Ecstasy (25 page)

“I can guarantee you, most people aren’t going to feel that way.”

He shrugged yet again. “That’s not my problem.”

“Chief, I’m not trying to be rude. But this stuff you just told me’s going to be in the paper tomorrow. Once it hits the streets,
your phone is going to be ringing off the hook.”

“A person does something wrong, it seems to me he ought to face the consequences. That’s what I’ve tried to teach Trish, anyway.”

I started to get up. “Fair enough.”

“Let me ask you something,” he said. “Do you know what they say is the single biggest influence on a kid?”

“Um… their parents?”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But it’s not. And it’s not their teachers, either. It’s their friends—the people they hang
around with every day. That’s what makes all the difference. You gravitate toward the A students, you’re probably going to
be an A student. You fall in with the wrong crowd…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. Not that it really needed finishing.

“Peer pressure,” he said. “That’s what it all comes down to.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

“And you know what?” he said. “It damn well doesn’t stop when you turn twenty-one.”

W
hen it came to the reaction to my story about drugs and Melting Rock, “furious” proved to be one mother of an understatement.
But as it turned out, said fury kicked in long before the paper was even printed. When I called Rosemary Hamill for commentary
about what Chief Stilwell had said, she went so ballistic I was fairly sure that if she could’ve reached through the phone
line and throttled me, she would’ve done it. As it was, I had to hold the handset a foot from my head to avoid popping an
eardrum.

Predictably, she categorically denied that anyone would even
suggest
ignoring drug use at the festival; what was a tad surprising, though, was that she’d have the chutzpah to argue that there
were hardly any drugs there in the first place. I’d barely gotten off the line with her when I heard the phone ring in the
managing editor’s office. Sure enough, it was Mrs. Hamill threatening all manner of doom if we printed the story.

Predictably, Marilyn told her to go to hell. Then, just as predictably, Mrs. Hamill promptly called downstairs to the publisher’s
office. But, it being a whole two minutes after five
P.M
., he’d already flown the coop.

The story ran the next day.

The good news was, with the Melting Rock sidebar metastasized into a giant story of its own, I appeared to be off the hook
for the ever-vexing mainbar, at least for the moment.

The bad news was, people were, well…
furious.

Now, this didn’t really impact negatively on yours truly, controversial stories generally being the most fun to cover. But
it did have the good people of Jaspersburg beating their bosoms and rending their garments—though why it was so traumatic
to have the facts about drugs at Melting Rock go from blatantly obvious to merely confirmed was beyond me.

Such a hot potato of a story, naturally, demanded a whole slew of follow-ups. I ran around interviewing irate parents and
embarrassed officials. Meanwhile, the editorial-page editor cranked out a column condemning what he called “an ends-justify-the-means
mentality.” The letters on the Op-Ed page were running three-to-one in favor of Chief Stilwell, who (to my surprise) got more
praise for blowing the whistle than condemnation for turning a blind eye to the drugs in the first place.

Two days after the big story came out, Marilyn and Bill decided it was a perfect opportunity to satisfy Chester’s edict that
the
Monitor
be, quote, “a moral leader.” So they assigned me to do one of those tortured debate pieces, the subject of which was the
future of Melting Rock. Considering all that had happened over the past few weeks—the boys’ deaths, the lawsuits over bad
debts, and now the revelations about lax drug enforcement—I was supposed to go out and take the people’s pulse about whether
the festival ought to be scrapped for good.

It may sound straightforward, but my interview list was a couple of dozen names long. I needed to talk to musicians, fans,
average J-burg residents, antidrug folks, festival organizers, vendors, town officials, et cetera, et cetera. When Marshall
suggested at an edit meeting that it might be nice to add a sidebar on whether Melting Rock was financially feasible in the
first place, I could’ve strangled him.

Naturally, Bill thought it was a smashing idea. So there I was, twenty minutes later, stuck in the basement of city hall going
over the festival’s stupid budget numbers. They were on file down there because Melting Rock had gotten some kind of city
arts grant that required financial disclosure. And although maybe a mathematically gifted human being—or an investigative
pit bull like Gordon—might’ve been able to make some sense of it all, to me it was just a mess.

