He ran us around to the front entrance so that the lush, mature woman at the reception desk could make a lengthy fuss over her damp boss and the VIP.
My wife and others had warned me that my Yankee sense of subjective time was going to be badly wrenched on this trip, and so it was. I have to admit, though, Miz Jessica impressed me with her ability to adroitly weave Southern Gothic autobiography and fawning references to sweet Mr. Lassiter into the woof of incoming calls. Unfortunately, too many of the calls seemed to be from disoriented guards either looking for their assigned post or reporting they had shown up at one already manned. She wasted no time in rerouting them to the dispatcher once their plaintive tone struck her practiced ear.
I extracted myself only after vowing a pilgrimage to her list of favorite spots in and around the capital.
The conference room, of which Dale seemed inordinately proud, was right off the lobby. The big polished table shimmered with a virginal gleam when he clicked on the overheads. The matching chairs looked like they hadn't been pulled out since March Madness.
The dispatcher's office was next. I thought I was looking into a betting parlor. Whiteboards covered everything except the doors and windows. A young man in shirtsleeves moved around like a mural painter with colored markers clenched in one hand. He was adjusting lists of names, times, and locations from a clipboard he held in the other hand. A big-bellied, mustachioed guy with lieutenant's bars called out from a central desk stacked with more clipboards: "Lonnie, you put Roscoe out to the inkabator 'stead of Gen'rul Turbine. Fix that. And use the red marker for the night shift, not the blue. You color-blind?"
He heard our step and swiveled around affably. Then he realized the visitor had arrived and rocked himself up and out of his oversized chair with a croaking of springs that sounded like a bullfrog being crushed. I could tell he was proud of his sprawling database.
"Lonnie, leave off and come on over here."
Somewhere, the angelic, analog version of my wife's voice counseled me again about cultural bias.
"Mr. Difile, this is Lieutenant Beljour, our head dispatcher and a former Wolfe County deputy sheriff. His assistant here is Lonnie Mills, who is an intern from the criminal justice program at our community college."
Beljour gave me a confident handshake, sensing the presence of another retired lawman.
"Where's Wolfe County, Lieutenant?"
"It's further out the Piedmont, but my wife has people in Durham, so we made the move after I retired from the department."
Behind him, Lonnie breathed noisily around the green marker cap and looked down at some stray pen marks on the front of his white uniform shirt. His mom would have a tough time with those.
"Quite a setup," I said. One wall was devoted to a personnel roster that cross-referenced with the numerous facilities, businesses, malls, and campuses on the other walls, all in block letters like a ransom note.
"I show it to every new prospect," Dale said, crinkly-eyed. He pointed at a blank section of whiteboard and added, "Always room for one more."
Especially, when one's clients were defecting.
I perused the GlobalSoft listing, which rated an around-the-clock team. During business hours, we had an on-site supervisor-lieutenant and seven men rotating between the gate, monitoring stations, and foot and vehicle patrols. At night, they made do with a sergeant plus one inside and one outside man. I noted the names and shift lengths and walked over to the personnel list.
"This guy Hurley, he goes from GlobalSoft days to Qualitech on two nights. He's doing fifty-six hours a week, yet you have some part-timers who could cover those nightshifts and save us overtime."
Dale spoke right up, no hemming or hawing. "Yes, indeedy, but we need to keep Qualitech mollified with our square-jawed guys. Besides, Jeff needs the extra time 'cause his wife's got a disorder, and our benefits plan hasn't quite kep' up with the bills."
I looked toward Beljour. He said, "Hate to lose Captain Fontel's nephew to some other outfit what would pay him the overtime." He remained genial, but he had pulled his gut in a millimeter or two. I let the topic drop for the time being.
