Editor's note: Cadaver Blues is a serialized novel exclusive to TNB.  Check out weekly additions of one or two chapters from the Fiction home page.  This page features the novel's progress up to the previous week.

1.

Three rules to live by.  Never owe.  Never sweat.  Never apologize.

My clients, when I have any, share certain characteristics.  Optimism caused them to borrow.  Expectations are making them sweat.  And nobody but nobody wants to hear their apologies.  Unless, of course, those apologies appear in the memo section of a check made out to King Cash.

And even then, my friend, what good saying you’re sorry?

I hang up the phone, seething, frustration a foul taste in the back of my throat.  On my desk lies a handful of folders.  Make that two — one just went inactive and slithered into the round file.

A fourth rule: if you want to work with me, then spell my name right and learn to pronounce it.  Easy to oblige if you’re called George Washington, I admit, and not so easy when it’s Phuoc Goldberg.  But, then again, I’m not the guy who stood with his torch in the air beseeching the globe’s huddled masses, am I?

So I blew my top and lost a client today, an exceedingly white woman who presumed to ask about my name, as if I’m a guide working the afternoon shift in the Asian pavilion at Epcot Center.

“What’s it mean, that name?” was how she put it.

Needing the business, I slid open my right-hand desk drawer and removed the shiny blue squeeze ball, proceeding to torture it.

“Gold mountain,” I said.

“Not that one.  The first—”

Goodbye.

I’m a student of the art of persuasion.  Therefore, should I have apologized for taking offense?  Should I have explained that I was hatched at the base of a bitter tea tree in the middle of a war zone?  That my adoptive parents, Myron and Phyllis Goldberg, gave me an obscenely un-American first name so I wouldn’t lose my identity?  That they were socialists at the time and lived among delusions?  Not a chance.

The squeeze ball settles into a shallow depression on my desk and quivers.  Like the squeeze ball, I have trouble containing my misbegotten energy.  My anger isn’t new, only newly stoked.  It flowed into me over time, like blood filling a vial, and it smolders still, a low-grade fever that stirs me to my feet.

I work in a second-floor two-room office on the north side of Wilmington, Delaware, nowhere near downtown.  It’s a cheap addition to a small house that was overtaken by strip malls a decade ago and went commercial, and the insulation is uneven, leaving drafts in unexpected places.  There’s a window in each room, in both cases situated too high on the wall to present any kind of view, so all you can see is the clouds skittering through, when they bother to skitter.  Today there’s mostly blue sky, not worth a second look.

I pull on my coat and take the stairs down in quick succession, the angle of descent a controlled crash landing, rubber soles thrumming the nosing.  At the bottom is a vestibule not big enough for any furniture, with a slanted arrow on the wall, directing my victims to the lair, where I will improve their balance sheet — maybe their credit score, too, if they’re lucky — but only while separating them from the last of their funds on hand.

Smart people in my profession don’t rent space high up in office towers.  Their clients might jump.

In the parking lot my yellow Mini Cooper glistens under winter sunshine, black racing stripes down the hood game for any adventure, white roof as seductive as a little chapeau.  The Mini is one of my few pleasures in life — maybe my only one at the moment.  But the lunch place is only two blocks away and I need to walk off some steam.

It’s January, cold air well established.  The cracked sidewalk and the narrow brown grass strip have the lonely feeling of manmade tundra.  I walk briskly with my hands in my pockets and my head down, crossing the street without breaking stride, thinking that turning cars can kiss my ass.

Somewhere over my brow, two shapes approach, hogging the sidewalk in proprietary fashion.  As we close in on each other I move to one side, but my feet don’t leave the concrete.  The shapes press forward, unyielding.  They’re black teenagers, and I view their stubbornness as a form of aggression.  I am slightly built, not tall, barely 120 pounds after a big dinner.  You could fit three of me inside the bigger kid with room to dance.  The other one is a little taller and broader than me, though his open parka probably creates the illusion of more heft than he really carries.

As we meet, the smaller kid leans in to invade my personal space, jostling me.  Ready for him, I give no ground, and my elbow catches his ribs, backing him into his friend.  His arms flail forward, but he misses me.  He stops and strikes a confrontational posture.  “What the fuck, man.  What the FUCK!”

I pause on the sidewalk, not three feet away.

The kid carries his hands chest high, ready to rumble.  “What’s wrong with you, fresh-off-the-boat motherfucker!  That how they walk in Chinatown?”

For the record, Wilmington has no Chinatown.

They step toward me in unison and take up positions off each shoulder, so I can’t look squarely at one without losing sight of the other.  They smell young and feral, like fresh sweat.  Both wear red Nike Air Max sneakers with black laces, baggy jeans bunched at the ankles, and printed T-shirts hanging loose below their puffy open parkas.  I don’t risk pausing to read what the T-shirts say, but I see the rest.

The smaller kid is light-skinned and freckled with a Phillies baseball cap nearly covering his eyes.  The bigger kid goes bare-headed.  He has much darker skin with a sheen to it, broad nose, full lips framing a wide mouth.  He’s easily a foot taller than me, so my angle is poor.  Still, it’s important to establish a strategy and stick with it.

You always go after the big guy first.

I ball a fist and nail him with a left hook, catching his lower lip and feeling his teeth cut into my knuckles.  He goes down in a heap and the smaller kid forgets me quicker than the fifth race at Delaware Park.  He drops to a knee to tend his friend, muttering, “Damn.  Damn.”

2.

The lunch place sells nothing but hotdogs and sides.  There’s a narrow space by the counter with a plastic chain strung between white stanchions for crowd control, but you can’t help rubbing up against the others in line — AstraZeneca employees with I.D. badges, hospital workers in scrubs, ordinary people from all walks of life in full-throated hunger for their nitrite and sodium fix.  I’m in here at least once a day, sometimes twice.  I know every face behind the counter, but no one has ever acknowledged my loyalty or bothered to ask my name.  Maybe when you only have twelve things on the menu everything in life starts to feel equally familiar.

Today I order two Boston Back Bay Beanie Weanies, large chili fries and a large vanilla shake.  I lay my iPhone on the table and set it to stopwatch mode.  The first dog disappears in just under a minute, the second in 37 seconds.  I don’t time myself every day, just on a lark.  If I put my mind to it, I’m convinced that I could suck down as many sausages as Joey Chestnut or Takeru Kobayashi, the dudes who always run neck and neck in that great patriotic stuff-face known officially as Nathan’s International July Fourth Hot Dog Eating Contest.  But I couldn’t come close to scarfing as many in the time they make.  Kobayashi has a good ten pounds on me.  Chestnut is a giant by comparison and, by percentage of one’s own weight consumed, he doesn’t touch Kobayashi.  As Franklin said to Harry, watch out for a Japanese with something to prove.

The skin on two of my left knuckles has peeled away where they caught the big kid’s teeth.  The cuts sting a little under the dab of a napkin, but they’re not bleeding much.

I set the napkin down and bide my time with the fries, eating them with one hand while I play cell-phone hangman, waiting for the too-cold milkshake to melt.  I never intermingle dishes.  I don’t believe in food miscegenation — the hangman word I nail after acquiring two stick arms and a leg.

I admit to having something of a racial obsession.  Or, to be more polite to myself, a high level of racial awareness.  It’s not that I believe in assigning particular characteristics to a given race of humans.  Just the opposite, in fact.  I have my radar finely tuned to the racial distinctions that all people make, and I’m rarely disappointed in my cynicism about the intentions of others.

During my early years of high school — before my father wandered into the woods and hung himself from a tree — a certain group of tough kids alternated between throwing pennies at me in the hall to see if I’d pick them up and asking me for help with their math homework.  At first, I walked right by those flying pennies, but then an idea formed.  After a couple weeks of humiliation, I began to pick up the coins, but only those thrown by Nick Deluca, the biggest brute in a tough crowd.  When others dropped a penny at my feet, I’d pause, look at it, and walk right by.

A couple weeks after I started this, I heard Nick say, “Little half-Jew don’t do it for anyone.  He just picks up my pennies.  Heh.”  He’d seized on my strange behavior as a point of personal pride, and his worldview wouldn’t let him see it any other way.

For the better part of a semester, I didn’t just stoop to pick up Nick’s pennies.  If he rolled one down the hall I took off through the crowds on period break like Walter Payton going for a loose football, bobbing and weaving, falling to my knees and pocketing the little copper with a satisfied grin.

But as finals neared, he stopped slinging pennies my way.  In fact, he seemed overcome with contrition.  “How you doin’, little man,” he’d call to me.  “Everything all right, little man?”

Nick had his reasons.  Not long before the end of the term, he approached me with a different agenda, leaning against a locker and looking down my way.  “Hey, Goldberg, no hard feeling about the pennies.  You know it was a joke, right?”

“You’re almost a week early.  Exams don’t start till next Thursday.”

“I’m planning ahead this year.”  He looked at me and cocked his head — a quizzical great ape.  “If I flunk this math final I can’t wrestle for the rest of the year.  I don’t suppose you’d be up for helping me.”

“Sure, Nick.”

“You would?”

“You’re the jock and I’m the math geek.  Isn’t this the way it’s supposed to work?”

We agreed to meet the next day in the library during free period.  Nick showed up first, so desperate he actually had his textbook open on the table.

I reached into my knapsack and pulled out a roll, fifty pennies wrapped tight with red paper and carefully sealed on each end so it wouldn’t come undone.

“Yo, Nick, check it out.”

“It’s a roll of coins.”  He absorbed my stare.  “Oh, I get it.  The pennies I threw at you.”

“I can’t keep them.  Religious reasons.  Before the semester’s out, I wanted to return them.”

He watched as I daintily picked up the roll with my fingertips and placed it into the palm of my right hand.  He continued to watch, bemused, as I wrapped my fist around the cylinder of pennies.

The first two blows caught him so quick he didn’t have a chance to defend himself.  Then I kept going, pummeling his face and head.  I broke his nose, his jaw, his left thumb and two of my own fingers.

Consequences?  The assault charges would get buried as a juvenile offense, and my long suspension from school gave my hand time to heal.  More important, Nick Deluca never wrestled another match.  Forget the fact that he had his jaw wired shut for a month.  He couldn’t face his old friends after Phu Goldberg kicked his ass, and he moved schools the next year.  Much later, he tracked me down and wrote a letter thanking me for knocking him in the right direction.  Turns out he became a corporate lawyer, no doubt now picking on old ladies who dare to ask for refunds on their broken toasters.

The bigger point is, I’d planned for that moment of confrontation, but I hadn’t trained for it.  The element of surprise helped and pure anger served as the multiplier.  That’s how a bantamweight brings a heavyweight to his knees.

Walking back to work, half sated, I come to the teenagers again.  There’s a black uniformed cop there now, middle aged and balding with sergeant stripes on the shoulders.  He’s wearing a thousand-yard stare, but I’m sure he’s not looking past me.  As I close in on his position, his right hand rises with great subtlety and poises near his gun holster.

I draw to a stop on the sidewalk about ten feet in front of him.  The noise of lunch-hour traffic on Route 202 has risen to a dull roar, and passing cars and semis stir up gusts of cold wind.  The black-and-white has come to rest with one tire on the curb.  The lights are flashing and the driver’s side door remains open.  This scene strikes me as a bit melodramatic.

The big kid’s on his feet now but half bent over, one hand resting on the hood of the cruiser, lower lip hanging slack, young white teeth stained red.  He groans and issues a long belch, then spits a stream of blood into the dead grass.

3.

The sergeant frisks me and finds nothing sharper than my iPhone.

He returns it to me gingerly.  “Don’t suppose you’ll do much damage with that.”

“You’d be surprised.  I get you on another line, I could chew your ear off.”

His name is Buxton, according to the brass plate on his uniform.  Sergeant Buxton steps between me and the big teen, looking back and forth.  He extends both hands, palms up, and seesaws them up and down like an old-fashioned scale, weighing us against one another.  Then he points.

“You did this?”

“Yes, officer.”

Buxton’s mouth drops open and he laughs heartily, without regard to whether he’s shaming me or the big teen.  He almost doubles over, looks away, catches himself, guffaws again until he’s milked the moment to its full enjoyment.

“They called you?” I ask, suppressing a smile.

Buxton shakes his head, more serious now.  “I was just happening by and they waved in distress.  Wanna explain to me what all this was about?”

“Sure thing.  It was about dignity.”

“Yours or the boy’s?”

“Take your pick.  No matter how this shook out, only one of us was going to walk away with his dignity intact.”

“I see that.”  He still has my wallet.  He holds it open at arm’s length, scanning my driver’s license.  “You got a car?”

“Sure.”

“Where were you walking to?”

“Lunch.”  I point to the hotdog joint.

“From?”

“There.”  Indicating the office.

“Who do you work for, Mr. Goldberg, when you’re not nailing people in the teeth?”

“I’m a sole proprietor, debt relief negotiation.”

He nods in a way that makes me wonder whether he has more than a passing knowledge of the subject.  “Helping people pay their bills, that sort of thing?”

“More like helping them avoid paying.”

“Above board?”

I snatch a breath.  “Cast your eyes down the road here, Sergeant Buxton.  You walk into that mattress store across the street looking for something basic and they sell you the deluxe model with financing, no interest payments for fourteen months.  What they don’t say is that the interest payments you aren’t making are an accruing debt.  You end up owing interest on top of the interest, and you’re still paying for the damned mattress when it’s turned gray and the springs are popping out.”

“How I figure it, too.”  He frowns and adjusts the thick leather belt on his hips.

“Less than a mile from here there’s a phone store happy to give you unlimited services you don’t need while charging you in the fine print for all those services you really do require.  Next door is a payday loan place that’ll skim more vigorish than Shylock for a two-day advance.”

Sergeant Buxton flashes me the heel of his hand, but I’m in flow.  “On your way there, you can stop into the car-title company that cheerfully claims three hundred percent annualized interest while taking legal possession of your wheels.  When you’re ready to pray for your car’s return, on the right is a church that asks its parishioners to tithe ten percent of their income, people scraping by in tiny little houses, renting apartments.  The minister lives tax free in a mansion in Greenville on the other side of the tracks.”

He scratches at something on his uniform shirt, maybe the big kid’s blood.  “I know the church.  My sister attends.  I keep trying to tell her…”  His voice trails off.

“It’s the pattern of life,” I conclude.  “Screw or be screwed.  I can’t turn my clients into studs — they’re too far gone for that.  But I can lend them a strap-on.  That’s what I do.“

This is a canned speech that I’ve given a thousand times.  Like all canned speeches, it has its effect.  Buxton nods knowingly, but he doesn’t know.  Not really.  The truth is simpler.  The truth is that I’m a blood-sucking parasite, just like the rest, all my activities perfectly legal, of course, as is the mattress store’s game and the title loan company’s and the church’s.  But legal doesn’t make it fair, not for a second.

The teens are huddled together in a state of shared amazement at my conversation with the sergeant.  He goes to the trunk of his cruiser, pops it open, and finds a big metal First Aid kit in the mess back there.  He snaps that open and fusses around inside, then tosses a clean white cold pack to the big teen.

“Hold that on your mouth for a while, son.  You may need some medical attention, but you’ll be all right.”

The kid does as he’s told.  Buxton turns to the shorter one.  “I heard your story and I heard what you left out.  Did you fail to yield to this man on the sidewalk?”

“Motherfucker failed to yield to us!”

“Hey, hey.  That’s no way to talk.  Mr. Goldberg here is a solid citizen and you just sound like another punk.  No wonder he felt threatened and overreacted.”

He walks over to the big kid and pulls the hand with the cold pack away, angling his head for a better look.  The cold pack has red on it already.

“You may need a stitch or two,” Buxton says, gently returning the kid’s hand with the cold pack to his mouth.  “You can file assault charges, if you want, but any judge looking at you three in a room — well, his sympathy’s not gonna be with the smart-ass gang banger whose mouth is full of four-letter words.”

“Ain’t no gang banger,” the smaller kid mumbles, more uncertain than before.

Buxton quiets him further with a frown.  He looks into his palm and seems surprised to find my wallet still there.  “Debt relief,” he says, handing it back to me while returning his attention to the teens.  “You or your families might need this man one day, and now you know where to find him.”

The same occurred to me a minute ago, though I’m not as sanguine as Sergeant Buxton about the benefits.

“Mr. Goldberg,” he winks, “if you’ll give each of these boys one of your business cards for future reference, I think I can persuade them to drop the whole thing.”

Well, I already pointed to the damn office, and opening myself up to crank calls seems preferable to a free taxi ride to the station house, so I comply with Sergeant Buxton’s request.  The smaller teen looks stunned by the injustice of it all, like he’s finally on the right side of the law and a guy who could be his father is letting the perp off the hook without cause.  The big kid just looks on with wide eyes, cold pack pressed into his mouth, the burning sensation of the lip still his top priority.

I leave them all standing there.

But I harbor no illusions about the deeper reason Sergeant Buxton so readily lets me go.  In the sight of my straight black hair, my narrow eyes, my bow lips, he finds a portrait of harmlessness.  In other words, I walk scot-free because no one in America fears the little Asian man.

4.

Downstairs from my office is a chocolate maker and retail store, where they collect the mail and rent.  I don’t eat chocolate myself — my tastes run more toward sour — but I maintain a stash in a bowl on my desk for visitors to savor.  Positive oral associations help seal transactions.

The store calls itself Creamy Dreamy.  The people who own it, along with the building, are a married couple who fled California’s high taxes, not to mention the wildfire smoke, the earthquakes, the mudslides, and all the rest.  They’d have moved to Texas or Florida, but heat is hell on their product.  Which is why, they tell me, though cacao is tropical, the meccas of modern chocolate — Switzerland, Belgium, Hershey, PA — all reside north of forty degrees latitude.  They also learned early on that there’s about an inch of difference for most people between a fine chocolate and a wet dream, and they know how to play that approximation to maximum advantage.  Fed by brown gold, they drive matching Mercedes and knock around in a six-bedroom house.  But they pull this off without appearing to manipulate their customers.  In fact, earnestness seeps from their pores.

Too-Tall Tabitha is working the counter when I enter.  She’s six feet off the ground if she’s an inch, and she carries her height with pride — upright posture, string bean figure, and a bob of short straight hair on top that matches her steely eyes.  Brad, always wearing the chef’s toque, waves to me through the open kitchen door.

The place is empty of customers: two o’clock, mid-afternoon lull.

I inhale deep and loud.  “Mmm.  Smell that!  If fatness was in my future, I could pork up just breathing the air in here.”

“Aren’t you cute.  Try one of these crispy things.  It’s on me.”

“What does Brad call them?”

“They’re new.  They don’t have a name yet.”

“Chocolate Scrunch!” Brad shouts from the kitchen.

Tabitha shakes her head and holds out the tray.  “He’s kidding.  Go on.”

“You know I can’t.  Doctor’s orders.”

“Oh, bull.  It wouldn’t hurt you to sweeten up, Phu.”

“Yes it would.  Haven’t you seen any werewolf movies or the Incredible Hulk where his face turns purple and he looks like he’ll bust a gut?  Transformation is painful.”

Tabitha sets the tray down, giving up hope.  “You could talk circles around Dennis Miller,” she says.  “I’ll get your mail.”  She disappears into their small office.

I browse while I wait.  The place is spotless, well polished pink travertine marble tiles on the floor and walls, curved glass cases so free of streaks that Tabitha had to place a row of gold dots across the center to keep people from bumping their noses.  And the contents of those cases are equally perfect, chocolate candies and desserts with such clean edges you’d think Brad cut them with a laser.  Then again, maybe he did.  He has more equipment back in that kitchen than the Northrop Grumman factory in Philadelphia.

Tabitha emerges from the office with my mail in a rubber band.  I take a quick flip through and find nothing worth the wait — two bills, no checks, and a whole lot of junk.

She holds a Chocolate Scrunch — or whatever they’re called — between two well-manicured fingernails and nibbles one corner.  “You keep screwing up your face that way and it’ll get stuck in that position, Too-Phu.  Didn’t your mother ever tell you?”

“My mother is a sore subject.”

“Lord, what a stiff you are!  If there’s anyone in this world who should eat chocolate, it’s you.”  She tosses the partially gnawed candy in the trash and rests her elbow atop the display case.

I tap the mail impatiently on my thigh.  “I’m in no mood to be converted.  Honest to God, I clocked a guy today.”

“Sweet!” Brad calls from the kitchen.

“No doubt he approves.”  Tabitha raises her voice and jabs her thumb in that direction.  “He’d come straight away to hear the details, but he’s got a confection in there that requires monitoring.”

“You know she’s right!”  Brad calls again.

“What’s with you men and violence, anyway?”  Tabitha pokes me.  “Bet you feel bad about it now, don’t you?”

“No.”

“You’re just being contrary.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Guess what today is.”

“I don’t want to.”

