David Glick Conclusion

DAVID GLICK, PRIVATE DICK

The Case of the Missing Momma

 

Conclusion

 

     It didn’t take a genius to understand that Arnold was the key to this mystery.  Find Arnold and you find Katrina’s mother Laurina, or find out what happened to her.  If she is dead Arnold either killed her or knows who did.  It seemed to me that finding him shouldn’t be that big of a deal.  Lawyers can’t easily disappear, assuming they continue to practice law. 

     The next morning I wandered over to Perko’s office about 9:00.  His secretary, Ruth Ann, told me to just go in.  I flirted with Ruth Ann sometimes, and she had done some internet stuff for me as a favor.  I went into Perko’s office and found him there with his feet on the desk, a huge coffee mug within reach.  He was reading the Denver Post sports page. 

     “Well David!  And how did you make out with the new client, if the question isn’t too personal?”  He didn’t take his feet off the desk and barely looked away from the newspaper.  He was wearing an ugly tie, short-sleeved shirt and suspenders.

     “I don’t make out with clients, Perko.  At least I haven’t yet, but who knows, she could be an exception.  Something I need to ask you about.  Do you remember a local shyster name of Arnold, maybe twenty years ago?”

     Perko told me that Conrad Arnold disappeared shortly after Perko started practicing in town.  There was a lot of local gossip and the consensus was that a woman was involved.  Arnold had a couple of partners, Strand and Speken, and he really put them in a bind when he left. They had to take over all the clients he was working with and that made for a mess.  Strand left town long ago but Speken, who was retired, still lived here.  Arnold’s wife was still in town as well.  Perko said that she never believed that Arnold ran out on her.  She thought the mafia had killed him.  I was beginning to notice a pattern.

     “Anything to that?” I asked Perko.  “Any chance the mob whacked Arnold?”

     “Hell, Dave, there’s no mob presence in this town and there hasn’t been for as long as I’ve been here, and that’s 1985.  Maybe in the old days, but a long time ago.  She’s kidding herself.  I don’t know the reason Arnold disappeared himself but I would bet my Bojon butt that’s what he did.  Where he got to, who knows?  But that’s what that little sweetie is paying you to find out, right?”

     I found a number for Arnold’s wife and called her.  There was a long pause after I told her that I wanted to meet her to talk about her husband but curiosity won out and she agreed to see me that afternoon.  I returned the call of an insurance company manager I had done some work for a few months ago.  He had a disability claim he was suspicious about and he wanted me to tail the guy to determine just how disabled he was.  Back problems, is what the claim was about.  I told him I would do it tomorrow because I was busy today.  When it was close to noon I drove over to the Pass Key Drive In and picked up a couple of Pass Key specials with fries and drove back to Vito’s.  I put the sack on some newspaper on the floor of the car because I knew the grease from the sausage would leak through the waxed paper the sandwiches were wrapped in and through the brown sack too.

     When he saw me walk through the door Vito popped the cap on a Pabst for me and a Bud for himself and we ate at the bar.  There weren’t any customers yet.  Sinatra’s voice came over the jukebox.  Love and Marriage.

     “I really don’t like that song,” Vito said.

     “Why not?”

     “It’s not the man’s kind of song.  Not a ballad, not a saloon song.  It’s a cute piece of crap.  But it plays more than any other song.”

     “Why don’t you remove it from the jukebox?”

     “Scared to.”

     After we finished eating I used a toothpick I had grabbed at Pass Key to dislodge a bit of sausage and I asked Vito about the Pueblo mafia.  He told me stuff his father, uncles Calogero and Vincenzo, and even his grandfather had told him.  Most of the Pueblo Italians came from Sicily.  They left the old country at the end of the 19^th Century and the beginning of the 20^th to work in the smelters and the steel mill.  Some of them brought the old ways with them.  Prohibition became the law in Colorado in 1919, a year before the rest of the country.  Pueblo was a city with a lot of single men whose women hadn’t been brought over from Europe yet, and many of them were drinkers.  Bootlegging took off like a rocket and rival gangs fought each other for the action.  When the Volstead Act was repealed in 1933, all of that ended and things calmed down, but when World War II started everything heated up again and the town was wide open.  There was an Air Base near town and and Army Camp forty miles away.  These guys, along with the steelworkers, had money to spend and prostitution and gambling took much of it.  The mafia controlled vice in the city and paid off the law.  This lasted until the middle 1960’s when the citizens demanded and got change from local politicians.  The old mafiosi retired and died off.  They didn’t want their sons to have the lives they did and the sons went to college or into the mill.  By 1975 it was all over.

     “Anybody telling you the mafia did murder in 1987, well, it just didn’t happen, Dave.  Any of those guys still alive by then, they were old, and anyway, what reason would they have to do it?  Nah, you’re getting bad info.  Look someplace else.”

     It hadn’t sounded right to me from the get-go, and after talking to Perko and Vito I was pretty sure that it wasn’t the mob that had killed or chased off Arnold and Laurina.  Maybe Arnold’s wife thought that her husband had been murdered by the mob or maybe it was just a smokescreen on her part.  You know what?  People are duplicitous.  I’m not certain what that word means but I think I do, and I like saying it.

     The Arnold house was on the north end of the city, on Greenwood, a perfectly named street.  The trees planted more than a hundred years ago, when people counted on shade instead of AC to cool their homes, were close to a hundred feet tall.  The houses were large and had front porches, but I didn’t see any people sitting on them.  The one I was looking for was on a corner with a big lot and when I pressed the doorbell it emitted an annoying buzz. The door was open and a little yapping mutt ran up to the screen door.  I don’t mind a big woofer but these little pooches no bigger than a doberman’s turd drive me up the wall.  I learned a long time ago that if you growl gruff and loud at these mini-dogs they will shut up and back away, and that’s what I did.  That little bastard acted like he had just seen Cujo and he did a u-turn and took off for the rear of the house.  Just then Mrs. Arnold came to the door and looked me over up and down.  I don’t think she liked what she saw.  She was maybe a little hard of hearing.  She hadn’t heard the growl.

