You Have the Wrong Man (23 page)

He looked back at his client.

Her bare skin, the fluff, the leather. These gradations. Then it was the snow. The snow melted in a ragged necklace across her bare breastbone. She didn’t seem chilled. She looked slightly overheated; the snow dotted her shoulders like the tepid icing on hot cinnamon rolls.

And she didn’t dress like women who typically worried about the environment. He thought those women usually wore hiking attire or the floral Indian prints of hippie fashions. This Angela Snyder was wearing a tight skirt, above the knee, and a bright blue sweater, dense as rabbit fur, just like the hostess at a steak house was expected to look. He noticed that her hair was loosely permed—at home, inexpertly—and frosted in uneven patches. Her mouth, touched with pencil, made her lips oddly defined, dingy at the edges.

She pulled up from her circle and said, “Can you tell me one thing? Peterson, who owns a church? I mean, who
owns
a church?” She smiled. Waited. She looked utterly merry stating her point.

“You think it’s funny?” he said. “Who owns a church?
It’s like a knock, knock? Some kind of punch line? You should have squared this away before you called me out here.”

“You? I thought it was going to be the other guy, your brother. He seemed to have some experience.”

Peterson turned to get back in his truck. He opened the door and rested one foot on the rocker panel, lifting his hip so it rested against the high seat.

“Oh wait,” she said, “I’m sorry. I’m not fooling around. I don’t have the faintest idea who owns this church. It’s some kind of congregation, right? Well, what about these asbestos fibers? Invisible. It’s my little boy. It hasn’t exactly been a picnic. Three years at the Fairfax Supper Club. First I was at Steak & Ale, now I’m at the Fairfax. One pay stub. I’m on my way to work now. Right after this. The hours. You should know my hours. And now, this
hazard.
This
risk.
I mean, maternal instincts. Instincts have a life of their own—” She kept talking until her explanation became wholly monosyllabic.

Peterson noticed how her breast heaved lightly after she was finished. Her delicate respirations suggested her feminine triumph. Her words coming fast, clipped, until it was severe litany—then her breathless calm. She had him going for a moment. He extracted a toothpick from its delicate white wrapper and poked it through his bottom incisors and sawed it back and forth over his gums.

“There’s usually a board of trustees,” Peterson told her. He was putting his key in the ignition and the dash lit up like a hospital wall. “Get in here with me and I’ll tell you what I need before I go in that building,” he said.

“Oh, really?” she said. She walked around to the other side of the truck but skirted the open passenger door. “Who
do you think I am?” she said. She walked over to the front door of the church and tugged it with her bare hand. She put both hands on the brass pull and rattled the heavy panel.

He jumped out of the cab and told her she had misunderstood him. Then he saw she was laughing, pressing her one gloved hand over her teeth. Her teeth against the leather made a tight, squeaking sound.

He watched her while twirling the toothpick against his tongue, using his thumb and forefinger to keep it turning. “Shit,” Peterson said, “I was going to explain the legalities. A church like this probably has a board of trustees. We need their consent before we can enter the premises and take away incriminating samples.”

“They’ll never let you.”

“Sure they will.”

“Trust me,” she said. “It’s now or never.”

She started to walk away in the snow, following the slight troughs and indented lines on the sidewalk. He followed her around the building to the back. He saw the small playground, which faced the old church cemetery. He never imagined these two worlds could exist in tandem, one beside the other, the tiny jungle gym for toddlers and, twenty feet over, the rough, flinty slate of antique graves. Were these first and last groups harmonious or indifferent? He felt his scalp sting when he imagined the relationship might even be some kind of malevolent entanglement.

“See this playground?” she told him. He was already staring at it. “It’s not up to standards, but I found out where to get free sand. The sand is supposed to be four inches deep to make a good cushion so the kids won’t get hurt.”

Peterson noticed the high ridges of sand, dunes of it,
capped with snow. He toed the sand and saw it was gray and gritty, like the stuff he’d seen at municipal ball fields. Flaked rock that got into your socks if you had to slide into base.

She said, “That’s Vulcan’s washed screenings from Vulcan Quarry. They give it away free to nonprofit organizations.”

