“That’s right.”
“How’s it coming along?”
“Well. It’s in the beginning stages. The home office in St. Louis is putting it in motion, I’m told.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“Then you’re really going, Crane?”
“Yes. There’s nothing for me, here. I have to get back to Iowa and hit the old books.”
Patrick rose. “Well, then. I’ll show you out.”
Crane smiled again. “No need. I know the way.” He extended his hand to Patrick. “Sorry about our misunderstandings, Patrick. They shook hands across the desk.
Patrick smiled and said, “We might’ve been friends, under different circumstances.”
Crane kept the smile going. “Who knows?” he said.
He left Patrick’s office. He glanced back and saw Patrick had followed him out in the hall, watching him. Crane waved, smiled, went into the room marked MEN.
He went into one of the stalls and sat; he kept his pants up. He sat and looked at his watch. When five minutes had passed he left the stall. He peeked out in the hall. No Patrick.
Down the Hall from Patrick’s office was a door that said PLANT MANAGER.
Crane opened it.
The secretary looked up, a woman in her late thirties with short dark hair and glasses and a nice smile. “Do you have an appointment with Mr. Johnson?”
“I don’t need one,” Crane said, and opened the door, at the left, which said WALTER JOHNSON, PLANT MANAGER.
Johnson was a thickset man about fifty, with wiry brown hair going gray, a mustache, wire-rim glasses. He was in his shirt-sleeves and a red-and-blue striped tie, with some work on his desk and a phone receiver to his ear.
At first he smiled, just hearing the door open, not looking at Crane, assuming it was his secretary or someone with something important his secretary had sent on in; but the smile was momentary, turning to confusion on seeing someone he didn’t know barge in, turning to irritation that would’ve turned to anger if Crane hadn’t slammed a fist on the man’s desk, upsetting papers, spilling a half a cup of coffee, rattling the desk itself, turning Johnson’s expression to one of fear.
“Hang up the fucking phone,” Crane said.
Johnson said, “Excuse me,” into the receiver, softly, hung up.
The secretary was behind Crane, having come in on his heels, and Johnson motioned to her to leave and she did.
“Who are you?” Johnson said.
“Crane.”
“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
“I think so.”
“Well it doesn’t.”
“How about Anne Boone? Does that mean anything?” He then listed the other “suicides”: Woll, Meyer, Price, Mary Beth.
Johnson said, “I know those names. All of them worked for us, except Mrs. Boone. And Mrs. Boone’s husband is in our employ.”
“I know all about Patrick being in your employ. And I know all about what you people have been up to. Everything from dumping hazardous wastes in household dumps to unsafe working conditions at the plant; I know about your arson, I know about your phony suicides, which is to say murder.”
Johnson said nothing. He was looking Crane over, nervously, possibly wondering if Crane had a gun.
Crane pointed a finger at him. “I know. I know all about everything. Burning Boone’s book won’t stop a goddamn thing. I’m going to have your corporate asses. I’m taking what I have to the Hazardous Waste Strike Force, and to the media and…”
The door opened behind him. Two armed security guards, one of them a woman, came in.
“Hold him!” Johnson shouted. He was standing behind the desk, now, shaking, furious, not quite over being afraid. “Hold him while I call the police.”
Patrick came in the room. He looked briefly dismayed, then was all business.
“Walt,” he said. “Let me have a word with you.”
The guards escorted Crane into the outer office. They stood. He sat. Voices within Johnson’s office argued.
A few minutes later Patrick came back out.
“Do you have a car here?” Patrick asked Crane.
“No,” Crane said.
“I’ll drive you.”
“What about the police?”
“I’ve convinced Mr. Johnson not to bring them in. Next time, don’t expect me to bail you out, Crane.”
“What would I do without you.”
“Are you going to cause any more trouble?”
“Not today.”
For the first ten minutes of the ride back to Greenwood, Patrick said nothing; he just drove, quietly fuming, like the Kemco plant.