“The fourth of the month.  You know what that means?”

“Lemme think: you’re past due.”

“No.  But you are.”  She extends a long bony arm and makes a grasping motion with her long bony fingers. “That would be the rent we’re talking about.”

“Who says granola crunchers from Lotus Land are pushovers?  If you’re gonna go all technical on me, my lawyer would tell you I’m within the grace period.”

“We don’t sic lawyers on people.  We have other means.”

“For sure.  You’ll just treacle me to death.”

“Wouldn’t it be ironic if the debt workout man got a notice of failure to pay?”

Yuk yuk.  I grind the toe of my shoe into the fancy marble, like I’m putting out a cigarette.  “You know I’m good for it, Too-Tall.  I’m just one client away from temporary solvency.”

“Temporary solvency?”  She taps her teeth with her fingernails.

“That’s right.  Temporary.”

No one is solid forever.  Solvency, experience has taught me, is not a permanent condition.

“So what do you have that’s not fresh?” I ask.

This is part of our routine.  Brad and Tabitha keep the chocolates they’re least proud of in a bin around back and sell them to me discount.  Even stale candy from Creamy Dreamy brings smiles to my clients’ faces, and these are not people who generally get to smile much.

Tabitha reaches around the corner and places a small paper bag on the counter in front of me.  I peer inside as if I cared: two dozen things like miniature Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

“Monkey Style,” Tabitha explains.

“They’re not rancid, are they?”

“You really know how to charm a person.  I’m barely charging our cost of the paper they’re wrapped in and you’re insulting the chef.”

The wrapping is a relevant point because they started doing it just for me.  I once had a client who worked in the Department of Health.  This guy earned $47,500 salary and in one single year ran up credit card debts of $63,000 for nothing of importance.  It often happens that dramatically when a person is funding a small business or falls suddenly ill or loses a job or some combination of those things.  But this guy only got happily divorced, no kids to support, no alimony in the settlement, just woke up one morning and decided to shuck off the self-restraint.  In the end, all he had to show for it was a lightly used Boston Whaler on a trailer in the driveway, three video arcade machines lined up in the garage, and a brand-new thirty-pound spare tire around his waistline to remind himself of all the dinners he’d thrown on the Discover card.

In those days I kept a bowl of strong licorice bites on my desk, Lick-a-Bitch in Creamy Dreamy lingo (you can see why they don’t get many kids in this candy store).  Licorice suppresses the sex drive, and at the time I had few prospects, so I was munching these things throughout the day.  Not daintily, either, just jamming fistfuls down my maw.  This guy went for the guest chair while I was digging out a handful.  Once he was settled, I picked up the bowl and offered.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Go ahead.  Take one.  They’re good and tangy.”  I popped a few more in my mouth to demonstrate.

He looked like I’d just eaten a worm.  When he regained some composure, he said, “You can’t offer candy unwrapped!”

“But they’re not for sale — they’re free.”

“So’s avian flu.”

I ended up referring him to a shrink for his spending addiction, consolidating his balances from eight credit cards to four, and working out a debt management plan – a DMP, in the creative lingo of the credit business.  I even found a buyer for his boat.

Today, I still don’t have any romantic prospects, but I ditched the bitch of a licorice bill.  And now I offer my clients chocolates and they’re individually wrapped.

Tabitha knows this whole story.  It led to a successful new business line for Creamy Dreamy, and I know she’s only busting my chops about the wrapping because she wants me to lighten up.  It’s not working, though, and I couldn’t tell you why.  Maybe learning to like chocolate would help.  Or maybe I need another line of work.

“Get in here, Phu!” Brad calls from the kitchen.  “You gotta tell me about the fight you had!”

“That meringue is more important,” Tabitha says.  “And Phu has to go.”

I claim the candy bag from her.  “Put it on my tab?”

“I thought you didn’t believe in credit.”

I get into Hulk position and issue a roar.  “Let the transformation begin!”

I’m halfway to the door when she says, “Speaking of individually wrapped, have you seen the item in your office?”

No, I haven’t.

“You’d better step lively.  She’s been up there awhile and you don’t want her to melt.”

5.

 

When I get upstairs there is indeed a woman sitting in a chair, a stunning thirty-something brunette with peekaboo nipples showing through a white ribbed tank-top and a smile that could blind an Eskimo in Oakleys.

I am unmoved; she’s eaten nearly the entire contents of my candy bowl.

Before saying a word, I lean over and refill from the bag I just bought.  The bowl was a gift from my mother, Irish cut crystal in a blue Tiffany box, but the store at the King of Prussia Mall wouldn’t accept the return.  I suspect Mom found it on eBay.

“Thanks,” the woman says, as if I exist to serve free candy.  “I’ll try a new kind.”  She giggles and reaches out.  “The others were soo good.”

I settle into the seat of authority and introduce myself.

She extends a hand, soft and a little sticky.  “My name is Melissa Eider.  I go by Mindy.”

“Have you been waiting long?”

She smirks and opens her opposite hand, revealing a mound of balled candy wrappers, silently expanding.  She’s still chewing, too.  I start to say, “you might want to lighten up on those before you make yourself sick,” but then I remember the rent.  One of the great human motivators is reciprocation.  You give someone a freebie and they feel obligated, almost compelled, to offer you something in return.  This is why shrewd homeless men hold the door for you at the cash machine lobby and you have to fight yourself to keep from making a donation.  So for a few bucks worth of candy, if I play it right, I might be able to gather enough scratch to carry me through the month.

“How’d you hear about us?”

Mindy swallows the last of her chocolate and takes a swig from a water bottle in her purse, dabbing the corners of her mouth with a tissue.  I half expect a compact and lipstick to emerge next, but she’s a natural beauty, apparently wearing no makeup whatsoever.  She digs further around inside her purse far longer than I’d expect, finally re-stows the bottle and tissue, and rebalances the purse on her knees.  It’s a large off-white item with zippered pockets all over and frills hanging in every direction.  She rests her hands atop it and offers a polite smile.  “Thanks for the candy.  I didn’t get lunch today.”

I nod.  “You were going to tell me how you heard of us.”

“I was?  Well, I was passing by and saw the sign.  I’m not from around here.  I drove all the way from Minneapolis this morning.”

“Minnesota?  You must have a lead foot.”

“No, silly, didn’t leave home this morning.  I stopped overnight in Cleveland, then Pittsburgh.  I’ve been in Pennsylvania all day, driving around, looking for help.”

I explain that she’s in Delaware now, not PA.  She may have missed the sign, only five miles up the road.  “Must be cold in Minnesota these days.”

She nods.  “Two degrees when I left.”

It appears that the chill followed her, too.  I’m trying not to let my eyes drop, but her tits are unusually assertive and the outfit does little to restrain them.

“You own a coat?”  I lean back in my chair.

“Of course, silly.  But who needs one in Delaware?”

“Sure.  It’s like perpetual summer.”

By the look on her face, she fails to register the snide tone.

“You understand what it is that we do here, Ms. Eider?”

“I’m hoping from the sign that you help people clear up problems when they owe money.  CPR – is that someone’s initials?”

“Not someone’s.  It stands for cardiopulmonary resuscitation.”

“Like bringing people back from the dead?”

I smile.  “We have these little miniature paddles.  We apply them to someone’s wallet: buzz buzz.  The monetary circulation gets going again.”

She blinks.

“I’m kidding, Ms. Eider.  All you have to know, really, is that we assist people who have more debts than they can handle.  You have a problem, Phu’s here to help.”

“It’s not so much—”

I stop her.  “There are a few procedures.  We’ll discuss your situation once we’ve gotten some paperwork out of the way.”

This is an important step, and I always initiate it as soon as possible, because it promotes a sense of commitment on the part of the potential client.  Statistics show that filling out a form and signing it – even if the form contains no legal obligation – inclines a person to move toward firmer commitment.  Most people have been raised to be consistent, and they’ll seek to maintain the relationship that the form makes them think they’ve already begun, even if they’re free to walk.  So I hurry to pull a sheet of paper from a pile behind me and slide it across the desk with a pen.  “Now, Ms. Eider—”

“Mindy.”

“Ms. Eider, this is a form that requests certain information about your financial status, bank accounts, credit card balances, assets and liabilities.  Please sit down in the next room there and fill it out to the best of your knowledge.”

“The thing is—”

“Make sure to sign it, which indicates that you are providing me with this information voluntarily and that I will only share it with third parties in an effort to help you.  Okay?”

She hesitates but then nods and steps to the next room, and I look around for something to do.  I can’t use the phone in these circumstances.  It’s humiliating for prospective clients to overhear the things I must say to extract other clients from the boulders that crush them.  Plus, if they pay careful attention to these conversations they may realize how little they need me.  It requires no special skills to beg for mercy.

So while she’s filling out the form, I use the opportunity to straighten up my desk and put away some files.  I’m depressingly short of business lately, a bit of bad luck which my hair-trigger temper alone doesn’t explain, considering that half the nation’s in hock.  I reach for the squeeze ball and work it under my desk, resisting the temptation to start bouncing it off the wall.

Finally, Mindy returns.  She’s filled out the form in perfect script, everything legible, the numbers written with some florid flourishes, her commas especially curvaceous.  There’s scarcely a field she’s left blank, though under Employer she simply entered the abbreviation “N/A.”  Unlike for most adults, every letter in her signature is eminently legible, tiny little perfectly drawn hearts replacing the dots over her i’s.

“An A for penmanship,” I say, running my eyes across the paper.  “Let’s have a look.”

I rub my chin as I go through the details.  The form says Mindy has a 30-year fixed mortgage on her house with 26 years to go, meaning she’s paid little more than interest so far.  She possesses a small retirement fund, account unspecified, owns her car outright, carries very small balances on a handful of credit cards, has nearly finished paying off a student loan, and has no life insurance.

If this info shows the whole picture, Mindy needs me like a fish needs ballet shoes.  In fact, the sharks at Visa should be filing their teeth by her mailbox.

I set the paper down and tent my fingers over my nose.  Then I throw my shoulders back casually, so as not to appear intimidating.

“This is a common problem, Ms. Eider—”

“Mindy.”

“Mindy.”  I grin.  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, and honesty is the first step toward self-healing.  You need to be more forthcoming about your debts.  Now, what have you left out?”

She looks shocked, and I notice for the first time that she collects lovely freckles and stores them across her nose.

“I haven’t left anything out, Mr. Goldberg.”

“Phuoc.  Call me Phu.”

She sits forward slightly and puts her hands together.  I do the same, mirroring her to build rapport — a trick from Neuro-Linguistic Programming that would make Anthony Robbins proud.

“Please continue.”

“I have nothing else to say.  I’ve been completely honest.  Well, now you mention it, I do owe my friend Sarah for the microwave she sold me.  Thirty-five dollars and I meant to pay her before I left.”  She rotates the paper and picks up the pen.  “I can put that, let’s see—”

I gently pull the paper away.  “Thirty-five bucks isn’t consequential.  You’re sure this is the full picture, then?”

“I can’t be certain.  But I don’t think I left anything else out.”

She sits back and crosses her legs.  I sit back and do the same.

She lifts her eyes toward the ceiling, searching her own memory.  I lift my eyes to the ceiling, wondering what the hell is going on in her head.  And then — damn — it hits me.

“You’re telling the truth, aren’t you?”

“Why, of course!”

“You don’t have a credit problem.”  I let out a long sigh.  “With all due respect, Mindy, what did you think I could do for you?”

She lowers her voice as if someone might overhear.  “It’s not for me.  It’s my uncle.  His name’s Gunnar Karlson and he has a bad problem, I think.”

I look at my watch rather ostentatiously to see that an hour has passed, and I feed her form into the paper shredder with a flourish.

The machine is loud.  Mindy startles when it barks into action, and as the shredder ticks toward silence I imagine I can hear Brad and Tabitha through the floor making wagers in their California singsong about my ability to pay the rent.  Monthly obligations are a kind of tyranny, and if the woman sitting in front of me turns out to be a waste of time, then I’m already another stripe behind the eight ball.

“The first step is that Phu needs to know who’s in need of assistance.  Make sense?  Why didn’t you say up front that it wasn’t you with the problem?”

“I tried to.  You kept interrupting.  Procedure, you—”

“Never mind.  Phu’s here to help, right?”

“For Uncle Gunnar’s sake, I hope so.”

“Let’s start again.”  I pull a second questionnaire from the top of the pile, this time taking up a pen and resolved to fill it out myself.  A few minutes later, it ends up something like this:

 

Name: Gunnar Karlson.

Birth Date: August 18, 1925, Mindy thinks.

Address: Somewhere in Pennsylvania.  She has it in the car.

Social Security Number: Unknown.

Last Year’s Estimated Income: Unknown.

Bank Account Balances: Unknown and unknown.

Liabilities: Unknown.

 

“Sort of,” Mindy adds, a tigress for accuracy.

I set down the pen.  “With all due respect, this is getting us nowhere.  If all you wanted to do was eat candy, you’d have been better off downstairs in Creamy Dreamy.  Of course, they do charge for the privilege there.”

“Very funny.”  Mindy purses her lips.  “If you want to know something useful, then stop asking me questions I don’t have the answer to.”

I can’t hear the clock on my wall ticking, but I can feel it.  “Okay.” The chair squeals as I lean back, and Mindy flinches.  “Why don’t you tell me why you think Mr. Karlson requires my services.”

“We’re getting somewhere.”  She takes a deep breath.  “Every year after first frost, which is kind of late around here, Uncle Gunnar goes off to the mountains for a few months.”

“Every year?”

Mindy gnaws the inside of her lower lip.  “The past few, anyway, maybe the past four or five.”

It immediately crosses my mind that anyone who goes away for so long doesn’t lack for resources.  Then again, if she got the birthday right, he’s had a lifetime to save.

“He forwards his mail to me.”

“Doesn’t he have anyone closer?”

“We’re very close.”  She looks offended.

“I meant, geographically speaking.”

“Oh.  No.  He doesn’t have immediate family.  The mail all comes to me in Minnesota and I hold it for him.”

“What about the bills?”

“He prepays those, I guess.  I never asked.  He gets things from the phone company and what have you, but there’s never been any kind of warning on the envelope, like anyone was going to turn off his utilities or anything.  I don’t open the mail.  I just collect it and sort out the junk.”

“What happens to the junk?”

“I toss it into my wood-burning stove.”

“Even the plastic stuff?”

She shakes her head.  “That’s bad for the environment.  So there’s this pile — the stuff I don’t burn — that I keep in a basket until he returns.  And I never had a problem.”  She pauses, looking at her hands, then lifts her gaze to me again.  “Until last month when he got a notice from the bank.  It was a foreclosure notice.”

She half whispers the word foreclosure.

“You opened that one?”

“It had some words of warning on the outside.  Something pretty urgent.  From time to time you get these things from people trying to sell you something, very official sounding and all that, and you tear open the envelope and they’re just nonsense.  This wasn’t that kind of item.  It came registered mail and I had to sign for it.  It said they were going to seize his house if he doesn’t pay right away.”

“How many notices has he gotten like that?”

Mindy counts on her fingers.  “Three.”

“Three?!  You’re sure?”

“Yes.  I can count to three.  I’m not an idiot.”

I say nothing to reassure her on that score.  “Over what period of time?”

“Six weeks, I’d say, all registered mail.”

“Oy.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s Jewish for ‘shit,’ sort of.”

“Can you help him, Phu?”

“If he wants to be helped, yes.  I suppose you’ve spoken to him.”

She shakes her head gravely.

“You’ve tried?”

She shakes her head again.  “He’s unreachable.  It’s what he does on these trips.  Kind of like a retreat from the world.  So this is my thing to deal with.”

“Presuming you want to.”

“I’m here, aren’t I?  Besides, how could you not?”

“Of course.”

So I give her the bad news, though I make it sound like a blessing, as I’ve trained myself to do.  Five hundred cash before I pick up the phone, plus another $1500 in good funds by the end of the week, to cover fees and pay-downs and such.

Now she’s lost something of her glow.  “I don’t have five hundred dollars on me.  I’ll have to think about that.”

“Sure.  Take a ride.  There’s an ATM located in the next shopping center over.  There’s one in the grocery store, too, or the convenience store past that.”

Despite my best intentions, she appears a little startled by this information.

“The banks are still open,” I add.  “I’m partial to portraits of the presidents myself, but a cashier’s check is just as good.  I don’t process credit cards.  Not a great idea in my line of work, you understand.”

She nods, but we still seem to be operating on different wavelengths, and I find myself wondering about the commitment thing, whether it counts that she filled out the form for someone else, which is a first in my experience.  Either way, some distance has grown between us now, which was bound to happen.  Like in the emergency room, everyone wants help RIGHT NOW, but how to pay comes as an afterthought.  Certain banking executives have become very wealthy exploiting this propensity among consumers.

Mindy gathers up her purse and stands to go.

I stand, too, no purse, but otherwise mirroring her.  The parting is awkward, though, and I’m sadly figuring it’s the last I’ll see of this prospect.  But just in case, I offer up the candy bowl.

Mindy snatches two more Monkey Styles and heads for the stairs.

 

 

6.

 

An hour later I’m on the phone trying to cut someone’s MasterCard bill in half when a white woman the size of a manatee lumbers in.

“Phuoc Goldberg?” she asks, pronouncing it perfectly.  She’s a woman to be reckoned with, despite the mustache and the bolt of cloth she’s using for a dress.

I hang up the phone and wave her to a seat and point to the candy bowl with an open hand.  She shakes her head dismissively, possibly self-conscious about her hungers.

“I’m Terrance’s aunt, Penelope Jones.  People call me Penny.”

“Terrance?”  The name doesn’t compute.

“You’ve met him.  He lives a mile or so from here.”

“Don’t know anyone of that name.  You sure you have the right guy?”

She looks at me like I’m ducking her.  “Are people named Phuoc Goldberg as common as stink bugs in these parts and someone forgot to tell me?”  She pulls my card from her knitted purse and presses it into the desk.

I like her pluck, I have to admit.  But I don’t know this person she’s speaking of.  My mind’s a blank and my face must be, too.  She narrows her brow — not an attractive look, but effectively intimidating.  “I’m sure you do know him, a sixteen-year-old African-American, tall and pleasant looking, very dark skin.  Terrance Smuthers is his name.  Some of the kids call him Terry, but I never do.”

“Whatever you call him…” I shake my head.  Maybe I need a milkshake to excite the neurons.  “It’s been a long week.  No bells are going off.”

“You’d recognize him if I brought him by.  No more than a few hours ago you punched him in the mouth and split open his lip.”

Recognition dawns and there’s no point denying it.  “You’re that kid’s aunt?”

She nods once as I peer at her, telling myself: some family — you can have any color you want, but they only come extra extra large.  Her skin is yellowish white, splotchy and dimpled with fat.  It’s hard to discern how she could have roots on the same continent Terrance’s ancestors came from, let alone be related.  But that’s not my business.

“He’s the one who gave me your card.  Most unusual, but there it is.  I’m here to engage your services, Mr. Goldberg.”

She speaks with a haughtiness that I recognize as an attempt to gather together the final shreds of her social standing.  It’s a familiar tone, if not entirely common in my office, because by the time they come to me it takes a certain moral fiber just to utter their home address with any certainty.  Nobody arrives at my door at the beginning of their tether.

I give her my usual spiel and present the information sheet to her, but she pushes it back at me.

“I can’t do another form, Mr. Goldberg, can’t bear another form, don’t want to see another form.  I’ll talk.  You can scribble notes if you wish.”

“Okay.” So the commitment thing is once again out the window but, yearning for new clients, I take up the pen for the second time that day.  “Be as complete as possible, please, Penny.  The more thorough you are, the better to help you.”

“There’s a fee?”

“Naturally.  We’ll talk about that after you give me your information.  What you’re providing is confidential, but if you hire me you’ll have to release me to share it with others.”

“Others?”

“Your creditors and the like.”

“They have to know already.  They’re all in cahoots.”

“You could put it that way.  Most big creditors report to agencies that aggregate the information.  Then, in turn, they use that same data to make decisions.”

She furrows her brow again, as if she’s screwing up the determination to launch herself over a brick wall.  “I know all about credit scores and universal defaults, Mr. Goldberg.  I’m flat broke with few immediate prospects for making it better.  I’m on disability with limited income and I have mouths to feed.  What I used to count in dollars I now figure in nickels and dimes, and it’s been that way longer than I care to admit.  The rent-to-own place took our only television this morning.  They say they’re coming for the couch next week.”

“The couch?”

A crack forms in the armor.  “It’s a foldaway.  Two of the girls sleep on it.”

Medical bills, it turns out, have gradually eroded her financial cushion, which is a common story.  Typically, too, there’s no suggestion on Penny’s part that eating herself obese has anything to do with her problems.  It’s all, like, an act of God.  The people who want their money back, they must be working for the Other Guy.

