Nightwork (13 page)

“Write your name on there, will you?” the guard said. “Truth is, I’m supposed to, but I can’t hold a pen too good anymore.” He appeared past retirement age. The raindrops on his drooping, hound-dog face looked like tears. “When your name is on it, pin it to your jacket and I’ll open the gates and you can drive on in.”

Dave did as he was told. The guard continued to lean at the window, watching but probably not seeing. Dave pricked a finger pushing the pin through his lapel. He sucked the finger. “That do it?”

“Fine, thanks.” The guard stepped creakily up into the booth again and shut the door. The wide, high, chainlink gates swung open. Dave drove the rattly car through, and headed it up a two-lane strip of blacktop that glistened in the rain. He passed parking lots filled with cars parked on the bias in neat, shiny rows. He drove on. A sign read
EXECUTIVE PARKING LOT
.
He slowed and almost swung in at the arrow painted on the paving, then saw ahead through the rain another sign—
VISITORS
.
He left the battered Valiant there, among new Audis, Cutlasses, BMWs, and hurried, head down, toward double glass doors that glowed with light in the bleak, unbroken plane of the building front.

He waited an hour for Lorin Shields, in the reception room of offices marked
PUBLIC RELATIONS
.
He was not neglected. He was served tea from a Worcester pot in a Worcester cup and saucer. At a guess, English breakfast tea. There were English muffins. There was English marmalade. The young woman who served them on a Japanese lacquer tray was oriental herself. She apologized smoothly and smilingly for Shields’s tardiness at first. He was rarely late. It must be the rain. He had a long way to come. But as time dragged on, she became embarrassed. Little lines appeared between her beautiful brows when she glanced up from the whispering electronic typewriter at her desk, saw Dave, saw the clock.

Dave, trying to make sense of a trade journal article on the molecular structure of a new breed of plastics, gave her a smile. “It’s all right. I have no other appointments. I don’t mind waiting.”

“I can’t think why he hasn’t telephoned.”

In the end, a blond, rosy-cheeked, chubby lad named Jochim led him into an office that did not have a name on its door, and that was some little walk from Shields’s door, which not only had Shields’s name on it, but
SENIOR VICE-PRESIDENT
as well. Jochim probably wasn’t even a junior vice-president. But he was friendly and welcoming. For a while, at least. At the word “murder,” his smile faded. He watched worriedly as Dave brought out a rumpled cargo manifest from his jacket, unfolded it, held it out.

Jochim read it, frowned. “But this was weeks ago.”

“He didn’t have a waybill for what he was hauling that night. Did it come from here? Could you check your files? Night of the ninth?”

“Why?” Jochim gave back the paper. “Why Tech-Rite?”

“It’s someplace to start. The records, Mr. Jochim?”

“We’ve nothing to hide.” Jochim touched an intercom button. “Shipping records for the ninth of this month.” He tilted his head at Dave. “But surely this man hauled all sorts of cargoes, from all sorts of businesses.”

“Not a lot that was dangerous,” Dave said.

“Dangerous?” Jochim’s voice squeaked like a high-school boy’s. “What are you implying? We observe the strictest standards of safety in all our manufacturing processes. We have to. Most of our contracts come from the U.S. government. You’ve no idea of the restrictions they impose.”

“That suggests that some of the materials that go into Tech-Rite products aren’t exactly harmless.”

Jochim drew breath to answer, and the door opened. The young oriental woman looked in. “I’m sorry, Mr. Jochim, but files from around that time are missing. No one in Shipping or Order has them. Shall we keep looking?”

Jochim raised pale brows at Dave. Dave shook his head. Jochim said, “That’s all right, Frances. Forget it. Thank you.” When the door closed behind her, Jochim said to Dave with a thin smile, “The environmentalists really make very little sense. Why would Tech-Rite or any of us manufacture products that would harm the very people we want to serve and serve again? Think about that.”

“There was the asbestos business,” Dave said. “And the coal-mining business. Not to mention the lead business. But okay. Even if what you make is harmless—poisons, pollutants, carcinogens come out of the manufacturing process, don’t they? It’s in the papers all the time. What does Tech-Rite do with its toxic wastes?”

“Just a damn minute.” Jochim’s face was red. “Are you holding Tech-Rite responsible for this trucker’s death?”

Dave looked blank. “Why would you think that?”

“Then I don’t understand your line of questioning,” Jochim said. “And I don’t like it.”

