Free Dead & Buried by Howard Engel Page A

that there’s no way to prove what they are doing with their wastes?”
    “I’ve been on their tail for three years at least. They have CBs—you know, radio-equipped trucks. If they spot you following them, they send an SOS and your goose is cooked. Without a relay team of cars, you’ll never be able to get close to them. And, believe me, Benny, they play rough.”
    “What tricks are they up to?”
    “You want the whole catalogue? They’ll run a rig, say, to Boston and back and open up a tap on the Massachusetts Turnpike. You can get rid of a lot of PCBs that way. Or, they’ll stick a hose in a storm sewer or a stream running into the Niagara River at night. There’s so much crap going into the Niagara from both sides of the border that you can’t make book on who’s doing it more, the Americans or us.”
    “Are they dumping PCBs into the Niagara?”
    “I don’t think so. Not Kinross. They go more for plating sludges, you know, cyanide baths either organic or inorganic.”
    “You just lost me.”
    “Organic are things like carbon-related products. You know about the carbon rings?” I shook my head. Pásztory shrugged. He wasn’t responsible for the quality of the detective asking questions. He didn’t have time to worry about that too. He kept on going. “It doesn’t matter. The inorganic stuff is solutions with heavy metals in them. Things like lead and zinc. They sometimes will sell oil with PCBs in it to township rubes for laying the dust on back roads. It lays the dust all right! Ha!” His cheeks gotquite red when he laughed; the capillaries on his high cheekbones stood out on his tough, tanned face. “But to be fair,” he added, nearly choking on his sip of coffee, “even that’s harder to get away with now. The province has just plugged this loophole on paper. You can’t legally lay the dust as in days of yore.”
    “How do you know Kinross is doing these things?”
    “I know and I don’t know. I know because I’ve had a few spies out looking, but I don’t know well enough to take Kinross or any of the others to court. I mean, short of having a photograph of a truck putting a hose into a sewer at midnight, you’re talking about tough proof to collect. Okay, say you’ve got them red-handed, staring into the camera flash with their beady pink eyes. They up and say, ‘We were pumping water from the river into the truck to mix with the waste.’ Or they say, ‘We were only dumping water from clean tanks.’ What are you going to say to guys like that? They got you coming and going.”
    “At the time Dowden died, he was reading up on the subject. He must have been getting scared.” Pásztory nodded and worked his mouth from side to side, as though there was a bit of tobacco stuck between his teeth.
    “The post-mortem didn’t show any organic disease that could be related to driving hot stuff,” Pásztory said.
    “Oh, so you’ve seen that too. I know you’ve seen the coroner’s report. Have there been any other deaths at Kinross since Dowden?” At the mention of the coroner’s report, Pásztory sat up straighter in his seat. I think he appreciated the homework I’d been doing.
    “I haven’t heard of anything at Kinross. But accidents like what happened to Jack Dowden are rare. They look out for their drivers because there’s so much riding on their goodwill. They get good wages for keeping their mouth shut, and there’s always a medical man around in time of crisis.”
    “Like Dr. Gary Carswell?”
    “That’s the one. Yeah, like him. On one side of the fence he deals with all medical needs. On the other he tells the world what the firm is doing to clean up the environment. He can make me cry when he talks about the evils of pollution in the Great Lakes. Have you ever heard him? He does the Chamber of Commerce and Rotary a couple of times a year,” Pásztory said, lighting another cigarette.
    “We know that Dowden was worried about the toxic substances he was carrying a