Chump Change

by G. M. Ford

  I reached out and snatched them from his fingers.

  “Top of the stairs. First room on the right.”

  He started to protest. I waved him off.

  “You’re way too drunk to drive, kid,” I said. “You’ve got enough problems without adding a DUI to the mix. The maids leave the room ready to go. Go sleep it off. We’ll talk about things in the morning.”

  The way I figured it, if a night’s sleep didn’t bring him back to reality, the seventy-five-dollar parking ticket he was going to find on his windshield for not having the correct zone parking sticker should be a real eye-opener.

  I was on my second cup of coffee when he came tottering into the kitchen with his shoes in his hand. “Sorry about barging in here like that last night,” he offered.

  I gestured toward the table. “Have a seat. How do you take your coffee?”

  “Don’t drink coffee,” he said, as he slid into a chair.

  Which, in Seattle, is like saying you don’t exhale. The place runs on coffee. Morning, noon, and night. If you fell in a manhole, you’d land on an espresso stand.

  “So . . . whadda you drink in the morning?” I asked.

  “Hot chocolate usually,” he said.

  I did good. I didn’t laugh.

  We settled on a Diet Coke that had been in the fridge since the Eisenhower administration. He took a big pull, set it on the table, and said, “I guess I just felt like I had to do something,” he said, around a belch.

  The doing something about Gordy part wasn’t a subject I much wanted to think about, so I asked him about himself. In my experience, most people are just dying to tell their stories; all you’ve gotta do is get them started. The kid was no exception. He was twenty-seven. Born and raised in some godforsaken burg in Nebraska. Dad passed away when he was eight. Mom still lives there, as does an elder brother.

  Graduated from Iowa State, with a degree in criminal justice. What with the economy and all, finding a job was a whole lot harder than he’d been led to believe by the school’s placement office, so he took advantage of the U.S. Air Force’s new two-year enlistment offer and did a deuce in Texas as an MP, which made him want to be a cop even more, so when he got out, he went back on the job hunt and came up with the gig out on the peninsula. He’d been there about five months, and was just about to move out of his probationary period when the shit hit the fan the other night.

  He finished the Coke, stifled another belch behind his hand, and stood up.

  “Listen, kid—” I began.

  “Keith,” he said. “My name is Keith.”

  “Listen, Keith . . . you made a mistake. Everybody does. It’s the story of our species.” I shrugged. “Don’t let this define you. You’re young. Move on to whatever comes next in your life.” He still looked like a beaten puppy, so I tried to give him an out. “I have it on good authority that Gordy wasn’t long for this world. He was a very sick man. All you did was hasten the process a little.”

  Ten seconds of silence ensued.

  “I was scared,” he said, finally.

  “Know the feeling well,” I said, unabashedly.

  “Really?”

  “All the time,” I assured him.

  I watched as he slipped his feet into his shoes. When he finished, he looked over at me. “I still feel like I’ve got to do something,” he said. “Apologize to his family. Put flowers on his grave . . . something.”

  “First off, ki . . . Keith . . . we don’t know if he’s even got a family.”

  “We need to find out, then.” He said it as if it had just occurred to him.

  I wagged a stiff finger. “No, Keith . . . you need to find out.” When he didn’t say anything, I went on. “This was a guy who breezed in and out of my life in the space of two weeks. I don’t know a damn thing about him, except that he seemed like he was a nice guy, he had a bunch of money and real bad instincts for women.” I cut the air with the side of my hand. “And to tell you the truth, beyond that it’s absolutely none of my damn business.”

  He said he understood. He didn’t, but at least he was being a big boy about it.

  He thanked me for the hospitality again and started for the front door. I followed him out into the hall, turned off the security system, and opened the gate for him. Toodles.

  He gave me a desultory nod, hunched his shoulders, and started hoofing it out toward the road. I locked the door behind him.

  Ten minutes later, I was in a full froth, brushing my teeth like crazy, looking like a mad dog, when the doorbell rang. I sighed, decided that whatever sorry-ass salesman was out there deserved me au naturel, and headed for the door.