“Let me explain,” Dave said. He outlined the story of Paul Myers’s lucrative, secretive, late-night hauling operations, the beating of Paul Myers’s wife, the earlier recruitment of Myers by Ossie Bishop, the curious circumstances of Ossie Bishop’s death. “I went down to Halcon to talk to his wife about it. She won’t talk. She’s frightened. But that I expected. What I didn’t expect was that Ossie’s truck was sold. For cash. In a great hurry.”

“Yes?” Jochim asked warily. “To whom?”

“To a woman known as the Duchess. Ever hear of her?”

“Sounds like a cheap television show,” Jochim said.

“Doesn’t it? Unhappily, it’s real. Why did she want that truck to disappear just when it was discovered that Paul Myers’s death was no accident?”

“We farm out shipments to many independent truckers,” Jochim said impatiently. “We really have no control over their activities, outside of their work for us. As for this missing truck—”

“I can’t help thinking the Duchess wanted it out of the way because it contained evidence that would link Myers’s death to that of Ossie Bishop. And I wondered what sort of evidence that would be. The truck was empty. Like Myers’s. But law-enforcement laboratories don’t regard ‘empty’ as the rest of us do. The Duchess must have been afraid traces of whatever Bishop was hauling at midnight in that truck were still there for electron microscopes to find.”

“Are you suggesting that Tech-Rite—?” Jochim began.

“I read a disturbing article last night,” Dave said. “In
Scientific American.
It describes the reactions of people who have handled toxic wastes carelessly. Violent diarrhea, vomiting, coughing, lung congestion, paralysis of the diaphragm—the same symptoms Ossie Bishop showed before he died.”

“I see.” Jochim gave a short nod and stood up. “Let me show you something. Can you spare me”—he looked at his wristwatch—“half an hour, forty-five minutes?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He opened a closet, took out a pale raincoat, a rumpled rainhat. “I’m sure I can clear away all your doubts and dark suspicions.” He smiled and opened his office door.

Dave smiled back. “Best offer I’ve had all day,” he said, and followed Jochim out of the building. It was still raining in those fat, lazy drops, out of the sort of sky water-colorists like best, smudgy grays and whites. Beyond the hulking curves of the storage tanks, the mountains had already begun to show a tinge of green on their tawny summer hides. Dave walked beside Jochim into the executive parking lot. Coming out of the lot, hurrying in a clear plastic raincoat that rustled, a tall man nearly collided with them. Rain dripped from the brim of his rough Irish tweed hat as he glared at Jochim. The tall man was Lorin Shields.

“This is Mr. Brandstetter,” Jochim told him. Dave wondered why the name seemed to startle Shields. Or was he imagining things? Jochim said, “He’s an investigator for insurance companies. He’s interested in our system of disposing of hazardous wastes. I thought I’d just show him.”

“Good idea.” Shields gave a brisk, executive nod, twitched a smile and tugged the brim of his hat to Dave, and loped off toward the bright doors of Tech-Rite.

Dave got into Jochim’s Cimarron. “Your Mr. Shields looks like a man under a lot of strain.”

“Lost his wife recently.” Jochim drove down the long wet tarmac strip toward the gates. “Very suddenly. It was a shock. She was young. Beautiful. He worshipped her, built her a glorious new house. Married in April. Dead in September. Lorin hasn’t collected himself. This place used to mean everything to him. Now he doesn’t even come in, half the time.”

The kitchen help, in rumpled, food-stained white jackets and pants, were eating when Dave stepped into Max Romano’s through the back door. Steamy heat embraced him. The smells were overpowering—of garlic, cheese, fish, onions, basil, oregano. Alex, the skinny head chef with caved-in, acne-scarred cheeks, looked up from his plate of Alfredo and gave Dave his graveyard smile. The other men in puffed white hats—fish, soup, salad, dessert chefs—murmured welcomes. Dave pushed out a zinc-covered swing door into the quiet dining room. Max—short, fatter than ever, his few remaining curly locks combed glossily over his pate—was counting lunchtime checks by a tiny bright lamp at the cash register. Cocking an eyebrow at Dave, he turned back a snowy cuff fastened by a big diamond stud to read his watch, and shook his head in mock-fatherly reproach.

“You late again,” he said. “Keep everybody waiting.”

Dave laid a hand on his shoulder, then moved between white, empty tables to the corner table where Cecil sat. He gave him a kiss and sat down. “Sorry. I was treated to a demonstration of how scrupulous Tech-Rite is about dumping its toxic wastes.” He laughed. “Or what was meant to be that.” A little green bottle stood beside Cecil’s wineglass. Perrier water bubbled in the glass. “You’re not drinking?”