     “What did you do to my dog?” 

     “Animals sense that I represent danger.  They fear me.”

     She was a stout woman, probably about 70, who looked like she was capable of kicking my butt and the expression on her face indicated she wouldn’t mind doing it.  She didn’t have a good first impression of me.  That’s not unusual.  She left me standing with the screen door between us long enough for me to use a line I had been saving for years.

     “Can I come in?  I feel like a fly out here.”  It was from an old movie with Robert Mitchum based on a Raymond Chandler novel.  Maybe Farewell My Lovely.  I’ve always loved private eye movies.  None of them are even close to being real but I still like them. 

     She finally let me in and went to the back of the house to let the dog out without telling me where she was going.  It gave me a chance to look around.  The living room was just off the foyer where I was standing.  I walked over to a bookcase and looked at some of the pictures.  There was one of the Arnolds on their wedding day and some others of the two of them, but no pictures of children.  Conrad Arnold was a tall, good looking guy, at least when these pictures were taken.  In the pictures of the two of them together he wasn’t smiling.  Mrs. Arnold came back into the room and asked me to sit down but didn’t offer me any refreshment.  She didn’t seem like the small-talk type so I got down to it.

     “As I told you on the phone, I’d like to ask a few questions about your husband.”

     “My deceased husband.”

     “Your deceased husband?”

     “Conrad died in 1987.”

     “I wasn’t aware of that.  My condolences.  What happened to him?”

     “He was murdered.”

     “Murdered!  That’s terrible!  How was he killed?”

     “I don’t know.  The body was never found.”

     “Who was convicted of the crime?”

     “Nobody.  The crime is still unsolved.”

     I paused and gave her a long look.  She didn’t blink.  “Mrs. Arnold, if there was no body and if no one was convicted of killing him, how can you be so certain he was murdered?”

     “Because it’s the only thing that makes sense.  Conrad loved me with all his heart.  He would never have left me voluntarily.  If he had been kidnapped there would have been a ransom demand.  If he had amnesia he would have eventually shown up.  He had to have been killed.

     “Is there a chance he left you for another woman?”

     “None.  He knew that if he did I would have found him, reached my hand down his throat and pulled his lungs out.”

     “So you are saying that his motivations for staying were love and fear?”

     “Exactly.  In that order.”

     “What about his car?  Did it disappear with him?”

     “No.  They found it in the parking lot near his office where he always parked.”

     “What about his clothes, belongings?”

     There was a small hesitation before she didn’t answer the question.  “You told me you are a private investigator, but who hired you?  Why are you asking these questions so many years after Conrad’s death?”

     “Naturally, I can’t reveal my client’s name, but I can tell you it is someone who is trying to locate a loved one, and who believes Mr. Arnold’s disappearance and the other person’s disappearance are linked.”

     “The family of that slut.”

     “Which slut is that?”

     “The slut who worked for Conrad.  The one some people said he had a fling with.”

     “He didn’t, though?”

     “He assuredly didn’t!  Conrad loved me.”

     “I have one other question.  Who do you think murdered Conrad?”

     “It was the mafia.  He had defended some of those animals in prior years.  They may not have been happy with his representation.  Or maybe they thought he charged them too much.  Those people know how to dispose of bodies so they are never found.  Yes.  It was the mafia.”

     A few minutes later I stood up to leave.  Mrs. Arnold put her hand on my arm at the door and squeezed my bicep.  It hurt.

     “If you find out what happened to him, or even if you find out he’s still alive, you must tell me.”

     “I’m sorry.  You’re not my client.  But I promise you that I will speak to my client, and if my client agrees, I’ll tell you what I found.”

     After speaking to Perko, Vito, and Mrs. Arnold I now had a theory about Conrad Arnold’s disappearance.  It was not original.  It was the same theory everyone with the exception of Mrs. Arnold had, and I wasn’t sure about her either.  Conrad started getting some action on the side.  He and Laurina fell in love.  She left town without telling anyone, he left two weeks later.  They met up wherever it was they planned to meet, possibly changed identities, and lived happily ever after.  Or didn’t.  But I had no doubt that they were together after they left Pueblo.  I did, however want to talk to Conrad’s former law partner, Dowell Speken.  If he had another take I wanted to hear it.

 

*

 

     Speken lived on the other side of town, but it only took 15 minutes to drive there.  It was another neighborhood with tall trees and old, well-kept houses. Probably it had been the best part of town fifty years earlier.  I hadn’t called ahead and I drove up to the house listed in the phone book.  It was on Ditmer, a brick ranch with a large picture window.  A man came to the door even before I rang the bell.  When I told him who I was he let me in without asking questions.  His bald head was fringed with black hair mixed with gray.  His eyes were black but friendly.  A woman was in the kitchen watching a small TV while she did something with food.  She didn’t look in.

     “Mr. Speken, I have been hired to locate someone, and I believe that Conrad Arnold has information that will help me. I’d like to ask a few questions about him.”

     “Who are you trying to find?”

     “I can’t tell you that.  It’s confidential client information.”

     “Is it Laurina’s family?”

     I paused just long enough for him to know that he had scored a bullseye, then told him again that I couldn’t tell him.

     “So those kids grew up and want to know what happened to their mother.  That’s understandable, since she left the poor children without explanation.  What’s your theory?”

     “I’ve heard rumors that the mafia killed them both.”

     “That’s bullshit and I think you know it.”

     “Some people think Arnold and Laurina ran off with each other.  What do you think?”

