“She’s a bit…pissed,” Jackie, the receptionist, whispered.
From way down the hall: “I heard that!”
Jackie nodded, sending me behind her station and back. Fifty feet of hallway separated Eileen’s inner office from Red Line’s front door, but still she’d heard. I walked back, set my stuff on the floor beside her desk.
“I’m, like, fifteen minutes late,” I objected. “You’d think it was a week.”
“Time’s money, Peanut,” she said. “Park it.”
I did. She sat, hands folded, an immaculately bare desktop.
“The dirty look,” she went on, “is for all the times you were a week late. Whatcha got?”
“Well, first things first,” I said. “Now, that divorce case—”
Eileen shook her head and smiled. “What I want to do comes first.”
“That’s not case files?”
“Case files are fun,” she said. “Fun comes later. Paying you is not fun. Expenses first.”
She began shuffling through the papers I handed her. Ticked a couple of items with a blue marker. Flipped pages. Then a circle, this time in red.
“What?” I said.
“Petro truckstop restaurant, West Memphis,” she said.
“I was following this guy”—I held up the divorce file—”and I hadda go where he went.”
“Granted,” she said. “But did you really have to go for the all-you-can-eat chicken-fried steak extravaganza?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because it was a Friday, and Friday is chicken-fried steak. The all-you-can-eat meatloaf extravaganza is Tuesday.”
“Have a salad next time.” She gestured with the red pen. “Take it as personal advice.” She grabbed a blue, ticked the item to say okay.
“Et tu, Brute?”
Good Christian woman, Eileen. And she can command a certain gentility on occasion. “As any Southern woman should,” she’d say. But Eileen Leckie’s also an ex-Bartlett cop. Twenty years on the force, she and her husband Les (gone these six years, now), before they started Red Line. The old cop in her can command attention, too, whenever she wants. And thus it came to be that, state-of-the-art intercom notwithstanding, the principal mode of inter-office communication at Red Line Investigations—with no clients present, at any rate—was shouting.
“JACKIE!”
“WHAT!”
“TWO EIGHTY-TWO SIXTY-THREE!”
“ROGER THAT!”
Faint giggles in the outer office.
Not that I minded the amounts of my expense cheques being known to the entire place. It’s an investigations outfit—what didn’t they know? I was rarely enough there, anyway—just when Eileen wanted me. And I wasn’t, after all, an employee.
Red Line was the umptie-third agency I’d applied to, after the Garrison Security affair blew up, five-six years ago. Brilliant: I’d managed to bring down my own employer, second biggest security and investigations outfit in the region—not even so much knowingly, just tripped up in a tangle of goings-on in the vein of mail fraud and money-laundering and (just maybe) a murder mixed in there somewhere. Millions in assets seized. Licences jerked. A string of holding and operating companies ended up folded, spindled, and mutilated. Dozens suspected, eleven people charged, nine convicted. About eighty-five of Garrison’s prize former-FBI agents thrown out of work, most with a measure of taint in the job market, even for those cleared in the investigations by the Memphis police, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, and half a dozen lettered federal agencies. And every last one of those guys and a couple of gals, it seemed, harboured a resentment. All of it directed, in greater or lesser degree, at me.
Among those never indicted, never charged, never found: Isaac Breitzen, my old boss, the lord and master of Garrison’s clutch of companies. A stand-up guy, early on, as Machiavellians go. Been a great place to work, people said, when his dad Buddy ran the company, when it was just the old, original security-guard outfit. Brown pants, yellow stripe, lunchpails. Regular folk. Friendly, and every employee, top to bottom, called him Buddy. Respectfully. But still, Buddy. The Breitzen I’d known was Ike, at first. Then Mister Breitzen, when Buddy took sick. Then, when Buddy was gone, Breitzen was simply sir—to everyone. Same tone as you’d address the queen’s husband. By then, the job application form had grown to fifty-six pages—fifty longer than for my top secret clearance in the army—and even those of us already there had to fill it out. (Thank God the HR guy owed me a favour, let me fudge an answer or two.) Lie detector. Sworn oaths of allegiance—to the company, to him. Pat-downs in the front lobby, on a couple of days when Breitzen had felt the mantle of Roman senator especially heavy upon his shoulder.
