Chump Change

by G. M. Ford

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Nice doing business with you,” I lied, as I turned and headed for the street.

  With lowlifes like those two, you never know, so I kept an eye on my back as I dodged traffic across Jackson Street. Satisfied my wake was clear, I leaned against a store window and gazed down at the card in my hand. Scrawled on the card was a name. Gordon Stanley. Two nights. Twelve bucks a night, plus tax.

  Somewhere in my mind, a rocket rose in the night sky. “Gordon Stanley,” I whispered to myself. “Who in hell is Gor—” And then the rocket exploded, filling the darkness with brilliant streams of multicolored light. I pulled the photo from my pocket. My eyes crawled over it like ants at a picnic.

  “Gordy,” I whispered. “Holy shit. It’s Gordy.”

  Rachel kept running her palm over the photograph, rubbing the shiny surface as if her hands could somehow smooth the deep lines etched in his face.

  “What happened to him?” she whispered.

  “I think we both know what happened to him.”

  Her eyes were going damp. “But . . . I mean, like, there was nothing we could . . .” She stopped. Looked up at me again. “You think we should have . . . ?”

  I didn’t say anything. We were wandering into one of those moral minefields, where people are forced to recognize that the veneer of civilization is purely illusionary. A set of undefined agreements, the vagueness of which allows us to blame an unjust God, or bad luck, or anyone or anything but ourselves for the ofttimes predictable misfortunes of others. I remembered a line from a song. Said that people don’t do what they believe in, they just do what’s most convenient, and then repent. Break out the scourges.

  Year and a half back. A glorious spring. The kind of weather you only get every six or seven years here in the Pacific Northwest. Temperature twenty degrees above the norm. Seventy-five in April. Rachel and I camped out at the Landry manse for the first time, all touches and looks, soaking naked in the spa, mooning over one another, lost in the heady fumes of carnal expectation.

  As the days kept getting warmer, it was like some homing signal was being broadcast to the houses lining the north edge of the bay. One by one, residents and renters alike began to emerge from their winter hibernation, shielding their sleepy eyes from the fiery glint on the water, rummaging for charcoal briquettes in the garage.

  That’s when the party started. I don’t recall who first invited everybody over for a barbecue and a few drinks, but that’s how it began. T-bones and tequila on the terrace. Then somebody decided to return the favor. Then somebody else made crab cakes for everybody, until damn near every night somebody or other was having some kind of shindig, and a whole collection of disparate souls who normally kept to themselves were suddenly thrown together.

  We were a week into the rolling party scene when Gordy first showed up.

  He’d rented the house next door to the Morrisons’, and came wandering into the light of the bonfire one night, tentatively, like the new kid in town.

  He seemed harmless enough. A big doughy guy, with a smile and a story. Seems he’d won the Washington state lottery a few months back. Lived all of his life over in some minuscule town on the other side of the state. Way out there in wheat country. About fifteen seconds after receiving his first disbursement check, Gordy decided it was time to flee the fescue and check out life in the big city.

  Rather than throw himself directly into the belly of the beast and rent an apartment in downtown Seattle, he’d wisely decided to spend a couple of months making day trips into the city, from the other side of the Sound. He’d figured the somewhat slower pace of peninsula life would help ease him more gracefully into full-scale urban chaos. Probably turned out to be the worst decision of his life.

  If I had to choose a word for Gord, I guess it would be sweet. A big corn-fed mama’s boy bachelor with a smile on his face and a dimple in his chin. A bit of an oaf, I suppose, but a genuinely nice guy. Not necessarily the sharpest tool in the shed, but not, by any means, stupid either. Always showed up with a couple of bottles of wine. Always stayed around to help clean up when the party was over. First one to volunteer when a store run was needed. Generous, but careful with his money. The kind of guy you’d enjoy having for a neighbor. Within a week or so, Gord had become an integral part of the perpetual party.

