“I’m looking for the foreman.”
He stared at me briefly, then pointed to the opposite corner without speaking. I threaded my way back past the machines, stopping to watch a giant drill move in and out of a thick metal bar on one side. On the other someone was raking more metal curls onto the floor. The men operating the equipment were totally oblivious of me.
Finally I moved to the far end of the floor, where I found yet another minuscule office. A man of about fifty sat behind a desk inside talking on the phone. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to reveal massive forearms. I’d be careful not to make him mad enough to want to pick up one of the presses and hit me over the head.
When he finally finished his conversation—which consisted mostly of a series of grunts and the statement that the fifteenth wasn’t possible—he looked up at me and grunted again. I went through my worn-out spiel about Uncle Mitch.
“Did you know him when he worked here?”
The foreman shook his head slowly, not blinking his flat, rather lizardlike eyes.
“I’d like to talk to some of the guys. A couple of them look old enough that maybe they overlapped a few years. He was around here a week or ten days ago. One of them was bound to have talked to him.”
He shook his head again.
“You know they didn’t talk to him?”
“I know you don’t belong on this shop floor, girlie. So why don’t you get your cute ass out of here before I move it for you.”
I looked from his flat, lizard eyes back to his massive forearms and left with as much grace as I could muster.
Chapter 17 - The Prodigal Son
I sat in Lotty’s car, drumming my fingers on the hot steering wheel, trying to decide what to do next. I felt as though everyone in Chicago had been bullying me the last few days, from Todd Pichea through the sheriff’s deputies and now the crew at Diamond Head. It was time to fight back, or at least to prove that I wasn’t just lying down in my sweaty clothes and dying because they’d frowned at me.
I couldn’t decide what to do about Pichea after the failure of my letter to the Chicago Lawyer, but the easiest way to take on Diamond Head would be to lie in wait for the end of the shift and tackle the guys as they came up the road for their cars or the bus. It would be a good two hours until then; I could fill in the time by getting a photo of Mitch Kruger to show them. Anyway, a photo would be essential if I was going to do door-to-door canvassing at the row of bungalows tucked beneath the Damen Avenue bridge. I didn’t think Terry Finchley really had the enthusiasm necessary to add those inquiries to his investigation.
I didn’t want to drive back north to see what Mr. Contreras might have. He might dredge up some old group picture from the local, but I doubted he had anything that would make a good identity aid. The real stumbling block, though, would be his desire to come down and take on the bosses in person. Not that I was doing such a great job on my own, but the old man saw himself as Mike Hammer and I wasn’t ready yet for confrontation on that scale.
I thought I remembered a photo ID among the documents I’d found in Kruger’s room at Mrs. Polter’s house. Her place was almost close enough to walk to, but my hours in the hot sun had taken their toll; I moved Lotty’s Cressida over to Archer.
Mrs. Polter was alone at her battle station—her tormentors must have found some cooler entertainment for the afternoon. A couple of men were coming out of Tessie’s, but the rest of the street was quiet.
When I mounted the rickety steps I saw Mrs. Polter drinking something murky-brown out of a corrugated glass. It might have been instant iced tea, but it looked as though it had been mixed with transmission fluid. She was still wearing the brown gingham housedress. The fabric had frayed further on both sides of the safety pin, so her decolletage was better covered, but ominous holes were starting to open on the sides.
“That old man you was looking for—he’s dead,” she said abruptly.
“Oh, yeah? How’d you find out?”
“His son came. His boy. He told me when he come to collect the old man’s stuff.”
“All the way from Arizona, huh?” Mr. Contreras would have told me if he’d gotten in touch with Kruger’s family. Had Terry Finchley done it? If so, young Kruger got here mighty fast—it was only fifteen hours since we’d identified the body.
“He didn’t say nothing about Arizona. Just that he wanted his father’s things. Not that he took all of them, but I figured since you’d paid for the room through the end of the week I might just as well leave them lay.”
“I guess I could pick up the rest of his stuff. Take it off your hands.”
She finished the brown murk and pulled a pitcher from the left side of the chair. “I’d offer you some, but I’ve only got the one glass. You look kinda thirsty.”
I made a hasty gesture of refusal. I wasn’t that hot.