Midnight Haul

by Max Allan Collins

  “It’s too early to tell. But tonight might be the night. Or tomorrow night, or the next night, maybe. This place turns out a lot of waste. We won’t have to wait forever.”

  “That’s encouraging.”

  “Take a nap. I’ll wake you if anything happens.”

  “Don’t let me sleep more than eight or ten hours.”

  “Crane, we only have to watch a couple hours a night. Between midnight and two, is all.”

  “I still don’t know how you arrived at that.”

  “I guessed, okay? But they would probably wait till after third shift went on at 11:30, and, if they’re going any distance at all to do the dumping, they wouldn’t want to get started any later than two.”

  “I guess that makes sense.”

  “Take a nap.”

  “Okay.”

  Crane got as comfortable as he could in the Datsun, with her in the driver’s seat. He was following her lead in this because he didn’t know quite what else to do; she had the information, the insights, he needed. So he was going along with her on this effort to link Kemco with “midnight haulers.” But it seemed to him ill-advised at best; and he didn’t want to think about what it was at worst.

  This afternoon, at Boone’s, he’d listened to three cassette tapes—interviews with the wives of the three other suicide victims—and he’d found that, for a “journalist” who’d been working on a book for a year and a half, Boone had somewhat less than a professional interviewing style. She pushed her subjects, led them, tried to get them to help her make her preconceived points. (She had not interviewed any of the members of the Brock family—Mr. Brock being the man who killed his wife and two children and himself—as there was no one left to interview.)

  Despite her lack of professionalism in interviewing, Boone was an amazing researcher and, from what he’d read so far, her writing style was considerably less hysterical than he’d supposed. Actually, it was a nicely understated style, getting her anti-Kemco points across convincingly. The Agent Orange section of the manuscript alone was devastating—her interviews with Vietnam vets were much more effective than those with Greenwood residents—and she may have been wrong in assuming the book could not stand on Agent Orange alone to find her a publisher.

  He was halfway through the manuscript and would finish it tomorrow; but he would need days to absorb Boone’s file cabinet of data on Kemco’s adverse effects on the citizens of Greenwood.

  She had cooked supper for him, and it was delicious: lasagna, his favorite. They—Crane, Boone, Billy—ate in the kitchen, a big off-white room with plants lining the windows. Her husband had been nice enough to leave her all the appliances, but then most of them were built-in.

  “This is really good,” Crane told her, between bites.

  “You sound surprised.”

  “It’s just great. I hope you’ll let me help out on the groceries, while I’m here. And I can do some of the cooking, if you like.”

  “You can cook?”

  “Isn’t that kind of a ‘sexist’ question?”

  Boone smiled. “What’s your specialty?”

  “I’m glad you like Italian,” he said. “I do terrific spaghetti and meatballs.”

  “Sounds wonderful. Only I’m a vegetarian.”

  “Really.”

  “You don’t sound surprised.”

  “Well, I noticed the lasagna was meatless, of course, but, then I fix it that way myself. I like it with spinach and cottage cheese like this.” He turned to the boy. “Are you vegetarian, Billy?”

  “No!” the boy said. He was looking at his plate as he ate.

  “I fix Billy hamburgers or tacos, when he wants,” Boone explained. “I don’t try to force vegetarianism on him. It’s not a religion with me.”

  “Daddy feeds me steak,” Billy said. Still looking at his plate.

  “Daddy can afford steak,” Boone told her son.

  “How long are you going to live here?” Billy asked Crane, turning and looking at him for the first time. His expression was that of a prosecutor with an accused mass murderer on the stand.

  “Just a little while, Billy,” Crane said.

  “Daddy won’t like it,” Billy said.

  “Daddy won’t know about it, either,” Boone said.

  “I might tell him.”

  “Not unless you don’t want to live with mommy anymore.”

  “I might live with Daddy. If he’s gonna live here, I might.”

  “Mr. Crane is my friend, Billy. He’s helping me work. He won’t be staying here long.”

  “He better not.” Billy pushed away from the table. “Be excused?”

