Reed Ferguson 1-3

by Renee Pawlish

  My phone rang, breaking me out of my reverie. It was Jack Healy.

  “Reed, I’m glad you’re there. Do you think you could meet me at Ned’s house?” His voice sounded like a tuning fork, ringing with apprehension. Or fear.

  “Sure,” I said, glancing at the clock. “What’s going on?”

  “I stopped by Ned’s house on my lunch hour, and it looks like the place has been broken into.”

  “I’ll be right over.”

  I hung up the phone, grabbed my keys and rushed out the door. I had just found something suspicious.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I assumed Jack must take an early lunch because when I drove up to Ned’s house in, it was barely after eleven and Jack was here instead of at work. I stepped out of my nice air-conditioned 4-runner and the summer heat hit me like a dry wave. As I walked up the drive past a blue Volvo, I took a good look at Ned’s house – it had neglect written all over it. Due to water restrictions in the metro area, most of the neighborhood lawns could’ve used a little more water, but Ned’s was like wheat bread, with just a few green patches that needed to be cut. It seemed even more rundown than the first time I was here. A few newspapers were strewn on the porch, and some flyers were stuck in the front screen door. The exterior desperately needed a coat of paint, a drainpipe was torn away from the house, the windows needed a washing, and dried-out rose bushes with wilted buds screamed for water. Jack opened the door as I approached.

  “Come on in.” He gathered up the newspapers and tossed them inside the door onto a growing stack. More neglect for Ned’s house. “Thanks for coming,” Jack said as I closed the door behind me.

  “Sure.” I stepped into the living room after Jack. A stale smell hit me, and the heat engulfed me like a stifling blanket as I glanced around. The house was so sparsely furnished I couldn’t tell if anything was disturbed. “Have you called the police?”

  He shook his head. “I wanted you to see things first.”

  “But what about prints, stuff like that?” I asked, even though I didn’t believe any would be found.

  “I don’t think they’re going to find anything,” Jack echoed my thoughts. “A back window was jimmied open. Nothing seems to have been taken, but someone rifled through his records. The file cabinet door was left open, and I’m positive I closed it when we left the other night.”

  “You’re sure nothing was taken?”

  “I think so. I guess I didn’t look that closely. I doubt if I’d notice a file or two missing anyway.”

  “Let’s call the police and report this,” I said. “No sense in messing up a potential crime scene.”

  Jack agreed and used his cell phone to report the break-in, then called his work to say he would be later than he first thought. When a police officer arrived, Jack explained that the house belonged to his deceased brother. The officer was not enthusiastic about finding a burglar, but he took a report, and asked if anything appeared to be missing. When Jack said he didn’t believe so, the officer said Jack shouldn’t keep his hopes up. With that, the officer left.

  “Now that I can touch things without contaminating a crime scene,” Jack said with light sarcasm, “let me open some windows.” He threw back the blinds of the living room window, and in seconds a slight breeze blew in, just enough that the fresher air from outside rejuvenated the inside air.

  “Where’s the goldfish?” I asked, noticing the empty spot where the tank once sat.

  “I took him home to my daughter. She’ll take good care of him.”

  I nodded, secretly pleased that the little guy had a home. He and I’d had a connection.

  “Let’s take a better look at Ned’s files, and make sure you don’t notice anything missing,” I said. “If someone wanted to see the files bad enough to break in, there might be something gone.”

  We headed down the narrow hall to the office. The tiny bedroom was just as stuffy as the rest of the house, so I took Jack’s lead and opened the window first thing. It helped a little.

  “Have you really checked all his real estate files?” I asked.

  “I started to. I examined the first few carefully, then thumbed through the rest, but it’s all just legalese to me.”

  I wasn’t sure it would be any different for me. I grabbed the handle of the top cabinet drawer. “Aren’t these files confidential?”

  Jack shrugged his shoulders. “You’re a detective. Can’t you bend the rules?”

  “Bend, yes. Break, no,” I said. If I don’t know what the rules are, is that breaking them? I thought. A philosopher in my own mind.

  Jack stared at me.

  “Oh hell.” I yanked open the drawer and perused the files, all neatly gathered in manila folders. Ned had alphabetized the files, so “Anderson” was the first in line. With as much enthusiasm as I could muster, I took the folder and sat down at the desk. The file was an inch thick, filled with all kinds of paperwork, forms for inspections, notices, and every other kind of documentation possible for the purchase of a house. My whole life didn’t have this much paperwork associated with it.

  “Why don’t I start at the end,” Jack said, grabbing a folder from the back of the drawer. He sat down on the floor and rested the paperwork on his lap.

  I rummaged in the desk drawers for a pad and paper, having left my standard, Hollywood detective-issued notepad at the office. I found a spiral notebook in the middle drawer with a bunch of pens, so now I was set.

  “Did you talk to Samantha?” Jack asked after a few minutes.

  “Uh- huh,” I said. “I got exactly nothing from her.”

  “She was a bitch, right?” he said. “I’ll bet she slammed the door on you.”

  “How did you guess?”

