Ecstasy

by Beth Saulnier

  “They might.”

  “Besides, the window’s kinda cracked open. Even if there’s an alarm, it can’t be set, right?”

  I never got a chance to answer because Mad proceeded to slide the window open and pull himself inside in one surprisingly fluid motion. Lacking much in the way of upper-arm strength, I just stood there whispering at him to get his drunken ass back outside.

  “I’m just gonna have me a little lookee-look around,” he said. “Now, do you want in or don’t you?”

  “Oh, hell. In.”

  He reached down and gave me a hand up—which basically amounted to hauling me bodily over the sill.

  “Jesus, that was easy,” he said. “Music folks ain’t too security conscious, eh?”

  “Like you don’t leave your windows open all the damn time.”

  He stuck his tongue out at me, eyes vaguely crossed. “Yuh,” he said.

  There was a crooked shade atop the window, and Mad pulled it down before he turned on the flashlight. Then he hunted around for a light switch, finally figuring out that you were supposed to pull a string hanging from the ceiling. The single bulb didn’t do a great job illuminating the room, but at least we could see enough to read.

  There was one whole bookshelf filled with multicolored volumes; even in the context of Melting Rock—and, more to the point, the context of my booze-addled brain—I tended to doubt they were financial statements. So we pawed through the piles of papers clogging the place; a lot of it turned out to be promo stuff from unknown bands hoping to play at the festival.

  Finally, when Mad was starting to sober up enough to think that maybe it was time to leave, I came across a three-ring binder in the bottom left-hand drawer of the desk. It looked like something a seventies-era junior-high student would’ve brought to school—denim cover, blue-lined paper inside.

  But…I seriously doubt that some middle schooler was inclined to give thirty thousand bucks to Rosemary Hamill.

  At least that’s what I assumed this entry meant: R.H.—$30K.

  There were about two dozen other ones too—most of them initials with amounts of money. But Mrs. Hamill was clearly getting the most, followed by one T.F., who I assumed to be Trike Ford; he appeared to have raked in twenty thousand clams himself. Some of the entries had the initials M.A. in the margin, whoever that was. I flipped through more pages and found another, shorter list of amounts, presumably from a previous year. But if it was, the recipients had completely changed; none of the initials were the same, not even T.F. himself. The amounts were a lot smaller too, most around a grand and none topping five thousand.

  “Whatcha got there?” Mad asked.

  “Your basic smoking gun. At least I think so.” He peered over my shoulder and I flipped back to the first list. “Looks here like Mrs. Hamill got thirty grand. The guy who runs the Melting Rock finances got twenty.”

  “Who’s M.A.?”

  “Damned if I know. Can you think of anybody?”

  “Just Mayor Marty.”

  “What?” Martin Anbinder is Gabriel’s crusty-but-lovable chief executive, a retired Benson engineering professor whose politics make Karl Marx look like Ronald Reagan. “You can’t seriously think he’d be on the take.”

  “Nah. You just asked me if I recognized the initials.”

  “Oh.”

  “So if we’re really seeing a list of payoffs, which I sure as hell think we are, then what do you think it’s all about?”

  I scratched at my scalp in a vain attempt to get some of the alcohol out of my cranium. “Um…drugs?”

  “You think Rosemary Hamill is buying dope?”

  “Nah, not buying it, maybe just… making sure Melting Rock doesn’t have, you know, a hostile atmosphere. Maybe it’s a cover-up to keep people quiet about all the cash they’re skimming. Or maybe it’s just plain-old kickbacks. The festival generates a ton of money. Maybe this is a way of letting the powers that be …What’s the Italian phrase? ‘Dip their beak.’ ”

  “Oh. I get it. I think.”

  I turned to the page with the smaller amounts. “What do you make of this other list?”

  “ ‘A.G., M.L., A.R., R.S., A.W.,’ ” he read off from the top. “Anything ring a bell?”

  “Um…Actually, yes. A.R. could be my old pal Axel Robinette. R.S. could be Rob Sturdivant. I don’t recognize any of the others.”

