Repo Madness (23 page)

“How long you had this place?” I asked Rogan.

“About ten years. I worked here a little before I bought it. I was a dentist down state, but I really always wanted to own a bar up north. My partners decided to buy me out of the practice, and the rest is history.”

“That's funny, because I always wanted to quit the Black Bear and become a dentist.”

Rogan laughed, and Alan made an impatient noise. I brought out my folder. “So, were you working the day that woman fell off the boat? Nina Otis?”

Rogan's expression shifted, looking not so much suspicious as wary. “Actually, no, I wasn't here that day.”

I pulled out the photograph of Nina, the blurry one from the newspaper, and then another one that ran with her obituary. “You sure?”

“What have you got there?” Rogan asked, eyeing the other papers in the folder.

“I'm just looking into a few things.”

“What sort of things?”

“Well. Missing persons. I work with Barry Strickland, the former sheriff. And we came across some unanswered questions on a few people.”

“Can I see?”

I couldn't think of a reason to deny the request. I opened the folder and spread out the pictures like I was dealing cards. “A couple of these women were found floating in the lake a few days after they vanished. But these last three are more recent. They're still missing.”

“Huh,” Rogan said. I could see he was swept up in the mystery, because he had an excited look on his face. This was how I was going to solve this thing, I realized—I was going to get people to help me, ask people to ask people.

Rogan sifted through the pictures, stopping at one of them and regarding it carefully. It was a professional headshot, like maybe she was an actress or a model. She was quite pretty, actually. “Who is this?” he asked, holding the photo up.

“Rachel Rodriguez,”
Alan informed me when I hesitated.

I told Rogan. “So, have you seen her before? Has she been in here?”

“In the Ferry Bar? No, not that I know of.”

“You know who you should ask is the mayor,” Guy #1 piped up. I hadn't even realized he was conscious.

Rogan darted a look at him, as if angry at the interruption, then grinned. “That's right; anybody'd know, it'd be Mr. Mayor.”

“The mayor? Of Charlevoix?”

Rogan laughed. “He wishes. Naw, of Shantytown. You know how they elect a mayor every year? It's pretty much a formality. Phil owns all the emergency equipment, keeps it in his shanty, so they can't really vote for anyone else, since the only real job he's got is to keep the emergency equipment handy for anyone who needs it.”

“So how would he know if any of these women have been in here?” I asked, tapping the photo of Nina Otis because it was really only her I cared about.

“Because he spends most of his time planted right next to where you're sitting. Year-round. July, at Venetian festival, when the crowds are lined up to get in here, I won't let anyone sit on that stool. He's spent enough in here that I told him he's bought the thing. I'll bury it with him if he wants.” Rogan laughed again.

“So he might show up here today?”

“Be surprised if he doesn't.”

“Okay. Thanks. I'll ask him.” I started to shuffle the pictures back into the folder, but Rogan reached out and picked up the photo of the woman who had fallen off the Charlevoix docks.

“Now her, I know, of course,” he told me.

“Of course?”
Alan repeated.

Rogan was nodding. He tried to look mournful, but on his happy face it just came across as something like embarrassment. “Yeah. She fell off the docks right behind here. I saw her.”

 

18

Looks Good on Paper

“He saw her fall off the dock?”
Alan demanded with the stridency of a person watching a pet theory get shot to death.

“You saw her?” I repeated to Rogan.

“Yeah. I mean, she was in here.”

“Oh, so you saw her
in here
.”

“Yeah. I served her. She got a little lit, but not, you know, totally wasted. Got to be careful about that.” Rogan gave me an insider's smile—purveyors of alcohol are always gauging the line between increasing sales and increasing liability. “She said she didn't drive here, though. So, you know.”

“So you served her drinks, but you didn't actually see her fall off the docks.”

“No, I saw that, too.”

“Ah.”

Alan groaned.

