Chapter 4
Saturday, March 17
I knew right where to find Eric Chen-in the cafe at the Borders bookstore in Hannawa Falls. Eric spends every Saturday and Sunday there, from the minute the store opens until the manager sweeps him out at closing time, playing chess with the city’s other dust-collecting geniuses. They’re quite a bunch, I’ll tell you. I suppose there are fifteen or twenty of them. Ethnically they’re a real box of Crayolas: Whites, Blacks, Asians, Latinos, Iranians, just about one of everything. And almost all of them have an advanced degree in some difficult subject. They gather around the little tables like starved squirrels around a walnut tree. They play game after game after game. Fast, noisy games. They chatter and groan and slap their foreheads. They bang their chess pieces down and pound their timers. They giggle in Farsi and screech Shit! in Chinese.
Eric was sitting right in the middle of this mayhem, locked in battle with some unshaven old fart in a bowling shirt. I sat at an empty table and waited for him to notice me. When he did, I wiggled my fingers at him. He gave me the international finger signal for “just a minute.” He played-and lost-three more games before joining me. “You know,” I said, “if you and your little friends stopped wasting your brains on that worthless game, you could have half of the world’s problems solved in about five minutes.”
Eric was cradling a big, half-empty bottle of Mountain Dew in his arms. “Is there a compliment in there somewhere?”
“Actually, no.”
“Good,” he said. “I don’t think any of us could take the pressure of being admired.” He pulled out a chair with his foot and slumped into it. He held his Mountain Dew bottle up to the light and shook it until the carbonation bubbles were swirling like the snow in one of those worthless glass balls. “So, what brings you to Borders, Maddy? Trolling for a well-read man?”
“Trolling for a man who still reads comic books. I need your help, Eric.”
It took him two seconds to put two and two together. “Ah-Sweet Gordon. The police haven’t arrested anybody yet?”
“From what Detective Grant tells me, that yet may be a long way off.”
I was expecting him to put up a tussle. I’d forced him to help with the Buddy Wing investigation and that little adventure hadn’t exactly gone well for him. But he just sat there, grinning at me like a toad that had just drilled itself out of the mud after a long winter. Post Traumatic Chess Disorder I suppose. I laid out my game plan before he came to his senses. “We’ll have to look into his love life. From what I see on all those TV shows that’s always numero uno. After that, relatives, other professors and his students. Anybody whose life is even marginally better now that Gordon’s dead. But the big thing I’m going to need your help with is that awful landfill.”
Eric screwed the cap off his Mountain Dew and took a long chug. He swished the liquid back and forth between his cheeks. He swallowed, scrunching his face as if he was drinking rat poison. “This isn’t going to involve a shovel, is it?”
“Only your computer.” I told him what I wanted: “See what you can find out about the landfill itself. If anybody else has ever been killed out there. If anything else strange or controversial has happened there since it closed.”
“Easy enough,” Eric said. He took one of the ballpoints from his shirt pocket and wrote it on the paper napkin he carried in his pants pocket instead of a handkerchief.
I continued: “Second, let’s see if anybody’s missing from that part of the county-especially where the police expect foul play.”
“Even easier,” he said.
“This next one may not be so easy,” I said. “There could be oodles of things buried out there that shouldn’t be.”
“Including a lot of poopy diapers.”
“Illegal things, Eric. Something that would send somebody to prison for a long time if somebody found it.”
“A body?”
“Maybe. Or maybe a murder weapon. Or a big wad of stolen money. Or a drug dealer’s stash. Secret government documents linking Elvis and Lassie to the Kennedy assassination. Who the hell knows? An old landfill would be the perfect place to hide almost anything. But for the time being, let’s concentrate on one thing-toxic waste.”
Eric’s eyebrows shot up until they were hiding under his shiny black bangs. “Ahhhh-Margaret Newman’s series.”
“That’s right. Print out Margaret’s stories for me. And anything else we might have on the subject.”
Margaret Newman was The Herald-Union’ s environmental writer. Several years ago she’d written a terrific series on a local chemical company caught burying some of its nastier stuff in the dead of night. “It’s been a few years but I seem to remember that some of that goop was never accounted for,” I said.
Eric had filled one side of the napkin and was now scribbling on the back. “The head honcho went to jail, didn’t he?”
“I don’t remember that much about it,” I said, “but I think the guy hired to do the dumping is the one who went to jail. The honcho, as I recall, merely went missing.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t. And neither do I. It’s just a hunch.”
Eric launched into one of his irritating songs-this one sung to the tune of La Cucaracha: “Hunch about the honcho! Hunch about the honcho! Deedee-deedee-deedee-dee!”
I put my fingers in my ears until he was finished amusing himself. “Now, you understand that this is not exactly a sanctioned project?”
“What fun would it be if it was?”
“Because if Tinker finds out we’re snooping into another murder, he’ll run us through the printing press feet first.”
Tinker, of course, was Alec Tinker, the paper’s managing editor. He was a sweetie, but a very nervous sweetie. There was no point bringing him into the loop until I knew that loop led somewhere.
Eric nodded that he understood the need for secrecy. “Anything else you need?”
“There is a feature Doris Rowe wrote for the Sunday magazine a few years ago,” I said. “But I can find that myself.”
Eric’s eyes squeezed skeptically. “You sure about that?”
I wasn’t sure. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to admit it. “What am I,” I exploded, “a sweet potato? If I said I can find it myself, then I can find it myself!”
Eric went back to his chess buddies. I drove to across town to Hemphill College, to see Chick Glass.
Chick, like a lot of his fellow professors, lived in one of the dark, old Tudors in the hills just west of the college. I parked on the street and waded through the snarls of pachysandra that filled his entire front yard. I climbed the broken stone steps. The door swung open before I could ring the bell. “Maddy Sprowls-where have you been?”
Chick stepped aside. I slipped into his narrow foyer. The table under the mirror was stacked high with junk mail. Only one of the three bulbs in the ceiling light was still burning. I let him kiss my cheek. He let me take off my coat by myself. “I had a meeting that went a smidge long,” I said.
“Meeting on a Sunday morning? I didn’t realize you were such an important woman.”
I smiled and let him think anything he wanted to think. “It was nice of you to invite me for lunch.”
“And it was nice for you to call me.”
Niceties out of the way, we wound our way to the solarium at the back of the house. It would have been a lot sunnier if the window panels had been washed sometime in the past twenty years. “What a darling space,” I
