by Steve Brewer
If college students knew what lay ahead of them, a lot more of them would study economics. Believe me, economics is the big problem. The economics of my situation, for instance, are pretty simple and pretty depressing. Working for Richard Rosenberg, I make ten bucks an hour and thirty cents a mile. If I made that every hour, I’d get four hundred a week plus expenses, which, while not princely, would be enough to get by. But it doesn’t work like that. I don’t get paid for an eight-hour day. I only get paid when I’m on the clock. I wear a beeper. When there’s work, they beep me. When there isn’t, they don’t. The result is, I average somewhere between twenty and thirty hours a week, which is never quite enough.
There are two reasons why I work this draggy job. One, I can’t find anything else that will pay me more than ten bucks an hour and thirty cents a mile. And two (and this is the biggie), the flexible hours were supposed to leave me time for my real profession: writing.
My quote, real profession, unquote, is not what one could call a steady source of income. In fact, it’s not what one could call any source of income. Aside from kid’s comic books and trade magazine articles, I’d never gotten anything published. Seeing as how everyone always tells me what a fabulous writer I am, this is rather depressing.
I guess I am a fairly good writer. My basic problem is I can never figure out what to write. I do know, however, that kiddies comics and trade magazine articles aren’t it. When you come right down to it, given my druthers, I’d like to write Catch-22. The problem is, Joseph Heller has already written it. The same applies to almost anything else I’d like to write. It’s too bad, ’cause I have a feeling if I could figure out what I wanted to write I’d be dangerous.
For a while I toyed with the idea of writing up my exploits in solving the Martin Albrect and Darryl Jackson cases, but I soon abandoned that. In the first place, I didn’t want anyone to know about it. In the second place, those adventures, while absolutely hair-raising to me, were rather humdrum compared to your usual detective story. The average TV detective would knock off one of my little adventures in fifteen minutes flat, including commercials, leaving him forty-five minutes to sit around twiddling his thumbs until the end of the program.
That was the problem. My adventures didn’t work with your typical macho hero in the role. They only worked for me. And the problem was, if I wrote it that way, if I told it like it is, as Howard Cosell would say, no publisher in the world was going to accept a manuscript where the leading character was a cowardly, incompetent, bungling fool.
Peddling the movie rights would be even worse. I could imagine the call my agent would have to make: “Manny? … This is Warren … Yeah…. I got a property here. Great part in it for Rob … Yeah. He plays a chicken-shit asshole … Hello? … Hello? … Manny? … Hello?”
No, writing up my exploits was out. And there wasn’t any other writing work of any sort on the horizon. My only source of income at the moment was the pittance paid by Rosenberg & Stone. And I had just agreed to take time off from that to go to Atlantic City on a hopelessly unpromising case for which I had refused to accept a fee. And all this at a time when I was behind on the rent, behind on Con Ed, behind on the phone bill, and behind on my son Tommie’s tuition.
I could imagine what my wife Alice was going to say.
4.
“GO.”
My wife never ceases to amaze me. We’ve been married for over ten years now, and I would think I know her pretty well. But I don’t. Sometimes I think she does it deliberately. ’Cause it seems as if every time I get too complacent, every time I tell myself, “Well, I know how she’s gonna react to this one,” she throws a curve ball at me.
“What?”
She smiled and shrugged. “Go,” she said. “The man’s in trouble. He needs your help. You obviously have to go.”
I looked at her. “I’m not going to get paid for this.”
“I know.”
“He offered. I just couldn’t take his money.”
“Of course.”
“I know we’re behind on the bills.”
She shrugged. “We’re always behind on the bills. What’s the difference?”
“I guess so,” I said.
I was utterly baffled. I was also totally psyched. Alice had foxed me again. What was her game? Was she playing with me? Was she just waiting for me to agree, for me to say, “All right, I have to go,” for her to jump up and say, “Oh, no, you’re not! You think you’re going to Atlantic City by yourself for a vacation, is that what you think? Well, you’ve got another think coming!” Was that her game? I really didn’t know.
I’d told her it was for MacAullif. Alice knew about MacAullif. Not everything, of course. She knew he’d helped me in the Darryl Jackson case. She didn’t know how deeply he’d involved me in the case, or how close I’d come to getting killed. But she knew MacAullif had befriended me, if you could call it that, and perhaps that’s why she thought I owed him the favor.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be gone,” I ventured.
“I know,” she said. “But I don’t think it will be that long. You’re very clever. You’ll figure something out.”
“Patching up marital disputes is not my forte,” I told her.
She smiled. “Well, our marriage is still together. You must be doing something right.”
If so, I couldn’t figure out what it was. I was really at sea.
“Well,” I said. “I guess I’d better start packing.”
“I’ll help you,” she said.
I went in the bedroom and took down a suitcase from the closet shelf. Alice started pulling open drawers and packing underwear, socks and the like.
“Did you tell Richard?” she asked me.
“Not yet.”
“Gonna call him?”
I shook my head. “I think I should do it in person. I have to turn in my cases, anyway.”
“I see,” Alice said. She packed my electric razor. “So you’ll just stop in on him on your way.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But, I could come back.”
“Why?”
