Blood Work

27

ON THE DRIVE up to the Times plant in the Valley, McCaleb sat in the passenger seat of Graciela’s Volkswagen and was mostly silent. His mind moved over the activities of the night like an anchor dragging across a sandy bottom, seeking but finding no purchase, nothing to grip.

After he had noticed the wet spot on the carpet, he had retraced the chase to the parking lot and found the dock also was wet. It was a cool, crisp night and too early for the morning moisture to have formed. The intruder had clearly been wet when he had broken into the boat. The shine of light on his body indicated he had probably been wearing a wetsuit. The question McCaleb could not answer now was why?

Before they had left, McCaleb had gone over to Buddy Lockridge’s boat to see if his neighbor was there. He found Buddy, looking disheveled as usual, sitting in the cockpit reading a book called Hocus. McCaleb asked him if he had spent the night on the boat and he said he had. When asked why he hadn’t answered the phone, Buddy insisted that it was because it hadn’t rung. McCaleb let it go, thinking either Lockridge had simply been passed out and hadn’t heard his call or McCaleb had pushed the wrong speed-dial button.

He told Lockridge that he didn’t need him as a driver for the day, but that he wanted to hire him as a diver.

“You want me to scrape your hull?”

“No. I want you to search the hull. And the bottom. And all the piers around the boat.”

“Search? Search for what?”

“I don’t know. You’ll know it when you see it.”

“Whatever you say. But I ripped my wetsuit again doing that Bertram. As soon as I sew it up, I’ll go over and check it out.”

“Thanks. Put it on my tab.”

“You got it. Hey, is your lady friend going to be driving you now?”

He was looking past McCaleb at Graciela standing in the stern of The Following Sea. McCaleb looked at her and then back at Lockridge.

“No, Buddy. Just today. She’s got to introduce me to some people. That okay?”

“Sure. It’s okay.”

In the car McCaleb sipped from the mug of coffee he had brought with him and looked out the window, still bothered by Lockridge not having answered his call for help. They were in the Sepulveda pass, going over the Santa Monica Mountains. Most of the traffic on the 405 was going the other way.

“What are you thinking about?” Graciela asked.

“Last night, I guess,” he said. “Trying to figure it out. Buddy is going to take a dive under the boat today, maybe find out what the guy was doing.”

“Well, are you sure you want to see this Times guy now? We could reschedule it.”

“No, we’re already on our way. It can’t hurt to talk to as many people as we can. We still don’t know what any of this stuff from yesterday means. Until we do, we should keep plugging away.”

“Sounds good. He said we could talk to some of her friends who worked there, too.”

McCaleb nodded and reached down to the leather bag on the floor. It had grown fat with all the documents and tapes he had accumulated. He had decided to leave nothing from the case behind on the boat, in case of another break-in. And adding to the bag’s weight was his gun, a Sig-Sauer P-228. Other than at his interview with Bolotov, he hadn’t carried the weapon since he had retired from the bureau. But when Graciela went into the shower, he had removed it from its drawer again and slid the clip into it. He did not chamber a round-following the same safety precaution he had always practiced while with the bureau. He then made room for the pistol in his bag by jettisoning his medical kit. His plan was to be back at the boat before it was time for him to take more pills.

He dug through the stacks of paperwork in the bag until he found his legal pad and he opened it to the timeline he had constructed from the reports in the LAPD murder book. He read the top and found what he wanted.

“Annette Stapleton,” he said.

“What about her?”

“You know her? I want to talk to her.”

“She was Glory’s friend. She came over once to meet Raymond. And then she was at the funeral. How do you know about her?”

“Her name is in the LAPD stuff. She and your sister talked in the parking lot that night. I want to talk to her about other nights. You know, see if your sister was worried about anything. The LAPD never spent much time with Stapleton. Remember, they were running the random-holdup angle from the start.”

“Bozos.”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to blame them. They carry a lot of cases and this one looked the way it was set up to look.”

“Still no excuse.”

McCaleb let it go and turned silent. He didn’t particularly feel the need to defend Arrango and Walters anyway. He returned to his thoughts on the events of the night and came to one positive conclusion: he was apparently making enough waves to engage a response from someone, though he didn’t know what exactly that response had been.

