I must have spent the night in my car. That’s where I woke up. My head pounded like the bass drum in a street band. Thump, thump. My stomach churned like a cement mixer.
I got out of the car, went into my office building, and climbed the stairs to the third floor. There seemed to be more stairs today than usual.
I’ve got to talk to the landlord about that elevator. It hasn’t worked since before Nixon resigned. But then he’ll talk to me about the rent. Which hasn’t been paid since...well, you get the idea.
I went in the door marked, “Bentworth Detective Agency, LLC.” I had lettered that sign myself. It showed. The door opened into Willa’s office, which served as a waiting room and reception lobby. My office was behind hers with a closed door that separated us. The two offices could have used some paint, and the few pieces of furniture were more suited for the land fill, but clients didn’t seem to mind. Like Buford, they had problems to be solved, and most of them cared more about results than about how my office looked.
Willa was already there, settled at her desk, looking in a hand mirror, and adjusting her makeup, a wasted effort. She was in her fifties with graying hair, square-rimmed reading glasses, and was as skinny as a fourteen-ounce pool cue. Today she was wear-ing a drab one-piece suit and Eleanor Roosevelt shoes.
Willa had come to work the previous year and was the most efficient office manager I’d ever had. For the first time in my long and illustrious career as a P.I., my files were in order, my schedule organized, my books balanced, and my bank account reconciled. Overdrawn but reconciled.
Rodney was waiting for me in my office, sitting in my chair reading a comic book with his feet up on my desk. I stood in the doorway, bleary-eyed and head throbbing, and looked at him.
“What’s up Uncle Stanley?” Rodney was too cheerful for this kind of morning. Hell, Ebenezer Scrooge before the ghosts would have been too cheerful. My mouth felt like I’d been licking the bottom of a bird cage, the ringing in my ears would have rivaled the Anvil Chorus, and my asshole felt like Johnny Cash’s burning ring of fire. I didn’t dare fart. They’d have had to pick me up somewhere near Cleveland.
If you need any more hangover metaphors, come back tomorrow.
I made my usual morning-after resolution to quit drinking. This time I meant it. Like all the other times.
Rodney made no move to vacate my desk. He was tall and gangly with spiked orange hair. He was dressed in the usual baggy shorts, the top of which was down around the lower part of his ass with the crotch at his knees.
“Rodney, what holds those pants up?” He put the comic book on the table and turned the swivel chair to face me.
“Will power,” he said.
“Get up,” I said.
He stood up and walked past me. I sat down.
“Your Jockey shorts are showing,” I said.
“That’s the style.” He turned to face me.
“I hope you change them every day.”
“Yellow in front, brown in back.”
His T-shirt said, “If God hadn’t meant for man to eat pussy, He wouldn’t have made it look like a taco.” The back of the shirt had a picture of a vertical taco.
“Damn, Rodney. That shirt can get you arrested. Does your mother know about it?”
“She bought it.”
My sister. What a piece of work.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
“You called last night. Said we have a job.”
“I did? Oh, yeah, I did.” I didn’t remember the call, but we did have work. “Got your laptop?”
“Yeah, in my backpack.”
“If I give you an e-mail address, can you find out whose it is and where they are?”
His backpack hung from a hook on the coat rack. He got it, pulled the other chair over, unpacked the laptop, and set it up on the desk.
“Usually,” he said. “It can take some time depending on whether it’s through a website service or a dedicated mail server. One way or other I have to hack into the server with its IP address, crack the password file, get root privileges—”
“I don’t need details, Rodney.” If I’d let him, he’d give me the history of hacking all the way back to Babbage.
I wrote the blackmailer’s e-mail address on a slip of paper and gave it to him. “How long will it take?”
“Better part of the day,” he said.
That meant about an hour. Rodney always overestimated.
“I might not find out where the guy is located,” he said. “He can log on from anywhere. But I can probably get his name and sometimes his home address.”
“That’ll be enough. When you’re done with that, I’ll have another job for you. Use my desk. I’ll be gone for a while. Breakfast.”
Just saying the word turned my stomach. But often food was the only way out of a hangover.
“Can I smoke in here?”
“Smoke what?”
“Shit.”
“No.”
“You drink in here.”
“Booze is legal, Rodney, and won’t cost me my P.I. ticket, and it doesn’t get into the draperies.”
“What draperies?”
“I keep meaning to get draperies. Anyway, keep the shit in your backpack.”
I got the thousand bucks out of the safe, left Rodney to his hacking, and went into the outer office.
“Most secretaries would have brought coffee to the boss by now,” I said to Willa.
“Most secretaries get paid with some degree of regularity.”
I handed her Buford’s stack of hundred-dollar bills.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“What’s it look like?”
“I don’t know,” she said, counting the money. “It’s been so long.”
Everybody’s a smartass today.
I shrugged. “Pay some bills with it.”
“Can I start with my back pay?”
“If you must.”
“I must.”
“Will it cover what I owe you?”
“No. But I won’t take it all.”
I sat on the edge of her desk. “Start a file, Willa. New client. Name of Buford Overbee.”
“You’re kidding,” she said. She was making notes.