     “Mr. Glick, Conrad and Jeanine had an unhappy marriage.  That’s not unusual.  But Conrad was afraid of Jeanine.  He thought that if he asked her for a divorce she would kill him.  Whether she was capable of that, I don’t know, I didn’t know her that well, but Conrad thought so and that’s all that matters.  When Laurina came to work for us there was an immediate attraction, even though Conrad was many years older.  Everyone in the office knew they were having an affair.  When Laurina stopped coming to work we asked Conrad where she was but didn’t get an answer.  Two weeks later, when he didn’t show up at the office and Jeanine didn’t know where he was, we all figured it out immediately.  I never heard from him again, and that surprised me, as he had an interest in the partnership practice and I assumed he would ask for his money.”

     “Did Jeanine get the proceeds from his share?’

     “Yes.  She had him declared dead three years later.  She got his share and she had inherited some family money and she has done all right for herself.”

     “Since there was no evidence of foul play, I would think it would have been difficult to have Conrad declared dead.”

     “Not if you play bridge with the judge’s wife every Tuesday.”

     “What about life insurance?  Wouldn’t the insurance company have searched hard for him before they paid out?”

     “Mr. Glick, insurance companies look only at the bottom line.  If the policy was for a million they would move heaven and earth looking for Conrad before they paid the policy.  If it was $100,000, they might think it more cost effective to just pay off.”

     I finally asked the most important question, the only one I really cared about being answered.

     “Where would you look for Conrad and Laurina if you wanted to find them?”

     There was a long pause while he stared at me and thought about his answer.  “I don’t know if is wise to find them after all this time.  I know Laurina’s kids want answers, but they very well might not like what they learn.”

     “I appreciate what you are saying, Mr. Speken, but with all due respect, I don’t think that you have the right to make that decision for them.  If they want to find out what happened to their mother, whether they want to meet with her or not, they should have that knowledge.”

     There was another long, thoughtful pause, and then the elderly man rubbed his face with his stubby fingers and said, “I would look in Idaho.  Conrad grew up there and spoke fondly of it.”

     “Wouldn’t Jeanine have looked for him there?”

     “Jeanine never looked for Conrad.  If he was with another woman, I don’t think she wanted to find him.  She would have been humiliated.  She felt she was better off thinking of him as dead.”

 

*

 

     I planned to surveil the disability applicant for my insurance company client the next day.  I went by my office after I left Speken.  By the time I got there Perko’s door was closed and it was dark inside.  I wrote out a note to his secretary, Ruth Ann, asking her to see if she could find out anything about Conrad Arnold or Laurina in Idaho by checking out the Internet.  I wrote that I would buy her dinner at Giacomo’s if she got me good information.  I slipped it under the door, knowing she would get there before Perko and he wouldn’t see it. 

     The next morning I was sitting in my car four houses down from a two-bedroom frame house that was more brown than white because most of the paint had peeled off.  I had a 16 ounce cup of coffee from Solar Roast on Main Street in my hand and both the Pueblo Chieftain and Denver Post on the seat next to me.  I got there at 8:00 to follow the guy who had applied for disability that my client the insurance company wanted checked out.  One thing about surveillance – it gives you time to think.  I had no doubt now that Conrad and Laurina had run off together.  She must have left town, probably didn’t go far, maybe just up the road 40 miles to Colorado Springs, might have stayed with a friend for a couple of weeks, then picked Conrad up and they traveled to wherever they had planned to go.  The cops certainly figured this out immediately and didn’t look for them as they hadn’t committed a crime.  Mrs. Arnold knew too, although she is still pretending that she doesn’t.  Only Laurina’s parents were taken in by the silly ruse, and probably only because they couldn’t believe that Laurina could leave like that.  When they hired the private investigator and he started snooping around word got back to Laurina somehow, and she sent the threatening note that ended the search for her.  We all suffer our demons, but what had latched on to Laurina that would cause her to leave her kids and let them and her parents think she had died?  To never contact them as they grew up.  Did she wonder about them?  Did she ever come back and wait outside their home, hoping for a glimpse?  Or did she just forget them?  Was it simply a case of falling so hard in love with Arnold that she was willing to give up everything, even her kids?  Or was it something darker, a depression so hurtful that she was afraid that if she didn’t leave she would cause them more harm than she did by leaving.  There is no limit on the things people will do to get what they want, or to run from what is chasing them.  There were a couple of cases in Seattle that still give me nightmares.  In 1995 a mother took her two little kids down to the pier.  She tied both of them to herself, then she tied a cinder block to the three of them and jumped off.  In the other case, a guy had a fling with a woman he worked with and fell hard for her.  He had a wife and three kids.  He knew that paying child support would ruin him financially and he took out insurance policies on his whole family and one night when he was supposed to be on a business trip he set the house on fire.  The wife burned up trying to save the kids.  She threw two of them out of a second floor bedroom window but they were so burned that they died anyway.  I was first on the scene and saw her throw them out and helped the firemen douse the flames and heard them screaming while their skin came off.  There is nothing you can imagine that humans aren’t capable of doing.  So Laurina leaving her kids to think she was murdered isn’t that big a stretch. 

     At 9:45 I saw the door to the little house open and a man using a cane came out and walked to the Chevy parked in the carport.  Even from where I was sitting I could see the hurt on his face.  I snapped a couple of pictures and followed him to a physical therapy clinic.  He came out after about thirty minutes and drove back home and hobbled in the house.  I stuck around until 4:00 and he never came back out.  Not everybody filing for disability is a phony son of a bitch.

