by C. R. Corwin
My use of the word curious made him wince, as if he’d just swallowed one of those bitter little gnats that buzz around over-ripe bananas. “You’re not going to involve yourself, are you Mrs. Sprowls?”
“Involve myself?”
“You did a great job with the Buddy Wing thing. We never would have found the real murderer without you. We’re very grateful. But that little snoopfest of yours was just a one-time deal, right?”
“Well, of course it was a one-time deal.”
My assurance resuscitated his appetite. “That’s good to hear,” he said through a mouthful of slippery potatoes. “Because this case may have to be on hold for a while. And I don’t want you out there causing trouble. For me or yourself.”
“Heavens to Betsy, don’t worry about that-what do you mean on hold for a while?”
“Not exactly on hold. But we only have so many detectives. And only so much time. And we’re up to our boxers in this Zuduski thing.”
He was talking, of course, about the murder of Paul Zuduski, younger brother of Congresswoman Betty Zuduski-Lowell. He’d been missing for six weeks when his badly decomposed body was found in an abandoned factory on the south side. He’d been shot several times and duct-taped inside a Persian rug. He’d worked in his sister’s Hannawa office, helping solve the everyday problems of her constituents.
“The good congresswoman is putting tremendous pressure on the mayor,” Grant said. “And pressure on the mayor means pressure on the chief. Which means pressure on yours truly. But don’t worry, Mrs. Sprowls, we’ll get the sonofabitch who killed your friend sooner or later.”
***
Of course I wasn’t going to involve myself. No matter how many unanswered questions were eating away at me. No matter how upset I was that Detective Grant was putting Gordon’s murder on the backburner while he figured out who killed the congresswoman’s little brother.
Of course if I remembered something that might be important, I’d share that with the police. And if, as the head librarian of The Hannawa Herald-Union, I came across something interesting in my files, why, yes, I’d certainly pass that along. But involve myself? No way in hell was I going to involve myself.
Chapter 4
Saturday, March 17
I knew right where to find Eric Chen-in the cafe at the Borders bookstore in Hannawa Falls. Eric spends every Saturday and Sunday there, from the minute the store opens until the manager sweeps him out at closing time, playing chess with the city’s other dust-collecting geniuses. They’re quite a bunch, I’ll tell you. I suppose there are fifteen or twenty of them. Ethnically they’re a real box of Crayolas: Whites, Blacks, Asians, Latinos, Iranians, just about one of everything. And almost all of them have an advanced degree in some difficult subject. They gather around the little tables like starved squirrels around a walnut tree. They play game after game after game. Fast, noisy games. They chatter and groan and slap their foreheads. They bang their chess pieces down and pound their timers. They giggle in Farsi and screech Shit! in Chinese.
Eric was sitting right in the middle of this mayhem, locked in battle with some unshaven old fart in a bowling shirt. I sat at an empty table and waited for him to notice me. When he did, I wiggled my fingers at him. He gave me the international finger signal for “just a minute.” He played-and lost-three more games before joining me. “You know,” I said, “if you and your little friends stopped wasting your brains on that worthless game, you could have half of the world’s problems solved in about five minutes.”
Eric was cradling a big, half-empty bottle of Mountain Dew in his arms. “Is there a compliment in there somewhere?”
“Actually, no.”
“Good,” he said. “I don’t think any of us could take the pressure of being admired.” He pulled out a chair with his foot and slumped into it. He held his Mountain Dew bottle up to the light and shook it until the carbonation bubbles were swirling like the snow in one of those worthless glass balls. “So, what brings you to Borders, Maddy? Trolling for a well-read man?”
“Trolling for a man who still reads comic books. I need your help, Eric.”
It took him two seconds to put two and two together. “Ah-Sweet Gordon. The police haven’t arrested anybody yet?”
“From what Detective Grant tells me, that yet may be a long way off.”
I was expecting him to put up a tussle. I’d forced him to help with the Buddy Wing investigation and that little adventure hadn’t exactly gone well for him. But he just sat there, grinning at me like a toad that had just drilled itself out of the mud after a long winter. Post Traumatic Chess Disorder I suppose. I laid out my game plan before he came to his senses. “We’ll have to look into his love life. From what I see on all those TV shows that’s always numero uno. After that, relatives, other professors and his students. Anybody whose life is even marginally better now that Gordon’s dead. But the big thing I’m going to need your help with is that awful landfill.”
