I considered driving to Dana Endicott’s brownstone and banging the door, in case she was home but not answering the phone, debated the wisdom of harassing a wealthy client while pondering the hostile parking situation in her neighborhood—tow zones, fifteen-minute meters, resident-only parking. My leg throbbed, probably because of the worsening weather, but possibly due to guilt. I hadn’t been to the gym in three days.
I drove to Gold’s—plenty of parking in the lot—raced a stationary bike for half an hour, did prescribed leg lifts and extensions, grunted through hamstring strengtheners. The regime relieved the guilt, but didn’t improve the weather.
It was wet and nasty when I emerged, horizontal gusts of rain rendering my umbrella useless. I rarely cook, but on nights like this nothing beats chili, so I stopped for ingredients at the Star. The recipe varies, but cans of Ro-tel diced tomatoes and green chiles are usually in the mix, along with a couple of huge Spanish onions, ground meat, and plenty of garlic. I showered as soon as I got home, got into comfy sweats, then chopped, stirred, and tasted, downing a beer to counter the spices. I felt good about work, something I hadn’t done for awhile. I prefer working for myself—that had something to do with it—but for some reason, a line from a Tennessee Williams play kept slipping into my head, the one about the father who worked for the phone company and fell in love with long distance.
I could easily fall in love with missing persons. If I ever get to the point where I can pick and choose, specialize, concentrate, I’ll take a missing persons case every time. I like studying what isn’t there, envisioning the hole in the doughnut. It’s like observing air currents, disturbances caused by the absence of a body in space. I couldn’t yet see Veejay, not even in my mind’s eye, but I was starting to feel the eddies of her absence, from the unskilled Elvira covering her tables, to the business owner doing the work of his employee, to the landlady with an empty room and a missing car.
Missing people move me more than missing construction equipment, no doubt about it. Was meeting rich Dana Endicott a sign that I should go back to working for myself? I considered my finances. My bankbook needed more than a single boost. Paolina and college, I reminded myself. Paolina’s got money of her own, from her absentee druglord dad, but I’d spent a lot of it recently, getting her out of public housing on the theory that she’d never make it as far as college if she stayed.
I ate steaming chili, listening to the thump of icy rain against the windows. I thought about calling Sam Gianelli, asking whether Norrelli Construction was a familiar name, how he was, was he married, what kind of money was the mob screwing out of the Dig. I’d had about a beer too many, I concluded. I played guitar, went to bed.
Morning. I dressed in the dark, decided to concoct a sack lunch featuring leftover chili. I didn’t want to cement a lunch habit with Marian, and it seemed to me that the workers might be prompted to chit-chat about theft over lunch, once such traditional matters as who should play center field for the Red Sox dried up. Then, wouldn’t you know it, I couldn’t find the thermos. I knew I had one, red plastic with a wide mouth. The idea of eating cold chili sitting on the cold ground was definitely unappealing.
By the time I found the thermos I was running late. I missed a train, the snow turned to slush—you get the idea—but when I rushed into the field office, primed with excuses, I found it deserted. I poked my head into the inner office, saw no one. Marian’s purse was visible in her half-opened desk drawer, but there was no evidence that either of the Horgans had been in, and O’Day was missing, too. I made a quick inventory of items on the Horgans’ desks. The photo smiled. The laptop was absent. A glossy brochure from the Artery Business Committee lay on top of a payroll form. I gave a quick tug at the top drawer of Gerry’s desk. It didn’t budge, but Liz’s opened easily. Her cell phone was gone.
The lights were on, the alarm disengaged. I went back into the outer office, checked my watch against the clock on the microwave. Yesterday, in the same trailer at the same hour, I’d heard engines whine, jack-hammers sputter and jitter. Now, only the rush of distant traffic, speeding by. I parted the curtain over the stingy window, stood fixed for a moment, then grabbed a hard hat. It took seconds to kick off my shoes, stick my feet into heavy boots, shrug into my coat. I ran outside, taking the three cement steps in a leap.
Yesterday, the site was a hive of activity wherever you looked, each person working at his own rhythm, each person part of a group that moved to a different beat. Now the site had little movement, a single focus. Knots of hard hats stood near the glory holes that pierced the decking, staring down into the pit, their breath rising in a cloud. I headed for the west scaffold steps and found myself blocked by the crowd.