Dale took me upstairs and we peeked into his office. It was privileged with corner windows looking down upon a quiet, sloping intersection, but aside from a big red and white state banner hanging on the interior wall, it was unpretentious: a bare oak desk, a leather couch and matching chair, and a low bookcase for family photos and a showing of regs and yearbooks propped between a pair of undersized trophies. Pictures of pedigree industrial campuses hung between the windows. Among the certificates on the wall above the bookcase, I recognized Mr. Nixon's heartfelt appreciation for Dale's service to the nation.
The next office was shared by his two captains. One desk was empty; a trim guy with short gray hair occupied the other. When he stood up, his uniform uncoiled into military creases, but his desk was not quite so well ordered. It looked like he was involved in a prodigious struggle with payroll. He was working with a lot of paper and a laptop while a larger monitor sat aside on an ell, hooded like the cage of a noisy bird.
"This here is Phil Langley, my numbers guy. We were in the Army together, but he stayed on and made a career of it after I bailed. Glutton for punishment."
Langley smiled politely. He was clearly anxious to get back to the fiscal jigsaw puzzle that had probably devolved from the wallboards downstairs.
"How many years were you in?" I said.
"Twenty, sir. Came out Sergeant First Class."
"What was your MOS?"
"Ordnance disposal. Took some accounting courses while I was in and finished them up when I got out. Safer job." He gave me a thin smile, wondering perhaps whether the job was as safe as he thought.
Dale said, "My other right-hand guy, Pete Fontel, is out drummin' up business and doin' drive-bys."
Fontel's desk looked more like a bare monument than a workstation.
"He's on the road quite a bit actually, checkin' posts and nosin' out new clients," Dale said. The reiteration struck me as defensive.
We let Langley get back to his ordeal, which looked trickier than defusing a booby-trapped shell, and moved on to the IT room. Dale rapped a quick knuckle on the locked door and waited. The panel swung open on a submarinelike interior of stacked modules and a pair of monitors filled with programming text.
"Hey, Pal! What's happenin'?"
Pallav Annapragada was a second-generation Indian transplant not much older than Roscoe downstairs. He hadn't an ounce of fat on him, which made the big dark eyes look as if they were going to spill out. His hair poked up like he'd been running his hands through it steadily since daybreak.
"Pal, say hello to Mr. Difile."
"Hello!" Or was it "Help!" Anyway, Pallav looked beseechingly at me, as if I were a rescuer.
"We got Pal gettin' us ready to fire up our customer info and personnel files and payroll in a 'lectronic version."
"I am ready!" Pallav said expressly to me, because I don't think he believed anyone else in the room would listen.
"Come on now, son, you got to admit we got a little more dry runnin' to do before we take the plunge."
"Didn't we have this equipment installed a year ago?" I asked rhetorically.
Pallav bit his lip. Any more vocal desperation would have been disloyal. Around us, cooling fans whirred valiantly; tiny lights glowed like miniature traffic signals.
I said, "What kind of power backup do we have for this system?"
"We have batteries that will give us eight hours if the electricity ever goes out. No problem."
"How did you fare when the hurricane came ashore this summer?"
"Fine, fine, no outage. Another time, a car crash took down a line, but we were back up in two hours. No problem."
"And what if Bertha had headed here instead of up the coast?"
"We are ready with the batteries."
"No problem, right?"
Dale came to the rescue. "These tropical storms usually shear off fr
om us after they chew up the Outer Banks. They might dump a lotta rain, but the wind runs outta steam."
I knew his observation could be disputed by any number of elderly locals who still had memory cells at their disposal. I said, "Well, there's another big one not too far away, and there's no guarantee our luck will hold out. How prepared are the clients? Are they ready for the worst?"
"Come on now, don't jinx us. Fran's headin' for South Carolina, God hep'm. Anyways, them high-tech outfits in the Triangle ain't about to skimp on emergency power. They all got generators."
I had begun to feel an incipient claustrophobia in the cluttered room. "We'll talk again," I promised Pallav, although the assurance did not seem to penetrate his gloom.
