A Firing Offense, Page 2

  “I don’t need you to get his job back, Mr. Stefanos,” he said. “I need you to help me find him.”

  A long silence followed. He made a swallowing sound, then cleared his throat.

  “Why are you calling me?” I asked.

  “I bought a TV years ago from John McGinnes in your store on Connecticut Avenue. This year I bought a toaster oven from him. He’s my man there,” he said with that peculiarly elderly notion of salesman ownership. “I talked with him yesterday morning. Said he didn’t know anything but you might. Said you’re pretty good at finding people when you put your mind to it.” I made a mental note to slam McGinnes for that.

  “Mr. Pence, if you’re worried about your grandson you should call the police,” I said with what I hoped was an air of finality.

  “Please. Please come see me, only for a few minutes. I have something to give you, anyway. A cassette tape you made for Jimmy.” I remembered it, the usual soft punk and hard pop. Though it was no big deal, the Broda kid had seemed mildly touched when I gave it to him.

  “I have somewhere to go tonight,” I said, “But maybe I could stop by for a minute. I mean, if it’s on my way. Where do you live?”

  “I’m on Connecticut, the first apartment building northeast of Albemarle. Apartment ten-ten. Do you know it?”

  “Yes.” It was right up from the store.

  “I’ll meet you in the lobby then,” he said excitedly.

  “Right. Twenty minutes.”

  TWO

  MY GYM BAG was in the trunk as I headed down Thirteenth Street. Bob “Here” was the DJ on HFS and spinning some post-patchuli oil nonsense. I pushed a Long Ryders tape into the deck. The first song, “Sweet Mental Revenge,” had a guitar break reminiscent of the Eagles, the difference being that the Ryders had testicles. I turned up the volume.

  I made a right on Military Road, passed under Sixteenth, and neared the Oregon Avenue intersection where I hung a left into a severely sloped, winding entrance to Rock Creek Park. As kids we had as a rule driven this stretch of the park with our headlights off, navigating by the moonlight that cut a path through the treeline above. God or the dumb luck of youth had always brought us safely through; tonight, even with my hi-beams on, the darkness seemed to envelop me.

  At the bottom of the hill I crossed a small bridge and turned left onto Beach Drive. Soon after that I made a right on Brandy-wine and cut over to Albemarle, cruising by million dollar Tudor houses with dark German and British automobiles parked, like hearses, in their driveways.

  At Connecticut and Albemarle I looked across the street to the left. Though there was no foot traffic at this hour, Nutty Nathan’s was open. I decided against dropping in on McGinnes. By this time of day the effects of malt liquor and marijuana would have rendered him incoherent.

  I parked on Connecticut, an after–rush-hour privilege, and walked across a brownish lawn to a tall, tan-brick building. As a salesman at Nathan’s on the Avenue, I had often delivered and installed air conditioners here for the elderly residents of these rent-controlled apartments.

  When I entered the first set of glass doors, a guy in the lobby who looked to be on the green side of seventy caught my eye. He motioned to a bored-looking young woman behind the switchboard and a buzzer sounded. I pulled on the second set of doors and entered the lobby.

  The old man strode towards me quickly and with deliberate posture, though he looked as if it pained him some to do so. His handshake was firm.

  “I’m Nick Stefanos.”

  “I knew when I saw you,” he said in a self-congratulatory manner, then looked me over. Either Pence liked what he saw or felt he had little choice; he pointed a slim hand towards the elevators.

  We passed an obese young security guard with a seventies Afro who was talking to the woman at the switchboard and ignoring us and all the old people sitting around the bland lobby. The lobby had the still, medicinal smell of a nursing home.

  Pence took me to a metal door that led to the elevators and attempted to pull it open. A look of mild panic appeared on his face as the weight of the door knocked him off balance. The security guard said something behind us about the old man forgetting to take his Geritol. We heard the laughter of the guard and the woman at the switchboard as we entered an elevator.

