Chapter 7
Wednesday, March 21
Eric appeared at my desk the moment I sat down with my morning tea. He was waving a folder in each hand. “Wooster Pike Landfill, toxic waste.”
“Good boy,” I said.
I wanted to plant my nose in those folders the second he handed them to me. But I was a woman with responsibilities. I put the folders in the top drawer of my desk, so I wouldn’t be tempted. I got busy marking up that morning’s paper, deciding which stories should be saved and under which categories. That always takes the better part of the morning. Then I looked up the information city hall reporter Mike Hugely needed on the Elmer Avenue bridge project. After that I was trapped in a one-sided conversation with Candy Prince about her five hairless Chinese cats. I self-medicated that twenty minutes of agony with a call to my niece in LaFargeville to wish her a happy fiftieth birthday. Finally at eleven-thirty I scooted off to the cafeteria with those two tempting folders and the Tupperware container of leftover chicken teriyaki I’d brought from home.
The folder on the landfill was filled with a lot of dry government stuff that was absolutely useless. Nor had Eric’s search found any murders, missing person cases or other chicaneries in that part of the county that might require further investigation. I closed the folder. I couldn’t decide whether to be relieved or disappointed.
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?”