A Safe Place for Dying

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.”

“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.”