A Favorable Favor
by Brendan Dubois
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I passed over the empty bowl, let him lick for a few
moments, then took it back. It was one thing to spoil him; I didn’t want him to
get so fat he couldn’t move around.
“But I don’t intend to die right now. I’ve got a lot going
on, and part of that going on is doing a favor for the chief. Downside? Possibly
losing my license, getting arrested by the Montcalm police, and being featured
in poor light in the local paper. Not a good way to build your customer base.”
I finished my wine, looked at the television—where justice,
or a form of it, had been dispatched in just under 15 minutes—and set the empty
glass on the coffee table. “The upside? A huge deposit in the favor bank.
Meaning, not only would I get cooperation from the chief on my future local
endeavors, but if I ever ran into a roadblock with any other police agency in
the state—and even parts of Vermont—one
phone call from the chief would clear the way. And having such power at my
fingertips would mean a leg up on my competition.”
Hell of an upside.
Still … why did I have the cold, queasy feeling I was going
someplace I shouldn’t?
“Roscoe. What do you think?”
My fickle companion leapt from the couch to the coffee
table, where he attempted to lower a paw into my wine glass. I reached over and
picked him up and placed him in my lap. I stroked his fur. “Have to do it right.
Am I correct, buddy?”
Roscoe showed his
affection by being a perfect lap cat for about five seconds before jumping down
and heading to his water bowl.
Good ol’ Roscoe. Always knew which way to jump when the
time was right.
I wished I had that same talent.
The following day I was in the next town over, Montcalm,
traveling up Timberswamp Road
in my Ford Explorer. The first half-mile was paved, after departing Route 112,
and then it changed to dirt. Largely unpublicized in the glossy magazines about
quaint and curious New England is that a large
number of country roads remain dirt. The towns in this part of the state are
fairly poor, which means most of the rural roads haven’t been paved. Twice a
year they get graded and that’s about it.
Another part of the picture people often miss is the
soul-grinding poverty, out here beyond the white church steeples and little
shops selling gourmet coffee for 20 dollars a pound. The homes are usually
trailers, pre-fab double-wides dumped on a concrete slab, or foundations with
one habitable room where dad works on weekends and holidays to install plumbing
or put up a frame for the first and second stories. Still, the land and the
property taxes are relatively cheap, so there you go. In this part of the world,
there are no large housing projects, apartment houses or tenement buildings. So
people make do.
I drove up along the road until I reached number 14 and
slowed down a bit. I saw a black mailbox, tilted to one side, with the numerals
1 and 4 painted white on the side. A dirt driveway on the right led off to a
double-wide trailer, the color of old coffee. I kept on driving for a few
minutes, running things through my mind. Despite the warm spring day, I felt a
chill.v
Up ahead was a wide
spot in the road, and I turned around. There were other homes, other farms out
here, some with a few chickens or sheep or goats in a fenced-in yard. I put my
truck in park, thought things over, then drove back down to number 14. As remote
as it was out here, it was the type of place where strange vehicles on the road
were noticed, so I knew I wouldn’t have much time before I’d be spotted by a
neighbor—and before the Timberswamp Road telephone relay team got into action,
and reported that a Ford Explorer was trundling up and down the road without
stopping. Which meant said Explorer was checking things out, was being suspect …
No time to be suspect.
I stopped in front of
the dirt driveway and parked the Explorer. I rummaged around in the back for a
moment and then stepped out. I now was wearing a long-brimmed baseball cap with
the Audubon Society’s logo on it and was carrying a small knapsack over one
shoulder, a pair of binoculars slung over the other. Strange men—especially
those bearing private investigators’ licenses—always get noticed in
neighborhoods, no matter how rural. Strange women are noticed as well, but if
they’re pretending to be census takers, soap vendors or birdwatchers, then
they’re usually ignored.
I walked up the dirt driveway. There are driveways and then
there are driveways. Really good dirt driveways have a nice base of gravel, with
a shallow drainage ditch on each side, and the brush and vegetation are cleared
away about a yard in either direction.
This driveway wasn’t one of those.
