Midnight Haul

by Max Allan Collins

  “My pleasure.”

  He moved toward the door. “Well, anyway, thank you. I know it must’ve seemed strange, getting a phone call from somebody you never heard of…”

  “Don’t be silly. I knew who you were.”

  “You did?”

  “Of course. I knew Mary Beth. Isn’t that why you came? Because you needed to talk to someone who’d known Mary Beth? Someone who’d been through what you’re going through now, which I have, with my husband’s suicide?”

  “Uh, well. I didn’t know how well you knew her.”

  “I didn’t know her well, but I knew her. She was a wonderful person. It’s a tragic loss.”

  “Did she talk to you about me?”

  “Not really. She mentioned you. The girl was crazy about you, I’d judge. And I didn’t blame her.” She gave him an openly flirty look; her mouth was her daughter’s. “I’d seen your picture, after all.”

  “She showed it to you?”

  “No, it was on her desk.”

  “You worked with her?”

  “Yes. I’m in charge of the secretarial pool at the Kemco plant. You knew that, certainly?”

  “Uh. Certainly.”

  “Well, good night, Mr. Crane.”

  “Good night.”

  Just as the door was closing, the volume on the TV went up; he could hear the canned laughter.

  Chapter Eleven

  The barrels were stacked four high, and everywhere. Toxic Tootsie Rolls, standing on end, more rows deep than Crane dared guess. In their midst was a sprawling warehouse, faded red brick with black windows, its loading-dock area clear, but otherwise surrounded by fifty-five-gallon barrels.

  And the barrels looked sick. Piled haphazardly, unlabelled, many of them pockmarked, stained by unknown fluids that had streaked them like dried blood. Some of the bottom barrels were so corroded that weeds grew in and out of them, God knew how.

  They’d taken the New Jersey Turnpike to Elizabeth, and Boone had guided the Datsun down this industrial waterfront stretch lined with storage tanks of gasoline and natural liquid gas that loomed like silver UFOs; the air hung with the smell of industry. At the end of this unshaded lane was Chemical Disposal Works, this Disneyland of waste drums they were now wandering around, like tourists, complete with camera.

  “I thought you said you’d already been here,” Crane said, uneasy that she was strolling around at two in the afternoon, and a sunny one at that, taking pictures of what had to be a criminal operation.

  “Sure,” Boone said. She was cheerful today, her long hair pulled back by a bright yellow headband, an incongruity next to her faded denim jacket and jeans and black-on-white NO NUKES sweatshirt. “But last time I was here they only had twenty thousand barrels. I’d say they’re up to thirty, now.”

  “I mean, this is illegal, right?”

  “I can take pictures here if I want. They don’t have any no trespassing sign up, that I can see. We didn’t climb a fence to get in.”

  “I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about this.” He gestured to the barrels stacked on either side of the cinder drive they were walking along; the warehouse was up ahead, fifty yards.

  She shrugged. “I contacted the Solid Waste Administration about it.”

  “And?”

  “I was told this was a licensed facility.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I sent photos I took, and never heard anything. So I called back and was told Chemical Disposal Works had been ‘administratively required’ to clean up their site, within a ‘reasonable amount of time.’ ”

  “When was that?”

  “Three months ago.”

  They had reached the warehouse. No one seemed to be around. Boone took pictures of the loading-dock area; there were no trucks present, however, just a battered-looking tan station wagon, which indicated perhaps someone was around. Crane was getting nervous.

  “What’s in those things, anyway?” Crane asked.

  “The barrels? Who knows. Could be anything. Solvents. Plasticizers. Nitric acid. Cyanide. Pesticides. You know.”

  “That sounds… dangerous.”

  “You might say that. If they got certain compounds in ’em, exposure to the air could explode them.”

  “Explode.”

  “It’s happened before. Not here, but it’s happened.”

  “Does Kemco use this place?”

  “I don’t know. I just know I wanted you to see this place. It’s not the only one of its kind, you know.”