“Shit, looks bad.”
“Is he moving?”
“Where’s the fuckin’ EMTs?”
Three had died on the Dig since Governor Weld smashed a bottle of champagne to begin work in December of ’91. One had been badly injured. Construction machinery was heavy and ornery, conditions hard and wintry. Acetylene torches burned, footing was treacherous. Still, workers were careful, safety officers wary. Thousands had died building the Panama Canal, hundreds on the Golden Gate Bridge. The Dig was a model site with an enviable record.
An ambulance pulled to a whip-tailed halt, lights flashing. A man standing near the east scaffold semaphored his arms, yelled, “Bring a gurney!”
I tucked myself into the crowd, edged closer to the nearest glory hole. No one descended the staircase and I wondered if it were blocked.
A man said, “The way Horgan’s reaming out Charlie, you figure something went wrong with the scaffold?”
“Charlie checks those fuckers every morning.”
The EMTs were having trouble lowering their gear down the scaffolding. Hands grabbed it, eased it down. There was grumbling about how long the rescue was taking. There’d been drills, hadn’t these guys been paying attention? One site, they had to haul a man out in a clamshell bucket, by crane. This was fucking nothing, and look at the time it was taking!
“Yeah, well, he ain’t movin’.”
“Could be paralyzed.”
“Yeah, look on the fucking bright side.”
Out of the corner of my eye I caught Gerry Horgan, red-faced, shoving toward the ambulance, Liz behind him, breathing hard. The paramedics, aided by random workers, were lifting the stretcher, passing it hand to hand. A man was fastened to the gurney with orange straps. I tried to see his face but it stayed hidden behind heads, shoulders, hard hats. The gurney surfaced, and a name surged through the crowd, group to group, like a rushing breeze. Kevin Fournier.
Watery blue eyes in the trailer. An urgent need to see Liz Horgan. I made tracks for the ambulance, too.
The orange-clad paramedics were moving fast, rigging oxygen lines. The victim was strapped to a spinal board. I caught a glimpse of his head, partially wrapped in a sweatshirt hood, dark with blood. He ought to be bleeding more, I thought. Gushing blood, from a wound like that.
O’Day, the site super, stood at Horgan’s left. He looked like he wanted to strike out, smash something. Liz Horgan clutched her husband’s hand, but he shook her off, pursuing the paramedics, yelling into a walkie-talkie. Liz touched O’Day’s shoulder, then started after Horgan. She looked as though she were about to be sick.
“Can I help?” I cut her off at an angle of the fence. “Are you okay?”
She stared at me blankly.
“Carla,” I said.
“It’ll be okay,” she said, more to herself than to me. “It’ll be okay.” Her teeth were chattering. She took a step, staggered, grabbed the fence to stay upright.
Her husband was suddenly next to me. “You! Get her out of here! Get her some water or something, up at the trailer. Go on, Liz. Leave it to me. It’s gonna be okay, Liz.”
“How?” she said softly. “How? With this—”
“We’ll go to twenty-four/seven if we have to. We’ll do what we have to do.”
“We’ll hire a night watchman.” Her voice was so low I barely made out the words. “We’ll hire him. Promise.”
“Okay. Jesus Christ, okay.” His head was turned away from me; I couldn’t see his expression, but he sounded reluctant.
She touched his shoulder. “Promise, Gerry.”
“Okay, okay, Liz. I’ll take care of it.”
“Promise,” she insisted.
“Get her a blanket, too,” Horgan told me.
I wanted to abandon her, find a way into the trench, examine footsteps, bloodstains, but such actions on the part of a secretary would be noted, questioned. Instead I ushered Mrs. H. into the trailer, my arm protectively circling her shoulders. She asked for aspirin. Her hand, when it touched mine, felt icy.
She kept aspirin in her bottom desk drawer, she told me. I found it, grabbed a sweater off a hook in lieu of a blanket, wrapped the garment around her shaking shoulders. Her teeth were chattering so hard it took five minutes before she could manage the aspirin. If she hadn’t been there I’d have called Eddie. I no longer had any desire to quit my day job. I’d seen Kevin Fournier as he lay on the gurney. I thought he was probably dead, or dying.
A dead man is a missing person, too.