George came down to the parking lot and got into his car. As with the day before, I followed him. I followed him all that day until he returned to his apartment, and for the next two days after that. What I discovered confirmed my suspicions about George.
George was quite the ladies’ man. In the days I followed him, he went to the homes of three different women and spent several hours with each of them. He also checked into hotels for several hours with two others. The women did not have much in common: some were short, some were tall; some were skinny, some were fat; some were plain-looking, others were stunning; some were old, some were young. They did have two things in common, though: they all were married to filthy rich men, and they all had a lot to lose if it became public they were having an affair. Since George had no other visible means of support, following him confirmed my suspicions he made a living off of sleeping with wealthy married women and then blackmailing them. I made notes of each woman I saw George with.
Though I did not approve of what George was doing, I did admire his stamina. The third day, I saw him spend time with three separate women. It made me tired just to watch him in action.
During one of the days I tailed George, I also consulted with the leasing office of the apartment complex George lived in. For some reason, they got the impression I was a police officer. It was an impression I did nothing to dissuade. I discovered George Chase was not George’s real name. At least, it was not the name he had leased his apartment under. That name was Sidney Waters. I wondered if that was the name which appeared on George’s birth certificate. I doubted it.
On the fourth day, I decided to try a different tack. Though I had little doubt I would uncover even more women if I followed George around some more, I did not know how useful that information would be to me. It was clear already George was slinging dick around town like it was an Olympic sport he was hoping to medal in.
So, on the fourth day when George left his apartment in the mid-morning to no doubt service some more married women, I did not follow him. Instead, I merely watched him drive off. I waited for a bit to make sure he was not coming back immediately on the off chance he had forgotten something in his apartment, like a sense of morality or self-restraint. Or, perhaps a bag of extra-large condoms.
Once I was somewhat confident George the Genitally Generous was not coming back immediately, I got out of my car. I went up the stairs again to his apartment door. I stretched out my water awareness again. George’s apartment seemed empty. Since it was better to be safe than sorry, I knocked on the door. I waited. No one came to the door or made a sound inside.
I glanced around. No one was nearby, including in the parking lot below.
I inspected George’s door. There were two locks, one on the doorknob and another above it which I supposed was a deadbolt. They appeared to be standard locks and nothing super-secure. I pulled out a small case from my jacket pocket. I took my lock picking tools out of it. It was illegal to be in possession of such tools. I would have to be sure they did not fall into the hands of any hardened criminals.
In less time than it would take to talk about it, I picked both locks. It crossed my mind to lock them back and then pick them again just to prove that I could. But, since no one was watching, who exactly would I be showing off for? I opened the door with a small sigh of disappointment. I had spent more hours than I could count studying locks and practicing opening them with my tools. It had been quite a while since a lock in the field had posed a challenge to me. No one being around to witness my hard-earned skill was like a concert pianist performing to an empty theater. On the upside, if the whole Hero and detective thing fell through, I could always become a cat burglar.
I stepped inside. I closed the door behind me. The place looked and felt empty. There was a large sliding glass door which took up much of the wall on the other side of the apartment. Though blinds extended across the glass door, they were partially open, allowing in sunlight. I had no problems seeing without turning lights on.
I put on some thin latex disposable gloves I had in my jacket pocket. I did a quick survey of the apartment. To the left of the entrance was a small dining room table and chairs. Across from it was a kitchen which was separated from the rest of the apartment by a raised L-shaped counter. There was a living room in which were a couple of bookcases crammed full of leather-bound books. Also in the living room were a small but thick glass coffee table, a leather recliner, and a large black leather couch. The couch and chair faced a large and state of the art television that rested on a wooden TV stand. The bedroom contained a queen size bed, a chest of drawers, and a small desk. There was a small bathroom connected to the bedroom.
It was a small apartment, but an expensive one. I had gotten from the leasing office how much George paid in rent. His rent would have paid my mortgage a couple of times over. Or, it could have paid for a few cups of coffee from Astor City Coffee.
George was a fastidious housekeeper. Everything was neat and clean. The furnishings were stylish, modern, and pricey. If I was right about how George made a living, the blackmailing business must have been succeeding like gangbusters. Perhaps I should have considered a change in occupations. Maybe blackmailing, not cat burgling, was the way to go.
After I finished glancing around, I quickly but carefully tossed the apartment with an efficiency born out of long practice. I was careful to put things back the way I found them as I went through them. I did not know what I was looking for. I figured I would know it when I saw it. Looking for information was like pornography that way.
The first thing I found of interest was a tin containing sugar in the back of George’s kitchen cabinet. The sugar itself was not of interest, but the items in the plastic bag hidden underneath the sugar were. Since this was not my first rodeo, I had opened the containers I had found in George’s kitchen, and poked into them with my gloved fingers, hoping to find something of interest. It never ceased to amaze me how many people tried to hide things that way.