In phony sympathy I pick up the candy bowl and offer her a mouthful of relief, but she refuses again.  So noted.  I set it back down.

“Here’s the deal, Penny.  Five hundred up front, cash or bank check.  Another fifteen hundred within five business days, which will be applied to fees and the like.”

The crack begins to fissure.  “What kinds of fees?”

“Anyone who gave you credit will charge a penalty to change the terms, presuming I can get them to do so.”

“On top of what I owe?”

I shrug.  “You could say that.  It might cost a little up front to reduce what you owe over the long run.  It’s sort of like prepaid insurance, the way they look at it.  Maybe we can get your TV back in the bargain.”

“If I had the money for fees, I wouldn’t have missed the payments.  I paid three times over for that television already, but it’s the couch that’s more important.  The furniture starts disappearing and I can’t give those kids anything that resembles a normal life.”

“How many kids?”

“Four or so.”

“You don’t know?”

“It makes no difference to men like you.  And I don’t have the five hundred, either, by the way.  I can get it if you can’t manage otherwise.”

I spread my hands wide, indicating that I’m as subject to the laws of the jungle as the next person.

“In that case, Terrance can have your money by the end of the week.”

Drugs, I’m thinking.  “I’m licensed.  I won’t accept funds from illegal sources.”

Her mustache wiggles, like she’s trying to control an impulse.  “He’s an A student, Mr. Goldberg, and he has a job.  I’ll grant that he might have looked threatening to you, but if you won’t assist me voluntarily his transcripts would help persuade a lawyer that there’s a case here.  A case against you, sir.”

“You don’t want to do that,” I respond, feigning nonchalance.  “A lawsuit’s a long expensive slog.”

But she’s not done.  She looks at me hard.  “Two hundred dollars cash the hospital required to sew up that lip, and we owe them another two forty-five.”

I direct my attention to the middle space.  This feels more than a little like blackmail, which would normally raise my hackles.  And, as for lawsuits, right or wrong, I don’t like her chances there.  But the woman has gravitas, something a little witchy that makes me think I may have brought bad karma onto myself by slugging the wrong kid.

She’s digging in her purse, and I half expect a small handgun to emerge, but it’s just another business card, Bucky’s Rent-to-Own, biggest in the area, and I know a guy there.  I squeeze the edges of the card, bowing it, and look briefly into the cartoon representation of Bucky, who smiles toothily from the midst of the logo.  He’s all twinkle and smarm, a face you trust only with your eyes closed or your options few.  If you squint, his bow tie resembles a dollar sign turned on end.

As I set the card down, I become suddenly self-conscious about the scabs on the knuckles of my left hand and hide it beneath the desk.

“Tell you what, Penny.  I’ll call Bucky’s as a courtesy, on account of the trouble, no fee right now, see what I can do.”  I’m waiting for a smile, but she only lifts an eyebrow, then thanks me unkindly.

 

7.

 

As the hands of the clock pass six, I locate a sheet of leads that I purchased from Salesgenie.com and make a few phone calls, trying to rope in a client to pay the rent.  The names all fall within a thirty-mile radius and are sorted by credit score, and I concentrate on the middle of the list, where the best prospects lie.  Those with merely poor credit still think they can save themselves the honorable way.  The ones with disastrous credit are usually so far gone they’ve split town with no working phone and no forwarding address.  The mid-range deadbeats are another story.  They’re living with a queasy feeling, the kind you get moments after having done something really stupid, like dropping your cell phone in the toilet or pulling out into traffic without looking and having to watch the woman you cut off go careening into the bushes.  It’s the feeling that you’re not getting past this moment without outside intervention, that forces bigger than you have taken over some aspect of your life and will not be ignored.  It’s a feeling of hopelessness, and Phuoc Goldberg, debt workout specialist, sells hope.

In this round of fishing I get many voicemail greetings and a slew of hang-ups and leave a lot of messages.  Most people at the early-crisis stage of their financial implosion are just learning to ignore every caller the I.D. doesn’t identify as mother.  The guy at the deli who hasn’t seen you for a while, maybe you “forgot” to return the twenty he spotted you.  Close cousins are suspect — you may owe them for the dinner you were supposed to chip in for.  Businesses that sell things don’t desperately solicit your patronage anymore; they’re calling for more ominous reasons.  Credit card companies are beyond offering to consolidate your balance on a new card — now they read from another script.  In short, the loving phone has morphed into a weapon turned against you.

When I do reach a living person my delivery is smooth yet prodding.  Years ago, when I was starting out, I worked in a bucket shop, foisting penny stocks on suckers looking to make a quick killing.  You got a lot of hang-ups, of course, but of those who asked specific questions, you’d sink your talons into eight out of ten.  Once you became seasoned, you recognized that the questions were usually a front, intended by the sucker to make himself seem sophisticated before he saw his practiced skepticism obliterated under verbal assault.  And I say “him” because most of the suckers were men.  A mark is someone who expects to get something for nothing, but life or genetics teaches most women to know better.  Maybe that’s because men don’t have to live with the deposits they leave in the nearest uterus or maybe there’s another reason.  I don’t know, I just live here.

This evening I reach two people and slip without effort into the round-vowel Delaware accent I’ve been perfecting since I moved to the area.  Folks like to do business with people like themselves, so it helps to sound like them for starters.  If I sweep them in on a cold call, they may be wearing a perplexed look when they visit for the first time.  “Oh, excuse me, I’m looking for Phil Goldberg,” they’ll tell the “Chinese” guy sitting in my chair.  But then I greet them with the same familiar voice they heard on the phone – super-local, like their friend Rich from the auto-parts store – and they drop their guard a bit.

The two people I reach this evening are innocuous enough, one a little hangdog and the other less contrite, both heading downhill quicker than a Jamaican bobsled team on waxed runners.  But the best I can do is to extract promises that they’ll think about using my service.  I pull on my coat to go.  When the next big notice comes in the mail, I tell myself, one of them might feel compelled to dig my number from the kitchen drawer and commit.

I climb into my Mini and spend an hour running errands at the Concord Mall, then head for dinner to a biker bar I heard about out on Route 1.  I like going where I’m unwanted.  Sometimes, if I’m in a real foul mood, I can pick a fight and record a small entry for my kind on the credit side of the world’s big ledger.

Outside, the bikes are lined up in the parking lot like chariots.  I pull around the side of the building and tuck my Mini in front of the dumpster, nose facing for home, in case I require a quick escape later.  The place is dark and smells of stale beer.  There’s a pool table toward the back, but no one playing.  Men and women with sleeveless shirts and tattoos press shoulder to shoulder at the bar, standing tall in their black touring boots, mostly facing away from me, though I do get a few glares.

I walk across the room and slide into a booth, resting my iPhone on the table, its top edge pointing out.  I must have left its phaser setting on stun, though, because the long-haired waitress in jeans and a small black apron gazes at me with an open mouth.  She waits just long enough to communicate that I’m not welcome, but she has no way to suspect that I find this promising.  She comes over eventually, and half an hour later I’m downing Budweiser pints and tucking into several frankfurters, good and dry from the rotisserie behind the bar.

I play with my phone awhile, checking emails and browsing a book I’ve downloaded about reverse mortgages.  These products involve transferring ownership of your home equity to a bank that is then kind enough to pay you back over the course of your life.  The author writes about them like they were invented by Midas and he’s Adam Smith, but in most deployments that I see they’re the equivalent of tossing a pot of molten gold to a drowning man.

When I look up there’s a guy with a ZZ Top beard staring at me.  Next to him stands a drunken friend with a three-day growth who looks like he didn’t shave because he forgot which end of the razor provides personal hygiene.  I decide right there, if it comes to it, that my first move will be to nail ZZ in the solar plexus.  Even without a fistful of coins, I hit hard, my small hands penetrating like spear tips.  The other guy, I decide, I’ll just knee in the groin.

In the background, the crowd seems to go quiet as ZZ directs a snarl at me, as if to say, “This ain’t no place for small-boned accountants.”  But his teeth are too perfect, and it occurs to me that he’s probably a guy with a desk job himself, here playing Hell’s Angels while waiting to learn whether he got that promotion to vice president of the I.T. department.

Still, I rest my knuckles on the table and press myself into a standing position,

“Nice beard, tough guy,” I say.  “Aren’t you due back at the North Pole any day now?”

Violence, or at least an elf comment, would be a deserving response to this provocation, but ZZ just laughs with menace.  Almost as a reflex his friend tightens his fists, but rather than coming right at me they go into sidebar, talking to one another under their breath, ZZ’s friend making karate chop motions.  After a minute of this, ZZ appears to assess the prospects and conclude that attempting to kick my ass carries nothing but downside.  “Ah, shit,” he says finally, walking away.  “You ain’t worth it.”

Just my luck, another guy who can’t live up to his own image.

Ten minutes later, the two of them are grunting their way through a game of Eight Ball and looking considerably less threatening to everyone in the room.

To be honest, I rarely manage to find fights in biker bars.  Their patrons have all the wrong prejudices.  They presume that if I have the guts to be in their presence, I must be some kind of tae kwon do master, but that’s far from the case.  I was twelve years old when The Karate Kid premiered, and that was a rough time.  Back then a team of naked runway models couldn’t have dragged me to see a movie about a wise old Asian counseling a little white boy.  And to this day, in fact, I’d rather be dead than set foot in a dojo.

 

 

8.

 

Next morning, bright and early, I call over to Bucky’s Rent-to-Buy and ask for the guy I know there.

“Who wants him?” spits an old timer on the other end.

“Nobody, last I checked.”

“That’s not the half of it.”

“Tell him Phu Goldberg has a deal for him.”

“Better not be any jokers in that deck.”

I hear the phone set down like a slab of meat, then snatches of conversation.  “Get Ralph.”  “Sure, if the couch is genuine leather, the ottoman is too.”  The rustling of paper.  “Discontinued.”  “Floor model.”  “It’s on page four eleven.”  Computer keys tapping.  “On the phone.”  “Mr. Robinson has that.”  “Sleeps two comfortably.”  “The interest rate is the interest rate, ma’am.”  “The remote is always included.”  “For Ralph, yeah, Ralph line two.”

The phone groans and kicks off, as the original electronic systems used to do, then it clicks and Ralph comes on.  We reacquaint ourselves and I mention Penelope Jones.

“Penny, sure.  I remember Penny.  Heavyset lady.”

“She’s in financial difficulties brought on by a medical situation and she’s hired me to clear up with her creditors.”

“Yeah?  Real problem, though, is that her heart’s too big, taking in all the stray family members and such.  We worked out something a while ago.  Hold on.”

He looks her up, reads the file or whatever he has there in silence, though I can sense his lips moving and I hear the crinkling of paper.

Ralph clears his throat.  “Even with the restructuring, she’s eight months past due on a sofa and her credit rating’s shit.”

“Of course her credit is shit.  Otherwise she wouldn’t be paying six times the cost of the damn couch in tiny little increments.  She’d have gone to Macy’s and put it on plastic like any normal person who can’t afford it.”

He grunts as he shifts his weight.  “Well, she’s not paying anything now.  Nada.”

“Don’t speak Spanish, Ralph, you know it confuses us simple folk.”

“We had to repo the television.  Nice set, too.  Sharp thirty-seven-inch LCD.  Lucky if I get ten cents on the dollar for it now.”

“No no.  The sob story is my shtick.  That TV probably paid your kid’s college tuition already.”

“He’s got three years to go, plus grad school.  She wants the unit back it’s still here.”

“It’s the couch she’s most concerned about.  She says you’re threatening to repossess that, too.”

“C’mon!  We never threaten, you know that.  Let’s see...we informed her, yes, that the couch is in jeopardy.  You can’t go half a year living with a sofa you don’t own and just thumb your nose at Bucky.  He doesn’t like that.”

“There is no Bucky.  Never was, according to my research.”

“Research!” he chortles.  “I was speaking figuratively.”

“You’re owned by Luciano Minetti of Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.”

“This is starting to sound like a shakedown.  What, you got his wife and kids tied up there or something?”

“Just give it to me straight, Ralph.  What’s the lady gotta do to keep her couch?”

“Pay the back interest plus fifty bucks on the principal.  Total comes to, let’s see...two hundred thirty-six and forty-seven cents.”

“And how much does that leave her with?”

“Twenty-three months at forty-eight ninety-eight a month.”

I do the calculation in my head: $1,126.54.  “She’ll pay you two hundred now and call it even.”

Ralph laughs and there’s no mirth in it.  “Nobody put a gun to her head and forced her to buy this sofa.  She walked through Bucky’s door a free person.”

“And she walked out in chains.”

“What is this, a political discussion now?  Let’s stick to business.”

I hold the phone to the mechanical part of my chair and lean back and let him hear it shriek.  It won’t help much, but it gives me a moment of pleasure.  In addition, part of my strategy is to keep Ralph on the phone longer than he’d like.  At this point, I know, he’s written off the couch.  If his time is worth anything to him, every second he spends with me represents good money thrown after a bad debt.

“What the hell was that noise?  You strangling a ferret?”

“Need to oil this chair.  Or maybe you can sell me a new one.”

“Sure.  Come on down, we’ll talk turkey.”

“I pay cash.”

“Son of a gun!  We just went out of stock on chairs.”

“That’s what I figured.  About the couch, Ralph, here’s my client’s perspective.  I don’t know what she looked like when she walked into Bucky’s and signed that usurious agreement, but I’d bet she’s no easier on a piece of furniture than she used to be.  In addition, she’s got kids climbing all over it, big kids, rough kids. Teenagers getting hand jobs late at night.  Go into a creative trance and envision the condition of the couch at this point.  You won’t get seven bucks for it and you’ll be down for gas money and the truck driver’s time to pick it up.”

“So what are you proposing?”

“I told you, two hundred to settle the whole thing.”

“No, sir.  Four hundred fifty maybe I could take seriously.”

“Three hundred net and — to be clear — you’re forgiving the interest.”

“Can’t do it.”

“Come and get it then, goddammit.  She’s not paying another nickel.  Send the truck and drag it out of the house and see what you can get for it in the tattered furniture column of Craigslist.”

He pauses.  “You really won’t do four?”

“Won’t.  Can’t.”

“Gimme a sec.”

I catch the blue squeeze ball in mid air, unaware until that moment that I’ve been bouncing it against the wall.  I place it back in the desk drawer.

A rustle comes over the phone.  “Agreed.  Three hundred cash by a week from tomorrow.”

“You got it.  Nice talking to you, Ralph.”

“The pleasure was all mine.”

It’s a good settlement, presuming Penny can scare up the cash, and the irony of that is never lost on me.  If only rich doctors could swap liabilities with down-and-out common folk, everyone would win.  In the debt workout game, the worst payers always draw the best deals.

9.

As I’m hanging up the phone, Mindy traipses in.  She’s wearing some kind of black spandex thing that may as well have been applied with a paintbrush.  But, like last time, she seems oblivious to the suggestiveness of her own appearance.

I say hey.

She says, “I thought about this.  Those little paddles you talked about are probably a good idea.”

“The little paddles?”

“CPR.”  She nods.  “For Uncle Gunnar’s wallet.  I know you were lightening the mood when you said it, but this isn’t a joke, not for me or my uncle.  The case needs an expert, and, well, I don’t know anyone better than you around here.”

How’s that for a ringing endorsement?  It has me wondering: could the tenth piece of Creamy Dreamy chocolate that Mindy consumed have tipped the scales in my favor?

“I thought about going it alone,” she continues, “but in one or two steps I’d be out ahead of my skis.  That’s happened to me more than once.”

“In life?”

She shakes her head.  “On the slopes.  Nearly became one with a tree.”

“Uh huh.”

She holds out a neatly sealed bank envelope.  Judging by the thickness, I conclude that there are twenty-five twenties inside, probably spit out of a cash machine.

Trust but verify.  I sloppily tear it open and count out the five hundred.  That’s exactly my monthly rent, which is no accident.

We sit down and Mindy digs through her off-white handbag and produces an envelope with the green strip of a certified mail postcard still attached.  She hands it over: Gunnar Karlson’s foreclosure notice from a bank I never heard of in Essington, Pennsylvania.  There’s a phone number.

“Great, this’ll do.”  I stand up and set the paper atop the small pile that passes for my in-box.

She stands, too, but she lingers like she’s got something else on her mind.  I’m accustomed to clients expecting to watch me pick up the phone and solve their problems in the next five minutes, but life doesn’t work that way.

“Is there something else?”

She shakes her head, but her feet don’t move.

“You want a receipt for the five hundred — is that it?”

“Why would I need a receipt?”

“You’re not afraid I’ll walk with your dough?”

“Why would you walk with my dough?”  Mindy zips her purse.

“So we’re square for now?”

She raises her chin.  “On behalf of Uncle Gunnar, consider yourself hired.”

I scratch my jaw.  “Listen, about that.  This is an unusual circumstance, so I should be especially clear.  I can talk my way through a lot of things, but this obscure bank might not give me change for a dollar without the express written consent of the client, who technically is your uncle, not you.  Normally there’d be a paper with his signature, if not a power of attorney then at least something that authorizes the bank to discuss his affairs with me.  Your autograph might not have meaning for them.”

“I see.”  She frowns.  “Well, I can’t very well get him to sign if I can’t find him.”

“I know.  I’m not blaming you.”

Although I’m looking right at her, she touches my arm as if to call my attention back from another place.  “You can do it, Phu.  Just put your shoulder into it.”

I feel a scowl forming and struggle to reverse it.

Mindy clarifies.  “That was my father’s favorite piece of advice.”

“Sounds like a tough guy.”

“The toughest football coach in the Midwest.  He liked to call himself that, anyway.  Whenever I had a hard job to do – whether it was a math problem or a boy I needed to cut loose – Daddy would say,  ‘Lower your shoulder into it, Min.’  And I would, and it usually turned out all right – except the math problems.”

This is harder than it should be.  Again I make sure to meet her eyes, which sparkle with the color that a cornflower possesses in early sunrise.  “What I’m saying, Mindy, shoulder or no shoulder it might not work out for that reason alone — the reason I explained.  And my time would have been committed and you’ll be out the deposit.  No guarantees, no refunds.”

It’s not like me to soft-pedal, but there’s little harm.  Her certainty only waivers for a second, then she narrows her brow.  “Uncle Gunnar’s counting on me, and I won’t allow him to lose his house on my watch.  Plus, something brought me here to you, something bigger than both of us.”

“Yes, that would be the mortgage company.”

“Oh, posh!  You know what I mean.  There are forces at work in the world.”

“You can’t really believe in that mystical crap.”

“Of course I do!  When I was a little girl I wrote a poem:

Love is my parents.

Love is inside your heart.

Love is when my Daddy cheers.

Love is birds chirping.

Love is the Earth tinkling with magic that made us.

“I stand by that today.”

“Well,” I shrug, “it’s a nice sentiment, but the love of the world tinkling isn’t gonna rescue Mr. Karlson’s house.  Rules are rules, and your average bank will insist on enforcing them to the letter more than fifty percent of the time.  There is another option, though.  You can keep your money and wait for Uncle Gunnar to return.  Maybe he comes back this afternoon, maybe the next day or shortly after that.”

“I don’t understand.  They’re taking his house away.  They’re doing it soon.”

“There’s a process.  Soon isn’t tomorrow.”

“He won’t be back for weeks, though.  I couldn’t live with myself if we didn’t act and he came home to nothing. ”

“I understand.  Just so you do, too.”

She touches my arm again.  Her fingers are warm through my shirtsleeve.  “Lower that shoulder, Phu.  Believe in yourself – I have faith in you.”

It’s the faith part that scares me, but Mindy doesn’t sense it and I’m done talking myself out of her money.

“We’re good to go, then,” I concede.

She puckers her face like she’s reluctant to bother me further.  “Can I ask when you’ll be calling the bank?”

It’s a natural question, but on this occasion I feel a strong urge to lower expectations.  “Sometime today,” I promise.

She chews the inside of her lip and searches my face.

“May take awhile,” I explain.  “It can be hard to get through to these places.”

Little do I know.

10.

When Mindy leaves I go down to Creamy Dreamy and walk past the line of drooling housewives and scoot into the kitchen.

This back room is more spacious than the public section of the store, at least partly because it supports a substantial wholesale business, the goods delivered by Tabitha in the Creamy Dreamy van before store hours begin.  Wheeled racks of perfect chocolate truffles, set out to cool, line two walls.  There are giant mixing machines on another side with brushed aluminum drums and controls so elaborate they’d make Dr. Frankenstein blush.  Pots of ingredients bubble on the gas range, bricks of butter and rows of eggs show through the clear refrigerator doors, and vast vented hoods hum softly on the ceiling.  All of it is spotless.  On one section of the expansive marble counter rise diminutive mountains of cocoa powder.  On another section, a pristine dusting of flour mutes the marble’s gray veins.

