The Midnight Plan of the Repo Man

by W. Bruce Cameron

  “What about you, though? Did you get compensated?”

  Burby’s eyes lost some of their softness. “What’s this about, Mr. McCann?”

  “I had a family member buried in the old cemetery,” I lied.

  “Oh? Who?”

  “How much were the families compensated?” I parried.

  He regarded me for several long seconds. “In the thousand-dollar range,” he finally stated quietly. “May I inquire who it was you were related to?”

  “Alan Lottner.”

  No amount of practice could have prevented the wild look from passing through his eyes then. “That’s … impossible,” he whispered.

  I took a step forward and was rewarded when Burby took a fearful step back, tilting his head up to stare at me. “Why do you say that, Nathan? Why’s that impossible?”

  “I know the family,” he stuttered. “No one has ever mentioned…” He gestured toward me.

  “I had a whole group of cousins in Wisconsin,” Alan advised me.

  “I’m from Wisconsin,” I explained. “Alan had a whole group of us cousins up there. All good runners.”

  “Runners?” Burby repeated helplessly.

  “So is Alan Lottner buried here? Did you move his body from the old cemetery?”

  That one took a while for him to process, but when Burby spoke next he had rediscovered his gift for imperturbability. “Actually, no. I don’t know what you’ve been told, but your cousin left town without a word. After several years, he was declared dead, and his ex-wife and daughter had a service for him here. We placed a memorial headstone on the grounds in a very nice area, if you would like to see it.”

  “What does he mean, ex-wife?” Alan demanded indignantly. “We weren’t divorced!”

  “I’m confused about something. You said ‘ex-wife.’ I don’t remember Alan being divorced.”

  “Ah, well, after he disappeared, his wife…” Burby spread his hands, hating to deliver unpleasant news. “It was a simple case of abandonment.”

  “What about Kathy? Does she still live here?” Alan asked.

  “Does the family still live here?” I pressed.

  “Yes,” Burby answered reluctantly. “They are both living in East Jordan.”

  “Where? Ask him where!” Alan implored.

  I was more interested in a different subject. “So you sold the cemetery to the factory. That must have made you a lot of money.”

  “Actually, no, that’s not right. Burby’s operated under a nonexclusive lease to the city of East Jordan. The city sold the land. Burby’s surrendered lease rights in exchange for the deed to the property here.”

  There was something about that last statement that rang false for me, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I pushed in a slightly different direction. “Well that must have saved you a bundle, not having to make those lease payments to the city.”

  Burby chuckled, but there was no humor in his eyes. “Hardly. Our lease formerly cost us a dollar a year. This new arrangement subjects us to property taxes.”

  “What does this have to do with anything?” Alan asked churlishly.

  “May I ask why you are so interested in these matters?” Burby inquired, essentially asking the same thing. Maybe I should just shut up and let the two of them talk to each other.

  “I’m just trying to understand. So the factory is on land formerly owned by the city?”

  “Yes. Well no, not entirely,” Burby admitted reluctantly. “Most of the parcel was a ranch belonging to a local family. The city land was less than a quarter of the total.”

  Far more interesting than his answer was his uneasy expression. In better lighting, I might have seen sweat on his shiny, toupeeless head. “What was the name of that family?”

  “I really don’t recall,” he replied uncomfortably. “Mr. McCann, does any of this matter? Shall I show you where Alan Lottner’s memorial is placed?”

  “So you got paid to move every body? That must have amounted to a lot of money,” I speculated.

  Burby had had it with me. “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

  “Oh, just wondering if it wouldn’t be a good idea to open a cemetery in Minneapolis,” I joked.

  “Wisconsin!” Alan corrected.

  “Wisconsin. The funeral business pay pretty well?”

  “I’d like you to leave, Mr. McCann.” He made as if to nudge me forward, but someone Burby’s size can’t budge a bar bouncer without help, and I didn’t move. We were now standing almost intimately close, like dancers, and I leaned down to murmur in his ear, the way Alan’s voice sounded to me. “Man doing well like you, must own a second place, maybe on the lake?”

