“He’s at lunch,” one of the Spanish speakers said in heavily accented English. “You are looking for work?”

“No. Just the foreman. Is he in the building?”

One of the women pointed silently at a door at the far end of the room. It had a chicken-wire glass top; neon shone dimly through it. I made my way past the assembly tables toward it, but then stopped.

“Really, I’m looking for someone who might have seen my uncle last week. He used to work here, and he came back around a week ago yesterday.” They stared at me blankly. “After that he fell into the canal and drowned. They only found his body yesterday.”

A little buzz started behind me in Spanish. The group near the windows coalesced as though drawn by gravity. After a few minutes one of them asked what I wanted.

“I’m hoping someone might have seen him.” I spread my hands in embarrassment. “He was an old man, a drunk, but my mother’s brother. She wants to know if he talked to anyone, or if anyone saw him. The police don’t care about him, but she needs to know—she’d like to know just when he died. He’d been in the water too long for the doctors to be able to tell her.”

The buzz sounded approving. “What did he look like, this uncle of yours?” a heavyset woman about my own age asked.

I described Mitch as best I could. “He used to be a machinist here. For many years.”

“Oh, a machinist. They work on the other side, you know.” It was one of the women by the window speaking, a person of about fifty with a matted yellow perm. When she saw my blank look she added, “You have to go around all the offices and turn left, and then you come to the machine shop, honey.”

I was turning back to the door when she said thoughtfully, “Maybe I seen your uncle, honey. Last Monday, you say? But I don’t think it was then. It was before that he was around here. We were just getting off shift, see, and we could hear some hollering coming from the other end of the hall, and then this old guy came around the corner, kind of shuffling, and laughing a little to himself, and one of the bosses showed up behind him, still yelling.”

“Do you know who it was? Which one of the bosses?” I tried not to speak too quickly.

She shook her head. “I wasn’t really paying that much attention. You know, my mind was on dinner, what I felt up to cooking, what I might be able to find in the store, you know how that goes, honey.”

“You don’t remember what he was saying, do you?”