Meter Maids Eat Their Young: A Love Story

by EJ Knapp

  As the lilting sound of her voice faded from the last song, I looked up from several pages of notes. Lynn was standing in the doorway.

  Hinky Is As Hinky Does

  “Hey,” she said, smiling. “Nice music. Nice voice.”

  “Yeah,” I said, clicking off the player before the CD started again. “I got turned on to her while I was in Greece. Hard to find her over here. A friend sends me her stuff when it’s released. I didn’t expect you until morning.”

  Her smile slipped as she took a seat.

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  “I thought you might be here,” she said. “I tried calling the house. Your cell phone.”

  My hand went to the pocket of my shirt. No cell phone. “I must have left it in the car,” I said. “On the charger. Why do I get that bad moon rising feeling?”

  “I don’t know, Cat,” she said. “I thought I’d get an early start on it. But, the deeper I dug, the weirder it was. I mean seriously hinky.”

  “Hinky?” I said. “Is that like a computer term or something?”

  “Yeah.” She laughed. “Something like that. Maybe I’d better give you the other report first. Get it out the way.” She set a stack of paper on my desk. “Twenty-one,” she said.

  “Twenty-one?”

  “Reports of meter vandalism not related to the Mangler in the six months before you came home.”

  “That many,” I said, picking up the stack of papers. They were printouts of newspaper articles. None with my byline.

  “Nothing like what’s happening now. Minor stuff, gum in the coin slots, hammer blows, a couple of meters knocked over, which could have just been an accident. They wouldn’t have even been reported had it not been for the fact that it was never just one meter.”

  “Or it was a slow news day,” I added.

  “Yeah, that too. The interesting thing is there are eighteen occurrences in the last four months that don’t involve the Mangler directly.”

  I scanned the dates quickly. “Since my first article.”

  “It would appear that way. Three the first month, four each month afterward, and seven in the last month alone.”

  “And the month isn’t over yet.”

  I started skimming through the articles. A driver, beaten and maced. Two construction workers. Several carts had been vandalized. One turned over. A couple with their tires slashed. A windshield or two smashed. Another incident of fisticuffs and an actual mêlée at a little league game. I knew there had been problems but not to this extent. Too wrapped up in my own investigation, I suppose. Still, I should have known about this. Especially the progression over the last month. HL had been right. I hadn’t been performing at the top of my game for a while there.

  “This one,” I said, peeling off one of the sheets. “Crazy glue and nickels in the meters. Are we sure this isn’t the Mangler? That was his first act of vandalism. Ninety meters as I remember.”

  She took the sheet, skimmed through it, turned it over. “This guy was caught in the act,” she said. “Claimed he’d been inspired by the Mangler. And he had an alibi for the night those ninety were hit.” She handed the sheet back to me.

  “Rough out there,” I said, tucking the sheet back in the pile. “Rougher than I thought.”

  “Yeah. Those meter maids are a real pain in the ass. People are becoming afraid to park but what can you do? You can’t go anywhere in this town anymore where there isn’t a parking meter.”

  “Yeah, I’ve noticed that.” I set the stack of paper aside. “Okay, tell me about this hinky thing.”

  She laughed. “Do you know how a website works?

  I stared at her. “Uh, you click on the little blue underline things?” I said.

  “Jesus, Cat,” she said, her eyes rolling back. “Internet 101. Okay, those little blue underline things? They’re called links and a website is just a series of pages, individual files really, written in ....” She hesitated. “You don’t even want to know this, do you?”

  “I don’t even understand this,” I said. “I lost you after links.”

  She blew out a long breath. “Okay. The DPE has a website. Very pretty. Very government. You got your history. You got your chain of command. Pretty pictures of meter maids cruising around in their little carts. The whole nine yards. What you don’t got is anything statistical or financial. All the links to that stuff are broken.”

  “Broken? What do you mean broken?”

  “It means you can’t get there from here. You click on the link and it just times out.”

  “Times out?”

