women feeding the machine accidentally gets a hand under it, the bar snaps up and stops the machine.
At least that’s how I remember it.’
Hunton nodded. ‘It’s a state law. But it happened.’
Hunton closed his eyes and in the darkness he could see the Hadley-Watson speed ironer again, as it
had been that afternoon. It formed a long, rectangular box in shape, thirty feet by six. At the feeder end, a moving canvas belt moved under the safety bar, up at a slight angle, and then down. The belt carried
the damp-dried, wrinkled sheets in continuous cycle over and under sixteen huge revolving cylinders
that made up the main body of the machine. Over eight and under eight, pressed between them like thin
ham between layers of superheated bread. Steam heat in the cylinders could be adjusted up to 300
degrees for maximum drying. The pressure on the sheets that rode the moving canvas belt was set at
800 pounds per square foot to get out every wrinkle.
And Mrs Frawley, somehow, had been caught and dragged in. The steel, asbestos-jacketed pressing
cylinders had been as red as barn paint, and the rising steam from the machine had carried the
sickening stench of hot blood. Bits of her white blouse and blue slacks, even ripped segments of her bra
and panties, had been torn free and ejected from the machine’s far end thirty feet down, the bigger
sections of cloth folded with grotesque and blood-stained neatness by the automatic folder. But not
even that was the worst.
‘It tried to fold everything,’ he said to Jackson, tasting bile in his throat. ‘But a person isn’t a sheet, Mark.
What I saw. . . what was left of her . . .’ Like Stanner, the hapless foreman, he could not finish. ‘They
took her out in a basket,’ he said softly.
Jackson whistled. ‘Who’s going to get it in the neck? The laundry or the state inspectors?’
‘Don’t know yet,’ Hunton said. The malign image still hung behind his eyes, the image of the mangler
wheezing and thumping and hissing, blood dripping down the green sides of the long cabinet in runnels,
the burning stink of her
‘It depends on who okayed that goddamn safety bar and under what circumstances.’
‘If it’s the management, can they wiggle out of it?’
Hunton smiled without humour. ‘The woman died, Mark. If Gartley and Stanner were cutting corners on the speed ironer’s maintenance, they’ll go to jail. No matter who they know on the City Council.’
‘Do you think they were cutting corners?’
Hunton thought of the Blue Ribbon Laundry, badly lighted, floors wet and slippery, some of the
machines incredibly ancient and creaking. ‘I think it’s likely,’ he said quietly.
They got up to go in the house together. ‘Tell me how it comes out, Johnny,’ Jackson said. ‘I’m
interested.’
Hunton was wrong about the mangler; it was clean as a whistle.
Six state inspectors went over it before the inquest, piece by piece. The net result was absolutely
nothing. The inquest verdict was death by misadventure.
Hunton, dumbfounded, cornered Roger Martin, one of the inspectors, after the hearing. Martin was a
tall drink of water with glasses as thick as the bottoms of shot glasses. He fidgeted with a ball-point pen under Hunton’s questions.
‘Nothing? Absolutely nothing doing with the machine?’
‘Nothing,’ Martin said. ‘Of course, the safety bar was the guts of the matter. It’s in perfect working order.
You heard that Mrs Gillian testify. Mrs Frawley must have pushed her hand too far. No one saw that;
they were watching their own work. She started screaming. Her hand was gone already, and the
machine was taking her arm. They tried to pull her out instead of shutting it down – pure panic. Another
woman, Mrs Keene, said she did try to shut it off, but it’s a fair assumption that she hit the start button rather than the stop in the confusion. By then it was too late.’
‘Then the safety bar malfunctioned,’ Hunton said flatly. ‘Unless she put her hand over it rather than
under?’
‘You can’t. There’s a stainless-steel facing above the safety bar. And the bar itself didn’t malfunction.