Dig (7 page)

Ike’s is located in the Longacre Building, one of the many empty office buildings in Hannawa’s dying downtown. It used to house some of the city’s most successful doctors and lawyers. Now it just houses Ike.

“Morgue Mama!” Ike sang out when we walked in. “Mr. Marabout!”

Ike is the nicest man. He’s about my age. He taught high school math for 30 years before opening his coffee shop. He makes me laugh when there’s nothing to laugh at. He drives me home when my car won’t start. He maintains his high opinion of me no matter how cranky I get. He’s earned the right to call me Morgue Mama to my face.

I should also explain that Ike’s name isn’t really Ike. It’s Leonard, Leonard Breeze. He says he got the nickname because he was the only black man anybody knew who voted for Dwight Eisenhower.

Dale and I took a table by the window. We didn’t have to order. Ike knew I’d want a mug of Darjeeling tea and Dale a regular coffee with room for a little half-and-half. He got busy pouring them.

“So what’s this you’ve stumbled on?” Dale asked me, drumming his fingers on the table. “And more importantly, on a scale of one to ten how much agony is it going to cause me?”

I hate drumming fingers. I stopped them. “No more than a six,” I said. “I just want you to do a little checking.” I told him about my trip to the landfill that morning with Andrew, about David Delarosa’s murder all those years ago.

Dale connected the dots. “So you think maybe Gordon was looking for the murder weapon out there? That’s a real stretch, don’t you think?”

“I won’t know if it is or isn’t until you look into the status of the Delarosa case.”

“It’s been a billion years, Maddy. I’d say the status is that there isn’t a status.”

“I know the case is cold. But I thought maybe you could see if there’s something in the police files that didn’t make it into our stories. Was the murder weapon ever identified or found? Was Shaka Bop the only suspect ever questioned?”

I’d told Dale something he didn’t know. “
The
Shaka Bop?”

Ike appeared out of nowhere with our drinks. “How many Shaka Bops do you think there are in Hannawa?”

Ike grinned at Dale. Dale grinned back at Ike. But they were not easy grins. Ike knew all about my history with Dale. And Dale knew that Ike knew. It was nice to have two men go grin-to-grin over me like that, but it sure wasn’t going to help me get to the bottom of Gordon’s murder. “Thanks, Ike,” I said. “You’re a lamb.”

Ike retreated behind the counter and watched us over the top of his espresso machine while he pretended to work.

“I’m sure I’m just tilting at windmills,” I whispered to Dale, “but Gordon was pretty thick with David Delarosa and I remember how hard he took his murder.”

Dale tipped his head and squinted, the way dogs do when they’re trying to decipher the confusing sounds coming from the flat faces of their masters. “Are you saying Gordon was gay?”

“Good gravy, does everything have to be about sex?”

The second I said it I wished I hadn’t. Sex was not a good topic for Dale and me. We were just friends now. He’d been married to Sharon for twenty years and I’d long ago lost what little physical appeal Mother Nature rationed out to me. But once upon a time Dale Marabout and I had been a couple of real bunny rabbits with each other, I’ll tell you. So the S-word, in any context, always dredged up a lot of awkward feelings better left in the murky past.

And having those feelings dredged up in front of Ike made matters all the worse. Unfortunately, there was something more than friendship between Ike and me, too. Not that we’d ever acted on those feelings, of course. Good gravy! We were both closing in on seventy. He was black. I was white. He was a Republican and I’d once held a coffee klatch for George McGovern. No way were we going to mess up a wonderful friendship with foolishness. I started over. “Gordon’s sex life is neither here or there. All that’s important is why he was murdered.”

Dale finished his coffee in a few great gulps. He was as anxious to leave as I was. “Okay, Maddy, I’ll see what I can find. But this is not going to be Buddy Wing II.”

“Absolutely not,” I said. “This is the last thing I’m going to ask you to do.”

We said good-bye to Ike and headed out into the evening. The rush hour was over. The streets were all but empty. It was even colder and windier than before. We climbed the hill to
The Herald-Union
. We said “See you tomorrow” in the parking deck, got into our respective cars and drove off to our respective houses.