  “Yes, Billy.”

  Billy left the table.

  “He’s a charmer,” Crane said.

  “He’s not a bad kid. He doesn’t like Patrick and me not living together.”

  “Well. No kid in his situation likes that.”

  “I don’t think Billy’s going to warm to you, Crane. You might as well get used to it.”

  “It doesn’t bother me. I’ve lived with younger brothers. I can put up with it.”

  “Good. Thank you.”

  “Now that Billy’s gone, there’s something I need to ask about your husband.”

  “Yes?”

  “How much does he know about this book you’re doing?”

  “Nothing, really. Patrick knows I’m writing a book, but he’s never bothered to ask what about. Which is fine with me. As far as I know, nobody at Kemco knows what I’m up to, exactly. And now that ‘suicides’ are becoming an epidemic around here, that’s probably a good thing.”

  Earlier she’d told him that she had not yet confronted Patrick with what she knew Mary Beth had seen: that exchange of money between him and a questionable-looking trucker. Now looking across the kitchen table at her, in the house she’d lived in with her husband, Crane could see that as much as she disliked Patrick, as much as her hatred for Kemco was tied in with how she felt about him, she didn’t like thinking Patrick might’ve been part of what happened to Mary Beth.

  “This afternoon,” Crane said, “I tried to absorb as much information as I could.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m just getting started, really. But already something is bothering me.”

  “What bothers you?”

  “The ‘suicide’ victims. Okay, they all worked at Kemco. But otherwise I see no connection… we have a maintenance man, a foreman, an executive. Then there’s Mary Beth—a secretary, temporary summer help.”

  “So?”

  “It’s just that the list is too disparate. It’s not a group of people working together, in similar jobs, with similar access to information.”

  “They all worked at Kemco. That’s connection enough.”

  “No it isn’t. As you’ve said, everybody around here works at Kemco. What other connection did they have? Boone, I’m going to talk to the wives of those ‘suicides’ myself.”

  “Fine.”

  “Alone.”

  “That’s fine, too.”

  “You see, I don’t share your basic assumption that Kemco is evil. That all big business is the enemy of the people. I just don’t buy that naive leftist bullshit, okay?”

  “Please. I’m still eating.”

  “I just want you to understand that I’m in this only for one reason: Mary Beth. I want to know what really happened to her.”

  “That’s easy. Kemco killed her.”

  “Kemco didn’t kill her. Possibly some people that work for Kemco did.”

  “Kemco killed her. You’re playing games with semantics, Crane.”

  “I’m not playing any kind of game!” He was standing. Angry.

  “It hurts, doesn’t it, Crane?”

  “S-sorry,” he said. Sitting back down.

  “I know it hurts.”

  He felt words tumble out. “I dream about her. Every night. It’s not the same, exact dream every night. But it’s always Mary Beth, and she’s alive, and we’re together,
and we’re doing something, anything. Picnic, a play, at home listening to music and talking. Then I remember she’s dead. Sometimes she touches my lips and shakes her head, smiling: ‘Don’t think about it,’ she’s saying. Sometimes she just disappears.”

  He was dreaming now. Mary Beth was sitting by him in a car.

  “Crane,” Boone was saying, “wake up.”

  He opened his eyes. Lights were coming down on them.

  “It’s a truck, schmuck,” she said, crawling over on him, awkwardly.

  They embraced.

  The truck roared by; emblazoned on its side was KEMCO.

  “One of their own,” Boone said, still in his lap, looking back at the receding semi. “That’s no midnight hauler. They’re carrying product, not waste.”

  “Here comes another.”

  They kissed for a while, as half a dozen trucks rolled by; one truck honked, and they looked up, startled: a truck driver was smiling and waving at them.

  When the trucks had passed, Boone got back over in the driver’s seat and said, “We might as well call it a night.”

  “Right.”

  “They’re not hauling any waste out of here tonight.”

  “Right.”

  Boone started the car, pulled onto the road. Crane felt uneasy, and a little ashamed, as he had back in the church, at Mary Beth’s funeral, when he’d seen Boone and got an erection. Like the one he had now.

