“Yes, but—”
“They at home now?”
“Actually, they’re at my parents’—”
Till nodded, the corners of his mouth turning down. “Get everybody out. I can’t insist, because I have no standing right now, but if turning one switch can send your whole development into the sky, you’re fools not to evacuate.”
Ballsard’s eyes were wild as he looked toward the Bohemian. “You’ve got to do it, Bob,” the Bohemian said.
“When word gets out—”
“I understand, but Agent Till is right. You must get everyone out.”
“I’ll take it to the Board,” Ballsard said.
“Do it this evening, Mr. Ballsard.” Till picked up his watch and strapped it on his wrist. “That’s it, then. The chief and I will work together, with A.T.F. in an advisory capacity. Mr. Ballsard will inform his Board of Members that Crystal Waters must be evacuated. We will reconvene as the situation warrants.” Till stood and started for the door. Chief Morris scrambled to follow him. Ballsard, looking dazed, stood up then and also walked out, his lips tight over his Teddy Roosevelt teeth.
I started to get up, too, but the Bohemian motioned for me to sit back down.
“I wouldn’t want to be Bob Ballsard tonight,” the Bohemian said.
“I wouldn’t want to be Bob Ballsard any night,” I said.
“Vlodek—”
I held up my hand. “Why the hell didn’t he run out of here like Paul Revere, to alert everyone at Crystal Waters to get out?”
“He has considerations,” the Bohemian said.
“Bullshit.”
“The Members are not as resilient as you, Vlodek. They were not schooled in bouncing up and starting over, like you did. They would not know to bathe at a local health center.”
It was a small thing, but startling. “How do you know that?”
“Stanley apprised me of your status.” He shook his head. “Enough of that. How do we progress?”
“We’re out of it,” I said. “Chief Morris has the case, but that’s nominal. A.T.F. has the scent; they’ll follow it.”
The Bohemian shook his head. “Only until the next rumor of a terrorist threat aimed at a downtown skyscraper. Then we go on the back burner. No, Vlodek, we must pursue this investigation ourselves. Stanley, do you agree?”
“Absolutely, Mr. Chernek.”
“How, Stanley? You know law enforcement. A.T.F. has the databases, field agents, labs, and big-time experience. Things we don’t have.”
“Maybe, Mr. Elstrom, but like Mr. Chernek says, we’re just one terrorist alert away from being put on hold. You saw the way Agent Till was reluctant to commit to anything, how he wanted the chief to be in charge. Agent Till can’t commit resources to a threat against a gated community full of rich people, especially since what’s been destroyed is an empty house and a lamppost. Think what would happen if the papers picked up on that, what they would say about Agent Till nursemaiding a place like Crystal Waters when he should be focused on the airports, the railroad stations, the skyscrapers downtown. No, we’ve got to stay on this ourselves, like Mr. Chernek says.”
“So you both believe we should continue our own interviews?”
They nodded.
I pulled out the contractor list the Bohemian had revised. “Do either of you remember anything about these electricians? Any problems, even little ones?”
“I just wrote the checks,” the Bohemian said. “The Safe Haven partners would have dealt with any problems.”
“I’ve been thinking of something this morning, Mr. Elstrom.” Stanley started drumming his fingers slowly on the tabletop. “At the tail end of the project, one of the electricians didn’t show up to wire something, and everybody was worried the final occupancy permits wouldn’t be issued on time. They had to scramble to get somebody else to finish the work.”
The Bohemian shook his head. “I don’t remember.”
“Would it have had to do with wiring the fountain?” I asked Stanley.
His fingers stopped drumming. “Could be.”
“Ziloski, the electrician I brought to look at the lamppost, told me that’s why he was hired back then, to finish wiring the fountain for somebody who hadn’t shown up.”
Stanley nodded. “I remember the electrician going missing, and wondering if he might have had something to do with the bomb. But I called his employer and they said he had a family emergency, so I dropped it.”
