The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams (8 page)

After Wooly’s hearty
breakfast we set out in his Lexus loaner, Nickie directing him on a
different way to work. Beautiful sunlit day, peaceful and calm. You
could smell summer coming.

Testing fabrics, Wooly was
saying, “is all about time. How’s that for ironic? But that’s what
the business is about. How do things change over the course of
time, how do things fall apart, decay. I got some of the biggest
manufacturers in the world coming to me and saying, what’s gonna
happen to my product over the course of time?”

Material Witness Labs
consisted of two Quonset huts sitting side by side with a
connecting tunnel between them. Slice a humungous aluminum can in
two, lay the halves face down next to each other and you’ve got the
setup.

The parking lot was only a
third full with weekend shift cars. Nickie and I were on full
alert, ready for anything that looked or sounded suspicious. Wooly
pulled into his space and got out.

“Stay close to the cars,”
Nickie said. “Don’t walk out in the open.”

He complied, but he wasn’t
showing a lot of caution. Wooly moved at a good clip, arms swinging
in front of him like a man doing the breast stroke.

“I started right outta
high school, like I told you. Fort Lee, then Seventh Avenue. That’s
how I learned the trade. After a while, though, working for
somebody else, you got as much chance for advancement as a
heterosexual priest. So I took out a loan and moved back
here.”

The main entrance was
nothing special—a pair of gray double doors with an intercom buzzer
and a security card swipe pad. As we approached, Wooly suddenly
cocked his big butt in the air and attacked the swipe pad with a
full-ass body slam. The magnetic card in his pocket unlocked the
doors.

“Those were some years,”
he said, “doing 18, 19-hour days trying to build this thing
up.”

We went through the doors
into a toneless, no-frills hallway. No frills, no lobby, no
reception—the place evidently didn’t get many visitors.

“I had a staff of two,
total, and I was doing all the work myself. The measurements, I
mean—taking the measurements. I had to do every one of them by
myself.”

He almost sounded a little
nostalgic about it.

A door just ahead of us
opened and a young, tired, dark-skinned man carrying three
clipboards under his arm came out. He looked at Wooly with dull
surprise. “You’re here today?”

“Little while. I’m giving
these people a looksee.” Wooly turned to us. “This is my manager,
Farooq. He’s one of the reasons I don’t have to come in all the
time anymore. I tell him what to do, he tells everybody
else.”

Farooq shook our
hands.

“What’s it like,” I said,
“working for Wooly?”

“We have a deep bond
between us,” said Farooq. “It’s called my salary.”

We caught up with Wooly as
he was taking a corner. He strolled to a table piled with tinted
goggles. “You’ll need these,” he said. We each put a pair on and
went through the next door.

It was like walking into
the center of the sun. Rows of 6,500-watt Xenon arc lights were
blazing down on at least 100 samples of fabric stretched over metal
frames. Goggled workers waded through the sea of light, nodding at
Wooly when he came near but quickly looking away, trying to avoid
him.

“This is one phase of the
testing,” he said. “Ten days under these things, 24/7, it’s equal
to 30 years of normal light exposure. Best in the business, very
efficient, no question. But let me ask you, you’re looking at it,
you’re looking around. You see any problems? You see any spillage,
any light leaking outside?”

Squinting in the light, I
couldn’t see any windows. “No.”

“Of course not. Remember
those F.L.A.C. people, all that shit about fatal light? It was
shit. This isn’t fatal light. It’s
good
light.”

One of the workers was
carrying a sample past him, heading for the door.

“Paulita,” he said,
“how’re you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“Light bothering you at
all?”

“No, Mr.
Cornell.”

“See?”

She left, we kept walking
through the room.

Wooly made a sound like he
was blowing through his nose. “Those F.L.A.C. people, they were
working overtime at the crap factory. What we’re doing here, this
is for a
good
purpose. This is so, you buy a nice piece of material for
your sofa, it’s not gonna fall apart on you in 12 fucking months.
Here, like this.”

He stopped in front of a
baking sample.

“This has been here a day
already. You see anything?”

“Not really.”

“Right, cause at this
stage, it’s almost impossible to eyeball. That’s why we do color
analysis.”

We left the light room,
deposited the goggles and went down the hall to another door.
Paulita was inside with a few other workers, running samples
through a giant digital-crazy contraption.

“This does it all,” said
Wooly. “Are the tones turning? Are the highlights fading? Are there
any kinds of prognostic signs? It’s Swiss, it’ll show you anything
on a microscopic level. Paulita, how much did I pay for
this?”

“Four hundred and
ten.”

“That’s right, $410,000.
And whatever it sees, it automatically records the data in the main
server. “

He sighed and shook his
head, then turned and went back in the hall. “That’s what I used to
have to do by myself, the old days. I’d take all the numbers down
by hand and put them in the computer myself. Not no
more.”

The corridor was
narrowing. We must’ve been crossing over to the other Quonset
hut.

“How bad were Monte
Slater’s results?” I said.

“Terrible. One of the
worst I’ve ever seen. Stuff flunked just about every
indicator.”

He popped a door open. The
machinery inside was brushing mitts back and forth over a fabric
sample.

“This tests for
durability, simulates hand rubs. Thirty thousand rubs without
showing wear, for instance, is a very good mark. Monte’s crapped
out at 4,000.”

“I can see why he’d be
upset.”

Wooly shut the door and
kept moving. “Yeah, but this happens all the time. Lots of
people’ve asked me to bury the results or queer the standards.
Monte’s just one.”