***

I ran straight to Gordon’s apartment that April afternoon in 1957 when Effie called to tell me that David Delarosa’s body had been found. Literally ran, through a shower of cold rain that stung like BBs. Effie was already there, making Gordon the only thing she knew how to make—canned soup. Gordon was sitting in the ratty, overstuffed chair he’d rescued from the dump. He was sucking on a beer and staring at the wall.

I don’t remembering Gordon saying anything that night. Or eating his soup. I just remember Effie and me opening beer bottles for him.

Gordon drank for two more days and then on Easter morning took the bus to Sandusky for David’s funeral. We all offered to go with him, but Gordon wanted to go alone. “Wowzers,” Chick said in his best beatnikese as the Greyhound pulled out, “have you ever seen anything more appropriately beat in your life? Sweet Gordon bouncing along in a half-empty bus past soggy fields of broken corn, on a day when everybody else is celebrating life everlasting?”

I guess the reason I couldn’t believe that Gordon was gay now was that it had never occurred to me then. Homosexuality wasn’t something people talked about much in the fifties, not even us bohemian types, but we did know what it was, and surely we recognized it when we saw it.

Gordon returned from Sandusky just as depressed as when he left. He didn’t say boo about David Delarosa until that morning at Mopey’s when we saw the story about Sidney being questioned by police. His sadness mushroomed into anger. And little by little that anger seemed to heal him.

***

When I got home I turned on
Jeopardy
and fell asleep during the first round. When I woke up Barbara Walters was interviewing the parents of sextuplets on
20/20
. I ate a bowl of grapes, paid some bills, and went to bed. I turned on my radio and waited for Art Bell to come on. While he interviewed a Wyoming man who’d been abducted nine times by time-traveling aliens, I thought about the men in my life who weren’t in my life. I thought about my father, who’d died when I was eleven. I thought about my dead, philandering ex-husband Lawrence. I thought about Dale Marabout. I thought about Ike. And I thought about Sweet Gordon.

Chapter 7

Wednesday, March 21

Eric appeared at my desk the moment I sat down with my morning tea. He was waving a folder in each hand. “Wooster Pike Landfill, toxic waste.”

“Good boy,” I said.

I wanted to plant my nose in those folders the second he handed them to me. But I was a woman with responsibilities. I put the folders in the top drawer of my desk, so I wouldn’t be tempted. I got busy marking up that morning’s paper, deciding which stories should be saved and under which categories. That always takes the better part of the morning. Then I looked up the information city hall reporter Mike Hugely needed on the Elmer Avenue bridge project. After that I was trapped in a one-sided conversation with Candy Prince about her five hairless Chinese cats. I self-medicated that twenty minutes of agony with a call to my niece in LaFargeville to wish her a happy fiftieth birthday. Finally at eleven-thirty I scooted off to the cafeteria with those two tempting folders and the Tupperware container of leftover chicken teriyaki I’d brought from home.

The folder on the landfill was filled with a lot of dry government stuff that was absolutely useless. Nor had Eric’s search found any murders, missing person cases or other chicaneries in that part of the county that might require further investigation. I closed the folder. I couldn’t decide whether to be relieved or disappointed.

I concentrated on my lunch then opened the other folder. There were oodles of stories on lead paint, asbestos and polluted creeks. There was a spellbinding three-part series on how the city was breaking its own rules on the disposal of used antifreeze and motor oil. There were several stories on Mayor Finn’s failed effort to stop the federal government from trucking radioactive wastes through the city. I saved the best for last: Margaret Newman’s stories on illegal dumping by the E.O. Madrid Chemical Co.

The nut of Margaret’s stories was this: E.O. Madrid was a small company on the city’s industrial south side. It manufactured industrial solvents and adhesives.
It prospered nicely for five decades under the long hours of its founder, Edgar Oliver Madrid. When a massive stroke whisked the still-working, 82-year-old Edgar off to his eternal reward in the summer of 1987, his 47-year-old son, Donald, moved into the big office.

Donald apparently had not inherited his father’s attention span. He was much more interested in losing money on his minor league baseball team, the Hannawa Woolybears, than making money with the family business. And so in 1993, up to his shinbones in red ink, Donald decided to
out-source
the disposal of a toxic chemical called toluene. He hired an independent trucker named Kenneth Kingzette to make the toluene disappear.