“Well, to see Tommie when he gets home from camp. Say goodbye.”
“You can talk to him on the phone,” Alice said. “Don’t worry about us. We’ll be fine.”
I was sure they would. However, I wasn’t doing so well at the moment.
“You’re sure you don’t mind?” I said.
Alice straightened up, put her hands on her hips, and looked at me as if I were a total idiot.
“It’s his daughter,” she said.
And suddenly I understood. If there’s anything Alice is, it’s a good mother. And that’s what was happening here. That’s why she could empathize with MacAullif. MacAullif’s little girl was in trouble, and something had to be done. Never mind the fact that MacAullif’s little girl was a grown woman of twenty-eight, she was still MacAullif’s baby, just as Tommie was still Alice’s baby, and always would be.
God bless motherhood. I was home free on this one.
Of course, I still had to get around Richard, and that might be a little more difficult.
Richard was a bachelor.
5.
“YOU’RE WHAT?!” Richard screamed in his best you’re-ruining-my-life tone of voice. “What did you say?!”
“I’m going to Atlantic City for a few days.”
“Today?” Richard cried, his high-pitched voice miraculously managing to rise even higher on the last syllable. “Starting today?”
Richard got up from his desk and began bustling around his office. It was as if someone had just uncapped a bottle marked “Nervous Energy.” Richard was a hyperactive little guy who would chew you up and spit you out if you gave him half a chance. Insurance adjusters were generally his meat. But if provoked, he could do a pretty good job on his own investigators.
“You come in here on the spur of the moment, with no notice whatsoever, and tell me you are taking a vacation starting immediately.”
“A vacation
without pay,” I pointed out.
“Without pay? Without pay?” Richard sputtered. “Of course, without pay. You think I want to pay you to go to Atlantic City? Maybe give you a little extra money to gamble? What am I supposed to do while you’re gone? You tell me that. Suppose someone breaks his leg in Harlem? What’s gonna happen then?”
A thought flitted through my mind: suppose a leg breaks in Harlem and there’s no investigator there to sign it up—does it make a sound?
I didn’t voice the thought. “You have other investigators,” I said.
“Yeah, I have other investigators,” Richard said. “Part-timers, though. They’re never there when you need ’em. Can’t count on ’em. You’re the only one that I’ve got I can count on full time.”
“If I’m that valuable, maybe I should be making more money,” I pointed out.
That almost threw him, but Richard hadn’t become a veteran courtroom lawyer without learning how to counter-punch.
“More money? You’re making more money right now. That’s why I give you cases ahead of the other investigators, because you want to make more money. I do all that for you, and this is the thanks I get.”
“It’s only for a few days,” I said.
“Right,” Richard said. “A few days. You can’t even tell me how long you’re gonna be gone. You want it open-ended. And then I suppose you expect your job will be waiting for you when you get back.”
“You have every right to replace me,” I said.
That calmed him somewhat. “I have no wish to replace you. You’re a perfectly good investigator. I just need you investigating. Not cavorting around Atlantic City somewhere.”
“I understand,” I said. “I shouldn’t be gone long.”
Richard got a gleam in his eye. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. How far is Atlantic City, anyway?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been there.”
“Well, is it in beeper range?”
My heart began to sink.
Richard snatched up the phone and pushed the intercom button. “Hello,” he yelped into the phone. “Yes, of course, it’s me, who did you think it was? … What’s the mileage to Atlantic City? … Yes, from here, dammit, where’d you think, from Miami? … Well, look it up and call me back.” Richard hung up the phone.
“Who was that?” I asked.
Richard shrugged. “Wendy or Cheryl.”
I groaned. Wendy and Cheryl were Richard’s twin secretaries. I call them twins. I shouldn’t. Actually they had only two things in common: their voices and their incompetence. Whichever one of them it had been on the phone, there was no way the mileage she was gonna come up with would be right.
“Well,” Richard said. “Perhaps this isn’t a total waste. I’m licensed to practice in New Jersey, as you well know. You’ve signed lots of cases in Jersey. I don’t think I’ve ever had one in Atlantic City, but I’m sure we’ve had some close to there. So—”
I didn’t have to hear what came next. Richard, in his infinite ballsiness, had already decided that since I was gonna be in Atlantic City anyway, I should keep in touch with the office, either by beeper if it was in range, or by calling in periodically if it wasn’t, to see if there was any case within the immediate vicinity that I could sign up while I was down there.
By the time Wendy/Cheryl had called back to say that Atlantic City was sixty-nine miles, and therefore within beeper range, which was seventy-five, Richard had his campaign all mapped out. I was his man in Jersey. Johnny on the spot. What a wonderful idea.
It was gonna be one hell of a vacation.
6.
I LEFT RICHARD’S office, picked up my car where I’d left it at a meter on Fourteenth Street, went through the Holland Tunnel, and got on the New Jersey Turnpike heading south.
