Midnight Haul (8 page)

Harry Woll, a foreman at Kemco, had been dead just over a year. He’d taken an overdose of sleeping pills, washing it down with Scotch; that was the story. The house he’d lived in was two blocks from Boone’s. Crane walked there.

It was another cool night. Crane wore his jacket, but it didn’t keep his teeth from chattering. He supposed that was nerves, more than anything. He didn’t like doing this. He couldn’t have felt more uncomfortable.

Woll’s house was one of several newer, one-story homes at the tail end of Woodlawn, a side street. There was a well-kept lawn with some shrubbery around the front of the pale green house, but there were no trees, which was unusual for Greenwood. The porch light was on.

Crane knocked on the front door.

A pretty redheaded girl of about fourteen, wearing snug jeans and a white T-shirt, answered. The T-shirt had a
TWISTED SISTER
logo on it; under it were pushy, precocious breasts that made the logo bulge. She looked at Crane and pretended to be sullen, calling out, “Mom! It’s that guy who called.”

The girl leaned against the door and a smile tugged at the corners of her pouty mouth. Crane gave her a noncommittal smile and looked away.

“Mr. Crane?”

Mrs. Woll was a slender, attractive woman about forty doing a good job of passing for being in her mid-thirties. She wore a light blue cardigan sweater over a pastel floral blouse and light blue slacks. Her hair was dark honey blonde and rather heavily sprayed. She had the face of a cheerleader or homecoming queen, twenty years later.

She extended a hand to him and gave him a dazzling smile. “It’s nice to see you, Mr. Crane.”

He managed to return her smile, but the warm reception threw him: why was she so pleased to see him? She’d never met him before.

He stepped inside.

“Take Mr. Crane’s jacket, dear,” she told her daughter.

The daughter took his jacket, brushing her breasts against him as she did, and tossed the jacket in a chair by the door.

“Would you like some coffee?” Mrs. Woll asked him, taking his arm, leading him to a sofa nearby, a painting of the crashing tide above it, one of several undistinguished oil paintings that hung in a living room of white pebble-plaster walls and contemporary furniture. The place was immaculate; either she was some housekeeper or had cleaned up because company was coming.

He said thanks, yes, to her offer of coffee and she left him to go get it. The fourteen-year-old redhead stood and looked at him and let her pout turn into a full-fledged smile and, butt twitching, walked into the next room, from which he soon heard a situation comedy and its laugh-track, TV turned up loud enough to be annoying on purpose.

Mrs. Woll brought Crane the coffee, smiled, and went into the room where the fourteen-year-old had gone, and the TV sound went down. Some.

While this was going on, he glanced at the far end of the room, where a color studio photo of the Woll family, taken perhaps five years ago, hung above a spinet piano. In the picture, Mrs. Woll looked heavier, sadder; an older daughter, about fifteen in
this picture, wore a lot of makeup and wasn’t quite as pretty as the younger daughter (who was just a kid, here) was turning out to be. Mr. Woll was a jowly redheaded man, whose smile seemed forced even for a studio portrait.

Mrs. Woll came back and sat down next to Crane. “Now. You said you wanted to talk to me.”

“It’s very considerate of you to see me, Mrs. Woll. To agree to talk with me.”

“Mr. Crane, I understand what you’re going through, losing someone you love. If I can be of any help to you, in such a difficult time, I’m more than happy.”

“Your husband’s… death. Did it come as a shock to you?”

“My husband’s
suicide
, Mr. Crane. It’s important not to evade reality. You can use euphemisms, if you like, but I’ve found they’re not really helpful. The sooner you face up to your fiancée’s death as
suicide
, and deal with it honestly, the sooner you can get back about the business of
your
life.”

“Yes. But did it come as a shock to you? By that I mean, did it happen out of left field, or was Mr. Woll suffering from depression in the weeks preceding his… suicide?”

“I can’t really say. My guess would be, yes, he was depressed.”

“Your guess?”

“Mr. Woll and I were separated at the time of his suicide. We might have gone on to get a divorce; it’s hard to say.”

“What was the problem, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“His moods. He’d always been a moody individual, but it had gotten worse lately. At times, he even hit me. His daughters, as well. We have two girls, Jenifer you’ve met, Angie, who’s nineteen, moved out and got her own apartment when she turned eighteen.”