  The corners of his mouth twitched up as he tried to hide a smile. “She did it to me when I showed up to tell her about Ned. His death didn’t even faze her.”

  “No?” I looked up. “She wasn’t sad at all?”

  “No. She got mad at me, then ordered me to get off her property. Like I said, she hated Ned and she hates me.”

  I mulled that over, then turned back to the records I’d been reading. After ten minutes I was bored and having trouble focusing on the papers. I kept hearing a nearby dog bark with every passing car. A sprinkler started in a yard somewhere. I shifted in the chair. It squeaked loudly. I tried to concentrate. Five more minutes and the only thing written on the pad were some notes that Ned had written.

  I glanced at them, at first thinking I was reading a description of a sculpture of some kind, but then I realized that the notes described of all things an Oscar statuette, the famous Hollywood Academy Award:

  2- Karat bronze statue, gold-plated

  13” tall

  Weight: 6 ¾ lbs

  Base made of marble

  Statue stands on an 8-slotted movie reel

  What the heck were those notes doing along with his real estate notes? “Did Ned like the Oscars?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “He liked seeing movies, so maybe.”

  “Huh,” I tried to wrap my fingers around a sense of who Ned Healy was. All around his notes were doodles, numbers, an address, and, a bit oddly, I thought, a list of colors: blue, gray, white, yellow. Whenever he’d written that stuff he’d been as bored as I was right now. Or maybe he was playing some kind of trivia game.

  “I don’t have any idea what to look for,” Jack broke the silence.

  “I don’t know. A pattern. Numbers that don’t add up.” I couldn’t help feeling like I was wasting my time. A beer and a few games of pool sounded so much better.

  We managed the task for just over an hour. At that point, I’d been through more than a dozen files, and I felt like I would see real estate data in my dreams.

  “This is nuts,” I said, pushing paperwork across the desk. “We’ll never find anything this way.”

  Jack sighed. “You’re probably right. But what do we do?”

  I was tempted to say, “Maybe there’s a secr
et compartment, and if we push the right book on the shelf, a door will magically appear. Inside we’ll find what we’re looking for.” I resisted though, raking my hands through my hair in frustration. “If somebody did take a file, we wouldn’t know it.”

  “What if they just wanted information?”

  “We could spend all night looking at these files and not see what's missing, or incorrect,” I said, my frustration palpable. “I’ve got a better idea.” I turned to the computer and switched it on.

  “As long as Ned didn’t password protect anything, we can access the electronic files.”

  “How does that help us?”

  “I have a friend who might be able to tell if any of the files don’t look right.” The computer sang a jingle at us, and the desktop appeared. I didn’t notice anything that might be real-estate related, so I hit the start button. Under “Programs” I found what I was looking for. HousePro was in the list, the only one with a real estate reference in its name. I opened the program. A window opened with a list of documents. At the end were folders, labeled by year. Ned was more organized here than in his file cabinet.

  “There!” Jack leaned over and pointed at the screen. I glanced at him, wondering if he always pointed out the obvious.

  There were about twenty files. I opened one and saw that it was a standard contract, just like many of the ones we’d been reading. I still didn’t see anything fishy, but Cal might.

  Cal Whitmore was my best friend. He was also the Holmes to my Watson. Cal rarely left his home in the foothills west of Denver, preferring to work within the confines of his home office. He was the ultra computer geek, as well as an all-around genius. He’d know more about these files than I ever would.

  “I wonder if Ned’s Internet access is still working,” I muttered.

  “I haven’t cut the phone or cable or anything,” Jack said hopefully.

  “He must have cable or DSL. Something.” I didn’t care what, as long as I could email the files to Cal.

  I hit the icon for the Internet and sure enough, I found I was able to access the World Wide Web without any problems. In a couple of minutes, I had connected to my own email account.

  "I'm glad he didn't password protect this," I said.

  The safety freaks were death to detectives like me. Ah, the things that Bogie didn’t have to deal with.

  I pulled out my cell phone and hit a button, which automatically dialed Cal.

  “Yeah,” he said after two rings.

  “You have time to help me with something?” I asked.

  “What’s up?” Cal didn’t waste time with words.

  I explained what I needed.

  “Aren’t those files confidential?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, not wanting to discuss my rationale. “That’s never stopped you before.”

  He chuckled. “I guess I deserved that one.” The term hacker could’ve been invented for Cal, and I knew better than to ask what all he did on his computer. “Send the stuff over. You don’t know if the files are on the up-and-up or not?”

  “They probably are,” I said. “I’m stabbing in the dark.”

  “Okay. I’ve got some work to finish this afternoon before I can get to it. Give me until the morning.” I knew he’d spend all night if he had to. I didn't know how Cal managed to operate on so little sleep, let alone how he managed to figure out the things he did.

  “Thanks,” I said and hung up.

  “Who was that?” Jack asked.

  “A friend of mine. He’s a modern-day Sherlock Holmes. He knows everything about everything.”

  “I wish I could retain stuff like that,” Jack said.