“See, I left early that night,” Rogan explained. “Can't remember why. And as I was backing out of the garage—I've got a one-car stall underneath here that I park in during winter, and it was November—I saw her heading down to the docks. She had a brown bag, and I saw the neck of what I'm pretty sure was a bottle of Maker's Mark sticking out of it. You know, the red wax at the neck? She wasn't walking really well, like maybe after she left here, she took a few pulls on the Maker's.”

“So he didn't see her fall,”
Alan summarized excitedly.

“So you didn't actually see her fall into the water,” I pressed.

“Oh no. No, and I told the cops about her going to the docks. I guess—maybe I should have tried to help her.” The guy's facial muscles couldn't really do guilt, either.

“No one can blame you,” I told him. “You didn't know what was going to happen. Sometimes things occur and you feel responsible, but you're not.” Like me. Like how I had felt responsible all these years for something I now believed I did not do.

“Thanks, man,” Rogan said sincerely.

I waited around for the mayor of Shantytown to show up, but there's really nothing to do in a bar in northern Michigan but drink, and after my second beer, I got bored with that. I gave Rogan a nice tip and told him to stop in the Black Bear sometime. I gave him my repo man business card and asked that he have the mayor call me. “Kramer Recovery,” Rogan read out loud.

“Yeah, it's the company Strickland and I work for.”

On the way back to Kalkaska, I got pulled over by Dwight Timms again.

“Have you got a crush on me or something, Dwight?” I asked mockingly.

He wanted to know if I'd been drinking, and when I told him I'd had two beers in two hours, he made me do a roadside sobriety test. Another deputy pulled up to watch the fun, but I touched my nose and leaned back and walked in a straight line like a circus performer, and he finally let me off with a warning. That's how he put it: “I'm letting you off with a warning.” He didn't tell me what, exactly, he was warning me about. That the local deputies were stupid?

I went to see Kermit to get my dog and vent a little bit. “Timms hasn't let up, Kermit. He says he's going to pull me over every time he sees me,” I complained. “Can't you get an injunction or something?”

Kermit thought it over. “I could put a camera in your unit.”

“My … unit?”

“The tow truck.”

Alan laughed.

“I'm not sure what good that would do,” I said.

“You get him to say he's harassing you with deliberation, I think we can injunctify him.”

“Injunctify,” I repeated. “Well, let me think about it. Would the video camera have a shutoff, like the emergency Kermit transmitter?” I asked, thinking of my date with Katie.

“You mean, could you unplug it?”

I grinned at him. “Yeah, like that.”

“I suppose.”

Something occurred to me. “Hey, are you going to get back into financing, like your uncle?”

“Yes, I think probably so. I don't know a lot about buying paper, but I get calls sometimes.”

“Buying paper?”

“You know. The car dealer writes a contract, and I repurchase it from him. Some of the people around here can't get financing because the credit logarithms score them so badly, but we know who they are, so we can figure on servicing the paper without too much trouble.”

“Real estate is the same way. The loan originator often sells the mortgage off for servicing,”
Alan lectured me.

I leaned down and stroked Jake's ears, putting my face very close to his. “Alan,” I whispered to my dog, “shut the hell up.” I straightened. “Well, there's a deal I want you to do. His name is David Leinberger. We repo'd him a few years ago, back when he was a drunk and his business was going south. Now he's sober, his client base is up, and he needs a break. I think he would be a good risk.” I told Kermit to call the Chevy dealer in Gaylord.

He nodded, writing it down. “If you vouch for him, I'm sure it's a good deal,” he said.

“Yep,” I replied, hoping it was true.

*   *   *

“Ruddy McCann, repo man with the heart of gold,”
Alan pronounced skeptically as I opened my front door for Jake.
“Or maybe the repo man willing to have his brother-in-law risk investing in car paper so the guy will talk to us about Nina Otis.”

“Okay, Alan? First, don't say
car paper
. It sounds stupid. Second, Leinberger doesn't talk to us, because there is no us. And third, I thought you said I was a war criminal for stealing his Malibu. Now I'm helping him get a replacement and I'm a bad guy for doing that, too?”