It looked like someone took a bulldozer or grader and
merely scraped away the top level of soil, grass and saplings, leaving a rough
and bumpy scar on the ground that would turn to mud every spring or fall.
Up ahead was the double-wide, a pre-fabricated house that
was probably dragged in here some time ago and dropped on a concrete slab. The
lawn was a muddy, grassless patch; an ATV was parked to the side, its big wheels
muddy as well; and there was a mess of trash bags, piles of rock, rusting tools
and rotting lumber tossed around the yard. It was as if an evil twin of Martha
Stewart had been landscaping. The door was unpainted, and there was a set of
concrete steps before it, one of the steps hosting an orange flowerpot that was
growing a mess of weeds.
From the house there was music, some low type of country
that had some serious thumping bass going for it. I was making my way around the
side of the house when I spotted him through the large living room window.
He was bare-chested, wearing sweatpants and boxing gloves,
and he was pounding the crap out of an Everlast punching bag suspended from the
ceiling. Some people like having dining room sets or big-screen televisions in
their living room, but this place didn’t look like it belonged to some people.
Nope, it belonged to one Logan Duprey, boyfriend of the
police chief’s daughter, apparent amateur boxer and one seriously irritated
individual. While it was easy to decipher that he was into boxing, it took the
mind of a detective to deduce that he was ticked off, for right then and there,
he looked out the window and straight at me. Menacingly.
So. I stood my ground.
The door flew open, and I looked behind him and saw lots of studwork and bare
plaster. Logan
stepped out of his home-in-progress and said, “What the hell do you want?”
He was well-muscled, with short black hair, now with one
boxing glove dangling off his hand, the other glove stuck under an armpit. He
had tattoos up both arms and over his chest, a style that’s popular among some
but not for me. Dark-blue sweatpants and black sneakers finished off his
ensemble.
In a bright, chirpy
voice, I said, “Oh, I hope I’m not
intruding. I’m doing a bit of birding and saw the most amazing Pileated
Woodpecker come up your driveway.”
He seemed to struggle with what I’d said. He acted as if a
visitor from another dimension had suddenly appeared, speaking Sanskrit. He
shook his head, “This is private property, okay? And you’re screwing up my
training time.”
I kept up the smile and chirpy voice. “Sir, if I can just
bother you one more moment, I’m the membership chair for our local birdwatching
chapter, and we’re offering free memberships to women of all ages, and if the
lady of the house is available, I’d like to talk to her and—”
“She ain’t here,” he said, glaring at me, “and I don’t want
you here, too. So get the hell out.”
He stepped back, slammed the door, and in a moment he was
back in the living room. But he wasn’t taking his anger out on the punching bag.
Nope, he was staring right at me again.
My, this was going to
be interesting. I gave him a cheerful wave and then left, walking back down the
driveway with the little knapsack thumping against my back, and I wondered if
young Logan Duprey would have been so rude to me if he knew the weaponry I was
carrying in that little knapsack. Besides my .357 revolver, there were also
handcuffs, pepper spray, and an extendable police-style baton that is great for
whacking knee and elbow joints.
So maybe he would have been more polite.
Maybe.
But I wasn’t counting on it.
About 12 hours later, I was back on Logan Duprey’s land,
but this time I wasn’t dressed up as Local Amateur Ornithologist with Her Head
in the Clouds. This time, I was dressed as Rough and Tough Female P.I., which
meant black jeans, black sneakers and black sweatshirt. I was in a little stand
of brush and birch trees, keeping watch on the Duprey estate.
This time a dark-blue Ford Escort was parked in front of
the double-wide. My own Ford motoring product was about 50 yards behind me,
parked in a set of woods on a path that wasn’t even a dirt road, but which was
maneuverable with my vehicle’s four-wheel drive. The Ford product in front of
me, although not a four-wheeler, had suffered more than my own set of wheels
had. The front fender had been stove in, and it looked like the rear bumper and
tail light were being held onto the frame by duct tape.
