09 To the Nines (5 page)

“Singh must have had some friends on the job. I'd like to talk to them.”

Andrew Cone sat through a couple beats of silence, his eyes holding mine, his thoughts private, his expression guarded. “Why don't we put you undercover,” he finally said. “I can give you Singh's job for a day. We haven't filled it yet.”

“I'm not even sure what you make here.”

“We make little things. Machine-tooled gears and locks. Singh's job primarily consisted of measuring minutia. Each part we supply must be perfect. The first day onboard you wouldn't be expected to know much.” He reached for his phone and his mouth tipped into a small smile. “Let's see how good you are at bluffing.”

Ten minutes later I was a genuine bogus TriBro employee, following after Andrew, learning about TriBro Tech. The gears and locks that composed the bulk of TriBro's product were made at workstations housed in a large warehouse-type facility adjoining the reception area and offices. The far end of the warehouse was divided off into a long room where the quality control work was done. Windows looked into the interior. In the entire facility there were no windows looking out. The quality control area consisted of a series of cubbies with built-in tables, shelves, and cabinets. The tables held an odd assortment of weights, measures, machine torture devices, and chemicals. A single worker occupied each of the tables. There were seven people in the quality control area. And there was one unoccupied table. Singh's table.

Andrew introduced me to the area supervisor, Ann Klimmer, and returned to his office. Ann took me table by table and introduced me to the rest of the team. The women were in their thirties and forties. There were two men. One of the men was Asian. Singh would have gravitated to the Asian, I thought. But the women would warm to me faster.

After the introductions and an overview lecture on the operation, I was partnered with Jane Locarelli. Jane looked like she'd just rolled off an embalming table. She was late forties, rail thin, and drained of color. Even her hair was faded. She spoke in a monotone, never making eye contact, her words slightly slurred as if the effort of speech was too much to manage.

“I've worked here for thirty-one years,” she said. “I started working for the senior Cones. Right out of high school.”

No wonder she looked like a walking cadaver. Thirty-one years under fluorescent lights, measuring and torturing little metal doohickeys. Jeez.

Jane hitched herself up onto a stool and selected a small gear from a huge barrel of small gears. “We do two kinds of testing here. We do random testing of new product.” She sent me an apologetic grimace. “I'm afraid that's a little tedious.” She displayed the gear she held in her hand. “And we test parts which have failed and been returned. That sort of testing is much more interesting. Unfortunately, today we're testing new product.”

Jane carefully measured each part of the gear and examined it under a microscope for flaws. When she was done, she reached into the barrel and selected another gear. I had to bite back a groan. Two gears down. Three thousand gears to go.

“I heard Singh didn't show up for work one day,” I said, going for casual curious. “Was he unhappy with the job?”

“Not sure,” Jane said, concentrating on the new gear. “He wasn't very talkative.” After extensive measuring, she decided the gear was okay and went on to a third.

“Would you like to try one?” she asked.

“Sure.”

She handed the gear over and showed me how to measure.

“Looks good to me,” I said after doing the measuring thing.

“No,” she said, “it's off on one side. See the little burr on the edge of the one cog?” Jane took the gear from me, filed the side, and measured again. “Maybe you should just watch a while longer,” she said.

I watched Jane do four more gears and my eyes glazed over and some drool oozed from between my lips. I quietly slid from my stool and moved to the next cubicle.

Dolly Freedman was also testing new gears. Dolly would drink some coffee and measure. Then she'd drink more coffee and perform another test. She was as thin and as pale as Jane, but not as lifeless. She was cranked on coffee. “This is such a bullshit job,” Dolly said to me. She looked around. “Anyone watching?” she asked. Then she took a handful of gears and dumped them into the perfect gear bucket. “They looked good to me,” she said. Then she drank more coffee.

“I'm going to be doing Samuel Singh's job,” I told her. “Do you know what happened to him? I heard he just didn't show up for work one day.”

“Yeah, that's what I heard, too. No one's said much about him. He was real quiet. Carried his computer around and spent all his breaks on the computer.”

“Playing computer games?”

“No. He was always plugged into a phone line. Surfing. Doing email. Real secretive about it, too. If someone came over to him he'd close up the computer. Probably was on some porno site. He looked like the type.”

