“That’s alright, Uncle Jake,” she said soothingly. “I understand. I’m just teasing. You said the job involved guarding an empty building?”
“Well, a night guard in an office building. I was going to watch a bunch of blank television screens and yell if I saw any burglars.”
“They came all the way up from San Diego and offered you subsidized housing for a job like that?”
“Plus salary and moving expenses too. It sure sounded like a good deal. If it wasn’t for this house I’d have been tempted. Hey, what’s wrong?” He hadn’t heard anything but he could feel the disturbance in her.
“Subsidized housing? Moving expenses? A salary? Nothing personal, Uncle Jake, but you’re not exactly the sort of person a big business makes a long-term investment in.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. But he said that his company liked to help out seniors and that my references checked out good.”
“Uncle Jake, you haven’t held a regular job in twenty years.”
She was beating a dead horse, and Jake told her so. “It doesn’t make any difference, Mandy, because I never really considered taking the job. So I didn’t think about it all that much. You know,” he went on, changing the subject, “they cleaned up the old dump below the house.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” she said. “That was long overdue. From what you’ve told me about the place it sounded like one of hell’s cesspools.”
“It wasn’t no field of chrysanthemums, that’s for damn sure. I worried all the time about the local kids playing down there. I used to do it myself when I was younger, until I learned better. Now it’s nice and clean. Hey, you know I showed this visitor some of my tricks.”
“Now Uncle Jake,” said Amanda warningly, “you know what I told you about that.”
“Yeah, I know. But he saw me do the bottle cap trick for the kids. I don’t get a chance to show off much. So I cleaned up his car for him. Took the dirt right off. Made it slipt.”
“Oh Uncle Jake, I’ve told you not to do that kind of thing in front of adults, and strangers especially.”
“It’s alright, Mandy. This fella was real nice. He seemed to enjoy it. You should’ve seen the look on his face. Anyway, he said that I was entitled to a free checkup on his company, to show you what a nice guy he was. I don’t like fooling with the hospital. You know how they can be about Medicare and Medicaid.”
Amanda was immediately on guard. “What kind of checkup?”
“Now Mandy, there’s no reason for you to react like that. This fella was being real straight with me. I never asked him for a thing. He just volunteered as how they had the slot open for me that I might as well make use of it.”
“Did he offer it to you before or after you made the dirt on his car slipt?”
Jake had to think a moment. “After, I guess.”
Her voice was full of exasperation. “Uncle Jake, you like people too much.”
“Can’t help it, Mandy. That’s just me.”
“Uh-huh. So this joker offered you a job in San Diego. Moving expenses, salary, free medical exam. Uncle Jake, companies just don’t do that sort of thing out of the goodness of their collective hearts. Sure you’d make a good night watchman, but not that good a night watchman. Surely not so good that they’d bring you all the way from Riverside down to San Diego. Not when they could find just as good a watchman in San Diego.”
“You’re awful suspicious, Mandy. I’m not sure I understand. Why make me the offer if they didn’t mean to follow through with it?”
“I’m sure they would have, Uncle Jake, but not for the reason you think. You say they just cleaned up that dump?”
“That’s right. You should’ve seen all them tractors and trucks running around here in the middle of the night. I guess they wanted to do it cheaply.”
“Sure they did, and quietly. They also probably wanted to get you and anyone else who might prove talkative away from the site.”
“Oh, come on now, Mandy. You’ve been reading too many of those spy novels.”
“Uncle Jake, have any people moved away from the neighborhood recently? In the past couple of weeks?”
“Well, yes. The Greens and the Gomezes. But that’s no big surprise. People are moving in and out of here all the time.”
“How did they move, Uncle Jake?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, did they pile everything in the family car, or did professional movers come and take them away?”
“Now that you mention it, they used moving vans. Two different companies, but—”
“Doesn’t that strike you as kind of unusual, Uncle Jake? From what you’ve told me, the people who live around you are awfully poor. Professional moving services don’t sound like the kind of thing any of them could afford.”
“Well, I don’t know for sure what kind of money people around here have or don’t have,” he replied a bit defensively. "Although neither the Greens nor the Gomezes struck me as particularly well-off. Maybe they got new jobs someplace and their employers helped them move.”
“Exactly, just like the job for which this fellow was offering to help move you down to San Diego.” Excitement began to compound her suspicions. “Uncle Jake, this man wanted something from you. He sounds like the type of person who only wants things from people.”
Jake started to argue, hesitated. Mandy was very good at working complicated problems out. He’d learned to trust her opinions.
“He doesn’t sound like the sort of person who comes straight out and asks for what he wants. He’d try to get it indirectly, the way they probably did with the Greens and the Gomezes.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” Jake wondered.
“The people who were responsible for the dump. Are you sure this man who came to offer you the job wasn’t a representative of the outfit that owns the dumpsite?”
“He said he represented some security company in San Diego,” Jake murmured.
