Nobody Bats a Thousand (14 page)

Once home, with Nadine away at work, MJ enjoyed the solitude and silence, but not for long. After a short amount of preparation, she was out the door and on her way to a nearby print shop where she had fifty posters, offering a reward without specifics, printed concerning the return of her one-of-a-kind, non-working timepiece. Afterward, armed with only a staple gun and the fortitude of an obsessed neurotic maniac, she set about decorating every telephone pole and suitable empty spot she could find in the Pyramid District until both she and her supply of printed pleas were exhausted.

Darkness had fully settled in as she pulled into Maggie’s driveway. In the apartment Nadine was on the couch in front of the TV eating Chinese food directly from the carton.

“So how did your meeting go?” Nadine asked.

“I’m not really sure. I keep thinking I should turn on Channel 63 to find out the real truth
about everything
.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.
”
Mary Jean thought about eating but was too tired to do anything about it. “I’m going to bed.”

“My brother called and said he got a headlight and he’d be over tomorrow to put it in.”

“Good, but if you talk to him again tell him not to wear h
is uniform, it makes me nervous.
” MJ went into the bedroom, then remembered, and stuck her head back into the other room.  “Oh yeah, I put up some reward posters, so if anybody calls about my clock wake me up right away, okay?  It’s important.”

“You got money for a reward?”

“Not really. Right now if I wanted to buy anything I’d have to use my time-ravaged good looks until I work Sunday, but I’m tempted to use just about anything at this point. Don’t forget to wake me, good-night.”

But there were no calls that night, not all day Saturday nor Sunday up until the time MJ left to do her shift at
Danny’s
. The action that night was slow but steady, and she left with over forty bucks after tipping out Chester.

“Any calls?” MJ asked as soon as she was through the door.

“Yes, some weird woman called and asked about the reward then hung up on me after I said I didn’t know.”

“Yeah?
  What’d she sound like?”

“Weird.
” Nadine picked up a small piece of paper from the coffee table.  “And some guy named Bill called. He said to tell you,” Nadine began to read directly from her note,
“ ‘may
have found our suspect’s haven, stakeout begins tomorrow, I’ll get back to you.’ I wrote it down word for word. Does it make any sense?”

“I hope so. Did he leave a number?”

“Nope.”

Mary Jean suddenly remembered Bill’s card. She dug through her purse until she found it and dialed his number.

“Hello?” a tired voice answered after the sixth ring.

“Bill?  This is Mary Jean, did I wake you?”

“Indeed you did young lady. Didn’t you get my message?  I think I found out where this Red Hat Patty lives, and since she is known to be out and about early, I figured I needed to be out and about even earlier to catch her off guard.”

“I want to go with you.”

“That’s not possible. I work alone. I’ll report to you any progress.”

“I want to go…. Please?”

“No.”

“Please?”

“No.”

“Please?”

“No.”

“Please?”

“Geez, I suppose this could go on for awhile.”

“For as long as it takes.”

“
Ooookay
…. but, you do as I say, and don’t get in the way, or I’ll turn around and dump you off quicker than a bag of last week’s fish.”

“Okay, okay, whatever you say.”

“And I’m talking early. I want to be in front of her place by four AM, so I’ll be by to get you at three-thirty, and if you’re not ready the bus is leaving without you. Now, can I get some sleep?”

“I’ll be ready.”

Monday, 3:25 a.m.: Mary Jean, dressed to face the cold, holding a full thermos of strong coffee, stood on the sidewalk in front of Maggie’s, watching as a huge 1968 black Buick pull up to the curb just in front of her. She stooped and saw Bill in suit and tie behind the wheel before she opened the door and got in.

“
Morning.
”
Mary Jean, her blood already festering with caffeine, was ready for action, conversation and explanations. But Bill merely grunted hello, and they drove without speaking for about ten minutes to only the sound of Mozart playing against the noise of the Buick’s heater. Finally they stopped and parked on a thin, dark, residential street, where Bill killed his lights and engine but left the Berlin Philharmonic playing at a low level.

“What now?”

“We wait.”

Mary Jean sat silent for less than a minute.  “Are you going to tell me what’s going on or what?”

“Okay, listen closely so I don’t have to repeat myself. You see that house over there?” He pointed to a small house just across the street.  “It’s owned by a woman named Teresa, one of those types people say is ‘not all there’. Anyway I guess she inherited the house and lets Red Hat Patty live in the garage in back. So we are waiting for Patty to come out and have her day started in an unusual way, which is me grabbing her by the collar and shaking her until she tells me what I need to know.”

“This Teresa is ‘not all there’, how so?  I mean besides the fact she lets that slimly little bitch live in her garage.”

“Well, so far I found out she’s openly adamant about two things, that Regis
Phibin
is the Anti-Christ and the fact that she is abducted by space aliens on a regular basis. Now the former possibility leads me to believe she’s not totally nuts, and as far as that abduction thing, who really has the right to call her crazy?  Maybe it’s true. I mean anything is possible, right?”

Mary Jean quickly thought about the overview of the current predicament and had
to agree. “I guess
you’re right.” S
he pulled up her socks and rubbed her calf to stimulate circulation. “So how did you find out all of this stuff?”

“From talking with some unsavory characters who would sell out their best friends for five dollars or their own mothers for ten.”

A short time later, Bill opened his own black thermos, poured the cap half full, and began to
sip
through the stream, as MJ was finishing off her second full cap.

