“I can hear the wheels going from over here,” said Rosaline, sitting across from me.
“Sorry,” I said, dipping another stalk into the green stuff, which I liked a little better than the maroon, black and yellow-speckled stuff.
“As much as I’d like to say we had a deal, I don’t think it’d be fair to make you honor it tonight,” she said.
I sat back and killed a few more seconds chewing the hors d’oeuvres.
“The truth is, Rosaline,” I said, “I really try not to think about what happened to me with Abby and my job. Do I know why I did what I did? No. I just did it. And then I looked back and said to myself, geez, man, what did you do?”
She listened to me very carefully, studying my face.
“Maybe your conscious mind doesn’t know. But what about the subconscious?”
“Oh, Christ, Rosaline. Let me get my five-pound sledge out of the car and you can beat me with it. That’d be a better way to spend the next hour than trying to psychoanalyze me.”
She smiled that smile of hers conveyed entirely through the eyes.
“I know that, Sam. What I mean is, you
do
know. That’s why you don’t want to think about it, and why you don’t want to talk about it. You know the truth about yourself. You’ve been through some things, and you’ve grown more introspective, but you’re still essentially the same person who manned the helm of an incredibly complex and far-reaching organization. You are still the man who invested everything you had, your heart, your soul, your time and deeply held faith in the value of your work, and the idealization of your marriage, even as both were disintegrating before your eyes.”
There are people who actually pay to hear that kind of shit, I wanted to say, but couldn’t. It wouldn’t have been fair to Rosaline, who I knew thought she was trying to do a good thing. That’s the problem with the brilliant and well-intended. It’s hard to stop them when they think they’re on to something.
“Okay, Doc. I’ll cop to it,” I said instead, hoping a quick surrender would satisfy her.
“For all your combative and cynical behavior, I think you’re fundamentally tolerant of others. You endure their foibles and foolishness.”
“And alliteration.”
“But there’s something you cannot abide, something that reaches into a dark place, releasing another essential component of Sam Acquillo. The one you know is there, but refuse to acknowledge.”
“A something?”
She thought about that. Then shook her head.
“No. More an act.”
I knew she’d get to it somehow anyway, so I just asked.
“Yeah? What?”
“Betrayal.”
T
HE NEXT MORNING
Eddie and I headed out on our easterly jogging route, which took us down around the lagoon and by the WB plant. As expected, the cyclone fence was open and a white DEC van was parked near the entrance with its side door and back hatch wide open revealing racks of expensive-looking analytical equipment.
Eddie flushed Dan out from behind a small outbuilding. He was wearing earphones and holding what looked like a boom mike supported by a thick nylon harness. He pulled off the phones when he saw me approach.
“This yours?” he asked, pointing at Eddie.
“In theory.”
“Scared the crap out of me.”
“Sorry. How’s the study going?”
“It’s going.”
“You can’t tell me?”
“Nothing to tell.” He pulled the boom out of a holster
sewn into the harness webbing and gently laid it on the ground, then moved his torso around, stretching his back muscles. “You’d think they could make that thing lighter.”
“Field guys always bitch about something.”
He sat down on a windowsill that protruded from the outbuilding.
“We went through the original phase-one study and everything checked out, not surprisingly,” said Dan. “I know the guys who did the work. Pretty thorough. But we’ve only now had a chance to look for those cellars, the crux of the matter. You sure you don’t know where they are?”
I sat on the ground so he wouldn’t have to look up at me while I briefed him on my background, that I’d been on hundreds of industrial sites all over the world that were engaged in processing all manner of toxic and explosive chemical compounds. I hated that kind of talk, because you mostly heard it from people needing to assert their importance in the world. But I needed Dan to know my bona fides so I didn’t have to get into technical debates, or have to listen to the third-grade version of things I knew better than he did. He took it like I hoped he would.
“If you can think of any way to avoid bringing backhoes in here and digging up the place, I’d like to hear it,” he said. “The State pays me either way, but Amanda pays for the holes.”
“I need a closer look at the drawings,” I told him. “Like I said, I’d never seen them before.”