  I didn’t bother with the security cameras, I just yanked the door open and stood there, shirtless, with the toothbrush sticking out of my mouth at a jaunty angle.

  The kid, again. “Somebody stole my car,” he bleated.

  I swallowed half a gallon of toothpaste foam, pulled the toothbrush from my mouth, and said, “No, kid . . . you’ve been towed.”

  He got off easy. A mere three hundred and twenty-seven dollars to retrieve his five-year-old Honda Prelude from Lincoln Towing. They only allow the car’s registered owner inside the razor wire, so I waited outside the impound yard while he and his ride were tearfully reunited.

  The sky wanted to rain but couldn’t seem to muster the gumption, leaving the air still and sullen. Low clouds had swallowed the tops of the trees along the Burke-Gilman Trail as the chain-link gate clanked and then slowly slid back.

  He pulled up next to me and rolled down the window. “Thanks,” he said.

  “What are you gonna do?” I asked him.

  His neck visibly stiffened. “I’m gonna follow through with the hearing and stuff,” he said. “I’m gonna get my job back.”

  I’d already told him once; I wasn’t going to be the Grinch and say it again.

  “Well, good luck to you, ki . . . Keith. Hope things work out,” I said sincerely.

  I stuck my hands in my pockets and watched him drive off toward the Montlake Bridge and the freeway beyond.

  It’s just under four miles from the Montlake neighborhood to the Pike Place Market. Took me twenty-five minutes. Seemed like every highway, byway, avenue, street, lane, and boulevard was under construction simultaneously. One detour led you to another detour. Near as I could tell, there was no getting there from here.

  Rachel had commandeered her usual window table, overlooking the narrow cobblestone alley that fronted the market. Matt’s in the Market was where we always met for lunch. Good food, good drinks, nice view of the tourists shuffling back and forth past flying fish, flower stands, and every artsy-craftsy persuasion ever invented by man.

  She had her hair up, which was the way I liked it. During daylight hours anyway.

  “You look nice,” I said as I pulled up a chair.

  She pretended to be insulted. “Just nice?”

  “Scrumpulicious,” I amended. “I didn’t want to get carried away on a workday.”

  “Both my afternoons cancelled. I’m finished for the day.”

  “Your place or mine?”

  She smiled. “Wish I could, but I’m getting my hair done.”

  The waiter didn’t bother with introductions when he showed up with menus and ice water, which was another thing I liked about Matt’s. Color me with a crabby crayon, but I’m one of those tortured souls who doesn’t feel as if knowing the server’s name improves my dining experience. Rachel ordered a glass of the house cabernet. Still feeling a bit fuzzy from last night’s whiskey, I stuck with water.

  Rachel ordered what she always ordered, falafel and baba ghanoush, with a little flatbread on the side. I went for the lamb burger.

  The waiter took our orders, collected the menus, and disappeared, which was also just the way I liked it. “Guess who came to visit me last night,” I said.

  “Who?”

  I told her the story.

  “Poor kid,” she said when I’d finished. “Taking a life is a sca
rring experience.”

  I wanted to say especially for the dead guy, but I kept my mouth shut.

  At which point, mercifully, the waiter showed up with the food, and the conversation took a backseat to serious grazing. I make it a point to slow down when eating with Rachel, who, by anyone’s standards, is a very deliberate eater. I’m just the opposite. I can inhale a burger and fries, pickle and all, before she’s through playing with the napkin, so, in an effort to be more genteel, I take little “come up for air” breaks between bites.

  “Did he ever tell you how much?” she asked, out of the blue.

  “He who?”

  “Gordy. Did he ever tell you how much he won in the lottery?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “Must be a matter of public record,” she said after a few more bites.

  “Must be,” I agreed, and went back to my lamb burger.

  She rearranged her lunch with a fork.

  “Aren’t you curious?” she asked after a bit.

  “No,” I lied.

  “Yes you are.”

  I made my appalled face. “How can you tell me what I do and don’t feel?”

