by Chris Knopf
“This yours?” he asked, pointing at Eddie.
“In theory.”
“Scared the crap out of me.”
“Sorry. How’s the study going?”
“It’s going.”
“You can’t tell me?”
“Nothing to tell.” He pulled the boom out of a holster sewn into the harness webbing and gently laid it on the ground, then moved his torso around, stretching his back muscles. “You’d think they could make that thing lighter.”
“Field guys always bitch about something.”
He sat down on a windowsill that protruded from the outbuilding.
“We went through the original phase-one study and everything checked out, not surprisingly,” said Dan. “I know the guys who did the work. Pretty thorough. But we’ve only now had a chance to look for those cellars, the crux of the matter. You sure you don’t know where they are?”
I sat on the ground so he wouldn’t have to look up at me while I briefed him on my background, that I’d been on hundreds of industrial sites all over the world that were engaged in processing all manner of toxic and explosive chemical compounds. I hated that kind of talk, because you mostly heard it from people needing to assert their importance in the world. But I needed Dan to know my bona fides so I didn’t have to get into technical debates, or have to listen to the third-grade version of things I knew better than he did. He took it like I hoped he would.
“If you can think of any way to avoid bringing backhoes in here and digging up the place, I’d like to hear it,” he said. “The State pays me either way, but Amanda pays for the holes.”
“I need a closer look at the drawings,” I told him. “Like I said, I’d never seen them before.”
“Fair enough.”
He hauled himself up and walked back to the van, where Ned, also wearing headphones, was glued to a bank of CRTs examining oscillating waveforms and scrolling tables of data. Dan tapped him on the shoulder and he jumped.
“Sorry, Ned. We’ve got company.”
Ned pulled off his headphones and shook his head.
“No, my fault. You shouldn’t be listening to Pink Floyd and radar pings at the same time.”
“Sam wants to get another look at the cellar elevations. I said it was okay.”
He retrieved them from the box and we all went over to the main building where we could spread out on a dusty conference table.
I’d spent a lot of time with the original drawings and their subsequent iterations. Running through the scrolled sheets refreshed my memory and stirred up some odd and slightly unwanted associations. But there was nothing there I hadn’t seen before beyond the cellar elevations.
I used an Agfa lupe I’d brought in the pocket of my running shorts to compare the paper and drawing style, especially the lettering and flourishes that were common to the day. Without a document expert it was hard to know for sure, but the cellar elevations looked like they belonged with the first set drawn in the twentieth century. There are a million little details you could compare on a hand-drafted architectural drawing. A forgery would be an impressive achievement.
“You think they’re real?” I asked Dan, looking up from the lupe.
“Forensics could nail it, of course, but the people in the State’s Attorney’s office thought they were legit, and so do I.”
“Me too. Can you say the same about the other information?”
“They do. Said it’s as clean as it gets.”
“The term toxic waste covers a lot of territory. Anything more specific?”
Ned rummaged around in the box and came up with a report from the DEC lab, basically a laundry list of possible feedstocks, compounds and component chemicals used in the manufacture of rubber rafts beginning around the Second World War and into the fifties and sixties after vinyl was introduced. I once lived in a sea of these technical papers, plans and reports. It was like looking at the faces of your old football team in the high school yearbook. Familiar and strangely distant at the same time. I forced myself to concentrate until I saw it. The bad thing.
“Ah, shit,” I said, despite myself.
“What?” he asked, trying to look over my shoulder.
“Buna-N. I didn’t think they used it for rafts.”
“WB mixed up a lot of it,” said Dan. “That’s all we know.”
“A copolymer. Part acrylonitrile.”
“Right. An IARC Group 2B carcinogen. Could’ve been in a lot of things these guys made. Can you say acrylics?”
I looked out the window at the rusty, overgrown plant site. Then back down at the cellar elevations.
“But why?” I asked.
“Nobody cared about toxic waste back then. You wouldn’t believe the shit we uncover.”
“No, why the missing drawings, why the anonymous tip, and why now?”
“Not my turf, like I told you,” said Dan.
“I know. I’m just talking. Don’t know what else to do.”
I walked outside leaving the DEC guys to pack up the drawings. Eddie was lying in the grass waiting for me. He’d been to the site plenty of times and knew there was nothing interesting there for him anymore. Just as well. I didn’t like him sniffing around the place anyway. God knows what could be in the air, in the soil. Actually, I could guess. So could Dan. Which would be easily confirmed by any junior chem engineer with a simple test kit.
Everything made sense and everything didn’t.
Dan came up behind me.
“I need two more days with this gizmo,” he pointed to the instrument mounted on the end of the boom lying in the grass nearby, “and then we can move to drilling test holes. Give that a few days before we start bringing in the heavy equipment. After that it’ll get harder to keep this thing under wraps. But I’ll do the best I can. I’m not in the business of destroying people’s investments.”
I thanked him and told him to take all the time he needed.
“Nothing’s happening to Amanda’s project till this gets resolved, one way or the other,” I told him.
“You got that right.”
