time, too. Everything’s made out of plastic now, of course.”
Penelope suppressed a yawn. “So it was probably an all-tin can, but it could have been part cardboard? But either way Gordon must have figured he had a good chance of finding it?”
“That’s right. Now, did it have one of those oval snap-in lids?”
She answered quickly. “I’m sure it did.”
I asked my next question slowly. “Did you bother looking inside the can before you threw it out?”
Now she suppressed a flash of anger. “That’s exactly what Gordon asked me. Only he was screaming at the time. And the truth is, yes, I did look inside. If there was cocoa inside I was going to put it back in the kitchen.”
“So you saw the pine cones?”
“I saw them.”
“Didn’t it occur to you that maybe he wanted them?” I asked.
The anger on her face was now directed toward herself. “I know I should have-but I was in a cleaning frenzy. Gordon had junk everywhere and I was going to get rid of it. To make him love me more. Consider me for a wife I suppose. God, I don’t know how many bags I carried out to the trash.”
The story Penelope told me that morning at Speckley’s-as bizarre as it sounded-nevertheless jelled with my own research into Jack Kerouac’s life. Or should I say Eric’s research. Earlier that spring he’d Googled up all sorts of interesting stuff for me. Anyway, it boiled down to this:
In June of 1956, Jack Kerouac hitchhiked from San Francisco to the Mt. Baker National Forest in Washington State. He worked as a fire lookout for 63 days, perched alone in a tower, atop a mountain, watching the horizon for wisps of smoke, bored to near insanity by the desolation of the place. Each night, to mark the passing of another interminable shift, he placed a tiny pine cone in an old cocoa can he found amongst the tower’s clutter. When he began working his way east at the end of the summer, he took that can of pine cones with him, as a souvenir of his foolishly spent summer. In November he dropped in on Gordon and Chick here in Hannawa. And before leaving for New York, he gave his pine cones to Gordon.
According to what Gordon told Penelope fifteen years later, the gift had been “purely a materialistic one.” Gordon had given Kerouac several bottles of cold Schlitz beer for the bus trip and he simply had to make room in his duffel bag. “Why don’t you hold onto these for me, good daddy?” he said to Gordon.
I’m sure Gordon fantasized about Kerouac coming back for his can of pine cones some day. I’m sure he fantasized how Kerouac, overcome with gratitude, would invite him to join his inner circle. To wander America’s back roads with him, hobnobbing with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Larry Ferlinghetti and Lucien Carr. I bet he even fantasized how Kerouac would make him a character in one of his novels.
Jack Kerouac never came back for his pine cones. But that apparently did not diminish their value to Gordon. I can only imagine how precious they became when Kerouac published Desolation Angels in 1965. In that novel, Kerouac described his 63 days on Desolation Peak as a fire watcher. He described how his alter ego, Jack Dulouz, each night dropped a new little pine cone into an old cocoa can, to mark the end of another excruciating day. When Gordon read that, I’d venture to say he pretty much figured he had the beatnik version of the Holy Grail in his possession.
When Penelope told me about the pine cones that morning at Speckley’s, I simply could not believe that Gordon could have had such a treasure in his possession and not told anyone. Only after a long afternoon at Ike’s, rattling his patient eardrums with my cockamamie theories, did Gordon’s secretiveness begin to make sense to me: Jack Kerouac had given those pine cones to him. And the fact he didn’t tell anybody underscored just how deeply it had touched his young bohemian soul. So much that he created a secret shrine to Kerouac’s gift on his window sill-a shrine that included beer bottles that just maybe touched Kerouac’s lips, and pots of violets that, despite his good intentions, he forgot to water.
“Now wait a minute,” Ike objected when I explained all this to him. “I can understand why the professor didn’t tell you about those pine cones. And maybe some of those other crazy folks. But I can’t believe he wouldn’t have been tempted to rub Chick Glass’ nose in them. Considering how those two carried on over that cheeseburger all those years.”
I was nodding, watching the dribble of traffic outside his coffee shop. “I think maybe it just comes down to the kind of guy Gordon was,” I said. “He knew those pine cones would trump what the great Jack Kerouac had or didn’t have for lunch. He knew it would make him Kerouac’s undisputed apostle at Hemphill College, and not Chick. He also knew it would destroy their friendship.” It was six o’clock. Ike got up with a long, Saturday afternoon groan. He flipped the sign on the door over to CLOSED. I kept talking. “And so for fifteen years Sweet Gordon kept that cocoa can of pine cones to himself. A literary artifact of immeasurable value. Until his new girlfriend in a fit of love- induced tidiness threw them out.”
Ike returned to the table with a handful of Ghirardelli chocolates from the counter. “So how does all that help you find Gordon’s murderer?”
I popped one of the balls of chocolate into my mouth and attempted to answer. “Who the hell knows? But I am certain about one thing, Ike. Gordon was not out there digging for drums of toluene, or the weapon used to kill David Delarosa, or even a restaurant receipt from Mopey’s. He was digging for that cocoa can of pine cones.”
Ike had a ball of chocolate in his mouth, too. “Sounds reasonable. Crazy as shit-but reasonable.”
Ike was right on both counts.
According to Penelope, she and Gordon spent several nights in a row out at the Wooster Pike dump, on their hands and knees, looking for that cocoa can in a week’s worth of God’s snow and Hannawa’s garbage. Only when the city bulldozed a fresh layer of trash over the top did Gordon give up. Penelope, of course, was quickly out of the picture. When Gordon tossed her out, she traded her crappy job in Hannawa for a good one in Toledo. She eventually met her Lebanese dentist and put her bohemian years behind her. Until one Dolly Madison Sprowls gave her a jingle.
Ike and I said goodnight on the sidewalk and I drove home to James. I knew I had nothing more to fear from Kenneth Kingzette, but I left my booby traps in place. I curled up in bed with a notepad and my television remote. Hannawa’s local PBS station was doing a fund drive featuring the pop songs of the fifties. Patty Paige. Mel Torme. Perry Como. The McGuire Sisters. Half of the singers they were remembering were dead. The other half were older than Methuselah’s mother.
I didn’t make a lot of notes that night, but what I did write guided me through the rest of my investigation, inspiration-wise at least:
You can be almost certain that Gordon was only digging for his can of pine cones out there. For years he’d given up any hope of ever recovering them. Every week they were somewhere under another week’s worth of trash. And then when the city built the new adjoining landfill, they covered the entire old dump with three feet of dirt. But those pine cones certainly stayed in Gordon’s brain, and in his heart, and years later when Dr. William Rathje of the University of Arizona started the whole garbology movement, Gordon saw an opportunity to reclaim his secret treasure.
Gordon’s dig wasn’t completely selfish. Above all, Gordon was a teacher. A dedicated teacher. Yes, he was looking for a can of pine cones. But he was also doing important academic work. His students were learning how to be good archeologists. How to patiently pursue the truth.
Gordon also subliminally instructed his students to be on the lookout for cocoa cans: “Anything interesting today, boys and girls?” he’d regularly ask. “Old soda pop bottles? Betsy Wetsy dolls? Perhaps an old cocoa can or two?” Over the years he’d collected a whole shelf full of cocoa cans. But apparently not the one he was looking for. All of the cans I’d bought from his nephew were as empty as the feeling I’m sure Gordon felt when he opened them.
So, if Gordon was murdered because of what he was looking for, then what he was looking for was not what the murderer thought he was looking for! And Gordon was murdered for nothing!