Then he laughed; it sounded harsh. “I believed you,” he said.
“Don’t be bitter,” Crane said. “I’ve fallen for your bullshit, on occasion.”
“What was the purpose of all that back there, Crane?”
Crane shrugged.
“Are you flipping, or what?”
Crane didn’t say anything.
Patrick shoved an Eagles tape into his dash and turned it up loud. At least it wasn’t Willie Nelson, Crane thought. He found Patrick’s little sports car comfortable enough. He settled back.
When Patrick pulled up at the motel, he said, “You better do what you said you were going to do: leave town.”
“Thanks for the lift,” Crane said. He got out.
Patrick shook his head and drove off.
In his motel room, Crane made some phone calls. Then he walked to the pizza place downtown and ate. By the time he finished, it was dark. A light snow was falling. He walked to Boone’s house. Patrick’s car, the MGB, was in front. So was Boone’s Datsun, still covered with snow. No one had touched it since her “suicide attempt,” he’d bet.
There was no one around; the street light was still out. He felt fairly safe going over to the Datsun and seeing if it was locked. It wasn’t.
He opened the glove compartment. Reached his hand in. Felt the coldness: the gun was still in there.
He put it in his belt, shut the door of the Datsun and walked back to the motel room.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Kids were bundled in their winter clothes as they left the grade school, walking into the blowing snow. Some of them got onto the waiting buses; other paused impatiently till the crossing guards let them trudge homeward. None of them were playing or fooling around, today: the wind had teeth and they wanted to get away from it.
Crane liked the way it felt on his face, the wind, the snow. There was some ice mixed in with it, and it whipped him, like a sandstorm. He stood in the playground shivering, hands in the pockets of his light summer jacket.
Billy was wearing a parka. He and two other boys passed right by Crane. Billy didn’t look at him. Crane wasn’t sure if he was being ignored or just hadn’t been seen. He did know that he had the odd urge to grab the boy, hug him, hold him to him. The feeling lasted only a moment, and Crane didn’t understand it: he genuinely disliked the kid.
Over to the left, on the same side of the street as the playground, a local cop car was parked, its motor running. The officer he’d talked to in the candy shop, five weeks ago, was sitting in it, alone, keeping an eye on the kids. Thin, dark-complected guy named, what was it? Turner. Officer Turner.
He walked over and knocked on the driver’s window and Turner rolled it down. He said, “Yes? Got a problem?” Turner’s breath was visible, like pollution.
“Just saying hello,” Crane said. “We spoke a month or so ago, about my fiancée’s death.”
“Oh, sure. Crane, isn’t it? How’s it going?”
“Not bad. How about you?”
“Can’t complain.”
“Kind of slow in Greenwood these days?”
“Yeah. Kind of. You know how it is.”
“Sure. You probably haven’t had a suicide since Thursday.”
“What?”
“Nice seeing you, officer. Keep up the good work.”
He turne
d his back on Turner and walked across the street and into the school. It was pretty well cleared out, very few kids, just a few teachers.
He quickly found the cafeteria. It was a big white room full of long tables with no one in it, except Mrs. Price, who was sitting drinking a cup of coffee. She looked tired; she seemed to have lost some weight. She was wearing a gray dress and little makeup and her red hair was rather mussed.
“Mr. Crane,” she said, with a perfunctory smile, getting up, sitting back down. “There’s coffee over there. Help yourself.”
He did.
He came back and sat down and sipped black coffee from a Styrofoam cup. Slipped off his wet jacket and draped it over the back of his chair.
“Well,” she said. Hands folded. “You said you wanted to see me.”
“Thank you for agreeing.”
“I didn’t think you were asking so much.”
“Mrs. Woll did. So did Mrs. Meyer.”
“Pardon?”
“I called them, too. I wanted to arrange a meeting between the four of us. Three widows of suicides, and me: the two-time loser.”
Mrs. Price winced, swallowed, said, “The other young woman… Ms. Boone… has she…?”
