Dig (3 page)

I could believe it. To members of the Meriwether Square Existentialist Baked Bean Society, Jack Kerouac’s unlikely visit to Hemphill College was the first and second coming rolled into one. He’d visited the campus in late November 1956.
On The Road
hadn’t been published yet, but he was already well known among the little groups of beats sprinkled around the country. He only stayed for two days. He drank a lot of free beer and ate a lot of free food and slept on the sofa in Gordon’s apartment. After 48 hours of mooching, he took the bus to New York and became famous. Three Novembers later the Baked Bean Society held its first party to commemorate his already legendary visit. We officially, and breathlessly, called it The Grand Kerouacian Anniversary Ball. By the second year we were simply calling it the
Kerouac Thing
.

“You had the Kerouac Thing in March?” I asked. “Whatever happened to November?”

“We stopped having it in November ten, twelve years ago. Finals and football kept getting in the way. Not to mention Thanksgiving. Half the time half the people couldn’t come. So I finally said to Gordon and Chick, ‘Jesus, why don’t we just hold the damn thing when nobody’s busy with anything.’ March it was.”

Lawrence and I were already two years out of college and married when the first Kerouac Thing was held. But we attended. And we continued to attend for the next several years. And those get-togethers were great fun. We’d read from Kerouac’s poems and novels. Shaka Bop would play the bebop tunes Kerouac allegedly loved. We’d eat beans and drink cheap wine. We’d remember—and embellish—our precious personal minutes with the great bohemian bard himself. “You still have it at your place?” I asked.

Effie moaned like a seasick walrus. “Hell, no. I gave up that honor twenty years ago. We hold it at the Blue Tangerine.”

“The Blue Tangerine? That’s a little un-bohemian, isn’t it?”

Now Effie laughed. “It’s a lot un-bohemian. And I’m sure the great Mr. K is rolling over in his box. But time does march on, Maddy my love.”

“That it does.”

“We’ve sure missed you over the years,” she said.

“After Lawrence and I divorced I guess I got busy with other things,” I said. I could see that Effie was itching to ask me what went wrong between Lawrence and me. She’d once warned me not to marry a man that handsome and I did not want to reward her with the details of his infidelity. So I changed the subject. “You said you saw Gordon at the Kerouac Thing just three days before his body was found—did it seem to you that he was bothered by anything?”

Her eyes shifted back and forth inside her big yellow glasses. “No.”

“It’s just so hard to believe somebody would want him dead,” I said.

“Yes, it is.”

“And why that old landfill? Not that any place is a good place to be murdered.”

“Maybe he was digging where he shouldn’t have been digging,” Effie said.

Chapter 3

Thursday, March 15

I was a wreck all morning. That afternoon I’d be having lunch with Detective Scotty Grant. For better or worse Dale Marabout had let it slip to his sources at the police department that I knew Gordon Sweet. And now Grant wanted to see me. For what he called a friendly chat.

“I’d be happy to,” I said when he called me Monday morning. “I’m in the morgue all day. Come by whenever you want.”

He laughed so loud I had to pull the receiver away from my ear. “With a hundred reporters hovering around? I thought maybe you’d come to see me.”

I’d never been to a real police station, of course, but I’d seen plenty of them on TV. I wanted no part of that testosterone-soaked lunacy. “Couldn’t we meet on neutral ground?” I asked.

His laugh was kinder now. “I suppose.”

We settled on Speckley’s, that wonderful little mom and pop diner in Meriwether Square famous for its meatloaf sandwiches, glob of au gratin potatoes on the side. We’d meet there at two, after the lunch rush, when we’d be surrounded by empty tables.

So all morning Tuesday I made Eric’s life a living hell—even more than usual—and then drove to Meriwether Square for my friendly chat with Scotty Grant. We both ordered the meatloaf sandwiches.

Scotty Grant looked more like a junior high school principal than a homicide detective. He was tall and doughy, comfortable in a suit that didn’t fit very well. He had a high forehead and massive blond eyebrows that swooped across his brow like the McDonald’s arches. He was closer to fifty than forty.

Grant and I had first met during our paper’s investigation into the Reverend Buddy Wing murder the year before. The famous evangelist was poisoned on live television. As the weeks went by, and my suspicions began to bear fruit, Grant came to trust my instincts. I figured that was why he was having lunch with me now.

“So, you knew Gordon Sweet pretty well?” he asked.