  And then . . . then she showed up. I’d like to think that, had I not been quite so distracted by the gravitational throes of lust, I might have been the one to take him aside and warn him that maybe he was getting in a bit over his head here. That maybe this particular pretty package would be better left unopened. But who knows? Maybe that’s just my usual dose of self-serving tripe.

  She showed up one night just about at dark. As Jill Crowley was putting the flame to the barbecue, Missy Allen came stumbling into the scene, panting like a terrier, her blouse ripped nearly in two and her face streaked with tears. Talk about an entrance.

  Needless to say, everybody dropped what they were doing and rushed to her aid.

  Blankets were found, brandy was poured. We waited with bated ear.

  Punctuated with bouts of sobbing, the story eventually emerged. She told us she was Canadian, from the suburbs of Windsor, Ontario, where she’d spent the last nine years nursing a dying mother. After Mom passed, and the bank took the house, finding herself without prospects, she’d accepted a job offer from a family friend. An older man from the U.S. she’d always thought of as an uncle. Some sort of an au pair position, looking after the guy’s adolescent children, taking care of the house, a small salary and a roof, that sort of thing. They’d flown back to the States on a private jet, and settled into a somewhat stilted version of domestic bliss. Briefly, anyway.

  Turned out a maid wasn’t what this guy really wanted. What he wanted was into Missy Allen’s knickers. At first, it was just an occasional misplaced hand, a tweak here, a fondle there. Destitute in a foreign country, Missy pretended not to notice. Two weeks into Missy’s domestic tenure, however, the children were sent to visit their birth mother in New York, and the situation promptly went to hell in a handbasket. Touchy-feely quickly evolved into a series of perverse sexual demands so repulsive and shameful she couldn’t bring herself to describe them in any real detail.

  Things had come to a head earlier today, when he’d quite literally tried to tear the clothes from her body. Terrified, she’d fled the house. Ran through the woods for what she thought was hours, until she’d stumbled upon our little gathering. She didn’t know where in the U.S. she was. No papers. No passport. No nothing.

  She wouldn’t reveal the scoundrel’s name, either. A matter of pride, she said. If the folks back home should ever find out what had happened to her . . . well, that was something she just couldn’t live with.

  In twos and threes we wandered off and talked it over while she sipped brandy and huddled under a blanket by the fire. Calling the cops was discussed, of course; we were, after all, a pretty solidly upper-middle-class bunch. That’s when Gordy piped up, which was, now that I think about it, really out of character for him. Gordy was a listener, not a talker. Maybe we should wait on the cops thing, he said. He had plenty of room. He was knocking around a six-bedroom house all by himself. Let’s give the lady a good night’s sleep and then see what it is she wants to do.

  We should have known something was amiss when neither of them showed up at the following night’s gathering. By the time anybody saw Gordy again, he was so distended by lust, his big feet looked as if they were floating above the grass.

  In less than a week, she owned him, lock, stock, and lottery. That’s when people began to say what they later claimed they’d been thinking all along. This wasn’t right. This poor guy was a deer in the headlights. Maybe somebody should have a word with Gordy. Everybody had an opinion. Bob with the ski boat was still pushing for the cops. Rachel was in favor of the man-to-man approach. Me? I’ve never been much on telling other adults what to do. I mean, I’ll stop you if you’re about to ste
p in front of a bus, but otherwise you’re pretty much on your own, as far as I’m concerned.

  Interestingly, it was the women who first had doubts. Right off, Tina Bandon said she thought the story was crap. Even Rachel, who is much disinclined to render her professional opinion outside the office, said there was something just a bit off about the woman, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. All of which was odd, when you think about it, because, I mean, here was a wronged woman, fallen victim to the paternal penis oppressors, a situation where womanly solidarity should have reared its coiffured head, but where only distrust seemed to fester.

  Me? I mean . . . I don’t kid myself . . . who could blame the guy? Missy Allen was a very hot package, indeed. When I look at it now, there was more of an art to that packaging than I’d noticed at the time. You had to get past the baggy clothes and the wan smile to notice how incredibly put together she was. She made you work at it. All fresh-scrubbed girl-next-door with a truckload of serious woman equipment. The allure was lost on nobody.

