When Shelby had got home from the bikers’ bar-long after the paramedics had hauled away the bearded biker with his guts kicked out-Shelby had crept into his girlfriend’s closet and retrieved his leather jacket, the one he’d worn last Friday night. He removed both manifests from the pocket of the jacket and read them. The material from North Island was properly manifested for disposal at a Los Angeles refinery. Then he sat down at the kitchen table and carefully read the manifest from Southbay Agricultural Supply.
On line 11-a of the State of California Health and Welfare Agency form, the proper shipping name, hazard class, and I.D. number did not list a waste poison mixture of Guthion. It was listed as “waste flammable liquid,” and specifically described as “weed oil and kerosene.”
And on line 9, which required the name and address of the disposal site, the facility listed was a refinery in Los Angeles where Shelby and Abel had often hauled ordinary waste. There was no mention of a disposal site in Texas.
Shelby folded the manifest and put it inside a plastic sandwich bag. Then he hid the plastic bag inside one of his spare boots and took that pair of boots out to the garage. After that, Shelby fired up the power mower and started running it over the little yard until a next-door neighbor and fellow tweaker walked out of his house in his underwear at 4:30 A.M., and said, “Dude, if you don’t stop workin like a deranged fuckin beaver my old lady said she’s gonna burn your house down and that’s a promise!”
The first one up the next morning was Bobbie Ann Doggett. The second was Fin Finnegan, only because Bobbie phoned him at 8:00 A.M. sharp.
Fin stared at the ringing telephone like he was Alexander Graham Bell’s cleaning lady wondering what the hell that strange contraption was.
“Uuuhhhh!” he mumbled, after he worked it all out and picked it up.
“It’s Bobbie!” she said. “I’m real sorry, Fin, but I could hardly wait to call!”
“Uuuuuhhh!” he said, afraid to raise his head from the pillow. “Bobbie, I’m near death! Please!”
“Don’t you want a second opinion? Listen to me, Fin. The shoe? Whaddaya say we call and talk to the officer that found the dead guy’s foot? Or maybe we could call the morgue?”
“It’s Saturday, Bobbie! I’m on a day off. You’re on a day off.”
“But Fin,” she said, “if the dead guy’s foot was inside a black steel-toe high-top U.S. Navy flight-deck shoe, I’m gonna arrest those two truckers for grand theft!”
“Wait, Bobby!” he said, sitting up. Then, “Owwwwww!”
“What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong? You drank as much, no, more than I did and you ask what’s wrong?”
“I felt a little sick last night, but I went for a jog this morning and I’m fine,” she said.
Youth. Communication was hopeless. “Don’t go running off and arresting anybody,” he said. “Lemme get up and find my head and make some coffee and call a priest for last rites. Then I’ll phone the CHP and see if I can get in touch with the young officer who added to my present torment by going on a treasure hunt for a goddamn foot!”
“Okay, I’m at home and I’m ready to go to work,” she said. “This’ll be the biggest arrest I ever made. It’s rad!”
“Rad,” Fin said, hanging up the phone. Then, “Rad. Cool. Awesome. Ow, my freaking head!”
While Fin was trying to accomplish the most difficult task of the week, namely, locating the bathroom door, another urgent call was being made by an equally anxious caller.
“Here, pus brain,” she said, “it’s for you.”
Shelby Pate didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know who she was for a moment, even though he’d been living with the woman for eighteen months.
He lay in bed and tried to focus, but couldn’t. He heard the telephone voice saying, “Hello? Hello?”
He tried to put the receiver back on the cradle, but only managed to knock everything on the floor.
“Hello?” the voice said, more faintly.
Then Shelby felt himself being shaken by his hair. “Ooooooo!” he moaned. “You bitch!”
“Get up, puke face, and talk to him!” she said. “It’s your fucking boss! I gotta leave for work now or I won’t have a job and you’ll have to support me for a change, you speed-freak asshole!”