  “How do I explain this?” she said, sounding exasperated. “Okay. There are several reasons you might not access a particular page you want to see. The page isn’t there, for one. In that case, the web server will throw up a ‘Page Not Found’ error. Usually that’s a file naming problem, or the file was moved during some reorganization of the site, or you just typed in the wrong URL. Happens all the time. No biggie. Then there are ‘time-out’ problems. That usually happens during really peak times when a lot of people are trying to hit the same page at once. Generally, if you wait a bit, or keep trying, sooner or later the traffic jam eases and you get the page.”

  “But not this time?”

  “Nope. That’s what made me suspicious. No matter how many times I tried, I got squat. Finally I had one of the guys look at the code.”

  “Code?”

  “Don’t ask. What we found were the links to stats and financial info, called an ASP page.” She waved me off before I could interrupt. “Just think of it as a page of special code and leave it at that, okay?”

  “Whatever,” I said.

  “Anyway, when we examined that page, we found that it sent the web server into an endless loop which will eventually cause your browser to time out. In other words, the browser just gives up and tosses an error message at you.”

  “And that’s a bad thing.”

  “A bad thing, yeah. But you’re missing the point, Cat.”

  “I’m missing this whole conversation, Lynn. What are you trying to say? The information isn’t there?”

  “It’s more than just not there. And, by the way, the information isn’t there, but I’ll get to that, okay? Just stay with me here a minute.”

  “I’m too confused to go anywhere else.”

  “Good. Now. Look at it from the point of view of the people running the website. If a user gets a ‘Page Not Found’ error and they know they’ve typed the right address, they might complain. Send an email, or something, because obviously the fault lies with the site itself, right?”

  “Sure. I can buy that.”

  “But, if the user times out trying to get to a page, they’ll likely figure the problem is at their end, or that the site’s really busy at the moment and they’ll move on to something else. People tend to have a short attention span when it comes to the Internet.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess so.”

  “Trust me. They do. But the bottom line in that time-out scenario is that they won’t report it to anyone.”

  “And no one will think anything is wrong?”

  “You got it. By law the gov has to provide the information. From the looks of things, the information is there, it’s just not accessible at the moment. The key being at the moment.”

  “But, in this case, if I’m following you, the information is never going to be there, right?”

  “Right. But the average user would never know that.”

  I considered this. “But how can that be? It’s public record. It has to be there. I mean, you can walk over there and view the stuff in their file cabinets, can’t you?”

  “That’s the theory, sure. Tried that even. Sent Mark over there. He’s the straightest one of the bunch, as long as you keep him away from the sugar bowl, and his brother’s one of the Admin building night guards. The room where they keep that stuff was locked up, under construction according to the sign on the door.”

  “Under construction? They didn’t
set up a temporary place to view the records?”

  “Not that Mark or his brother could find.”

  “But, the public is authorized to have the information. Aren’t they?”

  “Well, sure. They’re supposed to. By law. But what the hell does that mean anymore? Enron wasn’t supposed to rip off people, either. Law is relative, Cat.”

  “Relative?” I said. “Relative to what?”

  “To the amount of money involved, of course,” she said. “Wasn’t it one of your kind who said ‘follow the money’?”

  “Deep Throat,” I said, not to mention my mysterious informant. “Yeah, that’s the reporter’s credo. Or was, at one time. I’m not so sure anymore.” I chewed the end of my pencil. “You said something about the files not actually being there.”

  “Yeah, well, the time-out thing bothered me. The fact that the browser was calling a page that forced a time-out bothered me more. So, I had one of the guys look a little deeper.”

  “Deeper?”

  “Don’t ask. And we didn’t do it using the paper’s computers. We used a satellite feed laptop and bounced it off a site in Russia. Long story. The Reader’s Digest condensed version is, the data is simply not there. Not on that server, anyway. Could be internal. Would have to be, in one form or another, or they couldn’t do their job. But no way could we find that without leaving a footprint.”

  “Footprint?”

