Smith's Monthly #11

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  After he’d gotten out of law school at the ripe old age of twenty-four, he had gone to work in corporate law and had managed to last in the law firm through the two years of his first marriage before becoming bored with both. Then his grandmother, a woman he barely knew, died and left him more money than even he could imagine or try to spend. He had become free to do what he wanted.

  So after a year of drinking and traveling around the world and another even shorter marriage, which got boring faster than corporate law, he went back to school to become a private detective.

  Most of the training was not like the books about private detectives he loved to read. In fact most of what he had done was learn how to track someone by computer and look up financial records, which was flat dull.

  Finally, out of desperation to do something interesting, he set up his own law and private detective firm, hired a couple of associate lawyers to handle the boring stuff, and offered his services for free to the different city police departments around the Portland metropolitan area.

  Hugh and Associates was born, the strangest law firm to ever have plush offices in a downtown Portland high-rise.

  A few old corporate clients paid very well and kept a growing staff of associates busy and the police forces started to take him up on his offer to look for free into strange and odd cases that no one else wanted to deal with. Now, at the age of thirty-eight, he had been working to solve weird crimes and find missing people for almost a decade. And not once in those ten years had he been bored. Even now, staring at an old couch.

  This couch was so out of place as to be funny in the middle of a well-kept lawn in the Portland, Oregon, suburb of Hillsboro. The three-story home seemed perfectly kept and no doubt a gardener did the yard. Pilgrim imagined the house inside to be as perfect as the lawn. More than likely the owners pretended to be just as well-kept, at least on the surface. This area was known for its pretend rich. He didn’t want to think about the size of the mortgage on this house.

  He shuddered at the thought of how close he had come to this lifestyle with his first wife, Karen. This would have been her perfect home. And he would have spent more time in Henry’s Sports Bar than in it if he had stayed married to her.

  TWO

  THE SUN BEAT on the old piece of furniture, making it smell even worse if that was possible. Clearly something musty and rotten was inside it as well. More than likely a number of dead mice.

  Pilgrim stepped back onto the sidewalk and clicked his earpiece to talk to his driver. “Carrie, a couple Diets for me and the officer if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Shit,” she said in his ear. “Too damn hot to go out there.”

  Pilgrim smiled as he watched her climb out from behind the wheel to bring him and the officer a couple of Diet Cokes. They both had figured this was going to be a quick stop.

  She was right, it was hot. Portland didn’t have too many really hot days, but today was promising to be one of the record-setters. The sun and warm June day was making him regret wearing a black Henry’s Bar tee shirt this morning. He should have gone with the white Next Gen tee shirt and Bermuda shorts instead of the Levis.

  He loved being self-employed and rich and able to wear anything he damn well wanted any time he damn well wanted. Sometimes dressing like an over-aged college student helped him on cases. People tended to talk with him more when he wore a tee shirt than when he had on his three-piece court suit.

  Carrie went to the back door of the limo and retrieved from the fridge a couple bottles of Diet Coke and then grabbed another for herself. Today she had on blue short-shorts and a white tank top that left little to anyone’s imagination of what was under it. Her short blonde hair framed her deep blue eyes and chiseled features perfectly. She never wore make-up and never seemed to comb her hair, yet she always looked perfectly put together.

  She was a good six-feet tall, just an inch shorter than he was, and looked like she belonged on a runway modeling dresses and underwear, even at thirty-eight. She had been Pilgrim’s best friend since high school in Bend, Oregon, and acted more like his partner than his driver at times.

  She had helped him get through two wives and far too many girlfriends to count. And not once had they slept together. It just seemed wrong to him, like sleeping with his sister, if he had had a sister.

  She felt the same way about him. Over the years she had managed to keep boyfriends to the sex-and-leave stage that she liked. Never married, Pilgrim doubted she ever would. Not her thing as she often said.

  Carrie had only one more year of law school and she would be joining the law firm side of his business. She had spent eight years in the military after high school learning computer skills and other things that constantly surprised him. Then she had traveled the world for a few years. During that time he got letters and messages from her from just about every scary hell-hole on the planet. Now she was just finishing her law degree.

  She didn’t handle boredom any better than he did.

  Until she passed the bar, she paid her way through school and for her Penthouse apartment by helping him with cases and being his limo driver when he needed one for clients or for police cases.

  For some reason he really, really liked showing up at a crime scene in a limo. It had become part of his image around town and he and Carrie had turned the limo into a major office and computer center on wheels. Tee shirts and a limo. Pure Northwest rich geek.

  Pilgrim watched as Carrie headed up the sidewalk toward him. She had a sharp eye for details about a case that seemed right, but looked wrong. Just last week she had helped him solve a very obese woman’s murder when both he and the police thought it nothing more than death by natural causes. The way the woman had fallen in the kitchen was just wrong to Carrie’s mind and she led Pilgrim to discover the dead woman had a boyfriend who wanted her coin collection and thought murdering his girlfriend for the money was a good idea.

