“He say anything at all about the party?”
“Just that I’d missed a groovy evening.”
“He actually said groovy?”
“He was always using goofy words like that.”
My mind drifted to all the wonderful late-night talks Sweet Gordon and I had in college. How the hip words of our generation sounded even hipper when he said them. How much I liked him, even though I was hopelessly in love with Lawrence Sprowls. “Did he seem okay to you that day?” I asked Andrew.
“A little wasted maybe. But for the most part he was his jolly old self.”
We reached Hannawa and inched through the heavy, noontime traffic toward West Tuckman. “Where’d you grow up, Andrew? Your voice has sort of a southern Ohio twang to it.”
“Circleville.”
“Oh, the annual pumpkin festival! That must be fun!”
“It’s a riot,” he said. His voice that told me that he was not exactly proud to be from a town that celebrates pumpkins.
“I’m from LaFargeville, New York,” I said in the same voice. “Three hundred people. Seven thousand cows.”
I didn’t take the same route back to the college. Instead I took the Indian Creek Parkway and wound through the bare oaks toward the athletic fields at the northern edge of the campus. It’s a somewhat isolated area, flatter than a pancake, separated from the campus and its adjoining residential streets by the creek and a long shale ridge. There are soccer and lacrosse fields there, the practice fields for the track and football teams, tennis courts, a winding asphalt jogging path, and, of course, the four back-to-back baseball fields where Dale Marabout told me Andrew had found Gordon’s car. Like the Wooster Pike landfill, it would be a perfect place to go unnoticed, especially in March when every day is shittier than the last. “I hope you don’t mind,” I said.
What could he say? We were already there, pulling into the parking lot alongside the baseball fields. “Where exactly was Gordon’s car?” I asked.
He pointed. “In front of the restrooms there.”
I drove up to the restrooms and stopped. We were a good two hundred yards from the jogging path, which presumably Andrew was using for his morning run. “You were able to recognize his car from quite a distance,” I said. My question sounded an awful lot like a police question and I immediately wished I’d asked it less skeptically.
“Professor Sweet drove an old pea-green Country Squire station wagon, the kind with fake wood panels on the sides. Big as a battleship. Not too many of those on the road anymore.”
It sounded reasonable. There weren’t too many 1987 Dodge Shadows on the road anymore either. “I’m sure you were relieved to see his car.”
“I figured maybe he was around here somewhere,” said Andrew. “Using the restroom. Hiking along the creek or something. But his car doors were unlocked and the keys were in the ignition. And his briefcase was on the back seat. His whole life was in that bag.”
“Now you got frantic?”
“I checked the restrooms-both sides-and yelled his name. I got in his car and started it-I thought maybe he’d had car trouble-and it ran just fine. Then I ran back to my apartment and got my car. I drove to his house again and then came back to the ball fields. I drove all over the place.”
“And then you drove out to the landfill?”
Andrew’s head bounced up and down like a basketball.
“I think I would have called the police first,” I said.
He raked back his wet hair. “I almost did. But I felt a little foolish, know what I’m saying? Like I was overreacting. I thought maybe he’d arranged to meet somebody here and drove out to the dig with them. He was always going out there. Even in the winter. I just wanted to make sure he was okay.”
Up to that point Andrew’s story had made sense to me. Now I could see why the police were interested in him. Why would he think Gordon was at the landfill if his car was here? With the doors unlocked and keys in the ignition? With his briefcase on the back seat? Wouldn’t Andrew suspect foul play by now? Wouldn’t he call the police by now? Even the dopey campus police? No matter how foolish he felt? There simply had to be more to the story, even if this Andrew J. Holloway III was telling the truth. “I apologize for putting you through all this again,” I said.
He tried to smile. “I know I don’t have the greatest alibi,” he said. “I can account for the hours I take classes and teach, and deliver pizzas, but I spend an awful lot of time alone in my apartment.”
I drove him back to Menominee Hall.
Chapter 6
Tuesday, March 20
After dropping Andrew off, I drove to Artie’s for a few things. I bought a half-pound of smoked turkey breast, a few slices of baby Swiss, a bag of freshly baked croissants, and a big jug of laundry detergent. When I got home I put three strips of bacon in the microwave. While they shriveled, I sliced one of the croissants. I piled the bottom half high with turkey and cheese. I squeezed a thick squiggle of horseradish sauce onto the top half. I piled the bacon in the middle and carefully put the croissant back together, so the pointy ends matched. I searched the shelves in the refrigerator door and behind my sticky, almost-empty bottle of maple syrup found a lone pickle spear swimming in a jar of green juice. I poured myself a glass of skim milk. I put it all on a tray and headed for the basement. Not to do the laundry. To conduct an archaeological dig of my own.
In the old days the morgue was a sea of filing cabinets. Stories were clipped from the paper, dated, and stuffed into manila envelopes. The envelopes were stuffed into the cabinets, alphabetically, sometimes by subject, sometimes by people’s last names. Finding what you wanted was always an adventure. Now we store everything in cyberspace. Bink-bink-bink on your keyboard and a story that might have taken you an hour to find in the old cabinets is hovering in front of your nose. Eric Chen, meanwhile, is slowly transferring all of the old files onto computer disks. As soon as he finishes with one of the old cabinets, that cabinet, files and all, goes straight into the back seat of my Dodge Shadow, and then down my basement steps. I bet I’ve got fifty of them down there. A few are painted an ugly green but most are what we used to call battleship gray. They are all exactly five feet high and 18 inches wide. They all have four deep drawers that require a determined tug to get open. Two or three nights a week-even when I’m not looking for anything in particular-I go down there and sift through the old clippings, remembering things I’d forgotten, stuffing my brain with things I never knew. I know it doesn’t say much about my social life but I just love it.
I put my lunch on the old chrome-legged kitchen table I keep by the dryer, pulled on the light, and headed for the D drawers.
Why the D drawers?
One reason was to see if any stories had ever been filed under Dumps, although that seemed unlikely. I couldn’t remember ever filing anything under that category in my forty-odd years in the morgue. But I knew The Herald-Union had written about the David Delarosa murder. There would be plenty in the D drawers about that.
Andrew, you see, had pointed me in a direction I was already beginning to point myself. But it wasn’t any of the interesting facts he told me about landfills, or archaeological techniques, or even the condition of Gordon’s body that got my mind working. It was his perceptions -which was ironic given his high-minded declaration that “perception doesn’t hold a candle to a trowel.”
According to Andrew, Gordon never let on that he was looking for something in particular. Yet Andrew clearly suspected that Gordon’s murder might be tied to something buried out there. “I’ve been wondering about that like everybody else,” he said. As an old beatnik might say, Andrew had picked up a vibe.
And so had I.
And so all the time I was at Artie’s, fighting my way through the aisles clogged with harried young moms, like some old salmon struggling up the rapids to spawn, my fertile mind was fixed not only on the fifties, but on the late fifties, and what might have happened all those years ago that touched Sweet Gordon’s life enough to make him go digging now. David Delarosa’s pretty face popped up again and again.