Ecstasy

by Beth Saulnier

  Unfortunately, the chance to have a veggie burger and pet my dog for an hour was just about all the consolation I was going to get; with the search for Sturdivant at a standstill, Cody had taken the three-day weekend to drive his mom back to Boston to visit his sisters and their frighteningly well-behaved kids.

  That left me to make my own fun on Friday and Saturday night. I saw a delightfully stupid action movie for my column, split some veggie sushi with the still-heartbroken Melissa, and spent a good hour reading Dog Fancy in the bathtub. Labor Day itself turned out to be gorgeous—the kind of blue-sky-perfect weather that we rarely see here in the cloud capital of upstate New York. This, as you can imagine, inspired me to thoroughly research my piece on the Solidarity Barbecue. And I mean thoroughly.

  The yearly event, which pretty much takes over the big park at the edge of Mohawk Lake, is a major fund-raiser for the Workers’ Alliance—a nonprofit group that promotes union membership, lobbies for living wages and fair working conditions, and generally tries to keep the little guy from getting screwed by the Man. There’s always a bunch of speeches by politicos and union agitators, plus games of horseshoes, softball, volleyball, and the like, with many a beer bet riding on the outcome.

  And speaking of beer, the local Budweiser distributor traditionally parks a truck on the grass and sticks a tap in the side of it; suffice it to say, everybody has a damn good time.

  But for a lot of the people, the real draw is the barbecue itself, which is an orgy sufficient to bring about the fall of Rome. In addition to the various creatures dipped in sauce and grilled over a spit, there’s also a ton of distinctly unhealthy vegetarian food: butter-laden corn on the cob, delectably mayonnaisey potato salad, that sort of thing. Yours truly got a complimentary media ticket, which garnered me a blue plastic OVER-21 bracelet and the freedom to eat and drink till I keeled over.

  Between the weather and the comestibles, I spent a good three hours at the barbecue. I was just about to bow to the inevitable and go back to the paper for another round of cop calls when I figured I should have more to show for myself than a couple of measly quotes, so I made another loop around the park.

  I was interviewing a Benson janitor when the screaming started.

  It came from the water, which is where a bunch of future union-dues payers were playing, and at first everybody seemed to take it for the usual kiddie screeching. But it didn’t take long for people to realize that there was something wrong. The natural assumption, of course, was that some poor kid was drowning. What seemed like the city’s entire union membership ran en masse to the water’s edge, and I had to dodge my way through a crowd of very solid men to get a look.

  By the time I got through the clutch of people, it was too late—for the victim, anyway. The body was floating facedown, gliding back and forth with the motion of the water. The way it was moving implied a weird sort of purpose—it came close to shore, then slid back toward the open water, hovered at one particular spot, and slid back in again. It was an illusion, of course; the person lying facedown in Mohawk Lake no longer had any free will, nor would he ever.

  It only took a second for me to realize that I’d seen this body before. I’d seen it in exactly the same position, glimpsed by flashlight, floating in a near-freezing pool.

  The truth of it was still sinking in when a couple of guys waded into the water, sneakers and all. They grabbed the body as though there were some hope of reviving it, turned it over like they could drag it to shore and give it mouth-to-mouth and maybe everything would be okay.

  But they’d barely flipped it on its back when they dropped it again. The horrified sounds they made were decidedly unmacho, but nobody could blame them—no one, at least, who saw what they’d seen. And touched.

  It was a body that had been underwater for more than a week—discolored, decomposing, dehumanized. A collective gasp went through the crowd, hands clasped to mouths, mothers (literally) covering their children’s eyes.

  There’s probably a psychological study to be done about who keeps watching at moments like this and who looks away. I don’t know what it says about me. I couldn’t drag my eyes from the corpse’s face. It was bloated, distorted—and familiar.

  ON HOLIDAYS, the Gabriel Police Department—like the Gabriel Monitor—runs on a skeleton crew. Maybe big-city law enforcement schedules a full complement of officers 365 days a year, but around here the mayhem level is generally low enough to allow most of our men in blue to toss around a football on Labor Day.

