CHAPTER 13

Liz made the appointment with Philyaw two days after returning from the interview in Monterey. Dressed in a very white-person blouse and pants suit, she parked two blocks from the address in El Segundo so no one would see her Gypsy car. She must not look or behave like someone who’d spent the night in the backseat splayed out atop her belongings in a precise position calculated to avoid hard objects.

The address was in a section of old warehouses, block after block and spooky even in daylight, as forsaken as the neighborhood where she’d passed the night next to a refinery. You could park your live-in car all night in depopulated neighborhoods like these and no one minded. But it was also the kind of place where you could drag a body into a car trunk with nobody around to care. Freddy Krueger-land.

Each time she ran out of motel money she felt herself falling deeper down the rabbit hole. The scrambled feeling in her gut seemed practically permanent now. Sometimes she thought about college classmates whose families protected them from eviction, repossession, fast-food drudgery, and meal skipping. They didn’t always have sparkling personalities, but their circumstances made sparkling personalities possible. If they fell they never hit the ground. Liz always knew a fall could break her neck.

At this point Philyaw the Bogart character was her only live hope. But a man who’d seen her dressed as a chicken was a tenuous, frolicsome sort of hope, like one of those wild schemes you’d see in a silly movie. Not used to her high heels, she carefully picked her way across the dirt, weeds, and sparse gravel that passed for a parking lot. She steered around a used condom. Could there really be an office around here? Finally she spotted a green door atop a tall strip of reddish brown wooden steps along the side of the building. But she couldn’t make out the little sign next to the door. After climbing up there she discovered it said Pacific Asset Management instead of Western Credit Associates. Now what? That’s when she heard someone else climbing the steps. A tall, good-looking guy with dark hair pulled back into a small ponytail. She was just about to ask him whether she had the right place when the door opened and a woman stepped out, colliding with Liz.

“Yeeee! . . .” The woman straightened her glasses, which had giant baby-blue frames. She was fiftyish with sparse red hair that had been chemically ravaged, three-inch heels and turquoise slacks clinging to a slender figure. Frilly blouse with tanned, aggressive cleavage.

They apologized to each other, and when Liz asked whether she was okay the woman briefly made a face, a half smile mixed with a squint, signaling just what it was hard to tell. She held an unlighted cigarette and throwaway lighter, but the collision had snapped the cigarette in two. She carefully lit the stub and inhaled deeply. “Can I help you?” she asked in a froggish voice. Exhale.

“Is this Western Credit Associates?”

“Who’s there?” The voice came from somewhere inside. Philyaw the Bogart man stepped out on the landing and asked her inside. The tall guy who’d come up behind her still hadn’t said a word. He followed Liz into a room as big as a basketball court, obviously an ex-storage facility. Mostly bare, it contained a dozen or so metal desks concentrated near the door, maybe half of them used by employees conversing into headsets. There were big windows up high, some of them broken. Across the room pigeons roosted on an overhead pipe. No one looked dressed for success. Books and papers were piled atop a few beat-up filing cabinets. Gray linoleum floor in the office section, rough-cut wood everywhere else. Nothing on the walls but a couple calendars and a big Reservoir Dogs movie poster, no frame. “You need to change the sign,” Liz told Philyaw. He nodded but didn’t seem terribly concerned.

“Not really,” said the collision survivor. She stood in the doorway, holding the lighted butt outside. “We don’t need anybody finding us.”

“Nobody we don’t want finding us,” said a fat man sitting at one of the desks.

“Lots a crazies out there,” explained the woman. “Even got some right here.” She jabbed a thumb in the direction of the fat man. He wore an Apache-style headband and sported thick, graying facial hair carefully trimmed into a neat Vandyke that didn’t match his sloppy persona. One more thing: he was shirtless.

“Please Speed, I’m begging you,” Philyaw told him. “We’ve got visitors.”

The fat man smiled at Liz and said, “Talk to Sandra.”

“Forget it. I’m not apologizing,” said the woman, who’d stubbed out the butt.

“I guess you might as well see this now,” Philyaw told Liz. “It would have come up eventually.”

The woman fished a shirt out of the fat man’s waste-basket and held it up for Liz. “Does this or does this not clash with his pants?” The shirt was blue and white gingham, the trousers medium brown, almost tan.

“She’s always knocking my clothes,” the fat man said. “The shirt offends her, so I decided to make her happy.”

“Why don’t you decide?” Philyaw told Liz. “What’s the truth here?”

The tall guy who’d followed Liz up the steps had seated himself at a desk and was looking through a file. “Be careful,” he said. “Most people can’t handle the truth.”