Eric screwed the cap off his Mountain Dew and took a long chug. He swished the liquid back and forth between his cheeks. He swallowed, scrunching his face as if he was drinking rat poison. “This isn’t going to involve a shovel, is it?”
“Only your computer.” I told him what I wanted: “See what you can find out about the landfill itself. If anybody else has ever been killed out there. If anything else strange or controversial has happened there since it closed.”
“Easy enough,” Eric said. He took one of the ballpoints from his shirt pocket and wrote it on the paper napkin he carried in his pants pocket instead of a handkerchief.
I continued: “Second, let’s see if anybody’s missing from that part of the county-especially where the police expect foul play.”
“Even easier,” he said.
“This next one may not be so easy,” I said. “There could be oodles of things buried out there that shouldn’t be.”
“Including a lot of poopy diapers.”
“Illegal things, Eric. Something that would send somebody to prison for a long time if somebody found it.”
“A body?”
“Maybe. Or maybe a murder weapon. Or a big wad of stolen money. Or a drug dealer’s stash. Secret government documents linking Elvis and Lassie to the Kennedy assassination. Who the hell knows? An old landfill would be the perfect place to hide almost anything. But for the time being, let’s concentrate on one thing-toxic waste.”
Eric’s eyebrows shot up until they were hiding under his shiny black bangs. “Ahhhh-Margaret Newman’s series.”
“That’s right. Print out Margaret’s stories for me. And anything else we might have on the subject.”
Margaret Newman was The Herald-Union’ s environmental writer. Several years ago she’d written a terrific series on a local chemical company caught burying some of its nastier stuff in the dead of night. “It’s been a few years but I seem to remember that some of that goop was never accounted for,” I said.
Eric had filled one side of the napkin and was now scribbling on the back. “The head honcho went to jail, didn’t he?”
“I don’t remember that much about it,” I said, “but I think the guy hired to do the dumping is the one who went to jail. The honcho, as I recall, merely went missing.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t. And neither do I. It’s just a hunch.”
Eric launched into one of his irritating songs-this one sung to the tune of La Cucaracha: “Hunch about the honcho! Hunch about the honcho! Deedee-deedee-deedee-dee!”
I put my fingers in my ears until he was finished amusing himself. “Now, you understand that this is not exactly a sanctioned project?”
“What fun would it be if it was?”
“Because if Tinker finds out we’re snooping into another murder, he’ll run us through the printing press feet first.”
Tinker, of course, was Alec Tinker, the paper’s managing editor. He was a sweetie, but a very nervous sweetie. There was no point bringing him into the loop until I
knew that loop led somewhere.
Eric nodded that he understood the need for secrecy. “Anything else you need?”
“There is a feature Doris Rowe wrote for the Sunday magazine a few years ago,” I said. “But I can find that myself.”
Eric’s eyes squeezed skeptically. “You sure about that?”
I wasn’t sure. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to admit it. “What am I,” I exploded, “a sweet potato? If I said I can find it myself, then I can find it myself!”
***
Eric went back to his chess buddies. I drove to across town to Hemphill College, to see Chick Glass.
Chick, like a lot of his fellow professors, lived in one of the dark, old Tudors in the hills just west of the college. I parked on the street and waded through the snarls of pachysandra that filled his entire front yard. I climbed the broken stone steps. The door swung open before I could ring the bell. “Maddy Sprowls-where have you been?”
Chick stepped aside. I slipped into his narrow foyer. The table under the mirror was stacked high with junk mail. Only one of the three bulbs in the ceiling light was still burning. I let him kiss my cheek. He let me take off my coat by myself. “I had a meeting that went a smidge long,” I said.
“Meeting on a Sunday morning? I didn’t realize you were such an important woman.”
I smiled and let him think anything he wanted to think. “It was nice of you to invite me for lunch.”
“And it was nice for you to call me.”
Niceties out of the way, we wound our way to the solarium at the back of the house. It would have been a lot sunnier if the window panels had been washed sometime in the past twenty years. “What a darling space,” I said.
Chick grandly gestured for me to sit at the small wicker table. He poured two goblets of white wine and then trotted off to the kitchen. He returned with a huge bowl of tossed salad, heavy on the croutons, black olives and feta cheese. A second trip produced a pair of chilled plates, fancy silverware wrapped in cloth napkins, and four bottles of Kraft dressing to choose from. A third trip produced a pair of huge sourdough rolls stuffed with tuna salad. “Oh my,” I said. Maybe Chick wasn’t much of a housekeeper, but he’d certainly acquired some skills in the kitchen.
