Due to technical issues (as in it wouldn’t let me post it) yesterday, here is my WIP Wednesday post on Thursday.

This is a passage in which our hero, Harry, meets his new client. Hope you enjoy it:

Before I could say anything else, there was a knock on the frame of my office door, which was half open. A man peeked through the opening. His face was craggy and deeply tanned, like he’d worked a long time outdoors and his hair, or what I could see of it sticking out from under a Cincinnati Reds ball cap, was black flecked with silver and close-cropped. He cleared his throat. “Oh, sorry, didn’t realize you were busy.” His voice was a growl, but not an angry one. I wondered if maybe he was a smoker.  

Fred stood. “No, no. I’m on my way out. Just here on my lunch hour to thank Harry here for saving my life. At his own wedding, if you can believe it.”

The man stepped in and looked around. He was tall, probably a few inches over six feet. His lean, angular arms stuck out from a light blue short-sleeved button-down shirt with the name of a company, Clingerton Farms, on the left breast. I recognized it as a place in Marietta, which is twenty minutes up the Ohio river from my office in Parkersburg.

Fred reached out his hand, which I took. His handshake was firm, not like a man who recently nearly died. “Don’t forget, Harry. Friday night at 7:00 at our place. Bring swimsuits. The pool’s heated.”

“See you Friday.”

As he left, Fred stopped in front of the man. “Whatever you need help with, Harry’s your man. He’s as good as they come.”

The man didn’t seem to know what to say to that, so he just nodded. Fred gave a last wave and disappeared out the office door, which he closed behind him. The man cleared his throat again as he took off his hat and held it between both hands over his chest. His jeans were dark blue and were rolled up at the cuff. His boots were light brown leather and looked to have put in a lot of miles.

The man turned and looked at the door. “That was Fred Gailey.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes. Do you know him?”

He kept staring at the door for maybe ten more seconds before he turned to me. “Nah, just seen his face on a billboard or something.”

He turned to the door and back to me. There was something about his manner that made me feel like it was more than that, but I let it go. I came around the desk and extended my hand. “Hi, I’m Harry Shalan, though I imagine you probably know that, unless you’re lost.”

He shook my hand and cleared his throat again. It was starting to bother me. Not in an irritated way, but in that distressed, I-wish-I-could-clear-your-throat-for-you kind of way. “Nah, this is where I’m supposed to be. I need to hire you.”

“Have a seat.”

He put his ball cap back on and sat in the client chair Fred had just vacated. I offered him a drink. “I have coffee, or there’s iced tea and water in the fridge.” Drain cleaner for that throat?

“Nah, I’m good.” He fished around in the breast pocket of his shirt for something. His hand still inside the pocket, he stopped and looked at squinted at me. “You really save his life at your wedding?”

I shrugged. “Saved his life is kind of a strong term. And my wife had more to do with it than I did.”

“He choke on something?”

“Nope. Dropped dead.”

The man found what he was looking for in his shirt pocket: a chewed stump of a cigar, which he put in his mouth.

“I’m sorry, but I’d rather you didn’t smoke.”

He looked at me and back at the cigar like he wasn’t sure he understood the words I’d said at first. “Oh, I don’t smoke. Not no more, at least. Gave it up last year. Cancer. But I still chew on cigars some. Doctor says it’s not much better, being as how I’m eating the tobacco instead a’ smoking it, but, well, you know.”

I didn’t know. My grandparents smoked and their house always reeked. I was an anti-smoker at a very early age. Don’t ask me to explain why, but I had a brief dalliance with chewing tobacco in high school. And by brief, I mean long enough to know that chewing tobacco was roughly akin to eating lava. I barfed right there in front of my friends and never tried it again. It still goes down as one of the worst memories of my life. And I’ve been around ripe dead bodies. But I digress.

I got a legal pad from the top left drawer of my desk and put my phone away in the same drawer. People like to know you’re paying attention. “Yes. So, what can I do for you? I’m sorry, I never got your name.”

“Clingerton. Del Clingerton. He dropped dead?”

“Hi Mr. Clingerton. Yes, he dropped dead. Are you the owner?” I pointed at the logo on his shirt.

“Along with my brother Bert. He’s who I needed to talk to you about. How’d he drop dead?”

Lots of questions. “The usual way, I guess. His heart stopped beating. Tell me about your brother.”