Liz, still standing, rested her chin on one fist in the manner of Rodin’s “The Thinker.” “Are the pants brown or tan?” she asked. “That’s what it comes down to.”

“Brown,” said the woman.

“Tan,” said the fat man.

Liz looked carefully at the fat man. “Here’s my ruling. In this particular instance, the shirt matches your beautiful blue eyes. That makes the color of the trousers a moot point. So although I can understand why the question was raised,”—she smiled toward the woman—“it’s okay.”

The woman and the fat man shook hands to applause and she helped him on with his shirt. Meanwhile Liz became aware that the room didn’t smell quite right. Not awful, but not something you’d particularly want to smell either. Some of it was owing to the pigeons, but it was probably mostly from the crates and pallets of merchandise stored here when it had been a functioning warehouse. Onions, apples, potatoes. Even plastic widgets from China have a certain aroma. The smells were all mixed into a too-sweet background stench of fermented produce plus the peculiar ghost odor of cardboard boxes and the raw, cheap lumber of the pallets that once made a home here. Philyaw seemed to know what she was thinking. “It wasn’t always an office,” he explained. No kidding. “Sat empty a long time and . . . Well, anyway, they offered me a long-term lease so I added some paint, thought I was brilliant. Then summer hit and I had to put in air-conditioning, but we were still broiling so I paid a fortune for some half-assed roof insulation. Anyway, there’s plenty of parking. I’m getting ahead of myself, but this job comes with health insurance. Starts the first of the month. We figure that beats office space in Beverly Hills with a big fountain in the courtyard.”

Fat man: “It’s good, too, the health insurance.”

“They won’t give me oxygen, though,” said the woman.

Said Philyaw, “You let smokers take home oxygen and they blow themselves up. Listen,” he told Liz, “I’m gonna give you—I guess you could call it an orientation. Please, take a seat.” Seating himself next to her, Philyaw called over to the fat man, “Speed, whaddaya got?”

The fat man moved an earphone off and covered the mouthpiece with a meaty hand. “That lying prick who lives in Jack Benny’s old house,” he said.

“Is it the gay guy?”

“If he’s not gay, then there aren’t any gay people—it’s all a hoax.”

“Is he on the line?” asked Philyaw.

The fat man held up one finger in a waiting gesture.

“If you reach him, put him on speakerphone.”

“Hello, this is Mr. Holland from Internal Revenue,” said the fat man, impressively calm and authoritative. He sat on one of those beaded seat liners you see beneath the butts of Tijuana cabdrivers and reminded Liz of that immense Star Wars creature who kept Princess Leia on a leash in one of the sequels. Jabba the Hutt. “We’ve been trying to get him his refund. Is Mr. Millincamp there? . . . Okay.” The fat man pressed a button.

“This is Millincamp,” a wary voice said over the speaker.

Fat man: “It’s about that $4,632.11 Mr. Millincamp.”

“My God, didn’t I tell you—”

“Green, Western Credit. How ya doing, Mr. Millincamp?”

“My, you’re a sly villain . . . What’syourname?”

“Green. Listen, I’ve got a new proposition for you, Mr. Millincamp.”

“If your name’s Green, mine’s Rockefeller.”

“Look, you start to pay this down, just start is all, just a little a month, not enough to hurt you, and we’ll stop calling, all right?”

“Excellent. I can send you like ten bucks and you’ll go away for good?”

“Mr. Millincamp, it’s like this—”

Philyaw signaled thumbs down to the fat man, who turned off the speakerphone and continued the conversation over his headset. Philyaw swiveled his chair to face the opposite direction and signaled to Liz to do the same.

“Forget everything you think you know about collecting bills, okay?” he told her. “What we do here isn’t what you—what we’re dealing with is schmoes.”

“And there are three kinds,” said a light-skinned black man seated nearby. He spoke with a soft cushiony voice that surrounded you like an old leather chair. He was fleshy but not fat. Both his eyelids and the big bags under his eyes were intensely dark, almost pure black. Set off against his tan complexion, they made him look like a serene raccoon.

“Yeah,” said Philyaw. “Speed’s talking to our favorite kind. At least they’re my favorite. The guys who were out to screw you from the beginning. Never intended to pay. They can, they just don’t want to.”

“It’s their hobby,” said the black man.

“Do they ever get away with it?” she asked.

“Funny part is, mostly they do,” said Philyaw. “Babe Ruth, he was born to swing a bat. This guy Speed’s talking to, if he’s the one I’m thinking of, he’s the Babe Ruth of deadbeats. He once went to this big charity banquet run by, what’shisname? Eddie, who’s the guy—You know, he was in the Coen brothers movie where they escape from the chain gang?”

