Poisoned Justice

by Jeffrey Alan Lockwood

  The most intriguing and worrisome list was handwritten on paper torn from a yellow legal pad. It was a series of items that were each innocent enough, but together told a chilling story:

  ammonium nitrate (farm supply), 500 lbs

  nitromethane (campus chem store?) or diesel fuel (7 gal)

  methylammonium nitrate (campus chem store?)

  powdered aluminum?

  nitric acid (9 qt)

  potassium perchlorate + sulfur + white glue

  22 gauge wire

  nichrome wire (from toaster)

  I’m no expert in chemistry, but a dog-eared booklet in Odum’s files from the Wisconsin Conservation Department left no doubt as to the professor’s plans. The document was titled Pothole Blasting for Wildlife and described how a conservation officer could blast craters in marshy soils that would fill with water to entice ducks and geese. For about $3.50 worth of chemicals you could create a pit four feet deep and twenty feet in diameter.

  I poured myself another drink, which I hadn’t been planning on, but the most sensible explanation of the evidence was unnerving even for me. Odum was evidently planning to bomb the AmeriChem Industries plant in Oakland. This was the company that had manufactured chlordane, the insecticide which Laurie said had poisoned him years ago. And he was going to even the score. I surmised that he was paying off several of the security and maintenance people at the site in order to gain access and position an explosive-filled van within the grounds. The bomb was cheap, but the entire operation was going to cost him a bundle—enough to put a sizable dent in the finances of even an overpaid professor at Berkeley. Paul Odum was plenty serious.

  I knew some of the guys at AmeriChem from training programs they’d provided to exterminators. And an old pal, Bino Mancini, had retired from the force in the late ’60s and taken a position as chief of security at the company. Nobody knew his real name because, as he was the last of ten children, his mother had called him her ‘little bambino,’ which had been mercifully shortened by his father to Bino. I’d talked to him a couple times in the intervening years, and he was always happy to describe his job as the cushiest gig of all time. “Nobody wants to steal pesticides,” he’d told me. But now it looked like things were becoming a lot dicier for the folks at AmeriChem.

  If Laurie was right and the top dogs had gotten wind of Odum’s plan, then maybe the stupid bastard really had been the victim of a corporate hit. Considering the scope of the bombing that he had in the works, the stakes might’ve been high enough. I doubted that Bino would know anything about an assassination, or whether he’d tell me if he did. But with the right sorts of questions, I might learn something from a visit. Like whether Odum was even on the company’s radar.

  Bino might well lie, but at least there was one informant I could trust. I dug into my jacket, which was hanging by the front door. At first I couldn’t find the vial with the beetles that I’d collected from Odum’s bag of dope, but it had slipped through a tear in the pocket and into the liner of my coat. I made a mental note to sew up the hole, but it had about the same chance of getting done as my scraping and painting the porch or putting new linoleum in the kitchen.

  The beetles weren’t in great shape. One was missing a head, and there were only three legs among them. However, it was possible to identify them as ladybird beetles based on their tarsal features. From there, I went to my books. However, nothing in Peterson’s Field Guide to the Beetles of North America or The Beetles of the United States seemed to match their size and color. Now I had another visit to add to my list if I was going to be generating more answers than questions. If anybody could identify these beetles, it would be Scott Fortier at the Essig Museum of Entomology. It’d mean another drive over to Berkeley, but I was planning to catch up with Odum’s other student at Tilden Park tomorrow afternoon anyway.

  I threw back the last of my Black Bush and headed to bed. With four days down and ten to go, the case was looking more interesting. And less solvable.

  CHAPTER 24

  I didn’t get up until midmorning. All night I’d alternated between strange dreams and fitful bouts of trying to piece together dead flies, unidentified beetles, poisonous chemicals, exploding vans, bags of pot, and a South African temptress. And nothing was working, including sleep. In an effort to stop my imagination from churning, I picked up where I’d left off reading The Monkey Wrench Gang. I figured that after a couple chapters, I’d nod off, but Abbey was too good of a storyteller. Having finished the book around four a.m., I drifted into a dreamless and unsatisfying sleep. At least I had developed a better understanding of Paul Odum’s passion for attacking AmeriChem Industries. I knew that the story was fiction, but I couldn’t shake the sense that corporate assassination of troublemaking environmentalists was more plausible than I’d initially assumed. I also concluded that Mormons are even wackier than Catholics.

