The building’s interior was cool, but not cold. Two heavyset women sat behind a reception counter studying computer screens, and they both turned when Letty and Kaiser came through the door. From the way they dressed and did their hair, the two women might have been twins, except that they didn’t look alike. One of them said, “Miz Davenport? Mr. Kaiser?”
“Letty and John,” Letty said. “Is Mr. Grimes in?”
“Yes, I believe he’s waiting to talk to you. Between you and me, he’s not in a good mood.”
“Maybe we should have brought him a cheesecake from IHOP,” Letty said, smiling at the two women.
“More like a yard-wide lemon sheet cake,” the woman said, returning Letty’s smile. She pointed at a hallway leading toward the rear of the building. “You go on back, hon. Last office on the left. Dick is skulking in there like an angry armadillo.”
Skulking like an angry armadillo,Letty thought, as she started down the hall. Whatever kind of man Grimes might turn out to be, he wasn’t the kind of boss who terrorized his employees.
All the officesdown the hall had glass doors, three of them occupied by men in T-shirts with pockets or golf shirts; and the place hadthe same warm oil smell as the building in OKC, but thicker. The last door on the right had a nameplate that saidboxie blackburn.
To her left, in a larger office, Grimes was sitting behind a wooden desk, talking into a cell phone. She knocked on the glass and he looked up, saw her, and crooked his finger to tell them to come in. They stepped inside and he pointed at two visitor chairs and said into the phone, “I really don’t want to hear any shit about it, Ed. You tell Marky I want it up and running by tomorrow morning, or I’ll know the reason why it isn’t. Yeah. Yeah... yeah.”
Grimes’s office was purely functional: the desk, an expensive office chair behind it, filing cabinets along a wall, a bookcase, and the visitor chairs sitting on a brown carpet dusted with sand. Four pictures hung on the wall behind Grimes, in brown plastic frames: a thin, blond, fiftyish woman with sharp eyes and a sharper nose; and three willowy dark-haired girls, who, though they caught features from both the older woman and Grimes, were all improbably pretty, given their gene pool. A plain Christian cross hung on the wall to the right of them, and Letty noticed a well-worn Bible on the bookcase.
Grimes said “Yeah” one more time, and “Talk to you later.”
He punched the phone off and said, “I spoke with Vee—Mr. Wright. He said that as big a pain in the ass as you’re likely to be, he wants me to cooperate in every way I can and give you everything you need.”
He was a large man, both tall and thick, with close-cropped curly black hair and tangled eyebrows, brown eyes so dark that he didn’t seem to have pupils, and a fleshy nose. The two sides of his nose didn’t match, and Letty thought he might have had a part of it cut out, like you would with skin cancer. He had a couple other scars on his left cheek, and when he lifted a hand, she saw that hewas missing most of his left little finger. He was wearing a pink golf shirt under a gray canvas overshirt, and jeans.
“What’d you think about that?” Letty asked. “About cooperation?”
Grimes scratched the scarred side of his nose and then said, “Well, I didn’t like it. Then I thought about it for a while. Since Vee runs the company and has about a billion dollars and, sometimes, a bad temper, I decided I’d cooperate every way I can and give you everything you need. Idoplan to piss and moan about it from time to time.”
“Then we’ll get along,” Letty said. “I’ll tell you what, Dick: you don’t have to help us much, other than getting the people around here to listen to us, if we need them to listen. We’ll try not to bother you, or worry you, or create any trouble. We don’t mind some pissing and moaning. We’ll probably do some ourselves.”
Grimes nodded. “Then what can I do for you? I mean, right now?”
“I’m sure you know about Mr. Wright’s problem with missing oil?”
Grimes shook his head. “He thinks we’re short. It’s driving me crazy. It’s like when my wife sends me to the grocery store to get her some strawberries and the store doesn’t have any. When I get home, it turns out that’s no excuse. I’m telling you, I looked everywhere and I can’t find a leak. Boxie—Boxie Blackburn, our numbers guy, Vee told you about him—couldn’t find one, either. Vee says ten or twelve thousand barrels, or more, per year, and he is death on those kinds of numbers. He can smell a leak, so I believe him, but I can’t find ten barrels. I’m pulling my hair out.”
“You’re not losing it at, you know, the pumps? Uh, the rigs?” Letty was unsure of the nomenclature.
“Nawp,” he said, a Texas cross between “naw” and “nope.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“If we are, I can’t figure out how. A couple of guys here wonder if there’s a phantom pipeline cut somewhere, where somebody takes the oil out before it gets to the tanks. But that’s... nutso. I can’t even think how in the hell you could do that, with nobody seeing it. My personal opinion is, if we’re missing oil, it’s paperwork somewhere along the way. Somebody’s accountant is stealing it.”
“Blackburn?”
Grimes stood up. There was only one window in the office, behind his desk, a high, thin slit whose lower edge was chin high on Grimes. He turned and peered out at a slice of blue sky, then said, “I’ve known Boxie for twenty goddamn years, since we were both working outside. I can’t believe he’s stealing it, but... where is he? Where’s Marcia? We can’t find either one of them.”
“Talk to the police?”
“Yeah, but they’re not too interested at this point. They’ve gone out to his house, they say both of his cars are gone. Can’t find them, but they’re gone. They think he and Marcia took off for somewhere. Either for good or evil.”
“Would you mind if we poked through Mr. Blackburn’s office?”
“Yeah, I’d mind, and so would he, but given what Vee’s said, and that you’re government people, and the fact that we can’t find Boxie or Marcia... go ahead,” Grimes said. “The door’s unlocked, I was in there this morning.”
“What about his computer... You think it’s protected?”
Grimes sat down again, reached across his desk for a scratch pad, and jotted some numbers and letters on it: 71Boxer73. He pushed the note across the desk and Letty picked it up.
