My phone was ringing when I unlocked the door to my house. I put on a light. On the floor, among the cardboard packing crates, I found the handset.
“Mr. Rasmussen?” a woman asked.
I said it was.
“This is Maddie Hartley director of human resources at Garden State Foods. I hope it’s not too late to be calling.” It sounded as if it might be too late for her; I thought I heard her yawn.
“It’s fine, Ms. Hartley. Thank you for getting back to me.” I fished my notebook out of my jacket pocket.
“You had a question about a former employee?”
I told her the reason for my earlier call and gave her Troy Pepper’s name.
She made a little hiss of indrawn air. “Oh dear. I’m sorry. This happened up there in Massachusetts?”
“Last night. He was arraigned today. His attorney is gathering information for a defense.” I shoved some clutter aside and sat on the couch and switched on a table lamp.
“Well, I do remember him. He started with us four years ago. He
worked second shift, as a picker—that involves filling orders, getting items off the warehouse shelves, and putting them on pallets for delivery to supermarkets. To be honest, I wasn’t sure he was going to be able to cut it. He has a disfigured hand. Well, I was wrong. He never missed a shift—all in all, a reliable worker. He did have one difficulty, I recall.” She sighed, and I heard the weariness for certain this time. “A group of others on the shift, who’d been there longer, approached him one night at break and asked if maybe he was working too hard, if maybe he should take it easier. Evidently he thanked them for their concern, but he decided he didn’t like the suggestion, so he worked even faster.”
“And the others saw the light, increased productivity and set a plant record,” I said.
“Yeah, exactly.” There was a hint of zest in her voice that seemed to want to bubble up through the weariness. “No, they decided that telling gets more results than asking. They met him in the parking lot one night. It got physical, and he took the worst of it, but he fought them until security broke it up. The other men could’ve been terminated, but Mr. Pepper insisted it had been a misunderstanding. They worked it out, and life went on—with probably some middle course hashed out on the work-pace issue.” She sighed. “Why can’t world leaders resolve differences that smoothly? Anyway, Mr. Pepper was fine for about three years, worked his way up to forklift operator. And then he resigned. That’s the last I knew.”
“Do you know why he left?”
“We didn’t have a formal exit interview process in place then, but he did come in, and he was polite and all, thanked us for the opportunity, and assured me it wasn’t because he was unhappy there. But that’s about all he had to say.”
“Would you happen to have the file right there with you?”
“No, I’m at home. It’s in my head, though.”
“You remember that?”
“It’s this problem I’ve had for years. I can’t seem to forget a darn thing.”
“That’s not a bad problem to have.”
“It is when you can’t shake the name of every schoolteacher you ever had, every classmate you shared Valentine’s Day cards with from
grade one on. If I could lose all that rummage it might free up some space on the hard drive.”
“To do what?”
“Good point. Anyhow, I do recall one other thing about Troy Pepper … he had this nervous way of looking at you—or avoiding looking, maybe. I got the feeling that he had things to say but couldn’t quite bring himself to say them. Well, I wish you the best, Mr. Rasmussen. Now, I’ve got another clock to punch. I’m caring for my mother, who’s in the last stages of Alzheimer’s. She can’t remember a blessed thing, including who I am. And I can’t stop remembering—and realizing that eventually each of us ends up in the cemetery flying the marble kite. Of course, if I’d known that back in the day when I was a camp follower with Springsteen’s band, I’d have done things a lot differently.”
“Put your nose to the grindstone and started saving kite string?”
The zest welled up finally in an honest laugh. “It only takes six feet of string to fly that puppy. No, I’d have enjoyed myself even more. Good luck to you.”
A minute after I hung up, the phone rang again. It was Sonders. “You’ve been yapping a while,” he said. He sounded agitated. “I’m getting jerked around here. Who makes up all these chickenshit rules, anyhow?”
I asked him to take a breath and explain. He’d spoken with Fred Meecham about resuming business, he said, but Meecham told him there wasn’t much legally he could do. “I’m allowed to keep the equipment where it is, because I’ve contracted for the field, but will they let me operate? Negatory. And if I’m not operating, no residency permit. Deal is we can flop here tonight, but that’s it. Starting tomorrow we need to find someplace else to live. I had Nicole phone up some hotels, but at those prices we’ll go bust before they have to change the linen. There’s got to be someplace cheaper, and I figured you might know where.”
I tried to picture forty bodies camped in my four rooms but couldn’t see it. “I’ll snoop around and call you tomorrow,” I said. “Get some sleep.”