Brad is there in his toque and white chef’s coat, spreading icing on some pastries with his good hand.  He’s a tall man in his fifties, clean shaven and trim.  He has a buzz cut, so only a strip of fuzzy hair in back and the ends of his sideburns poke down from the hatband.  The short-sleeve uniform doesn’t carry a mark, though the hair on his good arm glistens with fine powder.  The other arm is deformed from thalidomide.  Sometimes Brad puts a sock puppet over it and introduces the character as Stubby, but today it’s undressed.  A kind of arm-hand barely pokes out, not long enough to feature a discernible elbow and, on the working end, only containing a thumb-like protrusion and two deformed fingers.  The thing contributes, though — Brad has even constructed special tools for it.  Regardless of that, he’s a wonder with the good arm alone.

I’ve folded Mindy’s cash in half to form a nice thick wad, and I flash it at him.

“Sweet!” Brad says.  That’s his response to most good news.  He points the tip of his pastry bag at me.  “Don’t put that filthy lucre down anywhere in here!”

“Should I wrap it in a condom and shove it in Bubba’s Banana Bread?”

“I need a better name for that product, something that suggests chocolate chips — and don’t say the unappetizing thing that just came to your mind.”

“Jeesh.”

He returns to icing a line of tarts, laying a perfectly swirled mocha ribbon around the edge of each one.  Watch any show on baking, and you’ll conclude that this shouldn’t be possible with one hand.

Brad doesn’t look up, an entranced craftsman.  “Give the money to Tabitha when she gets a break out there.  No sudden moves.”

“She was frisky yesterday.”

“It’s her natural state.  She’s cocoa cuckoo.”  He looks up.  “How’s the financial world?”

“I wouldn’t know.  My clients are un-financial, non-financial, de-financial.  They’re sucking me dry with their negative energy.”

“You were a bundle of positive before?”

“Point well taken.  It’s not the negative energy; it’s the negative circumstances.  I had a client last month who hasn’t ponied up a single child-support payment in half a year and the judge is threatening to throw him in jail.  I worked my magic and got him the refund of a downpayment the developer had escrowed on a condo the guy never closed on.  Stupid attorney sends the check directly to my client, instead of through me, as we’d arranged so I could collect my fee.  The client tries to give me some b.s. about how he’ll pay me next month.  Like he’s ever paid anyone ‘next month’ in his life.”

“What’d you say?”

“I reminded him that I’m privy to some stuff his ex-wife would love to know.  He says, ‘Hey, you signed a confidentiality agreement.’  I tell him I also signed an agreement that specifies the refunds I obtain come through my office.”

“He caved?”

“Like a South Florida sinkhole.  Except he sends his boy up to my office with the check, ten-year-old shit cute as a button — a con man in training — making cow eyes at me like the little girl in that Ryan O’Neal movie.”

“What?  Paper Moon?” Brad nods to himself.  “I hated that flick.”  He sets down the now empty pastry bag.  “So, what happened with the kid?  Did you trip over the guilt trip?”

“What do you think?  I took the damn check and sent the little actor on his way.  But my point is it’s aggravating having to deal with these deadbeats.  It’s one hard luck story after another and nobody in the equation wants to pay.”

“I’ve asked you before, Phu: come work for us.  It’s getting to be too much for me and Tabitha alone.  And you’re the one guy I know who wouldn’t eat the profits.”

Nothing has less power to move people than a standing offer frequently repeated.  I let it hang out there while I watch Brad tuck the cloth pastry bag under his stub and use a wooden spoon to refill the wide end from a big metal bowl.  Anyway, deep down he knows I can’t be around the scent of this place all day, and I’m not cut out for sustained manual labor, either, even with two functional hands.  Quick, short bursts and fast-talking are more my thing.  They get me into trouble, but then they get me out of it.

Usually.

I slap the cash wad into my palm.  It feels good.  “Signed a new client.”

“Sweet!”

“She is, too.  It’s a danger.  When I explain things, I’m not sure she’s following me.”

“Ignores your advice?”

“You might say that, or you might say we’re operating on different wavelengths.”

“What do you mean?  She’s not an Asian-American Jew with a grudge against the world?  What a surprise!”

“Another good point, Brad.”

“How’d she get into trouble?”

“She didn’t get into it.  It found her, if trouble it be.  Probably just one of those misunderstandings.”

“Her misunderstanding or yours?”

“Guess I’m about to find out.”

I thrum a thumbnail through the edge of the cash wad.  There’s a crease across Andrew Jackson’s forehead, making him look skeptical.

11.

Tabitha has a line out the door, mostly women looking at their watches, playing with their cell phones, tapping their feet.  She moves deliberately behind the counter, though, handling everything with great care and pausing to make sure the presentation looks just right.  Every aspect of her manner suggests, You may be in a hurry, but I’m not — so chill. She’s daring them to say something, and they never do.  I love her for this.

“Can’t you help me?” a woman pleads upon seeing me.

I utter a marginally coherent apology in a heavy Vietnamese accent.  No, I’m not above cynically exploiting my national origin if it suits me.

When Tabitha heads toward the display case to fetch an order of chocolate bark, I get behind the cash register, open the drawer and lift the tray, sliding the rent underneath, glad to be square again.

Upstairs in my office, I pick up the notice that Mindy’s uncle received in the mail.  Printed with no great flair — even the logo black and white — it came  from an outfit calling itself Triple Fidelity Mortgage Company, and it’s the opposite of all the slick four-color marketing materials that bankers throw out into the world when they’re trying to rope you in.  The brochures that banks foist upon you when they want “your business” are like flashy magicians in bow ties and tails, sharply snapping elaborate face cards and pampering the audience.  But once you’ve defaulted, all you’ll ever see again is the magician’s backstage persona: chain smoking in his torn sleeveless T-shirt, cleaning his ear with a dirty pinky and breaking wind in his dressing room.

I dial the number they’ve buried in the fourth paragraph, just north of the obligatory explanation of defaulter’s rights.  Naturally, the first thing I reach is an automated menu requesting a social security number.  I punch in all zeroes, wait on hold for five minutes to the music of Dire Straits (subtle message or coincidence — I don’t know), then get a living person who immediately asks me to hold.  She returns in a minute.

“Can I help you?”

“This is Phuoc Goldberg from CPR Debt Relief.  I represent a man named Gunnar Karlson of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania who is in receipt of a notice from your company with regard to a mortgage that you hold.”

“What kind of notification was it?”

“A default notice.”

“If you have it in front of you, I’ll take the account number.”

“Of course.”  I read it off.  “May I ask your name?”

“Mrs. Wilson.”

I write that down in Karlson’s newly created file.  “You have a first name?”

“Em.”

“Em?”

“The initial M.”

“That must’ve been tough when your mother was calling you in for dinner.  Do you have any other letters to go with it?”

She waits a bit to indicate she has no desire to be perceived as a fellow human being.  “How can I help you, Mr. Goldberg?”

“There’s been a misunderstanding.  My client — your customer — is out of town and can’t return immediately to deal with this matter.  I’d like to discuss with you postponing any action the bank plans to take.”

“I can look into that.  Please fax me a release from Mr. Karlson with his permission for us to discuss this with you.  I’ll give you the number.”

This is what I feared, of course.  With few weapons in my arsenal, I attempt cheap flattery.  “You have a lovely voice, Mrs. Wilson.”

“Really?”

“Very Celine Dion.  Do you sing, by any chance?”

There follows a cold silence.  “The number for faxing the release…”  She recites it with a complete absence of emotion, like she’s talking to a dead perch at the fishmonger’s.

“The problem, ma’am, is that Mr. Karlson is out of town and can’t be reached right now.”

“Well, he hired you, didn’t he?”

“Yes, sure,” I say as smoothly as possible.

“So he can sign a release wherever in the world he is and he can fax it to me.”

“This is awkward.  I forgot to get the release and now he’s incommunicado for a few weeks.”

“Where is he?”

“The Po—  The Himalayas.”

“That’s hardly my problem, Mr. Goldberg.”

“It’s Mr. Karlson’s problem — your customer, my client.”  Do I hear the sound of this woman filing her nails?  “His niece can sign.  Would that work?”

Another strategic pause, then: “You know it won’t, not unless she has Mr. Karlson’s power of attorney.  You’ll have to prove that just the same.  I refer you once again to the fax number.”

“Yeah.  I got that.”

She sighs.  “Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?”

Yes, there is.  But articulating it would be unprofessional.

At times like these I take a special interest in my office wall, which was white once and now has a series of faint blue crescents from the stress ball that I extract from my desk drawer without looking.  I’m working it as I call Mindy.

“Hey, it’s Phu.”

“That was quick.”

“The news is disappointing.  They won’t talk to me.”

“You called them?”

“I spoke with a Mrs. Wilson, but she won’t give me even Gunnar Karlson’s shoe size without a signed release.  I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do until your uncle returns.  Hopefully it won’t be too late by then.”

She sucks a deep breath and exhales evenly.  “Well, thanks for trying.”

I wish her luck and tell her I stand ready to act when I can be properly authorized to do so.  “Sure,” she says, taking it in stride, not another word about the $500.

It feels a bit wrong, even by my loose standards, but the lights are on, the phone still works, and Brad and Tabitha can’t look at me cross-eyed for another 25 days.

I kill the rest of the morning negotiating credit card settlements and making cold calls — mostly the latter, shaking trees and hoping some green leaves will float down into my greedy hands — but the only thing colder than the calls is my luck.  When I’ve had enough, I walk down the road to the hot dog joint and order a pair of Texas Tommies, chili fries and a large vanilla shake.

Vanilla shakes are the only truly sweet things I allow to pass my lips.  I’m listening to the whir of the blender, forcing pleasant thoughts on myself, when who do I see but Mindy Eider, wearing the same outfit as this morning, but her black spandex clinging tighter, if that’s possible.  As I take my tray and head over, I see that she’s about to tuck into a New York Style Classic and a small Coke.  Winter sun pours through the plate-glass windows, throwing all details into high relief: the unnaturally green relish atop her dog, the sweat forming on her styrofoam soda cup, and every subtle hue that the pores of the spandex reveal.

Five goggle-eyed men swarm about her like yellow jackets in September.  A pair of them have twisted themselves around in their chairs, suddenly eager to have the salt passed, as if half the Dead Sea beach isn’t already lying atop their fries.  Two more sit on either side, bracketing her position like fire dogs.  Another guy stands dumbly by the empty seat across her table, seemingly prepared to chuck his lunch over his shoulder and use Mindy’s left breast for a pillow.  The corner of his tray almost catches me in the eye as I glide in.

“Hi, baby, good news.”  Raising my voice.  “I got the test results back and it’s just herpes.”

All of a sudden every man’s hot dog looks a lot more interesting to him than Mindy.  I settle into the chair facing her.

“Phu!  What luck!  I was about to call you.”  She waves the phone for proof.  “What was that you said about tests?”

“Only an attempt to create some breathing room.  Making friends?”

“People are so nice here.  That guy who just left offered to help me get a better signal.”  She waves the phone again.

I roll my eyes.  “How was he gonna do that?”

“He knows a spot outside, apparently.”

On a mattress in the woods behind the building, I’m guessing.  “Gosh, Delaware is chock full of good samaritans.”

“I was just thinking that!”

I nod toward the trays of food, myself feeling starved.  “Get it while it’s hot dog.”

Her lips form a perfect O around the blanketed frankfurter, and I take this as my cue to dive into lunch.  The guy next to me, who finished eating hours ago, takes it as his cue to adjust the glasses on his nose and ogle Mindy.

I fumble my milkshake and almost drop it into his lap without apology, making no effort to disguise my intent.  He lingers just long enough to preserve his manhood and heads for the door.

“What were you planning to phone me about?”

“It’s my uncle again.”  Mindy picks at the crust of her hot dog bun.  “I tried calling his house, on the off chance he’d come home, and the number’s been disconnected.”

“Disconnected?”

“I never got any notice about that in his mail, and he usually pays it way ahead before he leaves, along with the electric and gas.”

“You told me that yesterday.  You’re sure you dialed right?”

She nods and leans back in her chair.  “I tried twice.  We need to go to the house.”

“And what good would that do?”

“I don’t know, but it’s not like him.  First the mortgage, now the phone — and I promised to take care of his affairs.”

“No no no,” I wag a finger.  “You promised to collect his mail.  That’s what you said.”

She balls her napkin and places it next to the half-eaten dog.  On my side there’s not a crumb left.

“You’re done with that?”

“I can’t eat,” she pouts, pushing her tray toward me.  “I’m worried.”

It takes me ten seconds to make the balance of her hot dog disappear.  With my tongue I’m still clearing some remnants of the roll from between my teeth when she stands to go.

“Are you coming with me to Uncle Gunnar’s?”

I point to my watch and shake my head.  “Work to do.”

“How can you?”  Mindy clutches her giant purse to her chest under folded arms.

“Me?  I sit down at my desk and pick up the phone, that sort of thing.  I’m no use to you as a mascot, dropping in on uncle.  When you need someone to interface with his creditors, you reach out for me and I’ll make the wired world tinkle with that magic you were writing poetry about.  But house calls — that’s not my bag.”

We’re outside in the parking lot now.

I wink at Mindy, so as not to part on a sour note.  “Next time, let me know you’re in the neighborhood.  I’ll bring those chocolates you like and lunch is on me.”

She turns to go.

“Best of luck!” I call, as she heads toward her heavily scuffed, navy blue Volvo.

Walking with little sense of urgency, I’m half a block from the restaurant — one and a half blocks from my office — when I see a police cruiser pull to a stop by Creamy Dreamy.  A tall black man in uniform emerges and heads for my door.  Sergeant Buxton.  What could he want?  Then I remember that I never called Penny.

I turn around and step off the curb and wave my arms just as Mindy’s car is gaining speed up Route 202.  She comes to a screeching halt and a Dodge Caravan swerves and almost clips her rear bumper.  When I climb into the passenger seat, she says, “I knew you’d come.  You’re a good egg.”

“Nah,” I mutter.  “If I’m a breakfast item it’s more like burnt toast.”

“Oh, hush.”

Behind us, cars are honking.  Up ahead, Sergeant Buxton spins around and looks our way.

I turn back to Mindy.  “You might want to step on it.  Maybe we can get to your uncle’s before they turn off the electricity.”

The well-worn Volvo pulls into traffic, and I avert my face as we pass the sergeant, then settle in for the ride.

Mindy’s car has a bone-white leather interior that nearly matches her purse.  It has two hundred thousand miles showing on the odometer, a loose door panel on my side, and light blue shag carpeting covering the floor.  A pink velour pig in a fancy hat occupies half the back seat.  I do a double take.  There’s a grin under its snout.

12.

It’s a twenty-minute ride to Uncle Gunnar’s place, involving no highways, so we proceed at a leisurely pace.  I’ve strapped myself tight and checked my seatbelt twice, expecting a wild ride on Space Mountain, but Mindy drives with surprising care, no jerkiness, no two-wheel turns, eyes conscientiously scanning the road.  Her thoughts, however, appear to be elsewhere.

She lowers one hand from the steering wheel to her midriff and rubs.  “That hot dog isn’t sitting too well.”

“You only ate half of it.  Probably hunger pangs.”

“Hmm.”  We pass through a small Eighteenth-Century enclave called Centreville, followed by some fenced open fields the color of lager.  She bites her lip approvingly.  “It’s pretty around here...the rolling hills.  There are so many fieldstone buildings.”  Then, as an afterthought:  “What do you think of them?”

“I think the stones probably miss their natural habitat.”

“It must be nice here when the trees leaf out.”

“Soon after that it gets muggy.”

She cocks her head and scowls.  “Does anything at all please you?”

“I had a cat once.  She was all right.”

In the closed quarters of the car, I notice for the first time that Mindy emits the vague scent of lemons, which I find much better than the cloying floral smell that most perfumes possess.  She has the heat set low, but I press a button to open the window a crack and let in fresh air.

“Mind?”

“Go ahead.  I like it chilly.”

We come to a light.  She pauses, watching the traffic cross.  “You know, this thing with Uncle Gunnar has me so puzzled.  I can’t think of the answer, but there has to be a simple explanation.”

“Well, does he have Alzheimer’s or dementia or anything like that?”

She shakes her head.  “He’s a bright man, handsome and articulate.”

“Many people start out that way...”

She thinks it over.  “He can be a little dotty, I guess, like any person pushing ninety, but it’s nothing clinical, unless he took a bad turn recently.”

“Any reason he’d just split?”

“Not that I know of.”  She accelerates smoothly out of the light.

“Anything that would force him to run, maybe?  Or something that would tempt him, something worth running toward?”

“Un uh.  You’re talking like he’s gone.”

“Well, it looks like he stopped paying his bills.  That’s what a person might do if they took off for Mexico or something.  Less likely if they planned to come back.”  I don’t want to say that he could be dead, but I’m thinking it.

Mindy hangs her hands over the steering wheel and twists one of her opal rings.  “I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t pay his bills.  Maybe something got confused.”

I’m beginning to feel like the little Hispanic detective on Cold Case.  Then again, he’s only there to make the blonde look more beautiful.  “No immediate family, you said…”

“No.  He was married once, a long time ago, but she’s gone and they never had children.”

“Ah.  How’s he related to your family exactly?”

“He isn’t, not technically.  My mother and he were close friends.  They came from the same town, and Uncle Gunnar was always around when we were growing up.”

“So you drove all the way from Minnesota to help out a guy who isn’t even related to you?”

“You sound disapproving.  Why wouldn’t I?”

“He’s not really your uncle, that’s why.”

“Sometimes a person does something out of the goodness of their heart, that’s how I look at it.  He’s an old man and he needs help.”

“Half the world needs help.”

“Wouldn’t you help half the world if you could?”

“No.  Not even a quarter or an eighth.”

“You would so.”

“You grossly overestimate me, Mindy.”

We pull to a stop sign at the edge of Kennett Square.  There’s no one behind us.  Mindy puts the car into park and twists around in the seat, facing me.

“My father always told me I was a terrible judge of character.”

“Football Coach Eider?  There you go.  A wise man.”

“Actually?  He was an asshole.”

13.

Kennett Square is an old-fashioned small town of workaday shops and parallel main streets, State running one-way west from Route 1 and Cypress running one-way east.  A plug of neatly kept housing stock occupies about ten square blocks, fending off the occasional low-slung office building, and at the heart of the retail district stores and restaurants intended for locals jostle with more upscale efforts.  There’s no telling which of these will ultimately get elbowed aside, but one senses continual change in the air.  A generation ago, old-world craftsmen and their descendants filled the town.  Now you’re more likely to find a great soft taco than a spicy sausage, and Spanish signs hang over the community center and the local church.

The weakened orb of a late afternoon sun floats low in the sky when we pull to the curb on Meredith Street in front of Uncle Gunnar’s house, near the edge of town.  It's a small brick cottage with pea-green trim and a pillared front porch.  Along the sidewalks, day-labor types and housekeepers are trudging home, but there’s also evidence that other residents have managed to clamber their way into small-time entrepreneurship.  In fact, we park behind a red plumbing van on which the name Torres is painted with no great flair.  The license plate is from Delaware, though.

A narrow concrete walkway bisects Uncle Gunnar’s lawn.  Bleached by winter, the grass appears thickly knitted, trim and lifeless.  If it were spring, I can’t help wondering, we’d know immediately whether the man has also skipped out on his lawn service bill.  But the weeds have retreated fully by this time of year.

I turn to Mindy.  “You’ve been here before?”

“Yep.  But not for a while.”

We study the house from halfway up the walk, its windows in shadow under the porch overhang.  No lights appear to be on and the structure has an expectant feel, as if its owner will return from work at any minute or come straightaway to the window, aroused from an afternoon nap.  Uncle Gunnar should be out of town, of course, but so should the mortgage and phone bills be paid.  Therefore, something isn’t right.  Perhaps, if there’s an innocent explanation, Mindy just got some dates wrong with regard to her uncle’s whereabouts, but the foreclosure notice seemed legit to me, and the fact of it doesn’t fit with the way she described him.  Right now, in the miasma of free-floating uncertainty, Mindy looks like I feel: half afraid to go inside, half afraid to be embarrassed by our growing suspicions when Uncle Gunnar shows himself and wonders what the fuss was about.  We take a few tentative steps together, and my foot is on the verge of the first porch step when someone pokes out from behind the corner of the building.

Both of us catch a breath (I can hear Mindy gasp softly), and the man stops in his tracks, a Latino wearing Timberland work boots, soiled jeans, a heavy Carhartt jacket, and a look on his face like we just caught him with a hand in the empanada jar.  He’s clearly coming from the back of the house.  A surge of adrenaline rises in my chest and I tamp it down, not wishing to appear confrontational, and stride right over.  He takes a reluctant half step in my direction, so that we end up converging in the midst of the postage-stamp lawn.