About a half-hour earlier, young Carla Hughes had arrived
home, wearing the uniform of a hamburger chain, and also the expression of one
who had been on her feet for too long, smelling too much grease and
disappointment. She had walked up to the trailer, went to the door and tried the
handle.
Locked, it seemed.
She fumbled around in her bag for a moment, and after
saying a string of words that her police chief father would disapprove of, she
pounded on the door. “Logan!
I forgot my keys again! Open up, will ya?”
No answer from the inside, no doubt because the music was
still thumping loudly. Carla muttered a few words, retrieved a key from the
flowerpot, unlocked the door, replaced the key and went inside.
I rubbed at my chin. Goal tonight was to do a little recon,
try to establish some sort of pattern, because I didn’t want to try to talk to
Carla with Logan
in the way. He seemed over-muscled and too over-tempered to let me, and I didn’t
think a cheerful heart-to-heart talk with him about the desire of dad and mom to
get their daughter back would work either. If I could discover a pattern, a
schedule, and then get Carla alone, I might be able to persuade her. Maybe use
that older-woman-symbol-of-sisterhood gig with her, try to convince her that
coming home would be best for everyone.
Well, that had been the plan, until the screaming started.
At first I wasn’t sure what I was hearing. Then the music
stopped. The yelling, and the screaming, grew louder. Add to that a muffled
sound that seemed like punches being landed on flesh.
I hesitated. Thought about my cell phone. Quick call to the
Montcalm police and—
Sure. Do we have cell phone coverage out here? And if the
911 call got through, what then? At this time of night, Montcalm had maybe one
cop on duty. So it would be 10 or 15 minutes before he or she got here, that is
if he or she wasn’t tied up with a traffic accident or a break-in or . . .
The screams, the yells, grew louder.
“Damn,” I said in the darkness, and got up with my gear and
sprinted to the house.
The front door was
locked, of course—paranoia on Logan’s
part, perhaps from taking a few too many steroids?—but I reached into the dry
soil of the flowerpot, grabbed the sharp metal of the key, and got the door
open. In the grease- and sweat-smelling hallway the noises grew louder, followed
by an even louder thump, as that of a body falling to the floor. I turned left
into the open living room.
The Everlast punching
bag was still there, hanging from the ceiling. On the wood floor, fighting mats
and other boxing gear were spread around.
Logan
was leaning over some of it, sweaty, fists clenched, still shirtless. Sprawled
out on the floor, now wearing sweats and a T-shirt, was a very
frightened-looking Carla. She looked up at me. Logan, now realizing there was a visitor to
his little punch pad, turned to me, face red, breathing hard, fists clenched.
“You—what the hell are you doing here? You break in? Huh?
Did you break in?”
I ignored him, looked to Carla, and said, “Honey, get up.
I’m getting you out of here. Your dad and mom sent me.”
That set Logan
off. “The hell you are! Nobody’s taking her away, nobody!”
He came at me, lunging
across the floor, but I guessed he wasn’t used to women who didn’t back away or
cower, and I turned to meet him, quickly shrugging my knapsack off my shoulder.
I had opened the zipper while I was hanging out in the birch trees, and by the
time he got a few steps toward me, I had my 24-inch extendable police baton in
hand. He was another step closer when I flicked it open with a snap of my wrist.
The trick was not to hit him in the arms or torso or face. It was to neutralize
the threat by getting him on the floor, which I did with two quick blows to his
knees.
He went down with pit bull snarls. I went to Carla. I’d
like to say she leapt into my arms, crying with gratitude; but no, as in the sad
case of so many women who stand by their man no matter what, she started
screaming at me as well, refusing to get up, refusing to be rescued.
Crap.
No time for much of
anything, because a bruised and very upset Logan was trying to get up off the floor. So I
did the best I could, which was to go into my bag of tricks, pull out a set of
handcuffs and cuff one of my wrists to Carla’s. Then I got her to her feet.
Logan was right behind her in the on-the-feet part, so I went at him again, once
to a knee, the other time to the chest—to knock some air out of him—and with all
the yelling and screaming on everyone’s part, it was amazing I was able to drag
Carla out of the house.
