Ecstasy

by Beth Saulnier

  Thus jazzed up, I plopped myself on the porch swing with my faithful canine at my feet and tried to figure out just what the hell I was going to do. In an effort to be organized—not something that comes naturally—I decided to make a list entitled Things to Figure Out in No Particular Order.

  It was depressingly long, but here it is:

  Who put the coke in my car? Why? How? When? Where did they get it?

  Why did that jerk testify against me?

  Who broke into my house?

  Who killed Axel? Why?

  Who made the poisoned LSD?

  Were Shaun, Billy & Tom really killed on purpose? (Duh.) Who did it?

  WHY???

  Is whoever had me framed the same person who killed the guys?

  What does Dorrie know?

  Does Lauren know anything she hasn’t told me? Trish? Cindy? Alan?

  What’s up with Mohawk Associates?

  Did Deep Lake really spend $50K to shut up the opposition?

  When is Gordon breaking his stupid story?

  Am I going to jail?

  I crossed out that last one because I didn’t want to think about it.

  I stared at the list for a while, trying to figure out where to start. It made sense to begin with the easiest question and go from there; unfortunately, all of them seemed pretty hard. So I read over the list again and again—and every time I did, my eyeballs stuck on number nine.

  What does Dorrie know?

  All of my snoopy reporter’s instincts were telling me that she was hiding something; I couldn’t believe that she’d smacked me across the face purely out of moral indignation. No, I definitely got the feeling that she was agitated about something. But how could I get her to tell me what it was?

  Blackmail her, came the answer from the devilish corner of my psyche. Prove that she’s the one who got the Deep Lake Cooling key for Robinette, and threaten to tell on her unless she comes clean.

  That much decided, I went back to the top of the list. Finding out who’d framed me was, obviously, the most pressing issue of all; solving the Melting Rock case wouldn’t do me much good if I wound up playing the lead in a chicks-in-prison movie. And in terms of solving question number one, question number two seemed key.

  On one hand, it could be that Sturdivant had fingered me just because my arrest had been in the news. But then again, maybe there was something more nefarious going on; maybe whoever had put the drugs in my car had put him up to it, just to make sure I was well and truly screwed.

  Considering the situation I was in, my money (and, come to think of it, my entire future) was riding on the second version.

  Believe it or not, that struck me as good news. If Sturdivant had really been told to railroad me, that meant he was a link to whoever had ordered it—as far as I could see, the only link. If I could get him to talk, then maybe I could find out who’d gotten me into this mess. But how?

  For a while I sat there imagining how great it would be if Cody beat the guy senseless until he confessed. Sadly, such an event did not seem likely to occur in the real world.

  I was distracted from this happy fantasy by the ringing phone. It turned out to be Gordon.

  “Hey, Alex, how are you doing?”

  “Astonishingly shitty. How the hell do you think?”

  “Do you want to get together for lunch today? I’m buying.”

  Now, if Gordon Band were a normal human being I might have assumed that he was trying to be nice. As it was, however, the idea never even occurred to me.

  “Gordon,” I said, “if you think I’m going to give you anything on the record about my miserable predicament, you’re out of your nasty little mind.”

  “But—”

  “Listen very carefully. My only comment to you is ‘No comment.’ ”

  “Comment? Who said anything about comment?”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “Can’t a friend take a friend out for lunch?”

  “And why would you want to do that exactly?”

  “I’m worried about you.”

  “Huh.”

  “Hey, what’s your problem? Are you that pissed about the story?”

  “What story?”

  “The one in today’s Times.”

  Shit. “Please don’t tell me it has anything to do with goddamn Deep Lake Cooling.”

  “So you saw it, huh?” To be fair, Gordon did seem to be making some little attempt not to gloat. Unfortunately, he was failing big time. “I just live for this kind of—”

  “Jesus …all right, you win.” I scratched number thirteen off the list so hard my pencil broke. “Go ahead, rub it in. How the hell did you get onto it?”

  “Wasn’t that hard. That town of yours is such a bunch of freaks, it was obvious there was something up when I heard only a handful of people showed up to protest the Deep Lake opening. So I did a little digging, and I finally got a source to tell me the university was doling out fake consulting fees to keep people quiet.”

  “Somebody who was in on it?”

  “Nah. Somebody kind of on the sidelines. I guess some documents went missing from someplace—source wouldn’t give me the details—and the people behind Mohawk Associates just immediately went apeshit that they were gonna get caught. She’d had her suspicions before, but that’s when she figured out what was up and tipped me off, so I zipped on over to the library and found the company in the Deep Lake papers. Broke the story this morning, and from what I hear, Shardik’s gonna be clearing out his desk by noon.”

  “So who’s this source?”

  “Like I’m gonna tell you.”

  “At least tell me how you got the source to talk.”

  “No way.”

  “Come on, Gordon. Dazzle me.”

  “Okay, but…I’m only telling you because it’s a riot.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Source called me because she had a vision.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. You know how I drive a, er …a Volkswagen Vanagon, right?”

  “Sure. Sometimes you sleep in it.”

