Ecstasy

by Beth Saulnier

  “Don’t knock it,” Mad said. “Those finance chicks are wild.”

  “You were saying about credits and debits?”

  “Okay. So in terms of payouts, Deep Lake Cooling has to balance its budget, right? A university project can’t just charge off fifty grand to ‘miscellaneous expenses.’ It’d need a bona fide company to make a payment to.”

  “A payment for what?”

  “Damned if I know. I’m just talking about the system here, okay?”

  “Okay. Was that the debit or the credit?”

  “The… Oh, hell, I don’t know,” Mad said. “But now let’s look at it from the other side. Somebody, say that J-burg lady Rosemary Hamill, wants to take a payoff. Maybe she’s getting bribed for something. She’s breaking the law, so she’s obviously not too concerned with doing the right thing. But what’s the one bunch of people she doesn’t want to mess with?” Ochoa and I swapped clueless glances. Mad looked like a teacher disappointed in his class’s abject stupidity. “The I.R.S.,” he said. “Get it?”

  “No,” said Ochoa.

  “Not even a little,” said I.

  “Okay, look,” Mad said. “It’s one thing to make money you don’t deserve. Cheating on your taxes is a whole other ball game. It’s like this hooker I knew once.” More gaping stares from me and Ochoa. “Hey, I’m a reporter, okay? I meet people. Once when I was in college, I did this story on certain… ladies who earned their living by non-traditional means. And I remember this one told me she reported all her income to the I.R.S. ’cause she didn’t want to get in trouble with the taxman—said it was way worse than the vice squad. So she’d file it all on her taxes as ‘public relations.’ Clever, huh?”

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. “You think these people took money, but they wanted it…”

  “I think,” Ochoa said, “that the word you’re looking for is laundered.”

  “Right,” I said. “And if there’s really that much money at stake—I mean, it looks like we could be talking about hundreds of thousands of bucks over the years—then are we safe in assuming that maybe it has something to do with those boys getting poisoned? Not to mention Axel getting dead?”

  “Hell yeah,” Mad said. “I’d kill for half that much.”

  “It’s like you were saying before,” Ochoa said. “Most murders are about money, right? So here we’ve got some money, and we’ve definitely got some murders. What are the odds they aren’t connected somehow?”

  “Okay,” I said, “then who had the most to gain? Or maybe I should say…to lose?”

  “Top of the list,” Ochoa said as he flipped through the binder, “is our friend R.H.”

  “Rosemary Hamill,” I said. “Owner of one very ugly and expensively restored B and B.”

  Mad plucked the last grape leaf out of the aluminum take-out box. “So waddaya think?” he asked. “Can you picture her mixing up some nasty-ass acid and offing those kids?”

  “In a word…no.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. She’s just …way too prissy. But maybe I can picture her hiring somebody to do her dirty work for her.”

  “Okay,” Ochoa said, “what about the rest of the people on the payoff list?”

  “Good question,” I said. “Unfortunately, we have no idea who they are. We better copy them down and start comparing the initials to… well, I guess to everybody who’s anybody in Jaspersburg.”

  “You know who might be able to help us with this?” Mad asked. “Brad. It is in his beat, ya know. Maybe he’s—”

  “That little moron?” I said. “No way.”

  “He’s not so bad.”

  “The hell you say. First off, he’s a total loose cannon, so God knows who he’d go drill. He’d probably blow the whole damn story. Plus, J-burg is one of half a dozen towns he’s covering. He’s hardly been on the beat long enough to know his ass from his elbow anyway.”

  “Okay,” Mad said, “I’m getting that the answer is no.”

  “Hell no,” I said. “And if you breathe a word to him about this, I’ll wring your neck.”

  “Nobody’s wringing anything,” Ochoa said. “Let’s just concentrate, okay? What about this other list?” He held up the page with the smaller amounts. “Any idea what’s up?”

  I broke off a corner of their baklava in the interest of calming down. “It’s got the initials A.R. on it, which I figure has to be Axel Robinette. It’s also got R.S., which is probably our buddy Sturdivant.”