Periodically sneezing from the gobs of dust and mold lurking in the corners, I tried to force myself to look at it piece by
piece. According to the papers, the festival made a little over $100,000 on admission fees, which seemed right. About twelve
thousand people showed up, and a four-day pass cost $100; a single day was $30. Then there was income from campsite rentals,
revenue from T-shirt sales and the like, and a whopping $65,000 in vendor fees; thus explaineth the $4 hot dogs.

It all sounded like Melting rock ought to be in the gravy—if only its expenses weren’t equally titanic. There were the costs
of insurance, garbage hauling, program printing, sound-system installation; the list went on and on. The festival had broken
even the previous year, but just barely.

I took some notes and fled the basement while I still had working sinuses. Then I went back to the paper, where I pulled out
my folder on the vendor lawsuit story and tried to figure out which one I should call for comment. But when I got to the ticket
printer, I noticed that something didn’t jibe.

A & S Printing was complaining that Melting Rock had stiffed it for printing seventeen thousand tickets—two thousand day tickets
and fifteen thousand all-fest passes. I called the guy, and he confirmed it; they’d filled the same order as in the past two
years, only this time they didn’t get paid.

Now, I may not be anyone’s idea of a C.P.A., but this sounded funky to me. Melting Rock consistently paid to have seventeen
thousand tickets printed, but whenever it announced its attendance figures, they always hovered around twelve thousand. Overprinting
one year could be chalked up to optimism, but
three?
And by an organization that had always operated just barely in the black?

No, it seemed to me that there was a far more likely explanation, which was that Melting Rock was selling a lot more tickets
than it was copping to. And if that was true, it meant that it was pulling in—what?—as much as fifty thousand dollars more
than what was reflected on its financial statements. And that was assuming that it wasn’t also cooking the books in other
places.

So where was all the money going?

It was a good question. And within a couple of hours, I had a pretty good answer.

N
OW
, I’m sure this isn’t what Mrs. Hamill wanted to accomplish when she called Marilyn that afternoon, her tactics having changed
from stonewalling to spin control. Since we’d been irresponsible enough to run the story, she said, she positively
demanded
that she be allowed to give her side of things.

So I drove out to Mrs. Hamill’s house, which turned out to be one of those “painted lady” Victorians. The place had been restored
to within an inch of its life, with so many contrasting colors and painstaking architectural details it looked like some architecture
magazine’s version of a centerfold; call it preservationist porn. Sitting on the front porch waiting to be installed was a
hand-painted sign that said
CUPID’S CUPOLA BED
&
BREAKFAST
.

I rang the antique bell, and Mrs. Hamill answered—wearing a typically hideous flowered skirt-and-sweater combination and an
utterly wrathful expression. She showed me inside, and the interior turned out to be equally overdone, with doilies on every
available surface. There were also little angels and cupids everywhere, so many that if they ever decided to rise up in a
winged army, Mrs. Hamill wouldn’t have a chance.

She put me on a couch that looked like it belonged in a French Quarter bordello; it had an intricately carved wooden frame
and hot-pink velvet cushions. She sat in a doily-laden armchair opposite me, and though there was a glass plate of lacy chocolate
cookies on the table, she didn’t offer me one. She just looked me up and down, pursed her lips, and said, “Why are you doing
this?”

“Doing what?”

Her lips puckered even more, like she was sucking on an invisible lemon. “Why are you trying to destroy Melting Rock?”

“Er…I’m not.”

“Of course you are.”

“Really, Mrs. Hamill, all I’m doing is covering a story. I went to interview Chief Stilwell about drugs at Melting Rock, and
he told me he’d been instructed to look the other way.”

“Instructed by whom?”

“He wouldn’t say.”

If she was relieved, she didn’t show it. “In any event,” she said, “the man is mistaken.”

