by Rob Hart
“That’s funny.”
“What’s funny?”
“It’s the same way in New York. The reason a studio apartment rents for three thousand a month is because there’s some asshole willing to pay it. That drives up the property values, which drives out businesses. Then these big, beautiful buildings get torn down so some spiritless monolith can go up in its place.”
“Well,” Crystal says, rooting around in her purse for a smoke. “Bullshit is bullshit, no matter where you are.” She pulls one out and goes to light it, pauses. “I shouldn’t smoke in someone else’s car.”
“Crack the window.”
She considers this for a second, puts the cigarette down in the cup holder.
“So do you miss it?” she asks. “Do you think you’ll ever go back?”
“I don’t know if I have a good answer for that. The city’s in my blood. I’ll go back eventually. My mom is still there. My friends. I don’t know what the terms will be.”
“I’ve never been to New York.”
“You should go.”
She glances at me sideways. “Maybe you can show me and Rose around. We can all go together.”
I smile. Catch myself smiling, but don’t stop. “That’d be nice.”
We drive a little more, down a few more busy streets clogged up with traffic. There’s nothing holding up the traffic, just the roads are so narrow and it’s so hard to make a left turn, so we spend a lot of time sitting and waiting.
I’m dozing off when Crystal turns down a street and says, “This is it.”
We pull to the curb and the numbers next to me show it should be on the other side of the street. I hop out of the car and light a cigarette before I’m even fully standing, stretch my legs, and look across the road.
Crystal says, “Holy shit.”
Across the street from us is a storefront with a big sign up top, deep French blue with white lettering.
The sign says: Committee to Elect Mike Fletcher to Congress.
Crystal puts a cup of coffee next to the keyboard.
“Black no sugar,” she says. “I don’t know how you drink it like that.”
“I like coffee to taste like coffee. Not a milkshake.”
She pulls a chair over to the computer terminal. The computer banks at the Multnomah County Central Library are empty, given the place is about to close.
I pull up Fletcher’s Wikipedia page so Crystal can take a look. There’s a picture of him against an American flag. He’s looking vaguely off to the right. He’s got chubby cheeks, a goatee that’s starting to show gray, some salt and pepper in his dark hair. A grin like he’s trying to sell something that’s broken.
“So what have we learned?” Crystal asks.
“Mike Fletcher. A city commissioner. Made his money in real estate before running for office. He’s a little shady, some questionable donations, but from the tone of what I read it’s nothing egregious, and probably par for the course. He’s running for Congress and is considered to be the favorite for the seat.”
Crystal leans back in her chair, picks up her coffee, takes off the lid. It’s a light mocha brown, and she blows across the surface before taking a sip, legs crossed, one canvas sneaker kicked into the air.
“So what do we know?” she asks. I’m about to answer when I realize it’s rhetorical. “We know a cell phone was calling Dirk, a lot, within the time that he took Rose. We know that the phone is registered to this guy’s campaign office under another person. Why Ellen?”
“That,” I tell her, pulling up another screen. There’s a picture of Fletcher at a rally for Keep Our Water Clean. He’s got his arm around Ellen. She’s got a look on her face like she’s tolerating him. He’s got a look on his face like he wants to fuck this cute little thing he’s got his arm around. “She did some volunteer work at his office.”
“So the phone was used to communicate with Dirk because whoever was doing it knew it could be traced back to her, and it would be harder to make the connection to Fletcher?”
“It wasn’t foolproof,” I point out. “We made the connection. But it would definitely slow down whoever was looking. It looks like it was a smokescreen. Maybe she signed something without looking at it.”
Crystal leans forward and puts her cup down. “So Fletcher, or someone connected to Fletcher, wants me and Dirk gone. Why?”
“He announced his campaign two months ago. Maybe someone working for him is trying to clear his closet of skeletons.”
Crystal shakes her head. “This is a little heavy. Who the fuck am I?”
“This is very fucking heavy.” I pull up another photo of Fletcher. “Look at the nose. Do you know what Dirk said to me in the bathroom? He said something about what the old man told him. What if this is his dad? They kind of look like each other.”
Crystal squints, her eyes opening slowly with realization. “You think this guy could really be Dirk’s dad?”
“His profile says he’s got three kids and his wife is his high school sweetheart. I have to imagine that he wouldn’t be as viable a candidate if people knew he had another family.”
“So he’s trying to disappear any trace of me and my daughter so he can run a political campaign?”
“Maybe.”
Crystal puts the lid back on her coffee and looks at the screen. “So where do we find him?”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s go to his office and find out where my fucking daughter is. Right now. I’ll beat it out of him.”
“Bad play,” I tell her, bringing my voice down to a whisper, hoping she’ll match. “Watch this.”
One more screen, and this is the one that scares me. It’s a picture of Fletcher with the head of the police union, on a news article in which he’s accepting the endorsement of just about every law enforcement union in the city.
Crystal reads for a couple of second and says, “Fuck.”
“Right? It looks like Chicken Man wasn’t lying. So besides the fact that someone may have been willing to kill me because of all this, you think he’s going to be cool with us walking in to his office and demanding answers?”
