18

A pillow factory. I imagined clouds of white goose down. Just thinking about pillow factories made me sleepy, so I kept careful watch in my rearview mirror. Nobody tailed me to the corner drugstore, where I checked out Hunneman Pillows in the phone booth Yellow Pages. I scratched down the Brighton address on the back of an envelope. Nobody tailed me from the drugstore to Cambridge Street.

I turned the volume up on the tape deck and sang along with Chris Smither on “Love You Like a Man.” Bonnie Raitt covers it, but I have a fondness for the original raunchy version.

Those men you been seein’ got their balls up on the shelf,

You know they can never love you, babe,

They can’t even love themselves.

If you need someone who can, I could be your lover man,

You better believe me when I tell you,

I could love you like a man.

The lyrics made me think about the INS guy, not Walter Jamieson, the shriveled-up rat, but the second guy, Harry Clinton, the one with the eyes and the shoulders.

Uh-huh, I thought, checking around for a white Aries. Sam Gianelli’s been in Italy a damn long time. And what’s he been doing in those Turin hotel rooms with the big canopied beds? Dreaming of me?

Mississippi John Hurt sings my all-time favorite blues rhyme.

Red rooster say: Cock-a-doodle-do,

Richland woman say: Any dude’ll do.

I’m not like that Richland woman, I told myself virtuously. But Harry Clinton was on my mind.

Hunneman Pillows was located off North Beacon Street in between a plumbing-supply shop and a going-out-of-business shoe-factory outlet. As far as I can figure, North Beacon Street has no relationship to Beacon Street at all and is just called that to throw new cabbies off the scent.

Veteran jockey that I am, I wasn’t fooled.

The Hunneman factory seemed to be an unmarked brick square with patches of boarded-up window and an air of desertion. It was plunked next to a slab of pot-holed cement that could have been a parking lot or an auto junkyard. It didn’t have any neat yellow lines delineating spaces, but it did have lots of junky cars. I found most of an empty slot for my Toyota, squeezing between a rusted Oldsmobile and a maroon Chevy with a battered left rear fender. I took in a deep breath and eased my body out the door with maybe a quarter inch to spare. If I’d been wearing looser jeans, I’d never have made it.

The white Aries wasn’t in the lot.

Hunneman didn’t exactly advertise its presence. There was no sign over the door, no billboard. I checked the address I’d scrawled on the envelope. Without it, I’d have driven right by. With it, I wondered if the factory had closed down and moved out.

I leaned against the hood of an old Ford wagon, pulled Harry Clinton’s card out of my pocket, and stared at the phone number until it blurred before my eyes.

I figured I should call Mooney. And Harry Clinton. I got back in my car and sat, ignition keys weighing down my hand.

Mooney was pursuing some wacko serial killer. I realized I had trouble believing in his existence. Oh, I’m not naïve, I know the goons are out there. I read about them in the papers like everybody else, glued to the print by the horror, unable to look away. But I don’t see them here, in my city. Despite the Boston Strangler, I think of them as California crazies, Texas loners. Far away. Other.

I wasn’t concerned with a serial killer. I was concerned with a woman who’d worn a filigree ring, who’d paid me five hundred dollars to get her a green card that didn’t even belong to her.

Why?

I tried to make my client’s visit fit with Harry Clinton’s theory. If my Manuela was searching for his Manuela, the turncoat coyote, could that make my Manuela a member of a so-called death squad? If so, why the hell had she turned up dead herself?

I decided not to call Clinton. Still, I wasn’t ready to rush the factory’s front door and demand to see Manuela Estefan.

I checked out my nose in the rearview mirror. It was tender to the touch but not broken, I thought. There was some bruising high on my right cheek.

Damn. I could sit here all day watching my cheek turn color or I could stop dithering and check out a goddamn lead. I slid out of the car and walked resolutely toward the factory.

I gave a door a push. I wasn’t sure if it was the front door, the back door, the servants’ entrance, or what. Locked. There was a doorbell to the right of the brass handle. I pushed it, and after a three-minute wait during which I pounded on the metal surface, a buzzer buzzed. The lock clicked open and I breezed on through.

