Inside the building, I was met by a young thoroughbred of a woman with long legs, wide brown eyes, and a flowing mane. She smiled at me and said, “May I help you?”
“I’d like to see Ms. Peterson.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry, but Ms. Peterson is very busy, and—”
“Tell her it’s McKenzie.”
She smiled some more. I smiled back. Apparently it was unusual for strangers to come in off the street and ask for the boss, and she was curious to see how the scene would play out.
“Just a moment,” she said and disappeared down a corridor. It was only a moment before she reappeared.
“This way,” she said.
I followed her. She led me to an office. Inside the office, leaning her backside against the edge of her desk, was Salsa Girl. She must not have believed spring had sprung either, because she was wearing a long-sleeve sweaterdress with a hem that ended below her knees and knee-high boots. Her arms were folded across her chest. She looked like she was actually glad to see me.
Every time I saw Erin Peterson reminded me of the first time I saw her. It was at the arena where we played hockey. She was sitting alone in the stands. I was sitting on the bench with my teammates. You wouldn’t have missed her even in a crowd, which there wasn’t.
“Who is that?” I asked.
None of us knew, yet we were all convinced that she was a guest of one of the hockey players. It was kind of a tradition among us—as soon as a guy became seriously involved with a woman, he took her to a game and introduced her to his friends. It was also a tradition—or a consequence of just how boring we were—that the woman almost never returned to watch us play again.
Finally Dave Deese said, “I think that’s Gotz’s new girlfriend. Erin something.”
We were all impressed by Ian’s good fortune, yet Deese blew it off.
“Just another dumb blonde,” he said.
“You’re basing this assessment on what, exactly?” Bobby asked.
“Well, look at her. She’s blond. She’s dating Gotz. How smart can she be?”
Personally, I hadn’t met that many dumb blondes. Certainly blondes didn’t seem to be dumb in any greater proportion than the brunettes or redheads I’ve known. Meeting Erin in the bar after the game, however, discovering who she was and what she did, pretty much shattered my confidence in the stereotype once and for all. Forget her dress, which was made of some magic material that seemed to both hang loose and cling to her generous curves. Ignore the winter-blue eyes—if you could—and her warm smile. There was a quiet center to her that you rarely see in people, and almost never in someone younger than forty, that impressed me even more. She didn’t greet us as much as absorb us into her life. The way she spoke went beyond mere communication. It was a reflection of a belief system that valued intelligence, grace, and self-control. You’ve heard the term ‘woman of substance’? That was Erin Peterson.
“Rushmore McKenzie,” she said. “You honor me.”
“Hardly.”
She came off her desk, unfolded her arms, and hugged me. I hugged her back. The thoroughbred watched. Erin broke the embrace before it became uncomfortable or evolved into something else.
“Alice Pfeifer,” she said. “This is my friend, McKenzie.”
I offered my hand. “Alice,” I said.
She shook my hand. “Mr. McKenzie.”
“Just McKenzie,” I said.
“Alice is the most important person in the building,” Erin said. “Without her, Salsa Girl Salsa would shudder to a halt.”
“That’s not true,” Alice said.
“It is; it is.” As if to prove it, Erin draped an arm around the young woman’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze. For a moment they reminded me of Nina and Erica, the proud mother showing off her daughter.
“McKenzie,” Erin said, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I was in the neighborhood. Thought I’d drop in and see how you’ve been doing.”
“I’m doing quite well, thank you.”
“No problems?”
“None beyond the usual trials and tribulations of managing—wait.” A troubled look clouded Erin’s eyes, and she removed her arm from Alice’s shoulders. “Ian. He sent you, didn’t he?” She turned her attention toward the young woman. Her voice was quiet, almost tranquil, as always. “What is it with men that they have such a difficult time keeping a secret?”
Alice shrugged her reply.
“I should explain,” Erin said. “McKenzie is—what should I call you?”
I didn’t have a ready answer, although I was asked the question all the time. Unlicensed private investigator? Semiprofessional busybody? Unabashed kibitzer?
Bored rich jerk? my inner voice said.
“How ’bout concerned friend?” I said aloud.
“I should go,” Alice said.
“No, don’t,” Erin said. “McKenzie isn’t that kind of friend. Unless something’s happened I haven’t heard about. You and Nina?”
“Nina sends her love,” I said. “She wants to know when you two are going to get together.”
“See, Alice, not that kind of friend. McKenzie, the thing with my door locks—it was just a prank. Kids.”
“Not a chance.”
“Oh? That’s your considered opinion?”
“You’re isolated here. There isn’t any residential housing within a half mile in any direction. No parks. No malls. No stores. Do you honestly think a bunch of kids went out of their way to pull a practical joke on someone they didn’t know in a place they never hang out?”
“It could happen.”
“Did it happen to anyone else in the park?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“Well, then.”
“That doesn’t mean I require your services.”
“Yet they’re at your disposal.”
“What kind of services?” Alice asked.
“McKenzie is an ex-cop,” Erin said. “He now works as a kind of roving troubleshooter.”
Roving troubleshooter—I like the sound of that, my inner voice said.
“Maybe…” Alice said.
