by C. R. Corwin
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.
Chapter 8
Friday, March 23
I took a two-hour lunch and didn’t eat a darn thing. Instead I drove to the college to talk to Bernard Murray. He teaches environmental science and was quoted extensively in a couple of Margaret’s stories. He’d worked with the Ohio EPA that year they’d searched for the drums of toluene Kenneth Kingzette dumped for Donald Madrid. I was hoping that if there was any connection between Gordon’s murder and the missing toluene, Murray would help me make the link.
When I called to make an appointment, I offered to take him to lunch. “Not necessary,” he said. “Just pop in when you can.” The second I walked into his office in the L.W. Hertzog Science Center I knew why he’d turned down the free meal. He was the boniest man I’d ever seen in my life. The kind who eats a couple of celery sticks and then runs ten miles to burn off the calories. He was in his fifties, but the lack of meat on his face made it hard to tell just how far in.
“It’s so nice of you to give me a few minutes,” I said, sitting in one of the cheap, metal and plastic government office chairs lined up along the glass wall.
“I was a friend of Gordon’s, too,” he said. When he sat back in his huge swivel chair, the leather barely dented.
I explained my theory that Gordon may have been murdered to prevent him from finding something hidden in the dump. I told him I’d been reading old stories about the Madrid chemical case. “I know I’m probably tilting at windmills,” I said, “but I can’t help but wonder if there’s a link.”
Murray leaned forward on his elbows and pushed his fists into the thin layer of flesh under his eyes. “Actually, there just might be,” he said.
I leaned forward, too. “You think so?”
He studied me, cautiously, I think to judge if I knew more than I was letting on. “When you called yesterday I thought maybe you’d already connected a few dots.”
I gave my ignorance away. “I haven’t even connected one dot yet.”
He smiled grimly, as if he needed a swallow of Pepto Bismol. “Maybe you have now. Gordon worked with us on the investigation. As a volunteer. I recruited him, in fact. I figured his archaeological know-how would be helpful. Help us find ground that was freshly disturbed, that sort of thing.”
“And was he helpful?”
“Yes and no. He loved poking around old farms and abandoned junk yards. But he seemed more interested in looking for arrowheads than drums of toluene.”
“About those junk yards—was the Wooster Pike landfill one of them?”
“Oh, sure. We checked every old dump in a fifty-mile radius. We did find drums from Madrid chemical buried at the Hartville Road dump and in the dump in Morrow Township, but not the Wooster Pike site. Which frankly surprised me. The Wooster Pike dump would have been the perfect place for Kingzette. Accessible. Abandoned. Middle of nowhere. ”
“Did Gordon seem upset that not all the toluene was found?”
“We’re all a bunch of tree-huggers around here. We were all PO’d when the EPA pulled the plug.”
I searched for the right words and couldn’t find them. “Was Gordon’s PO’d-ness more intense than other people’s?”
He chuckled. “Did he jump up and down and vow to find those missing drums of toluene even if it killed him? I don’t recall that.”
“How about you? Did you jump up and down?”
He chuckled again. “I’ve been consulting with the EPA since my graduate days. They’re always coming into a case too late and pulling out too early. They had enough to convict Kingzette and Madrid and they had other cases in other cities. They said they’d keep looking but they didn’t, of course.”
I’m sure Bernard Murray’s atrophied stomach hadn’t growled in years, but mine was beginning to sound like a wolverine in heat. “When exactly did you search the old landfills?”
He drummed on his bottom lip. “Let’s see—May, June and July of ’95.”
“No more digging after July?”
“Nope.”
***
I wanted to find the nearest fast-food drive-thru window and order the biggest hamburger and French fries combo they had. But while I was at the college there was one more stop I had to make: the offices of the campus newspaper, the Hemphill Harbinger.
I knew The Harbinger was now housed in one of the massive old Victorians on the eastern edge of the campus. But I did not know which massive old Victorian. There were oodles of them. So I headed in that general direction, on foot, hoping I could get directions along the way. The first three students I stopped didn’t have the foggiest idea. The fourth knew precisely where it was. Naturally she was yakking on her cell phone at the time. Without the slightest break in her important conversation—“That is so gross…That is so fantastic…How gross is that?”—she swung her index finger off her phone and pointed at the house right in front of us.
She walked on before I could thank her. I heard her mumble into her little phone, “Just some old woman who doesn’t know where she’s going.”
I barked after her: “You’re sure right about that, honey!”
I followed the uneven slate walk to the porch and climbed the lopsided steps. The door opened like an out-of-tune bassoon. I poked my head into the living room. It was a maze of messy desks and empty chairs. A real newsroom. Behind a huge, bright blue computer monitor I spotted a tiny girl with short, spiky, lemon-lime hair. She had two silver rings in each nostril. “I’m looking for the editor,” I said.
She was feisty but friendly. “No—y
ou’re looking at the editor.”
I told her who I was.
She’d heard of me. “Oh. My. Gawd! The same Dolly Madison Sprowls who found Buddy Wing’s real killer? Oh. My. Gawd!”
“In the wrinkled flesh,” I said.
She apparently liked the way I’d poked fun at my advanced age. Her eyes got dreamy. She reached out and shook my hand like a lumberjack. She told me her name was Gabriella Nash. She brought me a chair. She microwaved a mug of hot water for me and gave me a bowl of tea bags to choose from. She told me about her future career in journalism without stopping to think that I might be there for a reason.
“Well, I’m sure you’re going to have a terrific career,” I said. “In the meantime I was wondering if you’d let me look at some of your old morgue files.”
She sprang out of her chair dutifully, as though I was Queen Elizabeth asking for another crumpet. “Is there a specific story you’re looking for?”
I stood up slowly. “Well, it’s a silly thing,” I said. “I graduated from Hemphill College back in 1957—”
“Yes, I know.”
“And so did my late husband. Lawrence Sprowls. He was a journalism major.”
She tipped her head like a lop-eared puppy. “Oh—I’m so sorry.”
I pawed the air. “He’s been dead for fourteen years and we were divorced twenty-eight years before that,” I said. “But I guess I’ve reached that age when a person gets the biological urge to reminisce. I was hoping I could rummage around a little. Maybe Xerox a few things.”
She wrinkled her nose. “You know we had a fire, don’t you?”
At first I thought she was talking about a recent fire. Then it hit me she must be talking about the fire in 1968 that destroyed the building that once housed the journalism department. It was one of five old wooden barracks built for soldiers on the GI bill after World War II. In April 1968, one night after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., those five old barracks, as well as a dozen run-down houses near the campus, were burned by students, both black and white, whose belief in nonviolence was blown to smithereens by their overwhelming anger. “Don’t tell me all the old files were lost.”
