The Investigator Asked To See The Pages Behind My Drawings

The second car belonged to the morning lab courier. I had been holding my breath for a man who only wanted our sample cooler.

Leona noticed.

"I make a poor first impression," she said. "Usually I get ten minutes before someone looks that worried."

She was sixty-one, a Cape Verdean American woman with dark brown skin, silver curls, and reading glasses on a red cord. Her coat had a missing cuff button. She showed me her state investigator's badge without waving it around.

"Financial crimes," she said. "Your call reached our intake desk."

I checked the number on the fraud notice against the office number on her card. Then I called and asked to be connected to her.

Her phone rang in her hand.

"Good," she said. "Keep doing that."

We sat beside the warm pump housing. I gave her the scale slip and showed her the loading picture.

"Does the water tell you whose clams they were?" she asked.

"No. It tells me the tank was running and being tested at twelve thirty-one. The tag tells me whose catch was in the tub."

"And the weight?"

"That something came in. Not what it was, by itself."

She wrote that down exactly.

I had expected someone who would turn my careful maybes into a loud certainty. Instead, she asked which clock I had used.

I showed her the scale display, the camera, and the lab pickup sheet. Once a week I compared them with the office clock and wrote down any difference. Old equipment drifted. So did men who said old equipment never drifted.

"Two circles?" she asked, touching the edge of a drawing.

"Checked twice."

"Wish we had that stamp at my office."

I smiled before I meant to.

She asked permission to photograph those first records. Then she gave me a receipt naming each page and image I had shared.

"Don't go looking in Gordon's office," she said. "Don't promise Ruth we can fix everything. And don't change your routine for me."

"What if the routine shows more?"

"Call me."

Over the next nine days, three trucks arrived after midnight. Each was marked empty on the office movement sheet. Each gained weight before reaching us and lost it after tubs went into tank four.

I kept making the same records I had always made.

Leona came on two late shifts. On the first, she brought coffee so bitter I had to hold it away from my face.

"Evidence room blend," she said.

On the second, she brought tea.

She asked about the sketch of a pump pinned beside my desk. I told her my wife, Joan, had framed it as a joke twenty years earlier. Joan had been gone eleven years.

Leona did not fill the silence with a story of her own.

She just said, "She chose a good frame."

That helped more than sympathy usually did.

Later, while we waited for a printer, she mentioned her divorce. It had been final eight years. She said her former husband had liked being married to someone useful until her work interfered with his dinners.

"These hours bother you?" I asked.

"Only when the coffee's bad."

I started leaving a clean mug on the shelf.

Ruth finally agreed to meet her away from the harbor. I did not go. Leona told me only what Ruth gave her permission to share.

There had been a man called Dale Kett at the staging dock. He carried a clipboard and called himself a compliance agent. He had no public badge. He claimed Gordon could arrange the return of held catch for a fee.

Two other crews had paid $1,900 and $3,400.

Their receipts said HARBOR ASSURANCE SERVICES.

"A private fee doesn't prove a crime," Leona said. "A threat attached to it might. We need their words and the records."

"You'll get the records."

"I need to know why you're so sure."

I showed her the index to my field books. Each truck had its own line. Each line led to a weight slip, a sample receipt, and a photograph.

She stopped turning pages.

"How far back does this go?"

"Before Gordon."

"Where are the originals?"

"Somewhere with a better roof."

She closed the book and let me keep that answer for the moment.

On Friday, Gordon arrived with a box of warm muffins. He set it where Leona's mug had been.

"Heard you've had company, Eddie."

"Lab people come through."

"Of course. All those little bottles."

He handed me a letter bearing his company's seal.

It ordered a record cleanup by Monday. Old maintenance books, duplicate photographs, and loose scale slips were to be shredded.

At the bottom, someone had typed my name beside the words EMPLOYEE CONSENT.