He narrowed his eyes and stuck out his lower lip, ready to be plenty mad. Before he could decide to do anything really violent I ducked behind him and vaulted up onto the platform. He started after me, but his size and his work boots limited his agility.
I looked around for someone to talk to, but the platform was empty. Only a forklift with a crate on it suggested that someone might be loading—or unloading—the truck.
I didn’t wait for my friend to join me but sprinted along the lip of the dock until I came to an open door going into a long hallway. Here I did find a small cluster of men, all in shirts and ties, deep in conversation. The bosses. Just what I wanted.
They looked up at me in surprise. One of them, a youngish guy with short brown hair and tortoise-shell glasses, took a step forward.
“You lost?”
“Not exactly.” I caught sight of a long tuft of prairie grass stuck in the tongue of my right shoe and wondered how much more debris I was carrying. “I’m looking for someone who might know something about an old Diamond Head employee. Either the shop steward or the plant manager.”
Just then my trucking friend came pounding in. “Oh, there you are,” he roared, a world of menace in his tone. “She came sneaking around the back of the place just now.”
“She did?” The spokesman turned back to me. “Who are you and just what do you want?”
“I’m V. I. Warshawski. And I want to speak either to the shop steward or the plant manager. Despite what Bruno here says, I wasn’t sneaking around. But I spent a frustrating forty minutes trying to find you from the road and finally had to come on foot.”
No one spoke for a minute, then a second man, older than the first speaker, said, “Who are you working for?”
“I’m not an industrial spy, if that’s what you’re wondering. I have only the dimmest notion of what you make here. I’m a detective—” That brought a quick outburst from two of the group. I held up a hand. “I’m a private detective, and I’ve been hired to find an old man who used to work here.”
The older man looked at me sharply for a minute. “I think I’d better talk to her in my office, Hank,” he said to the brown-haired man. “You go back to the truck, Simon. I’ll make sure she’s off the premises when she goes.”
He jerked his head toward the end of the hall and snapped, “Come on.”
He set off down the hall at a good clip. I followed more slowly, stopping to pull the tuft of grass from my shoe. When I stood up he had disappeared. Two-thirds of the way down the hall I found a door that led to a short corridor. My guide stood just inside it, his hands on his hips, his dark eyes sharp. When I caught up with him, he whirled without speaking and marched into the utilitarian hole he used as an office.
“Now, just who in hell are you and what are you doing snooping around our plant?” he said as soon as we were seated.
I looked around on his desktop, but didn’t see a name-plate. “You got a name?” I asked. “And a position with the firm?”
“I asked you a question, young lady.”
“I told you out in the hall there. I haven’t got anything to add. But if you want to talk it over, it would be really helpful for me to know your name.” I leaned back in my chair and retied my right shoe.
He glared at me. I took off the left shoe and shook some dirt from it onto the floor.
“My name is Chamfers. And I am the plant manager.” The words came out as though snapped through a peashooter.
“How do you do?” I took my wallet from my handbag and dug out the laminated copy of my PI license and showed it to him.
He looked it over and threw it contemptuously onto the desktop. “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me who’s employing you, but I’ve got dicks of my own. I can check you out fast enough.”
I made a disgusted face. “And when you’ve spent a couple of thousand bucks doing that, you won’t be any wiser than you are now. I realize it looks strange, me crawling around your premises, but there’s a simple explanation. Your guy Simon was the first person I saw. When I tried talking to him he got kind of ugly, so I scrambled for safety and found you.”
He scowled for a minute. “And what’s your story on what you want with me?”
“My story, as you put it, is also very simple. I’m looking for an old man who used to work here.”
“Did we fire him?”
“Nope. He left the old-fashioned way: he retired.”
“So there’s no reason for him to be here.” He wasn’t believing me. His tone and the curl to his upper lip made that clear enough.
“So it would seem. But the last time my client saw him, on Monday, the guy who’s missing said he was coming over here to see the bosses—his word. He had something on his mind about Diamond Head. So, since no one who knows him has seen him since Monday, I was hoping he might actually have done it. Come over here, I mean.”
“And what is this ex-employee’s name?” He gave a little smile to show he appreciated our game.
I smiled back, just as thinly, but with more contempt. “Mitch Kruger. Did he show up?”
“If he did, he never made it past my secretary.”