“You had them deliver it here? These washed screenings?” The name for it sounded absurd.

She told him, “The truck had a hard time getting around the gravestones to dump it here. The load was so heavy, they thought it might roll over an unmarked pocket—you know, a grave. The dirt would cave in. It was one more thing for the church to bitch about.” She turned back to look at the dark building. “These are the classrooms, here, in this basement wing.” She pointed to the preschool rooms. “These windows push out from the inside. I’ll find one that isn’t locked and we can pry it open,” she told him.

“We’re not going to destroy any property to get in there. If it doesn’t come easy, that’s it for me,” Peterson said.

“Look, you say you’re an expert? Well, you should know how important this is. All these babies, some still on the bottle, rolling around in asbestos.”

“That’s your guess, anyway,” Peterson told her. “Why don’t you find another day-care center for your boy? Why are you making such a hassle for yourself?”

“Do you have kids?” she said. “If you had some kids, you’d know.”

“Who says I don’t?” He didn’t like her making these grand assumptions.

She told him, “Let me tell you something. Listen to me. When you have children, it’s cash on the line.”

“You make it sound rewarding,” he told her.

“I mean it. I can’t afford to pay professional day care when I already pay a sitter who comes five to twelve each night. You know what that runs? Plus the two-liter bottles of Coke she has to have. I’m just trying to steer my own ship. These asbestos fibers. You should know. Microscopic.”

“You can’t be sure it’s asbestos, it’s not proved yet,” he told her, but the way she described it made him think of a barge with a hundred babies drifting into a sea of monolithic chrysotile structures.

Until this time, he had not experienced the subtle pressures of his job at Dover Environmental. His usual routine consisted, singularly, of light tasks. Cutting chunks of friable asbestos insulation from heating ducts and plumbing, brushing particle samples together, sealing them in plastic bags and shipping them off to a state-certified lab, where the materials were tested using transmission electron microscopy. Some days he set up the large three-horsepower fans for aggressive air samples. He wasn’t involved with the testing procedures or the subsequent discovery of the facts. He never once envisioned a personal consequence, it was always general. It was for the health of the general public, the general upkeep of industry.

She told him, “This tile is probably thirty years old. It’s totally abraded. Like cake flour, dense and weird. You’ll see once we get in there.”

She was checking the windows, trying to insert her fingernails under the aluminum moldings so she could tug. Everything was tight. Then she found a window that
wasn’t fastened. On the inside pane, yellow construction-paper ducks were taped in a neat row. She pressed her cheek against the glass, trying to inch it free; Peterson saw the little ducks behind her face. Peterson went over and jerked the window open. The entrance was at a hard angle and was hardly enough room for her, let alone for a man his size.

“I can’t get through that,” he told her.

“No kidding,” she said, turning to look at him square. “Of course, I don’t expect you to come through this window. I’ll squeeze inside here, then I’ll go around and let you in the door. You get the red carpet and don’t have to rip your pants.”

He walked a tiny, almost imperceptible box step when she spoke those words. When she turned away, he looked at her, following her legs until they disappeared at the hem of her coat. Her hair was loose and knotty beneath a melting crown. She looked back at him, making the okay sign with her thumb and index finger. He studied her but the snow started to come heavy, like a glittering fiberglass curtain between them.

He raised his voice to mask his rocky feelings. “Be my guest,” he told her. “Climb in that window. It’s not up to me. Breaking into a house of worship. Not every day I witness this sort of thing.”

“Oh, don’t be such a priss,” she said. “I’ll get in, and then you can come through the proper door. It’s on my shoulders then, right?”

He rubbed his hand down his forehead and over the sharp, freezing tip of his nose. He was getting into something. Peterson tried to figure how he could run the tests at
the lab without his brother knowing. He struggled to ignore the children, the way he pictured them, on the swing set beside the tombs, or on the drifting barge.

Perhaps it was the snow, the ice specks pumping around the streetlight that gave everything an unnatural surge. He was excited by the first weather of the year, and by this woman, who seemed to have put him in an obedient trance. He started to trust it.

