Switcheroo

by Robert Lewis Clark

  “Look come by my office after you make bail and give me the facts on your girl’s stolen truck and I’ll get her file back out and look into it for you.” This made me smile a little in spite of my captivity.

  “And don’t be thinking we’re pals or anything. That girl is a hot little number and I might need to ask her a few more questions. That’s the only reason I’m helping you. Here’s where you get off,” he said, skidding into the Oakridge P.D. parking lot.

  I ducked my head and exited the cruiser. I was as I bracing myself mentally for time to screech to a halt while I was processed and waited to make bail.

  Chapter 21

  After my attorney Willie Crandle bailed me out I picked up my car from the impound lot. I paid my fine, got a jump start from a wrecker and drove to Auto Shack. I waited while they installed a new battery. I saved the receipt to add to Tammy’s tab.

  So I got home at noon, on Monday. My answering machine had messages from Tammy, Grandma Tuttle, Wendy, my mother and a man named Wysinski. It took me a minute to remember that Wysinski was the Handy Self Storage manager. This could not be good, the truck must be gone.

  “Wysinski, it’s Rust Stover. Is my truck gone?” I sat listening for the inevitable.

  “No, but your unit got broke into. Truck’s still there, but now it has some pretty serious front end damage, you better come down here. There’s also some uh… crap in the corner.”

  “What kind of crap?”

  “Real crap. You know feces, manure, shit. Somebody pinched a loaf in the corner of your storage unit!” He hung up.

  I drove around randomly for fifteen minutes even though the storage place was two miles away. No cars seemed to be following me so I pulled into the parking lot.

  Wysinski had no life. He lived in a flat above the Handy Self Storage office. The building was Volunteer orange and white painted cinder block. In spite of the cheerful color scheme, the high fence topped with barb wire surrounding the storage compound gave the building the charm of a gaudy Folsom Prison.

  Wysinski was on call every day and spent a good deal of time eating take out pizza and sub sandwiches. This was obvious from his shape and his smell. The fact that someone broke into one of his storage units and dropped a deuce in the corner probably made his week. As I walked in he was telling this story to a frightened housewife at the front counter. She took advantage of the interruption when I came into the office and bolted out before the door closed.

  I followed Wysinski out the door as he stuck the ‘back in five minutes’ sign on the glass door of the office. We headed toward my storage unit. His strong body odor was like the presence of a third person. I noticed his old blue Volvo 850 sedan parked in front of the office. I asked him how it was working for him.

  “Yep. Motor blew up and had to be replaced two years ago.”

  I think it’s a mistake to replace the motor in any vehicle. Especially for me since I am usually about to wreck my car. It makes more sense for me to replace the whole car, rather than doing an expensive repair.

  We walked along the side of the structure, passing row after row of orange sliding garage doors. He stopped in front of the unit I had rented.

  “Noticed dents in the door when I was making the rounds yesterday.” He pointed. He used the key to open the master lock, which was intact and undamaged. He threw up the metal sliding door and my head began to pound.

  “What I can’t figure out is how the bastard got in here. I got surveillance cameras everywhere and nobody has opened this door in the last forty-eight hours. I checked. There was activity at some of the neighboring units, but I don’t see any damage to the interior walls. I don’t see how the bastard could have gotten from one unit to the next.”

  “How do you know he was a bastard?”

  “It’s a figure of speech, man. Come on.” Wysinski was agitated by my sarcasm. He was no longer numb to it as he had been in New York or New Jersey or wherever he came from. When a Yankee moves south, their blood gets thin and so does their skin, I guess.

  Wysinski was dumbfounded when we looked at the truck and found no body damage. He did not know that the trucks had switched places since yesterday and this was the undamaged one. I was not going to explain anything.

  “Looks okay to me,” I said, playing dumb, which is easy for me.

  “The front of this truck was all bent up, man. I saw it myself yesterday. Did you get it fixed?” He was turning pale.

  “Nope, no one’s been here in forty-eight hours, you said so yourself. Besides, I’ve been in jail. There’s no way I could have fixed the kind of damage you’re describing.”

