Killer Nashville Noir

by Clay Stafford

  Even though he shouldn’t have, even though it came dangerously close to the line on respecting and safeguarding the privacy of the U.S. mail, George jotted down and Goggled a couple of the firms.

  He was surprised—and then again, not surprised at all—by what he found. Firms with numerous ethics violations. Fraud warnings from various business and trade associations. Warnings from an international watchdog group. And in several cases, no website, no contact info, no information, no web presence at all. No evidence of existence beyond an address on an envelope. A return address that was just a post office box—on an island overseas.

  • • •

  After the walls and the fencing came satellite dishes. Weird lines to the house. Unmarked, small white vans pulling in at night, parked there for hours, sometimes even overnight, then pulling out, the drivers in sunglasses.

  Jeez, what’s he doing there, George? Tracking satellites? Going off the grid?

  The annoyance of the neighbors shifts to a much higher gear, with the hammering, drilling, noise, activity, at two in the morning. Can’t tell what it is, behind the high new walls. And by the time a neighbor frets and paces and fumes and finally calls the police, the sound has stopped, and the police do nothing. It happens a few nights in a row. The neighbors come to anticipate and dread it.

  (Soon, there’s a police cruiser driving slowly through the neighborhood. Drifting slowly past the Muscovito residence, circling lazily—and doing nothing. Even more infuriating, in a way, because of its obvious impotence. The neighbors shake their heads—incompetent suburban cops.)

  George hears more anecdotes. Muscovito’s Cadillac SUV, with the blacked-out windows, driving in and out at unpredictable hours—midnight, three in the morning, 5 A.M.—and always too fast, way too fast for the neighborhood lanes. The other morning, Muscovito almost hit the two Miller kids on their bikes at the corner, up early catching worms. Never even stopped to look and see if they were OK! Tommy Miller fell back into the rhododendrons in terror, crying, poor kid was so scared…

  And finally, of course, an electric locking gate and—symbolically, inevitably—a new mailbox with it. A large locking mailbox built like a strongbox into the elaborate gate’s left stone pillar. Stark contrast to the rickety, rural-route style mailboxes along the rest of the lanes—cheap, casual, periodically knocked over by a delivery van or snowplow and propped up, dented and brave, their hinged tongues opening and closing with a squeak, and falling wide-open half the time.

  The Muscovito’s new mailbox, a narrow, tamper-proof slot to slip mail into methodically. For George to collect any outgoing mail, a special key issued through the Post Office and now an official part of the of the route, forms properly filled in, the whole key-issuing procedure processed through the mail, so George, once again, never sees Muscovito in person.

  • • •

  George gets it all in bits and pieces. Hearing the anecdotes of misery, of mystery. Many of them wrapped in the bland manila envelope of resignation: “The neighborhood is changing I guess. The world is changing…”

  George ponders this from the worn, duct-taped driver’s seat of his truck. Isn’t that what all the resentment is really about? People resent change, they’re suspicious of it, they’re wistful and nostalgic for the familiar. Doesn’t Muscovito have a right to his weird mail? A right to alter his residence and property? A right to his privacy and his odd hours? He’s a symbol, a lightning rod of change, in the neighborhood, in the world. A reminder of nature’s cycle of decay and replacement, the myth of stasis. Life is change; death comes to all eventually—people, neighborhoods, political systems, nations. All of it. All of us.

  George would come to wonder in the days ahead, how much this line of thinking had taken ahold of him.

  • • •

  He starts small, and quickly. George slips the next Caymans document out of its envelope, snaps a shot of each of its eight pages with his iPhone, slips the document back into the envelope, and reseals it. All postal carriers know how to reseal. They carry special glue in the truck for items that have opened in transit. It takes less than twenty seconds. If you see him in his truck, it looks as though he is sorting mail.

  He prints the photos at home.

  Overseas account statements. Offshore investments—no doubt unreported and untaxed. Clearly illegal—there in black and white. You didn’t have to be a genius to see it. Exhibit A.