“Was that before or after Mr. Woll died?”

“Killed himself. Before. Harry couldn’t handle the changes I was going through.”

“Changes?”

“Mr. Crane, for nineteen years of marriage I worked, just like he worked. In fact, I brought in only a few dollars a month less than he did. But in addition to
my
job, I was supposed to be a full-time housewife, as well—do all the cleaning, cooking, laundry. What extra effort did Harry make to help out around the house? Nothing. Not a thing. I put up with it for years. Years. Then finally I guess my consciousness got raised, like with a lot of women, and I put an end to it. I told Harry we could afford a cleaning woman. He blew up! But I hired her anyway. I told him he could either learn to cook, or start taking us out for meals. He laughed at that, but it didn’t strike him so funny when he started coming home from work to no supper prepared, every other night. And so we started going out to eat a few nights each week. Our life-style changed—but Harry didn’t, not really. I thought sharing the work load fifty-fifty was only fair, but he didn’t see it that way. He said he was old-fashioned, like that explained it. And he drank, he drank too much. I tried to get him to enroll in AA, and that made him furious. We had some very unpleasant months around here.”

“I see.”

“Harry and the girls weren’t getting along too well, either. He and Angie were always going at it, because he felt she had loose morals. He accused Jenifer of the same thing, and she was only thirteen. Why, she’s
still
a baby! Can you imagine?”

“No.”

“So Harry took an apartment over the hardware store. That’s where he took his pills and Scotch.”

Crane sat there and tried to absorb what he’d just heard. Make some sense of it.

“Mrs. Woll, I need to ask you something that may seem a little… off the wall…”

“All right. Ask.”

“Was there anything at all suspicious about Mr. Woll’s death?”

“Suicide. No. I think he hoped someone would stop him. I don’t think he really meant to do it.”

“No, I suppose not. What I mean to say is, did you at the time—or do you now—have any suspicions, whether based on fact or just a feeling you might have, that Mr. Woll’s death might have been something other than suicide?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Mrs. Woll, there have been five suicides in Greenwood in a little over one year. Mr. Woll was one; my fiancée, Mary Beth, was another. All five worked for Kemco.”

“I still don’t understand what you’re driving at.”

“Five suicides in a town the size of Greenwood is about ten times the national average. That strikes me as odd. And all five suicide victims worked for Kemco. That seems odd to me, too.”

She smiled; she really was a beautiful woman. “
Now
I understand. Mr. Crane, accept your fiancée’s death for what it was: suicide. It sounds harsh, but the truth often does. Just because Harry and I were separated when he killed himself doesn’t mean I’d stopped loving him. We weren’t divorced, after all. We might’ve gotten back together. It was a crushing blow to me. I cried and cried. But I learned to accept it. Live with it. Life goes on.”

“Uh, right. But that doesn’t make the coincidences I mentioned any less odd.”

“It also doesn’t make them anything more than coincidences.”

“Perhaps.”

She touched his leg. “It’s only natural that you find it hard to accept the fact that your fiancée took her own life. It’s normal for you to try to make it be something else. Accept her suicide
as her suicide
, and not an accident or some conspiracy or other such nonsense—and get on with your
own
life.” She leaned forward and, with a smile, lifted her hand from his leg and wagged a motherly finger at him. “Just because someone else threw their life away, doesn’t mean you have to. More coffee?”

“No, no thanks.”

“It’s no trouble…”

“No, really,” he said, rising. “Listen, it was really very nice of you to see me. Talk to me.”

“My pleasure.”

He moved toward the door. “Well, anyway, thank you. I know it must’ve seemed strange, getting a phone call from somebody you never heard of…”

“Don’t be silly. I knew who you were.”

“You did?”

“Of course. I knew Mary Beth. Isn’t that why you came? Because you needed to talk to someone who’d known Mary Beth? Someone who’d been through what you’re going through now, which I have, with my husband’s suicide?”

“Uh, well. I didn’t know how
well
you knew her.”

“I didn’t know her well, but I knew her. She was a wonderful person. It’s a tragic loss.”

“Did she talk to you about me?”

