He frowned, not wanting to give away anything to anyone, but finally directed me to the third door up the hall from him.
My luck didn’t hold when I found the proper door. The man in the tiny office had been in the cluster that saw my undignified entrance into the plant four days ago. At first he didn’t recognize me, but as soon as I mentioned Mitch Kruger’s name, Friday’s episode came back to him. He frowned ferociously and picked up the phone.
“Milt? Dexter here. Did you know that female dick was back? The one who came around last week? You didn’t? Well, she’s with me right now.”
He slammed the receiver down and folded his arms. “You just don’t learn, do you, girlie?”
“Learn what, pork chop?” I saw a folding chair next to his filing cabinet and pulled it out flat to sit on.
“To mind your own business.”
“I’m here doing just that. Answer a few simple questions about Mitch Kruger and you won’t see me again.”
He didn’t say anything. Apparently we were waiting for Milt Chamfers. The plant manager arrived a few seconds later, his tie knotted up to his throat and his jacket on. This was going to be a formal meeting, and I was wearing socks instead of pantyhose.
“What are you doing here?” Chamfers demanded. “I thought I told you to get lost.”
“Same thing that I was here for last week—to see who saw Mitch Kruger and when and where and all those other w questions they teach you in journalism and detecting schools.”
“I don’t know who this Kruger was, let alone when and where,” Chamfers mimicked in a savage falsetto.
“Then I’ll have to talk to everyone here at the plant until I find out who does, won’t I.”
“No you won’t,” he snapped, tightening his thin lips until they disappeared into his chin. “This is private property and I can have you thrown out if you don’t leave at once.”
I tilted back in the folding chair until it touched the filing cabinet, and smiled a little. “It’s a murder investigation now, sonny. I’m going to give you to the cops and you can explain to them why Mitch Kruger’s name makes you so angry and agitated.”
“I don’t let anyone come into my plant snooping around, pretending they’re looking for missing persons when they’re really engaged in industrial espionage. If the cops want to talk to me about some old man who worked here twenty years ago, I’ll talk to them. But not you.”
“Then I’ll just have to come at it from a different direction. You got a pretty small work crew here for such a big management staff, don’t you?”
Chamfers and the benefits guy exchanged a look—guarded, wary—I couldn’t quite make it out. Then Chamfers said, “And you keep wanting me to believe you’re not scoping us out for someone. Who you really working for, Nancy Drew?”
I stood up and looked at him solemnly. “Lockheed, sonny, but keep it to yourself.”
Chamfers once again stayed at my elbow while we made the long hike around to the front. Before we parted I said, “You want me to tell the guy tailing me where I left my car?”
His face shifted momentarily beneath its frown. He was surprised. At the news I had spotted my tail? Or at the news I had one? Pondering that little conundrum I forgot to wave good-bye.
I walked down the road to where the tall grass cut off his view from the side of the building. Once there I hunkered down to wait. It was just about twelve. Maybe Chamfers brought a sandwich, but I was willing to bet he headed over to the little block of Italian restaurants four streets over. I pegged him for the late-model Nissan as well.
The grass hid me from the road, but it didn’t protect me from the sun. It was also a favorite hangout for flies and bees. I was so hot and sweaty after a while that I stopped trying to brush them away when they landed on my arms. At one point I got a rather nasty fly bite. Finally, a few minutes before one, the Nissan drove past me with the flare of gravel I expected from Chamfers.
Staying in the grass along the verge I walked back to the plant. Another car was heading my way from the asphalt square; the maroon Honda, with the benefits manager at the wheel. I waited a few more minutes, but that seemed to be their output from the first shift.
I went back inside, to the door behind the stairwell, and reentered the machine assembly room. By now I figured I looked like someone who’d been doing roadwork on a chain gang all morning. The tops of the high windows had been pulled out on their hinges to let in some air, but it was still cooler in here than it was outside. The women in their tank tops or T-shirts and work pants didn’t look particularly ruffled.
