American PI

by Jude Hardin

  Fair skin, strawberry blond hair.

  “Is there a problem?” she said.

  “Actually, there is. Can we sit down?”

  “I’m really busy, sir. If there’s something I can help you with—”

  “Where’s Everett Harbaugh?” I said.

  “Sir?”

  “I didn’t stutter. Where’s Everett?”

  “Are you a police officer?”

  “Private investigator.”

  I handed her a business card. She took it and looked at it.

  “Everett and I aren’t seeing each other anymore, so I couldn’t tell you where he is. I assume he’s in class right now, and that he’ll be back at the PEAK house later this afternoon. Otherwise, I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “He’s not in class,” I said. “And he won’t be back at the fraternity house later this afternoon. Everett has been missing since yesterday. I think he might have been abducted. In fact, I’m almost sure of it. His father hired me to look for him.”

  She looked genuinely surprised. Either she was the best actress in the world, or she had nothing to do with Everett’s disappearance.

  A man and a woman and four children walked in and stepped up to the counter.

  “Come on back to my office,” Shelby said.

  She led me through the swinging door and past the walk-in refrigerator to a room you could have boxed up and hauled with a pickup truck. There was an outdated computer and printer and a small square Plexiglas window with a view of the grill area and the front counter.

  I banged my knees on the front of Shelby’s desk as I wedged myself into the cramped little space and sat across from her.

  “Now I know how the Apollo astronauts felt,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Never mind. It was before your time. Mind if I smoke?”

  She pointed to a sign tacked to the wall. It was partially obscured by an employee schedule, a greasy receipt from a meat vendor, and a postcard from a dentist’s office, reminding her that she had a cleaning scheduled for Friday afternoon at four o’clock. The sign behind all that stuff said NO SMOKING, and there was a smoldering cigarette with a fat red circle drawn around it and a fat red line drawn through it. I pulled my fat red pack of Marlboros out of my shirt pocket and lit one anyway.

  Shelby coughed. She was obviously annoyed, but she didn’t try to make me put it out. She picked up a pencil and started tapping it on the desk.

  “So let me get this straight,” she said. “You think I kidnapped Everett?”

  “Rumor has it that the two of you were involved in the sales and distribution of illegal substances,” I lied.

  Shelby laughed. “That’s absurd. I don’t even drink alcohol. Everett might take a hit on a joint at a party sometimes, but that’s about it. We’re not selling drugs, Mr. Colt. I can promise you that.”

  “Okay. Like I said, just a rumor. But a very reliable source told me something else that was rather disturbing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That you weren’t handling the breakup very well. That you were stalking Everett.”

  “Another lie,” Shelby said.

  “Is it? I’m sure I could gather some witnesses to corroborate what my very reliable source told me. Then I could gather some copies of Everett’s cell phone statements and—”

  “All right,” she said. “Maybe I went a little overboard on the phone calls and all, but I would never do anything to intentionally hurt Everett Harbaugh. I’m in love with him.”

  “You’re not in love with him,” I said. “You’re obsessed with him. There’s a big difference. You want to own Everett. You want to possess him. And if you can’t have him, nobody can. Is that how it is? Am I nailing it so far?”

  She shook her head. “You’re insane,” she said. “Get out of my office before I call the cops.”

  I held my cigarette over a Styrofoam coffee cup that had probably been on the desk since dawn. I flicked the filter with my thumb. The hot ash sizzled when it hit the bottom of the cup.

  “I don’t think you’re going to call the cops,” I said. “I think that’s the last thing you want to do. There are laws against stalking in the state of Florida. If you call the cops, there’s a good chance you’ll be led out of this office in handcuffs. It’s no fun to be arrested, Shelby. It’s a hassle. It’ll be in the newspaper, so all your friends and family members will get to see what a bad girl you’ve been. And, when word gets around, I’m sure the owner of this fine establishment you work for won’t be very happy to hear about it either. So go ahead and call. I dare you.”

