Directed by a couple of employees along the way, I discovered the supervisor near the loading docks, talking to a group of workers. I waited for them to break up and then quietly introduced myself.
I showed him the list that we’d compiled of Vogel’s co-workers, all of whom we’d interviewed previously, and explained that I was merely doing some last minute double-checking. “Did we miss anyone that Vogel might have worked with?”
He looked it over carefully, shaking his head, and then stopped, putting a finger on one name. “There’s Fran Gallo. He may’ve been out sick when your boys came by. He’s sick a lot.”
It was said without rancor, or with a poker player’s demeanor. I took the list back. “He here tonight?”
“Yeah. Area five.” He pointed toward a large opening in one of the galvanized-steel walls nearby. “Look for a skinny guy, ’bout six feet, lots of pimples, pale face. Always wears a purple cap, even under his hard hat.”
I passed into an enormous stacking yard, under the same roof as the rest of the building. It was lit by the same sodium lights, but with chain-link walls on two sides, open to the cold air-presumably a feature allowing both security and flexibility, if not worker comfort. I found Fran Gallo gingerly fitting the blades of a forklift under an enormous stack of lumber laid out on the cement floor. He may have been skinny underneath, but he’d been fattened in appearance by multiple layers of heavily patched quilted clothing. He cut his engine as he saw me approaching and gave me an incongruously affable, off-center grin. I guessed he couldn’t have been much over eighteen years old.
“Help you?” he asked, his breath floating before him in a misty cloud.
I showed him my badge and muttered my name as inaudibly as possible, sensitive of the thin ice I was treading. “You know Bob Vogel?”
His eyes grew wide, as befit the publicity Vogel had been getting. “Oh, wow. Sure I do. I mean, who doesn’t? Right?”
I looked at him closely, wondering if this was going to be worth the effort. “Do you know him personally? I gather you worked with him.”
“Sure I did.”
I waited for more, but Fran Gallo’s initial exuberance seemed to have abruptly lost wind. He finally raised his eyes to look at me, smiling apologetically. “I didn’t get along with him, that’s all.”
“Why not?”
“He landed on me pretty hard first time we met-called me a douche bag and told me to mind my own business. All I’d done was say hi and ask who he was-just being friendly. We didn’t talk much after that.”
“Did you ever work side by side?”
“I do with all of them, more or less, at least out here-’cause of this.” He patted the steering wheel of the forklift.
“How was he different from the others?”
Gallo pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Is this going to get out?”
“Why?”
“I just don’t want people to think I shot my mouth off.”
I addressed instead what I thought was the root of his problem. “Bob Vogel is going to jail for a long time, Fran, regardless of how the rape trial turns out. He’s never going to know we talked.”
He nodded, obviously relieved. “Okay. I thought Bob was a real asshole. He treated everybody like shit, sat on his butt every chance he got, and I smelled liquor on his breath a lot of times. I did everything I could to stay out of the guy’s way.”
“He had no friends that you know of?”
“Nobody would put up with him.”
“He ever talk about women? Or rape?”
“Not with me. I never saw him talk with anybody, except to insult them.”
I glanced down at the folder, in which Ron had included a sheet summarizing the questions that had been asked the other workers here. I was beginning to feel this entire outing had been a waste of time.
“Did he seem any different on the night of the rape?”
“Nope,” Gallo answered simply.
“Did you see what he was wearing that night-under his overalls?”
Gallo shook his head and opened his mouth to answer but then paused. “I guess I did-I almost forgot. We were in the men’s room at the same time. He came out of one of the stalls and got back into his winter gear near the sinks. We got to wear a lot of stuff to keep warm.”
I looked again at Ron’s notes. No one else had had this kind of opportunity. “What clothes was he wearing?”
Gallo thought back. “Jeans, work boots, one of those chamois shirts-”
“Anything under the shirt?”
“I don’t know-a T-shirt, I guess… it was something white.”
“What color was the chamois shirt?”
“Blue.” He smiled suddenly. “Sort of. He was real dirty, too-smelled awful.”
“What else?” I asked, as stimulated by the mention of the blue shirt as I’d been by the oil stain on the road.
“He put on a black insulated vest-one of those quilted things, like this.” He unzipped his own overalls to show me a dark green version of his own. “And then his overalls, cap, and work gloves. I think that’s it.”
“He wasn’t wearing anything red?”
“Nope.”
“How about at the end of the shift? Don’t you guys generally leave some gear in a locker?”
Gallo nodded. “Most of us do, but not Vogel. He came and left in his work clothes. I heard him tell a guy once he’d sooner give us all blow jobs than leave his stuff where we could rip him off. That’s just the way he was.”
I returned to the warmth of my car’s heater in a thoughtful mood. I’d known already that Vogel came and went to work in his insulated overalls-that much had been gleaned by earlier investigators. It had explained why no one had been found who’d seen what he’d been wearing underneath, until now.
Not that Fran Gallo’s testimony did any more to change the case than the oil slick I’d found. No one in his right mind would stealthily enter a woman’s house and sneak around wearing work boots and the equivalent of a ski-mobile suit. Vogel could have had the red shirt in the back seat of his car, along with a completely different set of clothes; or he might even have gone home and changed before going on to Gail’s.
But while none of what I’d found would be of any interest to James Dunn, it had made a believer out of me. I was not facing a jury, preparing to paint portraits in black and white only. I was much farther afield, circling like a trespasser seeking entrance to enlightenment. My goal was less to supply answers and more to address questions, and I’d already found more of them than an ironclad case should have.
But I was coming in late in the game, after all the whistles had been blown, and I knew that the news I’d be bearing would not be well received. It was the old story of the messenger better killed than heeded.
19
I sat in my darkened apartment, surrounded by the familiar, tangible milestones of my life-books, framed photographs, odds and ends of sentimental value-all barely visible in the gloom, all so anchored in my brain I didn’t need to see them to feel their presence.
But despite them, I felt I was in a rowboat adrift offshore, watching impotently as a loved and comforting landscape slipped slowly away to the horizon. It was an estrangement made all the more unsettling because it was intentional and self-motivated. I was willfully pulling away from the status quo I’d worked so hard to create, distancing myself from the people I worked with and the woman I loved, potentially for the sake of a convicted rapist who’d tried to kill me.
I had to wonder why. It wasn’t to save a possibly innocent man-at least I didn’t think it was. Gail was right about Vogel-he was a bastard, and probably deserved the worst he could get.
But maybe not for this particular crime.
That was the gist of it-regardless of what James Dunn might believe, and a jury decree, I had to know Vogel’s guilt or innocence for myself. His history in the courts had already highlighted the system’s vagaries, so in this most important investigation of my career, I had to have more than a merely legal conclusion. I had to have the truth.