“He talks like a sociologist.”
“That’s what he wants to be when he grows up.”
“How about you, Crane? What do you want to be?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re supposed to be a journalism major. Why don’t you dig in and help me with this goddamn thing.”
“Your book? No. No thanks. That’s not what I have in mind.”
“I know it isn’t. But you came here, to me, because you know we share a common purpose.”
“I came here because you seem to know more about what’s going on than the Greenwood cops do.”
“The cops here are a joke. They’re nothing.”
“The guy I spoke to seemed competent enough.”
“If they were competent, they wouldn’t swallow these phony suicides whole.”
“They’re not all phony. One of them was a guy who shot his wife and kids — and then himself, in front of a cop.”
“Fine. He’s the one suicide Greenwood is statistically allowed. What about the other four?”
He looked at her. Nodded. Sipped his tea. It was still warm.
“Okay, then,” he said. “You still have to explain some things. What was Mary Beth doing, where Kemco was concerned, that could’ve gotten her killed?”
“Maybe she stumbled onto something.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? What aren’t you telling me?”
Boone got up and began walking around the braided rug, pacing, as she explained.
“You’ve got to understand,” she said. “The book I’m doing deals with a lot of things. Agent Orange, for one. I’ve talked to dozens of Vietnam vets who came in contact with it, corresponded with another twenty or twenty-five. But I haven’t come up with anything new, really... much of what I have on Agent Orange is secondary source material. You’re a journalism student, Crane, I don’t have to tell you that firsthand, primary source material would carry more weight.”
“I can see that,” Crane said, keeping a calm tone. Trying to give her room to say what she wanted to say. “The story of Agent Orange would have a place in your book, but the book couldn’t depend on that... it’s a story that’s been told elsewhere.”
“Exactly! And the interviews, the statistics, laying out the pattern of illnesses here in Greenwood and other nearby small towns, whose populations largely consist of families supported by one or more Kemco employees, it’s impressive, it’s shocking even... but it’s circumstantial. And, damnit, I’m no scientist. I can’t say I’ve really proven anything.”
“Can’t you get inside the plant, to check on safety conditions and so forth?”
“Are you kidding? How, by asking Patrick, my ex-husband, for a tour? And what would I see on a company-directed tour? I’d get the standard P.R. shuffle, right? And suppose I got in on my own somehow, to really snoop around? What would I be looking for? How would I know how to judge the safety conditions in a chemical processing plant?”
“What you’re saying is your book lacks something.”
“It sure as hell does. I need a smoking gun, Crane.”
“A smoking gun.”
“Right! Something really tangible. Don’t you get it? Don’t you understand, Crane? Kemco is fucking malignant, festering, a bed of corruption and negligence...”
“I see,” Crane said, hoping her journalistic style was somewhat more subdued.
“I need to be able to show Kemco being criminally negligent. Not just a big well-meaning corporation that may have had some problems with plant safety.”
“It doesn’t sound to me like you have anything remotely like that.”
“Oh but I do. In one of my interviews, with a company employee who was a friend of one of the ‘suicide’ victims, I learned that Kemco’s playing dump-and-run.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Kemco has to account to the federal government for the disposal of any potentially hazardous waste material; like this stuff PCB, which is used to insulate electrical transformers. Kemco makes that, and the waste from it can be dumped at only three federally approved sites. For years these companies dumped their shit wherever the hell they wanted... sewers, creeks, rivers. You know what they used to think? ‘Dilution is the solution to pollution.’ Only it didn’t work out that way; there are plenty of toxic substances that don’t harmlessly break down in water. So they started burying the stuff — Kemco, and Dow and Monsanto and DuPont and Hooker and all the others. Usually in 55-gallon steel drums, which eventually corroded and started to leak out into the ground, contaminating farmland and water supplies and people.”
She was starting to rant; he tried to stop her: “Boone, I’ve heard of Love Canal. I know about things like that. But those are dump sites from twenty years ago. Things are more regulated than that now.”
“In theory. You know, I’m glad you’ve heard of Love Canal, because so has Kemco, only they don’t give a fuck. They are still hiring lowlife truckers to come dump this stuff God knows where, and with Christ knows what results on the environment and the people living nearby.”
“What does any of this have to do with Mary Beth?”
“She was working this summer in Kemco’s secretarial pool. A lot of the execs used her — she was good, and well liked; the daughter of a late, trusted employee. She heard some things. Saw some things.”
“Such as?”
“One major thing, specifically: one evening, when she was working alone, staying late, trying to catch up on some work, she saw one of the executives give an envelope to a rough-looking guy who might’ve been a trucker. The trucker took some cash out of the envelope and counted it.”
“That’s it? That’s what she saw? That’s thin, Boone. That’s goddamn thin.”
“I don’t think that’s all she found out.”
“Don’t you know?”
“I was out of town for about three days, doing some research on the Agent Orange aspect of the book. When I got back, there were half a dozen messages for me to call her. I called. She was dead.”
“She was snooping around for you, then. For your book.”
“Crane, blaming me won’t do any good.”
“I’m not blaming you. Do you know the name of the exec she saw handing the money over?”
“Yes. It was Patrick.”
Chapter Nine
From the highway, glancing over to the left, yellow-orange light stained the horizon, just above the trees. It was as if the sun were coming up at midnight. They turned off onto a blacktop and followed the signs that led them from one blacktop onto another, and another, and the stain against the sky became a city. A city of lights and smoke.
As the city’s skyline emerged, the only skyscrapers were smokestacks, a dozen of them, emitting ever-expanding grayish white clouds that made seductive patterns as they rose.
Crane had expected the Kemco plant to be big, and it was; but it was more spread out, and closer to the ground, than he’d thought. There was an eerie, almost underwater look to it all, with the shifting smoke backdrop, the green-yellow-aqua outdoor lights strung about like bulbs at a particularly drab pool party. The taller, larger buildings resembled greenhouses, their walls sheets of mottled aqua-colored plastic, cross-hatched with metal, rising up amidst massive inter-twines of steel pipe. There was a massive electrical substation nearby. Numerous one-story buildings. Countless chemical tanks. Off at the sides, huge, squat, silo-like structures huddled like metal toadstools. Just inside a full-to-capacity parking lot, an American flag flapped against a grayish white breeze. The plant was going full throttle, but Crane had yet to see a human being.