Meyer said gently, “I never really got to know her. I should have made the effort. But she had a very busy life. We all think of the inconvenience of making an effort. We’re all going to do the right things a little later on. Soon. But soon slides by so easily. Then we vow we’ll try to do better. We all carry that little oppressive weight around in the back of our mind-that we should be living better, trying harder, but we’re not. We’re all living just about as well as we can at any given moment. But that doesn’t stop the wishing.”
We went down into the tunnel system and found the underground garage and paid the ticket on the way out. He was silent on the way back to Piney Village, apparently concentrating on his driving, but I sensed that things were moving about in the back of his head, where his little personal computer works on equations.
As soon as we were inside, he announced his return and the voice of the security office made its metallic acknowledgment. I stretched out on the couch near the fireplace. Meyer stood by the glass wall and looked out into the little garden.
Finally he came over and sat near me. “Once Windham arranged for me to stay here, he asked me to go through all the papers and documents I could find to see if I could learn anything about Evan Lawrence. The only traces of him were some old clothes, a pair of work shoes, and some love letters from Norma to him.”
“With addresses?”
“Without envelopes. From the contents I think they were sent back here from some field trips she went on. All the rest of her papers were professional documents, in those files there in the office alcove. Reports, surveys, daily drilling reports. Field maps. Computer printouts. All apparently in good order. How do we look for him?”
“We can start with a picture of him.”
“There isn’t one here. Not one. I thought there would be wedding pictures at least.”
“There probably are. She would have invited her friends from the company to the wedding. People who go to weddings take their little cameras and take shaky shots of the happy couple. And they would not have thrown them away.”
“Yes, you mentioned that before. I’d forgotten. I seem to be forgetting too many things this year.”
Nine
ON SATURDAY we drove out to a commercial area where Amdex Petroleum Exploration was located. It was out Interstate 10, east of town, past Jacinto. Hurricane fencing and barbed wire enclosed a yard full of big trucks and incomprehensible hunks of machinery. There were two long prefab steel buildings. Even at nine thirty in the morning it was sickeningly hot. The guard on the big gate let us in and told us to park over near the first building. Meyer parked between a white Continental and a row of big rugged-looking trucks.
We walked through a shop area, the machines silent, work floor empty, air stale. The offices were at the far end of the first building, partitioned off and air conditioned. Beyond the reception area, two men and several women worked at the keyboards of data processing units, green figures glowing on the small screens. Fanfold paper came out of two high-speed printers that clattered and roared as the paper piled up in the waiting tray.
Mr. D. Amsbary Dexter came hurrying out of the larger office in the rear. He had met Meyer, of course, and seemed glad to see him. He looked me over with that quick appraisal of my financial condition which all hustlers learn before they leave grade school and decided I was worth only a small portion of his attention.
He shook hands, then trotted ahead of us into his office, waving us in, waving us toward the chairs. “Come in, come in.” He perched a haunch on the corner of his desk, a smallish wiry man, going bald, fishing in his shirt pocket with yellowed fingers for a cigarette. He had faded eyes, full of a nervous alertness, and a sore-throat voice.
“Meyer, I have to ask you for a favor. I talked to our lawyers. And I’ve cleared this with Roger Windham. He doesn’t see any estate tax consequences here, because even if the trust account were intact, there is enough coming in from the employee insurance, and enough pay and royalty interest due her, to more than take care of the tax. Apparently, all she has otherwise is that old van of hers, professional library, the furniture, and so on. There’s two four-drawer, gray-steel, fire-resistant, legal-size filing cabinets in that little office setup of hers in the apartment near the stairs. We bought them, and they are on our corporate inventory. They hold work papers which she created as a part of her employment contract with us, and thus belong to us. Most of the work papers are case histories, but there are quite a few which involve acreage we still have under lease.”
“I went through the files, Mr. Dexter. Her personal papers are in one drawer, half of one drawer. Once I remove those, you’re welcome to the files and the rest of the documents.”
“I appreciate your attitude. If it’s convenient, I’ll have some men over there tomorrow to pick up the filing cabinets.”
“Have them bring a letter from you, explaining ownership. Just in case anybody ever asks.”
“No problem. Now then, gentlemen, what was it that you wanted to see me about?”
Meyer signaled me with a glance, and I said, “We wonder what opinion you formed of Evan Lawrence.”
“Opinion? Well, he seemed very likable. Everybody around here took to him right away. I thought he was maybe a little bit old for her, ten or twelve years, I guess, but on the other hand she was beginning to get a little long in the tooth. Pushing thirty. Reaching the point where if she wanted kids she’d have to hurry. Maybe I resented him a little. He was marrying a successful woman. Someday she was going to be my best geologist. Maybe someday she would be a legend in the drilling industry. I mean she had that capacity. And I thought marriage might send it all down the drain. Children and a husband and all that. Of course, now all my worries seem ridiculous. What did I think of him? A very relaxed cat. A drifter, I think. And just by the way he listened to you, he could make you feel important and interesting.”
“She’s a big loss to your company?” I asked.
“I’m going to miss her. A lot. Unless you know modern oil and gas exploration, it’s hard to describe her talents. An old friend birddogged her for me when she was with Conoco. I hired her six years ago after talking to her for an hour. We worked out a contract.
“What the public doesn’t know is that there is just too damned much information available when you try to make an exploration decision. Old wells, core samples, old geophysical surveys, producing wells, geological surveys. It’s a big fat confusion because of so much raw data. Norma helped move this company into computerized data processing and into electromagnetic mapping from the air. I’ve got the airplane now, loaded with electronics. We do some contract mapping with it to help pay the rent. Norma got into remote sensing analysis too. That’s where you get a computerized image analysis of satellite photographs. She worked with a good programmer until they finally developed the software to tie all the random information together, all the way from the history and the geophone records from the charges and the thumper trucks to core analysis.