As she climbed through the window, her coat snagged on something and the leather was gouged. She cursed, rubbing the hide between her fingers in the near dark. Then Peterson lost sight of her as she moved away from the window to find a light switch. He was out there in the churchyard, alone. He thought about Believe Me, the silver tape locking its muzzle shut. After ten minutes the men had gone back into the pen to unwind the metallic strips. They used a terry-cloth rag to carefully clean the short fur and whiskers on its refined, scooped face, to remove any telltale adhesive.

He heard Angela calling his name. He walked up and down the length of the building, trying to find her voice, his boots sliding through new ribbons of snow. Then she was taking his arm, pulling him through a side door. She led him down the hallway to the playroom, which was pitch-black, but he could smell the dust. He heard her as she patted the cement walls with her palms, trying to find the light switch. She touched it and the fluorescents fluttered on.

“See, it’s everywhere.” She twirled slowly in the center of the room. She pointed to the dusty corners, the glazed toys and tricycles. She ran her fingertip along the window ledge and showed him the lemon-yellow powder. “It’s
even in the light fixtures. They ride the trikes and it rises up this high.”

He squatted down and rubbed the palm of his hand over the floor’s surface. “Christ, this tile’s completely abraded, porous.”

“There’s asbestos in this kind of tile, am I right?” she asked him.

“See that over there?” he told her.

“What?” she said.

“Those old shuffleboard inlays. You never see these anymore. That’s from the 1950s. This is some old linoleum.”

“Asbestos?” She looked at him. “Well. What are you waiting for? Get the samples. Get everything we need,” she told him. Her eyes were glossy, triumphant and desperate in one halting gaze.

He suggested going for drinks. They had finished scooping up dust from little drifts around the legs of the playhouse and from underneath the foam mats near the wooden slide. “Let’s go have something when we’re done here,” he told her.

She acknowledged his invitation. Her eyes rolled around once and returned to a businesslike squint. She pushed the side of her hand along the floor, making piewedge swipes through the dust. He was closing a plastic bag, turning a twist tie until it was secure. “How about it?” he asked her, but he didn’t want to look at her to see if she rolled her eyes again. He was thinking that he had been utterly professional in his handling of the situation up until that very moment. Other than the fact that he was trespassing, and stealing property, he was on the level. When
she didn’t answer him, he returned to the same, worn-out declaration, “I don’t like taking these samples without the proper consent. In writing.”

“Shit. The Lord is with us,” she said, but she didn’t say it with any reverence. She sniffed loudly and rubbed her nose with a bony knuckle, and he could tell she wasn’t even thinking about God. Maybe the dust was making her eyes itch; her eyes looked accentuated, watery. Her eyes had that darty, intense style of watching him without seeing him.

Peterson told her, “This is enough dust, these four bags, but we’ve got to cut a sample of the tile. A sliver about an inch square.”

He scored the linoleum and shoved it loose with the flat edge of the knife. She was bending down to watch him. Her lips looked bitten, crosshatched, when he saw them up close.

He put the plastic bags with the dust samples and the sliver of floor tile in his breast pocket. They left the basement of Glenside United Methodist Church, making sure the window was closed and the door was locked behind them.

She started to show her relief; her teeth chattered lightly as if, at last, the cold had touched her. They were sitting in the cab of his truck. She told Peterson, “He was breathing it, pretty as you please. It was everywhere. All over the trikes and Hot Wheels. You saw it. Not the best thing for a child.”

“No, that’s true,” he told her, trying to calm her down. He turned the heat on full blast, hoping she would quiet, but she raised her voice over it.

She said, “I went to the preschool director. A fluff-brain. Then I met some church guy, whoever, and he said anytime there was kids, you had dust. He said, ‘Kids make dust.’ He twirled his finger in the air, you know, like a Dennis the Menace cartoon with the little whirlwind. Shit. Kids can’t make this kind of dust. Thick as Bisquick, you know, like pulverized rubber.”

“That’s degraded linoleum. It’s vile.” He didn’t know what else to say. He was embarrassed by her gratitude, the sudden, breathy hitches in her voice, strange tri-level inhalations which were new and wonderful to him. Perhaps he would tell his brother to step over the line and send the samples to the lab. Disrupt procedures. The business had to have a social conscience, didn’t it?