  It just so happens, though, that the Gabriel police union is a major sponsor of the Workers’ Alliance; therefore, nearly every guy who wasn’t in uniform was roasting weenies in Mohawk Park. The crime scene, in other words, was already crawling with cops—including the chief himself.

  Wilfred Hill had been at the far side of the park when the body washed up, so it took him a couple of minutes to get to the shore, but once he did he was all business. He assigned a few cops—presumably, the ones who smelled less like the floor of a frat house—to secure the scene, then pulled a cell phone from a voluminous front pocket of his plaid Bermuda shorts.

  I guess he was trying to track down the coroner, but he didn’t seem to be having much luck; he dialed four or five different numbers before he flipped the phone shut and jammed it back into his pocket with a scowl.

  I approached him because I didn’t have much choice.

  “Excuse me… Chief?”

  He turned around, and if there existed someone he was less in the mood to see, well…I pity them.

  “How did you get here this fast? You people are unbelievable.”

  “I was already here. Covering the picnic.”

  “Oh.”

  “Listen, Chief, can I talk to you for a second?”

  “Come on, Alex. You have to know better than that.”

  “But I just—”

  “We’ve been on the scene five minutes.”

  “I know, but—”

  “No, we do not know who the victim is. No, we do not know how he died. No, we do not know how he got here. Are you satisfied?”

  Since the chief is usually the epitome of levelheaded, this lakeside freak-out was definitely out of character. The reason why made itself clear when Mrs. Chief came over two seconds later to inform her husband that she was taking the children home.

  “Your family’s here, huh?” I said once she’d gone.

  This comment sounded, if you can believe it, even lamer than you might think.

  “If you’re even thinking about putting that in the paper, I promise you’ll regr—”

  “What? That wasn’t what I—”

  “Now, please do me a favor and go away. We’ll let you know if there are any developments.”

  Yeah, right. “Listen, Chief, I—”

  The expression on his face said he wished he’d had room in the damn Bermuda shorts for his .357. “Do you want me to have you removed from the scene?”

  “No, I—”

  “Donner,” he called to one of the relatively sober cops. “Do me a favor and escort Miss Bernier to her car.”

  “Wait,” I said. “I’m not trying to be a pain, it’s just—”

  “Do you want to get yourself arrested for interfering with an investigation?”

  “I recognized him.”

  “You what?”

  “The body. I know who it is.”

  “Jesus, why didn’t you say something?”

  Yeah, I know; it sounds like something out of a goddamn sitcom. And it might’ve struck me as funny—except for the rubbery corpse lying twenty feet away.

  “Come on,” he was saying, “who is it?”

  “It’s this kid I met at Melting Rock. I didn’t know him that well, but I interviewed him a couple of times. He’s been missing since last week. I was supposed to meet him someplace, but he never showed up, so I thought maybe he left town, and—”

  “For God’s sake, Alex, out with it,” he said. “What’s his name?”

 
; “It’s Axel,” I said. “Axel Robinette.”

  YOU WOULDN’T HAVE THOUGHT that a picnic for a few thousand union workers would have much (or, in fact, anything) in common with the Melting Rock Music Festival. But this year, it did. At both events people were having a perfectly good time—just whooping it up and minding their own business—when somebody’s corpse came along and ruined everything.

  If the death of Shaun Kirtz wasn’t enough to immediately shut down Melting Rock, the discovery of Axel Robinette’s body was plenty to derail the Solidarity Barbecue. Amid the wails of children upset by a glimpse of the decaying Axel—and others simple traumatized by the cancellation of the make-your-own-sundae bar—everyone packed up their chairs and blankets and boom boxes and headed for the exit.

