Losers Live Longer

sparse white hair and stooped shoulders in a light brown suit were all I saw of him.

“So, Owl, what can I do for you?”

“Matt gave me your card a while ago, said you’d opened your own office in the Village, and that you were the guy to call if ever I found myself in need here.”

“That must’ve been some while ago,” I said. Matt hadn’t referred any work to me in years and that loss stung as much as the loss of our friendship.

Maybe Owl detected it in my voice, because he asked, “Did Metro bring you in on that Law Addison business? That had an East Village connection.”

The name rang a bell—something earlier in the year, May maybe. Then I had it: Lawrence Addison. “Law” to his friends, and to his victims/clients.

“Grand larceny case,” I said, pulling it up from my memory. “Securities fraud. Independent money manager, ran an outfit called Isolde Enterprises, lot of high-profile clients. Turned out to be just a big Ponzi-go-round, only Addison didn’t step off the ride soon enough.”

Just showing I knew my onions, but no great feat; it’d been front-page news for a couple days this past spring before the next young starlet’s D.W.I.

Owl said, “But he did manage to step off eventually. Addison was granted bail. And then he skipped. Ran off with the wife of one of his ex-clients. The bail bond agency hired Metro to track him down. I’d have thought Matt would’ve brought you in on that. Addison had a place in the Village.”

“No.”

“Huh. Probably why no one’s tagged him yet, right? Ha.” He chuckled softly, letting me know it was a joke. “Still, odd that—”

I decided to come clean, weary of the square dance.

“Metro stopped dealing me in several years ago, Owl. It’s a long time since I’ve talked to Matt about anything.”

“Oh.”

I listened to the city traffic over his end of the line. A young woman laughed broadly. An angry dog with a peanut-sized bark yapped itself hoarse. A bus surged by in a whoosh, its loose side panels and windows rattling like a haunted house on wheels.

“These things happen,” Owl finally said.

“Yeh, well, I only bring it up so you know, any recommendation Matt gave you no longer stands up. I doubt he’d say the same today if you called and asked him.”

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” Owl said. “Cards on the table, I had heard something like that already, but wanted your side of it.”

“No side,” I said. “Just a professional disagreement.”

“Over what?”

“Oh, my being a professional. Matt disagreed.”

Owl snorted. “Guys like Matt, they don’t understand freelancers like you and me, Payton. That’s the trouble. He doesn’t…doesn’t get why we do it.”

I cleared my throat. “Why do we do it?” I asked. I didn’t even know myself. “But then again what I do, Mr. Rowell, and what you’ve achieved over your—”

“Oh fuck that,” he said, and it shut me up, but to my credit I didn’t sputter like my Aunt Fannie. “I mean going out on your own, Payton, starting your own business! Most people don’t know what that means. It takes guts.”

“Guts, yeh, but not brains,” I said. “Like spelunking with my dick out.”

He laughed.

“Something like that. But I made it. And it looks like you’re making it, too.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know how you managed it for fifty years, Owl.”

“Tell you one trick. You don’t think about the last fifty years. You don’t think about the last year. You think about tomorrow, you move with the times. Y’know how old I am?”

“How old?” I said.

“Eighty-four last month. But I still stay current with all the new technology. Just to keep my hand in. Lotsa guys my age, all they do is bitch about young people always talking on their cell phones, and meanwhile they’ve all got one, too, only none of them knows how to use it. Me, I don’t have a cell phone—but I’ve got a device that listens in on other people’s cell phones from up to twenty yards away, and you better believe I know how to use it.”

I heard a click on the line then, followed a moment later by the sound of a coin dropping into the phone’s metal guts.

When his voice came back, he got right down to business.

“Listen, Payton. The reason I called. I need your help to flush a tail out into the open. There’s a meeting later today and one of the people leaving the meeting, I think, is going to be followed. I need to know who is doing the following. It’s not much, just daywork, maybe into early evening. But you’ll be covered for the whole day. What’s your rate, Payton?”

I heard a sharp crack, like a distant rifle report or a wood plank slapping the ground, over the phone and out my window. I looked out, but didn’t see what made it, then heard it again, just out of view directly below my window, sounding more clearly like a flat wooden board smacking pavement.

Something about Owl’s call was bothering me, something off. My normal rate was $50-an-hour plus expenses, but I told him, “Hundred a day.”

“Please, not your professional rate, Payton. What’s your regular? C’mon, I’m retired, just a private citizen now, not a private eye.”

“Doesn’t sound like it.”

“Oh, this? It’s a personal matter. Client is someone I owe a favor to. Old time’s sake. You live long enough, it’s actually a pleasure to still be around to repay your debts.”

Long as you don’t chalk up more along the way, I thought. But didn’t voice it.

“I should be comping you, Owl, professional courtesy. If it gets around to the other agencies that I’m not, I’d never get another referral throughout the five boroughs.”

That was it, the not-quite-right-something bugging me. George Rowell was connected, had friends in all the top agencies in Manhattan. Hell, he was tight with Moe Fedel. He only had to ring up Fedel Associates and have a half-dozen ops at his disposal, with probably a groovy spy-van thrown in, and all on the house. Even Matt Chadinsky—perennial tightwad—would have only billed him pro rate, and then torn up his check. Before he’d been recruited into the upper echelon at Metro, Matt had learned the ropes as Owl’s apprentice.

So with all that at Owl’s fingertips, why was he calling me? I’d be the first to say it: he could do better.

“Okay, a hundred,” he said. “But I buy you dinner later.”

I agreed. I’d never intended to comp him anyway. It was just bluff. I wouldn’t even comp my own mom these days. But I couldn’t just lap it up either. I asked him, “Why you bringing this to me, Owl? It can’t be my mad skills.”

Maybe the slang threw him, he didn’t respond right away. If not for the background noises and my looking down at him, I would’ve thought he’d hung up.

Instead, he gave me a jolt. Turned and tilted his head up and looked right at me framed in my second-floor window. Knew I’d been watching him, sensed it; he was a canny old bird. He smiled, a big toothy grin. Tall and bony as he was, for a second he did resemble an owl, an old white owl like on the cigar boxes. He shrugged his stooped shoulders.

“It’s short notice. And it’s right here, just a couple blocks away. Thought about who could cover it and you came to mind.”

“We talking hard cover? If it’s muscle you ne—”

“Nah,” Owl said. “Soft cover. Simple. Nothing rough. It’s just legwork, but I haven’t got the legs for it anymore. You do. And the Lower East Side is your neck of the woods. You’ve got the natural coloring.”

I nodded my head, but wasn’t completely convinced.

“And how’s this job tied in with Law Addison?” I asked. “Don’t tell me you’ve turned him up?”

Owl laughed, no mirth in it though.