off and he shrugged.
Lafleur didn't share Louis's admiration for the adventure. “So?” he said.
“You've called him,” Louis said. He nodded at Julia Rose. “We've got the figures here, the new contracts. He's agreed to sign.”
“Hell, Louis, I mean what do you advise?”
“You're in pretty deep to be asking for advice.”
Lafleur ran his palms along the slippery steel arms of his chair. “Is he trying to hide the duplicate company, or does he figure I'll know about it?” It was important to Lafleur that he understand what Blaylock willingly divulged and what he did not.
Louis shook his head. “He didn't try to hide it.”
“What happens to the duplicate?”
Louis smiled. “Just what I asked him. He says he'll diversify it into concrete or something, and divest it of excavation.”
Lafleur looked down and smiled despite himself. “Often, concrete is what you pour into holes.”
“Even I figured that out,” Louis said, chuckling. “He may want to merge them. If he does, he has to have your agreement, and you've got first option on up to fifty percent.”
“Fine,” Lafleur said, though he doubted he'd want to be drawn any deeper into these financial convolutions, dense, it seemed, as brain. “And the property? The equipment in the old partnership? The tools?”
“Everything goes back. He owes you, or you and Gus, for the use of equipment in the past year. We'll set that against the losses the company's taken, which will help, even if it still doesn't quite make you come out ahead.”
“Then he has the old partnership, which we're in arrears to him for, and the other company, too. It's hard for him to lose.”
“Damn near impossible,” Louis said. “And he has more. He's a rich man. He's got interests in about six other outfits. For a dirty old mechanic he's awfully slick.” Louis glanced at Julia Rose and smiled at her. “He left grease smudges all over the papers.” Lafleur looked at Julia. She stirred in her chair and smiled faintly back at him. “Look,” Louis said. “You can still sue him, which would supplement my income for a few years, but what you'd get wouldn't hold a candle to what Gus put in the company.” He wrestled loose the knot in his tie and undid the top button of his shirt. “Personally, I think you're going to be a lot better off going ahead and gaining some ground on him. You see? It's tactics, that's all. Legally, sure, you've probably got him cold right now, but financially your position isn't strong, not if you want to make a living and support your family and get ahead and get that income going back to Gus and Jewel.” Louis held out his hands. “So?”
“And that's what Ned's gambling on,” Lafleur said.
“What? That you won't take him to court?”
“Yes.”
“Are you considering it?”
“No.”
“Of course not. He's not gambling. If you go to court everybody loses. We'd have to be morons not to figure that out and he knows it. He's set it up beautifully. He may look like a slug, but in there somewhere is an intelligent sonofabitch.”
“Okay,” Lafleur said. He knew that Blaylock was crafty, but he'd never exactly considered him intelligent. He thought about that and let it stretch way back to the beginnings. It put things in a different light. The man his father had hooked up with years ago was an intelligent sonofabitch.
“Best of all is to dig in and make a go of it, though you're certainly going to have to mix it up with him once in a while,” Louis said. “To tell you the truth, I think Blaylock wants you in.”
“Seems like he was counting on it,” Lafleur said.
“Sure,” Louis said, smiling faintly. “He gets you in there to run that company for him, which he knows you can do…will do. The fact that you've come to me, had me check it all out, hired an accountant, everything you've done is telling him that when you take a job on you do it right. He knows who you are, for Christ's sake.” Louis leaned back, making his calibrated stainless-steel swivel chair click. He put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. “That's another thing,” he said. He looked at Lafleur out of the corners of his eyes. “Gus was in on this, the changeover in the company.”
“Yeah.”
“Have you asked him about it?”
Lafleur frowned. He felt a quizzical and mystified expression pinch his face. He'd been over to see Gus and Jewel several times in the last week. He didn't know what went on in his father's head, or what half of the croaks that came out of the old one's mouth meant, or if Jewel really knew, either. “He can't talk,” he said.
“I see,” Louis said softly. He lowered his chair and leaned on the desk again. “They were getting on. They were moving toward general contracting. More management and less labor for them. More money. It's logical.”
“This new contract is a general contract.”
“Right,” Louis said.
“It'd probably be a good idea to make damn sure that contract's been written by the partnership.”
Louis stared at him for an instant, then picked up a pen and wrote himself a note. He glanced over at Julia and said, “We'll double-check it.” He leaned back and stroked his belly. “It's just laying there, Hank.”
“I know.”
“And that bothers you.”
Lafleur grunted and looked down at the carpet.
Louis chuckled resonantly, then said, “You can make it work. If you decide to pull out later, that'll work too. The only way this can fail, financially speaking, is if the whole ship goes down.”
“And that's the bottom line?”
“In private partnerships like this there is no bottom line, not until everybody's kicked off or the sole survivor sells off the leavings. Look, I know what the situation is. Julia knows.” He tipped his head toward her. “We'll watch it.”
“Good.” Lafleur had finally got what he wanted most from Louis: a judgment call, a voice from the outside that echoed some of his own conclusions, and by that mounted a triangulation—the lines from Louis's perspective and from Lafleur's converging upon the obscure point, Blaylock. The conjoining of perspectives established angulation and defined the field. It was a survey.
“I haven't told you anything you didn't know, right?” Louis said.
“The duplicate company. The other six he has an interest in. I wondered. I figured he had something running on the side, but I didn't know for a fact.”
“Do you want me to check them out?”
“You're offering?”
Louis smiled. “For you, fifty bucks an hour.”
Lafleur pulled a scrap of paper from his shirt pocket and wrote: H. Lafleur, P.O. Box 19, Rome, Oregon. He passed it across the desk.
Louis looked at it, then up at Lafleur, and laughed softly. “You've already got an address out there?”
“Yeah.”
“You're as slick as your partner.”
“No,” he said, although it was true that things had been moving fast in the last two weeks. He'd given notice at work, and the bid on the project in Rome—a tiny place on the other side of the mountains, deep in the southeastern Oregon desert—was virtually finalized. He'd been in touch with a man named Victor Sabat, the owner's representative for the project. He'd called yesterday from a booth on a street corner, in the rain at dusk, and he got through first to a woman with a crisp, professional manner that jarred with his mental image of the barren, wind-scoured place. The connection was clear, exact even,