“Died? No. She’s still in her coma. I spent the morning with her.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Crane. I don’t know how you can hold up under it.”
“I’m holding up fine. I’m fine.”
“You don’t look like you slept much last night.”
“Neither do you.”
“Well,” she said, shrugging. “I haven’t slept terribly well for over a month. Not since you came around and started me thinking.”
“Is that what I did?”
“Of course you did. You know you did. You started me thinking about George. The second George, that is. Well, and the first George, too. They both worked at Kemco. Maybe it killed them both.”
“Bet on it.”
“You seem very convinced, Mr. Crane.”
“Aren’t you?”
“I don’t know. I know I’m not sleeping. What about the other woman… Mrs. Meyer, and who?”
“Mrs. Woll. Neither of them would see me. Either alone, or in a group of the four of us. Mrs. Woll still works at Kemco, and said to get involved would be to risk her job, and after all she has a daughter to raise, and has no suspicions in particular about her husband’s suicide. Mrs. Meyer didn’t give me a reason: she just hung up on me. I take that to mean she’s steadfast in her loyalty to her late husband’s company.”
She shook her head. “How can they ignore it? Suicide upon suicide…”
He felt a lump growing in his throat. He sipped the coffee. The lump didn’t go away. He put the coffee down. He put a hand to his face. Tears were streaming down his face. He could feel them.
“Mr. Crane…”
“I’m sorry… I’m sorry…”
Then she was beside him, her chair pulled in beside him, and she put an arm around him; comforting him. Patting him.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Price,” he said, better now. “I… I guess it just hadn’t really hit me yet, about Boone. I’m… I’m fine. Maybe it’s that I can’t believe it, that somebody else is actually acknowledging what’s going on.”
She scooted her chair away from his a bit, just to give him room, then gave him a warm, weary smile and said, “I don’t claim to know what’s going on here. But something is going on.”
“If you and Mrs. Woll and Mrs. Meyer and I were to band together, and contact the Hazardous Waste Strike Force, and any other appropriate or even goddamnit inappropriate agencies, and if we’d tell our story to the media, then maybe, just maybe something, something, would be done.”
“Yes, but about what? What really is going on here in Greenwood?”
“Kemco is killing people.”
“Be specific, Mr. Crane.”
“Boone, and the others, your husband included, stumbled onto something Kemco wanted kept quiet. The illegal hazardous waste dumping, I imagine.”
“Are you sure? That’s not the sort of crime you go around killing people over.”
“Kemco’s capable of it. Kemco’s capable of anything.”
“Mr. Crane, you’re talking about Kemco as if it were a person, an entity, a monster. That just isn’t the reality of it.”
“I used to think that way, Mrs. Price. I know the truth now. I’d blow the goddamn place up, if I thought it would do any good. If there weren’t a hundred more goddamn plants that would need blowing up as well.”
She touched his hand. “Mr. Crane. Try to keep your self-control.”
“I am. I’m fine.”
“Have you considered that perhaps Ms. Boone’s research turned something else up? I know she’d compiled disturbing statistics about diseases among Kemco employees and their families. But I understand there was a fire at her home, not long before she allegedly took an overdose of sleeping pills. Was her research material destroyed?”
“Yes.”
“If someone is killing people and making it seem like suicide, they’re doing a thorough job of it; each victim’s been a likely candidate for self-destruction. Is it true her husband had filed for custody of Billy?”
“Yes. Where did you hear that?”
“It’s a small town, Mr. Crane.”
“So everyone tells me. But nobody seems to be overly concerned about a galloping suicide rate.”
“Too many people collect Kemco paychecks, here, Mr. Crane, to get overly concerned about anything. In times like these, a paycheck comes in handy. The suicide rate—and the cancer rate—would have to go considerably higher before Greenwood would wake up.”
“I’ll wake them up. I’ll wake everybody up.”
“How?”
He smiled. “You see, I’m the next victim.”
“What?”
