Chump Change

by G. M. Ford

  Gord was an unspectacular student, graduated just about in the middle of his class . . . all forty of them. Tried Idaho State for one semester, then dropped out and went to work for the Idaho Noxious Weed Abatement Section. Living in one state and working in another was how come he didn’t show on the Washington State employment rolls. That lasted until the week he won all that money, at which point he quit his job, changed his name, and headed for greener pastures. How you gonna keep em down on the farm and all that? Carl tapped the screen.

  “Originally he opted for the annual payout, but changed his mind on the twentieth of May last year, when he ate the thirty percent penalty and took the rest of it up front. The state paid out just over nine million six on the ninth of June.”

  “I need to call Rebecca,” I said as much to myself as to Carl.

  He looked surprised. “You two . . . are you . . .”

  “No,” I said. “ME’s office has Gordon’s body listed as a John Doe. I don’t get ahold of Rebecca, the poor bastard’s gonna end up in potter’s field with the rest of the unfortunates.”

  “She work weekends?”

  I shook my head.

  “And you don’t have her cell number anymore.”

  Another shake.

  Carl pushed a button on his keyboard.

  “You seen this?” he asked.

  I followed his eyes to one of the computer screens. KOMO NEWS SPECIAL.

  Triple homicide on Greenwood Avenue. About three miles from here. LIVE in red letters down in the right-hand corner of the screen. Cops, cruisers, and yellow crime-scene tape everywhere.

  “She’s gotta be there,” he said. “We don’t get that many triples.”

  He may have said something else, but I missed it on my way out the door.

  SPD had the whole North Greenwood Manor apartment complex cinched up tighter than a frog’s ass. Nobody in, nobody out. To a man, they seemed remarkably unimpressed with my PI credentials. Took me fifteen minutes of solid bitching before somebody even sent word inside that I needed to see Dr. Duvall, and another fifteen before she put in a guest appearance. The set of her jaw said she was seriously annoyed. She kept the yellow crime-scene tape between us.

  “What, Leo?”

  “Sorry to bother you,” I said.

  She wanted to go off on me, I could tell. The muscles along her jawline writhed like snakes. “Guy’s wife wants a divorce, so he kills himself and the kids.”

  “Some folks just can’t let it go.”

  “Kids are four and six years old. A boy and a girl. He took a linoleum knife and . . .” She stopped herself before she slid off the rails.

  If there was something you said at a moment like this, I sure didn’t know what it was, so I kept my big mouth shut.

  She took a deep breath. “To what do I owe the honor . . . ?” she asked.

  “I know who he is. The guy with the scars.”

  Her green eyes flickered. “So do I,” she said, disgustedly. “Now . . . if you’ll excuse me . . .” She spun on her heel and started back toward the building.

  “How do you know that?” I said to her back.

  She stopped and looked back over her shoulder. “His sister picked up the body earlier today. Said they had a family plot they were going to put him in.”

  “He doesn’t have a sister,” I said.

  An awkward moment passed. She thought about walking off. I could tell from her body lean. Instead, she turned back my way.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “She had his birth certificate.”

  “I’ve got a copy in my car,” I said.

  “Why would someone claim a body they had no right to?” she demanded. This kind of thing had always been difficult for her. She’d always toed the straight and narrow, and, on one level at least, couldn’t imagine why anyone would do anything else.

  “No idea,” I admitted. But then again, there were a whole lot of things about ol Gordo’s living and dying that I didn’t understand. Primary among the mysteries was how whoever picked up the body even knew he was dead. It’s not like anybody notified his next of kin. Then there was the little matter of those horrible scars on his back, and changing his name in his mid-forties, and, of course, the ever-popular Where the hell’s Missy Allen and all that damned money?

  I’d stopped at Carl’s hoping to put this thing behind me. So I could jettison Gordo and his missing millions from my consciousness forever, and get back to my favored states of procrastination and sloth. The visit had, however, produced exactly the opposite effect. Seemed like the closer I got to Gordon Stanley, the less I knew about him.

  Rebecca was pissed. This was a woman who didn’t tolerate mistakes. Hers or anybody else’s. She must have been called down to the morgue this morning. No way anybody in the ME’s office was gonna let a John Doe go without her say-so, and now she felt like she’d mailed it in, because it was a Saturday and maybe she wasn’t as careful as she might have been during regular business hours. She started to walk off and then stopped. She turned back my way. “I can’t leave here right now,” she said.

  “I know.”

  It got quiet enough to hear the traffic on Greenwood Avenue.

  “I’ll be in the office early tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” I said.

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “See you there,” I said.

  “I don’t like this at all.”

  “Me neither.”

  “The scars . . . somebody claiming to be his family . . . this is all very sinister.”

  I nodded in agreement.

  “Be careful,” she said.

  “I will.”

  And that was that.

  “How’d it feel seeing Rebecca again?” Rachel asked.

  “Very uncomfortable,” I said.