“Fair enough.”
He hauled himself up and walked back to the van, where Ned, also wearing headphones, was glued to a bank of CRTs examining oscillating waveforms and scrolling tables of data. Dan tapped him on the shoulder and he jumped.
“Sorry, Ned. We’ve got company.”
Ned pulled off his headphones and shook his head.
“No, my fault. You shouldn’t be listening to Pink Floyd and radar pings at the same time.”
“Sam wants to get another look at the cellar elevations. I said it was okay.”
He retrieved them from the box and we all went over to the main building where we could spread out on a dusty conference table.
I’d spent a lot of time with the original drawings and their subsequent iterations. Running through the scrolled sheets refreshed my memory and stirred up some odd and slightly unwanted associations. But there was nothing there I hadn’t seen before beyond the cellar elevations.
I used an Agfa lupe I’d brought in the pocket of my running shorts to compare the paper and drawing style, especially the lettering and flourishes that were common to the day. Without a document expert it was hard to know for sure, but the cellar elevations looked like they belonged with the first set drawn in the twentieth century. There are a million little details you could compare on a hand-drafted architectural drawing. A forgery would be an impressive achievement.
“You think they’re real?” I asked Dan, looking up from the lupe.
“Forensics could nail it, of course, but the people in the State’s Attorney’s office thought they were legit, and so do I.”
“Me too. Can you say the same about the other information?”
“They do. Said it’s as clean as it gets.”
“The term toxic waste covers a lot of territory. Anything more specific?”
Ned rummaged around in the box and came up with a report from the DEC lab, basically a laundry list of possible feedstocks, compounds and component chemicals used in
the manufacture of rubber rafts beginning around the Second World War and into the fifties and sixties after vinyl was introduced. I once lived in a sea of these technical papers, plans and reports. It was like looking at the faces of your old football team in the high school yearbook. Familiar and strangely distant at the same time. I forced myself to concentrate until I saw it. The bad thing.
“Ah, shit,” I said, despite myself.
“What?” he asked, trying to look over my shoulder.
“Buna-N. I didn’t think they used it for rafts.”
“WB mixed up a lot of it,” said Dan. “That’s all we know.”
“A copolymer. Part acrylonitrile.”
“Right. An IARC Group 2B carcinogen. Could’ve been in a lot of things these guys made. Can you say acrylics?”
I looked out the window at the rusty, overgrown plant site. Then back down at the cellar elevations.
“But why?” I asked.
“Nobody cared about toxic waste back then. You wouldn’t believe the shit we uncover.”
“No, why the missing drawings, why the anonymous tip, and why now?”
“Not my turf, like I told you,” said Dan.
“I know. I’m just talking. Don’t know what else to do.”
I walked outside leaving the DEC guys to pack up the drawings. Eddie was lying in the grass waiting for me. He’d been to the site plenty of times and knew there was nothing interesting there for him anymore. Just as well. I didn’t like him sniffing around the place anyway. God knows what could be in the air, in the soil. Actually, I could guess. So could Dan. Which would be easily confirmed by any junior chem engineer with a simple test kit.
Everything made sense and everything didn’t.
Dan came up behind me.
“I need two more days with this gizmo,” he pointed to the instrument mounted on the end of the boom lying in the grass nearby, “and then we can move to drilling test holes. Give that a few days before we start bringing in the heavy equipment. After that it’ll get harder to keep this thing under wraps. But I’ll do the best I can. I’m not in the business of destroying people’s investments.”
I thanked him and told him to take all the time he needed.
“Nothing’s happening to Amanda’s project till this gets resolved, one way or the other,” I told him.
“You got that right.”
I thanked him again and jogged off with Eddie. We completed our usual westerly route, which included a run though a bird sanctuary, a favorite of Eddie’s, and a stop at a roadside deli for Gatorade and dog biscuits served from behind the counter by the leathery Frenchman and his chubby Cambodian wife who ran the place.
“He like zee
petit gâteau
, no?”
“Mostly the presentation,” I told him. “Don’t give him too many. We still gotta run back.”
