who’s supposed to be paralyzed slam-dunking a basketball. If I hadn’t been in Louisville, Marsha and I might have missed the call telling her to come in to work Saturday night, and now she might be out here with me wondering when the morgue siege was going to be over.
I headed toward the shower, remembering my encounter with the bricklayer. “Shoulda hit him with that stun gun again …”
I wasn’t used to the world at this time of the morning, especially after two hours’ sleep the night before. At least I think it was two; hell, it could have been five minutes for all I knew. A warm front had moved in as I slept, and the cool spring weather had been swapped overnight for humidity and temperature in the high eighties. By the time I got to the office, it was past eight. I don’t know why I was so worried about all this. Phil said he’d get the check here. It was in his own best interest to do so, and I’ve always counted on people acting in their own best interest. Lately, though, I’d begun to wonder. Maybe I was just feeling like the smallest guy in the feeding chain.
Once inside the office, I scanned the floor for envelopes that might have been slipped under the door. Nothing. No blinking light on the answering machine either. No calls, no check.
I slammed the door behind me, pulled off my jacket, then slid into my chair. Maybe I’d just slip off and take a little catnap for a while, try to make up for lost time. I closed my eyes, let myself drift, tried to let go of everything.
Only problem was, everything wouldn’t let go of me. I kept thinking of Marsha and what might happen this weekend. Slim kept popping up in my mind as well. I imagined him sitting in jail, helpless, frustrated, with very few options left open to him.
Then there was Mac Ford’s Rolls-Royce. The more I sat there, the more that kept coming back. Why? Why would a guy like that be in the position of having a car repossessed? I knew from my experience working for Lonnie as a part-time skip-tracer and repo man that there are certain symptoms that crop up in a deteriorating financial life, and these symptoms are as predictable as the stages of a terminal disease.
It starts out with there never quite being enough cash to cover the expenses, so you start loading up the credit cards. First the gas, then the restaurant and bar bills. But then at the end of the month, you can’t pay off the credit cards, so you start paying the minimum balance due, but you keep charging those suckers up, anyway. Then you’re getting cash advances to cover kited checks, or maybe you’re borrowing off one credit card to pay another. Meanwhile the cash situation gets tighter and tighter; the lifestyle’s out of control, like a cancer eating away at you. If you don’t stop soon, it’ll swamp you. But you can’t, so you miss a car payment or a loan payment. The house payment’s late and you drop your insurance. People start calling you around dinnertime, polite inquiries about late bills. You explain and mollify, placate and appease, for as long as you can. Then you dodge. You screen your calls, or you stop answering altogether.
Panic sets in and you feel like you’ll do anything. By then, it’s usually too late. Usually, the car goes first. The repo man comes in the middle of the night and rides off in your wheels. Then your house note’s a couple of months overdue, and the mortgage company’s sending you notices printed in red ink.
At that point, if you’re still thinking fast enough on your feet to have a strategy, you start looking for a good bankruptcy lawyer and hope you can come up with the cash to pay his retainer.
So about two steps back from collapse was where I figured Mac Ford must be. The amount of cash it takes to keep an office like that operating on a day-to-day basis must be horrendous, but at the same time he had to have a ton of cash coming in. Where did the balance get upset? What went wrong?
What the hell happened? And what did it mean?
I didn’t know if it meant anything. I’d been digging around for so long in the muck, I couldn’t see clearly anymore. But for now, I had nothing else to go on. You pull a thread loose and you start unraveling and you see how long it takes you to get to the core.
I sat there thinking for over an hour, my mind running in circles, then drifting, then spiraling down into focus again, then losing the focus and floating off lazily, like in and out of the rapids down the Ocoee River.
Somewhere in the fog, I started to doze off. Just as I was about to cross over into the drooling-on-myself stage, there was a loud knock at the door.
“Huh?” I mumbled, my feet dropping to the floor with a painful clatter. My knees hurt from being hyperextended for so long.
“Messenger,” a voice outside called. I looked down at my watch, which read 10:15. Not quite two hours late.
I opened the door and a young kid with a knapsack in his hands and a bicycle helmet strapped on his head handed me a sealed envelope. I signed for it, tipped the kid my last two singles, then locked the door as he left.
Inside was a certified check for five thousand dollars. The way it made me feel, the messenger could’ve been straight from the Kentucky Lottery, which was where a lot of Tennessee gambling money goes since we can’t have a lottery here.
I folded the check into my coat pocket, then reached for the phone. I tapped in seven numbers, then waited while an answering machine with no outgoing message clicked on. A few seconds later, a beep.
“Yo, Lonnie. Ed McMahon just dropped off my red Corvette outside. That was okay, wasn’t it? Red, I mean. I know it’s been done before, but I just didn’t think the teal was me. Anyway, this means you can cash that check I gave you. Better get it quick while the getting’s good.”
I started to hang up, then a thought struck me from somewhere in my still-asleep subconscious. “Oh, hey, I got a favor to ask. That Rolls you’ve got to repo, the one belonging to Mac Ford? How about running a credit report for me? Let’s see how much trouble the dude’s in, okay? Get back to me. Thanks.”
I hung up the phone. The credit report would be a start, but just a start. I needed someplace else to dig, some resource. I needed someone who could show me the secret handshake. Then it hit me.
Agon Dumbler.
I slapped the side of my head with an appropriate, self-directed critical epithet. Why the hell hadn’t I thought of him before?
I don’t like to cast aspersions on anyone’s character, and I don’t mean to get personal here, but Agon Dumbler was without a doubt the biggest asshole I’ve ever met in my entire life.
Agon’s about five-seven, and the last time I saw him, he was pushing three hundred and fifty pounds. He wears cream-colored suits, silk ties, and sports a white Dick Tracy hat. He drives a mid-Seventies restored Cadillac Coupe de Ville, which happens to be one of the few land yachts large enough to carry him in comfort. In appearance, he’s somewhere between Sydney Greenstreet and Rush Limbaugh, with a voice like Truman Capote on steroids. So it’s putting it diplomatically to say that Agon doesn’t exactly have a lot of dates. Luckily-because he’s overbearing, arrogant, insensitive, totally lacking in tact or consideration. And those are his good points. He’s the kind of fellow that when people speak his name, they usually follow it up with a good-sized hawker on the sidewalk.
But Agon Dumbler is also one of the half dozen or so best music-industry reporters in the country. His three-times-a-week column in the newspaper we both used to work for had gone into syndication a few years before I, euphemistically speaking, changed careers. This had the result of making him the richest employee on the paper within a year or so, not to mention the substantial extra income he made stringing under an assumed name for publications like the
I hadn’t thought of him in years. Strangely enough, I never had much trouble getting along with him. He’d waddle over to my desk with a copy of one of my stories from the previous day’s paper and proceed to rip it to shreds, ending with a supercilious, dictatorial lecture on how I could improve my work. I’d just smirk at him, nod, thank him for stopping by. The only explanation I have for my behavior toward him is that I just never felt that it was my place to interfere with another person’s compulsive need to be an asshole.
The White Pages were buried in a stack of unanswered mail and junk on my desk. I pulled them out without tipping the pile over, and thumbed through the business section. Under the Ds, Agon had bought one of those new listings where they print your name in double-sized red type. His read: AGON DUMBLER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST.
