Ross Thomas: Ah, Treachery!

Dave howled, dropped the clipboard, clapped his right hand over the eye, then covered that hand with his left one, leaving himself open to more damage. Partain instead placed a gentle hand on Dave’s shoulder, steered him into the living room and eased him into a comfortable armchair.

“You won’t lose the eye,” Partain said.

“Fuck off,” said Dave and bent over to hang his head between his knees, either to ease the pain or to keep from fainting. Only his right palm now covered the wounded eye and he was still in the bent-over position when Jessica Carver came into the living room, glanced at Dave and said, “What’s his problem now?”

“A disagreement,” Partain said.

“I see he won.”

“I think not.”

“He’s inside, isn’t he?” she said.

Because Jessica Carver had locked herself in her bedroom, refusing to have anything to do with Dave, it was Partain who taped a gauze pad over the bruised eye where the surrounding skin was beginning to hint of the bilious colors to come. Partain then fed the big man a Percodan and a beer after making sure he had arrived by taxi and would leave the same way.

They now sat at the living room bar, Partain sipping a breakfast beer and listening to the alcohol-and-Percodan-inspired monologue from the false messenger who confessed he was really David Laney, a 36-year-old UCLA graduate, class of ’79, with a degree in political science even though he had never given a shit about politics but back then had figured it ought to be a good way to meet women and was, in fact, the way he’d met Jessie in ’88 during the Dukakis campaign. And where the hell was Jessie, anyhow?

“Taking a nap,” Partain said.

“Yeah, well, are you and she — you know?”

“I work for her mother.”

“Doing what?”

“Security consultant.”

“Rent-a-cop, huh?”

“If you like.”

“Old Millie’s something, isn’t she? She’ll hit on anyone. She even tried me one time.”

“Jessica’s mother?”

“Sure. Who else? There was this guy who wanted to be governor — Van de something. So Millie ran through her spiel and asked me to contribute a thousand to the guy’s campaign. Well, Christ, the only income I’ve got is from this almost nothing trust fund, so I told her I’d do what I could and sent her a check for twenty-five bucks. That pissed her off so much she wouldn’t speak to me for months.”

“A trust fund sometimes must be more burden than comfort,” Partain said.

“You know you’re right?” Laney said. “Everybody thinks you’re rolling in it, but two million’s nowhere near what it used to be. Mine’s handled out of a bank in Boston by some belt-and-suspender guys who still think six percent oughta draw money from the moon.”

Partain decided it was time to send Laney on his way. “Want me to call a taxi?”

“Yeah, thanks, but let me ask you this.” He touched his right eye. “How bad’s the mouse going to be?”

“Bad enough.”

“I still don’t see why you had to pick my eye.”

“To get your attention. If I’d wanted to do real damage, the eye’d’ve popped out and rolled around on the floor. But you’re lucky in a way. If I’d been having one of my real black mood swings, Imight’ve shoved your nosebone up into your brain and we wouldn’t be sitting here over a couple of beers.”

“What mood swings?”

“They started in Vietnam,” Partain said, wondering where his embellishment would lead. “When I’m crossed, I’m sometimes subject to violent episodes. For example, if you try to bother Jessica again, I might go berserk and bite off your nose.”

Laney’s right hand went to his nose as he said, “You’re shitting me, aren’t you?”

“Am I?”

Laney studied Partain carefully with his one good eye for several moments, then nodded, as if reaching a decision. “I’ve met guys like you before. Lots of times. Guys who claim they eat lizards and fried red ants for breakfast and shit like that. I met a lot of ’em in Mexico.”

“In Guadalajara?”

“There and La Paz and a bunch of other places. Guys who don’t work and never have, but always have new cars and money and women. Fact is, I met one like that just before I flew up here. He came looking for Jessie, but she’d already gone. The guy wanted Jessie to tell her mother something.”

“He have a name?” Partain said.

“Guys like him have as many names as they do women. Take your pick. But the one yesterday was calling himself Sid Solo.”

“Is Ms. Altford supposed to know Mr. Solo?”

Laney started to shake his head no, thought better of it and said, “Nah. He was just the runner. Someone handed him maybe a hundred or two and told him to go find Jessie and tell her something.”

“Tell her what?”

Laney frowned. “Will you tell her — Millie, I mean?”

“Sure.”

“Okay,” Laney said. “Sid Solo said for Jessie to tell her mother to call off the hunt. That’s it and don’t ask me what it means.”

Partain smiled. “I misjudged you, Dave, and I apologize.”

“For what?”

“You turned out to be a real messenger after all.”

In the spring of 1971, a reporter for the now defunct Washington Star was roused from sleep by a phone call and a harsh deep voice that the reporter later wrote “sounded like the first cruel crack of doom.”

The voice belonged to Emory Kite, a private investigator and skip-tracer, who warned the reporter to come up with a couple of past-due car payments or face unspecified consequences, which, the reporter imagined, would “begin with the rack, continue with the thumbscrew and end mercifully with a variation of the Asian bastinado.”

The reporter borrowed money from his credit union, paid up and later that week went calling on Emory Kite at his rented desk in a divorce lawyer’s office on the fourth floor of the old Bond Building at 14th and New York Avenue, N.W. The reporter discovered “a small man, somewhat larger than a big jockey, with the eyes of an amused hangman, the face of a young Mr. Punch and the sole proprietor of what sounds like hell’s own official voice.”

The byline feature ran fifteen column inches on an inside page under a three-column headline that read:

The story gave only a sketchy account of Kite, noting that at 19 he had left Anniston, Alabama, in 1961 with only the vague promise of a patronage job as an elevator operator in the Capitol building. He arrived in Washington with one suit, a high school diploma and his frightener’s voice, which he claimed to have acquired at 13 after being treated for strep throat with a home remedy tasting of turpentine.

Kite never got the elevator operator job, but he did find work with a collection agency that specialized in harassing Federal employees who fell behind on their installment loans. His voice soon made him the agency star and, after five and a half years, Kite acquired a private investigator’s license. Soon after that, he quit the collection agency and, in his words, “went independent.”

Since it was only a feature story, the Washington Star reporter saw no reason to dig more deeply and three months later quit the newspaper to teach journalism at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. But on sheer hunch one of the story’s readers did dig more deeply and discovered what he would later describe as “some very rich and nasty pay dirt.”

The man who dug deeper was a young Army major just back from Vietnam. His assignment at the Pentagon was to devise a new and better way to track down Vietnam War deserters — most of them draftees. The Major had convinced his superiors to fund a small pilot program that would offer civilian bounty hunters $200 for each deserter they located. During Emory Kite’s one and only visit to the Pentagon he asked Major Walker L. Hudson if, for the $200, “I gotta just find ’em, or both find ’em and bring ’em in, even if they don’t wanta come?”