“Years ago I did. When we were in college. We were all part of this little group called the Meri—”

He held up his hand like a stop sign. “I know about the little group.”

I felt a flash of heat, from my ears to my toes. But it wasn’t menopause—that bubbling cauldron of misery was long behind me. It was embarrassment. The Meriwether Square Baked Bean Existentialist Society was suddenly becoming a big thing in my life again. As if I’d once been a member of the Communist Party or something. “It wasn’t a real organization or anything,” I said. “It was just a bunch of—”

He stopped me again. “Have you stayed close to any of those people?”

I shook my head.

“So you weren’t at that Kerouac Thingy-dingy the other night?”

“Good gravy, no. I haven’t gone for years.”

“So your relationship with Sweet and his friends is pretty much ancient history then?”

“Well, yes. I suppose so.”

I could tell from the way Grant was nibbling on the ice in his water glass that he was disappointed. “Exactly when was the last time you talked to Gordon Sweet?” he asked.

“It could have been six months ago—or maybe a year.”

“That memorable, was it?”

“It was just the usual small talk when you bump into someone. ‘How you doing?’ ‘You’re looking good.’ That kind of thing.”

“And was he looking good, Mrs. Sprowls? He didn’t look troubled or frightened? Preoccupied with something?”

“Well, Gordon was always preoccupied with something,” I said. “He was a very smart man and there was always a lot going on upstairs. But I don’t have any memory of thinking something was wrong.”

He put another spoonful of ice in his mouth. “You went to the memorial service, right?”

I nodded, wondering how he knew.

“You have a chance to talk to anybody?”

I told him who’d I talked to, Effie, Chick, Gwen and Rollie.

“Any of them say anything interesting?”

“Just the stuff everybody says. What a great guy Gordon was. How they’re going to miss him.”

“Nothing relating to his murder?”

“Well, Effie did say maybe Gordon was digging where he shouldn’t have been.”

Grant showed a smidgen of interest in that. “Was that
her
maybe or
your
maybe?”

“I’m pretty sure it was her maybe.”

“So you didn’t get any sense that she knew something?”

“Not really. But you do have to wonder if his dig had anything to do with his murder, don’t you?”

The waitress brought our drinks. Grant had ordered a Diet Pepsi. I’d ordered hot tea. He watched me squeeze the goodness out of my teabag and I watched him take his straw out of the wrapper. I figured if he wasn’t going to ask me another question, then I’d ask him a few of mine. “You don’t have any suspects then?”

He bent the tip of the straw at a convenient angle and took a long suck of his Pepsi. “Every murder comes with a shitload of suspects, Mrs. Sprowls. Pardon my Vulgarian.”

I waved off his apology. “But nobody you’re going to arrest in the next day or two?”

He adjusted the angle on his straw and sucked again. “This one could take a while to unravel.”

“What about that graduate assistant, Andrew Holloway III?” I asked.

One of Grant’s big eyebrows arched higher. One went flat. “What about him?”

“Dale said the kid found both Gordon’s body and his car. Fifteen miles away from each other.”

Grant stared at me for an uncomfortably long time. He was not thrilled that I knew that much about the graduate assistant, which meant he was not thrilled that Dale knew that much. Clearly somebody back at headquarters was going to get his ass chewed out for leaking that. “That’s really all I know,” I assured him.

“Let’s try to keep it that way,” he said.

The meatloaf sandwiches and sides of au gratin potatoes arrived. Like everyone who’s ever eaten at Speckley’s, we raved about how good it was all the time we were stuffing our faces. “I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful,” I said.

He put down his fork. Folded his fists under his chin. “That’s not the only reason I wanted to see you.”

I put my fork down, too. Fidgeted with my napkin. “Oh?”

“Let me ask you this—If you weren’t that close to Professor Sweet anymore, why did you go to his memorial service?”

It was a good question. One I’d asked myself. I fumbled my way through a number of answers: “I guess because he was such a nice man. And I had so many good memories of him. And to tell you the truth, I was curious to see who else might show up.”

My use of the word
curious
made him wince, as if he’d just swallowed one of those bitter little gnats that buzz around over-ripe bananas. “You’re not going to involve yourself, are you Mrs. Sprowls?”

“Involve myself?”

“You did a great job with the Buddy Wing thing. We never would have found the real murderer without you. We’re very grateful. But that little snoopfest of yours was just a one-time deal, right?”

