“Yup. Not looking good.”
“Better that I’m not watching it, then,” Virgil said.
“Same with me, but I can’t help myself,” Terry said. “Six-zip in the third.”
“Damn Yankees…”
—
A woman pushedthrough the glass door, round-faced, middle-aged, sharp-eyed, with a pair of reading glasses hanging from a gold chain around her neck. “Officers?”
Lucas introduced them and she said, “You’re the two who caught Judge Sand’s killer. I saw you on television.”
“We did,” Virgil said.
“I hope we haven’t killed anyone here?” She said it with a smile, but there was a question mark in her voice.
“We’re looking into the Doris Grandfelt killing,” Lucas said.
“Oh-em-gee,” she said. “I read about the reward. Five million dollars?”
“Yes. Something’s come up. We’d like to talk to whoever supervises your cafeteria.”
“Well, okay…That’s up on two.”
They followed behind her through a room with three glass-faced offices and perhaps twenty thigh-high gray cubicles with people—five-to-one women—looking at computer terminals. She took them to an elevator, and they rode up one floor. As they did, the woman, who said her name was Hester Sweeney, asked what they were looking for.
Virgil said, “A table knife was found near the crime scene. We’re interested in the silverware you use in the cafeteria.”
She asked, “A metal knife?”
“Stainless steel…”
“Huh. Well, I’ll introduce you to Marlys, who runs the lunchroom and the dining room. We have separate facilities for the regular employees and the executives. The only real silverware would be in the executive dining room, but I don’t know how long that’s been the case.”
Lucas: “How long have you worked here?”
“Six years. Marlys has been here a little longer. I don’t think there are many people left, who were here when Doris was killed. It’s famous around here, of course, the killing is.”
She took them to a lunchroom, a plain tile-floored open room with plastic-topped square tables, four orange or blue plastic molded chairs for each table, windows that looked at the former warehouse across the street. A line of coolers stood against one wall, with a plastic-topped counter that held baskets of plastic knives, forks and spoons, straws, napkins, along with packs of ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, and salt and pepper. Three people were sitting at separate tables, eating sandwiches or soup, reading their phones and ignoring each other.
Marlys Jackson was a short Black woman, pretty and busy, her head in one of the coolers, a clipboard in her hand, the type who’d be doing four things at once. She was wearing black jeans with a deep-red blouse and had rings on six of her ten fingers.
When Sweeney introduced them, Jackson put her fists on her hips and said with a Texas accent, “I’ll help any way I can, but we wouldn’t have any silverware left from way back then. Let’s go talk to Philip. He was here when Miz Grandfelt was killed.”
Philip Wall was a dishwasher, a thin shaky white man with a gray ponytail and tattoos on his skinny forearms. He wore a transparentthrow-away plastic apron and had a pack of Marlboros sitting on a sterilizing cabinet.
With Sweeney and Jackson listening in, he told Lucas and Virgil that the lunchroom never had anything but self-serve food—sandwiches, yogurt, drinks, granola bars, candy—with a few other items that could be heated in a couple of microwaves. “It’s all been plastic throw-away utensils since I been here, except executive dining,” he said. “I think the silverware was changed about, shoot, I dunno, maybe ten years ago? Same brand, Oneida stainless, different design.”
“You don’t have any of the old stuff around?”
Wall scratched the back of his head, thinking, then said, “You know…we might still have the picnic stuff.”
“What’s that?” Lucas asked.
“A long time ago, we used to have office picnics. The execs would take employees who’d done good work out to one of the parks,” Wall said. “They’d, you know, play volleyball and croquet, or whatever, and they’d take food along and silverware, instead of plastic, because, you know, it was supposed to be kind of fancy, and they were executives. They had these big old wooden picnic baskets.”
“You still have them?” Virgil asked.