“Do you remember his name?”
“James, I think. James something. But like I said, he came up clean.”
I picked up my contractor list. “Do you remember which company he worked for?”
“It was so long ago, Mr. Elstrom. And like I said, it was a dead end.”
“You looked for the man’s name on the parolee list?”
“I didn’t recognize any of those names.”
“Keep trying, Stanley. We’re chasing straws in the wind.”
Stanley reached across the table for my copy of the contractor list, circled two names, and gave it back. “You check those electricians. I’ll check the other two.”
We left the Bohemian sitting in his grand conference room and rode down in the elevator together and went to our cars.
The sun was going down as I got off the expressway. I didn’t want to eat alone. I didn’t want to think alone. I swung by Leo’s. His Porsche was parked at the curb in front of his mother’s bungalow.
“Want to go get something to eat?” I asked through the screen when he came to the door. Then I noticed the silvery, geometric-patterned shirt and the light green slacks. Dress duds. “Going out, or merely planning to change a tire on a dimly lit road?”
“I just dropped Ma at church for Friday night bingo. Endora and I are going to the movies.” He opened the door and stepped out onto the concrete porch. He studied my face in the glow of the yellow bug light. “You all right, Dek?”
“Peachy. Why do you ask?”
“Because you look like shit. When’s the last time you ate?”
I thought back. “Lunch, but I left most of it. I’m on a new diet: the Bad Nerves Diet. I’m going to write a book about it and get rich.”
He turned around and held the door open for me. “You hit the jackpot tonight, pal: pork, sauerkraut, and dumplings. A Polish Happy Meal.” I followed him into the kitchen.
He pulled a big plastic salad bowl out of a cabinet, opened the refrigerator, and filled the bowl with the leftovers. He stuck a fork and a knife upright, like two flagpoles, into the big chunk of pork and handed the bowl to me. It must have weighed five pounds, and it was still warm. “Mind if we sit outside? You’re such a pig, and I won’t have the time to hose down the kitchen after you’re done.” He grabbed two bottles of Pilsner Urquell out of the refrigerator, and we went outside to sit on his front stoop.
He opened both beers and set one on the cement next to me. “Now tell Uncle Leo what’s ailing you, but talk straight ahead, toward the street. I don’t want your food on this two-dollar shirt.”
I ate and told him about the extra wires under the lamppost and the meeting with A.T.F. at the Bohemian’s. When I told him my theory that all the D.X.12 in Gateville was wired together, he set down his beer bottle so hard I thought I heard a crack.
“One switch blows it all away?”
“Could be.”
“Why hasn’t he threatened that, then?”
“I think he’s playing with them, stringing them along, one explosion at a time. A cat with a mouse.”
“Or because he thinks he can extract more total money if he does it a chunk at a time.” Leo looked off down the street. “At least you’ve passed it off to the Feds,” he said.
“I’m still on it. Stanley remembered part of a name from 1970, one of the electricians. The Bohemian wants Stanley and me to chase it down, paralleling Chief Morris and Agent Till.”
“That’s probably wise,” he said, taking a pull on the Urquell.
“No, it’s not. Using Stan
ley and me is like using Laurel and Hardy. I’m not equipped for it, and Stanley is supposed to be spending his time watching security at Gateville. Besides, his wife is sick, and he gets called away.”
“What’s the harm in you poking around, too? Worst case, you generate some billing that buys you hot water for the turret, unless you actually enjoy going to the health center and getting naked with winos?” His eyebrows cavorted on his forehead.
I laughed, for the first time in what felt like forever. Leo Brumsky, with his crazy shirts, pastel pants, and furry eyebrows, always found a way through the cloud to the lining.
He grinned and went on. “Talk to coppers, they’ll tell you: The damndest things can pop up out of nowhere during an investigation. Everybody’s just got to keep plugging.”
I set the bowl of food on the step. It was still over half full. “It’s so amateurish. People can die, Leo, unless this thing is handled right.”