“Are you telling me that the Jaspersburg chief of police somehow misunderstood the fact that he was supposed to ignore drugs
at the festival?”

“That’s precisely what I’m saying.”

“No offense, but that doesn’t sound very plausible.”

“Of course it does,” she said. “Some…well-intentioned person could have mentioned to the chief how arrests might tend to make
people uncomfortable, and he simply took it the wrong way.”

“Are you serious?”

“It certainly could happen,” she said, cracking something resembling a smile. “Who’s to say it didn’t?”

I’m not going to bore you with the rest of the conversation, which consisted entirely of the same crap being shoveled for
another forty-five minutes. Suffice it to say that by the time I left, I felt like I needed to take a shower to get the slime
off. But, instead, I went back to the paper and dutifully added a couple of Mrs. Hamill’s lame quotes to the story. I also
spent a fair amount of time bellyaching to anybody who’d listen about what an insufferable battle-ax she was.

“What’s this chick’s story, anyway?” Mad said. “Sounds to me like the lady needs to get laid.”

“You say that about everybody.”

“And it’s usually true.”

“Well, I have no idea about the state of the woman’s sex life, and I’d just as soon not find out.”

“Is old Mr. Hamill still in the picture?”

“I don’t know. Her house sure as hell didn’t look like someplace any self-respecting man would want to live.”

“Maybe she killed’m and ate’m.”

“I wouldn’t put it past her,” I said, and went back to the story.

But as I was typing in Mrs. Hamill’s quotes, it occurred to me that I really didn’t know a damn thing about her—beyond a generalized
desire to smother her with a pillow every time she opened her mouth. Partly out of curiosity and partly out of old-fashioned
procrastination, I went back to the newspaper’s library to see if there was a file on her. There was, though all it contained
was a four-year-old profile from when she became the first woman to head Jaspersburg’s town government.

The story had been written by a former towns reporter, a position now filled by the ever-annoying Brad. Much as I hate to
say it, though, Brad would probably have done a better job of it. The clip I was holding had a lame lead—“On the Jaspersburg
town council, the right man for the job is now a woman”—that, come to think of it, made its subject sound like she’d undergone
gender reassignment surgery. The quotes were mediocre, and the reporter apparently hadn’t bothered to ask Mrs. Hamill anything
about actual issues facing the town government. It was, in short, a puff piece.

The story did tell me a few things, though. Mrs. Hamill was way older than I’d thought; she was fifty-one when the story was
published, making her fifty-five now. She was a widow living on what she called her husband’s “modest life insurance.” And
although she lived in the same house as she did now, back then it was a dilapidated mess.

I photocopied the story, put the clip back in the folder, and slammed the file drawer shut with something akin to satisfaction.

I’d been wondering where all that Melting Rock money had gone. What, I thought, were the odds that a fair amount of it had
gone into bankrolling—the name alone made me want to hurl—Cupid’s Cupola?

•   •   •

“
Y
OU KNOW
,” Cody was saying from the other side of the pillow, “that’s a pretty serious accusation.”

“Well, her house is pretty seriously ugly.”

“I’m not sure that’s a crime in this county.”

“Honestly, Cody, the woman’s gotta be on the take. Where else could she have gotten all the money to restore her place? I’ve
done stories on people who’ve done stuff like that in Gabriel. It can cost, like, hundreds of thousands of dollars. And her
house is
huge.
Plus, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts the woman’s had a face-lift.”

“Maybe she inherited the money or something.”

“Jesus, do you always have to think the best of people?”

“It’s a weird habit for a cop, I know. Now, tell me again about what you found in the Melting Rock financials.”

“Hey, weren’t you even listening before?”

“I was busy trying to get your jeans off you.”

“The button fly is something of an impediment to romance.”

“And about Melting Rock…?”

“Like I said, I really think they’re making more money in ticket sales than they’re copping to. And if they’re doing it with
the tickets, who’s to say they’re not also doing it with everything else—vendor fees and camping passes and merchandising
and all that?”

“How much money do you think we’re talking about?”