A half dozen were sitting near the door, eating sandwiches and talking softly in Spanish. The others stood alone or in pairs under the windows, looking vacantly at nothing, or talking desultorily. A couple in a far corner were having an intense interchange. This time they all saw me, all but the pair in the far corner, and conversation stopped.
“I’m looking for the foreman,” I said.
“He’s at lunch,” one of the Spanish speakers said in heavily accented English. “You are looking for work?”
“No. Just the foreman. Is he in the building?”
One of the women pointed silently at a door at the far end of the room. It had a chicken-wire glass top; neon shone dimly through it. I made my way past the assembly tables toward it, but then stopped.
“Really, I’m looking for someone who might have seen my uncle last week. He used to work here, and he came back around a week ago yesterday.” They stared at me blankly. “After that he fell into the canal and drowned. They only found his body yesterday.”
A little buzz started behind me in Spanish. The group near the windows coalesced as though drawn by gravity. After a few minutes one of them asked what I wanted.
“I’m hoping someone might have seen him.” I spread my hands in embarrassment. “He was an old man, a drunk, but my mother’s brother. She wants to know if he talked to anyone, or if anyone saw him. The police don’t care about him, but she needs to know—she’d like to know just when he died. He’d been in the water too long for the doctors to be able to tell her.”
The buzz sounded approving. “What did he look like, this uncle of yours?” a heavyset woman about my own age asked.
I described Mitch as best I could. “He used to be a machinist here. For many years.”
“Oh, a machinist. They work on the other side, you know.” It was one of the women by the window speaking, a person of about fifty with a matted yellow perm. When she saw my blank look she added, “You have to go around all the offices and turn left, and then you come to the machine shop, honey.”
I was turning back to the door when she said thoughtfully, “Maybe I seen your uncle, honey. Last Monday, you say? But I don’t think it was then. It was before that he was around here. We were just getting off shift, see, and we could hear some hollering coming from the other end of the hall, and then this old guy came around the corner, kind of shuffling, and laughing a little to himself, and one of the bosses showed up behind him, still yelling.”
“Do you know who it was? Which one of the bosses?” I tried not to speak too quickly.
She shook her head. “I wasn’t really paying that much attention. You know, my mind was on dinner, what I felt up to cooking, what I might be able to find in the store, you know how that goes, honey.”
“You don’t remember what he was saying, do you?”
She chewed on her lower lip a minute, trying to remember. “It was more than a week ago, and I wasn’t paying that much attention.”
A younger woman standing near her spoke up. “I remember, because he looked just like my uncle Roy.” She looked at me apologetically, as if not wanting to imply I had an uncle as bad as Roy. “I don’t know who it was yelling, because the light was behind him, I could only see his shape, but he was just yelling at him to get the hell away from Diamond Head.”
The far door opened and the foreman came out. “Time to get back to work, girls. Who you talking to here?”
/> “Just a girl.”
He looked at me suspiciously.
“She thought maybe you were hiring, but we told her we were all lucky to still have the jobs we got.” It was Roy’s niece, protecting me the way she probably had to protect him, and her own mother, and perhaps herself as well.
“You shouldn’t be on the work floor, girlie,” he said to me. “You looking for a job, you should go to the office. It’s marked real clear and this door ain’t. So scoot.”
I didn’t say any of the things I was thinking of. He was the kind of guy who’d take it out on the other women as soon as I’d shut the door.
I moved down the hall at a good clip, not wanting to run into Dexter or any of the others on their way from the can or the lunchroom or whatever they did this time of day. Following the directions the woman in the assembly room had given me, I made it to the far side of the building and another set of high double metal doors. Beyond these clearly lay a machining room: it was filled with gigantic machines.
Their size was so monstrous that I somehow couldn’t imagine a function associated with them. Large curls of steel lay on the floor near me, like the curls of wood that used to fall when my uncle Bernard was planing boards for shelves. Perhaps the monster above it was some kind of metal plane.
