Chapter Seven: THE WRONG CLIENT

I stopped at the first mini-mart I came to on Avenue B. Bought a small bottled water and stripped off my dress shirt as I paid, telling the clerk, “It sure turned warm.” He was a stocky, middle-aged Middle Easterner with a puckered scar on his left cheek and gold in his smile. He nodded and grinned full agreement like he didn’t understand a word I said.

On the way out, I untucked the green t-shirt I’d worn underneath and put the paper painter’s hat on my head, tucking up my loose hair. Altering my appearance in case those goons in the gold Grand Cherokee were circling the block for me. I traveled back facing the oncoming traffic along one-way side streets.

I re-entered Tompkins Square Park at the Ninth Street entrance by the handball courts and the dog run. Stopped and leaned against the fence to check out the dogs and their owners and see if anyone I knew was around, but all I saw were the faces of young strangers.

At the base of a high wooden chainsaw-sculpture of a femur bone, a black Yorkie was digging furiously into the cedar woodchips exposing dark soil beneath. A tawny Great Dane loped up behind it and sniffed the little dog’s ass. Then, like a man on stilts bending down to tie his shoes, the Dane squatted low on his bunched-up hind legs to mount the Yorkie with amorous intent. But before even the first thrust, the little black dog scampered away from him and darted off across the dog run, leaving the Dane, awkwardly over-balanced, dry-humping the empty air.

I turned away. I knew how he felt.

Exiting the park at the St. Marks Place entrance, I returned to the Yaffa Cafe. This time, I went inside and ran the name of George Rowell past the hostess, asking her if he’d made a reservation or if anyone had asked for him.

She was a dumpy woman in her early twenties and had copper-orange hair and harlequin eyeglasses with seashells and tiny starfish glued around the edges. She shook her head no.

I ordered a take-out cappuccino. The purchase left my wallet with two fives and three singles. Lucky me.

I walked up First Avenue to Twelfth Street and turned left, passed the fenced-in blacktop behind Asher Levy Elementary School where kids were filing in from recess, their cumulative voices a high-pitched roar.

At Second Avenue, I stood on the same corner Owl had three hours ago. In the road the tar and pavement was partly worn away, torn up by snowplows and the patches never setting, so the cobblestones beneath peeked out like bare ribs through a tattered shroud.

I waited for the light to change. It only took a minute, and I wondered again what had taken him so long to make it from the phone to my door. What could account for that two or three minute lapse before the accident?

Again the only answer I came up with was a sudden attack of disorientation. But could it have been another sort of attack?

I didn’t wonder about it long because at the front door of my building a tall, well-dressed man with curly blond hair was jabbing one of the buzzers, and as I got closer, I saw it was mine.

I thought maybe it was one of Tigger’s team of financial advisors pushing the wrong button. He had a long, lean, handsome face. Ten years younger than me and four inches taller, wearing clothes that would’ve covered my rent. Five hundred dollar suit, three hundred dollar shoes, hundred dollar hair grooming, a fifty dollar tan, and twenty dollar aftershave, of which, as the breeze changed, I figured he wore ten bucks’ worth.

I approached, consulting my empty cupped hand like it held a piece of paper, and rang my own buzzer.

He turned, looked at me, and said, “Mr. Sherwood?”

So much for playing it cagey. He knew me by sight, but I’d never seen him before in my life.

He said, “I’ve been trying your bell for the last five minutes.”

“Oh. How do you like it?”

“What?”

“Skip it.” I put my key in the door and opened it. “What can I do for you?”

“My name is Paul Windmann. Two N’s, M-A-N-N. I need to hire a—” he lowered his voice “—a detective.”

I stepped into the entryway. He followed on my heels. In the closed space, his cologne reeked like concentrated formaldehyde. My nostrils revolted against it. I breathed in through my teeth.

“Well, then you better come up, Mr. Windmann.”

“Please call me Paul, Mr. Sherwood. But before we go further, I need to know, are you free today?”

“No. But I’m reasonable.”