  “Any idea why they’d be getting payoffs?”

  “Not off the top of my head.” Mad pulled open a filing cabinet and started riffling through the folders. “What are you looking for?” He didn’t answer. “Come on, we found what we were after. Don’t you think we’d better get out of here?”

  “Just give me a minute.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “The budget.”

  “I told you, it’s on file over in city hall. That’s how I found out that—”

  “I mean the real budget.”

  “You really think they’d be stupid enough to write it down?”

  He looked through the rest of the folders and shook his head. “I guess …Wait a second.”

  “Did you find it?”

  “Something else.” He pulled out a file and handed it to me.

  “ ‘Mohawk Associates, Inc.,’ ” I read off the tab. “M.A.”

  “Right-o.”

  I opened it up. “All there is in here is a receipt for a post office box in Gabriel.”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Do you recognize the name?”

  “It sounds sort of familiar, but I can’t place it.”

  “Well…are we looking for anything else in here?”

  “I think we’ve broken enough laws for one night, don’t you?”

  “What about those?”

  Mad gestured toward the albums on the bookcase, and I pulled one at random. They turned out to be scrapbooks of past Melting Rocks, laden with photos of dazed-looking dancers. “Nothing useful,” I said.

  “Then let’s get out of here,” he said, tucking the denim binder under his arm and tossing a leg over the windowsill.

  “What are you doing? We can’t just take that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Isn’t it…I don’t know, tampering with evidence or something?”

  “We’re preserving it,” he said. “Who’s to say when that Trike guy gets back into town he doesn’t destroy it to cover his tracks?”

  He had a point. So I stopped arguing and followed him out the window, whereupon we went back to Mad’s and hid the binder in his bedroom closet. Then we repaired to the living room for a celebratory drink, only to discover that there wasn’t a drop of liquor left in the whole damn place.

  I WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING with a nasty hangover and a vague sense that I’d done something very, very stupid. It took me a couple of minutes to piece it together—the sight of Axel Robinette’s body washing up on shore, the news that Norma Jean Kramer was awake, the red-wine bender in Mad’s apartment. And then—this was the thing that finally sent me retching to the commode—the two of us breaking into Groovy Guitar to steal documents from the Melting Rock office.

  Had I actually been drunk enough to go along with it? Was there really enough alcohol on the whole damn planet to get me to do something that intrinsically stupid?

  Apparently, the answer was yes. I was definitely in no hurry to share this news with Cody.

  I gave my teeth a halfhearted brushing and flopped back onto the mattress. I had the day off as payback for working Labor Day, and I’d planned to get stuff done—like, maybe do laundry for the first time in a month. At the moment, however, I was busy lying in bed with the shades drawn and a facecloth on my forehead.

  But Shakespeare was determined to go outside and powder her snout. So after her whining hit a fever pitch, I put on some sweats and took her around the block. Although the thought of breakfast didn’t appeal, I made myself gag down a piece of toast in the hopes of settling my stomach.r />
  It was a quarter after three.

  I was on my way back upstairs when I noticed the answering-machine light blinking. The first message was from Cody, who’d called the night before to say he was back in town and that he was going to come over and get Zeke. The second must’ve come in while I was walking the dog. It was from Ochoa, who wanted me to call him at the paper ASAP.

  Since this duty could be performed from the boudoir as well as anywhere else, I crawled back into the sack with the cordless phone. He answered with his usual bark.

  “Newsroom. Ochoa.”

  “It’s Alex.”

  “Good. I needed to—”

  “Could you maybe not talk so loud? I’ve kind of got a hangover issue going.”

  “It’s about Band. Madison thought we ought to give you a heads-up.”

  “What about him?”

  “The bastard’s up to something.”

  “Up to what?”

  “I’m not sure. But Madison and I were going past the library on the way to grab lunch, and out came Band looking like the cat that ate the goddamn canary. Bastard was grinning ear to ear.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “That’s what Madison said. I didn’t think anything of it myself, but he seemed to think it was bad mojo.”