  Why Chief Benson from the Hillsboro police had called Pilgrim on this “couch case” was beyond him. More than likely it was just something he didn’t want to waste manpower on on a hot day and figured Pilgrim could find a way to make the problem just go away with some legal language. For Benson and the city, Pilgrim was free.

  More than likely the guy in this house had donated a decent amount of money in the last election and had Benson’s direct phone line.

  It didn’t matter to Pilgrim. He owed Benson many favors from over the years, so handling something like a misplaced couch on a lawn of a political supporter was the least he could do for him.

  Pilgrim took the Diet Coke from Carrie, rubbed the cold bottle against his forehead, then opened it and stepped back to just stare at the intruding piece of furniture. More than likely this was just a bad joke of some sort being played on the family.

  The plastic and wood wrapping that had brought the couch to its present location had been tossed to one side leaving the old couch sitting like a bad nightmare on the mowed grass.

  Someone had paid a lot of money to have this old couch delivered here. Why?

  The shipping instructions were with the wrapping so he went and retrieved them as Carrie came back from giving Officer Dennis his drink. More than likely, with what Carrie was wearing, her visit just heated the poor officer up more than the Diet Coke would cool him down.

  The plastic wrap the couch had come in was very strange. Part of the plastic was clearly very, very old and had just cracked and fallen apart when removed, while another layer over the top was new, more than likely put on by the moving company. Clearly this couch had been sealed in that original old plastic for a very long time.

  “So figured out The Case of the Intrusive Furniture yet?” Carrie asked, as he came back with the shipping instructions. “This is one for the strange disclosures file.”

  “Not a clue,” Pilgrim said, shaking his head at Carrie. She really loved to name all their cases like mysteries from a 1940’s serial radio program and planned on putting some of them into a book she called “St
range Disclosures.”

  There was nothing on the delivery instructions but the house address for delivery, instructions to open the plastic wrapping and just leave the couch on the lawn, and a greeting from a man named Thomas.

  Pilgrim read the note on the shipping label aloud. “You liked this so much, I figured you should have it now that I am dead.”

  “Wow, that’s cold,” Carrie said, shaking her head. “You think that’s blood on the cushion?”

  “I’m hoping not,” Pilgrim said, but after the note he was becoming less sure of his cola-spill theory.

  He handed the shipping label to Carrie. “Get on the phone and talk to the shipping company. Get an address and name of where this came from and any information you can find on this Thomas guy, even if you have to threaten a subpoena.”

  She nodded, looking at the label in her hands. “You talking to the homeowners?”

  “You got it in one,” he said. “Feed me any information you might dig up along the way. Get a couple people at the office helping on this as well.”

  “Got it,” she said and turned for the limo as he headed past the couch for the house.

  THREE

  AS HE RANG the bell to the McMansion, he realized he more than likely should have gotten a sports coat from the limo. Someone in a home like this would give him more information if he looked like an investigator instead of an overgrown and aging college student.

  “Too late now,” he said to himself as inside he heard someone’s steps coming toward the door over a hard surface.

  A woman who looked to be in her late fifties opened up the door and a frown managed to cross over her face even with all the plastic surgery holding her skin in place. She had short brown hair done perfectly around her face. She wore a white blouse with a black lace garment under it that looked far too hot for the day. A cool blast of air-conditioning caught Pilgrim in the face as she glanced at him, then at Officer Dennis standing under the tree.

  At one point this woman had been very beautiful. Fighting to keep that beauty had not gone well for her.

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Pilgrim Hugh,” he said, handing her his card that said “Hugh Investigations” on it and nothing about him being an attorney. “Chief Benson of the Hillsboro Police sent me to look into the issue with the couch. Can I talk with you for a moment?”

  She nodded and indicated by stepping back that he should enter enough for her to close the door to the heat. But she didn’t offer to take him anywhere but the stone entryway. And she didn’t introduce herself.

  “Her name is Alice Bluehaven,” Carrie said in his ear. “Wife of Dan, mother of two grown kids both in college out of the city.”

  Pilgrim glanced around as Carrie fed him the information. He had been right about the house. It looked perfectly maintained and impossible to live in. More like a home taken right out of a picture in a magazine. Sterile and angry-feeling. Just as the woman in front of him felt.

  “I wish my husband had never called the police about this,” Mrs. Bluehaven said, clearly upset. “It should just be hauled to the dump.”

  “What can you tell me about that couch?” Pilgrim asked.

  “It belonged to me and my first husband, Thomas Williams. We lived in Chicago when we split up in 1984.”

  Pilgrim was surprised at that information. He expected her to not know a thing about the old furniture on her lawn.

  “Married to Thomas Williams in 1981, divorced in early 1985,” Carrie said.

  “I don’t want to press charges against Thomas for doing such a thing. I just want it off my lawn.”

  “It says on the note that he’s dead,” Pilgrim said.

  “Then the executor of his estate should be replaced for doing this. That is just embarrassing to have sitting out there and I plan on having it removed as soon as possible.”