     There was a manila envelope on the floor when I opened my office door.  When I took out the contents there was a note on top from Ruth Ann that read, “Pick me up Saturday night at 6.  Get a haircut.”  She had found Conrad and Laurina in Lewiston, Idaho on the Washington border.  In the envelope there were newspaper articles about Conrad selling his insurance agency and retiring, about Laurina doing volunteer work for Meals on Wheels, and them celebrating their wedding anniversary.  There were pictures.  It was them.  Ruth Ann had copied documents about their house from the county assessor and other public records she had found.  I read it all, then read it again.  There was a phone listing for Conrad.  I dialed the number.  An elderly man answered and I asked for Laurina.  He asked who was calling and I told him never mind who’s calling, just put her on.  When she said hello I just ran with it.

     “Mrs. Arnold my name is Glick.  I’m a private investigator from Pueblo.  I was hired by your daughter to locate you and I guess I have.”

     There was a long pause before she said anything.

     “What do you want?”

     “I don’t want a damned thing and I don’t know if Katrina does either, but I would like to know if you will agree to talk with her or meet with her if that is what she wants.”

     “No.”

     “That’s it?  You haul ass, make your kids think you are dead, never contact them, and now that they are grown you won’t even speak to them?”

     “What possible good would it do now?  What would we say to each other?  I doubt Katrina would throw her arms around me and hug me, do you?  I think it would be best if it all stays in the past, for her and the other two to get on with their lives and leave me to mine.  It’s been too long and too much has happened.  They will never forgive me.  Tell me what you want.  Tell me how much you will take to tell her you can’t find me.  I’m willing to pay a reasonable amount.”

     “I don’t operate that way.  I don’t sell out my clients.  I’m going to tell her where you are and she can decide for herself what to do next.  If I were her I would write you off and forget you, but that decision is up to her.”

     I hung up and called Katrina and told her I had some information and would come by her house at 7:00.  Then I looked for used computers in the classifieds. 

     This is a strange town.  The way it works here, your parents either live on the south side or the north side, the two parts of town divided by the Arkansas River.  If you grow up on the north side, if you stay in town (and many people do) when you become an adult you live on the north side.  Same for the south-siders.  Except for high school sports there is no antagonism or competitiveness between the two sides.  I’ve asked a few people why it’s like this.  Nobody knows.  When I moved here I rented a 70 year-old bungalow on the south side.  Katrina lives in a similar house.  When I walked up to the door, the sun not down and the heat of the day not subsided, I could see Katrina through the open door.  She was sitting on the couch watching television.  I knocked lightly and she turned off the TV and came toward me.  She was wearing shorts, a sleeveless top and sandals and she was gorgeous.  She invited me in and I made a point of sitting on the couch next to her.  I opened the brown envelope and showed her the pages Ruth Ann had printed and waited while she read them.  When she was done I broke the news that I had spoken to Laurina and she had no wish to meet with her.  We were only a couple of feet apart and when her tears spilled out of those beautiful eyes I moved over and held her while she sobbed.  After a couple of minutes she got up and was gone for a little while, then came back and she was composed.  She didn’t sit and she thanked me for all I had done.  I asked her what she planned to do and she said she didn’t know yet, she wanted to think about it, it had all come together so fast.  I got up, took her little hand and wished her well, kissed her on the cheek, and left.

     I do my best thinking when I am driving, and so I drove through the shady streets of twilight and then total darkness.  I knew that although I had fantasized about a relationship with Katrina she had no similar thoughts about me.  Her mother had left her for an older man.  Wouldn’t that fact alone preclude her from wanting anything to do with me?  In our two meetings she had never given any clue that she wanted anything from me except a business relationship.  I had to respect that.  Still, the memory of holding her sweet form, of smelling again that certain perfume…  But what the hell.  It wasn’t to be.

     In this business, mostly there aren’t happy endings.  The information you supply clients sometimes ends marriages, sometimes puts people in jail.  The worst part is that every once in a while you don’t know the ending.  Did Katrina ever call her mother?  Did they meet, reconcile?  Or did she try to forget Laurina and go on with her life?  I wish I knew.  I forgot about my promise to Mrs. Arnold to ask Katrina if it was OK to let her know where Conrad was.  I didn’t owe her anything and I honestly didn’t think she really wanted to know.  Conrad had been dead to her for a long time.

     I ended up at Vito’s Bar and Grill.  From outside I could hear Sinatra’s voice, Night and Day.  It was Friday night and many of the after work crowd had stuck around and the joint was busy and loud.  There was an empty stool to the left of the doorway and as I moved toward it I noticed a guy sitting alone at the end of the bar.  He was wearing an old-fashioned cloth cap, a cigarette between his brown fingers.  There was a small tumbler of beer in front of him but Vito serves beer in mugs.  The guy was looking at me with an angry expression on his dark features.  I don’t know if he didn’t approve of me, of the people in the bar in general, or of the 21^st Century.  He looked hazily familiar.  Vito was serving a customer at the other end and I waved my arms to get his attention, then pointed back to where the stranger was sitting.  I could read Vito’s lips ask, “what?” and he held his hands out in a gesture that said the same thing.  When I looked back to the left the stool at the end was empty.  No glass on the bar, no pack of Luckies and Ronson lighter that had been there before.  Only a thin line of smoke that quickly dissipated in the night air.

     Vito Bucchinfuso is the best friend I have in this town.  At least once a week we have a late breakfast together before he opens, and frequently on Monday when the joint is closed he invites me to dinner with his wife and kids.  I stop by Vito’s for a beer when I have a chance, but I honestly would rather not.  I’ve been in some tight spots over the years and I have never backed down when things were tough.  I just don’t like to go up against what I don’t understand.  That includes the Sicilian sitting at the end of the bar that night.  Who was that guy?

 

 

Jerr Miller

    

 

 

David Glick

Classmates:  This is a highly fictionalized version of a true story that was related by Dave Mihalick on the blog two years ago.  You may notice places you know, and some of the characters will have the same names as some of you.  This was not done to offend anyone, but is an attempt to lighten to a small degree what is a very dark tale.  Due to it’s length, it will be posted in two segments.

