“How so?”
“We didn’t really get into it. She’s just a flake, Roger. It wasn’t worth listening to, really.”
“Well it must be worth talking about, ’cause you’re doing it long distance.”
“It’s nothing. I talked to the local cop here who handled it, and he said it was a clear-cut, cut-and-dry case.”
“Really? How many suicides does a small-town cop like that handle, anyway?”
“More than you’d think. He said he’s handled five in a little over a year.”
“He said that?”
“Yeah. So what?”
“Oh. Nothing probably. Listen, what time should I be at the airport?”
“You were going to make a point, Roger. Make it.”
“Oh it’s nothing. Uh, tell me. What’s the population of that town? What’s it called? Greenburg?”
“Greenwood. 6000.”
“I see.”
“Roger.”
“Crane, it’s no big deal. It’s just that five suicides out of 6000 people is a high suicide rate. I mean, I’m a sociologist. I know these things.”
“You’re a grad student. You don’t know shit. How high a suicide rate is that, exactly?”
“About ten times the national average.”
Part Three:
BOONE
Chapter Eight
“I thought you’d be back,” Boone said. “But I didn’t think you’d bring your suitcase.”
She was standing in the doorway with her arms folded, properly smug.
“It looks like I might be around for a few more days,” Crane said. “I can’t afford the motel much longer. Can you put me up?”
“I can put you up,” Boone said, not budging in the doorway. “The question is, can I put up with you?”
“Right. I’ll just go back to the motel and stay till my money runs out.” He turned to go.
She put a hand on his shoulder. “You needn’t pout. Come on in.”
She led him upstairs, took him into one of the rooms, a big, completely empty one—nothing but smooth white walls and dark wood trim and polished light wood floor.
“I told you my ex took all the furniture,” she said, shrugging. “The only two beds in the place are mine and Billy’s.”
“I can guess how your son would feel about sharing a bed with me.”
“Right. About the same way I would.”
“That’s not what I’m here for.”
“I know you’re not. That wasn’t fair. I have a sleeping bag you can use, and there’s a desk in Billy’s room with a chair, which we can bring in and make this nice and homey.”
“Thanks.”
He followed her across the hall to a small room with a window and a big metal desk and not much else. To one side of the desk was a two-drawer gray steel file; on the other a couple wastebaskets. On the desk was a manual typewriter, around which were scattered notecards, tape cassettes, pages of rough draft and pages of manuscript. Above the desk was a bulletin board with newspaper and magazine articles pinned to it: “DO ‘AGENT ORANGE’ HERBICIDES DESTROY PEOPLE AS WELL AS PLANTS? THE EVIDENCE MOUNTS,” “THE POISONING OF AMERICA,” “KEMCO PROFITS UP.”
“To which you no doubt say, ‘Up Kemco Profits,’ ” Crane said, looking back at her archly, where she stood watching him take all this in.
“You will, too, once you hear the story,” she said.
Crane poked around her desk a bit, just tentatively, waiting for her to stop him. She didn’t.
“You can’t be working on just an article,” Crane said. “There’s too much here for that. Is this the manuscript, so far?” He hefted the box of typescript. “There’s a couple hundred pages, here.”
“It’s a book,” she said.
“How long you been working on it?”
“Since Patrick and I split. Year and a half.”
“Is it for a publisher? Do you have an advance?”
“It’s on spec. I won’t have any trouble selling it.”
“How do you live?”
“Alimony. Child support.”
“From Patrick? Who gets his money from Kemco?”
“I see it as ironic.”
“I see it as hypocritical.”
“Fine, coming from somebody who’s freeloading in the first place.”
“Yeah, well, you’re right. That was uncalled for. Sorry. You wouldn’t happen to have some coffee or something?”
“Herbal tea.”
“That’d be fine. Can we go someplace where there’s furniture? I’d like us to sit and talk, awhile.”
“Sure.”
Downstairs, he returned to the faded red sofa of the evening before, and she brought hot tea for them both, and sat next to him.
“Why did you come back, Crane? Why are you staying?”
“Because I don’t think Mary Beth committed suicide. That’s been my instinct from day one. And now I’ve learned something that convinced me.”
“I suppose you found out about the other suicides.”
“You mean you knew?”
“Of course. If you hadn’t been so quick to classify me as a loon, I’d have been able to tell you that by now. I’ve been doing research into Kemco for a long time, Crane. I know a lot of things that you don’t.”
“What do the suicides have to do with Kemco?”
“All five suicide victims were Kemco employees.”
“Jesus.”
“Of course that could just be a coincidence. A lot of people around here work for Kemco.”
“Jesus. Maybe they did kill her…”
“Where have I heard that before?”
“Why would they do it, Boone?”
“I don’t know exactly. I may know. But I can’t be sure.”
“Tell me what you do know.”
“The book I’m doing… it’s called Kemco: Poison and Profit… it mostly centers on what working at the Kemco plant near here has done to the residents of this and half a dozen other small towns, whose workforce Kemco draws upon. What I’ve come up with is a pattern of miscarriages, birth defects and cancer, among Kemco employees and their children.”