  “Please. I’ve answered all your questions.”

  “What about on the Jordan River?”

  Burby looked truly puzzled.

  “Ruddy…,” Alan warned faintly.

  “Be nice to own a piece of property on the Jordan River someday, wouldn’t it? Beautiful in the autumn. You ever go up there, take a look at a piece of land on the Jordan, some autumn afternoon?”

  Burby’s expression was slack and empty, trying to cope with the implications of what I was asking him. I slapped him on the shoulder and he flinched. I liked that. “Hey, just making conversation. Listen, I’ll come back some other time to check out where Alan’s buried.” I turned to leave.

  “Well, no, actually, he’s not buried here. As I explained, it is a memorial.”

  “Oh?” I turned back. “Where is he buried, then, Nathan?”

  We looked at each other for an open and honest moment before Burby decided he must be reading too much into this whole thing and relaxed. “From what I understand, no trace of him was ever found.”

  “Is that so.” I nodded pleasantly and walked out the door.

  “I can’t believe you did that!” Alan fretted as I drove away. “Why did you ask him about the Jordan River property, and where I was buried?”

  I waited to answer until I had driven out of eyeshot of Burby. “Why not? What did you want me to do?”

  “But now he knows we’re suspicious!”

  “No, now he knows I’m suspicious. And so what?”

  “I don’t know, I just … you’re just so different than me, I would never confront someone directly like that.”

  “You think that was direct? That wasn’t direct. If I had confronted him directly he’d be in the hospital right about now.”

  Alan ruminated for a few moments. “There was something strange there, at the end, when you asked him about the land.”

  “He was lying. Something about the ranch, I don’t know what it is, but it made him nervous. I’ve seen the same expression on people’s faces when they tell me they don’t know where their car is.”

  I realized I was grinning. Whatever doubts had remained were gone now: Alan Lottner had been a real person, he was a real person, and I’d just shaken hands with his killer. I wasn’t crazy.

  My smile faded when I thought about Katie. I might not be crazy but I wasn’t exactly without problems. The first woman in a decade to make my pulse race, and I had her father trapped inside my head.

  I tried to picture telling Alan that I knew his daughter, and how I knew her, and found myself almost shivering with dread. I could not think of a single reason to talk to him about it. Ever.

  The East Jordan library was still open. I started flipping through back issues of the Charlevoix Courier on the microfiche, irritated that Alan couldn’t remember the date of his appointment to show the property on the Jordan River. “It was the date you died, how could you forget something like that?” I challenged peevishly. A woman at a table within earshot gave me an alarmed look, and I smiled weakly.

  “I don’t know, it’s not like me to forget. But it’s erased, I really can’t … the past few months, I mean, the months before I went out there, are all blurred, like I was drugged. I can’t remember anything.”

  “Well, you can bet that when I die, I’ll pay attention,” I
grumbled.

  Screaming headlines from the winter after Alan vanished caught my eye. 32 DIE IN EXPLOSION. “Oh yeah, I remember this,” I muttered.

  “I hate this. You read at a different speed than I do. I can’t … it makes me a little sick,” Alan grunted.

  I bristled. “Are you saying I read more slowly than you?”

  He didn’t reply.

  “Come on,” I pressed, “that’s what you’re implying, right? I’m a big dumb jock who moves his lips while he reads.” The woman at the other table glanced at me again—I was moving my lips while I read.

  “I don’t think it matters which one of us reads more slowly,” Alan proclaimed haughtily.

  “Ha! So I am faster!”

  “You’re so competitive.”

  “And you’re such a snob! It really burns you to admit a football player reads faster than you do, doesn’t it?”

