Meter Maids Eat Their Young: A Love Story

by EJ Knapp

  She gave me a strange look as she said that. Almost as if she wanted to take her words back.

  “An electronics shop?” I said.

  “Uh, yeah,” she said. “Gizmos and stuff.”

  “Gizmos?”

  “Well, I don’t know what they are, Teller,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said, wondering why she was becoming so uptight. “He lost the buildings?”

  “No. He still owns them. It’s the businesses that shut down and moved away.”

  “Because DPE changed the meters?”

  “More or less,” she said. “People stopped coming downtown to shop. The mall was easier with no possibility of a parking ticket. All the small shops downtown started closing,” she added. “Not just Tom’s.”

  “And that’s when he started that little anti-parking meter campaign of his?”

  “Yeah. I think so. Somewhere around there.”

  “And this was?” I said.

  “Well, the electronic shop went first,” she said. “Maybe a year, year and a half ago. Not long after Cooper changed the meters, anyway.”

  “And the café?”

  “He kept that open a while longer,” she said. “Still a lot of workers down there but his biggest trade was Friday and Saturday nights when he featured the bands. When the DPE extended the meter hours downtown to 10:00 p.m. that was when business fell off to nothing. I think he finally closed it down, set up that little kiosk, a month or two before you came back to town.”

  “And he had CARPE running by that time?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “But he’s kept his part in it a tight secret. It was small at first, maybe a dozen people in all. It didn’t start growing until you started writing your articles.”

  And until the Meter Mangler showed up, I thought.

  “Why a secret?” I said.

  She turned to me, staring deep, as if she was debating what to say.

  “Let’s just say that the way things are in this town, it’s not good to be seen as opposing the DPE.”

  I thought about what HL had said about his total lack of support in opposing the department and had to agree: they seemed a formidable enemy.

  “And what about you?” I said. “You work for them. Where do you stand?”

  “Me?” she said. “I’m the elephant in the living room. I collect a paycheck and that’s about it. They’re too afraid of a discrimination suit to fire me. They don’t want any more heat than the Mangler and your stories have already brought down on them. But they’ve cut me out of every loop there is. I probably play a thousand games of solitaire a day while I’m there. I think they hope I’ll get so frustrated and bored, I’ll just quit.”

  “Will you?”

  “Not a chance. That’s my department. What Cooper has done to it, to this town, is an obscenity. No. I won’t quit. They’ll have to drag me out of there, kicking and screaming.”

  The Miasma Of A Sick Ghost

  After Jaz left for work, I sat on the porch, struggling with my thoughts, an exercise that was the equivalent of trying to herd cats. Between my investigation and the anniversarial revelations of the morning, I was on information overload. Add to that the growing paranoia I was feeling over the tickets and all I wanted to do was crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head.

  Though I was reluctant to burden HL with the tickets, I knew it was the right thing to do. After the attack last night, those tickets were a key piece in the puzzle.

  It didn’t take long to retrieve them. There was one last thing I needed to do before I turned the tickets over to HL. I stepped out the elevator door before it had a chance to close and hurried up the stairs to the second floor. Forty minutes later, back on the elevator, willing it to move faster, I emerged on my floor, cross-legged and anxious as I hobbled toward the john.

  Another of the finer points of fifty-something is becoming quite familiar with the location and interior design of bathrooms. Road trips are no longer calculated on the basis of destination, or the attractions you might encounter along the way, but by the number of rest stops, and whether the attractions might have bathrooms. Those huge, ugly, brown Saw Palmetto capsules become a daily routine: the first thing you swallow in the morning, the last thing down the pipe at night. And don’t ever make the mistake of biting into one of those. The taste is beyond bad and will stay with you for hours regardless of what you do to rinse it out or mask it.

  When I got back to my office, Rafe was standing by my desk.

  “Rafe,” I said. “What’s up, man?”

  “Oh, Mr. Teller.”

  “Yep,” I said, feeling a little irritated and not quite knowing why. “Why are you here, Rafe?”

  “My car was towed.”

  I considered this non sequitur for a moment, wondering if I’d heard him correctly, or if I was losing it from all the running around I’d been doing.

  “Your car?”

  “I love my car, Mr. Teller. It was my dad’s.”

  I’d love his car too: A ’56 T-Bird, low mileage, mint condition. The thing had to be worth a fortune. Then I remembered I’d seen the car when I parked mine in the underground garage.

  “I just saw your car, Rafe,” I said. “Down in the garage.”

  His eyes grew wide, like a rabbit’s staring at approaching headlights.

  “I have to go now, Mr. Teller.”

  “Why were you here to begin with?” I said. He started to shake and I started to feel guilty about grilling him. “Look,” I said. “Why don’t you ...” I looked around, spotted the trash can, “… why don’t you, you know, take the trash can, or whatever you came here for, and go back to your office. Okay?”

  His face brightened, lost that about-to-be-flattened look. “Yes, sir,” he said. “The trash can.” He picked it up and hurried out the office. I watched him walk away and then forgot about him. I had one last thing to do.