Crane sat and thought about that for a while.
“And Mary Beth knew about all this,” he said.
“Of course. You know, I was in high school with Mary Beth’s sister, Laurie, and Laurie and I were good friends back then, though we long since drifted apart. But even in those days Mary Beth was a sharp little kid—she was in grade school and way ahead of her age—and we used to talk. Then, this summer, we got together again and got kind of close. She was interested in my writing, my research, and I felt, considering how close she was to this, considering the tragedies in her own family, which related to the Kemco thing, it, well, seemed natural to let her in on it.”
“No wonder she was depressed about her father… and little Brucie… she was seeing them as symbols of something larger…”
“It explains why she was blue, Crane, but it doesn’t explain suicide. Because she didn’t commit suicide. Not unless you believe it’s possible for Greenwood to have ten times the national suicide rate.”
“That’s exactly what Roger said.”
“Roger?”
“Friend back home. I called him, earlier this afternoon. When I told him there’d been five suicides here in a little over a year, he said that was about ten times the national average… without taking into account that rural areas have a ‘markedly lower rate,’ he said. Less pressure in the lives of ‘rural residents’ as compared to ‘city dwellers.’ ”
“He talks like a sociologist.”
“That’s what he wants to be when he grows up.”
“How about you, Crane? What do you want to be?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re supposed to be a journalism major. Why don’t you dig in and help me with this goddamn thing.”
“Your book? No. No thanks. That’s not what I have in mind.”
“I know it isn�
��t. But you came here, to me, because you know we share a common purpose.”
“I came here because you seem to know more about what’s going on than the Greenwood cops do.”
“The cops here are a joke. They’re nothing.”
“The guy I spoke to seemed competent enough.”
“If they were competent, they wouldn’t swallow these phony suicides whole.”
“They’re not all phony. One of them was a guy who shot his wife and kids—and then himself, in front of a cop.”
“Fine. He’s the one suicide Greenwood is statistically allowed. What about the other four?”
He looked at her. Nodded. Sipped his tea. It was still warm.
“Okay, then,” he said. “You still have to explain some things. What was Mary Beth doing, where Kemco was concerned, that could’ve gotten her killed?”
“Maybe she stumbled onto something.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? What aren’t you telling me?”
Boone got up and began walking around the braided rug, pacing, as she explained.
“You’ve got to understand,” she said. “The book I’m doing deals with a lot of things. Agent Orange, for one. I’ve talked to dozens of Vietnam vets who came in contact with it, corresponded with another twenty or twenty-five. But I haven’t come up with anything new, really… much of what I have on Agent Orange is secondary source material. You’re a journalism student, Crane, I don’t have to tell you that firsthand, primary source material would carry more weight.”
“I can see that,” Crane said, keeping a calm tone. Trying to give her room to say what she wanted to say. “The story of Agent Orange would have a place in your book, but the book couldn’t depend on that… it’s a story that’s been told elsewhere.”
“Exactly! And the interviews, the statistics, laying out the pattern of illnesses here in Greenwood and other nearby small towns, whose populations largely consist of families supported by one or more Kemco employees, it’s impressive, it’s shocking even… but it’s circumstantial. And, damnit, I’m no scientist. I can’t say I’ve really proven anything.”
“Can’t you get inside the plant, to check on safety conditions and so forth?”
“Are you kidding? How, by asking Patrick, my ex-husband, for a tour? And what would I see on a company-directed tour? I’d get the standard P.R. shuffle, right? And suppose I got in on my own somehow, to really snoop around? What would I be looking for? How would I know how to judge the safety conditions in a chemical processing plant?”
“What you’re saying is your book lacks something.”
“It sure as hell does. I need a smoking gun, Crane.”
“A smoking gun.”
“Right! Something really tangible. Don’t you get it? Don’t you understand, Crane? Kemco is fucking malignant, festering, a bed of corruption and negligence…”
“I see,” Crane said, hoping her journalistic style was somewhat more subdued.
“I need to be able to show Kemco being criminally negligent. Not just a big well-meaning corporation that may have had some problems with plant safety.”
“It doesn’t sound to me like you have anything remotely like that.”
“Oh but I do. In one of my interviews, with a company employee who was a friend of one of the ‘suicide’ victims, I learned that Kemco’s playing dump-and-run.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Kemco has to account to the federal government for the disposal of any potentially hazardous waste material; like this stuff PCB, which is used to insulate electrical transformers. Kemco makes that, and the waste from it can be dumped at only three federally approved sites. For years these companies dumped their shit wherever the hell they wanted… sewers, creeks, rivers. You know what they used to think? ‘Dilution is the solution to pollution.’ Only it didn’t work out that way; there are plenty of toxic substances that don’t harmlessly break down in water. So they started burying the stuff—Kemco, and Dow and Monsanto and DuPont and Hooker and all the others. Usually in 55-gallon steel drums, which eventually corroded and started to leak out into the ground, contaminating farmland and water supplies and people.”