The plastic bag contained a wad of cash. It consisted of mostly hundred dollar bills. I gave it a quick count. There was a little over six thousand dollars there. I considered reimbursing myself for my considerable coffee expenses for the past few days. In the end, I resisted the temptation.
The bag also contained several passports and driver’s licenses. They all had a picture of George on them, and they all had different names and dates of birth on them. Each of the driver’s licenses was issued by a different state. I held each piece of identification up to the light and examined it closely. Though I was no expert on forged IDs, each of them looked authentic to me. Clearly they could not all have been, though, assuming any of them were. George must have spent a pretty penny getting such real looking fake documents. I wrote all of the information down from the IDs on a small pad of paper I had brought with me.
I put the money and the IDs back into the bag I found them in. I then put the bag back into the sugar tin, being careful to cover it back up with sugar. As I did so, I thought about the bag’s contents. Lots of people kept an emergency stash of cash around. Not too many people kept around a bunch of different IDs in a bunch of different names, though. It all served to reinforce my early suspicions that George was not a simple nine-to-fiver with a love for the ladies.
There was a laptop on top of the living room table. I opened it. A sign-in screen asking for a password greeted me. I guessed it would have been asking too much for George to not password protect his computer. A shockingly high percentage of people use “12345” or “123456” or the word “password” as their password. Unfortunately, George was not one of those people. I tried all three of those passwords to no avail. I gave up trying to log in after those three attempts. Without even a clue as to what George’s password might be, I could have sat there and gone gray trying different combinations of numbers and letters. I closed the computer, and moved on.
There was a small stack of mail on the desk in George’s bedroom. Most of it was addressed to S
idney Waters, though there were a couple of things addressed to Timothy Barnes. The Barnes name was one I recognized from the IDs in the sugar tin. The mail was all open, and I looked through it. It was all bills, and nothing of interest to me other than the names they were addressed to.
I took a look at George’s bookshelves. I let my eyes rove over the spines of the books. They ranged from contemporary thrillers to non-fiction tomes on ancient Roman history. Eclectic. As I had no interest in reading about Cicero’s adventures, I was about to move on. But, one book in particular caught my attention. Something about the spine did not look quite right. I would have missed it if I had not taken the time to glance at each title.
I pulled the book out. I discovered it was not a real book at all. Rather, it was a plastic container that had been manufactured to look like a book. I opened the cover to find a handgun concealed inside. It was a loaded double-action .38 special revolver. It was not a state of the art gun. But, if you hit your target with it, state of the art didn’t matter. An old gun could kill you just as dead as a laser shot from a drone.
I put the gun back into the fake book, put the book back onto the shelf where I found it, and moved on.
George’s desk in his bedroom was locked. Perhaps this lock would prove to be a challenge. My eagers fingers got to work. Alas, it was not to be. I picked that lock even more quickly than I had the locks on the front door. It barely even slowed me down. Why even bother to lock something if this was the quality of lock you had? Both George and the people who designed these locks really needed to step up their games.
I said earlier the information I was looking for was like pornography in that I would know it when I saw it. Well, I found pornography in George’s desk, and I knew it when I saw it. Perhaps I should not have used the word pornography as the word implied sets, actresses with Daddy issues, and a poorly written script. That was not what I found. Rather, what I found was a file of dozens of pictures of women in various stages of undress, one of the most prominent of which was nothing at all. Many of the pictures showed George—I assumed it was George from the size and shape of the phallus involved—inserting himself into the women. I could have used a different word than phallus, but I was a high-class private dick.
The pictures were all taken from the perspective of the man, so I assumed the stills were all taken with George’s power. How he reduced them to photographic form, God only knew.
I flipped through the pictures. Most of the photos clearly displayed the face of each woman. I spotted some featuring Claire Morganthal, the woman I had seen with George the first day I tailed him. In all of them, Mrs. Morganthal was as naked as the day she was born. She was a lot bustier and more nipped and tucked in the pictures than she had been the day she was born, though. Seeing her naked body confirmed my suspicions she had some work done. There was some slight scarring on her body that made the surgery evident. I looked at the pictures closely. You never knew when a clue would jump out and slap you in the face. Claire’s surgically enhanced breasts certainly were big enough to slap one in the face. I found a picture of her where she was doing that very thing to the man taking the photo. Despite the surgeries, Claire still looked pretty good, even if parts of her were overinflated.
I continued to flip through the photos. I came across several of my client Eileen. Some women looked better in clothes. The right clothes could lift and shape and conceal. Eileen looked as good out of her clothes as she did in them, though. Her body was age appropriate. To me, she looked much better than Mrs. Morganthal even though Mrs. Morganthal’s curves were more dramatic.
I finished looking through the pictures. There were a total of seventeen women in the pictures. George had been a busy beaver. If it were not beneath my dignity as a licensed Hero and private detective, I would instead have said it was the women with the busy beavers.