“We go to the press, then,” Crystal says. “Tell them everything.”
I pick up my coffee and take a sip. Too hot. I put the cup down and tell her, “That’s not a bad idea, actually.”
Crystal isn’t happy about it but she agrees to wait in the car after I point out that it’s best to keep her face out of this. I finish my cigarette as I walk across the parking lot, toward the blank office building that looms out of the trees on a blank strip of buildings near the airport.
I check in at the security desk, where a catatonic white-haired security guard prints out a sticker for me to put onto my shirt. I crumple it up and shove it in my pocket and head toward the elevators. At the third floor, I find an empty receptionist desk and stand there for a couple of minutes, thumbing through old copies of PDX Weekly. I’m halfway through a story about a new trend called Bacon Mondays, in which bars are offering a free strip of bacon with every drink on Mondays, which actually sounds like a really great idea, when an old woman half my height but twice as angry storms over.
“Who are you here to see?” she asks.
“Molly Rivers.”
She picks up the phone, hits a few numbers, and says, “Your meeting is here.” She slams down the phone and looks up at me. “You can go back.”
I don’t know where “back” means, but I walk through the waist-high swinging door and weave through the empty newsroom, desks bounded in by cubicles of sea green felt partitions. There’s a phone ringing somewhere in the distance.
At the far end of the room is something that looks like a nerve center—desks arranged into a giant square, computer terminals and papers and telephones scattered about. I head for that and see a young girl with red hair and freckles pick up the ringing phone, clearly annoyed to be doing it. “City desk, Molly Rivers… No, I’m sorry, we don’t have the manpower to cover that event�
� If I leave to cover your garage sale there’ll be no one here to answer calls from concerned citizens like yourself… No, fuck you.”
She slams down the phone and looks up at me, says, “You’re the guy who called?”
“I’m the guy who called.”
The phone rings again. She sighs, picks it up, and slams it down.
“Let’s walk,” she says. “I need a smoke.”
She gets up from the desk and doesn’t wait for me to follow. Her hair is in need of a good combing, her clothes wrinkled in the back. She looks like she’s been working for days.
She leads us through a cavernous warehouse, past what I assume to be a printing press, my shoes squeaking on the shiny concrete floor. I haven’t seen a single soul yet besides her and angry grandma and the security guard down front.
We get to a door with a gray metal security bar and she pushes it and steps onto a gangway over a parking lot behind the building and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. I pull out my own and offer her a lighter as she’s fumbling for hers. I cup my hand around the flame to keep it up in the wind and she nods and exhales.
“It looks a little quiet around here,” I tell her.
“We’re about to shut down. I’m not supposed to tell you that. I’m not supposed to tell anyone that. Thank god for my fucking journalism degree.” She pumps her fist. “Hooray internet.”
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “Is the job market that tough?”
“I got an offer from a newspaper in Wichita. Fucking Wichita. That’s not even a place. I’ll be covering cows. Fucking cows.”
“That sucks,” I tell her. “In the meantime, I was hoping I could ask you about Mike Fletcher.”
She waves her hand, which sends a veil of smoke into my face. “What about him?”
“You’ve written a lot of articles about him,” I say. “Clearly you’ve done some digging. I imagine there’s got to be some stuff you’re holding back. Maybe information that you couldn’t verify. I was hoping you could tell me about anything you’ve found that you weren’t able to print.”
“I’m sorry, who are you again?” she asks, squinting at me. “Are you doing oppo for the Osborne campaign? I don’t want to get involved in any of that shit. Do your own legwork.”
“I’m not involved with any political campaigns,” I tell her. “I’m just a guy trying to find some information.”
“Like a private detective?”
“If you want to call it that.”
Molly hugs herself. It’s warm out but the breeze is insistent. “I shouldn’t even be out here. Auggy won’t answer the phones anymore. She sits there and knits. I’m going to get my ass reamed out for not answering the phones.”
“By bosses who are about to let you go. And anyway, you’ve got Wichita.”
She laughs a little. “What do I get out of this?”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing’s free. What are you digging into?”
“I can’t say yet, but I’ll make you a deal,” I say. “If this shit turns out to be true, this will ruin him. Big time. I’ll give you everything. You’ll be able to have your pick of newspaper gigs.”
“So,” she says, sucking on the cigarette, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “This is about the love child?”
Something in my face gives it away, because she smiles and extends a finger at me. “That’s what I call a loose confirmation.”
“This might have to do with that. What do you know?”
“Rumors. He had a kid outside his marriage. It’s not an uncommon rumor. Every unmarried politician is gay, every married politician has a love child. But I heard it from someone who knew him, that he got a load on one night and spilled to someone that he had a kid out of wedlock, but I tried to chase it down, couldn’t find any paperwork. No birth certificates with his name on them besides those three little sadist goblins he calls kids.”
“That’s a pretty harsh way to describe someone’s kids.”
She tosses her spent cigarette down toward the parking lot. “They were running around at a campaign event and knocked me down and broke my recorder. He thought it was hysterical. They’re monsters. So, can you confirm the love child?”
