emergency and had to leave town? It sure didn’t occur to me he might be lying dead somewhere.”
We crossed back over Killbuck Creek. The water under the bridge was brown and rising. That end of the county has a lot of low, flat valleys. If the rain continued-and it looked like it might-there’d be a flood story for someone to write that night. “When exactly did you find Gordon’s car?”
“Not until the next morning. When I was running.”
“So that’s how you stay so skinny.”
“You think I’m skinny?”
“I think you’re skinnier than me,” I said. “You didn’t try to contact him Friday night then?”
“I did try to call Karen once more before going to work. But she’d already snuck out for the day.”
“I didn’t know you worked.”
“I deliver pizzas on weekends. Papa John’s on Fridays. Domino’s on Saturdays. Sometimes on Sundays for Carlo’s. It’s amazing how much tip money you can make if you’re willing to sacrifice your social life.”
I took that to mean he didn’t have a girlfriend. “So you saw Gordon’s car while you were running?”
“That’s why the police are so suspicious of me. They think it’s all a little too neat.”
“Have they actually said that to you?”
“Not in so many words. But they’re sort of scientists, too, aren’t they? They come up with a hypothesis and see if the evidence supports it. So they’re thinking, ‘Hey now! How convenient is that? The kid first finds the professor’s car and then his body. Maybe it’s part of some wily plan to make himself look helpful instead of guilty.’”
I figured it would be better to drive in silence for a while. Good gravy, what if Andrew Holloway III did kill Gordon? What if his finding Gordon’s car and then his body was indeed part of a wily plan to hide his guilt? What if his agreeing to take me to the landfill was also part of that plan? To turn me into a collaborating witness? To show the consistency of his story? I pictured myself on the witness stand, some smart-ass assistant city prosecutor making me look like a total doofus. “Was he there for his Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday classes?” I finally asked. “Assuming he had Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday classes.”
“He didn’t teach Tuesdays and Thursdays. But I saw him that Thursday.”
“That Thursday before he disappeared, you mean?”
“We met at Wendy’s for lunch like always.”
“Like always?”
“We met at Wendy’s every Thursday at noon,” he said. “We’d talk about the classes I was teaching and the classes I was taking. We’d talk about his plans for the summer dig. He liked their chili.”
Finally I had an opportunity to ask a question I’d been itching to ask all morning. “That particular Thursday would have been the day after the Kerouac Thing. You go to that?”
“No way. I went the year before. It was really lame.”
“Watching a lot of moldy oldies trying to relive their golden bohemian youths, you mean?”
He blushed. “Yeah. Sorry.”
“No need to apologize. That’s exactly why I stopped going.”
“He was really into all that beat generation stuff. Professor Glass, too.”
The next question came out of my mouth all by itself. “Speaking of Professor Glass-you know about their cheeseburger argument?”
“Everybody knows about the cheeseburger argument.”
“Did Gordon bring it up at Wendy’s? I understand they got into it at the Kerouac Thing.”
“Not that I remember.”
“He say anything at all about the party?”
“Just that I’d missed a groovy evening.”
“He actually said groovy?”
“He was always using goofy words like that.”
My mind drifted to all the wonderful late-night talks Sweet Gordon and I had in college. How the hip words of our generation sounded even hipper when he said them. How much I liked him, even though I was hopelessly in love with Lawrence Sprowls. “Did he seem okay to you that day?” I asked Andrew.
“A little wasted maybe. But for the most part he was his jolly old self.”
We reached Hannawa and inched through the heavy, noontime traffic toward West Tuckman. “Where’d you grow up, Andrew? Your voice has sort of a southern Ohio twang to it.”
“Circleville.”
“Oh, the annual pumpkin festival! That must be fun!”
“It’s a riot,” he said. His voice that told me that he was not exactly proud to be from a town that celebrates pumpkins.
“I’m from LaFargeville, New York,” I said in the same voice. “Three hundred people. Seven thousand cows.”
I didn’t take the same route back to the college. Instead I took the Indian Creek Parkway and wound through the bare oaks toward the athletic fields at the northern edge of the campus. It’s a somewhat isolated area, flatter than a pancake, separated from the campus and its adjoining residential streets by the creek and a long shale ridge. There are soccer and lacrosse fields there, the practice fields for the track and football teams, tennis courts, a winding asphalt jogging path, and, of course, the four back-to-back baseball fields where Dale Marabout told me Andrew had found Gordon’s car. Like the Wooster Pike landfill, it would be a perfect place to go unnoticed, especially in March when every day is shittier than the last. “I hope you don’t mind,” I said.
What could he say? We were already there, pulling into the parking lot alongside the baseball fields. “Where exactly was Gordon’s car?” I asked.
He pointed. “In front of the restrooms there.”
I drove up to the restrooms and stopped. We were a good two hundred yards from the jogging path, which presumably Andrew was using for his morning run. “You were able to recognize his car from quite a distance,” I said. My question sounded an awful lot like a police question and I immediately wished I’d asked it less skeptically.
“Professor Sweet drove an old pea-green Country Squire station wagon, the kind with fake wood panels on the sides. Big as a battleship. Not too many of those on the road anymore.”
It sounded reasonable. There weren’t too many 1987 Dodge Shadows on the road anymore either. “I’m sure you were relieved to see his car.”
“I figured maybe he was around here somewhere,” said Andrew. “Using the restroom. Hiking along the creek or something. But his car doors were unlocked and the keys were in the ignition. And his briefcase was on the back seat. His whole life was in that bag.”
“Now you got frantic?”
“I checked the restrooms-both sides-and yelled his name. I got in his car and started it-I thought maybe he’d had car trouble-and it ran just fine. Then I ran back to my apartment and got my car. I drove to his house again and then came back to the ball fields. I drove all over the place.”
“And then you drove out to the landfill?”
Andrew’s head bounced up and down like a basketball.
“I think I would have called the police first,” I said.
He raked back his wet hair. “I almost did. But I felt a little foolish, know what I’m saying? Like I was overreacting. I thought maybe he’d arranged to meet somebody here and drove out to the dig with them. He was always going out there. Even in the winter. I just wanted to make sure he was okay.”
Up to that point Andrew’s story had made sense to me. Now I could see why the police were interested in him. Why would he think Gordon was at the landfill if his car was here? With the doors unlocked and keys in the ignition? With his briefcase on the back seat? Wouldn’t Andrew suspect foul play by now? Wouldn’t he call the police by now? Even the dopey campus police? No matter how foolish he felt? There simply had to be more to the story, even if this Andrew J. Holloway III was telling the truth. “I apologize for putting you through all this again,” I said.
He tried to smile. “I know I don’t have the greatest alibi,” he said. “I can account for the hours I take classes and teach, and deliver pizzas, but I spend an awful lot of time alone in my apartment.”
I drove him back to Menominee Hall.
