Unfinished Business

by J. A. Jance

  She had arrived at the office bleary-eyed and weary but not empty-handed. Thanks to Alonzo’s early-morning efforts, she had shown up at work with a tray full of freshly made cupcakes sporting appropriately bright blue frosting. With the cupcakes receiving rave reviews in the break room, Ali had retreated to her office and gone to work. By midafternoon she was struggling to stay awake when the front-desk receptionist, Shirley Malone, stomped into her office.

  “I just came from the bank,” she announced. She tossed what appeared to be a check into the air, letting it slide the last few inches across the smooth surface of Ali’s desk. “Guess what?” she added. “It bounced.”

  The check was still in motion when Ali spotted the bright red words stamped across the front: INSUFFICIENT FUNDS. She didn’t need to read the signature to know what it said: Harvey McCluskey, their egregiously deadbeat tenant.

  Several years earlier the landlord of the office complex where High Noon was located had run into financial difficulties. Ali and B. had been able to purchase the property at a bargain-basement price. After doing extensive remodeling, they’d rented out the office spaces that High Noon didn’t currently need. Yes, having rental income was a boost to the bottom line, but the problems of finding suitable tenants, overseeing maintenance issues, and collecting the rent had been added to Ali’s ever-growing list of responsibilities.

  McCluskey, who billed himself as a real-estate consultant, occupied a one-man office at the far end of the complex. Initially Ali had assumed he was in real-estate sales. Over time she had learned that he actually worked as a home inspector. A recent conversation with Chris and Athena had revealed that McCluskey had done a home inspection for friends of theirs and had failed to turn up serious termite damage that would have killed the deal. Now the new owners were stuck with extensive repairs they could ill afford to do, and the fine print in the contract they’d signed with McCluskey meant he was off the hook.

  McCluskey was consistently a slow pay when it came to rent. The check he’d given Shirley earlier that morning had been meant to cover the previous two months’ worth of rent, which were both now in arrears, along with the one for April that had been due on the first of the month.

  “What now?” Shirley asked. “Can’t we just put a padlock on the door and shut him out?”

  “Unfortunately, no,” Ali told her. “We have to write up a five-day eviction notice and hand deliver it. The notice must be dated and needs to include the exact name and address of the tenant’s unit and the reason for the notice—failure to pay rent—along with the exact amount of rent due, including any late fees. It must advise him that he has five days from his receipt of the notice to pay up or we start eviction proceedings. Once you finish typing the letter, bring it here for my signature.”

  “Okay,” Shirley said, getting to her feet, “I’m on it, but just so you know, McCluskey isn’t in his office right now. As I was leaving the bank, I noticed his truck parked in front of the Cowpoke Bar and Grill over on Main Street.”

  “Then we’ll deliver it to him there,” Ali responded.

  Shirley paused in the doorway. “We?” she inquired with a puzzled look on her face.

  Ali nodded. “Yes, we, as in you and I. We’ll need to be able to document that we actually served him notice. I’ll hand it over to him while you take the video.”

  “Gotcha,” Shirley replied with a grin. “I can hardly wait. I’ll have that letter typed up in a jif.”

  “Once we deliver it,” Ali added, “I’m going home. After spending most of last night at the hospital, I’m beat.”

  While Shirley headed for her desk and computer, Ali went back into the lab in search of Stuart Ramey, B.’s right-hand man at High Noon Enterprises. Because of all the electronic equipment humming away, the areas of the building occupied by banks of CPUs had to be kept several degrees cooler than the office spaces. It might have been pushing the eighty-degree mark outside the building, but in the lab both Stu and Cami Lee, the company’s primary tech crew, were decked out in sweatshirts. The third key member of High Noon’s staff, Lance Tucker, was covering the night shift this week and would come on duty as the others went home.

  “I’m calling it a day and taking off early,” Ali informed Stu when, noticing her presence hovering in the background, he glanced away from the oversize monitor mounted on the wall in front of him.