  I gave him a pitying look, as if he were ill. I turned and walked to the front of the truck. In the far corner of the metal room was a stinking pile of crap and some smelly urine. A tire iron had been tossed off to the side. The bottom of the door was bent and curled up. Six small blackened dents surrounded the area of the latch, the bent steel pushed outward. Gunshots? The intruder had been unable to make a large enough gap to escape. The lock had stayed in place. This meant that whoever it was, had spent a day locked in here, with no food or water, until the trucks switched back. This made me feel better about spending last night in a tree in the cold.

  “Okay,” I said. “Listen. I want to move the truck to a different unit and get some more locks.” Wysinski was still looking at the front of the truck. He agreed to let me switch units, but was still shaking his head in confusion over the truck’s undamaged condition.

  After I parked the truck in its new garage bay I decided to try something. I disconnected the positive battery post. Glancing at the gauges on the dash, I saw that the digital clock was blank. Maybe these trucks would stay put now. I bought another Master lock from Wysinski and urged him to take a couple days off or maybe go get a massage or something. I left Wysinski’s office quickly, as I was tired of breathing through my mouth.

  Early Tuesday morning I picked up Grandma Tuttle, Tammy and Hannah at the Holiday Inn on Cedar Bluff. Their motel and room service tab heated up my credit card. I had that martyred feeling, but they are good people and it was hard not to sympathize. That feeling would be replaced with self loathing when I got my credit card statement. I tried to be the strong silent type, but I was back to my talkative goober personality by the time we got Hannah and the bags to Grandma Tuttle’s old Pontiac. Tammy and Hannah were both very sleepy and said little. Grandma Tuttle talked to me about how awful the Holiday Inn was. She said the sheets made her skin itch. She said the maids were rude, spoke no English, and did mediocre work while playing on their cell phones all day.

  Grandma Tuttle wanted her stove, her oven and her clothes, her hair dryer and her curlers. If she ever remarried it would probably be to the Maytag man.

  Hannah fell back to sleep in her car seat, looking like an angel. Her smooth forehead showed no signs of worry. A lock of light brown hair fell across her cheek and I tucked it behind her ear. I struggled to buckle her car seat, which was similar to a NASCAR restraint in both effectiveness and complexity. Hannah’s breathing was now whistling softly. I knew I had twenty jobs from LISA at the office, but I still watched her for a moment. She was charming in a way that I can only compare to the little boy in ‘Jerry McGuire’, the way he steals your heart and makes you love him, like it or not. I was gonna have to go to the firing range or maybe a football game to counteract these chick-flick feelings.

  Tammy was going to ride back to Grandma Tuttle’s house with me. I told them I would check out the home and grounds before I went to work. Tammy and I could discuss her case and its lack of progress on the drive over.

  “So, we’re not gonna have sex anymore then, right?”

  “Shut up!” she snapped, rubbing her eyes.

  “I was just seeing if you were awake. Just kidding. Wow,” I said innocently. She was not a morning person after a late night’s work of hustling drinks and humoring drunks at Orby’s Place.

  “Listen, your Grandma’s house is probably as safe as a
nywhere now that the truck is hidden. I suggest you keep the garage door open so that anyone who looks can see that the truck is not there.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Tammy, I gotta make some money and pay some bills. I’ve incurred some unforeseen expenses since we met.” I thought of my car and my credit card balances and my back log of LISA work to be done.

  The early hour and the lack of progress in getting both of the trucks back to her were working on Tammy’s nerves. She pulled the fingers of both hands through her unwashed hair and lit a cigarette. Her hand trembled slightly as she pushed the button to put down her electric window. The cool air and nicotine worked their magic and she spoke as she smoked.

  “Why don’t you just get in the truck and teleport to where the other one is and take it. You could shoot the bad guys if they’re guardin’ it. That’s the only way. I went through it and it didn’t hurt me.”

