Midnight Haul

by Max Allan Collins

  The executive offices of the plant were in a sprawling one-story building just off the parking lot, near the ever-flapping American flag. The nameless junior exec led him through a surprisingly shabby, claustrophobic lobby where a pair of plaid-upholstered couches met at a corner of the room and shared an end table littered with chemical company trade magazines. Over one of the couches was a framed quote from the founder of Kemco (Willis P. Connor, 1880–1955): “Industry is people.” A receptionist was walled within at right and the nameless exec spoke to her through a window, checking them in. The receptionist asked if they would need hard hats and safety glasses; the exec said no. Crane was glad. He followed the exec through a turnstile into a hallway.

  The building was nothing fancy: tiled floors, plaster walls, tiled ceilings, as impersonal as this exec he was trailing after. There was a studied informality about the place: the people they passed in the halls all spoke, on a first name basis (the nameless exec’s name was Chuck, it seemed) and wore white shirts and ties but with the coat invariably off, either over one arm or left behind. Doors on either side of the wide hall stood occasionally open, one of them revealing a laboratory wherein a dozen or so technicians worked. Another open door revealed several people attending computer terminals; another contained half a dozen desks with women of various ages typing—had one of these desks been Mary Beth’s? Then came closed doors, reading BOOKKEEPING DEPARTMENT, PRODUCTION SUPERINTENDENT, MAINTENANCE SUPERINTENDENT, PLANT MANAGER. They stopped at the door reading PERSONNEL MANAGER. Chuck opened the door for him, peeked in and said, “Mr. Crane to see Patrick, Sharen,” turned to Crane and said, “Nice meeting you,” and left. Crane stepped inside.

  A pretty blonde secretary, in her own, small outer office, rose from her desk, smiled, and opened the door to the inner office for him, without announcing him. He went in.

  Patrick Boone was already up and out from behind his desk with a hand extended for Crane to shake. He was a slender man, about Crane’s size, pale, handsome, vaguely preppie, despite his hippie roots, with dark curly hair and, with the exception of a wispy mustache and wire frame glasses, the spitting image of his son Billy.

  “I’m glad you agreed to come, Crane,” Patrick Boone said as he shook Crane’s hand, a firm, friendly shake. He smiled as he spoke. It wasn’t a bad smile.

  He got Crane a chair before getting behind the desk, where once seated, he said, “Can I order you up some coffee? Or something?”

  Crane shrugged. “I could use a soft drink. Anything.”

  Patrick Boone smiled again, and Crane admitted to himself that if he were meeting the man cold, he’d probably like him. “Sharen,” he was saying into his intercom, “a couple of Pepsies for us, if you would.”

  While they waited for the Pepsies, the preppie smile disappeared and he leaned forward, both arms on his desk.

  “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about Mary Beth,” he said. “I only knew her slightly. She did a little work for me. But my impression was she was a fine person.”

  “I didn’t catch you at the funeral.”

  “I wasn’t there. I didn’t know her well enough to intrude on her family and friends. And, too, Annie would’ve been there.”

  “Annie?”

  “My ex-wife. Let’s not pretend you don’t know her. I’d like us to be more up front than that.”

  The secretary, Sharen, brought the Pepsies in.

  As she handed them around, she said, “I need to pick my son up after Scouts today. Do you mind if I leave a little early, Patrick?”

  He glanced at his watch. “It’s four-fifteen now. Why don’t you just take off.”

  She beamed at him. “Thanks.”

  After she’d left, Patrick explained, “We don’t stand on ceremony around here. We like to keep it a bit, uh…”

  “Informal?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Boone…”

  “Patrick.”

  “Patrick, then. I know your ex-wife. I won’t pretend I don’t. I just didn’t know anybody called her ‘Annie.’ ”

  “Well, she’s taken to being called just ‘Boone,’ these days. Some kind of feminist stand, I suppose. But if that’s the case, why not revert to her maiden name?”

