Dig (Morgue Mama Mysteries)

by C. R. Corwin

  I waited for the rest of the story. But no more was coming. “That’s it? That’s the weighty question that split you asunder so un-copectically?”

  “For forty-five years.”

  “But you remained friends.”

  “The best of friends. But it was always there. A tiny sore that wouldn’t heal. Me insisting it was a cheeseburger, Gordon insisting it was a plain burger.” He shook his head. “Sometimes we really got into it. It was all so damn silly.”

  “What do you mean by into it?”

  His face turned even pinker than before. “The usual stuff grown men do. Yelling. Swearing. Making fun of the courses the other one taught.”

  “Like Garbology?”

  He laughed. “Like the Forgotten Novelists of Western Indiana.”

  I laughed even harder. “You used to teach a course on the forgotten novelists of Indiana?”

  “Western Indiana. I still do.”

  We concentrated on our salads and our sandwiches and the rain that was now rattling his rose of Sharon bushes. Then I brought up Gordon’s murder. “Did you have any sense of his being worried about something? Or afraid?”

  Chick refilled his wine goblet and tried to refill mine. I waved him off. “He was happy as a clam. Spring was coming. He had big plans for his summer dig.”

  “At the Wooster Pike landfill?”

  I thought he was going to take a bite out of his goblet. Instead he took a long, noisy sip. “That God-damned worthless dump.”

  “Worthless?”

  “I didn’t mean worthless, Maddy. That garbology project was important to him. And important academically. But he was a wee bit obsessed.”

  “Obsessed?”

  “It sounds selfish. But we used to travel together. Every July. Wonderful road trips all over the country. Wherever there were old ruins for him to crawl around on, and bookstores where I could buy the horrible, self-published novels of frustrated local writers. But the last few years, since he got permission to dig out there, he just couldn’t pull himself away.”

  For twenty minutes Chick bored my pants off with their summer road trips. Halfway through an especially mind-numbing account of their drive across western Kansas, I changed the subject and asked him about the Kerouac Thing just three days before Gordon’s body was found. “Just who was there, anyway?” I asked.

  “The usual suspects,” he said. “Me and Gordon, Effie and the Moffitt-Stumpfs. Other professors. Grad students.”

  “Shaka Bop?”

  Chick used Shaka’s real name, the name we all knew him by in the fifties, before his Black Panther days. “Sidney? No, Sidney wasn’t there. He usually is though.”

  “And Gordon was okay that night?”

  “Oh yeah. Of course he and I got into it about the cheeseburger. But we always did that.” Chick finished his second goblet of wine and poured a third. He spoke derisively of himself in the third person: “What would a Kerouac Thing be without that crazy asshole Chidsey Glass having a nervous breakdown over some lousy four-inch square of American cheese?”

  Chapter 5

  Tuesday, March 20

  That morning I did something I hadn’t done in thirty years. I called in sick. I didn’t pretend to have a sore throat or the flu. I just called the newsroom secretary and said, “Morning Suzie, this is Maddy Sprowls. I’m taking a sick day.” Suzie said “Okey-dokey” and that was that.

  Then after a nice long breakfast while I watched Regis and Kelly, I drove to Hemphill College for my appointment with Andrew J. Holloway III, Gordon’s graduate assistant, the young man who’d not only found Gordon’s body at the landfill, but also his car, fifteen miles away.

  To tell you the truth, I was more than a little surprised when Andrew agreed to take me to the landfill. He didn’t know me from Adam. And to some degree or the other he was a suspect in Gordon’s murder. I’m sure if I’d been up front about my motives, he would have treated me like one of those annoying telemarketers that call at suppertime—he would have slammed down the phone like he was dispatching a cockroach. Instead I’d gone on and on about how close Gordon and I had been in college—which was true enough—and how it would do an old lady good if I could see for myself the place that not only meant so much to his life, but also unfortunately meant something to his death. I think I even may have used that icky word closure, if you can imagine that.

  So, Andrew agreed to show me the landfill and I felt just awful about my—what’s that word Big Daddy used for it in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?—my mendacity!