“Hey, is Mr. Karlson home, do you know?”

He shakes his head, not meeting my eye.

“You work for Mr. Karlson?”

“Yes.  Plumber fixing.”  He has a heavy accent and his hair is mussed, stuck down with sweat at the temples.  He’s of medium build, thick hands, dark shifty eyes.  Maybe I could take him, I think, but it would be a tough fight.  Nevertheless, he shows no sign of seeking anything but escape.

Mindy comes forward.  “You’re frightening him, Phu.”

He’s not a pet kitten, I think.  He’s a grown person — a shifty-eyed person. When I turn back to her he starts moving again toward the truck.

Mindy calls after him.  “Have you seen my uncle?”

He twitches his head and reaches for the door handle.

I take a few quick strides to catch up.  “Hey!  The lady asked you a question.”

Mindy says, “We don’t mean you any harm.  We’re looking for my uncle, Gunnar Karlson.  Have you seen him this week at all?”

The man shakes his head with averted eyes and pops open the door of the plumbing van.

I step up and grab the forearm of his thick jacket as his right foot finds purchase inside.  My action twists him back slightly, forcing him to face me, but before I look into his eyes I scan his jacket for blood.  It’s soiled but not red.  He shrugs me off, more powerful than I expected, and pulls the van door closed from inside.  His window is open a crack, and he lowers it another couple inches as he cranks the ignition.

“No see.  No see.”

I’m already more involved than I planned to be, but I’m also familiar with the no-speaky-English play-dumb technique, and this guy’s intransigence doesn’t sit too well.  It’s a sign of disrespect that I can’t abide.

“Listen,” I say, reaching for the handle with one hand and into my pocket with the other.

He pushes down the door lock before I can get it open.

“Listen, roll down the window a bit more for a sec.”

He shakes his head.  “Have to go.”

“Well, if you happen to see him—”  I pull a business card quickly from my pocket and attempt to slot it through the top of the window, but it sticks less than halfway as he zips closed the window with the push of a button.  He makes no effort to deal with it, just looks from me to Mindy.  Then he pulls away from the curb, not in a screech of tires but purposefully, no tap on the breaks until he reaches the corner.

Mindy stares after him.  “That was plenty strange.”

We return to Uncle Gunnar’s porch, clanging the knocker that’s shaped like a pineapple and listening to its eerie echo off the wainscot ceiling.  We wait five minutes, looking from one another to the quiet neighborhood where occasionally a car passes, drivers paying no attention to us.

I try the doorknob and find it locked.  Mindy steps forward and raps with her knuckles on the nearest window, calling, “Uncle Gunnar!  Uncle Gunnar!  You in there?!”

He may be, I think to myself, picturing him with his skull bashed in by a cast iron plumbing pipe.  But when I shade my eyes and peer through a window into the dark house I see nothing but plain solid furniture and shadows.  In fact, the place appears to be entirely undisturbed.

Mindy stands in her leotard in uncomfortable silence, looking like a girl who’s left her coat in the school locker and just returned from dance class to find her parents away.  She screws up her face with uncertainty and worry, and it seems clear to me that her plan never went beyond a knock on Uncle Gunnar’s front door.

“You don’t have a key?”

“What good would it have done?” she snaps.  “He expected me to be in Minnesota and he’s closer to home from the Poconos than I am, isn’t he?”  She folds her arms across her chest, I assume because the cold has finally gotten through, but maybe it’s some other feeling creeping into her.

I cup one of her elbows with a hand and angle my face so our eyes meet.  Something’s come over me; I’m feeling chivalrous.

“There’s no point us both standing out here, Mindy.  You want to wait in the car while I look for a way in?”

She shakes her head.  “I’m all right.  Go.”

So I shove my hands into the pockets of my brown leather coat and walk around the outside of the house — counterclockwise and with deliberate steps.

Uncle Gunnar’s neighbors on either side and in back have fences, but he doesn’t.  I like the prudence of this: why pay money for a benefit that you’re already receiving for free?  The outdoors of his small property consists mostly of closely cropped lawn and a few bushes allowed to achieve their natural shapes, though there’s evidence of judicious pruning.  Near the northeast corner, a trellised wooden box encloses two clean plastic trash bins.  I open the slanted top and lift the lids off the bins one at a time, but find them empty.

In back, there’s a small poured concrete patio with a red Smokey Joe grill and some black wrought iron furniture under canvas covers.  Though it hasn’t rained for a week, puddles weigh on the depressions.  The water splatters as I tilt each of the chairs to examine them without having to fuss with the covers.  I find nothing but cobwebs and the remains of some kind of critter nest — the anonymous little creatures smart enough to seek better shelter as winter tightened its grip, no doubt.  The Smokey Joe shows signs of prior use and has a patina of rust inside, but someone has taken the trouble to remove the used charcoal ashes.  There’s a sliding door from the dining room to the patio, and it budges just enough to let me know that it’s locked.  On the shady side of the house, the steel Bilco door is also closed and padlocked, a firm tug doing nothing but jar my chilled joints from wrist to elbow.

When I return to the front of the house, Mindy is pushing back and forth gently on the porch glider.    She turns to me.  “What’d you find?”

“No sign of anything.  The doors are locked tight.”

“You tried the windows?”

This detective stuff is harder than it looks.  “I didn’t think of that.  Be right back.”

Mindy smiles and I start out again the same way, pausing at each ground-level window, forcing the screens aside and pushing up and down on the sashes to no effect.  On the south side of the house, the setting sun fights through nearby obstructions to throw yellow rhomboids across the brick and trim, like shapes in a geometric puzzle.  The afternoon is waning and I’m losing patience.

I spot a garden hose wound around a spindle.  It’s disconnected from the spigot, but an aluminum sprayer remains attached to the working end.  I mangle one screen and unravel about six feet of hose and swing the sprayer like a lasso at the window, shattering a couple of panes.  Elevating with the help of a nearby air conditioning compressor, I use my elbow to punch out the remains of the broken glass, reach through to unlock the window from the inside, and attempt to throw open the sash, but it’s painted shut.  So I balance between the compressor and the windowsill and splinter the mullions with the heel of my shoe and then go headfirst through the opening, flopping onto a kitchen counter and from there onto the floor.

Broken glass crunches underfoot and I observe that I tore a nice gash in my leather coat sleeve, but I’m in.  Through the front hall window, I see Mindy still on the porch, gliding back and forth with her hands sandwiched between her knees.  She jumps up when I pull open the door.

“Madam, I’m Adam.”

“You did it!”

“Not without a certain amount of violence.”  I pull at the tear in my sleeve as she steps inside.

The air is musty and fusty, permeated by essence of geriatric, and every step of mine feels like a violation of someone’s privacy, probably because it is.

We get to the kitchen and Mindy’s hand goes to her mouth and she says, “Who made this mess!”

I furrow my brow.  “What’d you think, I went down the chimney?”

We undertake a cursory appraisal of each room in silence, the backs of our necks gone to goose pimples and it isn’t the draft — we’re expecting a body.  But the rooms are neat and clean, no gaseous corpses or blood-splattered walls.  It’s a small two-bedroom house and this review doesn’t take long.  We end up back in the kitchen, gaping at one another in puzzlement, palms upturned.

“Now what?” Mindy says.

“As if I know.”

She’s in silhouette, the low-angled sun sketching her outline so finely that in a photo you might think she’s nude.  I look between her legs and say, “Don’t move!”  Her thighs and calves are like brackets, and I don’t want to lose the glimpse of what I’ve seen in between.  I approach cautiously, crouching as I go, then working around her left hip, staring at that area of the hardwood floor in the dining room behind her.

“What, Phu?  What?”

“There’s something about the pattern of dust on the floor.”  The dying sun illuminates it.  “Step around.  See here?”

You can only discern it from a certain angle, where the sun’s rays hit the settled dust motes just right — a pattern of disturbance that didn’t get there by chance.

As Mindy steps gingerly aside, I flatten my chin, struggling to analyze it.  There’s a swirl in the dust, then a pair of tracks leading in parallel to the sliding door.

“Somebody’s been here,” I observe, thinking of Torres.  “And he removed something on a hand truck or by some other means that would leave a track like that.  See?”

Mindy nods and her eyebrows narrow.

I fold my arms across my chest, feeling greatly satisfied to have my powers of deduction on such glorious display.

The confidence that I project only encourages Mindy, who looks at me now as if I’ll next produce her uncle from behind a hidden door in the adjoining room.  In reality, I don’t have an inkling of where to go from here.  I’m still only the same guy I was a minute ago, a debt negotiator who knows better how to work a phone than a case.

Mindy and I lock eyes, and I feel something that resembles a tug in my chest.  It’s the kind of force, I suspect, that promulgates both great discoveries and great fiascos.  But, before it does either of those things, that force must first drive an unsuspecting man from the comfort of his cave to that mysterious place you don’t find on any map: the Point of No Return.

I’m not going to that Point, I tell myself.  I’m not going there.  I’m not going there. But I’m not ready to leave Gunnar Karlson’s house just yet, either.

14.

“Think.  What might your uncle own that would require a hand cart to get out of here?”

Mindy shakes her head and throws up her hands.

“Something heavy,” I persist.  “A piece of furniture, a safe, a collection in a box, a large urn or sculpture perhaps?”  I’m grasping at straws.

“You’re grasping at straws,” Mindy says.

“I was just thinking that.”

“He’s an old man of modest means, not wealthy.  Look at this place!”

You can practically see the whole house from the kitchen doorway.  The furniture is mostly pine with a honey finish, unfussy but well kept and arranged without clutter, though a thin layer of dust clings to everything.  A variety of framed pictures fills the walls, but nothing downstairs that grabs my attention.  The upholstery in the living room is understated and well broken in, not shoddy.

Mindy lifts the portable phone from its cradle on the kitchen wall and presses a button.  “Dead.”  She shrugs.

“Isn’t that what brought us here?”

“Sure, but you never know.”

I look out at the patio and lawn for signs of hand-truck tracks, but don’t see any.  The sun is now disappearing rapidly behind nearby trees, casting the yard in deep shadow.

Mindy, for lack of a better thing to do, pulls open a pair of kitchen cabinet doors, revealing a modest collection of spices.  She pries the plastic top off a coffee can and sniffs like a connoisseur, then puts it away.  “I can’t tell how fresh that is.  We should examine things more carefully.  Maybe we’ll find a clue.”

It’s getting gloomy inside.  She goes to throw a switch and I stop her.  “We’re trespassing, remember?”  I look at the shattered window, paranoia creeping in.  “Someone on the street might see the light.”

We follow one another from room to room in the growing dimness.

“I don’t suppose you have a flashlight in the car.”

She shakes her head, but I find one in a drawer in the front hall.  Its battery is almost dead, the beam diffuse and nearly amber.

The main floor of the house consists of a small living room and study at the front (each with brick fireplace), in addition to the kitchen, dining room and front entrance hall.  Upstairs are two bedrooms with separate baths.  I open a closet in the room where Uncle Gunnar appears to sleep.  It smells vaguely of camphor, and it’s well stocked and neat, sensible shoes lined up like soldiers, sports jackets facing all in the same direction, left shoulder out.  On the floor, oddly, he also has a collection of four or five unbranded stainless steel canisters, presumably thermoses for coffee or tea.

“I guess the man likes his cup of mud,” I say.

I don’t touch anything.  Add up the dim flashlight beam in the growing dark, the draft you can feel even upstairs from the broken window, and the circumstance of a person who’s starting to seem not just gone but missing — and the place begins to feel even more creepy than it did at first.  In addition, we’re amateurs — so the search is less than thorough.

I do get a sense of Uncle Gunnar from some of the items in his bedroom: a bottle of absinthe on a tray on the dresser with slotted silver spoon and small Venetian-style glasses, detailed paintings of flowers, a few beautiful abstract photos that appear to have been hand colored, a couple of plaques on the walls from his army days and with appreciation from a drug company where it seems he once worked.  I peer into one of the complex and strangely beautiful photographs, trying to make out the details in poor light.

“What did your uncle do before he retired?”

“He was a pharmacologist, hardly likely to leave treasure lying around.”

We shuffle into the guest room, which feels equally abandoned but yet recently lived in.  Mindy opens the closet and we both stare unfruitfully.  The clothes seem younger.  There’s a pair of sneakers on the floor that remind me of the ones Terrance and his friend wore, though not quite the same color scheme.  I think of Penny and the repo men.

“There are no televisions.  Maybe they took those — whoever they is.”

Mindy shakes her head.  “Uncle Gunnar doesn’t watch T.V.  He reads and throws the books and magazines away when he’s done.  He’s not a hoarder like so many old folks.”

Indeed, there are only a few volumes scattered about the house.

“What does he do for hobbies?”

“I don’t know.  Art.  Photography.  A little gardening.  He likes to travel.”

“Maybe they stole his camera, but you wouldn’t need a hand truck to get that out of here.”

Mindy shrugs for the umpteenth time.  “I’m out of ideas.”  As if she’d contributed any.  “I have to use the loo.”

She ducks into the bathroom and I go downstairs and pull the curtains back on a couple of covered terrariums that stand in one interior corner of the living room.  While I wait, I pass the time shining the flashlight into the murky corners.  Pulverized straw coats much of the bottoms.  Also wood chips, what appears to be leaf litter, and some unidentifiable organic matter.  Atop all that stuff, in various shapes and sizes, grow gaggles of mushrooms.

Bent over, immersed, I’ve almost lost myself in this diminutive Tolkien-like environment when I see something else in there — the carcass of what looks like a half-buried mouse, a profusion of mushrooms sprouting from its rotting flesh.  It’s like a miniature monument to the cruelty of the world, I think.  The poor little fellow must’ve died of starvation waiting for Uncle Gunnar to return, and now he’s food for something else.

Mindy appears just then, disrupting my reverie, but I’m still carrying that notion as we walk out the front door and let it click closed behind us.  Without a key, we can’t do anything about the dead bolt, but the knob is locked.

We’re halfway down the steps when the headlights of a passing car sweep by, illuminating a stark-white item tucked into a crack of the porch railing.

“You see that?”

Mindy shakes her head as I backtrack.

The item in the railing is a small piece of stiff white paper poking up at an angle.  It’s a business card, and I lift it to eye level.  The car headlights have passed and there’s no light shining on Uncle Gunnar’s porch, but even in the dark I recognize the thing immediately.  It advertises the services of a certain debt negotiator – Phuoc Goldberg of Wilmington, Delaware, to be precise – his luck gone so cold that even a business card stuck in a van window finds its way back to him with little promise.

15.

Half an hour later, Mindy drops me at my office.  On my desk I find Sergeant Rufus Buxton’s card, city police seal and all the rest, the bottom edge of it lined up perfectly with the edge of the desk and square to my chair.  It’s that kind of week, I guess, business cards papering the town — a portent, I hope, of some revenue for CPR Debt Relief, but more likely presage to an escalating series of pains in my derriere.

Buxton left no note, but his message seems clear to me.  I tend to resist authority, however, so I resolve not to call Penny until day after tomorrow at the earliest.  Instead, I futz around for a few hours with meaningless paperwork, surf the Internet, and finally close up for the night and head to a bar downtown that I understand goes lesbian after nine.

It’s 9:30 when I arrive, and I’m not disappointed.  The lesbians are streaming in, groups of three or four women at a time, some looking very feminine and others, well, less so.  The bar has tables along one paneled wall, posters of buff chicks in action films clipped over whatever normally hangs there, and soft indirect lighting that prisms from hot pink to deep mauve and back without achieving other colors.  There’s a deliciously weird vibe from the growing crowd, and I’m lucky to claim the last open stool at the bar.

The bartender, who falls somewhere on the sexual continuum between Melissa Etheridge and Ellen DeGeneres, is a clean-cut brunette in black jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt that shows off her relative lack of breasts.  She has eight piercings in each ear and invites my aggression by throwing me the hairy eyeball, smirking and casting her gaze around for support, as if to say, “Which one of you losers ordered the Vietnamese pork?”  I’m sure I could take her in a test of fisticuffs, if she wants to prove her manhood, though she’s probably a hair-puller and I’d have to watch out for those two spiky rings on her left hand.

After the initial look of contempt, she does her best to ignore me for a good ten minutes, and the lack of a beer-bottle crutch leaves me nothing to do with my hands when I’m done playing busy with my iPhone.  So when she finishes serving the standing women who squeezed in behind me, I firmly tap her forearm before she can execute a full retreat.

“Miss!”

“Please don’t touch the bartender.”

“There’s a bartender here?  Great.  All I saw was barmaids.”

She wipes the area in front of me like she’s trying to get the paint to peel.  “You sure you’re in the right place?”

“Why are you saying that — because I’m an Asian American?”

“Ho ho ho.  You know why I’m saying it.”

“I’ll take a Dogfish Head pint, please.”

She pours me one and sets it down on a cardboard coaster that has a two-color picture of Angelina Jolie armed with a machine gun, sweat flying strategically.  In action movies, of course, you can spray all the bullets you want and never incur collateral damage.  But in the real world, it seems to me, every misstep creates a cascade of victims.

Chin tucked against my sternum, I stare hard into the speckled foam of my pint, watching the bubbles die.   And a question wafts up: was that dead mouse in the terrarium a pet of Gunnar Karlson’s or did it fall into the tank and fail to claw its way out?  It makes a difference because in the second instance one might dismiss the death as an accident of fate, but in the first it’s more like neglect, and not of the benign variety either.  A third possibility occurs to me.  What if Torres took the mouse from its nest in the patio chair and tossed it into the terrarium, leaving it to die days before we saw him?  But why would a person do a thing like that?

I take a long swig from my glass, leaving a foam stain on the rim.  In the car on the way home, I’d started to tell Mindy about the mouse but stopped myself.  Torres…the swirl in the dust…my card mysteriously returned to me…it seemed like more than enough for the poor woman to process about her wayward so-called uncle.  We ended up talking about nothing that we’d seen at the Karlson house, as if we were both too afraid to contemplate the possibilities.  Or maybe we’d just tired of having our suspicions consume us.

After the second beer, I request a menu.  The bartender practically throws it at me, and I begin to believe a chance may soon arrive to vent some steam, the chance that I never found in that biker bar the other night.  Not that I expect to perpetrate violence on a woman, mind you, but I figure maybe there’s a good heated argument in the offing.

When the bartender returns, I slide the menu over the maraschino cherry receptacle and say, “I’ll have the hotdog, grilled onions on the side.”

“Did you see a hotdog on the menu?”

“Now that you mention it, no.  Corn on the cob, then.”

“What the hell is your problem?”

“Large sausage for the main course with a larger zucchini as appetizer.”

“Phalluses, I get it.  You’re baiting me.”  She smiles for the first time.  “Don’t you feel a little out of place?”

“You asked already.  I feel as well placed as a tree in the desert, to tell you the truth, but that statement probably applies when I’m anywhere within a thousand-mile radius of this place.”

She spreads her hands on the bar.  “So why not strike out for other parts, go somewhere you fit in?”

“Let me know when you find it.”

She humphs in sympathy, which encourages me more than it ought to.  “Besides,” I add, “I can’t let them win.”

“Them?  Oh, them.”  A light comes into her eyes and she leans toward me with a conspiratorial air.  “Y’know, you remind me of my brother.”

I nod with recognition.  “Half-brother?  Pissed-off Asian dude, by any chance?”

“No.”  She clears the hair from her eyes with a jerk of the head.  “Tough little guy with a big heart, actually.  He eats cheeseburgers.  That’s what I’m bringing you.  And the next beer’s on the house.”

Killing me with kindness, the bitch.

There’s a website called angryasianman.com.  Last time I looked, if you click on the About page the founder begins with the statement, “I’m not as angry as you think.”  Honest to God, someone needs to give that boy lessons in anger mismanagement.  Yet here am I, knuckles almost healed on my left hand and the edge I carried taken off by nothing more than a free beer and a few smiles from a militant lesbian.  Or have I allowed thoughts of Mindy and Uncle Gunnar and dead mice to distract me from older habits of mind?  I’m thinking about that when the cheeseburger arrives, thick cheddar on top and burnt around the edges, just as I like it.

The bartender swings back.  “So?”

“As good as a hotdog, damn you.  I go in peace.”

16.

Mindy’s Volvo is parked in the small lot when I pull into a spot with my Mini the next morning.  By the time I’ve yanked the handbrake into place, she’s out of the car, looking anxious and voluptuous in a brown loungewear outfit that could make Larry Flynt rise and walk.  She follows me up to my office and takes one of two pieces of candy left in the bowl.

“Who ate all of these?”

“You did.”  I set my coat down.

She savors every smack of her tongue and swallows as she settles into the guest chair.

