Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 07 (19 page)

“I
don’t know who this Kruger was, let alone when and where,” Chamfers mimicked in
a savage falsetto.

“Then
I’ll have to talk to everyone here at the plant until I find out who does,
won’t I.”

“No
you won’t,” he snapped, tightening his thin lips until they disappeared into
his chin. “This is private property and I can have you thrown out if you don’t
leave at once.”

I
tilted back in the folding chair until it touched the filing cabinet, and
smiled a little. “It’s a murder investigation now, sonny. I’m going to give you
to the cops and you can explain to them why Mitch Kruger’s name makes you so
angry and agitated.”

“I
don’t let anyone come into my plant snooping around, pretending they’re looking
for missing persons when they’re really engaged in industrial espionage. If the
cops want to talk to me about some old man who worked here twenty years ago,
I’ll talk to them. But not you.”

“Then
I’ll just have to come at it from a different direction. You got a pretty small
work crew here for such a big management staff, don’t you?”

Chamfers
and the benefits guy exchanged a look— guarded, wary—I couldn’t quite make it
out. Then Chamfers said, “And you keep wanting me to believe you’re not scoping
us out for someone. Who you really working for, Nancy Drew?”

I
stood up and looked at him solemnly. “Lockheed, sonny, but keep it to
yourself.”

Chamfers
once again stayed at my elbow while we made the long hike around to the front.
Before we parted I said, “You want me to tell the guy tailing me where I left
my car?”

His
face shifted momentarily beneath its frown. He was surprised. At the news I had
spotted my tail? Or at the news I had one? Pondering that little conundrum, I
forgot to wave good-bye.

I
walked down the road to where the tall grass cut off his view from the side of
the building. Once there I hunkered down to wait. It was just about twelve.
Maybe Chamfers brought a sandwich, but I was willing to bet he headed over to
the little block of Italian restaurants four streets over. I pegged him for the
late-model Nissan as well.

The
grass hid me from the road, but it didn’t protect me from the sun. It was also
a favorite hangout for flies and bees. I was so hot and sweaty after a while
that I stopped trying to brush them away when they landed on my arms. At one
point I got a rather nasty fly bite. Finally, a few minutes before one, the
Nissan drove past me with the flare of gravel I expected from Chamfers.

Staying
in the grass along the verge, I walked back to the plant. Another car was
heading my way from the asphalt square; the maroon Honda, with the benefits
manager at the wheel. I waited a few more minutes, but that seemed to be their
output from the first shift.

I
went back inside, to the door behind the stairwell, and reentered the
machine-assembly room. By now I figured I looked like someone who’d been doing
roadwork on a chain gang all morning. The tops of the high windows had been
pulled out on their hinges to let in some air, but it was still cooler in here
than it was outside. The women in their tank tops or T-shirts and work pants
didn’t look particularly ruffled.

A half
dozen were sitting near the door, eating sandwiches and talking softly in
Spanish. The others stood alone or in pairs under the windows, looking vacantly
at nothing, or talking desultorily. A couple in a far corner were having an
intense interchange. This time they all saw me, all but the pair in the far
corner, and conversation stopped.

“I’m
looking for the foreman,” I said.

“He’s
at lunch,” one of the Spanish speakers said in heavily accented English. “You
are looking for work?”

“No.
Just the foreman. Is he in the building?”

One
of the women pointed silently at a door at the far end of the room. It had a
chicken-wire glass top; neon shone dimly through it. I made my way past the
assembly tables toward it, but then stopped.

“Really,
I’m looking for someone who might have seen my uncle last week. He used to work
here, and he came back around a week ago yesterday.” They stared at me blankly.
“After that he fell into the canal and drowned. They only found his body
yesterday.”

A
little buzz started behind me in Spanish. The group near the windows coalesced
as though drawn by gravity. After a few minutes one of them asked what I
wanted.

“I’m
hoping someone might have seen him.” I spread my hands in embarrassment. “He
was an old man, a drunk, but my mother’s brother. She wants to know if he
talked to anyone, or if anyone saw him. The police don’t care about him, but
she needs to know—she’d like to know just when he died. He’d been in the water
too long for the doctors to be able to tell her.”

The
buzz sounded approving. “What did he look like, this uncle of yours?” a
heavyset woman about my own age asked.

I
described Mitch as best I could. “He used to be a machinist here. For many
years.”

“Oh,
a machinist. They work on the other side, you know.” It was one of the women by
the window speaking, a person of about fifty with a matted yellow perm. When
she saw my blank look she added, “You have to go around all the offices and
turn left, and then you come to the machine shop, honey.”

I was
turning back to the door when she said thoughtfully, “Maybe I seen your uncle,
honey. Last Monday, you say? But I don’t think it was then. It was before that
he was around here. We were just getting off shift, see, and we could hear some
hollering coming from the other end of the hall, and then this old guy came
around the corner, kind of shuffling, and laughing a little to himself, and one
of the bosses showed up behind him, still yelling.”

“Do
you know who it was? Which one of the bosses?” I tried not to speak too
quickly.

She
shook her head. “I wasn’t really paying that much attention. You know, my mind
was on dinner, what I felt up to cooking, what I might be able to find in the
store, you know how that goes, honey.”

“You
don’t remember what he was saying, do you?”

She
chewed on her lower lip a minute, trying to remember. “It was more than a week
ago, and I wasn’t paying that much attention.”

A
younger woman standing near her spoke up. “I remember, because he looked just
like my uncle Roy.” She looked at me apologetically, as if not wanting to imply
I had an uncle as bad as Roy. “I don’t know who it was yelling, because the
light was behind him, I could only see his shape, but he was just yelling at
him to get the hell away from Diamond Head.”