  I nodded agreement while I set up the email and attached half of the files, and sent them off. No use taking the blame for Cal’s lack of sleep by making him look at all the files. If he was successful, I could send the rest of the files over. “He’ll take a look at them and see if anything looks fishy,” I said to Jack.

  He leaned on the edge of the desk. “Think he’ll find anything?”

  “You’d know better,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.” Burt Lancaster’s Swede couldn’t have said it better.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Cal let me down. It was actually early the next afternoon before he called me at my office.

  “I’m not sure what you wanted me to find,” he said when I answered the phone.

  “Nothing?” I asked. I honestly didn’t think he would unearth anything, but I was holding onto a sliver of hope. I was surprised at my disappointment.

  “Not nothing. But not much either.” I could hear the tapping sound of Cal typing on the keyboard. I pictured him, sitting at one of his many monitors in a room cramped with computers and computer equipment, discarded takeout boxes and trash lying around, a film of dust on everything but the precious electronic equipment. And since Cal was practically a computer himself, he fit right in. “Most of the files you sent were standard real estate files. I didn’t notice anything fishy with any of them.”

  “You said most.”

  “Right. There were two that struck me as a little weird. Not illegal, just odd.”

  “Odd how?”

  “One of the buyers had an unusually short time to back out of the deal. Typically, you build into a contract a clause where you’re able to back out, or cover yourself if you can’t sell your home first. And if you really want the new house, you make sure there’s plenty of time for you to sell off your old one first. Or you put in a contingency that says you have to sell your old home before you purchase the new one. One of the contracts doesn’t seem to do that.”

  “But that’s not illegal, right?” I asked.

  “No, just unusual.”

  “Which one?”

  “Wilson,” he said.

  “And the other unusual one?”

  “Owens.” I heard more tapping sounds. “On this one, everything looks fine, but there’s a whole list of items the buyer wanted changed after the house inspection. You usually don’t ask for too much, even in a buyer’s market. If you do, the seller can say no to the changes, and the contract is dead. Then, you wait until someone else is willing to pay more, or wants fewer changes. There’s more profit that way.”

  “So Ned’s buyer asked for too much, and the seller didn’t want to do that. Is that in the contract?”

  “Yeah. There’s a form voiding the contract because of the inspection. I’m emailing you both files now. On the Wilson contract, look at the time frame. It shows a period of only a couple of weeks for the sale. Pretty short, but again, not illegal.”

  “Why would someone do that?” I said, “other than to get out of the contract?”

  “Exactly. You need anything else, let me know.” Cal knew his role as my right-hand man, and that I’d probably be calling on him again.

  I checked my email, and the two files that he sent were waiting to be opened. Once I saved them on my hard drive, I opened the first one, for Bert and Amy Wilson.

  Bert and Amy – sounded like something out of Sesame Street, I thought with a chuckle.

  If Jack had read this file before, he apparently didn’t notice what Cal had. Not that I thought Jack would’ve, since he knew about as much about hokey real estate deals as a drunk knew about virgin drinks: they were out there, but you’d never seen them.

  I went to the page that Cal had said looked fishy and read through the text. He was right. I thought back to when I bought my condo, and how much time I wanted to get everything done. If I’d had a place to sell first, I would’ve needed that done before I bought the condo, and that could’ve taken a while. The time frame on the Wilson contract seemed a bit short, but that didn't make it illegal. So why do that?

  I found the name of the seller’s real estate agent: Eric Townsend. I looked up the name and called him. I got voice mail that said to leave a message, or if I wanted I could try Eric on his cell phone. Lest he miss a potential customer, I thought. I jotted down the number and dialed it.
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br />   Two rings and he picked up. “This is Eric.” I could hear static and road sounds in the background, indicating he was driving somewhere.

  “Eric, this is Sam Spade,” I said. One of Humphrey Bogart’s most famous roles was also my favorite nom de plume when I didn’t want to be me. “I was a friend of Ned Healy’s. I don’t know if you heard about him.”

  “Yes, that was unfortunate,” Eric said, although his tone didn’t match the sentiment. “I’ve worked with him on a deal or two.”

  “That’s what I’m calling about,” I said. “Trying to wrap up a few things with his estate, you know.” Eric uh-huhed on the other end like he was commiserating with me. “I was looking at the Wilson file. Bert and Amy?”

  “I know the one. That deal fell through.” Eric spoke in a high, squeaky voice, like an angry mouse.

  “I see that. I noticed that the time frame for them to sell their house was less than a month. Isn’t that a bit short?”

  The connection broke in and out, then I heard him say, “…can’t say what happened.”

  “What’s that?” I asked. “You don’t know what happened?”

  There was a long pause, filled with static hiss. “Who did you say you were?”

  “I’m a friend of Ned’s.” He was being cautious now. I knew I was losing him, and not just because of a bad connection. “I’m just trying to close out the Wilson file. Ned had a note on it, wanting to make sure the Wilsons were okay with how things turned out.”

  “Oh, is that all?” The edge left his voice. “I really shouldn’t be telling you this, but the Wilsons had changed their minds. They didn’t want to sell their home after all, so they left the time frame short.” Static cackled through the line.