guy to love, Glen. Sometimes, you can be such a hard-ass. Now we’re going to have to move away, and I’m going to have to get a job someplace else.” She stormed out of the room with one last shot. “I hope you’re happy.”
I wasn’t, particularly.
Sally went home after that. It was, after all, quitting time. The last thing she’d told me, in short, clipped sentences, was that Doug had left his truck, full of stuff, around the back of the shed, then taken off with Betsy in her Infiniti to go see the bank before it closed about the mess they were in. Sally said Doug had asked, if I had a chance, would I mind unloading his truck.
I put my head in my hands for a few moments. Then I opened my bottom desk drawer and took out a half-full bottle of Dewar’s and a shot glass, and poured myself a drink. I put the stopper back in the bottle and tucked it into the drawer.
I downed the drink, then went to the shed. I didn’t know that I could do much for Doug in his current predicament, but letting him and Betsy store their stuff here was at least something. There was a lot of room in the shed, and if their things were stacked efficiently they wouldn’t take up that much space. Unloading Doug’s truck would mean one less thing he had to deal with when-and if-he showed up for work tomorrow morning.
I felt sick about Doug. It was a strained relationship we had at times, particularly lately. We’d worked side by side for several years while my father was alive, more or less equals on the job. We not only worked together. We played. Everything from golf to video games. Our wives commiserated while their two grown men would kill an afternoon immersed in a Super Mario Bros. time-waster. And to prove we weren’t just children, we would get drunk at the same time. Doug had always been a carefree guy, someone who didn’t see much point in worrying about tomorrow when it was a whole night’s sleep away, and the unfortunate thing was he’d married someone who worried even less. Not, as today’s events proved, an ideal match.
His lackadaisical approach to life hadn’t been a problem when we worked together, but after my father died and I took over the company, and Doug became an employee instead of a coworker, things changed. First of all, we no longer hung out as a foursome. When I became the boss, Betsy didn’t like the way the scales had tipped between her and Sheila. Betsy imagined Sheila somehow lording it over her, like I’d somehow morphed into Donald Trump and Sheila was Ivana, or whomever Trump was married to these days.
The qualities that had once endeared Doug to me now occasionally drove me to distraction. His work was always good, but there was the odd day he phoned in sick when I knew he was hungover. He wasn’t as attentive as he could be to customers’ concerns. “People watch too many of those home reno shows,” he often said. “They expect things to be perfect, but it’s not like that in the real world. Those shows, they’ve got big budgets.”
Clients didn’t like to hear those kinds of excuses.
If we hadn’t at one time been buddies, Doug probably wouldn’t have felt he could hit me up for advances on his salary. If we hadn’t at one time been buddies, I would have said no the first time he asked, and not set a precedent.
I wanted to help him out, but I couldn’t rescue Doug. He and Betsy were going to have to hit rock bottom before they were able to pull themselves up again. I understood what he said about the banks, about those mortgages that were all too good to be true. He wasn’t the only one that got sucked in.
A lot of people were learning their lessons. I just hoped Doug and Betsy were able to learn theirs before they killed each other.
I opened the tailgate of Doug’s truck and the window of the cargo cap above it. Because the Pinders had not had time to organize their things, everything had been tossed in loose. I opened the door to the shed and cleared a spot in one corner for the stuff, and brought out a couple of chairs, a DVD player, some linens. They probably should have taken that to Betsy’s mom’s place, but they could sort that out later.
I had the truck nearly emptied when I noticed a couple of cardboard boxes, about the size a dozen bottles of wine would come in, tucked up close to the cab. I crouched down and walk-squatted the length of the truck bed. You spend enough time in construction, you can walk in the back of a pickup like that without getting a groin injury or pulling a hamstring.
Once I reached the boxes, I got down on my knees. I wasn’t sure whether this was stuff from Doug’s house or something he’d already had in the truck that belonged to the business. So I folded back the cardboard flaps and had a peek inside. There was a lot of crumpled newspaper, which had been used as packing material. I took out bits of paper to see what it was protecting. The box was filled with electrical parts. Coils of wire, outlets, junction boxes, light switches, parts for circuit breaker panels.
It might have been interesting to read some of the stories on the newspaper scraps, but they were all written in Chinese.
THIRTY-EIGHT
It wasn’t immediately obvious these parts were all junk. As knockoff electrical bits went, they looked pretty authentic. But sitting in the back of Doug’s truck, studying them, I was able to spot things that didn’t pass muster. The circuit breaker parts, for one, had no certification marks on them. Anything legit would have had them. The color of the plastic used for the light switches was off, not consistent throughout. You handle parts like these long enough, you just know.
I had a terrible, sinking feeling. There was something Sally had said. “What if someone gave him the wrong parts and he couldn’t tell the difference?” Maybe Theo hadn’t been in the business long enough to spot this kind of thing, to have an instinctive feel for it.
Shit.
What the hell was junk like this doing in the back of Doug’s truck? Was he the one who’d substituted parts like this on the Wilson job? Had he done it on any others?
I slid the two boxes along the truck bed until they were positioned on the tailgate, then carried them, stacked one atop the other, to my own vehicle. I tossed them into the back, put up the tailgate, then locked the shed, the office, and the gate that led into the property.
I called Doug on his cell phone, hoping his service hadn’t been cut off for nonpayment. Surely the bill had been one of those tucked, unopened, in his kitchen drawer.
I got lucky.
“Yeah, Glen?” He sounded weary.
“Hey,” I said. “You get settled in with Betsy’s mom?”
“Yeah, but man, this is no way to live. She’s got five fucking cats.”
“Have any luck at the bank?”
“They were closing when we got there, so we’re going to go first thing in the morning, try to talk some sense into them. This is totally unfair, man, really.”
“Yeah. Listen, I need to see you.”
“What’s up?”
“We need to talk, in person. I know you’ve got a lot on your plate at the moment, but it’s important.”
“Yeah, well, I guess.”
“I can drive up to Derby, but I don’t know where your mother-in-law’s place is.” Doug gave me an address. I was pretty sure I knew the street. “Okay, I’m heading up there now.”
“Can you stay for a beer?” he asked. “Because, listen. That thing I said the other day, kinda threatening you, that was out of line, you know? I feel bad about that. Elsie-that’s Betsy’s mom-she’s got some beer in the fridge and she says I can take three a day out of there. I’ll save you one.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “See you in a bit.”
It wasn’t that far to Derby, but it felt like a long drive. I’d really wanted to lay all this on Theo. I’d never liked the guy, and I’d never been that crazy about his work. If the fire had to be blamed on him, well, that suited me fine. Even considering that Sally was supposedly going to marry the guy.
I would never have wanted Doug to be the bad guy. I wondered what my father’s reaction would have been to finding out that one of his supposedly most loyal employees had done something that could destroy the company.
He’d have fired his ass, that’s what he would have done.