“So here’s the thing.  I went this morning to the Kennett Square police station to file a missing persons report.  I did the whole form until I got to a section called PLS — place last seen — filled that in, and then they had a follow-up question, which was whether there were any signs of forced entry at the PLS.”  She sucks her teeth a little, probably still tasting the candy, but not concentrating on it.  “Well, I couldn’t do that part without being dishonest, so I crumpled it up and left the building.”

I sit up.  “I don’t understand.  What was the location you last saw him?”

“Uncle Gunnar’s house, last year some time.”

“You could put that.”

She shakes her head slowly, lip trembling, jaw thrust forward.  “We broke into the place, Phu.  That’s illegal.”

“But it wasn’t the day he disappeared.”

“And how are we going to prove that?”

I choose to contemplate that one in silence.

Mindy says, “We need to figure out our next move.”

“We?  What do you mean — we?”

“Do you know any cops we could trust, who would understand that we only broke in because we were so desperate to find Uncle Gunnar?”

“You were desperate.”  I look at her.  “I was helping.”

“Well, I’m not the one who busted the window, climbed through and opened the front door from the inside, calling himself Adam.”

“It was a joke in the form of a palindrome.”

“The police won’t be laughing.  Do you know anyone or not?”

The only cop who comes to mind is Sergeant Rufus Buxton.  “There’s one guy.”  I hesitate.  “Met him the other day, but there’s a complication.”

“How come with you there’s always a complication?”

“I dunno.  Because life is complicated.  He’s in the wrong jurisdiction, for one thing, and I can’t call him right now because I owe him a favor, not the other way around.”

“What kind of favor?”  She cocks an ear.

So I tell her about Terrance and Penny and how I made the call to the rent-to-buy but failed to follow up with Penny.

“That’s simple,” Mindy says, standing up.  “We’ll pay off the couch.”

I shake my head.  “It’s not our obligation.  It’s Penny’s.”

Mindy tightens her lips.  “If you don’t want to do it, Phu, then I will.”

“Listen,” I begin, “I’m an authority on this subject...”  I don’t make this claim by accident.  Authority is one of the great human motivators, which is why testament from a real doctor trumps testament from an actor who plays one on TV.  I point to the framed calligraphy on my wall for emphasis.  “I’m a certified financial planner and a graduate of the Financial Counseling Certification Program.  I know what’s best for people in debt up to their eyeballs, and having a friend pay for their couch is not on the list.”

Mindy picks up her purse and slings the strap over her shoulder.  “I’m not her friend.  She doesn’t even know me.  And you’re not her friend, either.  That seems pretty obvious.”

My chair creaks.  “I don’t like the implications of that tone of voice.  I can’t very well pay off every client’s debts.  I’d go bankrupt myself.”

“She’s got kids, you said, nephews!”

So naive, I’m thinking.  I don’t want to talk down to her, but the bile is rising in my throat.  “You’re not hearing what I’m telling you, Mindy.  I.  Know. These.  People.”

Ignoring me: “Who does she owe?”

“She owes everyone!”

“Who does she owe for the couch?”

Penny’s file rests between us on the desk.  It has a duplicate sheet of the form I filled out for her — on which I’ve taken some additional notes — stapled to the top of the folder.

“The couch doesn’t mean anything.”  I pick up the folder and gesture with my free hand for emphasis, pretending to read.  “Yesterday it was the television, today it’s the couch, tomorrow maybe the oil company, then the electric bill and the car and the house, in an endless cascade.  That’s how all these characters work.  They’re not behind the curve — they’re flatlined!”

We lock eyes and I see in that instant that I’m not going to prevail upon her.  My argument would have to include the whole universe, it would have to incorporate the Cenozoic Era, retrace mammalian history, cite every contributor to the literature of personal responsibility from Plato to Charles Darwin to Suze Orman, and that would take more time than either of us has left on earth.

Mindy sets her teeth and narrows her eyes at me.  She reaches out, and I presume she’s going for the last piece of candy, but she has a sweeter exclamation point in mind.  She snatches the top sheet from Penny’s file, tearing it at the staple, turns without saying another word, and storms from my office.

This is the part where Professor Henry Higgins utters some epithet along the lines of, “Infernal woman!”  But I am stymied.

A moment later I hear the car door slam outside.

In frustration, I throw Penny’s thin file into the wall across the room.  It’s so light that it opens like a bird’s wings before it hits, fluttering without harm to the floor, denying me the satisfying sound effect.  I kick the arm of my chair and then walk over and pick up the few pieces of paper.  I smack the file back down on the desktop, feeling the breeze it creates sweep through my hair.  I bury my face in my hands, stand up, pace to the corner and back, stare at the file, then sit down again.

Next, of course, I call Penny Jones.

It rings three times and a deep voice answers with some kind of one-syllable version of “hello,” as if the greeting doesn’t rate a second vowel.  Or, as is more likely the case, the person answering is a teenager who simply can’t be bothered to open his mouth all the way.

“Is Ms. Jones home, please?”

“She in the bathroom.”

The kid spoke four words and already he’s giving up too much information.  “Will she be long?”

“Nah.”

“Who’s this?” I ask.

“Terrance.  Who you?”

I run my tongue across my front teeth.  “Terrance, how you doing?  This is Phu Goldberg.”

“Oh.”

“How’s that lip feeling?”

“Not as good as before I met you.”

“Hey, shouldn’t you be in school?”

“Home sick.  On account of—”

“Yeah.”  An awkward silence follows, Terrance probably carrying a jones for the apology he isn’t going to get, me wondering whether he’ll learn the lesson of choosing his friends more wisely.  “Well, it was good you gave your aunt my card.  I’ve managed to help her.”

“You got the TV back?”

“Not exactly.”

“Oh.”  He’s unable to disguise his disappointment — or maybe he prefers to lay it on me thick.  A voice in the background fades in.  “She here now.”

They exchange a few words.

“This is Penelope Jones.”  Once again, the formal tone used as a shield from further harm.

“Hi, it’s Phu Goldberg.  I’m calling with some good news.”  I picture Mindy driving around Wilmington — no navigation system in the car — stopping every five minutes in gas stations for directions to Penny’s place.  “And, in addition, I have some really good news.”

“Is that right?”

I relate my conversation with the guy at Bucky’s Rent-to-Own, leaving out the banter and the fact that I let more than twenty-four hours pass before informing her.  “That’s the plain vanilla good news.”

She releases an audible sigh.

“The really good news is that a friend of mine, Mindy Eider, has agreed to pay the three-hundred-dollar settlement for the couch out of her own pocket.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I don’t kid about things of this nature.  She’s on her way over there right now with the money.”

“Lord have mercy.”

“It may take her a while.  She’s not from around here.”

Penny pauses, gathering her thoughts.  “I don’t know how to thank you, Mr. Goldberg.  Honestly, I left your place with the feeling you wouldn’t come through, certainly not this level of generosity.  You don’t know how much this means to me and the children.  I — I’m overcome.”

“Yeah, well, look out for Mindy.  She should be there any minute — brunette in a brown outfit of some kind.  Not from around here.”

I’m stumbling and repeating myself because, to my great embarrassment, Penny Jones has begun to blubber with gratitude.

17.

Penny’s response to my apparent generosity continues to unsettle me, and I spend a long time staring into the cut-crystal bowl on my desk, where a single piece of candy and some chocolate crumbs remain.  After a while, though, I rouse myself from this unproductive funk.  Over the course of the next hour, I conclude the few items of business that remain from earlier clients, but that only serves to make me more aware of the fact that I’m down to my last two: a charity case and one where I’ve no authorization to take any action.

Sometimes the cold-call list looks like a sheer ice face with no toe-holds, and this is one of those days.  I pick up the paper three times and set it back down again without dialing a single number.  And I think:Where the hell could Mindy be, anyway? I envision her dead by the side of the road, victim of a mugging gone postal when she started giggling at the perpetrator or couldn’t locate her wallet in that giant purse of hers.

On the presumption that that’s a paranoid delusion, I head downstairs to replenish the candy stock of my only paying customer, who’s clearly a heavy user and may be hungry if she returns alive.

Tabitha is giving change to a woman when I enter, the computerized cash register doing electronic ding-dong noises.

“Ah,” I say as the woman leaves, “the sound of money being made.  Music to my ears.”

Tabitha looks down upon me, unsmiling.  “I don’t see why.  It’s not your money.”

“It’s an inspiration, that’s all.  What’s with the fret?”

She steps back into her office and emerges with my mail, Sergeant Buxton’s card pressed into the top of the pile with a bony thumb.  “The Law is after you.”

I turn it over: no writing on the back.  “Did he attach a note?”

“Do you see one?”

“A verbal message?”

Too-Tall shakes her head.

“Jesus!” I cry.  “Why can’t this guy leave a voicemail like a normal person?”

Tabitha puts a hand on her hip.  “Are you in trouble, Phu?”

“Nah.”  I flip through the mail, finding nothing of importance.  “I owed him a favor yesterday, but today it’s resolved.  With a bonus, even.  We’re more than square.”

The phone rings and Tabitha takes out an order book.  She pages through it and removes a slip, scribbling some notes as a quick conversation ensues.  She returns her attention to me almost apologetically.  “You know, Phu, Brad and I still have a thing about the establishment.  It may sound crazy with the lives we lead, all the stuff we have, but deep down we still imagine ourselves a couple of hippies, smoking grass in the Haight.  You find yourself in any serious trouble, I hope you’ll let us know before it gets out of hand.”

“Me?  Trouble?  I told you what happened.  I had to defend myself in the street and made Sergeant Buxton’s acquaintance.  He let me go, but called in the favor right away.  This card’s just a reminder, and I dealt with it already.  The way you’re talking, someone might think Brad is cooking up hash brownies for the Girl Scouts.  You have your own secrets to share?”

“Not on your life.  We’re mainstream these days and plan to stay that way.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry.  Whether Buxton drops in again or not, he now has me confused with one of the good guys.”

Tabitha reaches under the counter and walks around me with a spray bottle in one hand and a pink dust rag in the other.  She peers at the glass case with a frown, spritzes the fingerprints and wipes.

With her body folded in half, I have the rare opportunity to talk over her shoulder.  “Did the sergeant buy anything when he was in here?”

“Not really.”  The rag squeaks against the glass.  “I comped him some broken macaroon cookies.  Mocha cream filling.”

I lift an eyebrow.  “Graft, huh?  I like it.  What do you have in your brown bag of sugary tricks today?”

Tabitha turns around and straightens up.  “Out of your stash already?  Are you breaking into good habits behind my back, Too-Phu?”

“No, ma’am.  A new client of mine has a sweet tooth is all.”

“New client?”  She opens her mouth wide and pushes me in the chest.  “Don’t tell me it’s Pollyanna from Peoria!”

“Minneapolis, actually.”

Tabitha stows her cleaning supplies.  “She stopped in and bought some stuff recently, your friend.  Wiped me out of the free samples, too, while she was at it.  She mentioned you.”

“What’d she say?”

“Oh, no you don’t.  That’s between us girls.”

“I thought you wished to be known as women.”

“We’re girls when we wanna be.”

“How convenient.”  I roll my eyes.  “Are you gonna fork over the chocolates, or what?”

Tabitha washes her hands in a small utility sink behind the counter and turns back to me, shaking her head.  “We’re plumb out of remainders.  Come back tomorrow.”

Affecting nonchalance, I look into the case and point to some luscious bonbons.  “The Papa Cherries look good.  Can you individually wrap those?”

Tabitha closes her eyes and smiles like a person in the act of having her palate tickled.  “Whipped cherry ganache covered in six wafer-thin layers of light and dark chocolate, coated with a succulent sprinkling of cocoa nibs.”  She drops the smile.  “They’re out of your price range.”

“Can you loan me one or two?”

“Brad got the recipe from a chef in Bruges, Belgium.  We don’t do deals for those.  They’re not candy — they’re a sacred trust.”

“You sold me.  Just this once, I’ll take, say, half a dozen.”

She freezes in feigned shock, then rushes to the kitchen door.  “Brad, come quick!  I think our tenant’s running a fever!”

When they finish mocking me, I head upstairs and toss the mail away.  I’m standing in the doorway, turning Buxton’s card over in my hand, when Mindy floats up the stairs.

She looks at the card and her eyes go enthusiastic.  “So your cop friend’s gonna help us?”

“I didn’t say that.”  I shake the bonbons into the bowl and Mindy pounces before they settle.  I hold up a hand.  “Careful there.  They bruise easily.”

She nibbles one delicately at first and then shoves the whole thing into her cake hole.  “Mmm.  Wrorw.”

“Take your time, would ya!  They’re premium.”

“For these, I’d pay extra.  Did you call your cop friend already?”

“I — I was about to.”

I dial, but it rings to the station house and he’s not there.  I set the phone down.  “They said he’d call back.  Buy you a hotdog while we wait?”

Mindy shakes her head.  “Are you crazy?  I can’t eat hotdogs every day, I’ll blow up like a balloon.”

“But the chocolate…”

“That’s always worth it.  Now I do need some real lunch.  Protein.  And not the kind that comes from a feedlot.”

There’s a diner up the road.  We take a short ride with me driving the Mini, then settle into a booth at the Golden Castle.  I order a hotdog, split and grilled, french fries with gravy, and a large vanilla milkshake.  Mindy gets tuna salad on lettuce with a lemon iced tea.

“Penny Jones is a real sad story,” she says, extending her lower lip.

“Is that right?  Let me tune up my violin.”

“Have you been to her house?”

“No.”

“She’s really down on her luck.”

“All my clients are.  It’s amazing.  Warren Buffett never calls me.”

Mindy picks at her tuna.  “This is serious, Phu.  She’s got all kinds of health problems, wouldn’t tell me exactly, but she’ll need an operation soon and she says Medicaid may not cover it.  She—  Why are you smiling?”

“I knew this would happen.  The woman saw you coming.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.  Teach a man to take your fish and pretty soon he wants the whole damn boat.”

She looks off into space, then back at me.  “Fish is expensive.  I’d bet they’re not eating enough of it in that household.”

“Oh-kay…”  My hotdog long gone, I sop up the last of the gravy with a soggy fry.  “Lemme ask you something, how do you think Penny got that big?”

“You mean her weight?”

I pop the fry into my mouth and nod.  “Her obesity.  That’s exactly what I mean.  You think you can eat like a normal person and maintain that girth?”

“What does a normal person eat?  Do you eat like a normal person?”

“Probably not.”

“So you can’t judge from appearances.  She could be starving for all you know.”

“If she’s starving, someone forgot to tell her thighs.”

“That’s cruel!”

“The point, Mindy, is that we don’t know what came first, being fat or stuffing herself fat.  In the same way, we don’t know whether she’s down on her luck financially or she made her bad luck all by herself.”

She weaves an empty yellow Splenda packet among the tines of her fork and watches it curl.  “In the back of Penny’s house, there’s a hole in the plaster where a wicked draft comes in.  They have a blanket over it, no real insulation, can you imagine?  A blanket like you’d use for a baby.”

“She needs lessons from you on how to handle the cold, then, until she gets herself a job, at least.  She hasn’t worked in three years, if I recall.”  I look from my crumbs to her salad.  The lettuce is wilting in sympathy.  “Say, while we’re on the subject, you never mentioned what you’re having a sabbatical from.”

“Me?”

“Your day job.”  I slurp up the dregs of my milkshake with the tip of a striped straw, lifting my eyes back to Mindy as I do so.

The corners of her mouth have risen, a smile of pleasant recollection.  “I love my job.  I’m an elementary school teacher.”

“Elementary?”

She nods.  “First and second grade.  Why do you ask?”

“Just curious.”  I wave for the check.  “But now that I know, it explains a lot.”

 

 

18.

 

The cell phone didn’t ring over lunch, so when we return to my office I check messages, but the sergeant hasn’t called that number either.  Mindy extracts an instrument from her purse and buffs a nail with nervous energy.

I take out my blue stress ball and begin bouncing it off the wall, aiming for a spot I’ve chosen right in the middle, a pimple in the paint.  Mindy bites the edge of a fingernail, stares at it, resumes buffing.  I miss the pimple by a good inch, catch the ball and turn to her.

“How did it come to this thing,” I wonder aloud, “this arrangement whereby you’re responsible and all, but don’t have the means to get in touch with your uncle in an emergency?”

She pauses in her buffing and looks at me.  “I didn’t think to ask for a number to the place in the Poconos, and I guess Uncle Gunnar discouraged it, not wanting to be disturbed.  He doesn’t have a cell phone, as far as I know.  It’s just a quick trip — I mean, I understand that five or six weeks isn’t a short vacation for most people, but he’s an old man, not much happening in the dead of winter, and the days always flew by so fast in the past...”

“It’s going on eight weeks now, isn’t it?”

“He’s never been a stickler for time.”

I respond with silence.

Mindy adds as an afterthought, “He’s a long-time bachelor.”

“Even bachelors have connections.  This thing he’s done, it’s not a normal way to do things.”

She narrows her eyes.  “First you’re all over Penny about how normal her diet is or isn’t.  Now it’s Uncle Gunnar.  You’re obsessed with normality.  Define normal.”

“Normal.  Responsible.”

“Is it responsible for a grown man to punch a boy in the mouth out on the street?”

“Look, you don’t just fall off the planet, even an old bachelor.  You don’t leave behind a niece — or whatever you are — who might worry about you if she feels she needs to get in touch.  I mean, even these people who sail solo around the world have a radio where loved ones can reach them.”

“Do they?  They’re in the middle of the Pacific and they’re chatting on the phone?  I hadn’t thought of that.  But Uncle Gunnar’s not that way.  He’s the quiet type.  I don’t think he expected I’d have cause to worry.  He just went on vacation.  What was going to happen?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”  Still looking at her, I rest my wrist on the desk and dribble the ball in the cage of my fingertips.  Tum-tum-tum-tum. “The house burns down, say, or the pipes burst.  High winds.  Flooding.  Nuclear holocaust.”  Tum-tum-tum-tum. “Here’s one that would be a pisser: he forgets to pay the mortgage and the bank forecloses while he’s away!”

Tum-tum. I press my fingers into the ball.

Mindy gathers her thoughts.  She scrunches up her nose and puts the buffing tool back in her purse.  “Next year,” she says, “I’ll get him to give me the name of the hotel, at least.  Does that make you happy?”

Whether she’s fooling me or fooling herself, Mindy seems reluctant to acknowledge that there may be no need for future plans with regard to Uncle Gunnar – that maybe he’s gone for good.  Who am I to tell her otherwise?

“Well,” I conclude, “at least the county sheriff will have as much trouble running him down as we will.”

“The sheriff?  What’s he got to do with anything?”

“I don’t know what the law is in Minnesota, but in Pennsylvania foreclosures follow a highly regulated procedure.  If the bank goes forward with a foreclosure, as they’re threatening to do, they’ll ask the sheriff to serve a complaint against Uncle Gunnar.  But they have to do it in person.”

“What if they don’t find him?”

“It certainly complicates matters.  I’m not sure how they’d follow up.  In my experience, the person who’s losing his house has always been living in it still.  The guy from the sheriff’s office knocks on the door.  The door gets answered, an envelope is placed in the poor schmo’s hand.  Bingo!  He’s been served.  If he’s not home, the guy from the sheriff’s office comes back later.  But Uncle Gunnar’s been gone a really long time.”

We search each other’s faces.  Even if Mindy won’t concede the worst, there hovers between us an unspoken sense, the sense that the legal calendar isn’t as relevant to Uncle Gunnar’s case as we’d like to believe, that time isn’t his ally right now and may never be so again.  He’s two weeks overdue, according to Mindy’s most liberal calculations.  And, though she hasn’t said as much, a certain staleness has crept into his absence.

We sit uneasily for an hour longer in my office, staring at the phone as if a call from Sergeant Buxton will somehow rescue the situation.  As if a guy on the Wilmington police force has any reason to care about an old man who wandered off in a neighboring state, leaving behind no ticking time bomb and no sign of foul play, save for a window I broke and a few swirls in the dust.  But for Mindy the moment has taken on an air of vigil, and she looks as if she’s prepared to sit here all day, with little appreciation for the fact that I may have other things to do.

I stow my overworked stress ball in the desk drawer and open Gunnar Karlson’s file and peer at the foreclosure notice.

“This thing’s a month old.”

“I got it last week,” Mindy admits.  “I didn’t come right away.”

“So it took two weeks for a piece of forwarded mail to travel a thousand miles.  God bless the U.S. Postal Service!  This delay puts the sheriff’s notice that much closer.”  I pause.  “Tell you what, Mindy.  What do you say we take a ride to that bank?”

“Bank?”

“The one that’s looking for its house back.”

“That’s a great idea!”

As she brightens I cell-phone Google the driving directions.  A few minutes later we climb into my yellow Mini and zip away.

Mindy leans back on the headrest and gazes around the black interior.  “I noticed last time that there’s more room in here than I thought there would be.”

“Maybe if I had broader shoulders, you wouldn’t think so.  Guys like me make everything look giant.”