  This exodus caused a mother of a traffic jam, alleviated only when some of the off-duty cops donned orange vests and directed the parade of cars and trucks onto Route 13 in batches. Chief Hill continued to look pissed and weary in his Bermuda shorts and ugly white golf visor, and his mood only improved when two things happened: He finally got the coroner on the phone, and he watched his family station wagon drive out of Mohawk Park.

  As for me: Once the chief finished peppering me with questions about Axel and that night at the Deep Lake Cooling plant, I called the photo editor and told him to get back to the park pronto. Wendell had already taken pictures of kids running the potato-sack race; now he had to snap some of Axel being hauled away in a body bag. He found the task, quote, “very uncentering.”

  Instead of going back to the paper, I went home—where, conveniently, most of the newsroom was grilling hot dogs and getting companionably drunk. I found Ochoa presiding over the sangria pitcher, and five minutes later, most of the cityside staff was having an impromptu editorial meeting in my kitchen.

  The overtime budget being smaller than a bad kid’s allowance, it was decided that I could cover the breaking news all by my lonesome. After all, Marilyn said, it was really just a matter of writing about the discovery of the body, plus a reaction piece based on interviews with whichever of Axel’s friends might be slacking around the Green on a national holiday. That, and maybe a short summary of all the recent mayhem—basically, a roundup of how the county’s youth was dropping like flies. If I had the chance, I could put together a little time line of events, going back to the start of Melting Rock 13. No pressure.

  Hours later, when I was putting the hateful time line together—Chester just lives for devices that reduce the news to Tinkertoy chunks—it occurred to me that I ought to call Baltimore. I was writing up a bit about Norma Jean Kramer going comatose on the stuff that had killed the three Jaspersburg boys, and I figured I should go through the motions of updating her condition for the next day’s paper.

  So I called and got the poor P.R. underling who’d been assigned to work on Labor Day. The guy put me on hold for a good five minutes; I was about to hang up and dial again when he picked up.

  “Um…I’m sorry that took so long,” he said. He sounded barely old enough to drive.

  “That’s okay,” I said, doodling a pair of pointy dog ears in my reporter’s notebook. “So her condition’s unchanged?”

  “Uh… That’s just it. I mean, that’s what took me so long. I, er…I needed to get confirmation.”

  “Confirmation for what?”

  “I called up to the eighth-floor nurses’ station, and they told me…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Apparently, Miss Kramer is awake.”

  CHAPTER22

  I wanted to run down to Baltimore and interview Norma Jean Kramer the minute I found out she was conscious. Unfortunately, though, when I called the hospital back to ask about setting something up, the P.R. guy laughed at me, said, “You gotta be kidding,” and hung up.

  That left me with nothing to do but rehash the stories that had run on her when she’d first gotten sick, with a lead about her miraculous recovery slapped on top. When I was done, I felt badly in need of a drink but in no mood for the Citizen—nor was I inclined to go home and face the postpicnic disaster. So I went over to Mad’s and found him in his usual pose on the couch, sipping midpriced red wine out of an old salsa jar and watching a documentary about mummies on the History Channel.

  “You know something?” I said. “The only person who has uglier furniture than you is Mrs. Hamill.”

  “Mine’s what you call ‘shabby chic.’ ”

  “It’s what you call ‘garbage-dump.’ ”

  “You want a drink?”

  “More than you know.”

  He got me a jar of my own, and I told him about Norma Jean waking up—and how Marilyn had gone mildly ballistic when I told her we weren’t getting an interview anytime soon.

  “She’s gotta be psyched about the Axel thing,” he said. “Since he doesn’t seem to have any family for the cops to notify we’re gonna have it on the streets first thing in the morning. Only guys who could maybe scoop us is drive-time radio.”

  “True.”

  “Must’ve been a hell of a scene at the picnic.”

  “You said it.”

  “Cody there?”

  I shook my head, which was already starting to feel pleasantly groggy. “Took his mom to Boston for the long weekend to see his sisters.”

  “No wonder you’re here drinking with me.”

  “Since when do I need an excuse?”

  “You want a refill?”

