C Corwin - Dig

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!

Tuesday, June 5

Effie called me. Bright and early Tuesday morning while I was reading the obits. She told me she’d bought all of Gordon’s old books from his nephew. She was driving down to Harper’s Ferry to pick them up. On Thursday. In a U-Haul van she’d rented. She begged me to come along. “It’ll be like old times,” she said. “Two old beatnik broads killing the road.”

Killing the road. Now there was a phrase I hadn’t heard in a while. When we Baked Beaners were flitting around in Gwen’s pink Buick, we didn’t take the road, or travel the road, or even hit the road. We killed the road. We gave the road, and ourselves, all we had.

I hemmed and hawed. I was way too old to kill the road. Especially with someone who may have had something to do with killing Sweet Gordon. On the other hand, who knows what I might wheedle out of Effie on that long drive to the eastern tip of West Virginia? Or from Mickey Gitlin when we got there? “I’m not a wealthy tycoon who can come and go as she pleases, like you can, Effie,” I joked. “I’ll have to see if I can get a couple days off.”

As soon as Effie hung up I called Detective Grant, while the receiver was still tucked under my chin. I told him about Effie’s offer. My fingers were crossed that he’d say no. But he said, “Sure-knock your socks off.”

“But didn’t you tell me to stay away from Gordon’s nephew?” I protested.

“Two months ago I did.”

“And what’s changed in two months?”

“Unfortunately not that much,” he admitted.

“In other words, nothing at all?”

“Now, now,” he growled. “Would I be giving you the green light if I thought you were in any real danger?”

I growled right back. “So you’re saying I’ll be in un-real danger?”

I expected him to backtrack a bit. But he didn’t. “We’ve talked to both Mickey Gitlin and Miss Fredmansky several times now,” he said. “There is nothing to believe that either is involved in Professor Sweet’s murder.”

“Then why should I bother going?”

“You tell me,” he said.

So I told him. About the pine cones. About Effie’s copy of The Harbinger ending up on Shaka Bop’s desk. About Howard Shay and Penelope Yarrow. About Gordon’s ambiguous relationship with Chick, Andrew J. Holloway III and David Delarosa.

“Then by all means go,” he said.

“You’re sure you’re not just dangling me out there as bait?” I asked.

“The Hannawa police don’t dangle,” he said. “As much as we’d sometimes like to.”

Then I called Suzie and made an appointment to see Managing Editor Alec Tinker. He was so happy that I’d kept them in the loop that he gave me Thursday and Friday off without counting it against my vacation time.

Finally, I called Effie back. I told her I’d love to kill the road with her. “But there is just one small complication,” I said.

I could hear the suspicion in her voice. “How small?”

“Actually, not so small,” I said. “A rather rotund water spaniel named James.”

Thursday, June 7

Effie pulled into my driveway at five o’clock-in the morning. It was still dark. Very dark. And drizzly. I dragged James across the slippery grass to the van. Effie helped me lift him inside.

To be honest with you, I could have pawned James off on Eric for a couple of days. Or even put him in a kennel. But I just felt more comfortable bringing James along. I knew he’d be worthless if I got into trouble. But Effie wouldn’t know that. And neither would Mickey Gitlin. So James was just a big, happy, tail-wagging St. Christopher’s statue.

We took Route 21 south. Right past the entrance ramp for the interstate. “Did we miss that on purpose?” I asked Effie as we flew by in the dark.

“You bet we did,” she said. “As Sweet Gordon used to say, ‘If it ain’t a back road, it ain’t a road worth taking.’”

“He said that, did he?”

Effie laughed. “Well, somebody said it.”

I poured Effie a cup of coffee from her Thermos. I poured a cup of Darjeeling tea from mine. I gave James a big shrimp-flavored fire hydrant from the Ziploc bag of doggie treats I’d brought. Effie started singing that awful Willie Nelson song: “On the road again, da-da-da-da, I’m on the road again…”

“Is it necessary to be cheery this early in the morning?” I snarled.

“I can’t help it,” she said. “I’m a morning person.”

“I thought you were a night person?”

She knew I was alluding to the romantic excesses of her youth. “I’m that, too,” she said. She kept on singing.

A few miles south of Massillon we picked up U.S. 250 and headed east. At six-thirty we stopped at a roadside park so James could pee. And frankly, so we could pee, too. I’ve never understood it, but there’s something about a long drive that puts a woman’s bladder in a tizzy. Men can bounce along all day and not have to pee once. Which wouldn’t be fair if it wasn’t the only biological advantage their gender has. Anyway, the sun was coming up now and I could finally see how Effie’s traveling outfit stacked up against mine. She was wearing a baggy pair of khakis and a bright blue denim shirt with a big Tweetie Bird embroidered on the back. Her shirttails were down to her knees. She was also wearing a pink baseball hat and those big yellow glasses. Suffice it to say, I didn’t look much better.