The
far door opened and the foreman came out. “Time to get back to work, girls. Who
you talking to here?”

“Just
a girl.”

He
looked at me suspiciously.

“She
thought maybe you were hiring, but we told her we were all lucky to still have
the jobs we got.” It was Roy’s niece, protecting me the way she probably had to
protect him, and her own mother, and perhaps herself as well.

“You
shouldn’t be on the work floor, girlie,” he said to me. “You looking for a job,
you should go to the office. It’s marked real clear and this door ain’t. So
scoot.”

I
didn’t say any of the things I was thinking of. He was the kind of guy who’d
take it out on the other women as soon as I’d shut the door.

I
moved down the hall at a good clip, not wanting to run into Dexter or any of
the others on their way from the can or the lunchroom or whatever they did this
time of day. Following the directions the woman in the assembly room had given
me, I made it to the far side of the building and another set of high double
metal doors. Beyond these clearly lay a machining room: it was filled with
gigantic machines.

Their
size was so monstrous that I somehow couldn’t imagine a function associated
with them. Large curls of steel lay on the floor near me, like the curls of
wood that used to fall when my uncle Bernard was planing boards for shelves.
Perhaps the monster above it was some kind of metal plane.

Lost
in the scale of the machines were a dozen or so men in overalls or work
clothes. The ones actively engaged with the tools wore goggles. As I saw sparks
fly near me I stepped back nervously. I needed to find someone who wouldn’t
torch me or lose an arm himself if startled by a stranger. Finally I spied a
man sitting at a drafting table in a corner and went over to him.

“I’m
looking for the foreman.”

He
stared at me briefly, then pointed to the opposite corner without speaking. I
threaded my way back past the machines, stopping to watch a giant drill move in
and out of a thick metal bar on one side. On the other someone was raking more
metal curls onto the floor. The men operating the equipment were totally
oblivious of me.

Finally
I moved to the far end of the floor, where I found yet another minuscule
office. A man of about fifty sat behind a desk inside talking on the phone. His
shirtsleeves were rolled up to reveal massive forearms. I’d be careful not to
make him mad enough to want to pick up one of the presses and hit me over the
head.

When
he finally finished his conversation—which consisted mostly of a series of
grunts and the statement that the fifteenth wasn’t possible—he looked up at me
and grunted again. I went through my worn-out spiel about Uncle Mitch.

“Did
you know him when he worked here?”

The
foreman shook his head slowly, not blinking his flat, rather lizardlike eyes.

“I’d
like to talk to some of the guys. A couple of them look old enough that maybe
they overlapped a few years. He was around here a week or ten days ago. One of
them was bound to have talked to him.”

He
shook his head again.

“You
know they didn’t talk to him?”

“I
know you don’t belong on this shop floor, girlie. So why don’t you get your
cute ass out of here before I move it for you.”

I
looked from his flat, lizard eyes back to his massive forearms and left with as
much grace as I could muster.

I sat
in Lotty’s car, drumming my fingers on the hot steering wheel, trying to decide
what to do next. I felt as though everyone in Chicago had been bullying me the
last few days, from Todd Pichea through the sheriff’s deputies and now the crew
at Diamond Head. It was time to fight back, or at least to prove that I wasn’t
just lying down in my sweaty clothes and dying because they’d frowned at me.

I
couldn’t decide what to do about Pichea after the failure of my letter to the
Chicago Lawyer, but the easiest way to take on Diamond Head would be to lie in
wait for the end of the shift and tackle the guys as they came up the road for
their cars or the bus. It would be a good two hours until then; I could fill in
the time by getting a photo of Mitch Kruger to show them. Anyway, a photo would
be essential if I was going to do door-to-door canvassing at the row of
bungalows tucked beneath the Damen Avenue bridge. I didn’t think Terry Finchley
really had the enthusiasm necessary to add those inquiries to his
investigation.

I
didn’t want to drive back north to see what Mr. Contreras might have. He might
dredge up some old group picture from the local, but I doubted he had anything
that would make a good identity aid. The real stumbling block, though, would be
his desire to come down and take on the bosses in person. Not that I was doing
such a great job on my own, but the old man saw himself as Mike Hammer and I
wasn’t ready yet for confrontation on that scale.

I
thought I remembered a photo ID among the documents I’d found in Kruger’s room
at Mrs. Polter’s house. Her place was almost close enough to walk to, but my
hours in the hot sun had taken their toll; I moved Lotty’s Cressida over to
Archer.

Mrs.
Polter was alone at her battle station—her tormentors must have found some
cooler entertainment for the afternoon. A couple of men were coming out of
Tessie’s, but the rest of the street was quiet.

When
I mounted the rickety steps I saw Mrs. Polter drinking something murky-brown
out of a corrugated glass. It might have been instant iced tea, but it looked
as though it had been mixed with transmission fluid. She was still wearing the
brown gingham housedress. The fabric had frayed further on both sides of the
safety pin, so her decolletage was better covered, but ominous holes were
starting to open on the sides.

“That
old man you was looking for—he’s dead,” she said abruptly.

“Oh,
yeah? How’d you find out?”

“His
son came. His boy. He told me when he come to collect the old man’s stuff.”

“All
the way from Arizona, huh?” Mr. Contreras would have told me if he’d gotten in
touch with Kruger’s family. Had Terry Finchley done it? If so, young Kruger got
here mighty fast—it was only fifteen hours since we’d identified the body.

“He
didn’t say nothing about Arizona. Just that he wanted his father’s things. Not
that he took all of them, but I figured since you’d paid for the room through
the end of the week I might just as well leave them lay.”

“I
guess I could pick up the rest of his stuff. Take it off your hands.”