“I didn’t know how long you’d be,” Cecil said. “Didn’t want for you to have to carry me out over your shoulder.” He glanced through the shadows, looking for Max, but Max was already in the little bar. The restaurant was so quiet they could hear the clink of bottles, glasses, ice, that told them he was fixing their drinks. Cecil said, “What was it instead?”

“A farce.” Dave told him the morning’s events. “So we drove for twenty minutes to a place beyond beyond, with high fences and warning signs—a square mile of carefully labeled barrels of dangerous chemicals. And guess what? A picket line. All these men, women, adolescents, little kids, in jeans and parkas and slickers and stocking caps, carrying signs in the rain. Tech-Rite and the rest are poisoning the ground and water for miles around and dooming the people and their children for ages to come.”

“Oh, wow! What did Jochim say?”

“He’d been lecturing me all the way how this was a government-approved dump. No danger of seepage, leakage, pollution. Tech-Rite and the others had gotten an order two years ago to clean it up and make it safe. It cost them millions—oh, grief, oh, sorrow. But now it was totally harmless.” Max brought the drinks and set them down. Dave laughed again. “When Jochim saw those pickets, he stopped the car so fast it stalled. Then he dented the rear bumper, turning around to get the hell out of there.”

“Was television covering it?”

“Men with cameras on their shoulders. Pretty girls of both sexes with microphones. Another reason Jochim stood not upon the order of his going.” Dave grinned and picked up a chunky glass in which ice chilled Glenlivet. “Thank you, Max. What’s left for lunch?”

“No leftovers.” Max wagged disapproving jowls. “You tell me what you want, I fix with my own hands.”

They told him, and he waddled away, singing to himself.

Dave drank. “How did you fare at Chemiseal?”

“And Agroplex. I interviewed two merchants of death while you messed with one.” Cecil pretended to preen. He drank, shrugged, made a wry face. “Guess that’s what they mean by haste make waste. I didn’t get anywhere.”

“No one knew the Duchess?” Dave lit a cigarette.

Watching him wistfully, Cecil shook his head. “They let me see the shipping records. Paul Myers didn’t haul for them the night he died.” Cecil reached for Dave’s cigarette pack on the white cloth, and drew his hand back empty. “They used Ossie Bishop, time to time. But when I raised the subject of toxic-waste disposal, the interviews were over. I sure as hell didn’t get an all-expenses-paid, luxury vacation trip to the dump.”

“Don’t feel bad,” Dave said. “Maybe they haven’t got a dump.”

T
HE VALIANT STARTED RELUCTANTLY
in the rain, but once all the cylinders began igniting in order, it followed the van without trouble back to Horseshoe Canyon. Dave had stretched lunch out, glad for the chance to rest, and it was ten past four when the van tilted ahead of him down the sharp drop from the trail into the bricked yard, and he jounced down after it. Rain still fell, dripping from shrubs, trees, eaves, and darkness was coming early. A four-wheel-drive sports wagon stood reflected in the front building’s row of French doors. The vehicle was high on its wheels, well kept, three or four years old, with simulated wood paneling—and it looked empty in the rain.

But when Cecil rolled the van up beside it, Dave the jalopy, and the engines stopped and they got out, someone stirred in the Wagon. A broad, black young face under a Padres cap looked out the driver’s window. The door opened, Melvil Bishop got out. Three more faces appeared at the rear windows. Young boys’ faces, somber. “Man, I was scared you’d never get here,” Melvil said. “We been waiting for hours.” He glanced at the small boys in the car. “They peed in your bushes. I’m sorry, but you know little kids. Always have to pee when it’s no place for it.”

“What are you doing here?” Cecil said.

“Where’s your mother?” Dave said.

“Escondido,” Melvil said. Rain was darkening the satiny fabric of the baseball cap. He moved away from the car, jerking his head to indicate that they should follow him. Out of earshot of the children, he said in a low voice, “Mercy Hospital. Critical condition.” He glanced back at the car. All three faces were lined up at the rear window. Melvil said, “They don’t know. They think she took sick. It wasn’t that. She was shot.”

Cecil sucked air through his teeth.

Melvil’s eyes smoldered at Dave. “I knew something bad would happen when she told me she talked to you. We weren’t supposed to talk.”