  The old man was silent as we rode to the tenth floor, though his lips were moving and there was a slight scowl across his face. He was wearing workpants pulled high above his waist, a white cotton T-shirt, and oxford Hush Puppies that he wore laceless like loafers. The thick leather belt drawn tightly around his abdomen looked water-damaged and was permanently bent in several spots. Time had eaten him like a patient scavenger.

  The elevator bounced to a stop, causing Pence to grab the handrail with reluctance. The doors opened, he bolted out and I followed. He stopped at 1010 and with no trouble at all this time negotiated the lock and door.

  We entered as he flipped on a master light. The apartment, with its florid, cushiony sofa and armchairs and a curio cabinet filled with delicate porcelain figures, had obviously been decorated by a woman. But a glass caked with milk on the table and the general disarray of the place told me that his wife or companion was gone.

  “Have a seat,” he said. I chose one, noticing as I sat that its cushion contained a rogue spring. I remained seated, as none of the other chairs showed better promise. Though it was rather cool, I had the desire to crack a window. His apartment had the smell of outdated dairy products.

  “Goddamn security guard,” he muttered, unable to forget the fat rent-a-cop in the lobby. He quit pacing and lit on a seat next to an end table, on which sat a crystal lamp, a TV directory, an ashtray, and a pack of smokes. Pence shook one from the deck directly to his mouth, looked up at me, and said, “You mind?”

  “Not at all.” He lit it with a Zippo and let out a long stream of smoke that continued to pour out erratically as he began to talk.

  “You always have to ask now, before you smoke. It seems like every time I light up, in the Hot Shoppes cafeteria, or wherever, some young guy in a suit tells me the smoke’s bothering him. I’ve got to laugh at your generation sometimes. You guys spend all your time in health clubs in front of mirrors, you’re repelled by smokers, you drink light this and light that—and with all your health and muscles you’re basically a bunch of powderpuffs. Forty years ago I could have kicked your collective asses—with a cigarette hanging out the side of my mouth.”

  I looked at my watch and said, “I don’t mean to be rude.”

  “Of course. I apologize. I bring you up here and then I ramble like some bitter old man.”

  “Don’t worry about it. What’s on your mind?”

  Pence’s veined hands clutched the arms of his chair. Some ash from his cigarette fell to his lap. He glanced down to make sure it wasn’t live, then looked back at me, making no effort to brush the ash away.

  “I don’t know how much you really know about Jimmy,” he said. “His parents were killed when he was eleven, in a wreck on the Beltway, near what they used to call the Cabin John Bridge. He was their only child, and my only grandson.” He stopped to stub out the butt of his smoke.

  “Is your wife still alive, Mr. Pence?”

  He shook his head. “Janey died a year after we took Jimmy in. I guess you can imagine how hard it was. A man gets set to retire with his woman, all of a sudden he loses her and has to raise a son.” I had a quick, painful image of my own grandfather, a fisherman’s cap resting on his huge pinkish ears.

  “How did it go for the two of you?”

  “Fairly well, from my side of things. Jimmy was an easy boy to raise, easier than my own daughter.”

  “Has he ever gone away before without telling you?”

  “He’s nineteen years old,” he said by way of an affirmative.

  “So what makes you think this is any different?”

  “I’m not naive, Mr. Stefanos. The kid goes out with his friends, has a few beers, they wind up down at the shore, or Atlan
tic City maybe, if one of ’em has a few bucks in his pockets. But he always called me the next day, let me know where he was.”

  I shifted in my seat. “I’m not a detective, Mr. Pence. What Johnny McGinnes was talking about, we did some process serving together a couple of summers ago, for extra cash. It was for kicks mainly, we made a game of it. But I’m not licensed for anything like this. And I told you before that I thought this was a cop job. Unless there’s something you’re not telling, some reason you can’t or won’t go to the police.”

