Company Man (15 page)

“You're not helping me any,” Audrey said.

Bert Koopmans, the evidence tech, turned at the sink where he was washing his hands. There was something birdlike about the way he inclined his head, gawked at her. He was tall, almost spindly, with small close-set eyes that always looked startled.

“Not my job,” he said, dry but not unfriendly. “What's the problem?”

She hesitated. “Well, you really didn't find anything on the body, when it comes right down to it.”

“What body are we talking about?”

“Stadler.”

“Who?”

“The guy in the Dumpster. Down on Hastings.”

“The tortilla.”

“Burrito, really.”

He allowed a hint of a smile. “You got everything I got.”

“Did the body strike you as too…clean?”

“Clean? You talking hygiene? I mean, the guy's fingernails were filthy.”

“That's not what I mean, Bert.” She thought a minute. “The dirt under his fingernails—that got tagged, right?”

“No, I lost it,” Bert said, flashing her a look. “You forget who you're talking to? Like this was one of Wayne's cases?”
Not all the techs were as meticulous, as obsessive-compulsive as Koopmans. He walked over to a black file cabinet, pulled it open, selected a folder. He scanned a sheet of paper. “Pubic hairs, head hairs, fingernails left hand, fingernails right hand. Fibers from shoe left, fibers from shoe right. Unidentified substance under fingernails right hand, unidentified substance under fingernails left hand. Want me to keep going?”

“No, thanks. What's the unidentified substance?”

Another look. “If I knew what it was, think I'd call it unidentified?”

“Are we talking skin or blood or dirt?”

“You try my patience, Detective. Skin and blood, these are substances I've seen before, believe it or not.”

“Dirt you've seen before too.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “But dirt isn't dirt. It's…stuff. It's anything. I made a note that it had a kind of greenish hue to it.”

“Green paint? If Stadler scraped his fingernails against the side of a house, say…?”

“Paint I would have recognized.” He handed her the chain-of-custody sheet. “Here. Why don't you take a walk down to Property and get the shit? We can both take a look.”

 

The guy who ran the Property room was a clock-puncher named Arthur something, a flabby white man with a toothbrush mustache who wore coveralls. She pushed the buzzer, and he took his time coming around to the window. She handed him the pink copy of the Property Receipt, explaining that she only wanted item number fifteen. All the evidence—the pulled head hair, pulled pubic hair, the two vials of blood—was kept in a big refrigerator. Arthur returned a few minutes later and could not have looked more bored. As he went through the ritual of scanning the bar code label on the five-by-seven evidence envelope marked “Nail Clippings From Autopsy,” then the bar code on the wall chart to capture her name and number, Audrey heard Roy Bugbee's voice.

“That looks like the Stadler case,” Bugbee said.

She nodded. “You working Jamal Wilson?”

Bugbee ignored her question. As the property guy slid the envelope under the window, Bugbee snatched it before Audrey could get to it. “Nail clippings, eh?”

“Just some more trace evidence I'm running past IBO again.”

“Why do I get the crazy feeling we're not partnering on this, Audrey?”

“There's no end of things I'd appreciate your help on,” she said uneasily.

“Right,” Bugbee said. “You going over to IBO right now?”

 

Koopmans, who seemed surprised to see Roy Bugbee, placed two sheets of copy paper on the counter in the long narrow lab room where they fumed for fingerprints. He slit the bottom of each little envelope with a disposable scalpel and tapped out the contents onto the paper.

“Like I said, green dirt,” Koopmans said. He and Audrey both wore surgical masks so that their breath wouldn't blow away the dirt. Bugbee did not.

Audrey peered closely. “Would it help to put it under a binocular microscope?”

“Happy to. But I've already done it, and there's nothing more to see.” He sifted the tiny pile with a wooden applicator. “Sand, some kind of fine green powder, some fragments of what looks like pellets, maybe. Take it over to the state lab, if you want, but they're just going to tell you what I've just said. And it'll take 'em six weeks to tell you.”

“Christ,” said Bugbee, “you don't need a microscope for this shit.”

“Oh, is that right,” said Koopmans, giving Audrey a quick look.

“You don't have a lawn, obviously,” Bugbee said. “That's hydroseed.”

“Hydroseed,” said Koopmans.

“Which is what, exactly?” Audrey asked.

“It's grass seed and, I don't know, ground-up newspaper and shit they spray. To start a new lawn. Hate the shit, myself—full of weed seed. I call it ‘hydroweed.'”

