge. After hearing the footsteps alongside the house, she was almost certain she had heard the woodpile come crashing down. Yes, she was sure about it. First there had been gunfire, then about a minute later there had been the sound of someone running beside the house and a few seconds after that the woodpile had come crashing down. The problem was, she could no longer distinguish whether this new information came from the cobwebbed corners of her memory or from the boundless recesses of her imagination.
When she woke the next morning, Suzan lay perfectly still for several minutes. In her mind, she replayed the sound of someone running through her yard and then knocking down her woodpile. At that instant, she became convinced that the sounds had been real and not part of some unusual dream.
But before she gave the matter further thought, Suzan found herself thinking about breakfast. It was not until late that evening, after she’d spent several hours adding to her collection of lampshades, that she again began thinking about the murder and the strange noises she had heard. By the
n, she had long since forgotten about the bloodstains she was convinced she had seen on Ron Hardy’s hands.
At the same time that evening, Burbank police officers Mike Gough and Ronald Cervenka were parking their car along South Myers Street. They had waited until after 9 o’clock—nearly twenty-four hours after the murder—to begin door-to-door interviews with neighbors.
From inside her home, Suzan Brown watched the plainclothes officers begin their rounds. She quickly turned from the window, grabbed a flashlight, and walked into her backyard toward the woodpile.
Sure enough. The pile had collapsed and small logs lay scattered on the ground. Suzan shone her flashlight around the area and she saw a tennis-shoe print. It was a deep indentation adjacent to the woodpile in the dirt space between the pile and the cement wall closest to the Montecalvo house.
She bent over to get a better look at the footprint. Must be Reebok, Suzan thought, looking at the multisided design on the heel. Suzan often wore Reeboks and knew the design well, and she quickly deduced that whoever had been in her backyard must have been wearing Reeboks.
Suddenly Suzan knew she had to tell the officers about her discovery. She unlocked the gate that led to her front yard and went out in search of the police.
Gough and Cervenka had already spoken with neighbors at two houses and were walking back to their car to compare notes when they saw a heavyset woman bounding down her driveway in their direction. She was dressed in rumpled-looking shorts and a tank top. The sun had set hours earlier and by then a cool wind had begun to blow through the streets of Burbank. Silently both men wondered why the woman wasn’t dressed more warmly.
“Hey, wait a minute,” she yelled as she got closer to them. “You policemen?”
Cervenka stepped forward and waited until the woman stopped just a few feet from them. She was out of breath and as she gulped in huge amounts of air both officers noticed tattoos on her shoulders.
“Yes, we’re talking to neighbors about Mrs. Montecalvo’s murder,” Cervenka said politely. “Trying to find out whatever we can.”
Suzan Brown nodded excitedly. “I’ve got something for you,” she said, turning back toward her house and motioning for the officers to follow her.
Gough and Cervenka glanced at each other and shrugged. Cervenka led the way as they followed Suzan Brown into her backyard. She picked up a flashlight and shone it on what appeared to be a partially collapsed woodpile.
“See, I heard something last night, you know. Something like a loud backfire sound, only come to find out it’s gunshots.” Suzan was talking quickly and the officers struggled to understand her. Cervenka lifted his hand to slow her down.
“We’d like to take a report of whatever you heard, ma’am, but first we need your name.”
“I’m Suzan Brown, that’s Suzan with a z not an s. S-u-z-a-n,” she said, shifting her weight back and forth from one leg to the other. “Lived here about ten years, off and on.”
Cervenka wrote the information in his notebook and exchanged a glance with his partner. Neighbors had warned them about a crazy woman named Suzan.
“Okay, now what did you hear last night?”
“Well, it’s like I said. Sounded like a backfire, but come to find out it was bullets, you know? Two shots real quick and then a third one.” Cervenka began scribbling down notes while Gough glanced around the backyard. The woman had not yet said anything helpful.
“So, that’s when I remembered there was sort of like a sound of wood falling down right after the shots. Then I could swear there was a sound like someone was running away, maybe even right in my own backyard.”
With this statement, Suzan captured the officers’ attention.
“After you heard someone running through your yard, did you check for intruders?” Cervenka asked.
Suzan shook her head. “No. I forgot about it, actually. You know, what with the excitement and all over at the Montecalvo house. Too much going on. But then I came out here tonight to see my dogs and I find this.” She turned on the flashlight she’d been holding and aimed it toward the fallen woodpile.
“Not just the woodpile, but then there’s this Reebok footprint, too.” Suzan pointed the light toward a strip of soft dirt adjacent to a brick wall.
Cervenka knelt down and carefully checked the footprint. After a few seconds he stood up and cast a puzzled expression toward the woman. “How do you know it’s a Reebok?”
