Mother Nature Page 5

  Outside, I found the sky a thick gunmetal gray. No bright sunrise horizon to the east, no early morning birdsong over the oil-stained asphalt. I climbed into the little truck and set out in search of bright lights, coffee, and a newspaper to set my world back in a more bearable register.

  I found a deli across the street from HRC Environmental Consultants, Inc., the place where Janet Pinchon had worked. The avenue was a long run of sleek new pavement bordered by new “tip-up” prefabricated buildings styled in air-raid-bunker modern. There were no cars yet in the parking spaces; in fact, the whole office park was so damned plain-Jane sparkling clean and devoid of wear that I wondered if the builders hadn’t yet gotten around to installing the people. I parked the truck behind the deli and wandered by on the sidewalk, making a quick reconnaissance of the area. HRC Environmental Consultants crouched along forty or fifty feet of a building landscaped with withered rhododendrons cruelly misplanted in hard clay soil.

  I looked at my watch. It was early, not yet seven, long before anyone might be arriving to work. The deli had big windows and a great view of HRC; just the place to lie in wait and plan my assault.

  An astonishingly cheerful woman took my order. She wore a crisp chef’s apron (apple green to match the Formica tabletops) that exaggerated her ample bosom. Her name, Reena, was machine-embroidered in tomato-red thread across the leading acreage of her left breast, and she leaned toward me with so much enthusiasm that I wondered if I were her first customer ever. “May I take your order?” she inquired in a rich, deep voice accented from somewhere east of Athens.

  “Ah, yeah,” I mumbled, my own voice still clabbered from a night’s disuse. “Ah, two eggs, toast, and hash browns. And coffee.”

  “And can I interest you in some fresh-squeezed oranch juice?”

  “What the hell.” Damn the torpedoes: I’d have the ATM card cleared up in time to pay for lunch.

  “Excuse me a minute,” she caroled, pressing the electronic keypad on the front of her cash register. When the machine dinged to indicate that it had arrived at a sum, her face broke into a smile of beatific triumph. “That will be nine dollars and three cents.”

  “Nine—what?” I clasped the pocket that had my wallet in it.

  Reena’s eyes popped in alarm. Her hands fidgeted. “Four-fifty for the aiks, toas, and home fries, one-fifty for the coffee—unlimited refills!—and two-fifty for the oranch juice. Fifty-three cents tax.”

  “Hold the OJ,” I muttered, embarrassed. I pulled out my wallet and bowed my head over the ten and five ones that cowered in its murky depths between a disintegrating credit card receipt and a fortune cookie fortune that read, “You have a curious nature.”

  Reena was silent. I looked up to see her hand wavering over the keyboard of the cash register. “It’s new,” she whispered. “I don’t know how to subtract—”

  “It’s okay,” I said, a little too loudly, slapping the ten on the counter. “I shall savor every sip. Keep the change, please. I’ll be over there.” I spun around and headed to the counter under the window, humiliated at leaving only a ninety-seven-cent tip.

  As I sat down, I saw that someone had parked a car in front of HRC Consultants. Had they gone inside? No, no lights on yet, and a big man was ambling from the car toward the deli door. He wasn’t quite looking where he was going, more absorbed in counting change out of his pocket than watching his footing. His large, soft frame lurched as he came up over the curb.

  He shoved open the deli door with one shoulder, still concentrating on his pocket change, but his lips parted into the sort of smile one sometimes sees on the face of a sleeping child. He planted his large feet wide to stop a slight swaying in his body. I had thought at first that he was drunk, but now that he was close I could smell no booze. His head drooped forward at the neck. He was probably six foot three, had dark freckles on milky skin and a rich thatch of graying red-brown hair. He was fastidiously groomed, his hair freshly cut, his fingernails trimmed and clean, and his penny loafers polished to a high shine. He wore neatly pressed charcoal-gray flannel slacks and a muted red tie. The commercially starched collar of his pin-striped shirt and his narrow belt formed cofferdams against the descent of softening jowls and abdominal muscles that were taking the big middle-aged slide, but he was not so far gone as to seem sloppy.

  He called out a greeting to Reena in a vibrant baritone: “My, mymymymy! Reena, you are the apple of my heart. Good morning.”