  The only thing more clearly illegal? Opening someone’s mailed financial documents. So this is evidence that can be officially used exactly nowhere. Revealed to no one. It serves only as evidence to George.

  • • •

  Across the street from the Muscovitos: the lovely old Davidoffs. Now with their canes and osteoporosis and skin drooping from necks and arms, full lifetimes etched and stretched on them, but smiles of greeting unchanged for all the years since they had moved in as spry newlyweds. And they are a walking mirror, of course. George isn’t much behind them. Mandatory retirement with full benefits at the end of the year. Not something he can afford to jeopardize with illegal behavior.

  Next door, the Schumans. Doctor Schuman, an old-fashioned GP. Four Ivy League kids: two Harvard, a Yale, a Princeton. He remembers their acceptance letters. Now, two physicians, one cancer researcher, one oceanographer. God, he remembers all their bikes. The color of each one.

  The neighbors he has grown to love, the neighbors who have grown to love him.

  George feels their frustration, their sense of powerlessness. He feels identity with them. It isn’t just their neighborhood. It is his neighborhood too.

  One option: He can simply stop delivering the Muscovito mail. Just kind of, lose it. What would that do? Create a disruption, a delay certainly. But eventually Muscovito would simply get on the phone with the overseas entities he is dealing with, they would resend, and the disruptions and delays would ultimately trace back to the U.S. Postal Service, and ultimately, to George. No, that would accomplish nothing, except temporary mischief, and permanent dismissal.

  But what if Muscovito were to begin to receive contracts where the details of the deal were different? Where the terms were slightly altered? Certainly that would rattle Muscovito, infuriate him, sow seeds of paranoia and mistrust. Or what if the return documents that Muscovito sent back had different deal terms, the agreements had been altered, the documents had been changed, retyped, forged, as if trying to slip in more favorable terms for himself? Clearly his overseas business partners and entities—when they discovered the changes—would not be pleased about that. Could hardly continue to do business with someone so capricious, so unsteady.

  Clearly, that kind of elaborate forgery and fraud would not originate from a meek veteran postman on his daily rounds. It was too involved, too outrageous for that. Fraud like that would come from a longtime practitioner—such as Muscovito himself. Finally going a little too far. After all his caution and cleverness, he would become a little too risky and too bold.

  George is no longer simply slipping documents out of and back into their envelopes. Now, he is looking into everything, reading through it all, really getting to know Muscovito’s businesses.

  Lots of overlapping bank accounts. Shell financial companies inside shell financial companies, a shiny nautilus of dummy corporations and paperwork, echoes upon echoes in dark empty chambers. George sees some themes and patterns—schemes so complex, so cross-border, that it would be hard for legitimate investors caught in the maze to ever get their money back.

  He studies some of them closely. Tries to follow all the steps. Like a land purchase, 1,050 acres of what at first appears to be an Indonesian atoll in the Pacific. With the help of Google maps and GPS coordinates and a little further investigation, George ascertains there is no such atoll, no corresponding piece of geography. So the money is being sheltered somehow, to be funneled somewhere else.

  The money for that purchase, George sees, comes partly from a wire transfer out of an account at a bank in Montevideo, Uruguay.
George digs further: there is no such bank. So—a transfer from a bank that doesn’t exist to buy land that doesn’t exist. Laundering the money twice, George tentatively concludes. Making it squeaky clean, for some further expenditure.

  On the one hand, he doesn’t follow a lot of it. On the other hand, he follows it enough.

  Then, there are the names of the corporations: Parcel 666, Devil’s Bluff Partners, Black Hole Trust. How arrogant.

  No, George can’t follow it very well—hell, that is the idea in a lot of cases—but retyping and altering the terms of the contracts, and forging the signatures—that he can do. If the signatures on these “new” contracts look forged, give themselves away, well that would be even better. Because that would tell Muscovito that his partners are trying to pull a fast one on him—or tell his partners that Muscovito is trying to put one over on them. Either way, it would be an ugly development in any prospective partnership. Courtesy of George.