  A half hour later, I was climbing the stairs to HL’s office. As I rounded the fourth floor landing, I stopped. The scent of English Leather was as thick as the miasma of a sick ghost. Rafe. I looked around but he was nowhere to be seen. Shaking off the creepy feeling that stole up my back, I continued on my way.

  More Nefarious By The Moment

  “He’s waiting for you,” Felice said as I crossed her office. I didn’t bother asking how he knew I was coming.

  “Sorry,” I said, swinging open the oak door to HL’s inner sanctum. “I got kind of tied up.”

  “What are you sorry about now?” HL asked as I walked into the room.

  I thought about telling him of my strange encounter with Rafe, but what was there to tell? That the guy was acting weird? Weird was normal for Rafe. “It’s a long story,” I said, setting myself down in the chair in front of his desk.

  “It always is,” he said. “Pity your articles aren’t.”

  “I’m working on it,” I said.

  He looked me up and down, a look of concern on his face.

  “Are you sure you should be out traipsing around?” he said. “You look like something the bulls might have left behind at Pamplona.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m fine. I hate hospitals.”

  “As do I,” he replied. “I managed to avoid one at birth and all the days since and I hope to avoid one when my final deadline arrives. So, what do you have for me?”

  I glanced in the direction of Felice’s office. How ...? I shook my head. When was I going to learn not to combine ‘how’ and ‘Felice’ in the same thought?

  I tossed the envelope on his desk, studying him closely as he picked it up and turned it over in his large hands. He looked up at me.

  “Open it,” I said. “I think you’ll find it interesting.”

  He turned it over. The tickets spilled out on his desk.

  “What are these?”

  I explained what I’d found the day before.

  “And you saw this with your own eyes?” HL said.

  “Watched the whole thing, start to trashcan finish,”
I said.

  “And you were alerted to this by your ... source?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He removed a handkerchief from his pocket, removed his glasses and began rubbing at them while gazing absently up at the corner of the room. I knew what he was doing. I’d seen it enough times over the years. He was searching for the devil’s advocate position.

  “What if he was just lazy, didn’t want to get in and out of the cart?”

  “Then why did he walk the line of cars in the first place?” I retorted. “And why didn’t he leave any of the tickets on the cars?”

  “Were the meters expired?”

  “Only a couple. I fed those before he got there,” I said.

  He went back to rubbing his glasses.

  “What about quota? They have some sort of quota, don’t they? Have to write a certain amount of tickets each month?”

  “They’re already writing nearly the number of tickets written in DC last year,” I said. “And we have half the population.” I followed that with a brief description of my talk with Philo the day before.

  “A hundred and twenty million dollars?” HL said.

  “Probably more,” I said. “In meters and fines. That’s Philo’s estimate, anyway,” I added. “And it adds up if his figures are right. I can’t verify that, though. Through official sources.”

  “Why not?” he said. “That information should be available.”

  So I told him what Lynn had found, minus the part about maybe hacking the DPE system to dig deeper. I wasn’t sure what he knew about his research department, but I wasn’t going to be the one to reveal it.

  “This grows more nefarious by the moment,” he said.

  “And crazy, too.” I told him my lost-ticket-notice-in-the-mail theory. “I mean, sure, it looks good politically to be shoveling that kind of money into the city coffers, but what’s the gain versus the risk? It’s not like Cooper is planning to run for office or anything? Leastwise not that I’ve heard.”

  “Well, the man’s weasel enough to be mayor, that’s for certain. But I agree. And I’ve heard nothing to that effect either.”

  “So what is it?” I said. “Weird Brownie points? It just doesn’t make any sense.”

  He rubbed his glasses some more, peered through them finally and set them back on his nose.

  “What that meter maid did is patently illegal, of course, but if this was not a solitary act, if it is system-wide with covert sanctioning by the department itself, the implications are enormous.”

  “That’s why I didn’t write it up right away,” I said.

  “I see your point,” he said. “What if it were only that one meter maid, operating on his own, without any kind of sanction? We bring down the heat with a story, where does it get us? What does it get us? One meter maid. And there is more to this whole affair than one, rogue meter maid.”

  “There is a possibility, though,” I said, switching roles and taking the devil’s position, “that if we did write this up, it would draw out some people. Jog some memories. Put more heat on the department.”

  “True, true, and more heat would be good,” he said. “But I’m not sure whether that heat would bake them more than us.”

  “Us? Why would we catch flak? If nothing else, we’ll have exposed an illegal ticket operation. How could that hurt us?”

  “As I told you during our last conversation,” he said. “The DPE is a powerful force in this town. I’m getting a lot of pressure to back off. To make you back off. This ... I don’t know. I’m not convinced this ticket thing is big enough. Yet. We lack sufficient information. These are litigious times we live in, Teller. The era of shoving the hand in any deep pocket one can find. We publish a story like this, people will indeed come forward. But why will they be coming forward?”

  “Because they were ripped off?” I suggested.

