Diane Davidson - Chopping Spree

“Excuse me!” I hailed him, once I’d stuffed the bag of cookies into my purse, stepped awkwardly over the plastic fence, and skirted a Porsche with the license plate DIRT GUY. Victor was scowling at the clipboard in his hands. When he turned the stare and the scowl in my direction, however, he smiled.

“The caterer!” He sounded plugged up, as if he had a bad cold. Laboring in the snow and cold wind probably didn’t help. “How’re you doing? Bringing us goodies?”

“You bet! If I’d known your crew was working in this weather, I would have brought you cocoa, too. Do you have a minute to talk?”

He tucked the clipboard under his arm. “Great idea. Let’s go into the trailer and have some coffee.”

People were always very cordial in anticipation of food you’d brought, I reflected, as I followed Victor to the construction trailer. I leaped across an area where two workers were putting in pipe, then carefully ascended the wobbly, ice-slick wooden steps to the trailer. Once through the bent aluminum door, I looked around. The trailer resembled the inside of a much-battered can. Worse, it was poorly warmed by glowing space heaters. At the desk inside the door, a bulky woman in her sixties silently thrust her formidable chin in my direction. Using a pencil, she scratched her scalp through her thinning black hair. She was watching my every move.

“Victor,” she said in a low voice, “have you taken that sinus medication I gave you?”

“Not yet, Rhonda. I just need to have a bit of a visit with—”

Rhonda’s fleshy jowls jiggled as she addressed me. “No reporters yet, miss. We’ll have a big press party in six weeks, and then you can—”

“I’m not a reporter—”

“It’s OK,” Victor interrupted. “We’ll only be a few minutes.”

“Mall management said no journalists , Mr. Wilson,” she scolded him loudly, the edginess provided for my benefit. “And I have six urgent messages here for you.” She waved a handful of pink slips and sent another glower in my direction. Rhonda’s look said Every one of these is more important than you, bitch.

Victor ignored Rhonda’s protectiveness and handed me a foam cup of muddy coffee that he murmured might not be fresh, but was definitely hot. Huddled beside one of the space heaters, I thanked him gratefully. He gestured toward diet sweetener and nondairy creamer, non-food inventions that I wish could be relegated to kindergarten projects involving glue and construction paper. I declined and grinned in Rhonda’s direction, tempted to ask for real cream. Sensing a demand, she narrowed her eyes and jutted out that scary chin.

“Let’s go in my office,” Victor mumbled. I followed him into a walled-off cubicle, where he shut the plywood door, removed his hard hat, and shrugged out of his filthy overcoat. Then he nodded to a metal chair on the near side of his paper-strewn desk.

“Thanks,” I said again. “I really won’t be but a few minutes. Here you go,” I added, pulling the zipped plastic bag of cookies out of my purse. “My thanks for helping the other day.”

“No problem,” he replied cheerfully as he settled into his own squeaky desk chair. He unzipped the bag, put in a hand so dirty I shuddered, and brought out half a dozen cookies. Pushing a whole one into his mouth, he nodded, mumbled gratitude, and washed the crumbs down with the coffee.

As I watched him, I wondered why I’d ever thought catering was so demanding. Construction had to be much worse. Victor’s haggard cheeks glowed with grime, and his bloodshot eyes made me wonder if he was getting any sleep. After he finished a second cookie, he reached for a foil packet, probably Rhonda’s sinus meds. Pulling off the foil, he popped the pills into his mouth, then washed them down with more of the dark swill in his cup. He winced and said, “’Scuse me.”

“You probably shouldn’t be working if you’re sick.” Would my controlling-mom voice never shut up?

Victor gave me a half-grin. “Fat chance. Listen, I never got a chance to apologize about that truck situation. We figure it was a guy from the old crew, a misfit that No-toe Holden, our former construction manager, fired. The guy’s name is Jorge Sanchez. Sanchez is your standard disgruntled worker. Sometimes they come back, try to steal equipment or vehicles. Anyway, I’m really sorry about that, if you’re here looking for someone to take the blame.”

“No, that’s not why I’m here.” I smiled. “You’ve been on this project, what? A year?”

Victor blew on his coffee, took a sip, and let out a long breath. “From the beginning. Eleven months. Got promoted when Holden quit.” He furrowed his brow. “Hey, sorry about Rhonda, too. You’ve got to understand we’re under a ton of pressure here. We’ve got a drywall contractor refusing to send a crew out and landscapers claiming they can’t put in bushes until the snow melts. Half of the interiors were painted the wrong colors. The portable toilets haven’t been cleaned in two weeks, and I’ve got guys passing out from the stench. And that’s just today.”

Hey, don’t talk to me about portable toilets. I pretended to sip some of the viscous black liquid, then set the foam cup on a grubby plastic table. “Actually, the problem is a… this friend of ours ended up in jail after Barry Dean was killed—”

Victor nodded and rubbed his filthy forehead. “Yeah, I know. Poor Dean. He really wanted to see this project finished.” He drank more coffee, then sighed. “And I’m sorry about your friend. I know one of our guys said that the kid who was with you was driving our truck when Dean nearly got killed. I never did see who exactly was driving that truck. I still think it was Sanchez.”

Since I was quite sure that someone, if not several people, would come forward and say that Julian had been running up the parking lot, and not driving the truck, I let this pass.

“You know, if I just could have more crew,” Victor was explaining, “we could have had more supervision of the—”

“Victor,” I said quickly, to forestall more apologies, “there’s going to be something in the newspaper, probably in a few days. Lucas Holden has been found dead.”

He dropped his coffee cup. “Oh, Christ!” Shaking his head, he rolled back his chair and stared at the mess at his feet in disbelief. Then he grabbed a handful of tissues from a dusty box and threw them onto the floor. “Did he kill himself?”

Now it was my turn to be surprised. Suicide was not a possibility I’d even contemplated. And Helen Keith certainly hadn’t mentioned it.

“Heart attack, I think,” I stammered. “But… I guess I was hoping to find out about his background. I’m thinking maybe there’s something in it that could help our friend in jail.”

“I’ll bet it was suicide. No-toe was just so damned depressed,” Victor continued gloomily, as if he were thinking of offing himself, to end his own remorse about everything. “One day, he just said, ‘I quit.’” He shook his head in disgust. “Some guys just can’t take the pressure of construction.”

“I need to ask you about the time before Holden quit. About a month ago. Was Holden the one who pushed Barry down, so that he landed in a ditch out here on the construction site? Or did he see who pushed Barry?”

Victor’s thin eyebrows rose. “No. It wasn’t No-toe. But how did you hear about that?”

“Oh, you know, some gossip was reported in the paper…”

His voice turned cautious. “Well, Barry told us to keep our mouths shut about that incident. If it got out, he said, things would get worse for him. That’s what he said. They’re putting pipes and cables in that ditch now, but it was about seven feet deep before.”