“As you said, A.T.F. is on the job. As for you, do your best. Continue on, as this Chernek wants. And don’t discount amateurs.” He checked his watch and stood up. “You’ve been fed. I’m late.” He ducked into the bungalow and came back with a sheet of aluminum foil. “You can have the remaining pounds for breakfast.”
We walked down the stairs to the curb.
“What theater are you going to?” I asked.
He launched his caterpillar eyebrows into a crazed dance that would have made Groucho Marx squirm with envy.
“The drive-in.”
“You’re a perv, Leo. What’s playing?”
“It doesn’t matter. It makes me feel young,” he said as he got in the Porsche.
“And Endora?”
“She feels really young.” He smiled out the window, twisted the key, and drove away, leaving me with a blast of German exhaust, a double entendre, and a bowl of cooling pork.
Sixteen
“Two young boys from the A.T.F. took our old payroll files first thing this morning,” the woman behind the counter at Universal Electric said with an exaggerated southern drawl. She was in her seventies but still fighting. She’d dyed her hair orange and drawn eyebrows to match on her forehead. She wore a low-cut leopard print dress, tight.
I checked my watch. “It’s Saturday morning, only nine fifteen.”
Her perfume was strong. The kind, I imagined, that came in barrels.
“It’s the early bird gets the worm, honey. They was here at eight sharp.” She leaned over the counter to give me a glimpse of wrinkled breasts. “What’s this about?” she whispered, although we were alone in the tiny office. “Those two A.T.F. boys were as tight-lipped as lockjawed sparrows. They showed me a list of names and asked if any had worked here. I said no. Then they demanded our old payroll records, gave me a receipt, and took off with not more than two peeps.”
I looked around like a spy about to pass a government secret. “They’re looking for a guy who bombed a draft office in 1970. They think he was working for you at the time.”
It was a good lie. She brightened, keeping the breasts on the counter.
“Which project?” she asked, looking up to make sure I was looking down.
“Crystal Waters.”
She nodded.
“You would have been way too young to have been working here then.”
She dropped her voice even more so I’d have to lean closer. “I was a mere slip of a girl, you understand, too young to be working legal, but I was here then.”
I feigned surprise. “Ma’am—”
“Call me Willadean, Honey.”
“Willadean, that certainly is a shock. Do you remember anybody named James who would have worked on that job?”
“James, James …” she pursed her orange lips and lifted off the counter. “First name or last name?”
“I assume it’s a first name.”
She started to shake her head, then stopped. “Could it have been Jaynes, Michael Jaynes?” She spelled the last name out. “Him I remember.”
“How’s that, Willadean?”
“He was a strange, strange man. Wild man with a beard, and full of anger. I remember Mr. Davis, he was the owner then, having to tell Michael time and again to keep his political views to himself. Said he was agitating the other men and Mr. Davis didn’t want the work slowed down from arguing politics and all. Michael was always nice to me, though.”
“When did he leave here?”
“That’s the thing I remember: He just up and disappeared sudden one day. I can’t recall the specific day, but I do remember there was much consternation about what might have happened, like whether he’d been in an accident or been mugged or something. Mr. Davis phoned the rooming house where Michael was staying, but they didn’t know anything. They said his stuff was still in his room. The men working with him didn’t know anything, neither. It was a mystery all around. Mr. Davis held onto Michael’s last paycheck for a while but finally had me forward it on.”
“To where?”
“To the personal contact he wrote on his application, of course.”
“You wouldn’t still have that application?”
“Probably was in the box with the other payroll records I gave to them young boys from the government.”
“And that last canceled check?”
“They was young boys from the A.T.F. They didn’t know how to ask things of a lady.”
“You’ve still got it?”
“Oh, I still got it, honey.” She leered across the counter.
I tried to leer back. “For sure, but I meant that last canceled check.”
