was hoping that if there was any connection between Gordon’s murder and the missing toluene, Murray would help me make the link.
When I called to make an appointment, I offered to take him to lunch. “Not necessary,” he said. “Just pop in when you can.” The second I walked into his office in the L.W. Hertzog Science Center I knew why he’d turned down the free meal. He was the boniest man I’d ever seen in my life. The kind who eats a couple of celery sticks and then runs ten miles to burn off the calories. He was in his fifties, but the lack of meat on his face made it hard to tell just how far in.
“It’s so nice of you to give me a few minutes,” I said, sitting in one of the cheap, metal and plastic government office chairs lined up along the glass wall.
“I was a friend of Gordon’s, too,” he said. When he sat back in his huge swivel chair, the leather barely dented.
I explained my theory that Gordon may have been murdered to prevent him from finding something hidden in the dump. I told him I’d been reading old stories about the Madrid chemical case. “I know I’m probably tilting at windmills,” I said, “but I can’t help but wonder if there’s a link.”
Murray leaned forward on his elbows and pushed his fists into the thin layer of flesh under his eyes. “Actually, there just might be,” he said.
I leaned forward, too. “You think so?”
He studied me, cautiously, I think to judge if I knew more than I was letting on. “When you called yesterday I thought maybe you’d already connected a few dots.”
I gave my ignorance away. “I haven’t even connected one dot yet.”
He smiled grimly, as if he needed a swallow of Pepto Bismol. “Maybe you have now. Gordon worked with us on the investigation. As a volunteer. I recruited him, in fact. I figured his archaeological know-how would be helpful. Help us find ground that was freshly disturbed, that sort of thing.”
“And was he helpful?”
“Yes and no. He loved poking around old farms and abandoned junk yards. But he seemed more interested in looking for arrowheads than drums of toluene.”
“About those junk yards-was the Wooster Pike landfill one of them?”
“Oh, sure. We checked every old dump in a fifty-mile radius. We did find drums from Madrid chemical buried at the Hartville Road dump and in the dump in Morrow Township, but not the Wooster Pike site. Which frankly surprised me. The Wooster Pike dump would have been the perfect place for Kingzette. Accessible. Abandoned. Middle of nowhere. ”
“Did Gordon seem upset that not all the toluene was found?”
“We’re all a bunch of tree-huggers around here. We were all PO’d when the EPA pulled the plug.”
I searched for the right words and couldn’t find them. “Was Gordon’s PO’d-ness more intense than other people’s?”
He chuckled. “Did he jump up and down and vow to find those missing drums of toluene even if it killed him? I don’t recall that.”
“How about you? Did you jump up and down?”
He chuckled again. “I’ve been consulting with the EPA since my graduate days. They’re always coming into a case too late and pulling out too early. They had enough to convict Kingzette and Madrid and they had other cases in other cities. They said they’d keep looking but they didn’t, of course.”
I’m sure Bernard Murray’s atrophied stomach hadn’t growled in years, but mine was beginning to sound like a wolverine in heat. “When exactly did you search the old landfills?”
He drummed on his bottom lip. “Let’s see-May, June and July of ’95.”
“No more digging after July?”
“Nope.”
I wanted to find the nearest fast-food drive-thru window and order the biggest hamburger and French fries combo they had. But while I was at the college there was one more stop I had to make: the offices of the campus newspaper, the Hemphill Harbinger.
I knew The Harbinger was now housed in one of the massive old Victorians on the eastern edge of the campus. But I did not know which massive old Victorian. There were oodles of them. So I headed in that general direction, on foot, hoping I could get directions along the way. The first three students I stopped didn’t have the foggiest idea. The fourth knew precisely where it was. Naturally she was yakking on her cell phone at the time. Without the slightest break in her important conversation-“That is so gross…That is so fantastic…How gross is that?”-she swung her index finger off her phone and pointed at the house right in front of us.
She walked on before I could thank her. I heard her mumble into her little phone, “Just some old woman who doesn’t know where she’s going.”
I barked after her: “You’re sure right about that, honey!”
I followed the uneven slate walk to the porch and climbed the lopsided steps. The door opened like an out- of-tune bassoon. I poked my head into the living room. It was a maze of messy desks and empty chairs. A real newsroom. Behind a huge, bright blue computer monitor I spotted a tiny girl with short, spiky, lemon-lime hair. She had two silver rings in each nostril. “I’m looking for the editor,” I said.
She was feisty but friendly. “No-you’re looking at the editor.”
I told her who I was.
She’d heard of me. “Oh. My. Gawd! The same Dolly Madison Sprowls who found Buddy Wing’s real killer? Oh. My. Gawd!”
“In the wrinkled flesh,” I said.
She apparently liked the way I’d poked fun at my advanced age. Her eyes got dreamy. She reached out and shook my hand like a lumberjack. She told me her name was Gabriella Nash. She brought me a chair. She microwaved a mug of hot water for me and gave me a bowl of tea bags to choose from. She told me about her future career in journalism without stopping to think that I might be there for a reason.
“Well, I’m sure you’re going to have a terrific career,” I said. “In the meantime I was wondering if you’d let me look at some of your old morgue files.”
She sprang out of her chair dutifully, as though I was Queen Elizabeth asking for another crumpet. “Is there a specific story you’re looking for?”
I stood up slowly. “Well, it’s a silly thing,” I said. “I graduated from Hemphill College back in 1957-”
“Yes, I know.”
“And so did my late husband. Lawrence Sprowls. He was a journalism major.”
She tipped her head like a lop-eared puppy. “Oh-I’m so sorry.”
I pawed the air. “He’s been dead for fourteen years and we were divorced twenty-eight years before that,” I said. “But I guess I’ve reached that age when a person gets the biological urge to reminisce. I was hoping I could rummage around a little. Maybe Xerox a few things.”
She wrinkled her nose. “You know we had a fire, don’t you?”
At first I thought she was talking about a recent fire. Then it hit me she must be talking about the fire in 1968 that destroyed the building that once housed the journalism department. It was one of five old wooden barracks built for soldiers on the GI bill after World War II. In April 1968, one night after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., those five old barracks, as well as a dozen run-down houses near the campus, were burned by students, both black and white, whose belief in nonviolence was blown to smithereens by their overwhelming anger. “Don’t tell me all the old files were lost.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“You’re sure? It happened before you were born.”
“I know about a lot of things that happened before I was born.” She said it with a smile but I could tell from the way her cheeks were quivering that I’d insulted her.
“I’m sorry-I guess I’m just disappointed.”
She accepted my apology. “The fire’s sort of a legend around here.” She led me into the once-magnificent dining room. There was a row of battered filing cabinets along the wall. She pulled out a file and showed me a story
