“That’s probably wise,” he said, taking a pull on the Urquell.
“No, it’s not. Using Stanley and me is like using Laurel and Hardy. I’m not equipped for it, and Stanley is supposed to be spending his time watching security at Gateville. Besides, his wife is sick, and he gets called away.”
“What’s the harm in you poking around, too? Worst case, you generate some billing that buys you hot water for the turret, unlessyou actually enjoy going to the health center and getting naked with winos?” His eyebrows cavorted on his forehead.
I laughed, for the first time in what felt like forever. Leo Brumsky, with his crazy shirts, pastel pants, and furry eyebrows, always found a way through the cloud to the lining.
He grinned and went on. “Talk to coppers, they’ll tell you: The damndest things can pop up out of nowhere during an investigation. Everybody’s just got to keep plugging.”
I set the bowl of food on the step. It was still over half full. “It’s so amateurish. People can die, Leo, unless this thing is handled right.”
“As you said, A.T.F. is on the job. As for you, do your best. Continue on, as this Chernek wants. And don’t discount amateurs.” He checked his watch and stood up. “You’ve been fed. I’m late.” He ducked into the bungalow and came back with a sheet of aluminum foil. “You can have the remaining pounds for breakfast.”
We walked down the stairs to the curb.
“What theater are you going to?” I asked.
He launched his caterpillar eyebrows into a crazed dance that would have made Groucho Marx squirm with envy.
“The drive-in.”
“You’re a perv, Leo. What’s playing?”
“It doesn’t matter. It makes me feel young,” he said as he got in the Porsche.
“And Endora?”
“She feels really young.” He smiled out the window, twisted the key, and drove away, leaving me with a blast of German exhaust, a double entendre, and a bowl of cooling pork.
Sixteen
“Two young boys from the A.T.F. took our old payroll files first thing this morning,” the woman behind the counter at Universal Electric said with an exaggerated southern drawl. She was in her seventies but still fighting. She’d dyed her hair orange and drawn eyebrows to match on her forehead. She wore a low-cut leopard print dress, tight.
I checked my watch. “It’s Saturday morning, only nine fifteen.”
Her perfume was strong. The kind, I imagined, that came in barrels.
“It’s the early bird gets the worm, honey. They was here at eight sharp.” She leaned over the counter to give me a glimpse of wrinkled breasts. “What’s this about?” she whispered, although we were alone in the tiny office. “Those two A.T.F. boys were as tight-lipped as lockjawed sparrows. They showed me a list of names and asked if any had worked here. I said no. Then they demanded our old payroll records, gave me a receipt, and took off with not more than two peeps.”
I looked around like a spy about to pass a government secret.“They’re looking for a guy who bombed a draft office in 1970. They think he was working for you at the time.”
It was a good lie. She brightened, keeping the breasts on the counter.
“Which project?” she asked, looking up to make sure I was looking down.
“Crystal Waters.”
She nodded.
“You would have been way too young to have been working here then.”
She dropped her voice even more so I’d have to lean closer. “I was a mere slip of a girl, you understand, too young to be working legal, but I was here then.”
I feigned surprise. “Ma’am-”
“Call me Willadean, Honey.”
“Willadean, that certainly is a shock. Do you remember anybody named James who would have worked on that job?”
“James, James…” she pursed her orange lips and lifted off the counter. “First name or last name?”
“I assume it’s a first name.”
She started to shake her head, then stopped. “Could it have been Jaynes, Michael Jaynes?” She spelled the last name out. “Him I remember.”
“How’s that, Willadean?”
“He was a strange, strange man. Wild man with a beard, and full of anger. I remember Mr. Davis, he was the owner then, having to tell Michael time and again to keep his political views to himself. Said he was agitating the other men and Mr. Davis didn’t want the work slowed down from arguing politics and all. Michael was always nice to me, though.”
“When did he leave here?”
“That’s the thing I remember: He just up and disappeared suddenone day. I can’t recall the specific day, but I do remember there was much consternation about what might have happened, like whether he’d been in an accident or been mugged or something. Mr. Davis phoned the rooming house where Michael was staying, but they didn’t know anything. They said his stuff was still in his room. The men working with him didn’t know anything, neither. It was a mystery all around. Mr. Davis held onto Michael’s last paycheck for a while but finally had me forward it on.”
“To where?”
“To the personal contact he wrote on his application, of course.”
“You wouldn’t still have that application?”
“Probably was in the box with the other payroll records I gave to them young boys from the government.”
“And that last canceled check?”
“They was young boys from the A.T.F. They didn’t know how to ask things of a lady.”
“You’ve still got it?”
“Oh, I still got it, honey.” She leered across the counter.
I tried to leer back. “For sure, but I meant that last canceled check.”
She cocked her hip and wiggled her finger in a come-hither gesture I’d seen once in a beach-party movie made a few years before I was born. She led me to the back warehouse, walking in front of me so I could admire the shifting tautness of the leopard fabric from behind. As we moved between the skids of cartons, one of the degenerates that lurks in my brain struck up the strains of Maria Muldaur singing “It Ain’t the Meat, It’s the Motion,” complete with a bump-and-grind drum roll that kept time to the clicking of Willadean’s red high heels on the cement floor.
She stopped at the back wall and pirouetted. “The bank records are up there,” she said, pointing one arm and both leopard-covered breasts at a pile of cardboard boxes high on a storage rack. Theboxes were neatly labeled. “Whatever you want, just grab it,” she said, taking a half step toward me.
I don’t scamper-I’m too big-but at that moment, I was as sprightly as a pup chipmunk as I hopped up onto the skid of electrical cables below the cardboard boxes. I pulled out the box labeled CANCELED CHECKS, 1970-1979 and jumped down, clutching the box like a shield. I carried it to a nearby workbench. Willadean unfolded the top flaps and went through the rubber-banded bundles of bank envelopes inside, extracting several.
“You said he would have disappeared in April of 1970?”
“Yes.”
“Then we would have sent out his last check in June or July, and it would have come back processed in August or September.” She opened several of the envelopes and fanned through the green payroll checks inside, finally extracting one. “Here it is,” she said, handing it to me.
It was an ordinary check, dated April 25, 1970, made out to Michael S. Jaynes in the amount of $116.74. I turned it over. A woman’s hand had endorsed it first with Michael’s name, then with her own underneath, “Pay to Carlinda State Bank. Nadine Reynolds.” The Carlinda State Bank of Carlinda, California, had rubber-stamped it beneath her signature.
“You wouldn’t know what relationship this Nadine Reynolds had to Michael?” I asked.
“Only that she must have been the contact listed on his employment application. I don’t recall whether the form said she was his wife, his mother, his sister, or anything.”