  “I’m convinced,” he said. “It’s a real eyesore. Can we leave?”

  “In a minute.”

  She was still at it with the Nikon.

  Despite the sun, it was chilly. Crane buried his hands in his jacket pockets. The air here had a funny smell; not like the acrid industrial odor he’d noticed earlier, but something not unlike an unpleasant perfume, and reminiscent at the same time of rubber.

  To the left of the loading dock a door opened. A short, stocky man in a blue quilted work jacket and brown slacks leaned out. He had a pale face in which thick black streaks that were eyebrows obscured all else.

  He yelled at them: “Hey! What’s the fuckin’ idea?”

  Boone stopped taking pictures and gave the man, who was about ten feet away, a bigger smile than she’d given Crane so far and said, “We’re taking some pictures for our school paper. We’re trying for a mood, here, you know?”

  The eyes below the bushy black streaks narrowed: the guy didn’t seem to be buying Boone as a teenager. It seemed a little lame to Crane, too, actually, but he didn’t figure at this point he had much choice but to go along with it.

  He moved toward the man, who was still in the doorway, and got between Boone and the guy, blocking her from view—Crane figured he had a better chance of passing for a school kid than she did—and said, “We’re going for contrasts, like, uh, things that’ll look neat in black and white.”

  “Horseshit,” the man said, and moved forward, brushing Crane aside, and pointing a finger at Boone like a pissed-off father. He stopped in front of her, his finger almost touching her nose.

  “I remember you,” he said. “You were around here last summer asking questions. Taking pictures. Right before the state came down on our butts.”

  Boone kept smiling, but the manner of it changed.

  The guy returned her smile, but his was as heavy with sarcasm as hers. “Honey,” he said, “it’s been many moons since you were a teenager.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Boone told him.

  The guy didn’t take that well. He grunted, and reached at the camera with one hand, latching onto one of her arms with the other, and squeezed. Boone yelped. But she didn’t let loose of the camera.

  Crane grabbed the guy by a depressingly solid bicep and tugged, but the guy didn’t give any ground.

  “Let her alone,” Crane said, still tugging, still getting nowhere. “Let her alone, will you? We’re leaving now, all right?”

  The guy turned away from Boone, though he still held her by the arm, and said, with a spray of bad breath that almost matched the rubbery perfume of the air around them, “You’re goddamn fucking well told you’re leaving, but the film in that fucking camera isn’t,” and he ripped the camera out of her hands, opened the back of it and tore the film out, and flung the film against a nearby wall of barrels.

  Then he handed the camera back to Boone and smiled and nodded and Boone swung a small fist at his face and connected, leaving the man’s mouth bloody, the red looking garish in his pale face. He pushed her face with the heel of his hand, like Cagney in the old movie, but minus the grapefruit.

  Boone was on the ground, but she wasn’t hurt; she was sitting there swearing up at the guy, who was laughing at her, sort of gently, and Crane swung a fist into the man’s stomach, and surprisingly, doubled him over.

  If they had run for it, then, it might have been over, but Crane got greedy. He took another swing, toward the guy’s face this time, and the guy bat
ted it away, even while doubled over, and then came out swinging himself, first into Crane’s stomach, then into the side of his face, and Crane was unconscious for a while.

  When he woke up, a minute or so later, Boone was cradling his head in her lap, sitting on the cinders, saying, “Crane? Crane?”

  “Is he gone?”

  “He went inside.”

  “Good. Can we go now?”

  “Yes.”

  “He didn’t break your camera did he?”

  “No. The film is good and exposed, though. Did he break anything of yours?”

  “My self-esteem. Otherwise, I’m fine.”

  “You’re going to have a nasty bruise.”

  “No kidding.”

  She helped him up; he felt a little dizzy. She went and got her camera off the ground while he tried to stay on his feet. Then she walked him toward the Datsun.

  “Go fuck yourself,” Crane said.

  “What?”

