a coffee klatch for George McGovern. No way were we going to mess up a wonderful friendship with foolishness. I started over. “Gordon’s sex life is neither here or there. All that’s important is why he was murdered.”
Dale finished his coffee in a few great gulps. He was as anxious to leave as I was. “Okay, Maddy, I’ll see what I can find. But this is not going to be Buddy Wing II.”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “This is the last thing I’m going to ask you to do.”
We said good-bye to Ike and headed out into the evening. The rush hour was over. The streets were all but empty. It was even colder and windier than before. We climbed the hill to The Herald-Union. We said “See you tomorrow” in the parking deck, got into our respective cars and drove off to our respective houses.
I ran straight to Gordon’s apartment that April afternoon in 1957 when Effie called to tell me that David Delarosa’s body had been found. Literally ran, through a shower of cold rain that stung like BBs. Effie was already there, making Gordon the only thing she knew how to make-canned soup. Gordon was sitting in the ratty, overstuffed chair he’d rescued from the dump. He was sucking on a beer and staring at the wall.
I don’t remembering Gordon saying anything that night. Or eating his soup. I just remember Effie and me opening beer bottles for him.
Gordon drank for two more days and then on Easter morning took the bus to Sandusky for David’s funeral. We all offered to go with him, but Gordon wanted to go alone. “Wowzers,” Chick said in his best beatnikese as the Greyhound pulled out, “have you ever seen anything more appropriately beat in your life? Sweet Gordon bouncing along in a half-empty bus past soggy fields of broken corn, on a day when everybody else is celebrating life everlasting?”
I guess the reason I couldn’t believe that Gordon was gay now was that it had never occurred to me then. Homosexuality wasn’t something people talked about much in the fifties, not even us bohemian types, but we did know what it was, and surely we recognized it when we saw it.
Gordon returned from Sandusky just as depressed as when he left. He didn’t say boo about David Delarosa until that morning at Mopey’s when we saw the story about Sidney being questioned by police. His sadness mushroomed into anger. And little by little that anger seemed to heal him.
When I got home I turned on Jeopardy and fell asleep during the first round. When I woke up Barbara Walters was interviewing the parents of sextuplets on 20/20. I ate a bowl of grapes, paid some bills, and went to bed. I turned on my radio and waited for Art Bell to come on. While he interviewed a Wyoming man who’d been abducted nine times by time-traveling aliens, I thought about the men in my life who weren’t in my life. I thought about my father, who’d died when I was eleven. I thought about my dead, philandering ex-husband Lawrence. I thought about Dale Marabout. I thought about Ike. And I thought about Sweet Gordon.
Chapter 7
Wednesday, March 21
Eric appeared at my desk the moment I sat down with my morning tea. He was waving a folder in each hand. “Wooster Pike Landfill, toxic waste.”
“Good boy,” I said.
I wanted to plant my nose in those folders the second he handed them to me. But I was a woman with responsibilities. I put the folders in the top drawer of my desk, so I wouldn’t be tempted. I got busy marking up that morning’s paper, deciding which stories should be saved and under which categories. That always takes the better part of the morning. Then I looked up the information city hall reporter Mike Hugely needed on the Elmer Avenue bridge project. After that I was trapped in a one-sided conversation with Candy Prince about her five hairless Chinese cats. I self-medicated that twenty minutes of agony with a call to my niece in LaFargeville to wish her a happy fiftieth birthday. Finally at eleven-thirty I scooted off to the cafeteria with those two tempting folders and the Tupperware container of leftover chicken teriyaki I’d brought from home.
The folder on the landfill was filled with a lot of dry government stuff that was absolutely useless. Nor had Eric’s search found any murders, missing person cases or other chicaneries in that part of the county that might require further investigation. I closed the folder. I couldn’t decide whether to be relieved or disappointed.
I concentrated on my lunch then opened the other folder. There were oodles of stories on lead paint, asbestos and polluted creeks. There was a spellbinding three-part series on how the city was breaking its own rules on the disposal of used antifreeze and motor oil. There were several stories on Mayor Finn’s failed effort to stop the federal government from trucking radioactive wastes through the city. I saved the best for last: Margaret Newman’s stories on illegal dumping by the E.O. Madrid Chemical Co.
The nut of Margaret’s stories was this: E.O. Madrid was a small company on the city’s industrial south side. It manufactured industrial solvents and adhesives. It prospered nicely for five decades under the long hours of its founder, Edgar Oliver Madrid. When a massive stroke whisked the still-working, 82-year-old Edgar off to his eternal reward in the summer of 1987, his 47-year-old son, Donald, moved into the big office.
Donald apparently had not inherited his father’s attention span. He was much more interested in losing money on his minor league baseball team, the Hannawa Woolybears, than making money with the family business. And so in 1993, up to his shinbones in red ink, Donald decided to out-source the disposal of a toxic chemical called toluene. He hired an independent trucker named Kenneth Kingzette to make the toluene disappear.
And the toluene did disappear-into abandoned factory buildings, weedy ravines, old farm ponds, abandoned dumps. In 1995, when a fire broke out in an empty warehouse on Canal Street, firemen found several 55-gallon drums of toluene. The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency was called in. It did not take much of an investigation to trace the chemicals to the E.O. Madrid Chemical Co. Donald Madrid disappeared into the ether but not before fingering Kenneth Kingzette.
Kingzette’s legal strategy was to keep his lips zipped and stare menacingly at the jury. It got him four years at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. Just as I remembered, the Ohio EPA estimated that an additional eighteen drums of the toluene was still out there somewhere. So I guess you know what I was thinking. Heavens to Betsy, wouldn’t you be thinking that?
I know this isn’t the least bit important, but it will help you understand just how small-town the big city of Hannawa, Ohio, is. Our minor league baseball team, the Woolybears, has nothing to do with ferocious, growling bears. Here in the Midwest, Woolybears are what we call those fuzzy brown and orange-striped caterpillars you find crawling all over your chrysanthemums in the fall. They are the larvae for a moth. They’re about the width and length of a cheese doodle. We Midwesterners-with all seriousness-forecast the severity of the upcoming winter by how thick their coats are. The thicker the fuzz, the colder and snowier it’s going to be. Honest to God we do that.
So we Hannawans are not only famous for having more television evangelists per capita than any city in America-as you know, we’re known as the Hallelujah City-we also have a baseball team named after the larvae of a moth. Not a butterfly. A damn moth.
I wanted to talk to Margaret about her stories but I did not want Margaret to know that I was talking to her about her stories. It was dangerous enough that Dale and Eric knew I was snooping into another murder. If Margaret knew, the entire newsroom would know, and Bob Averill would finally have the ammunition he needed to force me into retirement