“You’re self-conscious about that.”

“Not really,” I lie.  “I can’t change it.”

“But you’d like to.”

“Well, it would be a little ridiculous if I emerged from a Hummer.  That would be an overcompensation.  Small guy, no family to haul around.  These wheels are all I need.”

“What kind of gas mileage does it get?”

“Pretty good.  More important, it holds its value better than any other car on the road.  It’s like a crazy club.  People in other Minis flash their lights when they see me or toot the horn, just because I made the same car choice.  I’ve never gotten a lot of that in my life.”

“A lot of what?”

“What would you call it — fellowship.  It was an unfamiliar feeling at first.  Kind of stupid.”

“It sounds like fun.”

“Until you consider that they’d pass me on the sidewalk without a second look — unless, that is, I wandered into the wrong neighborhood.  Then they might be even less friendly.”

We merge onto I95 North and I open up the throttle.  “It’s been a while since I had this thing on the highway,” I say, cracking the moonroof.  “Nice to get it into sixth gear.  Nice to get out of the office for a change.”

Mindy twists her opal ring and watches the colors dance in the sunlight.  “You don’t make trips like this often?”

“No.”  I shake my head.  “Usually, with the big creditors — banks and credit card companies — the call center can help.  They’ve got their instructions and their scripts, and I just need to guide them to the page that says, ‘Give this guy a break.’  What we’re doing now, though, is an end-run around that, because of the special circumstances.”

“You mean the foreclosure warning.”

“That’s the normal part.  I see those all the time.  What I mean is that I’m trying to solve a problem that I don’t know the extent of for a guy I don’t represent and whose whereabouts I can’t ascertain.  So, I’m hoping to go in there and throw myself on the mercy of the court, as it were.  Let someone whose skin isn’t so thick, maybe someone who doesn’t spend his life saying ‘No,’ someone at the administrative level rather than the call center — let them see that the advocate looking for mercy is a human being like them, not a number and not an operator.  It’s bullshit, but it might work.”

“But, why is it bullshit?  You are a fellow human being.”

“No.  Whatever the species, I am an operator, and this attempted end-run is a form of manipulation.”

“No way!  You’re fighting for the poor.”

“In my special way.  You know, most of the credit counselors are non-profit.  That’s why I call myself a debt negotiator.  My agenda’s more complex.  I’m a guy trying to make a living, and right now I happen to do it by helping some people who’ve gotten themselves into unfortunate positions financially.”

“There’s nothing wrong with making a living.  Everyone has to eat.”

“For a long time I was on the other side of the customer equation, selling time shares for a while, later working the phone in a bucket shop.”

“A bucket shop?”

“Foisting nearly worthless stocks on investors who wanted a wave to ride during the Internet boom, but didn’t really have a clue.  The managers taught us how to sell but not how to make money for our clients.  We executed the kinds of trades where the investor has a one-in-a-hundred shot at hitting a home run, but the house scores its nut on every transaction regardless.”

“That’s legal?”

“If you’re big enough, it is.  The smaller guys, like where I worked, have to hide in the shadows a little.  I should have learned that the only way you really beat the system in this world is to be the system, but here I am, tilting at windmills.”

“But what you do now isn’t that bucket shop thing.”  She looks out the window, then turns again to me.  “You act all tough but you’re on the side of the angels, Phu.  People like my uncle, people like Penny...you give them a lifeline.”

“A lifeline, absolutely.  But by the time they grasp it they don’t usually have the strength to pull themselves up — and I make sure to charge them for the rope before it breaks and they sink into the abyss.”

As I move for the right lane, preparing to exit, I wonder why I’m being so hard on myself and so nice to Mindy, lifting my own kimono like this.  But then I remember the rent and that “liking” is one of the great motivators.  Mindy being my only paying client, I should get her to like me more.

We hit a car-rattling pothole, and I look at my passenger to make sure nothing got shook loose.  Her hand’s gone to her throat, but she’s giggling like a second-grader.  And when our eyes meet, I almost see affection there.

To reach Melissa Eider’s liking, it seems, one needs only to clear a low bar.

 

 

19.

The Triple Fidelity Mortgage office skulks on an Essington service road in the industrial wasteland between Harrah’s Racetrack-Casino in Chester and the bland sprawl of Philadelphia International Airport — the airport a public work so bleak that no politician, living or dead, has yet agreed to put his name on it.  In that spirit, Uncle Gunnar’s mortgage company occupies a low-slung building with a flat roof, exterior walls wrapped in dented aluminum siding, and a parking lot that looks like it was installed by the contractors who rebuilt Iraq.  The sign out front features the name of the company in smaller letters than the street number, as if the enterprise suffers from low self-esteem.  At a minimum, it seems obvious that management doesn’t encourage walk-in traffic, but I suspect there may be something else going on here.

I yank the parking brake tight, kill the motor, and turn to Mindy.  “What could’ve brought your uncle to the middle of nowhere for a loan?”

“I don’t know.  Best rates on the east coast?”

“No doubt any bank would like you to believe that from their advertising and marketing.  But, even if it’s true, an old guy, you’d think, would take the path of least resistance and do business with the most competitive local branch.”

“Maybe he’s the exception.  Maybe he shopped around.”  She pauses.  “Don’t look at me that way, Phu.  It’s not like Uncle Gunnar consulted with me beforehand.  These notices were the first I heard of any of this.”

“Right, I forgot.  You’re just the mail collector.”  We watch an empty paper bag cartwheel in the wind across the potholed macadam.  Four white guys are leaning against a pair of shiny black Lincolns, taking in the midday sun.  As the bag approaches, one of them lifts a foot and stomps it, forcing the air out, then kicks it under the car anyway.

The vibe is no good here.  I frown toward Mindy.  “This isn’t an actual bank, from the look of it.  I’d guess it’s a third-rate mortgage company, and these types of outfits can be sneaky.  Are you sure you didn’t more than junk mail into that stove of yours?  Maybe missed a couple of notices that they failed to mark with proper urgency — failed to mark, you know, accidentally on purpose?”

“Why would they do that?”

“Lots of reasons.  Jack up the penalties, for one, or seize the house and sell it for more than the loan balance.”

Her gaze goes blank, like I’m speaking an unknown language.  “I tried to do my best.  It didn’t seem there was much to worry about in Uncle Gunnar’s mail until I got the envelope that I had to sign for.”

The way I parked, we’re twenty feet from the building, facing it through the windshield.  “This place looks just like the woman on the phone sounded,” I say, “stingier than Mariano Rivera in the bottom of the ninth.  Look at that seedy little entrance there.  Not very inviting.”

Still, I snap the disc-shaped key fob from the ignition and grasp the car door handle.  As I do so, the four guys by the Lincolns turn their attention toward us without moving.  They carry that New Jersey Italian-tough look.  The two in turtle necks with open leather jackets and slick hair are sitting on the hood of an MKS featuring tricked-out wheels, their boot heels resting lightly on the shiny fender.  A third guy wears black slacks and a patterned shirt, daring the chill with no jacket, his gold chains and thick gold watch glinting in the sunlight.  He has a sharp jaw and blond Jheri curls, like he just walked off the set of a Seventies show.  The one who stomped the bag is tall and lanky in bluejeans and a bad sports coat, his weight resting on the passenger door of a Town Car.

I drop my lids briefly and picture Mindy with the eyes that first saw her a couple of days ago — okay, the eyes that undressed her a couple of days ago, but it’s not like that required a big leap of imagination, and it still doesn’t.  She’s still wearing no coat and she’s going for the passenger door handle.  Without thinking, I reach across quickly and intercept her wrist, at the same time hitting the lock button on the key fob.  When she turns to me, startled, my mind catches up with my actions: I can’t parade her past those wolves out there.

“Wait in the car, Mindy, okay?”

“But what about that whole human being thing you were saying earlier?  Won’t it help to have a pair of us explaining things?”

“That’s not the pair I’m worried about.”

“I don’t understand...”

“I have to do this myself, Mindy.  Please please wait here.  I’m giving you the key.  You can play the radio.  Just don’t get out of the car for anything.”

She nods agreement, but in half-hearted fashion.  To make her more fully understand my concern, however, would require approaching a level of intimacy that seems inappropriate.

“Keep the doors locked.  Hit that button when I’m out.”  I press the fob into her palm and she closes her fingers around it.  Her hands are beautiful, delicate.  I try to ignore the dryness forming in my mouth as I exit the car, tap the window to remind her and listen for the click of the locks.

The men across the parking lot eye my every step toward the plate-glass door.  I tilt my forehead to them once and refuse them the satisfaction of a second look.  They project a virility that concerns me more than the black teenagers and the threatening bikers put together.  Whether they’re mobsters or hairdressers or something else entirely, I know in my gut that they’re experienced rumblers and I wouldn’t stand a chance outnumbered.  One-on-one might even be a challenge.

The door shows scratched old-fashioned silver alarm tape in a pair of rectangles.  It leads directly to a staircase with black rubber treads, at the top of which a sign with press-on letters announces Triple Fidelity, leaving off the word “Mortgage.”

“Fidelity to what?” I mutter, stretching to take the stairs two at a time.

Upstairs, the small lobby has stained taupe carpet, bubbling in places and worn down to threads in front of the reception desk, where a middle-aged bottle-blonde hunches over a telephone.  She extends a hand toward the floor palm down, splays her fingers and examines her elaborate red fingernails, which have miniature flowers painted on them.  She doesn’t acknowledge me, so I take in the rest of the windowless room: two closed doors and one ajar, walls covered in papery paneling, and a few utilitarian chairs cast to the margins.

The receptionist must feel my presence.  She says into the phone, “Yeah, yeah.  I gotta go.  Business to do.  Love you, too.  Smooch, smooch, smooch.”

She hangs up and considers the receiver for a minute, as if expecting something more from it.  Disappointed, she lifts her eyes to me.  They’re big and hazel and tired behind a thick hedge of mascara, and they bear the same glaze of disappointment they had when she was staring at the phone.

“He’s not in,” she says.

“Who?”

“Mister—”  She catches herself.  “Whoever you’re looking for.”

On first impression, I’m liking my chances here.

“So there’s no mister on the premises, you’re saying.  I can dig.  Can you produce a miss or missus or ms. — a person of the distaff persuasion who might offer assistance?”

“You’re looking at one.  As for assistance, give some thought to this.”

She extends an index finger over the front edge of the desk to indicate an etched plastic sign, chipped at the corners.

“No solicitors,” I read aloud.  “That’s fine.  I’m not selling.  I’m here on behalf of a mutual client.”

“Who would that be?”

“Given the confidential nature of our business, I’ll share that with the appropriate party, if it’s okay with you.”

“Sure, it’s okay.  But if you don’t tell me, I can’t help you.”  She adjusts her weight in the chair and brushes something off the broad lapel of her tight silk shirt — body language that it doesn’t require an expert to read.

I hesitate, wondering how to play things.  This woman is already harder to crack than I expected, difficult to mirror without mocking, sharper than her appearance suggests.  Having to concede something, I hand her a business card.  “My client’s name is Gunnar Karlson.  Who would you be?”

“Mrs. Smith.”

“Mrs. Smith…  You have a first name?”

“Not for you.”

“Another state secret.”  I have to laugh.  “A Mrs. Em Wilson didn’t train you, by any chance...”

“Never heard of her.  What can I do for you or this Karlson guy?”

“He’s in receipt of a foreclosure notice from Triple Fidelity.  I’d like to discuss that with a decision maker.”

She rolls her eyes as if she hears this request twenty times a day and I’m the nineteenth.    She jots an 800 number on a scratch pad and shoves it toward me.  “This isn’t a banking office, er, Fuck.”

“Excuse me?”

“This isn’t—”

“I heard you.  You can call me Mr. Goldberg or you can call me Phuoc — pronounced Fook — got it?”

She hesitates.  “Sure.  My bad.  Listen, there are procedures for these things and they all start with the phone number on the notice.  The people who answer are the ones who deal with situations like yours.  I hate to see you disappointed, but nobody in this office can help you.”

This seems a good time to shift my weight.  I settle into my shoes, claiming ownership of the spot like a statue on a pedestal.  “I’m sure you’re right, Mrs. Smith, and I understand that it’s your job to be as cooperative as a brick wall, but I’m not leaving here until I talk to someone with the authority to discuss this mortgage.  So why don’t you take those precious nails of yours and punch a few buttons on that phone and see if you can’t scare up someone in the back room.”

Naturally, her next move is to glare at me, but then she does pick up the receiver.  While she’s waiting for a response, I picture in my mind’s eye a kettle brought to boil and imagine turning down the flame.  Without the aid of this visualization, I’m afraid I’ll upend the woman’s desk and shred whatever spills from the drawers.

I listen surreptitiously, hoping to hear her speak a name into the phone — a name I can employ later, if all else fails — but she goes directly to the heart of the matter, saying there’s a man standing here who claims to represent a gentleman named Gunnar Karlson, etc.  It surprises me that she recalls his full name, so I peer around the empty file sorter on her desk to see whether she wrote it down while I wasn’t paying attention.  That’s when I see that there are no lights aglow on the phone.  She’s talking, but there’s no one on the other end to listen.

“That’s what I told him,” the big faker says into the receiver.  “Yes, ma’am, I’ll inform him of that.”  She hangs up.  “See what I mean?  There’s no one here who can help you.  Here’s your best bet.”  She holds up the paper with the number again, but I leave it dangling for a few seconds.

My eyes dart to the door to my left, to the one to my right, to the one ajar next to it.  Makes sense, I reason, to go for the one I know is open.  I snatch the paper from Mrs. Smith’s hand and bolt for it, throwing the door wide, but I’m brought to my heels in an instant.  It turns out to be the smallest room in the building.  Tile floor.  Sink.  Towel dispenser.  I’m standing in a bathroom, damn it!  I grab for the bridge of my nose and suppress a cry of frustration.  My impulses used to serve me better.  Now that I’m here, though, I flick on the light and close the door as if the toilet were my goal all along.  Screw it, I think, let Mrs. Smith presume I have the runs.

But, after allowing for a decent interval, I emerge to find the reception area empty, no sign that a person ever sat there at all.  I test the other two doors and they’re locked.  I knock hard and long on each and receive no answer.  The reception desk has nothing inside but a few generic office supplies, not even a business card or a piece of stationery.  I pick up the phone and tap in a bunch of combinations, trying for an inside line, getting nothing but dead air.  After a few more resets I press nine and obtain an outside dial tone and stand there like a moron until a mechanized woman’s voice comes on.

“If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and…”

 

20.

 

Downstairs, I pause on the threshold and let the closing door bump me in the ass.  Mindy is standing by the Mini with a most cheerful look on her face, chatting away with three of the four wolves who I saw on the way in.  The one with blond Jheri curls keeps touching her lightly on the forearm, a timeworn technique for establishing rapport.  Nothing in Mindy’s manner suggests that she notices the contact or is processing his intentions.

Flushed with heat at the back of my neck, wary of my aggravated state, I resolve not to say a word to these men.  I storm past them and climb into the driver’s seat, slamming the door.  Mindy left the key fob in the ignition, and the radio’s playing.  I press the starter and rev the engine aggressively, but she doesn’t take the hint.  Jheri curls has a hand resting on my roof, and his nose is a foot from Mindy’s, like he’s poised to steal first base with a dive.  The other two guys aren’t much farther away.

I lower the passenger-side window, struggling to contain myself.  “Ready when you are!”  A roughness has crept into my voice.

The conversation outside continues unabated.  I tap the horn once and no one even flinches, so I yank on the parking break and lean across the passenger seat and pop open the door, bumping Mindy in the hip.  She jumps a little and Jheri curls removes his hand from the roof and takes a step back in one motion.

“My ride’s leaving,” Mindy says.  “See ya around.”

The wolves say, “Right.”  “Later.”  “Keep in touch.”

Mindy climbs in and I’m so eager to get out of there that I almost forget to remove the handbrake.

“You gave them your number?”

“No.”

“You took one of theirs, then?”

“No.  What makes you say that?”

“He said, ‘Keep in touch.’”

“He’s just being silly.”

“You called me your ride.”

“It’s only an expression.”

We’re almost out of sight of Triple Fidelity Mortgage, but I glance in the rearview mirror in time to see the fourth guy emerging from the building with a manila envelope under his arm.  This inspires me to step hard on the brake pedal and pull a U-turn and duck the car behind some sorry-looking scrub by the railroad tracks.

“What’s going on?” Mindy asks.

“Beats me.  See that guy there?  Suspicious.”

“He’s a man with an envelope.”

“Coming from a building I thought had been left vacant.  That’s how the receptionist was acting, anyway.”

“So you met with them?”

“I talked to the receptionist.  She was as helpful as a vegan at a butcher convention.”

“You couldn’t win her over?”

“She was only the receptionist.  She gave me a phone number, same as the one I already have.  She pretended that there was no one there to help.  I used the men’s room and when I came out she’d split and whoever was inside pretended not to be.  Get it?  But here’s this guy who leaves the building with an envelope.  So, you see.”

“No, I don’t.  I’m confused.”

“So am I.”

“You think there’s something in the envelope that has to do with Uncle Gunnar’s mortgage?”

“Not exactly.  But from the second I walked into that building the whole response to my presence was an act.  Meanwhile, that envelope’s going somewhere for real.  I mean, it has to be, right?  Look, he’s getting into the Town Car.”

We watch the guy in jeans and a bad sports jacket climb behind the wheel.  Jheri curls takes the passenger seat.  The turtle necks both get into the MKS.  Then the Lincolns roll to the curb-cut in parallel.  They hesitate and the men exchange a few words through open windows.  In a moment the MKS goes left and the Town Car goes right.  I pull out slowly and follow the Town Car.

Mindy turns to me.  “What are you doing?”

“I believe they call this instituting a tail.”

“They split up.  How’d you pick the big car?”

“He’s got the envelope.  The envelope is our target.”

“The envelope that doesn’t have anything to do with Uncle Gunnar.”

“I didn’t say that.”  I pull at my lip.  “Playing detective wasn’t my idea, you’ll recall.  Don’t make me sound absurd.”

We follow the Lincoln to an office building in the Philly suburbs, to a Starbucks where the men purchase venti somethings and then to a bank branch in a shopping center near Media, Pennsylvania.  It appears to be one of those micro-size credit unions, but it looks a hundred times more legitimate than the mortgage company did.  This bank has a drive-thru teller, glass walls and a bright sign out front.

The men are inside the building for a long time.  We watch ordinary people come and go, mostly blue-haired old ladies.

I point to the umpteenth of these.  “Look at them, coming in to count their money.  I’ve seen my share of old men in the office but rarely old ladies.  On average, they’re probably in debt less than any other demographic group.  For all we know they might own half the damn country, these old ladies.”

“If they do, they’re hiding it well.”

“Exactly.  They’re not blowing it on clothes or big houses.  You know why?  They‘re satisfied.  They have no one they need to impress anymore.  They’re above showing off to the neighbors and they’re beyond going out and trying to get laid.”

“Pshaw!  My mother was sexually active till the day she died at seventy four.”

“But men of all ages are blowing fortunes on romance.  I bet your mother, if she was anything like you, didn’t have to lift a finger for a man.  When she was younger she must have been beating them off with sticks.”

“She beat them off all right.  She didn’t use sticks.”

A few more people come and go from the bank.  I keep my eyes fixed on the Lincoln.  “Still no sign of the men with the envelope.”  I scratch my jaw.  “Was it like that for your mother — the way those guys at the mortgage company were raking their eyes over you?”

“Oh, stop!  They had nothing better to do.  They were just being friendly.”

“I don’t know if they had anything better to do, but they were hitting on you like nobody’s business.  Didn’t you see that?  The guy with the hair kept touching you on the arm.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“In another minute he’d have been rubbing up against you.”

“You’re being silly.  I don’t see why he’d do a thing like that.”

I rest my hands atop the steering wheel and shake my head.  “Don’t take this the wrong way, Mindy, but you were leading on those guys the way you lead on all guys.  You have this provocative way about you, the ingenuousness, the clothes you wear.  I mean, look at you!”

She does drop her eyes, then tugs her sleeve.  “It’s just a shirt.”

“It’s not.  It’s — never mind.  None of my business.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’re jealous of those guys.”

“Jealous!  Me?  What for?”

“They’re tall and strong and not so grumpy, for one thing.  Tabitha told me—”

“Tabitha!  She doesn’t know me.  You don’t know me, either.”

“She said you were like one of those Cadbury eggs, hard on the outside but soft and sweat and creamy on the inside.”

“Oh, Jesus!  Tabitha wants every conversation to be about me, but she doesn’t have a clue.  Wait.  Here come those guys.”