  Boone seemed a little uneasy herself.

  Behind them, Kemco, like a bad dream, faded. And lingered.

  Chapter Ten

  Harry Woll, a foreman at Kemco, had been dead just over a year. He’d taken an overdose of sleeping pills, washing it down with Scotch; that was the story. The house he’d lived in was two blocks from Boone’s. Crane walked there.

  It was another cool night. Crane wore his jacket, but it didn’t keep his teeth from chattering. He supposed that was nerves, more than anything. He didn’t like doing this. He couldn’t have felt more uncomfortable.

  Woll’s house was one of several newer, one-story homes at the tail end of Woodlawn, a side street. There was a well-kept lawn with some shrubbery around the front of the pale green house, but there were no trees, which was unusual for Greenwood. The porch light was on.

  Crane knocked on the front door.

  A pretty redheaded girl of about fourteen, wearing snug jeans and a white T-shirt, answered. The T-shirt had a TWISTED SISTER logo on it; under it were pushy, precocious breasts that made the logo bulge. She looked at Crane and pretended to be sullen, calling out, “Mom! It’s that guy who called.”

  The girl leaned against the door and a smile tugged at the corners of her pouty mouth. Crane gave her a noncommittal smile and looked away.

  “Mr. Crane?”

  Mrs. Woll was a slender, attractive woman about forty doing a good job of passing for being in her mid-thirties. She wore a light blue cardigan sweater over a pastel floral blouse and light blue slacks. Her hair was dark honey blonde and rather heavily sprayed. She had the face of a cheerleader or homecoming queen, twenty years later.

  She extended a hand to him and gave him a dazzling smile. “It’s nice to see you, Mr. Crane.”

  He managed to return her smile, but the warm reception threw him: why was she so pleased to see him? She’d never met him before.

  He stepped inside.

  “Take Mr. Crane’s jacket, dear,” she told her daughter.

  The daughter took his jacket, brushing her breasts against him as she did, and tossed the jacket in a chair by the door.

  “Would you like some coffee?” Mrs. Woll asked him, taking his arm, leading him to a sofa nearby, a painting of the crashing tide above it, one of several undistinguished oil paintings that hung in a living room of white pebble-plaster walls and contemporary furniture. The place was immaculate; either she was some housekeeper or had cleaned up because company was coming.

  He said thanks, yes, to her offer of coffee and she left him to go get it. The fourteen-year-old redhead stood and looked at him and let her pout turn into a full-fledged smile and, butt twitching, walked into the next room, from which he soon heard a situation comedy and its laugh-track, TV turned up loud enough to be annoying on purpose.

  Mrs. Woll brought Crane the coffee, smiled, and went into the room where the fourteen-year-old had gone, and the TV sound went down. Some.

  While this was going on, he glanced at the far end of the room, where a color studio photo of the Woll family, taken perhaps five years ago, hung above a spinet piano. In the picture, Mrs. Woll looked heavier, sadder; an older daughter, about fifteen in this picture, wore a lot of makeup and wasn’t quite as pretty as the younger daughter (who was just a kid, here) was turning out to be. Mr. Woll was a jowly redheaded man, whose smile seemed forced even for a studio portrait.

  Mrs. Woll came back and sat down next to Crane. “Now. You said you wanted to talk to me.”

  “It’s very considerate of you to see me, Mrs. Woll. To agree to talk with me.”

  “Mr. Crane, I understand what you’re going through, losing someone you love. If I can be of any help to you, in such a difficult time, I’m more than happy.”

  “Your husband’s… death. Did it come as a shock to you?”

  “My husband’s suicide, Mr. Crane. It’s important not to evade reality. You can use euphemisms, if you like, but I’ve found they’re not really helpful. The sooner you face up to your fiancée’s death as suicide, and deal with it honestly, the sooner you can get back about the business of your life.”

  “Yes. But did it come as a shock to you? By that I mean, did it happen out of left field, or was Mr. Woll suffering from depression in the weeks preceding his… suicide?”