At first we talked about my life: How long I’d been at the paper and exactly what I did there; just where in Hannawa I lived and how I’d managed to stay unmarried after giving Lawrence the heave ho. Then we talked about his life: How he’d survived his two marriages and two divorces; what his three kids were doing; why he was still teaching at the rickety age of sixty-eight. To that last subject he said this: “A lot of that had to do with Gordon. If he wasn’t taking the last train to Retirementville, why should I?”
“I’m not the retiring type either,” I said. I told him about Editor Bob Averill’s many failed attempts to show me the door.
“Anyway,” he said, suddenly morose, “what would I do if I wasn’t teaching?”
It was the opening I was hoping for. “What about your poetry? I simply loved that poem you read at Gordon’s service.”
“Really?” His mood brightened as suddenly as it had dimmed. “Did I give you a copy?”
“Yes you did,” I said, cracking a crouton between my molars like one of those chipmunks that have turned my backyard into Swiss cheese. “I’ve read it a dozen times. Not that I understand it any better.”
Chick fell into that trap just as easily as the first. “What didn’t you understand?”
I squashed the sourdough roll down with the palm of my hand, so I could get the end of it in my mouth. I paraphrased his poem: “That weighty question that split you and Gordon asunder like Ti-Jean and the Howler-whoever or whatever they are.”
My ignorance simply thrilled him. “Don’t you remember? Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.”
“We called them that?”
“Everybody called them that, Maddy. Allen was the Howler, because of that famous book of his, Howl. And Jack, of course, was Ti-Jean.”
“Of course.”
“It’s the nickname his mother gave him when he was a kid. It’s French for Little John.”
“Of course.”
Chick pranced from the solarium like a barefoot boy running across a gravel driveway. I could hear his feet thumping up the stairs. Squeak across the ceiling. He returned out of breath with a photograph in a cheap wooden frame. “I keep it in my upstairs office,” he said.
I licked the tuna salad off my fingers and took the photograph. It was a black and white glossy, an 8? by 11, the kind someone who’d had a photography class or two would take. It showed a much younger Chick and Gordon sitting back-to-back behind a granite gravestone laid flush to the ground. They were both sporting grim, artistic faces. The inscription on the stone was large enough to read:
“Ti-Jean”
John L. Kerouac
March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969
He Honored Life
Chick took the photograph back and cradled it in his lap. He smiled at it like it was a newborn baby. “Gordon and I visited his grave in the summer of 1970. The Edson Catholic Cemetery in Lowell, Massachusetts. We always talked about going back sometime.”
Maybe I hadn’t remembered their nicknames-assuming I’d ever known them-but I did remember a thing or two about Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. They’d started the beat movement in the late 1940s, when they were students at Columbia University in New York, along with William S. Burroughs and Neal Cassady and a troupe of other tortured souls. They bummed around the world together. They became living legends together. “So Kerouac and Ginsberg had some kind of falling out?” I asked Chick.
“Oh yes, a very famous falling out. Allen always thought Jack turned his back on the beat movement. And of course he did.”
I got to the nub of my visit. “And apparently there was also some kind of weighty question between you and Gordon?”
Chick’s face went pink with embarrassment. “Not all that weighty. We stayed friends right to-”
“The bitter end?”
Chick was suddenly interested in his sandwich and his salad, taking big mouthfuls of both. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” I said.
He softened the food in his mouth with a long drink of wine and swallowed. “Like I said in the poem, it really didn’t amount to anything.”
“Enough for you to write a poem about it,” I said, trying not to sound as interested as I was. “And then recite it at his memorial service-wearing that ridiculous beret.”
Chick rubbed the bump on his cockatoo nose. “I’d forgotten what a pit bull you are.”
“Too many people do,” I said.
He leaned forward on his elbows, dug his fingers into the thick white hair hanging over his ears. An explanation was coming. “I guess you remember when Jack came to the college-”
“You and Gordon met him that summer in San Francisco at some poetry festival, and invited him.”
“That’s right. He stayed in Gordon’s apartment. The one he had above the dry cleaning shop on Light Street.”
“The one with the refrigerator in the living room?”
“That’s the one. The night Jack left for New York, Gordon and I got carryout from Mopey’s. You remember Mopey’s-”
“It’s a parking lot now, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “And all three of us ordered cheeseburgers. Except that Gordon insists-insisted-that Jack had a plain burger. But it was a cheeseburger. He wanted it smothered with mustard and piled high with pickle chips.”
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 a
ll 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.”