She was starting to rant; he tried to stop her: “Boone, I’ve heard of Love Canal. I know about things like that. But those are dump sites from twenty years ago. Things are more regulated than that now.”
“In theory. You know, I’m glad you’ve heard of Love Canal, because so has Kemco, only they don’t give a fuck. They are still hiring lowlife truckers to come dump this stuff God knows where, and with Christ knows what results on the environment and the people living nearby.”
“What does any of this have to do with Mary Beth?”
“She was working this summer in Kemco’s secretarial pool. A lot of the execs used her—she was good, and well liked; the daughter of a late, trusted employee. She heard some things. Saw some things.”
“Such as?”
“One major thing, specifically: one evening, when she was working alone, staying late, trying to catch up on some work, she saw one of the executives give an envelope to a rough-looking guy who might’ve been a trucker. The trucker took some cash out of the envelope and counted it.”
“That’s it? That’s what she saw? That’s thin, Boone. That’s goddamn thin.”
“I don’t think that’s all she found out.”
“Don’t you know?”
“I was out of town for about three days, doing some research on the Agent Orange aspect of the book. When I got back, there were half a dozen messages for me to call her. I called. She was dead.”
“She was snooping around for you, then. For your book.”
“Crane, blaming me won’t do any good.”
“I’m not blaming you. Do you know the name of the exec she saw handing the money over?”
“Yes. It was Patrick.”
Chapter Nine
From the highway, glancing over to the left, yellow-orange light stained the horizon, just above the trees. It was as if the sun were coming up at midnight. They turned off onto a blacktop and followed the signs that led them from one blacktop onto another, and another, and the stain against the sky became a city. A city of lights and smoke.
As the city’s skyline emerged, the only skyscrapers were smokestacks, a dozen of them, emitting ever-expanding grayish white clouds that made seductive patterns as they rose.
Crane had expected the Kemco plant to be big, and it was; but it was more spread out, and closer to the ground, than he’d thought. There was an eerie, almost underwater look to it all, with the shifting smoke backdrop, the green-yellow-aqua outdoor lights strung about like bulbs at a particularly drab pool party. The taller, larger buildings resembled greenhouses, their walls sheets of mottled aqua-colored plastic, cross-hatched with metal, rising up amidst massive inter-twines of steel pipe. There was a massive electrical substation nearby. Numerous one-story buildings. Countless chemical tanks. Off at the sides, huge, squat, silo-like structures huddled like metal toadstools. Just inside a full-to-capacity parking lot, an American flag flapped against a grayish white breeze. The plant was going full throttle, but Crane had yet to see a human being.
Other than Boone, of course. She was driving. They were in her yellow Datsun. They passed a green tin building half a block long: the loading dock for Kemco trucks.
“That’s where the trucks come out,” Boone said, pointing as they approached a graveled area to the left of the loading dock; a small brick building served as a clearing booth for departing trucks, of which there were none at the moment.
“Where do we watch from?” Crane asked.
“You’ll see.”
Opposite the Kemco plant, on the other side of the road they were driving down, was a flat open field; in the darkness it was hard to see how far the field extended. It resembled farmland. They’d passed several farms, within half a mile of the Kemco facility, on this same road; but this field wasn’t being used for farming, or anything else, though perhaps it
had once been a dump site for wastes—the proverbial “back forty” used by many chemical plants—long since filled up and smoothed over.
There was room alongside the road to park, which they did, a quarter of a mile down from the truck loading area.
“Are we going to be okay, here?” Crane asked.
“Sure. Nobody’s going to think a thing about us.”
“Yeah, right. What’s conspicuous about sitting out here in the open like this?”
“It’s dark. Nobody’ll see us.”
“A car going by will see us. A truck.”
“Crane, one of the few nice things about the Kemco plant is it’s out in the boonies… and you know what people in parked cars out in the boonies do, don’t you?”
“I think I can guess, but I don’t know what it has to do with us.”
“If a car or a truck goes by, we pretend to be making out. Think you can handle that?”
“I suppose. But be gentle.”
Boone frowned at that, but it wasn’t a very convincing frown.
They sat and watched for an hour, saying very little, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. The plant down the way, from this distance, looked like a cheap miniature in a ’50s science-fiction movie. The longer he stared at it, the less real it seemed; yet at the same time, it struck him as being something breathing, something alive. It was the constant billowing smoke that did it, he figured.
Another uneventful half hour passed.
“I don’t know about this,” Crane said. “We haven’t seen a car or truck since we got here.”
“Crane, if we’re patient, we can catch them in the act. You got that? We can wait and watch for the sons of bitches who are hauling Kemco’s shit, follow them to wherever they’re illegally dumping it…” She paused to point at the Nikon SLR camera on the floor between her feet. “… take a few nice candid shots, and we got them.”
“And you’re sure this is going to happen at night.”
“It will probably be at night. They aren’t called midnight haulers because they work days.”
“It doesn’t look like tonight’s going to be the night.”
Midnight Haul Page 5