With Alan hovering in disapproving silence, I called Katie. She answered breathlessly. I couldn't imagine what she might be doing in Grand Rapids that would cause panting—making out with her aunt's doctor? Well, I didn't like
that
image insinuating itself into my mind. My grip tightened on the phone. “Hi!” I chirped, trying to sound lighthearted but coming out more like I was being strangled.

“Ruddy! Hang on a second.”

I listened intently. I heard some bouncy, high-energy music get abruptly cut off.

“Okay. I'm back,” she told me.

“What are you doing?”

She hesitated, like there was something she didn't want to tell me. I wondered if I wanted to hear it. “Okay, um, so don't laugh. It's Zumba. I'm at my aunt's house, taking a break from the hospital.”

“How is this your business?”
Alan wanted to know.

“What? Zumba?”

“It's, like, dancing.”

“Oh.” I thought about it. “You know, maybe I should do that, too.”

Katie laughed.

“No, I mean it,” I insisted. “Then if you wanted, some night we could go Zumba dancing.”

“You're killing me here.”

“You'd be surprised at how good I am at things like that.”

“I'm going to wet my pants.”

“What is it?”

“You just … Oh my God,” she said, laughing so hysterically, I started chuckling in sympathetic response.

“What? Why are you laughing?” I demanded, though that's how we spent more than a minute, just laughing, her hysterical, me clueless.

“You have to Google it,” she finally advised. Then we talked about her aunt, for whom there was still no diagnosis, and then her mood darkened. “Oh, and my mom is here,” she stated, voice heavy.

“That makes sense. Kjersti is Marget's sister,”
Alan informed me.

“How is that for you?” I asked carefully.

She puffed out a breath in a way I knew meant she had blown an errant thread of curly reddish-brown hair out of her eyes. “Not good. She keeps wanting to talk to me, and I don't want to talk to her. Does that make me a bad person?”

“Of course not,”
Alan interjected.

Since I had been about to say the same thing, I changed my comment. “How do you feel about it?” I parried, having learned from Dr. Schaumburg.

“I don't know. She's still my mom, you know? Even after all that happened. I just wish she would stop trying to explain herself. That's what's bothering me. She says you've been poisoning me against her, telling her things that aren't true. She says she had nothing to do with what happened to my father.”

Alan and I were both silent. I knew that Marget had everything to do with it, but if the law wasn't going to enforce any punishment, wouldn't I be better off letting it go? “What I told you, I believe it, but that doesn't mean you have to, too,” I ventured.

We wound up talking for another few minutes, but then she said she was sweaty and getting cold and needed to finish her workout. When we disconnected, I used my phone to watch a Zumba video. If I tried to dance like that, I'd hurt myself and everyone else in the room.

“I think you handled that pretty well, Ruddy,”
Alan told me.

During the time I'd been talking to Katie, my phone had made the annoying beeps that indicated someone wanted to interrupt my conversation with my fiancée. Still chuckling, I pulled up my voice mail.

“Ruddy, it's William Blanchard…,”
the message began.

The smile dropped off my face. I didn't have to be a bar bouncer to know he'd been drinking, and his voice had that ugly tone to it that said the alcohol had only added fuel to an inner rage. He breathed into the phone for a minute.

“I got another job for you. You're gonna like this one. It's more up your alley.”
He laughed mirthlessly.
“More like what got you sent to prison. Call me.”

He fumbled with the phone, and it disconnected. I stood there, listening to the silence.

What got me sent to prison was murder.

*   *   *

I was pretty busy over the next few days. What Kermit called “lease terminals” came in batches: people who neglect to turn in their cars at the end of their lease and need a visit from the repo man to remind them of their duty. They were pretty routine—most people were sheepish, though occasionally I would run into someone who thought that at the end of the lease, he owned the vehicle and needed to have the contract explained. I got paid two hundred bucks every time I dragged one in—I averaged four a day for five days. Ruddy McCann was solidly in the black.