  Reena surged to the counter, a smile exploding across her wide face. “Good morning, Mr. Ryan. How are you?” she sang.

  The tall man looked up from the task of counting out change with fumbling fingers and renewed his own full-lipped smile. “Reena, Reena; it is a lovely morning, isn’t it?”

  I looked outside. Gray murk.

  “Why, Mr. Ryan…” Reena warbled.

  “If only because you are in it, sweet Reena. The usual, what ho.” He pursed his lips into a pixilated air-kiss that pulled his cheeks forward like taffy. “And when will you call me Pat?”

  Reena disappeared into the tiny kitchen behind the counter, leaving a deep-throated giggle hanging in the air behind her. Pat Ryan cast a pile of crumpled bills and a handful of change across the counter and stuffed two singles into the tip jar by the register. Then he waved to someone in the kitchen. “Morning, Ahmed. How’s tricks?”

  “Is good, Pat,” a voice replied.

  Then Pat Ryan swung toward me, catching me staring. His brushy brown eyebrows rose skyward, hoisting open some of the sweetest, sleepiest, most intensely blue eyes I’ve ever seen. Even as grouchy as I was feeling, this yanked a smile clean out of me. He bowed courteously. “Good morning, ma’amselle,” he purred, starting to move my way. “I thought no one was a worse insomniac than I.”

  My smile became a grin, and when he gestured inquiringly at the stool next to me, I nodded happily. “Em Hansen,” I said, reaching out my hand to shake his.

  “And what brings you into our midst, Ms. Hansen?” he asked, enclosing my hand in the warmth of his own.

  “I’m a geologist,” I said. “Out here looking for work,” I added, laying in my cover story. “Are you with HRC?” Ryan? Maybe he was even R!

  Ryan nodded, a flicker of irritation muddying his eyes.

  “Is HRC hiring?” I asked. Subtle old Em.

  Reena bustled up to our counter with two big mugs of steaming coffee and a handful of little tubs full of half-and-half. Ryan emptied three into his mug and stirred, his fingers limp and fumbling. When he looked up, his smile was no longer a happy one, and he pursed his lips several times, as if exercising them before a difficult athletic feat. “You want to work for H, R, and C? Brave woman.”

  “Why d’you say that?” I revised my prior speculation: Ryan was employee, not employer.

  “Aw, don’t take me too seriously, I’m just kind of like that.”

  Like what? I wondered, but asked, “Isn’t it a good place to work?”

  He poured on the charm again, though it had lost its cheer: “Aw, well, my dear … HRC is a nice enough place to work, I suppose, if you’re looking for some experience, but you’re a few years older than your standard entry-level kid, or do I miss my guess?”

  “The crumbs of my thirtieth birthday cake are long since stale, Mr. Ryan,” I intoned.

  He elaborately pursed his lips. “Just so. And by the cut of your jib”—he gestured toward my tweed suit—“I would guess your prior experience is in something that pays rather better than environmental consulting. Such as petroleum…” He let this last word roll out like an oil slick on the Persian Gulf.

  I made a mental note: This man may seem half-asleep, but he isn’t stupid. A geologist, no doubt; deductive logic, intuitive leaps … “Is oil-patch experience a problem?”

  Ryan pursed his lips and mouthed several words before choosing one he would voice. “Oh … Mr. H and Mr. R and Mr. C have a thing about oily types. H and C are civil engineers, which means they don’t much understand what geologists do,
and R is a hydrogeologist, which is by no means to be confused with a geologist.”

  “How so?”

  Ryan’s eyes roamed the room. “Let’s just say hydros don’t play nicely with the other kids. Don’t share the toys, always want to be team captain but never just a player. Abstractionists amok in a concrete universe. My own self,” he said, laying his long fingers across the fine pinpoint cotton of his pressed shirt, “they suffer to employ because I emphasized certain other accomplishments than geology on my resume. I had to hide my oily years, may they rest in peace. I hid them between the service and my tenure with the Water Board.”

