Loyal Be Jack

by Robert Tarrant

  I admired the streaming sunlight and the woodland view through the large windows as I ascended the circular staircase to the office to retrieve my notes. I took two steps toward the desk, and the warm feelings that had been building inside me over the past couple of hours were dashed to pieces. The desk and credenza behind it had been ransacked. All the drawers had been dumped on the floor. Books had been pulled from the shelves, presumably searched, and cast aside. The office area looked as if a tornado had spun it twice and then dropped it back in place. I stood gazing at the scene when the most significant factor struck me. Benjamin’s notes, all fifteen file boxes full, were gone. It was impossible for me to know for certain, but I didn’t think anything else was missing. I shuffled through the debris on the floor, looking for the small pile of notes regarding Shifty that I had put in the desk drawer. They were gone. It was obvious that whoever did this came for one thing. Benjamin’s files.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I backed onto the top landing of the circular stairs and stood staring. My mind was racing. This was a crime scene. Don’t disturb it any more than you already have, Jack. I hadn’t noticed anything out of place in the remainder of the lodge when I was looking around for stray items of mine to pack. Someone had come here for the sole purpose of stealing Benjamin’s personal files. Who? Why? When? I could answer the when. Sometime between the time I left yesterday morning and when I returned today. Who and why. Those were the tough questions.

  I systematically walked through the entire lodge and visually scanned every room. Nothing seemed the least bit out of place. Nothing seemed to be missing. Katharine’s laptop was still sitting on the bureau where she had left it two days ago. This was no ordinary break-in. Whoever was here had only one objective, and they were very thorough, but disciplined, in accomplishing it. If I hadn’t gone upstairs, I would have never known they were here.

  To further my cursory investigation, I looked first at the door I’d entered and then at the only other exterior door in the lodge, the one in the lower level game room. Neither showed any signs of forced entry, at least none that I could detect. I walked outside and looked at the parking area and the driveway leading in. With the traffic of Katharine and I coming and going the past few days and the frequent rainstorms, I couldn’t really discern anything from the numerous sets of vehicle tracks. I looked in all of the outbuildings, but just as with the majority of the lodge, nothing seemed out of place. No, this was a surgical strike. Benjamin’s files had been the sole target.

  I retrieved my suitcase from the lodge and placed it in the trunk of the car. I started the car, but lost in thought, just sat staring at the lodge. Whoever took the files must have had a sizable vehicle. A pickup truck with a topper over the box or a cargo van would be needed to transport the fifteen file storage boxes. They must have known the size of the load and come prepared. Who would be concerned about the contents of the files, and who would have known how many there were? The first name that popped into my head was Eric Russell, the guy who was accused of having his wife murdered. If not Russell, maybe the actual hit man. Yet how would either of those guys even know that the files existed? How would they know that the files were here or how many boxes there were? No, Russell just didn’t fit. Then I remembered something an old detective had told me once, “Never eliminate suspects or theories. Investigate them, and they will eliminate themselves if they are not valid.” Okay, I’ll leave Russell and his unknown hit man on my suspect list.

  The next name that occurred to me was Turner Kennedy. He told me he wanted the files back, even threatened legal action. He certainly would have known from his staff how many boxes were taken from the firm. Would he stoop to illegal action? Of course, he could argue his actions were not illegal because the element of larceny — taking someone else’s property — was missing because he was reclaiming property that was rightfully his, his firm’s. Given the circumstances of the disputed ownership of the property and Kennedy’s stature in the legal community, I doubted that the local prosecutor would ever bring criminal charges. Russell might remain on my suspect list, but Kennedy was now number one.

  Then Shifty came to mind. The files certainly contained disparaging comments about Shifty and information that could even potentially open a criminal investigation, although I wasn’t certain that the statute of limitations hadn’t run out on the events alluded to in the notes. Still, how would Shifty even know that the notes existed, much less where they were? No, Shifty might warrant inclusion on my suspect list, but Kennedy was still at the top.

  Like a bolt of lightning on a clear summer day, the thought struck me that the theft of the files and Katharine’s abduction might somehow be related. But how? If she was taken to be used as leverage to obtain the files, why hadn’t the kidnappers demanded them as ransom? Why demand fifty-thousand dollars and never mention the files? Maybe it was just a coincidence that while I was out chasing the ransom money, the files were stolen. Then I remembered what Justin once told me about his disbelief in coincidence. I knew I was far too tired to let my mind engage in the mental gymnastics of debating random events, the hand of God, or any of the other theories used to explain coincidence. I decided to follow the advice of the old detective and leave the potential relationship of Katharine’s abduction and the theft of the files on the list of theories and see where the facts took me.

  Okay, Jack, you’ve gone through the mental gymnastics, what are you going to actually do? The simple answer would be to report the theft of the files to the police. Yet the situation was far from simple. Katharine was adamant that she didn’t want the police involved in her abduction. How could I report the theft without explaining what I was doing here and why I was gone for over twenty-four hours? Once I started telling lies to the police, or even withholding material information, I would definitely be exposing myself to criminal liabilities. That was not a situation I wanted to find myself in. No, Katharine needed to agree to involve the police in both her kidnapping and the theft of Benjamin’s files. Actually, Benjamin’s files may technically be Katharine’s property now. I would expect that she’s the sole heir of all of his personal property. I guess it should really be her decision whether to report the theft or not. Katharine was key. I decided to begin the trip downstate.