“You’ve heard of him?”
“Who hasn’t?”
“Me. Wait’ll you see him.”
“Nobody’s ever seen him. Address?”
“Don’t have one. Here’s his phone number and e-mail.” I gave her the card.
She wrote down the contact information and turned the card over. “Whose e-mail is this on the back?”
“It’s relevant to the case.”
“Relevant e-mail address,” she said and made more notes. She gave the card back to me.
“Don’t send any e-mail to that address. Its owner doesn’t know we have it. Doesn’t even know about us.”
“Whatever. I suppose you’ll explain later.”
“If I have to. I’m out of here. Got to get some breakfast. Hope I can hold it down.”
“Get some breath mints too, Stan. Whatever you were celebrating last night is still with us. You’ve got a breath on you would wither crab grass across the Interstate.”
Only a true friend would tell you that.
She opened a drawer and began rummaging in it. “Now where did I put that Lysol spray?”
“Don’t worry. It won’t get into the draperies.”
“What dr—? Oh, get the hell out of here.”
I went across the street to Ray’s diner, my usual eating place. It was in a brick building, now mostly unoccupied. Ray grilled the best burger on either side of the tracks, and his loyal clientele
kept him in business.
Bunny was on duty. I was always glad to see Bunny. She had been my on-again, off-again girlfriend for about seven years. Even when we were off-again, like now, we stayed friends. Not many women in my life had been able to do that. My breakups had always been noisy and unpleasant. Not with Bunny, though. We’d just agree that time had come to move on, usually at her initiative. Then after some time off, we’d try again. This was one of those times when we weren’t trying.
One of those off-again periods had given me a low time in my life. I tried marriage. A failed experiment. I was not cut out for wedlock. Neither was my wife. It came to an end when she ran off with my best friend. I sure do miss him.
When the divorce was final, I got back with Bunny, which lasted less than a year, ending when she met the man of her dreams, which was how it usually ended. That was six months ago. As usu-al, we remained friends, a necessity because of Ray’s cooking.
I figured Bunny would go easy on a guy in a divorce, a hell of a criterion for choosing a girlfriend, but with experience comes wisdom. And caution.
Bunny had been the perfect girlfriend. She didn’t spend our times together saying what an asshole her ex-husband was. Or what she’d do when she won the lottery. Or snore.
I took a seat in a booth and looked out the window at the rundown building that housed my office across the street. The building hadn’t aged well.
Then I looked at Bunny. She had aged well. She still looked good for an old broad. Sexy women who take care of themselves stay sexy as time passes. Bunny had taken care of herself. A little wider in the middle and at the hips and a few lines on her face, but it was only a matter of perspective. I’d been without female companionship since we broke up. A couple more months of that and Grandma Walton would have looked good.
She leaned against the booth and crossed one ankle over the other. Her skirt was just above the knees. Her knees had aged well.
“Hi, Stan. You look like shit.”
“Good to see you too.”
“Maybe if you’d shave. Or change your shirt.”
“Or blow my brains out.”
“What happened? The usual?”
“Yep. Hangover. Chronic.”
She poured me a cup of coffee and scribbled on her order pad without asking what I wanted. Bunny knew I’d eat whatever she brought. Like being married but without the baggage. Ham or bacon and eggs, usually. Eggs cooked however it fancied her. Eggs didn’t sound so good this morning. I figured I might be able to get down a feather soufflé if I took it slow.
Bunny put the order through the window to Ray in the kitchen, came back, sat across from me, and handed me a mint. Subtle, but effective.
“So, what’s new?” she asked.
“Same ol’, same ol’,” I said.
“What were you celebrating?”
“Got a new client.”
“So, did you have to drink up the whole fee in one night.”
“He helped. I don’t drink alone. Unless there’s nobody around.”
“Another husband with a cheating wife?”
“No, a financier.” I lowered my voice. I could trust Bunny.
Well, to a point. “Guy named Overbee.”
“I’ve heard of him,” she said. “He’s been in some kind of deep shit for hustling hedge funds.”
Was I the only person who never heard of my client?
“What’s a hedge fund?” I asked.
“Beats me,” she said. “But apparently they can get you in deep shit. The TV news people are all over each other trying to get him on camera. Nobody knows what he looks like.”
“I do.”
“So? What’s he look like?”
“Big guy. Good looking in a rough kind of way. You’d like him. Reminds me of that jerk you dumped me for last time. B-B-B-Barry, the body builder. He still around?”
“No. It didn’t last. Barry was too much into himself. Muscle shirts and never met a mirror he didn’t love. If we weren’t talking about Barry, he’d change the subject. And I couldn’t stand the stutter.”
She wiped the table with her cloth. It didn’t need it, but it gave her something to look busy with while we talked.
“So Overbee looks like Barry?” she said.
She sounded interested. “Some. But older. Don’t get your hopes up. He has a twenty-two year old wife.”
“Don’t they all?”
I looked at her some more. The hangover got in the way, but I still found her attractive. I always felt like she found me convenient rather than attractive.
“So you’re available again?” I said.
“Who said I’m available?”