  “I’m a professional,” she said around a bite of falafel. “Your pathetic dissemblings don’t fool me for a minute.” She smiled and blew me a kiss.

  “How’s the falafel?” I segued.

  “It’s the money thing, isn’t it?”

  “What money thing?”

  “The guilt you feel about the money you inherited from your father.”

  “Who says I feel guilty?”

  “You do.” She waved her fork. “Every time you overtip, you make a joke about inherited money. Every time somebody new sees your house, you go through that song and dance about only living in half the downstairs, and how you do your own laundry.”

  She made a rude noise with her lips.

  “I didn’t realize I was quite so transparent.”

  She dipped a triangular piece of flatbread into the baba ghanoush. I watched in silence as she chewed four hundred times and then swallowed.

  “Nobody realizes,” she said, after a sip of wine. “Everybody believes they can see through other people, but nobody can see through them. It’s what gives us the courage to leave the house in the morning.”

  “Will you be invoicing me for this?” I inquired.

  “Don’t get mad, Leo. It’s just the way it is.”

  Carl was thrilled to see me.

  “What the fuck do you want?” he growled as I walked in the door.

  “What do you know about the lottery?” I asked.

  “I never fucking win.”

  “Seriously.”

  He rolled his wheelchair back from the keyboard and slowly turned in my direction. Carl Cradduck had once been one of America’s most prominent battlefield photographers. Twice nominated for the Pulitzer. His work had appeared in Time, Newsweek, Life, and every other magazine I could think of. Came through the jungles of Vietnam without a scratch and was at the very top of his game when a random piece of Bosnian shrapnel severed his spine in September of 1993.

  His shirt was buttoned wrong, and it looked like he hadn’t washed his face in a week, but other than that, he looked like he’d always looked. Like he was eroding, right before your very eyes.

  Paralyzed from the hips down and relegated to a wheelchair, Carl had parlayed his photographic expertise into a highly successful surveillance business. For the better part of two decades Carl did all of my peeper work for me. You wanted pictures of Melvin and the secretary doing the horizontal bop in a downtown hotel, Carl would wire up the room and provide the glossies.

  But, you know . . . times change. No-fault divorce made an even bigger dent in the surveillance business than it had in the private eye trade. While I was willing to work for nearly anybody, Carl had always hated corporations and refused to work the industrial espionage side of the street, and so, when the irreconcilable differences of marriage lost its commercial luster, Carl inventoried his skill set and segued into the information business. Skip tracing. Finding felons, freeloaders, and deadbeat dads became his mission. He was the Duke of the Database. Seemed like half the attorneys in the city made use of his services. Unless you were planning to go to ground in the wilds of Montana, à la Ted Kaczynski, Carl was going to find your ass, sooner rather than later.

  He’d bought a little three-bedroom over on Crown Hill a few years back and wired himself up to the world. Eight monitors lined the north wall of what used to be the front parlor, each keeping track of something or someone or other. I made it a point not to ask too many questions. There’s only so much sneering a man can take.

  I’d told myself I was gonna stop by Carl’s and put this Gordon Stanley thing to rest, once and for all. Find out he was just another schmuck for whom wealth proved too great a burden. Some folks are that way. I think it was Tolstoy who said that too much prosperity is bad for people, in the same manner that too many oats are bad for a horse. He may have had a point.

  Carl’s custom-made wheelchair had a robotic arm, like the writing surface of an old-fashioned school desk, except bigger. I’d always found it ironic that this little man who was virtually unable to move had found a way to extend his reach to the far corners of the earth. It said something; I just wasn’t sure what.

  “You playing at being a detective again?” he asked.

  “Naw,” I said. “This is for me.”

  “So . . . are sexual favors to be included here, or did you bring your checkbook?”

  “Much as I’d like to . . .”

  He waved me off. “Whadda ya want?”

  “I want to find out how much money a guy won in the Washington state lottery.”

  “What guy?”

  “Gordon Stanley.”

