by Ross Thomas
But the one who stood in the apartment doorway at 7:19 that morning seemed to regard himself as more emissary than messenger. He appeared to be 36 or so, topped Partain's six-two by a couple of inches and outweighed him by at least twenty pounds. Everything about him—his weathered good looks and size, his superior attitude and expensive clothes—irritated Partain and made him, at 41, feel old and jaundiced and secondhand shabby.
Partain was barefoot and wearing worn jeans and a ripped white T-shirt when he had opened the door to silence the chime-ringing. The smiling messenger stood there, resplendent in a navy-blue cashmere blazer with gold buttons, pale cream shirt, tan cavalry twill pants and, on sockless feet, cordovan loafers. But now the smile had vanished and the messenger wore an earnest, if puzzled, frown and beneath that an assortment of other lines and creases that Partain attributed to idleness, dissipation and too much time at the beach.
“I guess I haven’t made myself clear,” the messenger said in a friendly bass.
“Sure you have,” Partain said. “You said she has to sign for the envelope. I said I won’t wake her up but’ll be glad to sign for it. You say that's against the rules. I’m about to say: Come back later.”
“Who the fuck’re you?”
“I’m the family's new best friend.”
“Well, look, friend, I’m just trying to do my job and—”
“Like hell,” Jessica Carver said as she entered the foyer. Partain turned to find her wearing only a very long white T-shirt she obviously had slept in.
“Claims he's a messenger,” Partain said.
“He's Dave,” she said. “Does Dave look like a messenger?”
“Goddamnit, Jessie. We have to talk.”
“No, we don’t,” she said and turned to Partain. “Get rid of him.” “Could be messy,” he said.
“So?” she said and vanished into the living room.
Partain was still watching her leave when he said, “Sorry, Dave,” and turned around just as the false messenger cocked a big right fist and sent it toward Partain's heart. But because of the fist-cocking business, Partain easily slipped the blow, went in close and slammed the heel of his left palm against Dave's right eye.
Dave howled, dropped the clipboard, clapped his right hand over the eye, then covered that hand with his left one, leaving himself open to more damage. Partain instead placed a gentle hand on Dave'sshoulder, steered him into the living room and eased him into a comfortable armchair.
“You won’t lose the eye,” Partain said.
“Fuck off,” said Dave and bent over to hang his head between his knees, either to ease the pain or to keep from fainting. Only his right palm now covered the wounded eye and he was still in the bent-over position when Jessica Carver came into the living room, glanced at Dave and said, “What's his problem now?”
“A disagreement,” Partain said.
“I see he won.”
“I think not.”
“He's inside, isn’t he?” she said.
Because Jessica Carver had locked herself in her bedroom, refusing to have anything to do with Dave, it was Partain who taped a gauze pad over the bruised eye where the surrounding skin was beginning to hint of the bilious colors to come. Partain then fed the big man a Percodan and a beer after making sure he had arrived by taxi and would leave the same way.
They now sat at the living room bar, Partain sipping a breakfast beer and listening to the alcohol-and-Percodan-inspired monologue from the false messenger who confessed he was really David Laney, a 36-year-old UCLA graduate, class of’79, with a degree in political science even though he had never given a shit about politics but back then had figured it ought to be a good way to meet women and was, in fact, the way he’d met Jessie in ‘88 during the Dukakis campaign. And where the hell was Jessie, anyhow?
“Taking a nap,” Partain said.
“Yeah, well, are you and she—you know?”
“I work for her mother.” “Doing what?” “Security consultant.” “Rent-a-cop, huh?” “If you like.”
“Old Millie's something, isn’t she? She’ll hit on anyone. She even tried me one time.” “Jessica's mother?”
“Sure. Who else? There was this guy who wanted to be governor— Van de something. So Millie ran through her spiel and asked me to contribute a thousand to the guy's campaign. Well, Christ, the only income I’ve got is from this almost nothing trust fund, so I told her I’d do what I could and sent her a check for twenty-five bucks. That pissed her off so much she wouldn’t speak to me for months.”
