So a smidgen of subterfuge would be required.
I put on my coat and took the elevator to the pressroom. I borrowed the biggest screwdriver I could from the boys in maintenance and headed down the alley toward Charles Avenue.
Margaret Newman in my estimation is the best investigative reporter The Herald-Union has. She’s won every journalism award short of a Pulitzer. Better yet, she’s been sued for libel five times. And there’s no better proof of a reporter’s skill than having a lawsuit filed against them by some worthless weasel who’s upset that the whole world now knows that he is one.
Margaret also has what people in our business call a built-in shit detector. And she can be a bit flinty at times. Two traits I normally admire. Two traits that would make my do-si-do around the truth anything but easy.
I reached Charles Avenue and headed down the hill toward the Amtrak station and the short stretch still paved with bricks.
You see, I’d decided to take a page from Louise Lewendowski. No, I wasn’t going to seduce her with a sack of kolachkys. I’m afraid I wasn’t born with the flaky pastry gene. I was going to give Margaret a ten-pound block of baked clay.
Only one passenger train a day stops in Hannawa any more, and that’s at four-thirty in the morning. So I crossed the tracks without looking and started my search for the perfect brick.
Margaret for some unfathomable reason collects old paving bricks. She’s got hundreds of them, from all over the country. She belongs to a paving brick club-the Northern Ohio Brick Bats. She attends paving brick conventions. She spends her weekends and vacations scouring abandoned brickyards. She’s got so many of the blessed things in her garage there’s no room for her car. Dale Marabout jokes that she’s got so many of them in her bedroom there’s no room for a husband.
Most paving bricks are just smooth blocks of baked clay. But the old-time brick makers, in order to advertise their wares, used to put their name on every 100th brick. So I was shuffling up and down the empty avenue, head down, fists on the small of my back, looking for one of those, in the hope Margaret would be tickled pink to get it. In the hope she would just yak and yak and tell me everything I wanted to know about Kenneth Kingzette.
I finally found what I needed, right in the middle of the avenue-a big red brick the size of a Velveeta cheese loaf, without a crack or a chip, bearing the etched image of an Indian chief. Under that in deep block letters was printed HANNAWA BRICK CO.
I waited for a UPS truck to rumble by, then carefully wedged the screwdriver between the bricks and wiggled it until the treasure I wanted came loose. I pried it out, wedged it in my coat pocket, and hurried back to the paper.
I kept my eye on Margaret until she clicked off her computer and pushed herself back from her desk. I grabbed the brick and hurried over there before she could leave. “Oh, Margaret,” I said, “look what I found for you.”
Her eyes got as big as dinner plates. “A Hannawa Brick Indian Head? Maddy Sprowls, where in God’s name did you get that?”
Well, I sure wished she hadn’t brought God into it. I’d stolen the brick from a city street and now, if I wasn’t careful, I’d have to lie about it, too. I prayed that the Almighty wasn’t eavesdropping. “You know, Margaret,” I began, “I almost never go to garage sales. I just hate them. People pawing over other people’s junk. But my neighbor Jocelyn just loves them. She’s always asking me to go with her. And you know how I try to be a good neighbor. So, I saw this old brick and said to myself, ‘I wonder if Margaret has one of these?’”
She took the brick and held it like it was the baby Jesus. “Well, I do,” she said, “but I can always use another.” She told me how rare they were. How she’d seen one just like it on Charles Avenue and how tempted she’d been to dig it out. “How much did you pay for it?”
I pawed the air. “It was a steal.”
“I’ve seen them go for fifty dollars or more at auctions. Let me pay you.”
“Oh, no. It’s a gift.”
“Well, God love you,” she said.
As guilty as I felt, I’d succeeded in seducing the better side of Margaret’s nature. I let her go on and on about her brick collection until my toes were curling inside my Reeboks. “Well, you certainly live a more interesting life than me,” I finally said. “You collect bricks, you protect the environment.”
“I only write about people who protect the environment,” she said.
This time she’d said just the right thing. “But you sure help them protect it,” I said. “Like that illegal dumping stuff you did a few years back. You kept the pressure on with all those great stories. And that guy who dumped that stuff-what was his name?”
“Kenneth Kingzette.”
“That’s right. Kenneth Kingzette. He went to prison. How many years did he get, anyway?”
“Just four,” said Margaret.
“That’s all? From what I hear that stuff he dumped is pretty nasty.”
“Toluene. And nasty doesn’t begin to describe it. Even little doses can screw you up pretty good. Dizziness. Nausea. Impaired vision and speech. Exposure over a long time can permanently damage your liver and kidneys. Even your brain. Even kill you.”
“Yikes. When’s he getting out?”
“He was paroled in November.”
“Well, I hope the police are keeping an eye on him. And you, too. On Kenneth Kingzette, I mean.”
“He’s working with his son,” she said, lovingly brushing her fingers over the etched face of the Indian chief. “Some little rinky-dink moving company.”
“Not here in Hannawa, I hope.”
“Here in Hannawa.”
“And they let him do that?”
“It’s not against the law to make an honest living.”
“But aren’t some of the chemicals he dumped still missing?”
Margaret nodded. “And so is the president of the chemical company.”
“Oh, that’s right. Ronald or Donald something or other.”
“Donald Madrid.”
“Yes, Donald Madrid. I always figured Kingzette dumped him illegally, too.”
“You and a lot of other people. But there was never any evidence of a murder. I think the police figure Mr. Madrid took off for tropical climes.”
“And why would they figure that?”
“He ordered a shitload of stuff from Lands’ End a couple weeks before he disappeared-fancy set of luggage, several pairs of wrinkle-free chinos and one of those Indiana Jones hats.”
“Any money missing?”
“Not from his personal accounts, but apparently Mr. Madrid was a regular Wolfgang Puck when it came to cooking the company books.”
Margaret was watching the second hand on her wristwatch spin, a signal that I was wearing out my welcome. “Well, I’ve bothered you enough,” I said. “I just hope you’re happy with the brick.”
She told me she was tickled pink with the brick, and before I could stop her, she dug a twenty-dollar bill out of her purse and stuffed it in my hand. “It wasn’t any more than that, was it?” she asked.
I shook my head. I walked away wondering how many of the seven deadly sins I’d just committed.
Chapter 8
Friday, March 23
I took a two-hour lunch and didn’t eat a darn thing. Instead I drove to the college to talk to Bernard Murray. He teaches environmental science and was quoted extensively in a couple of Margaret’s stories. He’d worked with the Ohio EPA that year they’d searched for the drums of toluene Kenneth Kingzette dumped for Donald Madrid. I