“John Turturro?” said the black man with the light complexion.

“No, the leading man. You know.”

“George Clooney.”

“Right. George Clooney. It’s to raise money for starving people in Somalia, I think it was.”

“South Sudan,” Eddie said.

“Right. The banquet’s like $2,000 a head. This guy . . . Millincamp? He’s the one, isn’t he?”

“No,” said Eddie, “Millincamp’s the one who lives in Jack Benny’s old house.”

“I know that, but isn’t he—”

“Weitzel, he’s the one ordered banquet tickets from Clooney.”

“You sure?”

“Hundred percent.”

“Thank you,” Philyaw said. “This guy, what’s his name? He gets a whole table.”

“Weitzel,” said Eddie.

“Yeah. He’s a, you know—likes to act like a big shot. So he gets tickets for all his friends so they can schmooze with the stars. He buys up a whole table, and everybody drinks the wine, eats the food. I think he even bought some crap from the silent auction. Isn’t that right?”

“Yup,” Eddie said. “Got himself a jersey signed by one a the Lakers. Somebody who got traded though.”

“There you go. All kinds of collectors’ stuff. Outbidding people who really woulda paid for it.”

“The next week he files Chapter Seven,” Eddie said.

“Yep,” Philyaw said. “The guy, he’s got money, I know he does, but it’s hidden, see? He knew he was going to file the whole time, had a bankruptcy lawyer in his pocket before he reserved the table. I mean, can you believe this guy? Ripped off a charity. A goddamn charity!”

“They’re Phil’s favorites, guys like that,” Eddie said.

“I told her. See, they’re professional deadbeats. All the time you’re trying to collect, they’re laughing at you, running up new bills somewhere else. These people aren’t even human enough to be considered schmoes. Start chopping off fingers and they still won’t give up a dollar. Screwing you, to them it’s . . . it’s their life.”

“Their religion,” said Eddie.

“Exactly,” said Philyaw. “If they’re not swindling somebody they can’t get out of bed in the morning. They’re going to screw you and that’s just the way it is. They’re a waste of time. But,” he said, and paused.

“We don’t let them off easy,” said the fat man, off the phone now.

“At least not every time,” Philyaw said. “And if we smell assets somewhere, we get our lawyer to file for a judgment. Then we hire skip tracers—specialists—to find the money. They take a big chunk, but at least we get something.”

“Phil’s got a special name for the super deadbeats,” the fat man said. “Ask him.”

“Let’s save it for later. Don’t want to overwhelm her the first day.”

Phil’s wording strongly implied that she was already hired, but no one had mentioned wages, for example. That’s how the law firm worked her wage-free internship.

“Later when?” Liz asked. “After I take the oath?”

“Oath. I like that,” Philyaw said.

“The oath’s just part of it,” Eddie said.

“Every time I try to get out,” injected the tall cute guy with the ponytail—

“They pull me back in!” they all shouted in chorus.

Liz knew all this was for her benefit and that she ought to be flattered, but she couldn’t forget that underneath it all they made a living off the misery of others. “When you collect, how much of it do you get to keep?” she asked.

“Half, usually,” said Philyaw. “Sometimes I buy the debt at a discount or make other kinds of deals, but usually it’s half.”

“Some of these doctors had their way, it would be nothing,” said Eddie.

“They’ve got corkscrews for hearts,” Philyaw said. “They call you and say, ‘Forget about the Dingle account’ or whatever. Right away I know this Dingle, he must have paid up.”

Liz didn’t understand what they were talking about and wasn’t sure whether to admit it. Her puzzlement must have showed. “See, the schmoes, they’re supposed to send the money to us,” Philyaw explained. “But sometimes they send it to the client instead. We still get the commission. We’re supposed to, anyway. So when I hear, ‘Forget about this guy,’ right away I know what happened. ‘Doctor,’ I say, ‘you’ll never believe this, but Dingle called and said he mailed you a check yesterday.’ ‘Really? I’ll watch for it.’ Like he has no idea. You take Sears, somebody like that, they don’t try to rip you off. But these doctors?” He shook his head.

“Chiropractors are the worst,” Speed the fat man said.

“You’re just bigoted,” said the guy with the ponytail. His name was Bento, Liz would soon find out, and he was only recently hired. But he’d already proven himself a natural, everyone said.

“Not all a them though,” Eddie said. “Chiropractors, I mean. Not all a them are crooks.”

“Maybe, but they’re still quacks,” said Speed.