  “So what are they getting paid off for?” Ochoa mused. “And if they are getting paid off, why are they on a separate list?”

  “And speaking of which,” Mad said, “why is Deep Lake paying fifty grand to Mohawk Associates in the first place?”

  “The budget said ‘consulting fees,’ ” I said, “which could mean just about anything.”

  “Yeah, but obviously Mohawk is in bed with the guys who run Melting Rock. What could they have to do with Deep Lake?”

  “Specifically,” Ochoa said, “what could Deep Lake want from them that would be worth the fifty thousand clams?”

  I looked at my watch again. It wasn’t even seven-thirty yet, and I was starving-hungry. “Okay,” I said, “let’s look at this another way. Assuming this phony company is really laundering payoff money, how do we figure out who’s in charge of it? I mean, doesn’t a company have to have officers or something?”

  “I guess,” Ochoa said. “This isn’t really my beat.”

  “Mine either,” I said. “I hate to say it, but this is the kind of crap that Gordon is goddamn great at.”

  “So let’s ask ourselves,” Mad said, “what would Gordon do?”

  “W.W.G.D.,” I said. “Not likely to appear on a bracelet anytime soon.” Mad raised an eyebrow at me. “It’s a Bible-thumping thing. Never mind.”

  “Fine,” Mad said, “so how would Band tackle this?”

  “He’d dig through piles of documents. Probably dig up the articles of incorporation, or some damn thing.”

  Ochoa tossed the binder on the coffee table. “And where do you find articles of incorporation?”

  “How the hell do I know? Doesn’t that have to be filed with the state or something?” Four shoulders shrugged. “Wonderful. So how are we gonna figure out what’s going on?”

  We sat there pondering the question for a while. I answered first. “Christ, we’re reporters, aren’t we?” I said.

  “Er…yeah,” Mad said. “So?”

  “So,” I said, “let’s ask somebody.”

  WHILE THE GUYS SETTLED in for an evening of watching extreme sports on ESPN-2, I went off to meet Cody at Delhi Delite, which is a lousy name for a very good Indian restaurant. An hour of eating like pigs was followed by another of you-know-whatting like rabbits, after which we fell asleep in the company of two dogs.

  And just for the record…at no point was I even remotely tempted to tell him that my holiday weekend had included breaking into Groovy Guitar, removing potentially valuable evidence, and stowing said evidence underneath Mad’s scuba fins.

  I did, however, fill him in on what he’d missed by blowing off the union picnic; although he obviously knew about Axel’s body washing up onshore, he’d missed the gory details. And although I’d expected him to get all concerned about my delicate sensibilities, apparently he was starting to give me credit for being a fairly tough cookie—though frankly poor Axel had looked so gross I could’ve used a little sympathy.

  The next day, I followed my own advice and did some asking. But what I found out was something wholly unexpected.

  Which is: Nearly dying of poisoned LSD turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to Norma Jean Kramer.

  CHAPTER24

  How, you may ask, can this possibly be?

  Well, her two-week coma proved to be something akin to a health spa. Her parents may have been scared silly, but when she finally woke up, her weight was the lowest it had been since junior high.

  Granted, this s
till put her over two hundred pounds. But for Norma Jean, it was a step in the right direction. After her brush with death, she was determined to give up drugs, go to junior college, and get down to a size ten.

  At least that’s what she told me.

  I met Norma Jean three days after she awoke, by which time the American health-care system had already sent her home to the two-bedroom bungalow she shared with her parents. And although I had plenty to worry about back home in Gabriel, when the opportunity to talk to her suddenly manifested itself, I had no choice but to drive south with all deliberate speed.

  The terminus of my six-hour trip was the Kramers’ house. It was located in a working-class section of Baltimore, with gray aluminum siding on the walls and a Virgin Mary shrine on the front lawn. The family appeared to be nothing if not thrifty; the shrine was made from an old bathtub, the planters alongside the driveway fashioned out of recycled tires spray-painted silver. Next to the house was a postage-stamp garden, the tomato plants staked with sawed-off hockey sticks.