While being careful to keep the pictures in the order in which I found them, I pulled out a representative picture of each of the seventeen women. I used my cell phone to take my own shot of each picture. I did not take the photos for any prurient reason. I was no longer a 16-year-old boy. I did not need a picture of a naked woman to get my jollies. I vastly preferred the living, breathing, genuine article. I took the photos because who knew how or why the photos would prove to be useful.
Once I finished taking the pictures, I put all of George’s photographs back into the folder in which I had found them in the same order. I then returned the folder to the drawer.
In the back of the same drawer was a leather-bound notebook. I pulled the notebook out and opened it. It was a handwritten ledger. On the left side of each page was a column of dates, starting a couple of years ago. Next to each date was a name and dollar amount. The last entry was dated a few days before and read “Theresa Whitworth, $5,000.” The entries were clearly a record of the women who paid extortion money to George.
I flipped through the notebook. There were dozens of pages of entries. On the last few pages was a listing of names, addresses, and telephone numbers. I scanned through them. I found listings for both my client Eileen and Claire Morganthal.
While surveying the contents of the notebook, I shook my head. I was both amazed at and had a grudging respect for George. He indeed had been a busy beaver. There were dozens of women listed. Either George was extremely industrious, or he really enjoyed his work. Perhaps both.
Never before had I known a blackmailer to keep such detailed records. But, I was glad George had. Starting at the beginning, I took a picture with my phone of each page of the notebook, including the list of women in the back. Once I was finished, I put the notebook back where I had found it.
I finished searching George’s place. I did not find anything else of note. I did a last quick survey to make sure I had returned everything to where I had found it.
I went to the front door. I looked out of the peephole. The coast was clear. To be safe, I used my powers to check to see if anyone was on the walkway outside of George’s door. I sensed no one.
I had handled the door with my bare hands before I had put my gloves on. So, I pulled my handkerchief out of my pocket and wiped the door clean everywhere I had touched it. Still using the handkerchief, I opened the door. I locked the bottom lock from the inside. I stepped outside. Using my lock picking tools, I quickly relocked the deadbolt. I then wiped the exterior doorknob and the deadbolt down with my handkerchief.
I glanced at my watch as I walked back to my car. I had been inside George’s place for less than two hours.
Not bad.
CHAPTER 9
Two days later, I walked into Antonio’s Bar and Grill. I had earlier called Eileen to report what I had found out about George so far. I had asked her to call George and set up a meeting with him at Antonio’s, ostensibly for the purpose of paying him the money he demanded.
Instead, what George was getting was me. I looked like a million bucks as I had dressed up for the ritzy setting that was Antonio’s. A million bucks was a lot compared to the sum George was supposed to be getting from Eileen, yet somehow I did not think George would be happy to see me.
I walked into the bar area. It was all dark woods and muted colors. George was sitting at the bar. He was eating a platter of raw oysters on the half shell using a little fork. Of course George the Genitally Greathearted would be eating raw oysters.
I sat in the empty chair to his left.
“It’s a myth that oysters are an aphrodisiac, you know,” I said to him.
He looked up from his food. He grinned.
“I’ve heard that too,” he said. “But, they can’t hurt.” He scooped an oyster out of its shell, dipped it in some cocktail sauce, and popped it into his mouth. I did not approve of using cocktail sauce on oysters—I thought the sauce overpowered the delicate flavor of the oysters—but I did not tell George that. Perhaps George did not care what I thought. So few did.
It was the first time I had heard George’s voice. It was deep, and had a hint of molasses in it. I won
dered if George had grown up in the South. Maybe that was where he picked up the regrettable habit of drowning oysters in cocktail sauce.
George was wearing a thin, tight, powder blue sweater that hugged his athletic frame. He had on gray dress pants and black lace-up dress shoes. He had a strong jaw and good features. He really was a handsome man. I could see why he was so successful with women.
George carefully chewed and swallowed. He dabbed his mouth with his napkin before speaking again.
“Just so you know, buddy,” he said to me, “I’m expecting someone. You’re going to have to give up that seat in a few minutes.”
“Hot date?” I asked.
“You could say that,” he said.
“I know you’re expecting someone, George,” I said. “And I’m the person you’re expecting, you lucky dog you.” I pulled out a card, one of the ones that had my name and stated I was a licensed Hero and private investigator. I put it down on the bar and pushed it over to him. George put his fork down and picked the card up. He examined it carefully as I watched him. He did not seem to be the slightest bit worried, tense, or surprised about the fact I knew his name.
“Licensed Hero, huh?” he finally said. “Hot damn. What are your powers?”
“Super wittiness,” I said.
George smiled at me.
“Don’t feel like sharing?”
“No,” I said.
“Did you do some boxing back in the day? I see a bit of scar tissue on your face and ears. And, your nose looks like it’s been broken more than once,” he said.
“I competed in mixed martial arts for a while,” I said.
“Any good?” he asked.
“Good enough to compete at a high level. Not good enough to avoid the scar tissue and broken noses,” I said.
Superhero Detective Series (Book 1): Superhero Detective For Hire Page 5