  After a quick breakfast, I headed down the hill to my home away from home. As I came through the door and greeted Carol, whatever hope I had for popular music evaporated. Most of the lyrics were unintelligible, and the only line I could discern was “Play that funky music, white boy.” Given this, I couldn’t imagine that the other words, had they been understandable, would have salvaged the song. Carol was bobbing to the music and looking very nice in a fuzzy, low-cut sweater. She greeted me without missing a beat and blew me a kiss as I headed to my office.

  The screens over the buckets with Odum’s clothing were still in place, but I couldn’t see any of the mice. They’d evidently made themselves at home in the laundry piles. Before I could check on them, Carol forwarded a call to my phone. She knew I was in the middle of a mess, and would’ve taken a message if the caller wasn’t important.

  “Riley here,” I answered.

  “Nuthin’ like the voice of my best friend’s kid.”

  “Mr. Hale, it’s good to hear from you.” Tom Hale wasn’t important in terms of being a major contract, but he’d been one of my father’s first customers and had become a friend of the family. He operated a couple of motels, and even though they were from a bygone era, he took pride in his accommodations and made sure they were vermin-free.

  “Tell ya what, kid, I got a problem at my place on Fulton. One of the maids said she saw roaches in a bathroom. I checked it out and found a couple earwigs under the sink where a pipe was leaking.” Mr. Hale knew his business and his pests. Most clients couldn’t tell the difference between a cockroach and an earwig.

  “Those damp areas are heaven for earwigs, Mr. Hale. I’ll bet if you fix that pipe, hit the area with some Raid, and let the flooring dry out, that’ll take care of the problem.”

  “That might work, but we’re due for a treatment at the end of next month. So maybe you could come and spray this week.”

  “I could send one of my guys out, if that’d be okay.” I knew it wasn’t, but I couldn’t spare the time.

  “Nah. I’d rather you did the job. I know you have good workers, but I trust the guy who owns the business.” He’d always insisted that my father take care of treating his places. Now that I was the boss, he wanted me to take care of things. Although it was much more efficient to send out one of my technicians, I didn’t mind doing the job for him. In fact, it was nice to keep my hands in the real side of the business.

  “I’m sorry Mr. Hale, but my schedule is packed this month. I could come out two weeks from today but not any earlier.”

  “That’s what I like about you, kid. You’re like your old man was. No sorry-ass excuses, just telling me the way it is. I called an electrician last week, and he gave me the royal runaround. Promised to come that day and never showed up. His girl called me the next day saying he’d be there in the afternoon. He came the following morning when I was in the middle of installing some new drapes. The idiot said his secretary hadn’t put the appointment on his calendar. I told him I was too busy to deal with him and he left.” This was going to keep on for a while unless I cut in.

  “The world’s going
to hell these days, Mr. Hale. But I have you on my schedule for the twenty-fifth at ten a.m. Will that work for you?”

  “Sure, cuz I know you’ll be there. You’re not just stringing me along like that goddamn electrician. I prefer to wait a couple weeks and know a fellow’s going to show up rather than be told some guy will do his best to get here ‘as soon as possible’ only to have the asshole feed me some line of bullshit about a crisis when he’s been banging his secretary all afternoon.” He was on a roll, so I broke in and told him he could count on Goat Hill Extermination. Mr. Hale’s tirade was defused, and he finished by telling me to give his best to my mother and to “that hot little number you have working the front desk.”

  I hung up and found Bino’s number in my Rolodex. An officious secretary said he was in meetings all day, but that he had some time tomorrow afternoon. Would I like to schedule an appointment with Mr. Mancini, she wanted to know. I said yes and she asked what my matter with Mr. Mancini concerned. When I told her it was a subject that didn’t involve her, she turned snippy and said she’d work me into his calendar for three o’clock.