  Gordy never had a chance.

  That Thursday night, Gordy pulled his rental Escalade as close to the beach as he was able and walked down to the nightly fire. Missy stayed in the car. Gordy announced that he and Missy and the lottery money were leaving. Heading up to Canada to get her paperwork straightened out and then . . . pregnant pause . . . they were gonna get married. A considerably longer silence dogged him on his way back to the car.

  It’s like when people tell you they’re getting a divorce. You don’t know whether to say you’re sorry to hear about it, or pound them on the back with heartfelt glee. Sorta depends on the circumstances, doesn’t it?

  I’d thought of him a few times since then. Wondered how things had worked out. But I’d never laid eyes on Gordy again, until the night before last, when he died with my name spilling out of his mouth.

  Rachel smoothed the photograph for about the fiftieth time.

  “I wonder what happened to all that money?” she asked.

  “Now, that’s the question, isn’t it?” I replied.

  I stopped at The Two Bells Bar and Grill on the way home. The meter maids in that part of town ride Segways and eat their young, so I grudgingly stuffed my debit card into the parking meter thing and waited about twenty minutes for the piece-of-shit machine to spit out a parking permit. Anything in the private sector that worked that frigging badly would be gone in an instant.

  Two Bells owner Jeff Lee cleaned glasses and sympathized with my grousing while I wolfed down a couple of his excellent cheeseburgers and swilled a beer or two. By the time I pulled into my own driveway, it was damn near dark, and I was beginning to yawn.

  I live in about half the downstairs of the house. The maid service cleans upstairs once a month or so, but I seldom ascend to such lofty domains. Whereas my old man was a public figure, and thus required a lot of entertaining space, everybody with whom I’m close would fit into his former office, with plenty of room to spare.

  Since I came into the family pile, I’ve outsourced a bunch of the things I used to do for myself. I occasionally feel a bit guilty about it, but make it a point not to dwell on the subject. I don’t clean up after myself or tend to the landscaping anymore. Those Magnificent Maids show up on Tuesdays at the crack of dawn and go through the place like weevils. Kenji Yamada and his sons put in an appearance every ten days or so to spruce up the lawns and landscaping. What can I say? I don’t have to . . . so I don’t.

  I still cook for myself upon occasion and always do my own laundry. I admit it: The laundry fetish is more or less symbolic. Something inside me needs to personally perform at least one of the thankless tasks of day-to-day existence, as a means of proving, beyond doubt, that I’m not the spoiled rich kid some people think.

  I was moving my second load from the washer to the dryer when the doorbell rang. Just after nine P.M. A tad late in the day for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and I sure as hell wasn’t expecting company. Even curiouser, I’d closed and locked the gate behind myself when I got home from The Two Bells a couple of hours ago, so whoever was at my door wanted something bad enough to scale the wall and hoof it all the way up the driveway to the house.

  On my way to the front hall, I snagged my revolver from my desk drawer, checked the load, and stuffed it into the back of my pants. By the time a working private eye gets to be my age, he’s dealt with a thousand or so divorces and custody battles and has made himself an enemy or three. Some people just don’t get over it. “Better safe than sorry” is my motto.

  In my father’s time, there was a peephole way up high, just to the right of the door. He could stand on a little step inside the closet and see who was darkening his front porch. As I recall, the aperture made everybody look a bit like Gilbert Gottfried. When I renovated the downstairs of the house last year, I had the crew install something a bit more contemporary . . . a twelve-camera video surveillance system. Runs off motion sensors. If a mouse farts in the backyard, it’s recorded for posterity.

  I pulled open the hall closet, touched the button for camera number two, and watched as the screen blinked to life. It was a young man. Under thirty, curly black hair and what would have been a nice clean profile, if it wasn’t for the enormous purple knot decorating the left side of his head. Took a second, but eventually my brain bulb snapped on. The kiddie cop. The one I’d punched in the head the other night.