  She started to reach for the phone, but then thought better of it. She laced her hands together and held them in front of her.

  “What do you want from me?” she said.

  “I know you were following Everett around, even before he broke up with you. You couldn’t help yourself. You had to know where he was and who he was with and what he was doing every minute of every day. I want you to write out a list of all those places you followed him to. I want to know every location he’s been to since the two of you started dating. I want to know where he hangs out to drink with his buddies, and I want to know which dry cleaner he goes to. I want to know where he buys gasoline for his car. His favorite pizza joint. Where he studies. Where he goes when he wants to be alone with his thoughts. Everything. How about it, Shelby? Can you do that for me? Can you make a list?”

  “It’ll take a while,” she said. “But I guess I could do that.”

  “Good. I’m going to drive around and find a place to watch the baseball game. I’ll be back here at seven-thirty this evening. That should give you plenty of time. Okay?”

  She looked deflated and defeated, which was exactly the way I wanted her to look.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Also, I accidentally dribbled some ketchup and Big Woofa sauce on the table where I was eating. I want you to go out there and wipe it up.”

  “I’ll get someone to take care of it.”

  “No,” I said. “I want you to go out there and wipe it up.”

  “All right.”

  I dropped my cigarette into the empty Styrofoam cup, opened the door and walked away. On the way out, I stopped by the table where I’d eaten and grabbed my newspaper. I still hadn’t read the funnies.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I’d been successful in bullying the bully, and I felt good about that.

  I chose a direction on College Avenue and stopped at the first bar I saw. I walked inside and ordered a beer. The game hadn’t started yet, so I walked over to the pool tables and paid for an hour and racked a set of balls. I rolled a few cue sticks on the table, finally found one that wasn’t warped, and started hitting balls into pockets.

  When I play tournaments, or with Joe Crawford at Kelly’s on Thursday nights, I use my own stick, a very expensive Balabushka replica. It was a gift from Papa Fell, and it’s one of my most prized possessions. I don’t usually leave it in my Jimmy, so I didn’t have it with me. Still, it only took me about three minutes to knock all the balls in. I was pulling them out of the pockets and loading them into the rack again when a guy walked up and asked me if I wanted to shoot a game of nine ball. He was a young guy, probably a college student. He wore jeans and a T-shirt and a pair of diamond earrings, and he’d brought his own cue stick into the bar. He wanted to play for ten dollars a game.

  I’d counted the money in my wallet when I paid for the table. Forty-three dollars. My life’s savings.

  “All right,” I said. “Since I paid for the table, mind if I break first?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Forty-five minutes later, he loaded his cue into its leather-covered carrying case and exited the bar. He didn’t say anything. He just walked away. I’d beat him out of ninety bucks on his regular table, and I guess he was embarrassed about it.

  I walked over to the bar and found a stool and sat down and watched the fourth game of the World Series. I drank a few beers
and ate a basket of jalapeño poppers and some fried oysters. The Marlins were up three to one, but New York scored two runs in the top of the ninth, sending the game into extra innings. Florida ended up winning in the bottom of the twelfth. Now the series was tied at two games apiece.

  I looked at my watch. It was a few minutes past eight o’clock.

  I paid my tab and left the bar and drove back to Woof-A-Burger. I was afraid Shelby Spelling might have left for home already, but she was still there. She invited me back to her office again.

  “I put your list together,” she said. “Everything I could think of.”

  “Great.”

  I stood there waiting for her to hand it to me.

  “There’s only one problem,” she said. “My printer quit working a while ago. I’ll have to email the list to you, if that’s all right.”

  “I guess it’ll have to be all right,” I said.

  I told her my email address.

  “I got a phone call from a friend a couple of hours ago,” she said. “It was on television, on the news. About Everett. His parents reported him missing earlier this afternoon. The police aren’t calling it a kidnapping yet. They’re just saying that he disappeared.”

