Prologue
Stamford, Connecticut, 1960
Two teenaged detective wannabees trekked down Strawberry Hill Avenue after school at Stamford High, struggling with an unusual problem. Their normal daily conversations centered around two words beginning with B—Baseball and Babes—but today’s subject focused on another B—a Body, an actual dead body.
“No way!” exclaimed fifteen-year-old Jon Grunwald to his best friend, Ben Vaughn. “A dead body? He’s gotta be bullshitting us.”
“I believe him,” countered Ben. “Frankie was practically crying when he told me. He made me swear not to tell anyone, and I could see he was super-scared. I could only tell you because we’re partners. Besides, I don’t think he wants to keep it a complete secret. He just doesn’t want to have anything to do with it.”
Ben’s friend Frankie Ballo had been looking for a path to the Mill River to go fishing with his buddy Luke. They had cut through the wooded area behind Scalzi Park and pushed through high weeds and grasses until they smelled something putrid. Thinking it might be a dead animal, they came closer, almost choking on the smell, and saw a dead man.
“We knew he was dead,” an agitated Frankie explained. “He was covered with bugs and things.“If you want to look yourself, the area is across from an old house with red siding on the other side of the river.”
“Whoa! No way do I want to see that,” Ben said to Jon. “But I’d bet that the story is true.”
“Yeah, maybe he told you because he knows we’re interested in crime stories,” Jon speculated. “Or maybe he figures we’ll know what to do, but to keep him out of it.”
“Well, we’ve got to tell the cops,” insisted Ben. “But if we call the police station, they’ll ask our names, and if we lie about our names, we might get in trouble if they ever find out that we were the ones who called.
“But we can tell them another way, almost as fast. I got an envelope and a four-cent stamp from my mom’s counter this morning. Let’s write a note to the police chief, and mail it directly from the post office. He’ll get it by tomorrow morning. Then we’ll see if anything happens.”
The boys quickened their pace, walking downtown to the Ferguson Library at the corner of Broad and Bedford streets.
The library had a reading room with circular tables that seated five or six kids, making it a good place to hang out and to swap homework assignments. For Jon and Ben, it was a place to work together on their secret detective projects, ensuring that their hometown was safe from murderers, marauders, and Russian spies.
The first test was writing a note that the police chief would take seriously. Jon had better handwriting, so he would write the final version. After discussing every word, they finally wrote:
To Chief of Police Joseph Kinsella
Dear Chief Kinsella,
There is a dead body lying in the wooded part of Scalzi Park, along the river area. An officer can find it at a point across the river from an old house with red siding. We do not know who the dead person is, and we don’t have any information on how he got there or why he died.
Sincerely,
Friends of the SPD
The boys addressed the envelope to the chief, using an address from the phone book and adding the word URGENT! in large, bold, underlined letters under the address.
They practically ran to the main post office on Atlantic Street, and dropped the stamped, sealed message into a mail slot labeled “Local.”
For the next two days, Jon and Ben read every headline in the Stamford Advocate, hoping to see a police story about a dead body. On day three, a story finally appeared. It was only a short, single-column piece on page five, but they were nonetheless excited.
The article was a bland statement of the facts they already knew, but included some other important bits of information:
police reported that the man had been well-dressed and did not appear to be a vagrant. He had no ID, wallet, or other personal effects, and his dental work indicated that he might have been from Eastern Europe.
To Jon and Ben, those clues indicated that the dead man was probably a Russian Communist Spy! They believed that they had been right all along. There were spies working against America, right in Stamford. That realization might have ended their involvement, but the incident haunted both of them for years, until they learned the rest of the story.