The manila envelope is gone.  We duck down a little and I put the Mini into first and pull out after a decent interval.  We ride in silence for a while, me puzzling over how a conversation that was supposed to be about a woman who’s teasing every man who crosses her path could somehow end up being about the altruist who’s trying to protect her from herself.  I’d like to bring this up, set the record straight about my intentions, but the Lincoln pulls off Route 1 and onto quieter back roads.  This requires hanging farther back so as not to be seen, and every curve stirs anxiety and tests our concentration.

Mindy, like a good scout, maintains an impressive degree of vigilance, scanning from the hump of our hood to the horizon.  I keep the Town Car steadily about half a mile ahead of us, and it cruises at an unhurried pace, up and down gentle hills, past stone barns and rural open spaces.

Mindy brushes the hair from her eyes.  “It’s pretty here.  Where are we?”

“Doe Run Road, Unionville.  Horse country.  We’ve swung all the way around Wilmington and aren’t far from your uncle’s place, as the crow flies, though from a wealth perspective it’s darkness and light.”

“Oh.  Which side’s the light?”

Suddenly, I wish I knew.

The Lincoln pulls into the top of a driveway protected by an automatic black gate.    The gate swings open silently and the car soon disappears into a cluster of trees.

The property, hedged and cattle fenced and horse fenced, is as enormous as they come, seemingly one unified sweep of sod going on for miles.  Pristine woods form in the creases of the rolling hills, thick ancient trees stand guard in the fields, and a narrow stream meanders through, bordered by tufted grasses.  We see some barns and outbuildings and such, but we can’t spot the main house or any discernible residence from the road.

We wait quite awhile, but no one comes or goes.  There’s a number stenciled on the big maroon mailbox.  I take a ballpoint pen from the glove compartment and write down the address before we spin around and head for home.

 

 

21.

Mindy and I climb the stairs to my office at a crawl.  I feel for the slip of paper with the address in my coat pocket, thinking that we screwed up in not also getting the license plate of the Lincoln.  We must have stared at that car for half an hour in the bank parking lot, waiting for those guys to return, and I could have easily memorized the number, but I never let my eyes settle on the plate.

I’m so lost in silent self-recrimination that I don’t perceive the two people sitting in my office until I nearly trip over one gargantuan sprawled leg.  It’s attached to the big teen, Terrance, who occupies the small couch like it’s an inner tube on a river.  His friend sits in the chair catty-corner, red Air Max sneakers propped on my coffee table.  I indicate my disapproval with a scowl that doesn’t move him an inch.

“Your laces are untied.”

“That the look, man.”

Mindy comes up behind me.  She spots the friend first.  “Hey, Kyle.”

“You know this kid?”

“I met him at Penny’s.  How’s the lip, Terrence?”

He holds it out, the black threads of the stitches visible, knitted over a thin red line, still inflamed.  There appears to be a little pus, but no sign of blood.

“Good,” Mindy says.  “The swelling’s gone down a lot.  Better in no time.”

Kyle lifts an eyebrow to her.  “You ain’t a doctor, is you?”

I make a dopey face with my mouth.  “Does she look like a doctor?”

“Could be,” he pouts.  “Anyone could be.”

“Yeah, except people who spend their spare time cruising the sidewalks, looking for trouble.”

“Aw, shit.  Can’t we get over that?  Terrance is over it.”

For the first time, I notice that Terrance has a large paper shopping bag on the floor under his leg.  He sits forward and bends over and reaches in with a rustling noise, producing a bouquet of flowers, which he holds up like a trophy.

What’s his game, I’m wondering.  “What the hell is that?”

“Asters and tulips and shit.  Flowers.  What you think?”

“Whose idea was that?”

“Aunt Penny suggested it.”

I remove my coat and sling it through the doorway onto my desk chair.  “Your aunt doesn’t have a pot to piss in.  She has no call to send me flowers.”

Kyle guffaws and puts his feet on the floor.  “Ain’t for you, Charlie Chan.”

“For her,” Terrance says, tossing his chin in Mindy’s direction.  He stands, nearly filling the whole room, and hands the bouquet to Mindy.

“Oh, Terrence, they’re divine,” she mewls.  “Thank you!”

“Plus,” Terrence adds, “Aunt Penny didn’t pay for them anyway — I did.”

“Is that so?”  I step backwards through the office doorway in an attempt to create some space.  No room in my office was designed to hold more than two average people at a time, let alone this giant and three others.

Terrence shrugs to indicate he’s told the truth.

I rest against the edge of my desk, looking at him with penetration.  “If you have spare cash lying around, you should pay your aunt’s heating bill before you start bestowing gifts on strangers.”

“He might do that too,” Kyle says.  “Don’t put it past him.”

I go around my desk and pull Penelope Jones’s folder.  “There’s a big balance on that oil bill.  I can’t share the exact figure without your aunt’s permission, but I can give you the contact information and I bet if you call them yourself you might find a way to chip off a chunk of it, pay what you’re able to pay.”

“Got nothing to do with the flowers, though.  They hers.”

“It’s got everything to do with the flowers, Mr. A student.  What you spent on the flowers might keep the house heated for a week.  Money you waste on one thing you can’t spend on another.”

“Isn’t a waste, neither.  She deserves them.”

I shake my head.  “The heating bill—”

Mindy steps toward me and takes a firm hold of my triceps and squeezes hard.

“The heating bill has a zero balance,” she whispers.

“No, it doesn’t.”

She leans into me.  “It does now.  Your paperwork’s out of date.”

“Oh, for Christ sake!  You paid that, too?  Didn’t you hear what I said the other day, Min?  Paying her bills might make you feel good, but it doesn’t work.”

“I don’t know.”  She bites the inside of her cheek.  “Their house is warmer than it would’ve been, for sure.  Those kids freezing to death wasn’t going to accomplish anything.”

I scowl again, but it has as much effect on Mindy as it did on Kyle a minute ago.

“You have a vase for these?” Mindy asks.

“Sure.  It’s over between the silver chest and the candelabra.”

“I’ll go downstairs and ask Tabitha.”

Mindy picked up my sarcasm.  I consider that progress.

When she steps out, a feeling comes over me, not exactly contrition, but I lift the candy bowl and offer it to the teens.  They’re not as shy about their sweet tooths as Penny was.  They each take two and they’re eyeing one another over the single piece that’s left when I yank the bowl away.

“Yeah, leave one for the man,” Terrence says.

“Look, I’m not The Man, kid.  And I don’t like chocolate.  It’s for clients usually, not guests who drop in when they feel inspired.”

“We’re clients, too,” Terrance says.

“That’s funny.  All my other clients pay me, not the other way around.”

He lowers himself back onto the couch, preparing to stay awhile.  “How bad’s my aunt’s financial situation?”

“Worse than you can imagine, probably.”

He feels the thread of his stitches with his top front teeth and frowns.  “She’s got bad diabetes, Type Two.  Doctors say the only thing for it is to get her weight down, but it’s hard for her.  She could lose a foot or a whole leg if she don’t turn it around.”

“That’s truly sad.  I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Her only chance, really, is this crazy operation.  Gastric bypass surgery, they call it.  They’s two kinds, but she needs the big one — biliopancreatic diversion — where they remove part of her stomach.”

I nod, impressed that Terrence knows the terminology so well.

“Al Roker had it, the T.V. guy.  Crazy shit,” he repeats.  “Really expensive — like more than a nice car.  How’s she gonna do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you help her?”

“I specialize in bills that have already been incurred.  My guess is that your aunt doesn’t have the resources for anything an insurance company won’t reimburse.”

“They say it’s elective — means it’s a choice.  It ain’t a choice.”

“Shit,” Kyle grunts helpfully.

I crane my neck in sympathy.  “I have to give it to you straight, Terrance.  She doesn’t have a chance of paying for elective surgery on her own.  She’s deep in the hole just with the monthly bills.”

Kyle stares into his untied laces.

Terrance opens his eyes wide, like he’s just seen a ghost, and starts blinking, working himself into a state.  His mouth droops into the arc of an enormous frown, his lower lip suddenly threatening to burst the stitches.  And then he breaks into sobs, his chest heaving, his arms flopping loose in his lap.

“Who’s gonna help her!” he weeps, covering his eyes with a palm the size of a pingpong paddle.  “Oh.  Oh.  Oh.”

I spring to the balls of my feet and take a step forward.  “What the fuck is this?!”

He’s getting his breath in snatches now, like a little child coming off a tantrum.

Anger stirs in my viscera.  “Listen, you fucking punk — you think I don’t know a con job when I see it?!  A man your size crying like a baby?  Get the fuck up!”

Kyle has already risen, looking amazed that I’ve sussed them out so easily.  Terrance, suddenly a picture of obedience, pushes himself to his feet, crocodile tears streaming down his mahogany brown cheeks.

“It’s not enough that I send that nice woman to pay your aunt’s bills, huh?” I say.  “Now no good deed goes unpunished, just like I figured, and you’re in here working me for more.  Do I look like a fucking ATM?  Do you see twenty-dollar bills spitting from my mouth?”

“No,” Terrance says.

“Get out!  Just get the hell out!”

They’ve already been exposed once to my anger, and they know how that concluded.  I watch them straight down the stairs, and neither boy turns around to look at me again.

I return to my desk, shaking my head, and I’m still shaking it a few minutes later when Mindy comes back upstairs with the flowers in a plain glass vase.  She buries her nose in the anthers before placing the arrangement in the middle of my coffee table.  “Mmm.”

She also has a brown bag in hand with the Creamy Dreamy logo on the side.  She goes to the desk and pours the cut-crystal bowl full, folds the bag around what remains inside and stuffs that into her purse.

“Nice lady,” she says.  “These were on the house.”

“You serious?”  I throw up my hands.  “Phil’s my best friend and Tabitha never gave me so much as a flake for free.”

“Maybe that’s because you claim not to like chocolate.”

“Claim?  You don’t believe me?  What do I have to do, take a bite and gag for you?”

“Not really.  I don’t care that much.  What happened to the boys?”

“They were late for their appointment to rob a liquor store.  I’m out of here myself.”

“But what about Uncle Gunnar’s case?  We were just getting somewhere.”

I pull on my coat and point to the sky through the too-high window.  It’s nearly black.  Night has fallen.  “I’ll do some computer work back at the ranch, see what else I can learn about this mortgage company.”

We go the parking lot and climb into our respective cars.  Usually, I’d just back right out.  I don’t know what possesses me, but this time I wait for Mindy to pull away first, watching her expectantly through the side window.  Her car starter’s cranking in futility, not turning over.  She waits a minute, tries again, still nothing.

I get out of my car and walk around.

Mindy opens her door, keys in hand, and stands beside the Volvo.  “Oh, darn it!”

“Would you like me to try?”

She shakes her head.  “It’s happened before.  Something with the alternator.  Guess I’ll have to call Triple A.”

“We can wait upstairs, out of the cold.”

“Oh, darn it all!  I really don’t feel like dealing with this right now, after this crappy week.”

“Sure.”  I take a deep breath.  “I can lend you my car.”

“Then what would you drive?”

“Or I can give you a lift to your hotel.”

Mindy nods.  “It’s a motel, just a mile or two from here.  Stand-alone, no restaurant on site.  I can eat dinner from the vending machine, I guess.”

I look up into her eyes.  They’re glassy.

“You can’t score dinner from a vending machine.  After growing accustomed to Creamy Dreamy, a Nestle Crunch bar tastes like dirt.”

She offers a wan smile.  “How would you know?”

“I’m a keen observer of people, haven’t you noticed?  How about dinner?”

“A home-cooked meal would sure be good.”

“Well, I don’t do those, not unless you want hotdogs under the broiler.”

“I’m a good cook, Phu.  We can leave my car for the night and I can make dinner for both of us, if that’s all right.”

She appears so damned sad all of a sudden.

“Of course it’s all right.  You need anything out of your car?”

She shakes her head, opens the rear door and pats the smiling pink pig in the back seat before grabbing her purse.  We step away and she uses the remote to click her car doors locked behind us without a glance back.

Ten seconds later, I’m squeezing the Mini into line behind taillights on Route 202 with Mindy in the passenger seat.

So sue me.  I fell hard for the damsel-in-distress routine.

 

22.

We ease up to the driveway of my small stucco house and with Mindy peering out the passenger window I experience a flashback from college.  Summer break after junior year, and I’d scored a second date with a stunning sophomore, all legs and angles, the product of a Chinese father and Caucasian mother.  The father seemed pleasant enough, on parting offering just a gentle reminder to his daughter about curfew.

The girl’s name was Janet.  From ten to four daily she worked as an art gallery hostess that summer, and on weekdays I was having my own initiation into dialing for dollars.  At night, of course, other activities came to mind.

Our first encounter had been an impromptu romp on the beach, where, screened by a sand dune, I slipped my hand up her polo shirt with little resistance.  The bra was no worry, either.  After a respectful interval, my next move was to come between Janet and her Calvin Kleins, but just then her legs clamped shut.  An old-fashioned girl, she indicated that if I wanted more there was a price to pay, so I blew half my savings on a white-tablecloth place in the old Long Island neighborhood, mood lighting and waiters with napkins over their arms and all the rest.  Problem was that Janet and I had nothing in common beyond the hue of our skin and a certain hooding of the eyes, and so far as I was concerned we’d exhausted all possible conversation by the time the main course arrived.  She insisted on the soufflé, however, and as we worked our spoons we studied each other’s faces in near silence across the ramekin.

All I could think at that point was return on investment.  What she was contemplating, I don’t know.  She was an art history major.

After dinner, we went to a nearby park and in one remote spot found a bench under a malfunctioning lamppost.  She wanted to talk and I wanted to get the bad taste of that soufflé out of my mouth.  I had some ideas about how to accomplish that, but she wasn’t as creative as her resume suggested.  I left the park unsatisfied and, worse, almost convinced that the night was a total write-off.

But when you’re in college nothing seems impossible — maybe she just needed something softer than a bench underneath her.  We drove back to her house with the car windows down and the wind blowing fresh hope into our hair.  So as my headlights clarified on her garage door at half past one, I resolved to play the gentleman and walk her to the door, see what developed.  I was reaching to turn off the ignition when an ominous shadow filled the screen door and a voice boomed, “Janet!  Why home so late and you didn’t call?!”

The mouth of the mandarin.  He might have chosen to wait for his daughter to hit the front hall before communicating his feelings about the blown curfew, so it dawned on me right away that he spoke as much for my benefit as Janet’s.  She closed her car door and I closed mine almost at the same exact moment.  The only difference was that she stood in the driveway and I remained in the driver’s seat.  There was no percentage in my leaving that car; no one was getting what he wanted that night, and my hopes for the relationship’s future had sunk to zero.  I lurched into reverse and zoomed away.

Now, sitting beside Mindy on what suddenly feels like a first date, here I am, ostensibly a grown man in the presence of a world-class stunner, with parental voices at best a distant echo.  Yet an unspecified discomfort gnaws at me.

“It’s cute,” Mindy says, breaking my reverie.

“What is?”

“Your house.”

“Yeah, thanks.  It was the gatehouse to a minor Du Pont estate years ago.  But when I bought it the mansion was already gone and the property subdivided.  I got it for a song, on account of the poor condition.  Its roof was caved in.”

“You’re kidding.  That doesn’t sound like you.  I wouldn’t think a cynic would fix up an old house.”

“I paid next to nothing.  That was the key.”

“You took out a mortgage?”

“Not on your life.  I renovated a little bit at a time.  It took me five and a half years.”

The place is lit only by neighboring porch lights.  She looks hard at the pale yellow facade, as if to see my reflection there.  “You did the work yourself?”

“Some of it.  The interior painting.”

“Impressive.”

“You haven’t seen the smudges on the molding yet.”

She rests her fingers on the door handle.  “Should we go inside and figure out what can be for dinner?”

“If you want, but I can tell you.  Salt, pepper, sugar, a carton of milk, a box of Mini Wheats and the lesser half of a six-pack of Sam Adams.  What can you make with that?”

“Reservations?”

“We could in fact eat out,” I laugh, “like I suggested earlier.”

“So you can have another hotdog?  I don’t think so.  Get out of the car and let me head to the supermarket.”

“You know how to drive a stick?”

“Sure, sort of.”

I’m trusting Mindy against all my instincts, and I can’t bear to watch.  As I’m slipping my key into the front door, she peels away with the clutch screeching for mercy and I bury my face in the doorjamb.

Inside, I clean up the house as best I can in a quarter hour, running the vacuum, mopping, dusting.  The place isn’t a wreck, but it’s dirtier than it should be.  I think of my mother, to whom I haven’t spoken in weeks.  She’s a neat-freak who lives in Florida, and I owe her a positive sign of life.  But instead of phoning I sit down at the computer in my living room and start poking around on the Internet, searching for the owner of the property where we last saw the Triple Fidelity goons.  The Chester County recorder of deeds has a helpful website for this, so it takes just a few minutes to learn a whole bunch of information about the property.  It appears mostly to be several giant parcels knitted together, all titles held in the name of a limited liability partnership declaring its main business activity as “real estate holding company.”  Nothing too promising there for my purposes.

I go to the fridge in my small kitchen and turn to Mr. Adams for inspiration.  It’s seven o’clock, Mindy’s been gone forty-five minutes and I’d like to show some progress by the time she returns.  I set my beer bottle down next to the computer keyboard and try a more direct assault, seeking a listing of the executive leadership of the company.  Triple Fidelity, it turns out, is a single peripheral strand in a web of corporate entities that it takes me hours to unravel.

One name keeps cropping up: Albert Hubsher.  I Google and Bing and learn that he’s a flamboyant billionaire who founded a health insurer, owns a polo string, an art collection, several houses, fancy cars, fancier ex-wives and on and on.  He’s a major contributor to the Catholic Archdiocese, listed Number 296 on the Forbes 400, has his fingers in a dozen enterprises at least, and rarely plays small ball.  Triple Fidelity looks like the least impressive piece of his empire by far.  Though owning the bank would make a normal person wealthy, for Hubsher it’s the equivalent of my declaring a really nice stereo as part of my net worth.  Not that I have a nice stereo — more like a boom box with iPod dock.

Aside from the bank and the publicly traded insurer that seems initially to have made him rich, Hubsher owns or controls a biotech firm, a regional grocery chain, a generic vitamin manufacturer, and the biggest mushroom grower in the United States.

Gee whiz.  The man is practically his own country.

Very pleased with my efforts, I finally lift my eyes from the computer screen only to realize that it’s nearing ten o’clock and Mindy still hasn’t returned.  This fact makes me feel small.  A man like Albert Hubsher, no doubt, wouldn’t have allowed her out of his sight without a paid escort.  For a person of Phu Goldberg’s means, though, that was never an option.  In compensation, I admit, I could have been nicer to her along the way, but I was too busy — well, too busy being me.

I go to the front window and scan the dark empty street.  One neighbor’s miniature schnauzer yaps in the yard, but there’s no sign of human life.

 

This is a work of fiction.  While some of the places are real, any resemblance between characters in this story and real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.  Copyright © by J.E. Fishman

TAGS: authors, Cadaver Blues, J.E. Fishman

J.E. Fishman benefits from a short attention span.  It has led him from Doubleday editor to literary agency founder, from dot-com entrepreneur to successful retailer, from non-fiction ghost writer to novelist.  At Doubleday, he acquired and edited a range of non-fiction, from sports to business to narrative non-fiction to true crime.  His literary agency, The Bedford Book Works (later sold to Dystel Goderich Literary Agency) represented personalities as diverse as Howard Schultz of Starbucks and Kweisi Mfume of the NAACP, as well as writers from prestigious publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and the San Jose Mercury News.  The dot-com he founded, Subrights.com, crashed in pieces during the technology bust, but he learned a lot.  The retail operation he ran with his wife, Salem Saddlery, grew by more than 2000 percent and was purchased by regional chain Beval Saddlery.  He is co-author of All I Need to Know I Learned from My Horse (Doubleday) and Life Is a Series of Presentations (Simon & Schuster), and is a communications consultant for Acorn Energy (NASDAQ: ACFN).  After all these years and endeavors, his attention has returned to his first love: storytelling.  His recently completed thriller, Primacy, is available through Paul Bresnick Literary Agency, and his genre-busting mystery, Cadaver Blues, can be found in weekly serialization at The Nervous Breakdown.  Also in the works are the thriller The Summit, the satirical screenplay (with actor Tom Teti) The Wisest Wiseguy, and the stage play Home Game, among others.  He divides his time between Wilmington, Delaware, and New York City. Follow him on Twitter: JEFISHMAN and his blog.

Related Posts Authors and Tattoos, Part II of II by  DANIEL ROBERTS Ken McGoogan: The TNB Self-Interview by  KEN MCGOOGAN The Silver Hearted: An Excerpt by  DAVID MCCONNELL Race to the Polar Sea: An Excerpt by  KEN MCGOOGAN Cadaver Blues: Chapter 23 by  J.E. FISHMAN

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Fiction, Novel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.