 

 

DAVID GLICK, PRIVATE DICK

The Case of the Missing Momma

 

Chapters one and two

 

     The fluorescents flickered out and the Rockies/Dodgers game went dead on my radio with Holliday at the plate and two on base.  I had rarely noticed the dull roar from the air conditioner before but now that it was off the room seemed very quiet.  It was a sizzling July day and within thirty minutes it was nearly as hot in my office as it was in the steel mill across the river on the other side of town.  It’s an old building, built long before they started sealing office windows to keep jumpers in and flies out.  I thought maybe I could get a little breeze if I opened them but no go.  There were probably twenty coats of paint on the frames.  When I was on the force in Seattle I remember a guy once rented a room in a downtown hotel and asked for the 15^th floor.  His neighbor heard this loud banging and hotel security found the guy trying to bust out the window with a desk chair so he could take a dive.  They make those windows strong just for that reason.  Security grabbed him and called the cops and the officers got him over to the hospital where he was admitted as a head case, but the docs let him go a few hours later when he promised not to do it again.  So he went to the supermarket, bought a can of Liquid Drano and drank all he could until his throat started smoking.  That did the trick for him.  I don’t get it.  What’s the big deal?  You buy a cheap piece, you stick the barrel in your mouth, bang.  It’s done.

     I stuck it out in the office for another fifteen but then I decided to walk two blocks to Vito’s Bar & Grill to see if Vito still had AC.  What the hell, it’s not like I had anything else to do except read the sports page and wait for the phone to ring, which it hadn’t for four days anyway.  When the police commissioner in Seattle fired my ass for laying low that gob of phlegm Romero, I had to figure out some way to make a living, and being a cop was all I knew.  I didn’t blame the boss man for deep-sixing me though.  The shit storm that ensued after I put Romero down left him no selection.  Every do-gooder and Hispanic activist in the city camped outside his office door so what was he going to do?   Yeah, I shot the pocket of pus in the back, but so what?  He had a record from here to tomorrow and he had pistol-whipped a teller during a bank robbery and winged a cop who tried to stop him.  Two days later I saw Romero speeding in his Camaro on the south side of town and he took off when I tried to pull him over.  When I finally got him stopped he got out and started running.  How was I to know he wasn’t armed?  I figured he had a piece in every pocket.  You know what police officers say, you can be a great cop, treat everybody decent, save lives and win a lot of commendations, but shoot one lousy minority… Don’t get me wrong, I got nothing against any group.  As far as I’m concerned, if you commit a crime I don’t care if your name is John, Juan or Deon,  I’m coming after you.  At least I was coming after you, before I got canned from the only job I ever wanted.  Anyway, that’s past me now.  I needed twenty years to get my pension and I only had eighteen.  I’d been a police detective for eight of those twenty so I figured I would open a private investigator office and the bucks would roll in like snowballs on a slope.  Trouble was, in Seattle there were four pages of PI’s in the yellows, and I knew from experience that most of them weren’t making it.  My rep in that town was shot anyway.  So I went down to the library, found the telephone directories and started going through them to see how many private dicks there were in different cities in the west.  Somebody told me it’s a lot easier if you use the internet, but I don’t know anything about computers and don’t want to know.  So I got the phone books and started looking.  No way was I moving back east, and I didn’t want to live in California, either.  Trouble was, every place I looked at was just like Seattle.  PI’s, lawyers and bail bondsmen, one for every ten residents. Finally I checked out this burg, Pueblo in Colorado, and there were only three listings for PI’s.  I called the three of them and pretended I was a client to figure out do they know their business.  One is already disconnected, the other two are make-believe.  These guys couldn’t find their dicks if they had eight hands.  So nine months later here I am, not qualified for food stamps but damn close.  But I have made some good contacts with lawyers and cops who are sending a few customers my way.  Mostly women who suspect their husbands are banging their secretaries or somebody else’s secretaries.  Not my favorite type of work but it pays the rent.  And the rent is pretty cheap is this so-called city.  I have two rooms in what used to be the downtown Post Office, converted to office space, one room for me and one for the secretary I hope to hire some day.  And no, I won’t be banging her.  You don’t get your sex where you work, I learned that lesson my first year on the force.  Olga, who worked in the property room.  Yeah, she caused me some headaches, but it was great while it lasted.

     Vito’s Bar and Grill is a dive that some people in town say opened in 1933, as soon as prohibition ended.  Vito said it was opened before prohibition ended, that it was a speakeasy, and he ought to know because his grandpa, Vito the first, bought the joint in 1942.  It’s a little one-room bar, like a neighborhood place but downtown.  Vito calls it a bar and grill because that’s what the sign, in the original blue neon, has always said, but I haven’t seen a grill or him serving anything that came off one.  He has some jerky in a jar that looks like it has been on sitting on the bar since 1968 and a few bags of pretzels and potato chips.  That’s it.  Vito doesn’t do cocktails either.  Maybe a bourbon and seven or rum and coke.  This is a shot and beer joint with no big screens or any other screens.  The guys come here, they’re looking to have a couple jolts and some male conversation after work or on the weekend, get away from their wives and kids for a while.  They want to watch a game, the Broncos or the Rockies, they watch it at home.  Vito’s is for talking about sports, not seeing it on TV. The first time I went there, it’s in the afternoon and Vito, me and some well-dressed boozehound with both hands on his glass are the only ones there.  I’m shooting the breeze with Vito and all of a sudden Sinatra’s voice starts on the jukebox.  “All Or Nothing At All.”  The thing is, nobody had put any money in the slot.  I look over at Vito and he nods.  “Yeah.  Six, seven times a day it does that.  Always Sinatra, but different songs.”

     “Nobody pushes B-19 or whatever?”

     “Never.”

