“There must have been an address for her, to send the check?”
“On the application in the boxes them boys took.”
We walked back to the office, her leading, me a safe five paces behind. She made a copy of the check for me and promised to send another to the A.T.F. agents who’d been there that morning.
“I’m here every day except Sunday, honey, but my nights are free,” she told me at the door.
I told her she could count on me being back, sure as a bee sniffs honey on a dewy rose. I didn’t know whether that was possible, but Willadean liked it and smiled an orange smile.
It was ten thirty. I drove east to the other electrical contractor Stanley had given me to check. The owner, about seventy, came out of his office mad and said he’d told “the authorities” who’d come that morning that he didn’t have time for such crap, and besides, who saves payroll records from that long ago, anyway? I agreed with him and left.
I called Agent Till from the Jeep. His message tape said he was gone for the weekend. I told his voice mail about Michael Jaynes and Nadine Reynolds and said one of his junior agents would be receiving a photocopy of the canceled check. I asked him to get back to me on Monday morning with the address for Nadine Reynolds shown on Jaynes’s employment form.
I spent Saturday lunchtime at the Rivertown Health Center. I ran twice as far as my previous record, breathing through my nose to chase away the sticky scent of Willadean the Electric Lady. She’d seen me as ripe game for her lacquered wiles, and I needed to get younger, quick.
Agent Till called at two fifteen that afternoon. “Who’s this Michael Jaynes?”
“Your message machine said you were gone for the weekend.”
“Your government never rests. What do you know about Jaynes?”
“Only what your boys could have found out for themselves. He was outspoken politically. He vanished around the time of the guardhouse bombing, leaving behind his clothes in his rented room. His last paycheck was forwarded to a Nadine Reynolds, apparently to an address shown on the employment application your people picked up. I’d like that address.”
“We’ll check it out.”
“Can I have that address?”
“Why?”
“Anton Chernek wants me to run a parallel investigation.”
“Why the hell would he want that?”
“In case you get distracted with terrorists.”
“I don’t want to keep you awake, Elstrom. We’ll check things out,” Till said, and hung up.
Rivertown hasn’t had a public library since Lyndon Johnson was president, so I drove to the one in Maple Hills and Yahooed, Googled, and Lexis-Nexised on one of their computers the rest of Saturday afternoon. Once again, I scared myself at the information that’s floating out in cyperspace. Pressing the right Internet buttons gets directory listings for anybody in the country who has a published telephone number. Pressing others gets ages, high schools, spouse’s names, aerial photos of their neighborhoods, and maps to their houses. And that’s all for free. Spending a little money gets credit reports, divorce histories, and a lot of other information that shouldn’t be so easily available. The Internet has taken the wear off gumshoes, and replaced them with calloused fingertips. If Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and Sherlock Holmes were sleuthing today, they’d have squinty eyes from staring at computer screens, and carpal tunnel wrists from too many hours spent banging on a keyboard.
There were twenty-four Nadine Reynoldses listed on the Internet, ranging in age from twenty-six to eighty-one. None of them lived in California, but that didn’t rule anything out. Nor did the ages. They could be the daughter or the mother of the person I was looking for. I printed the list and drove back to the turret.
I started telephoning the East Coast numbers. The first six weren’t home. I left messages saying I worked for an estate attorney, which was true enough-the Bohemian did estate work-andasked for return calls to my cell phone. I counted on greed to make them overlook the fact that they couldn’t call it collect.
Nadine Number Seven was home. She’d spent her entire life in Canton, Ohio, and had never heard of a Michael Jaynes. I kept calling.
At six thirty, I took a break for dinner. I microwaved the last pounds of Ma’s pork, kraut, and dumplings and took it to the city bench overlooking the river. After I ate, I fell asleep, sitting up, like an old rummy with a wine load. At seven thirty, I went up to the turret for more telephoning and talked to Nadines Sixteen, Eighteen, Twenty, and Twenty-one, all in the West. All were wrong. During the evening, three of the earlier Nadines for whom I’d left messages called back. Each said she’d never heard of a Michael Jaynes, and each hung up the instant I said there was no potential for inheritance. I made my last call, to Nadine Twenty-four in Eugene, Oregon, at nine o’clock. She wasn’t home.
I was at a dead end, except to wait for a few return calls. The A.T.F. would be tracing Michael Jaynes and Nadine Reynolds through the federal database. Things were happening, but for me, there was no place to go. All I could do was sit on the sidelines and wait for the phone to ring.
I parked in the La-Z-Boy and ate a jelly doughnut and watched microscopic men play baseball on my little T.V. The players looked like gnats, flitting around on the tiny screen. And sometime in the middle of the night, after the baseball game, the seventies sitcom reruns, and the junior college broadcast of introductory economics, I fell asleep.
Five Nadines called by nine thirty on Sunday morning. Two of them tried very hard to convince me they had a distant relative named Michael Jaynes who, for sure, would have remembered them in his will. After I was certain each had never heard of him, Isaid I’d called for help with his burial expenses. Both hung up without getting my address for their Christmas card lists.
At eleven, the Bohemian called, sounding out of breath. “Your cell phone has been busy all morning. Don’t you have a second landline, a regular home number?”
I told him I only had one cell number, one computer line, and one mouth, and some considered that last a blessing.
He didn’t voice his agreement. “What did you say to Agent Till yesterday afternoon?”
I told the Bohemian what I’d told Till about my visit to Universal Electric, Michael Jaynes, and how I was trying to track down Nadine Reynolds. “I asked Till for Nadine Reynolds’s address from Jaynes’s employment application.”
“Do you think our bomber is this Michael Jaynes?”
“It’s worth checking out. What’s going on with Till?”
“He’s riled. He’s called a meeting for tomorrow morning at the Maple Hills police station.”
“Because of me?”
“He’s angry that I want you to keep investigating, but the meeting is about Bob Ballsard. He won’t evacuate.”
Seventeen
The Maple Hills police station occupies a redbrick building designed to look like something in Colonial Williamsburg. Parking is in back, because nobody in eighteenth-century Williamsburg parked cars in front.
I got there a half hour early and waited in the painted cinder-block hall, reading public notices about lawn-sprinkling restrictions while I drank vending-machine coffee from a paper cup that had a losing poker hand printed on it.
Stanley arrived at quarter to ten, holding the door open for Bob Ballsard. Stanley’s pale blue uniform looked crisp, but the skin on his face sagged like it was falling off of its own weight. Ballsard wore one of his blue blazers, a yellow tie with blue anchors on it, tan trousers, and polished boat shoes with no socks. He looked like he was going to a dockside tent party at the Chicago Yacht Club.
They paused in the hall.
“Elstrom,” Ballsard smiled nautically, “the chief invited you?”
“Actually, it was Agent Till. Seems he’s angry at you and me.”