  Now, you may be wondering why Norma Jean Kramer agreed to talk to me—why, in fact, I’d been invited to her family’s front door. The answer is simple: Norma Jean was talking to everybody.

  When she woke up, you see, Norma Jean found that not only was she slimmer, she was also a minor celebrity. Every news organization east of the Rockies seemed to want an interview with her. Suddenly, the girl who couldn’t get a date to the senior prom was that most elusive of things: She was popular.

  If we’d known all this beforehand, I might not have been the one to make the six-hour drive from Gabriel. Yes, Norma Jean had agreed to meet with a reporter, but since we hadn’t yet seen the spate of stories in media from the Baltimore Sun to CNN, we had no idea just how chatty she’d be. The whole reason for sending me (rather than, say, Ochoa) was that, as the possessor of my very own set of ovaries, I might make her more comfortable—and, therefore, more likely to spill her guts. As it turned out, though, she was so talkative we might just as well have sent her a tape recorder via Federal Express.

  I pulled up to her house just as a CBS news van was driving away. Norma Jean’s mother answered the door wearing a burgundy sweat suit, the velour kind with the zip-up jacket and matching pants that you never actually see in a gym—only on out-of-shape types who crave the elasticized waistband. She led me into the living room, where Norma Jean was lying on the couch, clad in a warm-up suit of her own. Her face was made up, and not particularly well; mascara clotted her eyelashes, and her cheeks were striped with cotton-candy pink blush.

  The room was a riot of get-well flowers, which looked cheery but saturated the air so the place smelled like a funeral parlor. Mrs. Kramer settled into an easy chair, a happily expectant look on her face, and I got the feeling that she was enjoying the spectacle every bit as much as her daughter was.

  The first thing Norma Jean did was offer me a glass of instant lemonade, which I took just to be polite. Then she told me to call her “Jeanie” and indicated a tin of expensive-looking chocolate-dipped cookies, which she said had come in a gift basket from the mayor’s office. These, I accepted with genuine enthusiasm.

  We spent the next two hours going over the life and times of Norma Jean Kramer. And although she turned out to be extremely sweet and surprisingly funny, I’ll spare you most of the details. She did mention that she was thinking about getting an associate’s degree in mass communication, that the local Weight Watchers franchise had offered her a free membership, and that her dream was to be a spokesperson for the company, “just like Fergie.”

  But the really interesting part of the conversation didn’t come until the end.

  “Jeanie,” I said, “before I go, I was wondering if you’d mind telling me about the circumstances of your buying the LSD.” Her face took on a blank, slightly confused look, which kind of threw me. “You did buy it, didn’t you? Or did one of your friends buy it for you or something?”

  “No, I bought it,” she said. “It’s just that …none of the other newspeople asked me that before.”

  “Oh. Well, I guess for most of them the story is really about you being the only person to survive taking one of those poisoned tabs. And besides, since Robert Sturdivant is obviously going to get charged with—”

  “Hey, who is he, anyway?”

  “Sturdivant? He’s…Well, he’s the guy who sold you the drugs. Isn’t he?”

  “Gosh, I …I don’t really know.”

  “You bought the drugs from a total stranger?” She nodded. “Didn’t you even get his name?”

  “Yeah, it was Robbie-something. I guess it could’ve been that Sturdivant guy. I just don’t know for sure.”

  “Listen, Jeanie, I’ll be right back, okay?” I went out to my car, retrieved a stack of newspapers from the backseat, and dug out a story that Ochoa had done on the continuing search for the bail-jumping Sturdy. “Was this the guy?” Jeanie squinted at the photo. “Does he look familiar to you?”

  “Um…yes and no.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He isn’t the guy who sold me the tab, but…I think I saw him one time.”

  “When was that?”

  “When I was still in the hospital, some nice people from the F.B.I. came by and showed me some pictures—a bunch of little black-and-white pictures, like six of them together. I’m pretty sure this guy was in one of them.”

  “They showed you a photo array and asked you to pick out the person who sold you the drugs?”

  “Yeah, I guess. And then they asked me if I knew somebody named Sturdivant, but I told them I wasn’t sure—all I knew was that I bought the stuff from somebody named Robbie.”