“But it's green,” Audrey said.

“That's the dye powder,” Koopmans said. “And the pellets—that's the mulch.” He pulled at his chin with his thumb and forefinger.

“Well, you saw the Stadler home,” Audrey said. “I didn't see any hydroseed, did you?”

“Naw,” said Bugbee, cocky. “A shitty lawn. All crabgrass and broadleaf weeds. Guys notice stuff like that.”

“If you're lawn-obsessed,” Koopmans said. “Is it possible your guy had some part-time job doing landscaping work or something?”

“No,” Audrey said. “He could barely hold on to his job at Stratton. No, I suspect he got that stuff under his fingernails from wherever he went. Maybe—probably—the night he was killed.”

The Mount Pleasant Cemetery was not the biggest burial ground in Fenwick Township, nor especially well tended. It sat on a high bluff above a busy highway and seemed forlorn, even for a cemetery. Nick had never been here before. Then again, he hated cemeteries and avoided them whenever possible. When he had to attend a funeral, he went to the church or funeral home and missed this part. Laura's death had made burials harder, not easier.

But he was late. He'd missed the service at the funeral home, having been unable to reschedule a major teleconference with the CEOs of Steelcase and Herman Miller to discuss a lobbying effort against an idiotic bill before Congress.

He parked his Suburban along a curb near where a ceremony was going on. There was a small clutch of people in dark clothing, maybe ten or twelve people in all. There was a pastor, a black woman, an elderly couple, five or six guys who might have worked with Stadler, a pretty young woman who had to be the man's daughter. She was petite, with big eyes and short, sort of chopped-looking punk hair. The paper had said she was twenty-nine and lived in Chicago.

Nick approached tentatively, heard the pastor, standing beside the casket, say: “Bless this grave that the body of our brother Andrew may sleep here in peace until You awaken
him to glory, when he will see You face to face and know the splendor of the eternal God, who lives and reigns, now and forever.” The roaring traffic obliterated some of his words.

A couple of the mourners turned to look at him. The Stratton guys recognized him, their eyes lingering a moment longer. Nick thought he saw surprise, maybe a flash or two of indignation, though he wasn't sure. The beautiful daughter looked dazed, like a deer caught in the headlights. Near her stood the black woman, who was quite attractive as well. She looked at Nick, her glance piercing, tears running down her cheeks. Nick wondered who she was. There weren't that many blacks in town.

He wasn't prepared for the sight of the burnished mahogany casket, sitting atop the lowering device, Nick remembered from Laura's burial, which was hidden behind drapes of green crushed velvet. It jolted him. Somehow it was even more brutal, that tall, rounded mahogany coffin, than seeing Andrew Stadler's dead body crumpled on his lawn. It was more final, more
real
. This was a man with a family—a daughter, at least—and friends. He might have been a dangerous, unmedicated schizophrenic—but he was somebody's daddy too. This lovely young woman with the spiky hair and porcelain skin. Tears sprang to Nick's eyes. He was embarrassed.

The black woman glanced at him again. Who was she?

The Stratton guys looked at him again, no doubt noticing his tears and inwardly rolling their eyes at the hypocrisy. Slasher Nick weeping at the grave of a guy he laid off, they had to be thinking.

When it was over, and the coffin was lowered smoothly and silently into the grave, the mourners began tossing clods of earth and flowers onto the coffin. Some of them embraced the daughter, clutching her hand, murmuring condolences. When the moment seemed right, he approached her.

“Ms. Stadler, I'm Nick Conover. I'm the—”

“I know who you are,” she replied coolly. She had the tiniest stud on the right side of her nose, a glint of light.

“I didn't know your father personally, but I wanted to tell you how sorry I am. He was a valued employee.”

“So valued that you fired him.” She spoke in a quiet tone, but her bitterness was obvious.

“The layoffs have been difficult for all of us. So many deserving people lost their jobs.”

She sighed as if the subject wasn't worth discussing any further. “Yeah, well, everything started to fall apart for my dad when he got forced out.”

He'd steeled himself against anger, given how often he met former Stratton employees, but this he wasn't quite prepared for, not here in a cemetery, from a woman who was burying her father. “It's a terrible thing he had to go through.” He noticed the black woman watching the exchange with interest, though she was far enough away that she might not have been able to hear what they were saying.

