Ecstasy

by Beth Saulnier

  But wait—maybe I didn’t just have to speculate. I’d recently run into someone who seemed to know Sturdivant and did not think a whole lot of him, either. So I grabbed the phone book and the cordless, came back outside, and dialed Lenny Peterson’s home number.

  “Hey, Lenny,” I said when he picked up, “remember that conversation we had at the Deep Lake open house about Rob Sturdivant?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “and I think the words I used were no comment.”

  “Come on, you obviously knew him. And what I’m wondering is… Did you maybe know him because he’s the one who supplies you with the green stuff you like to smoke for breakfast?”

  “How did you hear—”

  “It’s what you’d call general knowledge.”

  Click.

  I tried calling Lenny again, but he wouldn’t pick up. Thus rebuffed, I spent more quality time wondering whether I felt like being a decent journalist or a decent human being. I’m not sure how long I stayed there, swinging and thinking and sharing granola bars with my dog. I do recall that at some point I realized that all the time I’d spent staring at a computer screen had killed off a few too many brain cells. If I played my cards right, I could probably have it both ways.

  I informed Shakespeare of this, and I like to think that the way she raised her other eyebrow at me indicated that she was suitably impressed. Then I put her in the car and drove over to Cody’s apartment, too pumped up to bother calling first.

  I knocked, and when there was no answer, I let myself in with my key. Zeke, Cody’s husky mix, came bounding over to Shakespeare and did the canine equivalent of reciting love poetry. When the two of them finally stopped making ecstatic howling noises, I noticed the shower running.

  Now, this was what I call excellent.

  I made my way toward the sound, and, passing the bedroom door, saw that a T-shirt, shorts, and a pair of white jock-socks were lying on the bed. Since I was similarly clad, I decided it was only fair that I toss my biking shorts, T-shirt, socks, and jog bra on top of the pile. Then I snuck into the steamy bathroom, pulled back the shower curtain, and scared the bejesus out of a naked Irishman.

  BY MONDAY MORNING every reporter in New York State was pissed at me—at least that’s how it felt.

  My colleagues at other papers were irked because a pissant fish wrapper like the Monitor had scooped them on a certain story, headlined DEALER ACCUSED IN MELTING ROCK MURDERS. And in my own newsroom, Ochoa was fuming over having a joint byline foisted on him yet again. Never mind that we wouldn’t even have had the story if it weren’t for my source; Ochoa’s a damn good reporter, but he’s never been one to play nicely with the other children.

  Luckily, he was too busy to stay mad at me for long. Sturdivant being identified as the dealer who sold the drugs had kicked the case into high gear, and Ochoa was running around like a maniac trying to cover it.

  Mad and I, meanwhile, were charged with making sure some other news actually made it into the paper. He was doing a piece on how Bessler College was launching yet another initiative to make its science departments something better than moronic, while I was putting together a follow-up story on the Deep Lake Cooling brouhaha, along with yet another Melting Rock piece. This time, it was just a short one on how a bunch of its suppliers were fixing to sue over unpaid bills. Of course, said assignments didn’t impede us from soaking up the lunchtime rays on the Gabriel Green, where thanks to a leaky pita I managed to drip a great quantity of baba ghanoush down my cleavage.

  “What I don’t get,” Mad was saying as he bit into his chicken kabob, “is how Miss Journalistic Ethics can rationalize making some sweetheart deal with her boyfriend.”

  “Shhh.” I looked around, but there was no one within earshot. “Would you put a cork in it? Nobody’s supposed to know.”

  “So why’d you tell me?”

  “I had to tell somebody.”

  “Ha. Remember never to apply for a job with the C.I.A.”

  “And besides,” I said, jamming a napkin down my front in an effort to rescue my hundred-dollar Lise Charmel bra, “since when am I the ethics queen? I’m as much of a hack as you are.”

  “True,” he said. “I just wanted to hear you say it.”

  “Charming.”

  “So what gives with this Cody thing?”

  “I already told you.”

  “Yeah, but I wasn’t really listening.”

  “Argh.” I reached for another napkin. “I told you, this kid—”

  “This unidentified kid.”

  “This unidentified kid told me that Shaun Kirtz told her he bought the drugs from Sturdivant. And I didn’t think I could just sit on it until Monday, because what if some other kid croaked in the meantime? So then it hits me: What if Cody’s my source, and I’m his?”

  “How romantic.”

  “Do you want to hear this or don’t you?”

  He took another bite. “Do.”

  “So I went over to his place and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”

  “Hubba-hubba.”

  “The deal was, I’d give him the name of the dealer if he promised to sit on the Melting Rock connection until the paper hit the streets on Monday. That way, he could pick up the guy and start working on getting him to talk, and—”

  “And meanwhile make sure he couldn’t sell any more of that shit.”

  “Right. So the cops get their bad guy, and we get to break the story. Everybody’s happy.”

  “Except Sturdivant.”

  “The poor sweet thing.”