  When he didn’t answer I turned triumphantly back to the microfiche. “It was a firebomb that killed all those people,” I recalled after a moment, glancing through the story. “An explosion in the basement of a nursing home, and all the residents there died. It was deliberate, and I don’t think they ever found a motive for whoever did it. Just somebody out to kill off a bunch of local old people, plus I think a couple of nurses.”

  “Do you think it had something to do with me?” Alan asked.

  “Is that some sort of gentle reminder that we’re not here to catch up on old news?”

  “I am just trying to understand where the investigation is taking us.”

  “Is that what this is, an investigation? Hey, here we are.” I pointed to the story: LOCAL MAN MISSING.

  Alan Lottner, 41, of East Jordan, failed to return home from work on Oct. 11th, according to his wife, Marget. A Realtor, Lottner often works long hours, so she was not alarmed when she went to bed on the 11th and Alan still wasn’t home. “But when I woke up the next morning and he was still gone, he’s never done that before,” she stated. Authorities are asking local residents to be on the lookout for Lottner’s automobile, a green late model Olds 98 Station Wagon, license BA 113 08.

  Two photographs accompanied the story, and for the first time I got a look at Alan Lottner. The top photo was obviously from his real estate brochure—coat and tie, a fatuous grin, professionally lit background. Alan’s hair was short and curly, his eyes dark, his teeth even and, I assumed, well flossed.

  In the second picture he was standing on some steps, one hand reaching out of frame, probably holding onto his daughter, who had been cropped out of the shot. His pants were creased, his polo shirt pressed, probably underneath it all his boxers were ironed as well. I could see why a couple of ice fishermen might think he dressed funny.

  “October eleventh,” I noted for the record.

  A week later another story surfaced.

  STILL NO SIGN OF LOCAL MAN, MISSING SINCE 11-OCT.

  This one was pretty brief, with little to say other than the fact that the local authorities were investigating the possibility of foul play but had no leads.

  That was it. Flipping forward through the days on the microfiche eventually brought me to the stories about the nursing home bombing, the worst crime in the history of the area. “I lived here for eighteen years, and when I was killed I got less coverage than a story about some kids spray-painting a trash Dumpster behind Glen’s Market,” Alan groused.

  We left the library and headed back to Kalkaska. “But they didn’t know you were killed, Alan,” I pointed out. “They just thought you took off. Lots of guys do stuff like that.”

  “I wonder … I wonder what Marget told them.”

  “Told who?”

  “The police.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well look, we weren’t getting along very well. Marget was sleeping in the spare bedroom. She’d gotten so cold toward me. We really didn’t have much to say to each other. We’d talked about divorce, you know, like maybe that would be the best thing. If she told the police that, maybe they wouldn’t look very hard for me.”

  “That makes sense,” I admitted.

  “But I would never leave Kathy. It’s crazy to think I would just get in the Oldsmobile and drive off and leave everything: my business, my clothes, and especially my daughter, just because Marget and I were not getting along. It’s stupid,” he complained bitterly.

  I watched the road. It was a dark, moonless night, my headlights carving out a bright tunnel between the ridges of snow that lined both sides of the highway. Down there at the bottom was the snow that first fell in November—it would be the last to melt away.

  “You believe me now, don’t you, Ruddy? I’m not a figment of your imagination. Maybe it made sense that you had a bad dream and then got a voice in your head, but not after what we heard tonight. You know something’s not right, here. Burby, you recognized him, and you know he’s lying. And the newspaper. You didn’t imagine that.” Alan sounded plaintive and insecure.

  “No. You’re right. I didn’t create you out of my imagination. You lived, you sold real estate, you ironed your pants.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’ve just never seen so many creases on a living person. You looked like you could give someone a paper cut.”

  Alan lapsed into a moody silence, and a few minutes later went to sleep.

  The inside of the Black Bear was even quieter than the East Jordan Library had been. I slid up to the bar, massaging my thighs. You know you’re getting old when you’re sore from just driving your truck. “Hey, Becky,” I called.