  Driving out, I had decided not to alert Andy and Sharon that I was leaving. I didn’t want them to come to the lodge, find the mess upstairs, and call the police themselves. As I was passing through Vanderbilt on my way to I-75, I remembered my promise to stop and see Gunny. I considered skipping the stop but remembered how unselfishly he had jumped in to help me. The least I could do was stop in to say goodbye.

  I pulled into the Buck Pole and parked in the nearly empty parking lot. A couple of pickups pulled in as I was getting out of the car and joined the two that were already there. It was 11:30 a.m. The lunch crowd must be starting to arrive. When I entered, I saw Gunny in his usual spot behind the bar. The young woman behind the bar with him looked up and gave me a wan smile.

  Gunny spotted me and waved. “Hey, Jack, come on down here.” He gestured toward the empty seats at the far end of the bar. As I took a stool, he hopped up on the one next to me and called out to the woman, “Sheryl, we’ll have a couple of big Blues.” I wasn’t really intending to have a drink before I started my drive downstate but couldn’t think of a polite way to decline. After Sheryl set the beers in front of us and returned to the other end of the bar, Gunny said, “So, tell me the whole story again, Jack. It seems amazing that they just released her without the money.”

  I again recounted the story from the time I’d received the ransom demand while at his apartment until Katharine’s call early this morning. When I finished, Gunny grinned and said, “Damn. You’re the kind of friend I want. A guy who can lay his hands on fifty-thousand dollars in cash in a relatively few hours. You’re a good kind of guy to have around. Ever think about relocating to northern Michigan?”

  “Hey, buddy, even a blind squirrel finds a nu
t once in a while.”

  “Sure, okay, whatever the hell that means.”

  Now it was my turn to laugh. “Oh, just something my mother always says when things work out and surprise you.”

  I didn’t mention the break-in at the lodge and the missing files. I felt guilty not sharing that development with Gunny. He had certainly made every effort to help me obtain Katharine’s safe return, and I was feeling more and more like the two events were related, but I didn’t see how I could talk about the files without telling him what they were, and that felt like it would be a violation of Benjamin’s confidentiality.

  Gunny convinced me to have a burger while we continued to talk. I actually didn’t need much convincing since it seemed like a good alternative to the drive-thru burger I would have ended up grabbing on the trip downstate. While we were joking about our ill-fated mission to rescue Katharine, I asked Gunny where Buzz, Hound Dog, and Ironhead got their nicknames. He said that he didn’t know the origin of Buzz, but that Hound Dog was from the fact that people said he was as horny as an old hound dog. Ironhead, Gunny said, went clear back to his high school football days when he played fullback and was known for just lowering his head and barreling into the opposing line.

  Once Gunny started talking football his entire demeanor changed. He was always a friendly guy but in a reserved way. When football was the topic, his face lit up, and he became overtly animated. It was obvious that he loved the game of football. He told me he had been an assistant coach for the high school team when he first retired from the Marine Corps. He talked with a genuine fondness of the young men he had coached and told stories of games in such detail that they bordered on becoming tedious. I like football as much as the next guy, but Gunny truly loved the game. A couple of times he had me laughing so hard, it brought tears to my eyes. At one point, after he had referred to a player by some outlandish nickname that had been bestowed on him by his teammates, we began recounting football nicknames from the pros. Going back and forth we cited, “Broadway Joe,” “The Diesel,” “White Shoes,” “Night Train,” “The Sheriff,” “The Refrigerator,” “A-Train,” “Deacon,” “Johnny Football,” “Cool Brees,” “The Bus,” “Easy E,” “The Gunslinger,” and dozens of others. I challenged Gunny on a couple that I had never heard of, but he replied with names and a chronology of both their college and professional careers. The man was a walking encyclopedia of football facts. Had it not been for this one simple conversation, I would never have known about Gunny’s passion for football and those who played it. Most of those we meet in life are entities more unknown than known.

  After we finished eating, Gunny attempted to cajole me into having a second schooner of beer. I was really tempted, feeling more relaxed and having more fun than I could recall since before the hurricane and certainly since I had journeyed back to Michigan to see Benjamin. Still, I knew I needed to drive south and see Katharine. I needed to return to reality. At least reality as I knew it at the time. I reached for my wallet, but Gunny refused to allow me to pay. His only request was that I write down the address of Cap’s Place and expect to see him bursting through the front door sometime in the future. In our conversations about our bars, I had never mentioned the hurricane damage Cap’s Place had sustained and my current state of indecision about the future. When I said, “Hope to see you there,” it carried a double meaning.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I don’t know if it was the large schooner of beer or the lively conversation with Gunny, but I felt energized as I entered I-75 and headed south. As I had been since arriving in northern Michigan, I was mindful that at this time of year the whitetail deer, which bring hordes of hunters from the comfort of their easy chairs and out into the woods, were well into their mating season, the rut. Bucks and the does they are chasing will bound across a highway without the slightest hesitation. Hitting a 150-pound deer at seventy miles per hour can really ruin your day.

