by DaveKearns
"Before we start digging through these printouts, let me tell you what I'm looking for," I said. "What I want to know is this: should Brick have been there for that shift? Were any other cars there that night that usually weren't there?" I knew that if Brick was supposed to work that shift, and all the other cars in the lot were supposed to be there, we were going nowhere. It would just mean that someone on that shift probably did him in. That wouldn't narrow it down much.
Michelle looked up at me, blinking. "That's what the people in security said that the police wanted to know. I already went through these with security before I came over. Apparently, these are the only two cars that shouldn't have been in the parking lot." She picked up the copy of the report from the security office and pointed at a couple of license plate numbers on the printout that had circles drawn around them. I recognized one as being the plate on my brother's car. It was a New Mexico vanity plate: XL 429, for the model of car and the engine size.
Michelle continued, "Our records showed that Brick didn't usually work that shift. The other car belongs to Ray Archer. He also usually didn't work that shift. The only thing is," she paused, "people who want to work extra shifts can just show up and drive the trucks if one’s available. If there are extra trucks ready to go, they can use one. Just because Ray's car was there doesn't mean he did anything, does it?"
I thought about the ride in the blue Chevy with Ray. Ray seemed hostile when he drove off, but the idea that I had ridden in a car with Brick's killer seemed implausible to me.
"You say that someone can just show up to drive extra shifts," I said. "Do they have to check in with a foreman or anything?"
"Not for the graveyard shifts." She flushed in embarrassment at her choice of words. "I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking. The thing is, most drivers don't want to work the night shifts because it's harder to see what you're doing in the quarry. It's dangerous driving up and down the wall of the pit. Most nights only about half the trucks are in use. If someone wants to make some extra cash, the trucks are gassed up and ready to go."
"Do drivers punch a time clock?" I asked.
"Sure. All the hourly employees punch in. If they want to get paid, they have to punch their card."
"Well, did anyone check to see if Brick and Ray punched in at the time clock?"
"I don't know."
"Did the police ask you about who usually worked what shift?"
"Yes they did. I sent them out to talk to the foreman. He knows who works what shifts. There are only about fifty drivers."
"Can you get at the time cards?"
She nodded. "Anyone can," she said. "There's a big rack just outside the driver's locker room."
"I want to look at Brick and Ray's cards."
"I can look at them tomorrow morning and call you."
"I want to look at them now."
She sighed. "Okay," she said. "You drive."
Chapter Twenty-One
We were on Interstate 70 in Brick's Ford with the windows cracked. We weren't talking much. I was watching the road and I guess Michelle was watching it too. Occasionally she would reach up to straighten her hair or she would cross her legs and it would catch my attention. Then I would remember how beautiful she was and how much I liked being around her. At the same time, I felt that there was a wall between us that I couldn't break through. I didn't know if the wall was something Brick had left behind, or something that I had created. I was confident of one thing - Brick wasn't stupid enough to leave Michelle for another woman.
We passed the point where the cruiser had pulled Ray's car over that morning, and this time the car was gone. I wondered if Ray had come back for it or if it had been towed away.
Further along Interstate 70, immigration was running a roadblock in the oncoming lanes of the highway again. A dozen cars sat in line with their headlights on. As we passed the roadblock, an officer with a lighted orange baton waved one of the huge trucks coming from the quarry around the roadblock and it went on down the highway. No point in making that thing wait, I thought. If they checked every one of the trucks, there would be a permanent jam of quarry trucks at the roadblocks.
"How many trucks does the quarry operate?"
She thought about it for a moment. "About forty, I think, depending on which ones are in the shop."
"And all of them make this same run along the highway to the train yard?"
"That's right."
"None of them goes the other direction, towards Los Cruces?"
"No reason to. The train depot is in the other direction."
I made the turn off the highway smoothly and aimed the car down the center of the road to the quarry. I hit the high beams, ran the speed up to about 80, and settled in for the drive. I watched the reflective markers beside the road flash by. Michelle had fallen silent and stared out her window at the darkness.
When we arrived at the entry gate to the quarry, I popped Brick's card into the reader and the arm on the gate lifted for us to enter. The guard house at the gate was empty, and the parking lot had just a few cars scattered in it. A glowing cloud of dust hung over the quarry and the sounds of trucks straining under load in the quarry filled the air. Michelle pulled a magnetic key card from her purse and used it to unlock the door into the administration building.
"I thought the time cards were over by the locker room," I said.
"They are," she said. "But I had an idea."
I followed her down the rows of cubicles to her workspace. She had a small potted ivy on her desk, along with several pictures of Rosalie and one of her mother. She sat in her office chair, rifled through her top desk drawer, and found a set of keys.