“No worse than fortune-tellers,” said the redheaded woman, whose name was Sandra. As she spoke she kept her eyes on a TV screen on her desk. It was tuned to a glittery bracelet on the Shopping Channel, volume muted.

“An astrologer told my mom a bunch of weird stuff that all came true,” said Speed.

“Most of ’em are okay, chiropractors,” Philyaw concluded.

“Okay they cure you?” Sandra asked him. “Or okay they don’t try to chisel us out of commissions?”

“Commissions is all I know, sweetheart. The rest is silence.”

“What the hell’s that mean?” asked Sandra.

“How do I know? But it’s Shakespeare, I think. I’m trying to show Liz here we’ve got some culture.”

The last words of Hamlet, Liz almost said, but decided that would be showing off. “I guess you have a lot more business these days, since, you know, so many people are broke,” she said.

“Used to be,” said Eddie, “you didn’t have as many schmoes to chase, but it wasn’t so hard to collect. Now? Lotsa money owed, but you gotta fight for every dollar.”

“It’ll get harder after the massacres,” said Speed the fat man.

“Who’s getting massacred?” asked Sandra, eyes on the screen.

“People dying because they can’t afford medicine, that’s a massacre.”

“C’mon, no politics today, okay?” Sandra said. “It just gets everybody mad. Try to be a little more shallow.”

“Politics,” said Speed, “is how they can make loans at 360 percent and not go to jail.”

“We don’t take those customers,” Philyaw told Liz. “Payday lenders, he’s talking about.”

“You said three kinds,” Liz said. “Three kinds of schmoes.”

The question, she saw, pleased Philyaw. He opened his mouth wide for an instant in a half smile, half grimace as though he were examining his teeth in a mirror. It was something she’d seen the real Bogart do.

“Right,” he said. “After the lying, thieving deadbeats, you get the second kind. They’re not just broke . . .”

“They’re one step from the curb,” said Eddie. “Pawning stuff, maybe collecting cans. You don’t waste time on them.”

“You go on to the next schmo,” said ponytailed Bento.

Eddie: “Like a guy I talked to last week. Some kind of computer guy. Used to fly out to Aspen on weekends, stuff like that. Now he gets these little jobs sometimes—he’s practically crying telling me this—but his laptop blew out on him. He’s trying to work out of the library.”

Speed: “He might even be homeless by now.”

Liz felt a little sick to her stomach, as though she’d swallowed something sour and noxious. Maybe they’d figured her out already. Saw through her thrift store blouse. It’s their business to see things like that. “What did you tell him?” she asked, controlling her breathing.

“I don’t know,” Eddie said. “Wished him luck, told him to keep in touch. I mean, what can you say?”

“You loaned him money, didn’t you?” Sandra said.

“Bullshit.”

“Swear on your kids.” She shook her head and turned away from the TV screen. “Like I said, you loaned him money.”

“Didn’t.”

“Not yet,” said Sandra.

Philyaw looked suspiciously at Eddie as he told Liz, “This place can be like an ER. We see people cut up, smashed, burned. You gotta leave it here . . . Sandra, you ever take this stuff home with you?”

“All I take home with me is office supplies.”

“Anyway,” said Philyaw, “the third kind, he’s the one that keeps us in business.”

“God bless ’em,” Eddie said.

Philyaw: “He’s got a job, he’d like to pay his bills, but he’s over his head, can’t handle credit. Hasn’t got a clue.”

“Might even pay 5, 10 percent off the top just to get his paycheck cashed,” said Eddie. “It’s what they charge, those currency exchange joints.”

“A guy in that situation, he needs somebody to educate him,” said Philyaw.

Speed: “First thing, we steer him into a credit union to cash his checks. Then we sit down, see what’s coming in, going out, how much he’s in the hole, utilities, rent, all a that. And figure out a plan, a budget, you know?”

“I did that for a guy once and he was paying okay and everything,” said Eddie. “One day he calls and says, ‘Okay if I send you a little more this month? I’m all caught up.’ He wanted my permission.”

They were trying to come off as a squad of Mother Teresas, but Liz wasn’t sure she bought it. “When people don’t pay their bills,” said Philyaw, perhaps reading her mind, “it’s like shoplifting. Everybody else pays their tab.” Maybe he even believed it. He didn’t seem like a monster.

After thirty or forty minutes Philyaw prodded her into making a collection call. “It only takes a minute. Go on. You’re Miss White. Just dive in. Don’t think about it. You can think later.”

“We don’t think,” said Eddie.

“We calculate,” said Philyaw, handing her an information sheet.