And with that good morning, Shelby Pate’s long-suffering girlfriend went off to her job as a manager of a pizza joint, leaving him to listen to that fucking telephone voice yammering at him.
“Hello? Hello? Hello? Goddamnit!” the voice said.
Disoriented, he picked up the phone and said, “Flaco, is that you? It’s too early, man!”
“This is Jules Temple!” the voice said.
“What?”
“It’s Jules Temple! Wake up. We gotta talk.”
That brought him around a bit. He raised up on one elbow and said, “Kin I call you back, Mister Temple?”
“I just need a few minutes. It’s important.”
He couldn’t find a pencil anyway, so he said, “Okay, I’ll try to talk, but I was up late.”
“It’s about the cops that visited you yesterday,” Jules said. “I got back to the office and found a note from Mary.”
“Yeah?”
“What’d they want?”
“Kin this wait?”
“No, goddamnit! What’d they want? I gotta know! It’s my business! You’re my employee!”
There was nothing like a little jolt of anger to cut through the fog. “I know you’re my boss,” Shelby said.
“There seems to be a lotta interest in you two and that truck. What happened? Mary said a kid was contaminated from the Guthion.”
His head was clearing more quickly and he said, “That’s right, Mister Temple. From the Guthion.”
“That’s a shame,” Jules said. “But what else did they say? Did they find the drums? Did they find … anything?”
“No, Mister Temple,” Shelby said. “They didn’t say nothing about the waste drums. Whaddaya mean by find anything?”
“Well …” Jules hesitated. “Like the license plates, or registration, or any documents from the truck.”
“They didn’t say nothing about no license plates or registration.”
“Anything else? Did they ask about anything else or mention finding anything else?”
“Like what?”
“Goddamnit, like the fucking manifests! Did they mention finding the manifests?”
“Which one?” Shelby asked innocently. “The one from North Island or the one from Southbay Agricultural Supply?”
Jules could have shot him dead. He could have plunged a knife into his throat. He could have pushed him into a vat of acid in the storage yard. But he took a long pause and said, “All right, did they mention the manifest from North Island? Like maybe they found it?”
“No, they didn’t,” Shelby said, and even through the hellacious methamphetamine and tequila hangover, he was starting to enjoy this.
“Did they mention the other manifest?” Jules asked very carefully, the way you’d talk to a lunatic chained to a wall. “Did they maybe find the manifest from Southbay Agricultural Supply?”
“No, they didn’t say they found it,” Shelby said.
“They didn’t? Okay, I was just wondering, and …”
Shelby interrupted him: “But they mentioned it.”
“What … did they say, Shelby?” Jules asked, with no emotion whatsoever in his voice.
“Just that we was carryin this real bad Guthion and it would have to be manifested for outta state. Texas, I think. That’s what they said.”
“And what did you say?”
“That we never pay no attention to what manifests say. Our job was to bring the stuff back to the yard and then you tend to it after that.”
“Okay,” Jules said. “Okay, was there anything else they said?”
“Just asked us again about how the truck got stolen. Like, whether we saw anybody we knew around Angel’s when we went in for lu
nch. That kinda stuff. Cop stuff.”
Jules was enormously relieved. Now he wanted to smooth things over with this halfwit, to keep Shelby Pate from thinking that there was any more to this than a routine call from a concerned employer.
“I’m sorry to be so abrupt and to call you so early,” Jules said, “but you can imagine how I feel. A child died because our waste got dumped by some truck thief. It’s not your fault. It’s not my fault. Still, I feel very bad about it. You can understand, can’t you?”
“Sure, Mister Temple.”
“So that was it?” Jules Temple said. “They haven’t found any paperwork whatsoever?”
The ox managed a little smile, even with a blinding headache. It was fun being clever, particularly since Shelby hated this cheesy son of a bitch with his manicured fingernails and thirty-dollar haircuts. A guy who never so much as got a palm blister in his whole life. Shelby said, “They asked again about your five hundred bucks.”