  My mental gears shifted to fast forward, filing and assessing information. The army. Muscle tone lost and hair graying, face on close inspection sprayed with the first fine wrinkles. Mid-forties plus, makes that service Vietnam—marines? He likes lots of starch around his neck—which fits with a stint in the oil patch during the late-seventies, early-eighties boom. “The Water Board?”

  “You’re not a Californian, I see. So you’re not registered, either?”

  “Slow up, please; you’re losing me.”

  “The California State Water Quality Control Board. I was lucky, in a way, to be one of the first laid off from the oil biz, but it sure was fun while it lasted.”

  Pat Ryan clearly knew a lot and had a lot to say, but he was leaving out so many essential cars in the train of his thoughts that I felt like a caboose that had come unhitched and rolled onto a siding. I wondered again if he was a drunk who hadn’t been to bed yet, but no, there definitely wasn’t any eau de booze on his breath. “Water Board?” I repeated.

  He turned his thousand-yard glaze out across the street, which was waking up to the first few sorties of commuter traffic. “Aw, I suppose it’s not so bad as all that.”

  The conversation was beginning to make me feel a little hazy myself. I wasn’t a caboose on a siding, I was a spaceship that had gotten sucked into the slipstream of an existentialist fugue. Doggedly I said, “The Water Board is a state government regulatory agency?”

  Pat’s focus swam back toward me. “Yes.”

  “So I want a job at HRC. So how do I package my qualifications?”

  “Qualifications? Just tell them you want to learn about tanks,” he said. Suddenly he sat up straight, a happy twinkle in his eyes. “Yes, perfect! In fact, just today they’re interviewing to replace a geologist we lost. I bet if you walked in there this morning, they’d have you interviewed and out before they figured out you weren’t on the schedule!” The thought tickled him so much that he threw back his head and began to laugh at the building across the street as if it were a bully he’d managed to blindside.

  “Who do I ask to see?” I asked, as Reena slid our breakfasts in front of us.

  “Rauch. He’s the hydro guy. Hollingsworth is gone as usual doing expert-witness testimony, and Carter was last seen exiting stage left to Hawaii with wife number three. Ask to see Rauch, say you’re expected. And here’s what you do: you don’t have your forty, either, do you.” It was a statement.

  “What’s a forty?”

  “Right. So you say, ‘Mr. Rauch, I’ve heard you run the best shop in town, and I’m looking for the best experience.” Play to his ego. You can’t miss it, it’s a rather large feature. You say, ‘I’m not registered, but I have X years’ experience field-mapping’—something vague like that—‘and I plan to sit the registration exam next time it’s offered. And here’s what I’ll do about my forty, Mr. Rauch. I’ll work the first week for free, that way it costs you nothing to give me a trial, you even pocket whatever chargeable time I accrue. Then, if you like me—’” He slapped the counter, warming to his blarney. “‘When you see how much you like me, you send me for my forty.’”

  “Please translate.”

  He looked up at me politely, as if I were a conductor on that little mental railroad of his and I’d just asked to see his ticket. “California registers geologists under the Division of Consumer Affairs. RG, Registered Geologist. You can’t call yourself a geologist for hire without it. Regulator talk for here’s the hoops you have to jump through. And the fed OSHA—”

  I grimaced.

  He rolled his eyes. “—Occupational Safety and Health Administration—says you can’t work on a contaminated site without a forty-hour health and safety training course.”

  “So why would Rauch hire me on trial if he couldn’t send me on a site?”

  He steepled his fingers. “My dear, he does it all the time.”

  “Breaks the law.”

  “Precisely.”

  “And what happens if I get hurt on his site?”

  “He could get his greedy little buttocks jailed. Or sued. Or both. But of course, as long as we are ignorant of the regulations…”

  Red flags flew up in my head. Maybe Janet had quit to stay healthy. And maybe she threatened to blow the whistle on Rauch, and he didn’t like that, and— Excited, I swilled my two-dollar-and-fifty-cent orange juice without tasting it. “So I tell Rauch I want to learn about tanks,” I prompted.

  “Yeah.”

  “So you tell me about tanks, so I can act like tanks are the only thing that keep my heart beating.”

  “Tanks.”

  “Yeah.” Hel-looo!

  “Right. LUST.” His cheeks bunched in an elaborately prim smile.