He forced a chuckle. “Bad choice of words. What I meant is, are you available to help me?”

“That depends on what kind of help.”

He waved that away. “I mean, will you be able to act immediately? Give it your full attention? You aren’t, by chance, working on anything else that would… conflict?”

I shook my head.

“Nothing but a recovery.”

“A recovery?”

“My own.”

“You’re joking.”

“Good on you to spot it. Most don’t.”

“Well, it’s funny you should say that, because the help I need involves a recovery. But, you’re sure you aren’t engaged? It needs your undivided attention.”

I was getting a bad feeling about this guy. I said blandly, “I’ll worship it as a deity.”

“Please, there’s no need for sarcasm.”

“Isn’t there?”

“I merely stress the point because I don’t want to waste time—yours or mine—discussing it with you if it happens you’re busy working on…something else.”

“How did you come to choose me?”

He blinked, one two three.

“You were recommended.”

“By whom?”

“One of your satisfied customers, of course.”

If only he knew what a short list that was.

“And who would that be?”

Blink, blink, blink.

“I’d rather not say. Privacy, you understand. But does it matter? Maybe I should’ve said I picked you out of the phonebook. Do you check references on all your clients? I thought it worked the other way round.”

He was getting exasperated with me and I was getting sick of the smell of his cologne. I was going to have to light a match soon.

I bowed my head. “You got me. Come on up.”

Once inside, he gave my office a sweeping glance. Something about its barrenness made him smile.

“Take a seat,” I said, indicating the club chairs as I went behind my desk and sat down. The light on my answering machine was flashing four new messages, but I didn’t play them now.

Windmann looked at the answering machine, too, inclining his head slightly as if to say, “Go ahead, don’t mind me.” But I did mind him.

I picked up the pouch of loose tobacco and started to roll a cigarette.

Windmann smiled wryly, reached into a breast pocket, removed a thin silver case, and pushed a button which flipped open the P.W.-engraved lid.

“Have one of mine?”

Dunhill Blue. I selected one from the side near his thumb and lit up. I drew deep. After my harsh diet of roll-your-owns, the filtered cigarette was like smoking morning mist.

“How can I help you, er…Paul?”

He told me. And within thirty seconds, I pegged him as a wrong client. I recognized the signs because I’ve had a few over the years. Evasive, reluctant to give details, curious about what method will be used, restrictions on what they want done, and, above all, no police involved.

The most typical wrong clients a P.I.—especially a one-man operation—has to contend with are stalkers. They want to hire you to do one specific job, either get an unlisted phone number or find the new address where someone has moved to, and they’re willing to pay for it; money is no object (as long as you tell them how you do it, so next time they can do it for themselves).

All of which you sometimes get with a right client as well. But the decider is the story. A wrong client always has a story prepared. A right client, half the time, doesn’t know what he wants done. He has a problem, and by coming to you shows he’s run out of ideas on how to solve it. Getting his story is like removing shrapnel from a fleshy buttcheek with tweezers. Grab a bit here and drop it in the dish—kaplang—grab another bit there—kaplang—and probe deeper into the meat for a missing piece that might connect the two. Sometimes it requires more skill and finesse than the actual job itself.

But a wrong client’ll always tell you a tale.

I leaned back, smoking, and listened to Paul Windmann’s.

“Two nights ago,” he said, “I was robbed. I went for a drink with a business associate at this place that just opened on Rivington Street called The Parallel Bar. We had a couple of drinks and then my associate left around ten p.m. I stayed for another and while I was drinking it, this blonde woman came over and started talking to me. A real hottie. Sounded foreign, sort of a thick accent, but she didn’t say where she was from. I bought her a drink and we seemed to connect, so we had a few more. By midnight, we were both a little drunk. I had an early appointment the next day, so I decided to call it a night. I asked for her number so we could hook up over the weekend.