  “That’s what you told that guy. I can’t believe you sometimes.”

  “I guess I do lack tact,” Boone admitted. “Are you starting to understand?”

  They were at the car.

  “Understand what?”

  She opened the door on the rider’s side. “The seriousness of this.”

  He touched the side of his face. “I understand pain, if that’s what you mean.” He got in the car. She went around the driver’s side and got in.

  “I also understand why that guy was pissed off at us,” Crane said. “Like anybody in his place would be.”

  “You can rationalize anything, can’t you, Crane? Even getting the shit beat out of you.”

  She started the car. Crane looked back at the barrels, standing on top of each other, as if to get a better look at them as they drove away.

  Chapter Twelve

  They were parked alongside the road again. The midnight skyline of the Kemco plant was a study in plastic and steel and soft-focus green-yellow-aqua light, against a backdrop of smoke and smokestacks.

  “Why doesn’t it make any noise?” Crane asked. “It’s creepy that it doesn’t make any noise.”

  “It isn’t a noisy operation,” Boone shrugged. She was leaned back casually in the Datsun’s driver’s seat, munching on sunflower seeds. The near-darkness they were sitting in made for interesting shadows on her face; she looked quite lovely, for a girl, woman, eating sunflower seeds.

  “What are they making in there, anyway?” he asked her.

  “Herbicides. Pesticides. Plastics. Lots of things.”

  “Useful things,” he countered.

  “Right. Like Agent Orange.”

  “Are they still making that?”

  “Yes, and PCB, until a year ago.”

  “Isn’t that a little unfair?”

  “Bringing up the recent past? I don’t think so. I don’t think there should be a statute of limitations, just because the murder you committed was ten years ago.”

  Crane said nothing.

  “I don’t object to everything they make. I know a lot of farmers depend on the stuff… though personally I can’t see eating anything that isn’t organically grown.”

  “Jeez, who’d have guessed?”

  “What’s with you, Crane?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re really on the rag tonight.”

  “I guess I am. Sorry.”

  They sat. Boone ate her sunflower seeds, watched the loading-dock area. It seemed a quiet night: not a Kemco truck to be seen. Crane was still studying the Kemco plant itself, fighting ambivalent feelings. His face hurt, from where he’d been hit.

  “What are those things?” he asked her, pointing.

  “Those fat silo things? Storage vats.”

  “What’s in them?”

  “Waste, I guess.”

  “They’re fucking huge.”

  “That they are.”

  “You can’t be right. There isn’t that much waste coming out of this one plant.”

  “You been reading my research material, Crane. You’re up on how much hazardous waste is produced in this country every year.”

  Yes he was. Thirty-two million tons. But somehow it seemed obnoxious of her to mention it right now.

  “I also know,” Crane said, “that this plant, like most chemical processing plants, has its own waste-disposal unit. They are not dumping all that shit illegally.”

  “Of course they aren’t. Most of it gets dumped in the river.”

  “What river?”

  “The Delaware River.”

  “Where’s that?”

  She pointed back behind the Kemco plant. “We can drive straight into it, if you like… we aren’t a mile from it.”

  Feeling foolish, he said, “The stuff’s processed when it goes in, isn’t it? It’s probably cleaner than the river it’s going into.”

  “Maybe. But that’s not what we’re here for. We’re here to find out about the stuff they can’t run through their disposal unit. The stuff they have to dump.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  “Something’s wrong, isn’t it, Crane?”

  “No. Yes. I’m just… trying not to get caught up in your… crusade. It’s dangerous, what you’re doing. It’s not what a journalist does.”

  “What does a journalist do?”

  “You keep an open mind when you look into something. You don’t set out to prove something. You set out to find the facts, whatever they are.”

  “Yes, and your problem is you can’t face facts, when you find ’em.”

  “No! My problem is keeping myself reminded, in the midst of your leftist hysteria, that there are two sides to everything. Even to Kemco.”