“Well, of course it was a one-time deal.”

My assurance resuscitated his appetite. “That’s good to hear,” he said through a mouthful of slippery potatoes. “Because this case may have to be on hold for a while. And I don’t want you out there causing trouble. For me or yourself.”

“Heavens to Betsy, don’t worry about that—what do you mean on hold for a while?”

“Not exactly on hold. But we only have so many detectives. And only so much time. And we’re up to our boxers in this Zuduski thing.”

He was talking, of course, about the murder of Paul Zuduski, younger brother of Congresswoman Betty Zuduski-Lowell. He’d been missing for six weeks when his badly decomposed body was found in an abandoned factory on the south side. He’d been shot several times and duct-taped inside a Persian rug. He’d worked in his sister’s Hannawa office, helping solve the everyday problems of her constituents.

“The good congresswoman is putting tremendous pressure on the mayor,” Grant said. “And pressure on the mayor means pressure on the chief. Which means pressure on yours truly. But don’t worry, Mrs. Sprowls, we’ll get the sonofabitch who killed your friend sooner or later.”

***

Of course I wasn’t going to involve myself. No matter how many unanswered questions were eating away at me. No matter how upset I was that Detective Grant was putting Gordon’s murder on the backburner while he figured out who killed the congresswoman’s little brother.

Of course if I remembered something that might be important, I’d share that with the police. And if, as the head librarian of
The Hannawa Herald-Union,
I came across something interesting in my files, why, yes, I’d certainly pass that along. But involve myself? No way in hell was I going to involve myself.

Chapter 4

Saturday, March 17

I knew right where to find Eric Chen—in the cafe at the Borders bookstore in Hannawa Falls. Eric spends every Saturday and Sunday there, from the minute the store opens until the manager sweeps him out at closing time, playing chess with the city’s other dust-collecting geniuses. They’re quite a bunch, I’ll tell you. I suppose there are fifteen or twenty of them. Ethnically they’re a real box of Crayolas: Whites, Blacks, Asians, Latinos, Iranians, just about one of everything. And almost all of them have an advanced degree in some difficult subject. They gather around the little tables like starved squirrels around a walnut tree. They play game after game after game. Fast, noisy games. They chatter and groan and slap their foreheads. They bang their chess pieces down and pound their timers. They giggle in Farsi and screech
Shit!
in Chinese.

Eric was sitting right in the middle of this mayhem, locked in battle with some unshaven old fart in a bowling shirt. I sat at an empty table and waited for him to notice me. When he did, I wiggled my fingers at him. He gave me the international finger signal for “just a minute.” He played—and lost—three more games before joining me. “You know,” I said, “if you and your little friends stopped wasting your brains on that worthless game, you could have half of the world’s problems solved in about five minutes.”

Eric was cradling a big, half-empty bottle of Mountain Dew in his arms. “Is there a compliment in there somewhere?”

“Actually, no.”

“Good,” he said. “I don’t think any of us could take the pressure of being admired.” He pulled out a chair with his foot and slumped into it. He held his Mountain Dew bottle up to the light and shook it until the carbonation bubbles were swirling like the snow in one of those worthless glass balls. “So, what brings you to Borders, Maddy? Trolling for a well-read man?”

“Trolling for a man who still reads comic books. I need your help, Eric.”

It took him two seconds to put two and two together. “Ah—Sweet Gordon. The police haven’t arrested anybody yet?”

“From what Detective Grant tells me, that
yet
may be a long way off.”

I was expecting him to put up a tussle. I’d forced him to help with the Buddy Wing investigation and that little adventure hadn’t exactly gone well for him. But he just sat there, grinning at me like a toad that had just drilled itself out of the mud after a long winter. Post Traumatic Chess Disorder I suppose. I laid out my game plan before he came to his senses. “We’ll have to look into his love life. From what I see on all those TV shows that’s always numero uno. After that, relatives, other professors and his students. Anybody whose life is even marginally better now that Gordon’s dead. But the big thing I’m going to need your help with is that awful landfill.”

Eric screwed the cap off his Mountain Dew and took a long chug. He swished the liquid back and forth between his cheeks. He swallowed, scrunching his face as if he was drinking rat poison. “This isn’t going to involve a shovel, is it?”

“Only your computer.” I told him what I wanted: “See what you can find out about the landfill itself. If anybody else has ever been killed out there. If anything else strange or controversial has happened there since it closed.”