  “Perhaps,” he said. “But with no proof on their part, or ours, regarding further involvement of the DPE, what will be the perception? No one likes parking tickets. The parking issue was a hornet’s nest before you returned and you’ve been batting at the nest further with your articles. My instinct tells me that if we publish this now, it could backfire on us and we are too off balance at the moment to withstand that. No. We need more information. I think it best if we sit on this for the time being.”

  As reluctant as I was to sit on a story, I had to agree with his reasoning.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ve got some more questions for Philo. And the Mangler is still out there. And I still have that gut feeling Harrison’s murder is tied up in there somewhere. I’ll shake something loose.”

  Rising from his chair, HL moved over to the window, peering out toward the Admin building and the park.

  “The crowds grow more restless every day,” he said. “Every day. They’re already gathering when I arrive here. Small in the morning and afternoon, no more than a hundred, I’d say. Not bad for a workday, though. At the lunch hour, the crowd swells, spilling out onto the sidewalks. People actually eat their lunch there on the lawn, as if at a picnic.”

  He turned and faced me, surprising me with his next words.

  “Perhaps another go at Cooper might prove productive.”

  “What makes you think that?” I said. “All we ever get from him is a refusal or a ‘no comment.’”

  “I wasn’t thinking of an official interview request. More like something impromptu, spontaneous, show up on his doorstep kind of thing. If this meter maid acted alone, at best you’ll get the cold shoulder from Cooper. However, if there is something deeper going on, and if he is involved in it, surely he knows you have the tickets. The unfortunate incident last night proves that someone knows. One way or another, a sudden visit on your part could be telling. And, if not, what have we lost compared with what we might gain?”

  I smiled. In-your-face interviews had once been my favorite method of shaking the information tree. It had been a long time since I’d indulged myself with one.

  “I like it. And now seems as good a time as any.”

  He turned and looked back out at the crowd gathered on the Admin steps.

  “I would agree,” he said.

  I rose from my chair and was almost to the door when he spoke again.

  “Be careful, Teller,” he said. “I have no desire to lose you now that I’ve coaxed you back.”

  “Don’t worry, sir,” I said. “I’ll watch my back.”

  “See that you do,” he said.

  Mutt Minus Jeff

  I stood outside the newspaper building, looking up at the clear sky. I felt good about having taken the tickets to HL and thought his perspective on them was a good thing. And I especially liked his idea for an impromptu interview with Cooper.

  As I walked toward the Admin building, I scanned the street as surreptitiously as I could in search of my friend. Though I doubted he’d be making a public appearance any time soon ‒ not after what the cats did to him ‒ I didn’t want to be taken by surprise.

  As it was the beginning of the lunch hour, the crowd near the Admin steps was growing. In the time it had taken me to leave HL’s office and get this far, it had nearly doubled in size.

  I waded through the crowd, passed through the double doors and stepped into the dim, cool, quiet lobby. My footfalls echoed off the marble walls and it occurred to me that I hadn’t been here since my first interview with Cooper soon after I’d arrived back in town, just before my first article on the DPE hit the newsstands.

  The interview had gone well enough then, but there was something about the man that made alarms go off in my head. He had a lawyer’s smile and a politician’s way with words, both of which, according to his CV, he was; but there was something different with him, something darker, just behind the soft smile and hardy handshake.

  After the first article appeared, the department assigned a PR hack to deal with the press, to deal with me specifically. After the Mangler entered the scene, they stopped giving interviews at all and start
ed trying to quash my stories. I was more than ready to rattle some cages and Cooper’s cage was at the top of my list.

  The DPE offices were on the fifth floor. I merged with a couple of business types coming back from an early lunch, sauntered past the guards and stepped on the elevator. The suits got off on four. I rode the car up to six. Slipping down the fire stairs, I emerged at the end of a long, deserted hallway.

  It took me a moment to find my bearings but my innate sense of direction kicked in and I remembered how to get to Cooper’s office. I made my way to the end of the hall and peered around the corner. The floor was empty. A stern-faced woman sitting at a round desk barred my way to Cooper’s inner sanctum. Taking a deep breath, I turned the corner and walked past her.

  “Sir,” she said to my back. “Mr. Teller, you can’t go in there.”

  She grabbed my arm and pulled me back. I slipped from her grasp and opened the door.

  The room was as I remembered it from the last time I’d been here. Cooper was standing behind his desk, his back to a broad expanse of glass that looked out over the park. There was a man, a meter maid, sitting in one of the chairs, his head lowered, looking for all the world like a puppy being scolded for peeing on the carpet. When he looked up at my entrance, I recognized him immediately. The ticket guy from the other day.

  But all that slipped by when movement across the room drew my attention. I stared at a figure disappearing through a door at the far end of the office. He was gone in an instant, the door clicking shut behind him, but the copper-colored hair, the receding hair line, and most of all, the gauze bandage that covered the side of his face, froze me in place. All the things I had planned to say, lost.

  The receptionist or secretary or whatever she was, tugged at my shirt, trying to drag me from the room. I glared at Cooper. He smiled. I smiled back and made the same gun gesture my friend had made to me the day the Cushman cart almost ran me over. The smile on Cooper’s face faltered and fell away.