Which we did. We passed by the WB plant on the return trip and saw the DEC van still there and Dan walking slowly through the weeds, boom in the air and face creased with concentration. Questions hung like a sickening vapor over the whole scene, and all I could do was jog on by, focus on my breathing and not spraining an ankle on the rutty road that led back up to the tip of Oak Point.
——
I wanted to bring Eddie with me into the Village but assumed where I was going they’d frown on dogs. Made no sense to me. In Europe you bring dogs everywhere, including
restaurants and bars, and never once have I heard of a dogborne pandemic. If I had the money, I’d bring him to Paris. Stuff his face full of
petit gâteau
.
The
Southampton Chronicle
building sat on a hill that overlooked the backside of the Village center, which made it look both watchful and appropriately aloof. It was on the way to the big new library—my next stop if the foray into local journalism proved unfruitful.
I didn’t know what to expect and had only the roughest plan of attack, knowing nothing about the inner workings of a newspaper. I was surprised to see a reception desk inside the front door, just like any old office anywhere.
“I’m here to see a reporter,” I told the pert, round-faced receptionist.
“Certainly,” she said brightly. “Any one in particular?”
“How about an old one?”
She pulled out a plastic-covered list of names.
“Let’s see. I don’t know everybody perfectly well, but I can think of a few gray heads. I don’t mean that in a bad way,” she added, looking at the gray head standing before her.
“I didn’t think you did.”
“Some people think gray hair means wisdom. I do.”
“Wise decision. So what do you think?”
“Roberta is like my mother’s age. Or there’s Kyle who’s like been here forever. Not sure if he’s here now. We’re a weekly,” she added, as if that explained everything.
“But you’re sure about Roberta?”
“She gave me half her bagel this morning on the way in. I didn’t eat it, though. It had cream cheese. Bad for the tummy tone.”
She put both hands flat across her midriff to illustrate the value of restraint.
“Let’s give Roberta a call,” I suggested.
“Sure. And who may I say is calling?”
“My name’s Sam Acquillo, but she won’t know me. Just see if she’ll give me a few minutes to ask some questions.”
“Okay.”
While she called I had a chance to admire the blank opacity of the reception area. There were no clues it belonged to a newspaper. If I’d been transported there in a blindfold I’d think I was in a machine-tool factory. I expected to walk directly into a buzzy newsroom filled with hard-charging cynics who looked like Edward R. Murrow and spoke like Cary Grant. What I got was Roberta Camacho, a late-middle-aged woman shaped like a red delicious apple on a pair of sticks. She had a head of hair you’d call mousey, but only if the mouse had been dead for a while. She was, however, hard-charging, coming through the access door with hand thrust forward and eyes staring intently over a pair of cat’s-eye reading glasses.
“Roberta Camacho, and I know exactly who the hell you are,” she said to me as I shook her hand.
“You do?”
“You’re the guy from North Sea accused of murdering Robbie Milhouser with a hammer stapler. You here to confess? Give me the scoop? What a prince.”
“I’m just looking for some information,” I said, as the heartsickening realization hit me.
“Sure. I tell you, then you tell me.”
“I’m an idiot,” I told her. “Of course you’d want to ask me a bunch of questions. And here I am delivering myself to you.
“That’s brave of you to say. Most guys wouldn’t admit that in public,” she said, pulling a small steno pad out from under her ample arm and flipping it open.
I sat down on one of the innocuous leather and chrome chairs in the waiting area. She sat in the other one.
“What I know so far is the police have fingered you as their only suspect, but the grand jury has yet to hand up an indictment. Though people close to the case feel that’s forthcoming. They’re just dotting i’s and crossing t’s. What’s your opinion on that?”
“My opinion is that the clarity of my thinking has eroded somewhat recently, for a variety of reasons.”
She didn’t write that down.
“What about off the record? You have something to tell me? Is that what you’re here for?”
As punishment for my stupidity, I made myself listen to what Jackie Swaitkowski would have said if I’d told her I was going to the
Southampton Chronicle
to do a little digging around. I played it as a lot of loud words ending with “what the hell were you thinking?”