     He told me that some other weird things happen there.  Sometimes he puts the open sign in the window, next time he looks it’s turned around to closed.  Once he turned out the lights when he locked up and they came back on.  He did it four times, every time they come back on, and finally he just left.  Next day, the lights are off.  One night when he was busy he saw a guy in a cloth cap sitting at the bar smoking and staring at the beer he’s holding in his hand, but Vito never saw him come in and didn’t serve him.  Vito sees a pack of Luckies and a Ronson on the bar.  Next time he looks, the guy isn’t there anymore, there’s no beer glass and the ashtray is empty.  Stuff like that.  I don’t believe in it.  In my line of work, I know there’s a rational explanation for everything.  Vito says the joint was a mob hangout back in the day, maybe even some guys got whacked in there, and maybe they’re still hanging out.  I don’t buy it.

     The cool air in Vito’s place felt so good that I decided to stick around for a while.  I finished my first Pabst and had taken a couple swigs out of the second when the phone rang.  Vito answered, gave me the nod, and I went back behind the bar and picked it up.  It’s Perko, the shyster whose office is across the hall from mine. 

     “Jesus, Glick.  You finally get a client and you’re not here to talk to her.  You better head on back.  She looks like she has enough money to pay you and she’s a babe.”

     “Where is she?”

     “In my waiting room.  I’m going out there right now to ogle her.”

     “How’d you know I’m here?”

     “Where the hell else would you be?”

     “Did the power go back on?”

     “Yeah.  It’s cold as an embalming room in here.”

     I didn’t finish my brew.  I couldn’t take a chance on losing a client.  I took one big gulp, put a fin down for Vito, and headed out the door.  It may have been cool in Vito’s but it was still a furnace on the street. 

     I beat feet back to the office, sticking to the shady side of the street as much as possible.  By the time I got there I was mopping sweat off my face with my handkerchief.  The client was sitting on a plastic chair in Perko’s outer office and, just as he said he would, Perko was out there slobbering and talking to her.  And he had something to slobber about.  I introduced myself and she held out her hand for a shake.  It was small and cool, just like the rest of her.  We walked across the hall after I nodded a thanks to Perko.  I unlocked the office door with my name painted on the frosted glass and shepherded her past my empty receptionist’s desk, and closed the door after her in my inner office.  She sat down and I picked up a pen.

     “I didn’t catch your name,” I said, looking at her while she fiddled in her purse.  She hadn’t introduced herself  in Perko’s office.  Probably wanted to size me up first.

     “Katrina.  Like the hurricane.  Katrina McNair”

     There was a girl in high school, Sharon.  I  can’t come up with the last name.  When you talked to Sharon she always looked right into your eyes, like whatever it was you were saying, which usually wasn’t much, was the most important thing she would ever hear.  She was pretty, not a beauty, but she always had guys hanging around her, wanting to be with her.  This Katrina like the hurricane reminded me of Sharon.  She was looking at me like I could solve all her problems, whatever they were, and after that we would become the greatest lovers and the best of friends.  And already, I wanted that.  She wasn’t a Scottsdale trophy-wife type.  Her hair was blond but probably natural, certainly not platinum or anything close to it.  The eyes were as bright and blue as the blazing sky outside, and when you looked into them you started trying to remember the location of the nearest hotel.  She was dressed demurely in khaki shorts that ended just above her knees, a blue blouse, and a vest that matched the shorts.  A dark ring on her right hand.  I finally realized that she was waiting for me to say something.  The AC had chilled my sweaty face.  I felt a little weak.

     “OK Katrina.  Obviously you have some sort of trouble, since you came to see me.  Tell me what is going on.”

     “I want you to find my mother, if she’s still alive.”

     “Your birth mother?’

     “My only mother.”

     “When is the last time you saw her.”

     “In 1987.  I was eight.”

     “What’s her name?”

     “Laurina.  Laurina Cortese.”

     “You need to tell me the story even if it’s a long one.  I have time.”

     “You charge by the hour?”

     “Yes, but today’s session is on the house.”

     She gave me a long look.  I had the feeling that she had been wanting to tell this story for a while, but now that it was time to tell it she wasn’t sure she could.  Finally she started.

     “She just went away.  Or was taken away.  She and my dad were separated, he was in Boston, and all of us, my sister, my brother and me, I was the oldest, were living here with her and my grandparents.  One day she didn’t come home from work.  We never saw her or heard from her again.”

     “What did your grandparents do?”

     “They called the police.  They came and asked a lot of questions.  But Grandpa was always sure that they didn’t look too hard.”

     “Did she have a car?”

     “Yes.  An old Pontiac.  It went missing too.”

     “Who did your mother work for?”

     “A lawyer.  Mr. Arnold.  She was his secretary.  He said he didn’t know anything.  He said she left after work that day just like any other day.  But a few weeks later he disappeared too.  I know, it sounds suspicious, but my mom wouldn’t do that.  She wouldn’t leave us for a man without even telling us goodbye.  She loved us too much.  Besides, Mr. Arnold was 22 years older than she was.  After a month or so Grandpa hired a private detective, but right after that a letter came in the mail.  I didn’t know about it until a couple of years ago, just before Grandma died.  She gave it to me.  After the letter came, Grandpa fired the detective.”

     She took an envelope from her purse and handed it to me.  It felt like a soft rag, like a magazine in a doctor’s waiting room, like somebody had handled it a lot.  Postmarked Pueblo, July 19, 1987.  No return address.  The note inside was written on lined tablet paper that you can buy anywhere.  There was only one sentence.  “Stop looking for Laurina if you want to keep breathing.”

     I put the note back into the envelope and put it in a file folder and put the folder on my desk.

Katrina had been stoic up to now but I saw that her eyes had misted, and she quickly took out a Kleenex and dabbed at them.

     “Did you go to live with your father?”