Bars on the building, everywhere—even the windows of his eighth-storey office, where he’d had the fire escapes removed. He made all the staff memorize and recite, dead cold, his new, six-page, capital-C Code of Conduct, which he insisted be printed in red italics, a quirky font ripped from the Renaissance. Twenty-year guys, guys who wanted only to serve out their time walking security at strip malls, sitting night-shift desks in empty office buildings, guys who came to work on time and never took a sick day, guys who hadn’t memorized anything since Jesus loves me, lost their jobs, no notice, no pay in lieu—Tennessee is a “right to work” state, which means the very opposite of what the phrase implies—because their memories couldn’t get them past the second paragraph.
Breitzen was a small man, and became smaller, we saw, as time wore on. A bantam rooster in elevator shoes. He had a platform built in his office so his desk would be raised a step above the chairs his visitors would sit in. Story goes, Jim Bork, the company planner, wanted him to see some office-layout drawings, decided he’d plop his chair right up there and sit beside old Ike to show him. End of the morning, Bork was gone. End of the afternoon: Carpenters cutting down the platform so it would fit just one desk, just one gigantic leather swivel chair. And just one ego.
Laughter in the hallways became, through the years, whispers, glances, looks over shoulders. The building itself felt soaked in sadness. You daren’t quit—you couldn’t, not without bad references, recriminations. The whole place was simply waiting. Some employees—the optimists, we called them—were clearly waiting for Breitzen to die. Some might have been waiting to die themselves.
Middle of the night—not coincidentally the date of the morning raid the feds and Memphis PD had planned: Limo, private jet out of the Olive Branch airport, false flight plan filed. He took, they said, two suitcases, a couple of hundred pounds of hundred-dollar bills, a lifetime supply of Cuban cigars, and several custom crates bearing his precious collection of the drawings of Edvard Munch. Guys in black suits, briefcases full of platinum bars, palladium bars—silver and gold being, in Breitzen’s world, distinctly lowbrow. The guys in suits didn’t get to go, though their briefcases did. Those left behind, in the office or on the runway, all, in their own ways, screamed, sure as Munch’s figure on the bridge. Where Breitzen is, they say, is a warm place. Certainly we all hoped it was.
Eleven weeks I was a witness, all added together. Investigation rooms, discoveries, and five courtroom trials—two criminal, three civil. All said and done, I was extruded out the bum end of the legal process with no job, no prospects, few friends, my distinctly unflattering picture in the paper, and little enough coin that I had to cadge my walking-around money off Lynette. Thankfully, no charges. But this last benefit, I’d finally come to grasp, was largely due to the all-too-apparent fact the trial judges and the D.A. both regarded me as too ineffectual, too just plain obtuse, to have had a knowing, causal hand in all this chicanery.
I’d managed to recover my P.I. licence. Barely. But you can’t operate as a P.I. in Tennessee unless your individual licence hangs under the umbrella of an agency licence. The state government had long since said okay to my individual, but no to my getting my own shingle. They’d issue the individual when I’d found an agency home. I’d actually filed an administrative appeal, gone to Nashville for a hearing on getting my own company licence. I winced at the words. Not anytime soon, Mr. Minyard. Too many unanswered questions. Hence my hoofing the whole city—and a few outlying burgs, too—looking for something, anything, in the investigations line.