  I took over for my sister at the bar, and heard her chatting on the telephone in the back room. Alan woke up and, after I swept my eyes around the nearly empty room so he’d get his bearings, asked to know where everybody was. I told him we were in Kalkaska—this was everybody.

  Becky came back and slid up on the stool in front of me in a way I could tell meant she wanted to talk. “So Kermit told me he told you about this business deal he has,” she began.

  “He did?”

  “Yeah, you know, the one about the credit card thing.”

  “Oh, yeah. Swipe or nonswipe.”

  “Right.” She looked at me seriously. “We could make a lot of money, Ruddy.”

  I reached behind her for a beer, changed my mind and made it a glass of diet soda. “Becky, he wants us to run credit card numbers through our machine, here. Doesn’t that strike you as being illegal somehow?”

  She shook her head forcefully, her eyes sparking. I was a little taken aback: Becky never argued with me, never argued with anything, just accepted her fate with weary resignation. Something was happening to her. Could it be that Kermit Kramer, the worst repo man on the planet, with a criminally misaligned vocabulary, was responsible? “Kermit explained it all,” she said, confirming my suspicions. “His customer is an audiotext business.”

  “A what?”

  “Audiotext. You know, information and entertainment over the telephone. They take credit card numbers and give readings.”

  “Readings. They read to people?”

  “No.” She stroked a hand through her listless black hair, and the eyes behind her glasses looked unhappy to have to explain it to me. “Readings. From cards.”

  I processed this without comprehension. “Tarot cards,” Alan suggested helpfully.

  “Tarot cards? You mean, like psychic readings? Those people that advertise during the Tarzan movies in the middle of the night?”

  She frowned. “There are Tarzan movies in the middle of the night?”

  “Becky, what are we talking about here?”

  She took a deep breath, preparing to be patient. “To get a nonswipe account, which is what you need so you can take credit cards over the phone, you have to be in business for a few years. But you can’t be in business for a few years doing readings over the phone if you can’t take credit cards! So Kermit knows this guy who has this business, and he is willing to pay thirteen percent off the top
to anyone who will cash the card numbers his customers give him.”

  “If this guy is psychic, why does he need Kermit? He should be here himself right now, because he knows we’re talking about him.”

  “Ruddy, please. Listen to me.” Becky leaned forward. “We owe everybody in town. The money you make isn’t enough to keep the doors open. We can’t go on this way. We’ve been cut off from two suppliers, and the bank says no more.”

  “But … I just gave you a thousand,” I protested, reminding myself that $750 of it was an advance from Milt. Losing Einstein’s truck meant I was back in the hole on that one, since we couldn’t very well collect our fee from the bank twice.

  “That just kept us open for this month! What are we going to do when we need another thousand in three weeks?”

  I shook my head stubbornly. “This always happens this time of year. Another month or so and repos will pick up, business in the Bear will pick up, we’ll be fine.”

  “No, Ruddy, we will not be fine. We lose money every year.”

  I stared at her. “Milton would loan—”

  “That’s not a solution! You hear me? Are you even listening? You can’t borrow your way out of a losing business. Something has to change.” Her lips pressed together, trembling. “We’re going to lose the Black Bear, Ruddy.”

  Even though any idiot could have seen them coming, her words still hit me so hard they knocked me back two decades, when our folks were alive and the Black Bear was a second home to us. Becky and I would play in the boxes in the storeroom and help Mom scrub the floors every morning. Dad had his buddies from the cannery swarming at one end of the bar, and at Christmas we put a Santa suit on Bob the Bear and piled presents at his feet. We couldn’t lose the bar. I’d lost everything else in my life, but I would never let the Black Bear pass out of the McCann family.

  “I’ll sell the house,” I decided abruptly.

  “Oh, Ruddy.”

  “It’s worth fifty, maybe more. Depends on what is going on with the zoning. Free and clear. I’ll put the money into the Bear.”