Jules knew that this larcenous son of a bitch was rubbing it in about his money, but he forced himself to say, “And you told them the same as before? That the truck thief got it?”
“Right. That it was in an envelope wrapped up by the manifests inside the glove box. Where we put everything for safekeeping.”
Jules persuaded himself to say calmly and casually, “In the glove compartment with the two manifests?”
“Right,” the ox said, grinning now, because he knew that Jules Temple knew they’d ripped him off for the $500. And there was nothing he could do about it. Shelby loved this.
But he’d overplayed it again, just as he had with Bobbie Ann Doggett. As Fin Finnegan might say, he’d taken his performance clear over the top. But even if Shelby had had a clearer head he might not have been clever enough to manipulate Jules Temple.
“If I need to talk to you again, Shelby, I hope you don’t mind if I call you?”
“Anytime, Mister Temple,” said Shelby. “Anytime.”
Then Jules hung up. The blood had drained from his face. He got up and began to pace. He went into the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee. His hands were actually trembling, and that was not like him.
That imbecile said that both manifests were in the glove box, but the day after the so-called truck theft, he’d told Jules that one manifest was on the seat in the cab and one was in the glove box. Now he’d forgotten about that lie.
It could be an honest mistake. Shelby Pate was obviously hung over and more dimwitted than usual. Maybe it was an honest mistake, but Jules didn’t think so. There was something about the way he’d said “Guthion.”
Jules believed that Shelby Pate had read that manifest, and if he’d read it, he might still have it. Or at least he knew where he’d tossed it and he’d go find it, now that the cops had given those fools information that could put Jules Temple in prison!
But would Pate and Durazo risk jail themselves? They’d dumped the waste. They’d faked the truck theft. A moment’s thought provided the answer. They could tell the authorities that they had no idea that the waste was anything more than what the manifest said it was: waste flammable liquid. They could cut a deal with the police, if it came to it. Jules knew he was about to be blackmailed.
While Shelby Pate tried to pull himself together by drinking hot coffee, Jules Temple, for the very first time in his life, began to contemplate an act of violence. He began to contemplate murder.
It was Nell Salter who got the next phone call of the morning, and she was surprised that it was from Fin.
“I got some news for you,” he said.
“Was your pasta a success?”
“What pasta?”
“Last night. Pasta?”
“Oh, that. No, it’s about our case. The guy that got killed in the hot truck was wearing a shoe that was stolen along with a couple thousand other shoes at North Island when our two truckers picked up the hazardous waste.”
“What?”
“His cold foot was in a hot shoe!”
“Were you drinking again last night?”
“Yeah, but I’m sober now. The truckers and the dead guy apparently pulled a grand theft at North Island, then drove to T.J., then faked the theft of the truck. So this means they also dumped the waste!”
“Can we start from the beginning?”
“Not now, I gotta meet somebody. Are you willing to work on Saturday?”
“Of course not.”
“But we might get lucky and make you a case for intentional dumping of hazardous waste resulting in deaths. I don’t think you make a case like that every day, do you?”
The fact was, she’d never made a case like that, not for a dumping that caused death. Nell said, “Okay, where do I meet you?”
“At the front gate of North Island.”
“Why there?”
“It’s convenient for all three of us.”
“Three?”
“We’ll be driving down to Green Earth to have a talk with our two truckers, or we’ll stake out their homes if they don’t work on Saturday. We’ll find those boys.”
“Who’s the we?”
“An investigator from the navy’s gonna join us. She wants their shoes back.”
After hanging up, Nell thought, she?
“You were right!” Fin said after he got Bobbie on the phone later that morning. “It took me awhile to get him, but the CHP officer that found the foot described your shoe to a T!”
“Out-standing!” Bobbie said.
“Don’t go turbo on me,” Fin said. “We gotta do a few things. One thing we should do is wait till Monday when we’re all getting paid for police work.”
“What if those two dudes’re working today? What if they dump another load a waste like they did the first one? Do you think they care about human life?”