  “Probably because she’s raising your son.”

  “You’re probably right. Well. I suppose you know why I asked you to stop by.”

  “Not really.”

  “I know what Annie’s up to. Oh, maybe not exactly, I don’t. But I know it’s another one of her articles. Or maybe it’s a series of articles.”

  He paused, perhaps hoping for Crane to enlighten him.

  When Crane didn’t, Patrick went on: “She’s been asking questions around Greenwood for months. Researching Kemco. Trying to catch us doing something she doesn’t approve of. Which won’t be hard, considering anything any chemical company does would be something she wouldn’t approve of.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then you won’t deny she’s rather narrow-minded on the subject?”

  “Well…”

  “Surely the basis of her hatred of Kemco is apparent to you.”

  Crane said nothing.

  “It’s me, Crane. It’s me she hates. Kemco’s a surrogate. Or scapegoat or whatever you want to call it. A perfect target for her outdated late ’60s/early ’70s radical liberalism.”

  “Didn’t you used to lean that way yourself?”

  “Of course. Didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, but you’re younger, aren’t you, so that explains it. Almost everybody on college campuses in those days felt that way. You would’ve had to live through the draft to understand. It was a valid enough point of view in its day, naive as it may have been. Some of us, like Annie, stay stuck in time. Some of us move on.”

  “Move on and sell out?”

  He grinned, swigged the can of Pepsi, pushed back in his swivel chair. “For somebody who sold out, I lead a pretty drab existence, wouldn’t you say?” he said, gesturing around an office that was four paneled walls and a couple of framed photos, one of the plant, the other of the home office in St. Louis. “All I make is a little over thirty grand a year, a goodly chunk of which goes to Ms. Woman’s Lib of 1969.”

  “You’re young. You’re moving up in the company.”

  “I will be. What’s wrong with that? Don’t you believe in capitalism, Crane?”

  “The problem is I do. I do believe in it, and it pisses me off when I see it get twisted up.”

  “Boy, you have been listening to Annie, haven’t you? She can be persuasive, I know. What kind of horror stories has she been telling you?”

  “About you, or about Kemco?”

  “Crane. Please. I want you to know something. I want you to know that I understand where you’re coming from. Or at least I think I do. Hope I do. Shouldn’t presume that I do, really. But I’m guessing that you took Mary Beth’s suicide hard. That you found it hard to believe anyone as full of life as Mary Beth could end that life, voluntarily.” He stopped and rubbed his forehead. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound so trite. To sound like I’m trivializing this. Christ. May I go on?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think you ran into Annie. Possibly at the funeral, or maybe later at Mary Beth’s mother’s home, or whatever. And Annie filled your head with her crazy leftist lunacy. Normally you might not have bought it. But it was easier accepting what Annie was saying than accepting Mary Beth’s death as suicide. I’m not far wrong, am I?”

  Crane said nothing.

  “I know that you’ve been asking some questions,” Patrick said. “I know that you have some suspicions.”

  He’d been right: it was Mrs. Meyer. Patrick did not know about the trip to Pennsylvania last night. Did he?

  “There are some disturbing statistics,” Patrick was saying. “We’re aware of the number of suicides in Greenwood; we’re aware of some illnesses that may be related to Kemco employees and their families. We’ll be looking into i
t ourselves.”

  “I’ll look forward to that investigation.”

  Patrick smiled sadly and shook his head. “She’s really poisoned you, hasn’t she? Don’t you see it? Don’t you see that this is a family squabble? That Annie is getting at me through the company I work for? I sold out, remember? It’s not enough to attack me. She has to attack the institutions I sold out to.”

  “All because the poor kid’s stuck in time.”

  “That’s right. It’s the ’80s now, Crane, in case you haven’t noticed. Damn near the ’90s, chilling thought though that is.”

  “I noticed.”

  “How close to her are you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I understand you’re staying at her house.”