Lost in the scale of the machines were a dozen or so men in overalls or work clothes. The ones actively engaged with the tools wore goggles. As I saw sparks fly near me I stepped back nervously. I needed to find someone who wouldn’t torch me or lose an arm himself if startled by a stranger. Finally I spied a man sitting at a drafting table in a corner and went over to him.
“I’m looking for the foreman.”
He stared at me briefly, then pointed to the opposite corner without speaking. I threaded my way back past the machines, stopping to watch a giant drill move in and out of a thick metal bar on one side. On the other someone was raking more metal curls onto the floor. The men operating the equipment were totally oblivious of me.
Finally I moved to the far end of the floor, where I found yet another minuscule office. A man of about fifty sat behind a desk inside talking on the phone. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to reveal massive forearms. I’d be careful not to make him mad enough to want to pick up one of the presses and hit me over the head.
When he finally finished his conversation—which consisted mostly of a series of grunts and the statement that the fifteenth wasn’t possible—he looked up at me and grunted again. I went through my worn-out spiel about Uncle Mitch.
“Did you know him when he worked here?”
The foreman shook his head slowly, not blinking his flat, rather lizardlike eyes.
“I’d like to talk to some of the guys. A couple of them look old enough that maybe they overlapped a few years. He was around here a week or ten days ago. One of them was bound to have talked to him.”
He shook his head again.
“You know they didn’t talk to him?”
“I know you don’t belong on this shop floor, girlie. So why don’t you get your cute ass out of here before I move it for you.”
I looked from his flat, lizard eyes back to his massive fore-arms and left with as much grace as I could muster.
19
The Prodigal Son
I sat in Lotty’s car, drumming my fingers on the hot steering wheel, trying to decide what to do next. I felt as though everyone in Chicago had been bullying me the last few days, from Todd Pichea through the sheriff’s deputies and now the crew at Diamond Head. It was time to fight back, or at least to prove that I wasn’t just lying down in my sweaty clothes and dying because they’d frowned at me.
I couldn’t decide what to do about Pichea after the failure of my letter to the Chicago Lawyer, but the easiest way to take on Diamond Head would be to lie in wait for the end of the shift and tackle the guys as they came up the road for their cars or the bus. It would be a good two hours until then; I could fill in the time by getting a photo of Mitch Kruger to show them. Anyway, a photo would be essential if I was going to do door-to-door canvassing at the row of bungalows tucked beneath the Damen Avenue bridge. I didn’t think Terry Finchley really had the enthusiasm necessary to add those inquiries to his investigation.
I didn’t want to drive back north to see what Mr. Contreras might have. He might dredge up some old group picture from the local, but I doubted he had anything that would make a good identity aid. The real stumbling block, though, would be his desire to come down and take on the bosses in person. Not that I was doing such a great job on my own, but the old man saw himself as Mike Hammer and I wasn’t ready yet for confrontation on that scale.
I thought I remembered a photo ID among the documents I’d found in Kruger’s room at Mrs. Polter’s house. Her place was almost close enough to walk to, but my hours in the hot sun had taken their toll; I moved Lotty’s Cressida over to Archer.
Mrs. Polter was alone at her battle station—her tormentors must have found some cooler entertainment for the afternoon. A couple of men were coming out of Tessie’s, but the rest of the street was quiet.
When I mounted the rickety steps I saw Mrs. Polter drinking something murky-brown out of a corrugated glass. It might have been instant iced tea, but it looked as though it had been mixed with transmission fluid. She was still wearing the brown gingham housedress. The fabric had frayed further on both sides of the safety pin, so her décolletage was better covered, but ominous holes were starting to open on the sides.
“That old man you was looking for—he’s dead,” she said abruptly.
“Oh, yeah? How’d you find out?”
