The Butcher's Boy

7

When the telephone rang it tore Elizabeth out of sleep, leaving her in an unknown place. After a second or two she remembered it was Ventura and a motel room, but it took four rings for her to see the telephone and one more to get her hand on it. The call was from Hart, who wanted her to be ready for breakfast in twenty minutes.

Elizabeth hung up and went to the nightstand for her watch. Seven o’clock exactly. Then she went off to the bathroom to brush her teeth and see about a shower. As she hurried through the morning rituals she tried to keep herself from becoming too excited. Even if there were a clue, something to go on, it would probably take months to follow it up, and by then the case would be common property. A hundred people in a dozen overlapping agencies would be involved. And there still wasn’t any reason to believe she had finally crossed the trail of a genuine professional hit man or that he’d be of any use if they caught him. It was like trying to capture an animal that was so small and rare and elusive that you sometimes doubted that it existed, but if it did exist it would be capable of killing you. No, this was worse, because there wasn’t any point in hunting it down unless you could keep it alive and teach it to talk.

WHEN THEY WALKED INTO the foyer of the Ventura police station, a sergeant carrying a mug of coffee was crossing the floor toward a corridor of tiny offices. He veered toward them, giving a reassuring half-smile. “Hi. Are you being taken care of?”

“Agent Hart, FBI, and Miss Waring, Justice Department, to see the chief,” said Hart, flashing his badge.

“Okay,” said the sergeant. “This way, please.” He shot a look over his shoulder as he conducted them down the hallway. “Chief know you’re coming?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Hart.

Elizabeth said nothing, having reminded herself as they were coming up the steps that she’d learn more by listening and watching than by trying to take charge. But the fact that Hart had said FBI and Justice department hadn’t been lost on her. Technically the FBI was just one of the divisions of the Department of Justice although that had been very easy to forget the few times she’d been inside the massive J. Edgar Hoover Building with its millions of files and hundreds of millions of fingerprint records and its museum. For the moment, anyway, she would leave Washington protocol for Washington.

The sergeant led them into one of the tiny offices, where an older version of himself sat behind a wooden desk, frowning over some papers as though he were translating them with difficulty from a foreign language. When he saw he had visitors he looked relieved. He turned the papers face down in a far corner of his desk and popped up, his hand held out. “You must be agents Hart and Waring,” he said. “I’m Bob Donaldson. Always happy to cooperate with the FBI.”

“Thank you,” said Elizabeth, forestalling the correction Hart would probably feel was necessary. “As they probably told you on the phone, we’re interested in the Veasy murder.”

“Well now, ma’am,” said the chief. “We’re still not absolutely and completely sure it was a murder yet. We’re coming around to that hypothesis, but we aren’t sure.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, smiling. “I misspoke, calling it what we’re looking for rather than what we’re looking at.”

He seemed appeased. “I’ve notified the homicide squad that you’d be here, and told them to be ready with the reports of the investigating officers and so on. Beyond that I thought we’d just wait and see, let you look around and pick out the leads you want to follow.”

“I’d like to take a look at the physical evidence, since that’s what I do best,” said Hart. “Miss Waring would like to study the reports. That way we can do two things at once.”

“Good idea,” said the chief, as though the idea struck him as revolutionary. “Sergeant Edmunds, take Agent Hart to the lab, will you? Miss Waring, I’ll show you the reports.” He took her elbow in a gentle but somehow weighty pressure, as though he were guiding a prisoner who wasn’t quite dangerous enough to be handcuffed, and led her down the corridor.

There was nobody in the room marked Homicide when they got there, but Donaldson sat her at a table and gave her a stack of reports. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said.

She heard his voice in the next office. “Where the hell are those guys? I told them these people were coming this morning.”

Another male voice said in a bored monotone, “Out on a call. Found a Mexican lemon picker stabbed to death out on Telegraph Road about half an hour ago. Macaulay told me to let you know if you asked.”

“Oh,” came the chief’s voice, now much quieter. Then there was a moment or two of silence. At last the chief said, “Well, when they come back in tell Macaulay I want to see him.”

Elizabeth heard him returning from the other office. She looked up at him in the doorway and listened with an expression of interest while he recapitulated the substance of the conversation she’d just overheard. She wondered how he could not know the sound carried between the little cubicles, but apparently he didn’t. Then he was gone and she was able to look over the reports in peace.