She cocked her hip and wiggled her finger in a come-hither gesture I’d seen once in a beach-party movie made a few years before I was born. She led me to the back warehouse, walking in front of me so I could admire the shifting tautness of the leopard fabric from behind. As we moved between the skids of cartons, one of the degenerates that lurks in my brain struck up the strains of Maria Muldaur singing “It Ain’t the Meat, It’s the Motion,” complete with a bump-and-grind drum roll that kept time to the clicking of Willadean’s red high heels on the cement floor.
She stopped at the back wall and pirouetted. “The bank records are up there,” she said, pointing one arm and both leopard-covered breasts at a pile of cardboard boxes high on a storage rack. The boxes were neatly labeled. “Whatever you want, just grab it,” she said, taking a half step toward me.
I don’t scamper—I’m too big—but at that moment, I was as sprightly as a pup chipmunk as I hopped up onto the skid of electrical cables below the cardboard boxes. I pulled out the box labeled CANCELED CHECKS, 1970–1979 and jumped down, clutching the box like a shield. I carried it to a nearby workbench. Willadean unfolded the top flaps and went through the rubber-banded bundles of bank envelopes inside, extracting several.
“You said he would have disappeared in April of 1970?”
“Yes.”
“Then we would have sent out his last check in June or July, and it would have come back processed in August or September.” She opened several of the envelopes and fanned through the green payroll checks inside, finally extracting one. “Here it is,” she said, handing it to me.
It was an ordinary check, dated April 25, 1970, made out to Michael S. Jaynes in the amount of $116.74. I turned it over. A woman’s hand had endorsed it first with Michael’s name, then with her own underneath, “Pay to Carlinda State Bank. Nadine Reynolds.” The Carlinda State Bank of Carlinda, California, had rubber-stamped it beneath her signature.
“You wouldn’t know what relationship this Nadine Reynolds had to Michael?” I asked.
“Only that she must have been the contact listed on his employment application. I don’t recall whether the form said she was his wife, his mother, his sister, or anything.”
“There must have been an address for her, to send the check?”
“On the application in the boxes them boys took.”
We walked back to the office, her leading, me a safe five paces behind. She mad
e a copy of the check for me and promised to send another to the A.T.F. agents who’d been there that morning.
“I’m here every day except Sunday, honey, but my nights are free,” she told me at the door.
I told her she could count on me being back, sure as a bee sniffs honey on a dewy rose. I didn’t know whether that was possible, but Willadean liked it and smiled an orange smile.
It was ten thirty. I drove east to the other electrical contractor Stanley had given me to check. The owner, about seventy, came out of his office mad and said he’d told “the authorities” who’d come that morning that he didn’t have time for such crap, and besides, who saves payroll records from that long ago, anyway? I agreed with him and left.
I called Agent Till from the Jeep. His message tape said he was gone for the weekend. I told his voice mail about Michael Jaynes and Nadine Reynolds and said one of his junior agents would be receiving a photocopy of the canceled check. I asked him to get back to me on Monday morning with the address for Nadine Reynolds shown on Jaynes’s employment form.
I spent Saturday lunchtime at the Rivertown Health Center. I ran twice as far as my previous record, breathing through my nose to chase away the sticky scent of Willadean the Electric Lady. She’d seen me as ripe game for her lacquered wiles, and I needed to get younger, quick.
Agent Till called at two fifteen that afternoon. “Who’s this Michael Jaynes?”
“Your message machine said you were gone for the weekend.”
“Your government never rests. What do you know about Jaynes?”
“Only what your boys could have found out for themselves. He was outspoken politically. He vanished around the time of the guardhouse bombing, leaving behind his clothes in his rented room. His last paycheck was forwarded to a Nadine Reynolds, apparently to an address shown on the employment application your people picked up. I’d like that address.”
“We’ll check it out.”
“Can I have that address?”
“Why?”
“Anton Chernek wants me to run a parallel investigation.”
“Why the hell would he want that?”
“In case you get distracted with terrorists.”
A Safe Place for Dying Page 15