  “Shut up. Anyway, apparently this person was looking for guidance about who to tell about the Deep Lake racket, and a voice spoke to her. Wanna know what it said? It said, ‘Tell the man in the van, man. Tell the man in the van.’ Can you believe that shit?”

  “Oh, my God,” I said. “It was Guinevere.”

  “Son of a…How did you—”

  “Small town. So, did you ever figure out who was in charge of Mohawk Associates? Like, who was running the operation?”

  “Uh…no. But I will eventually, you can bet your—”

  “Good-bye, Gordon.”

  “Hey, wait a second. If you haven’t actually seen the story yet, how’d you even know about all this stuff?”

  I hung up on him; it was rude, but satisfying. The phone immediately started ringing again, but I ignored it and got back to the porch just in time to see the Monitor deliveryman pitching the paper onto the neighbor’s lawn. Since the guy had already left for work, I decided to temporarily snag it.

  Now, I knew that reading the paper was probably going to upset me even further; being reminded of my suspension from the news-room was like a punch in the gut. But I didn’t anticipate how upset—or that the reason for it would be the banner headline stripped across the top of page one: JASPERSBURG TEEN INJURED IN HIT AND RUN.

  The subhead said CHAMPION ATHLETE IN CRITICAL CONDITION. The main photo was of an ambulance parked by the side of a rural road. And the name of the victim was Alan Bauer.

  ACCORDING TO THE STORY—byline, Cal Ochoa—Bauer had been out on his nightly five-mile run when he’d been struck. If some Good Samaritan hadn’t happened along the country road just minutes afterward, the kid would already be dead. As it was, he was barely hanging on.

  The car, which had been stolen from a Jaspersburg body shop the night before, had been found abandoned a mile away. “Alcohol,” Ochoa wrote, “is suspected t
o be a contributing factor.”

  But what the story didn’t say—what I’d have to find out directly from the reporter’s mouth—was that the ’94 Trans Am had been covered in Bauer’s blood and stinking of whiskey. They even knew what kind of whiskey; a nearly empty bottle of Jim Beam had been found on the floor of the passenger’s seat.

  The Jaspersburg cops were calling it a hit and run.

  They were calling it a joyride gone awry.

  They were calling it another drunk-driving tragedy.

  I was calling it attempted murder.

  I mean, what were the odds? All along I’d been suspecting that Bauer was meant to be the fourth victim, and now he was next door to dead. How could this so-called “accident” be anything but yet another setup?

  I posed this very question to Ochoa when I met him for lunch on the Green a couple of hours later. And yes, I did get a few snarky comments from strangers—but I thought, to hell with it. I was damned if I was going to spend any more time holed up in a cave like I was actually guilty of something.

  So I waltzed into the Center Gabriel food court and ordered myself a falafel pita, only to be told my “drug money” wasn’t welcome there. Then I went over to the Thai take-out stand, whose owners apparently don’t keep up on the news.

  “You know, Bernier,” Ochoa said once we got outside, “everybody in the newsroom knows you didn’t do that shit.”

  “Yeah, well, tell that to King David.” I tried a forkful of my pad Thai, which improved my mood. “So, okay,” I said, “what’s going on?”

  “First off,” Ochoa said, “I got an update on Bauer’s condition just now, and it doesn’t look good.”

  “You think he’s not going to make it?”

  “The odds are pretty lousy. And even if he does… the poor kid got really fucked up. One of his legs was so badly crushed they may have to amputate it.”

  Suddenly, my food didn’t look so appealing. “Holy shit. That’s… Jesus Christ. But how…if somebody just ran into him…”

  Ochoa shook his head, mouth set tight. “Whoever did it didn’t just hit him. According to his injuries and the tire tracks at the scene, after he got knocked down, the driver backed up and ran over him again.”

  “How come that wasn’t in your story?”

  “Give me a break, Alex. I just got the info this morning.”

  “And does all that, you know, convince the cops that there’s more to this than just your regular drunk-driving accident?”

  “Not necessarily. I mean, in a normal situation, why would anybody think that?”

  “So then what are—”

  “Conventional wisdom seems to be that after Bauer got hit, the driver pulled over; but since he was so loaded, he backed up to see what the hell happened and ran the kid down. Then he panicked, took off, and ditched the car.”

  “God, I just knew I should’ve warned him.”

  “What?”

  “Ever since we were talking about how he was probably the target for the fourth pill, I’ve been trying to get in touch with him, to tell him to be careful. But he wouldn’t return my calls, and now…I kind of feel responsible.”

  “Jesus, Alex. You didn’t run him over with the damn car.”

  “Yeah, but maybe if I’d said something…”

  Ochoa reached over and gave my shoulder a little shake. “Come on, chica, don’t go there. First off, it’s not your fault. And second, Alan Bauer’s no baby. He’s a jock with twice your body weight, and from what you said, he’s not stupid. If he and his friends really did something to piss someone off, and then three of them get dead, don’t you think the guy’s gonna be way on his guard in the first place?”

  “I guess.”

  “Believe it.”