“A trust fund sometimes must be more burden than comfort,” Partain said.
“You know you’re right?” Laney said. “Everybody thinks you’re rolling in it, but two million's nowhere near what it used to be. Mine's handled out of a bank in Boston by some belt-and-suspender guys who still think six percent oughta draw money from the moon.”
Partain decided it was time to send Laney on his way. “Want me to call a taxi?”
“Yeah, thanks, but let me ask you this.” He touched his right eye. “How bad's the mouse going to be?” “Bad enough.”
“I still don’t see why you had to pick my eye.”
“To get your attention. If I’d wanted to do real damage, the eye’d’ve popped out and rolled around on the floor. But you’re lucky in a way. If I’d been having one of my real black mood swings, Imight’ve shoved your nosebone up into your brain and we wouldn’t be sitting here over a couple of beers.” “What mood swings?”
“They started in Vietnam,” Partain said, wondering where his embellishment would lead. “When I’m crossed, I’m sometimes subject to violent episodes. For example, if you try to bother Jessica again, I might go berserk and bite off your nose.”
Laney's right hand went to his nose as he said, “You’re shitting me, aren’t you?”
“Am I?”
Laney studied Partain carefully with his one good eye for several moments, then nodded, as if reaching a decision. “I’ve met guys like you before. Lots of times. Guys who claim they eat lizards and fried red ants for breakfast and shit like that. I met a lot of ‘em in Mexico.”
“In Guadalajara?”
“There and La Paz and a bunch of other places. Guys who don’t work and never have, but always have new cars and money and women. Fact is, I met one like that just before I flew up here. He came looking for Jessie, but she’d already gone. The guy wanted Jessie to tell her mother something.”
“He have a name?” Partain said.
“Guys like him have as many names as they do women. Take your pick. But the one yesterday was calling himself Sid Solo.”
“Is Ms. Altford supposed to know Mr. Solo?”
Laney started to shake his head no, thought better of it and said, “Nah. He was just the runner. Someone handed him maybe a hundred or two and told him to go find Jessie and tell her something.”
“Tell her what?”
Laney frowned. “Will you tell her—Millie, I mean?” “Sure.”
“Okay,” Laney said. “Sid Solo said for Jessie to tell her mother to call off the hunt. That's it and don’t ask me what it means.” Partain smiled. “I misjudged you, Dave, and I apologize.” “For what?”
“You turned out to be a real messenger after all.”
CHAPTER 6
In the spring of 1971, a reporter for the now defunct Washington Star was roused from sleep by a phone call and a harsh deep voice that the reporter later wrote “sounded like the first cruel crack of doom.”
The voice belonged to Emory Kite, a private investigator and skip-tracer, who warned the reporter to come up with a couple of past-due car payments or face unspecified consequences, which, the reporter imagined, would “begin with the rack, continue with the thumbscrew and end mercifully with a variation of the Asian bastinado.”
The reporter borrowed money from his credit union, paid up and later that week went calling on Emory Kite at his rented desk in a divorce lawyer's office on the fourth floor of the old Bond Bui
lding at 14th and New York Avenue, N.W. The reporter discovered “a small man, somewhat larger than a big jockey, with the eyes of an amused hangman, the face of a young Mr. Punch and the sole proprietor of what sounds like hell's own official voice.”
The byline feature ran fifteen column inches on an inside page under a three-column headline that read:
WANT DEADBEATS TO PAY UP FAST? TRY HELL’S OWN OFFICIAL VOICE
The story gave only a sketchy account of Kite, noting that at 19 he had left Anniston, Alabama, in 1961 with only the vague promise of a patronage job as an elevator operator in the Capitol building. He arrived in Washington with one suit, a high school diploma and his frightener's voice, which he claimed to have acquired at 13 after being treated for strep throat with a home remedy tasting of turpentine.