  The image of Axel Robinette’s bloated body flashed across my brain. “Dear God yes.”

  We sat there like that for an hour, talking about the ridiculous number of stories we’d been covering and getting happily smashed. When we got to the Melting Rock embezzlement, Mad slammed his jar down on the coffee table and said, “You know what?”

  “No,” I said, still sober enough to be aware of the slur in my voice. “What?”

  “We gotta break this goddamn thing before goddamn Gordon Band breaks it for us.”

  “Cuh-lear-ly.”

  “Which means we got to get ourselves some proof of what the hell’s been going on.”

  “Ob-vee-ous-ly.”

  “We gotta get our goddamn hands on the real numbers.”

  I waved my jar at him in a boozy salute. “You said it, sister.”

  He stood up. “So let’s go.”

  I squinted at him. “What the holy heck are you talkin’ about?”

  “Let’s go get it.”

  “Go get what?”

  “Proof. Evidence. Incontrovertible”—he sat back down and poured more wine, most of which actually ended up in his jar—“stuff.”

  “Where?”

  “I dunno. Where d’ya think?”

  I stretched out on the couch. “If I thought you were serious, which I seriously do not, I’d say the place to look would be the Melting Rock office.”

  “Which is where?”

  “Back of Groovy Guitar.”

  “Like the store a couple doors down from the paper?”

  “Just like that.”

  He stood up again. “So let’s go.”

  “Let’s go where?” He waggled his eyebrows at me. “Let’s do what? Break into the place?” His face broke into a diabolical smile. “You… are… insane.”

  “Come on,” he said, “it’ll be fun.”

  “Actually,” I said, “it’ll be a felony.”

  “Only if we get caught. Which we won’t.”

  “And how the hell do you know that?”

  “Because we’ll go in all sneaky-like.”

  “Mad, the last time we tried to go someplace ‘all sneaky-like,’ we almost both got very killed. ’Member?”

  “Hey, baby. Horseshoes and hand grenades.”

  “You’re drunk,” I said. “An’ come to think of it, so am I.”

  “Chicken.” He flapped his elbows at me and clucked like poultry: brawk-brawk-brawk-brawk. “Alex Bernier is a big chicken.”

  “Alex Bernier,” I said, “doesn’t feel like getting arrested for brea
king and entering.”

  But there was no talking him out of it; within two minutes he’d pulled on a pair of khakis over the boxers he’d been lounging in, grabbed a flashlight, and headed out the door. So…I followed.

  Since the newspaper is less than a block from Mad’s apartment, we got to the guitar store in under a minute—not nearly enough time to convince Mad he was well and truly out of his mind.

  Finding the street deserted, he declared his intention to, quote, “case the joint.” Since the building that houses the music store abuts its neighbor to the left, that meant walking down the narrow alley to the right. And since Mad had the only flashlight and didn’t seem inclined toward chivalry, I picked my way in the dark, trying not to trip over broken bottles and discarded pizza boxes. He shone the light on the wall, which proved to be solid brick—no windows. Hopefully, Mad’s burglary career was going to be over before it started.

  At the back there was a door that didn’t look particularly solid—not steel reinforced or anything—but though Mad tried twisting the handle and pulling hard, it didn’t budge.

  Unfortunately, though, there was also a window. And to my even greater chagrin, the damn thing was cracked open.

  Mad made some happy-little-girl sound (“Ooh-hoo-hoo!”) and shone the light inside. The first thing we saw was a promotional poster for Stumpy the Salamander.

  “What do you think’s in there?” he asked.

  “I’d…rather not say.”

  “Don’t be such a pussy.”

  “Fine. If you gotta know, I think it’s the goddamn Melting Rock office.”

  “Excellent.” He made a move to open the window all the way.

  “Hold on just one sec,” I said. “How do you know there isn’t a”—I struggled for the term—“burglar alarm or something?”

  “Bernier, the place is called Groovy Guitar. You really think they got an alarm system?”