A Detective Story with Odd Bits Hanging On It

by Eric Chaet

Prices have gone up again at the Farmer's Friend—new menus—& when Linda asks if I want my usual oatmeal, I say no, only a cup of half-decaf, half-regular coffee.

Linda—wearing a Fort Harrison Wolves brown & blue sweatshirt bearing the number 3, the star quarterback's number—raises her eyebrows, & hurries off writing on her pad.

And Jack—sitting across the corner of the counter from me—wants to know why no oatmeal?—oatmeal is what I'm famous for—& says, "You'll waste away to nothing!"

"I ate at home. I caught myself complaining about distribution, & realized I either have to make a deal with a big media company—assuming I could—or develop better distribution myself. That means more investment. And that means less consumption."

(Don't ask me exactly what I meant—I didn't get much sleep trying to figure out whether I'm being a long-term success, like, say, Confucius, or just a self-deluded loser, as I would be seen by most of the "savvy" people, let alone what to do differently. But I definitely meant something, & mean something—& maybe it'll take on some shape I can act on, as similar resolves have, in the past.)

"If everyone did it that way, we'd be out of trouble," Jack says. He believes that the main trouble we are in is economic. He knows that I, too, believe that we are in big, politician- & imprudent consumer-led economic trouble. For now, as usual, he sets aside the complication that I think we're in even worse trouble, which trouble almost everyone—by no means just the politicians or imprudent consumers—considers normal & acceptable, & contributes to, to the best of their ability.

"Yeah. I was reading about how artists make deals with record labels. How when an artist signs a contract, he wants to minimize his risk & maximize his profit. The record label wants to do the same thing—reduce their risk & maximize their profit. But how the artist & the record label would do it is precisely opposite—their interests are precisely opposite. And I remembered why I never got motivated enough to do what it would take to get any kind of standard contract. Better to work independently. Of course, the record label—or book publisher, say, or whatever—has world-wide distribution, & I have approximately none. ..."

Jack asks me how my most recent research job—finding out about inventory management & forecasting software for the big house-building company guy—is going.

"Fine," I say. "I made sure I didn't commit myself to more than I thought I could do, then I did all I said I'd do, & a lot more—so the client should be happy. As usual, after I'd worked on it for almost all the budgeted time, I thought I'd struck out. All I could get was lists with dozens of software packages, & no way to discriminate among them. But then I looked up my company's competitors' names, & entered them along with the kind of software package, & found out which packages the competitors used, and what sites the information on each of those packages could be accessed at, and sites with those packages reviewed.

"That's what I sent him. I'd have been pleased, if I was him. Hopefully, he'll hire me over & over, for the next 5 or 10 years, once in a while. This is the second job for him. I have one other client like that. If I had 3—well, maybe 5—regular clients like that, I'd be earning enough to stay independent, without having to look for new clients."

Jack says he's recently found a website with all sorts of information about people. He's interested in people who've bought used cars from the lot for which he buys wrecked cars at auction—which his employer pays others to make functional & attractive—who haven't paid. Credit ratings, arrest records, all kinds of information. It costs $29.95 to join.

"For how long?" I ask.

"Forever."

I'm skeptical about deals with payments that entitle you forever, but we agree that, if it helps him collect hundreds or thousands of dollars, it would be a good deal, even if it were an annual fee. What's now available to him in an hour would take him days to find, otherwise—if he could find it. Of course, some of what he's referred to on the site, also has a fee for access—but a lot of it doesn't, too.

Jack says that when he was younger, he & another reformatory guard set up a security business on the side. They found out that there was a detective agency in town that did security work, & served subpoenas, & so on.

Jack went to their office, thinking he might get a job with them. Afterward, in the parking lot, the secretary dropped some files. "I could probably have got her in trouble if I told about it," he says. It was snowing & so windy she didn't go after most of the papers. Jack did—once she'd driven off.

And discovered that they were charging bigger money than he'd thought anyone would possibly pay, to find out things Jack thought he could find out.

One case—unemployment insurance, possible fraud—they got paid $3,000.

"I thought at first it said three hundred dollars. Who'd have thought that anyone could afford to pay three thousand dollars to find out if they were paying for someone faking a job injury?"

"I guess the insurance companies figure it's worth it, that people know they can't get away with it—like countries with all the nuclear missiles hoping to avoid going to war."

Jack laughs, in recognition.

"And I guess you have to pay a premium to people who deal with people at their worst," I'm thinking out loud, "& a lot of bad people who might react violently."

(Recently, Jack told me that he couldn't feel anything in one of his legs—he uses a cane, & has put on a lot of weight in his upper body—& that his back always hurts—from the riot in the reformatory, 40 or so years ago. After which, a doctor told him he could operate, but there'd be a 50-50 chance Jack would never walk again. Jack turned that down. Better to keep the pain, & keep walking.)

Jack's & his partner's main job was looking for shoplifters at a big local department store that caters to farmers, hunters, & people who drive a lot—nearly everyone around here, except those who can't afford it—especially trucks. The place is called Plow & Wheel. It's a good place to buy a pair of boots, a winter coat, long underwear, a hat, a hunting rifle, or a sight or ammunition for the rifle, or a snow shovel or snowblower, or surveying equipment.

For the railroad, Jack & his partner, when they were off-duty at the reformatory, would go around with dogs, & roust out bums who were sleeping in the boxcars.

"Seems like a good place for them to sleep," I say. "They'd probably cause more trouble somewhere else. Better the city should just pay the railroad a subsidy to let them sleep there."

Jack giggles.