     “He didn’t want us.  He sent money sometimes.  He died of a drug overdose a few years later.  Our grandparents raised us.”

     I told her what I charged and got the rest of the details.  She told me she worked as an administrator in a local hospital.  Her brother and sister lived in other states.  She gave me a picture of her mother, the same face as Katrina’s but harder, and gave me the rest of the information I needed to get started.  She also gave me a check for $500.  I thought she was going to leave but then she looked at me with those eyes again and dropped one last bomb.

     “There’s another thing.  I don’t put much store in it, but there was a rumor that it was the mafia that disappeared my mom.  She had nothing to do with anything illegal.  She didn’t run with any of those people.  What reason would they have to kill her?  But I thought I should let you know.”    Then she was gone, leaving behind only a scent of  perfume I knew from someplace, somebody.  I couldn’t place it.  Who had worn it?

     I went back to Vito’s to see if maybe he could fill me in on the mafia in Pueblo, but the after work crowd had come in and he was busy.  I waved at Vito and left, planning to return the next day.

 

*

 

     I decided to stop by Safeway to pick up a broiled chicken for dinner.  I was wrung out from  the heat and I didn’t want to go to a restaurant.  I parked the car next to a black pickup waxed so recently that I cold see a dull spot that the rag had passed over.  The windows were rolled up and the engine was running.  A guy in a sleeveless shirt was yelling something I couldn’t hear and shaking his fist at a woman in the passenger seat.  I walked into the store and decided to pick up a few other things since I was there.  I grabbed a Hungry Man from the frozen section, a sirloin marked down, a few bananas.  Some Ragu.  A few minutes later I came across the couple from the pickup in the potato chip aisle.  He was a couple inches shorter than my six foot and twenty pounds heavier than my one-eighty.  He wore a Harley Wings tattoo on his bicep and a bunch of other ones on his arms and back.  Greasy black hair.  He might have lifted weights sometime in the past but he was going a little soft now.  She was a bottle-blond with bruises on both sides of her face that were fading out, and a shiner that was almost gone.  She looked away when she noticed me watching.  It was the same shamed look my mom used to get after my stepfather had knocked her around, before I busted his kneecap with an aluminum bat when I was thirteen.  The dude was pointing out items for her to put into the cart, talking to her like she was mud on his soles.  A couple of aisles later I ran into them again.  He was giving her a ration of crap for putting something in the cart without his approval.  I cussed myself silently for what I was about to do but I made eye contact with the guy and motioned that I wanted to talk to him.  He told the woman to go on ahead.

     “I saw your unit outside,” I said to him. “ Nice looking wheels.  I can give you a helluva deal on some spinner hubs.”

     “Yeah?  How much?”

     “A hundred and a half for a set.”

     “Where they at?”

     “In my car behind the store.”

     He told the woman to wait for him at the checkout and he would be back.  We walked outside together.  He wanted to know where I got the merchandise.  I told him I was the Rocky Mountain distributor.  We were facing east on the south side of the building and the reflection from the sun, now lower in the sky, was hot against the yellow stucco wall of the store.  There was nobody back there.  It was too late in the day for deliveries.  There was nothing but some busted pallets.  When we got there I started looking around in confusion.

     “What’s up?” he asked.

     “My car!  I just left it here a few minutes ago and it’s gone!”

     He started laughing.  “Hey, that’s funny, man.  You’re trying to sell me some hubcaps you boosted and meantime somebody boosted your wheels.”

     I turned to face him.  We were in perfect position.  He had this big grin and was standing with his legs spread, like a phony macho asshole.  I shrugged my shoulders in a “what are you going to do?” gesture and then I kicked him square in the gonads.  I kicked him so hard that I pulled a muscle in my calf.  He screamed and bent over almost double.  The logical thing was for me to lift my knee into his face and lay him out, but that would have resulted in a broken nose and a lot of blood, and I didn’t want to get it on my pants.  I had just bought them two weeks ago, $37 on sale at Dillards.  I walked around behind him, put my foot on his butt and shoved him down.  He was still holding his balls and he landed face first on the blacktop and took a couple of layers of skin off his nose and chin.  I went over to his side and rolled him on his back with my foot.  He was gasping like a caught carp and as I kneeled down I grabbed him by the front of the shirt and pulled his head up.  I slapped him four times backhand forehand backhand forehand and let loose of his shirt.  His head fell with a crack on the hard asphalt.  There was blood all over his face, his eyes were big as coat buttons, and he was scared shitless.

     “What you do me like that for?  You don’t even know me!”

     I grabbed him up by the shirt again and got right in his slimy face.  “Oh yeah, I know you, pal.  I know exactly who you are.  You’re a big bad dude who likes to beat up women.  They’re not too strong and they don’t fight back, right?”

     “You got the wrong guy!  I don’t beat up no women!”

     I backhanded him again.  “Don’t bullshit me, mouse turd.  I saw you with your woman inside.  I saw what you been doing to her.  But you’re not going to do it again, are you?”

     He looked like he was going to cry.  “No man, I won’t hit her again.  She had it coming and it was only that one time anyway.”

     Once again he got the back of my hand.  “I thought I just told you not to bullshit me.  Listen, you can of puke, I want you to know about me.  I’m a guy who knows people, you know what I mean?  I work with people who work downtown, people who hear things.  You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?  And I’m going to tell these people to keep an eye on you, and on your woman and on any other woman you take up with, and if they tell me you screwed up, I’m going to find you again, whether you’re here in Pueblo or wherever you are, and when I do find you, punk, I’m going to gut you like a trout.  I think you can tell I don’t mind doing stuff like I just did to you.  I like it.  So don’t let me hear anything about you, OK?  And another thing.  If you see me walking down the sidewalk, cross to the other side.  I don’t want to smell you again.”