And the toluene did disappear—into abandoned factory buildings, weedy ravines, old farm ponds, abandoned dumps. In 1995, when a fire broke out in an empty warehouse on Canal Street, firemen found several 55-gallon drums of toluene. The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency was called in. It did not take much of an investigation to trace the chemicals to the E.O. Madrid Chemical Co. Donald Madrid disappeared into the ether but not before fingering Kenneth Kingzette.

Kingzette’s legal strategy was to keep his lips zipped and stare menacingly at the jury. It got him four years at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. Just as I remembered, the Ohio EPA estimated that an additional eighteen drums of the toluene was still out there somewhere. So I guess you know what I was thinking. Heavens to Betsy, wouldn’t you be thinking that?

***

I know this isn’t the least bit important, but it will help you understand just how small-town the big city of Hannawa, Ohio, is. Our minor league baseball team, the Woolybears, has nothing to do with ferocious, growling bears. Here in the Midwest, Woolybears are what we call those fuzzy brown and orange-striped caterpillars you find crawling all over your chrysanthemums in the fall. They are the larvae for a moth. They’re about the width and length of a cheese doodle. We Midwesterners—with all seriousness—forecast the severity of the upcoming winter by how thick their coats are. The thicker the fuzz, the colder and snowier it’s going to be. Honest to God we do that.

So we Hannawans are not only famous for having more television evangelists per capita than any city in America—as you know, we’re known as the Hallelujah City—we also have a baseball team named after the larvae of a moth. Not a butterfly. A damn moth.

***

I wanted to talk to Margaret about her stories but I did not want Margaret to know that I was talking to her about her stories. It was dangerous enough that Dale and Eric knew I was snooping into another murder. If Margaret knew, the entire newsroom would know, and Bob Averill would finally have the ammunition he needed to force me into retirement

So a smidgen of subterfuge would be required.

I put on my coat and took the elevator to the pressroom. I borrowed the biggest screwdriver I could from the boys in maintenance and headed down the alley toward Charles Avenue.

Margaret Newman in my estimation is the best investigative reporter
The Herald-Union
has. She’s won every journalism award short of a Pulitzer. Better yet, she’s been sued for libel five times. And there’s no better proof of a reporter’s skill than having a lawsuit filed against them by some worthless weasel who’s upset that the whole world now knows that he is one.

Margaret also has what people in our business call a built-in shit detector. And she can be a bit flinty at times. Two traits I normally admire. Two traits that would make my do-si-do around the truth anything but easy.

I reached Charles Avenue and headed down the hill toward the Amtrak station and the short stretch still paved with bricks.

You see, I’d decided to take a page from Louise Lewendowski. No, I wasn’t going to seduce her with a sack of kolachkys. I’m afraid I wasn’t born with the flaky pastry gene. I was going to give Margaret a ten-pound block of baked clay.

Only one passenger train a day stops in Hannawa any more, and that’s at four-thirty in the morning. So I crossed the tracks without looking and started my search for the perfect brick.

Margaret for some unfathomable reason collects old paving bricks. She’s got hundreds of them, from all over the country. She belongs to a paving brick club—the Northern Ohio Brick Bats. She attends paving brick conventions. She spends her weekends and vacations scouring abandoned brickyards. She’s got so many of the blessed things in her garage there’s no room for her car. Dale Marabout jokes that she’s got so many of them in her bedroom there’s no room for a husband.

Most paving bricks are just smooth blocks of baked clay. But the old-time brick makers, in order to advertise their wares, used to put their name on every 100th brick. So I was shuffling up and down the empty avenue, head down, fists on the small of my back, looking for one of those, in the hope Margaret would be tickled pink to get it. In the hope she would just yak and yak and tell me everything I wanted to know about Kenneth Kingzette.

I finally found what I needed, right in the middle of the avenue—a big red brick the size of a Velveeta cheese loaf, without a crack or a chip, bearing the etched image of an Indian chief. Under that in deep block letters was printed
HANNAWA BRICK CO
.