  “I can’t really say. My guess would be, yes, he was depressed.”

  “Your guess?”

  “Mr. Woll and I were separated at the time of his suicide. We might have gone on to get a divorce; it’s hard to say.”

  “What was the problem, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “His moods. He’d always been a moody individual, but it had gotten worse lately. At times, he even hit me. His daughters, as well. We have two girls, Jenifer you’ve met, Angie, who’s nineteen, moved out and got her own apartment when she turned eighteen.”

  “Was that before or after Mr. Woll died?”

  “Killed himself. Before. Harry couldn’t handle the changes I was going through.”

  “Changes?”

  “Mr. Crane, for nineteen years of marriage I worked, just like he worked. In fact, I brought in only a few dollars a month less than he did. But in addition to my job, I was supposed to be a full-time housewife, as well—do all the cleaning, cooking, laundry. What extra effort did Harry make to help out around the house? Nothing. Not a thing. I put up with it for years. Years. Then finally I guess my consciousness got raised, like with a lot of women, and I put an end to it. I told Harry we could afford a cleaning woman. He blew up! But I hired her anyway. I told him he could either learn to cook, or start taking us out for meals. He laughed at that, but it didn’t strike him so funny when he started coming home from work to no supper prepared, every other night. And so we started going out to eat a few nights each week. Our life-style changed—but Harry didn’t, not really. I thought sharing the work load fifty-fifty was only fair, but he didn’t see it that way. He said he was old-fashioned, like that explained it. And he drank, he drank too much. I tried to get him to enroll in AA, and that made him furious. We had some very unpleasant months around here.”

  “I see.”

  “Harry and the girls weren’t getting along too well, either. He and Angie were always going at it, because he felt she had loose morals. He accused Jenifer of the same thing, and she was only thirteen. Why, she’s still a baby! Can you imagine?”

  “No.”

  “So Harry took an apartment over the hardware store. That’s where he took his pills and Scotch.”

  Crane sat there and tried to absorb what he’d just heard
. Make some sense of it.

  “Mrs. Woll, I need to ask you something that may seem a little… off the wall…”

  “All right. Ask.”

  “Was there anything at all suspicious about Mr. Woll’s death?”

  “Suicide. No. I think he hoped someone would stop him. I don’t think he really meant to do it.”

  “No, I suppose not. What I mean to say is, did you at the time—or do you now—have any suspicions, whether based on fact or just a feeling you might have, that Mr. Woll’s death might have been something other than suicide?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Mrs. Woll, there have been five suicides in Greenwood in a little over one year. Mr. Woll was one; my fiancée, Mary Beth, was another. All five worked for Kemco.”

  “I still don’t understand what you’re driving at.”

  “Five suicides in a town the size of Greenwood is about ten times the national average. That strikes me as odd. And all five suicide victims worked for Kemco. That seems odd to me, too.”

  She smiled; she really was a beautiful woman. “Now I understand. Mr. Crane, accept your fiancée’s death for what it was: suicide. It sounds harsh, but the truth often does. Just because Harry and I were separated when he killed himself doesn’t mean I’d stopped loving him. We weren’t divorced, after all. We might’ve gotten back together. It was a crushing blow to me. I cried and cried. But I learned to accept it. Live with it. Life goes on.”

  “Uh, right. But that doesn’t make the coincidences I mentioned any less odd.”

  “It also doesn’t make them anything more than coincidences.”

  “Perhaps.”

  She touched his leg. “It’s only natural that you find it hard to accept the fact that your fiancée took her own life. It’s normal for you to try to make it be something else. Accept her suicide as her suicide, and not an accident or some conspiracy or other such nonsense—and get on with your own life.” She leaned forward and, with a smile, lifted her hand from his leg and wagged a motherly finger at him. “Just because someone else threw their life away, doesn’t mean you have to. More coffee?”

  “No, no thanks.”

  “It’s no trouble…”

  “No, really,” he said, rising. “Listen, it was really very nice of you to see me. Talk to me.”