I let Weston put the money back in the envelope, and I signed a paper saying that he had given me a pile of documents, as per Linn’s instruction, and that I had opened the envelope before either of us realized it was prohibited territory.
He agreed to let it go at that because he was as suspicious of used hundred-dollar bills as I was. Quite apart from any other considerations. And I agreed to let him go, back to his day off. We parted on better terms than we had met on.
The existence of the envelope wouldn’t leave my mind as I drove back to my office. “Not to be opened before I am dead.”
It added to my worries. John Pighee had seemed able to anticipate the need for various contingencies that, from what I knew of his situation, most people just wouldn’t have thought likely enough to allow for. Which meant only that there was a lot about his situation that I didn’t know.
As I walked up the stairs to my office, I could tell something wasn’t right. I had no door.
“What the hell is going on here?” I asked as I walked in. But I could see what was going on. I had left my daughter working at my desk. But now, in her place, I found my door and a sweat- soaked Raymond McGonigle.
“Hi, man,” he said.
Sam appeared at the living-room door. “Ray’s fixing your door,” she said. “You knew it stuck in the doorframe, didn’t you? Well, Ray’s going to fix it. We found some tools in a box in the other room. Isn’t that great?”
“Yeah, great,” I said, and walked through to the other room. Why don’t people leave things alone? Especially my things.
Sam followed me. “Isn’t it great?” she asked. “I knew you’d be pleased.”
“Linn’s asleep?”
“Yes. Is something wrong?”
“Doors are hard to hang. Has your friend ever ‘fixed’ a door before?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Go find out. Then bring me your charts.”
She left without question. I called the only “Bartonio, Jos.” listed in the phone book. John Pighee’s sales supervisor.
I reminded him who I was. He was still concerned about John Pighee. I told him there’d been no change in his medical condition.
“Gee, that’s a shame,” he said.
“There was a question I missed asking on Friday.”
“Shoot.”
I John Pighee was on your staff part-time?”
“Right.”
“Was he being paid part-time? What was the arrangement about his money?”
“Ahh,” Bartonio said. “Well, he was still on nine-sixteenths time with my department, though to tell you the truth he wasn’t really pulling that much weight. He was only getting about a third to half of the orders he had before he shifted, so his commissions were down. But we have an income-leveling plan for salesmen, and he was drawing on the basis of nine-sixteenths of his last two years’ commissions, plus nine-sixteenths of his base salary. So he hadn’t quite felt the full impact of his change.”
“If he was only doing a third to half of the work, why was he on nine-sixteenths rates?”
“Because that was the original arrangement about his time. We got four mornings and two afternoons a week. But really because the rest of his money was on research rate and those guys don’t come close to making the kind of money a good salesman can touch.”
“Let me get this right,” I said. “Pighee was also pulling seven- sixteenths research salary?”
“A technician’s salary, I think,” he said. “I didn’t handle that side of it but that was my understanding.”
“But he’d have been on the official payroll with two departments?” “That’s right. So that he came under the full-employment terms for insurance and pension and that sort of stuff.”
“And you’re also sure that Pighee would have taken a cut in pay to go into this arrangement?”
“Oh, yeah. No question. But John had interests which overrode money. That’s a sign of a guy who knows where he’s going.”
Sam was waiting for me when I hung up.
“What was that about. Daddy?”
“I was taking the opportunity to check some facts. To confirm what I thought was pretty clear.”
“And did they check?”
“I don’t know. Let’s see your handiwork.”
She had analyzed the Pighee financial situation in detail. On the surface it showed what my superficial figures had. No cut in money. The opposite. And no unusual expenditures. Except about $1,500 a year to Mrs. Thomas. I wondered if she got some used hundred- dollar bills to supplement her monthly check.
But a look at the deposit records showed when Pighee’s rearrangement had come. November of 1975, there were two credit entries adding up to what had been deposited on October, 1975. Payment suddenly by Loftus and Rush, instead of by Loftus alone.
Sam had laid the figures out well, made me pretty charts, and I told her so.
“What does it all mean. Daddy? What has happened? Aren’t you going to tell me?”
“It means we may have a police matter on our hands,” I said.
“Police!” she said. “What’s it got to do with the fuzz?”
“They can find out quickly what I could only find out slowly, if at all.”
“But the police . . .” she said, as if involving them were somehow not within the scope of fair play.