“Just guessing. B-B-B-Barry’s out of the picture, and your body language has an allure to it, that unmistakable seductive, sensuous come-hither quality. That’s usually a good sign.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Neither do I, but it worked the last time I used it.”
She laughed, got up, refilled my coffee, and went to see about my breakfast.
While I waited, Rodney came in and sat down.
“I thought you’d be here,” he said. “Here’s the name and address you wanted.”
He handed me a sheet of paper with the name Mario Vitole scrawled on it along with a phone number and an address in a residential section on the south side of town.
“Vitole. Sounds like a wise guy. Good work, Rodney. Didn’t take that long.”
“Yeah, it was easy. The guy’s mail server is local. Here in town. It runs under an old version of Linux. I got in by downloading the password file and decrypting—”
“That’s okay. You want breakfast?”
“No, I had a Hershey Bar and a Coke.”
“Don’t talk like that when I’m hung over. Here’s your next assignment.”
I took out Buford’s card, took a napkin from the dispenser, and copied down Buford’s cell phone number.
“Can you find out where the owner of this cell phone lives based on the number? It’s our client’s cell.”
“You don’t know where your client lives?”
“No. He keeps a lot to himself. Can you get his address?”
Rodney shrugged and put the napkin in his pocket. “I can do better than that. If he’s got the GPS turned on, I can find out where he is at any time.”
“That works. Wherever he spends his nights is probably his house. It’ll be in the Heights. But how can you do that? Without too much geek-speak, please. Can anyone do it?”
I was thinking about my own cell phone and whether I could be tracked too.
“No. You need software. The FBI has it on their main server.”
“And of course you can get into the FBI’s server.” Nothing about Rodney’s computer skills surprised me any more.
“Easy. I’ve done it a bunch of times. You start by—”
“Can I turn off the GPS in my own phone?”
“Yes. In the Settings app.”
He took my phone and showed me how to disable the GPS.
“And that prevents the FBI and geeks like you from tracking me?”
“Sure does.”
“Good to know. Okay, try to get this guy’s home address. Get back to me when you got it.”
Rodney got up to leave. I said, “Sit down. There’s one more thing.”
He sat.
“Our client is being blackmailed. The owner of that e-mail address you hacked is the blackmailer. He uses an OnlinePay account for the payoffs. You know what that is?”
“Yep.”
“Can you hack into that account?”
“Yep. I just need to—”
“What can you do once you’ve hacked in there?”
“I can do anything he can do. Get the balance, send money to someone, transfer money to another account, and like that. You see, the service’s main server—”
“Don’t do it yet. But we might need to later. I’ll be back in the office after breakfast.”
Speaking of breakfast, Bunny brought it. She sat it down in front of me, looked at Rodney, and read the inscription on his taco shirt. She almost choked and snorted to keep from laughing, turned, and hurried back into the kitchen.
After Rodney left, I looked carefully at my breakfast. The sight and smell of bacon and eggs probably would have made me hurl right there in the diner, but Bunny had been gentle. Oatmeal, cantaloupe, and a slice of unbuttered wheat toast.
Why do we call it “unbuttered?” It makes it sound like the toast was previously buttered and someone removed the butter. It should be “non-buttered.” Same with “unsweetened.” I worry about shit like that.
Bunny came out of the kitchen and sat down across from me.
“Enjoy. You want to talk?”
“You talk,” I said, my mouth full of non-buttered toast. “I’ll chew.”
She pushed forward so that her tits rested on the tabletop. I kind of choked on a swallow of oatmeal. She knew what she was doing.
“About me being available. I guess I am. You interested?” Here we go again. I swallowed the oatmeal, washed it down with coffee, wiped my mouth with a napkin, and looked her in the face, not easy to do when her boobs were rubbing back and forth on the table and showing their cleavage inside her non-but-toned blouse. She had that doe-eyed look that always made me wilt. She knew it too.
“You know, Bunny, we’ve been down this road before.”
“Yeah, and maybe we’ll go down it again. And maybe not.” She pulled away from the table, looked around the diner and ran her hand through her hair. “I’m getting a little long in the tooth, Stan. I’m not the hottie I used to be. You got a better chance of hanging on to me now.”
Bunny had given me a picture of herself in a two-piece bathing suit. I kept it in my desk drawer. With the onset of middle age, she had gone down a few notches on the Bo Derrick scale and had to lower her standards and go out with guys like me. Until she found better, that is. Then it would turn into the old may-be-we-should-see-other-people, let’s-stay-friends routine. What could you do?
I shook my head. “It sure flatters a guy when a woman wants him only because she’s too old to attract younger men.”
“I thought you’d feel that way. I’m sorry. You want to go out for a drink tonight?”
“I quit drinking?”
“Bullshit. When?”
“About a half hour ago when I realized that a fried egg would decorate the linoleum. So I’m off the sauce. It’s easier to give up than eating.”
“We’ve been down that road too.”
“Yes, we have.”
“Well, think about it. Stop by at quitting time if you’re willing. Since you’re on the wagon, maybe you can come by my place for a taco.”
She laughed again and returned to the kitchen.