She stood up and walked towards Dean's office. I followed her down the aisle, curious about what she was up to. She inserted the key into the lock of a file cabinet, pulled out one of the drawers, and started fingering through tabs on folders.
"What are you looking for?" I asked.
"Just a second," she said. She continued thumbing across the manila tabs on the folders. I crossed my arms and leaned against the wall, waiting. The office had an odd feeling to me. I knew that during the day the place hummed with work and energy, but it was late and we were alone in the sea of cubicles and office equipment.
She finally found what she was looking for and pulled the folder from the cabinet drawer. She walked over to the copy machine and turned it on. It hummed and indicator lights flashed on the little control panel, indicating that the copier was warming up. "I've got Ray's personnel file here," she said. "I knew you were going to ask for it eventually so I'm making you a copy. By the way, if it gets out that I gave you this, I'll lose my job. Okay?"
I swallowed hard. "I'll make sure nobody knows."
Michelle pressed the copy button, and the sheets from Ray's personnel file started to slide into the machine from the feed tray. Fresh copies of the file slid into the copy tray with a clicking sound. I resisted the urge to pull them from the tray and read them until all the sheets were copied.
The last page slid through the copier feed tray and returned to the top of the stack. "Thank God," Michelle said. "I'm always afraid when I'm copying something I shouldn't be that the thing will jam with my paper down inside it." She slid the papers back into the personnel folder and went over to the cabinet. She put the folder back into the drawer and locked the cabinet.
I flipped through the pages while Michelle was putting her keys back in her desk. The top pages had general information about Ray typed on them: name, age, address, social security and home phone numbers, education, health insurance information. The rest of the pages were work histories and performance reviews from the supervisor. Most of the handwriting on the performance review was in a scrawl that was almost impossible to read. Michelle was finished at her desk and was peering over my shoulder, looking at the pages with me.
"That's Conrad's handwriting," she said. "The driver's foreman. I've gotten to where I can read it."
"What a relief," I said. I handed the c
opies to Michelle, who folded the copied report in half and put it in her purse.
Michelle led me out of the administration building and into the building that housed the small cafeteria and driver's locker room. She flipped lights on as we walked down the linoleum-floored hallways. We came to the driver's locker room. Outside the door was a large gray rack peppered with cream colored time cards. There weren't any labels on any of the slots in the rack. I guessed that there were about fifty cards in all.
"How do people find their cards?" I asked. "This is ridiculous!"
Michelle gave me an amused glance. "The same way people find their car in a parking lot, silly. They remember where they put it."
"Oh," I said.
She started checking cards on the left side of the rack. I began my search on the right end. I found Brick's card almost immediately. It was on the bottom row of the rack on the column second from the right side.
"I've got Brick's," I said.
"Good," Michelle said, "don't lose your place." She was making her way methodically through the columns of cards, looking at each one for just a moment. I held Brick's card in my left hand and continued pulling cards from the rack, watching for Ray's. Each card had the last name and employee ID number along the top edge, and below the names was a thin series of columns for start and stop times, with one column for each day for two weeks.
Michelle pulled a card from the rack, stared at it for a second and said. "This is it. This one's Ray's. He didn't clock in the night of Brick's accident."
"But the security gate shows that his car was here, right?" I said.
"Right," Michelle answered. "This is odd," she said. "This shows that he didn't show up for his shift today either. Last week he worked all day shifts, and today he didn't clock in."
I thought about Ray's car parked on the shoulder of the highway after I’d seen the patrolman pull him over. I held Brick's time card out for Michelle to look at. Columns of numbers in red ink ran lengthwise along the card.
"Did Brick clock in the night of the accident?" I asked.
"No. He didn't work any other night shifts on this card, either."
I stood there thinking for a second, and Michelle was watching my expression to see what I was going to do. "Let's see if we can find Marty Broad Eagle’s card."
It only took us a minute to track it down. Marty hadn't clocked in the night of the accident, either. He apparently worked day shifts, but like Ray, he hadn't shown up for work after being pulled over by the patrolman either. We put the time cards back into the rack at the same places where we had found them and then we walked back into the administration building, turning off the fluorescent lights in the hallways as we went.
Chapter Twenty-Two
It was nearly eleven, but the quarry pit was active and the sounds of trucks carried into the parking lot. It occurred to me as we walked the short sidewalk to the car that Brick's life was snuffed out on a night like this, and that I was driving his girlfriend back to his house in his car after having dinner with her at his kitchen table. My morality was gnawing at me, but I got into the car and started it up just the same. This time I wasn't watching Michelle's profile out of the corner of my eye when I drove. I was looking at my reflection that the lights from the instruments cast in the windshield. I wasn't sure any more whether I was hunting Brick's killers or if I was trying to take his place, and in doing so somehow claim the things that had belonged to him.
