Ecstasy (21 page)

Then he busted out laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

He kept on laughing.

“Come on, Mad, what’s up?”

“Might that list include… gelatin by any chance?”

I checked my notebook. “Er…yeah. Why?”

“Adipic acid rang a bell,” he said, waving the square of newspaper at me, “so I grabbed this here story I did when Benson
won that big food-science competition.”

“And?”

“And the hideous substance that shut down the Deep Lake Cooling plant,” he said, “is better known as strawberry Jell-O.”

S
trawberry Jell-O? Are you kidding me?”

“Maybe it’s raspberry, I don’t know.” He was still chuckling, damn him. “You said it was red, right?”

“That’s what Shardik told me. But, come on…killer Jell-O? What kind of crazy shit is that?”

“Hey, it sort of fits. Those tree-hugging Save the Lakers wouldn’t really dump something toxic, now would they?”

“I guess not, but…come on. I mean, it was bad enough when those anti-G.M.O. morons dumped a load of transgenic potatoes in
the middle of Route Thirteen, but this is a whole new level of stupidity.”

“Why’s it so stupid? They managed to shut down the system for the better part of a week without hurting the lake or hitting
anybody over the head. Sounds like a solid plan to me.”

“Way to go, Mohawk Warriors.”

“Who?”

“The group that claimed responsibility for it.”

“Right.”

“So”—I cleared a space on the librarian’s desk and sat down—“what do we do now?”

“Write up the story for tomorrow’s paper. What else?”

“I’d love to. But where exactly am I supposed to attribute the information? ‘According to a fax ripped off Glenn Shardik’s
desk, the water contained—’ ”

“Don’t sweat it,” he said. “I bet they’re gonna release the findings any second.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because it’s goddamn strawberry Jell-O, for chrissake. It’s harmless.”

“I get it. Which means they can turn the system back on pronto.”

“I bet you a buck,” he said, “that they already have.”

He was right; we’d barely gotten back to our desks when the fax machine cranked out a press release from the Benson news service
announcing that the stuff in the cooling pool was, quote, “a common commercial flavored-gelatin food substance.”

The overwrought language was, no doubt, something the Benson lawyers had concocted to avoid getting the pants sued off them
by the Kraft Foods corporation—three guesses where Shardik and his staff had been when I came calling.

And speaking of lawsuits …I’d pretty much forgotten about the other story I was supposed to be writing, the one about the
music festival getting sued for not paying its bills. We’d gotten tipped off to it by one of the irate creditors, and although
I would’ve been happy to hand it off to the business reporter, the bosses had decided that I was now Queen of All Things Melting
Rock. So although I’m not one to balance my checkbook, I called up the injured parties and let them vent about how the festival
was run by a bunch of stinking deadbeats.

“I tried doin’ this the nice way,” said one pissed-off purveyor of Porta-Johns, “but those hippie bastards won’t even answer
my goddamn phone calls. Well, now they can talk to my freakin’ lawyer.”

I got a similar sentiment from the local companies that made the festival’s T-shirts, printed its tickets, and supplied its
overpriced water bottles. Melting Rock, apparently, was stiffing everybody.

I tried the festival office, but all I got was an answering machine telling me how great the bands were going to be at… Melting
Rock Lucky Thirteen. When I tried to leave a message, it hung up.

Stymied, I went back to the darkroom, where Melissa was tinkering with the new photo computer.

“Hey,” I said, “if you wanted to find somebody in charge of Melting Rock, where would you look?”

“At their office down the street.”

“No answer.”

“Did you try… what’s her name from the fest? Jo something?”

“Jo Mingle. She’s not in the book. But she lives with somebody from that band you like—Larry the Lizard or something.”

“That’s Stumpy the Salamander.”

“Big diff. So you know where I can find these reptiles?”

“Which one is she with?”

“The drummer.”

Melissa cracked a smile. “
Phew.
Glad to hear it’s not the guitarist. He’s a
babe.
”

“So how do I find this guy? I think his name’s Ford-something.”

“Trike Ford. They call him that ’cause he has one of those three-wheeled ATV things. He even wrote a song about—”

“Terrific. Do we know his real name?”

“I think …Wayne maybe. Or Dwayne.”