  Having dealt with my fellow humans, I got up and went around my desk to the row of buckets to check on my mice. I pulled on a pair of gloves and lifted the screens from the improvised cages. Most of the rodents were hiding under the clothing, but a few had to be shaken out of the folds of his shirt and pants. All of the test animals looked hale and hearty, until I came to the pail with Odum’s underwear. Both mice were lying dead beneath the pile of white cotton briefs. I tore last month’s page from the oversized calendar hanging on my wall and laid it on my desktop. No sense risking contamination of my personal space. I laid the underwear on the photo of a bikini-clad babe wearing a backpack sprayer and carefully looked for residue that might reveal the presence of a chemical. Not seeing anything at first, I went back into the shop and rummaged around for the magnifier that I use to read the fine print on pesticide labels—reading glasses being for old men.

  When I returned to my office, I didn’t need any help to find the chemical culprit. In the intervening minutes an oily stain had appeared on the paper. I ran my gloved fingers over the underwear, feeling for slickness. There was a clear, greasy substance along the elasticized leg openings. Using a knife, I scraped the material from the fabric and transferred it to a glass vial for safekeeping. I was about to wipe off the knife on the paper, but I wanted to be sure that my suspicions were correct. So I grabbed a mouse from the nearest bucket. As it struggled and dangled from my fingers, I wiped the residue from the blade onto its naked tail and set it back with its partner.

  By the time I’d returned to my office from tossing the paper and gloves into the contaminated materials drum, the mouse was in bad shape. It would stagger a few steps and then fall over, struggling to right itself. After another ten minutes it stayed on its side, gasping and kicking its legs. I reached in and broke its neck, careful to avoid touching the tail.

  The pieces were starting to fall into place. Odum had returned to his room, showered, pulled on what he took to be a clean pair of briefs, and sealed his fate. This also explained the dead flies. The poor bastard had been converted into fly bait. As with Marissa, the poison caused him to vomit and lose control of his bowels. When the flies moved in for a fecal feast, a few of them crawled over his poisoned underwear, picked up a toxic dose, and died with their dinner.

  I turned the surviving mice loose on the steep slope that stretched from Goat Hill Extermination up the Potrero projects—one of the few places that might’ve been too steep for even San Franciscans to build on or pave over. I’d once collected an exquisite California Sister, one of the rarest and most beautiful butterflies found inside the city, from that hillside. The mice might find something to keep them fed among the trash that dotted the crispy brown grass. In any case, I didn’t see any point in killing them. They’d done me a favor, and the little fellas represented job security.

  While washing out the buckets and stuffing Odum’s other clothing into the dumpster, I mulled over how and when the deadly ointment had been applied. Everything pointed to Sarah, who’d been in the room earlier that day. Maybe she’d been a hired assassin for AmeriChem Industries, but that sounded more like an Edward Abbey storyline than a plausible theory. I needed to find this woman rather than conjuring up wild conspiracies. I could come up with only one thin connection that might lead me to her. But making that link would have to wait, because I had an appointment in the forest outside of Berkeley.

  I wasn’t hopeful that Jen would be able to add much to what Odum’s other students had told me, but then, both Howard and John had surprised me. My image of a campus full of harmless, absentminded professors, working with their students on academic problems that nobody else cared about, was fast dissolving.

  CHAPTER 25

  I rummaged around in the glove box and found the map that John had drawn for me. Tilden Park covers a couple thousand acres in the rugged hills above Berkeley, and it would’ve been impossible to track down Jen without directions. John’s map took me to a turnoff from the Wildcat Canyon Road, which became a poorly maintained dirt road for a half mile before I saw a truck parked under a sprawling live oak. I found an opening into the underbrush, and the dried grass was crushed down well enough that I could follow a path that headed steeply uphill into the hot afternoon sun. Between my perspiration and the fragrant oils of the pines and eucalyptus it started to smell like Marty’s Gym—sweat and liniment. After a few hundred yards, the forest opened into a field of knee-high grass.