“But she made it—how shall I say—very obvious she didn’t want our evening to end. She suggested we go back to my place. Now, that’s important, because it was her idea, not mine. Not that I didn’t immediately concur, but generally I like to get to know someone first. When a woman is that eager, it usually means she does that sort of thing a lot, and I’ve no interest in catching an STD. But as I said, I was under the influence and she was very attractive and very willing, and well…I relaxed my caution. We took a cab back to my place.”

“And where’s that?”

“I live at the Crystalview. Do you know it? Well, it’s a relatively new condominium on the west side, just below Canal.”

He gave me the exact address and I jotted it down.

“Well, on the way, she practically raped me in the cab. I had to peel her off me in order to pay the fare. By the time we got up to my apartment, I was more than ready.

“But as soon as we walked through the door, she cooled off, didn’t act nearly as drunk as she had been—or as I felt. She wanted to talk, listen to some music, have another drink. She said she had this special drink she wanted to make for me.”

I arched an eyebrow.

Windmann said, “You can see where this is going. She made up these drinks that looked like Cosmos. She downed hers in two gulps and I followed suit. Suddenly she had her dress off and was taking my clothes off, and we were both naked on my couch. I tried leading her to my bedroom, but I couldn’t keep my legs straight under me, and she was laughing and laughing. That’s all I remember clearly until about dawn.

“I woke up naked on the floor. She wasn’t anywhere to be seen. I only realized when I was about to call out to her that she’d never told me her name. And I felt sick, sicker than any hangover I ever had. She must’ve drugged me with some sort of date-rape drug.”

“A roofie.” Rohypnol, one of the benzodiazepines. Better living through chemistry.

“Whatever, only she didn’t rape me, she ripped me off. All my money was gone, credit cards, two wristwatches, and my iPod. All gone. The little bitch.”

I sat forward and planted my elbows on the desk.

“Did you report it to the police?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Well…to be honest, I’m afraid to.”

“Afraid of what?”

He smiled sheepishly. He had even white teeth. “Well, in retrospect, I’m not a hundred percent sure whether she was eighteen or not.”

“You’re saying she may have been underage?”

“I’m not sure. They were serving her at the bar, so I figured she was old enough. But if not, well, I might end up getting arrested myself.”

I nodded. That made sense even if nothing else did. I reached for my pouch of tobacco to roll a cigarette, but Windmann got his engraved silver cigarette case out again and offered me another of his. I took one, but not because I really needed a cigarette. I wanted to see his case again. Looked like real silver to me. But if he’d been robbed, why hadn’t it been taken too? If he’d been robbed…

I lit up and smoked. It felt strange not to be constantly picking shreds of tobacco off my tongue.

I asked him, “You’ve cancelled your credit cards?”

“Naturally.”

“So, what you want me to do,” I said, anticipating the payoff, “is find the woman.”

But he surprised me.

“What? No. No. I never want to see her again. I just want my…things back.”

“Still means I’ll have to find this woman.”

“Does it really? I hoped you might have…other ideas.”

“I always have other ideas. Have you got a list of everything that’s missing?”

He blinked one, two, three.

“No…I mean, well, most of it I don’t care about. Actually, all I really would like returned is my iPod. You see, my entire music collection is on it. I’ve been assembling it for years. And like an idiot, I never backed any of it up on my computer.”

“What about the wristwatches?”

He waved it away. “They’re both old, and one doesn’t even work anymore.”

I nodded. I thought it over.

A private investigator confronted with a wrong client typically should respond by showing him the door and telling him never to come back. That’s if the P.I. wants to safeguard his bond and keep his license. Okay, so maybe this guy wasn’t a stalker, but he was something, something wrong, possibly even dangerous.

I told him, “I’m sorry, Mr. Windmann—”

“Paul.”

“Yeh, Paul, but I don’t see how I can help you, given that you don’t want me to do anything.”

Windmann crossed his legs, straightened his pantleg, uncrossed his legs again, then leaned forward.

“May I speak frankly to you, Mr. Sherwood?”

“I wish you would.”