  “Did you get a chance to look at any of those job applications?” he asked.

  Months earlier High Noon had prevented an attempted corporate coup—an inside job—that might have put one of their best customers, Swiss-based A&D Pharmaceuticals, out of business had the plot not been stopped in its tracks. The whole matter had been handled with utmost discretion and without any law-enforcement involvement. Since then Albert Gunther, the partner left in charge of A&D and the main beneficiary of High Noon’s work, had been lavish in praise of their efforts even though he was sketchy when it came to providing details. As a result there’d been a major expansion of High Noon’s customer base—including the potential new client B. was currently pursuing in Helsinki.

  Naturally, the increase in business called for an increase in personnel. When word they were hiring got out, High Noon had been overwhelmed with unsolicited applications and résumés. The ones on Ali’s desk awaiting perusal by both Ali and B. were the ones that’d made it past Stu’s initial scrutiny. Each of those was accompanied by a background-check dossier created by Stu’s pet artificial intelligence, affectionately referred to as Frigg. When provided with a name and date of birth, Frigg would search public records and the world of social media for any and all material on the applicant in question, including school-age indiscretions, sports participation, teenage pregnancies, unpaid income taxes, and DUIs. Frigg simply accumulated the material without providing any opinions. She delivered information only. Value judgments on what she unearthed had to be supplied by the human element involved.

  Stu had dropped a stack of file folders containing both the applications and the dossiers on Ali’s desk sometime Friday morning, and that’s where they remained. She hadn’t had time to lay hands on any of the material either Friday or today.

  “Not yet,” she said in answer to Stu’s question. “I’ll do my best to get after those applications tomorrow, but right now Shirley and I need to run an errand. I wanted you to know that we’ll be locking up and closing the security shutters early. If anyone needs to come inside, you’ll have to buzz them in.”

  “Got it,” Stu said. “See you tomorrow.”

  Ali returned to her office and cleared her desk. She sat for a moment, studying the application files. At the last minute, and on the off chance that she might get her second wind later in the evening, she grabbed the files and stuffed them in the side pocket of her voluminous purse. She was about to shut down her computer when Shirley popped into the room, waving a sheet of paper in the air.

  “Here’s my first-ever eviction notice, all typed up and ready to sign,” she announced. “You may want to read through it and make sure I didn’t leave anything out.”

  Ali turned off the computer and then quickly scanned through the letter. Not surprisingly, everything was in order. After scrawling her signature at the bottom, Ali took a close-up photo of the document before sealing it in a blank envelope and addressing the missive with the clearly handwritten words “Harvey McCluskey.”

  “It looks fine to me,” she told Shirley, “so let’s saddle up and go track down our bad boy. With any kind of luck, he’s still at the bar.”

  “Do you want me to ask Cami if she’ll come watch the front?” Shirley asked.

  “Nope,” Ali replied. “We’re locking up for the day. Once we finish serving our five-day notice, we’re both taking the rest of the afternoon off.”

  A few minutes later, they pulled in to the parking lot of the Cowpoke, where Harvey’s aging, steel-gray Chevy Silverado occupied one and a half spaces marked COMPACT directly outside the front door.

  Figures, Ali mutte
red silently to herself. Other people’s rules don’t apply to Mr. McCluskey, but at least he’s still here.

  Ali knew she and Shirley would be better off confronting the man in a public place rather than tracking him down at home, something she could easily have done had it become necessary.

  The town of Cottonwood, Arizona, contains any number of respectable bars and cocktail lounges, but the notorious Cowpoke wasn’t one of them. It had a reputation for hosting regular bar fights in which contentious customers whacked one another over the head with cue sticks or whatever other weapons came readily to hand. Local EMTs laughingly referred to the Cowpoke as Concussion Junction for that very reason.