  I pulled up in front of Menominee Hall, as we’d arranged the night before on the phone. I watched a skinny kid in a baggy unbuttoned pea coat trot down the granite steps toward my Dodge Shadow. His hands were planted in his pockets. His collar was pulled up around his ears. I lowered the window. He bent low so I could see his face. “Mrs. Sprowls?” he asked.

  “Andrew J. Holloway III?” I asked back.

  He got in and slammed the door so hard I thought my eardrums were going to burst. “Andrew is plenty,” he said sheepishly. He had a narrow face and a huge, V-shaped smile that featured overlapping front teeth. He also had a thick streak of blue in his hair. I’m sure it was a fashion statement but it looked more like somebody had accidentally dropped a paint brush on his head.

  I pulled away from the steps and looped back onto West Tuckman. “I don’t remember seeing you at the memorial service, Andrew.”

  “I guess I’m not very good at those kind of things,” he said.

  “They can be awkward,” I agreed.

  I drove past the Puritan Square Shopping Centre, where I can’t afford to shop, and then turned left onto Wooster Pike. We headed south through the low, rolling hills. When I first came to Hannawa, Ohio, in the early fifties, those hills were covered with cow pastures. Now they were covered with houses. “Gordon was a pretty good teacher, was he?” I asked.

  “Yeah—Professor Sweet really had it going on.”

  Andrew had called me Mrs. Sprowls and now he had called Gordon Professor Sweet. He was an awkward, insecure, well-mannered kid. I just knew I was going to get oodles of good information out of him. “Was this your first year as Gordon’s assistant?”

  “Second.”

  “You’re close to getting your master’s degree then.”

  “Just finish this semester and hand in my thesis.”

  “Then what?”

  “Start on my Ph.D.”

  “Here at Hemphill?”

  “Hemphill’s too small to have a doctoral program. I’ll have to go back to Ohio State.”

  “Back to Ohio State? You didn’t do your undergraduate work here?”

  “Wish I had.”

  We took the old iron bridge over Killbuck Creek. Gradually the housing developments gave way to open fields and thick stands of sugar maples. We were in Durkee Township now. “Quite a comedown coming to Hemphill, I guess.”

  Andrew finally showed some spunk. “Oh, no—Professor Sweet had built Hemphill’s archaeology department into one of the strongest undergraduate programs in the Midwest. I couldn’t believe he chose me.”

  “You must be a brainiac.”

  “When you’re born with a Roman numeral at the end of your name, you have lots of time to study.”

  We both giggled. I liked this goofy kid. “Then you were here for his dig at the landfill last summer?”

  “The summer before that, too.”

  “You and Gordon must have been pretty close.”

  He didn’t answer. But I could tell from the absent way he was staring out the window that he’d felt very close to Gordon indeed. I thought about my Aunt Ruby, and how much I’d idolized her, and how when she died, during my senior year in high school, I couldn’t bring myself to attend her funeral. I changed the subject before we both started crying. “I haven’t been to the Wooster Pike dump in years and years,” I said. “I’m dying to see it again.”

  Andrew knew the landfill’s history better than I did: “For decades it was tiny t
ownship dump, going back to the 1920s. The city of Hannawa bought it from the township at the end of World War II, when the city’s population was exploding. It was one of several dumps the city used back then. It served the Meriwether Square area, the college, some of the neighborhoods on the city’s far west end. It wasn’t expanded into a full-blown modern landfill until 1974, when the Environmental Protection Agency got on the city’s back. It was Hannawa’s primary landfill until 1996, when the Richland Hills facility was finally opened.”

  “Well, it was sure popular with students in the fifties,” I said. “We’d come out from the college to see what kind of interesting junk we could find. Half of the dorm rooms were decorated with junk from that old dump. Half of the rooms smelled like the dump, too, as I recall.”

  Andrew flashed his overlapping teeth at me. “Professor Sweet used to tell us it was also where students came to drink and have sex.”

  “Well—in those days what passed for sex,” I said.