I’d actually begun going back to freelance editing. Theses and dissertations, mostly. Tenure-hunting Memphis State assistant profs scrambling to squirt journal articles out of unreadable, turgid dissertations. The and an and a for Tamil- and Hindi-speaking engineers who thought their English was almost good enough. Verb tenses for work-all-night lab scientists from cold northern Chinese cities, smart enough to know their English blew. And from a Princeton business PhD, the most exacerbating case of gratuitous philological exhibitionism I’d ever seen. At first, all that wordsmithing was just to keep my hand in—we had more than enough money, on the home front, to ensure I needn’t worry about that.
Then there was the call from Lynette. That night we’d be dining out, she’d told me. Restaurant, reservation time, separate cars. There’d been in recent weeks, maybe months, a little…distance, for lack of a better word. The trial. A certain…fatigue. Not to mention Lynette’s travelling—rather more travelling than usual, of late, rather farther afield. And there were, as Lynette put it, “some things” she’d “heard,” arising out of the Garrison affair and its admittedly embarrassing aftermath. Lynette, I knew, had lost real estate business over it. But still, we had…
I was halfway through a middlingly enthusiastic blackberry cheesecake when she bit the matter off. I felt the heat of shock on my own face. A half-assed protest. “No, Jack. You don’t understand. I have left.” No, Jack, you haven’t “done anything wrong.” No, we couldn’t “talk,” there’d be no “working it out.” The house? “Sold,” she said. “You’ll need to be out by the eighteenth.” But, Lynette, where will you…? “Out of the country,” she said. That and “Martinique” and, more quietly, “I’ve met someone.” Then a sudden reach across the table and, so very, very oddly, she kissed my hand, set it back down, wiped her mouth on a clean napkin. Rose. Left. And that was that.
That and the twenty K—now nearly gone—she’d dumped into my account a week later from some bank in the Cayman Islands. Was it given out of guilt? I never knew her motivation. But I’d spent all but a bit of the money.
“Earth to Jack…”
“Sorry, Eileen.”
I looked up. She smiled again—this time a warm one, stripped of any sarcastic edge.
“I’m sorry, Eileen, I was just—”
“I know where you were, Jack.” That smile again, a softer voice, and sad eyes.
Then a rather deliberate-looking perk-up. She leaned in. Grinned. “Whatcha got that’s juicy?”
Eileen liked the divorce case report. Laughed at a couple of lines. (Couldn’t resist, I told her—English major, you know.) “Good enough evidence for trial?” I asked her.
“Never gonna go to trial,” she said. “Wife just wants her suspicions confirmed. Said she’d take my word for it, didn’t even want to see the evidence. Now what about the insurance thing?”
I sat back. “You got a sense of humour today, Eileen?”
“It’s Friday afternoon. Why not?”
“Then you might appreciate this,” I said, reaching for a parcel I’d brought in with my files, the parcel neatly wrapped in brown paper.
Eileen gave it a querulous look and a grin. “You open it,” I said. She did, and laughed out loud.
“My fifteen minutes of boss-annoying lateness,” I said, “was owing to my needing to stop in for the frame.”
“You know my tastes in art very well, Jack Minyard.”
“EVERYBODY!” she shouted. “Get in here!”
They did, and a dozen women dressed in everything from smartly tailored suits to Wal-Mart sweats sat on chairs and table-corners or leaned, arms folded, against walls, and listened with smiles and laughs as Eileen told the story. Weeks on this investigation. Said the insurance company “just knew” the guy was a fraud artist, though the doctors hadn’t caught him. I’d watched him for weeks, shadowed him as he went for this discovery, that doctor visit, physical therapy. Perfect perfect perfect—a wheelchair every time, helped into the car and out, the aching slowness, all the right moves and grimaces. All the right failures to grimace, too—this was neurological, after all, and there are some things you just don’t feel, if the nerves are gone. The totality of evidence—a rapidly building mound of evidence—pointed in the direction that Dwayne Poteat was legit, the forklift accident had left his bottom half paralyzed, and everything I was gathering was making things worse for our case. Sure thing for a big six-digit lump-sum payout, or seven digits in structured settlement. Dwayne’s attorney was going for the lump. But now…the picture was a coup. The picture would do it. Giant Bloodsucking Insurance Group of America would be, Eileen told me, very happy indeed.