  “I’m just crashing there.”

  “Crashing. There’s a Woodstock-era word for you. Did she tell you why we split up?”

  “No.”

  “Drugs.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was doing drugs. Nothing much. Some hash. Some coke.” His frankness was surprising, if somehow smug.

  “You buy coke on thirty grand a year?”

  He shrugged. “I dealt a little on the side. That upset her, too. Almost as much as me wearing a suit to work.”

  “She said she wasn’t into drugs.”

  “She’s lying. Oh, she isn’t now. But back in our college days, she was deep in it, deeper than me. She dropped acid like you take Alka Seltzer.”

  “I don’t take Alka Seltzer.”

  “Well you get my point. Then she reformed. There’s nothing worse than a reformed anything. She got on her health-food kick. She read books and articles on the bad effects of acid. Same with pot, for Christsake. Said it ruined brain tissue, affected the sexual organs, some bullshit. I don’t know. But she turned fanatic. I tried to do right by her. I stopped dealing. It was dangerous for me, anyway, now that I was with the company. I needed a straighter life-style. So no more coke, no more anything except smoke a little dope now and then. But even that was too much for her. I remember saying to her, the last generation liked its martinis, right? Well I like my pot. But that didn’t cut it with her, because alcohol’s on her shit list, too. It was like living with a religious fanatic. The screaming fucking arguments we had. Christ. But that’s neither here nor there. It got to be too much.”

  “It broke up your marriage.”

  “Yeah. She was on a real guilt trip, and believe me, it all ties in with what she’s doing now, where Kemco is concerned. She’s worried she fucked up her chromosomes dropping acid. She’s worried about Billy. The repercussions her doper days will have on our son.”

  “Aren’t you worried?”

  “No. I don’t believe that alarmist bullshit. But she does.”

  “I’ll tell you something. Maybe Boone’s motivation for all this does stem from her hating you. But I’ve been reading up on some of your precious chemical industry, and some of what I read scares me.”

  He shrugged, swigged the last of the Pepsi. “Haven’t you heard that TV commercial? Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible?”

  “So would cancer.”

  “You really believe that bullshit Annie tells you?”

  “I believe 350,000 Americans will die from cancer this year. And I believe the reason is largely chemical companies unleashing untried, untested chemical compounds on an unsuspecting environment.”

  “You even sound like her. Like a goddamn pamphlet. You’re a writer yourself, I understand.”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Studying journalism?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Everybody needs a hobby.”

  “Like dumping hazardous wastes in the middle of the night?”

  Patrick sat up. “Some of that goes on. Not here.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He shrugged. “I won’t say some of it hasn’t. I don’t know that any’s going on now. We have a manifest system in this state. We keep track of everything we dump.”

  “So you say.”

  “So we say. And if somebody says otherwise, they better be prepared to prove it.”

  “Maybe somebody will.”

  Patrick smiled. “It won’t be you and Annie.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “No.” He laughed. “Are you kidding? Annie has no credibility as a journalist. She’s published a few pieces in minor league leftist nothings. You? You’re just a grad student. She’s the ex-wife of an exec at Kemco she wants to crucify. You have your own grudge, where your late fiancée is concerned. With credibility like that, you and Annie are finished before you start. Get serious.”

  “You’re as much as admitting…”

  “Nothing. I’m admitting nothing. Let me ask you something. Is that shirt you’re wearing one hundred percent cotton?”

  “No…”

  “You’re goddamn right it isn’t. We probably made fifty or sixty percent of that shirt. You want to talk chemicals? You’re wearing ’em!”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

  “It has to do with everything. You and Annie and everybody else can blame the chemical industry for America’s environmental ills. But you conveniently ignore the major accomplice: the American public. A public that wears clothes made of synthetic fibers. A public that drives cars made of plastic parts. A public that eats food raised in chemicals, and wrapped for sale in chemicals. A public whose collective ass rests on plastic furniture. A public that includes people like Annie, who buys her ‘No Nukes’ and ‘Live AID’ albums ignoring the fact that records are a petrochemical by-product, then plays them on her stereo, thanks to nuclear-generated electricity.”