Noise, light—and different, thicker air. Those were the things that got to me, even in the vestibule. The lighting was awful, dim flickering fluorescents. The noise, a conveyor-belt-type racheting, was worse. And the air—I clamped my mouth shut, but then I had to breathe through my nose and smell the damp burned-rubbery aroma. I opened my mouth and thought maybe this was what New Yorkers talked about when they mentioned air you could taste, what L.A. dwellers dealt with when the air turned to yellow smog.

Had they had a fire here? Did it smell like this all the time? I could see three women shoehorned into a cubicle office, typing and chattering, not calling for help. The atmosphere must seem normal to them. I licked my lips and rubbed my mouth. I could feel something cottony on the back of my hand.

The women were conversing in animated Spanish, but they froze when I approached, like startled deer poised to flee. I yelled “¡Buenas días!” loud enough to make myself heard over the machinery, but that didn’t seem to reassure them. They shot anxious looks at each other. I studied them, checking for my dumpy informant in her flowered dress.

A phone rang. The oldest of the three, who must have been all of twenty-five, picked up a dusty receiver from her cluttered desk and answered in an accented voice. She directed the call to Mr. Hunneman, pressing buttons on a console and hanging up with a loud bang, as if she’d once been accused of eavesdropping.

One of the women probably would have said something to me sooner or later, I guess, but they were saved by the arrival of a guy. A big guy.

“You ring the bell?” His voice was a low growl that carried.

“Yeah.” He wasn’t any taller than I am, but he must have outweighed me by a hundred pounds. A lot of it was stomach, but some of it was muscle. He wore a once-white T-shirt with a Coors Beer logo. It didn’t quite meet a massive silver belt buckle but tucked easily into his jeans in back. It was just his belly that protruded.

“No soliciting,” he half hollered over the throb of the conveyor belt.

My eyebrows inched up. He looked like the kind of guy who only knew one meaning for soliciting, and I haven’t been accused of that since my police department undercover hooker nights. I smiled in spite of myself.

“I’m not selling anything,” I yelled. “I’m here to see Mr. Hunneman.” Since he was taking phone calls, I figured he must be somewhere in the vicinity.

“Oh, yeah?” Beer Belly said. He seemed amused.

“Yes,” I said politely. “Which way to his office?”

“What’s this all about?”

“I’ll tell Mr. Hunneman when I see him,” I said, keeping a set smile on my face.

“You tell me or you won’t get to see anybody,” the fat man declared. He took a step forward.

“It’s about a job,” I said, lowering my eyelashes and making it sound like employment was the furthest thing from my mind. Maybe he’d let me pass if he thought I was some fling his boss had going on the side.

“For you?” His smile broadened. He was missing a tooth.

I indicated the Hispanic women, who stopped all activity and gazed at me wide-eyed. “Maybe one of them could tell him I’d like to see him, check if he’s too busy, you know.”

“He’s busy,” Beer Belly said flatly.

I cursed inwardly. My coloring eliminated any chance of passing for Hispanic, but I should have faked an Irish accent. My dad was half Irish, and we used to kid each other in hokey overdone brogues. This jerk might have bought the tale if I’d come on like an illegal immigrant.

“I won’t take up much of his time,” I promised.

“Who wants to see me? Why didn’t anybody call?” The voice was tenor, but the man was large: broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, with legs a bit short for his girth. Otherwise he’d have towered over me instead of topping out at six feet. He had the florid complexion of a heavy drinker. His reddish-blond hair was fine and a little frizzy, like misplaced baby hair. His features were regular—far-apart eyes, wide bridge to his nose—blurred a little by extra weight. Twenty pounds lighter and he’d have been a very handsome man.

His tone was good-natured, but there was strain behind it, wariness.

Beer Belly seemed struck dumb by Hunneman’s sudden appearance, which gave me a chance to get in the first word.

I stuck out my hand eagerly. “Pleased to meet you, sir,” I said. I’ve found a little respectfulness can generally get you an audience with anybody short of the Pope.

“She says she’s looking for work,” Beer Belly chimed in.

Hunneman stopped mid-stride. He turned his eyes on me, gave me a thorough exam that made me feel naked. I got the feeling there was more than sexual interest in his glance. “Oh,” he said carefully, lightly, “and how did you hear about us?”

“A friend,” I said, matching his casual tone. “She said you needed a secretary. I’m a great secretary. Dorothy Gibbs. Not my name, I went to school there. Practically got my certificate, but then I got the flu. Real bummer, you know?”