  Carl swung the arm up and began typing. The monitors rolled and changed. He typed some more. We waited. One by one the monitors rolled up data.

  “Nobody by that name ever won the Washington state lottery,” he said, disgustedly. “You sure it was Washington?”

  “I thought so.”

  “I’ll try Oregon, Idaho, and Cali.”

  The wait was considerably longer this time. More like forty minutes. The screens rolled and blinked and rolled again like slot machines. Same deal, though.

  “No Gordon Stanley,” Carl said finally.

  What came up right away was the question of why anybody would lie about a thing like that, which was, of course, a stupid question, because people lied about money all the time; the more money, the bigger the lies.

  “You sure?”

  He pointed up at the bank of screens, moving his bony finger from left to right. “Powerball, Mega Millions, Lotto, Hit Five, Match Four, Daily Game, Daily Keno. That’s all of em, Bonzo. I searched the past five years, and there’s no fucking Gordon Stanley.”

  “What if we were looking for him . . . you know, in the flesh?”

  “That’s a whole nother ball game,” he said.

  “Let’s see what’s out there.”

  He named a price. I winced. He read my mind.

  “You start that old-times’-sake shit with me, and I’ll throw your big ass out of here,” he warned. “What’s that old Jean Shepherd book title? In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash.”

  “Do it,” I said. “Let’s see if we can find this guy.”

  Every time I watch Carl work, I get the willies. Despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, I still refuse to relinquish my illusion of personal privacy. I know . . . there’s a camera on every light pole. I know if they’re so inclined they could GPS-track my every movement through my cell phone. Yadda, yadda. I know all of that, and still I just can’t operate from the perspective that I’m under surveillance. When I’m alone, I have to work from the premise that nobody’s watching, even if they are. Otherwise I’d be lining the walls of my house with tinfoil and communicating by pigeon.

  I watched as a database of employment departments rolled by. Had he ever w
orked for anybody? Driver’s licenses, vehicle registrations, tax and revenue department rolls, court and law enforcement records, utility records, county assessor’s records, birth certificates, marriage licenses, business licenses, professional licenses, building permits. On and on. If you leave your house, somebody has it on record, and probably on film too.

  Took over an hour before Carl sat back in his chair. “Guy doesn’t exist,” he said.

  “Why would you lie about your name?” I asked myself out loud.

  “Lots of reasons,” Carl growled. “Maybe he was on the run.”

  “He sure didn’t act like a guy on the run,” I said. “This was a guy with a resting pulse rate of about fourteen. He wasn’t jumpy enough for a guy on the run. And I’d bet my ass that Gordy was his real first name. Just the way he answered to it.”

  Carl started typing again. “Just the state of Washington lottery. Let’s just do Gordon,” he said. “First name, last name, we don’t give a shit.”

  I waited until he sat back in the chair again.

  “How many Gordons?”

  “Fourteen, but only two where Gordon is the first name.”

  Another minute passed. Carl leaned forward. “One of the first-name Gordons recently changed his last name.”

  “From?”

  “Gordon Hardvigsen.”

  “To?”

  “Gordon Stanley.”

  “No shit.”

  “Yeah . . . and this Hardvigsen guy took the Washington state lottery for thirteen million six . . . seventeen months back.”

  I must have whistled or something. Carl nodded his head. “Lotta dough,” he said.

  “How do you lose that much money in just over a year?”

  “My first wife,” Carl piped in. “That bitch could vaporize money.”

  “Let’s see what we can get on this Hardvigsen guy,” I said.

  We got everything, from his birth certificate onward. He was the only child of two only children. Sarah Jane Wilder and Robert F. Stanley, who brought forth a son, forty-seven years ago, in Lewiston, Idaho’s Valley Hospital. Robert drops out of the picture almost immediately, never to reappear. Sarah Jane marries the Hardvigsen guy, and the rest is just boilerplate Americana. No death certificate for either parent. Asotin County records say they own a ranch called The Flying H, on the Washington side of the Snake River. Nine hundred acres, with water rights, on which the yearly taxes are thirteen thousand and change.