David Baldacci - Memory Man

Decker passed by them all and walked up to the bar. The same barman was there. Decker sat and ordered a Coors. The barman poured out the draft, skimmed off the foam on top with a butter knife, and slid it across, in return for which Decker passed him a fiver and told him to keep the change. This got the man’s attention.

“You were in here before,” said the barman.

Decker nodded and sipped his beer. “I was. With the other guy.”

“Yeah, that other guy. Weirdo.”

“Has he been back in?”

“Nah.” The man started to wipe down the mahogany bar using a rag with a circular motion briskly applied.

“Had he been in before?”

“Couple times.”

“You ever talk to him?’

“He never talked to nobody. Except you.”

“He live around here?”

“Don’t know. Only saw his back leaving the place. Never saw him past that.”

“I don’t see that waitress around.”

The barman chuckled. “That’s right.”

“What happened to her?”

“Her?” He chuckled harder and then stopped wiping, put his elbows on the bar, leaned across, and said, “You call it a her . Maybe I don’t.”

“Then what do you call it ?”

The barman pointed a finger at Decker. “Now that’s a damn good question. I don’t do the hiring here. I just pour the drinks and wipe stuff down and throw the occasional drunk bastard out the door.”

“Who hired her?”

“Management, whoever they are. Place has been sold four times in three years. Only constant is yours truly, and I wouldn’t be here ’cept I can’t find nothing else that pays better.”

“So are you saying she was a guy in drag?”

“Or something, yeah. Don’t know for sure. And I wasn’t about to check to confirm. I don’t hit from that side of the plate.”

Decker closed his eyes and the frames flipped through his head.

Tall, thin, blonde curls.

That hid pretty much all of her face.

Or his face.

And maybe the Adam’s apple, the surefire giveaway. Only surgery could take care of that.

“You have any info on the person? Must have given a name, address. Stuff for payroll?”

“Management has all that. And they’re not even local. Maybe even another state. Think they rolled up a bunch of businesses and combined it into one entity. Economy of scale or some shit like that. I bet they’re making a crapload of money, me not so much.”

“So none of those records are kept here?”

“No.”

“Who interviewed the person for the job?”

“Came from an agency.”

“You know which one?”

The barman looked at Decker. “Why, you hit from that side of the plate?”

Decker pulled out his police credentials. “Working a case. This person might be someone I need to talk to.”

The man studied the credentials and said, “Okay. Matter of fact, I don’t know which one. It just showed up one day and started working.”

“And you didn’t question that?”

“Hey, we needed a waitress. The other one didn’t show. Said she’d been sent by the temp agency that management uses. So I put it to work.”

“When was this?”

“Day before you came in with that other guy.”

“And if she hadn’t been sent by the temp agency?”

“Well, why the hell would it lie about that?”

“You have a restroom here just for employees?”

“Yeah, in the back.”

“The person ever use it?”

“I’m sure it did. Everyone has to take a pee or something more, right? Either standing up or sitting down.”

“Show me.”

The barman led him down a rear hall to a battered door marked RESTROOM.

“You got any duct tape?” Decker asked.

“In the back.”

“Get it for me.”

The confused barman left and returned a minute later with a roll.

Decker proceeded to tape off the door with long strips crisscrossing the doorway.

“What the hell are you doing?” asked the barman.

“I’ll have a forensics team here in five minutes. No one goes in.”

“But what if I have to use the facilities?”

“Use the one the paying customers do. And you’re going to be asked to give a description of it , so start racking your memory for every little detail.”

Decker made the call to Lancaster.

She said, “I’ll send them right now. How was your talk with Bogart?”

“Predictable.”

He clicked off and walked outside.

He had solved two things by coming here.

First, the waitress had taken the photograph of him and Leopold at the bar and sent it and the story elements to Alexandra Jamison. She was the only one who could have done it. The intent had been to ruin Decker’s reputation, to the extent he had one. But more than that, they wanted him to maybe even start questioning the truth.

Second, she had left the bar, gotten a car, and picked up Leopold when he left the bar. It must have been a hybrid or electric car, because Decker had not heard a car engine and he would have.

In the frames in his mind there was only the barman left that day when Leopold had exited. The waitress wasn’t there. Because she’d gone for the car.

A man in women’s clothing.

Or maybe a woman who used to be a man dressed in women’s clothing. It was like that movie he’d seen years ago with James Garner and Julie Andrews, Victor Victoria .

And maybe the waitress was Sebastian Leopold’s partner in crime.

Decker had not looked at the person’s feet, but now desperately wished he had. But if he had to guess, she would have been wearing a size nine. He tried to estimate her height in his mind. He had been sitting. She might have been wearing heels. He rolled the frames through.

Maybe five-ten or — eleven. And slim, with narrow shoulders and hips.

A long way from six-two and over two hundred pounds with shoulders as wide as Decker’s.

But not inconceivable. When the will was there, anything was possible. And it seemed anything had been possible here.

He waited for the forensics team. When they showed, he told them exactly what he wanted done. Lancaster had instructed them to follow Decker’s orders to the letter. A sketch artist sat down with the barman.

Then Decker set off for the next place.

Because something else had just occurred to him.

Shop class.

Shop class that never was this year because the teacher had quit before the school year started.

Decker had wondered if there was another reason — other than the passageway coming up in the storage room off the classroom — for the shooter to want access to this particular space.

He stepped through and into the storage room in the rear. He eyed the mounds of junk from old projects left behind like dinosaur bones waiting for an archaeological dig.

Well, Decker intended to dig.

He started at the top of each mound and worked his way to the bottom.

He found nothing useful. So he sat on the floor and thought about it. He went through the possible steps in his head. Up here, he decided, would not be pragmatic. The shooter would need more privacy, more of a buffer zone.

He left the storage room and went down the steps to the other room that had the false wall made of balsa wood. The junk pile here had been moved to the side by the shooter.

Decker didn’t have to dig very deeply through all the crap.

He pulled out the object and held it up.

A chicken-wire and leather contraption with padding built into it. The form was instantly recognizable to an old jock like Decker.

Football shoulder pads.

But much more than that. The structure went all the way down to the waist and included supports for the arms, broadening and thickening at every point. It was built on hinges that swung open when he undid two latches, like a shorter version of the Iron Maiden torture device from medieval times. It was like an entire torso that one could strap on and become basically twice one’s size.