Until the instant of his death, Veasy hadn’t been particularly noteworthy. He had a wife who’d been in his graduating class at Ventura High School, and three children born in the second, fourth, and fifth years of their marriage. They lived in a three-bedroom house in a tract which they’d been paying on for about eight years. Veasy was a machinist, making fairly good money working for Precision Tooling. The investigating officer had made a note at the bottom that his sources—the wife, the shop foreman, two fellow workers, and a neighbor—had not the slightest idea that Veasy had any enemies.

There was no indication that he owed anybody any money except the mortgage on his house. He didn’t gamble except for an occasional poker game at the union hall and the beer frames in his weekly bowling league. He had never been arrested or had anything to do with known criminals. Elizabeth was more than disappointed. She was bored. The only thing about the man that made interesting reading was his death.

She turned to the interviews with the witnesses. The whole thing had been completely unexpected. The monthly meeting of Local 602 had adjourned, he had climbed into this truck and was blown up. That was all any of them seemed to know.

After an hour and a half of reading and study, Elizabeth had made only two notes: to interview Richard O’Connell, the union president, about the minutes of the meeting, and to request file checks of Precision Tooling and Local 602. The file checks would have to wait, because it would be lunchtime at Justice now. She went to one of the empty desks and dialed the extension at Precision Tooling that O’Connell had given the homicide man. Yes, O’Connell said, he could see her at ten thirty.

Elizabeth sat for a minute staring at the file. She got out her telephone credit card, deciding to take a chance that Padgett was still busy enough to be working through another lunch hour.

On the other end she heard Padgett’s phone snatched up and his voice say, “Justice Padgett” as though it were a title.

“Roger,” she said. “I know you must be busy if you’re answering phones at twelve thirty, but I need some background. I need a file check on a company in Ventura, California, called Precision Tooling, and on Machinists’ Local 602.”

“All right, but what specifically?”

“I’m afraid I’ll need the whole thing on both. Any indication that anything isn’t aboveboard. History, assets, cast of characters, everything.”

“So you don’t know what you’re looking for.” He said it without emotion, as though he wasn’t surprised.

“I’m afraid not, Roger,” said Elizabeth. “I’m fishing.”

“I’ll get somebody on it after lunch. Give them a couple of hours and call back.”

“Thanks, Roger. I’ll do that. You’re a love.”

“I’m that all right. But Elizabeth?”

“What?”

“Try to keep it within bounds. Fishing can get expensive.”

She put her notebook away and went down the hall to Donaldson’s office. She found him still pondering the same sheaf of papers. “Chief,” she said, “I wonder if I could get a ride in a squad car. Agent Hart has the keys to our rented car, and I don’t want to interrupt him.”

“A ride? Sure,” he said. He lifted his phone and said, “I’m sending Miss Waring to you. Get her a car and driver. Right.”

THE FACTORY WAS A SMALL, rectangular aluminum building surrounded by a chain-link fence with an open gate. The place seemed to be all metal. Even the sounds that came from it were metallic, the noise of metal machines cutting and grinding and shaving metal, heating, bending, cooling it.

When she entered the shop, a man working a lathe lifted his safety goggles and walked over to her. “Are you Miss Waring?” he asked. He seemed to be about fifty, balding, and with the massive forearms of a man who worked with his hands.

“Yes. Mr. O’Connell?”

“We can talk out in the yard where it’s quiet.”

She followed him through the shop—where the whine of machinery was punctuated by an occasional ring of a hammer or the clank of chains—and out into a small asphalt square where there were a picnic table and benches. “Is this where you eat lunch?” she asked.

“That’s right,” said O’Connell, sitting down. “Now what can I tell you?”

“Mr. Veasy’s death was rather unusual, as you know, and so we’re working with the Ventura police to find out whatever we can about it. If there’s anything at all you think should go into the record, I can guarantee that it will.” She watched him for a moment, but he was just waiting for her to continue.

“I’d like to know what went on at the union hall that evening. Do you have the minutes of the meeting? I understand you’re president.”

“There aren’t any minutes of that meeting. We didn’t vote on anything, so there wasn’t much to write down,” said O’Connell.

“Do you remember what was said?”

“We were talking about the investment of the pension fund. How to get the best return for our money, how to keep it safe, you know. The usual things.” He looked at her through clear, empty gray eyes.

“Did Mr. Veasy say anything that you remember?”