  “Gordon’s not what you’d call the jolly type. If he’s all smiles, it means he’s about to scoop somebody but good.”

  “So I hear.”

  “And you said he was coming out of the library? Any idea what he was doing in there?”

  “Madison went in and sweet-talked the lady at the reference desk. Apparently, he checked out the Deep Lake Cooling file for an hour.”

  “Deep Lake? What the hell for?”

  “That’s the question. We looked through the file ourselves and we couldn’t find anything.”

  “Gordon’s scary with documents. He’s like the Amazing Kreskin of paper pushers.”

  “So we were thinking …You’ve been covering Deep Lake more than anybody. Maybe you could go over there and take a look for yourself.”

  “I suck at that stuff.” I readjusted the rapidly warming facecloth on my forehead. “And besides, I feel like hell.”

  “Alex, I don’t think we’ve got a lot of time here.”

  “Oh, screw Gordon. Let him have his stupid scoop.”

  “You really want to let him nail you on your own turf?”

  That got me. He knew it would, and it did. “Oh, fine,” I said, and made myself get vertical.

  Not twenty minutes later, I was over at the library checking out the Deep Lake Cooling folder myself. The reference lady made some crack about what a popular item it was, and I hauled it over to a table in the corner.

  I say “hauled” because the file was four inches thick; as part of its effort to convince people that Deep Lake was a good idea, Benson had been incredibly forthcoming about its plans. From the project’s inception, the university had made all manner of information available to the public. Now that it was up and running, the folder contained the final Environmental Impact Statement, construction specs, budget information, bios on the major players, et cetera, et cetera. Reading through it was going to take the whole damn day.

  I went through the EIS first, figuring Gordon would just love to break some scandal about the project threatening an endangered species of mollusk. But though I scrutinized the pages until my eyeballs hurt, nothing particularly naughty jumped out at me. Then I tried the construction papers, but I only lasted ten minutes; all the technical stuff might as well have been in Esperanto. That brought me to the budget documents, which were at least in my native tongue. I flipped through page after page of expenditures, of which there were plenty; it was, after all, a 150-million-dollar project.

  I can’t swear that I would’ve noticed it if the page hadn’t been manhandled. But with the paper a bit wrinkled and the corner slightly dog-eared, I gave the page extra attention. And there, about three-quarters of the way down, was the following entry: Mohawk Associates, Inc.—consulting fees—$47,355.

  The entry dated from three years ago, when planning for the cooling project was kicking into high gear.

  So… what did it mean? Why did a firm listed as a consultant for Deep Lake have a post office box paid for by somebody connected to Melting Rock? A bunch of the names on the Melting Rock payoff list, including someone I assumed was Mrs. Hamill, had M.A. in the margins. Why? Were they somehow getting money through the company?

  And—as far as I was concerned, an equally burning question—what did Gordon know about it? Was he somehow on to the Melting Rock connection? Or was he looking at Mohawk Associates solely because of Deep Lake?

  Whatever the answers, Gordon was obviously on to something big; at least he thought he was. Maybe it was my imagination, but I could swear—yep, there it was—the paper had a bumpy patch where it’d gotten wet and then dried. Gordon had, in all likelihood, actually drooled on it.

  CHAPTER23

  That night, Mad, Ochoa, and I convened our version of a war room, which consisted of sitting around Mad’s coffee table and drinking Crystal Light pink lemonade—our host having decided that even he was in no mood for a hair of the dog that bit him. The guys were eating giant gyro wraps from Yanni’s, downtown Gabriel’s primo Greek diner, while I was sitting there starving and trying not to pinch too many of their stuffed grape leaves. After not seeing each other over the long weekend, Cody and I were scheduled for a romantic Indian dinner, followed by a post-kheer booty call.

  “Jesus, Bernier,” Mad was saying. “Would you stop checking your watch already? You’re driving me nuts.”

  “Sorry. I just don’t want to be late.”