  Coming into the bar’s darkened interior from bright afternoon sunlight, Ali and Shirley had to pause just inside to get their bearings and allow their eyes to readjust. The place reeked of stale spilled beer and a long history of greasy food. As Ali walked across the floor, the soles of her shoes stuck to the grimy surface. Most of the illumination came from a series of neon signs posted on the walls in place of artwork. They provided some light, but not enough to expose the accumulated dirt lurking in cracks and crevices.

  Once Ali could see again, she noted that although it was still too early for happy hour, the dim room was already fairly crowded. McCluskey was seated at the bar. A half-empty pint of beer along with an empty shot glass sat on the counter in front of him. He was hunched so far forward on the barstool that his shirttail had pulled out, leaving an unnerving three inches of flabby, lavender-tinted flesh showing between the bottom of his shirt and his belt line.

  “There he is,” Ali said as she turned her iPhone’s camera to Record and passed the device to Shirley. “I’ll do the talking. You’re in charge of video recording.”

  She made straight for the bar, with Shirley following behind.

  “Mr. McCluskey?” Ali said.

  “Yeah, I am,” he muttered, slowly straightening up and turning to face her. “Who’s asking?”

  Harvey McCluskey had probably been a good-looking dude in his younger days, but that was over. He still had a headful of silvery mane, but his ruddy complexion and the thickness of his nose both spoke of someone who drank more than was good for him. Over time his figure had definitely gone to seed. The only vestige of what might have been his salad days was the hint of a gold chain peeking out from under the open collar of an incredibly loud Hawaiian shirt.

  In her days as a newscaster in L.A., Ali had seen plenty of his type—the bigger the jackass, the heavier the gold chain. The fact that her deadbeat tenant was wearing one of those wasn’t a mark in his favor.

  “I am,” Ali told him firmly, holding out the envelope.

  Beer in hand, McCluskey peered first at Ali and then at the envelope, but he made no move to take it from her. “What’s this?” he wanted to know.

  “It’s your five-day eviction notice,” she told him. “As of today your rent is three months in arrears, and not for the first time either. You have five days to pay up in full, or High Noon will begin eviction proceedings.”

  “Eviction? How can that be?” he demanded, pointing an accusatory finger in Shirley’s direction. “I gave that broad over there a check just this morning.” Then, noting the camera, he added menacingly, “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Turn that damned thing off!”

  Ali didn’t back away, and Shirley didn’t stop filming, but by now every eye in the place was focused on them. Ali was still holding out the envelope, and McCluskey was still refusing to touch it.

  “Yes, you gave her a check,” Ali agreed. “It bounced.”

  She didn’t bother lowering her voice. She didn’t care if all of Harvey’s drinking buddies knew he was a worthless lout. Chances were they already did.

  “By the way,” she added, “I’ve included our bank’s charge for a dishonored check in among late fees. You’ll find the total amount due laid out inside. As I said, final payment must be in our hands and clear the bank no later than Friday, four days from now.”

  “You can take your five-day notice and shove it,” McCluskey said, laying his hand on his chest as if to ward off a sudden attack of indigestion.

  With that, he started to turn back to the bar, but Ali was too fast for him. In a deft maneuver, she slipped the envelope into his shirt pocket and gave it a quick pat. “I already did,” she told him with a smile. “Shove it, that is.”

  Several of McCluskey’s barstool neighbors guffawed at that.

  Moments later Ali and Shirley were back outside in blinding sunlight.

  “Did you get it?” Ali asked.

  “Every bit of it,” Shirley replied. “For a minute there, I was afraid he was going to take a swing at you.”

  “So was I,” Ali said darkly, “but if he had, Harvey McCluskey would be going to court for a lot more than just a simple eviction hearing.”

  |CHAPTER 3|

  COTTONWOOD, ARIZONA

  The whole time that incredible bitch of a Reynolds woman was reading Harvey McCluskey the riot act and threatening him with eviction, he’d sat there burning with fury. The only thing that kept him from outright decking her was being able to touch his chest and feel the icons he wore under his shirt, dangling on his gold chain.