“Is he in the book?”

She shrugged, asked me to let her know if I heard anything about the guitarist’s relationship status, and turned back to the
oversize computer screen. I went back to my desk and found one Dwayne Ford in the phone book. I called and got Jo Mingle—or
what I could hear of her over the screaming baby in the background.

When I told her why I was calling, she sounded like she might bawl herself.

“Uh…I don’t really know anything about the financial stuff,” she said.

“But you run the festival.”

“Yeah, but, like …I don’t deal with numbers. I just do the creative stuff, signing up bands and all….”

“Did you know there’s eight different suppliers about to sue Melting Rock to get their money?”

“Huh?” The baby cranked its wailing up a notch. “Can you talk a little louder? Happy’s kind of having a fit right now.”

“I said, did you know there’s eight different suppliers about to sue Melting Rock?”

“Um…I’m sure it’s all just, like, a big misunderstanding.”

“They don’t exactly see it that way. They say you guys owe them over forty thousand dollars all together.”

“That much?”
Scream, wail, howl.
“Can’t be. It’s gotta be a big mix-up, you know?”

“Well, if you don’t run the business, who does?”

“Trike. He knows all that stuff. He manages Stumpy and all, so he’s really good at—”

“Can I talk to him?”

“He’s on the road. Won’t be back for, like, a couple weeks or something.”

“Well, is there anybody I can call for comment? Does the festival have a lawyer?”

“Why would we need a lawyer?”

“Because you guys are getting sued.”

There was a long pause, filled entirely by infantile caterwauling. “Jesus,” Jo said finally. “Melting Rock is a total goddamn
mess.”

I didn’t argue with her, just got off the phone and wrote up my piece on the impending lawsuit. To be charitable, I included
a line about how Melting Rock organizers thought it was all just a big misunderstanding. Then I turned my attention back to
Deep Lake.

It was at the afternoon editorial staff meeting, in fact, that somebody pointed out that although we now knew what was in
the cooling pool, nobody seemed to be talking about how it got there.

To be specific, how exactly did the so-called Mohawk Warriors break into the facility—a relative fortress by Gabriel standards—to
dump it in? And come to think of it, how do you haul around enough powdered Jell-O mix to muck up fifty thousand gallons of
water?

This, by the way, is not a question I ever anticipated having to consider in my lifetime.

When it came to trying to address such issues, there was only one place I could think of to start. I was reasonably well acquainted
with several members of the anti–Deep Lake lunatic fringe—as opposed to the calmer types who seemed content with legal action.
One of them was about to go up the river on drug charges; I went out onto the Green in search of the others.

I found one sitting on the pavement outside Café Whatever, strumming a guitar with what could either be described as artistic
passion or extreme hysteria. He had a paper cup with the coffee shop’s logo on the ground beside him, stained around the edges
and containing what looked to be less than a buck in change.

I can’t really say whether he had much musical talent. His playing and singing sounded to me like somebody was strangling
a monkey—but based on my Melting Rock experience, I was fairly sure I wasn’t the target audience.

He didn’t seem to notice me standing there, just kept strumming and howling. Then I dropped a dollar in his cup, and he acknowledged
my existence with a solemn nod, like I’d just paid proper tribute at the temple gates. After what seemed like several hours,
the song ended with a yowl that (I think) translated into
Oh, girl, come back to meeeeeeeee.
Before he could start singing again, I offered to buy him a cup of coffee.

“Whatcha want?” Axel said, looking at me warily from his cross-legged pose.

“Fine. If you don’t want any coffee, I’ll just—”

“Nah. Hold on. I’d dig some, yeah. Just… what gives?”

“I want to talk to you.”

He seemed, if it was possible, even warier. “ ’Bout what?”

“Deep Lake.”

“Oh.”
He sprang to his feet in one fluid motion. “That’s cool.” He picked up his guitar and the meager cupful of change and followed
me into the coffee shop, where he ordered an extra-large mug of the strongest stuff they had. I was just about to pay when
I noticed him staring at the pastry case with something beyond longing.

“Axel,” I said, “when was the last time you ate something?”

He shrugged and looked down at the dirty toenails sticking out of his Birkenstocks. “Got no dough,” he said.

“You want a bagel?”