  “What time is your hot date?”

  “Eight.”

  “And what time is it now?”

  “Five after seven.”

  “Then relax.”

  “Fat chance.”

  Ochoa squeezed some lemon juice onto a grape leaf and popped it into his mouth. “What are you so wound up about, anyway?”

  “Christ, what do you think? Goddamn Gordon’s about to break some huge story, and we have no bloody idea what it is.”

  “Sure we do,” Ochoa said with his mouth full, “Mohawk Associates.”

  “Which is what?” They both turned their attention to their food. “See? We’re gonna get totally screwed here.”

  “Okay,” Mad said. “Let’s think. What do we know about this thing?”

  “You mean Mohawk Associates?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not a whole hell of a lot.”

  “But what do we know?”

  “Okay,” I said, “we know that it’s probably being run by somebody at Melting Rock because they had the receipt for the P.O. box. And since Jo said she—”

  “Who?” This from Ochoa, still talking through his food.

  “Jo Mingle. She runs Melting Rock, but she says she doesn’t have bupkis to do with the finances.”

  “And you believe her?”

  “Yeah, I kind of do. She doesn’t strike me as a liar.”

  “So if not her, then who?”

  “Her boyfriend, this guy named Trike Ford—”

  “You mean the drummer from Stumpy?”

  “Right. He’s her boyfriend, and she says he handles all the money stuff. I tried to talk to him when the story broke about Melting Rock getting its ass sued off, but I guess he was away on tour.”

  “Yeah, but they gotta be back by now. They’ve got a big show this weekend. Release party for their new album is Friday night.”

  “All right, let’s try and get all this straight. For some reason, Deep Lake Cooling paid Mohawk Associates nearly fifty thousand dollars in so-called ‘consulting’ fees. Meanwhile”—I picked up the pilfered binder and flipped it open—“a bunch of people are apparently getting payoffs, and they’ve got the initials M.A. next to their names.”

  “I can’t believe you guys actually lifted that thing,” Ochoa said.

 
“We were pretty ballsy,” Mad said.

  “Actually,” I said, “we were pretty sloshed.”

  “Are you gonna put it back?”

  Mad shrugged. I shook my head. “Ain’t no way I’m goin’ in there sober,” I said.

  “Okay,” Ochoa said, “so if these people have the initials next to—”

  “Hold on a second,” Mad said. “Before we get into this, let me ask you guys something. Am I the only one who thinks this is one hell of a coincidence? I mean, Bernier and I find that Mohawk Associates file one night, and by the next afternoon, Band is over at the library digging through the Deep Lake papers and finding—badda-bing!—Mohawk Associates listed in the damn financials. Doesn’t that strike you as kinda weird?”

  “Er…You’re right,” I said. “Guess I’m even more hungover than I thought.”

  “So what’s the deal?”

  “I don’t know. Let me ponder.” I reached for another dolmadakia, and Ochoa swatted my hand away. “Seems like what you’re saying is…What? That our swiping the file somehow triggered Gordon’s trip to the library?”

  Mad shrugged. “I guess.”

  “But how?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “All right,” Ochoa said, “let’s concentrate on what we’ve got in front of us, okay? So like I was saying before, if these people have M.A. next to their names, it stands to reason that maybe they’re getting their money through this phantom company, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but there’s something I don’t understand.”

  “Which is?”

  “It seems like …I don’t know, like a weird combination of being sneaky and being aboveboard.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, if you’re going to take a payoff, why not just take it in an envelope full of small, unmarked bills? Why go through all the trouble of setting up some company? I mean, wouldn’t that make it more likely you’d get caught?”

  Mad refilled his glass, having previously explained that there was nothing unmanly about drinking diet pink lemonade. “I’ve been thinking about that,” he said, “and I’ve got two things for you. One’s a credit thing; the other’s a debit thing.”

  Ochoa gave me a querying look, so I filled him in. “Mad went through this phase where he was sleeping with M.B.A. students,” I said. “They generally fled once they got a look at his net worth.”