“Go remind Ray which end of the door goes at the top,” I said. She left without saying anything. Which surprised me.
Then I followed her to my office. “Are you an insured builder?”
I asked Ray. Then I remembered that the building was coming down in two and a half months. With luck he would still be inside it.
“Aw, come on, man,” Ray said. “I’m only trying to help.”
“Take a breather,” I said. “Answer a question for me.”
He stopped mutilating my door for the moment.
I asked, “How much work did John Pighee do around the labs? How much time did he put in?”
“I don’t really know,” McGonigle said. “My hours are so funny.”
“Try and remember. Was he usually there? Sometimes there? Always there?”
“Usually,” he said.
“Usually in the morning? Afternoon?”
“I don’t remember him in the morning much. Except maybe weekends sometimes. But he was there most afternoons and he seemed to do a lot of night work.”
I nodded. “Is there any record made of the hours he worked?” “There’s no punch clock, if that’s what you mean. If he stayed late, he’d have had to sign out, but that’s all.”
“Signed out?”
“If you go in or out after six, you have to use the main gate and sign the log.”
“Even if you’re a regular employee?”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks,” I said, and walked back to the phone in my living room. I called my friend at the police department, a graying lieutenant named Jerry Miller.
“Who’s there?”
I told him.
He said, “What’s the occasion? Trying to sell tickets to the detectives’ ball?”
“Sorry to bother you, Jerry.”
“I’m sure you are,” he said. “Tell you what. Why don’t you cut the stuff about how sorry you are, how’s Janie, when am I going to make captain, and get down to what you want from me. The answer is no.”
“I want to come in tomorrow and tell you about some things I’ve come across.”
“Like what?”
“Like a quantity of used hundred-dollar bills.”
“A quantity? How many?”
Two hundred and twenty.”
He was silent. I knew I had his attention. ‘That must have been some poker game, Albert” he said.
“They’re not mine,” I said.
“Whose are they?”
“Tomorrow,” I said. “First I wondered if you—”
“Oh,” he interrupted. “Just a little something else first.” But he didn’t say no.
“All I wanted to know was whether you have any connection with the security people at Loftus Pharmaceuticals.”
I could practically hear him raise his eyebrows.
“I want access to some logbooks they keep. I’m trying to reconstruct the movements of a man who worked there—works there. Sometimes he stayed late and when he did that he had to sign out I want to go through the books and find out how often it happened. That’s all. I can go now, I can go tonight, I can go tomorrow, but the sooner I have it the sooner I come to talk to you.”
“Loftus Pharmaceuticals, huh?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. I’ll see if I can turn someone up.”
We hung up. I waited by the phone, listening to Ray scraping my door to sawdust in the other room. Nothing else happened for twenty minutes. So I made myself something to eat. Baked beans and caviar, which seemed to be the only thing in the house, besides beer.
At twenty past six Sam came in and announced, “The door is back up.” At the same time the phone rang.
“Yeah?” I said. Into the phone.
“I’ve got a contact with one of the main-gate guards. He’s on duty now. His friend says that he’ll call him, but that you’ll have to go down and do whatever work you want to do on the premises. You can’t take logbooks away. That O.K.?”
“I’ll go down now,” I said.
“Guy’s name is Russell Fincastle. He’ll know your name.”
“O.K. Thanks, Jerry.”
“Tomorrow,” he said sternly. “Tomorrow.”
I gathered my notebook and headed for the outer world.
“How do you like it. Daddy?” Sam asked, but not confidently. The door was back in place. With a two-inch gap at the bottom. I looked at her scientific friend. Then I tried the door. It opened easily. Just by turning the handle and pulling.
“At least it doesn’t stick now,” I said. And left. I pulled the door closed behind me. It hit the frame and flew open again.
“You can close it, Daddy,” Sam rushed forward to assure me. “If you lift it and pull it gently.”
Russell Fincastle was short and lean, and young. I introduced myself and he shook hands with me left-handed. He showed me two heavily taped fingers on his right hand.
“Rough job here, then?” I asked.
He laughed modestly. “Broke them playing ball,” he said.
“Ball?”
“Basketball. Thought I’d just stunned them the way you do, hit them on the ends, but both bastards were fractured.”
“That’s bad luck. Where do you play?”