  He lowered his eyes and lit another smoke. The sound of the Zippo slamming shut echoed in the room. He was squinting through the smoke when he looked back up at me.

  “Jimmy has been hanging out with some tough customers,” he said. “The last couple of months, the guys who came to pick him up, they weren’t just kids out to get a little drunk and have a good time. They were different somehow.”

  “How so?”

  “I don’t know exactly. They wore a lot of leather. None of them ever smiled. And the music he started listening to in his room since he met those guys—it was, you know, more violent than what he used to listen to.”

  “Go on.” So far, nothing he had described was all that disturbing, and the music probably wasn’t much different from the music I used to listen to in the clubs downtown almost ten years earlier.

  “He’s been staying out all night, listening to music in bars supposedly. The way he looks when he walks in, I don’t know. I’ve done some drinking in my day. He just doesn’t look like he’s been on a bender. So I can only guess, maybe the boy is mixed up with drugs.”

  “Do you know the names of any of his friends?”

  “No, I’m sorry. They looked alike to me. All of these guys had crewcuts, shaved even closer than the kids wore them in the fifties.”

  If they were skinheads, they either hung out at the Snake Pit on F Street or at the Corps, which was near National Place. I figured the old man had the kid pegged on his drug use, though there was no way to tell how far he was gone.

  “I don’t mean to make light of Jimmy’s situation, Mr. Pence. But I frequented the same clubs and listened to the same kind of music myself. I still do, occasionally. As for drugs, I’ve used plenty and I came out of it more or less intact.” His eyes seemed to widen, but only for a moment. He was obviously more interested in finding his grandson than in my lapses of morality.

  “You are making light of this situation. You most certainly are. Because you don’t want to take any responsibility here. I know this boy. Even if he were on drugs, he would have called. He’s in some sort of trouble. If you don’t want to get involved, then fine. But don’t tell me there’s nothing wrong.”

  “I admit there could be some problem,” I said. “And I see your angle for going private. If he’s just underground because of drugs, a private cop could get him home and to some help without a possession or intent to distribute rap on his record. But I’m not that person. I paste down pictures of television sets for a living.”

  “You are the person.” He was on his feet now and close to me. I could smell cigarettes on him and, for the first time, a trace of whiskey. “Why do you think Jimmy talked to you so much at work?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your background and Jimmy’s background—they were very similar. Jimmy told me that you were born overseas. Your parents sent you to the States to live with your grandfather when you were very young, until they could afford to join you. For some reason or another they never made it, and you were raised by your grandfather. Is this correct?”

  “Roughly,” I said.

  “Jimmy was at that age—he needed someone to relate to. I think he found that a little bit in you.”

  “My grandfather died last April,” I said, though I was no longer talking to Pence. The moment his life ended I was doing lines off the bar in an after-hours club on upper Wisconsin Avenue.

  I rose from the chair and walked to the window. The traffic had thinned out on Connecticut, the northbound headlights approaching at a relaxed pace.

  “I don’t know if I’m up for it,” I said. He was silent behind me and I turned to face him. “I’ll ask around downtown. Maybe somebody knows where he is. But that’s all, understand?”

  “Thank you,” he said, moving towards me and gripping my hand. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

  I backed away. “We don’t need to discuss that now. I have somewhere to go. I’ll phone you tomorrow.”

  I walked out quickly. He was shouting his phone number as I closed the door behind me.

  I LET THE CAT in as I stepped into my apartment. I put some dry food in her dish and drank some ice water from a bottle in the refrigerator. Then I took two cold cans of beer with me into the shower.

  After leaving Pence, I had driven to a junior-high gym in Northwest to meet Rodney White, a friend of mine who had the curious distinction of being both a physician and a black belt. Though I knew next to nothing about tae kwon do, I had done a fair amount of Boys Club boxing, and enjoyed hooking up with White every couple of weeks to spar, provided he showed me some mercy.

