"Tell me about her last day."
"She was here in her office by herself all morning with the door shut. She took a few calls, but mostly I think she was calling out. About one o'clock I saw the light on her line go off, the door opened, and she came out. She was trying to hide it, but her nose was all red and she had sunglasses on. She told me she wasn't feeling well, packed up, and went home. I never saw her again."
"You have no idea what happened?"
"No. And usually I know everything. Whatever it was, she kept the secret well."
"I wonder if she confided in anyone. You don't know who she was talking to right before she left that day?"
"No. She was answering her own phone. I do have a log of all her phone messages, if you think that would help." She went out to her desk, this time taking her invoices with her. When she came back, she had yet another of her ledgers, which she opened on my desk in front of me. It was a single-spaced listing of callers, dates, and times of messages Molly had taken for Ellen.
"Are you keeping tabs on me, too?"
She turned to a page with my name across the top. Listed were all the messages I'd received since I'd been there.
"Dickie used to accuse me of not giving him messages," she said, "like he could even remember anything that happened from one day to the next. That's when I started keeping track. It really comes in handy sometimes."
I studied the pages, several pages with Molly looking over my shoulder. "These non-Majestic people, do you know who they were to Ellen?"
"When someone calls, I ask what's it about. If they say, I write it down on the message. I don't log that part, but I can remember most of them. Like this one"-her bracelets rattled in my ear as she reached across to point out an entry-"this was the woman who used to cut her hair. Here's a call from her aunt on Ellen's birthday. It was the only message I ever took from her. This woman here, I remember she wouldn't say what she wanted and she never left her phone number. Said it was personal."
"Julia Milholland. Sounds very old Boston. She called three times in one week?"
"She was trying to set up some kind of an appointment with Ellen."
I pulled out a pad, copied down Julia Milholland's name, and checked out the rest of the list. "Matt Levesque. I know him. He's a manager in the Finance department. We've done work together."
"He was usually returning Ellen's calls. I think she worked with him on the merger. And he's a director now, not a manager."
"Ellen worked on the merger?"
"She came here from that assignment, some kind of a task force."
I opened the drawer and pulled out the empty hanging file labeled nor'easter/majestic merger. "Do you happen to know where this file is?"
"I don't know where it is now, but she had it on her desk a couple of weeks ago."
I copied down Matt's number. "I think it's time I called my old pal Matt and congratulated him on his promotion."
CHAPTER TWELVE
"I've got Lenny on line one," Molly called from her desk, "and Matt Levesque on line two. Matt says he's only going to be in for a few more minutes."
I checked the time. It wasn't even six o'clock in Boston, which meant it was still early in Denver. "Tell Matt I have to talk to my boss and it'll be maybe ten minutes. Ask him to please wait."
I took a moment to review my list. I'd been keeping track of things to tell Lenny, or things he might ask me. There was the freight forwarder who'd had his shipment of live lobsters stolen out of our freight house for the third time in a month. There was the ever escalating incidence of sick time and corresponding overtime on the ramp. There was the FAA inspector who we'd caught trying to sneak a handgun through our checkpoint-a surprise inspection we'd passed. And there was Angelo. His was the first name on the list and the only one I'd done nothing about. I knew I'd end up bringing him back, but so far I hadn't been able to pull the trigger. Dan was probably right, I was just being stubborn. I picked up. "I know why you're calling, Lenny."
"You do?" He had me on the box again.
"I've been a little slow in following up on Angelo, but I'm going to get to it this week and I'll make a decision. You have my commitment."
"That's good, Alex. It's not why I was calling, but it's good to know you haven't forgotten my request. Hold on for me, would you?"
I slumped down in my chair and eavesdropped as he signed something for his secretary and asked her to send it out right away. I should have known better than to open with a mea culpa. It set exactly the wrong tone and who knows? He may have gone through the entire phone call and never raised the issue. Damn.
"I see we think alike, Alex." Lenny was back.
"In what way?"
"I just got off the phone with Jo Shepard out in California."
Uh-oh.
"She tells me you two had a nice chat."
I slumped down in the chair even more. I was close to horizontal, and the Angelo issue was starting to look more and more workable. At least with Angelo, my sin was in having done nothing. I couldn't make the same claim with Aunt Jo. I almost blurted out my second mea culpa, but decided to wait for his reaction first. "I spoke to her last week." I said. "Human Resources called from Denver and needed some information."
"Why didn't you tell me that you and Ellen knew each other?"
"We didn't. Did Jo Shepard tell you that we did?"
"No. But I surmised that the two of you must have been friends. Otherwise, why would you be interested in gaining access to her house?"
"Well, it wasn't that so much as I thought I could help her with Ellen's personal effects. There doesn't seem to be anyone else."
"Is that why you went up there on Friday? To help with her effects?"
I squeezed my eyes shut. Did everyone know everything that I did? I might as well post a daily schedule. This was getting out of hand. I didn't want to be lying to my boss. "No. No, that's not why I went up there, Lenny. The truth is that Dan has a theory-"
"That Ellen was murdered by the union in Boston. And he wants to get into her house to find the proof. Am I close?"
"You're right on target." I should have guessed that he would have known.
"Alex, listen to me. You should have called me before doing something like that… and I suppose I should have warned you about Fallacaro."
"What about him?"
"He's bad news, Alex. He's already ruined a couple of careers, including his own. And he didn't do Ellen any favors. He's always got his own agenda working, and I'm sure he does here, too."
I sat up straight. "What do you mean by that?"
"He's the one who encouraged Ellen to take such a hard line with the union. She got caught in the cross fire. Now he blames himself, and his way of dealing with it is to deny the obvious, to insist that she was murdered." Lenny's Southern accent grew deeper and richer as his frustration grew. I'd promised myself when I'd called Aunt Jo not to regret it later, not to do that to myself. Fat chance. As I listened to Lenny, I felt the guilt like a clinging vine growing around that defiant resolve and squeezing the life out of it.
Lenny was still going. "And I'll tell you something else. He's destructive. This ridiculous story is destructive for the airline, and as the Majestic Airlines representative in Boston, Alex, it's your job to make sure that a damaging and false story like that doesn't get out of hand. I don't want to see myself on Sixty Minutes. Do you?"
"Of course not, but this doesn't seem like Mike Wallace territory to me."
"No? Think about it. Five years ago you had the female ramp supervisor at Northwest who was murdered at Logan. Now here's another young woman dead at Logan, this time with Majestic. She was young, single, not that experienced, working in a tough place with a tough union. Majestic is high-profile, Bill Scanlon is high-profile, and she picked a strange way to die. You could spin an interesting tale."