“I don’t know what I can or can’t do at this point,” I say. “But Fletcher is involved in some bad shit. And once I get it sorted you’ll hear all about it. Is there anything else you can tell me about him?”
She nods. “He wants to be president one day. He’s said that to me on more than one occasion. The guy’s a power-hungry narcissist. Though, to be fair, every politician is a little bit of a power-hungry narcissist. I forget who said it, but politics is how ugly people get famous.”
“Do you think he has a chance? At the president thing?”
“A lot of people think he doesn’t.”
“What do you think?”
“Bush Junior could barely string a coherent sentence together and he got elected to a second term. Nothing surprises me. Fletcher is smarter than most people give him credit for. He’s not an incredible speaker, but he’s cunning, and when he sets his mind to winning something, he usually does.”
“Fair. Last question. Do you think Fletcher is dangerous?”
That one piques her curiosity. “Dangerous how?”
“Any way that might qualify.”
Molly takes a full, deep breath, and lets it out. “Here’s a rumor for you. One night, a friend of Fletcher’s shows up at a hospital, beaten to ever-loving fuck. His sternum was dislocated. I didn’t even know sternums could dislocate. The way he tells it, he got jumped by a bunch of kids. Couldn’t identify them, didn’t know why they did it.”
“You think it was Fletcher?”
“I’m sure it was Fletcher. I had a source at the hospital who clued me in. But there were no charges, no incident report, no nothing. I asked the cops about it and they shut me down. As it happens, the president of the police union and Fletcher are childhood buddies. Welcome to politics. It’s an incestuous clusterfuck.”
Nice to see my suspicious are being confirmed all over the place.
“What makes you so sure it was Fletcher?” I ask.
“I was able to connect a couple of dots. Not nearly enough for a story. Just enough to get my ass sued into oblivion if I ran with it. But I saw Fletcher at an event and his hands were bandaged up. He said his tool rack fell over. Lying fuckface.”
“A beating that severe, you’d think the victim would want a little revenge.”
“Remember when Cheney shot a guy in the face, and the guy ended up apologizing to Cheney? Yeah. Fletcher has deep pockets. I’m sure that one didn’t come cheap. Are we done now?”
“We are,” I say. “This is all very helpful.”
“You’re welcome,” she says. “Bring me what you’ve got when you’re done. You can let yourself out.”
She doesn’t wait for me to say anything, just turns around and leaves me standing there on the walkway.
After I’ve told Crystal what I’ve learned—pretty much solidifying our theory that Fletcher is Dirk’s dad—she asks, “What now?”
“Now you go to the club. And I find Chicken Man. Me and him have to have a conversation.”
“That doesn’t sound like a good plan.”
“It’ll be on my terms.”
We drive for a bit in silence.
Crystal asks, “So what are you going to do. Like, beat the shit out of him until he tells you where Rose is?”
“I’d rather it not come to that. If I can end this without violence I’d be very happy.”
“What if you don’t have a choice?”
“There’s always a choice.”
“But what if there isn’t?”
Inhale, exhale.
“When I went after Chell’s killer, I took the bullets out of the gun,” I say. “I brought a gun because I wanted to control the situation and make sure he listened, but I took the bullets out. I wasn’t planning on killing him. But I also figured that if worse came to wors
t, I could have beaten him to death with the gun. In case I wasn’t strong enough to let him live.”
“Seems like it would take more strength to kill him.”
I crack the window and go to light a cigarette but Crystal smacks my arm, so I hold it in my palm. “It would have been weakness. I have to believe there’s a way to solve things like this that doesn’t involve surrendering a part of myself.”
Crystal shakes her head. “Some people, there’s no talking to.”
I don’t know if she means me or Chicken Man. I don’t think I want to know.
After stopping off at my apartment to get a change of clothes, I drive Tommi’s hatchback toward Lake Oswego. My stomach grumbles at me.
I pass a parking lot with a circle of food trucks, so I stop and pick out the Mexican cart because it has the shortest line. At the window a teen in a starched white shirt and a yellow bow tie takes my order of a cabeza burrito and a black coffee and disappears. There’s the sound of pots moving and crashing and someone yelling at someone else, and he pops up with a burrito the size of my forearm, wrapped in wax paper, along with a small cup of coffee.
I load back in the car and drive to the campaign office, park down the block, far enough away that I feel safe but can still see the front. I don’t know what the plan is. I don’t think I have a plan.
Sit here, wait for asshole. That works. Hopefully he’s here. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of activity at the office. No one’s gone in or out.
The burrito is a marvel of food engineering. It’s thick and packed with meat but stays together as I dig through it. And I dig through it fast. For all my complaining, that’s one thing the West Coast has on New York: Mexican food.
The burritos out here are killer beasts. Mexican in New York is risky if you’re not in a legit Spanish neighborhood, like Port Richmond on Staten Island or Bushwick in Brooklyn. You pay for Portland burritos twelve hours after you eat them, but it’s always worth it.
I pop the lid on my coffee, get settled into my seat. It’s warm so I open the window and figure I’m going to be here a while. I risk a cigarette, think a little on what Crystal said.