"I slept in a boxcar once," I say. "Or tried to, 'til someone rousted me out."

(Now that I recall it, it wasn't a boxcar. It was a passenger car, one cold night east of London, when I was walking to Dover. I had a return plane ticket—second half of an Icelandic Airlines $100 student round-trip ticket New York to Iceland to Luxembourg & Luxembourg to Iceland to New York—in my pocket, with my passport. I'd been robbed of my guitar & backpack, including sleeping bag. I had few resources or encumbrances, had been traveling without a role or destination for months—felt like years. I seemed to have picked a route thru the most industrialized—tho mostly sooty ruins, rather than productive—strip of land on earth, along the Thames River. Heat was on in the parked railroad car—a motor was doing some muffled roaring—& I curled up, exhausted & discouraged, across 2 seats. Two policemen woke me, & one pointed out that bums would be glad to relieve me of my good boots, a remaining asset I'd been unaware of, & had failed to lose so far, while focusing on far-off goals generally considered impossible, which I couldn't see how I'd achieve. When he realized I was an American, & found out I was a writer, he said he was a Hemingway fan—& treated me, smiling—like Jack now—as some kind of kin.)

Besides rousting bums & looking for shoplifters at Plow & Wheel, Jack & his partner went around with their dogs, checking to see that doors & gates hadn't been broken into.

One night, Jack found a gate open, went in with the dog, & disturbed 2 trespassers. One got away, Jack doesn't know where to—because he chased the other one.

But this guy was too fast, & Jack wasn't going to be able to catch him, so he yelled, "Stop—or I'll let the dog go!"

The guy didn't stop, so Jack let the dog go.

The dog was a smart one. He ran ahead of the guy who was fleeing, turned, & snarled—here Jack imitates the dog curling his lip & looking dangerous—& the guy stopped.

Jack caught up, cuffed the guy, & called the city police—who arrested him.

That dog would growl & curl his lips at everybody, but as long as Jack was with him, & didn't tell him to get them, he wouldn't attack anyone. But everyone was afraid to sit with Jack when the dog was sitting at his feet, or to visit Jack at home, because of the dog.

Once, Jack had to leave town for a couple of weeks, & left the dog with his 80-year-old aunt.

"I don't want to take care of him—I'm afraid of him!" she said.

"He won't hurt you," Jack said. "Just pet him."

She petted the dog, the dog's eyes rolled back, & he leapt up into her lap.

The aunt laughed, & Jack left.

When he returned, the aunt said, "I haven't been able to get that dog off my lap for two weeks!"

"No one else petted him," Jack says.

That job at Plow & Wheel, Jack says, led to a job doing detective work for a guy in the record distribution business.

"The record distribution business? Around here?" I ask.

"Yeah. The kind of recordings you send in money for, that you see advertised on TV, the oldies. He did real well. He hired us to follow his wife, & get evidence she was having an affair—with a college kid."

"Seems like," I say, "if you thought your wife was having an affair, & you would hire detectives to follow her, you might just as well get a divorce, & eliminate the middle men."

"But he wanted to keep his kids."

"And his money, I suppose."

Jack grunts agreement.

"I don't much care about her having the affair," I say, "but not being honest would make it impossible," I say.

"That's the job," Jack says.

"Hard job, too." I say. "How did the guy find you? Did you have an advertisement in the paper, or what?"

"On the door of Plow & Wheel, it said Acme Detectives On Duty, with our phone number. So he called us. He gave us tracking devices to put on her car, in her hotel room. Stuff we wouldn't have known about or been able to afford. We told him that we'd never done anything like this, or this big—but he said he'd looked around, & no one was going to be able to do the job without his help, & he liked our attitude."

"So what did you do?"

"We followed her. Back then, a couple times a year, I drove cars from Chicago to a used car lot. So I asked the guy if I could use his cars once in a while—so she wouldn't be able to recognize me by my car—she was a smart one, & figured out that I was following her, pretty quick. I had a 4-wheel-drive International Harvester. There were a lot of them around then, but still.... He said, 'Sure.' So I took different cars off the lot different nights.

"It was a hard job. You never knew you where you were going. And, of course, we'd be following her, when it was time for our shifts at the reformatory.

"Once I followed her to Minneapolis, once to Madison.

"We rented a room in the Aristocrat Hotel—that's where they used to meet, around here—opposite the room they used, & we took all kinds of pictures of them together. One time, I called my partner from our room, & told him they were together now. He knocked on their door, the kid answered, my partner pushed the door open with his foot, & took a picture with the kid in the door, & the wife behind him on the bed, bare-assed.

"When it went to the judge, he asked the wife if the college kid stayed overnight at the house, when our client was out of town. Since we had photos that showed that he did, she admitted it.

"The judge said, 'Your two older kids have a room of their own, but the baby sleeps in your room, doesn't she?'

"The wife said, 'Yes.'

"'And the two older kids come & go into your room, too?'

"'Yes,' said the wife.

"'Do you think that's a good environment for the kids?'

"'They're too young to know what it's about,' she said.

"'I've been a judge a long time, & I can tell you, that it will have its effect, later on. I'm awarding the kids to the husband.'

"Well, she went about nuts, but she'd kind of been hemmed in by our pictures, & told on herself.

"The husband gave us an extra $5,000."

"Five thousand dollars!"

"We were getting $60 an hour. We thought that was pretty good pay."

"I'll say!"

"But he said no one else he could have found would have done what we did."

"You got him exactly the result he wanted."

"Yeah."

Copyright © Eric Chaet 2004