Kite never got the elevator operator job, but he did find work with a collection agency that specialized in harassing Federal employees who fell behind on their installment loans. His voice soon made him the agency star and, after five and a half years, Kite acquired a private investigator's license. Soon after that, he quit the collection agency and, in his words, “went independent.”
Since it was only a feature story, the Washington Star reporter saw no reason to dig more deeply and three months later quit the newspaper to teach journalism at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. But on sheer hunch one of the story's readers did dig more deeply and discovered what he would later describe as “some very rich and nasty pay dirt.”
The man who dug deeper was a young Army major just back from Vietnam. His assignment at the Pentagon was to devise a new and better way to track down Vietnam War deserters—most of them draftees. The Major had convinced his superiors to fund a small pilot program that would offer civilian bounty hunters $200 for each deserter they located. During Emory Kite's one and only visit to the Pentagon he asked Major Walker L. Hudson if, for the $200, “I gotta just find ‘em, or both find ‘em and bring ‘em in, even if they don’t wanta come?”
“You find, we fetch,” Major Hudson said.
Kite began his hunt with an Army-supplied list of the names and last known addresses of one hundred deserters. Within a week he had tracked down seventy-three of them by phone and, using only his voice from hell, convinced sixty-four of the seventy-three to stay put until either Federal marshals or the military police dropped by to pick them up.
Twenty-two years later the 51-year-old Emory Kite looked up from his Big Mac with those still-amused blue eyes and asked, “How come we gotta meet way the fuck out here in Silver Spring to eat hamburgers when we could be having something decent down at Zeibert's?”
“Because I don’t know anybody who’d eat lunch at two forty-five in a McDonald's, especially a McDonald's in Silver Spring.”
After that Colonel Ralph Millwed took his second and last bite of his Quarter Pounder and put it back on the tray, never to touch it again.
“So how's General Hudson doing?” Kite asked, his mouth full of hamburger and French fries.
Millwed looked away. “Fine.”
“Been a while since I saw him.”
“Three years, seven months and thirteen days,” Millwed said, still glancing around the almost empty restaurant. He continued to look around until he thought the open-mouth mastication might have ended. He looked back, only to find Kite's hand poised over the Colonel's abandoned Quarter Pounder. “You gonna finish it?” Kite asked.
“No.”
“I might as well, then,” Kite said, picked up the remains, had a large bite and said, “Me and the General used to be real tight, you know.”
The Colonel looked away again and said, “We go through this every time.”
“I just want you to let him know I understand,” said Kite. “Christ,a two-star general can’t be buddy-buddy with a guy like me or something shitty might rub off on him. I know that. I bet when you get to be a general, Ralphie, you’ll have yourself some tame major to eat lunch with me—probably out at the Roy Rogers in Hyattsville.”
“Hyattsville does sound promising,” the Colonel said.
Kite sucked up the last of his Coke with a straw, pushed away his tray, rested his elbows on the table and leaned toward Millwed. “What's up?”
“We want you to find us someone.”
“Like the three I already found you? The one in Montana, the other one to hell and gone in Texas and the one with the ha-ha name way to fuck out in Wyoming? Twodees. Old Edd-with-two-ds Partain.”
Kite cocked his head to one side to study Millwed. The Colonel thought it made the detective look rather like a reasonably intelligent rat terrier.
“You and the General,” Kite was saying. “You and him must’ve made just one hell of a lot of enemies down there in Central America and wherever else the fuck you guys were.”
“We made all the right enemies, Emory,” said Millwed. “Which is as important as making all the right friends. The General and I think of you as a friend—although an expensive one.”
“I’m not all that expensive. Fact is, I’ve been kind of cheap.”
The Colonel reached into a pocket of his tweed jacket and brought out a slip of paper. After glancing at it, he said, “Since January of nineteen-ninety, your fees and expenses have amounted to $231,373. All cash. And all, I trust, unreported to the IRS.”
The Colonel produced an old Zippo and set fire to the slip of paper. He looked around for an ashtray, but finding none, dropped the burning slip into his coffee. Kite watched the paper burn, then drown and said, “If you guys think I cost too much, go take from somebody else.”