  An intensive Internet search on Muscovito himself turns up nothing. Which tells George something: Muscovito has managed to scrub himself. When George checks the government databases open to government employees, he finds nothing. No mention of Muscovito.

  He can report Muscovito for mail fraud. With all the documents he’s photographed and copied, everything he’s learned, he can practically present the case himself. But prosecutions take forever. Years probably. At any point, with the right lawyers, an operator like Muscovito could manage to wiggle out of it and slip away. Plus, after all these opened envelopes and copied documents, George is now guilty of repeated, systematic mail fraud himself. No different from Muscovito, probably, in the blindfolded eyes and impartial scales of the law. He could be charged and prosecuted in the same courtroom. No, reporting the fraud is too risky, and maybe useless. Dealing with the fraud directly is the best, the only course of action—if action is what one wanted.

  • • •

  The neighborhood has always had a rhythm. Men leaving in early morning for the commuter train, then the buses and carpools for school, then the garbage truck, then the household repair vans—plumber, carpenter, electrician, appliances, the store delivery trucks, the dry cleaner’s van. And at half-past-two in the afternoon, the mailman. Part of the rhythm. Like the phases of the moon or the seasonal shifting of the sun. Ingrained in the nature of the place.

  Squirrels gathering nuts from beneath the shedding oaks, a wild turkey or a fox darting across the lane. The autumn rain pattering on the fallen leaves, the snow’s coating of white silence, the rich warm smell of spring. A primal orderly march, a deep rhythm, that Muscovito had tampered with.

  Or is it bigger than that? Is Muscovito simply guilty of…modernity? Personifying an atomized disconnected age. An age without social connection. An age of complexity. An age that leaves neighborhoods behind. Is George’s tampering with Muscovito and his mail simply, at some level, a rebellion against that age?

  Which leads to a broader philosophical question: in wanting to preserve the world around him, is George the one tampering with the rhythm of things, inserting himself into their natural processes? Is he the one creating change, just as guilty as Muscovito? Overstepping—a highly unfamiliar position for a U.S. postal employee.

  Playing god, or superhero?

  Superman. Batman. Mailman.

  • • •

  George works on the documents late at night. Lights burning brightly in his little dining room. Spreading them out at his dining room table. Retyping and spellchecking sections of the documents on his old Dell desktop. Downloading font libraries from suppliers around the world to let him match typefaces perfectly. Choosing printing paper that matches the weight and color of the originals, from the wide selection of papers he has purchased for just that purpose. Checking his handiwork with a magnifying glass, to scrutinize the telltale edges of the letters where ink meets page. Getting the appropriate international stamps and markings (which proves easy for a postal employee).

  He has been alone in the little ranch house since Maggie’s passing three years ago. All the retirement magazines recommend a hobby. George’s current activity isn’t what they meant, but it does keep him occupied, after all. Something to do. A craft. Focusing his mental energy. He can only take a day with each document so that Muscovito still receives it in a timely manner. The swift completion of his appointed rounds—with a slight detour.

  It adds up to a primer in white-collar crime. Mail fraud. He is a student of it, cramming assiduously at night.

  Making Muscovito, in a way, his partner in crime. Probably sitting at his own dining room table late at night—or in his locked home office, or wherever—cooking up a scheme, for George to slightly, subtly modify.

  Why is he doing this? Why really? Retirement is approaching fast, Maggie is gone, and once he is no longer behind the wheel of the truck, making his way through the neighborhood, he will lose his last connection to the world. He’ll have no focus, nothing to do. So is this a last act, a desperate bid for preserving not a neighborhood’s way of life, but his own? The neighborhood of his route is not his own neighborhood after all. But after thirty-five years, it is his past, his existence, his tie to daily life, and perhaps he is doing everything he can—even something completely crazy—to avoid at all costs the total, annihilating disconnection to come. Is keeping the neighborhood intact really about keeping himself intact? Doing something crazy to head off the aloneness he faces? Doing something uncharacteristically risky, utterly insane, as an alternative to utter quiet, utter resignation, utter loneliness?