  “They don’t know everything I know. He left his wallet and his cell phone and everything. He left his keys in his car. He was either kidnapped, or he was murdered. Those are the only two possibilities, as far as I’m concerned. Until they find a body, I’m going to assume he’s still alive.”

  Shelby lowered herself into the chair behind her desk. I sat across from her again and banged my knees again.

  “I guess the police will come and talk to me eventually,” she said.

  “You can count on it.”

  “I just want you to know that I didn’t have anything to do with this. And if you find Everett, and he’s still alive—”

  “If I find Everett, and he’s still alive, you’re going to leave him alone. Understand?”

  She nodded. “Okay. I’ll leave him alone.”

  I didn’t believe her, but there was nothing left for me to say. I got up and opened the door. She started tapping something into her computer as I walked away—her email to me with the list attached, I supposed.

  On the way out, I stopped at the counter and asked Ashley if Shelby had cleaned up the little mess I’d left earlier. We spoke in hushed tones, so nobody would overhear us.

  “She made me do it,” Ashley said.

  Amazing.

  “What kind of automobile does she drive?” I said.

  “It’s the little white car parked around back. Ford something-or-another.”

  “I would like an order to go,” I said. “Let me get a Big Woofa with extra, extra, extra sauce. And make sure to put plenty of ketchup in the bag.”

  It was a childish thing to do, but it was fun.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I called Laurie from the highway, and she told me to come on over. It was almost eleven-thirty by the time I made it back to her apartment. She greeted me with a hug and a kiss. We stood there in the foyer and drank each other in, as though we’d been separated for months.

  “How was Gainesville?” she said.

  “It was okay. I talked to Everett’s roommate at the fraternity house, and I talked to his ex-girlfriend. I thought Everett might have been dealing drugs, but I’ve pretty much ruled that out now.”

  “What was the girlfriend like?”

  “Aggressive. A little bit nuts, I guess. But I don’t think she arranged for anything bad to happen to Everett. In fact, after some coaxing, she decided it was in her best interest to cooperate with me. She’s supposed to email me a list of all the places he’s been over the past few weeks.”

  “How would she know that?”

  “She was stalking him,” I said. “Maybe she doesn’t know every single place he’s been, but I bet she knows a lot of them.”

  “So you’re going to trace Everett’s steps and hope you come up with a lead?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Sounds like a good one.”

  “We’ll see. I really don’t have anything else to go on at the moment.”

  “You were gone a long time,” Laurie said. “What else did you do down there?”

  “I played some pool and watched the baseball game. I made ninety dollars. And I sauced the white Fiesta.”

  “You did what?”

  I told her about vandalizing Shelby Spelling’s car. She started laughing hysterically.

  “I know,” I said. “It was a stupid thing to do. But there was something exhilarating about it. Something pleasantly naughty and hugely satisfying. It gave me a rush.”

  “No, I think it’s great that you sauced the white Fiesta. I love that. It sounds like some sort of secret code phrase from an action movie or something.”

  “It does?”

  Laurie pretended to be speaking into a walkie-talkie: “SEAL Team A, this is SEAL Team B. Do you read me? We just sauced the white Fiesta.”

  She started laughing again. She leaned into me, rested her head against my chest.

  “I’ve been told I have a way with words,” I said.

  “You do. And you’re handsome and smart and sexy. And you have an exciting job. I can’t believe I’m going out with a real private investigator.”

  “It’s not usually very exciting,” I said. “And we haven’t really gone anywhere yet.”

  “So maybe you can take me somewhere tomorrow with your ninety dollars.”

  “Where would you like to go?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. Paris, maybe.”

  “I don’t think we’ll get there on ninety bucks,” I said.

  She reached under my shirt and gently raked my back with her fingernails.

  “I guess that’s true,” she said. “So I’ll just have to think about it some more. But right now I would like to go to the same place you took me last night.”