  “Now who sounds like a goddamn pamphlet?”

  “Hey, I’m not ashamed to be working in the chemical industry. I think we provide a service, many services, the public wants. Needs. Demands. The chemical industry’s booming, pal—recessions don’t touch us. $133 billion last year. And next year, who knows?”

  “Kind of like cancer statistics.”

  “Don’t be an asshole. We don’t live in a zero-risk environment. Never have and never will. And if we tried, there’d be no creativity. No scientific advancement. Innovation would be stifled.”

  “Let me see if I got this straight. If we want to keep listening to ‘No Nukes’ albums and Willie Nelson, we need to accept the fact that the environment may get fucked over.”

  “Crane, it’s bad business to market hazardous products; it’s good business to market safe products. Have you been around Annie so long that the simple logic of that is lost on you? It’s crazy for you or Annie or anyone to think the chemical industry is going to make a practice out of being irresponsible. Just to make an extra buck or two. It just ain’t necessary, Crane. It ain’t good business.”

  Crane sipped the Pepsi. His first sip. It was warm now. “Then why do some Kemco plants still make Agent Orange?”

  “You mean 2,4,5-T.”

  “Yes. They’re not dumping it on Vietnam anymore. But it’s still being dumped on American forests.”

  “Of course it is. It’s an established tool of forest production.”

  “It’s got dioxin in it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Dioxin is only the worst foul fucking thing in the world, Patrick. It causes cancer. Birth defects. You name it. Good shit, as a retread ’60s doper like you might put it.”

  “Accusations like that have been leveled at 2,4,5-T for years, but the government has yet to ban it. And we believe it provides an important service.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m surprised you haven’t realized yet how one-sided Annie’s research is, Crane. How conveniently she ignores the facts she doesn’t like. The U.S. Forest Service did a study on the use of 2,4,5-T in the Northwest, and found that discontinuing the use of the herbicide would have an economic impact of several hundred million dollars on Oregon alone. That’s jobs that would be lost, Crane.
Families that would suffer. All because without that herbicide, the brush would come in and take over what would’ve been a healthy new forest. Did Annie’s research tell you that?”

  Crane said nothing.

  “You know, Crane, these well-meaning leftists are engaging in what you could call ‘chemical McCarthyism.’ The chemical industry makes such an easy target. The public doesn’t understand the science, the technology involved. The environmentalist types come along and spout some half-truths and whole lies, all because of an irrational, unscientific distrust of anything that isn’t ‘natural,’ that might tamper with Nature in a way God didn’t intend, only most of them don’t believe in God, so go figure. I don’t know. I’m just a guy trying to make an honest buck. I never hurt anybody.”

  Crane said nothing.

  “I’ll get somebody to take you home,” Patrick said. No more smiles. No more rhetoric. He seemed tired.

  “I’m sorry about Mary Beth,” he said. “I really am.”

  The hell of it was Crane believed him.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Crane was sitting on the couch in Boone’s house, watching a late movie without paying attention to it, when Boone got home.

  He could tell things hadn’t gone well for her. Her face looked tired. Her hair was messy, greasy. But she still looked pretty, as she gave him a weary smile and came over and joined him on the couch.

  “I could use a kiss,” she said.

  “Who couldn’t?” he said, smiling a little, kissing her.

  He put an arm around her and she cuddled against him.

  “How did you and Billy get along?” she asked.

  “Swell. He spoke twice: ‘What’s for supper?’ and ‘I’ll stay up as late as I want.’ ”

  Tired as she was, she managed a smile. “You cooked for him?”

  “Sure. Another of my specialties: frozen pizza.”

  “When did he get to bed?”

  “Half an hour ago.”