  “So what’s next? In the investigation, I mean.”

  “Chief Stilwell’s holding a press conference this afternoon.”

  “Oh. Thrilling.”

  “Yeah, well, I gotta go anyway. Five bucks says all he’s gonna do is make an appeal for information—‘Please come forward, it’ll be easier on you that way,’ the usual.”

  “Poor guy.”

  “Stilwell?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s a cop,” Ochoa said. “They live for this stuff.”

  “No, they don’t,” I said. “Trust me. And Bauer …he’s another one of Stilwell’s daughter’s friends. Not a particularly close one, I don’t think, but how much trauma can the poor kid take?”

  “I could say the same thing about you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Come on, Alex. You’ve been through the wringer yourself these past couple of weeks.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s nothing compared to what’s happened to some other people. Melissa, for one.”

  “I know, but I’m just…I’m kind of worried about you, okay?”

  “Um…okay.”

  “Look, I know we haven’t always been best buddies, but you don’t deserve this crap. So anything you need me to do, I’m going to do, comprendes? I know there’s only so much Cody can stick his nose into without getting up shit’s creek, but me …I’m not bogged down with a lot of scruples, okay? I’ll do whatever needs to be done.”

  “And then you’ll write about it, and eventually you’ll get a job at a much better paper than this one.”

  He flashed his very white teeth. “You say that,” he said, “like it’s a bad thing.”

  CHAPTER28

  As it turned out, Ochoa’s lack of scruples began to pay off almost immediately.

  He started by going to every bank in town trying to deposit a money order he’d had made out to Mohawk Associates. Most places told him that they couldn’t help him without an account number and showed him the door. But at (of all places) the Ethical Vanguard Credit Union, the teller apparently gazed deeply into his big brown eyes and said she wished she could help him, but she wasn’t allowed to give out any information about an account holder.

  One memorable evening later—I asked Ochoa to spare me the details—she’d changed her tune. Not only did we have confirmation that the bank did indeed have such an account, we had a printout of all the deposits made and checks written since it had been established three years ago.

  The bottom line was that there was a lot of activity three years earlier, when the consulting fee from Deep Lake was deposited—and was almost immediately disbursed in varying amounts of cash. Then a full year went by with no action on the account, until cash deposits started to come in, all of them under the federal reporting threshold of ten thousand bucks. The figures seemed familiar, and sure enough when Ochoa and I compared them to the copy we’d made of the lists from the Melting Rock office, they matched up. All the entries that had M.A. next to them corresponded to checks made out for the same amount, while those without the two letters matched with cash withdrawals.

  But here was the weird thing: The other list, the one that had Axel’s and Sturdivant’s initials on it, didn’t jibe with checks or withdrawals; they corresponded with deposits.

  “Son of a gun,” Ochoa was saying. “Does this mean that Axel wasn’t getting payoffs, he was actually making payments?”

  “That’s what it looks like,” I said. “But what the hell for?”

  “Think about it. He and Sturdivant are both on the list. What else do they have in common?”

  “They were both drug dealers.”

  “Exactly. So I’m thinking…”

  “Wait. I get it. Not only is the account laundering some of the excess cash that the festival isn’t reporting, it’s also collecting protection money, right?”

  “Smart girl.”

  “The drug dealers pay up, and the town fathers make sure they get to do business without the cops breathing down their necks. Everybody’s happy—the dealers, the customers, the people who run Melting Rock. The town makes its nut, and folks like Mrs. Hamill rake in the bucks personally too.”

  “Nice little racket,” Ochoa said, “until you get caught.”

/>   “So maybe the four kids—Tom and Billy and Shaun and Alan—they found out about it somehow. Maybe they tried to make a little money off it, or just tried to get themselves some free dope or something, and…”

  “And to keep their little money-making operation going, somebody killed them.”

  “But wait a minute. I think I understand all the financial ins and outs, but how do we get from Deep Lake to Melting Rock?”

  “Good question,” he said. “And I think maybe I have an answer.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Okay, look at it this way. Three years ago, the powers that be at Deep Lake help set up this shell corporation so they can pay the protesters to leave them alone. Now, obviously, this is a pretty small town, and a lot of those hippie types overlap. The payments get made, but the account is still sitting there. So when the Melting Rock guys need to wash their cash, why bother to start from scratch? Why not just use Mohawk Associates? It worked for them once, why not try it again?”

  “I guess that makes sense, but… what the hell do we do now?”

  “We break the story.”

  “How can we? We still don’t have—”

  “We don’t have a lot of choice.”

  “Why not?”

  “Something else Chrissy told me.”

  “Who the hell is Chrissy?”

  “The bank teller. She called me up this morning all upset. Apparently, she found out that the cops had also asked for a copy of the same account information.”

  “Which means they’ve got evidence of the payoffs, so…”

  “They’re probably going to make an arrest any second. If we want to break the story, it’s now or never. Did your buddy Cody really not mention this?”

  “Hey, don’t look at me like that, okay? God knows I haven’t been holding out on you or anything. It’s just…ever since I got busted, Cody and I have been kind of out of touch.”