“Easy enough,” Eric said. He took one of the ballpoints from his shirt pocket and wrote it on the paper napkin he carried in his pants pocket instead of a handkerchief.

I continued: “Second, let’s see if anybody’s missing from that part of the county—especially where the police expect foul play.”

“Even easier,” he said.

“This next one may not be so easy,” I said. “There could be oodles of things buried out there that shouldn’t be.”

“Including a lot of poopy diapers.”

“Illegal things, Eric. Something that would send somebody to prison for a long time if somebody found it.”

“A body?”

“Maybe. Or maybe a murder weapon. Or a big wad of stolen money. Or a drug dealer’s stash. Secret government documents linking Elvis and Lassie to the Kennedy assassination. Who the hell knows? An old landfill would be the perfect place to hide almost anything.
But for the time being, let’s concentrate on one thing—toxic waste.”

Eric’s eyebrows shot up until they were hiding under his shiny black bangs. “Ahhhh—Margaret Newman’s series.”

“That’s right. Print out Margaret’s stories for me. And anything else we might have on the subject.”

Margaret Newman was
The Herald-Union’
s environmental writer. Several years ago she’d written a terrific series on a local chemical company caught burying some of its nastier stuff in the dead of night. “It’s been a few years but I seem to remember that some of that goop was never accounted for,” I said.

Eric had filled one side of the napkin and was now scribbling on the back. “The head honcho went to jail, didn’t he?”

“I don’t remember that much about it,” I said, “but I think the guy hired to do the dumping is the one who went to jail. The
honcho
, as I recall, merely went missing.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t. And neither do I. It’s just a hunch.”

Eric launched into one of his irritating songs—this one sung to the tune of La Cucaracha: “Hunch about the honcho! Hunch about the honcho! Deedee-deedee-deedee-dee!”

I put my fingers in my ears until he was finished amusing himself. “Now, you understand that this is not exactly a sanctioned project?”

“What fun would it be if it was?”

“Because if Tinker finds out we’re snooping into another murder, he’ll run us through the printing press feet first.”

Tinker, of course, was Alec Tinker, the paper’s managing editor. He was a sweetie, but a very nervous sweetie. There was no point bringing him into the loop until I knew that loop led somewhere.

Eric nodded that he understood the need for secrecy. “Anything else you need?”

“There is a feature Doris Rowe wrote for the Sunday magazine a few years ago,” I said. “But I can find that myself.”

Eric’s eyes squeezed skeptically. “You sure about that?”

I wasn’t sure. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to admit it. “What am I,” I exploded, “a sweet potato? If I said I can find it myself, then I can find it myself!”

***

Eric went back to his chess buddies. I drove to across town to Hemphill College, to see Chick Glass.

Chick, like a lot of his fellow professors, lived in one of the dark, old Tudors in the hills just west of the college. I parked on the street and waded through the snarls of pachysandra that filled his entire front yard. I climbed the broken stone steps. The door swung open before I could ring the bell. “Maddy Sprowls—where
have
you been?”

Chick stepped aside. I slipped into his narrow foyer. The table under the mirror was stacked high with junk mail. Only one of the three bulbs in the ceiling light was still burning. I let him kiss my cheek. He let me take off my coat by myself. “I had a meeting that went a smidge long,” I said.

“Meeting on a Sunday morning? I didn’t realize you were such an important woman.”

I smiled and let him think anything he wanted to think. “It was nice of you to invite me for lunch.”

“And it was nice for you to call me.”

Niceties out of the way, we wound our way to the solarium at the back of the house. It would have been a lot sunnier if the window panels had been washed sometime in the past twenty years. “What a darling space,” I said.

Chick grandly gestured for me to sit at the small wicker table. He poured two goblets of white wine and then trotted off to the kitchen. He returned with a huge bowl of tossed salad, heavy on the croutons, black olives and feta cheese. A second trip produced a pair of chilled plates, fancy silverware wrapped in cloth napkins, and four bottles of Kraft dressing to choose from. A third trip produced a pair of huge sourdough rolls stuffed with tuna salad. “Oh my,” I said. Maybe Chick wasn’t much of a housekeeper, but he’d certainly acquired some skills in the kitchen.