I thanked him again and jogged off with Eddie. We completed our usual westerly route, which included a run though a bird sanctuary, a favorite of Eddie’s, and a stop at a roadside deli for Gatorade and dog biscuits served from behind the counter by the leathery Frenchman and his chubby Cambodian wife who ran the place.
“He like zee petit gâteau, no?”
“Mostly the presentation,” I told him. “Don’t give him too many. We still gotta run back.”
Which we did. We passed by the WB plant on the return trip and saw the DEC van still there and Dan walking slowly through the weeds, boom in the air and face creased with concentration. Questions hung like a sickening vapor over the whole scene, and all I could do was jog on by, focus on my breathing and not spraining an ankle on the rutty road that led back up to the tip of Oak Point.
——
I wanted to bring Eddie with me into the Village but assumed where I was going they’d frown on dogs. Made no sense to me. In Europe you bring dogs everywhere, including restaurants and bars, and never once have I heard of a dogborne pandemic. If I had the money, I’d bring him to Paris. Stuff his face full of petit gâteau.
The Southampton Chronicle building sat on a hill that overlooked the backside of the Village center, which made it look both watchful and appropriately aloof. It was on the way to the big new library—my next stop if the foray into local journalism proved unfruitful.
I didn’t know what to expect and had only the roughest plan of attack, knowing nothing about the inner workings of a newspaper. I was surprised to see a reception desk inside the front door, just like any old office anywhere.
“I’m here to see a reporter,” I told the pert, round-faced receptionist.
“Certainly,” she said brightly. “Any one in particular?”
“How about an old one?”
She pulled out a plastic-covered list of names.
“Let’s see.
I don’t know everybody perfectly well, but I can think of a few gray heads. I don’t mean that in a bad way,” she added, looking at the gray head standing before her.
“I didn’t think you did.”
“Some people think gray hair means wisdom. I do.”
“Wise decision. So what do you think?”
“Roberta is like my mother’s age. Or there’s Kyle who’s like been here forever. Not sure if he’s here now. We’re a weekly,” she added, as if that explained everything.
“But you’re sure about Roberta?”
“She gave me half her bagel this morning on the way in. I didn’t eat it, though. It had cream cheese. Bad for the tummy tone.”
She put both hands flat across her midriff to illustrate the value of restraint.
“Let’s give Roberta a call,” I suggested.
“Sure. And who may I say is calling?”
“My name’s Sam Acquillo, but she won’t know me. Just see if she’ll give me a few minutes to ask some questions.”
“Okay.”
While she called I had a chance to admire the blank opacity of the reception area. There were no clues it belonged to a newspaper. If I’d been transported there in a blindfold I’d think I was in a machine-tool factory. I expected to walk directly into a buzzy newsroom filled with hard-charging cynics who looked like Edward R. Murrow and spoke like Cary Grant. What I got was Roberta Camacho, a late-middle-aged woman shaped like a red delicious apple on a pair of sticks. She had a head of hair you’d call mousey, but only if the mouse had been dead for a while. She was, however, hard-charging, coming through the access door with hand thrust forward and eyes staring intently over a pair of cat’s-eye reading glasses.
“Roberta Camacho, and I know exactly who the hell you are,” she said to me as I shook her hand.
“You do?”
“You’re the guy from North Sea accused of murdering Robbie Milhouser with a hammer stapler. You here to confess? Give me the scoop? What a prince.”
“I’m just looking for some information,” I said, as the heartsickening realization hit me.
“Sure. I tell you, then you tell me.”
“I’m an idiot,” I told her. “Of course you’d want to ask me a bunch of questions. And here I am delivering myself to you.
“That’s brave of you to say. Most guys wouldn’t admit that in public,” she said, pulling a small steno pad out from under her ample arm and flipping it open.
I sat down on one of the innocuous leather and chrome chairs in the waiting area. She sat in the other one.
“What I know so far is the police have fingered you as their only suspect, but the grand jury has yet to hand up an indictment. Though people close to the case feel that’s forthcoming. They’re just dotting i’s and crossing t’s. What’s your opinion on that?”
“My opinion is that the clarity of my thinking has eroded somewhat recently, for a variety of reasons.”
She didn’t write that down.
“What about off the record? You have something to tell me? Is that what you’re here for?”
As punishment for my stupidity, I made myself listen to what Jackie Swaitkowski would have said if I’d told her I was going to the Southampton Chronicle to do a little digging around. I played it as a lot of loud words ending with “what the hell were you thinking?”
“No. I honestly just wanted to get some information. I guess I never thought beyond that.”
She flipped her steno book closed and sat back in her chair.
“Are those cigarettes in your shirt pocket?”
“Camels.”
“If you let me have one I’ll let you use our special smoking area on the side of the building.”
“As long as we don’t have to talk,” I said, following her through the access door, down a dreary connecting hallway to a side door, and out to a picnic table around which clung the bitter residue of banished smokers. We sat down and shared an ashtray.
“Tell you what,” she said. “Let’s really just talk off the record. I have no problem with that.”