  She was right. Persuasive. Even with the dark rings under her eyes she was still an attractive girl. She was just a shower and some make up away from being beautiful again.

  “I’m not prepared to do that yet.”

  Scared was more like it, but I still pretended otherwise.

  “Let me go back to Oliver Springs and confront this guy. And we’ll talk some more. I’ll call you tonight to check on you.”

  We were pulling into Grandma’s driveway. I hopped out and walked around the house looking for rednecks with shotguns. Finding none, I headed into the house. It had been left unlocked. I conducted a quick room by room, closet by closet search. No one seemed to have been inside. On the back porch, the contractor had replaced wood siding and Grandma Tuttle’s kitchen window. There was still some painting to finish and shotgun pellets to sweep up. I gave Tammy a reassuring hug, told her not to worry and left her in the den with Grandma Tuttle and Hannah. I think they were feeling like strangers in their own home. I drove off toward Knoxville wondering if I should be leaving them alone.

  Chapter 22

  When we were stationed in Columbus, Georgia in the Army, Jake Haskins had asked me what kind of town Knoxville, Tennessee was. With a lot of free time on our hands, sometimes there wasn’t much to do but talk. Haskins had already told me all about Bunnykill, Arkansas or wherever he was from, so it was my turn.

  “Well, it’s not like the other towns in East Tennessee,” I answered.

  “That doesn’t tell me shit about it.”

  He was right, but I wasn’t sure how to answer his question. Since there was plenty of time, I did my best.

  I told him that Knoxville had been settled by ambitious Carolinians who came to East Tennessee to escape frequent Indian attacks and swarms of mosquitoes. This is like moving to Manhattan from Chicago to escape overcrowding. The new Knoxvillians had to fight the Indians for about one hundred years and then the British for a few years and later the Confederate army at Fort Sanders. We are still fighting the mosquitoes, but mostly at sunset. As living there became safer, the property developers came. They built office buildings for banks, insurance companies and lawyers. They built department stores, furniture showrooms and whatever anyone else wanted built so they could hang up their shingle downtown.

  In the 1970's they built malls and shopping centers in the suburbs. Knoxville began to grow outward - urban sprawl. To the south was the Tennessee River and to the north, there were mountains. So Knoxville grew wider and wider, eventually extending to the county line. Kingston Pike runs down the middle of this haphazard, narrow development. No matter what you are looking for it will be off of Kingston Pike.

  All these people in the suburbs wanted to work in the suburbs. So the property developers built more offices west of town. They built neighborhoods with hundreds of houses in only three colors: white, blue or beige. All this lead to vacancies downtown. Downtown had a brief rebirth where it almost revived. In 1982, Knoxville played host to the World’s Fair. A burst of building and business growth lead up to the event, but it could not be sustained after the fair was gone. Paris got the Eiffel Tower. We got a giant gold ball on a stick, The Sun Sphere. Eiffel Tower vs. Awful Tower.

  I was remembering this while hiking up the hill from my parking garage to my office. It was a little before eight o’clock on Tuesday. On occasion, memories of friends and acquaintances play through my mind like a ghostly movie projector. This was starting to happen more often, since my ex-wives had garnered most of my money and all of my friends from the good old days.

  The sidewalks were crowded with people walking from parking garages to their offices and a few homeless panhandlers. Used to be that a man on the street, shouting into the air, was a mentally ill homeless guy. Now it was usually a business man with one of those annoying Bluetooth ear buds.

  I walked up to the Arcade Building and headed up the stairs to my office. Peeking into attorney Crandle’s office, I spied lovely Wendy Forsyth, but decided not to go in when I saw Thelma the office Nazi near her. I wondered if Willie had mentioned my trespassing arrest to Wendy.

  It took me an hour to throw out most of my mail (which was ninety-percent junk) and to download and print twenty field inspection jobs from various LISA e-mails. I pocketed the important mail (checks from LISA) and headed to the bank.