“I…this morning, I got a phone call. It was from a man who knew about my being robbed the other night. He said he had nothing to do with it, but that he might be able to arrange for the return of my things.”

“For a price?”

“Naturally.”

“How much?”

He waved that away, too. “The point is that I don’t trust myself to remain calm in the situation. I’d like to retain you to be available to retrieve my things if and when this person does call me back.”

I started to mumble a protest, but let it peter out as Windmann reached into his jacket pocket for his billfold. He extracted four bills, laying them down one at a time on my desk.

The whole set-up stunk, but I put my olfactory objections on hold as soon as I saw the color of his money. It was orange. Euros in the denomination of fifty. I’d never been bought in Euros before, it was a novelty. Times had certainly changed. The U.S. dollar was no longer the currency of coercion.

“It’s all I have at the moment,” he said. “Is it sufficient? To start with?”

I held one of them up to the window to see its watermark. Peek-a-boo. As far as I could tell, the bills were genuine.

I said, “Consider me retained. Paul.”

He smiled winningly.

“Thank you, thank you so much. I feel better already.”

Well, that made one of us. I opened my center desk drawer, swept in the bills and took out my carboned receipt pad. I started to write.

“I really don’t need a receipt,” he said.

I kept writing. “Yeh, well, I do.”

I had him sign it—his signature looked like a broken kite string—then handed him the copy and kept the original.

He stood and we shook hands.

He said, “I’ll call you as soon as I hear anything.”

He started toward my office door.

I called to him, “By the way, Paul, what kind of business are you in?”

“I don’t see how that—”

“Would it be real estate by any chance?” I was thinking back to that curtain-twitcher at Rauth Realty.

He triple-blinked and his lips curled into a half-smile lazily like worms awakened from dark soil. He said, “I’ve got my fingers in a lot of different pies, Mr. Sherwood.”

“Sounds messy.”

The smile went away. He said, “I’ll be in touch.”

After he left I changed clothes, into a pair of khakis and a dark blue Polo sport shirt. I got my last can of Coke out of the mini-fridge and sat back at my desk. I played the four new messages on my answering machine.

The first two were from Matt Chadinsky, both long messages, richly embroidered with expletives, which ate up the allotted times. Omitting all the swear words, the messages only amounted to, “Where are you? I told you to stay put.”

Yeh, easier said than done.

The third and fourth messages were both from women. None from Paul Windmann, which meant he came by and rang my bell without even calling first. His wrongness was growing by steady increments, but I was past being surprised.

But life still offered some surprises: the third message was someone who wanted to hire me.

“Good afternoon. This is Mrs. Dough. D-O-U-G-H, like bread.” She had a clear, young voice with just a twist of New England twang to it. “My husband John and I would like to discuss the possibility of hiring you. Your Yellow Pages ad says you perform background checks on potential employees. We’re new to the neighborhood and are in the process of hiring a nanny for our two-year-old daughter. We’d like to stop by this afternoon, say about three o’clock, if that’s okay. We don’t have a landline yet, but my cell phone number is…” She read off a 917 number and I wrote it down on the same sheet I’d jotted Windmann’s address on. I paused the message and called her back, got her voicemail and told Mrs. Dough three o’clock was convenient for me.

Then I played the final message.

“Hello, I am trying to connect…to contact George Rowl. I don’t…he told me he was to be seeing you this morning, but I do not heard from him since…is maybe I misunderstood. I am sorry, I will call you again.” Click.

Since it was the last message I’d received, I picked up my phone and dialed *69, but it was a number with a masked I.D. I listened to it again, a distinct accent in the woman’s voice. Sayre Rauth? No, her accent was barely noticeable. This woman’s was thick, nearly as thick as that mustached goon’s had been—or the woman Paul Windmann described to me as the one who robbed him.

But I wasn’t any linguist, it could’ve been anything from Croatian to Ukrainian to Turkish, for all I knew.

That was the problem, what I didn’t know outweighed what I knew ten to one.

Time to remedy that and get the odds on my side.

Just for a change.