  We were hunkered down in front of the TV, in what used to be my old man’s office. As soon as I came into my trust fund, I’d had it ground-up renovated into something I could live with. Had I left it the way it had been, he’d always have been sitting behind the desk, glowering at me, disapproving of damn near everything I did. The enormous oil portrait of him that used to hang across from his desk may have been packed in a crate up in the attic, but some astral vestige of Big Bill Waterman still seemed to hang in the air like cannon smoke.

  Rachel snuggled deeper into the crook of my arm. “Uncomfortable is good,” she said around a mouth full of popcorn. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  “That’s one of the things I like about you. You’re honest, even when it’s nasty.”

  “When it comes to you, big fella, I can get downright avaristic.”

  “Avaristic . . . is that a word?”

  “It is now.”

  I laughed. “Somebody way back in the seventeen hundreds said that ‘avarice is the sphincter of the heart.’ ”

  She laughed out loud. “Some aspects of human nature defy time.”

  An electronic signal began to beep.

  “What’s that?” Rachel asked.

  “The security system. Probably a rabbit on the lawn or something.”

  The beeping stopped.

  And then started again. More insistent this time.

  I slid myself out from under the blanket and made my way to the front hall, where I pulled open the closet door and hit the master switch. All ten cameras blinked to life. The yard lit up like Safeco Field. My neighbors hate it when I do that.

  A pair of legs were hanging down the front wall. I watched in silence as they eased their way to the ground, dusted off, and turned my way. It was him. The kid cop.

  Keith. I sighed and shut the system down.

  He was reaching for the bell when I jerked open the door.

  “Thought you were going back home,” I said, testily.

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  “They put my stuff in the street.”

  “Who did?”

  “The county. I’d been
staying in one of their subsidy units. Rent-free. You know . . . until my probationary period was over and I could afford something of my own.”

  “And they evicted you?”

  “Twenty-four-hour notice right there on the door.”

  I wanted to say “I told you so” but stifled it.

  “I’ve got company” was all I could think to say.

  “Oh . . . I’m sorry . . . I’ll . . .” He gestured toward the street.

  “Hang on,” I said, handing him the door.

  I turned and walked back into the den, as I called it these days. Rachel looked up when I stopped in the doorway.

  “We’ve got company,” I said.

  “Really?”

  I gave her the Reader’s Digest version of The Keith Taylor Story. “He doesn’t seem to have anyplace else to go,” I said at the end.

  “Then you should invite him in,” she said.

  I pointed at her. “Maybe you want to . . .”

  She looked down at herself and smiled. “You mean my tits.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You might want to . . .”

  She scrambled to her feet. “I’ll find a few more clothes,” she said with a malicious grin, and padded off toward the master bedroom at the back of the house.

  While she gussied herself into semi-respectability, I found the kid another ancient Diet Coke and ensconced him at the kitchen table.

  “I should go,” he said.

  “Go where?” I asked.

  He thought it over. “Home, I guess,” he said after a pause.

  “Sometimes that’s best,” I said in my Yoda voice.

  Rachel rescued us from further inanities by walking into the kitchen, wearing my new bathrobe and a smile. I got the impression the kid had never been that close to so much prime woman flesh before. I recognized the shallow breathing and moronic expression. Happened to me every time she took off her clothes.

  I introduced them. Everybody made nice.

  “This must be very difficult on you,” she said to him.

  The kid took a pull on the Coke. “This sure isn’t how I planned it,” he allowed.

  I busied myself with making a pot of coffee while Rachel went about the business of helping him get in touch with how he was feeling. Same thing she did for a living with unhappy couples. She was good at it. Not leading, but guiding him along his own pathways, until he finally said, “I’ll get over it, I guess. It’s just that I never really failed at anything before.” He wiped the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger. “Maybe I wasn’t top of the class, or first team . . . but I was always more than . . . you know . . . more than respectable.”

  I had a homily on my lips—something to the effect that the sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass every day—but mercifully, I had a sudden spasm of lucidity and swallowed it. Way I saw it, we were already way over our trite but true limit; no sense getting things further out of balance.

  He looked at me. “You were right,” he said, dejectedly. “I’ve got no future in law enforcement. The whole hearing thing is just for show. They’re throwing me under the bus.” His voice was heavy, like he was talking about somebody who’d died.

  “Everything I own is in the car,” the kid said.

  “Speaking of which . . . if you want to find your ride in the morning, you probably want to park it in the driveway.”

  Didn’t have to ask him twice, or go through the whole I couldn’t possibly impose on you again thing. I liked that about him. I hit the gate switch and watched him walk toward the street. Rachel was suddenly leaning against my arm. Lucky arm.

  “Poor guy,” she said softly.

  “He’s about to reinvent himself,” I opined, sagely.

  “Always a painful experience,” she said.

  I’m not much of an absolutist. “Always?” I asked.

  “Only fakirs volunteer for transformation, Leo. Real people . . . they’re forced into it. A spouse dies. They get divorced. They lose all their money in the stock market.” She waved a dismissive hand. “Stuff like that.”