  We warmed up with some stretching and light movement. Gradually we began making contact and our sparring intensified. After punishing me for a while with hand and foot combinations, he motioned me to stop. We tapped gloves and removed our mouthguards.

  “What were you just doing?” he asked. “You let me back you all the way across this gym. You accepted all of my forward energy.”

  “I was letting you kick yourself out. Anyway, I tagged you pretty good at the end.”

  He shook his head. “You had already lost. You start backing up, you’re defeated, believe me.”

  “I thought I’d use a little strategy.”

  “Don’t get too wrapped up in strategy. Technicians lose in the street. The winner in a fight is usually determined before the first punch is thrown.”

  “Too mystical for me” I said, adding, “I’ll stick to boxing.”

  “Stick to whatever you want, Homeboy. But step on over here and let me show you a little something.”

  In the shower I drank the first beer while washing. A bruise had formed on my bicep from a Rodney White side kick, and there was a scratch on my cheek from the nylon tie of his footgear.

  After rinsing, I popped the second beer and leaned against the tile wall, shutting the cold spigot off completely. I drank deeply of the icy beer and closed my eyes, as the burning hot water rolled down my back.

  THREE

  THE NEXT MORNING I called the office at nine A.M. from a payphone located in the side parking lot of the Connecticut Avenue store. Ric Brandon picked up his extension.

  “Hello, Ric?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nick Stefanos here.”

  “Where are you?” In his typically tight-assed manner he was asking why I was late for work.

  “I’m on my way to Connecticut Avenue,” I lied, not wanting to get the boys in trouble. None of them had arrived yet to open the store.

  “What for?”

  “Listen, Ric. All of last night I thought about our discussion yesterday in your office. I think one of the reasons I don’t have that team spirit is that I’ve lost touch with what’s going on out in the stores, out on the firing line.” I stopped speaking so as not to make myself sick.

  “I understand.” Since he had never been on the “firing line,” that imaginary, danger-filled zone that lowly salesmen are so keen on referring to, he could not have understood. But I had counted on that.

  “What I figure is, I’ll get back on the floor for a few weeks, see what’s going on again, talk to some customers and find out what they do and don’t respond to in our ads.”

  “What about your regular duties?”

  “What I can’t do here, I’ll finish up at night. I have a key to the office, and my Post contacts can do pickups here at the store. As for any important meetings or appointments, you call me here, I can be back in the office in f
ifteen minutes.”

  “I can see the merit in this,” he said, adding, “if you apply yourself. Understand that I’d like you to report to Gary Fisher every day as to the merchandising and advertising plans.”

  “Sure, Ric. Transfer me over to Fisher then, will you?”

  The phone rang several times, then Fisher picked up. In contrast to the dead calm of Brandon’s office, I could hear people laughing, typewriters clacking, and unanswered phones ringing in the background. I imagined a cigarette lodged above Fisher’s ear.

  “Fish, it’s Nick.”

  “Where the fuck are you?”

  “The Avenue. I’m going to be working out of here for a while. I had to get away from the office, man. You know what I mean?”

  “Not really. You worked your way up from stockboy to sales to management, now you want to go backwards. Besides, I need you here.”

  “I’ll still do my job, only I’ll do it from the store.”

  “You see Electro-World’s ad today?” he asked, changing the subject as if to ignore it.

  “I haven’t seen the paper yet.”

  “They ran a TP400 for two ninety-nine, the lousy giveaway artists. Tell the fellas not to match that price, hear? If we have to take a bath, we can wait till Black Friday.”

  “You’re going to wait till the Friday after Thanksgiving to run a piece that everyone’s in the paper with now?”

  “I’m not worried,” he said. “There’s gonna be a shortage of low-end goods this Christmas. The Japs and the Koreans are holding back, trying to drive up the costs to the distributors. My guess is, the longer we hold back on the bait, we’ll be the only ones in town with the plunder come D-Day. We bring ’em through the door, pass a few out, lose our asses—we’ll make it up on add-ons and service policies.”