  “It’s that talk you had with Mrs. Woll, isn’t it? That’s what’s bothering you.”

  “No.”

  “I think we should talk about that.”

  “I told you what she told me.”

  “But you can’t handle it, can you?”

  The windshield was fogged up from their talking; that was okay, because if anyone drove by, it would reinforce the idea that he and Boone were making out. Which was hardly the case at the moment. He turned to her. Calm. Rational.

  He said, “Mrs. Woll opened up to me, a little bit, possibly because I’m male, and also because I know how to interview better than you. But for the most part, she didn’t say anything that wasn’t on the tape of your conversation with her, a year ago.”

  “There was the news that she worked with Mary Beth at Kemco.”

  “News to me. You knew about it, ’cause Mary Beth would’ve told you. You just wanted me to find out for myself.”

  “Maybe,” she smiled. “When I interviewed her originally, not long after her husband’s ‘suicide,’ she was a secretary at City Hall. Had been for some years. Since then, she’s been given a, shall we say, enviable position at Kemco. Head of the secretarial pool, no less.”

  “And into that, I suppose, you read all kinds of conspiratorial under- and overtones. Tell me, did Kemco kill Kennedy?”

  “Which one?”

  “Boone, Kemco offering an employee’s widow a position with the company could be a strictly benevolent act on their part. It isn’t necessarily anything sinister.”

  “She was qualified for the job, I grant you. But surely you find it slightly suspicious…”

  Crane looked away from her. Said nothing.

  “Of course you do,” Boone said. “That’s what’s bothering you. Isn’t it?”

  He sighed, shook his head. Turned and looked at her.

  “Yes,” he admitted. “That, and that we’ve made a connection between Mary Beth and one of the other ‘suicide’ victims. An indirect connection, but a connection.”

  Boone nodded. “She’s connected to another victim, too: Paul Meyer. He was an exec, and Mary Beth was the darling of the secretarial pool, where the execs were concerned.”

  “Which could explain how she stumbled onto some high-level shenanigans. Well. Anyway, I’ll
be talking to Meyer’s wife tomorrow; we might get some insights, there. This is all very flimsy, from an evidence standpoint, you know.”

  “Maybe. But maybe we should both try to keep an open mind.”

  “Yeah. Maybe you’re right.”

  “A truck.”

  “Huh?”

  “That could be a truck.”

  Light caught the corner of Crane’s eye and he turned. Down the road, about a mile, were the high-beams of what appeared to be a truck, approaching Kemco.

  “Get in the back seat,” Boone told him.

  He did. She passed the Nikon to him.

  The truck—it was a truck—came into view. It was a big flatbed with the sides built up; a tarp was flung over the back of it, tied on. This they saw as it pulled into the graveled loading area.

  “Did you notice the clearing booth was empty tonight?” Boone asked him.

  Crane, in the back seat, feeling nervous, said, “No I didn’t.”

  “Well it was.”

  “That isn’t one of Kemco’s trucks, is it.”

  “It sure isn’t,” Boone said. She was smiling. “It’s an independent. Come to pick something up.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Boone drove by the loading-dock area at about twenty-five miles an hour. Crane, out the back window of the Datsun, took half a dozen pictures of the flatbed truck, which was waiting near the big green tin shed while one of the two men in its cab, a burly guy in a thermal jacket, hopped out to talk to a Kemco hard hat, who was gesturing, giving instructions for where the truck was to go to pick up its load.

  The Kemco plant receded behind them.

  Boone looked at him in the rearview mirror. “How did you do?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said, crawling back up in front, giving her the camera as she drove. “I hope there was enough light.”

  “You had it wide open, didn’t you? There was plenty of available light. I’m sure they’ll come out.”

  Crane hoped so. It was a clear night, with stars and a moon; that and the lights of Kemco itself should’ve made for some good shots.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “Wait half an hour and go back.”

  She pulled over to the side again; they were about a mile down from Kemco, now. She turned the motor off.