“Not really. She mentioned you. The girl was crazy about you, I’d judge. And I didn’t blame her.” She gave him an openly flirty look; her mouth was her daughter’s. “I’d seen your picture, after all.”

“She showed it to you?”

“No, it was on her desk.”

“You
worked
with her?”

“Yes. I’m in charge of the secretarial pool at the Kemco plant. You knew that, certainly?”

“Uh. Certainly.”

“Well, good night, Mr. Crane.”

“Good night.”

Just as the door was closing, the volume on the TV went up; he could hear the canned laughter.

The barrels were stacked four high, and everywhere. Toxic Tootsie Rolls, standing on end, more rows deep than Crane dared guess. In their midst was a sprawling warehouse, faded red brick with black windows, its loading-dock area clear, but otherwise surrounded by fifty-five-gallon barrels.

And the barrels looked sick. Piled haphazardly, unlabelled, many of them pockmarked, stained by unknown fluids that had streaked them like dried blood. Some of the bottom barrels were so corroded that weeds grew in and out of them, God knew how.

They’d taken the New Jersey Turnpike to Elizabeth, and Boone had guided the Datsun down this industrial waterfront stretch lined with storage tanks of gasoline and natural liquid gas that loomed like silver UFOs; the air hung with the smell of industry. At the end of this unshaded lane was Chemical Disposal Works, this Disneyland of waste drums they were now wandering around, like tourists, complete with camera.

“I thought you said you’d already been here,” Crane said, uneasy that she was strolling around at two in the afternoon, and a sunny one at that, taking pictures of what had to be a criminal operation.

“Sure,” Boone said. She was cheerful today, her long hair pulled back by a bright yellow headband, an incongruity next to
her faded denim jacket and jeans and black-on-white
NO NUKES
sweatshirt. “But last time I was here they only had twenty thousand barrels. I’d say they’re up to thirty, now.”

“I mean, this
is
illegal, right?”

“I can take pictures here if I want. They don’t have any no trespassing sign up, that I can see. We didn’t climb a fence to get in.”

“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about this.” He gestured to the barrels stacked on either side of the cinder drive they were walking along; the warehouse was up ahead, fifty yards.

She shrugged. “I contacted the Solid Waste Administration about it.”

“And?”

“I was told this was a licensed facility.”

“Jesus.”

“I sent photos I took, and never heard anything. So I called back and was told Chemical Disposal Works had been ‘administratively required’ to clean up their site, within a ‘reasonable amount of time.’ ”

“When was that?”

“Three months ago.”

They had reached the warehouse. No one seemed to be around. Boone took pictures of the loading-dock area; there were no trucks present, however, just a battered-looking tan station wagon, which indicated perhaps someone was around. Crane was getting nervous.

“What’s in those things, anyway?” Crane asked.

“The barrels? Who knows. Could be anything. Solvents. Plasticizers. Nitric acid. Cyanide. Pesticides. You know.”

“That sounds… dangerous.”

“You might say that. If they got certain compounds in ’em, exposure to the air could explode them.”

“Explode.”

“It’s happened before. Not here, but it’s happened.”

“Does Kemco use this place?”

“I don’t know. I just know I wanted you to see this place. It’s not the only one of its kind, you know.”

“I’m convinced,” he said. “It’s a real eyesore. Can we leave?”

“In a minute.”

She was still at it with the Nikon.

Despite the sun, it was chilly. Crane buried his hands in his jacket pockets. The air here had a funny smell; not like the acrid industrial odor he’d noticed earlier, but something not unlike an unpleasant perfume, and reminiscent at the same time of rubber.

To the left of the loading dock a door opened. A short, stocky man in a blue quilted work jacket and brown slacks leaned out. He had a pale face in which thick black streaks that were eyebrows obscured all else.

He yelled at them: “Hey! What’s the fuckin’ idea?”

Boone stopped taking pictures and gave the man, who was about ten feet away, a bigger smile than she’d given Crane so far and said, “We’re taking some pictures for our school paper. We’re trying for a mood, here, you know?”

The eyes below the bushy black streaks narrowed: the guy didn’t seem to be buying Boone as a teenager. It seemed a little lame to Crane, too, actually, but he didn’t figure at this point he had much choice but to go along with it.