  I’d made enough noise shuffling through the dried bark and leaves to announce my arrival. Jen was coming to greet me as I emerged from the tree line. She was a thin but not skinny woman with straight brown hair in a ponytail that reached to the small of her back. There was a cheery bounce in her step and a pleasing, if not voluminous, bounce beneath her T-shirt. She wore a pair of khaki shorts that covered very little of her long, brown legs. Damn, if women don’t want to be objects, they sure make the objects they have hard to ignore. I apparently needed a tutorial from Carol, but I’d have to make do with my manly befuddlement for now.

  “Mr. Riley, I presume,” she smiled.

  “Just ‘Riley’ is fine. And you must be Jen Tansley,” I replied.

  “John’s note said you were coming and that you had some questions regarding Dr. Odum. An ‘unofficial investigation’ is what he called it.”

  “I do, but first tell me about your work out here.”

  I wanted to put her at ease before broaching the topic of Odum’s increasingly strange life and death. And I was enjoying her vitality. She told me about her work on forest regeneration. The grassy field had been planted with Monterey pines and California bay trees to simulate the conditions of restarting a forest after clear-cutting. She was measuring the growth rates after various rates of fertilization. I’d not imagined that someone could be quite so enthusiastic about trees. She took me by the arm and led me to her saplings, stroking their branches as if petting a cat as she spoke. As the heat became too intense, we moved to the shade.

  “Watch out for poison oak,” she advised as we approached the underbrush. “It’s everywhere in this forest.”

  “Thanks for the warning.” I stretched out my legs and rested my back against the smooth trunk of a towering eucalyptus. The soft bark that had been shed by the tree made for comfortable seating. Jen sat cross-legged, with her knee resting on the toe of my work boot.

  “Well, I’m sure you didn’t come out here for my lecture on reforestation. What do you really want to know?”

  I gave her the same story I’d provided to John. Enough to make sense without offering too much detail. She seemed genuinely interested, which made getting down to work much easier.

  “I’m not sure that I have anything to offer. I was busy with classes and fieldwork the week before Dr. Odum left for the meeting in Los Angeles.”

  “Just tell me what you know about him and his work.”

  �
��Let’s see, he has, or had,” she sighed briefly, “three students. John, Howard, and me. John’s just a nerd who lives for his punch cards and wouldn’t know a plant from an animal. He was developing forest growth models. Saving the world through math. Howard’s a nice guy, a little naïve but well-meaning. Dr. Odum was planning to put him on the forest project in Thailand. The idea was to compare regeneration in temperate and tropical ecosystems.”

  “Was the project a done deal?”

  “No. It’s hard to get grant money for overseas work. But Dr. Odum had spent time in Thailand and established a good contact in the Ministry of Forests and Wildlife in Bangkok. The fellow had already coordinated the shipment of samples to our lab for a pilot study.”

  “So, you have tropical trees sitting around?”

  “Not whole trees, silly. Bales of leaves for nutrient analysis. We need a lot of material even for the preliminary work that Dr. Odum hoped to parlay into big funding. The idea was to start by looking at nitrogen levels, which he figured might be key to regeneration.”

  “That sort of research sounds like it would be expensive. Lots of sophisticated equipment, I suppose?” The man seemed to have plenty of dough—for a fine house, museum-quality artwork, research projects—and a major sabotage operation.

  “Yeah, time on the GC-mass spec isn’t cheap. New columns can run you hundreds of bucks, and then there’s the cost of gases and reagents.” I nodded, as if I had a clue what she’d said.

  “So, without a grant, how was Professor Odum funding the preliminary research and his international travel?”

  Jen smiled in a conspiratorial way and gave a soft laugh. She put her hand on my boot and pushed herself up. I stood up as well, and she leaned close to me, the softness of her breast pressing against my bicep. It didn’t seem like she noticed. I did.

  “You don’t look like an exterminator,” she declared, gently poking me in the chest. “Are you sure you’re not a cop?”