  “LUST?”

  “As in Leaking Underground Storage Tanks.”

  “Tanks.”

  “No really, the County Health Department calls it the LUST program. You’ll catch on soon enough,” he said. He popped the last of his English muffin into his mouth and chewed. When he’d swallowed, he rose and dusted the crumbs off his necktie and slacks. “Gotta go. Gotta be at my desk when the man gets in, look earnest, keep my job another day.” He turned to go but briefly glanced back at me, his smile completely absent. “You’ll probably want to dress a little more humbly, my dear, so your oiliness doesn’t show. Oh, and don’t tell them you know me. It wouldn’t help your cause.”

  * * *

  I REMAINED THROUGH two refills of my coffee mug, maximizing caffeine gained for cash spent, and watched the inmates of HRC Environmental arrive for their day at the salt mines. They were a morose lot, shuffling in with hunched shoulders and drooping necks, except for the only female in the bunch, a young boopsie who fairly bounced up the sidewalk. And a middle-aged guy who drove up in a shining BMW. He stormed into the building like there were heads in there that needed knocking together. I figured him for Mr. Rauch, my quarry.

  I fiddled absently with my watch, the image of Janet’s watchless wrist floating back up into consciousness. So the work she did for HRC dealt with leaking underground fuel storage tanks: what about them? I supposed that a leaking tank meant that whatever petroleum product had been in the tank was now outside the tank, which spelled contamination. I found that rather hard to get excited about, having worked for so many years in and around the petroleum finding business, where crude oil got spilled as a regular thing. And how much could leak out of a tank before somebody noticed? Wouldn’t they catch the problem after, say, ten or fifteen gallons?

  I did heed Ryan’s warning about my attire, a problem easy to remedy. Before setting out to storm the Bastille of job interviews, I made a run back to the motel and changed. The suit I had on amounted to the only clothing fancier than blue jeans I had brought with me, but Janet had worn the same sizes I did, and by gum, I had all her clothes. You might think it a little gutsy to wear a dead woman’s clothes to interview for her job, but her tastes had been remarkably unobtrusive, running to common, off-the-rack styles in don’t-notice-me blues. Perfect camouflage, and it was kind of comforting to put them on, like I had a friend in town who’d support me as I went through the agony of interviewing for a job.

  While I was at the motel, I tried to phone the Senator but got Murbles again, who again claimed the Senator was unavailable. As what I needed most just now more than anything was the money, I avoided another pissing mat
ch and kept to basics, trying to sound productive first before I hit him for the cash: “I’ve boxed Janet’s belongings. Shall I take them to the Senator’s California residence?” Yeah, that was a good idea; he’d give me the address, and Mrs. Pinchon would be there, and I could chat with her, and …

  “No.” For just a moment, he sounded flustered, almost human: “Just hold on to them for now.” But then he recovered himself, demanding brusquely, “Is that all you have to report?”

  “No, there’s one more item of business.”

  “Which is?” he drawled, sarcasm oozing out of the telephone and into my ear.

  I took a deep breath. “At our first meeting we failed to arrange for my retainer,” I announced, managing to sound a little indignant. “I’ll need a week in advance. Thirty-five hundred dollars. A cashier’s check will do.”

  He chuckled. It wasn’t a pleasant sound. “Working through the weekend, are we?”

  “You’d rather I dawdled?”

  “Out of funds, dear?”

  I was sitting on the end of the bed, clutching the phone, and could see myself in the mirror over the writing desk. A vein was beginning to bulge in my forehead. Yes, out of funds. Broke. Indigent. On the skids. Are we done with the humiliation now? Might we proceed with the business at hand?

  Silence seemed to work on Murbles. With boredom dripping from his voice, he finally said, “Okay, where shall I send it?”

  I hadn’t planned on letting him know where to reach me; that would mean giving up what slim control over our communications I had. But I had no alternative mail drop set up, and was already so humiliated that I didn’t want to get caught sounding like I hadn’t thought this through, so I gave him the name and address of the motel. “Cashier’s check, FedEx, tomorrow morning,” I concluded, and rang off in a huff. After the check arrived, I told myself, I would move anyway, and to a better motel.