Dale had a small "ready room" on that floor for guards ostensibly awaiting daily floating assignments. Amidst basic cafeteria furniture and snack and soda machines, two uniformed men were finishing up a heart-stopper of a brunch while watching a wall-mounted TV tuned to a soccer match, of all things.
The pair at the table paused in their eating, looking up respectfully but without embarrassment from their gravy-soaked biscuits. They could have been father and son, generational members of the nondescript sentries of America chowing down in their clubhouse.
"How's it goin', Yuri, Anzelm? Lieutenant Beljour's probably gonna send y'all over to Astrodyne today."
Well, well, Yuri and Anzelm—not only soccer fans, but also entrusted with guarding a defense contractor's premises. Senator McCarthy was rolling in his grave.
We retired to Dale's office.
He didn't look very much at home behind his desk; moreover, his good-natured veneer had thinned.
"Well, Rocky, Junior obviously thinks I need help workin' out this GlobalSoft thing. But what else are you here for?"
I had intended to begin our talk with a firm suggestion about converting some of the ready-room space into more elbow room and ventilation for Pal's technology-in-waiting, but since Dale wanted to cut to the chase, I obliged.
"Okay, once we get a handle on the breach over there, which seems to have happened on our watch, we are going to use our findings to figure out not only how to retain GlobalSoft, but how to hold on to our other clients and grow at the same time. Our existing customers are losing faith. We have to make them believe our services are indispensable, and their accounting departments have to be willing to pay up in a bottom-line universe. Also, while we're at it, we want them to spread the good word about us."
"I get that. I know we've lost an account or two, but they'll be back when they realize you git what you pay for."
"I'm not so sure. Right now, what makes us that different than the other uniformed stooges?"
"I can tell you I'm damn careful who I hire. The supervisors and key dudes are what make the difference. Even the rank and file here are better'n average."
"That may be, but in the long run it's how much more secure we make the clients feel. And that starts, as with any community, by demonstrating how insecure they actually are."
Rain lashed Dale's windows like a deliberate scourge.
"And, Dale, do you really think our clients and new prospects are impressed by Beljour's wall art? I think they'd feel much more comfortable if they knew we handled that stuff on a spreadsheet, don't you?"
"I don't entirely agree. It's like the scoreboard in one of them classy old ballparks—the human touch 'stead of a giant TV and light display."
"I hope you're not serious. And you've literally got your IT in the closet. It's time for Pal to come out, although you may have driven him half crazy with the delay and overcrowding."
"Pal's an emotional guy; he gets a little impatient. You know how these cum laude people are from Duke. Then again, maybe you don't; but I got our customer service reps just about done processing the paper files into the boy's database."
"And where are these processors?" I knew I hadn't matched up enough people with the cars in the lot.
"In the basement. I didn't show you that yet. It's a mite messy down there."
"Get that processing done, Dale. Consider it a priority."
He nodded tightly. "Okay, high tech comin' up."
"That ain't high tech, Dale. We need to step things up in every department. For instance, the home office is thinking about doing its own alarm installations and monitoring instead of farming them out."
"Hell, next thing you know we'll be going into residential security!"
I said nothing. He stared at me as if I had hatched out of a recurring nightmare.
"Home security. Well, bless Junior's ambitious heart," he said, so gently I couldn't take exception. He might have been more vociferous if I'd disclosed the rest of Junior's vision.
Difile paused as a ferry horn blasted across the old whaling harbor. The boats' nighttime arrivals were always lit up and full of fanfare, harking back perhaps to when the service had been run by a famous circus owner. As the double-ended vessel nuzzled into its slip and yawned wide for the waiting traffic, the storyteller took advantage of the hoopla to replenish empty tumblers.
When the actor in our midst complimented his spot-on dialect, Difile said, "That comes from all the trips I eventually made down there. I became totally immersed in the culture. You need to take on the camouflage of local manners to operate effectively when you're solving indigenous problems—something the government's never got the hang of."
"You could definitely have a go in my business," said the thespian.