“Really?” He turned a pair of pleading eyes on me, and I was instantly reminded of Cindy Bauer. “You mean it?”

“Sure.”

He asked for a pumpernickel bagel with extra cream cheese, and I got one of the café’s signature cookies for myself—a chocolate-frosted
question mark known as a “Whatever.” The place has some tasty treats, but sometimes it’s too cute by half.

I expected him to want to sit in the back, but he went straight for a table in the window. We’d barely sat down, when he jammed
half the bagel into his mouth and kept pushing and chewing until it was all gone. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of
his hand and guzzled down most of the coffee—never mind that it was still steaming.

The calories and the caffeine had a downright transformative effect on him. When he finally said something, he no longer sounded
like a Dickensian waif; the confident fellow from Melting Rock was back with a vengeance.

“So…
lady,
” he said, speaking in a funny singsong voice that was probably supposed to sound supercool. “So…newspaper
lady
…”

“Um, yeah?”

“Why does newspaper lay-dee want to talk to little old Axel Robbee-nette?”

“She’s wondering how the hell somebody dumped a ton of strawberry Jell-O into the Deep Lake Cooling pool.”

He started laughing so hard he grabbed his gut and doubled over. His greasy hair trailed into the other half of his bagel,
so when he finally sat up there was cream cheese on his head.

“Cool, huh?” he said. “I bet those corporate dopes never even knew what hit ’em.”

“Axel, Benson is a university, for chrissake. It’s nonprofit.”

“Ooh,
nonprofit,
” he parroted back at me before biting off a quarter of the remaining bagel slice. “Like big business doesn’t run the fuckin’
show up there.”

“Look,” I said, “I’m doing a story for tomorrow’s paper on the Jell-O thing. I’d really like to be able to say how you did
it.”

“Hey, lady, I never said I did anything,” he said with a laugh. “Don’t go misquoting me, or I’ll sue your ass.” More chuckles.
“I’ll
sooooo…
”

“Fine, let me rephrase the question. I’d really like to know how it was done. I mean, the heat-exchange building is like a
fort—big fence, barbed wire, the whole thing. So did somebody let you in or what?”

He smirked at me. “More than one way in there.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning why should I tell you?”

“Because whoever did it is probably dying to brag about it.”

He chewed on that for a while. “So why should I tell you instead of ”—he looked up to make sure I was paying attention—“Mr.
Gordon Band of the
New York Times
?”

That got me. “Gordon called you?”

“Talked to me on the Green yesterday. I got no phone.”

“And what did he want?”

“Guess he got my name from that cool-ass story you wrote. Wanted me to tell him what got dumped in the fuckin’ pool, ya know?”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him, ‘You want to know the dope, you gotta show me the green, man.’ ”

“Huh?”

“He wants the facts, he’s gotta pay up. A guy’s gotta eat, ya know.”

“And what did he say to that?”

“He offered me
one thousand dollars,
baby.”

“He did
not.
”

“Did so.”

“Axel, Gordon Band is a friend of mine. And although he may be the most competitive reporter who ever lived, there’s no way
he’d ever pay off a source to get a story. It’s what you’d call a big ethical no-no.”

“Well,” he said, “them’s the facts, Jack.”

He squirmed in his seat and stared at the tabletop. Axel Robinette was, in short, a very bad liar.

“Look, Axel, if you’re not going to tell me the truth, I’m just wasting my time here.” I started to stand up.

“Aw, come on, lady. Lighten up.” I sat back down. “Besides, what’s the big deal? You’re sittin’ here bribin’ me with eats,
right? What’s the problem with slippin’ a guy a little cash?”

“Buying you a snack during an interview and giving you money for information isn’t the same thing.”

“Yeah, well…” He did a little twisty dance in his seat; this, apparently, was supposed to represent moral relativism. Then
he ate the rest of his bagel. As he chewed, Guinevere the Psychic walked by the window and waved at us.

“Come on,” I said, “you don’t have to get your name in the paper or anything. I’m not trying to get you busted. I just want
to know how it was done.”

He shrugged and favored me with another smirk. So I focused my attention on the cookie, which was shaping up to be a much
more charming companion. When I finally looked up again, the expression on his face was, of all things, blatantly lascivious.