The Matter of the Duct Tape Tuxedo by Steve Levi

Author:Steve Levi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Publication Consultants

As soon as Blakely hung up, Noonan placed a call to the Peninsula City and County Sheriff’s Office in Florida. He asked for Geraldine Blakely and got her voice mail. The voice matched so Noonan was willing to believe that the call had been legitimate. Being in Alaska, one could never be too sure. After all, this was the land of absurding where it was a state sport to hoodwink gullible Outsiders on the most outlandish stories imaginable.

The first thing Noonan did after lunch – besides begging his wife over the cell phone to forget about buying a fur coat – was to take a cab out the Anchorage land fill. He had no trouble at all talking with the manager and the cabbie was more than pleased to sit and read the newspaper while the meter ran.

“You’re with the Sandersonville Police and you want to talk about an Alaskan landfill?”

“Well, that’s not exactly what I meant. I just have a few questions?”

“You’re the first cop that ever wanted to talk about a garbage problem.”

“Not a lot of crime happening out here?”

“Hey, you can have whatever you find out here.”

“I imagine that’s the case everywhere in the country?”

“Probably. Our problem is what people are bringing in; not what they’re taking out.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, you want to get technical? You can dump anything except toxic and hazardous items like paint, dynamite, tar, refrigerators, oil, batteries, chemicals and dead bodies.”

“You get a lot of dead bodies?”

“Got one last winter. A drunk died in a dumpster and we didn’t know about it until his cadaver fell out of the truck. No, we don’t get a lot of ‘em. The three we’ve had since I’ve been manager have all been DOA, if that’s the correct term to use in a land fill. There was no crime associated with them.”

“How long have you been the manager here?”

“Eight years.”

“Can you tell where your garbage came from in the land fill?”

“If you mean can I walk to the exact spot where the Muldoon Route 7 garbage from last year is buried, not exactly. I can come close. Last week I can be a bit more specific. But it’s not that easy. Garbage is not something that is compartmentalized. Each day one-sixth of the city has its garbage collected. It’s dumped into the land fill in the order the trucks make it here. Then it’s mixed with garbage that comes in daily from people driving in and dropping household garage. Everything is crushed with rollers – those at the big bulldozer-like pieces of equipment you can see rolling around on the landfill. When they aren’t pulverizing garbage they are rolling down earth. Every three or four feet of garbage is covered with a layer of dirt. That’s how the landfill is built.”

“If I wanted to find something that had been collected three months ago, how close could I get?”

“If and if and if and if I’d say somewhere in a circle about 30 feet across to a depth of four or five feet.

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