“No maybes.”
“But…”
“No buts.”
“Erin?”
Erin’s usually calm voice rang with authority. “Alice,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.” Alice gazed down at her shoes. She might have been the most important person in the room, but she wasn’t the boss. Erin sighed dramatically as if she regretted pulling rank on her assistant.
“Alice always calls me ‘ma’am’ when she’s disappointed in me,” she said. “McKenzie, you’ve never been here before, have you?”
“No.”
“Would you like a tour?”
“Sure.”
“I need—” Erin stared at her watch for a few beats. “I was promised a telephone call from California in three minutes. ’Course, they’re never on time. Alice, do me a favor. Give McKenzie a tour of our production plant, and I’ll join you in approximately eighteen minutes.”
“If it isn’t an imposition,” I said.
“Alice?”
“No imposition at all.”
“Good. I’ll meet you out on the floor. I’ll explain more thoroughly, McKenzie, why you have no reason to be concerned about me. Scoot. Scoot.”
We left the office. Erin closed the door behind us.
“California?” I said.
“It’s a long story,” Alice said. The sound of her voice gave me the impression that she’d love to tell it but didn’t think she should.
“You seem more concerned about what happened the other day than Erin,” I said.
Her eyes found mine and quickly darted away. Again I felt she wanted to explain but chose not to. I didn’t press the matter, deciding it would be better to ask Salsa Girl myself. Why risk getting the kid in trouble with her boss?
We scooted down the corri
dor back to the reception area. Alice deposited my jacket in a closet and pulled out a long white linen lab coat that fell to my knees.
“Put this on,” she said.
I did. She slid into one as well.
“I don’t like to leave the office uncovered,” she said. “We have a couple of other girls who work here, but they’re both part-time. One of them should be here, but she called in sick. If you’re wearing jewelry, take it off.”
I didn’t wear jewelry, but I asked anyway. “Why?”
“So it won’t fall off into the product.”
“That’s a thing that happens?”
“You’d be surprised. Our people can’t wear nail polish or makeup, either.”
Before we went any farther, Alice also gave me a board with a nondisclosure agreement clipped to it. By signing it, she said, I was basically agreeing that anything I saw or heard in the Salsa Girl production plant would remain in the Salsa Girl production plant. I took her word for it and signed without reading the document even as my inner voice told me, Don’t ever tell your lawyer what you just did.
Afterward, I was led into a “staging area,” where I was required to don a white hairnet, wash my hands, and submerge the bottoms of my shoes into a foot bath. From there, I was ushered into the production plant itself. It was brightly lit and had a wall of windows. It was also cool. Most of the employees—I counted over a dozen—wore sweatshirts and sweaters under their white jackets and hairnets. I asked Alice about it.
“The temperature is kept at a constant sixty-five degrees,” she told me. “The salsa itself is kept at thirty-four to thirty-six degrees. The threshold temperature is forty. That’s when spoiling agents start to work. It’s why the cold chain is so very important to us—keeping the product at the correct temperature from the moment it’s packaged until it arrives in the stores. We guarantee freshness for sixty days after purchase, but it’s actually closer to eighty. We estimate five days maximum to move the product to various distribution centers, although it rarely takes longer than three, if that; add another day for warehousing and one more to rotate the stock into the store coolers. That gives us plenty of leeway.
“What you need to remember, McKenzie, is that we don’t sell Salsa Girl off the shelf like Tostitos, Pace, Wild Harvest, Green Mountain, Old Dutch, Newman’s Own, or any of those other jar salsas guaranteed to last twenty years after the apocalypse. Our salsa is refrigerated. That’s why it tastes so good. ’Course, the trade-off is that we often miss out on impulse sales; people don’t usually think to go to the produce or deli section of a store to buy salsa. But for those who do, for those who demand a quality salsa, freshness is paramount.”
The plant was painted white with a concrete floor and a lot of stainless steel equipment. Alice led me across it to a large room in the back. There were huge stainless steel tubs and cabinets in the room, a conveyer belt that led to a washing machine, and a lot of equipment that looked as it would chop off your fingers, if not your entire hand, unless you were careful. There were also cardboard boxes and plastic bins filled with tomatoes, onions, jalapeños, and other fruits and vegetables. An older man, who wore a uniform similar to ours plus rubber gloves and a surgical mask, was examining the boxes and their contents. He looked as if he had done it for a hundred years and expected to continue doing it for a hundred more. He seemed miffed that we interrupted his work.
“This is our prep room,” Alice said. “And this is Hector Lozano, who really is the most important person at Salsa Girl.”
Lozano removed his mask and nodded at Alice as if he believed her.
“This is where we inspect and store all of our ingredients, make sure they’re up to our standards,” she added.
Lozano spoke with a thick Hispanic accent, and I wondered how long he had been in the States. “La Señorita, she will tolerate only the best,” he said.
“This is also where we wash everything, peel the onions, de-stem the jalapeños,” Alice said. “Most of our tomatoes and onions are sourced locally; we have a distributor across the river. Some of the other ingredients, the jalapeños, for example, come from Mexico. We bring them up in our own trucks.”