  I was definitely being followed. A man I had seen get out of his car after I arrived at the State Street parking garage was now tucking a newspaper under his arm and walking slowly in the same direction I was. After the monster Jeep truck incident ended with me wrecking my car, I was anxious to be on the offensive this time. It was four blocks to the First Knoxville Bank Building; Knoxville’s tallest building at forty-five stories. Keeping my eyes mostly on the brick sidewalk as I walked, I looked up periodically, using store-front glass as a rear view mirror. Dude was still back there.

  I slowed down and browsed the window of a jewelry store. He slowed down and glanced at a closed store front; the windows were covered with brown paper from the inside. It was an awkward effort to appear natural. Then he began walking again and slowly passed me. I did not look at him, but immediately headed back the other way and cut down some metal stairs that went down to parking below two buildings.

  After I was out of his sight, I darted under the steps so I could look between to the stair treads and saw his feet descending quickly. As he passed I reached through the opening and grabbed one of his ankles. He fell forward and I heard a few bangs and a howl. It looked as though he simultaneously banged his chin on the hand rail and smacked his knee on the pavement before he finally hammered down on his right elbow.

  I hurried out from under the stairs. He was whimpering and feeling his injuries with his good arm. The elbow seemed to be the worst.

  “Who do you work for?” I said bending low and close to his face. I had always wanted a reason to say that. It felt good.

  “I cracked one of my crowns,” he slurred, rubbing his mouth. He tried to hold his knee with his bad arm and had to flinch.

  He was a smallish person with an inexpensive suit and a gray raincoat. His chin was swelling, but he was sitting up now. He was an old-looking forty-five or a young sixty, I wasn’t sure. His thinning hair was mussed and his skin had the clammy look of chilled pork sausage. A woman, probably late for work, was walking up to us in the parking lot.

  “Sir, are you okay?” She said, looking at the fallen stalker.

  I bent down and helped him up by his good arm before he could yell for the cops.

  “Uh…Billy, is fine, aren’t yah?” I said loudly, to cover up the man’s grunts and groans of pain. I put my arm around him and walked him toward the back of the parking lot. The woman watched us struggle for just a moment before she went on, her heels clicking quickly up the metal stairs to the sidewalk.

  As soon as I let go of the man he sat down on the pavement of the parking lot.

  “So are you going to beat me now, until I say who my client is? ‘Cause you know the agency doesn’t even tell us.”

  Since I had basically assaulted him for no reason
I could explain to the authorities other than paranoia, beating information out of this man would be very risky. And it wasn’t my style. Having been in jail once already this week, I took the high road.

  I scooted him around and pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. There was a PI license and a Pinkerton agency badge. His home address was in Nashville. His business card showed the Nashville Pinkerton location and his name, Fred Smithey.

  I took one of the business cards and his Pinkerton ID badge from its holder. I jotted his badge number down and handed his wallet back to him. Still flinching with pain, he made no move to put it in his pocket.

  Sitting sadly on the bleached pavement, he reminded me of the weeds struggling up through the cracks nearby. I think the weeds were more prosperous. I told him to drive south on Gay Street and he would come to Baptist Hospital if he decided his injuries needed professional care.

  “No beating today,” I said, sounding tough. “You’ve been made, so you’re off the case. Tell them to send someone more cunning next time, possibly a hot female agent.”

  In the lobby of the First Knoxville building I used the bank’s courtesy phone to make a anonymous call.

  “Pinkerton Agency. How may I direct your call?” said the receptionist, in a calm, courteous tone.

  “Agent services, please,” I said and my call was transferred.

  “Brenda Jenkins, may I help you?”

  “Brenda, this is Fred Smithey, Badge number q47586i0.” I say, counting on the fact that Brenda does not know all the field agents personally. “I have a question about a job I’m in Knoxville working on.”

  “What’s the job number?”

  “I don’t know, the guy I’m supposed to tail is Russell Stover, like the candy? Ha.” I say what anybody else who doesn’t know me would say.

  “Hang on a sec,” Sound of keys tapping. “What did you need?”

  “I’m headed back to the hotel to type up my notes and I can’t find this file. Who is the client on this job?”