“Slimy?”

“Male. I keep protection in my desk for those types.” She opened her top desk drawer to show me her canister of pepper spray.

I continued to move around the room, saving Edgar, the Asian guy, for last. Several of the women thought Singh looked unhappy. Alice Louise thought he might be secretly gay. No one could fault his work habits. He arrived on time and he did his barrel. No one knew he was engaged. No one had any idea where he lived or what he did in his spare time, other than surf the Net. Everyone had seen the newspaper article and thought Vinnie looked like a weasel.

I called Ranger at noon.

“Yo,” Ranger said.

“Just checking in.”

“How are the folks at TriBro?”

“Not giving me a lot, but it's still early.”

“Go get 'em, babe.” And he disconnected.

I drifted over to Edgar's table mid-afternoon. Edgar was dropping acid on a small metal bar with threads at either end. One drop at a time. Drip, wait, and measure. Drip, wait, and measure. Drip, wait, and measure. There had to be a thousand bars waiting to be tortured. Nothing was happening. This job made watching grass grow look exciting.

“We're testing a new alloy,” Edgar said.

“This seems more interesting than the gear measuring.”

“Only for the first two million bars. After that, it's pretty routine.”

“Why do you keep this job?”

“Benefits.”

“Health insurance?”

“Gambling. If the product fails, one of us goes to Vegas as a tech rep. And the products fail all the time.”

“What's a tech rep?”

“A technical representative. You know, a repairman.”

“Did Singh ever go to Vegas?”

“Once.”

“And you?”

“On an average, once a month. Failure is usually stress related. And that's my area of expertise.”

“Did Singh like Vegas?”

“Why are you so interested in Singh?” Edgar asked.

“I'm taking over his job.”

“If you were taking over his job you'd be sitting at his desk doing measurements. Instead, you're floating around, talking to everyone. I think you're looking for Singh.”

A point for Edgar. “Okay, suppose I am looking for Singh. Would you know where to find him?”

“No, but I'd know where to start looking. The day before he disappeared he was in the lunch room calling all the McDonald's places, asking if a guy named Howie worked there. It was pretty strange. He was all excited. And it was the first time I'd ever seen him make a call.”

I looked through the window, into the manufacturing area, and I caught Bart Cone's eye. He was examining a machine, standing with three other men. He glanced up and saw me talking to Edgar.

“That's not a happy face,” Edgar said, his attention shifting to Bart.

“Does he ever have a happy face?”

“Yeah, I saw him smile once when he ran over a toad in the parking lot.”

Bart made a wait here gesture to the men at the machine and marched across the work floor to the test area. He wrenched the door open and asked me to follow him out to the offices. I took my purse since it was the end of the day and there wasn't much chance I'd be returning.

Bart was once again dressed in black. His expression was menacing. I followed him into an office that smelled like metal shavings and was a cluttered mess of stacked catalogues and spare parts collected in tattered cardboard boxes. His desk was large, the top heaped with loose papers, disposable coffee cups, more spare parts, a multiline phone, and a workstation computer.

“What the hell were you doing in there?” Bart asked, looking like a guy who might have murdered Lillian Paressi. “I thought I made it clear that we had nothing to tell you about Singh.”

“Your brother feels otherwise. He suggested I work undercover for a day.”

Bart snatched at his phone and punched a key on speed dial. “What's the deal with Ms. Plum?” he asked. “I found her in the test area.” His expression darkened at Andrews answer. He gave a terse reply, returned the handset to the cradle, and glared at me. “I don't care what my brother told you, I'm going to give you good advice and God help you if you don't follow it. Stay out of my factory.”

“Sure,” I said. “Okeydokey.” And I left. I might be a little slow sometimes, but I'm not totally stupid. I know a genuinely scary dude when I see one. And Bart was a genuinely scary dude.

My cell phone rang as I was pulling out of the lot.

“Stephanie? It's your mother.”

As if I wouldn't recognize her voice.

“We're having a nice chicken for dinner tonight.”