“He’s, uh, he’s missing?”

“Are you sure?”

He looked at me through narrowed eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, you didn’t say he was missing. You ended the sentence like a question, like you either don’t know what the word means or you’re not sure he’s actually missing. You seem like a pretty smart guy. I imagine you know what missing means, so I’m guessing it’s the latter.”

He nodded a couple times, and sat back in his chair. “I heard two things about you. One is you’re a bit of a smartass and the other’s you’re good at what you do.”

“Definitely guilty of the first charge. I’ll let you be the judge on the second one. So, what’s the whole story? I take it he’s actually gone or at least you don’t know where he is. Is the question whether he left of his own accord?”

He sighed and ran has rough hand over his craggy face. “Can I change my mind on that water?”

I got a bottle from the refrigerator and handed it to him. “Like a glass?”

“Nah, I’m good.” He twisted the top and took a long pull from the bottle. He put the lid back on and looked at the label. “Good and cold. I like cold water.” He put the bottle on the desk and straightened it so the label was facing him squarely. “Me and my brother don’t much like each other.”

He was silent for a while. I had nowhere to go, so I let him sit. He was in his own world, it appeared, so I made a grocery list. Then I made a to-do list. Then I drew hearts with Dee’s and my initials in them. Then I thought about how an upside-down heart looks an awful lot like Dee’s bottom. Then I started thinking about Dee’s bottom. Then I started thinking about Dee’s top. Then I started thinking about Dee’s entire anatomy. Then I started thinking about how often I think about Dee naked, which is pretty much anytime my mind isn’t actively occupied with something else. Then I started thinking about the honeymoon we’d just returned from. Then I decided I should think about something else. So, I wrote down the lineup of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds. As I got to Ken Griffey in right field, he reactivated.

“Funny. We were best friends growing up. Best man at each other’s weddings. We’re even godfather to each other’s kids.”

“What made it go sideways? Family business?”

“Yeah, I guess. Funny how people change when there’s money involved. How much is enough, what you do with what you have. Makes it hard when priorities don’t line up.”

“Did your brother leave with company money?”

He did the face-hand thing again and then took off his hat again. He had a high widow’s peak that ended about even with his ears. I tried not to think about how my hair was probably going to look like that someday. “Well, I hate to jump to conclusions. But he’s gone and a good bit of money is gone. And they disappeared on the same day.”

“I guess that could be a coincidence, but it doesn’t seem likely. He leave any note, any message of any kind?”

“Nope.”

“Has he done anything like this before? Disappeared without any explanation?”

“Nope.”

“Ever dip into the till before?”

He smiled and reached for his water bottle. “Well, now, that’s an interesting question. We’ve had money come up missing—not much, just fifty here, hundred there—a few times over the last several months, but he always claimed to know nothing of it. Even accused one of our workers of skimming, but I always felt like it was him.”

“He been having financial troubles?”

He laughed bitterly. He was on a roll now. “You could say that. His main financial trouble is named Izzy. His wife. She never met a shoe she didn’t want to buy and expects to have a new car every two years. And by car, I mean top of the line dual cab pickup, every bell and whistle you can think of. Don’t even know why she needed a pickup at all. She never hauled nothing. And Todd and Eric have trucks of their own, too. Neither one has a job.”

“His family missing too?”

“No sir, and they are starting to come after me over money. They got no savings and the house has two mortgages. Thank God I grew a backbone when he asked me to co-sign the second.”

“When was that? The second mortgage? Recently?”

He scratched his head and bit a loose piece of skin off his lower lip. “Nah, it was, lemme see, what eight, ten months ago? Yeah, it was right after New Year’s. He’d just bought Izzy a classic car of some kind. Don’t remember what. Never cared about cars. Anyway, he comes and asks if I’ll sign the note. I showed him the door. We’ve barely spoke since, other than business.”

“How did he get the second? Get somebody else to sign?”

“You need to know all this?”

“No idea what I need. No way of knowing what’s important. But he’s gone for a reason and money is about as good a reason as any.”

He cleared his throat, took the cigar out of his mouth, and looked at it like he really wanted to light it. “Fair enough. Truth told, I got no idea. Come to think of it, I guess I don’t know for a fact he ever got the second, but I overheard him bragging a couple months later to one of our clerks about the new building he was having built on his property, so I figured he must’ve talked some poor sucker into it.”