I remember back at the company being warned in the sternest terms to never speak to anyone from the press under any circumstances without our PR people’s prior approval and involvement in the interview. It was one of the few direct commands I submitted to with unqualified obedience. So much so that the head of corporate affairs complained I was undermining our credibility by stonewalling the media.
“You told me not to talk to them,” I’d said to the PR guy.
“Not not talk. Just not talk without our involvement.”
“So I don’t talk about the wrong things?”
“I don’t like the characterization, but I accept the gist of it. We need to control our message.”
“You do, I know,” I said sincerely. “And you’re good at it. I’m a lot better at controlling product quality. Let’s stick to our strengths, what do you say?”
We eventually reached a compromise where the PR people would send over questions or requests for information from the media—which usually meant industry magazines, but sometimes the general press—and I’d write back an answer. I never saw anything in print attributed to me that resembled anything I ever wrote down, which proved the wisdom of our strategy.
Roberta and I stared at each other and smoked in silence for a few minutes. Then my curiosity got the best of me.
“What’s that mean, exactly, off the record?” I asked her.
“You tell me anything you want and I promise not to print any of it. Except those things that will win me a Pulitzer Prize or get me fired for letting some other paper get a scoop on something I should’ve had.”
“Pretty airtight deal.”
We quietly smoked some more, then I put out my cigarette and tossed her an extra from my pack.
“Sorry to bother you,” I told her, standing up. “You don’t have to escort me through the building. I can walk around.”
Which I started to do when she called me back.
“What if I answer your questions first and then you decide if you’ll answer some of mine.”
I walked back to her.
“I can’t afford to mess up here,” I said to her. “It’s not my life being at stake. It’s the crap I’ll have to take from my lawyer.”
Her face, heavily jowled and marred with the antique vestiges of acne, looked amused.
“I spent almost twenty years as a reporter at the Boston Globe before marrying a guy I didn’t know at the time was about to inherit a place on Gin Lane. You want to check out if my word is good, call anybody there who knew me. I have no reason to break a trust with you. I don’t care that much about your story, and I don’t need the money or the job.”
I sat down and took the cigarette I’d given her off the table and lit it. Then I gave her a fresh one.
“You wanna talk about messing up,” she said, waving it at me.
“I was looking for a way to research a news story that’s about ten, maybe fifteen years old. I thought it might be quicker to ask a reporter who was around at the time.”
“That was early on for me, but I was here. What story?”
“Jeff Milhouser and some sort of bank fraud.”
“The victim’s father,” said Roberta.
“He was a Town Trustee back then. I was told he used Town money to collateralize personal loans.”
“Can you wait here?” she asked, then lumbered back inside the building, leaving me alone with my self-recrimination.
She came back ten minutes later with a handful of loose paper.
“Pulled this off the archives,” she said. “Piece of cake. Ain’t computers grand?”
“So they tell me.”
Roberta leafed through the stack till she found something she liked, which she read, then handed over to me. It was a report on Milhouser’s plea bargain, in which he gave up his seat as a Trustee, paid a hundred grand fine and got five years’ probation. The charge was the way Hodges remembered it. Milhouse
r was trying to start a retail nursery business on County Road 39, but was having trouble raising the capital with his house fully mortgaged and his credit rating in the toilet from a prior bankruptcy. He’d told East End Savings and Loan that the money he used to buy a six-month CD, which collateralized the loan, had come from an inheritance, when in fact it was Town funds. It was a simple plan, in every sense of the word, that came a cropper when accounts payable at Town Hall started bouncing checks before the CD term came due and Milhouser could jockey the funds back where they belonged.
The Town Treasurer at the time, a guy named Zack Horowitz, had authorized the withdrawals based on Milhouser’s suggestion that the Town take advantage of new investment vehicles being offered through some big commercial banks. What made Horowitz think this was a good idea, or why he let one of the Town Trustees handle the theoretical transactions, wasn’t clear from the news story, but the report of the Treasurer’s resignation, shortly after Milhouser’s scheme was uncovered, explained how he probably stayed clear of criminal court himself.
The bank’s position on the matter was more curious. Since the nursery deal fell through before he could close, Milhouser was able to return the loan, so technically, from the bank’s point of view, no harm was done except for some slight misrepresentation on the loan application. Milhouser’s legal trouble was then solely with the Town.
“You remember this?” I asked her.
“Sorry. Vaguely at best. Is it okay to ask you something now?”
“I guess.”
“Why are you interested in this?”
I didn’t know what was worse. Feeling endangered by a boneheaded move or being asked to examine motives I always preferred to leave unexamined.
“I don’t know.”
“No fair.”
“It’s the truth. I don’t know. It just seems interesting to me. A little ripple in the continuum.”
“Of course. One of those.”
I found myself imagining I had an understanding with Roberta Camacho. That was probably what she wanted me to think.
“I’ll tell you when I know myself,” I told her.
“You’ll tell me everything—me and nobody else. When you’re ready. I’ll wait. I’m patient. No deadline pressure. We’re a weekly.”