“You remember that high school program I was involved in last summer?”
“Sure,” I said. “Some kind of computer literacy course, right?”
“Yeah. I was supposed to do mostly supervisory stuff, but I ended up working with the students a lot, anyway. These were kids who had to attend summer school because they’d failed some of their classes the year before. Tell you what, JB, there were some real hardasses there. And the lady in charge of summer school told me that the worst kids don’t even show up over the summer.”
“So,” I said, “you’re saying you think I have a high probability of success with this endeavor.”
“Sure, JB, about as high a probability as Mr. Starbucks and me having that lunch.”
Chapter 4
When I left Starbucks, I walked several blocks to my office, which is just a loft in an old warehouse on the perimeter of the business district. Any day now, I expect the landlord to tell me he’s sold the place to Gap for Kids or Bed, Bath and Beyond, and that I have thirty days to vacate the premises. Truth be told, I don’t really need an office, since I conduct most of my business out of my home. The office has an answering machine, and I check it daily, along with the e-mail. Occasionally, though, it’s helpful to have a place to meet clients, make’em think I’m a grown-up.
My mail was mostly junk. The total amount of credit being offered to me this week by Visa and MasterCard was just over thirty-thousand dollars. I thought about a month in Tahiti. Then I thought about bankruptcy, so I tossed the applications. Easy come, easy go.
I sat at my desk and wrote out a couple of bills to people who owed me money, one to a woman who’d hired me to find out if her business partner was running a scam on her, the other to a man who’d asked me to see if his wife was cheating on him. In the first case, I’d discovered that the woman’s partner was completely honest, which, as it turned out, wasn’t at all what my client wanted to hear. Apparently, she was looking for ammunition to use when she tried to force her partner to sell his share of their company to her. I’d already billed this woman once, and I knew she could easily afford to pay me. She was just pissed at the outcome of the investigation.
As for the man with the unfaithful wife, he’d told me he was hoping against hope that he was wrong, but he didn’t think he was. This wasn’t about a bitter divorce or alimony or getting even with one’s spouse. The couple had already gone through counseling once, and the guy seemed to really love his wife. He said he’d held off for a long time before hiring a detective, because part of him was willing to just live with the situation. In the end, though, he’d decided he owed it to himself not to spend the rest of his life with someone who didn’t value the relationship as much as he did. It had taken me just three days to learn that his wife was meeting an old college boyfriend, and had been for some time. When I gave the guy my report, he read it through quickly, asked me if I was sure, and I said I was, and then he told me to send him the bill and got up out of his chair and left. I’m pretty sure there were tears in his eyes.
I’m world-class at detecting but not so hot when it comes to collecting money from people. When I was a student at Penn State, one of the many jobs I had was collecting overdue bills for a furniture store owner, guy named Carmichael. He gave me his pickup truck and the addresses of people who owed him money and told me to come back with either the money or the furniture. My first call was to a family who lived in a trailer out in the boonies, someplace called Bald Eagle. When I got there, the woman of the house, who appeared to be about 25, invited me inside and gave me a cup of tea. She told me that one week after she and her husband bought a table and chairs from Carmichael, the husband had been laid off from the mill. He couldn’t find work in the area, so for the past few weeks, he’d been over near Philadelphia, picking up day labor at a new housing development. He got home most weekends. As she told me this, her two kids sat quietly on the sofa opposite me, just staring at this stranger in their home. The woman asked what they owed, and I told her seventy-five dollars, and she went to a drawer in the kitchen and pulled out a business-sized envelope and looked inside and fingered a few bills. Then she turned back toward me and said that she could maybe give me fifteen dollars, would that be enough, because there was the heating oil bill due next week, and the youngest one needed more medicine, so she would really appreciate it if Mr. Carmichael could give them just a little more time, they’d pay him every penny, they really would. Her smile was bright and earnest and hopeful, but I could see the little bits of fear and strain behind it. I told her I was sure that Mr. Carmichael would be reasonable and that I didn’t think there was any need for me to take any money that night, and then I sat and drank my tea and played some with the kids before I left. Later that night, I met Mr. Carmichael at the back of his store and told him I hadn’t collected any money or repossessed any furniture. I said I didn’t expect to be paid for the night’s work, and that I had filled