"Thanks. Anyway, this technology gap I've described was obviously detrimental, but worse were the bad apples rotting in the barrel."
We parked away from Pete Fontel's company patrol car. Neither the weather nor the early hour seemed to have deterred the serious lunchers from crowding into The Pale Ale Grill. The lot was full of late-model sedans and pickup trucks, many decked out with snapping car flags that declared college allegiances with all the pride of Bloods and Crips.
Fontel's vague itinerary had listed a meeting here, so I suggested that we grab lunch at the same spot. Dale, dyspeptic from his first serving of management's new thinking, hadn't liked the idea. Now he was leaning on the wheel and looking at the barn-board exterior with pursed lips.
"Something you need to tell me, Dale?"
"Nope, just hate to crowd my people."
We made a dash with faces averted from the pelting rain. A tag team of young girls who should have been cheerleading someplace held the inner doors open. They showed us where to hang our damp coats, found out we wanted nonsmoking (now it was Sir Walter Raleigh's turn to roll in his grave), and led us to a booth that allowed us to watch five giant screens at once.
The VIP treatment energized Dale. He looked around and spotted his captain sitting at the bar beyond the room divider. He was talking loquaciously to a beefy suit with a stereotypical comb-over, a man Dale identified as the assistant operations manager of Hercules Systems.
Fontel's profile glistened under a spill of too-black hair. His peaked cap was on the bar at the foot of one of those supersized drafts they had begun to peddle. I watched him take a big gulp and point toward one of the screens over the bar.
Our waitress arrived to let us know her name was Jill and what could she get us to drink. Dale heard me order seltzer and followed suit, so I didn't learn right away what his poison was.
"Tell me about Captain Fontel, Dale."
"Hey, don't people wine and dine up North?"
"They sure do. It's a hobby with a lot of them."
"Well . . . me'n Pete go way back. His momma raised me along with her own when my folks passed." His eyes focused on a nostalgic interior scene.
"Maybe you should have hired his mother," I said after a decent pause.
The comment made him go so cold I thought he was going to get up and walk out.
"Sorry, that was out of line. I gather she was a good woman. Tell me about him, though."
He looked back at Fontel, whose big laugh I could now differentiate from all the others in the buzz
ing room. The Hercules contact at his elbow picked up a massive bun and bit into it. Sauce surged over the edges of the sandwich like blood from a gash.
Our seltzers arrived, and we ordered food, which gave Dale time to collect himself.
"I needed someone to help out with the sales end. That's what he's always done."
"Sales? What—lawn tractors? The local brewery?"
He looked directly into my eyes with misery written all around his own.
"Sales is sales, Rocky. And he's a fren' o'mine. Family. What else you want me to say? I know damn well even the Old Man's got other kin on the payroll besides Junior."
"The Old Man's retired now, Dale, so all that's going to be reassessed."
"I don't believe he's lettin' go like that."
"You better believe it."
I dragged more of Fontel's background out of Dale while I waited for my Cobb salad. Pete was the baby of the family, Dale's ward in the scheme of things. He had missed the draft, kicked around the community college for six years, partied in between jobs, married twice, and finally settled down into a hale and hearty mediocrity as a generic salesman of goods and services.
"It doesn't seem like he's picked up much of the slack for you."
"The clients like him. He shows up at least once a week to check posts and make a fuss. Buys 'em lunch."
"But he's not writing any new business to speak of, is he? How many times has he gone after this Hercules bunch?"
"It ain't that easy anymore."
"You got that right. That's why we have to gear up and repackage our whole operation."
Jill put a bacon cheeseburger and sweet potato fries in front of him. They sat there like a plateful of stones.
"You seem less and less pleased with the way we operate down here, Rocky."
"The problems keep multiplying, which is why we may be in trouble with GlobalSoft—and whoever else they can badmouth us to. Unhappiness travels fast, Dale."
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 10/01/12 Page 5