“Arnie, it’s Wendy. There’s a man from the Sheriff’s Department here about an investigation or something.”
McCaleb didn’t correct her. He hadn’t lied to her and he wouldn’t lie to her about who he was and whom he was with. But if she wanted to make incorrect assumptions, then he wasn’t going to correct her. After listening to the phone for a few moments, Wendy looked up at McCaleb.
“What investigation?”
McCaleb nodded toward the phone and held his hand out. The young woman hesitated but then handed the phone receiver to him.
“Mr. Toliver?” he said into the phone. “Terry McCaleb. A couple months ago you talked to a couple of sheriff’s detectives named Ritenbaugh and Aguilar about an employee named Mikail Bolotov. You remember?”
After a long hesitation Toliver agreed that he had.
“Well, I’m investigating that case now. Ritenbaugh and Aguilar are onto other things. I need to ask you some additional questions about that. Can I come back?”
Again a hesitation.
“Well… we are awfully busy back here. I-”
“I won’t take long, sir. Remember, it’s a murder investigation and I’m hoping you’ll continue to help us out.”
“Well, I suppose…”
“You suppose what?”
“Uh, just come on back. The girl will tell you where I’m at.”
Three minutes later McCaleb had walked the length of the building, past several rows of assembly and packaging benches, to an office at the rear next to a loading dock. There was a short flight of stairs up into the office. Next to the door was a window that allowed Toliver to look out across the workbenches as well as the shipping and receiving dock. As he had walked past the benches toward the office, McCaleb had overheard the conversations of the employees. Three different times he heard a language he believed was Russian.
As McCaleb opened the office door, the man he assumed was Toliver hung up the phone and waved him in. He was a skinny man in his sixties, with brown, leathery skin and white hair fringed around the sides of his head. He had a plastic pocket guard in his shirt pocket, jammed with an assortment of pens.
“I’ve gotta make this quick,” he said. “I have to check the lading on a truck going out.”
“Fine.” McCaleb looked down at the report on top of the stack he carried. “Two months ago you told detectives Ritenbaugh and Aguilar that Mikail Bolotov was working the night of January twenty-second.”
“That’s right. I remember. Hasn’t changed.”
“Are you sure, Mr. Toliver?”
“What do you mean, am I sure? Yeah, I’m sure. I looked it up for those two guys. It was in the books. I pulled the time card.”
“Are you saying you based it on what you saw in the pay records or did you actually see Bolotov working that night?”
“He was here. I remembered that. Mikail never missed a day.”
“And you remember him working all the way until ten.”
“His time card showed he-”
“I’m not talking about the time card. I’m talking about you remembering he stayed until ten.”
Toliver didn’t answer. McCaleb glanced out the window at the rows of workbenches.
“You’ve got a lot of people working for you, Mr. Toliver. How many work the two-to-ten shift?”
“Eighty-eight at the moment.”
“And then?”
“About the same. What’s the point?”
“The point is you gave the man an alibi based on a time card. Do you think it could have been possible that Bolotov left early without being noticed, then had a friend punch him out on the clock?”
Toliver didn’t respond.
“Forgetting about Bolotov for a moment, have you ever had that problem before? You know, somebody punching out for somebody else, scamming the company that way?”
“We’ve been in business here sixteen years, it’s happened.”
“Okay.” McCaleb nodded. “Now, could it have happened with Bolotov? Or do you stand at the time clock every night and make sure nobody punches two cards.”
“Anything’s possible. We don’t stand at the clock. Most nights my son closes up. I’m already home. He keeps an eye on things.”
McCaleb held his breath for a beat and felt the excitement he had been containing build. Toliver’s answer, if it were given in court, would be enough to shred Bolotov’s alibi.
“Your son, is that Randy?”
“Yeah, Randy.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“He’s in Mexico. We’ve got another plant in Mexicali. He spends one week a month down there. He’ll be back next week.”
“Maybe we can call him?”
“I can try but he’s probably out on the floor. That’s why he goes down there. To make sure the line is running. Besides, how is he going to remember one night three months ago? We make clocks here, Detective. Every night we make the same clocks. Every day we ship them out. One night is no different from the other.”
McCaleb turned away from him and looked out the window again. He noticed that several of the workers were leaving their posts as new workers were taking their places. He watched the shift change until he picked out the man he believed was Bolotov. There had been no photo in the records and only a spare description. But the man McCaleb was now watching wore a black T-shirt with sleeves stretched tightly around his powerful and tattoo- laced arms. The tattoos were all of one ink-jailhouse blue. It had to be Bolotov.
“That’s him, right?”
He nodded in the direction of the man who had taken a seat at a workbench. It appeared to McCaleb that it was Bolotov’s job to place the plastic casings around completed clock mechanisms and then stack them in a four- wheeled cart.
“Which?”
Toliver had come up next to McCaleb at the window.
“With the tattoos.”
“Yeah.”
McCaleb nodded and thought for a moment.
“Did you tell Ritenbaugh and Aguilar that the alibi you were giving that man was based on what you saw in the pay records and time cards and not what you or your son actually saw on that night?”
“Yeah, I told them. They said fine. They left and that was that. Now, here you are with these new questions. Why don’t you guys get your shit together? It would have been a lot easier for my boy to remember after two or three weeks instead of three months.”
McCaleb was silent as he thought about Ritenbaugh and Aguilar. They had probably had a list of twenty-five names they had to cover in the week they were assigned to the case. It was sloppy work but he understood how it could happen.
“Listen, I’ve got to go out to the dock,” Toliver said. “You want to wait until I come back or what?”
“Tell you what, why don’t you send Bolotov in here on your way out. I need to talk to him.”
“In here?”
“If you don’t mind, Mr. Toliver. I am sure you want to help us out and continue to cooperate, don’t you?”
He stared at Toliver as a final means of ending his unspoken objection.
“Whatever,” Toliver said as he threw his hands up in a gesture of annoyance and headed toward the door. “Just don’t take all day.”
“Oh, Mr. Toliver?”
Toliver stopped at the door and looked back at him.
“I heard a lot of Russian being spoken out there. Where do you get the Russians?”