At first we talked about my life: How long I’d been at the paper and exactly what I did there; just where in Hannawa I lived and how I’d managed to stay unmarried after giving Lawrence the heave ho. Then we talked about his life: How he’d survived his two marriages and two divorces; what his three kids were doing; why he was still teaching at the rickety age of sixty-eight. To that last subject he said this: “A lot of that had to do with Gordon. If he wasn’t taking the last train to Retirementville, why should I?”

“I’m not the retiring type either,” I said. I told him about Editor Bob Averill’s many failed attempts to show me the door.

“Anyway,” he said, suddenly morose, “what would I do if I wasn’t teaching?”

It was the opening I was hoping for. “What about your poetry? I simply loved that poem you read at Gordon’s service.”

“Really?” His mood brightened as suddenly as it had dimmed. “Did I give you a copy?”

“Yes you did,” I said, cracking a crouton between my molars like one of those chipmunks that have turned my backyard into Swiss cheese. “I’ve read it a dozen times. Not that I understand it any better.”

Chick fell into that trap just as easily as the first. “What didn’t you understand?”

I squashed the sourdough roll down with the palm of my hand, so I could get the end of it in my mouth. I paraphrased his poem: “That weighty question that split you and Gordon asunder like Ti-Jean and the Howler—whoever or whatever they are.”

My ignorance simply thrilled him. “Don’t you remember? Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.”

“We called them that?”

“Everybody called them that, Maddy. Allen was the Howler, because of that famous book of his,
Howl
. And Jack, of course, was Ti-Jean.”

“Of course.”

“It’s the nickname his mother gave him when he was a kid. It’s French for Little John.”

“Of course.”

Chick pranced from the solarium like a barefoot boy running across a gravel driveway. I could hear his feet thumping up the stairs. Squeak across the ceiling. He returned out of breath with a photograph in a cheap wooden frame. “I keep it in my upstairs office,” he said.

I licked the tuna salad off my fingers and took the photograph. It was a black and white glossy, an 8½ by 11, the kind someone who’d had a photography class or two would take. It showed a much younger Chick and Gordon sitting back-to-back behind a granite gravestone laid flush to the ground. They were both sporting grim, artistic faces. The inscription on the stone was large enough to read:

“Ti-Jean”
John L. Kerouac
March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969
He Honored Life

Chick took the photograph back and cradled it in his lap. He smiled at it like it was a newborn baby. “Gordon and I visited his grave in the summer of 1970. The Edson Catholic Cemetery in Lowell, Massachusetts. We always talked about going back sometime.”

Maybe I hadn’t remembered their nicknames—assuming I’d ever known them—but I did remember a thing or two about Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. They’d started the beat movement in the late 1940s, when they were students at Columbia University in New York, along with William S. Burroughs and Neal Cassady and a troupe of other tortured souls. They bummed around the world together. They became living legends together. “So Kerouac and Ginsberg had some kind of falling out?” I asked Chick.

“Oh yes, a very famous falling out. Allen always thought Jack turned his back on the beat movement. And of course he did.”

I got to the nub of my visit. “And apparently there was also some kind of
weighty question
between you and Gordon?”

Chick’s face went pink with embarrassment. “Not all that weighty. We stayed friends right to—”

“The bitter end?”

Chick was suddenly interested in his sandwich and his salad, taking big mouthfuls of both. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” I said.

He softened the food in his mouth with a long drink of wine and swallowed. “Like I said in the poem, it really didn’t amount to anything.”

“Enough for you to write a poem about it,” I said, trying not to sound as interested as I was. “And then recite it at his memorial service—wearing that ridiculous beret.”

Chick rubbed the bump on his cockatoo nose. “I’d forgotten what a pit bull you are.”

“Too many people do,” I said.

He leaned forward on his elbows, dug his fingers into the thick white hair hanging over his ears. An explanation was coming. “I guess you remember when Jack came to the college—”

“You and Gordon met him that summer in San Francisco at some poetry festival, and invited him.”

“That’s right. He stayed in Gordon’s apartment. The one he had above the dry cleaning shop on Light Street.”

“The one with the refrigerator in the living room?”

“That’s the one. The night Jack left for New York, Gordon and I got carryout from Mopey’s. You remember Mopey’s—”

“It’s a parking lot now, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “And all three of us ordered cheeseburgers. Except that Gordon insists—insisted—that Jack had a plain burger. But it was a cheeseburger. He wanted it smothered with mustard and piled high with pickle chips.”