He put down his clipboard. “We’ve got nobody here from that long ago, except for me.” He made a laugh with his mouth. “But I was more interested in Little League than landscaping in those days.”
He walked me around front to make sure I got back in the Jeep. He probably didn’t figure me for Immigration and Naturalization, because my story was too cheesy, too full of holes, but he knew I wasn’t telling the truth. I gave him one of my cards. It has my name, the word RESEARCH underneath, and my cell phone number. I asked him to call if he remembered anything.
As I pulled away, I looked in the rearview mirror just as he dropped my card into the trash barrel.
The electrical contractor worked out of a whitewashed converted gas station in a rundown section on the western edge of Chicago, next to Oak Park. I pushed open the peeling green wood door and stepped into the dank dark of what had once been the gas station office. An old man sat behind a dented metal desk, reading a tattered copy of Popular Mechanics in the dim light of a gooseneck lamp. He put down the magazine, pulled his feet off the desktop, and smiled up like he was grateful for the interruption.
I skipped the story about sewer leaks and just said I was trying to track down people who’d worked at Crystal Waters.
“I remember that job.” He offered me coffee from a scratched aluminum Thermos. I shook my head. He poured some for himselfinto a clear plastic cup and went on. “Never worked in a place so fancy. I was hired at the last minute to wire the marble fountain in the pond. Job only took two days.”
I remembered the Bohemian’s comment about hiring only big contractors to work at Gateville. “Weren’t you a little small for a project like Crystal Waters?”
“You bet,” he laughed. “Those projects always go to the big boys. I’ve always been small time, adding outlets in somebody’s home, putting in patio lights, or some such. That, and fixing electric motors.” He pointed at the doorway to the old auto service bay. I looked, and saw shelves piled high with dozens of small, oily black motors and dusty spools of colored wire.
“One of the main electrical contractors at Crystal Waters had a problem at the last minute,” he continued. “Somebody quit sudden or something, just as the job was almost finished. They called me, on the hurry-up, to finish the wiring to the fountain so they could get the final city inspection and people could start moving in. I figured they got me out of the yellow pages,” he said, pointing to a wood sign on the walclass="underline" A-1 Electrical. “My name’s Ziloski, so I go with A-1. I get a lot of calls because I’m the first name in the book.”
As he talked, I turned to look again at his inventory of electrical motors and coils of colored wire. Something about them nagged at me, a question I should know to ask, but I couldn’t think of it.
“Need a motor?” Ziloski chuckled, his voice nudging me. “I got plenty.”
I laughed at that and asked him more questions to keep him talking. I wanted time to think of the question I couldn’t grasp.
“I never worked around buildings so posh,” he said again. He sounded like someone who’d caught a glimpse of a movie star as he described the fountain, the houses, and the expensive, mature trees that were planted to make the development look like it had been there for years. The details were as fresh in his mind as if he’d seen them yesterday.
I was only half-listening; my mind was still clutching for the question that would not come. I gave up, finally, after an hour of jawing, and left him to his ragged magazine, rusted motors, and dusty coils of colored wire. I doubted he’d been at Gateville long enough to do much of anything, but I had to give him a question mark on the list because I didn’t have solid reason to cross him off.
I visited another landscaper and then one of the generic names that turned out to be a fertilizing operation. Neither seemed a likely candidate, but each had had access. I gave them angry question marks, too. I was getting nowhere.
I went east, then north up Western Avenue, to the second plumber on my list. I pulled off the street in front of the white frame building and parked between two vans.
“I need some help with a plumbing project you guys did in 1970,” I said to the black-haired man working at a cluttered desk in the paneled front office.
“Warranty ran out yesterday,” he said over his reading glasses. Then he laughed. “Which project?”
“Crystal Waters, in Maple Hills. Is there anybody here who worked on that job?”
“I did, start to finish. Over a year.”
I looked at him more closely. I’d thought he was in his early forties when I walked in, but the lines around his eyes made him older than that. He could have been at Gateville.
I didn’t bother with coy. “There have been a couple of recent disturbances that we think might date back to the construction of the development.”
“The house that blew up earlier this summer?”
“No, not that.”
“They’re thinking someone planted explosives in the plumbing when that house was being built?”
I looked out the window. He was reading me like I had a digital display wired on my forehead.
He whistled. “I’ll be damned,” he said, not at all bothered by my lack of a response. “We had ten, fifteen guys on that job, all told. Had the contract for the rough and the finish plumbing for all the houses. Mister, that place was crawling with all kinds of workers, so it could have been anybody, not just plumbers. Unless you’re telling me you’re sure the explosives were planted in the plumbing?”
“I’m not talking about explosives.”
“Bet your ass you’re not,” he grinned. “Well, hiding explosives on that job would have been easy enough. There was so much going on, nobody would have paid attention. That jerkweed Maple Hills building inspector sure wouldn’t have caught it. He didn’t look for much except where the doughnuts were.”
“Have you got employee records from back then?”
“You think we might have made a note in somebody’s file: ‘Good worker, but plants bombs?’” He waited for my laugh and then said, “We keep good records, but only for seven years.”
I showed him the list of parolees. “Any names look familiar?”
He took ten minutes to examine the pages before shaking his head. “None of these were ours.”
“Do you remember anything unusual about any of your men from back then, like someone who acted strange, or was mad about something?”
“Mister, I remember something unusual about most of the men who worked for me, then and since. Crystal Waters was a long, dirty job. There was mud everywhere because everything was tore up. Contractors were trying to get all the homes done at once, so there was lots of push to get things done on schedule. Job like that, at any one time, half our guys would have been pissed off at something. But mad enough to plant bombs? Not likely.”
On my way out, I asked him to keep what we’d talked about quiet, because a lot of it was speculation. He said he would, and I believed him. But as I closed his door, I realized I wouldn’t have minded if he used a megaphone to shout the story up and downWestern Avenue. It would chase the people out of Gateville, out of harm’s way.
It was noon; four hours until the Bohemian was to call the Feds. I stopped at Kentucky Fried, skipped the fried, had the grilled, fooled no one. I ate at a counter by the window and watched the cars buzzing by. Reds and blues, greens and yellows. Cars of all colors, like the spools of wire at A-1 Electric. Like the snakes writhing in the firelight in the dream I’d been having.
I understood.
I left the food. I got in the Jeep and hurried back down Western, bits of Kentucky poultry stuck like grit to the dry roof of my mouth.
“Change your mind about buying a motor?” Ziloski smiled from behind the desk at A-1 Electric, setting down his magazine.