'I thought Aubrey Wyatt's brother ran this place,' I said.
'Mr. Dahl is Aubrey Wyatt's brother-in-law,' she replied, clearing up Wade's genetic connection to all this.
'Yeah,' I said. 'Guess that's what I meant.' Then, to get on her good side, I added, 'I've certainly heard of Aubrey Wyatt though. He's pretty famous in L. A.' Didn't work. Her frown only deepened.
'Everybody should know about Mr. Dahl, too,' she snapped after a few seconds, sounding almost like she had a crush on him. 'He's like famous in packaging.'
'I must have missed that issue of People.'
She sighed and pulled up in front of a very attractive, greenish-beige office building. It was architecturally pleasing, if a little avant-garde. But the effective landscaping softened its modern look. Shrubbery in all the right places, a nice strip of lawn that was well-watered. A sign said: design center. So now I knew.
I followed my escort into the building and was told to wait. I chose a hard, chrome-frame red leather chair. Like a lot of places that sold design concepts, this lobby showcased minimalist design with cold, uncomfortable furniture. It was a triumph of form over function. The floor was shiny terrazzo and there were at least twenty windowed alcoves cut into three lava rock walls. A plate-glass fourth wall looked out onto a Japanese garden.
Each of the lighted alcoves featured some cardboard container that Cartco had manufactured. There were McDonald's cartons and the original FedEx box. Video cassette boxes and DVD packages were on display. The alcoves also featured all kinds of food and consumer containers. Everything from 7-Up to Pampers.
I was looking at the displays when the side door opened and a willowy, attractive, blonde woman entered. She wore an expensive, cream-white, tailored dress that hung perfectly on her athletic frame. She was followed into the lobby by one of those tall, executive, squash-player-type guys dressed in gray slacks and a dark blue blazer. He was in his early fifties, with a great head of silver-gray hair, and a robust health-club tan. His sculpted jaw parted the air like the prow of a Viking ship and framed a square, handsome face.
'We can't afford to put too many of those manufacturing bays in one design mode,' he was saying as they entered the lobby.
'I'll have graphics draw up new estimates and get us a fresh set of D costs,' she responded.
'Make sure everything is run past the entire development committee. I don't want a design kickback because of some needless boardroom squabble.'
She turned and spotted me while he pulled out a new Black-Berry, just like Wade Wyatt's. Then he squinted and started poking manically at the keys.
I was hoping the goddess in the cream outfit would turn out to be Miss Pascoe and my luck held. She crossed to me.
'Are you the policeman?' she asked pleasantly.
'Yes, ma'am.' I flashed my tin. Fast, but effective. If I was lucky, I'd get out of here without anybody knowing who the hell I was.
'I'm Dorothy Pascoe, Head of Operations. How can we help?'
I unwrapped the egg foo yung and let 'er fly. 'What time does Cartco end its workday?' I began.
'We let the day shift off at four-thirty. There's an hour of maintenance and cleanup, then the night shift starts at six.'
I nodded gravely, as if I'd just received her terminal biopsy report.
'Is that a problem?' she asked.
'Markets are being robbed all around this area and these robberies are happening at about four-thirty in the afternoon,' I said solemnly. 'Now we find out that your company lets out at four-thirty.'
'Yes?' She seemed puzzled as to how her factory shift times had anything to do with my robberies.
'Maybe the reason all these holdups happen at four-thirty is because one of the robbers is an employee of this company and doesn't punch out until then.' She just stood there, so I said, 'We wondered if you could identify any of these people as employees?' I handed her my photo six-pack from the old murder case.
'We have almost five hundred people on our day shift. Of course, unless they're very new, being in operations, I'd probably recognize most of them.' She took her time studying the six faces. 'Sorry, I don't think so,' she finally said and handed them back.
The squash player broke away from his text messages and came over. He'd obviously been eavesdropping because he said, 'Let me see.'
I showed him the six-pack and waited while he studied them. When interviewing people, you always get more with praise than punishment. We all have a pass key that opens us up. For instance, A-type corporate guys who build and run things, for the most part dearly love to talk about them. If this was the esteemed, but rarely recognized, Roger Dahl, maybe I could lure him into a broader conversation.
'Sorry,' he said, and handed the six-pack back. 'Don't think so.' He turned to leave, so I took my shot.
'Excuse me, but aren't you Roger Dahl?' I asked, letting a little gee-whiz seep into the question. He spun back, smiling like I was holding a plate of Russian caviar.
'Why, yes. Do I know you?'
'No, but my goodness, I've certainly read all about you. Didn't you start this place in seventy-three when you were in your early twenties, and then build it up from nothing after you designed the first FedEx package?' Using up the extent of my knowledge in one compound, complex sentence. I looked around at all the products shining under an array of alcove tinsel lights, gawking like a six-year-old girl at a Barbie exhibit.
'Just goes to show you what a good idea, carefully pursued, can accomplish,' he said proudly.
'Man, what is this place, like ten acres under roof?'
'Eleven point six.' Then, because most people like to work their fan base, he said, 'Wanta see something? Since you're interested, come here, follow me.' He led me through a back door, leaving the striking Miss Pascoe tapping an expensive Prada sandal in cream-white exasperation. We walked down a narrow hallway into a small design office where several architectural concepts were pinned up on a cork wall.
'This is what we're planning next year. It's going to be built down in Louisiana. I call it our two-fer because it helps create new badly needed jobs for people in New Orleans since Katrina, and we get to put our buildings on fifty acres of cheap land. Acreage down there is still in the crapper because of the hurricane. We're gonna do all our manufacturing for the East Coast from this new south Louisiana site. Alleviates a manufacturing crunch here and cuts our clients' shipping costs in half.'
'Nice,' I said, admiring the pastel renderings of a modern-looking factory complex, embellished with colorfully sketched trees and slender, pencil-thin executives walking in and out of clean-lined buildings or strolling on manicured walkways, carrying wafer briefcases. 'So you just make the packages, stuff like that?' Throwing up a jump ball. No clue where I was going.
'Yeah. Client companies hire us to make their packages, containers, shipping crates. Anything that holds their products.'
'So that's like almost everything, then.'
'Well, not cars or heavy equipment. We're cardboard manufacturers. That determines what we can do.'
'I saw the incredible security system you have outside. Pretty damn impressive.' More bread on the water.
'That's just on the E-Building because that's where we make the rares.'
'Right. The rares.' No idea what he was talking about. He picked up on my confusion.
'Prize-winning containers.' I was still lost. 'In a promotion, a rare is what we call a prize package,' he explained. 'As opposed to, for instance, a common, which is just a regular carton.' I must have still looked confused, because he added, 'It's a prize. A scrape-off. Some of the companies we make containers for put on big, national promotions, which they advertise in magazines and on TV. In these promotions, they often give away big prizes. If somebody buys the rare and scrapes off the winning number, they could win a car or even in some contests, up to a million dollars in cash. Since some of the containers we make have million-dollar scrape-offs on them, we had to put in all that top-shelf security to protect the integrity of the contests.'
'Got it.'
'Employees working in areas making or distributing rares have to be logged in during contest weeks. We even give lie-detector tests.'
'Makes sense.'
He looked at his gold watch and appeared startled by what he saw there. He'd already wasted too much