I wasn’t setting out absolutely cold. I had hotel reservations. My unexpectedly cooperative wife had called a friend of hers in our building who happened to be a travel agent, and asked her to book me a room. Alice and I had talked it over and figured out that the hotel casinos themselves would be the cheapest place to stay. The theory was that they would charge you next to nothing in order to get you there so they could take your money at their tables. This turned out to be a myth. The casino hotels charged almost twice as much as anyplace else, the theory being let’s keep the pikers out and attract the high-rollers who will be the only ones who can afford to stay. The casino hotels were charging a hundred forty to a hundred fifty bucks a night for a single room. Thanks, but no thanks.
The hotel the agent chose for me was the Comfort Inn, at eighty-five a night. It was three miles out of town, and you had to take a courtesy bus in to the casinos. That was fine with me, seeing as how I had a car, and seeing as how the casinos weren’t my main concern anyway. Besides, it was in Absecon, which happened to be where MacAullif’s daughter lived.
Aside from the hotel reservation, I was going it blind. MacAullif hadn’t told me one goddamn useful thing, with the exception of his daughter’s address. Even that wasn’t gonna help me much, unless I managed to buy a street map somewhere.
All in all, it was a pretty unpromising situation. The best I could figure it was, not having accepted MacAullif’s money, after two or three days poking around down there and not having accomplished anything, I could feel justified in reporting back to him what I had managed to learn, and telling him there seemed to be nothing I could do. That, basically, was the height of my expectations. My best-case scenario.
The depth of my expectations, my worst-case scenario, had me running around the outskirts of Atlantic City for three days signing up broken arms and legs for Richard Rosenberg.
However, the odds of that happening were actually poor. See, I have a map of New Jersey—I have to with all the sign-ups I do there. I’d had it right there in my briefcase when Richard had asked me how far it was to Atlantic City, but I hadn’t let on. As soon as I got out to my car, however, I whipped the map out and confirmed my suspicions. Sure enough, as I’d thought, there was no way Atlantic City was only sixty-nine miles away. The map didn’t list distances from city to city, so there was no way to figure the actual mileage unless I wanted to add up all the five- to ten-mile distances between the little arrows, which I certainly didn’t. But it wasn’t necessary. Atlantic City was south of Philadelphia. There was no way it was in beeper range.
Which was great. I’d been told to stay on the beeper, and I’d stay on the beeper, and when I got back and innocently reported that I hadn’t been beeped, there’d be nothing Richard could do about it, because it would be Wendy/Cheryl’s fault. I’d be the good soldier, just following orders.
I was tooling down the Jersey Pike and gloating over that when my beeper went off. Damn. The best laid plans of mice and men. I checked my watch. It had only been a half hour since I’d left the office. Too soon. There was no way to pretend I was already out of beeper range. I could pretend I’d forgotten to switch it on, but then it would be my fault. My best chance was to call in, and hope the beep was just routine and they hadn’t discovered the mistake. I cursed Richard, cursed Wendy/Cheryl, shut off the beeper, and pulled into the next Roy Rogers/Bob’s Big Boy on the pike.
I called the office, waited for the tone, and punched in my calling card number.
Wendy/Cheryl answered the phone.
“Agent 005.”
“Stanley,” came the voice of Wendy/Cheryl. “Glad I reached you.”
“Oh?” I said, my spirits sinking.
“Yes. I have an assignment for you.”
What a relief. Never have I been so happy to get an assignment. I’d knock it off like that, and hustle out of beeper range.
Wendy/Cheryl gave it to me. It wasn’t a sign-up. It was a picture assignment. A client had fallen down on the basement steps of a house in Linden, New Jersey, and Richard needed pictures of the broken steps.
I told Wendy/Cheryl I’d take it.
“Fine,” she said. “Where are you now?”
“In Elizabeth. R
ight near there. I’ll take care of it.”
“Fine. Just be sure you write it down.”
That was strange. I always write my assignments down. “What do you mean?”
“That you got the assignment in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Richard said to tell you your time and mileage start there. So don’t charge him from Manhattan.”
I groaned. What a cheap prick. But I wasn’t about to argue. I got off the phone fast before anyone thought about the beeper.
I got off the turnpike at the Elizabeth exit and sped down to Linden, which was a whopping four miles on the odometer. It was several more before I found the address, since I didn’t have a detailed street map of the area, and there was no answer at the client’s phone number Wendy/Cheryl had given me. That wasn’t surprising. I figured it was the wrong number anyway.
The address was probably also wrong, but that didn’t matter. With the client not answering the phone, there was no way to check it. I’d been assigned it, so it was my job to do it, and if it turned out it wasn’t the right address, it wasn’t my fault, and I’d get paid for it anyway.
But the main thing was getting it done so I’d be off the hook and could head south. I asked directions four times, and half an hour later found myself cruising down the street where the client, one Raymon Ortega, presumably was injured.
One of the things about Richard’s clients is, a lot of ’em don’t have any money, and the neighborhoods they live in leave a lot to be desired. This neighborhood was no exception. The houses were in remarkably poor repair, and the one I wanted was the worst of the lot. It was a two-story frame house that had presumably once been white with green trim. The most recent coat of paint was at least twenty years old, and had not worn well. The shutters, those that remained, dangled, sometimes by a single screw. Most of the panes of glass in the curtainless windows were broken. And the front door looked suspiciously as if it would fall off the hinges the moment I knocked on it.