  I left the security system on, and pulled open the big front door.

  “I’m . . . ah . . . Keith Taylor. I was—” he stammered.

  I cut him off. “I know who you are. The question is what the hell do you want?” Before he could answer, the rest of it spilled out of me. “Cause if you’re looking for some kind of absolution, I suggest you try the Catholic church up the street.”

  He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I’m suspended,” he said.

  “You oughta be,” I said quickly. “Because of you, a man’s dead.”

  Right away, I didn’t like the way that sounded. Something a bit too self-righteous to be coming out of my mouth. Nobody with my record had any reason to talk.

  As was my unfortunate habit, I made things worse by shutting the door in his face. When I reached into the closet, intending to shut down the monitor, I expected to see the back of him heading dejectedly back to his car. I could have lived with that . . . easy. But no . . . he hadn’t moved; he was still standing there on the front porch staring at the ancient alder planks. I heaved a sigh and cracked open the door.

  “What is it you want, kid?”

  “I didn’t mean to kill anybody,” he blurted.

  “When it comes to life and death, kid, your intentions don’t matter.”

  “He was a burglar,” the kid began. “He broke into that house.”

  The kid was trying to sell me the same crap he’d unsuccessfully been trying to sell himself, with much the same result. I could tell. I had lots of firsthand experience with the art of self-delusion.

  “He was just a poor, broke-down soul,” I said softly.

  The kid stopped studying his shoes and met my gaze. “He said your name.”

  I hadn’t realized he’d been close enough to hear. Couldn’t see any reason to deny it now, though. “Yeah,” I said. “He did.”

  “How’d he know your name?” the kid wanted to know.

  “It’s a long story.”

  We stood there in silence for what must have been a full minute. Him on one side of the threshold, me on the other. Finally, I pulled the door all the way open.

  “You might as well come in,” I said.

  He followed me into the back of the house. Sat in the kitchen while I finished up the laundry and tried to get a handle on my feelings. I’m usually good at putting things behind me. At moving on and letting the past be the past. Call it what you will, but it’s just the way I am. I get over things. I could spend a lot of time feeling bad about how my old man came by all the dough. But I don’t. That was then; this is now. I was a ki
d. Whatever the dirty deeds, they had nothing to do with me. I just got lucky, that’s all.

  This thing with Gordo. That was something different. I was having trouble throwing that one out the window. I could feel all the couldas, the wouldas, and the shouldas gnawing at my insides. Somebody shoulda told him that maybe he wanted to try something with training wheels before jumping on a full-dress Harley. Maybe that woulda changed everything. Coulda ended up completely different, if I’d only . . . yadda, yadda. Let the flogging begin.

  It was damn near eleven thirty by the time I’d finished telling him the story, over whiskey and bologna sandwiches. I slid the dishes into the sink, where the maids would probably find them before they petrified. I had my back to him when he asked.

  “What do you figure he was doing out there anyway?”

  I wiped my hands with a dish towel and thought it over. My brain kept running the movie of how his back had looked.

  “He rented that house, a while back. I think maybe he was trying to come back to the last place he could remember being happy,” I said.

  The notion proved to be a conversation stopper. For the next couple of minutes, both of us drifted off into our own little worlds.

  “All I ever wanted to be was a cop,” he slurred, finally.

  I’d been so lost in my own thoughts, I hadn’t noticed the kid was sloshed.

  “Maybe you better start making other plans, kid. They’re gonna hang you out to dry on this one, sure as God made little green apples.”

  I probably shouldn’t have said it, but it was true. Either the kid was going to be the scapegoat for Gordy’s death or Lewis County was going to take the rap, and somehow, I just couldn’t see the county fessing up to anything.

  He didn’t want to hear it, of course. He was still young and green enough to think life was supposed to be fair. That good intentions count. That good prevails over evil and all that rot. He pushed himself indignantly to his feet, fumbled around in his pockets until he came out with his car keys.