  “Evidence that someone was trying to peek. We could breach the firewall protecting their internal data, but if they’re on the ball, they’d know someone was trying to get at it from the outside.”

  I considered this. Their knowing, whoever they were, might not be a bad thing. After all, if my editorial didn’t shake something loose, perhaps that would. “You could do this? Break their fire-whatever?”

  “Breach it, yeah. Heather could do it. She’s the best hacker I’ve got.”

  I chewed on my pencil some more. “Okay,” I said. “Do it. But wait two days. And only if I give you the go-ahead.”

  “Not a problem,” she said, rising from her chair.

  And In That Maze There Be Dragons

  I sat in my office for a long time after she left, staring out at the newsroom, trying to wrap my thoughts around what she had told me. But I couldn’t focus on it. A Counting Crows song started spinning in my head. I laughed a bitter laugh. Though it was a Tuesday, it wasn’t near 3:00 a.m. but it might as well have been the way my thoughts were turning.

  An empty newsroom is a spooky place, full of whispers and shuffling noises. The countless stories played out there, defined and redefined; the drama, the angst, the joy, and sorrow; it all seeps into the woodwork over time, coats it like varnish.

  The Essex family has owned and operated the Call Register since the newspaper was a single hand-crank press in the barn of Hiram Walker Essex, sometime before the southernmost states of this country decided to move off on their own. Old Hiram lost his youngest son, a budding reporter, in the disastrous war that followed that action.

  A hundred and ten years later, Henry Louis, named for Henry Louis Mencken, lost his eldest son, a photojournalist, in a war a lot farther away and infinitely more senseless.

  Lawrence, HL’s youngest son, had withered under the old man’s solitary gaze. There was a time when I felt sorry for Larry. He’d had a big set of loafers to swim around in and he was drowning in the tsunami of his older brother’s fame. Eventually he ran from the weight of his father’s loss and pity, ventured out on his own, and even managed a certain amount of success.

  To be sure, he had succeeded with Robyn. Something I couldn’t claim for myself. But whose fault was that, anyway?

  I stared across the room to where Lawrence had once had his office. The enclosure was long gone now, dismantled to make room for more desks. Back then, after he’d had it built, he’d had ceiling to floor curtains installed, blocking the light that had poured through the south-facing windows.

  This building is old. High ceilings, dark wood panels, poor overhead lighting. Those windows, and the light that shone through them, were the only things that kept the newsroom from becoming dungeon-like. In a fit of pique, I had torn those curtains down one day. I was angry with Lawrence. Angry over his insecure bullying. Angry over the fact that he had Robyn. Just angry, I suppose.

  I couldn’t blame Robyn for that anger. I had known the score shortly after meeting her. She and Lawrence were engaged. They stayed engaged throughout our five-year affair. One powerful family wedding another powerful family, she would explain, lying in bed beside me after a night of sweaty, unreal sex. It was just the way things were when you lived life at the top of the social food chain.

  In those early, orgiastic days, I was too busy falling to give thought to what I was falling into. I had never met a woman like Robyn, one who had so quickly, and completely, dismantled my long-held shields. Ten years my junior, her twenty-one spent sheltered from a world she longed to explore, meeting me had thrown open the locked gates and like a frisky mare suddenly free, she had rushed headlong through them, carrying me in her wake.

  For Robyn, our affair was never an issue. In her mind, marriage between royalty was one thing. Good sex on the other hand, was everything, and good sex wasn’t so easy to find. Having felt she’d found it in me, she couldn’t fathom why she couldn’t have both. She was a WASP princess, after all. As the only child of a rich and powerful man, she had always had whatever she wanted.

  Once I found out who she was, who her father was, I tried to keep the affair a secret. But Robyn had a lot of friends her own age. Very visible friends who loved to party and who accepted me without question. Some of our exploits in this town are still whispered of to this day.

  No. Keeping our affair a secret didn’t work from day one. There might as well have been billboards strung along the main thoroughfare of town proclaiming ‘Robyn Loves Cat.’