They got to the L.A. Times plant ten minutes before their appointment with Glory’s supervisor, a man named Clint Neff. The Times plant was a huge property at the corner of Winnetka and Prairie in Chatsworth in the northwest corner of Los Angeles. It was a neighborhood of slick office buildings, warehouses and upper-middle-class neighborhoods. The Times building looked as though it were made of smoked glass and white plastic. They stopped at a guard station and had to wait while a man in uniform called in to confirm their appointment before lifting the gate. After they parked, McCaleb took the legal pad from his bag to take in with him. The bag itself had become too cumbersome to lug around. He made sure Graciela locked the car before they left it.

Through automatic sliding doors they stepped into a two-story lobby of black marble and terra-cotta tile. Their steps echoed on the floor. It was cold and austere, and not unlike the paper’s coverage of the community, some critics would say.

A white-haired man in a uniform of matching blue pants and shirt came down a hallway and greeted them. The oval patch above the pocket of his shirt said his name was Clint before he got a chance to say it. A set of professional ear protectors like those worn by ground crews at airports was around his neck. Graciela introduced herself and then McCaleb.

“Miss Rivers, all I can say is that we’re all real sorry here,” Neff said. “Your sister was a good gal. A fine worker and a good friend to us.”

“Thank you. She was.”

“If you want to come back, we can sit down for a minute and I can help you as best I can.”

He led the way back down the hall, walking in front of them and throwing conversation over his shoulder.

“Your sister probably told you, but this is where we print all the papers for the Valley edition and then most of the specials we insert in all the editions. You know, the TV magazine and whatnot.”

“Yes, I know,” Graciela said.

“You know, I don’t know what good I’ll be to you. I told some of the crew you might want to talk to them, too. They said it would be fine.”

They came to a set of stairs and went up.

“Is Annette Stapleton still on the night shift?” McCaleb asked.

“Uh… actually, no,” Neff said. He was winded from the climb. “Nettie… got sorta spooked after what happened with Glory and I don’t blame her, a thing like that. So she’s on days now.”

Neff headed down another hallway toward a set of double doors.

“She’s here today?”

“Sure is. You can talk to her if you-the only thing I ask is that you talk to these folks on their breaks. Like Nettie for example. She goes to the break room at ten-thirty and maybe we’ll be done by then, so you can talk with her then.”

“No problem,” McCaleb said.

After a few steps in silence Neff turned around to look at McCaleb.

“So you were an FBI man, is that right?”

“Right.”

“That must’ve been pretty interesting.”

“Sometimes.”

“How come you quit? You look like a young man to me.”

“I guess it got a little too interesting.”

McCaleb looked at Graciela and winked. She smiled. McCaleb was saved from further personal inquiry by the noise of the press room. They came to the thick double doors which barely contained the roar of the presses on the other side. From a dispenser attached to the wall next to the doors, Neff pulled two plastic packages containing disposable foam earplugs and handed them to McCaleb and Graciela.

“Better put these in while we walk through. We’re running the whole line right now. Printing the Book Review. A million-two copies. Those plugs’ll knock about thirty decibels off the sound. You still can’t hear yourself think, though.”

As they opened the packages and put in the plugs, Neff pulled his ear protectors up and into place. He opened one of the doors and they walked along the line of presses. The sensory impact was tactile as much as it was auditory. The floor vibrated as if they had just stepped into a minor earthquake. The earplugs did little to soften the high-pitched keening of the presses. A heavy thumping sound provided an underlying bass line. Neff led them to a door and into what was obviously the break room. There were long lunch tables and a variety of vending machines. The free spaces on the walls were taken up with corkboards cluttered with company and union announcements and safety-related warnings. The noise was greatly decreased when the door swung shut. They crossed the room and through another door entered Neff’s small office. As Neff pulled his ear set down around his neck again, McCaleb and Graciela pulled their plugs.

“Better hang on to those,” Neff said. “You go out the way you came in. Depending on when that is, we might be rolling out there.”

McCaleb took the plastic bag out of his pocket and put the plugs in it. Neff took the seat behind his desk and signaled them to two in front of it. The vinyl padding of the seat McCaleb was assigned was smeared with ink. He hesitated before sitting.

“Don’t worry,” Neff said, “it’s dry.”

For the next fifteen minutes they talked to Neff about Gloria Torres and got very little usable or salient information. It was clear that Neff liked Glory but it was also clear that his relationship was typical of most supervisor-employee interaction. It was primarily job focused and there was little personal information passed back and forth. When asked if he knew of anything that could have been troubling Glory, Neff shook his head and said he wished he knew something that would help. Any disputes with fellow employees? Same shake of the head.