  “How much did he get caught with, anyway?”

  “Um…a bunch of pot, some ecstasy, acid, mushrooms, prescription pills, you name it. The guy was a walking drugstore.”

  “Why don’t people just go into a bar, for chrissake? It’s cheaper, and it sure do taste good.”

  “So you’re suggesting alcoholism as an alternative to drug addiction?”

  “Hey, baby,” he said with a wink, “don’t knock it till you try it.”

  Back at the newsroom, I had five phone messages from various members of the anti–Deep Lake Cooling contingent, but zippo from the one person I really needed to reach: Glenn Shardik. I tried Lenny at the Benson news service, but if he had any idea what was up with Deep Lake, he was in no mood to tell me. Benson had yet to hire a replacement for its recently departed vice president for P.R., so I didn’t have a lot of options for finding somebody to tell me when and if the cooling system was getting turned back on. Therefore, turning ambitious through sheer desperation, I braved the wrath of the Benson parking police and drove up to campus.

  Shardik’s office is in an aging facilities-maintenance building on the far side of the vet school. Square and squat, it seems to have been designed for maximum ugliness, and on this point it succeeds spectacularly well. It’s always been amazing to me that out of what looks like the bureaucratic equivalent of a medieval oubliette sprang a revolution in air-conditioning technology—or, indeed, anything else.

  At Benson, like at all colleges, faculty are the sacred cows; during lean times, in other words, you don’t get to kill them for food. When budget crises strike, the ax falls on the support staff—and folks who deal with pipes and lightbulbs rather than live human beings tend to be first on the chopping block.

  I mention this by way of explaining why there was a single beleaguered secretary at the front desk trying to cover the whole building. I told her I was looking for Shardik but—what with the ringing phone and the hold lights blinking on her desk like a peep show marquee—she was barely listening. She just pulled a pencil out of the hairsprayed helmet atop her head and waved vaguely down the hall, then answered another call.

  “Facilities management,” I heard her say, her voice a delicate balance between boredom and stress. “No, I’m not sure when it’ll be fixed. Yes, I know it’s been two weeks. Yes, I know it’s supposed to rain tomorrow. Have you thought about getting a bigger bucket?”

  I kept walking. Shardik’s off
ice was at the end of the hall, a private closet amid a warren of partitioned cubicles. The whole place was deserted; he and his staff were probably off at some meeting on how to salvage their $150 million mess.

  Shardik’s tiny room had space for his desk, a filing cabinet, and two chairs, period. I sat down in the visitor’s chair and tried to decide if there was any point in waiting for him. Since I had no idea when he’d be back, I decided to leave him a pleading note about how I needed to talk to him ASAP. I scribbled it on a sheet of paper from my reporter’s notebook and dropped it on his desk, pausing to appreciate the fact that, at least judging by the work of the Sears Portrait Studio, Shardik’s kids were going to turn out as hairy as he was.

  I was just about to pack up and go, when my eyes alit on a fax cover sheet from the Gabriel Police Department. It was perched atop the mound of paperwork on the desk—Shardik apparently being as well organized as I am—so I almost missed it. But there it was, the department crest reproduced in grainy black and white.

  And since (like every other reporter I know) I can read upside down without breaking a sweat, I can tell you what it said, typos and all:

  TO: Glen Sherdick, Benson Facilities

  FROM: G.P.D. Forensics

  RE: D.L.C. H2O analysis

  PAGES W/ COVER: 2

  I stood there for a minute, not so much wondering whether I should read it as whether I was at all likely to get caught. Deciding the danger was slim, Miss Journalistic Ethics grabbed the papers and started copying down a list of chemicals that sounded like they’d eat your innards clean through. Then I put the pages back exactly where I’d snatched them—as though he’d noticed the difference in all the mess—retrieved the note to Shardik by way of covering my tracks, and hightailed it out of there.

  By the time I got back to the newsroom, I was positively giddy. Mad was doing a phone interview with some Bessler prof, and I stood there practically hopping up and down until he hung up. Then I grabbed him and dragged him into the library.

  “Bernier, what’s so—”

  “What would you say if I told you I just lucked into getting my grubby hands on the analysis of the Deep Lake Cooling water?”

  “I’d say you’ve been a very bad girl.”

  “And?”

  “And then I’d say you better tell me.”

  I brandished my notebook. “You ready?”

  “Give it to me, baby.”

  “Okay, check this out.” I cleared my throat. “Adipic acid, disodium phosphate, fumaric acid…” I looked up at Mad, who had a weird expression on his face. If I was looking for horror, I didn’t get it. “Whaddaya think? Sounds pretty awful, huh?”

  “Yeah…” He sounded distracted. “What else?”

  “Um… sodium, ace… acesulfame potassium, malodextrin, glucose—”

  “Hold on,” he said, and started digging through one of the filing cabinets. After a minute he pulled out a clip and scanned it.

  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.”

  CHAPTER16

  Strawberry 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.”