We were only a couple of miles from the intersection with the highway, and I could just pick out the headlights of cars coming west from Alamogordo. I thought back, trying to remember how many days I had been there. I must have been tired, because I had to focus hard to realize it had been less than a week. I shook my head.
"What's the matter?" Michelle asked.
"Nothing," I said. I wasn't going to tell her that I was unsure of my own motives, that I felt more alive in Brick's shoes than I had felt for several years in my own.
"Something's up. You haven’t said anything since we left the quarry. What is it?"
I wasn't going to tell her that I wanted to drive her back to Brick's house and make love to her there, but that I knew that she’d been in Brick's bed.
"Nothing," I said. "All right?" My voice sounded hard and cold, and she watched me for a second. Then she just gave up and crossed her arms, staring out the window into the darkness.
I didn't say anything else until we were back at the spot where the immigration patrol ran the roadblock. The traffic jam was gone, along with the patrol cars and the bus. I switched on the dome light in the car. The light it produced was feeble.
"Read me Ray's personnel file," I said. She was leaning up against the door, showing most of her back to me. "Please?" I asked.
"Okay," she said tonelessly. She pulled the copy of Ray's personnel file out of her purse and looked at the first page for a few seconds. "Ray's 36," she said factually. "He's worked at the quarry for three years. Graduated high school in Alamogordo, but that was before my time. No dependents listed under the insurance section. Looks like he's on his own."
"Except for Marty," I said quietly. She flipped the page and shifted her position in the seat to get more light on the pages of the file.
"Here's Ray's supervisor's report. Looks like the first two years there wasn't much to talk about. Apparently the supervisor didn't have any trouble with him. Last year looks different. This says that Ray was reprimanded for fighting with other drivers a couple of times. Wait a minute! Says here that Ray had a fight with Brick in the locker room only a few weeks ago."
"What?"
"It doesn’t say what the fight was about, but apparently several drivers had to separate them."
"Did Brick ever mention the fight to you?" I asked.
"No." She put the paperwork down in her lap and stared at me for several seconds.
''You know I would have told you about it if he had. You still don't trust me."
"I was just asking," I answered. I didn't think my voice carried much conviction in it. Michelle frowned and went back to reading the file. "This is odd," she said.
"What's that?"
"It says that the foreman reprimanded Ray last week for goldbricking in one of the trucks. It says that he only ran two loads from the quarry in his eight hour shift, and that only one load actually showed up at the train yard. It says he warned Ray that if it happened again, he'd fire him and dock him for the price of the load from the quarry."
"Does it say what Ray's excuse was?"
"Apparently Ray said he had trouble with the truck and didn’t think it was safe to drive to the train depot so he brought the truck back for the mechanics to look at."
"That might explain the missing run to the train yard, but not the missing load. Do they usually keep close track of how many runs the drivers do per shift?" I asked.
"Well, I've heard that most of the drivers average about four runs for a shift. The foreman does spot checks on the drivers to make sure they're pulling their weight."
"How would they know if a particular load shows up at the train yard or not?"
"They have a man at the train depot who writes down the tonnage of the load and the truck number when he loads the copper ore into the rail cars. If the foreman was doing a spot check on that driver, he'd see the number of loads that the driver dumped over there."
"Can you think of anyone local who would want to buy copper ore?" I asked.
"No. It requires a big processing plant to make anything useful out of it. There’s some gold in the ore, too, but not a lot."
"Maybe he just dumped it in the desert so he wouldn't have to make the trip over to the yard. Maybe he was sitting drinking beer somewhere," I said.
"Maybe," she said, but I don't think either of us believed it. We had passed Holloman Air Force base and were at the edge of Alamogordo. A smorgasbord of fast food restaurants, gas stations, and hotels beckoned us with neon lights.
"Do you mind if we drive by Ray's place on the way
home?" I asked.
"That depends," she said. "Are you planning on getting into a fight with him tonight?"
"I just want to know where he lives," I said. "It would be easier if you helped me find it. Do you mind?"
"All right," she said. She looked at the first page of the personnel file, and read Ray's address from it. "1414 Mantez. Just drive like you're going to the shopping mall and take a right at the stop light just before you get to the mall." Then she reached across to hand me the folded up copy of Ray's personnel file. I took it from her and shifted forward in my seat far enough that I could get it into my back pocket.