Out of the blue McCaleb asked him if he knew James Cordell.

“Who’s that?” Neff said.

“What about Donald Kenyon?”

“What, that savings and loan guy?” Neff smiled. “Yeah, we were pals. At the country club. Milken and that guy, Boesky, hung out with us, too.”

McCaleb returned the smile and nodded. It was clear Neff was not going to be of much help. His mind drifted and Graciela asked Neff questions about who Glory’s friends were. McCaleb thought about the ink-stained chair upon which he sat. He knew where the ink came from. Probably everyone who sat in the chair before him was someone called in off the press line. It was why they all wore the navy blue uniforms. To hide the ink.

A thought occurred to him. Glory had been on her way home from work when she was killed. But she wasn’t in any uniform. She had changed. Here. But there had been nothing in the LAPD report about detectives finding work clothes in her car or checking the contents of a locker.

“Excuse me,” McCaleb said, interrupting Neff as he told Graciela about how skilled her sister was at driving a forklift that loaded huge rolls of newsprint into the presses. “Is there a locker room? Did Glory have a locker?”

“Sure, we got a locker room. Who wants to get into their automobile covered with ink? We’ve got complete fa-”

“Would Glory’s locker have been cleaned out yet?”

Neff sat back and thought a moment.

“You know, we got another hiring freeze here. We haven’t been able to get permission to replace Glory. Since we haven’t done that, I doubt we’ve cleaned out her locker.”

McCaleb felt a little jump. Maybe it was a break.

“Then is there a key? Can we look at it?”

“Uh, sure, I suppose so. I have to go get the master from the maintenance supervisor.”

Neff left them in his office while he went to get the master key and to find Nettie Stapleton. Since Glory’s locker was obviously in the women’s locker room, Neff had said before leaving that Nettie would escort Graciela in to search its contents. McCaleb would have to wait in the hallway with Neff. This did not sit well with McCaleb. It was not that he didn’t think Graciela capable of searching a locker. It was just that he would look at and treat the locker in its entirety, taking in the subtleties of what he saw the way he studied crime scenes and crime scene tapes.

Soon Neff was back with Stapleton and introductions were made. She remembered Graciela and offered seemingly heartfelt condolences. Neff then led the entourage downstairs to the hallway leading to the locker rooms. McCaleb was going to make one last offer, that if the locker room was empty, he be allowed in. But as they approached the door to the women’s locker room, he could hear the sound of the showers running. He knew he was going to be left out.

McCaleb had run out of things to ask Neff and was short of small talk. While they waited, he slowly sauntered away from the man so that he could avoid idle conversation and personal questions. There were more bulletin boards affixed to the wall between the locker room doors and he acted as though he was reading some of the posted notices.

Four minutes of silence went by in the hallway. McCaleb had moved from one end of the side-by-side bulletin boards to the other. When Graciela and Nettie finally came out, he was staring at a hand-drawn rendering of a liquid drop on a poster attached to the board. The drop was half shaded in with red, indicating that the employees were halfway toward their goal in an ongoing blood drive. Graciela walked up to him.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just some clothes, a bottle of perfume and her earphones. There were four pictures of Raymond and one of me taped to the door.”

“Earphones?”

“I mean ear protectors. But nothing else.”

“What kind of clothes?”

McCaleb was still staring at the poster as he spoke.

“A couple of fresh uniforms and a top from home and a pair of jeans.”

“You check all the pockets?”

“Yes. Nothing.”

It hit him then, with the impact of an armor-piercing bullet. He leaned forward and put his hand up against the bulletin board for support.

“Terry, what is it?” Graciela said. “Are you okay?”

He didn’t respond. His thoughts were racing. Graciela put her hand to his forehead to feel for fever. He brushed it aside.

“No, it’s not that,” he said.

“Is there a problem?” Neff chimed in.

“No,” McCaleb said, a little too loudly. “We just have to go. I need to get to the car.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes,” McCaleb said, again too loudly. “I’m sorry, but everything’s fine. We just have to go.”

McCaleb nodded his thanks to Annette Stapleton and headed down the hallway toward what he believed was the entrance lobby. Graciela followed and Neff called after them, telling them to take their first left.