  We reached the road to the landfill. I pulled in and we bounced through the muddy puddles at the entrance. There was still a piece of yellow crime scene tape tied to the trunk of a tree. Andrew jumped out and unlocked the gate. We drove in. The road hadn’t changed much in fifty years. It was still a narrow, gravel-covered lane cutting straight across a flat expanse of weeds and briars. For several hundred yards the ground sank ever lower. Then after a small brook it began to rise. The road wound through a series of knobby hills, finally ending in a small, gravel-covered parking lot.

  We got out of the car. There wasn’t a house in sight. “You can see why the killer wasn’t afraid to shoot a gun out here, can’t you?” I said. “It would just be a faint pop in the distance, if anybody heard it at all.”

  I didn’t mean for it to be a rhetorical question, but Andrew treated it like one. He put his hands in his coat pockets and started walking toward the path that led up the side of a grassy hill. I trotted like a penguin to catch up. I tried again. “And you wouldn’t have to worry about anybody else being around, would you?”

  He didn’t answer that one either. He put his head down and started up the hill. I followed. It was a dirt path but the ground was still hard from the winter. In a week or two, once the temperature climbed a bit and the spring rains started in earnest, it would be a soupy mess. “Exactly where did you find him?”

  Andrew stopped and pointed into the brown, foot-tall grass, just a few feet to his right. “Right there.”

  “There?” I was expecting to find crime tape and footprints and ground stained purple with Gordon’s blood. But it was just grass, tall, dry and brown, nodding ever so slightly in the late winter wind. “So that Saturday you found him—did you see his body from the parking lot?”

  “If I did, I didn’t realize it was a body. I mean, you don’t exactly expect to see a body, do you?”

  Andrew was shaking. And it wasn’t from the cold. I knew that because I was shaking, too. “No, I guess you don’t.”

  “I started up the path toward the dig site, just like we’re doing.” He pointed again at the grass. “And there he was.”

  “Did you know right away it was Gordon?”

  “He was face down. And the grass was kind of covering him. But I recognized his coat. He always wore this big denim barn coat.”

  “I know the police have already put you through this—and I know this is hard—but did you try to revive him?”

  He shook his head, almost violently. “There was no doubt he was dead, Mrs. Sprowls. There was a hole in the back of his head. His face was all red and green and bloated. His eyes were—”

  I waved off any further description. “What did you do then?”

  “I ran back to my car and threw up. Right on the door. Then I called 911.”

  I scanned the parking lot below us. “There’s a pay phone out here?”

  “Huh?”

  I spotted the tiny leather case clipped to his belt and felt like a fool. I must be the only person alive who doesn’t carry a cell phone. “Never mind,” I said. “So did the police come right out?”

  “A couple of sheriff’s deputies first. Then a bunch of cars from the Hannawa police.”

  “I suppose they put you through the wringer.”

  It was an old expression from an old woman and it took him a few seconds to figure out what I meant. “I’m sure they think I killed him.”

  I pawed the air to let him know how ridiculous I thought that was. “I’m sure they even suspect me.”

  His eyes were cloudy now. “I loved the old guy, Mrs. Sprowls.”

  “Of course you did. We all did.” I patted his shoulder until the sadness was gone from his smile. “Now, Andrew,” I said, “what do you say we go see that dig site of yours.”

  We continued up the hill.

  It was not a real hill, the kind made by God, time and the rumpling of tectonic plates. It was the outer rim of the man-made basin dug to hold Hannawa’s garbage. The slope was smooth and even, like the wall of an ancient earthen fort. We were on top in only a minute.

  The landfill stretched out to our left—a prairie-like expanse of tall grass sprinkled with scraggly shrubs and trees. I’m no judge of space, but I bet it covered twenty or thirty acres. We turned to the right, toward a line of shaggy pines. As we walked, Andrew told me how the landfill had been constructed. “Landfills are like big bathtubs,” he said. “The first thing engineers look for is a good hydrogeologic setting, a nice mass of unfractured bedrock that won’t leak into the groundwater. They dig out a big bowl and put in a bottom liner, sometimes clay, sometimes high-density polyethylene, sometimes both. This site unfortunately has just clay.”

