Vic Daniel 6 - As she rides by

said.
    “They did,” he said. “Now, however, the percentage of workers entitled to a pension of some kind on retirement is slipping fast and is probably down to around forty percent.”
    “How come?”
    “Don’t you ever read anything but the sports pages and the funnies?” Benny said.
    “Not if I can help it,” I said. “I used to read Popular Mechanics, but my subscription ran out in 1957. Anyway, how come pensions are on the skids, Benny?”
    He said, “Because of lots of reasons, like companies having less money available now because of the economy’s present lethargy, because more and more people work in the service area, in smallish companies which obviously don’t have the funds to offer pension plans, because unions aren’t as militant now as they were, generally speaking, and also because there’s so much red tape and paperwork needed now due to expanding governmental regulations that running a pension plan has gotten highly complicated and much more expensive.”
    “A large company,” I said, “that did have a pension plan, how would it work?”
    “Money goes in, monthly,” he said. “Years and years and years pass. You retire. Depending on the number of years you’ve put in, you get a percentage of your mean salary, up to a hundred percent, paid back to you, monthly. Sometimes, if you die, half that sum continues to be paid to your spouse until his or her death. All of which you certainly know already, Vic, so what’s up?”
    “Me,” I said, “if you’re talking about the creek. Otherwise, I dunno, probably nothing. In a huge company, Benny, what would a Senior Personnel Executive, Pensions Department, do?”
    “High-level filing,” he said.
    “Is that all?”
    “Sure,” he said. “He’d have any number of executive V.P.’s above him doing the real work.”
    “Like what?”
    “Guess.”
    “OK,” I said. “Like practicing putting golf balls into one of those plastic things that kicks the ball out again across the carpet to you.”
    “Aside from that,” he said.
    “I give up,” I said.
    “Like investing, Vic,” Benny said. “You know how much money a major corporation has in its pension fund?”
    “No.”
    “Hundreds of millions, son. And that kind of money you do not change into Krugerrands and hide under the mattress.”
    “You invest it,” I said.
    “Spot on,” Benny said. “In mutuals, in land, in the stock market, in art, you name it. And that is what the big shots in charge of the fund get paid a lot of money for doing—investing large sums profitably over a long period of time. They do not get eighty grand, plus stock options, for writing out checks every month to the widow of one of their former tail-assembly welders.”
    “Ah so,” I said. “Benny, muchas gracias, you have given me cause to ponder yet again.”
    “That’s nice,” my friend said. “Vic, I’ve got to go, the Daimler’s here. See you Friday.”
    “OK, babe. Thanks.” We rang off. The Daimler’s here... does one really need a Daimler limousine to go looking at some godforsaken deserted tarmac out Norco way? What could the boy be up to now? When I asked him about it a few months later, all he’d reveal was that he’d indeed bought the property in question, at four o’clock that very day we talked. At six o’clock he sold it again, for a lower price. How you come out of a deal like that ahead is beyond me, but I’m damn sure he did somehow. Only thing I could figure was that he needed a legal flying field in his name or one of his companies’ names for a couple of hours, presumably to fly something in, so what he’d done was to buy it, use it, and then sell it back by prearrangement to the original owner. But when I put this surmise to him, he just smiled, shook his head, and said, “No flights in, no flights out.” So you figure it, you armchair sleuths, you.
    What did I want? Facts, instead of wild conjecture. I got out the road map again, and the phone book. I looked up the address of the theater Mrs. Jones and Mr. Flint had attended that night of March 14, 1989, and found it on the map. I put a little dot where the recording studio was located. I marked out the shortest way to get from one to the other. The shortest route did not intersect the corner of 8th and Berendo, where the shooting took place, but to be fair, it did pass within a block or two of it. What was I thinking?! Was I really toying with the idea that there was something nonkosher about the