Well, I sure wished she hadn’t brought God into it. I’d stolen the brick from a city street and now, if I wasn’t careful, I’d have to lie about it, too. I prayed that the Almighty wasn’t eavesdropping. “You know, Margaret,” I began, “I almost never go to garage sales. I just hate them. People pawing over other people’s junk. But my neighbor Jocelyn just loves them. She’s always asking me to go with her. And you know how I try to be a good neighbor. So, I saw this old brick and said to myself, ‘I wonder if Margaret has one of these?’”
She took the brick and held it like it was the baby Jesus. “Well, I do,” she said, “but I can always use another.” She told me how rare they were. How she’d seen one just like it on Charles Avenue and how tempted she’d been to dig it out. “How much did you pay for it?”
I pawed the air. “It was a steal.”
“I’ve seen them go for fifty dollars or more at auctions. Let me pay you.”
“Oh, no. It’s a gift.”
“Well, God love you,” she said.
As guilty as I felt, I’d succeeded in seducing the better side of Margaret’s nature. I let her go on and on about her brick collection until my toes were curling inside my Reeboks. “Well, you certainly live a more interesting life than me,” I finally said. “You collect bricks, you protect the environment.”
“I only write about people who protect the environment,” she said.
This time she’d said just the right thing. “But you sure help them protect it,” I said. “Like that illegal dumping stuff you did a few years back. You kept the pressure on with all those great stories. And that guy who dumped that stuff-what was his name?”
“Kenneth Kingzette.”
“That’s right. Kenneth Kingzette. He went to prison. How many years did he get, anyway?”
“Just four,” said Margaret.
“That’s all? From what I hear that stuff he dumped is pretty nasty.”
“Toluene. And nasty doesn’t begin to describe it. Even little doses can screw you up pretty good. Dizziness. Nausea. Impaired vision and speech. Exposure over a long time can permanently damage your liver and kidneys. Even your brain. Even kill you.”
“Yikes. When’s he getting out?”
“He was paroled in November.”
“Well, I hope the police are keeping an eye on him. And you, too. On Kenneth Kingzette, I mean.”
“He’s working with his son,” she said, lovingly brushing her fingers over the etched face of the Indian chief. “Some little rinky-dink moving company.”
“Not here in Hannawa, I hope.”
“Here in Hannawa.”
“And they let him do that?”
“It’s not against the law to make an honest living.”
“But aren’t some of the chemicals he dumped still missing?”
Margaret nodded. “And so is the president of the chemical company.”
“Oh, that’s right. Ronald or Donald something or other.”
“Donald Madrid.”
“Yes, Donald Madrid. I always figured Kingzette dumped him illegally, too.”
“You and a lot of other people. But there was never any evidence of a murder. I think the police figure Mr. Madrid took off for tropical climes.”
“And why would they figure that?”
“He ordered a shitload of stuff from Lands’ End a couple weeks before he disappeared-fancy set of luggage, several pairs of wrinkle-free chinos and one of those Indiana Jones hats.”
“Any money missing?”
“Not from his personal accounts, but apparently Mr. Madrid was a regular Wolfgang Puck when it came to cooking the company books.”
Margaret was watching the second hand on her wristwatch spin, a signal that I was wearing out my welcome. “Well, I’ve bothered you enough,” I said. “I just hope you’re happy with the brick.”
She told me she was tickled pink with the brick, and before I could stop her, she dug a twenty-dollar bill out of her purse and stuffed it in my hand. “It wasn’t any more than that, was it?” she asked.
I shook my head. I walked away wondering how many of the seven deadly sins I’d just committed.
Chapter 8
Friday, March 23
I took a two-hour lunch and didn’t eat a darn thing. Instead I drove to the college to talk to Bernard Murray. He teaches environmental science and was quoted extensively in a couple of Margaret’s stories. He’d worked with the Ohio EPA that year they’d searched for the drums of toluene Kenneth Kingzette dumped for Donald Madrid. I was hoping that if there was any connection between Gordon’s murder and the missing toluene, Murray would help me make the link.
When I called to make an appointment, I offered to take him to lunch. “Not necessary,” he said. “Just pop in when you can.” The second I walked into his office in the L.W. Hertzog Science Center I knew why he’d turned down the free meal. He was the boniest man I’d ever seen in my life. The kind who eats a couple of celery sticks and then runs ten miles to burn off the calories. He was in his fifties, but the lack of meat on his face made it hard to tell just how far in.
“It’s so nice of you to give me a few minutes,” I said, sitting in one of the cheap, metal and plastic government office chairs lined up along the glass wall.
“I was a friend of Gordon’s, too,” he said. When he sat back in his huge swivel chair, the leather barely dented.
I explained my theory that Gordon may have been murdered to prevent him from finding something hidden in the dump. I told him I’d been reading old stories about the Madrid chemical case. “I know I’m probably tilting at windmills,” I said, “but I can’t help but wonder if there’s a link.”
Murray leaned forward on his elbows and pushed his fists into the thin layer of flesh under his eyes. “Actually, there just might be,” he said.
I leaned forward, too. “You think so?”
He studied me, cautiously, I think to judge if I knew more than I was letting on. “When you called yesterday I thought maybe you’d already connected a few dots.”
I gave my ignorance away. “I haven’t even connected one dot yet.”
He smiled grimly, as if he needed a swallow of Pepto Bismol. “Maybe you have now. Gordon worked with us on the investigation. As a volunteer. I recruited him, in fact. I figured his archaeological know-how would be helpful. Help us find ground that was freshly disturbed, that sort of thing.”
“And was he helpful?”
“Yes and no. He loved poking around old farms and abandoned junk yards. But he seemed more interested in looking for arrowheads than drums of toluene.”
“About those junk yards-was the Wooster Pike landfill one of them?”
“Oh, sure. We checked every old dump in a fifty-mile radius. We did find drums from Madrid chemical buried at the Hartville Road dump and in the dump in Morrow Township, but not the Wooster Pike site. Which frankly surprised me. The Wooster Pike dump would have been the perfect place for Kingzette. Accessible. Abandoned. Middle of nowhere. ”
“Did Gordon seem upset that not all the toluene was found?”
“We’re all a bunch of tree-huggers around here. We were all PO’d when the EPA pulled the plug.”
I searched for the right words and couldn’t find them. “Was Gordon’s PO’d-ness more intense than other people’s?”
He chuckled. “Did he jump up and down and vow to find those missing drums of toluene even if it killed him? I don’t recall that.”
“How about you? Did you jump up and down?”
He chuckled again. “I’ve been consulting with the EPA since my graduate days. They’re always coming into a case too late and pulling out too early. They had enough to convict Kingzette and Madrid and they had other cases in other cities. They said they’d keep looking but they didn’t, of course.”
I’m sure Bernard Murray’s atrophied stomach hadn’t growled in years, but mine was beginning to sound like a wolverine in heat. “When exactly did you search the old landfills?”
He drummed on his bottom lip. “Let’s see-May, June and July of ’95.”