“Who’s your friend?” Hunneman asked with a charming, smile. He wore a well-cut navy business suit that would have looked fine in a bank or a boardroom. It seemed pretty formal compared to the fat man’s T-shirt. Cuff links gleamed at his wrists, gold or brass.

“She make a mistake?” I asked. “Maybe I misunderstood her.”

“I don’t need a secretary,” Hunneman said.

“Too bad. I’m good at shorthand, and I can run a computer and everything.”

“Your friend work here?” Hunneman walked into the tiny office. The three women busied themselves filing papers and typing, faces set, eyes downcast.

I watched Hunneman and I had the feeling that the Coors man was watching me just as avidly. The factory owner’s suit looked expensive; so did his highly polished black loafers.

“What’s your friend’s name?” Hunneman snatched up some papers from a desk. He wore a domed ring on his left hand. High school or college, not a wedding ring.

I didn’t want to part with Manuela’s name. Not yet.

“Hey, what difference does it make?” I said cheerfully. “Her English isn’t so hot, and I probably misunderstood her, like I said.”

“No difference.” Hunneman came up beside me, stood a little too close. He had a few reddish-gold hairs on his upper lip. “I thought maybe you’d like to stop in and say hello to her, that’s all.”

Sure, I thought. But I pretended to give his suggestion some consideration before turning it down. He smiled at me, but his eyes stayed cool and remote. I thought he might be wearing cologne, but in the poisonous atmosphere I couldn’t be sure. His eyes were slate-colored, like a winter sky.

“Sorry to take up your time,” I said.

“No problem,” he answered. He nodded to Beer Belly. “Show her out.”

I opened my mouth to protest that I could find my own way to the door, but I was interrupted by a deafening whistle. The narrow corridor filled with women heading toward the door in quick, grim march-step. They didn’t speak. Most of them had handkerchief triangles tied across their mouths like bad men in old Westerns.

Hunneman disappeared through a doorway beyond the secretarial cubicle. The fat man said, “Outside, okay?”

He took a step toward me, and since he blocked the whole corridor, I didn’t see that I had a lot of choices. I nodded and joined the flow, towering over the women, sidestepping outside the front door, no longer part of the parade. An observer.

As they stepped out the door the women loosened their masks, a few whipping them off over their heads, some going to the trouble of untying, balancing handbags precariously while they used both hands for the maneuver. The majority just pulled the masks down over their faces until they turned into neck scarves.

Most of them coughed and snorted at their first breath of real air.

The faces seemed predominantly Hispanic, but there was a sprinkling of fair hair and freckles, as well as a contingent of dark-skinned women who seemed to crowd together.

Which of them had come to the Herald this morning with the message? I stared at them, searching for a twentyish, dumpy woman in a flowered dress.

A face jumped out of the crowd.

Marta inched along slowly, minus her cane, leaning on the arm of another woman, a woman who looked like her in a vague, familial way. Cousin Lilia.

So Marta didn’t know my Manuela.

Maybe my anger beamed across the driveway. Marta glanced over suddenly, caught my eye. Her face turned pale and she stumbled. She murmured something to her cousin, kept her gaze fixed on the broken concrete. Lilia turned back to the factory door to see if they’d been observed, to see if someone was watching me.

Marta wasn’t embarrassed at being caught in any lie. She was scared. Plain scared.

She walked right by me, still staring at the ground, her back unnaturally straight. She seemed to be holding her breath.

I pretended not to know her, giving all the women the same careful scrutiny. I noticed the Coors T-shirt framed in the doorway. Was Marta afraid of the fat man?

I’d mentioned my “friend” inside. Now I looked from face to face, as if I couldn’t spot her. I glanced at my watch, tapped my foot, acted out my impatience in mime. Maybe this wasn’t her shift. Well, I’d give it a few more minutes, see if she came out. Be nice to say hello, but no big deal if this was her day off.

I waited until all the women came out, the last few rushing to keep up with the crowd. Beer Belly watched me from the doorway. I was afraid I might have reacted involuntarily when I saw Marta, so I decided to spread the suspicion around. I asked a fat lady of fifty if she knew a woman named Hester Prynne. I asked a tiny redhead and a black girl of no more than sixteen the same question.

They gave me curt, negative shakes of their heads, kept on walking.

They were all scared of me.