different.”
Chick was suddenly a very sad clown. “He was my best friend, Maddy. For fifty damn years.”
I handed him a paper plate with a square of white cake. He didn’t wait for me to hand him a fork. He took a huge bite, sadly wiggled his eyebrows like Groucho Marx, and walked away, plate in one hand, beret in the other.
His departure startled me. I was expecting to have a long talk with him-about the old days, about what each of us were doing now, about Gordon’s murder. I finished making my tea. I nibbled on a piece of cake. I tried to get Eric’s attention. He was finally talking to the girl with the tattoo on her belly. Then a sharp trill rattled my eardrums: “Dolly Madison Sprowls, I can’t believe it’s you!”
It was Gwendolyn Moffitt-Stumpf. She had her husband, Rollie, in tow.
Gwen Moffitt had been a year behind me in college. I have no idea what she majored in. She probably had no idea herself. She was one of those rich girls who went to college to find a boy whose potential equaled-and with a little luck surpassed-that of her father. The boy she found was Rollie Stumpf. Rollie was the son of a Pittsburgh steelworker. But his potential as a husband was dazzling. He had a brilliant mind and a malleable spine. How those two ever found their way into the Baked Bean Society I have no idea.
I do remember that Gwen was one of the few students at Hemphill with a car. It was a 1954 Buick Roadmaster convertible. It was a going-off-to-college gift from her father. A bribe so she’d still live at home. I have no interest in cars at all, but I sure remember that car. From the front it looked like an angry catfish. Like all Buicks back then it had those four nostrils on the front fenders. It was painted bright pink and had an enormous amount of chrome. It had white seats, a white canvas top and fat, whitewall tires that glowed in the dark. We Baked Beaners just loved riding around in it. We called it the Beat Buggy. Can you imagine it? The campus bohemians, sworn enemies of American materialism, crammed like sardines in that decadent car, cackling at our own hypocrisy?
“Gwen, Rollie,” I said. “I figured you two would be wasting away in Florida by now.”
“Not while there’s still money to be made here in Hannawa,” she said. It sounded like a joke but I knew from Rollie’s hounddog eyes that she wasn’t joking.
While Rollie fidgeted, Gwen and I took turns telling Gordon stories. Each one was funnier than the last. Each one made us a little sadder.
There was one story that Gwen and I artfully avoided. It was the one about the Halloween party at the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority house, our junior year, when both Gwen and Gordon came as the Wizard of Oz scarecrow. The spiked cider was flowing and poor Rollie was busy bagging groceries at the A amp;P. As the night wore on, their silly, wobbly-legged dancing led to some serious cheek-to-cheek dancing, and then two hours of serious necking in the basement rumpus room. As far as I know it never went further than that, but they did keep their distance for the rest of the semester.
I’d no sooner pried myself away from Gwen and Rollie than I felt a finger drilling me in the elbow. I remembered whose annoying habit that was. I turned with the biggest smile I could muster. “Effie!”
“I figured that had to be you, Maddy.”
“I really loved your talk, Effie.”
“Sorry I don’t have any Xeroxes.”
Oh, how I howled at that. I’d forgotten what a wonderful sense of humor she had. Dark. Sarcastic. Always right on the button. “You still running that little bookstore?” I asked.
“Of course-and you’re still at the paper?”
“Of course.”
“You get married again after Lawrence?”
I shook my head. “How about you? You ever find time for a husband?”
She stood back and dramatically unfurled her arms. “Would I still look this good if I’d gotten married?”
We laughed. We ate cake. We talked about Gordon. “I saw him just three days before he was-before they found him,” she said. “At the Kerouac Thing.”
“The Kerouac Thing? You’re still holding those?”
She smiled sadly and nodded. “Every year since 1959. Can you believe it?”
I could believe it. To members of the Meriwether Square Existentialist Baked Bean Society, Jack Kerouac’s unlikely visit to Hemphill College was the first and second coming rolled into one. He’d visited the campus in late November 1956. On The Road hadn’t been published yet, but he was already well known among the little groups of beats sprinkled around the country. He only stayed for two days. He drank a lot of free beer and ate a lot of free food and slept on the sofa in Gordon’s apartment. After 48 hours of mooching, he took the bus to New York and became famous. Three Novembers later the Baked Bean Society held its first party to commemorate his already legendary visit. We officially, and breathlessly, called it The Grand Kerouacian Anniversary Ball. By the second year we were simply calling it the Kerouac Thing.
“You had the Kerouac Thing in March?” I asked. “Whatever happened to November?”
“We stopped having it in November ten, twelve years ago. Finals and football kept getting in the way. Not to mention Thanksgiving. Half the time half the people couldn’t come. So I finally said to Gordon and Chick, ‘Jesus, why don’t we just hold the damn thing when nobody’s busy with anything.’ March it was.”
Lawrence and I were already two years out of college and married when the first Kerouac Thing was held. But we attended. And we continued to attend for the next several years. And those get-togethers were great fun. We’d read from Kerouac’s poems and novels. Shaka Bop would play the bebop tunes Kerouac allegedly loved. We’d eat beans and drink cheap wine. We’d remember-and embellish-our precious personal minutes with the great bohemian bard himself. “You still have it at your place?” I asked.
Effie moaned like a seasick walrus. “Hell, no. I gave up that honor twenty years ago. We hold it at the Blue Tangerine.”
“The Blue Tangerine? That’s a little un-bohemian, isn’t it?”
Now Effie laughed. “It’s a lot un-bohemian. And I’m sure the great Mr. K is rolling over in his box. But time does march on, Maddy my love.”
“That it does.”
“We’ve sure missed you over the years,” she said.
“After Lawrence and I divorced I guess I got busy with other things,” I said. I could see that Effie was itching to ask me what went wrong between Lawrence and me. She’d once warned me not to marry a man that handsome and I did not want to reward her with the details of his infidelity. So I changed the subject. “You said you saw Gordon at the Kerouac Thing just three days before his body was found-did it seem to you that he was bothered by anything?”
Her eyes shifted back and forth inside her big yellow glasses. “No.”
“It’s just so hard to believe somebody would want him dead,” I said.
“Yes, it is.”
“And why that old landfill? Not that any place is a good place to be murdered.”
“Maybe he was digging where he shouldn’t have been digging,” Effie said.
Chapter 3
Thursday, March 15
I was a wreck all morning. That afternoon I’d be having lunch with Detective Scotty Grant. For better or worse Dale Marabout had let it slip to his sources at the police department that I knew Gordon Sweet. And now Grant wanted to see me. For what he called a friendly chat.
“I’d be happy to,” I said when he called me Monday morning. “I’m in the morgue all day. Come by whenever you want.”
He laughed so loud I had to pull the receiver away from my ear. “With a hundred reporters hovering around? I thought maybe you’d come to see me.”
I’d never been to a real police station, of course, but I’d seen plenty of them on TV. I wanted no part of that testosterone-soaked lunacy. “Couldn’t we meet on neutral ground?” I asked.
His laugh was kinder now. “I suppose.”
