She gave me a startled look. “What?”
“Forget it. Where do the bean counters count the beans around here?”
She stood up. And up and up. Man, was she ever leggy. “This way.” She headed down a short hallway, past a lunchroom, toward a big back office space. She had a nice walk, very distracting, and I took full advantage of it.
Back there in the depths of the building, the smell of meat grew stronger. Rachel handed me off to a woman with an artificial mass of flaming red hair, the kind of thing you could use to stuff a mattress. Reminded me of my mother, which was eerie.
“This is Mr. Angel, Betty.”
“Mort,” I said.
Rachel walked away.
“We’ve been expecting you, Mr. Angel,” Betty said, giving me a guarded smile and limp, damp fingertips to either grab or shake, it was hard to tell which.
Yes, they had. Betty Pope. Phil Galloway. Iris Kacsmaryk. All of them were staring at me. Every hand in the place turned out to be limp and damp except mine, so, no clue there if I thought I was going to act as a mobile lie detector.
After “hi’s,” vague smiles, “gladt’meetcha’s,” Phil and Iris went back to their screens. These days, computers count the beans and bean counters oversee the counting. And maybe one of them jiggles a number or two in a spreadsheet that modifies the end result ever so slightly—say, to the tune of 0.6 percent. Just greedy enough to be stupid. Skulstad might not have noticed 0.2 percent.
Betty was in her fifties. She looked like a former Soviet shot-putter by the name of Tamara Press. Phil was roughly my age, lank blond hair, the freckles no longer boyish. I had him by seventy pounds and half a foot. He didn’t look overjoyed to see me. Iris was in her mid- to late-twenties, pale, thin, pretty in an overly delicate way that reminded me of a not-yet-filled-out Mia Farrow. With the IRS, I’d once had a paperweight—a bronze bust of Nixon with “I am not a crook” inscribed on the base—that might’ve outweighed Iris Kacsmaryk. If a gust came through, I could maybe slam her down on my desk to keep the loose stuff in place.
Nothing overtly unfriendly. Iris, in fact, had given me a glimmer of a smile. But bean counters are a naturally serious lot. Numbers are serious, not to be trifled with. They aren’t subjective, except on Wall Street, in and around Washington, in the hands of tobacco-company statisticians and lobbyists, and out of the mouths of pathological liars—if you can tell the difference between any of those groups.
But they can be juggled, if one is adroit enough and has the inclination.
I was given a squeaky chair and a desk facing Iris, or, more accurately, the top of her head with its pale-white part right down the middle. She was currently plowing through a stack of well-thumbed, slightly greasy tally sheets from the warehouse, from whence, I assumed, issued the heady aroma of meat.
I began to take stock of my surroundings.
I had a computer and a nineteen-inch Samsung flat-screen monitor, all my own, and what looked like coffee stains on the keyboard.
I had a phone. Ext. 41—my age, what a stroke of luck. With it, I could probably get hold of Rachel in an instant. Maybe Zozo’s Ristorante would do the trick. She’d caught me off guard with that bit about Pasta Maniacs having gone out of business. I oughta get out more.
I had a framed picture of a cat on my faux ash, sheet-metal desk, and a brownish water stain on the desk itself that looked remarkably like a portrait of Lenin. Or Marx. Or maybe Engels. I can never keep those guys straight, but they’d been a dour-looking bunch.
Twenty seconds later, I had a three-ring “procedures” binder full of tabs that explained certain company policies and outlined what I was supposed to be doing there, courtesy of Betty Pope.
My phone rang.
I stared at it. Everyone else did too, waiting for me to pick up. New guy gets a call. Right away, things are getting interesting.
Figuring Rachel, I caught it midway through the second ring. “Hello?”
“Mort?” A woman. I knew that voice.
“Yeah.”
“It’s Dallas.”
The ex-wife, being hassled and harried by the media even more than I, now that our beloved mayor, Jonnie, had flown the coop. I had a choice of responses, a few of which might blow the lid off my cover, things like: “How’d you find me here?” So I said, “What’s up, kiddo?” Kiddo to throw off the ears in the room, but I call her that from time to time to keep her loose.
“Who’s the girl?”
“What girl?” I asked.
Iris’s head hitched up half an inch. Both Phil and Betty’s fingers slowed on their keyboards.
“The girl at your house.”
“Uh, K.”
“Kay?”
“Yeah, K.”
“Not especially bright, is she?”
“Why do you say that?”
“It was a bit like talking to a fence post.”
“At least you got through.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She’s kind of tired.”
“Oh? Did you wear her out? If I remember correctly, you have a way of—”
“Is there a point to any of this, Dal?” Ears twitched at the name. No one looked up, however.
“I have a flat.”
“Yeah? You looking to rent it out or sell it?”
That stopped her. “A flat tire,” she expounded.
“Flat all the way around or only on the bottom?”
“For God’s sake, Mort…”
“Exactly what do you want me to do, Dal?”
“I…What are you doing at…at that place? Skulstad Meats? I spoke with Gregory.”
“Then you know,” I said. Iris flicked her eyes up at me, then down.
“Oh. Sorry. Private investigation stuff, right?” A hint of irony in her voice. “You can’t talk right now, can you?”
“Now you’re cookin’, kid.”
“Well, I was hoping…maybe if you could get off for an hour, like for lunch?”
“That depends. Are you buying?”
“To change my tire, Mort.” She was starting to sound weary. Jonnie’s absence was probably getting to her. That and the media, going through her bank account, underwear drawer,