     I got up and noticed some flecks of his blood on my pants. “Shit!”  I gave him a solid kick to the ribs, not strong enough to break them, just enough so he would have a final memory.  I left him there moaning and went back to the front of the store, limping and wiping the blood off my hands with my handkerchief.  The woman was standing just inside the door looking out.  She was a small woman with extremely large breasts and she was way overdue for her dye job. 

     “You better get the truck and drive it around to the back of the store.  Your friend had an accident.”

     “Is he hurt?”

     “Oh yeah, he’s hurt, but he doesn’t need to go to the doctor or ER.  He’s not that hurt.  Just take him home and wash him up and give him a couple of days.  He’ll be OK.  Tell him I talked to you.  Tell him I told you that if he beats you again I’ll find him, and next time he will have to go to the ER.  And lady, you don’t need to put up with that crap, not from him or any man.  You’re too good for that.”

     She gave me a long, scared look, and then she grabbed her cart with the bags in it and hurried off to the truck.  I waited until she drove to the back so she wouldn’t see my car, then I left.  I didn’t even get my chicken.  I drove over to Collette’s and ordered takeout rigatoni with extra sausage, then I headed home.  My leg was hurting, I had bruised hands and I had blood on my new pants.  After I put peroxide on the blood spots, ate dinner and took a shower, I put on some Diana Krall, Chris Botti and yes, Sinatra.  I sat in my good chair, put my feet up and thought about the case, about Katrina, and what had happened at Safeway.  I asked myself, why did I get involved in this?  Like the Texans say, over and over again, I didn’t have a dog in this fight.  Will what I did make any difference anyway, or will that puddle of slime just beat her up worse next time?  Won’t he blame her for the beating I gave him?  And that brought up another question.  Was it true what I told that rat’s ass lying there on the ground?  Do I like to hurt people?  Do I enjoy it?  Is that the real reason Romero is turning into a lump of mold six feet under in a Seattle boneyard?  In the dimness of a room lighted only by a single lamp, my old friend Jim Beam and I thought about it for a long, long time.

 

Jerry Miller

 

 

1968 Pardun

Nineteen Sixty-Eight. I was in Chicago working in the national office of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) on Madison Street. The office was in a run down building in the two-block buffer zone between the black ghetto to the west and skid road to the east. The street below our office was where the prostitutes with blood trickling down their legs from multiple needle sticks tried to come up with a few more dollars to feed their habits. It was there that I watched as a good-looking young woman in her early twenties plied her trade to feed her habit and became an old hag in less than a year. It was the place where a young black man tried, with limited success, to convince the local drunks that LSD was a better way to get high than drinking MD20-20. It was in 1968 that I found a  human hand one morning and a human foot the next inside the entryway to our building. They were gifts from the gang of sub-teenage boys who played on the streets of the ghetto.  It turned out that when the neighborhood went to hell the local chiropractic school moved to a better location leaving a basement full of bodies hanging from hooks just waiting for a gang of kids to break in and take a few body parts.

 

Madison was the kind of street where the noise of the people, false alarms, police sirens, and the occasional gun shot mingled with the sound of the Thursday evening choir practice and Sunday morning choir at the predominantly African American church somehow  gave the impression that there was hope, even though slight, that everything would come out all right.

 

Nineteen Sixty-Eight got off with a bang. Our government had been assuring the American people that there was light at the end of the tunnel in Vietnam and then it turned out that the light was the Vietnam Liberation Express attacking every provincial capital at once during the Vietnamese New Year called Tet. This general uprising shocked the American people and finally tipped the scale so that a majority of Americans opposed the war. In spite of that the war continued and spread across Southeast Asia.  The reaction of the government on the home front was to increase the repression of the anti-war movement.

 

When Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, 1968, the rioting happened in front of our office. The mobs of people were replaced first by a  National Guard unit then by an Army tank that was parked in front of our office. At one point the tank crew rotated the turret so that the cannon aimed straight at us as we watched from the second floor.

 

We didn’t know what the government was doing to stop us but we assumed that they were taping our phone and might have an infiltrator in the office. At one point an entire issue of the SDS weekly newspaper, many tied bundles sorted by zip code, got “lost” in the post office. Two weeks later the missing bundles were “found” and sent on their way. We figured the FBI needed a couple of weeks to copy down all the addresses. The FBI contacted the IRS asking for an audit of our tax returns. The IRS determined that my income of $267 for the first half of 1968 was so low that I didn’t owe any tax.

 

Jeff, a friend of mine, had been found guilty of refusing to be drafted and was out on appeal. He got a call from his lawyer saying that he had been requested to come to the Federal Court House to clarify his status with a federal judge. “No big deal. Just routine”. He and I planned to go see a movie afterward. I was amazed as the judge revoked his bond and he was sent to the federal maximum-security penitentiary in Springfield, Illinois. Years later in copies of my FBI files I discovered that this action was considered a success for the FBI’s “Counterintelligence Program, COINTELPRO. The goal of this program was to use whatever means necessary to destroy the Black movement and the movement against the war. I was included in the “Rabble Rouser Index” and later in the Security Index and the words “Neutralize” and “should be considered dangerous” are everywhere. This led to the addition of a certain level of surreality to my life. I was pulled over and searched on suspicion of robbing a bank while in Chicago. In Austin the Army tried to set me up on helping a soldier go AWOL. We left him standing by the road in the Texas hill country waiting for his next ride on the “underground railroad.” Several jobs I had were sabotaged. Job records were mysteriously lost. At one point, while in rural Arkansas, the FBI raided our farm looking for a draft dodger. Then the Forest Service sprayed Agent Orange on our watershed. Later a group of three fighter bombers pretended that we were the Viet Cong and ran a series of extremely low elevation bombing and strafing practice runs on our farm.

 

All in all, nineteen sixty-eight was indeed an “interesting year and helped me understand the meaning of the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” 

 

Robert Pardun