“I like it when you pretend to hurt feelings,” Millwed said. “It always reminds me of a sensitive scorpion.”
“The General and me used to kid back and forth like this,” Kite said. “Before he got to be a general.”
“You think I’m kidding?”
“I sure hope so, Ralphie,” Kite said, smiled his thin wide smile and asked, “So who d’you want me to find this time?” “Somebody to fix Partain.”
Kite nodded judiciously, curling the corners of his wide mouth down into small hooks. “When?” “We’ll let you know.” “How much you willing to spend?” “What's the going rate?”
“The going rate,” Kite said, spacing the words. “Well, I didn’t check the price list this morning, so I can’t give you an exact figure. But it's sort of like asking, How much does a house cost? You see, Ralphie, when you hire somebody who's in the business of doing what you want done, you’re dealing with the loose-wire crowd. It might be fifty thousand, five thousand or five hundred. Or the price can depend on if it rains or shines. Know what I’m saying?”
“You’re saying you’ll do it yourself for the right price.”
Kite's eyebrows formed two surprised arcs above the blue eyes that remained cool and amused. “Never crossed my mind.”
“Think about it,” the Colonel said. “You’ve got two minutes.”
“Your pal Twodees, huh?”
The Colonel nodded.
“He expecting it?”
“No.”
“You want it done right, of course. I mean, you don’t want some amateur job. You want it done by a pro who’ll be in and out but not so fast he don’t clean up after himself.”
“You to a T, Emory,” Colonel Millwed said.
“Maybe.”
“How much?”
“Fifty thousand—plus expenses,” Kite said. “Half in advance, half when it's done. That's the no-dicker price.”
The Colonel stared at him before he finally asked, “How’re things at VOMIT?”
“The usual.”
“The usual what?”
“The usual ‘Lordy, Lordy, look what they went and done now.’“ “Has Partain been back in touch with the Greek—Patrokis?” “Nope.” “You’re sure?”
“I’m there from nine to six, six days a week, practically sitting in Nick's lap. He's there from nine to nine, seven days a week. So what the fuck happens on Sunday I can’t say. But fa
r as I know, Nick's only talked to your friend Twodees twice since Christmas Day.”
“You were there Christmas?”
“Sure. It's one of my best days. Maybe the very best. You call up Christmas morning around seven or eight and tell the guy you’re on your way over for the pickup or the TV or the VCR or maybe even the stove and icebox, and that really puts the fear of God in him. He not only comes up with the cash, he even wants to bring it down to you.” Kite smiled at the Colonel. “Twodees went to work for her, didn’t he— out there in L.A.? For Millicent Altford?”
“Maybe.”
“That why you want him fixed?” “No.”
“Old scores, huh?”
“You don’t really need to know the why, Emory. Only the who.”
“And the how much?”
“I can okay the price.”
“So that just leaves the when, don’t it?”
The Colonel rose. “I’ll let you know.”
CHAPTER 7
Millicent Altford stared at the red carpet of her corner room for nearly a minute before she said,” ‘Sid Solo said for Jessie to tell her mother to cancel the hunt.’ “
The words had come out in the near monotone that some use for quoting or reading aloud. Altford now looked up at Edd Partain and asked in a normal voice, “Why isn’t Jessie telling me this?”
“Because she wouldn’t talk to Dave. So after some Percodan and beer, he told me.”
“What’d he need Percodan for—that scrap you all had?”
Partain nodded.
“You on Percodan?”
“I had a root canal three months ago. The dentist gave me a prescription for twelve Percodans. I have ten left.”
Altford nodded her approval of Partain's abstemious ways, then asked, “Could you please hand me my purse over there on the bed?”
Still on his feet after delivering his six-minute report, Partain crossed to the bed and picked up the large old brown Coach shoulder bag. After he handed it to the seated Altford, she removed a wallet,counted out twenty $100 bills, gave them to Partain and said, “Two weeks in advance.”