At the Oaktree Diner Cirba ordered meatloaf for Harry again, but Harry overrode him and ordered a Caesar salad.
“You order anything you like, honey,” waitress Sue said in encouragement. “Don’t be intimidated by the hat.”
“Sue, I warned you about comments about the hat,” Cirba said.
“If you gentlemen insist on walking around looking like a character out of a Smoky the Bear ad then you better get used to the comments.”
“I like her,” Harry said loud enough for her to hear as she walked away.
“She’ll change her tune after a few nights in the pokey.”
“You guys still have pokeys?”
“I’m a professional law enforcement officer – I know the correct lingo. So what did you think of Frank?”
“I think he was probably telling the truth.”
“Probably? What am I paying you for?”
“To be honest I’m not sure what you are paying me for. I’m not like that TV show Lie to Me – ’cause that show’s a crock of shit. I’m not a genie who can just magically tell if someone is lying or not.”
“You did it to me.”
“That was a stupid game with a drunk cop who got drunker the luckier I got. Look I admit I can spot a liar better than most people but the truth is that most people are pretty good at it all by themselves. If you had paid attention during my lecture you would know that my speciality is setting up situations where people find it difficult to lie. Questioning a drunk in his own backyard while he has a beer in his hand is hardly an interrogation. And you sending him reassuring smiles didn’t help either.”
“I was being Good Cop,” Cirba said.
“Again, this isn’t a TV show. If you want an opinion a bit more definitive than ‘probably’ then I need to get subjects into interrogation rooms.”
“OK, shall we go pick up Frank and bring him in?”
Harry sighed. “No.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause he didn’t do it. At least, he didn’t do it with those guns. He gave them up too easily.”
“He could have shot him with a different gun that he got rid of,” Cirba said.
“Maybe, but it didn’t feel like that to me.”
“So now you’re a truth genie?”
“You were there. What do you think?”
“I think I don’t want Frank to be the killer ’cause I knew and liked his old man but two million is a lot of cash. But yeah, I don’t think he’s our man either.”
The food came and over lunch they decided that the man they needed to talk to was the strip club owner.
As they were leaving, Cirba said: “Didn’t you say you wanted to go to an Internet café?”
“Yeah.”
“Well they got computers at the library. Mind if I drop you off while I do something and I’ll pick you up in an hour?”
“Sure.”
As Harry waded in online, he realized that fracking, like all controversial topics on the Internet, is so full of propaganda, both pro and con, it’s hard to weed through all the crap. On the one side you have the pro-fracking people who claim that the natural gas produced by fracking is going to free America from the tyranny of overseas oil imports. They state that thousands of wells have been fracked safely for fifty years, and this seems to be true. Fracking, or to use its more technical term, hydraulic fracturing, originated as a way to eke out some last bucks from dried-up oil wells. The gas companies would utilize old wells to go down vertically and then use special right-angle drills to bore horizontally into the shale. Then water, sand, and special lubricant chemicals would be injected at high pressure, fracturing the shale and releasing pockets of natural gas. Thing is, almost nobody noticed what they were doing because they were usually doing it on the site where there had been an oil well for years. It was when gas companies started drilling new wells solely for the purpose of fracking that people started to pay attention – especially when those operations were in places where there had never been any wells before, like New York and Pennsylvania.
Anti-fracking documentaries showed well water being contaminated with methane to the point where homeowners could set fire to running water coming out of the taps in their kitchens. They claimed that the water that came back up from those wells was filled with heavy toxic metals and often radioactivity. The environmentalists wanted to know how the dangerous wastewater was being disposed of.
Protesters were also demanding to know what chemicals were being pumped into their ground but the thing was – the gas companies didn’t know. The chemicals that were added to the water and sand before being injected into the wells were made by Ramjack. Ramjack somehow got their fracking mixture exempt from the Clean Water Act, so they didn’t have to say what’s in their drums of chemicals. Many wonder how Ramjack pulled that off. Some think that the US president’s best friend (who happened to be the vice president of Ramjack) had something to do with it.
* * *
Cirba drove down the Five Mile Road and found Officer Dom Barowski snoozing at the speed trap near the exit of the Drunken Indians.
Barowski startled awake and then laughed apologetically when he saw Cirba’s passenger window level with his. He rolled down the window and said: “Hey, Ed, it was a late night last night.”
“Would that be a late night at the strip club?”
Barowski sat up straighter in his seat and lost the sleepy smile that was on his face. “What makes you say that?”
“I just came from your station. One of your deputies told me that last week you locked up Big Bill for most of the day. When I asked to see the paperwork on it he said you hadn’t filed any.”
“Aw Ed, you know how it is? You can’t tell me you never dogged it on your paperwork.”