  Lawrence was furious, of course. He tried his best to make my life miserable in the newsroom but he was caught in that awkward social stigma of being the cuckold, so there was only so far he was willing to go.

  Her father was enraged, as well, and even more so when she threatened to break off her engagement with Lawrence and marry me, in a nude wedding no less, if he didn’t act as my lawyer when I was accused of a murder. I thought the man was going to have a stroke when he walked into the interrogation room and arranged my bail.

  But in the end, both men won. Lawrence and Robyn were married shortly after she and I broke up. And, they’re still together, according to the society pages I pretend never to read. And her father had the satisfaction of knowing he hadn’t lost his daughter to a commoner.

  Somewhere in those five years with her, cracks appeared, doubts forming like mold in dark places. And in the end those doubts destroyed me; destroyed what I had with Robyn. How I had let them grow to jealousy is a question I’ve asked myself, and tried to drown, since leaving this town. I’ve never found an answer to why I had pushed her away so violently, while trying so hard to cling to her.

  It hadn’t been that way in the beginning. No green monster. No insecurities. Lying in bed, going over the details of her wedding plans, or discussing Lawrence’s sexual foibles and inadequacies, planning the conquest of the men she wanted to bed, or the women I wanted to, none of this caused me the least amount of angst.

  So what changed? Who changed? Me? Robyn? Or had it all been there from the beginning, hiding in the shadows of ‘being in love’?

  I threw the pencil into the darkness. This was getting me nowhere. The Robyn Zone was circles within circles and I knew from long experience that thinking wouldn’t lead me from the maze, only deeper into it. And in that maze there be dragons. It was time to go home, call it a day.

  Attack Cats

  I was starting to feel paranoid about the tickets, checking them twice on the slow ride down to the parking garage. I considered putting them back in my car but rejected the idea. The tickets were better off there than somewhere near me.<
br />
  As I pulled out the parking garage, Joni started reminiscing about how she hadn’t seen Richard since Detroit in ’68. Cynical and drunk and no doubt boring, that had been me for more years than I cared to think about. At least I wasn’t drunk anymore. I wasn’t sure about the cynical and boring part.

  It was late and downtown was all but deserted. It didn’t take long to get home. I pulled into the driveway, noticing that Jaz’s car wasn’t parked in its usual spot out front. Another late night for her. I wondered if she had another girl friend. She hadn’t mentioned one, but then she wouldn’t.

  I stepped out the car, stretched and looked up at the heavens. The sky was bright with stars. I turned toward the house and stopped in my tracks. The Doubtful Guest was turning right-hand circles through the lilac bushes at the front of the house. I looked around. No way she could be out. No way Jaz would have let her out. The Guest was too brain damaged to let her run loose anywhere but in the house. Or the backyard and then only if I was out there with her. So oblivious and in her own world was she, that she’d have right-hand circled herself into roadkill.

  I ran over, scooped her up and stepped as quietly as I could past the screen door and onto the porch. She started to squirm so I set her down on the chair and tip-toed to the front door of the house, putting my ear to it. I couldn’t hear anything. I peeked through the window. All the lights were off. Not a good sign. I always leave the kitchen light on for the cats.

  I tried the door. It was locked. What to do? Call the cops? That would be the smart move. Let them handle it. I backed away from the door, crossed the porch, picked up Doubtful and went outside again. I patted my pockets but no cell phone. Screw the cops. I headed around the side of the house to the backyard.

  He, I assumed it was my friend from earlier in the day, had forced the utility room door. It was hanging ajar, which explained how the Guest had escaped. She is fascinated by open doors and will spend hours going in and out of them. I widened the gap and slunk into the utility room, set Doubtful down and quietly closed the door behind me. As I crossed the room, a cat brushed my leg and I nearly squealed. It was Booth. He opened his mouth and squeaked at me. Hungry. I waved him away and tip-toed toward the kitchen. He followed.