I’d blown up my best shot to eleven-fourteen, had it put in an eighteen by twenty-four frame. Eileen kept the picture to her chest, didn’t show the girls till she told how I’d noticed a four-wheel in Poteat’s back yard one day, missing the next, back the day after. I’d managed to cash in a favour with a sweet girl at Dwayne’s bank. Decently, mind you—she was married, Baptist, two-point-four children, what can you do? Thanks to her, I’d seen credit card charges, not Poteat’s own but let’s say “connected,” up Dyersburg way. Too far out of Memphis for anyone to follow, he’d probably figured. And surely one indulgence of an old hobby couldn’t hurt—hell, I could feel the guy’s own rationale. Eileen turned the framed picture around and showed it. Dwayne Poteat’s idiot leer, larger and wider than in the file photos—funnier, too—got them all on their feet applauding. “You go, Jack!” A couple of whistles, even.
Eileen, the last card I held, had outright declined to hire me back when, desperate as I was. Said she simply wouldn’t have me as an employee, that I’d be “an occasional agent,” with Red Line, sometimes Eileen herself, as my client, even though she’d set it up so my licence came under her aegis. No, she said, I was to do those sorts of things—”tacky” things, she’d said—that she wouldn’t ask her employees to do. They were an office bunch, mostly—employment drug screenings, credit checks, background checks for everything from drug company vice-presidents down to Kroger bagging boys. Me—I was to do what they, Eileen’s “own people,” wouldn’t do, shouldn’t do, in Eileen’s conception of the world. Anything that might get dirt on your shoes, dirt on your reputation, dirt in your mind, anything that might make you trip in the dark or even see something unseemly—that was where I’d come in. It meant a certain distance, a certain un-belonging, between me and Red Line.
But today I felt twelve feet tall, heard a couple of dozen iterations of Way to go, Right on. Today, I belonged. A cheque, albeit a small one, and the promise of more in the next week or two or three. I met the new girl, the shy one. Verlie. Averted eyes. A stutter. But something sparkled there.
Met the one guy, Tommy, new, the geek, the IT man—the only male employee I’d ever seen working at Eileen’s. Nice guy. Took an interest. He asked me a couple of questions about what it’s like to be a detective. “Private investigator,” I corrected. “Only the police get to be detectives.” A certain admiration, on his part, I thought. I Barney-Fyfed my way through a couple of answers, beyond what he’d asked, till his smile began to wane and it looked like he wanted to get back to work. Or back to something.
The crowd thinned. Eileen took a call, waved us all out of her office. On the way from the stationery closet to her desk, Jackie even hugged me. Verlie offered me some homemade peanut brittle, and Christy bagged me a coke from the break room. More smiles, congrats, but quieter, now.
“Who’s up for a drink?” I asked. “Dinner? Thought I might hit the Hunan Grill. The works. Anyone? My treat.”
The ones with husbands and kids offered those by way of excuse. The ones without looked at watches, busied themselves with purses, with papers on desks, a couple with nothing on desks.
There would be no takers tonight.
“All right, then,” I said, trying for cheeriness. “Thanks, y’all.” I never have been able to manage a convincing y’all. After nineteen years here, I’m still too damn Canuck.
As I passed her desk, Jackie looked up. Smiled faintly, looked me in the eye, looked away, back briefly again. “Jack, you take care, now. Good care. Some Friday night, you and I, we’ll…”
“Sure,” I said. “Love to. We’ll…”
“Absolutely. We will.”
Years ago, it was, that I’d first heard that from Jackie.
“You have yourself a good weekend, now,” one of us said.
“You, too,” said the other.
I forget which.
The bell on the office front door. Their voices disappearing as the door closed behind me. The heat and noise of Summer Avenue.