My unmarried sister was nine months pregnant, living with my parents, and had turned into the hormone queen. I'd have to endure Valerie's mood swings to get to the chicken dinner. Valerie's boyfriend, Albert Kloughn, would most likely be there, too. Kloughn was also Valerie's boss and the father of her unborn baby. Kloughn was a struggling lawyer, and he was practically living at the house, trying to get Valerie to marry him. Not to mention Valerie's two little girls by a previous marriage who were nice kids, but added to the bedlam potential.

“Mashed potatoes with gravy,” my mother said, sensing my hesitation, sweetening the offer.

“Gee, I sort of have things to do,” I said.

“Pineapple upside-down cake for dessert,” my mother said, pulling out the big gun. “Extra whipped cream.” And she knew she had me. I'd never in my life turned down pineapple upside-down cake.

I looked at my watch. “I'm about twenty minutes away. I'll be a couple minutes late. Start without me.”

Everyone was at the table when I arrived.

My sister, Valerie, was pushed back about a foot and a half to accommodate her beach ball belly. A couple weeks ago she'd started using the belly like a shelf, balancing her plate on it, tucking her napkin into the neck of her shirt, catching spilled food on her huge swollen breasts. She'd gained seventy pounds with the baby and she was all big boobs and double chins and ham hock arms. Unheard of for Valerie, who previous to her divorce had been the perfect daughter, resembling the serene and slim Virgin Mary in every way, with the possible exception of virginity and hair style. The hair was Meg Ryan.

Albert Kloughn was at her side, his face round and pink, his scalp gleaming under his thinning sandy hair. He was watching Valerie with unabashed awe and affection. Kloughn wasn't a subtle guy. He hadn't any idea how to hide an emotion. Probably he wasn't great in a courtroom, but he was always fun at the dinner table. And he was surprisingly endearing in an oddball way.

Valerie's two girls from her first and only marriage, Angie and Mary Alice, were on the edges of their seats, hoping for a fun disaster . . . like Grandma Mazur setting the tablecloth on fire or Albert Kloughn spilling hot coffee into his lap.

Grandma Mazur was happily sipping her second glass of wine. My mom was at the head of the table, all business, daring anyone to find fault with the chicken. And my dad shoveled food into his mouth and acknowledged me with a grunt.

“I read in the paper where aliens from a different galaxy are buying up all the good real estate in Albany,” Grandma said.

“They'll get hit hard with taxes,” Kloughn told her. “They'd be better to buy real estate in Florida or Texas.”

My father never raised his head, but his eyes slid first to Kloughn and then to my grandmother. He muttered something that was too low to carry. I suspected it was in the area of good grief.

My father is retired from the post office and now he drives a cab part-time. When my grandmother came to live with my parents, my mother stopped storing the rat poison in the garage. Not that my father would actually take to poisoning my grandmother, but why tempt fate? Better to store the rat poison at cousin Betty's house.

“If I was an alien I'd rather live in Florida anyway,” Grandma said. “Florida has Disney World. What's Albany got?”

Valerie looked like she was ready to drop the baby on the dining room floor. “Get me a gun,” Valerie said. “If I don't go into labor soon I'm going to shoot myself. And pass the gravy. Pass it now.”

My mother jumped to her feet and handed the gravy boat to Valerie. “Sometimes the contractions are hardly noticeable in the beginning,” my mother said. “Do you think you could be having hardly noticeable contractions?”

Valerie's attention was fully focused on the gravy. She poured gravy on everything . . . vegetables, applesauce, chicken, dressing, and a heap of rolls. “I love gravy,” she said, spooning the overflow into her mouth, eating the gravy like soup. “I dream about gravy.”

“It's a little high in saturated fats,” Kloughn said.

Valerie glanced sideways at Kloughn. “You're not going to lecture me on my diet, are you?”

Kloughn sat up straight in his seat, his eyes wide and birdlike. “Me? No, honest, I wouldn't do anything like that. I like fat women. Just the other day I was thinking how fat women were soft. Nothing I like better than big, soft, squishy pillows of fat.”

He was nodding his balding head, trying hard, running down dark roads of panic.

“Look at me. I'm nice and fat, too. I'm like the Doughboy. Go ahead, poke my stomach. I'm just like the Doughboy,” Kloughn said.

“Omigod,” my sister wailed. “You think I'm fat.” She went into open-mouthed sobbing and the plate slid from her stomach and crashed onto the floor.