  Pilgrim was stunned. The woman was colder than her house. She had just been told her first husband was dead and hadn’t even flinched or cared in the slightest. Even though Pilgrim and his two wives were divorced, he still liked them and would be very upset to learn that anything had happened to either of them.

  Whatever heart this woman had once possessed had clearly been removed with the plastic surgery to her face.

  And honestly, Pilgrim was starting to like this Thomas guy. He must have known what his ex-wife was like, that she wanted everything to look and appear perfect, and knew how to torture her perfectly after his death.

  “Before I can allow you to have the couch removed,” Pilgrim said, “I’m going to need more history.”

  “Why would you need that?” she asked, her cold blue eyes almost emitting sparks.

  “Your husband filed a complaint and thus this is technically a crime scene,” Pilgrim said, lying, or actually just stretching the truth some. “To clear the scene I need background about the couch and your former husband. Paperwork. Otherwise the couch will have to remain where it was delivered until we get to the bottom of all this, and that might take days without your help.”

  She looked appalled and shocked to her very cold core. The idea of that couch staying on her lawn all day and into the evening for her neighbors to see was clearly more than she could handle.

  “What can I tell you?” she said, her voice cold and low and very mean. How this woman stayed married to any man was beyond Pilgrim.

  “Why this particular couch? Why would your former husband keep it for decades?”

  “I had an affair on it,” she said, her voice level like she was telling him about the weather. “Thomas walked in and caught us. I grabbed my clothes and ran out the back door and never went back. I never talked to Thomas again.”

  “Oh,” was all Pilgrim could say.

  They stood there in silence for a moment. The house like a tomb around him. At that moment all he wanted to do was run for the limo and get out of the icebox this family called a home.

  “Oh, wow, is more like it,” Carrie said in Pilgrim’s ear. “This is really going into the Strange Disclosures file.”

  “What happened after that?” Pilgrim asked Mrs. Bluehaven.

  “I honestly don’t know,” she said. “I stayed with a girlfriend for a night, then flew back to Portland and stayed with my parents. Thomas filed for divorce and stayed in Chicago and I didn’t fight it. As I said, I never saw him again after that day, so I would have no idea what happened next. Our marriage was clearly not doing well.”

  “Clearly,” Pilgrim said.

  She stiffened even more if that was possible, but said nothing.

  “But even after all the years you still recognized the couch? How is that possible?”

  “I would recognize that trash anywhere,” she said, so disgusted she almost spit as she talked. “I wanted to get a new couch, but Thomas was so cheap he kept saying we couldn’t afford it and that tattered old thing was perfectly fine. I refused to sit on the couch.”

  Pilgrim almost said, But no problem screwing your boyfriend on it. Luckily he stopped himself.

  “One more question,” he said, “then I think I can have Chief Benson close this case and remove the couch.”

  She nodded, clearly relieved.

  “What was the name of your boyfriend?”

  “I don’t see how that would matter?”

  Pilgrim smiled. “Just making sure all the details are in order is all.”

  “Craig Marshal,” she said. “Craig S. Marshal. He was a graduate student at Northwestern. I never talked to him again, either.”

  “Got it, on it,” Carrie said in his ear.

  Pilgrim nodded and turned for the door. “This should be over shortly, Mrs. Bluehaven.”

  As he stepped back into the heat of the front yard and she closed the door solidly behind him, he had a hunch this was far from over.

  And his little voice on cases was seldom wrong. Carrie just might be right. This might end up being one for the book.

  FOUR

  HE NODDED TO Officer Dennis and headed for t
he limo with only one more look at the couch as he went past. The heat actually felt good after being with that woman. She was one cold human.

  But on the other hand, the couch was starting to get a real smell to it. And not a good one. He knew that smell anywhere. Something inside that couch was very, very dead. And the hot sun was not helping the issue at all.

  As he climbed into the limo, Carrie was working the computer station on the right side. It had two large screens that dropped down from the ceiling and a full desk and keyboard that slid out from under the wet bar. Her fingers were flying over the keys while at the same time she was talking into a headset to someone, more than likely an assistant at the office.

  From their car they could get just about any information they wanted. He had had it outfitted better than most offices. And both he and Carrie were damn good at hacking into places they shouldn’t be hacking into. He just didn’t allow them to do it without darned good reason.

  After a moment she finished her conversation, thanked the person on the other end, and turned to him.

  “The boyfriend vanished completely on October 4th, 1984,” Carrie said, confirming what Pilgrim had feared had happened. “No sign of him was ever found.”

  “I have a pretty solid hunch where we are going to find him,” Pilgrim said. “Did our couch-sender actually die?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Liver cancer from a lifetime of hard drinking. The couch was removed already wrapped as per instructions from the garage of the home and delivered as instructed. His death triggered the automatic pick-up and a neighbor let the movers into the garage. He has no executor. And no family as far as I can find. And not much of an estate beside the house.”

  “Great work,” Pilgrim said, taking his phone and dialing the private line to Chief Benson.

  “You think we have a body?”

  “The smell in the sunshine around that couch isn’t getting any better,” he said.

  “The husband killed the boyfriend?” Carrie asked.