Stadler's daughter smiled ruefully. “Let's get one thing straight, Mr. Conover. As far as I'm concerned, you killed my dad.”

Leon's oldest sister, LaTonya, was a very large woman with an imperious way about her, adamant in all her opinions, though maybe you had to be to raise six kids. Audrey liked being around her—she was everything Audrey wasn't, bawdy where Audrey was respectful, profane where Audrey was polite, stubborn where Audrey was compliant. Things might not have been so good with Leon, but that didn't affect their friendship. Sisterhood was stronger. LaTonya didn't have much respect for her younger brother anyway, it seemed.

Fairly often Audrey babysat the three younger Saunders kids. Most of the time she enjoyed it. They were good kids, a twelve-year-old girl and two boys, nine and eleven. No doubt they ran roughshod over her, took advantage of her good nature, got away with stuff their drill-sergeant mother would never let them. But that, she figured, was what aunts were for. It didn't escape her, either, that LaTonya herself took advantage of Audrey, asking her to sit way more than she should, because LaTonya understood what was never said aloud, that her kids were the only kids Audrey would ever have.

LaTonya arrived home an hour later this evening than she'd said she would. She was taking a motivational training seminar at the Days Inn on Winsted Avenue, learning to start
a home business. Her husband, Paul, managed the service department of a GMC dealership and usually worked late, didn't get home until eight. Audrey didn't mind, really. She'd just come off a long shift, which included attending the Andrew Stadler funeral, and would rather spend a few hours with her niece and nephews than at home with Leon, to be honest. Or thinking about poor Cassie Stadler. You had to take a break sometimes.

LaTonya was lugging a huge cardboard box heaped with white plastic bottles. Her moon-shaped face was beaded with sweat. “This here,” she announced as the screen door slammed behind her, “is going to liberate us from debt.”

“What is it?” Audrey asked. Camille was practicing her piano in the den by now and the two boys were watching TV.

“Hey, what's this? What the
hell
is
this
?” LaTonya hollered at her sons as she dropped the box on the kitchen table. “I don't care how much of a pushover your Auntie Audrey is, we have a rule about the TV. Turn that goddamned set off, and get to your homework, right now!”

“But Audrey said we could!” protested Thomas, the younger son. Matthew, experienced enough to know never to argue with their mother, scampered upstairs.

“I don't give a shit what Audrey said, you know the rules!” she thundered. She turned to Audrey, her voice softening. “It's weight-loss supplements. In a year or two, I'm not going to
need
Paul's salary. Not that there's much of that.”

“Weight-loss supplements?”

“Thermogenic,” LaTonya said. It was clear she had just learned the word. “Burns the fat off. Stokes up your metabolism. Blocks carbs too. And it's all natural.”

“Sistah, you got to be careful with those make-money-at-home schemes,” Audrey said. It was funny, when she was around LaTonya she found herself talking black, the rhythms of her speech changing. She was acutely aware that LaTonya considered Audrey saditty, or conceited.

“Careful?” LaTonya gasped. “This is the wellness industry we're talking about. In five years it's going to be a
tril
lion
-dollar industry, and I'm getting on the elevator at the ground floor.” She opened a new box of Ritz Crackers, offered it to Audrey, who shook her head. LaTonya tore open the wax paper on one of the cracker rolls and grabbed a handful.

“LaTonya, can I talk to you for a second?”

“Mmmph?” LaTonya replied through a mouthful of cracker.

“It's the way you talk to your kids. The language. I don't think children should hear that kind of language, particularly from a parent.”

LaTonya's eyes widened in indignation. She put her hands on her hips. She chewed, swallowed, then said, “Audrey, baby, I love you, but they're my kids, you understand? Not yours. Mine.”

“But still,” Audrey said, regretting she'd said anything, wanting to take it back.

“Honey, these little buggers respect strong words. If you had kids, you'd understand.” LaTonya saw the wounded look in Audrey's face. “I'm—I'm sorry, I didn't mean it the way it came out.”

“That's okay,” Audrey said with a dismissive shake of the head. “I shouldn't have said anything.”

LaTonya was holding up one of the big white plastic bottles. “
This
you need,” she said.

“
I
need?”

“For your no-good, lazy-ass husband. My brother. Least he can do while he's sitting on his butt is take some of these thermogenic supplements. Twenty-four ninety-five. You can afford it. Tell you what: I'll give you my discount. Sixteen fifty. Can't do better than that.”