“Hey, take it easy on that coffee,” he told her, “it will make you
have
to pee, and this is no place for it.”

“What about you?”

“For me, if worse came to worst, I could empty out this thermos and piss in it.  I doubt you could accomplish that without badly soiling my seats.”

“I wish you wouldn’t have mentioned peeing, because now I have to.”

“Women.
”
He shook his large baldhead.  “I knew I shouldn’t have let you come along.”

“You don’t like women much do you?”

“Quite the contrary, nearly every stupid thing I’ve ever done in my life can be directly related to my love of women.”

“Have you ever been married?”

“Yes, yes indeed I was. Two blissful years that lasted until she gave me a Christmas present I’ll never forget.”

“Which was?”

“Gonorrhea.”

Their conversation took a long pause. The CD of Mozart ended, and Bill started it again with a push of a button. As the time crept by, the minutes inching past, Mary Jean’s thoughts of her clock and Red Hat Patty, and the fact that soon she would have to find another job to boost her income to an acceptable level, thoughts which had been incessantly spinning around in her head bugging her for days, were now quickly fading away toward the back burner because she had to pee badly. She looked around the neighborhood.  “I’m going to go pee in those bushes over there before it gets too light out.”

Bill shook his head again.
“If you really have to but be quiet.”

Mary Jean tried to move slowly and was as quiet as anyone in such tense agony could be. The bark of a dog in the next yard scared, jolted and stopped her for just a moment, but she finally finished. She emerged from the large hedge with an entirely new, relaxed attitude, which lasted about twelve seconds as she was almost beheaded by a copy of the Ashland Tribune thrown by a newspaper boy working his way down the sidewalk on his bicycle. The kid was working a neighborhood where the unusual probably was the norm, so he barely glanced at the stranger emerging from the bushes before he continued on his way in pursuit of the American Dream.

“Wow, did you see that? I was almost killed by a copy of the morning paper,” MJ said after she closed the heavy door of the Buick.

“Yes, what they regard as journalism today can be hard to take.”

“
Nooo
, I
mean

”

“I know what you mean. I saw what happened. You’ve already drawn more attention to us than I would have liked. I knew I shouldn’t have let you come along.”

“Well, excuse me for living, but do you really think we’re hidden sitting here in the open?”

“With all this condensation on the windows it’s virtually impossible to see us,
at least until the sun comes up.
” Bill rubbed his window to create a peephole.  “Surveillance can be a tricky thing sometimes. A couple of weeks ago I busted this guy making a disability claim, claiming to be blind. I made a videotape of him driving seventy miles an hour down freeway 41. The way I had to go about it,
so he wouldn’t make me,
was 
to

”

“Wait a
minute,
you really are a real private detective? I mean you really do legitimate jobs?”

“What do you think I’m doing here?  Jacking-off my dog?”

“No, but I thought it was more of a lark or a hobby for a rich guy wanting to kill some time.”

“Rich? Who told you that?”

“I’ve learned things about you from asking around.”

“I have access to money for legitimate secure investments, but it’s not like the money is really mine. Actually I’m just a working stiff like everyone else.”

“What about your business card, all the stuff you had listed? Licensed barber?  What’s that all about?”

“That’s true. I haven’t really kept my chops up, but I pay my fee every yea
r to keep my license up to date.
” Bill smiled and again wiped at his peephole. “You are curious aren’t you?”

“No, I’m Mary Jean, but if you want to get something off your chest….”

“Why is it I feel if I don’t you are going to pester the hell out of me until I do?” Bill smiled again. “I’m sure Maggie told you we went to UC together?”

“Yeah, and she said you quit just before the end of your final semester.”

“She did?  That is true, but I quit only after I found a loophole in my trust fund agreement that allowed me to continue to receive my money every month as long as I continued my education. So, right after I left Berkeley, I headed straight for bartender school, but I could only stretch that out for a few weeks, then it was barber college for a couple of months, then guitar lessons and dance lessons.  After that I found correspondence school, and I was set. Heating and air conditioning repair, TV and radio repair, bookkeeping and accounting, hotel/motel management. Actually I ended up certified in so many trades I probably could fill up both sides of a business card if I listed them all. Boy, it pissed off my old man, but the way he had everything set up there w
as nothing he could do
about it.
” Bill grinned and turned his head side to side working his neck. “Looking back at it now, it was fun, and I came to learn that I did love to learn.”

“If you loved to learn why did you quit college?”

“As a supreme display of alienation I suppose. But there really isn’t that much learning going on at a university compared to the time you have to put in now is there?  Speed through the classics, memorize facts for a test then forget them the day after. Is that learning?  No, young lady, for anyone who thinks college is that one great infallible roa
d to success I’ve got two words,
Ted Kaczynski.”

“You had the Unabomber for a professor?”

“No, I went there pre-Ted. But I had other professors that were crazier than him. They just weren’t as committed, or they didn’t have the balls to jump off the deep end and get put away like Ted. Still, Unabomber aside, you can call
me
crazy, but I’ll take the school of hard knocks over Harvard any day.”

Bill again rubbed clean his peephole as he turned Mozart up just a hair. He started the CD again after it was finished, just as the first hint of morning light was starting to work against the incessant overcast. The gray horizon was filled with dim light when Bill first checked his watch.

“It’s after six. This is starting to worry me. The story I get on Patty is she’s always out and about by now.”