  My loose plan had been to just show up at Katharine’s house in Bloomfield Hills. I wanted to learn what had gone on during her abduction. Why she’d been released without the ransom being paid. With all of the grief I had gone through in attempting to meet the kidnapper’s demands, I felt that I was owed some explanation. I was afraid that if I called her first, she would refuse my visit, and I really wanted some answers. I remembered PJ telling me that it was much more difficult for people to refuse to talk with you when you’re standing on their doorstep than if you’re on the telephone. Besides, I needed to tell Katharine about the break-in at the lodge, and for some undefined reason, I wanted to see the look on her face when I told her.

  The only problem with my plan was that I didn’t know what her home address was. I decided to call the number she had called me from this morning. She had said that Doctor Phil was with her, so I guessed that it was his phone. The ex-husband getting a woman’s home address from her current fiancé could prove challenging, but I was feeling more and more comfortable with my skills at lying. My guess proved correct when the number I called went to a voicemail message. “You have reached the cell phone of Doctor Phillip Reynolds. At the tone, leave a message and the phone number you would like to be reached at, and I will return your call at my earliest opportunity.”

  “Hi, Doctor Reynolds, this is Jack Nolan calling. I was hoping to learn how Katharine is feeling. Please call me back at your first opportunity. Thank you.” I repeated my number twice so that he couldn’t say he didn’t have it even though any moron could find it on the received calls list on your phone. My plan was that when he returned my call and told me Katharine was still resting and unavailable to talk, I would casually ask for her address so that I could send her flowers. He would have to admit that he was an insecure jerk to deny that request. I doubted that he was insecure and was confident he wouldn’t want me thinking that was the case.

  As I drove on, my mind drifted back to today’s banter with Gunny. I kept recalling how animated he became talking football. A thread of pride ran through each story he told about the kids he’d coached in high school. Pride, not in himself, but in the young men the players had become, in part as a result of their experiences through football. Gunny remarked that, in his opinion, football was the next best thing to the military for developing character in young men. Having never played football nor been in the military, I couldn’t offer much of an opinion.

  I caught myself laughing out loud when I recalled some of the stories. One of the funniest involved Ironhead. Thinking of Ironhead led me to think of the list of football nicknames Gunny and I had debated. Then, with the force of someone slapping me across the face, it occurred to me that Shifty might be a football nickname. After all, a shift is when an offensive player changes from one position to another before the ball is snapped. Couldn’t a player acquire the nickname Shifty? Maybe it was just the result of Gunny and I spending so much time talking football nicknames, but it seemed like a viable possibility.

  I pulled into the rest area on I-75 just outside of Bay City. I went to the internet on my phone and began to research football nicknames in the state of Michigan. It became immediately apparent to me that the small screen of my phone wasn’t adequate for this type of inquiry. I switched my search to find the nearest public library. I had to backtrack a few miles, but twenty-five minutes later, I found myself in front of the Alice and Jack Wirt Public Library. My guess was that Alice and Jack were local philanthropists and the library was one of their beneficiaries. The building was a stately structure of limestone and brick. Inside I quickly found the computer lab and completed the necessary sign-in process.

  My first efforts querying football nicknames in Michigan turned up copious amounts of information about University of Michigan players. As a Michigan State University alum, I found this drivel useless, although I did force myself to carefully consider the material just in case Shifty had been a Wolverine. I continued to refine my search terms but still had to fight not to allow myself to sink into ratholes of sports trivia. I was begin
ning to understand why large portions of the populations of technologically advanced countries had disappeared from the fabric of society.

  Internet research may be the greatest time suck ever created. At least that was my opinion until I entered “nicknamed Shifty from his football days.” Suddenly, I struck pay dirt. A biographical article published a few years earlier in the Detroit Free Press detailed the early life of a high school football player who had been nicknamed Shifty as a result of his success as a running back in offensive formations that regularly utilized a backfield shift. Shifty had gone on to play college football at Central Michigan University, but with moderate success. Shifty had found his calling when he ran for public office and ultimately rose to the position of governor. For obvious reasons, Robert Armstrong had dropped the nickname Shifty when he entered politics. Vote for Shifty probably wouldn’t resonate with the electorate, even by today’s standards.

  I read and reread the article. Could Governor Armstrong be the Shifty of Benjamin’s notes? How could he not be? Benjamin had represented Armstrong in business dealings for years. I recalled that Armstrong had even wanted Benjamin to be legal counsel to the governor during his first term, but Benjamin wasn’t willing to take the extraordinary reduction in income that would have resulted. At least, that’s what Katharine had told me at the time. I attempted to recall the timeline of the allegations against Shifty, but without access to the files, I couldn’t be certain. The best I could recall from the dates that had been written on the storage boxes, the last mention of Shifty had been approximately ten years ago. I had no idea when the first mention had appeared. My best guess was that it was nearly three decades ago. The more I concentrated on attempting to remember the notes about Shifty and their relative position with the remainder of the material, the more confused I became.