  Harvey might have been hearing Ali Reynolds’s words, but all the while the face he’d seen had belonged to his mother. Ida Mae McCluskey had been the same kind of arrogant harpy. Once she went off on either Leo, Harvey’s dad, or on Harvey himself, there had always been absolute hell to pay.

  Harvey’s physical body remained in the Cowpoke Bar and Grill in Cottonwood, Arizona, during her tirade, but his soul and heart were transported back in time to Butte, Montana, and to the day when, at age seven, he had suffered his first public humiliation at his mother’s hands. They’d gone to the drugstore in town. While his mother was back at the pharmacy counter picking up a prescription, she left her son unsupervised and sitting alone at the fountain to finish his root-beer float. When it was gone, Harvey had climbed down from the tall stool and meandered around the store on his own for a few minutes before his mother returned to collect him.

  By the time they stepped outside, Harvey had two pilfered candy bars from the counter on the far end of the fountain—a PayDay and a Snickers—along with a bag of peanuts, all of them concealed in the pockets of his jacket. Once sprawled in the back seat, and thinking his mother wouldn’t be any the wiser, Harvey had stealthily opened the bag of peanuts and slid one of the salty treats into his mouth. That’s when she suddenly slammed on the brakes. “What the hell are you eating, boy?” she demanded.

  At the time he’d had no idea how she knew what he was doing. Now he understood that she’d probably caught sight of him in the rearview mirror. However she figured it out, she had him dead to rights.

  “Just a peanut,” he said. “I found it in my pocket.”

  Ida Mae wasn’t fooled in the least. “Like hell you did,” she muttered.

  Harvey was aware that his mother was careful not to use bad words like that at church or around other people they knew, but when they were alone at home or in the car, Ida’s cuss words buzzed through the air like swarms of angry hornets.

  Moments later the car was parked on the shoulder of the road. Ida Mae got out of the driver’s seat, slammed open the back passenger door, and dragged Harvey from the station wagon. Seconds later she turned his pockets inside out and tossed the two stolen candy bars onto the ground. As for the remainder of the peanuts? She emptied them from the bag and then mashed them to pieces in the dirt with the sole of her shoe.

  “Did you steal these?” she demanded.

  When Harvey said nothing in reply, Ida Mae slapped him hard across the face. “I’m speaking to you, young man!” she railed. “When I ask you a question, I expect an answer. Did you or did you not steal these?”

  Harvey’s face hurt like crazy. Despite his best efforts, tears started to flow. “Yes, ma’am,” he muttered finally.

  “Get back in the car,” she
barked at him. “Now!”

  Harvey did as he was told. His face ached, but he resisted the urge to touch it. Moments later his mother was in the driver’s seat again. Instead of going home to their double-wide off German Gulch Road, she executed an immediate U-turn and headed back into town.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Shut up,” Ida Mae said.

  Apparently they were returning to the drugstore. When they got out of the car, Ida Mae grabbed Harvey by his shirt collar and frog-marched him into the store. Mr. Wilcox, the owner, was also the pharmacist. In order to find him, they had to go to the very back of the store, as whoever was there—customers and employees alike—watched their every move.

  “Why, yes, Mrs. McCluskey,” Mr. Wilcox said pleasantly when he noticed Harvey and his mother standing there. “Will there be something else?”

  She pulled the two candy bars and the remains of the peanut bag out of her pocket and slammed them down onto the counter. “Tell him,” she ordered Harvey. “Tell Mr. Wilcox exactly what you did.”

  Harvey hesitated for a moment. Instantly his mother’s fingers dug sharply into his shoulder, and she gave him a fierce shake. “Tell him,” she commanded again.

  “I stole them,” Harvey admitted in a tiny whisper. “I hid them in my jacket pockets.”

  A bemused Mr. Wilcox, looking as though he were doing his best not to smile, glanced first at Ida Mae and then back at her son.