“Summers in the park. Winter the Industrial League. Semipro. And a little cash from it hurts me not a bit.” He looked at me coolly.
“Ah,” I said. “A little cash. What’s the rate for looking through your logbooks, then? Five do it?”
“Ten would do it better,” he said.
“I’m sure it would, and twenty better still, but five’s my limit.”
He just nodded. I pulled out my wallet. Found four ones. Fished through my pockets and turned up ninety-eight cents.
He laughed, which was just as well. “Bargain day,” he said. And he showed me the current log.
“I’m interested in January, this year.”
“January?”
“Yeah. You keep them that long, don’t you?”
“Well, yeah. Hell, that’s O.K., I suppose.” He pulled out a big book from below the counter level of the guard’s window.
“Who exactly has to sign these things?”
“Everybody who goes in or out after six, or anytime on weekends and holidays.”
“Everybody? There are no other points on the premises where people go in and out?”
“Not after six.”
“Would Sir Jeff have to sign out?” I asked.
“If I was on duty,” he said.
I started on the first of January, since I didn’t know the exact day of John Pighee’s accident. Everyone said it was seven months ago and that meant January.
I found John Pighee’s name, signed in at 1:15 and out at 6:30 on January 1st. There were eight other names in the book for January 1st. Which seemed pretty busy going for New Year’s Day. Which is the day after New Year’s Eve. But on the second of January there were thirty-one names. Not including Pighee’s.
“A lot of people come in and out out of hours,” I said to Fincastle.
“That’s what I’m in business for,” he said.
“Is there any way of telling where inside the perimeter they are?”
He showed me the column of squiggles that indicated where people said they were going or said they had been. “R 3” for Research Three. Which made a certain amount of sense.
In the first three weeks of January, Pighee’s name was in the book twelve times, half of them signing out after midnight. He was there each of the three Thursdays and never on Monday, with each of the other nights being represented at least once. His timings were not regular; he had signed out as early as, 6:15 p.m. and as late as 3:30 a.m.
The first day of the fourth week was Thursday, January 27th. He had signed in at 7 p.m. but had not signed out. I managed to hypothesize that that was the night of the accident.
I called Fincastle’s attention to the entry. “What do you do when somebody signs in but doesn’t sign out?”
He squinted over it. “Let’s see. That one’s been checked out and approved. That’s what that check is about.” He pointed to a red tick.
“But what happens?”
“Well, about eleven-thirty we go through the book and make a call from here to everybody who’s still in, reminding them they’re supposed to be out by twelve.”
“They’re supposed to be out by twelve?”
“Mostly, yes. But it wouldn’t apply to your fella there. He was in a research building and they work some weird hours.”
“So you’d just let him stay.”
“We’d let our patrol people know which building he was in. They’d usually have a look before 1 a.m. And even the scientists don’t stay much after that, usually. But we keep tabs on them.”
I went back to the books. Confirmed that John Pighee’s name didn’t appear after the twenty-seventh of January, then went back to the accident night, to see who else was in Research Three.
I found Ray McGonigle’s name, signed out at 10:15. And Dr. Marcia Merom’s for 7:39, which was before the accident. Ray had timed it about eight. But those were the only signatories for Research Three.
“This is funny,” I said.
“What is?”
“I know of at least one person who was in Research Three on the twenty-seventh who isn’t signed in or out.”
“How do you know that?”
“The guy I’m tracing had an accident. People have told me he was there.” Ray had said Dundree was quickly on the scene.
“Accident?”
“A guy blew himself up in Research Three. January 27th.”
“I remember something about it, vaguely,” he said vaguely. “I suppose sometimes people get in or out without signing. And if they stay there all night, they wouldn’t sign out.”
“You don’t seem all that worried.”
“I wasn’t on that night,” he said.
I thought for a minute.
“You wouldn’t want to do me a favor, would you?” I asked.
“Shouldn’t think so,” he said, with a smile.
“For maybe ten bucks?”
“What kind of favor?”
“I’d like a list of all the people who signed out or in and out of Research Three over the year or so before this guy’s accident.”
“You’re talking about a long list,” he said.
“I thought maybe something you could do easily enough in your slow times tonight.”
“You gave me four dollars and ninety-eight cents just to look in the books yourself. At that rate, what you’re asking me to do would be worth forty-nine ninety-five.”
“Twenty’s the limit.”
“Done,” he said without hesitating.