I waited for a UPS truck to rumble by, then carefully wedged the screwdriver between the bricks and wiggled it until the treasure I wanted came loose. I pried it out, wedged it in my coat pocket, and hurried back to the paper.

I kept my eye on Margaret until she clicked off her computer and pushed herself back from her desk. I grabbed the brick and hurried over there before she could leave. “Oh, Margaret,” I said, “look what I found for you.”

Her eyes got as big as dinner plates. “A Hannawa Brick Indian Head? Maddy Sprowls, where in God’s name did you get that?”

Well, I sure wished she hadn’t brought God into it. I’d stolen the brick from a city street and now, if I wasn’t careful, I’d have to lie about it, too. I prayed that the Almighty wasn’t eavesdropping. “You know, Margaret,” I began, “I almost never go to garage sales. I just hate them. People pawing over other people’s junk. But my neighbor Jocelyn just loves them. She’s always asking me to go with her. And you know how I try to be a good neighbor. So, I saw this old brick and said to myself, ‘I wonder if Margaret has one of these?’”

She took the brick and held it like it was the baby Jesus. “Well, I do,” she said, “but I can always use another.” She told me how rare they were. How she’d seen one just like it on Charles Avenue and how tempted she’d been to dig it out. “How much did you pay for it?”

I pawed the air. “It was a steal.”

“I’ve seen them go for fifty dollars or more at auctions. Let me pay you.”

“Oh, no. It’s a gift.”

“Well, God love you,” she said.

As guilty as I felt, I’d succeeded in seducing the better side of Margaret’s nature. I let her go on and on about her brick collection until my toes were curling inside my Reeboks. “Well, you certainly live a more interesting life than me,” I finally said. “You collect bricks, you protect the environment.”

“I only write about people who protect the environment,” she said.

This time she’d said just the right thing. “But you sure help them protect it,” I said. “Like that illegal dumping stuff you did a few years back. You kept the pressure on with all those great stories. And that guy who dumped that stuff—what was his name?”

“Kenneth Kingzette.”

“That’s right. Kenneth Kingzette. He went to prison. How many years did he get, anyway?”

“Just four,” said Margaret.

“That’s all? From what I hear that stuff he dumped is pretty nasty.”

“Toluene. And nasty doesn’t begin to describe it. Even little doses can screw you up pretty good. Dizziness. Nausea. Impaired vision and speech. Exposure over a long time can permanently damage your liver and kidneys. Even your brain. Even kill you.”

“Yikes. When’s he getting out?”

“He was paroled in November.”

“Well, I hope the police are keeping an eye on him. And you, too. On Kenneth Kingzette, I mean.”

“He’s working with his son,” she said, lovingly brushing her fingers over the etched face of the Indian chief. “Some little rinky-dink moving company.”

“Not here in Hannawa, I hope.”

“Here in Hannawa.”

“And they let him do that?”

“It’s not against the law to make an honest living.”

“But aren’t some of the chemicals he dumped still missing?”

Margaret nodded. “And so is the president of the chemical company.”

“Oh, that’s right. Ronald or Donald something or other.”

“Donald Madrid.”

“Yes, Donald Madrid. I always figured Kingzette dumped him illegally, too.”

“You and a lot of other people. But there was never any evidence of a murder. I think the police figure Mr. Madrid took off for tropical climes.”

“And why would they figure that?”

“He ordered a shitload of stuff from Lands’ End a couple weeks before he disappeared—fancy set of luggage, several pairs of wrinkle-free chinos and one of those Indiana Jones hats.”

“Any money missing?”

“Not from his personal accounts, but apparently Mr. Madrid was a regular Wolfgang Puck when it came to cooking the company books.”

Margaret was watching the second hand on her wristwatch spin, a signal that I was wearing out my welcome. “Well, I’ve bothered you enough,” I said. “I just hope you’re happy with the brick.”

She told me she was tickled pink with the brick, and before I could stop her, she dug a twenty-dollar bill out of her purse and stuffed it in my hand. “It wasn’t any more than that, was it?” she asked.

I shook my head. I walked away wondering how many of the seven deadly sins I’d just committed.