“When I lock people up, Dom, I write it down – otherwise it’s kidnapping.”
“Aw shit, Ed, this was just a local thing.”
“What was it about?”
“Nothin’ really; I stopped him for drifting a stop sign and he gave me lip so I hauled him in to settle him down. You gotta keep authority in a little place like this or guys like Billy will run right over you.”
“So,” Cirba said, “did you hear that I was at the strip club last night?”
Cirba didn’t need Harry’s expertise to notice how long it took the cop to answer, “No.”
“You’re lying to me, Dom; I drove by at about midnight and I saw your squad car parked around back. You weren’t in it. You mean to say that when you talked to Mr Titty he didn’t mention that he bounced a state trooper a couple of hours earlier?”
“All right, yeah, he did tell me but I figured it wasn’t any of my business.”
“Are you on the take, Dom?”
Barowski looked like someone had just slapped him. “No, absolutely not.”
“Then why you doing favours for him, like hassling Big Bill?”
“Hey, despite what the holier-than-thou Oaktree council members say about the strip club to their fellow churchgoers, those guys love the fucking titty bar. The Dew Drop raises almost as much in tax revenues as all of the other businesses in Oaktree combined. It ain’t me that’s on the take, it’s the whole fucking town. Sure I go in and get me a special free lap dance every once in a while, but it’s the town council that tells me to be sweet with the guy.”
“The titty bar owner, his name is Di Angelo, right?”
“Yeah,” Barowski said.
“You know anything about him?”
“Comes from Jersey, used to be in garbage disposal.”
“Sounds like Mafia, don’t it?”
“Shit, Ed, I grew up in Oaktree. I learned everything I know about organized crime from The Sopranos.”
“Why he want you to lean on Billy?”
“Billy was giving one of his strippers a hard time. Just ’cause those girls take off their clothes doesn’t mean guys can follow them home. I just let Billy know he was outta line.”
“I heard one of the bouncers had a go at him.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
Cirba gave the cop a long look and said nothing.
“Seriously, Ed, I don’t know nothing about any of that. Look, I liked Big Bill. On the day I locked him up he never lost his cool and he swore to me that he was turning his life around. I’ve heard that pitch before from a thousand lowlifes but I actually believed him.”
“Is there anything else I should know, Dom?”
Even though they were talking car to car, parked at the side of the road, Barowski looked around as if he was checking if he was being overheard. “This Di Angelo is a hard nut, but he didn’t kill anybody.”
“And on what are you basing that statement?”
The policeman opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out.
Cirba put his car in reverse, but before he pulled away, he said: “There’s been a murder here, Captain Barowski. I need you to be a cop.”
* * *
Harry still had his nose stuck in fracking research when Cirba tapped him on the shoulder and made him jump.
“Learn anything?” Cirba asked.
“I learned that two million is awfully cheap for a hundred acres of gas-rich land.”
“You say Keystone Drilling Inc. is lowballing hillbillies?”
“Looks like it – by about two million – but maybe it wasn’t them. Mayor Boyce brokered the deal.”
“If he engineered a two million dollar discount, Keystone could afford a million dollar kickback.”
“At least,” Harry said.
“A million is worth killing over.”
“I’d kill you for a mill,” Harry said. “No offence.”
“None taken.” Cirba sat down next to Harry and shooed him away from the keyboard. The trooper logged into the state police website and opened up a police report on one Paul Di Angelo.
In it was a series of mugshots chronicling the progressive ageing of the strip club owner. There was at least one picture for every decade of the forty years since Di Angelo sprouted whiskers on his chin. His early crimes brought with them convictions: petty theft, assault, and car theft. But his later arrests all concluded with acquittals: extortion, unlicensed shipping, and toxic-waste dumping. The last arrest fell short of a criminal conviction, but the civil case cost him money and a ban on working in the waste industry.
“He’s a model citizen,” Cirba said.
“Yeah, if your last name is Corleone. So if you know this guy is crooked and you know he’s laundering money, why doesn’t anybody do anything about it?”
“No one will. It’s not like he’s stealing. He’s actually putting money back in the system. He pays the most taxes in the county. His make-believe lap dances are buying geography books.”
“Geography books with a picture of Sicily on the cover… hold on.” Harry pushed Cirba out of the way and clicked on a browser tab, bringing up an anti-fracking web page he had been looking at previously. The page had the logo of Keystone Drilling on it surrounded by a big red circle with a line through it. Underneath in big red letters it read, “FRACK OFF!”
“Have a look who’s hauling away the wastewater.”
Cirba leaned in and read, “Garden State Waste.”
Harry clicked back on the police report and pointed. “Mr Di Angelo’s old company.”