“I went out to Kemco yesterday. I made myself noticed. So they’ll be coming around to see me. To try to make a suicide out of me. Or accident, or whatever. Only I’ll be waiting.”
“Is that why you didn’t sleep last night?”
“I sat up in bed with a gun. And I’ll do that every night until they come. And then we’ll see. We’ll just see.”
“Mr. Crane. You’ve got to get hold of yourself. You should get some rest.”
“I’m fine.”
“I don’t think you really know what’s happening here in Greenwood.”
“Do you?”
“No. I might have an idea, though.”
“Yes? What?”
“I told you you started me thinking. It’s about all I’ve been able to do at night, is think. I drove Harry away—he’s the gentleman employed at Kemco, I’d been seeing—and I’ve jeopardized some longstanding friendships, by asking embarrassing questions of people like Ralph Foster, a local merchant who’s the part-time mayor. All because you got me thinking. It made me consider some of the research Ms. Boone has done… the illnesses. Take for example the skin rashes. I’ve seen more children with skin rashes in the last three years than in all my previous years of teaching combined. And then there’s the inordinate number of absences we’ve had at Greenwood Elementary, the past several years. Chronic attendance problems that I think have been misinterpreted. There have been PTA meetings at which parents have been castigated for letting their children play sick. At these meetings always a few indignant parents would insist that they have done no such thing: that a sick child is a sick child and a sick child stays home. But with changing mores in this country, attendance problems have naturally been considered a disciplinary problem, not a health problem.”
“I have a friend,” Crane said, “who wondered why the children and spouses of Kemco employees would be affected by negligent conditions at a plant twenty-some miles away.”
“The same thought occurred to me. Do you remember my mentioning to you that the school is built on ground donated to the city by Kemco?”
“Yes…”
“The school grounds, and the playgro
und across the street, as well… land given the city twenty years ago by Kemco.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what the west edge of Greenwood was, twenty years ago?”
“No.”
“A household dump. A landfill. Operated by Kemco, for use by the city as its dump, and for Kemco’s own disposal of certain nonhazardous wastes. Or so the mayor told me. But a thought crossed my mind… if Kemco is engaging in illegal dumping of hazardous wastes today, a time of environmental concern… what do you suppose they were doing twenty years ago?”
Crane was shaking. He felt himself shaking. Was this what Mary Beth and the others had discovered? Was this what Boone had discovered? Why her book was burned? Why she now lay in a coma?
“So one has to wonder,” Mrs. Price was saying. “What’s buried across the street, under the playground? Last month I saw children playing over there—they picked up rocks and threw them at the sidewalk and watched the pretty colors the ‘fire rocks’ made.”
He had seen that. Crane had seen that and at the time thought nothing of it: Billy and his friends hurling that rock at the sidewalk and the flash of bright color.
“One has to wonder,” Mrs. Price said. She pointed at the floor. “What’s buried down there?”
Chapter Twenty-Four
They pulled him out of bed and onto the floor and had the tape over his mouth before he was fully awake.
He didn’t remember falling asleep. He’d watched everything there was to watch on television, which had taken him till around two. He’d read some magazines and started a paperback and had read until his burning eyes wouldn’t let him read any longer. It wasn’t like he hadn’t had any sleep: he’d slept for two hours this afternoon, after seeing Mrs. Price. When his travel alarm had woken him, he’d walked downtown to eat at that pizza place again and walked back to the room to watch TV and read and wait in bed with the reading lamp on and the gun in his hand.
The gun was in somebody else’s hand, now. It was in the hand of one of the two men who’d pulled him out of bed. The one who had put the tape on his mouth. The other man was beside Crane, on the floor by the bed, tying Crane’s hands in front of him.
They wore ski masks, red-and-black, a matched set. The one with Crane’s gun was a tall skinny guy in a green-and black-plaid hunting jacket; the other one, standing up now, pulling Crane up by the arm, wasn’t as tall, but was wide in the shoulders and wore a black quilted mountain vest and long-sleeved dirty black sweatshirt that hugged his massive arms.
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