“Carla,” I said, “shut up and stop fighting me, all right?”
And for some reason, the screaming stopped, though not the
crying, and now with the knapsack back on my shoulder, a flashlight in hand, I
dragged her through the brush and woods, back to my Explorer. When we got there,
she said, “Look … I’m just … look, can we get the handcuffs off, please?”
So I took the small key,
undid the cuff to my wrist, and then—
Surprise time.
She tried to run back to the house, but I tripped her to
the ground. I caught both her hands, pulled them behind her back and snapped the
cuffs. A lot more curses came my way from a teenage girl who should have known
better, but in a couple more moments, she was in the front seat of my Explorer,
fastened in with a seatbelt, cuffs and all.
I got in the driver’s side, started up the engine, and
Carla said, “He’ll find you. Logan
is good. He knows these woods, these roads. He’ll find you and get me back!”
I punched the accelerator, got out of the hiding place, and
then was on the town dirt road, heading away from the double-wide. “Maybe he’ll
get you back, but not tonight, hon. Not tonight.”
And so we drove into the darkness, the headlights cutting a
path ahead of us.
I made a few turns here and there, and promptly got lost.
Which was fine, for I thought if I had no idea where I was going, the upset
boyfriend back there probably wouldn’t know how to follow me. As I drove, I
looked over at my ward, sitting there sullenly, sniffing, nose dribbling snot
down her chin. She saw me looking at her and said, “What? You a cop or
something?”
“Or something. I’m a licensed private investigator. Your
dad and mom sent me here to take you home.”
She snorted. “Yeah. Right.”
“No lie, Carla. I’ll show you my license if that’d make you
feel any better.”
More sniffles. “You …
you didn’t have to hurt him like that.”
“Yes I did, hon. Yes, I did.”
“Why?”
“Because he was coming to hurt me, just like he was hurting
you, that’s why,” I said. “And that’s one thing I won’t stand for—a man hurting
a woman, either me or someone else.”
“But he wasn’t hurting me!”
I glanced at her again, the poor young girl, snot on her
chin, handcuffed in my front seat, the latest and maybe not greatest addition to
the Stockholm Syndrome.
“Carla, I saw you. You
were on the ground. He was over you. Fists clenched. And I heard you, too. The
screaming. The yelling.”
“But he wasn’t hurting me!”
“Carla, look, I know it seems like it now, but when I get
you back to—”
She kicked at the floorboard of my Ford. “Damn it, listen
to me! He wasn’t hurting me!”
I slowed down. “All right, I’m listening to you. What do
you call it then?”
“Training,” she spat out. “I was helping him train.”
We slowed some as I hit the brakes, and the Ford came to a
stop on the deserted dirt road.
I shifted in my seat, looked at her. “Explain.”
She looked a bit scared. “You didn’t know?”
“Know what?”
She coughed. “I thought you said you were a private
investigator. That you found things out. Didn’t you know about Logan before you came here?”
I opened my mouth to say something, firmly shut it. Talk
about a life lesson learned, from a girl half my age. Sure, I knew a lot about Logan. From what I had
seen, and from what her dad had told me. No bias there, eh?
Now I talked. “Sure. A bit. But you tell me, Carla. You
tell me about Logan.”
She coughed again and leaned forward to ease the pressure
on her handcuffed hands. “He’s in the state championships next week, for
kickboxing. I was helping him train. That was the sounds you heard. Him hitting
and me screaming, to encourage him. But this time—” and she giggled a bit “—he
went too far, again. I slipped and fell on the floor.”
“But he was still hitting you, wasn’t he?”
“Well, yeah, but I was
holding hand pads. Didn’t you see them?”
“They weren’t on your hands.”
“Of course not. They were on the floor. I had pulled them
off to get up off the floor when you broke in.”
I said nothing, listening to her breathing, the engine
running. “You said Logan
is trying for state championship.”
She nodded. “That’s right. He’s got a good shot at winning
it. And one of the judges, he’s a Hollywood
producer.”
“A movie producer?”