  I handed her the paper. “And you’re sure this isn’t the guy?”

  “Nah. He was a lot smaller, and he had way more hair. And this Sturdivant guy looks, I don’t know… mean. The other guy was kinda cute.”

  “Okay, well, thanks for—”

  “Hey,” she said, “there he is.”

  She’d unfolded the paper and was looking at a story on the facing page.

  I followed the direction of her eyes. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. There’s the guy. Omigod, that’s him.” She was starting to get upset, and her mother came over to pat her on the back. “That’s the creep who sold me the stuff that almost killed me.”

  She pointed a pink fingernail at the newsprint—hard enough to poke a hole right through the photo of Axel Robinette.

  I WROTE UP THE PIECE on Jeanie Kramer in my Super 8 motel room, fueled by a mushroom-and-onion pizza and a six-pack of Tab. When I was done, I made yet another call to Alan Bauer—and, for the fifth time, got the family answering machine. I left another message telling him to call me on my cell, that it was important, but something told me I was wasting my time. If I talked to Bauer, it was going to have to be in person.

  Then I tried Glenn Shardik again, this time at home. His wife answered, said he was out, but she’d be glad to give him another message.

  The headline to my page-one piece (ROBINETTE SOLD DEADLY DRUGS, SAYS VICTIM) blared out of the Monitor vending boxes as I drove into town the following afternoon. I made it to the newsroom just in time for the afternoon editorial meeting, during which I got a slightly malevolent stare from Ochoa and high fives from everybody else.

  Five hours later, when we’d repaired to the Citizen Kane, the reporter in question was still mouthing the phrase sob sister at me.

  “Oh, piss off,” I said. “And while you’re at it, how about you buy me a drink?”

  “Fat chance.”

  “Don’t be such a sore loser. Besides, all I did was interview the Kramer girl. Robinette’s death is completely in your beat. And as far as I’m concerned, you can have it.”

  “Since when are you so generous?”

  “Since I saw his goddamn body floating in the water. Twice.”

  “Yeah, well, right now I’m as stalled as the cops are.”

  “Meaning?”

  “M
eaning I’ve been nosing around for a week and I’ve hardly been able to find out anything beyond what the cops released.”

  “Which is that he died of hypothermia from falling into the Deep Lake Cooling pool.”

  “Right. Whether it happened accidentally or on purpose—according to my buddy in the coroner’s office, they’re not having much luck nailing it down.”

  “And if he was pushed in on purpose,” I said, “which I assume that he damn well was, did it have anything to do with the fact that he sold the drugs to Kramer? Or was it about Deep Lake somehow? And what’s the connection to Mohawk Associates?”

  “Goddamn Robinette,” Mad said. “Seems to me like the son of a bitch is at the middle of everything. Too bad he’s in no shape to talk.”

  “The Axis of Axel,” I said, mostly because it sounded so clever. “Let’s count them up. First, he was at Melting Rock. He was the one who sold the drugs to Norma Jean, and presumably to the boys as well. His initials were on one of the payoff lists in the festival office, but there’s no M.A. next to his name. He was one of the demonstrators on opening day at Deep Lake—in fact, he’s one of the people who shut down the system with goddamn Jell-O. And to round out the list, one of the J-burg girls has a massive crush on him, and he’s best buddies with our missing drug dealer, Rob Sturdivant.”

  “And while we’re on the subject,” Ochoa said, “where the hell is he?”

  “Rob Sturdivant,” I said. “Goddamn Axel Robbee-nette. I was thinking about it on the whole drive up, how Axel pronounced his name that way when I talked to him at Café Whatever. That’s even how some of his stupid slacker friends said it when I interviewed them for his news obit.”

  “And?”

  “And the only evidence that Sturdivant sold the drugs to those boys was double hearsay—Cindy said that Shaun told her he did it. But Shaun was dying, and Cindy was hysterical, and maybe…”

  Mad raised an eyebrow. “And maybe,” he said, “she misunderstood him. He said ‘Robinette,’ and she heard ‘Rob Sturdivant.’ ”