  “And where is that?”

  “Somewhere exhilarating. Somewhere pleasantly naughty and hugely satisfying.”

  “I get it,” I said. “You want me to sauce the white Fiesta.”

  She laughed. “Yes. I want you to sauce it like it’s never been sauced before.”

  We kissed hard and deep and started getting busy with our hands. Our clothes were on the floor in a matter of seconds. She led me to her bedroom and we made love, wildly and passionately, as if we’d been starving for each other, and an hour later we were sitting against the headboard sharing a cold beer and a cigarette by candlelight.

  Laurie leaned against my arm.

  “This should be the part where you tell me your deepest darkest secrets,” she said. “All about your past. About the physical and emotional wounds that shaped you into the man you are today.”

  “I don’t know you that well,” I said.

  She slapped at me playfully. “I’m serious. I want to know all about you. When did you decide you wanted to be a private investigator? Were you a cop first, like the ones in the novels?”

  I took a sip of beer and stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray on the nightstand.

  “I was never a cop,” I said.

  “What, then?”

  “Maybe I don’t feel like talking about it right now.”

  She traced the scar on my belly with the tip of her finger.

  “Was it really that bad?” she said.

  “Let’s just say you might want to take me in doses.”

  “Okay. Can I have my first dose now?”

  “My mother died when I was five,” I said. “She was driving a brand new Ford Fairlane home from the dealership when she smashed into an oak tree. There was no one else around. They think she might have swerved to miss a dog or something.”

  “That’s terrible,” Laurie said. “You must have been devastated.”

  “You could say that. I had to repeat the first grade. I guess that was why. I still have the St. Christopher statue that was on the dashboard. S
he’d taken it out of her old car when she traded it in. It’s the only thing I have of hers. The only thing to remember her by. I don’t even have any old photographs.”

  “So you were raised a Catholic?”

  “Baptist. I don’t know why she had the statue. But she did.”

  Laurie took the beer bottle from my hand and drained the last couple of ounces.

  “Did your father raise you by himself after that?” she said.

  “Doses, remember? That’s enough for tonight.”

  “You’re a mysterious man, Nicholas Colt. Maybe that’s why I like you so much.”

  “I’m glad to know it’s not just for my money,” I said.

  “Well, there’s that too. It’s not every day you run into a man with ninety dollars.”

  “And it’s not every day you run into a woman with a voice like yours. Where did you learn to sing like that?”

  “Are you really interested?”

  “Sure.”

  She told me all about the domineering mother, the voice lessons, the pageants, the scholarship to Juilliard.

  “And here I am,” she said. “Tending bar in a nightclub. Filling beer mugs and lighting cigarettes and listening to a million different sob stories from a million different losers.”

  “Did you ever try to do anything with the singing?”

  “I tried. And, as you can see, I failed.”

  “It’s a tough business,” I said. “But you really do have a beautiful voice.”

  “Thank you.”

  We slid down on the bed. With the warmth of the candlelight flickering on the ceiling and the warmth of Laurie’s arm draped over my chest, the tender caress of her breath on my neck and her fingertips on my shoulder, a moment of utter joy and serenity washed over me, something that had been lacking in my life for a long time.

  I closed my eyes and tried to go to sleep, tried to end the day on this beautiful harmonic note, but I kept seeing Everett Harbaugh sitting across from me at the little table in my camper. He was just a kid. Not even old enough to order a drink in a bar. He’d come to me for help, and the best I could do was nod off in front of him, spinning in circles on a hundred-proof river, sorrowfully drowning in my own wake. Papa Fell had sent him to me, and that was what he’d found. A forty-two-year-old drunk, hopelessly lost in the misery of the past. If I’d been sober, or if I’d just told him to come back another day, it wouldn’t have happened. Not at my place, anyway. I knew I wasn’t responsible for Everett’s disappearance, but I also knew I wouldn’t find any real peace until I found him.