“Oh hell, not one of the fancy studios, we know that. But a
guy who does kung fu films, that sort of thing. He’s one of the judges, and part
of the first prize is flying out to
Hollywood, to be in his next movie. It’s a good break; Logan’s been training for it all these months.
I work and pay the bills, give Logan
time to train and focus. And we’re both going out to California if he wins.”
“You sure?”
Another quick nod. “He promised. And believe you me, a
promise from Logan,
it’s a guarantee.”
I waited another moment, and said, “Carla …”
“Yeah?”
“I’m going to take the handcuffs off of you, but only if
you promise to tell me one more thing. And I’ll promise to do something myself.”
“What’s that?”
“Tell me about your dad.”
She leaned forward.
“It’s a deal. And what’s your promise, then?”
I turned to her, key in hand. “If it all works out, I’ll
apologize to Logan.”
The next day, the chief came back to my office with a big
grin on his face. “Karen … I don’t know how to thank you. Honestly, I don’t
believe it. You dropped her off last night and she apologized to me and Maureen,
and it’s like she’s a new girl. What the hell did you do to make her change like
that?”
I smiled sweetly at him and said, “I listened.”
That confused him for a moment as he sat down in the chair.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“I said I listened. That’s what I did. And I learned a
lot.”
Now I had gotten his attention. “Karen—”
I leaned back a bit in
my own chair. “Like the reason she left home. Not because you beat her or kept
an eight p.m. curfew or read her online diary. Nope, she left because you were
ready to pack everyone up and move away. To Massachusetts. To a high-paying Homeland
Security gig in Boston.
And that’s why you wanted her home with you and your wife. The guy running that
Boston office is
a straight-and-narrow guy who loves family values and runs his office on said
values. Having someone working for him who had a teenage daughter living in sin
with a boyfriend wouldn’t have met his needs, would it? And you wouldn’t have
gotten that job.”
Bryant’s face colored. “That’s none of your business.”
I leaned back even more. “Oh, it became my business when
you told me to go fetch her. Which I did. But you left a few things out. Like Logan. Maybe he’s not the
sharpest knife in the drawer, but he works hard at something he’s good at. He
doesn’t drink or do drugs. And Carla. Sure, she’s seventeen. But in just over a
month, she’s going to be eighteen. And then she can live anywhere she wants. Am
I right?”
He stood up. “We’re done here. And don’t expect any
payment. All right? And as for me doing you any favors in the future, forget
it.”
“Oh,” I said. “You’ve already done me a favor, and you’re
going to do me another one. If you get that job, you’re going to let Carla stay
here until she turns eighteen, when she can move in with Logan without your say-so.”
“What the hell makes you think I’ll do that?” he said, his
face really red now.
“Because if you don’t, I’ll e-mail a picture of your
daughter and Logan, living in non-married bliss, to your new boss, and we’ll see
how your employment prospects are.”
He stood there, a man in uniform, the police chief in my
hometown, and I suddenly got the feeling I had better follow the speed limit on
the local roads during the next several weeks.
“Why? Why are you sticking up for Carla like that?”
I looked straight at him. “Because I don’t like bullies,
bullies who pick on women, bullies who can either be a husband or a boyfriend.
Or a dad.”
There seemed to be a struggle with his temper going on
behind that fleshy face of his, and the promise of moving up and out of Purmort
seemed to win, for he kept his temper about him.
“All right,” he finally said, and headed to the door. Then
he turned.
“The other one,” he said.
“What?”
“You said I had already done you a favor earlier,” Bryant
said. “When did I do that?”
“Earlier,” I said, no
longer leaning back in my chair. “When I took this job from you, I got sloppy. I
trusted you. I didn’t do any background checking, didn’t do any real
investigating. Just blundered into something I knew nothing about. Now I know
better. You did me a favor, reminding me of the right way to do my job.
The chief muttered something that would have made at least
two-thirds of the board of selectmen turn white with shock, and then he left,
slamming the door behind him. It was so loud, I was sure the patrons and owners
of the Italian restaurant next door had heard him.
And to the empty doorway, I said, “Thanks.”
And you know what?
I really meant it.
The END
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