  As Andrew described the landfill, his entire demeanor changed, his voice and his eyes and the way he held his head. Maybe he was a goofy boy with blue hair on the outside, but inside resided a smart, serious, self-assured man. I could see why Gordon chose him over all those other candidates. “You really know your stuff,” I said.

  The boy in him blushed. The man in him quickly recovered. “As the garbage is dumped, it’s covered with layers of clay, sand and gravel, and finally a layer of topsoil and grass—not just for aesthetic reasons, but to keep rainwater out. But of course water does get in, and picks up contaminates as it filters down. They call that contaminated water leachate. It’s collected at the bottom of the basin in pipes and pumped out.”

  “It’s hard to believe there’s sixteen years of garbage bubbling away down there,” I said. “It all looks so tidy on top. So peaceful.”

  My naiveté made him smile. “Despite all the science, and all the care, all landfills fail to some degree. This one included. Liners crack. Pipes clog. Roots and animals drill holes through the cover soil. People get lazy. Budgets get cut. Too much water washes in. Too much leachate leaks into the surrounding environment.”

  “Garbage in, garbage out?” I quipped.

  “True enough,” he said. “But then where would we archaeologists be without garbage?”

  We reached the shaggy pines. And Gordon’s dig site.

  Just below the rim of the landfill was a dome-shaped mound, maybe 500 feet across. “That’s the old Wooster Pike dump? I don’t recognize it a bit.”

  “That’s it,” Andrew said. “The old dump road you remember came along right where we’re standing now. When the city built the new landfill they left the old junk right where it was. Covered it with dirt and threw a little grass seed around. Then they dug the new landfill basin alongside.”

  “They didn’t make any effort to clean up the old dump?”

  “Nope. They just covered it over and forgot about it. Which is great for us. There’s a hundred years of wonderful old stuff under there. A real time capsule.”

  We headed down the slope and waded into the tall grass atop the mound. It was knee deep, cold and nasty, choked with the rotting stems of last summer’s goldenrod. “Professor Sweet lobbied the city for three years to get permission to dig here,” Andrew said. “He finally got it in
1999. But it was a couple more years before the dig actually started.”

  My foot hit something. I started to tumble. Andrew caught me. “Careful, Mrs. Sprowls. There’s a stake every ten feet.”

  “Booby traps for nosy old women?”

  “Grid posts for nosy archaeology students,” he said. He dropped to his knees and pulled the grass away from the offending stake. It was about a foot high. Square. Marked with faded black letters and numbers that made no sense to me.

  “What’s that gibberish?” I asked.

  “Coordinates. Archaeology is very precise. Where something is found is just as important as what’s found. So before you start digging, you mark off the site in a grid pattern. You establish perpendicular baselines running north to south and east to west. Then along those lines you stake out digging squares. You excavate square by square, carefully recording what you’ve found, in what condition, at what depth, in what environment. Carefully boxing up the stuff you want to keep for later study.”

  We continued through the grass, Andrew high-stepping like a moose, me stepping very carefully, like a pink flamingo. “It would take forever to dig up the entire dump, wouldn’t it?”

  “Just about,” Andrew said. “Professor Sweet only dug for twelve weeks over the summer—ten or fifteen students working in teams of two, each team hoping to finish one ten-foot block—so, yeah, it would take a while to excavate the entire site.”

  We reached the center of the mound and started down the other side. I could see now the twenty squares or so that had already been excavated and then re-covered with dirt. Lumpy and weedy. “It looks like my vegetable garden,” I said.

  He offered me a weak smile and continued: “Officially Professor Sweet was studying the eating habits of postwar American families. He called his summer course Digging the Fifties: The Roots and Realities of Conspicuous Consumption. But he’d joke that he was just an old beatnik reliving his wasted youth—at the expense of his students. ‘Your parents’ tuition money, your hard labor and my boyish joy,’ he’d say.”