  “We can finish the movie in bed,” I said.

  “I’ll go warm er up,” she said with a salacious grin.

  “The VCR?” I asked.

  “No,” she said with a leer.

  She kissed my cheek and wandered back into the house.

  The sweep of headlights pulled my attention out toward the gate. The kid wheeled the Prelude up next to the house and got out. He held a small gym bag in his right hand. I flipped the switch. The gates began to swing together.

  “The guest room’s like you left it,” I said with a shrug. “The maids don’t come till Tuesday.”

  Eight-fifteen on a rainy Sunday morning. Two floors below ground at the medical examiner’s office. Me, Rebecca, and two fresh-faced cops from the Techno-Crimes Section are staring at a bank of four computer monitors. How she came up with two city employees and all that equipment on a Sunday was testament to how little she appreciated being scammed out of a body.

  We’d spent the past half hour studying the security tape of Gordon’s remains being picked up yesterday morning. As expected, the Idaho plate on the Dodge pickup turned out to be bogus. “Plate comes back to an ’83 Dodge Astro van from Spokane. According to DMV records, the van was scrapped in late 2004,” one of the nerds said.

  Not to be outdone, the other guy announced, “Telemetry’s back on the woman.”

  The screens rolled to Rebecca and another woman coming out of her office. I’d never really thought about what a great disguise being in mourning was. The ebony-clad figure, strangling a white lace hankie with a black-gloved hand, striding along next to Rebecca. Black maxi dress and boots, black head scarf the size of a tarp, and a pair of off-the-rack sunglasses big enough to hide her from the lips up. Coulda been anyone from Mahatma Gandhi to Marilyn Manson.

  “Caucasian female,” the cop intoned. “Five foot six, a hundred and forty-seven pounds. Between thirty and forty years old. From the density of the leg muscles, and expanded lung capacity, the program suggests she probably runs several miles a day.” The camera followed the two women outside to the loading dock, where a pair of Rebecca’s white-clad minions slid the body into the back of the red Dodge Ram pickup truck with bogus Idaho plates. We watched in silence as the body was locked inside the custom camper shell and the keys were returned to the lady in black.

  Some trick of light kept pulling my attention toward the driver’s door of the truck. I pointed with my finger. “Can you get us a close-up of the driver’s door?” The technology was amazing. Zoom, adjust the focus . . . zoom, adjust the focus, and suddenly we were there.

  “See how square that patch is?” I said. “Right there in the middle of the door.”

  “You’re right,” the closest cop said. “Looks like that square in the center has suffered quite a bit less paint fade than the rest of the door.”

  “Some kind of advertising sign,” Rebecca said.

  “The magnetic kind you just slap on and off,” I said.

  “Is that helpful to us in some way?” Rebecca wanted to know.

  “Everything’s helpful in some way.”

  She folded her arms tightly across her chest and looked away.

  “How about the back bumper?” I asked.

  In ten seconds, the lens was scanning the thick layer of dust that had collected along the rear of the truck. Again, I pointed to the area that had drawn my attention.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  The lens tracked back and forth across the area in question, several times.

  “Might be a bumper sticker,” one of the techno-cops said.

  “This’ll take a few,” one of them muttered. Keyboards went into high gear.

  I motioned to Rebecca with my head. She followed me out into the hall. I had something I wanted to ask her, but not in front of the help.

  “She touch anything in your office?” I asked.

  “Never took the damn gloves off,” Rebecca said
, bitterly. She was beating herself up for not having been more diligent. I could tell. I’d seen it before, lots of times. Unlike me, she was an engine that ran best on high-octane guilt. When I glanced over at the window, both techno-cops were motioning for us to come back into the room.

  “The program says it reads BANTAMS.” He spelled it out.

  “Chicken ranch, maybe?” the other techie said.

  “How’s about a high school mascot,” I corrected.

  Searched Washington high school mascots. Only one Bantams. Clarkston, Washington.

  The kid was packing his car to leave when I pulled into the driveway. The rain had stopped. As I got out and walked in his direction, I could hear drops falling from the bare branches of the trees, and percolating into the ground.

  “Guess I better get on with the rest of my life,” he said gamely. “I really want to thank you and Miss . . .”

  “Rachel,” I said.

  “You know . . . for putting up with me and all.”

  “No problem,” I said.

  “Oh . . . oh . . . I almost forgot. She said she had a full schedule today and that she’d call you later. She wanted to make sure I told you she said that maybe you could finish the movie later.” He shrugged. “I don’t know why, but that’s what she wanted me to tell you.”

  I walked over and leaned against the Honda’s front fender.

  “You still feeling that great need to do something?” I asked him.

  “There’s nothing to do,” he said with conviction.

  “Maybe there is,” I suggested.

  He eyed me. “Like what?”

  “Like seeing if we can’t find some kind of closure, maybe.”

  “We?”

  I shrugged. “For you . . . maybe provide a little impetus for getting on with the rest of your life.”

  “What’d you have in mind?” he asked after a minute.

  “A road trip,” I said.