“All I ever wear,” she answered, noticing as she spoke that she did not have tennis shoes on. “Well, you know what I mean,” she said, chuckling softly. “I only wear Reebok tennis shoes. Whenever I wear them kind. Of course, back in Vietnam they didn’t have Reeboks, so I didn’t wear them back in Vietnam. In fact, this kind of reminded me of Vietnam and the time I was . . .”
Cervenka nodded solemnly as Suzan launched into a meandering story and motioned to Gough, who interrupted her. “Thank you very much for the information, Ms. Brown.” They’d had enough of this strange woman and her story. By then they were convinced that she was indeed the crazy woman neighbors had warned them about. She seemed harmless enough, but they made a note to keep an eye on her.
“I’d advise you to stay away from the footprint for a few days in case we send someone over to make a plaster cast impression of it. Might be important for evidence.”
That evening Suzan never mentioned that she might know who killed Carol. Neither did she mention that she and her friends were heavy drug users who had been partying the night before and had run out of money an hour before the murder. And she said nothing about one of her guests and how many times she believed she had seen him wash his hands the night before.
As the officers left her yard that night, Suzan Brown was certain they would be back to make a plaster impression of the footprint. Just like she was certain she had heard someone running through her yard.
Because of that, Suzan was very surprised when the Burbank police did not return the next day with a bucket of ready-to-pour plaster. In fact, not until the trial did anyone ever speak to her again about her conversation with police officers that night. And no one ever made a plaster impression of the footprint.
As the days of the murder investigation wore on, the forgotten footprint grew more and more difficult to see until finally the image disappeared completely from the soft brown dirt in the backyard of Suzan Brown’s home.
Chapter 5
In some ways, the events and circumstances that crossed Carol Tronconi’s path with that of Dan Montecalvo were neither surprising nor unforeseen. Although Carmelo and Maria Tronconi’s daughter was highly educated, she was desperately naive in her dealings with men. Worse, Carol was interested only in men who represented a challenge, whose problems might be solved only with her help.
Nevertheless, neither Carol’s parents nor her brother and sister ever thought she would marry a man like Dan Montecalvo—a man who had never held a steady job, never been able to stay clear of trouble, and never mastered the art of commitment. A man who was everything her father was not.
Carol’s father, Carmelo Tronconi, met his petite, dark-haired bride during the Great Depression when they were both in their late twenties. Carmelo, or Mel as his friends called him, had grown up the youngest in an Italian farming family that made its living off an adequate piece of land in Buffalo, New York. The Depression was especially hard on farmers who lived in Mel’s neighborhood. Long after his older siblings had left the farm, Mel stayed on, helping his parents with the chores.
He was a handsome young man with a nearly six-foot-tall strapping frame that was perfect for the hard physical work of farming. Years earlier, Mel had dreamed of having a farm of his own one day. But by the time he and Maria married in 1939, the Depression had made the dream impossible. His parents had been forced to sell their farm and Mel had no money to buy land of his own.
Because he had been farming while his friends attended school, Mel suddenly found himself job hunting without th
e assistance of even a high school diploma. Maria, meanwhile, had earned her college teaching degree while she was still single. But like other educated women in the 1930s, she gave up any thought of a career the moment she became Mel’s wife. Throughout the 1930s, Mel struggled to provide for them by working long hours as a machinist and a floor sander. For a few years he and his brother even tried to get their own hardware business off the ground, until they succumbed to the pressures of the fickle economy. Time and again Mel found himself frustrated in his job search by his lack of education.
His persistence finally paid off in 1940 when he was hired by their local telephone company as a maintenance worker. The job carried union benefits and a high-paying salary. Long after he’d found the job, Mel refused to forget how many he had missed out on because he wasn’t an educated man. He promised himself that his children would have every opportunity to attend college, regardless of the sacrifices he might need to make.
“Doesn’t matter if I have to work round the clock, Maria,” Mel would say, determination ringing sharply in his voice. “Someday our kids are going to be college graduates.”
Maria would smile sweetly. So far they had no children and she thought it a bit premature to be thinking of college educations. But if Maria ever thought her husband was a bit extreme in his fierce resolution, she never said so. She was a docile wife, easily allowing Mel to be ruler of the household.
Early in their marriage, the Tronconi family lived in a working-class neighborhood on the ethnic Italian west side of Buffalo, where in 1941 they were blessed with a daughter, Roseanna. Mel was not happy bringing his tiny baby girl home to a neighborhood of working-class people. He believed his children deserved better than that.
During the next several years he often worked overtime, scrimping and saving enough money so that in 1945, shortly after the birth of their second daughter, Carol, the family could finally afford to move. By then, Mel’s salary with the telephone company was better than many professionals made and Mel saw to it that their new home was situated in an upper-class area where their neighbors were doctors and lawyers and corporate executives. Mel had already convinced his family that they were a class above the people in their previous neighborhood, so the Tronconis had no trouble adjusting to their new setting.