“Just like every woman I ever met,” Fin said. “A guilt maker.”
“I think it’s our duty to take those guys down as soon as possible. If you don’t, I will!”
“Whoa!” he said. “Chill out, Bobbie. I’ll meet you at the main gate of North Island at two o’clock. The D.A.’s investigator I told you about, she’s gonna be there.”
“Oh, then you’d already planned to do the right thing?”
“I mighta known. You’ve got a black belt in guilt-tripping.”
* * *
At 11:30 that morning, Abel Durazo crawled lazily out of bed and fried himself some chorizo and scrambled eggs. He drank three cups of coffee and watched TV cartoons along with four of the kids belonging to the Guatemalan couple who rented him his room. He could’ve afforded better than a rented room, but he never squandered money. Abel sent $400 a month to his mother in Tijuana. She in turn wrote to him twice a week and prayed that someday they’d have enough so that he could return home and be with the rest of the family forever.
Before noon, Abel received a phone call from Shelby Pate, who said, “Kin you talk now, dude?”
Abel was puzzled and said, “We got problem?”
“We got a pot a gold waitin, dude, is what we got!”
“Yes,” Abel said. “Een Tijuana.”
“That ain’t nothin!” said the ox. “I’m talkin about big money. Robo bucks. Humongous dinero!”
“You steel drunk, Buey?”
“A little bit, but I managed to get an hour’s sleep. Let’s meet and talk somewheres before we go to T.J.”
“Okay, where?”
Shelby said, “Meet me where we got our truck stole.”
“What?”
“At Angel’s, you dumb Mexican!” Shelby said.
Abel giggled and said, “Okay, Buey, we meet at Angel’s, but we don’ stay too long. Maybe somebody steal my car!”
This time it was Shelby’s turn to giggle. He said, “Meet me there at, say, three o’clock.”
“Okay, Buey,” Abel said, and hung up just in time to catch a Porky Pig cartoon. He liked the old cartoons best, especially Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.
* * *
Naturally, Bo
bbie arrived first, and she made sure that her bike was still safely locked up from the day before. She was wearing a raspberry, flannel-lined fleece stadium jacket that she got on sale for $29, along with Bill Blass jeans. The most expensive item on her body, next to her Colt.45 automatic, was her Gloria Vanderbilt lace-up booties that set her back $35. Bobbie had tried to dress for action in the event that the arrest of Shelby Pate and Abel Durazo got rough. Bobbie had been wildly excited all day and had gone jogging twice trying to calm herself.
Nell Salter arrived next, looked for a place to park her five-year-old Audi sedan, then decided to make a U-turn and wait at the curb for Fin’s Corvette. While she was waiting she saw a young blonde in a raspberry jacket chatting with the navy sentry.
Fin parked on the side street, locked his Vette, and while walking toward Nell’s Audi, spotted Bobbie with the sentry.
“Bobbie!” he shouted, and she waved, then trotted toward Nell’s car.
Nell was casually attired, but had invested more than Bobbie had. She wore a lavender silk blouse with rolled sleeves, pleated black stirrup pants, and black leather pumps. She had a black sweater vest in the car in case they worked into the evening.
Fin could see that Nell was not packing, but he figured that Bobbie would be loaded for rhino, and she was. When the three investigators linked up, Fin said, “Bobbie, this is Nell. Nell Salter, meet Bobbie Ann Doggett.”
Bobbie showed Nell a big smile and shook hands vigorously. Nell gave her a half-smile and shook hands with less enthusiasm, especially when Bobbie looked so approvingly at Fin, who wore a blue cotton turtleneck, Dockers, and a white windbreaker.
Bobbie said, “You look cool in a turtleneck, Fin!”
“Hides a sagging neck,” Nell said, dryly.
Bobbie thought that Nell was very attractive, but not in the usual way, not with that bent nose. Yet she was a mature woman who looked in charge of her life, and that was intimidating to a woman Bobbie’s age.
Finnegan's week Page 21