“Al? Sure,” he said, beginning to smile as he remembered. “He was a great talker all right. He was complaining about the quarterly statement from our biggest investment. Said we weren’t getting anything back for our money, that we were speculating instead of saving, and that we were gonna lose it.”

“Do you agree?”

“No,” he said. “Not at all. A union has to do something or inflation will eat up the pension funds before anybody has a chance to use them. You have to put money into things that’ll produce profits in the long run, even if nothing much happens the first year or two.”

“What investment bothered him?”

“Well,” said O’Connell, “we have a lot tied up in an investment corporation called Fieldston Growth Enterprises.”

“Mutual funds?” Elizabeth wrote down the name.

“No. Land, mostly. Resorts, golf courses, retirement places. Al didn’t like it one bit. Said he’d tried to find out about them and couldn’t. There weren’t any resorts or anything that they owned, so he panicked. They’re new, so they haven’t done any of that yet. But I’ve seen brochures with the designs and layouts, and it’ll be big. I’m sorry Al couldn’t live to see it.”

“What else happened that night? Did he argue with anybody?”

“No, not really. He and I went round a little about the pension fund, but it wasn’t personal.”

“Did anything else seem to be on his mind? Was he depressed lately or nervous?”

“Al Veasy didn’t commit suicide,” said O’Connell. “His truck blew up is all. Must have been a leak in the fuel system. Could happen to anybody the way they make ’em now. If I was his wife I’d sue General Motors.”

“So it looked to you like just a tragic accident?”

“What else? Murder? What for?”

“I just have to cover all the possibilities, Mr. O’Connell.”

Elizabeth thanked him and walked back to the waiting police car. Both doors were open and the officer was leaning against the trunk gazing off down the road through his mirror-lens sunglasses. He was probably nice looking, she thought, but you’d have to get him out of uniform to tell. They always seemed to be covered with bits of metal. “Where to?” he said.

“Twenty-seven twenty-four Grove Avenue.”

“Veasy’s house?”

“That’s right,” said Elizabeth. All the stops were routine, she thought—no way to break out of it, nobody new to ask.

The rest of Elizabeth’s morning was just as unproductive. What she got from Mrs. Veasy was inarticulate grief. At least the investigating officers had managed to find out a little about the dead man’s habits. But they did this kind of thing every day, and were probably pretty good at it—ignoring what people were trying to say—their theories, opinions about people and life and death—and listening for what they had to throw in to make it comprehensible to an outsider—specific information about the victim’s habits, behavior, friends, and enemies.

Elizabeth was suddenly tired. She glanced at her watch and saw that it was almost noon. “Let’s go back to the station,” she said. The policeman drove with a special kind of authority, a tiny bit faster than anyone else on the straight, level highway, so the other cars would move aside to let them cruise by. She looked out on the rows of low suburban houses as they slid past, now and then surprised by a squat date palm or a row of towering eucalyptus trees. If it weren’t for the plants this could be Indiana. Or Virginia, anyway. Just about anything seemed to grow here. But not on Grove Avenue. The houses were built so close together there wasn’t even room for a decent lawn.

When they reached the station she asked to use the desk sergeant’s telephone and called Padgett in Washington. “Hi, Elizabeth,” he said. There was something odd about his voice, but she couldn’t identify it. Amusement? Spite?

“Hi, Roger,” she said. “What have you got for me?”

“Precision Tooling isn’t going to help much. They’re purer than Caesar’s wife. Started in 1936 by a couple of master machinists who hired a few friends, then grew when the war came. Made airplane parts, patterns for drop-forged ship fittings, things like that. Been a minor defense subcontractor ever since.”

“Any chance of new stockholders? Unusual loans or anything?”

“Elizabeth, these people have been on our books for thirty-five years. They get a new clearance every time a contract comes up for renewal. If they moved the water cooler we’d know it. They’re in perfect health.”

“Well, save the file for me anyway. What about the union?”

“Clean too, at least so far. They’re part of the file, but we’re still checking with the Department of Labor. All we know at the moment is there aren’t any shady characters hanging around the factory; that was all Defense was interested in. Labor should know something.”

“When they answer ask them for information on the pension plan.”

“The what?”

“The union’s pension fund. And oh, yes. I’m afraid I’ve got a new one. Fieldston Growth Enterprises. The union invested in it.”

“All right, but keep the fishing to a minimum, okay?”