The next room was
basically a steam bath. We stood outside, watching through a glass
panel as swatches of material were washed in waves of humidity and
heat.

“I call it Panama City at
3 p.m.,” said Wooly. “Plenty of product’s wilted and failed here
too. I’ve gotten sucked into many an ugly spat just over this test
alone.”

“I guess,” said Nickie,
“it’s a contentious business.”

“You have no idea,” he
said as we walked. “This business brings out the worst in human
nature, it really does. I know some people say it’s bars or hotels,
but it’s this line of business that shows people at their
worst.”

There was also a window at
the next door. Inside, two workers dressed in hazmat gear were
exposing samples to clouds of brownish gas.

“This one I call Mexico
City at 3 p.m. We pump in carbon monoxide, all your major
pollutants. It’s 15 times as toxic as what the federal regulators
call a bad-air day.”

“Wooly
.” Farooq was coming up the hall, three clipboards still
under his arm. “Jay Chan just called, said you stiffed him on
$3,000.”

“Stiffed him? I never
stiffed him.”

“The repairs he did, the
recalibrations? He said he billed you for $8,000, you only paid
five.”

“Jay Chan?”

“Right.”

“It was only worth five.
One of those machines was almost new—you could still smell the
clean on it. Tell him he’s only getting five.”

“Then why did you agree to
eight?”

“Jay knew I was gonna fuck
him out of three. Tell him five is all he gets.”

Farooq started to say
something, then his face collapsed in give-up pain and he turned
and walked away.

“You put him through some
kind of shit,” I said.

“Yeah, but Farooq’s better
off than when I first met him.”

“When’s that?”

“When he broke into my
house trying to rob me.”

Nickie and I exchanged
boggled looks.

“I hear a noise one
night,” said Wooly. “I get up, grab my Berretta. I see this guy
climbing into the living room window, so I shoot him. Once he got
out of the hospital, though, I felt sorry for him. Dropped the
charges, gave him a job. Was out of guilt, I guess, but he’s worked
out. Really does a fine job, though he’s still got a language
thing. Couple weeks ago I tell him I wanna try to start eating
lite. He looks at me, he’s not getting it. He says, what
kind
of
light?”

We came to the last door
in the hallway. It led into a room that was much smaller than the
rest. One Xenon-arc light fixture stood in the middle, shining on a
mere three samples.

“This is mostly for my own
amusement,” said Wooly. “Every once in a while we get product that
hardly shows any wear—they pass with flying colors, so to speak.
When the testing’s done, I bring ‘em here, study them myself, just
for the hell of it. I just want to see how long it’ll take for them
to go. Why? I don’t know, there’s just something fascinating about
disintegration, watching something falling apart with the passage
of time. In a way, it’s like looking into the future, predicting
what’s going to happen.”

“Sort of liked being
psychic?” I said.

Wooly wasn’t at all
pleased by the comparison. “Yeah,” he said, “except I get it
done
.”

>>>>>>

SATURDAY JUNE 16, 1:35
p.m.

A NEAT FREAK

At least I felt I had a
better understanding of testing now—I was in a better position to
talk to Monte Slater. In terms of somebody wanting to take Wooly’s
life, Monte was still at the top of my list.

Downtown Hidden lake was
crowded today, tourists enjoying the weather, lot of traffic.
Including an ambulance, parked in front of the Executive Center.
And an emergency service truck from the HLFD. Plus two cop cars
pulled up and parked on the street.

My lungs stopped working.
The air had been vacuumed out of my chest.

Okay, it could be
anything. There are plenty of tenants in the building. But then I
got to the fifth floor and I thought I was dreaming. The yellow
tape down the end of the hall, the tape cordoning off the area
around the Trident Manufacturing door, it didn’t seem real. It felt
like a dream coincidence.

One of Alex Tarkashian’s
paunchy cops was standing outside. “Whatta you want?” he said as I
approached the tape. He was reeking with attitude.

“I was hoping to see Monte
Slater. What happened?”

“What did you want to see
him for?”

“I wanted to talk to
him.”

The cop gave it some
thought. “Did you have an appointment?”

“No.”

More thought. “Wait
here.”

Alex came out of the
office a minute later. His face was a sick white.

“I’m seeing too much of
you,” he said.

“What’s going
on?”

“You say you wanted to
talk to Monte?”

“I talked to him
yesterday. I thought he might have something to do with the threats
on Wooly.”

“You can probably take him
out of the running.”

“I’m hearing a lot of past
tense.”

Alex nodded. “His body’s
in there.”

“How did it
happen?”

“He ate a gun.”

My lungs weren’t airless
anymore. They were beyond that now. They’d been crushed
flat.

“You sure it’s
suicide?”

“He left a note,” said
Alex. “He was in terrible financial shape. The shit was coming down
on him hard.”

“The textiles?”

“Everything. The textiles,
the plastics, some real estate deals he had. It was all going bad.
He was about to lose everything.”

Neither of us said
anything. Alex looked like he wanted to lean over the tape and
hurl.

“Pretty messy in
there?”

“Actually, no,” he said.
“Monte, it turns out, was a neat freak. There’s a supply closet in
there? He lined it with plastic, actually tacked plastic sheets to
the shelves. They caught all the brain splatter.”

Gary Bogash, Monte’s
partner, stepped quietly out of the door. His hustler’s eyes had
gone glassy, his tanned face looked even more neutered now. He
looked at me.

“Are you okay?” I
said.

“You ask me that
now
? Don’t say anything
to me. Do not to me say
anything
.” He glanced emptily down
the hall, running a hand through his spiked blond hair.