There was an open box filled with large, ripe tomatoes near the door. I reached for one. Lozano slapped my hand. I pulled it back, looked at the swelling on my knuckles and then at Lozano. He adjusted his hairnet as if nothing had happened. Alice laughed, took my elbow, and spun me toward the door.
“That hurt,” I said.
“Hector takes his job very seriously.”
“Still…”
Alice slowed so I could get a good look through an open door into another room, this one filled with carefully sealed ten-gallon buckets and bags with labels that I couldn’t read from a distance.
“This is where we mix our spices, our recipes,” she said.
I noticed that she didn’t allow me to go inside.
We stopped next to a large stainless steel tank mounted on a metal stand three feet above the floor. A man was standing on a ladder and stirring the ingredients inside the tank with a paddle. Alice said that it was one of two mixing tanks. She explained that all of the ingredients were blended together in the tanks before being siphoned to a “filling hopper.” From there the salsa was pulled through flexible tubing called “filler cylinders” and poured into plastic pods. I watched three women working the assembly line, filling the containers, sealing them, and placing labels on the lids. The lids indicated the flavor of the salsa—the company offered half a dozen varieties—and featured an illustration of a smiling Salsa Girl that bore no resemblance at all to Erin Peterson.
“As you can see,” Alice said, “most of the work is done by hand.”
I watched as the containers moved along rollers into still another room, where the batch numbers and expiration dates were sprayed onto the labels with an ink-jet printer. The next stop was a packing area, where the containers were loaded into boxes that were sealed, labeled, and stacked on wooden pallets. One of the men doing the packing eyed me furtively. I was sure I had seen him before but couldn’t place him. ’Course, I’d met and spoken with so many people over the years, first as a cop with the St. Paul Police Department and now as an unlicensed private investigator, that nearly everyone seemed vaguely familiar to me.
Music was being pumped into the plant, most of it in Spanish. Two-thirds of the employees were Hispanic. The rest were African American, Asian, and white, and I wondered if they ever switched it up—one day Latin tunes, the next hip-hop, the next something else. I was going to ask Alice if they ever listened to jazz, but her attention was drawn away by a half-dozen containers that had somehow slipped through without labels. Alice scooped up the containers and carried them back to the woman who was doing the honors. While she was gone, I noticed again that the man packing the salsa was watching me while pretending not to. That’s when I put a name to his face. Tony Cremer, a good-looking kid who once made his living stealing cars that he sold to chop shops, boosting them out of the parking lots of shopping malls and apartment complexes—Hondas, Toyotas, and Nissans mostly, sometimes Ford and Dodge pickups, whatever could be stripped for parts—until I caught him.
“You behaving yourself, Tony?” I asked.
He didn’t like the question.
“You want somethin’ from me, Officer?” Cremer asked.
“Me? Nah? Tell me, though—does Ms. Peterson know about your checkered past?”
“Yes.” The word came out like a hiss. Cremer added that unlike some people he could name, Ms. Peterson believed in giving a guy a second chance.
“Good for her,” I said.
As far as Cremer was concerned, I was just another cop trying to screw up his life. He proved it by stepping close enough to make me feel uncomfortable. “You gonna ruin it for me?” he asked.
I don’t know why I told him, but I did. “I’m not a cop anymore.”
“Don’t mean you’re not still an asshole.”
“How many cars did you b
oost before I stopped you? And you call me an asshole?”
“What I did—everyone thieves, man. You know that. Some thieve big like the Wall Street guys, some small like me. The only difference is that I got caught.”
“I’m glad to see that you’ve turned it around, Tony,” I said. “But that kind of reasoning can only lead you back into trouble.”
“Like you said, you ain’t a cop no more.”
“What do you know about the super glue in the door locks the other day?”
“I don’t know nothin’ about that. Why would I? This has been a good place for me. Why would I fuck it up?”
“Just asking.”
“You tryin’ to hang that on me, Officer? You gotta know, a man don’t shit where he eats.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
By then Alice had returned. She must have felt the tension between Cremer and me.
“Everything all right?” she asked.
“He was interrupting my work, is all,” Cremer said.
“Sorry,” I said.
Cremer returned to his task. Alice led me away. She whispered, “He makes me nervous.”
“How so?”
“The way he watches me.”
“You are a pretty girl.”
“Not like that. He watches like he’s waiting for me to do something wrong.”
Something that he can use against her? my inner voice asked.
“It’s probably just my imagination,” Alice added.
“Or not,” I said. “Always trust your instincts. We have them for a reason.”
Alice led me to the room where the pallets loaded with packed boxes of salsa were stored. Most of them were wrapped in plastic. Another worker was arranging them near the large back door. It was cold inside; near freezing, I guessed.
“This is the finished-goods cooler,” Alice said. “From here the salsa is loaded onto the trucks. On Mondays we have a truck that takes the product to Texas and New Mexico and another for local deliveries, those within half a day’s drive. For all of our other customers, we have a distributor that picks up the product on Fridays and delivers it to distribution centers across the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes Region. We’re in fifteen states now. McKenzie, I don’t think what happened with our locks was a prank. I think someone wanted to send us a message. Someone who knew how important Fridays are to us.”
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