“I also understand why that guy was pissed off at us,” Crane said. “Like anybody in his place would be.”
“You can rationalize anything, can’t you, Crane? Even getting the shit beat out of you.”
She started the car. Crane looked back at the barrels, standing on top of each other, as if to get a better look at them as they drove away.
Chapter Twelve
They were parked alongside the road again. The midnight skyline of the Kemco plant was a study in plastic and steel and soft-focus green-yellow-aqua light, against a backdrop of smoke and smokestacks.
“Why doesn’t it make any noise?” Crane asked. “It’s creepy that it doesn’t make any noise.”
“It isn’t a noisy operation,” Boone shrugged. She was leaned back casually in the Datsun’s driver’s seat, munching on sunflower seeds. The near-darkness they were sitting in made for interesting shadows on her face; she looked quite lovely, for a girl, woman, eating sunflower seeds.
“What are they making in there, anyway?” he asked her.
“Herbicides. Pesticides. Plastics. Lots of things.”
“Useful things,” he countered.
“Right. Like Agent Orange.”
“Are they still making that?”
“Yes, and PCB, until a year ago.”
“Isn’t that a little unfair?”
“Bringing up the recent past? I don’t think so. I don’t think there should be a statute of limitations, just because the murder you committed was ten years ago.”
Crane said nothing.
“I don’t object to everything they make. I know a lot of farmers depend on the stuff... though personally I can’t see eating anything that isn’t organically grown.”
“Jeez, who’d have guessed?”
“What’s with you, Crane?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re really on the rag tonight.”
“I guess I am. Sorry.”
They sat. Boone ate her sunflower seeds, watched the loading-dock area. It seemed a quiet night: not a Kemco truck to be seen. Crane was still studying the Kemco plant itself, fighting ambivalent feelings. His face hurt, from where he’d been hit.
“What are those things?” he asked her, pointing.
“Those fat silo things? Storage vats.”
“What’s in them?”
“Waste, I guess.”
“They’re fucking huge.”
“That they are.”
“You can’t be right. There isn’t that much waste coming out of this one plant.”
“You been reading my research material, Crane. You’re up on how much hazardous waste is produced in this country every year.”
Yes he was. Thirty-two million tons. But somehow it seemed obnoxious of her to mention it right now.
“I also know,” Crane said, “that this plant, like most chemical processing plants, has its own waste-disposal unit. They are not dumping all that shit illegally.”
“Of course they aren’t. Most of it gets dumped in the river.”
“What river?”
“The Delaware River.”
“Where’s that?”
She pointed back behind the Kemco plant. “We can drive straight into it, if you like... we aren’t a mile from it.”
Feeling foolish, he said, “The stuff’s processed when it goes in, isn’t it? It’s probably cleaner than the river it’s going into.”
“Maybe. But that’s not what we’re here for. We’re here to find out about the stuff they can’t run through their disposal unit. The stuff they have to dump.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“Something’s wrong, isn’t it, Crane?”
“No. Yes. I’m just... trying not to get caught up in your... crusade. It’s dangerous, what you’re doing. It’s not what a journalist does.”
“What does a journalist do?”
“You keep an open mind when you look into something. You don’t set out to prove something. You set out to find the facts, whatever they are.”
“Yes, and your problem is you can’t face facts, when you find ’em.”
“No! My problem is keeping myself reminded, in the midst of your leftist hysteria, that there are two sides to everything. Even to Kemco.”
“It’s that talk you had with Mrs. Woll, isn’t it? That’s what’s bothering you.”
“No.”
“I think we should talk about that.”
“I told you what she told me.”
“But you can’t handle it, can you?”
The windshield was fogged up from their talking; that was okay, because if anyone drove by, it would reinforce the idea that he and Boone were making out. Which was hardly the case at the moment. He turned to her. Calm. Rational.
He said, “Mrs. Woll opened up to me, a little bit, possibly because I’m male, and also because I know how to interview better than you. But for the most part, she didn’t say anything that wasn’t on the tape of your conversation with her, a year ago.”
“There was the news that she worked with Mary Beth at Kemco.”
“News to me. You knew about it, ’cause Mary Beth would’ve told you. You just wanted me to find out for myself.”
“Maybe,” she smiled. “When I interviewed her originally, not long after her husband’s ‘suicide,’ she was a secretary at City Hall. Had been for some years. Since then, she’s been given a, shall we say, enviable position at Kemco. Head of the secretarial pool, no less.”
“And into that, I suppose, you read all kinds of conspiratorial under- and overtones. Tell me, did Kemco kill Kennedy?”
“Which one?”
“Boone, Kemco offering an employee’s widow a position with the company could be a strictly benevolent act on their part. It isn’t necessarily anything sinister.”
“She was qualified for the job, I grant you. But surely you find it slightly suspicious...”
Crane looked away from her. Said nothing.
“Of course you do,” Boone said. “That’s what’s bothering you. Isn’t it?”
He sighed, shook his head. Turned and looked at her.
“Yes,” he admitted. “That, and that we’ve made a connection between Mary Beth and one of the other ‘suicide’ victims. An indirect connection, but a connection.”
Boone nodded. “She’s connected to another victim, too: Paul Meyer. He was an exec, and Mary Beth was the darling of the secretarial pool, where the execs were concerned.”
“Which could explain how she stumbled onto some high-level shenanigans. Well. Anyway, I’ll be talking to Meyer’s wife tomorrow; we might get some insights, there. This is all very flimsy, from an evidence standpoint, you know.”
“Maybe. But maybe we should both try to keep an open mind.”
“Yeah. Maybe you’re right.”
“A truck.”
“Huh?”
“That could be a truck.”
Light caught the corner of Crane’s eye and he turned. Down the road, about a mile, were the high-beams of what appeared to be a truck, approaching Kemco.
“Get in the back seat,” Boone told him.
He did. She passed the Nikon to him.
The truck — it was a truck — came into view. It was a big flatbed with the sides built up; a tarp was flung over the back of it, tied on. This they saw as it pulled into the graveled loading area.
“Did you notice the clearing booth was empty tonight?” Boone asked him.
Crane, in the back seat, feeling nervous, said, “No I didn’t.”
“Well it was.”
“That isn’t one of Kemco’s trucks, is it.”
“It sure isn’t,” Boone said. She was smiling. “It’s an independent. Come to pick something up.”
Chapter Thirteen
Boone drove by the loading-dock area at about twenty-five miles an hour. Crane, out the back window of the Datsun, took half a dozen pictures of the flatbed truck, which was waiting near the big green tin shed while one of the two men in its cab, a burly guy in a thermal jacket, hopped out to talk to a Kemco hard hat, who was gesturing, giving instructions for where the truck was to go to pick up its load.