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for the next several years. And those get-togethers were great fun. We’d read from Kerouac’s poems and novels. Shaka Bop would play the bebop tunes Kerouac allegedly loved. We’d eat beans and drink cheap wine. We’d remember—and embellish—our precious personal minutes with the great bohemian bard himself. “You still have it at your place?” I asked.
    Effie moaned like a seasick walrus. “Hell, no. I gave up that honor twenty years ago. We hold it at the Blue Tangerine.”
    “The Blue Tangerine? That’s a little un-bohemian, isn’t it?”
    Now Effie laughed. “It’s a lot un-bohemian. And I’m sure the great Mr. K is rolling over in his box. But time does march on, Maddy my love.”
    “That it does.”
    “We’ve sure missed you over the years,” she said.
    “After Lawrence and I divorced I guess I got busy with other things,” I said. I could see that Effie was itching to ask me what went wrong between Lawrence and me. She’d once warned me not to marry a man that handsome and I did not want to reward her with the details of his infidelity. So I changed the subject. “You said you saw Gordon at the Kerouac Thing just three days before his body was found—did it seem to you that he was bothered by anything?”
    Her eyes shifted back and forth inside her big yellow glasses. “No.”
    “It’s just so hard to believe somebody would want him dead,” I said.
    “Yes, it is.”
    “And why that old landfill? Not that any place is a good place to be murdered.”
    “Maybe he was digging where he shouldn’t have been digging,” Effie said.

Chapter 3
     
    Thursday, March 15
    I was a wreck all morning. That afternoon I’d be having lunch with Detective Scotty Grant. For better or worse Dale Marabout had let it slip to his sources at the police department that I knew Gordon Sweet. And now Grant wanted to see me. For what he called a friendly chat.
    “I’d be happy to,” I said when he called me Monday morning. “I’m in the morgue all day. Come by whenever you want.”
    He laughed so loud I had to pull the receiver away from my ear. “With a hundred reporters hovering around? I thought maybe you’d come to see me.”
    I’d never been to a real police station, of course, but I’d seen plenty of them on TV. I wanted no part of that testosterone-soaked lunacy. “Couldn’t we meet on neutral ground?” I asked.
    His laugh was kinder now. “I suppose.”
    We settled on Speckley’s, that wonderful little mom and pop diner in Meriwether Square famous for its meatloaf sandwiches, glob of au gratin potatoes on the side. We’d meet there at two, after the lunch rush, when we’d be surrounded by empty tables.
    So all morning Tuesday I made Eric’s life a living hell—even more than usual—and then drove to Meriwether Square for my friendly chat with Scotty Grant. We both ordered the meatloaf sandwiches.
    Scotty Grant looked more like a junior high school principal than a homicide detective. He was tall and doughy, comfortable in a suit that didn’t fit very well. He had a high forehead and massive blond eyebrows that swooped across his brow like the McDonald’s arches. He was closer to fifty than forty.
    Grant and I had first met during our paper’s investigation into the Reverend Buddy Wing murder the year before. The famous evangelist was poisoned on live television. As the weeks went by, and my suspicions began to bear fruit, Grant came to trust my instincts. I figured that was why he was having lunch with me now.
    “So, you knew Gordon Sweet pretty well?” he asked.
    “Years ago I did. When we were in college. We were all part of this little group called the Meri—”
    He held up his hand like a stop sign. “I know about the little group.”
    I felt a flash of heat, from my ears to my toes. But it wasn’t menopause—that bubbling cauldron of misery was long behind me. It was embarrassment. The Meriwether Square Baked Bean Existentialist Society was suddenly becoming a big thing in