blue-light special. He was probably in his mid to late fifties with a luxurious headful of wavy silver hair and a matching mustache. A closer examination revealed that the mustache was his. The hair wasn’t.
He was definitely not a staid, three-piece-suit, coat-and-tie man. He was wearing a gaudy blue-and-white Hawaiian shirt with white slacks and turquoise boat shoes. The top three buttons on his palm-tree-covered shirt were unbuttoned, exposing far too much of a totally hairless chest. He wore not one but three long gold chains and lots of sickly sweet froufrou water. I figured the chains were as phony as the hair. The bony remains of a Kentucky Fried Chicken lunch sat on the coffee table in front of him.
“Help yourself to a drink,” he suggested.
“No thanks,” I said. “We’re on duty.”
“Coffee, then? It’s already made.”
“No thank you. Nothing. We’re in a hurry.” I was trying my best to keep the questions on track, to keep my mind from wandering away from the point of our visit, but Debbie and her antics with the men from Dallas were interfering with my train of thought.
“We’re looking for one of your employees,” I said.
For the first time, Richard Damm glanced away from the writhing living-color bodies on his television screen. He seemed mildly interested. “Which one?” he asked.
Al and I sat down side by side on the couch. “Larry Martin,” I answered.
Richard Damm sighed, punched his remote control, and froze a mass of naked, nubile bodies in midscrew. “That little shit,” he said. “I’m looking for him, too.”
“He didn’t come to work today?”
“That’s right. He left a note saying that he was taking this week off. The whole goddamned week, when I’ve got twenty-three installations scheduled. He can take the rest of his life off, for all I care. If he shows his face around here again, I’ll fire his ass.”
Damm got up, walked to the kitchen, and came striding back with a stack of Styrofoam cups and a coffeepot. “A hell of a lot of thanks a guy gets for trying to help.”
In his agitation, Damm must have forgotten I had told him we didn’t want coffee. Truth be known, he probably hadn’t been listening. He poured coffee into three cups, passed one each to Al and me, then flopped back down on the couch with his own. He punched a button on the remote control and the bodies on the screen resumed their impossible contortions.
“What do you mean, ”thanks“?” I asked.
Richard Damm shook his head. “Larry’s been straight for five years, give or take. I figured he had his act together, that I could trust him. But now this.”
He lit a cigarette and pulled a brimming ashtray within easy reach.
“Straight?” I asked. “I don’t understand.”
“Me either. It’s guys like him who make it tough on everybody else.”
“You’d better tell us about it,” I suggested.
“Like I said, I hired him about five years ago, fresh out of the slammer. I let him work in my warehouse. It was like my civic duty, know what I mean? One of those work-release arrangements. It looked to me like it was working out fine.”
“He’s worked for you the whole time, then?”
Richard Damm nodded. “He handled the warehouse job for a couple of years, and then asked if he could start doing installations. He could make a lot more money doing that. I figured what the hell. He was a good enough worker. Turned out I was right. At least it looked that way at the time. He was a little slow at first, but he caught on.”
“What did he get sent up for?” Al asked.
“Vehicular manslaughter. DWI. He came out of the joint sober and went straight to AA. Hasn’t had a drop since, as far as I know.”
“How about lately? Any unexplained absences before this morning?”
Damm shook his head. “Not so as you’d notice. But he screwed up a truck over the weekend. My mechanic is pissed as hell about that, and I’ve been waiting all morning to hear whether or not he got that dentist’s office finished before he took off.”
“Dr. Nielsen’s office?” I asked.
Richard Damm seemed surprised. “That’s right. How’d you know about that? Nielsen’s a son of a bitch to work for. I call him ”Mister Got Bucks.“ He’s just like an old woman- fussy as hell. If Larry took off without completing that job, Nielsen’ll have my ass. I tried calling his office a couple of minutes ago. No answer.”
And there isn’t going to be, I thought. I said, “What makes you think Martin didn’t complete the job?”
“You wanna know what I really think?” Richard Damm demanded.
“Yes.”
“I think he went out on the town Friday night, fell off the wagon, and got himself in some kind of hassle. Maybe even skipped town. If he did, he took off with enough of my tools to be able to get himself another job wherever the hell he ends up.”
I happened to know that most of Larry Martin’s tools, minus the kicker that was down at the crime lab, were still in Dr. Frederick Nielsen’s office, but I didn’t tell Richard Damm that. I wasn’t about to tell him anything I didn’t have to. For some reason-maybe the phony hair, maybe the phony smile-Richard Damm rubbed me the wrong way.
“You always jump to these kinds of conclusions when one of your employees doesn’t show up for work on a Monday morning?” I asked.
Richard Damm’s whole manner changed abruptly. “I’m not stupid,” he said. “I had one of my guys drive by to check on him. His car wasn’t there, and nobody answered the door. That’s all I know.”
“You said something about him screwing up one of your trucks,” Al mentioned. “Tell us about that.”
“One of my installation vans. It’s a mess.”
“What about it?”
“He musta gotten in some kind of fight, that’s what we figure, or maybe an accident. All I know is there was blood all over the place, and one of the doors is bashed in. I guess I should be grateful, though. At least he didn’t steal it.”
“You say there was blood in the van?”
“You deaf or what? All over the seat, all over the floor.”
“We’d better have a look at it,” Big Al said, getting up and starting toward the door. “Where is it?”
“Nick took it down to Westlake to have it cleaned up and detailed. He’s probably back by now. It had been sitting out in the sun for a day and a half at least. Those stains really set up good. Nick says he doesn’t know if they can save the upholstery or not. He may have to tear it all out.”
“Who’s Nick?”
“Nick Wallace, my mechanic. We’ve got a whole fleet of vans. He’s in charge of keeping them all on the road.”
“And where is he?”
“Out back, in the garage. That’s usually where he is, him and his trucks-his babies he calls ”em. He couldn’t treat ‘em better if they all belonged to him personally, know what I mean?“
I got up and followed Al toward the fur-lined door. “So where’s the garage?”
“Straight through the warehouse. You’ll have to ring the bell for him to let you in.”
I stopped in the doorway door and turned back toward the room. The movie had returned to life on the television screen with all the moanings and pantings turned back up to full volume.
“Do you know Larry Martin’s address?”
Enthralled once more, Damm didn’t bother to look up. “Not off the top of my head. Get it from Cindy, my secretary. Tell her I said she should give it to you.”
“We may be back,” I added.
“Sure thing. I’ll be right here.”
Cindy gave us Larry Martin’s address and phone number up in Lake City, then she directed us through the warehouse to the garage at the far end of the building. She assured us that was where we’d find Nick Wallace.
“Do you believe that little shit?” Big Al asked as we made our way through canyons of carpet rolls. “Damm