“Sure, Roger. Whatever you say,” said Elizabeth, without conviction. “I’ll call you early tomorrow.”

“Wait a minute, Elizabeth,” said Padgett. “Brayer wants to talk to you.” The irony was back in his voice.

Then Brayer’s voice said, “Elizabeth, have you heard the news about Senator Claremont?”

“No. What about him?”

“He died in his hotel room in Denver last night. It looks like a stroke or a heart attack, but the autopsy will take a while. There’s going to be an investigation, so I’m taking you off what you’re working on. I want you in Denver by late afternoon or early evening.”

Elizabeth couldn’t help herself. She said, “What for? It’s crazy! I’ve been on this case exactly four hours, not to mention the fact that there’s nothing for me to do in Denver when I get there.”

“No use arguing about it, you’re going. It’s orders from the Attorney General’s office. We’ve got to send a field agent, and you’re the closest one that I can spare today. This thing Roger’s working on looks big, and everybody’s tied up.”

“You trying to tell me the FBI doesn’t have a field office in Denver?”

“Damn it, Elizabeth! I’m not going to stand here for the rest of the day justifying my decisions to you. There are reasons, that’s all. Now get moving.” He hung up, hard.

Elizabeth whispered to herself as she hung up the telephone, “Yes, sir!” When she looked up, Hart was coming down the hall with the chief of police.

“Chief, thank you very much for your cooperation,” he said. “We’ll be in touch.” It was all very cordial, but there was an edge to his voice as though he were trying not to sound angry.

As they walked down the steps to their rented car he said, “Was that your call from home?”

“Yes,” she said. “Did you get one too?”

“Of course. A little while ago.” The anger was definite now.

“I don’t understand it.”

“I do,” he said. “Politics. Pure politics. They have to reassure the senators who vote on budgets that we take it seriously when one of them dies. Even if it’s a heart attack.”

“But I’m not even a field investigator. I’m a data analyst.”

“Who cares? There’s not going to be anything to investigate. We’re just there for the roll call.”

“That still doesn’t explain why they pulled us off an actual fresh murder when there must be thirty or forty teams closer to Denver who are better qualified than I am at least—”

“How do you know this was a murder?” he asked.

“Well it is, isn’t it?” she said. “Nothing else makes any sense at all. I was at Veasy’s house this morning. They have a yard you could cover with a bedspread, and he was supposed to be carrying big sacks of fertilizer around in his pickup truck. What for? And the other thing is that you’re really angry and I don’t think you would be unless you thought it was a murder too, so we can at least agree on that even if nobody else does. If you didn’t think the case was important—that is, a murder—you wouldn’t care if they took us off it.”

As she spoke, the words came faster and faster until Hart could hardly follow her. He took his eyes off the road for a second and saw Elizabeth was staring straight ahead with her brows knitted a little, which meant she had settled that part of it and was already launched into the next stage, whatever that might be, so before she got too far he’d better tell her. “Do you want to know what I found this morning in the union hall parking lot?”

She turned to him again and smiled. “Of course, Bob.” He wasn’t sure if she was humoring him or not, but he went on.

“A few bits of wire and a fragment of the jacket of a blasting cap. Both charred. So I guess we know that much, anyway.”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth. “That much is for certain. Now if only we didn’t have to go on a side trip to Colorado. I wonder what it’s like there this time of year.”

“Cold, clear. Now and then some snow.”

“Terrific,” she said. “And all just so the Senate staff can look at a report in two months and see that two people from Washington were there.”

“Oh, I’m afraid it’s worse than that, Elizabeth. They won’t have to wait more than a day. There’ll be reporters, photographers, probably national television. Senator Claremont was a very important man. That’s the real reason why they sent us, I think. After tomorrow’s newspapers whoever’s there won’t be of much use in undercover stuff, and we’re home office.”

“Oh, God,” she said, and slumped back in the seat. She thought, wonderful. Elizabeth Waring on national news in her thin California clothes investigating a death by old age. On national television. While somewhere in Southern California there would be two clerks, both of them busy forgetting what the man looked like that bought the hundred-pound bags of fertilizer and the blasting caps last Friday around supper time. Probably they’d be watching television. And what they’d see was … Elizabeth Waring. In Denver, Colorado, there, by her official presence alone to reassure ninety-nine men over sixty that there was no such thing as a death by old age.