“His son came. His boy. He told me when he come to collect the old man’s stuff.”
“All the way from Arizona, huh?” Mr. Contreras would have told me if he’d gotten in touch with Kruger’s family. Had Terry Finchley done it? If so, young Kruger got here mighty fast—it was only fifteen hours since we’d identified the body.
“He didn’t say nothing about Arizona. Just that he wanted his father’s things. Not that he took all of them, but I figured since you’d paid for the room through the end of the week I might just as well leave them lay.”
“I guess I could pick up the rest of his stuff. Take it off your hands.”
She finished the brown murk and pulled a pitcher from the left side of the chair. “I’d offer you some, but I’ve only got the one glass. You look kinda thirsty.”
I made a hasty gesture of refusal. I wasn’t that hot.
“I was kinda thinking of his clothes for the Goodwill,” she added.
Meaning she thought she could sell them, perhaps to her other lodgers. “If you think they want his clothes, be my guest. Let me just make sure this—son—didn’t overlook something valuable.”
Of course, anything valuable would be long gone, but Mitch Kruger hadn’t had stocks or bearer bonds to worry about. There was no reason to be gratuitously offensive to the lady by suggesting as much. Mrs. Polter gave gracious consent to my searching Mitch’s room once again.
After the glare of the street I couldn’t see in the unlit stairwell. I felt my way cautiously up the stairs, not wanting to stumble on any loose pieces of linoleum. None of the other inhabitants was roaming the halls, but a fresh smell of bacon overlay the stale grease and cabbage in the air. Someone was having a late lunch, or a very late breakfast. My stomach rumbled sympathetically. I wondered if I could get a cheese sandwich at Tessie’s when I finished here.
By the time I reached the top my eyes had adjusted enough to the dim light to find Mitch’s room. Between Mrs. Polter and the son not much remained. Certainly not Kruger’s union card or his pension papers—not even the newspaper clippings. I hadn’t paid much attention to his clothes, so I couldn’t tell if the landlady had already skimmed off anything, but the portable black-and-white set was gone. If I poked around until I found Mrs. Polter’s room I’d probably discover it there. The temptation was strong, but I didn’t have any real desire to confront her over it.
/>
As I made my way back down I thought gloomily about my own old age, if I lived that long, and probable end. Would it be like this, in a derelict boardinghouse, with nothing but an old TV and some threadbare jeans for an ungrieving landlady to pick through? I wouldn’t even have Mr. Contreras to mourn me. Just as my fantasies were reaching a peak of dreary loneliness, I caught my foot in a loose piece of linoleum and reached the bottom on my hands and knees. I swore and dusted myself off—nothing injured but my pride. If I went around daydreaming instead of keeping my wits about me, Mr. Contreras would at least survive to mourn me.
“That you falling in there?” Mrs. Polter asked when I regained the porch. “Thought I heard kind of a thud.”
“But not worth your while to come investigate. You should get that linoleum tacked down. It’d be kind of hard for you to haul away your boarders’ bodies if they tripped and croaked.… When did Mitch Kruger die?”
She shrugged majestic shoulders. “Couldn’t tell you that, honey. But his son was by here first thing this morning. Matter of fact, I wasn’t even up. He caught me still in my curlers.”
That must have been an awe-inspiring sight. “What did he look like, this son?”
She moved her shoulders again. “I didn’t take his picture. He was a youngish fella, maybe your age, maybe a little older.”
“Did he leave a phone number in case you needed to reach him?”
“I don’t have any call to reach him, honey. I told him the same I’m telling you: take what you want while the room’s still paid for, ’cause at the end of the week I’m turning the rest over to the Goodwill.”
It made me uneasy to give up the room, give up Mitch’s last connection to life. I thought about shelling out another fifty to hang on to the room through next week. And yet, what could I possibly find in there?
Still uneasy, I crossed the street to Tessie’s. She remembered me at once, even what I’d been drinking.
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