According to the DMV, Hamm lived in a condo in what used to be the warehouse district adjacent to downtown Minneapolis. Though it was getting late, Virgil decided to take a shot at a contact and headed downtown.
Hamm’s place was a brick-and-glass cube, a couple of decades old, with a keypad at street level to get into the lobby and a video camera that looked down at a brass plate with buttons for each individual apartment. Hamm was listed, and when Virgil pushed the button, he answered, “Do I know you?”
“No. I’m an agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said. “I need to speak to you for a few minutes.”
“About what?”
“Boyd Nash.”
“We’re no longer associated,” Hamm said.
“I still need to speak to you. Push the button for the door or it’ll get unnecessarily complicated.”
After a moment of silence, the door buzzer sounded, and Virgil pushed inside. Hamm lived on the third floor, and Virgil took the stairs, both because he needed the exercise and because if Hamm ran for it he’d probably take the stairs.
Virgil met no one coming down, and when he emerged in a third floor lobby, he saw Hamm standing down the hall at an open door; he did look like a taller version of one of the Seven Dwarfs—Sneezy, Virgil thought.
On the other hand, his voice sounded like Waylon Jennings’s. He said, “In here,” and led the way into his apartment. “What’s your name?”
“Virgil Flowers.”
“Flowers? I used to know a Tommy Flowers, out of Chicago.”
“No relation,” Virgil said.
Hamm’s apartment was like an unconscious man cave—not designed to be one, but it was—two brown corduroy-covered easy chairs, with a matching ottoman for each, facing an oversized TV with five-foot-high speakers on either side of it tuned to an all-sports channel, the baked-in scent of cigars and microwaved mac ’n’ cheese, floor-to-ceiling windows looking out at the condo across the street.
Hamm pointed at one of the chairs, and said, “This has got to be way after duty hours. Want a beer?”
“Sure,” Virgil said.
Hamm got two Dos Equis out of his refrigerator, popped off their caps with a counter-mounted opener, handed one to Virgil, settled into the other brown chair, and asked, “What’s that asshole up to now? Boyd.”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“We haven’t been associated for more than a year,” Hamm said. “I set up a deal on a nice piece of property off Lake Nokomis: little old lady died and left a teardown sitting on a gold mine. The relatives—the heirs—were out in Dayton, didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. Nobody saw it but me. My piece would have been fifty K. And Boyd fucked me out of it.”
“I’ve been told that he’s ethically challenged,” Virgil said.
Hamm snorted. “That’s the kindest description you could put on him.” He poured some beer down his throat, coughed, then asked, “What are you looking for?”
“I would fear for your future as a go-to guy if I told you and then you spread it around,” Virgil said.
“Us go-to guys can keep our mouths shut when we need to,” Hamm said. “That’s part of our package.”
Virgil nodded. “I’m investigating the murder of Barthelemy Quill, a professor over at the university. He was doing cutting-edge research on spinal cord repairs. You know, trying to repair nerve damage in quadriplegics and paraplegics.”
“Okay, that sounds like something Boyd would try to steal. You think he killed Quill?”
“I don’t know, but his name came up as somebody who’d spent time stalking Quill’s lab,” Virgil said. “You think he could kill?”
“Boyd? Sure, no problem. Well, small problem: he wouldn’t want to get caught. He wouldn’t kill unless he thought he was ninety-nine-point-nine percent likely to get away with it. If he planned to kill, he’d have a heavy-duty alibi.”
“And you have no idea of what he’s up to now?”
“I didn’t say that,” Hamm said. “I asked if you knew, to see if it was the same thing I know.”
“I have no idea what he’s doing,” Virgil said. “I’ve never seen the guy or spoken to him. So, what do you know?”
“He won’t hear it came from me? Because he could be a killer, and I know he holds a grudge,” Hamm said.
“I’ll keep it under my hat best I can,” Virgil said.
Hamm took another swallow of beer, then said, “Have you ever heard of a company called Surface Research?”
“No.”
“It’s not huge,” Hamm went on. “But, it’s not small, either. The engineers who started it, they have a private jet, you know. A small jet, but they’d like to have a big one. What they do is, they develop paints for different kinds of difficult to cover surfaces. That’s where their name comes from—they cover surfaces.”
“Paint?”
“Yeah. Big money in it, you’d be surprised,” Hamm said. “Stock tip: you can buy Surface Research for ten bucks a share right now, and it’s going to fifty in two years, maybe more.”
“Why would—”
“—Boyd be interested in paint? Because of the money involved,” Hamm said. “What I hear is, Surface Research is developing a glass-and-metal-based paint for striping highways. It has to be certain specific colors—white and yellow, I guess—and, I’m told, also a clear paint, transparent. It has to be way durable and make it through all kinds of traffic and temperature extremes twenty-four hours a day.”
“The road paint they’ve got now isn’t good enough?” Virgil asked. “Seems like there might be a lot of competition.”
“This paint is designed to get driverless vehicles down the road,” Hamm said.
Virgil said, “Ah.”
“Yeah. It has some built-in components that’ll work with car sensors and even allow, you know, road painters—the state, I guess—to paint instructions on roads that people can’t see but the cars can pick up to warn about hazards and so on. If this all works, Surface Research will go to a thousand bucks a share, and we’ll all be billionaires. I’ve got a thousand shares myself, and I’m seriously thinking about mortgaging this place and buying another ten thousand.”
“What’s Nash doing?”
“Boyd’s been scouting them for a while—even back when I was working with him. Lately, I’ve heard, he’s gotten inside. He’s got some kind of low-level connection inside the company, and he’s been in there at night taking pictures.”