Steven Womack: Dead Folks' blues

I also started skip tracing for Lonnie, using the phone in my office. Skip tracing’s not quite as risky, but it’s about as intense. Somebody falls behind on a loan payment, the bank sends them a letter, and it gets returned NOT AT THIS ADDRESS. So some silly-assed bank officer calls the number in the file folder and explains that he’s trying to locate the person who’s fellen behind in his payments.

They usually don’t have much luck, which should come as no surprise. Not many people are willing to cooperate with a bank on the trail of a deadbeat. And the suits at the bank, being all but completely bereft of imagination, don’t know what else to do, so they turn the account over to a skip tracer.

Lonnie’s got a terminal in his office that runs off credit reports. It’s scary the stuff that comes in off these computers. Nobody has any secrets these days. Frightening. Anyway, Lonnie runs a credit bureau report, sticks it in a file with the bank’s paperwork, then hands it over to me. I get twenty bucks for each verified address and phone number, with an extra five thrown in for verifying employment. It was pretty rough at first, but after a few days’ practice, I got to where I could scam about six or eight a day, when I’d make myself work at it.

A couple months go by, and things are cruising along. I still haven’t got a case yet, but I’m bringing in a few bucks now and then subcontracting for Lonnie. The two guys down the hall are songwriters and publishers: Slim and Ray. They told me their last names, but I’ve never been able to remember them. They rent another one-room office and write songs all day and listen to tapes from other starving songwriters. I don’t really know how it all works; it just seems like everybody I’ve ever met in the music business is hungry. Like the old joke you hear down on Music Row: Know what they call a Nashville musician without a girlfriend? Homeless.

Occasionally, at the end of the day, I’ll stop by Slim and Ray’s office and have a beer with them. Cocktail hour for these two starts around four. The singing gets a little louder. People drop by with guitars. The place turns into a regular little party, and they’re playing all this moaning and groaning, crying in your beer stuff. But some of it’s pretty good, and I can’t really knock it.

One Wednesday afternoon, I was sitting in my office with a stack of folders in front of me. I opened the top one; a Linda Wolford at 2545 Forest Avenue had defaulted on an unsecured personal note. The bank couldn’t even go after this lady’s car. They sent her a half-dozen notices. All were returned. Somebody from the bank called. A female voice claiming to be a roommate said Linda Wolford moved away. Sorry, no forwarding address. No phone number.

I figure if I call this lady up and say “Hey, I need to verify your identity and address so the bank can nail your ass,” I’m probably not going to get very far. I decided to run the UPS scam on her, then picked up the phone and dialed the number.

“Hello.”

“Yeah, I’m trying to reach Linda Wolford at 2454 Forest Drive.”

“Ugh, who wants to know?”

“This is Carter over at UPS Customer Service. We had a package to deliver for a Ms. Wolford that came back as un-deliverable. We’re just trying to find the right address so we don’t have to send the package back.”

“What’s in the package?”

“I don’t know that, ma’am, but it’s insured for two hundred dollars and it’s prepaid, so you don’t owe anything on it. Must be a gift or something.”

“And what address was that?”

“2454 Forest Drive, ma’am.”

You usually get a chuckle or a sigh of anticipation at this point. This time, it came right on schedule.

“Oh, that’s it, Mr. Carter. I’m Linda Wolford, but my address is 2545 Forest Drive.”

“I’m grinning now.” Bang, got her . “Let me see, you’re Linda Wolford at 2545 Forest Drive, correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Great, Ms. Wolford. Sorry for the inconvenience. You’ll be hearing from us in a few days.” Yeah, and give my regards to the bankruptcy judge .

“Thanks for going to the trouble to find me.”

“All part of the service, ma’am. All part of the service.”

So after twelve years of private school and four years of private university, I’m making a living by lying to people. Which puts me up there with some of the top biz school graduates in the country.

For a guy who got canned and had to move into a dumpy little apartment in a neighborhood filled with old Buicks on concrete blocks in the front yards, I’m doing okay. I’m having a swell time. I’m getting by. I’m nailing deadbeats. Life is sweet.

I close the folder in front of me, then look up from my desk just as the door opens. Rachel Fletcher is standing in my doorway.

Damn.

She was Rachel Todd when I first met her, back when we were undergraduates at Boston U. in the Seventies. Maybe it’s my own dysfunction, but spending my adolescence at a boy’s school kind of skewed my early perceptions of women. In fact, when I met this woman freshman year, at some dumb mixer on campus, it was like being run over by a truck, just as powerful and marginally less painful. Her blond hair was longer then, her face a little fuller, with the last traces of teenage baby fat still hanging on. But she was gorgeous, drop-dead-leave-your-tongue-in-the-dirt gorgeous. And somehow I got her to date me. A couple of weeks later, I got her to sleep with me, only we didn’t sleep very much. Three years later, she left me and married some dweeb named Fletcher, a rich prick who went on to become a doctor.

What the hell! I made peace with it a long time ago. So unlike some other relationships I’ve wound up in, I don’t carry too much baggage from this one. But seeing her looking down on me that day was, for a long moment, akin to getting hit by that truck again.

She opened the door without knocking. I guess she figured she’d be walking in on a secretary and a waiting room and all the other normal business fixtures. She looked surprised to see me, as if she wasn’t really sure I was who she thought I was. Then she turned and stared at the black lettering on the frosted glass. She shook her head almost imperceptibly, then stepped in, closing the door behind her.

“Hi, Harry. How’ve you been?”

By this time, I was standing behind my desk without even realizing I’d gotten up. I looked her over, trying not to gape. You have to understand, I hadn’t exactly-well, I think the euphemism is been- with anybody in quite some time. Kind of a long dry spell, you see, but at least partly by choice. So when I found myself alone in a closed office with a lovely blonde, and not just any lovely blonde, damn it, but this blonde, I had to remember not to drool out loud. And remembering she was a natural blonde didn’t help.

“Hi, Rachel,” I said, hoping like hell my voice held up. “How are you?”

“I’m fine, Harry. How are you?”

I stood there a second, awkward and tight, then finally managed to activate my tongue.

“Nervous, actually. You’re the last person I expected to walk into my office.”

“Don’t be nervous, Harry. I’m not a process server.”

“Good. I got nothing worth suing for. Have a seat.”

She was dressed in a black silk blouse, white pants with a sheen bright enough to hurt your eyes and a crease sharp enough to pick your teeth with. I hoped my chair wouldn’t get her dirty. She’d lost the weight in her face, leaving the outline of high cheekbones visible just underneath her skin. I always suspected there was great bone structure buried there someplace. Her skin was as alabaster as always, as clear as unpolluted snow. Her hands were thinner as well, and the soft blue of her veins gave a tinge of color to them.