Eddie: “It’s like riding a bicycle, kid. Just get on and you’ll figure it out.”

She looked from one to the other. “Which is it? Dive in or pedal?”

“We got another joker,” said Eddie. “Like Bento.”

“Okay, I’m Miss White, right? Is everybody color-coded?”

“Simple names, easy to remember,” said Philyaw. “Jones, Vance, nothing that announces race, creed or color. No Gomezes or Booker Ts.”

“Or Chungs or Goldbergs,” said Sandra.

“Sometimes these discussions get, you know, kind of heated,” said Philyaw. “Mostly we want to make it easy for them. When they call and ask for Miss White, she’s always here. Whoever sits at that desk, that’s Miss White. The desks around here are like restrooms. Boys, girls.”

“Don’t they ever notice? When you switch people, I mean.”

“Never,” said Speed.

“Just remind him he’s got a payment due,” said Philyaw. “The phone number, the amount, it’s on the bottom of the sheet.” Liz punched the number into her phone. Eddie put the call on speaker phone.

“Hello.” A man picked up. Liz heard in his voice that whatever bad news she might give him would be no surprise. After identifying herself, she said, “You have a sixty-two-dollar payment due Thursday?” She didn’t feel as revolted as she thought she would. It was only borderline unpleasant, like mediocre sex.

“Yeah?”

What now? Philyaw scribbled on a slip of paper. “We’re just calling to remind you, sir,” Liz said.

“All right.” He wasn’t happy about it, but he wasn’t happy about anything. When she hung up, they were all looking at her intently.

“Well,” said Sandra, “there goes that cherry.”

Liz wanted to smile but couldn’t. “Why’d we even make that call?”

“Because he needs to be policed,” Philyaw said. “Some people need policing. But listen, you got to get that question mark out of your voice, okay? It’s not, ‘You have a payment due?’ It’s, ‘You have a payment due!’ Understand? Forceful. Confident. Very sure of yourself. We always know, okay? We don’t ask anybody’s permission. We’re the Big Kahuna. Godzilla.”

“Godzilla’s badder brother,” Eddie said.

“And don’t lend them anything,” said Sandra.

“Let me show you something about our files,” Philyaw said.

As Liz followed him toward a computer she moved closer to him and half whispered, “Can I talk to you?”

He led her outside onto the landing. “Mr. Philyaw,” she said—”

“Phil,” he said.

“Phil, I’m going to do something—it’s something you’re not supposed to do in interviews, okay? I’m—I think you’re a nice guy. You picked me off the street, and I’m grateful.”

“It’s not like that at all. You were doing honest work.”

She shook her head.

“I mean, you weren’t turning tricks. Which, by the way, wouldn’t exclude you,” he said. She saw his instant embarrassment. “Not you personally. You know, hypothetically speaking.”

She nodded, trying to reassure him.

“Okay, what’s this thing you’re not supposed to do?”

“I already did it. I told you you’re a nice guy.”

“Thanks. You’re the first. Are we done out here?”

He was trying to show a hard-hearted cynicism that wasn’t in his heart, like Bogart, who told the troubled bride to go back to Bulgaria.

“Making that call, Phil, it felt . . .”

He nodded. When he saw she wasn’t going to finish the sentence, he said, “We have to make collections sweetheart. Otherwise we’re all unemployed.”

“Look, what do you call them? The deadbeat schmoes out to get you from the beginning. They . . . you said you had a name for them.”

“Madoffs,” he said.

“How many have you got?”

“Hundreds. We could get more if we wanted. The other agencies, they throw them back eventually.”

“Are commissions bigger? For Madoffs?”

“Yeah.”

“So they’re mostly just thieves, right?”

“Not mostly. All. They’re lying, thieving bastards.”

“Then they’re the ones I want. Give them all to me. The con artists, whatever. Let me have them before you give up. I want all the assholes.”

“But they’re my hobby.”

“You said there are hundreds. Keep some for yourself too.”

“I don’t know, kid. They’re tough cookies, Madoffs. I don’t want you discouraged right away. A lot of agencies don’t take them at all.”

“Then they should grow some balls.”

He smiled. “But you have to pull your weight here, kid. I can only be so nice. We haven’t talked salary.”

“I’ll follow them into hell if I have to. But sure, let’s talk salary. And commissions. There’s a nice big commission attached to Madoff money, right?”

He nodded, obviously pleased.

The base salary was more than twice the minimum wage, and the commissions sounded generous. She’d brought a résumé but never got the chance to show it. He just trusted a chicken dancer.

“You can wait out here awhile,” he said. “Before you come back in.” That was how he acknowledged her tears.