  One day, as he delivers Muscovito’s mail, the gate opens. A disembodied voice comes on a speaker built into the gate: “Can you bring the mail in today? I want to ask you something.”

  George’s heart accelerates, pounds as if on cue. Does he know? Does Muscovito know?

  George watches himself, observes it from outside himself: backing the truck out, in a screeching-rubber retreat, hustling the truck down the familiar lane, guilt on plain display, abandoning his bright trusty vehicle in a commuter lot by the highway just as he’s imagined for years, disappearing into a new life. A flash of extreme action, of clear procedure, shooting through his brain.

  But George is George, with a mailman’s temperament and a mailman’s soul, and he drives his bright, cheerful mail truck obediently through Muscovito’s new front gate, and up the drive.

  Muscovito is there in the driveway to meet him.

  Squat, thick. Skin pale, almost translucent. Clearly a man who spends an inordinate amount of time in front of computer screens. An ungroomed mop of black hair. Big, fleshy arms folded across his considerable, Buddhistic chest and stomach.

  George rolls the truck to a stop. Takes out the pile of Muscovito’s mail. Holds it out to him with a friendly smile.

  The smile is not returned making George’s smile hang there, awkward, unacknowledged.

  Muscovito: No greeting. No niceties. Going right to it. “I’ve got a question.”

  George: “Yes, sir?”

  Muscovito: “Could anyone be tampering with my mail?”

  George frowns with concern.

  Muscovito: “At any point in the process?”

  George: (pausing, considering) “When you say tampering, what do you mean?”

  Muscovito: (irritably) “I mean tampering. Opening it somewhere.”

  George: (leadenly) “Well, where exactly?”

  Muscovito: (irritation rising) “Somewhere! Anywhere! That’s what I want you to tell me.”

  George: (shaking his head) “I can’t imagine that happening, sir. That kind of thing is very rare. I’ve been on this route for thirty-five years, haven’t had a problem. But it’s not unheard of. I can file a report if you want.”

  Muscovito: (looking somewhat alarmed, shifts on his feet a little, looks out past George to the gate) “No, that’s OK. Just wondering if it’s possible.”

  George: “Well, if you change your mind, I can have it looked into. You let me know.”

&nbs
p; And pulling out of the driveway, a huge exhalation of relief. His relief fills the truck cabin. But he is wistful, philosophical, as well.

  Because the man never imagines that it might be George. Based upon the immutable, unchanging, common perception that George—after thirty-five years—knows he can utterly rely upon: not that mailmen are honorable and above reproach, but that mailmen are stupid. Why else would you be just a mailman?

  Presumably, Muscovito is calling the various parties. Either accusing them of changing the contracts, or apologizing for the bizarre changes in the contracts coming back to them. If he is accusing them, that tone of accusation is undoubtedly not going over very well with his overseas partners. And if he is apologizing, he is raising their anxiety about being involved with such a reckless, untrustworthy party. And if he is apologizing, then they will be doubly irritated when the alterations and forgeries continue. Either way, his partners aren’t going to be happy.

  At the very minimum, it is producing an atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust. And phone calls, normally a recommended mechanism for clearing the air, might in this case only heighten that mistrustful atmosphere, hearing the annoyance, frustration, and suspicion in each other’s voices. So go ahead, call away. Talk as smoothly and reasonably as you like to each other. You’re only going to amplify each other’s suspicions and dark alertness that, a few weeks ago, existed not at all.

  George continues to deliver the mail. Through rain, snow, sleet, and hail. And at night, he continues to inspect Muscovito’s mail and make small alterations and amendments. George drives toward some ultimate action, but what action he does not know.

  It turns out, he does not know at all.